He had changed. He had grown a full beard, his hairline was receding and there were touches of grey in his beard and curly hair, but he was just as stooping and thin as before, and he wore spectacles again, oval and unframed. She noticed that in the taxi. You’ve stopped wearing your contact lenses, she said. He smiled, shy at her commenting on his appearance. Barbara had made him wear contact lenses. He said it in a way that told her they were no longer together, but she asked all the same. He met her eyes as he shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile like someone who has overcome the blows he had received. She leaned back and looked ahead.

He had just come back from Reykjavik. One of his compositions had been performed at a festival for new Scandinavian music. Although I don’t feel so young any more, he added. He might have been right there, sitting with his well-trimmed beard and unframed glasses, grizzled and in a herring-bone coat. Was it Daniel? The short-sighted, unworldly Daniel she had once made so unhappy. She pictured him at the piano in his little apartment, as she stood at the window and made an end of it.

She told him about Andreas and Lauritz, about the house they had renovated, and how relieved she had been to move out of town and forget all the brooding over her career, totally absorbed in watching her son grow, seeing their home taking shape . . . Well, it must sound boring . . . He shook his head. He didn’t think so. Incidentally, he had seen her on stage, in The Father. He had followed her progress. She borrowed his mobile and called Else to say she would be delayed. They walked beside the canal, he insisted on carrying her case. The reflections from the old street lamps trembled on the restless black water. The wind had got up, the boats rocked beside the quay and tugged at their mooring ropes, making them creak.

She watched the cobblestones sliding to meet her through the lamps’ circles of light. I wasn’t very nice to you, she said. He made light of it, it was so long ago. They walked for a while in silence. How strange it is, he said, that we should meet, out of the blue! Yes, she replied, I meet you every time I am deserted. It leaped out of her. He looked at her in a way that made her lower her eyes. She told him how Otto had dropped her a few hours after she ran into him and Barbara one evening in a bar. He had thought she was the kind who did the dropping. She shrugged her shoulders. She had thought so too. He smiled ironically. If only he had met her the next day instead! She smiled back. Well, he was not free then. The cold made him shiver. Every time . . . he said cautiously. Did that mean? . . . He looked at her inquiringly. She told him briefly about Paris and the letter. What kind of daft shit had she married? She looked at him. Sorry, he just felt . . .

Daniel’s houseboat was at the end of the quay. He crossed the gangway first, put the cases down on the deck and gallantly took her hand. It was an old barge. There’s no electricity, he said on the way down the stairs. She stood still while he lit the oil lamps and a gas stove in the middle of the floor. The piano was on a dais at one end of what had once been the hold. At the other end there was a galley and a door into the cabin where he slept. She recognised his grandmother’s teacups on a shelf above the kitchen table, with a rowing boat in moonlight and a romantic couple. The handle was missing from one of the cups. The place was covered with varnished boards that shone in the glow from the lamps and candles, and there were small portholes in the walls from which you could look out over the canal and the quay. He uncorked a bottle of wine, they sat on safari chairs. A chest between them functioned as a table.

He was quite frank. He had had one or two brief relationships since Barbara left him, but they had never turned into anything permanent, he was probably not fit for that. He poured out the wine. Gradually he had grown used to living alone. It had its advantages, he could do as he pleased. She told him how surprised she had been when she met him with Barbara. Just imagine how surprised he had been himself! She took off her shoes and pulled her feet up in the chair. The red wine and the slight rocking beneath her had a calming effect.

Barbara had found herself a stockbroker. He smiled, but without bitterness. That probably suited her better . . . But he did not regret their relationship, she had been rather sweet, and she had helped him to get on. She had made him believe he was not entirely impossible. But he had been impossible back then, he could see that quite well . . . Lucca smiled. He raised his eyes and she regretted her smile when she saw the expression in his eyes. Now he had to smile himself. It’s like a disease, he said, being hopelessly in love. And you almost go crazy, he went on, because you can’t get it into your head that your disease isn’t infectious.

