Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  Georg Pauli, another of the Swedish painters, said, “If she did not choose her subject, you would never know it from the painting called Ploughing in the Nivernais. It is superb what she does with four bulky cows and a farmer driving them through great reddish-brown clods of earth.”

  Quite suddenly, Sofie loved Georg Pauli. Not in the way she loved Nils, a love that consumed her with desires to touch him, to put her hand in his pocket so she could feel where his hand had been, to feel their knees meeting under the table. She loved Georg in a way that meant, “You are a fine person, and I salute that.”

  But Rosa Bonheur had had to give up too much—love, children. Sofie saw no reason to make those sacrifices.

  Nils ignored Georg Pauli’s praise of Rosa Bonheur. He turned the conversation to two male painters in the new, realistic school they all admired.

  “That is the kind of work we should be concentrating on,” he said scoldingly, as though he had not led the group in mocking Bonheur.

  Chapter Three

  1891–1893

  MARIANNE WAS BORN in the second year of Sofie’s marriage. She and Nils had returned to Grez, and they gave the baby a French name. When she was six months old, they left France for Sweden. At first they lived in Sodermalm, a working-class neighbourhood in Stockholm, while Nils and his colleagues formed a group they called the Opponents. The Opponents worked feverishly on an exhibition designed to show the conservative Swedish art world what it could learn from the new French painting. The exhibition included seven paintings by Nils and was a tremendous success.

  Two years later, in 1893, they moved to Gothenburg and a boy, Markus, was born. Nils taught at the Valand School of Art, denouncing the ideals of classical beauty that had warped his own education and introducing his students to the fresh air of modern art. They had a small flat close to the school, with a distracted maid named Berta. In between school terms Nils was often away, studying monumental art in Paris and frescoes in Italy, or travelling in Holland.

  Sofie’s parents came to meet their grandson, and her mother spent hours with Marianne and the baby. Her father preferred talking with Nils about art. Would France retain its supremacy? What did he think would be the ideal education for an artist? What about these new fellows, French mostly, who apparently took off their spectacles before they began painting? Sofie had no idea that her father was so knowledgeable about art. Then again, if Nils owned a shoe factory, her father would have made it his business to be equally well informed about the shoe market.

  No one needed to be informed about her work, she thought. It was obvious that she was nursing Markus, trying to teach Marianne her colours and numbers, and working with Berta to tidy, clean and put meals on the table. No wonder she fell into bed at night exhausted and yet feeling that she had let the day slip through her fingers.

  When Nils was not travelling and not overwhelmed with his own work, some of their happiest hours were spent sitting up late at the newspaper-covered dining table, painting their china. They had ordered plain porcelain dinner plates from Rorstrand, fired at a low temperature or “biscuited.” Each plate was to be decorated with a different flower, and sent back to Rorstrand for a second, higher firing. It felt to Sofie like old times, when Nils had sat next to her painting out of doors in Grez, trading suggestions, compliments and mock insults. The decoration had to be painted with a rapid, unfaltering hand. Nils went like lightning, instinctively knowing how stems and flowers would wind around the plate. She, who pored over flowers in Gothenburg’s Botanical Gardens, needed a little time to map their route before she plunged in, because there was no going back. They needed blooms that insinuated themselves around the rim, in a look reminiscent of Nils’s beloved eighteenth century. They ruled out gladioli and irises—too stiff. Both claimed the nasturtium, with its tendrils clambering irrepressibly over everything, its little outbreaks of buds and its leaves as round as saucers. In the end, Sofie surrendered the nasturtium to Nils, and contented herself with the moss rose. It too was pliable, even with its thorns.

