PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2018 Katherine Ashenburg
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ashenburg, Katherine, author
Sofie & Cecilia / Katherine Ashenburg.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780735272682
eBook ISBN 9780735272699
I. Title. II. Title: Sofie and Cecilia.
PS8601.S435S64 2018 C813′.6 C2017-905119-9
Book design by Kelly Hill
Cover images: (lady with flower) © Lyn Randle / Trevillion Images; (brush strokes) © Lara Cold / Shutterstock.com
Interior images: © Dover Publications, Inc.
v5.2
a
To J., who gave back my gift,
and to M. and S., wise counsellors.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
Prelude
Sofie
PART TWO
Prelude
Cecilia
PART THREE
Red
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Prelude
JUNE 1901
IT WAS DURING that first visit to the Vogts’ house that Sofie Olsson and Cecilia Vogt began to know each other. Their husbands were friends, but the two women had only met in passing at gallery openings and exhibitions. Lars Vogt had been trying to arrange a visit for months.
“You must bring your wife and all your children,” he wrote to Nils, “and any cats and dogs if you have them.”
Sofie refused to bring Oskar, who was a baby. The four older children, three girls and a boy, would be quite enough. The Vogts were collectors, and she hoped the children would remember not to touch their things.
Nils had fixed some old sleigh bells on the carriage, and they made such a clamour that the farm horses the Olssons passed along the way neighed in alarm. He told the children the horses imagined that the king must be coming. That made the older ones laugh, but Birgitta, who was four, was round-eyed and silent at the idea of horses expecting the king.
Leggy stands of birch and pine edged the road, their boughs high above the ground. Every so often they passed a cluster of dark-red houses outlined with white corner boards, like a child’s drawing of a village. Early in the morning, when they left home, belts of fog held the trees close, but by the time they reached Siljevik, Lake Siljan glittered in the morning sun.
The Vogts’ yellow house sat behind its long garden, just at the edge of the village churchyard. Lars waited on the porch like a handsome tortoise slowly opening his eyes in the brightness. He smoked slowly and deliberately, as if he did not want to wake himself up too abruptly. He embraced Nils with special warmth, and shook hands with the others, even Birgitta.
“Later,” he told them, “we’ll visit my mother next door. She has to know everything that goes on here. But first the grown-ups need some coffee and the children some cinnamon rolls. Then we’ll have a tour.”
The front door opened, and Cecilia Vogt appeared.
“Welcome,” she smiled at Sofie, over the milling children. The husbands called each other by their last names, as male friends did, but friendship was still in the future for their wives. If indeed it happened, they would move from Mrs. Vogt and Mrs. Olsson to first names. Small, with eyes the colour of forget-me-nots, Cecilia was a few years younger than Sofie. Almost everything about her was chic, beginning with her narrow, childlike feet in shoes that looked like gloves, the leather was so fine and the fit so close. She moved quickly, spoke quickly, probably thought quickly. Only her big, clattering laugh was neither elegant nor brisk.
Sofie was not especially tall, but Cecilia was so petite she almost felt that her height was a mistake. She had chosen a long, full, red jacket for the visit, one she had made herself, with black velvet scrolls appliqued on the yoke and pockets. She knew Lars Vogt loved red too—he often painted Cecilia dressed in scarlet. But it was Cecilia who admired the contrast between the jacket’s mossy velvet scrolls and the hairy, loosely woven wool.
A maid brought a tray with coffee and rolls out to the table on the porch. Now that he was fully awake, Lars’s long, purposeful fingers moved constantly, rolling a cigarette, rearranging the cream and sugar, drawing a picture for six-year-old Sonja of her doll drinking coffee. Sofie had brought her knitting, a pair of black stockings for Nils. She left the porch to see about milk for Birgitta, leaving the stocking on her chair, and by the time she returned, Lars had taken up her needles and turned the heel as deftly as any woman.
While the men congratulated themselves on finally getting together in Siljevik and laughed their way through shorthand remarks about other painters, their wives smiled at each other across the table, unsure where to begin. Spring had been late that year, they agreed. Sofie thought, Why do we always say that? Spring is guaranteed not to arrive in Sweden until the middle of May. She said something flattering about the formal beds of flowers in the Vogts’ garden. “But you are a gardener too,” Cecilia replied. “I can see that from your husband’s pictures.”
Sofie’s garden, if you could call the space between their house and the river a garden, was wilder, the bulbs and perennials multiplying, travelling and dying according to their own, unknowable schedule. Indoors, at the big windows facing the river in the workroom, she grew the Christmas cactuses, geraniums, lilies and paper-whites that appeared in Nils’s pictures. He often painted her, secateurs in hand, head cocked to one side as she studied a plant, coddling and disciplining it into shapes he could use.
“It’s odd, isn’t it,” Cecilia continued, “feeling familiar with someone before you know them, even familiar with their house, from paintings you have seen of them? Seeing you here, I think of your husband’s portrait of you holding your first child.”
