The Stronger Sex (15 page)

She stopped. I thought about it. I sensed that she was watching me. After a while I asked, “Your husband obviously hadn't spoken to Weber yet?”

“No. Not by yesterday afternoon when I called Weber, anyway.”

I nodded. Then I said, “The fact that Weber didn't know anything about the… the order is not, of course, conclusive evidence. Do you understand? I mean, it doesn't prove that the order was pure invention on your husband's part.”

She frowned. Then she said, “You mean some other customer from abroad might have discussed such an order with him?”

“Exactly. I suppose he has a whole series of foreign customers?”

“A whole series would be something of an exaggeration.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well… it's possible, of course, that he meant someone else. Or an entirely new customer.” She looked at me. “But then why would he write ‘Thionville' in the file?”

“That's what I'm asking
you
.”

She picked up her glass and drank. Then she looked at me again. “Maybe because he was planning to appeal to him if he had to. I mean, if Frau Fuchs were to enquire into the order that suddenly dissolved into thin air. I don't
know whether she can… but perhaps something of the kind might be possible?”

“I don't know that either.”

I wasn't being entirely straightforward with her. I did in fact fear that Frau Fuchs might well be able to do that very thing. Presumably she knew about the firm's customers abroad. And here she could at least call a witness in the form of Pauly the business manager, whom Klofft would have had to inform of her dismissal without delay after his conversation with her. And when it came to the crunch, even the tribunal would want conclusive evidence from us that the order really had been in prospect, but then against all expectations failed to materialize.

I asked, “Do you think that Weber would help your husband out? I mean that he'd confirm – would confirm, contrary to the truth – that he proposed to give him the order?”

The answer came without delay. “No. Most definitely not. Not after he'd told me he knew nothing about such an order.” She shook her head. “He wouldn't want me thinking of him as a liar.”

I nodded. After a while she said, “So my… my research is no use to you? I may even have spoilt a chance for you, have I?”

“No, no!” I laughed. Then I said, “At least I now know a little more about the vulnerable spots I must defend.”

She sighed, and this time there was no derision in it. “I'm sorry.”

“You don't have to be sorry. But I tell you what.” I indicated her champagne glass. “I wouldn't mind a little of that after all. It's supposed to cheer you up.”

She laughed. “I'll get you a chilled one.”

She went to the kitchen, and I had a good view of the perfect fit of those jeans again, but I instantly called myself to order.

Had Gaston Weber ever visited this studio? Presumably he had. And he'd have bought one or two of her pictures. A large one, maybe a view of his hunting lodge in a wide, green valley, and now it hung in his office at work opposite his desk. He'd wanted to hang it in the living room at home, but his wife had said that if he did she was moving out.

She came back with a mini-bottle of champagne, opened it and poured it for me, then picked up her own glass and raised it. “Here's to cheering you up.”

After we had put our glasses down again, I said, “Since we're on the subject… of your researches, I mean…”

She looked at me. “Yes? What do you want to know?”

This
was
conspiracy, what else? I was involving myself more and more in activities that might simply be a campaign of vengeance mounted against her husband.

I drank another sip, and then another. Then I said, “When we were talking in your studio at home… do you remember?”

She nodded. I went on, “I asked you then whether Frau Fuchs had threatened your husband. In their conversation about the time she wanted off. You didn't answer the question… or not entirely, anyway, because your husband came bursting in, remember?”

“Of course.” She looked at me. “Yes, she did threaten him. But I can only say…”

I held up a hand. “Yes, I know. You said you could understand Frau Fuchs very well there. But I'm concerned about something else.”

Her brows drew together.

I said, “I'd like to know
what
she threatened him with.”

She shook her head, clearly annoyed. “Listen, you're poking about in a… a garbage heap of unpleasantness and obscenities, I assure you! The whole thing is a rather repellent story, and I don't want to discuss it now! Please understand!”

What was
this
? I could see that I'd be well advised to drop the matter for now. But I was not happy about it. I said, “Just one question, please: did she threaten to get a medical certificate saying she was sick if he didn't give her time off?”

She looked at me reluctantly. Obviously she thought the question entirely insignificant. But then she said, “Yes, she said that or something like it.”

I breathed again. My suspicion that the nature of her threat did provide adequate grounds to fire her without notice was confirmed.

“Thank you,” I said. “That was it. Many thanks!” I picked up my glass and drank to her. She raised hers, and her forehead smoothed out.

I asked, “Do you have one of the pictures you painted in Thionville here?”

She looked at me a little thoughtfully. “You'd be interested to see it?”

“Yes. I have no idea what the place is like, or its surroundings. Or of what you'd make of such subjects.”

She smiled. Then she rose to her feet. “I have a portfolio here with sketches and a few watercolours. And two or three larger pictures.” She pointed to the steps up to the gallery. “But I'd have to get the bigger ones down from there.”

“No, no, I don't want to put you to any trouble. The sketches and watercolours would be fine… I just want to get some impression of the place.”

She opened a large cupboard under the structure of the gallery, pulled out a drawer about halfway up and began searching it. She had turned her back to me, bending forward, and I watched her.

The idea that I was not behaving well didn't bother me this time. My mind was on a different problem.

What had she meant by a garbage heap? Full of “unpleasantness and obscenities”? Did she mean the sex
he had demanded from his employee? The sex that she might actually have given him that morning with his wife listening?

No, it couldn't have been like that, or he would have had to give Katharina Fuchs the time off that she wanted. In return, so to speak. Or were my ideas of the deal he had wanted to do with her right off target?

She came back with two large portfolios, put them on her chair and untied the first. After she had moved the glasses and little bottles aside, she put a cardboard base on the table and a handful of sheets of paper on it.