  One thing she had kept from her painting days was the shape of her clothes. When she was pregnant, her dresses were waistless and loose, like a painting smock. She found she liked that, whether or not she was pregnant. (To which Nils said, encircling her waist, “But you are always pregnant.” It did seem that she had no sooner weaned the new baby than she was pregnant with the next one.) In England, she read, this style was called Aesthetic Dress, and had been taken up by the disciples of William Morris. So-called New Women, who supported female suffrage and were in revolt against corsets and the other constraints forced on women, also favoured it. Sofie wasn’t in revolt against anything, but it was pleasant not to have a waist, or stays, or a weighted skirt, just a loose body of unpressed pleats that hung from the yoke like a child’s tunic. She designed a few dresses of her own: the trick was to have some eye-catching decoration, usually applique or embroidery, at the yoke and sleeves.

  * * *

  —

  When Marianne was born, all Sofie had wanted to do was nurse her, watching the baby work to keep up with the first milk that came in quickly and then relax into more measured swallows. She ran her knuckles along the curve of Marianne’s cheek and watched her laugh well up. Nils thought she doted too much on the baby.

  With Markus, she was strangely sad and always tired. He was more demanding than Marianne, but by no means a difficult baby. But Sofie did not particularly want to live. That sounded so dramatic, but it felt the opposite of dramatic. Everything was heavy, so awkward she didn’t know how to pick it up. She still loved Marianne, she supposed because it was a kind of habit. Loving Nils seemed less of a habit, but she carried on with him. And he was so absorbed in his work that he did not notice much that was happening at home.

  It was for the baby that she felt painfully, guiltily little. She wondered how it would end, and whether she would have to spend her life pretending to care for him. Loving Marianne was like eating warm bread and freshly made butter, it felt so natural and wholesome. Loving Markus seemed impossible, like swallowing nettles.

  “He is so homely,” she had complained to her mother when her parents visited Gothenburg.

  “He is not,” her mother said. “He is perfectly handsome.”

  But she knew her mother was lying, to save her feelings. Or to save Markus? She knew Marianne was the most exquisite baby ever born, and Markus one of the least attractive. Years later, when she looked at photographs or Nils’s paintings, she saw that Marianne was not as beautiful as she had thought and Markus nowhere near as homely.

  It was early summer and Markus was ten months old when the idea came to her. She had gone into the nursery to make sure he had settled. In his sleep, he breathed a double breath, with a catch between the first, shorter breath and the longer, second one. As she watched in the dark she thought, I need to draw him. At least, to draw him. Maybe not paint him, but at least to fix on paper those cheeks, the slope of his eyes that was like Nils, the mildly pointed chin. She felt quite calm and not particularly disloyal to Nils, because she knew she would not need to do this again. And that it was important.

  Nils had gone sketching with friends to one of the nearby islands. There would be no problem finding the necessary privacy. She took the baby to the Botanical Gardens, while Berta watched Marianne at home. There was plenty of room for paper and drawing pencils at the foot of the carriage. In a bosky little cul-de-sac where the sun slanted down on a border of mayflowers and lady’s mantle, Markus played with a ball of yarn. The velvety, cupped leaves of the lady’s mantle, each one holding a single drop of dew, tempted him, but his crawling was still too unskilled to take him from his blanket to the border. Sofie spent the morning drawing him. Then she took him home and drew him some more while he surrendered to sleep, on his back, his arms and legs splayed. Only one thing was missing in her sketches, and that was his strawberry-blond colouring. After the children were in bed for the night, she made some rapid watercolours by lamplight. Nils
was meticulous about his paints, but she left them in perfect order.

  By the end of the day, Markus was hers. She loved him, loved his haunches that were like small hams, the way he rocked back and forth trying to crawl and then thought better of it, the way he hoisted himself up on a chair, mostly with his right arm, and crowed triumphantly once his chin was level with the seat, the way he moved his blocks around, searching methodically for some magic block-formula that eluded him.

  Her “day off,” as she thought of it, had worked, where Markus was concerned. But it left her feeling rather flat, at times even short-tempered. The next time Nils went away, a week later, she took the children on a picnic to the park that surrounded Skansen Kronan, the octagonal fortress that guarded the city. Marianne cried and then pouted because she wanted to climb up to the lookout at the top—even for her fat, determined legs, the steps were too steep. Markus fussed more than usual. The day was a very long one.