Had it gone on a long time? He shrugged it off. A year and a half, two years, until he met Barbara. She cured him. He laughed and shook his head at himself, raising his glass again. Lucca tried to remember the girl with the big red lips and bulging breasts. That was what it took, obviously. But two years . . . exactly the same time she had been with Otto. In all that time Daniel had been thinking of her even though he knew it was hopeless. She almost smiled again but stopped herself. He looked as if he thought it was quite funny himself when he thought back on the heartbreak of his youth. But who had ever loved her so faithfully, knowing well he hadn’t the ghost of a chance to have his love requited?

It was odd to be on Daniel’s houseboat drinking red wine. Their chance meeting and the unusual surroundings matched her feeling of observing her life from outside, as if she was someone else. She felt strangely untouched by what had happened in Paris, as if she was divided in two. Her twin sister took all the pain on herself and gave herself up to all the unanswered questions about what would happen if Andreas left her, and what was wrong with her to make him fall for a Swede with black curls and blue eyes.

How different they were, she and Daniel. He had gone on loving her long after their relationship had ended, although he knew she had met someone else. His love had not lessened when he no longer had her near him. It had merely grown stronger and more faithful in her absence, away from his reach. The loss of her had filled him to the brim with love, when she was no longer there to receive it. It had grown and grown, and he had been at bursting point because he could not get rid of it. Whereas she had started to think of her love for Andreas in the past tense as soon as she realised she could no longer count on him.

Daniel had loved her in spite of himself and in spite of her, until it was driving him mad, his love turned into a disease. She was not like that. What made her twin sister suffer was not the fever of emotion, apart from jealousy at the thought of the polaroid picture of the pale beauty sitting on an unmade bed with a halo of morning sun in her unruly hair. What hurt wasn’t anything inside her, but the feeling that something had been amputated, leaving only a bleeding wound.

Reading the terrible letter had been like the stroke of an axe, and that axe had been so sharp and slashed so hard and unexpectedly that several minutes passed before she felt pain and realised that a part of herself had vanished. Even more time passed before she understood that it was not like losing an arm or a leg. Not until next morning when she sat sunning herself on the balcony and trying to imagine what it would be like to jump off, not until so many hours later did it strike her that the axe had cut her in two. One who could actually have swung her legs over the rail, and another to whom that was merely an unreal idea. One was already in the train bound for home, leaning her forehead against the window as she stared despairingly into the darkness. The other sat on a safari chair on Daniel’s houseboat drinking red wine.

She rose and looked at her watch and realised it would have looked more convincing if she had looked at it before getting up. She said she would try to catch the last train. He fetched her coat and held it out for her while she put her arms in the sleeves. He carefully lifted her pony tail so it fell over the collar. When she turned round he looked quite frightened at his own intimate gesture. It had been good, she said, to see him again. He smiled and looked into her eyes. It had . . . She walked towards the stairs, he followed. She had already taken two steps up when he said it. She stopped and turned round. She wasn’t sure she had heard aright. He wished she didn’t have to go. He looked at her without blinking. Bravely, she thought, as he raised his hands to the side a little with an apologetic movement. Now it was said. He caught hold of her without faltering when, slightly theatrically she had to admit, she let herself fall into his embrace.

She still had her coat on when she lay back on his bed. She closed her eyes as he kissed her. It was an unusual feeling, she had never had a lover with a full beard. He unbuttoned her with practised fingers. She recalled how she had admired his confident hands when they struck even the widest chords. He stripped off her pants and tights. As he kissed her nipples she regretted not leaving. She suddenly felt she was a retrospective reward for his faithful, fruitless love.

