Oscar took the tram uphill to Alfama, the old fishermen’s quarter in the middle of the city. From there he looked out over the River Tagus and listened to the sing-song tones of Portuguese spoken around him. A scattering of palm trees put him in mind of Africa; there was a Moorish feel to the place. But he paid little attention to his surroundings, all he wanted was to find some peaceful spot to escape the oppressive heat of the downtown area. The outdoor café he stopped at was almost empty. The sun shone on the Tagus, with its wide mouth leading out to the ocean. Cargo boats chugged upriver, fishing craft moored at the quays, pilot boats sent up curves of spray as they raced to their clients, yachts sailed leisurely to sea. It left him cold, all of it. It was as if a huge screen had been unrolled upon which the scene on the river was projected: unreal, obscure, a magic-lantern performance that had nothing to do with the real world. He heard seagulls, church bells, children playing in the alleys, the sounds of a lost age. It felt unseemly to be sitting there, as if he were shirking his duty. Which was what he had done, of course. He had tried his utmost to push Emma’s news to the back of his mind, pretend she had never told him. Only when that didn’t work, and the realisation hit him that he had no choice but to warn Morton, had he set about booking a flight. It had all taken days and days. Morton’s arm was long, but even for him Switzerland was a difficult nut to crack. In Portugal apparently he had more influence.
For the past three months Lara had occupied him without pause. Occupied was not the right word: too matter-of-fact. She held sway over him without touching, infusing every chamber of his soul with warmth. Even that was a poor description, like some old-fashioned fairytale romance; no, it would not do. Try as he might, he was unable to put his dreamed life with Lara into words. How she looked, moved, spoke, kept silent, asked a question. He felt himself the keeper of a warehouse of gestures and words, he was a repository of feelings both processed and raw. She took him back to the days before the death of his father, to an age of innocence. She was a wondrous, distant echo of the girl who had kissed him on the mouth in a fathomless past, and breathed life into him.
His memories of their first days together were all tangled up. His confusion had not abated since that day in Café Eiger and their walk the next morning – not before ten, she had said, and he had been there at ten.
“Hello, Oscar, quite a change from yesterday, isn’t it?” The sun had not yet risen above the Jungfrau, which stood out against the deep blue sky in almost lurid contrast. Waiters were shovelling the snow off the terrace into banks along the edges. There was one couple having breakfast with their overcoats on, waiting for the sun to burst upon them.
“Germans,” Lara muttered. “Complete fanatics.” Oscar, ever on his guard, peered at them. But they seemed harmless: the man and the woman were far too showily dressed, and besides, he had only decided to go skiing on the spur of the moment two days earlier. But should he not, for his part, have made some enquiries about Lara? He dismissed the idea at once, feeling almost ashamed.
“Shall we walk to Kleine Scheidegg?” He had made the suggestion casually, as if that was what they had already agreed to do. Going to sit with her at a table again seemed a little daunting. The previous day had been the longest café-table session of his life: an avalanche of impressions as he came under the spell of the woman he was with, who had dropped from the snowy sky like a falcon on a field mouse.
Lara van Oosten, forty-one years old, whose life, according to her, seemed to be over. No children, and a boyfriend she had once loved, but whose whereabouts now were unknown. He might be dead, in fact that was quite likely. In any case, he had vanished. The story of her life. She evoked in him a sharp ache of yearning which he had not known since boyhood, when books and poems were opening up a dizzying range of possibilities, when he met the girl who whisked him away from an existence flowing calmly along its steady course. Now, aged fifty-six, he found himself well and truly at sea.
He had held her hand for the last hundred metres back to her hotel, because it was slippery underfoot, and she might fall. Her hand in his for a hundred metres. That was what it all came down to: her hand had never let go. He had left her on the terrace of Hotel Jungfrau. At the very last, he had pulled her glove off her hand and held her warm palm against his cheek. A minor embrace with major consequences. Naked, the intimacy could not have been greater.
