Headhunters (13 page)

Lotte had opened the door a crack and I glimpsed her pale face.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

‘Here I am again.’

She didn’t answer. She usually didn’t.

‘How are you?’ I asked.

Lotte Madsen shrugged. She looked just the way she had the first time I saw her: a timid whelp, small and
scruffy
with fearful, brown puppy eyes. Greasy hair hung lifelessly down on both sides of her face, her posture was stooped, and shapeless, colourless clothes gave the impression that she was a woman who spent more time concealing rather than drawing attention to her body. Which she had no reason to do; Lotte was slim, shapely and had smooth, perfect skin. But she radiated the kind of submissiveness I imagine you find in those women who are always being beaten up, always being left, never getting the deal they deserve. That may have been what aroused something that I had hitherto never guessed I possessed: a protective instinct. As well as the less platonic feelings that were the springboard for our short-term relationship. Or affair. Affair. Relationship is present tense, affair past.

The first time I saw Lotte Madsen was at one of Diana’s private views in the summer. Lotte had stood at the other end of the room, fixed her gaze on me and reacted a little too late. Catching women in the act like this is always flattering, but when I saw that her gaze was not going to return to me, I ambled over to the picture she was studying and introduced myself. Mostly out of curiosity, of course, since I have always been – considering my nature – sensationally faithful to Diana. Malicious tongues might claim that my fidelity was based more on risk analysis than love. That I knew Diana played in a higher league than I did, attraction-wise, and that consequently I was not in a position to take such risks unless I was willing to play in lower divisions for the rest of my days.

Maybe. But Lotte Madsen was in my division.

She looked like a freaky artist, and I automatically assumed that was what she was, or possibly the lover of one. There was no other way of explaining how a pair of limp, brown cord jeans and a boring, tight grey sweater
could
have gained admission to the private view. But it turned out she was a buyer. Not with her own money, naturally, but for a company in Denmark needing to fit out its new rooms in Odense. She was a freelance translator from Norwegian and Spanish: brochures, articles, user manuals, films and the odd specialist book. The firm was one of her more regular customers. She spoke softly and with a tentative little smile as if she didn’t understand why anyone would waste their time talking to her. I was immediately taken with Lotte. Yes, I think taken is the right word. She was sweet. And small. One fifty-nine. I didn’t need to ask, I have a good eye for heights. By the time I left that evening, I had her phone number to send her photographs of other pictures by the exhibiting artist. At that point I probably thought my intentions were honest.

The next time we met was over a cappuccino at Sushi&Coffee. I had explained to her that I would rather show her printouts of the pictures than email them because screens – just like me – can lie.

After quickly flicking through the pictures, I told her I was unhappy in my marriage, but I was sticking it out because I felt obliged to do so because of my wife’s boundless love for me. It’s the world’s oldest cliché in the married-man-picking-up-unmarried-woman or vice versa scenario, but I had an inkling she hadn’t heard it before. I hadn’t either for that matter, but I had definitely heard
of
it and presumed it worked.

She had checked her watch and said she had to go, and I had asked if I could pop round one evening to show her another artist I considered a much better investment for her customer in Odense. She had hesitantly agreed.

I had taken along some poor pictures from the gallery and a bottle of good red wine from the cellar. She had
appeared
resigned to her fate from the moment she had opened the door to me that warm summer evening.

I had told her amusing stories about my blunders, the kind that seem to put you in a bad light, but actually show that you have enough self-confidence and success to be able to afford self-deprecation. She said she was an only child, had travelled round the world with her parents when she was young and that her father was the chief engineer for an international waterworks company. She didn’t belong to any particular country; Norway was as good as anywhere. That was it. For someone who spoke several different languages she said very little. Translator, I had thought. She preferred other people’s stories to her own.

She had asked me about my wife. Your wife, she said, even though she must have known Diana’s name as she had been invited to the private view. In that sense she certainly made it easier for me. And for herself.

I had told her that my marriage had received a buffeting when ‘my wife’ became pregnant and I didn’t want to have the baby. And, according to her, had persuaded her to have an abortion.

‘Did you?’ Lotte had asked.

‘I suppose so.’

I had seen something change in Lotte’s expression and asked what it was.

‘My parents persuaded me to have an abortion. Because I was a teenager and the child would not have a father. I still hate them for that. Them and myself.’

I had gulped. Gulped and explained. ‘Our foetus had Down’s syndrome. Eighty-five per cent of all parents who go through this experience opt for abortion.’

I had instantly regretted saying that. What had I been thinking? That Down’s syndrome would make my not wanting to have a child with my own wife more understandable?

‘There is a great probability that your wife would have lost the child anyway,’ Lotte had said. ‘Down’s syndrome often goes hand in hand with a heart condition.’

Heart condition, I had thought, and inwardly thanked her for being a team player, for making things simple for me once again. For us. An hour later we had taken off all our clothes and I was celebrating a victory that for a person more accustomed to conquests certainly would have appeared cheap but which put me on cloud nine for days. Weeks. To be more precise, three and a half. I had a lover, nothing less. Whom I left after twenty-four days.

As I looked at her now, in front of me in the hall, it seemed quite unreal.