When Sofie looked at that painting, which she rarely did now, she wondered if the fugitive curls from her topknot had ever echoed the shape of her soft, thick eyebrows so perfectly. Behind the determined look of the young woman’s round chin and straight mouth, there was a glint of something still undecided.
“I’m glad you know that picture,” Nils said to Cecilia. “Sofie says I do not paint her face any more, just her big French sun bonnets.”
Sofie knew he expected her to laugh along with everyone else, so she did. Nils painted her in sun bonnets over and over, the broad brim hiding her face as she bent over her mending in the garden or strung beans on the back steps. Floppy brims and loose dresses. She could not complain that he tented her in fabric, because she designed the dresses herself. These days, often all that showed of her in his paintings was a pair of hands, cutting, pruning, knitting, shelling, kneading.
Nils, as he often did when he and Sofie were in company, was playing the comic, exaggerating his devotion, calling her his idol and pulling out chairs for her with great flourishes. She looked amused, as if this were happening for the first time.
Nils turned to Lars. “Sofie has brought you a gift.”
It was Lars
’s birthday, and she had sewed him a cushion, modelled on the long, thin coach cushions the women made in the south of Sweden. Hers was black felt, appliqued with hearts and clouds, and embroidered in red with Lars’s initials and birth date in the corners.
Lars and Cecilia held it up together, and Cecilia ran her hands over the thick felt, appraising it. Sofie felt a prick of uncertainty. She thought it was good, but it would be easy enough to find it a childish effort for a trained painter. She had, after all, studied with August Malmstrom at the Academy of Fine Arts, but perhaps the Vogts did not know that. Lars gave the cushion one of his thorough examinations and thanked her.
“How cleverly you put it together,” he said, “taking all the old traditional things—hearts, initials, the colour scheme—and paring them down and rearranging them to make something that is modern. And then, the one thing that is completely modern, the stylized clouds.”
So, it was all right then. Still, she wondered what Cecilia thought. He is the artist, she told herself, why should his wife’s reaction concern you? But it did. Something about Cecilia’s confidence made Sofie want her approval.
Cecilia led the way as Lars explained about the house. He had grown up in the village, but Cecilia was from Stockholm, from a Jewish family of textile manufacturers. Although she and Lars had been in the house less than a year, they had started a library and a folk school, where adults could learn to read and write, and where people who still practiced the old crafts passed on their knowledge. Cecilia did all the administration. And now she spoke the Siljevik dialect with the servants and in the village.
Markus, who was eight, was impressed by the house’s modern inventions, the central steam heating that included hot water, the toilet inside the house, and especially the telephone, hanging self-importantly on the wall in a room off the kitchen. Although it had been Siljevik’s first telephone, the numbers had recently been reassigned, and the Vogts’ number was four. The pharmacy was given number one, and the children thought that was most unfair.
Cecilia mentioned that she was thinking of putting in a second telephone, for long-distance calls. She used the telephone every day, arranging Lars’s commissions and exhibitions and negotiating with his clients, but she did not want this clumsy machine in her green-and-gold study. Here was a kind of artist’s wife Sophie had not seen before. All the planning and efficiency was impressive, but Sofie did not think she envied it. Yes, with a wife like Cecilia, a man would have more hours to paint, but would Nils want such a wife?
Sofie need not have worried about the children touching the Vogts’ pottery or weavings. The Dalarna furniture the Vogts collected did not interest them either, but the Hall, with its Viking look and high, sloping timber ceiling, did. While the children chased each other around the billiard table, Lars pointed out the old textiles hanging on the walls and the shelves of folk pottery. The Vogts’ pieces were as fine as people had said, but the thing she had not expected was the books—the Swedish first editions behind glass, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the shelves of English novels ranged above the sofas.
Lars had already turned to leave the Hall, when she said, “But the books.”
“Oh yes,” he said off-handedly, “those are Cecilia’s.”
Sofie held up her hand to keep Cecilia beside her while she scanned the novels. Many were old friends, and others she had never heard of. As a girl, she had read all of Victoria Benedictsson and the other Swedish writers, but once she could read English, she preferred British novels—more brightly coloured, peopled with more outrageous eccentrics, thicker, richer, wilder.
“I see you have most of Dickens’s books. Which do you like best?” And then, without waiting for an answer, because she noticed something else, “So you like Mrs. Gaskell too. I have not read her, but I mean to, perhaps this winter.”
“Please, borrow any you like,” Cecilia urged her. “Cranford is very popular, but I would suggest starting with North and South.”
Sofie said, “I would like to borrow Cranford, please.” Seeing surprise bloom and fade on Cecilia’s face, she added, “And North and South too, if that is not too much.”
