Lucca was nervous as the plane came in to land at Charles de Gaulle airport. She was afraid Andreas would not be there as arranged on the telephone. She imagined he might have forgotten, preoccupied as he was when working. Maybe he had forgotten to look at his watch, maybe he had overslept because he had sat up writing all night. But she was also nervous at the thought of seeing him again. It was silly, they had only been apart for a fortnight and had talked on the phone several times. She was in the toilet when she heard the stewardess over the intercom asking the passengers to go back to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. She was putting on lipstick. There had been quite a lot of turbulence during the last part of the flight, it had spilt the coffee on her small folding table and almost made it drip on her clothes several times. Perhaps that was what made her nervous. The plane jolted again as she held the lipstick and pressed her lips down over her teeth, looking like a turtle. Her hand slipped and the lipstick left a long line on one cheek.

She was wearing a short beige dress she knew he liked. It was tight-fitting and fairly low-necked, and the skirt ended quite high up her thighs. He always had to touch her when she wore that dress. She had been in quite a state at the thought of getting coffee on it during the daft turbulence. Over the dress she wore a grey tailored jacket and a petrol-blue silk scarf he had bought for her when they lived in Rome. She had not looked so elegant for months, and it was equally long since she had put on any make-up.

As she was waiting to be checked in at Kastrup Airport she had felt like the typical provincial wife who had decked herself out just because she was travelling by air, but she wanted to look beautiful and sexy when he met her. She knew he had a weakness for girdles and high-heeled shoes with ankle straps. Besides, it was seldom now that she had the chance of making something of herself. At home she mostly dressed in dungarees and wellies.

She had finished painting the bookcase and all the books were in place, even down to alphabetical order. The living room had been the last job. While the bookcase was drying she had managed to fill in the hole around the stove pipe with mortar and then paint it over. It was an old cast-iron stove they had found at a scrap merchant’s and hammered the rust off. She and Else sat by the stove drinking red wine after Lauritz had been put to bed. Else said all her doubts had been put to shame. She looked affectionately at Lucca and stroked her cheek. The glow from the open stove door softened her lined features. So she had got herself a home at last . . . Did Else realise the implications of what she had just said? It seemed unlikely. There was not a shadow of heart-searching in her tender expression. Lucca got up to open another bottle of wine. She wasn’t used to her mother getting sentimental.

She thought of Else’s remark again as she watched Copenhagen grow smaller and vanish in the clouds. She leaned back in her seat and observed the massed clouds, dazzling white above, making her screw up her eyes. So she had got herself a home . . . at last. Else had said it in a loving tone and she would have liked to give herself up to the affection in her glance and the hand that brushed her cheek. Instead she had moved her face away and gone into the kitchen for more wine. She believed she had long since put her bitterness behind her. Bitterness at Else and Giorgio making such a mess of their lives and her childhood. She could see Else was hurt when she took her hand away and looked into the flames in the stove.

As she pulled the cork from the bottle she reproached herself for behaving like a rejected child. But she had felt that her mother was pawing at the life she had herself created. The home she had in fact made, at last, with Andreas. As if Else was invading her happiness in order to warm herself the way she sat and warmed herself by the stove that Lucca and Andreas had had to hammer and scrape away at for days before getting rid of all the rust. Suddenly she was irritated because she was dependent on her mother to look after Lauritz while she was in Paris. She snapped at Else when she poured their wine and her mother asked how Andreas’s new play was coming on. Else could not get over having a son-in-law who was an author and even starting to be famous.

Why couldn’t she just share her happiness with Else in the home she had managed to get at last after all the wrong turnings and blind alleys? Why was she so touchy, now that she was supposed to have found peace in herself? She looked out of the small window at the wing. Suddenly she thought it looked like a diving board, a ten-metre diving board above a very large swimming pool filled with whipped cream. Surely the stewardess would soon bring her a plastic-wrapped swimsuit. The telephone had rung as she sat drinking red wine with Else. It was Miriam. They had chatted on the phone every day. Most of the time Lucca had just listened to her friend, who alternately wept, then furiously recited her jazz beloved’s human failings, his egoism, his cowardice, his unfeeling and spoilt attitude to life. Miriam asked if she could come and see Lucca. A mutual friend had offered to drive her. Lucca explained she was on her way to Paris to visit Andreas.

After she had put down the phone she felt guilty again for not welcoming the deserted, heavily pregnant Miriam, and it did not improve matters that her excuse itself must seem like scorn. She hadn’t time for her unhappy friend because she was flying down to her lover to walk around Paris arm in arm. But she felt even more guilty over her silent, inattentive reaction to Miriam’s furious outbursts of sobbing. She could not hide it from herself. There was something repulsive about all that snivelling heartbreak. It was as if her friend was blowing her nose in Lucca’s ear. She recalled how Else had stretched out a hand and caressed her cheek, as if she wanted to leave her fingerprints on her happiness and lick the butterfly dust from her fond fingers.

