A Beautiful Young Wife by Tommy Wieringa Read Free Book Online

Everyone. Eating, drinking, skiing, a little networking and then back to eating, drinking, skiing …’
    â€˜Which is to say?’
    â€˜That you let yourself be pampered, too, like everyone else … the chauffeur, the welcome cocktail, the room …’
    â€˜Maybe what’s bothering you is that you enjoyed it so much,’ he said.
    Ruth got up and went to the kitchen. He picked up his glass and went after her. She was staring out the window at the darkened garden. A lock of hair hung down over her face. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘that was the first time I’d experienced something like that. I had no idea how seductive it could be. It was really very nice — the food, the good wine, the mountains. I let myself be lulled to sleep. But now I understand how things like that work.’ She turned her head to look at him. ‘It was the last time I’ll go along. I hope you realise that.’
    Her anger had made way for something else, something resigned, but now the rage welled up in him. ‘That’s … uh …’ He nodded, his eyes closed. The trips, the hotels with their wainscoting and mirrored walls, that was part of how he saw the life they were going to have together. Now it had made him a suspect. She saw the tightness around his jaw, she waited for the outburst, but when he opened his eyes the rage had worked its way out of his expression. Slowly, he said: ‘Your neo-Marxist friends will be proud of you. But I am … not amused.’
    That was it. He went no further. He climbed the stairs, leaving her behind in the kitchen, a woman unappeased; she poured herself the last sip of wine left in the bottle.
    She had seen him keep himself in check; he couldn’t hide the fact that he didn’t dare to do otherwise. He couldn’t remember ever letting himself go in an argument. He controlled himself, which took a greater effort than any battle waged.
    If the arguments became more embittered and destroyed their love, he thought, Ruth could easily start anew. She was successful and attractive and still only thirty-one. She still had a few lives left; she could still have children.
    He had let his last birthday pass him by — he hadn’t even answered the phone. They went out to dinner together at the restaurant in the park. He was pleased with the watch she’d given him — an Omega with a white dial, a beautiful present, even though it looked, she said, a bit thin on his wrist. Later, when he’d already had a good bit to drink and had mumbled ‘forty- six ’ a few times in disbelief, she said she hoped he wouldn’t take it wrong, her present. It was meant to remind him of the time they had left, not the time that had already passed.
    Around midnight, when she came into the room and lay down beside him, he awoke from a light sleep. They lay in the dark, listening to each other’s breathing.
    â€¢ • •
    Friso Walta, Ruth’s younger brother, is the kind of man all the Natashas of this world call ‘darling’; he has the emaciated face of a visionary poet, and the manners of a man born in a three-piece suit. They run their fingers through his blond beard and caress his hair in his sleep. He once herded sheep in Australia and played music in the streets of Lima, but that life came to an end. The woman with whom he fell in love turned out be an even bigger egomaniac than he was: she left a letter behind on the table and abandoned him with their child in the projects of south-east Amsterdam.
    The little boy’s name is Hunter, after the American cult writer; he was conceived on a beach in Bali and born in a hospital in Honfleur. He is almost four, but can barely pronounce his father’s name, because the muscles of his mouth are too feeble. On rare occasions, one can make out a word amid his babbling: ‘Oop’ when he has a dirty nappy, ‘dwink botta’ when he’s thirsty. His