  Sofie kept the sketches and watercolours for a while in her recipe folder, between the instructions for Mamma’s apple cake and Mrs. Hedlund’s gingerbread. But she did not need them. And when Markus was five and they moved permanently to Askebo, she burned them with the other rubbish.

  Chapter Four

  1897–1898

  WHEN SOFIE WAS a girl, the Falkners spent their summer holidays in Askebo, a village in Dalarna where two of her aunts lived in an old cottage on a river. In 1897, after Aunt Karolina died and Aunt Emmy moved to a nearby town, Sofie’s father, who owned the cottage, gave it to Sofie and Nils. Askebo was like hundreds of villages—a sprinkling of houses, farms and an old church along the winding river. Falun was the closest town, with a mine whose copper produced the dark red paint that covered most of Sweden’s cottages. The Olssons’ cottage was painted Falun red and, depending on her mood, Sofie found that charming (it was so Swedish) or boring (it was so Swedish).

  Since there was nothing distinguished about the cottage, they added and renovated in bits and pieces, when they had the time and money. They stayed in Gothenburg for one more school term, and moved to Askebo in 1898. Nils was selling enough that he no longer needed a teacher’s salary. By then, there were four children, Birgitta and Sonja having followed Markus. Little by little, they added a verandah, opened up the ceiling in the nursery and robbed the dining room of its view of the river by building the first studio in front of it. Nils did small, fanciful things, sculpting a gargoyle of himself for a roof truss, for example, and topping a chimney with a weathervane in the shape of a palette signed with his initials.

  Askebo, 25 June 1898

  Dear Mamma,

  Thank you for the embroidery patterns, which arrived yesterday. That kind of handcraft always reminds me of Mrs. Greger from down the street, and those huge green apples she was eternally embroidering on orangey-red wool. I don’t remember ever seeing anything she finished, just those giant fruits multiplying on her wool.

  No one will ever like the Askebo house as much as we do, we are doing such odd things that suit us alone. Aunt Emmy came to visit, before we are ready to have visitors, but when will we ever be ready for that? She was most dismayed by the second-floor room where the little girls and I will sleep. We have taken away the ceiling, to make it more spacious, and we look right up to the roof. And we have taken down the aunts’ curtains and put shutters on the inside, no curtains. A bare wooden floor so the girls can push their doll carriages and build with their blocks. My bed lies behind a simple curtain strung up on a pole. Aunt Emmy said it looked like a dungeon. Oh dear, you see what I mean.

  Marianne loves playing little mother with the baby, and she and Sonja quarrel, each claiming “Birgitta’s my baby!” “No, she’s my baby!” It quickly becomes tiresome. Nils has painted a picture of me nursing the baby, but actually she is weaned, sooner than the others. My milk dried up, who knows why, and for the last few sittings I had to pose with a doll, which was strange.

  I feel a bit listless, perhaps because the house is still so unsettled. It does not seem to bother Nils: he works all the time on his mural for the girls’ grammar school in Gothenburg.

  Once we had assigned the rooms on the second floor for bedrooms, a reading room and a guest room, there was no place for my desk. Nils’s bright idea was to put it in the hall, so that is where I write to you. The good side of this decision is that I am easy to find when Nils or the children or the maid need me; the bad side is the same! What is the opposite of a hideaway? That is what I have.

  Love to you and Pappa

  from six of us,

  Sofie

  Reading it, she thought, No, this is not a good letter. She tried again.

  Askebo, 25 June 1898

  Dear Mamma,

  Thank you for the embroidery patterns, which arrived yesterday. You are right, I should stir myself and stop moping, and get interested in some handcraft. I will look more closely at the patterns and, once I get the hang of them, perhaps I will design my own.