Suddenly she could not stand the idea of her mother lying in the bed she and Andreas slept in every night. Perhaps Else would lie awake in the dark listening for a faint echo of their blissful sighs and moans from the walls. Through the years Else had been witness to all her failed relationships and affairs, and she had lamented them so enthusiastically that Lucca had sometimes suspected her of finding comfort and reassurance in her daughter’s setbacks. She was in no doubt that Else rejoiced for her sake, but nor did she doubt that in her heart her mother envied her all that happiness and secretly thought it was really incredible after all the men she had gambolled with. She probably did not realise it herself, but Lucca had heard it as an undertone in her comments. Imagine, that she had got herself a home in spite of it all! When actually she did not really deserve it. How merciful life could be, after all . . .

She thought of Miriam who despite everything had believed so fervently in her jazz beloved that she had decided to have a child with him. She’d had the same faith in Andreas, in the certainty of his gaze and his voice one late summer morning in Trastevere when she told him she was pregnant. Was it just because she compared herself with her deserted friend that she felt so vulnerable in her own home? A few days before, when all the books were in place in the bookcase, she had looked around her not knowing what to do next. Now everything was as it should be. She called Andreas to tell him this, but she could feel she was disturbing him. Normally he called, in the evening. She asked him why he didn’t just disconnect the phone. He mumbled that you never knew what might happen.

She missed him although there was less than a week to wait. She felt the lack of his presence, now she no longer had anything to throw herself into. The daily housework was quickly done, and the hours when Lauritz was at nursery school seemed longer than before. She sat and looked vacantly out of the window at the slanting ploughed furrows and the bare crown of the plum tree. She tried to read but put down the book after a page or two, unable to find any interest in the plot. She felt far too sensitive about the sudden emptiness. She had said that herself as an excuse one evening when she almost quarrelled with him on the telephone. They hardly ever quarrelled. Afterwards she could remember precisely what it was that had made her cross. He had seemed distant, as if he hadn’t anything to say to her, but of course he was far away in his mind, deep in his play.

She told him about Miriam and said it was probably her snivelling phone-calls getting on her nerves. He replied that when all was said and done Miriam had brought it on herself. She said she missed him. He missed her too, he replied after a pause. She laughed down the phone at him and asked why he said that when it wasn’t true. He had his work and the whole of Paris to romp around in when he was free. He didn’t go out much, he replied. But shouldn’t she get going on something soon? Now her role of do-it-yourself-woman was played out? It couldn’t be much fun for her to be financially dependent on him. She was hurt. As if she was a little kept housewife, and had only been playing a game, covered with paint and mortar. During the hours when he had been writing she was actually the one who had buckled down to it, and she had done a great part of the work on her own.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t want to quarrel with him, not on the phone while he was in Paris out of range. When, on rare occasions they did quarrel, as a rule they ended up going to bed together and erasing all disagreement with caresses. They had never been angry for more than half an hour at a time, and she did not want the conversation to end on a bitter note when she could not snuggle up to him afterwards and feel everything was all right again. Besides, he was right. She ought to get going again, the question was, on what. She had not had a stage part since Lauritz was born, only one or two radio plays when he was little, and some dubbing for a Disney film. She had probably been forgotten, it would be almost like starting out afresh. She had said no when she was offered a job with Lauritz on a television ad for nappies, chiefly because Andreas had made fun of it and had been against their child being made use of commercially. Maybe it was stupid of her.

She had not been given the role of Nora in Harry’s production of A Doll’s House. Andreas had intervened. At the time she had not given much thought to it, newly in love as she was. She had merely thought it was the price she had to pay for the choice she had made. When she fell pregnant shortly after that, the role faded into insignificance. But she had paid the price.

When she and Harry had begun to show themselves publicly she could feel that people held their breath in shock and disgust over both her and the shameless old seducer. Lucca dared not think what they would have said if they had known she had been in his bed less than twenty-four hours after his wife died. But when the news spread that she had left Harry she felt people distanced themselves from her afresh. Suddenly everyone seemed to take his side, and the theatre magician’s talented find was transformed into a calculating career prostitute who had ensnared the noble old artist in the midst of his loneliness and despair. They apparently forgot she had been given her role in The Father long before anything happened between her and Harry. Anyway, there were no more offers, and it felt as if she had been struck by a dangerous, infectious disease.

Harry had been right, then. She had ended up leaving him after all. But surely anyone could understand that sooner or later she would leave a man who was so much older. What if he had fought harder to keep her? To start with she had not cared much for his young disciple, and if anyone had told her he would be the father of her child, she would have laughed, both at the idea of having a child and the idea of having it with him.

She thought about that at Charles de Gaulle as she stood among the other passengers on the escalator in one of the plexiglass tubes. All these people, she thought. All of them had a place they called home, but how many of them would be able to say that they had been destined to get one particular home and not another? She thought about Otto again, that they had both had a child with just one year between them. What if he had not grown tired of her? Would those two children have been one and the same child, then? And what if it had not happened to be Andreas she ran into? It was hot in the tube, she was sweating and her impatience felt unbearable as she waited for her suitcase by the conveyor belt.

He was standing in the background in his shabby old leather jacket, which hung on him summer and winter. He waved and smiled, he looked like himself. Who else should he look like? She laughed at him and at herself. She could see he found her lovely and was glad she had taken pains with herself. He walked to meet her and tears came into her eyes as she put down her case and nestled into his embrace.