Luckily Lea had left some cornflakes at the bottom of the packet. There were enough for one portion, and the boy looked on approvingly as Robert gave him breakfast on the terrace. He had slept in Lea’s room. When Robert went to wake him in the morning he was lying with an arm around one of her old teddy bears, kept for sentimental reasons. Could he remember being here before? Lauritz looked around and thought. He could remember playing table tennis with Lea and digging in the garden. He asked when he was going home. Later on today, Robert replied without knowing what he was talking about. He went to get Lea’s Tintin books and brought one of the white plastic chairs onto the lawn where the sun was shining. He took off his bath robe, his body was quite white. Lea was right, he ought to do something about those handles. The problem was he couldn’t really be bothered. He sipped his coffee, looking at the strange boy bending over the table, absorbed in interpreting the little pictures where Tintin and Captain Haddock escaped from one scrape after another with a mixture of chance, optimism and adroitness.

He closed his eyes. It was hot already and he enjoyed feeling the grass under his bare feet and the sunrays warming his pale skin. He really should go in and call the woman with dyed hair and the muscle man to tell them where Lauritz was, but he didn’t feel like moving. It was so long since he had sat in the sun, and he defended his laziness by working up some indignation over their irresponsibility and the recklessness Andreas had shown in leaving his son with such superficial friends. He was sure he had told them when he would bring the boy back.

Andreas called later in the morning. He would come and fetch Lauritz. Robert was about to say something about the woman with dyed hair having forgotten their arrangement, but didn’t, amazed the other man apparently took it for granted that he had taken the boy home with him. Andreas would come at once. Where was he calling from? The house, he replied curtly. He had arrived yesterday evening on the last train, he hadn’t wanted to call so late. How considerate, thought Robert, and offered to drive. He had a car, after all.

When they turned off the main road and drove beside the meadow towards the wood they saw the horse in the same place as it had been two months earlier, on the rainy day when Robert took Lauritz and Andreas home. The sun shone on its flanks, which quivered as if from a shock when the flies pestered it. Andreas came out into the yard and squatted down with open arms as Lauritz ran towards him. They sat in the garden on a bench by the house wall. Lauritz was on a swing hanging from a big plum tree. Andreas had set a bowl of plums between them on the bench, violet blue, with a matt skin like dew. The grass had not been mown for a long time and was almost as long as the corn in the field at the end of the garden. The wind made the cobs rock from side to side in snaking tracks, and poppies glowed restlessly, scattered amidst the corn. Andreas offered him a cigarette, they smoked and ate plums. Robert tried to think of something to talk about.

How had the première in Malmö gone? Andreas squinted in the sunshine. It had come off very well, the Swedish reviewers had been quite over the moon. But that didn’t matter now. Pensively, he lowered his eyes and dug his nail into the circle of loose tobacco at the end of his cigarette, then abruptly started to talk. Robert was surprised they seemed to be on such familiar terms. On the telephone Andreas had been very short, almost formal, maybe because he thought Robert might be cross. Look at me! called Lauritz. They looked. He was standing up, his hands on the ropes, swinging high. They waved, the boy laughed.

Andreas had come back from Stockholm the previous day. He was no longer quite sure what he had been thinking on his way up there. When he had read the scenographer’s letters or written to her he had felt that here at last was someone who touched his innermost soul, more than anyone had done before. Now he didn’t know. They had arranged to meet at an outdoor café on Strandvägen. He was surprised she had asked him to meet her there and not at her home in Söder. He was given the explanation when she arrived, twenty minutes late, as beautiful as he remembered, pale, black-haired and with blue eyes. She did not live alone. It sounded complicated. For about six months she had been about to leave the man she lived with, but she had not yet brought herself to do it. They sat silently watching the glinting water and the ferries plying up and down. Neither of them could find anything to say, strangely enough after all the letters, all the confidences and tender words that had gone to his heart so deeply.

When she finally came walking towards him smiling in the sunshine it had seemed as if all his hopes were coming with her, no longer in the form of vague thoughts hard to pin down, about how his life could change and take on a new direction, but in the shape of a living body appearing to hold all possibilities in store for him, stepping lightly among the café tables. She went to his hotel with him, now he had come, after all. That was how it seemed, precisely as dispiriting and dull as that, when they lay side by side on the hotel bed afterwards. It had not been exactly passionate. He was not even sure she had had an orgasm. He called her in the evening. She was not alone, she said, it was difficult to talk properly. He called again the next day in the morning. Her husband had just gone. Were they actually married? She laughed down the telephone. No, not exactly.

