SPOUSE OF RECORD, the form says, and under it, in a clerk’s tidy type: Ines Teixeira, forty-six, Lisbon. Under that are two boxes. The traveller’s is signed. Mine is empty.
TRAVELLER, the form says, and under that: Hedda Lund. She signed on her first morning in quarantine, three weeks ago, the clerk tells me, as if it’s good news. The Ministry sat on it for sixteen days and then posted it to me. Hedda is thirty-six. When she left, she was a year older than me.
Twelve years by my clock. Sixteen months by hers.
The Return Act was written for the first crews, the ones who came home to spouses who had remarried, or died, or stopped answering at the old address. Any marriage whose two clocks have drifted more than five years apart lapses thirty days after release, unless both people sign to keep it. I interpret in the Lisbon courts for a living. I’ve put this clause into Swedish, English and French for other people’s husbands, and I know whose door it’s built to open: the one who stayed home. I’ve been standing in that door for three days, trying to hold it open for her.
Quarantine allows one visit, on the last day, through glass. The visiting room at the return facility in Beja has one wall of it, four centimetres thick, rated against things nobody has found yet. There’s a chair on each side and an intercom grille that makes everyone sound like an air-traffic controller. On her side of it, my wife is ten years younger than I am, and she’s eating an orange.
“Olá, velhota,” Hedda says, with her mouth full.
Velhota is what people here call their mothers when they’re being fond, or a woman on the tram when they’re being rude. Hedda’s Portuguese has always been a crime she commits with total confidence. Languages are my job. We made a rule the year we married: the important things get said in the other one’s language, so she has to try and I have to listen.
“You’ve been practising,” I say.
“I had eight months with nothing to do but practise.” She works another segment loose. Her hair is the ship cut, short at the back, the one from the photo she took in her first week out, which reached me four months later. “On the way home your letters came in fast. A year of you every twenty days. I watched you get a new kitchen in a week.” She points the orange at me. “It’s a good kitchen.”
I have a sentence ready. I’ve had it since the Ministry rang, and it’s in Swedish, because it’s important. “Du behöver inte stanna—”
“I always wanted an older woman,” Hedda says over me, in English, which is how I know she’s frightened. Then she grins, and it’s the same grin, one front tooth set a little crooked, and that’s worse.
“You married a woman a year younger than you.”
“And look how that turned out.” She puts her hand flat to the glass, the palm sticky with orange. There’s a scar right across it I don’t know—pink, new, gone white where it presses the glass. Sixteen months is long enough for a scar. She’ll have told me about it in a message I haven’t opened. The last eight months of her arrived in a single fortnight, and I’ve been rationing them like someone afraid of the end of a book.
I don’t put my hand up to meet hers. I want to, which is the problem.
They let her out that Thursday at four, through a door with a light over it that turns from amber to green.
I mean to let her come to me. I decided it on the drive down: stand still, let her choose, give her the room the law gives her. Then the door opens and she’s there in a grey facility tracksuit with a bag on her shoulder, and I’m across the hall before the light has finished changing.
She smells of the ship—a soap with no flower in it, made to last sixteen months. I get my hands on her face. Her skin is cool from the filtered air, and under my thumbs her jaw is the jaw I kissed goodbye. My own hands look like my mother’s now. I notice that, and then she’s kissing me and the hands stop mattering.
She kisses me like she’s late for it. One hand fisted in the back of my coat, the other at my neck, her mouth tasting of oranges again and something sharper underneath. She laughs into it when I groan, out loud, in front of a Ministry clerk.
“I signed mine,” she says against my cheek.
“I know.”
“First morning. Before breakfast.”
“The clerk told me.”
She leans back far enough to see my face. Whatever she finds there makes her mouth go flat for a second. “So.”
“So I have thirty days,” I say, and pick up her bag before she can.
By the time we get up the hill into Graça it’s dark. The flat has the same front door and the same cracked tile on the third step, and almost nothing else is where she left it.
I knocked the kitchen through in year four. In year seven I gave her bicycle to Rui across the landing, after it had stood in the hall so long it turned into furniture; he records bands in Porto now and sends me a photo of it every Christmas. Her coats are in the wardrobe. I couldn’t do the coats.
Hedda walks through it all like a guest. She opens the cupboard where the glasses used to live and finds tins. She stands in the new kitchen with one hand on the counter, looking out at the river, which is the one thing I couldn’t move, and says, “You put the tram stop somewhere else.”
“The city did.”
“Rude of it.” She goes hunting for a glass, and I let her, because she has the right to find things in her own house, and because I want to watch her do it. Three cupboards. Four. She gets it on the fifth and holds it up for me to see, and then she turns to the tap and sees the shelf.
My mother’s photo is the one from the café in Alfama, the year she turned seventy: sunglasses pushed up into her hair, caught mid-sentence, one hand a blur because she never in her life said anything without it. In front of it there’s the candle I light on Sundays, and the rosary she didn’t believe in, and the ashtray she stole on her honeymoon and showed to everyone she ever met.
Hedda sets the glass down very carefully, as though it might go off.
My mother called her a sueca—the Swede—for six years, to her face, with enormous affection, and taught her every Portuguese obscenity she knows, which is most of her vocabulary.
“You didn’t tell me she was sick,” Hedda says.
“I told you in year eight.” It comes out level. I’ve had nearly three years to get it level. “I told you every Sunday.”
“I know. I got them.” She turns round. “Do you know how fast your Sundays came, on the way home? Every nine hours. ‘Mãe has had some tests.’ Nine hours. ‘Mãe is worse.’ Nine hours. Fifteen months of it in three and a half weeks, and then ‘The funeral is Friday. Padre Abílio has promised to keep it short.’ I read that one in the galley with a cup of soup going cold, and then I had to go and fly the ship.”