The bed rose and fell in time with the rocking movements of the boat, and she felt the rough prickling of his full beard on the thin skin of her thighs. In a detached flake of a second she saw the waving tufts of pine needles. She locked her thighs around his neck and felt his scratchy beard and the firm grip of his hands round her ankles, and once more she was carried on a pair of broad shoulders in the same rocking rhythm among the tree trunks towards the dunes and the sea.

It rained all the way from Copenhagen. The raindrops crawled sideways across the windowpane as houses, trees and fields rushed past under the low clouds. When she stepped off the train she noticed a young girl humping a heavy bag. The girl broke into a run when she caught sight of a tall man in his forties coming towards her. They had the same colour hair, chestnut brown. The man embraced her slightly clumsily and took her bag. Probably a divorced father, thought Lucca and followed them out of the station where they got into a car. She tried to picture what it would be like if she and Andreas took turns to have Lauritz. She couldn’t imagine living alone in the house. But where then? She thought how she had moved away, first from Otto and then from Harry, with her cases and bags. There were no taxis. She rang for one and stood in shelter for a long time in the cold, gazing at the depressing, unchanging square with its provincial shops and parked cars.

Else sat in the kitchen reading the paper. She hadn’t yet cleared the breakfast things. As usual Lauritz had shaken out more cornflakes than he could eat. The orange flakes had gone soft in the yellowish milk. Else put her head on one side with a worried look in her eyes. Lucca put down her suitcase and leaned against the fridge door as she slid down onto the floor and began to weep. Her mother rose and went to kneel beside her. What had happened? Lucca pulled herself together, got to her feet and walked into the living room. She tore off her coat on the way and let it fall on the floor. Else followed her, they sat down on the sofa. Lucca bent over. The weeping broke out of her throat again in cramped contractions, as if she was vomiting. Else put an arm around her and stroked her back.

Lucca explained in disconnected sentences interrupted by sniffing. Else clasped her close. I suspected as much, she said, stroking her hair. Lucca snatched her hand away with an angry movement, rose and went to one of the windows looking onto the garden. What did she mean, she thought as much? Else made no reply. It had stopped raining. Lauritz’s little plastic tractor lay overturned on the muddy lawn. The branches of the plum tree dripped. She turned round. Else stood beside the stove, she bent down and picked the coat up. What do you mean by that? repeated Lucca, herself surprised at her accusing tone. Else laid the coat over one arm and stroked it slowly with her hand. Say it then! shouted Lucca as she went to sit on the sofa. Else sat down beside her in the opposite corner.

Now she must try to calm down a bit. She had not exactly gone around expecting it, but she had to admit she had had her ideas through the years. You’re sure to be cross with me, she said, pausing. She brushed dust off the stove with the flat of a hand. In a way she had been asking for it herself. That was probably an awful thing to say, but . . . She looked firmly at Lucca. Now I’m being honest, she said. Lucca looked out of the window again. She could see the neighbour’s horse in the meadow beside the drive, unmoving except for its tail fluttering limply like a pennant. She had worshipped him far too much. Else’s voice had grown cool and confident, it was the voice she used on the radio to all and sundry. A small bird flew over the black field, itself black against the grey sky. It rose and fell in arcs, as if it wanted to imitate the curves of the plough-land.

She had become subservient to him. What did she think it was like, to be worshipped in that way? She had completely neglected herself for the sake of him and the boy. Lucca squeezed up her eyes. The rainwater had gathered in pools on the lawn, and the grass blades were reflected in the quiet water, black against the greyish mirror image of the sky. She breathed evenly again. Good Lord, there were enough suckers about who thought it was lovely to have a sweet, home-loving woman always ready and waiting. But Andreas was no sucker, he was an intelligent and sensitive person, and an artist too. He needed challenges, even opposition, and she had not given him any. When all was said and done he was only a man, and men tended to grow tired of women who clung to them and only yearned and sighed for confirmation. It was no surprise to find he had succumbed to temptation. Lucca looked at her. What do you want me to do then? she said. Else fell silent and looked at her for a long time, as if reading her face for an answer. Get yourself a lover, she said.