She had read the new play he had sent her. She made some comments, and again he felt it was there, the special understanding between them. She had hit on things in the play no one else had understood. He said he was coming round to see her. She didn’t think that was such a good idea. He took a taxi. She seemed different when he saw her in her own surroundings, somehow more ordinary. They drank herb tea and she showed him her sketches for an exhibition she was working on. She resisted when he went to kiss her. He threw her down on a sofa, she twisted free. She couldn’t do it here, she said and asked him to leave.

Maybe there had been something hyped up, something rather too stilted about those letters, both hers and his own. They had been scaffolding for each other’s castles in the air, he said, smiling bitterly, as he sank his teeth into a plum and wiped juice off his chin with the back of his hand. Lauritz was lying in the tall grass, the swing swayed back and forth under the tree. Andreas had kept on phoning her. The more he doubted his precious and all-consuming passion, the more he persisted, until one afternoon a man’s voice answered from the apartment in Söder. He slammed down the receiver. In the morning a letter awaited him at the hotel reception. She had gone to Gotland with her husband. It was no good. She hoped he would understand.

He had not told the scenographer what had happened to Lucca, and he hardly thought of her at all during his stay in Stockholm. When she did cross his mind it was in the guise of an evil spirit who had constantly threatened his attempts to release his innermost self. At first in the form of her all too unconditional, indeed her frankly parasitic love, later with the deadly, bourgeois daily routine and finally his own bad conscience. Robert recalled what Andreas had said when he called on him one evening and drank his Calvados, tortured by guilt and the urge to rebel. How he had long been in doubt about his relationship with Lucca, and how he had felt a lack of challenge when she turned her back on the theatre and had Lauritz, then focused all her energies on the boy and on creating their home. But in the plane from Stockholm he saw it in quite a different light. She was his victim, he thought, as the pine forests and blue lakes passed beneath him, and he had almost killed her. Although she was the most important thing that had ever happened to him. She and the boy. To think it was only now he realised that . . .

He lit a fresh cigarette and looked at Lauritz, who was trying to make a ladybird crawl up his hand. Robert cleared his throat. What if the scenographer left her husband? Andreas turned to him, apparently floored by the idea. He shook his head, she would never do that. In reality they were too alike, they were equally introspective, it would never work. That was probably why he had once fallen in love with Lucca. Because she was so different from him. No, as he said, he had deceived both himself and the set designer in Stockholm. Besides, she was too young, too immature, the illusion of one of them had nourished the other, it had been a dream that could not stand the light of day. Yes, it seemed rather like waking from a dream. As if he had slept through all those years with Lucca and Lauritz right in front of him, the only people who had ever seriously meant anything. The only ones he might ever mean something to, something real. He owed her that . . . he owed it to all three of them, he corrected himself. He rose, went over to Lauritz and kneeled beside him in the grass, stroking his cheek. The boy seemed not to notice him, totally absorbed in the ladybird. Andreas walked slowly back to the bench.

When something goes up the spout, we call it a mistake, thought Robert, because it is hard to get your head round the thought that it is not only ourselves but just as much luck and circumstance which form our lives. Then it’s better to admit we were foolish. He thought of his mother and his father, the deceased gentlemen’s hairdresser he had never known. If the barber had stayed with her, wouldn’t he perhaps not have been a mistake? He might even have turned out to be a nice man.

What had Lucca told him? Robert looked at him. Told him? Andreas sat down beside him again. Yes, surely she had said something, given a message or request. He faltered. How was she? Robert said he could not tell. He met Andreas’s eyes. He didn’t know her well enough, he went on, to know, but in the circumstances she seemed to be managing. Andreas sat looking in front of him, either at Lauritz or the poppies in the swaying corn or the swing hanging motionless beneath the plum tree’s crown. Of course it would be different, he said quietly, now she was blind. But it was a question of will. He had realised that. One must exert will on one’s life, it would not live itself. And was there any life other than the one to be lived every day? The intimate things he had despised so much, daily life, the child . . . you had to take them on, stand up and face them . . .

