One morning in October Robert woke up while it was still dark. He peered at the hands of the alarm clock. It was twenty past five. He sank back on the pillow feeling sleep rising from below again. He pictured the water trickling out of the soil between the grass blades under their boots as they walked along the isthmus towards the reed-bed further out. It had begun to drizzle. He had taken her hand to show her the way along the strip of land between the shallow stretch of sea and the flooded meadows. She put her head back to feel the light prickling of the rain on her forehead and cheeks. The dark glasses were spotted with drops. She had folded up her white stick and put it in her coat pocket.

Lucca had never been out to the headland. She wondered why they had never been there, she and Andreas. They had been able to see the sand bank and the rushes from the beach where they went to swim. Listen, she said, stopping, and now Robert too heard the airy, rhythmical whistling of wing beats. He looked up and turned round, but did not catch sight of the flock before it was far out on the horizon, where the calm water and clouded sky converged along a blurred edge of reflections.

The alarm started to beep. He had been on the point of falling asleep again. Half past five. He must have set it at the wrong time. He did not usually get up before seven. He was about to switch off the alarm when he caught sight of the packed travel bag standing in front of the wardrobe. They had planned to leave at six o’clock to catch an early ferry. He rose, put on his dressing gown and opened the curtains. It had rained all night, the trees were laden with rain. He met Lucca in the corridor. She wore her sunglasses, she never showed herself to him without them. She had heard his alarm even though Lea’s room was at the opposite end of the house. He asked if she would like the bathroom first. She made an evasive, sleepy gesture and went back along the corridor, her hand brushing the wall. She had grown used to the house by now.

She often heard sounds he had not caught. Her hearing had grown sharper as she trained herself for blindness. That was her own expression. He took night duties so he could drive her to the Institute for the Blind once or twice a week. She was a good student, and so far the only impediment was her firm refusal to have anything to do with dogs. She couldn’t stand dogs, particularly Alsatians, she would not dream of making friends with one. But she had started to learn Braille. One morning she sat in the kitchen moving her fingertips over the breadcrumbs on the table. What does it say? he asked. She smiled secretively. I’m not telling!

He went into the bathroom and took off his dressing gown. He leaned against the basin as he brushed his teeth and now and then glanced at himself in the mirror. A solid tousled man in his forties with foam round his mouth. He felt as heavy as the weather, but within the weight of his body he felt a lightness he had not noticed for a long time. It was the prospect of travelling that made him light, the thought of the endless motorways that would take them south, away. If he drove hard they could get through most of Germany before midnight, perhaps right down to the Stuttgart area.

He had scarcely been anywhere abroad since his divorce from Monica, on the contrary he had worked so hard for the past two years that he usually had some holiday due to him. Once only he had taken Lea to the Algarve. It was pretty awful, but she had seemed to enjoy herself. As a rule she went away with Monica and Jan, and he had not felt like going alone. He could not see himself trailing around some picturesque town and going to a restaurant in the evening. A solitary tourist secretly spying on the inhabitants, grateful if anyone smiled at him.

It was his idea for them to go away, and Lucca had agreed at once. He felt the trip might get something in her to loosen its grip. Something that had firmly embedded itself and made her life, during the past months, seem like a closed circle. She had been staying with him since he visited her at the orthopaedic hospital. He had surprised himself by his sudden whim, when he saw how deep her despair was, and invited her to stay with him. He had not known what to say when she asked why he made such an amazing offer. Too much room. That had been his modest reason. That he was someone who had too much room. But it was still the best explanation he could hit on.

Luckily she had not asked him again. He did not think it was because she had started to take him for granted. She behaved more like someone afraid of upsetting the temporary and precarious state of things with too many questions. She often kept to herself in Lea’s room or on the terrace, until it grew too cold to sit outdoors. When it began to get dark early he found her several times sitting out there in her coat or wrapped in a rug. Sometimes he asked her to come inside. He did not like the thought of her staying outside in the dusk so as not to impose on him. At other times he left her alone, relieved that she did not feel obliged to be sociable.

As he rinsed the toothpaste from his mouth his gaze fell on some of her things that had found their place on the bathroom shelves, bottles of perfume and skin lotion, her nail file, hairbrush, shower cap and bag of sanitary towels. There wasn’t a name for their chaste life together. You could say she was his guest. Since the accident he had gradually been drawn into her life, until he discovered he had moved far outside his medical sphere of action. The expression made him smile as he tidied away some used cotton wool sticks she had dropped on the floor beside the waste bin.

She had not seen Andreas or as much as talked to him on the phone since he came back from Paris and confirmed what she already knew. Robert was still playing the part of messenger, and several times he’d had to ask Andreas to be patient and stop ringing. Give it time, he kept saying to the grief-stricken man, but he could feel Andreas growing ever more despondent at the thought that he might have left it too late to repent and show goodwill. Robert himself had no idea what the future would bring. He defended Lucca’s decision to isolate herself from everyone except her son without wholly understanding her fierce resolution, and he did not press her to explain herself. The accident had stopped her in her course, and no one could tell how long her stupor would last. She did not even know that herself.

