The Stepdaughter

by Margit Sandemo

  “Dag, my dear, how can you say such a thing? Have you ever known me to be a snob?”

  “No, never, thank goodness!”

  “Give her time, Dag. Be patient. I think you’ll have to tread very carefully. We all know the horrors that Liv endured in that marriage.”

  “Well, I can imagine some of them,” he sighed. “I’m afraid that this may take quite some time. Maybe I’ll never be able to reach her?”

  Charlotte shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right. She seems to be burdened by pangs of conscience. It’s as if somebody or something persists in making her feel guilty for everything she tries to do. What’s more, I think that the possibility of love between two people who’ve grown up together as siblings may frighten her even more. Poor girl! We must give her all the love and compassion we possibly can.”

  “You’re quite right, mother,” said Dag quietly.

  ***

  One day a family gathering was held at Linden Avenue and everyone had seated themselves around a groaning table of delicious food. Sol shot a mischievous smile at Silje when she noticed that she kept well away from the cakes. When things got properly under way, Tengel said from his chair at the head of the table: “Liv, you have to consider your future. You’re now the owner of an important timber-shipping business.”

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with it whatsoever!” she replied glumly.

  “Well, then you’ll have to sell it,” said Tengel. “The business can’t and mustn’t be allowed to drift with nobody at the helm.”

  “Isn’t it a little foolish to sell it?” interrupted Are. “I want to work the forest here and Aunt Charlotte and I have discussed how it could be done. Now what would be better than our own business to transport and ship out everything?”

  “What a splendid idea,” said Dag.

  “But I know nothing about trade,” objected Liv. “Besides, I don’t wish to live in that awful house with all its memories. I want to live here!”

  “That’s still possible,” said Dag, disappointed again that whenever he spoke to her she avoided his glance. “I can help you sort out all the legalities. You can count better than anybody I know, so you could do the bookkeeping from here. I don’t know what to do with the house, though. It would be a pity to sell it ...”

  “Why not let me live there?” said Sol casually. “Then I can act like the lady of the manor. I bet a lot of suitors will turn up and go into raptures over the elegant house, and they’ll take me into the bargain.”

  “Stop talking nonsense,” said Tengel sharply. “You can’t live there on your own.”

  “That would be no problem,” said Sol jokingly. “It would make everything so much more exciting. People would be ever so curious about the beautiful woman with the sad look on her face.”

  “Sad look on your face! You?” laughed Are. “Your eyes show your devil-may-care approach to life.”

  “Are!” said Silje sharply. “I don’t want you to swear in this house!”

  “I’m not swearing – it’s just an expression.”

  Tengel sighed but couldn’t help smiling. “Yet another family meeting that is coming to nothing. Now let’s try to get down to some serious talk. You’re all grown-up now except Are, but he’s the only one who’s making a living and earning his own money. You older ones simply can’t stay here any longer just letting the days pass by. Dag, you’ve now earned your degree, so what to you intend to do in life?”

  “I haven’t really figured it out yet, Dad. I’ve received two splendid offers and there are several other possibilities.”

  He’d called Tengel “Dad” all his life, which amused friends and relatives. They would often tease Charlotte about it.

  “So there you stand – unable to choose. Liv has inherited a fortune in the lumber business but hasn’t felt strong enough to deal with it,” said Tengel, looking slowly round the table. “And you, Sol – can’t you come back and help me with the sick once more? Everyone misses you, most of all me.”

  “I suppose I could,” replied Sol half-heartedly while she thought of the freedom she’d experienced. Or to be more precise: Her life had changed completely since her meeting with the Prince of Darkness. Nothing was as it had been before. “Yes, I suppose I can,” she continued cautiously. “Maybe just for a short time while I decide what I really want to do with my life. It doesn’t seem as though there are many suitors around here knocking on my door.”

  “You know perfectly well that there have been plenty of suitors,” smiled Silje. “About half of your patients would like to marry you, but it would seem that you’re not interested in any of them.”

  “Well, I suppose I just haven’t met Mr. Right,” Sol chirped. And so the conversation came to nothing once more.

  ***

  Little by little harmony settled again on the two farms. Sol helped Tengel with his sick patients, although she sometimes absentmindedly gave them useless medicine while promising them a swift return to good health and the moon and the stars. Occasionally the medicine worked and at other times it didn’t. But this hardly mattered because all the sick people loved her vibrant presence and visibly thrived when she visited.

  Once or twice she went out into the woods and “made a trip” to Blakulla, but the after-effects were so bad that all her thoughts were concentrated on reducing them. She often considered giving up the “trips,” but she knew in her heart that that would be too difficult. Because she was becoming increasingly intrigued by the wonderful image of Satan, who would invariably meet her at Blakulla. Besides, after each “trip” she quickly found that she longed to see him again.

  Although the scenery and activities at Blakulla changed, “he” was always the same – an appalling, suggestive man with the demonic quality that Sol yearned for. Maybe he grew slightly more handsome and more erotically attractive after each visit, or perhaps the distance between him and earthly men was too great. Whatever it was, she had met “him” three times now and been taken to the heights of ecstasy and left with a bitter emptiness in her soul when she woke up from her trance. Several times her helplessness had nearly brought her to tears.