“I didn’t get to choose the speed either.”
“No. You got to have it at the right one.” Her voice cracks on right and she pushes straight through the crack. “You’ve had nearly three years. I’ve had eleven weeks. I keep turning round to tell her things.”
“So did I. For about a year.” I stay by the door. If I go to her now it will be to stop this, and I don’t want it stopped.
“And the form,” Hedda says. “It’s in your bag. You’ve had it three days.”
There it is. “You married a woman a year younger than you.”
“You keep saying that like it’s a clause.”
“It is a clause. Five years, thirty days. It exists so nobody has to stay married to somebody who isn’t there any more. That woman isn’t, Hedda. She’s forty-six. She has reading glasses on a cord. She has opinions about grout. She can’t eat after nine at night—”
“I watched you get every one of those,” Hedda says. “Every second day you had a new haircut. I stood in the galley and watched you go grey over a fortnight, and I wanted you so badly I had to go and sit in the airlock.” She takes one step towards me and stops, as if I’m still behind four centimetres of glass. “I signed before breakfast, Ines. Don’t you dare hand me a way out I didn’t ask for.”
I could answer that. I have the sentence. Instead I put my bag down on the floor, with the form still in it, and take off my coat, and I walk past her into the bedroom without looking back to see whether she’ll follow.
She follows. She stops in the doorway, and I let her stand there.
I take off my jumper. I take off the shirt under it. My fingers aren’t steady on the buttons and I don’t hide that either. I’m not going to tell her what twelve years have done; she has eyes, and she’s watched it on fast-forward for eight months. I want to be touched as I am, in this room, by her, with the lamp on.
Her face does something I’ve never had a word for in any of my languages. She laughs once, like somebody has knocked the air out of her, and her eyes go bright, and she says, “Oh, there you are,” as if I’ve been hiding in another room of the flat for sixteen months of her life.
She crosses to me and stops with her hands an inch from my ribs. Her Portuguese, when it comes, is terrible and completely serious. “Posso?”
The rule is the rule. “Ja,” I tell her. “Ja. Hedda—ja.”
Her palms are cold at first, and then they aren’t. She lays them flat on my sides and leaves them there, taking the heat of me, and I shiver, and she hums, pleased, so I do it again on purpose. Her mouth finds my shoulder. My collarbone. The soft place under my jaw where I’ve started to feel my own pulse at night. Wherever twelve years have left something she doesn’t know, she stops for half a second, and then doesn’t.
I want her so much it’s nearly funny. I pull the tracksuit top over her head and her hair comes up with it in a crackle of static, and she swears in Portuguese—one of my mother’s—and I laugh into her neck. Her skin smells of the ship’s soap and, under it, of her, and that hasn’t moved an inch in twelve years. Salt at her throat when I put my mouth there. I walk her back towards the bed with my hands spread on her shoulder blades, She lets me, then pulls me down with her, and for a while there’s only her mouth on mine and the cotton warming under us.
It’s my hand that starts it. She catches it to kiss the knuckles and finds my mother’s ring on my third finger, the thin gold one with the stone worn smooth, and her breath goes wrong. She keeps kissing me. She kisses me faster, harder, her hands everywhere at once, as if there’s a version of tonight somewhere past this one where nothing has happened to anyone, and if she can only get there quickly enough—
I know that speed. I lived at it for most of year nine.
I take her face in both hands and hold it still. Her eyes are wet. Her mouth is red from mine.
“Hedda.”
“Don’t.” She tries to laugh. “I’m seducing you. I’ve got a whole plan.”
“I know. I want you to.” I do; it’s in every inch of me, and it will keep. “Not to get away from her.”
She holds out for about three breaths. Then she puts her forehead down against my breastbone and makes a sound I have only ever heard come out of me, in this bed, in the spring of year nine.
So I hold her, and I tell her the way, because I’ve walked it. I tell her about the soup Dona Lurdes downstairs left on the mat every day for a month without once knocking. I tell her the second month is worse than the first and nobody warns you. I tell her the smell goes out of my mother’s coats in the second winter, and that I took one of them to the dry cleaner’s by mistake and sat outside in the car for an hour afterwards. I tell her all of it in Swedish, because it’s important, and she corrects my grammar once, thickly, out of pure spite, and I kiss the top of her head for it.
Then, into my skin, she says, “You were supposed to seduce me back.”
“I’m forty-six,” I say. “I can do both. I just do them in order now.”
She laughs properly. It hurts her. She does it anyway.
That’s where the night stays: her cheek on my chest, both of us half-dressed under the old blanket, the ring warm between us where she’s holding my hand, and the want still there in me like a pilot light, low and blue and going nowhere. I lie awake and listen to her breathe on my clock.
On the fifth day we take the 28 across town to Prazeres, and on the walk up between the cypresses I teach her how to say I’m sorry I wasn’t here. She says it to my mother’s stone in an accent like a Swede ordering cod. I make her say it again. The third time she gets it right, and then she adds something filthy my mother taught her, and the man raking gravel two plots down pretends very hard not to have heard.
That afternoon I sign the form at the kitchen counter with the pen from my court bag, standing up, the radio on. It takes four seconds. Hedda, who has been pretending to read the back of a tin, has the form out from under my hand before the ink is dry and is down the first flight of stairs in my slippers, shouting up that the registry office shuts at five and she’ll run the whole way—estou a corar!—which means she’s blushing.
I lean over the banister in my socks and shout the right verb down the stairwell after her.
