Bogman Read Free Page A

found our man.”  

    3.

    It was nearly ten o’clock when he got back to his flat. He was hungry. He could almost smell the roast pork loin, the cabbage with juniper and garlic, the roast potatoes, Inge’s apple pudding. Too late for all that now. He went pessimistically to the refrigerator. A curled up lettuce, three eggs, a dried up slice of ham in an opened plastic packet, half an onion in cling wrap and a nugget of crumb-embedded butter on a saucer. He had the makings of an omelette at least. He cheered up. An omelette was a proper meal. It justified a glass of decent wine.  
    He laid the table beside the window leading to the balcony, adjusting the knife and fork to lie parallel to each other, equidistant from the sides of the table. He lit the single candle in the blue and white Royal Copenhagen pattern candlestick which sat in the dead centre of the table. The same candlestick had sat on the dining table in the house where he grew up. It had been ritually placed on the tiny fold-out table in the boat on which he spent endless weekends and holidays with his father after his mother died, because his father had not been able to bear being in the house without her.  
    He selected a bottle of Macon Villages from the temperature-controlled wine cabinet above the refrigerator, unscrewed the cap and poured himself a glass. He took a sip, swilled it around his mouth, savouring the taste before swallowing a mouthful. He took the omelette pan from a cupboard and began to cook.  
    He drank the Burgundy with the omelette. He washed up his plate, knife and fork and swept the remains of the lettuce into the compost bin. In the three periods in which he had shared his living space with a woman – including his ex-wife – he had found that they, not he, left dirty plates in the kitchen sink, scattered clothes about the bedroom, abandoned damp towels on the bathroom floor.   The last woman in his life, Anna, a librarian in Silkeborg, had tried to persuade him to move in with her. To live in her cosy house with its fat cushions and swagged curtains and scented candles everywhere. But on the occasions when Tobias had stayed there he had felt suffocated. He preferred the spareness of his own flat. She had called him a dried up stick.  
    He poured himself a second glass of wine and carried it out to the balcony. He could just about afford the mortgage on the flat. It was worth it to be right in the centre of Aarhus. To see, over the rooftops, the cathedral spire soaring into the sky. To see below him in the space between the back of his own building and the next street, the neat gardens and patios of his neighbours with their budding lilac and cherry trees, their bicycles and their pots of tulips, his ground-floor neighbour’s lily pond with its miniature fountain spouting from dawn to dusk. Thank God it was Sunday night. On Fridays and Saturdays there was always noise from the bars and cafes in the surrounding streets, sometimes making him nostalgic for the student life he had briefly glimpsed and left behind.  
    He watched his neighbour, Hilde, in the flat across from his balcony, moving about in her kitchen. He wondered if it was too late to telephone and invite her over for a nightcap. But that usually meant sex and he was enjoying being alone. He wanted to sip his wine and listen to music . Hilde was energetic and fun. She was married to the first officer on a cruise ship who was away from home for weeks at a time. She had exchanged glances with Tobias when they met in the street and, after several such encounters, had rung his doorbell on the pretext of asking him to help mend a fuse. He was both taken aback and aroused by the blatancy of her approach. She quickly abandoned any pretence of not being competent with fuses. She was more than competent in bed as well but she talked a lot and she liked Bruce Springsteen. Tobias was in the mood for something ordered and serene. Bach preludes, a Haydn sonata or a fugue by Arvo