Lucca pulled up her feet and stretched out for a cushion, she clutched it to her stomach with her arms crossed over it. She looked down at the floor. The cloud cover was thinning, and pale sunlight lit the floorboards in softly outlined squares. What about you? she asked. Else smiled. What did she mean? Lucca hesitated for a moment before going on. What about the time she was with Ivan and suddenly started wearing completely different clothes and changing all the furniture? As for her friends, she had exchanged even them for Ivan’s advertising chums. Else looked past the stove into the kitchen. She had even demanded a church wedding although Ivan didn’t want that at all. She who had always held bourgeois traditions to scorn and talked of marriage as a form of prostitution. That hadn’t hindered her from parading as a fifty-year-old bride with a white veil and naughty underclothes.

Who said Ivan didn’t want a wedding? Else’s well-modulated voice suddenly sounded dry. Lucca prodded the cushion cover with a nail. He had said so himself . . . Else cleared her throat and looked at her. When? Lucca laid down the cushion, put her feet on the floor and crossed her legs. She swallowed and met her mother’s eyes. She explained that she had gone into the country one summer’s day not knowing Else was in town. She described how she had had dinner with Ivan and talked to him more easily than ever before, and how for the first time she had understood what Else saw in him. Until she had gone to bed, drunk with all the white wine he had poured into her, only to be woken up by his paunch rubbing her back and his stiff prick between her thighs.

She went on despite the tears that ran down Else’s cheeks. She had noticed how he looked at her in the mornings when she was on her way to the bathroom, but she had to admit she was pretty surprised to wake up with her stepfather in her bed and her stepfather’s prick between her thighs. That was why she had gone to Italy so suddenly to find Giorgio. And maybe in the end that was the reason, and not so much because he had found himself another tight delicious twenty-year-old, for Ivan finally making off. For fear of her letting the cat out of the bag some day.

Else had got up. She stood for a moment without moving, one hand resting on the cold stove pipe, before going into the bedroom. Soon afterwards she came back with her suitcase. She went into the hall to put on her coat. Lucca said there would not be a train for another hour. Else wanted to leave at once. Neither of them spoke in the car. Lucca went onto the platform with her. Maybe, she said, maybe you were asking for it. Maybe you worshipped him too much . . . Else turned round and slapped her soundly. Lucca staggered. Her cheek still burned as she walked to the exit. She turned in the station entrance. Her mother was sitting on a bench with legs crossed and her head leaning back. An elegant, lone female figure at a station in the provinces. Lucca could not see whether her eyes were open or closed.

A week later she stood on the opposite platform holding Lauritz by the hand and waiting for the train from Copenhagen. It was a dry day but windy and the passing clouds made shadows appear and fade again by turns. Lauritz played with the shadow of the roof as they waited. He placed himself with the tips of his toes in line with the edge where the shadow was succeeded by sunshine on the asphalt. He was equally excited each time another cloud had passed the sun and he still stood balancing like an acrobat with his toes on the boundary between light and shadow.

She still had the feeling of being cut in two. One who feared Andreas was going to leave her, and one who had started to disengage herself from the moment she had read the letter from his lover. But they no longer lived side by side, her two halves, they took turns to rule over her feelings and thoughts. She had hardly slept since getting back from Paris, and as she stood waiting for Andreas she was dizzy with exhaustion.

Lauritz did not understand why she lay in bed weeping, or why she pushed him away when he tried to comfort her. She grew irritable and reacted harshly with cross words to his persistent attempts to make contact. At other times she completely ignored him and sat for hours gazing dejectedly out at the garden and the field, torturing herself with elaborate fantasies about Andreas and the black-haired letter writer. When she was in that state everything about the boy seemed unbearable, his very existence seemed like a hindrance to her, a parasitic organism that drained her of energy and life. She came to regard him as a frightful mistake who suddenly represented everything that had made Andreas tire of her. All the routines, all the dull cud-chewing, all the washed-out and sloppy details of daily life.

