Two Tall Men and a Fish

Joachim Lund came to dinner on the first Saturday in February and brought, as he always does, a bottle of something too good for the occasion and a small brown-paper parcel of liquorice from the shop on Amagerbrogade that he insists is the only liquorice.

“Teresa,” he said, at the door, and kissed me on both cheeks, and held my face for a second the way he has done since the first time Martin brought me to Copenhagen. “You are thinner. You are working.”

“I’m the same, Joachim.”

“You are thinner and you are working.” He handed me the parcel and went past into the kitchen. “Where is my son, and why can I smell burning?”

The burning was the skin of the salmon, and it was intentional, and Martin defended it for ten minutes with the enthusiasm of a man who has recently discovered a technique on the internet. Joachim was scandalised. Joachim is Danish and seventy-three and holds that fish should be treated kindly. The argument went round the kitchen twice and ended with both of them laughing and me pouring wine, and I remember standing at the counter with the bottle in my hand thinking: this. This is the thing I have. Two tall men shouting affectionately about a fish.

This is the part of the story where I should tell you what was wrong with my marriage.

Here is the truthful answer: nothing you could put in a report.

Martin has never raised his hand or his voice to me. He has never had an affair — I would have known; Martin cannot keep a birthday present secret for four hours. He is funny in company and reliable about money, he taught himself to cook when my mother was dying so I wouldn’t come home to an empty fridge, and in 2019 he sat in a hospital corridor in Ipswich for eleven hours to be there when I woke up.

He is also, on a Tuesday in February, a man who has begun to say it’s fine about everything, and who watches television with his phone in his hand, and who has stopped asking me questions because he already believes he knows the answers, and who is right about that in roughly eighty per cent of cases, which is the dangerous number.

And I have been letting him.

That’s the bit I have to keep saying, because it would be very easy to write this as something that happened to me.

“So,” Joachim said, when we sat down. “Copenhagen in September.”

Martin looked at his plate.

“He hasn’t told you,” I said.

“He told me he was considering.” Joachim reached for the potatoes. “Which in this family means he has decided and is waiting for someone to disagree so he can enjoy it.”

“That’s not—“ Martin put his fork down. “It’s eight weeks. Eight weeks of touring means eight weeks of not being here to take the calls that come in, and the calls that come in are how you stay on the list. If I go, I come back in November and I’ve dropped off two fixers’ lists in London and I’m starting again at forty-six.”

“Or,” said Joachim, “you go and play very well in front of four thousand people in a country where they still know what you are.”

“That’s a beautiful sentence, Far. It’s not a diary.”

“It’s your diary I’m talking about.”

I watched them do it. Martin has had this argument with his father for twenty years, and it is always, underneath, the same argument: Joachim was a violinist and stopped at forty-one to teach, and Martin has spent his whole career refusing to be a man who stopped.

“He should go,” I said.

Both of them turned.

“He should go,” I said again, “because in September I’m going to be in the middle of Ivyholt with a roof that’s opened up, and he’ll be on the phone to me at eleven at night telling me about a hotel in Aarhus, and I would honestly rather that than watch him wait for a call about a Wednesday in March.”

Silence. Joachim’s eyebrows went up, approvingly, in the direction of his son.

“Well,” Martin said, after a moment. “That’s me told.”

“You asked me last week.”

“I did ask you.” He was smiling, but he was also looking at me with something faintly puzzled in it, the way you look at a familiar road when a shop’s changed hands. “You’ve got very decisive about it.”

“I’m decisive about everything. It’s one of my two settings.”

“What’s the other one?”

“Asleep.”

Joachim laughed. Martin laughed a beat later.

—

After he’d gone — cab at eleven, liquorice divided, kisses on both cheeks — we did the washing up together, which is when we’ve always talked, if we talk.

“He looked well,” I said.

“He looked old.” Martin ran a glass under the tap. “He’s started doing the thing where he tells the same story twice in an evening. Did you catch it? The one about the conductor in Malmö.”

“I caught it.”

“That’s new.” He set the glass on the rack with great precision. “Anyway. So you think I should take Copenhagen.”

“I think if you don’t take it you’ll spend the autumn being angry in a way you won’t be able to name. And I think I’d rather miss you than live with that.”

“That’s brutally put.”

“You’ve known me eleven years.”

“Twelve. You’re counting from the wedding.” He handed me a plate to dry. “Tess. Are we alright?”

The tap was running. I had a plate in one hand and a towel in the other and the answer came up in me so fast and so complete that I had to physically hold it — no, we’re not, we haven’t been for two years, you stopped asking me things and I stopped telling you and now I sit in a cold swimming pool on Thursdays because it’s the only place anyone asks me a question I have to think about — and I stood there holding it, feeling it press.

If he had asked it again. If he had said it twice.

“We’re tired,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, relieved, already turning back to the sink. “That’s what I said to Dad.”

And that was the moment. Not the kiss, four months later. Not the roof. That, right there, at the sink, at twenty past eleven, with the water running: my husband asked me a direct question, and I gave him the answer that let us both go to bed.

I have gone back to that sink more times than I can count.

—

We went to bed at midnight. He fell asleep first, the way he always has, with one arm out and the other hand curled by his face, and I lay there and counted what I have, which is a thing I do when I can’t sleep: a flat we rebuilt with our hands. A father-in-law who calls me Teresa and means it as a compliment. A man who sat in a corridor in Ipswich for eleven hours. The way he says that’s my girl when I’ve been ruthless about a building.

It is, by any standard, a good list, and I want that said plainly, because what happened afterwards is not the story of a woman escaping something.

So on the Monday I asked him about Malmö.

He was restringing the bass on the kitchen floor when I got in, with the radio on and the peg winder between his teeth, and I sat down on the floor opposite him with my coat still on and said, “Tell me about Malmö.”

“I told you about Malmö.”

“You told Joachim about Malmö. Twice. I want the version where you don’t have to be polite about the conductor.”

So he told me. It took forty minutes, and it was very funny, and about halfway through he stopped pretending it was a story about a conductor and it became a story about being twenty-nine and certain, and the specific way certainty leaves a person — not all at once, he said, but the way a hall empties: a few at a time, politely, while you’re still playing.

“That’s grim,” I said.

“It’s not grim. It’s arithmetic. There are nine bassists in this city who can do what I do and four of them are under thirty.” He wound a string. “The trick is to stop expecting the arithmetic to be fond of you.”

“And Copenhagen’s arithmetic?”

“Copenhagen’s arithmetic likes me.” He looked up. “Which is a hell of a reason to go and stand in my father’s city for eight weeks, isn’t it.”

I moved round and sat next to him against the cupboard doors, and he put the bass down, and we stayed like that on the kitchen floor for a while with the radio doing something orchestral and unidentifiable.

“We rebuilt this kitchen,” he said.

“We rebuilt this kitchen.”

“You did the joists and I did everything wrong.”

“You did the tiles. The tiles are perfect.”

“The tiles took a month.” He tipped his head back against the cupboard. “That was a good month. That was — what, 2017? You had that awful job with the church and you’d come home and we’d do two rows of tiles and drink that terrible wine from the shop on the corner.”

“It was a good month,” I said.

And it was. That is the honest record. On Monday the ninth of February my husband and I sat on the floor of a kitchen we built and remembered being happy, and neither of us was performing it.

Somewhere around ten he said, “I’ll take Copenhagen,” and I said “Good,” and he got up and finished the strings.

Then he said, in the lightest possible voice, from the sink, “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you. If something was wrong.”

“Yes,” I said.

He never knew there was anything to forgive.