One evening Helga had the food waiting for an hour before Egon came home, and when he did arrive, he was drunk. He threw himself down on the divan, from which he followed her movements through the living room with a watchful, sinister glare. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Your face looks all pasty.’ She was shocked and quickly put some rouge on her cheeks, but later she got used to his tone. She also got used to making food that was easily reheated, because it became impossible to predict when he would come home. She told her mother about it. ‘Egon started drinking.’ Her mother seemed to be more uneasy about it than Helga was. ‘When a man drinks, it’s because he’s dissatisfied with his wife,’ she declared. And, since she was of the opinion that you could always do something about a problem, she advised her daughter to ‘talk it out’ with Egon and figure out what was the matter. But Helga had never tried to put herself in another person’s shoes; it had never been necessary. Her entire character consisted of a pile of memories without a pattern or a plan. There were a number of pairs of brown eyes, a twilight mood, an immense, undefined expectation, a yellow dress, and an umbrella. There were tears and disappointments, and so many other things, and small joys in between. And there was a man who had opened her pale, narrow lips, and for a few moments made her feel the tug of something unknown and wonderful. There was a voice that had said strange and sweet words to her, and over it all stretched the fine silk umbrella canopy of her childhood and her dreams. This had nothing to do with the man who had started drinking. She thought she had given him as much of herself as he could reasonably expect, and her vague feeling of inadequacy with him was only because she wasn’t pregnant, as a newly married wife ought to be. But it seemed to her that, as usual, she expected something more for herself, a kind of surfeit that went only to other, unknown individuals. Not that she blamed anyone for anything – she had never done that, because she knew how unreasonable she was. She had written things on her life’s wish-list which were achievable: time to dream, a husband with brown eyes, and a child – the last one for conventional reasons. Her outward behavior had always been dictated by tangible things, so she assumed that it was something concrete that had made Egon start drinking and speaking harshly to her. She nodded thoughtfully to her mother over her tea and promised to ‘talk it out’ with her husband. But she had already decided it was the lack of a child that was bothering him, and matters no one could do anything about were not proper topics of conversation. Not even with her mother.