But Lauritz was still more confused a few minutes later when she took him on her lap and hugged him or sat on the floor building a house with his Lego bricks, completely involved in the activity. It was not only guilt at her unexpected hatred of him that made her so attentive and devoted. She was kind to him again because she was thinking of Andreas in the past tense. She doubted that her love for him had been anything other than a craving, a self-obsessed dream. When she embraced her son she also passed into herself, into the vacuum Andreas had left when he took his love away from her and gave it to someone else. There was nothing left there, not even the shadow of love, and maybe her love had been just a shadow of his. As she buried her nose in her son’s soft neck and licked the fair down, she imagined herself another life somewhere else, alone with Lauritz. He was the only one whose love she did not need to doubt, and the only one she knew she loved more than herself.

Her thoughts about Daniel and what had happened on his houseboat went through the same fluctuations as her feelings for the boy. When she slammed the door in Lauritz’s face and lay down on her bed to weep she heard Else’s words again, inflamed with venomous female spite. Get yourself a lover! She despised herself for having yielded to Daniel’s pleading dog’s eyes. Their chance reunion had broken open the poor man’s old wound again. She had ministered to his needy loneliness merely to take revenge on Andreas and create a balance in their shared account, but that had just made her an even greater traitor. She felt she had not only betrayed Andreas but herself as well.

Daniel called one evening after she had put Lauritz to bed. Could she speak freely? It offended her to be drawn into the low-voiced mood of intimate conspiracy. She quite forgot to ask how he had got hold of her number. Did she feel very bad about what had happened? No . . . she just hoped he was not sorry about it himself. He was not. He still cared for her, so why should he regret it? Because . . . said Lucca, but did not finish the sentence. He understood. She must not think that he in any way . . . Now he was the one who interrupted himself. She didn’t. He gave her his mobile number, but she didn’t write it down. He hoped she would call him one day. He shouldn’t rely on that, she answered coldly.

When she had replaced the receiver she immediately regretted not having noted his number. Lauritz called from his room. He asked if it was Andreas. Yes, she said. Andreas had not telephoned since she came back from Paris. That in itself was proof, she thought and kissed the boy’s cheek. Later when she sat in front of the stove gazing dully at the glowing coals, she pictured her life without Andreas, but not alone. It was just a foolish fleeting daydream, but for a moment she saw herself and Lauritz on the houseboat with Daniel. She stood on deck hanging out washing on a line. The boy was fishing with a rod, and Daniel sat in the hold strumming on his piano. Furious with herself, she kicked shut the door of the stove so the cinders dropped down inside.

Lauritz called again. She went to him. He asked why she was making a noise. It’s because I miss your dad, she said. He did too. He would like to make a noise too. Do, then, she said. Lauritz crawled out of bed and turned his box of Lego bricks upside down. She asked if it helped. He didn’t know yet. She tucked the duvet round him and told him gently to try and fall asleep. When she could hear his even breathing, she went outside. The moon was almost full and its pallid light fell leaden and faint over the grass and the branches of the plum tree.

Nowhere, she thought, nowhere in the whole world did she belong. She felt no pity for herself at the thought, she merely thought it, slowly stating the fact as she watched the lights of a car pass the end of the gravel road. A dog barked further away. A subdued soughing came from the woods. But not so far away someone had loved her in spite of himself and in spite of her. After all those years he was still so fond of her that he was not afraid of humiliating himself yet again.

She recalled what Harry had said one night about his career as a seducer. How he had long ago seen through himself and yet kept on pursuing one unknown beauty after another. As if his knowledge and his desire were unable to communicate. But perhaps it was not only desire that had made him reach out time and again for a new, strange face. Perhaps it was hope as well, which something inside him had refused to give up, although his experience told him it was useless to go on hoping for a meeting that would change everything. She would like to believe that was why he had reached out to her the night before Christmas Eve when she turned up unexpectedly.