  While Nils was in Stockholm I had the panelling installed in the dining room. I could see that the workers were surprised that we would line the heart of a Swedish house with cheap tongued-and-grooved wood, the kind you see in an ordinary cafe or a railway waiting room. But it would be silly to waste expensive wood on walls we are going to paint forest green and obscure with pictures and shelves for some of our favourite pieces. I did not dare go ahead with the green until Nils returned. Reluctantly, because he had wanted something more formal, he agreed—he says my colour sense is better than his.

  But he has come up with all kinds of ingenious solutions and pretty touches. He cut a window in the wall in his bedroom that looks down onto the studio, so he can see the progress of his painting from that angle. Then he painted a garland of oak leaves all around the opening. For the lovely old clock we bought in Paris, he made a bracket for the dining room wall, and then he cut a square in the bracket and in the shelf beneath it for the clock’s weight. So simple and space-saving!

  Marianne and Sonja love playing little mother with the baby, and Markus would happily spend all day at his workbench. Thank you again for such a fine birthday present. Nils is terribly busy with his mural for the Gothenburg Girls Grammar School. I confess I feel a bit listless, but no doubt everything will be better once the house is more settled.

  Love to you and Pappa,

  from six of us,

  Sofie

  She dreamed that all Sweden was tented in the thick wool on which women embroidered. Piano covers, curtains, lap rugs, bed coverings were all pressed into service, and no one in Sweden could see the sky for these dark pieces of wool. Plums, grapes, irises and pears embroidered in loud colours grew on the wool, a good thing because there was no sun where the real things could grow. Underneath, where people walked, the threads stretched, taut and criss-crossed, a web that could never be disentangled.

  Later, when people talked about their Askebo house and their family as a model, Sofie found it all rather exaggerated. Letting in as much light as possible and choosing bright colours rather than the sleepy darkness that filled so many houses was unconventional, she supposed that was obvious. And the idea that children should not be consigned to the nursery but have the run of the house was unusual, although it was more or less the way she had grown up. But beyond that, their choices were purely personal, and often last-minute improvisations.

  There was plenty to do, with four children and the renovations. But she was restless, beginning a lacy knitted jacket and cap for the baby and abandoning it, searching for curtain fabrics—perhaps she should embroider something on the uninspiring cottons and linens they sold in Falun—and then losing interest. Nils’s friend Lars Vogt had given him an eighteenth-century pattern book, and she stared at its festoons, garlands and cartouches, looking without much success for inspiration for the cottage.

  They bought an old ceramic stove at the auction rooms in Falun, covered with tiles in the yellow of rich new cream. The tiles were decorated with the folk painter’s alphabet—
crowns, flowers, hearts and pairs of birds in red, blue and a brighter yellow. Once the stove was installed in a corner of the parlour, Nils wanted to paint an echo of the tiles, a fan-shape of birds and flowers, on the ceiling above the stove. He is gilding the lily, she thought, initially amused—something he never does in his paintings.

  “Let well enough alone,” she told him. He paid no attention.

  Now he stood on the ladder, palette in hand, literally overshadowing the lovely, self-sufficient stove. She busied herself at the other end of the room, her back to the stove, playing with some silhouettes and engravings she wanted to arrange on the wall.

  “You don’t like it,” he complained when she made no comment on his work, inflating his hurt feelings to camouflage them.

  “The stove is beautiful, all to itself. Let it do its work.”

  “Wait until I am finished,” he insisted, and went on painting.

  Annoyed, she talked reason to herself. This degree of good fortune would have been unimaginable to him as a poor, overlooked child. It was only natural that he wanted to put his mark everywhere on the cottage. She trained her eye to look at the midpoint of the stove, and not the pointless fanfare painted above it.

  Up until now, in France, Stockholm and Gothenburg, she and Nils had shared a bedroom. Many bourgeois couples did not sleep in the same room, and Sofie had assumed that, in the larger space of Askebo, Nils would have his own room. Rather than build another single bedroom, it would be simpler if she slept for a while with the three little girls.