  She also realised that with each visit, her personality was becoming more divided. What she’d come to think of as the “abyss”, the extraordinary depths of darkness into which she plunged herself willingly each time, was for her a boundary, a great dividing line. It was the passageway between her two worlds, and she began to understand more and more clearly where her heart lay and where she longed to be.

  As this realisation started to dawn on her, it frightened her so much that she became unwilling to admit it fully to herself.

  Meanwhile her little ‘sister’, Liv, was very slowly becoming her old self again, but she still had a long way to go. Dag always showed her unending patience and had refrained from mentioning the near fatal moment when they both understood that they were definitely not brother and sister. Instead it was Liv who first brought up the subject.

  They had been sitting at twilight in a window-seat up at Graastensholm and were quite alone. Charlotte was with Silje, discussing a recent visit to a neighbour and, unusually, for a time their conversation died to nothing. Then Liv sighed loudly and asked: “What’s to become of us, Dag?”

  He shrugged uneasily: “What do you mean?”

  “You know very well what I mean.”

  “Yes,” he said after a long pause. “You’re right, I do. I simply haven’t had the courage to mention it.”

  Liv waited. She’d asked the question – now it was up to Dag.

  “Do you want to, Liv?” he asked in a whisper. “You know, do you want to marry me?”

  He gave her a long, searching look, but she didn’t turn round towards him.

  “Do you really want to?” he asked again, speaking very softly. “Do you want to marry me?”

  Liv shook her head, then nodded. Dag
didn’t ask her with further questions about a subject that was obviously very hard for her. He turned instead to Sol, frank and honest Sol, and asked her to see if she could – very carefully – find out what lay behind Liv’s reluctance to marry him.

  “First of all, it’s too soon after her husband’s death,” said Sol when she reported back to him. “It doesn’t seem there’s been a long enough, decent interval.”

  “I realise that – but I can wait!”

  Sol had recently decided once and for all not to carry on with the Blakulla “game” because it had caused such an imbalance in her life. For that reason alone, she was glad to have something else to occupy her mind.

  “I’ll ask her, Dag. Marrying you is the only thing that can set her free. Why has it taken you so long to figure that out, you fool?”

  “Did you work it out before I did?”

  “No, to be honest, it never occurred to me. But I wish you both the very best of luck, Dag, and I’ll find out the truth, you can be sure of that!”

  And so she did. Not long afterwards, in the bedroom she and Liv were sharing just as they used to, Liv felt ready to speak about her awful marriage. Sol lay quietly in the darkness and simply listened to Liv’s soft voice.

  “Our mum, Silje, had advised me to give him all my love; let him come to me and then receive him gladly. I was to show him that I shared his – desire. I did all that, Sol – only to be harshly told off for being unfeminine. I was told that it was my duty to remain passive from then on. He was the hunter, the conqueror. I was his woman, his possession for him to be proud of and for him to use.”

  “Misuse is what you mean surely,” hissed Sol so loud that Liv had to ask her to lower her voice. “I’ve never heard of anything so sickening – or so wrong. You mustn’t believe what he told you, Liv. Silje was right when she said that most men want a response to their advances and need to feel loved and wanted.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Liv with hope in her voice.

  “THINK? I know they do!”

  Liv was silent for a time. When she spoke again, her voice showed she was too heartbroken to recognise that Sol had a great deal of experience in these matters. “If only I’d been strong enough to realise it – but I was too cut off, too isolated from everyone and so unsure of myself that I thought it was my fault and that he was right to compare me to prostitutes and say all those other things. That really broke me, Sol, and it led to all the humiliation, my shame and my mounting feelings of guilt. Can you see how he crushed me? And, Sol ... No, I can’t speak about that.”

  “Liv, you must. Get it all off your chest – now! Otherwise you’ll never rid yourself of all these terrible thoughts.”

  “It was just something that occurred to me.”

  Sol waited. Then, not being one of nature’s most patient creatures, she muttered: “Well?”

  Liv summoned all her courage and said: “Of course, it’s a terrible thought, but I can’t help ... You see whenever he used his whip or punished me in some other way, he would afterwards become so strangely affectionate and loving. Then he would ... you know what I mean?”

  Sol sat bolt upright in bed. “Oh, gosh! No! No! What a beast of a man – how ghastly! Ugh. Such a horrible ...”

  Sol was unable to find suitable words to express how she felt and lay back in bed again. “I could have killed him!” she muttered to herself, forgetting for a brief moment that she already had!

  “It wasn’t so important,” said Liv apologetically. “The most awful thing was the constant pressure, the eyes that watched me all the time. I always had to make sure that I behaved properly. That is why I can’t marry Dag. I’ve nothing to offer him. I daren’t show my feelings and I’d be constantly scared of doing something he doesn’t like. The thought of ... ”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Of being reprimanded.”

  “By Dag?”