As she stood in front of the house hunching her shoulders against the cold she decided that Harry had been a victim both of his own hope and of hers, when she met Andreas. Had Daniel’s phone call made her hope again? After all, she had been receptive to him despite the knowledge of how many times her hopes had been disappointed by one man or another. If she thought of Daniel it was possibly in spite of herself, but it was also thanks to the hole Andreas had left in her. It made her suffer, that hole, not so much because of him as of its own yawning emptiness. But it was not only the emptiness in which something was missing, it was also the opening where someone else might show his face. It hurt to go on hoping, but would she ever be able to do anything else?

Stretching out her hand as she lay in bed, she felt the T-shirt Andreas had slept in. She put it to her face and breathed in the faint smell of sweat, his smell. She began to weep again. She could not explain to herself why she felt so sure it was over. She had no inkling of what would follow. There was nothing to imagine, nor was there anything to hope for.

He looked pale, and he avoided her eyes when he stepped out of the train and Lauritz ran to meet him. The boy’s delight and hundreds of questions lasted all the way home. When they were inside Andreas said he needed a rest before dinner. They had still not exchanged more than generalities. She opened a bottle of red wine while cooking. Lauritz lay on the living room floor with a fire engine Andreas had brought him. The feeble but constant sound of its siren made her feel like screaming and smashing something, but for once she controlled herself. When the food was ready she had drunk the best part of the bottle. She went into the bedroom to wake Andreas. He sat on the edge of the bed looking out into the twilight, he had not heard her. He turned round with a start and tried to smile.

All seemed as usual after he had returned from a trip. The boy fired questions and Andreas talked about what he had done. He asked who had called and what had happened while he was away. He had finished his play. Quite finished, he said, with an exhausted air. After dinner he brushed Lauritz’s teeth and put him to bed. She cleared away and sat down again while he read a bedtime story. Her eyes fell on the notice-board where they had put pictures of themselves and Lauritz. She looked at the one he had taken of her in the café in Paris. He had given her the film to take home for developing. She sat for a long time meeting her own surprised, searching gaze that seemed in itself impenetrable, as if it was not her. When at last he joined her she had drunk a bottle and a half of wine. She went to kiss Lauritz goodnight. He stroked her cheek and asked if she was happy now. Yes, she said and felt a smarting sensation around her eyes. I’m happy now . . . She hastened to switch off the light and stood for a moment in the darkened room until she was sure she was not going to cry. The telephone rang in the living room. Andreas had already risen but she managed to get there first. Did she know it was Daniel? She had guessed it was. He asked if he was interrupting. Yes, she said. He had thought a lot about her. Could they meet? She asked where he was calling from. The boat, he replied. She raised her voice as she said goodbye and put the receiver down before he could say more.

Andreas looked up as she went into the kitchen. Who was that? He had lit a cigarette. My mother, she said and sat down opposite him. The cigarette smoke made her feel sick. He looked out of the window. It was pitch dark now. What is it? she asked. Her voice sounded thin and unnatural. He turned to her. He had lost weight, and he had a pimple on his forehead, red and swollen. I want to live alone, he said. She was perfectly calm now. Was there someone else? He looked away. No, he said. She did not take her eyes away. Why did he want to live alone, then? He watched the smoke of his cigarette, curling upwards in the lamplight. Because he didn’t love her any more.

She rose from the table and went out into the hall, put on her coat and made sure the car keys were in the pocket. He followed her outside. She could not just go off, they must talk about it. He had been thinking a great deal about this . . . She slammed the car door in the middle of his sentence and started the car. He shouted her name as she drove down the drive. It was cloudy and the road was dark. She thought of calling Daniel from a phone box but decided to surprise him instead. She looked at the clock beside the speedometer. She could be in Copenhagen in an hour.