Hamsun wrote that we humans are soon sated with love. We don’t want anything that is served up in excessively large portions. Are we really so banal? Apparently. But that wasn’t what happened to me. What happened was that I was assailed by a bad conscience. Not because I couldn’t return Lotte’s love but because I loved Diana. It had been an ineluctable realisation, but the final blow came in something of a bizarre episode. It was late summer, the twenty-fourth day of sin, and we had gone to bed in Lotte’s cramped two-room flat in Eilert Sundts gate. Before that we had been talking all evening – or, to be more precise, I had been talking. Describing and explaining life the way I see it. I’m good at that, in a Paulo Coelho kind of way, that is, a way which fascinates the intellectually amenable of us and irritates the more demanding listener. Lotte’s melancholic brown eyes had hung on my lips, swallowed every word, I could literally see her stepping into my world of homespun fantasy, her brain assimilating my reasoning into hers, her falling in love with my mind. As for myself, I had long fallen in love with her love, the loyal eyes, the silence and the
low
, almost inaudible, moaning during lovemaking that was so different from the whine of Diana’s circular saw. Falling in love had put me in a state of constant wantonness for three and a half weeks. So when I finally stopped the monologue, we just looked at each other, I bent forward, placed my hand on her breast, a shiver ran through her or perhaps me – and we made a charge for the bedroom door and the 101-centimetre-wide IKEA bed with the inviting name of Brekke, or break. This evening the moaning had been louder than usual, and she had whispered something Danish in my ear that I didn’t understand, since from an objective standpoint Danish is a difficult language – Danish children learn to speak later than any other children in Europe – but nonetheless I found it uncommonly erotic and increased the tempo. Usually, Lotte had been somewhat against these increases in tempo, but on this evening she had grabbed my buttocks and pulled me into her, which I interpreted as a wish for a further step-up both in thrust and frequency. I obeyed while concentrating on my father in the open coffin during the funeral, a method that had proved to be effective in preventing premature ejaculation. Or, in this case, any ejaculation at all. Even though Lotte said she was on the pill, the thought of pregnancy gave me palpitations. I didn’t know whether Lotte reached an orgasm when we made love; her quiet, controlled manner suggested to me that an orgasm would only manifest itself as tiny ripples on the surface, which I might simply fail to notice. And she was much too delicate a creature for me to expose her to any stress by asking. That was why I was totally unprepared for what happened. I sensed I had to stop but allowed myself a final hard poke. And sensed that I had hit something deep inside. Her body stiffened as her eyes and mouth were thrust open wide. This was followed by some
trembling
and for one tiny insane moment I was afraid I had induced an epileptic fit. Then I felt something hot, even hotter than her vagina, enveloping my genitals, and then a tidal wave washed against my stomach, hips and balls.

I levered myself up with my arms and stared in disbelief and horror at the point where our bodies were conjoined. Her lower abdomen was contracting as if she wanted to eject me, she gave a deep groan, a kind of lowing I had never heard before, and then came the next wave. The water poured out of her, spurted out between our hips and ran down into the mattress that still had not succeeded in absorbing the first wave. My God, I thought. I have poked a hole in her. Panicking, my brain searched for causal connections. She’s pregnant, I thought. And I have just poked a hole in that bag containing the foetus, and now all of the crap is soaking into the bed. My God, we’re swimming in life and death, it’s a water child, another water child! Well, I might have read about women’s so-called wet orgasms, OK, I may have seen it in the odd porn film too, but I had considered it a trick, a sham, a male fantasy about having a partner with equal ejaculation rights. All I could think as I lay there was that this was the retribution, the gods’ punishment for my persuading Diana to have an abortion: for my killing another innocent child with my reckless prick.

I struggled onto the floor, pulling the duvet off the bed with me. Lotte gave a start, but I didn’t notice her huddled-up naked body, I just stared at the dark circle still spreading outwards on the sheet. Slowly I realised what had happened. Or, even more important, what by a happy chance had not happened. But the damage was done, it was too late, there was no way back.

‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘This cannot go on.’

‘What are you doing?’ Lotte, barely audible, whispered from her foetal position.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘But I have to go home and beg Diana for forgiveness.’

‘You won’t get it though,’ Lotte whispered.

I didn’t hear a sound from the bedroom while rinsing the smell of her off my hands and mouth in the bathroom, and I left, closing the front door carefully behind me.

And now – three months later – I was standing in her hall again, and I knew that it was not Lotte but me who had puppy eyes this time.

‘Can you forgive me?’ I asked.

‘Couldn’t she?’ Lotte asked in a monotone. But perhaps it was just Danish intonation.

‘I never told her what happened.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s very likely that I have a heart condition.’

She sent me a long searching look. And I caught the suggestion of a smile at the back of those brown and much too melancholic eyes of hers.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Because I can’t forget you.’

‘Why are you here?’ she repeated with a firmness I had not heard before.

‘I just think we should—’

‘Why, Roger?’

I sighed. ‘I don’t owe her anything any more. She has a lover.’

A long silence ensued.

She jutted out her bottom lip a fraction. ‘Has she broken your heart?’

I nodded.

‘And now you want me to put it together for you again?’

I hadn’t heard this woman of few words express herself in such a light, effortless fashion before.

‘You can’t, Lotte.’

‘No, I suppose not. Do you know who her lover is?’

‘Just a guy who’s applied for a job with us he won’t get, let me put it like that. Can we talk about something else?’

‘Just talk?’

‘You decide.’

‘Yes, I will. Just talk. And that’s your department.’

‘Yep. I brought a bottle of wine.’

She gave an imperceptible nod of the head. Then she turned, and I followed.

I talked us through the wine and fell asleep on the sofa. When I awoke, I was lying with my head in her lap and she was stroking my hair.

‘Do you know what the first thing I noticed about you was?’ she asked when she spotted that I was awake again.

‘My hair,’ I said.

‘Have I told you before?’

‘No,’ I said, looking at my watch. Half past nine. It was time to go home. Well, the ruins of a home. I dreaded it.