At times he felt like a living fortress against what she must feel was a siege. Andreas kept on insinuating himself with his eager guilt, impatient for her to relieve him by at least meeting him and hearing how fluently he could talk about his error. She made no comment when Robert passed on what he had been asked to tell her. She never asked what he knew about Andreas’s trip to Stockholm. Nor did she ask him to respond to the messages her mother and Miriam got him to deliver.

Robert had long telephone conversations with Else when she called to hear how things were going, and to ask if Lucca wouldn’t at least come to the phone. He had to smile when this woman with the cultivated voice tried out her mature charm on him in the hope that he might happen to reveal the nature of his relationship with her daughter by his tone of voice or some unconsidered word. He also spoke to Miriam and heard her baby wailing in the background. Still less could she comprehend why her friend had no use for her now that everything in her life had fallen apart. Else hinted darkly that they’d had a kind of row, but that it was of no importance now. He pretended not to know what she was talking about. Robert also concealed his knowledge from Andreas, although he sometimes almost interrupted his grief-stricken monologue when he went out to the house in the woods to fetch Lauritz or take him home again.

They would sit in the kitchen where the pictures of Lucca still hung on the notice-board. The sighted Lucca, building the house or swinging her son around or sitting at a Parisian café and smiling, her eyes surprised and yet aware. Andreas could be so full of remorse and self-pity that Robert found it hard to keep quiet. He remembered the shame he had heard in her voice and read on her face when she told him what had happened on Daniel’s houseboat. He could see and hear that her shame related not merely to Andreas, to whom she had been unfaithful, or Daniel whom she had misused. Something had been shattered that night, a week before she had driven herself into disaster, and Robert was the only one who had any inkling of it. He was relieved each time he drove home without having betrayed her confidence, even though he had seen Andreas in all his misery, sincere but also hollow.

One evening it was Daniel on the phone. He presented himself as an old friend and said he had been given Robert’s number by Else. He asked how she was. He did not say Lucca, but she. His intimate tone surprised Robert, seeing they had never talked to each other before. How many times had he phoned the house in the woods and slammed the receiver down because Andreas answered? Or waited until the connection was broken off because no one answered? Daniel paused. Are you . . . he asked and interrupted himself before trying again. I mean . . . you and Lucca . . . Robert almost sympathised with the irrepressible need for clarity beneath the other man’s heavy-hearted stammer.

Lucca sat in an easy-chair wearing headphones. He went over to her and laid a cautious hand on her shoulder. She was alarmed, for once she had not heard him, she who otherwise heard everything. He could faintly hear the crescendo in the last movement of Brahms’s third symphony. He said it was Daniel, and as he spoke he wondered at himself for not telling the caller as usual that Lucca did not want to speak to anyone. She hesitated a moment before rising and walking over to the telephone, orientating herself as was now her habit by brushing the furniture with her hand en route. He took care not to change the position of anything when he did the housework. She waited to pick up the receiver until he had gone out of the room and closed the door behind him.

He went into the kitchen and started clearing up the dinner things. One of the plates clattered as he put it into the dishwasher, and at the same moment he heard a corresponding clatter from the other end of the house, like an echo. She squatted in the middle of the room surrounded by tulips, water and fragments of glass. She used one hand to search for the pieces and collected them in the other, curving it like a cup. Two of her fingers were bleeding, he led her into the bathroom. She had a deep cut on one fingertip. I’m sorry, she said. I just needed to smash something . . . When he had bandaged the cut finger and put a plaster on another, she collapsed onto the lid of the lavatory seat. What was I thinking of? she mumbled. What could I have been thinking of? She bent forwards and began to weep. He looked at her for a moment before going into the scullery to get a dustpan and brush.

He stood waking up under the shower for a long time. It felt as if the hot water slowly made his fatigue crackle and fall away from him in invisible flakes. His own life was the same, almost. He went to the hospital every morning and came home in the late afternoon, but whereas previously he had spent his leisure hours vegetating and listening to music, now he helped Lucca get accustomed to her new existence. He had stopped playing tennis, and not only because he had no time. His friendship with Jacob had cooled after he had let him wait in vain at the tennis courts one summer day, and after Jacob had stood in his garden an hour later and seen him through the window talking to Lucca on the telephone. One day when they were together in a queue in the hospital canteen Jacob asked Robert what he was up to with his former patient. Someone must have seen them together in town, although Lucca seldom went out, for fear of meeting Andreas.

To spare her pride he tried to help her as little as possible. He cleared up discreetly after her small accidents and behaved as if he had not noticed them. Now and again, before she was familiar with the house, he took her arm cautiously when she was about to run into a door or crack her head on the open door of a cupboard, and the episode with the flower vase was not the only time he had to put a plaster on her, like a clumsy child. She said that herself. That it was like learning everything over again, just like a child. At first he’d had to help her in the bathroom in the morning. He guided her under the shower and took her hand to show her how to regulate the water. Her nakedness made them shy and very correct.

