She stood up in her stained cotton coat, nauseous and uneasy and – and something else she didn’t have a name for, which was hers alone. But didn’t she leave him alone with his tooth abscess? Hot compresses, and, for that matter, also pregnancy, belong to marriage, and if she wasn’t going to have its pleasantries, then she didn’t want to be bothered with its difficulties. Even though Bent had never talked about it, she could tell he was fond of his child, that he was a fine father and husband. It was simply a side of him which had nothing to do with her (but which she was definitely helping to maintain). With a tiny dash of bitterness, she thought about how nice it must be to return to a well-ordered home after the embraces of a lover.

‘Next!’

Spindly and erect, with dark circles under her eyes, she walked reluctantly into the dimly lit room. Her heart, which should have been rational and hard, was hammering with anxiety and defiance.

He barely looked at her. He was sitting at a desk, half in shadow, without a lab coat, as she had imagined. He lazily gestured with his hand toward an empty chair. Her lips were dry, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything. The man stared out the window while he drummed on the desktop with a pencil. His dark eyebrows met in the middle, but Alice only saw his hands, which were large and hairy, and for that moment she was horrified at the thought that he was going to touch her.

When he was finished with his calculations, he suddenly tossed down the pencil and turned to face her. He bit vigorously into his bottom lip and finally asked:

‘So what is the matter?’

She wet her lips with her tongue and cleared her throat.

‘I – am going to have a baby,’ she said quietly, adding, before thinking about it: ‘You know that very well.’

‘How should I know that?’ he asked with voice like a scratchy record.

A helpless feeling came over Alice. She had been told that she should ‘go about it carefully’, and before she had come, it had all seemed so clear to her, so right and natural; but even the man’s appearance and manner gave her a sense of shame, of something unclean and terrible. She didn’t understand anything, herself least of all, when she answered:

‘Isn’t that what you do for a living?’

She had snubbed the lifeline the man had extended. She had done something irrevocable, something whose consequences she couldn’t foresee. Her reason had abandoned her.

The man’s expression was vacant and uncomprehending. Without looking at her, he took out a smudged handkerchief and started cleaning his eyeglasses very energetically.

‘I don’t understand at all what you mean,’ he said flatly.