Margriet de Moor - The Storm

Nothing special. Armanda, who had been called Mama by Nadja for so long already that she’d forgotten it had ever been otherwise, kissed the copper-red curls on the head of the toddler now sitting on her lap. Then, contented, as she looked around the room, where conversation had started up again, she realized that Betsy was trying to meet her eyes, and looking acutely interested. It was the look of a friend from a far corner of the room, but so penetrating that her inner ear could pick up the whispered arguments that came with it.

“Sweetheart, fate has certainly intervened in your life, hasn’t it?”

Calm, persuasive. Armanda stared back.

“A little effort on your part, and my brother, shall we say, gets his wife, whom he misses, back again. But à propos, do tell me why you behaved so impossibly to him after the movies last week.”

Without dropping her gaze, Armanda had carefully picked up her glass from the occasional table and taken a sip. Then, with Nadja’s hot little head resting against her neck, she had telegraphed back: “Dear Betsy, I do understand — you want to see your half brother and his family settled with a competent woman to run the house again. I myself am conscious of certain powers that sometimes encourage this, and sometimes suddenly rule it out altogether. When the three of us went to the Rialto last week to see La Città Dolente , to begin with I liked it that you arranged things so that Sjoerd sat in the middle and I could feel his shoulder against mine as soon as the lights went down. When afterward you wanted to excuse yourself quickly so that Sjoerd and I could spend a few minutes in the rosy dimness of the foyer talking a little about the really moving story of the man who got left at the North Pole, I was already ahead of you. Two quick kisses for each of you, then I beat it. And now you want an explanation. All I’m going to say is that because of the short that ran before the main film, I didn’t register a single thing about the North Pole business. It was about Schouwen-Duiveland. Do you remember? The weekly newsreel once again was delivering the most heroic report, and in the most heroic voice: all forces had been deployed to close the last breach in the dike in Zeeland, near Ouwerkerk. Why this had to be done in night and fog was a mystery, but here were the pictures: the black expanse of water, sections of the dike, cranes, and on the foredeck of a ship the queen, a beret on her head, standing among the workers chewing her lip, because this job has already been done once, and failed miserably. But this time it works. Incredibly impressive, all these lights at night! The gap in the dike at Ouwerkerk is enormous, and four huge concrete caissons have to be pulled into it by tugs and then lowered. Three of the things are already in place, tonight it’s the turn of number four. The tugs have brought it into position as the tide goes out, and now, one and a half hours later, it comes to rest on the sea bottom, precisely placed to the inch. How diligent we are today. From now on, no more tides turning right there between the houses. All over the island, which I’ve long thought of as Lidy’s island now, bells begin to ring out in the night. Major celebrations. I kept hearing them, Betsy, in fragments, all through the other film about that man at the North Pole.”

They had both laughed out loud. Betsy had stuck out a knee and filched a cigarette from the glass on the table.

When she was finished at the hairdresser, Armanda took care of a couple of errands, then went home. Surgery hours were still in progress on the first floor, her father’s patients came and went, but upstairs she bumped into no one. So I’ll just pop over to number 36, she thought with the feeling of happy relief that she had come to associate with this idea. She liked going to Lidy’s house. She really loved to keep it running in apple pie order.

When she got there, there were a couple of letters lying on the mat. As she picked them up and checked to whom they were addressed and who had sent them, her raincoat dragged on the floor. “Mr s . L. Blaauw,” she murmured on the stairs, realized it sounded strange, got a lump in her throat, and went, as soon as she got upstairs, to the garbage can that lived in a deep cupboard next to the kitchen. A short time later the unopened mailing from the perfumery to its customers was buried under the chrysanthemums that had been there all week. She also emptied the ashtrays.

The light was already fading as she looked around the living room. No need to dust today. So I’ll iron a couple of shirts. A few minutes later she was doing this, one flight up. The ironing board had its allotted place in the hall, with a lamp above it, and she spread out the ironed shirts on the bed in the master bedroom next door.

Inhaling the smell of steam and almost singed cotton that Lidy always said made her feel faint, she was just getting a dress iron out of the cupboard when she heard the front door close downstairs. She jumped, and looked at the time. He’s early today, she thought, and then did something that just came over her. She hurried to the dressing table set at an angle in the corner, ran a brush through her hair, and pulled her sweater nice and tight over her breasts. Then she switched off the overhead light, and lit a floor lamp, cast a glance at the curtains but decided to leave them open so that Sjoerd, whom she could already hear on the third tread of the stair, would find her bathed in ocher light, very much to her advantage, with a mysterious reflection in the window behind her.

He stood in the doorway. Pausing for a moment to take in the situation, he came over to her with the same decisiveness, she realized in a flash, with which he must have stopped work half an hour before. And they started to kiss, immediately, greedily. Moving one arm behind her back, he had already succeeded in closing the curtains.

It was not their first embrace, far from it. For more than a year now, Armanda had been going around the house at the oddest hours for a woman. And Sjoerd had quite often reached out in the dark hallways or by the stove in the kitchen to pull her close. But contrary to what might be assumed, the more time went on, the more she began to be coy, pushing him away from her when he pressed her against a wall, his desire for her declaring itself openly as he went hard against her stomach. One time she had interrupted their playful wrestling and said, “I won’t do it till I’ve seen my sister’s dead body.”

Did those words come out of my mouth? she had thought immediately, and was relieved when he reacted so casually, even quite heartlessly.

“Anyone who still surfaces these days is put straight into a closed coffin. You’ll never get to see it now.”

So today it looked as if Armanda had pushed her reservations aside. When Sjoerd said, “Be my wife,” whispering, as if someone could hear him, she found it wonderful that his fingers, which never had a problem anyway, had already located the hooks on her bra.

Armanda returned his embrace, pulled her sweater over her head, let him undo the zipper on her skirt, climbed out of it eagerly, and searched at once for his warm mouth again. Then she simply couldn’t find anything amiss in her behavior, as she fell back with him onto the bed covered in carefully ironed shirts, first she was on top, then he was. In that moment Armanda was already far away in her head. The only signal her thoughts gave off was in a certain look, yearning, utterly honest, that a man would recognize as declaring that she was his love, and yes, she was willing.

Then, at a moment that was totally inconvenient, erotically speaking, Armanda, who was still a virgin — this requires saying, because these things are relevant — started a conversation. And its opening theme was the undeniable fact that legally speaking, Lidy was still alive.