He turned off the shower and opened the window to let out the steam. It resembled the smoke from a fire as it billowed up and blew away into the cold damp murkiness. It had been dark when they arrived at his house for the first time. He asked her to wait in the hall while he went in and switched on the lights. She asked him to show her the house. He took her arm and led her round. She wanted to know what each room looked like, and he described the furniture, the pictures on the walls and the other things. She smiled when he got to the ping pong table in what should have been the dining room. As he described it in detail, he suddenly felt he was seeing his home like a stranger.

Later in the evening she grew hungry, and he suddenly realised he had not done any shopping. He offered to make an omelette. She insisted on breaking the eggs and beating them. She needed to cook again after months of insipid hospital food. He set a bowl and a tray of eggs on the kitchen table and put a whisk into her hand. When she knocked the first egg on the edge of the bowl, the yolk slid down onto the table, and so it went on. In the end she had broken almost all the eggs in the tray and half the shells lay in the bowl with the yolks that had been lucky enough not to land on the table. She broke down, convulsed with sobbing as she bent forwards, the tips of her hair dipping into the pool of egg yolk on the table top. He cleared up after her, washed the bowl and suggested she start again. This time she succeeded. She whisked the eggs, he fried the omelettes. Don’t worry, he said. I’m not sorry for you. She turned her dark spectacles towards him. That’s good, she said in a muted voice.

He did not know how she passed the time when she was alone in the house. He asked her when he got home one afternoon and found her sitting on the threshold of the terrace. I’m remembering, she said. He taught her to work the stereo, and she sorted his extensive record collection into piles on the floor, which she memorised, as she tried them all out to find the music she liked. She kept returning to Chopin, but one day when he arrived back in the afternoon, the passionate voice and crisp guitar of José Feliciano reached him out in the drive. He had forgotten that one. It was filled with childhood memories, she told him. Her mother had been mad about José Feliciano, and now he had become a kind of colleague as well. When she had played Che serà serà for the fifth time he suggested that she might like to try what it sounded like listening through his earphones for a change.

He sometimes called her when he was on night duty. They did not talk about anything special, but he lowered his voice nevertheless if the night nurse walked past. He asked what she was doing, and said whatever came into his head. Perhaps that was the biggest change. Someone being in the house when he was not there. The fact that he could call home. He mostly thought about the change during their nocturnal telephone conversations. Things had become quite natural by now, when they were in the house together. When they came to an end of their conversation she always thanked him for phoning. Her politeness made him feel sad. As if he had only called because he knew she was sitting there alone.

Every time after he had driven her to the training session at the Institute for the Blind he would walk around the centre of Copenhagen, browse in music shops or sit in a café. Sometimes he went to see his mother, at others he waited for Lea outside her school. She had given him a teasing look when he fetched her from the station for the first time after the summer holidays and explained in the car that he no longer lived on his own. To start with she wouldn’t believe that Lucca wasn’t his new girlfriend. She only began to believe it when she found one of Lucca’s elastic hair-bands on her bedside table. When Lea came, Lucca slept in an empty room previously used as a store-room. He had tidied away the junk, piled the packing cases at one end and made up a mattress at the other.

Lea felt uncertain about Lucca when they were introduced. She had never before been with a blind person and was shy about her dark glasses and searching manner of turning her face in the direction of anyone speaking. She made an effort to seem natural and behave nicely, but it did not help that she was handicapped, this strange woman who had moved in with her father, even though they were not lovers. As if that wasn’t odd enough anyway. Conversation at the dinner table languished. Lea’s replies were only monosyllables, and Lucca withdrew into herself. Robert felt like an unsuccessful clown desperately rushing around the ring trying in vain to elicit a smile from the audience.

It helped when he fetched Lauritz the next day. The boy’s joy over the reunion made an impression on Lea and she began to relax with Lucca. Lea and Lauritz played blind man’s buff with her in the garden. Standing inside he wondered at her cynical ease as he heard them laugh and saw her reeling around after the children. She was touched, he could see, to sense how Lea treated the boy as if he were her little brother. She succeeded in winning Lea’s confidence, he didn’t know how, and when he saw them sitting on the lawn together, he did not disturb them.

It was one of the last warm days of August, and after lunch they went to the beach. Lea took Lucca’s hand and led her out to the other side of the reef where it was deep enough to swim. He stayed on the edge of the sea with Lauritz. While the boy tumbled around in the waves he watched Lucca, standing with her arms crossed, in water up to her waist. Lea kept encouraging her and finally she gave way and stretched out her arms, lifting her feet off the bottom. They swam slowly side by side towards the posts. Robert admired her courage. She laughed, at once nervous and released. He wasn’t sure he would have dared entrust himself to the water without sight.