Chapter 12 — Wandering, Madame Odéro at Riva

Niels does not go straight back. He cannot face Lönborggaard with the news of Erik's death so freshly attached to his own behavior, and he cannot face Copenhagen with the same news in different rooms. He travels. The novel sketches the travel without lingering on it: Hamburg, the Rhine cities, a stretch in Munich, the Alps, the lakes of northern Italy. He is, for a while, simply a man with money for trains and time enough to sit in the cafés of foreign cities. He reads the papers. He writes a letter occasionally to his father. He does not write to Mrs. Boye, or to Hjerrild, or to anyone who might ask the questions he is trying not to be asked.

He stops at Riva on Lake Garda — a small Italian town under the cliffs at the north end of the lake — and stays. The reason for the staying is mostly accident; the reason for the dwelling is a singer, Madame Odéro, who is also at Riva. She is older than Niels, famous in her sphere, recovering her voice after a long illness; she walks the lake with a parasol and her doctor's instructions; she takes her coffee at the same café Niels has begun to take his. They begin to walk together. They begin to take their evening meal at the same table. The novel does not stage a passion. It records a long, careful attentiveness between two convalescents, each of whom is using the other to think about something neither of them is willing to talk about.

She is the lowest point of the drift, and the novel knows it. She is not the figure of recovery; she is the figure that marks how far Niels has gone from the life he had imagined for himself. After several weeks she leaves Riva — her voice has come back enough; her engagements call her — and Niels stays one more week and then turns north. He goes back to Lönborggaard. His father is older and quieter than he had remembered. The estate has waited for him. The chapter ends on his return: the same gate, the same trees, the same view of the fjord his mother had loved. The novel gives him no welcome. It gives him the house.