Robert asked what he meant. Andreas looked at him in surprise. Lauritz called from inside the house, Robert had not seen him go in. Andreas shouted that he must wait. Lauritz called again. We’re talking! shouted Andreas, half turning towards the open door. Lauritz went on calling. His father rose with an irritated expression and went inside. Robert walked round the house. Andreas caught him up in the drive. If he saw her . . . well, he didn’t know. Was he going to see her? Robert replied that so far they had not arranged anything. Andreas looked down at his shoes and nudged a small stone with one toe. If he saw her would he tell her what they had talked about? Robert promised he would. He went over to his car. As he got into the driving seat the other man was still standing there. He started the engine and moved off. Andreas raised his hand, but Robert did not manage to wave.

He was in a bad mood when he turned into the suburban road. The sun was high in the sky. It shone whitely on the asphalt and the polished cars in the drives and the leaves of the dense shrubberies along the pavements. He sat on in the car when he had parked in the entrance and switched off the engine. He thought of the picture of Lucca he had seen on the notice-board in their kitchen, sitting at a pavement café in Paris, elegantly dressed in a grey jacket, with her hair in a pony tail. Lucca looking into the camera as if she had just turned round, apparently surprised at being snapped. He visualised the picture clearly, the plane trees in the background, her green eyes, painted lips slightly parted, possibly because she had been about to say something. Her gaze seemed to pierce the shining membrane of the photograph. It reminded him of something, he didn’t know what. Something forgotten, something never quite understood or completed, a missed opportunity perhaps.

It was quiet around him. He could hear the whispering, pinging sound of a sprinkler in one of the adjoining gardens. He looked at the lath fencing alongside the drive. In some places the bark was peeling off the laths and hung in loose slivers. The gate was open. He could see a portion of the newly mown lawn and the terrace with its white plastic chairs and their transparent reflections in the panorama window’s repetition of everything within range. Chairs, grass and small white clouds. He turned the key again, put the car into gear and backed out onto the road. Soon afterwards he reached the outskirts of town. He drove through the industrial district, passed the hospital and came to the viaduct leading to the motorway.

It didn’t matter what he thought about Andreas. They had a son, the fool was still her husband, after all, and it didn’t matter if his newly won and rather tacky insight into life’s true values had been induced by being forced to leave Stockholm with shattered hopes. Something or other had to induce it and one cause could be as good as another. His sudden piety was of course merely an attitude, but he was clearly unable to explain things without sounding pathetic and pompous. You had to ignore that, as you considerately ignore people’s handicap or speech impediment, an embarrassing limp or lisp. His sticky chatter about the important things and standing up for them sounded like another of his splendidly illuminating self-deceits, but in the long run it didn’t make a lot of difference what you thought. Maybe illusions had roughly the same function as your skin. You could breathe through them. If they were stripped off, the contact with reality would doubtless be too raw. They should be allowed to dry and crackle and peel off in their own good time allowing new, fresh layers of illusion to form in their place.

The only thing that mattered was whether you were together or not, whether you were alone or had someone to be with. Whether there was a scrap of kindness and sympathy, a scrap of patience with your weak, unaccomplished sides. Then you could always think your own thoughts, tinker with your self-portrait and dream great or modest dreams. On the whole life lasted longer than your dreams, thought Robert, and when they stopped it ought to be bearable. Lucca would never regain her sight, but maybe some sort of life did await her, even if everything had crashed into darkness and solitude. Perhaps the months and years could do for them what they themselves could not envisage just now, and if he was the one who could give her the chance of considering a future with the repentant Andreas, he might well afford the time to play the role of messenger.

He waited for a long time on the terrace where she had sat with Lauritz, until he heard the slight tick from the point of her thin white stick. It made him think of the sound of Lauritz’s pine cones rolling over the tiles the previous day, the prickly sound of the hard seeds. A nurse led her by the arm. She had been surprised when they told her he had come, not expecting him to visit her again so soon. Actually she had not been sure he would come at all.

She was wearing a long black dress with many little buttons, one of the dresses he had brought her from the empty house. Her hair was combed back and held in a pony tail just as in the picture from Paris, and she had put on lipstick. Someone had helped her. The nurse left them alone. Lucca put a hand on the parapet. Maybe they could go for a walk on the beach, if he felt like it. He took her hand and laid it on his arm, and thus they walked, in an old-fashioned way, he thought. She said it. Now we’re walking like two old people . . .

