The Serbian Dane Read Free Page B

fact that the crucial dialogue with the clerical government in Teheran had not given the expected result. Well, she would catch the story again at eight o’clock. If it was big enough. Otherwise she would just have to wait until she got to the newsroom.
    She nudged Ole and got out of bed. He sighed, but she noticed that he opened his eyes before she disappeared into the bathroom. He smelled faintly of stale alcohol.
    ‘Turn off that radio, for Christ’s sake,’ she heard before she shut the door.
    As always, a shower helped. First the hot water then the cold. Once out in the spacious open-plan kitchen, with the light cascading through the window and the faint hum of the Østerbro morning traffic in the background, what she herself would have called her black waking thoughts disappeared. Then she no longer longed for rain and cold. They would return soon enough to Denmark, where grey seemed to be the most constant hue. She loved the warmth and sunshine. She poured water into the coffee machine, set the table, boiled eggs and sliced bread for toasting, while making up her mind yet again that she would speak to Ole about it . I mean, if you couldn’t talk to your husband about a little bout of the morning blues, who could you talk to? And he was a psychologist. He was paid to listen to people with serious psychological problems. Maybe that was why he was so bad at listening to her? Maybe she didn’t conform to his textbook theories? Maybe the problem was that she only ever told him half of what she was thinking and feeling.
    Lise collected the newspapers from the hall. Her own paper, Politiken, and Berlingske Tidende , so that she could check out the competition’s arts pages. She opened Politiken straight away and found that her piece on the new gallery had been given quite a decent space under a three-column headline, but Berlingske Tidende had used a picture as well. And those dummies at Rådhuspladsen wondered why circulation was dropping! She turned to the foreign news and ran a quick eye over the headlines. She would read each report in depth after she had had her breakfast, or once she got to the office. She preferred to get out of the apartment quickly at this time of day. Somehow she found it hard to concentrate here. She dumped the papers onto the big, scrubbed-oak table that dominated the kitchen-cum-living room. The coffee machine gave a little hiss. Outside a bird was singing half-heartedly.
    Ole came in and kissed her on the cheek before settling himself with the main section of Berlingske Tidende . Once he had been a radical socialist, now he had his own practice.
    ‘D’you think you could switch off that radio or at least turn it down?’he said.
    ‘I want to hear the news. It’ll be on in a minute.’
    ‘Surely it can’t make any bloody difference whether you hear it now or in an hour’s time.’
    ‘I’m a journalist.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So I need to know what’s going on, Ole.’
    ‘You can do that at work.’
    ‘We have this same conversation every single morning.’
    ‘Well, there’s a reason for everything…’
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    He looked up from his paper. The two slices of bread popped out of the toaster. Instinctively she turned to take them.
    ‘That we seem to put all our energy into arguing about little things instead of having a serious talk about why our marriage appears to be in trouble.’
    For a moment she stood there saying nothing, holding the hot slices of bread. Then they burned her fingers, and she almost threw them onto the table, wafted her fingers and said ‘Ow’. She really did not want to talk about this right now. She wanted to be the one to say when the time was right.
    ‘There’s no need to exaggerate. Are you going to tell me you didn’t have a good time last night? Just because I like listening to the radio in the morning.’
    He turned back to his newspaper.
    ‘I’ve got a long day ahead of me,’ he said.
    ‘Well, didn’t