The charcoal sketch on top was a street scene, realistic and yet oddly improbable, a square in a small town, with flower beds to right and left and young trees, not very tall, and in the background two corner buildings with a narrow street opening up between them. The view at the end of this street was cut off by four-storey apartment houses in a street crossing it. The two rectangular wings of the left-hand corner house were linked by a round turret, its lower floors built out into an oriel. The turret had a little dome level with the attic windows to right and left of it; the dome rose above the roof ridges of the two wings and had two round windows like bull's-eyes set into its base.

I leaned over the sketch. “Anything particular that interests you?” she asked.

“It reminds me of something.”

“Of what?”

I said, “That turret with the dome…”

She leaned over me as I pointed to the corner house in the sketch, and went on, “I think it reminds me of Parisian buildings. I've only been to Paris once, but I think I saw buildings with little turrets like that there – larger, of course, in the city centre, but with the bull's-eyes at the top and the attic windows in the top storey of the rest of the house framing them. And lower down oriels with balconies.”

She nodded, smiling. “I know what you mean. Of course we have buildings like that here too, or we did, before the war. In Berlin, for instance. But in Paris they're still standing, yes.” She sat down beside me on the sofa. “They were built around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Thionville was part of the German Reich at the time, and had gone back to being Diederhofen. But the architects there will have been paying tribute to their former capital – summoning up a memory of Paris.” She smiled. “Like you?”

She was sitting quite close, so I could distinctly smell her perfume. But this time I wasn't going to fall victim to the ridiculous confusion that had come over me whenever I was too close to her before. I started talking away.

“Well, it couldn't really be called a memory. Nothing happened, I just saw those turrets, almost like little onion domes, and the domes interested me, that's all. And the rooms behind the bull's-eye windows, attic rooms like the rooms on the top floors of the house on either side of them, I imagined them – circular, the rafter structures under the tiles must have been unusual. The smell of timber. I imagine the rafters exposed, and the laths with the tiles fixed to them. And I wonder, I mean I wondered how you'd feel in a room like that. At sunset, for instance.”

She was watching me, smiling. I realized I'd let my tongue run away with me. She raised one hand and laid it against my cheek. “You're a remarkable man,” she said.

Now she had me totally confused again. I stammered, “Oh, I… I only meant to say that's what your drawing reminded me of.”

She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

When she moved away, I saw her eyes with the cloudy grey irises very close to me. The little lines under her eyes were growing deeper and merging together. She was smiling.

I heard her say, “You're not going to apologize for thinking such wonderful, crazy thoughts, are you? Onion domes! Attic rooms!” She took me by both shoulders and shook me gently.

I don't know how it happened, but suddenly I felt her lips on mine, my lips on hers. I was holding her in my arms. Her lips were soft. Suddenly the idea shot through my head that next moment she would be sucking wildly at my lips, pushing her tongue into my mouth, deep and still deeper, without any inhibition. As if beside herself.

She did nothing of the kind. She moved her lips slightly; it was a very gentle kiss.

When she took her lips off mine, I felt that she was reaching behind her with one hand. I opened my eyes. Hers were still closed, but she was groping on the coffee table next to the sofa and behind her with her left hand. She found a small black box that looked like a remote control. She pressed a button and put the box down again, placing her left hand back on my shoulder.

I heard a faint humming sound that seemed to come from above. Looking up, I saw a pale grey curtain moving sideways below the large skylight. The further it moved, the more diffuse the light became. The big room was in twilight now.

Her lips sought my mouth.

Suddenly I thought I knew what was going on: she was darkening the room so that pitiless daylight wouldn't reveal her age. She wanted to offer me what I' d seen in my fantasies of her, naked on the deckchair in her garden. But she didn't want me to see the lines and wrinkles, the slack skin, the brown age marks disfiguring her body.

I was to see her only vaguely, only in half-light.

Did she want me to make love to a phantom?

I moved away from her, sat upright, turned my back to her and rubbed my face. After a while I said, “I'm sorry. I think I must go now.”

She did not reply. I turned to her. She was not looking at me. For a moment there seemed to be nothing but the humming of the curtain as it moved. She picked up the remote control and switched it off. The curtain stopped.

I said, “Thank you… for inviting me here. And for… well, thank you anyway.” I was looking for words, but I couldn't find anything to say.

I turned away and fled from the studio.

16

Before reaching my apartment I slowed down, and when I saw a parking place free, I drove into it. It was just after twelve on a Sunday morning, and the streets were not yet as empty as they would be at lunchtime and just afterwards. A good many people were out with their children, going for a walk, maybe on their way home after church. I didn't want to put the car in the garage and go home myself yet.

I'd find deathly silence waiting for me in the apartment. The only sounds to be heard would be the clattering of the pan in which I'd heat up my lunch, the tearing of the sachet, the sound of the dried soup as I tipped it into the pan. The muted click of the fridge door closing when I took out the butter to spread some on a slice of bread.

I thought of Cilly Klofft. Cilly.

Was she still sitting on that sofa in the dim light under the curtain? Was she wondering about the reason that had driven me out so abruptly?

What had I said as I turned away from her? When I so suddenly and rudely turned my back before I left? What kind of explanation of my behaviour had I offered?

Not even an attempt at an explanation. I'd got something out, the sentence saying I must go, but I hadn't even adorned
it with an “unfortunately”. And I hadn't given her any reason for my abrupt departure.

She was too alert not to have noticed that I had taken to flight at the moment when the curtain began veiling the scene. And she was much too intelligent to deceive herself about the connection. True, I had not actually wiped my mouth after removing my lips from hers. But there'd been no need for that with Cilly Klofft.