The shadows had grown long and gathered in small, bluish puddles on the trodden sand. The foam of the waves shone in the low sunlight. Only a few holiday-makers remained on the beach. Up in one of the dunes he saw a white-haired man putting on his bathing robe. He resembled the barrister, but Robert could not decide whether it was really him. They walked at the edge of the beach where the sand was damp and firm. They walked slowly but he could see she was regaining the use of her limbs. It was the first time she had been down on the beach. Her white stick left little holes in the sand, a wavering track. She breathed in through her nose. Seaweed, she said. It was true. A salty, slightly rotten odour hung over the intertwined belts of dried kelp between the edge of the sea and the dunes. It was better than the smell of cleaning materials . . . She paused. Her hand slipped from his arm when she stopped. She couldn’t bear being in hospital. She said it quietly, like a statement. No, he said.

They sat down on the sand, close to the sea. She bent her knees and pulled her dress down around her legs. The waves were small, and there was a silence after one had fallen before the next arched itself and collapsed. Fans of water and foam reached right up to the shadows of their heads and shoulders. He told her Andreas was back at the house, and what he had said that afternoon. That he was sorry. That he wanted to try again. He said nothing about what had happened in Stockholm. She picked up a handful of sand, closed her fist and let the sand filter down again in a fine stream like the sand in an hourglass. Was that why he had come? To tell her this? Robert was silent for a moment. Yes, he said.

The last grains sifted out of her hand, and she laid it flat on the sand. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something. She sat with her face directed at the breaking waves. She was no longer the person who could return. Her tone was hard and clear. She was no longer the one who could decide for that, she went on. She said no more. They fell silent. He took his cigarettes from his breast pocket, there were two left. Would she like to smoke? No, thanks. He lit a cigarette and looked across at Kullen. She didn’t know . . . Now her voice was so low that half the sentence was lost when a wave broke. He asked her to repeat it. She cleared her throat. She didn’t know anything any more. She drew a deep breath and put her head back, and he saw the tears running down under her big sunglasses. She wiped them away with her fingertips so the knuckles pushed up the edge of the sunglasses and he caught a glimpse of her glass eyes. She sniffed and breathed out through her mouth. It was like living in a waiting room, she said. Without knowing what she was waiting for.

He invited her to come and stay. That would make it easier to be with Lauritz while she thought over what to do next. She turned her face to him, and he looked out at the waves to avoid his reflection in her dark glasses. He had not thought of it before, but as soon as he had said it, it seemed the obvious thing. She could have his room, he could sleep in Lea’s. After a week or two she might change her mind. When she had spoken to Andreas. At some point they would need to talk.

She did not reply. Neither of them said anything as they walked back. She stopped in the foyer and let go of his arm. Had he meant it? He sounded more offended than he meant to when he replied. What did she think? She smiled apologetically and reached out for his arm again. It was just . . . unexpected. They went on across the foyer. Why should he care about all her problems? She directed the dark glasses towards him as if regarding him with an expectant look. Let’s say I am someone with too much room, he went on at last. Too much room? Yes, he said. Too much room, too much time. She stopped again and tapped her stick on the floor, raising it and letting it go. And how did he intend to get her out of here?

He asked her to wait on a sofa in the foyer and went into the office to ask for the doctor on duty. He had gone home. Robert told the secretary he was taking Lucca with him. She looked at him incredulously over her reading glasses. They couldn’t discharge a patient just like that. I am her doctor, said Robert. He took full responsibility. It sounded rash. The secretary pushed her glasses up her nose. It was against the rules. Don’t you worry about that, replied Robert and promised her she could rely on him to witness that she had protested.

He went back to the foyer and took Lucca up to her room. She sat on the bed while he packed her bag. You must be crazy, she said. Not exactly, he replied. The secretary and a nurse came in sight at the door. Was he next of kin? Not really, he said. Lucca turned away, picked up the pillow and lowered her face. The secretary pulled the corners of her mouth down in an offended grimace and handed him a ball pen and a document. Would he kindly sign this? He did so without reading it through. When they had gone, Lucca collapsed over the pillow. It was the first time he had heard her laugh.

The sun had set and the sky was pink and lilac when they came out onto the motorway. He put on a tape, they sat listening to the music. After they had passed Copenhagen she felt hungry. He drove into a lay-by with a McDonalds. They ate in the car. She got ketchup on her chin and one cheek, but he didn’t say anything. In the end she discovered it herself. You must tell me when I mess myself up, for God’s sake, she said, wiping her face with the serviette. There was still some ketchup on her cheek. He took her serviette and removed the red streak, started the car again and glided in to join the column of red rear lights between the pale yellow fields in the twilight.