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By the same author
Silence in October
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She didn’t see him. When he was not present she did not think of him. She only saw him if he was actually there, but not because she wanted him to be there. She just didn’t give him a thought. Later on she could not remember what she had thought about during the weeks before her sudden departure, in the strange house in company with strange people she had not herself chosen to spend summer with. She could remember lying awake at night, and often thinking about her mother without actually missing her. She thought about the woman who happened to be her mother, and about the cramped, dark flat near the harbour that was her home.
She heard the bombers flying over Denmark and imagined them flying above the city and dropping their cargo. Perhaps one of the bombs would hit the block they lived in, and crash down through the living-room ceiling. Her mother would be sitting in the shelter down in the cellar as the bomb hit their home and the rest of the block and brought it crashing down in a cloud of rubble. They had been in the shelter several times with the other residents on the staircase when there was an air-raid warning. Some of them had been in night clothes and dressing gowns. Nothing had ever happened. The war went on somewhere else, far out behind the black-out curtains. It consisted of sounds, voices on the wireless and rumours in the street, sirens from the rooftops and the distant drone of the aircraft engines approaching from out at sea.
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