  “Yes! You know that he’s always been so particular and meticulous about things. He wants everything to be in its place and hates a mess.”

  “True, but how can you compare that with being in love?”

  “It’s not difficult.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Sol.

  They continued discussing this for a while, but Sol wasn’t able to convince Liv of the truth.

  So the next day she went back to Dag and told him the whole story.

  “It would seem, Dag, that your need for orderliness frightens that part of Liv that craves spontaneity. It just won’t do!”

  Dag sat at the window, watching Liv help Meta with the chickens. He was deeply shocked by the way Laurents had destroyed his own wife’s happy and outgoing personality and her ability to be natural. As Sol finished speaking, Dag turned angrily towards her.

  “But surely she’s not afraid of me, Sol?” exclaimed Dag with desperation in his voice. “After all, she knows me!”

  “Yes, Dag, and that’s exactly the point.”

  Dag was unable to find words. “But ... but ...” He beat the palm of his hand against his forehead. “How on earth can she compare me to that beast?”

  Sol looked calmly at him and said slowly: “I think you’ll find that you have a very long, and maybe bumpy, road to travel.”

  Chapter 11

  One day, when all four siblings and Meta were helping to harvest Are’s turnips in a nearby field, they saw a rider in the distance heading towards Linden Avenue. As the horse and rider drew nearer, they could see that he was wearing a military uniform.

  “Who can that be?” wondered Liv.

  Dag took a second look. “Isn’t that the soldier who escorted you to Scania, Sol?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Meta.

  “Damn,” hissed Sol. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. What brings him here?”

  “I thought you quite liked him,” said Meta.

  “Liked!” sniffed Sol. “I suppose I did, but I’m finished with him.”

  The others gave Sol a surprised and inquisitive look.

  The rider had stopped on the road and was apparently rearranging his pack. He hadn’t noticed that they were watching him.

  Sol felt that she owed the others an explanation. “We had a little crush on each other on the journey – it was completely innocent – a trifle romantic. But that’s no reason for him to come here! Dag, would you be an angel and invite him up to Graastensholm? I don’t want my past admirers hanging around in the house.”

  “Of course,” said Dag.

  After the winter in Copenhagen, Dag knew his stepsister better than the others. Wiping his muddy hands on his overalls, he started off towards the farmyard, taking with him great lumps of earth stuck to his boots.

  “Dag, wait a second. I’d better come along as well,” said Sol.

  She didn’t want Jacob to say anything to her parents that might compromise her. He was still some way from Linden Avenue, so Dag stopped and waited for Sol.

  “For God’s sake,” she mumbled, pulling so hard at one last turnip that she fell over backwards. “Why can’t people learn that when it’s over it’s over?”

  Are, who was watching Meta working at his side, heaved a huge sigh of exasperation. “No, Meta, you’ve put it on the wrong pile again! The best ones go there and the small ones there. Can’t you tell the difference?”

  “Sorry,” murmured Meta.

  “Can’t you do anything right?”

  Sol, who was irritable by Jacob Skille’s arrival, reacted immediately to Are’s irritation with Meta. “Stop going on the whole time at the poor girl, Are,” she hissed. “She rushes around just to try and please you, but you completely ignore it. All you notice are her mistakes!”

  “When does she do anything except make mistakes? Look, she’s standing there sniffing and sobbing again. While she’s doing that, she puts the turnips in the wrong piles all the time.”r />
  “You make her nervous. She’s never done this sort of work before. Can’t you understand that?”

  “No! Nobody should be that clumsy!”

  Sol dropped the turnip from her hand and moved very close to Are, her eyes flaming. Because he was so tall, Sol had to lift her head to look her brother straight in the eye.

  “How do you think you would have behaved if you were born out of wedlock by a whore and been a so-called bastard? Being there when she carried out her business with men for as long as you can remember? Putting up with beatings because you didn’t belong to a Christian community? Meta has lived in great poverty because nobody wanted to offer her mother and Meta a job. All she had was a mother who – no matter how pitiful she was – tried to keep the girl from being immoral or turning to crime. When I found her, Meta was so infested with lice that I could see them crawling on her. I had to bury her mother who’d been dead for three months beneath a wretched hut, their only home, because Meta didn’t know how to take care of the dead! Since then, she’s been alone and unprotected. When I found her, she was bent double and bound to a fence by a dozen soldiers, who were sexually abusing her, a starving child – from behind! Judging from the scars on her legs, most of the soldiers had already indulged themselves before I came along and put a stop to it. And I brought her back here with me. Why? Because I believed that our family would understand! It seems I was mistaken.”

  Are was speechless. He’d listened to everything that Sol said and the silent expression on his face showed that he regretted his total lack of sensitivity and understanding.

  Liv, the unfortunate one, had walked over to Meta, holding her close, circling one arm around her head and pressing her cheek against Meta’s hair. At that moment, an intimate bond was formed between the two young women – one which would be of great benefit to Liv. She saw in Meta another tragedy that almost overshadowed her own. Finding somebody to comfort and care for helped her forget her own troubles. Sol and Dag saw the beginning of this at once and it made them happy.