The men were not interested in Mrs. Gaskell and had gone ahead to the bedrooms. Eventually their wives followed, still quizzing each other about their favourite novels. The furniture in Cecilia’s bedroom was Louis XVI, ivory and gold, with spindly-legged chairs and tables that looked as if they were standing on tiptoe, awaiting their mistress’s orders. Thinking of the heap of unanswered correspondence on Nils’s desk, some of it probably six months old, and her own makeshift bedroom in a corner of the little girls’ room, and the constant struggle to tidy the toys, Sofie said to Cecilia, “I don’t know which I admire more, the beauty of your things, or the perfect order in which you live.”
Cecilia said, “But it is your house that is famous throughout Sweden.”
“And we still don’t know what to make of that,” Sofie said, and she and Nils laughed. This time, it was genuine.
Lars’s bedroom, a few rooms away from Cecilia’s, was painted bright red, his bed under a silky red canopy like a general’s on campaign. Although the house was full of paintings, Lars had only one in his bedroom, a watercolour he had commissioned from Nils called In the Studio. One of Nils’s favourite models, Margit, brunette and slim except for the gentle swell of her belly, posed nude in front of a full-length mirror. Nils was reflected in the mirror, a paintbrush raised at his easel, scrutinizing Margit with eyes half-shut. She stood with her arms akimbo, thumbs at her waist and fingers meeting at her back. It was a position that raised the breasts. Hers were small, and young.
Sofie watched the men looking at the picture. She had heard the innuendos about the Vogts’ marriage, but an artist’s life always attracted rumours. Sofie tried not to pay attention to rumours.
“Lovely thing,” Lars said happily.
Whether he meant Margit or the painting was unclear.
* * *
—
In the afternoon, while the men looked at Lars’s engravings in the studio and the Vogts’ maid watched the children running around under the trees, Cecilia took Sofie into the village church. In the midday sun, the light inside was cruel. High white walls, clear glass windows, a white ceiling sectioned like a honeycomb. Everything was exposed, unlike the churches in Spain or Italy, where the darkness was filled with clutter—relics, votive candles, stained glass, holy water fonts.
And yet, Sofie thought, even here, in the Protestant north, even in all this whiteness and light, much is hidden.
“It is beautiful,” she said finally, turning from one austere corner to another, “but rather bleak. There is nowhere to hide.” She had to smile at the silliness of wanting to hide in a church, but there was a tremble at the edge of her smile. When Cecilia turned toward her with an answering smile, her guest’s eyes were brimming with tears.
“Mrs. Olsson, what is it?” she said, taking a step toward Sofie. “Do you want to sit down?”
The wooden pews, fenced in behind doors that shut tight, promised as little comfort as the rest of the church. Sofie wiped her eyes hard on her red sleeve.
“No, it’s nothing, please don’t even think of it. I’m sorry, I’m being so foolish.”
Cecilia waited.
To fill the growing silence, Sofie said, “It’s just that I am weaning the baby, and I find I am ridiculously tearful at these times.”
She thought, How stupid this must sound to a woman who has no children. And how indelicate to mention it to a stranger.
“If you are sure you are well enough, then…”
“Yes, perfectly well, thank you.”
Still a little hesitant, Cecilia turned back to the church, pointing halfway up one of the columns. “The only bit of colour is the preacher’s golden perch,” she said. “No wonder my husband prefers the churches in the south.”
Sofie nodded, rubbing her moist sleeve against her jacket to dry it.
* * *
—
Markus had brought his fiddle, and after an early dinner he played for them in the Hall. When the songs had words, the two older girls sang them, holding hands. Sonja was shy, Marianne not. They performed an Irish song that was new to the Vogts.
When I was single I wore a plaid shawl
Now that I’m married I’ve nothing at all.
Ah but still I love him I’ll forgive him
I’ll go with him wherever he goes.
He bought me a handkerchief red, white and blue
But before I could wear it he tore it in two.
Sofie noted, not for the first time, that the lyrics and music went in different directions. The words suggested a plaintive melody, but it was brisk and matter-of-fact. She could feel Cecilia watching her, and she took care to show that she was quite herself again.
Askebo, 9 June 1901
Dear Mrs. Vogt,
Thank you for all your bounteous hospitality, right down to the very welcome provisions for the journey home. I hope Markus’s fiddling did not bore you too much, but I could see how eager he was to play under that wonderful high roof. I spent some time this morning working at the Dalarna braiding. Yours is precise but airy, and mine is not! But all goes well enough, in my slapdash way, until the end of the row, when things fall apart. When we see each other again, if I still haven’t worked it out, I will ask for your help.
I found myself in the strangest reverie during the ride home. Do you ever look back on your wedding day and feel surprised at how your life turned out? I was so young, and so sure that Nils and I were making a new kind of marriage, something that my parents, for all their care for each other, hadn’t known. But perhaps they too thought they were at the start of a new thing. Maybe everyone who gets married thinks that.
I wonder, what is giving me these curious thoughts? Nothing, I suppose, but seeing your beautiful house and watching spring advance, hour by hour.
With thanks again for letting those noisy children and their grateful parents invade your sanctum,
Sofie & Cecilia Page 1