Sofie headed east, to meet Hanna at the National Museum. Marriage and children had not noticeably relaxed Hanna. She opined her way through the permanent collection (“Never understood his reputation,” “Now that one is good”) as they walked toward the second-floor rooms reserved for the Salon. Searching for Dorotea’s work on walls crowded with paintings of peasants, flowers, sheep huddling in fields and rain pooling on lamplit streets, Sofie felt the gallery-goers behind her making room for a determined stride. Unconsciously and efficiently, Cecilia Vogt had a way of parting a crowd.
“Cecilia! What are you doing here?” Hanna said. They had gone to school together as girls in Stockholm.
“Mrs. Vogt,” said Sofie, flustered by the memory of her encounter with Lars. They shook hands.
“Please, it’s time to be Cecilia and Sofie,” Cecilia said. “Lars and I are in town because he is showing at a new gallery, on Sveavagan. He has a meeting with the owner this morning.” Sofie nodded, and hid her confusion: Sveavagan was in the opposite direction from the Old Town where Lars and Mrs. Holmgren had been headed.
Cecilia seemed not to notice her silence. She chatted about the visit to Askebo she and Lars had promised, but not yet accomplished. Hanna and Sofie explained about their friend Dorotea, and with Cecilia’s help they found her pictures. There was an unremarkable seascape, a fine portrait of a girl with a family resemblance to Dorotea, and a painting of a table set for breakfast in a summer garden that delighted Sofie. She put up her hands as if to touch the sun-dappled tablecloth. This one was worth the trip.
Cecilia smiled. “Yes, she has something, doesn’t she?”
Sofie was scheduled to catch the afternoon train back to Falun, but had time for sausages and dill potatoes in a cafe around the corner from the museum. Once they had ordered, Hanna told Cecilia the story of Dorotea’s painting teacher who had recommended dispatching her paintbox to a watery grave.
“How did she react?”
“Probably more politely than she should have,” Hanna said. “We were brought up to turn the other cheek.”
Cecilia looked at Sofie, wanting her response. Sofie lined up her knife and fork in parallel lines across the top of her plate. She was reluctant, but there was something imperative in Cecilia’s gaze.
Slowly, because she had never thought about it so explicitly, she said, “It was such a new thing for all of us, a woman wanting to paint, that perhaps Dorotea didn’t know then what she really wanted. Or how much she wanted it.”
Hanna was busy cutting her potatoes, and Sofie stared into the middle distance, frowning a little.
“But after all,” she continued, “she didn’t take his advice. We’ve just been looking at the result of that. And the dishes the teacher sent for the wedding present are probably all broken by now.”
Cecilia and Hanna smiled. Sofie thought of the cracked and chipped dishes at the back of her cupboard at home. No doubt Cecilia disposed of her broken dishes immediately.
“Yes, china breaks,” Cecilia agreed. “Dreams should not.”
Sofie considered the perfectly turned-out Cecilia, her fur thrown back on her chair while she ate her sausages with gusto. What are Cecilia’s dreams, she wondered. And did they have anything to do with the woman who’d been in the cafe with Lars?
Still circling the question of Dorotea and her teacher, Hanna said, “Lots of people felt the way that teacher did, and many still do. Georg remembers the time when he praised one of Nils’s paintings, and Nils answered that his greatest achievement was stopping Sofie from painting.”
Hanna’s tactlessness was famous. Sofie turned red, and said lightly, “That is Nils talking for effect. You know how he likes to stir things up.”
Hanna shrugged and buttered her bread. Cecilia said nothing. Sofie thought, Why, when Nils and Hanna have behaved badly, am I the one who has to smooth things? And why does Nils say these stupid things, when he surely doesn’t mean them? Something about Georg brought out a cruelty in Nils—Georg’s sweetness, perhaps, or the way he indulged Hanna’s painting life.
“Saying that to Georg was unkind,” she said to Hanna, “when he has worked so hard to encourage your painting.”
Now, she thought, I have been disloyal too. Before she left for Stockholm, she had said goodbye to Nils in his studio, where he was sculpting a frame for his painting. At the bottom of the frame, a nude was lying on her side, seen from the back. Her crooked elbow jutted out of the frame and broke into the real world. That little miracle was shocking and marvellous, and when she saw it, she had kissed him from sheer pleasure. Why would a man who could do that wonderful thing exult, even as a joke, at stopping her from pursuing a very small talent? That was a power any waiter or clerk had over his wife, if he wished to exercise it.
Her eyes on her plate, she made a minute adjustment to her fork and knife. Hanna was chewing her bread and butter, apparently still oblivious. Abruptly, Cecilia changed the subject. She had been rereading David Copperfield, she said, and still loved the idyllic scenes where the boy David visited his nurse’s family on the Yarmouth coast. But this time, she was more impatient than she remembered being with David’s first wife, Dora, who was such a dimwit. Could a reasonable man really love such an empty-headed baby, however pretty?
Cecilia pressed on, almost breathlessly. This is kind of her, Sofie thought. When Cecilia finally paused, Sofie had something to add.
“I agree with you about Dora, but at least David realizes he has made a mistake before she conveniently dies. It is Agnes, the choice of his maturity, who bothers me more. She is such a stained-glass saint, she endures, endures, endures—taking care of her alcoholic father and silly Dora, suffering her unrequited love for David in silence. Unlike Dora, she is going to be a helpmeet for David, but that is all she is. She seems to have no wishes at all for herself. I find her very tedious.”She could see that she had surprised Cecilia, although that was not her aim. Perhaps Cecilia thought Sofie was not in a good position to cast stones at Agnes. Certainly it was easier to be critical of a fictional character than of real people, or yourself.
When she got home, she went briskly up the stairs to her desk, saying “Later” to the clamouring children. She hoped that Nils had not heard the carriage from his studio.
Askebo, 15 October 1901
Dear Dorotea,
This comes to you with many congratulations! Your “so-called talent,” as you used to call it, is alive and well. I admired all three pictures, beginning with the bold Persian carpet in Portrait of a Girl. It reminded me of Professor Lavartin’s ideas about the buildup of colour, how well you learned that lesson. Hanna Pauli, who was with me—do you remember she married Georg?—was very impressed with that. Is the girl a daughter, or a niece? The set of her mouth looks like you. But my favourite is Summer Breakfast. It is idyllic, the mismatched chairs, all the roundnesses of teapot, goblets, cups and table, the sun glinting on the green-glass cracker box, all masterful. You have put your paintbox to very good use!
With fond memories of our time in Grez,
Sofie
After she addressed the envelope, she went downstairs to hear about the children’s day and to see what progress Nils had made with his frame.
Chapter Eight
NOVEMBER 1901
IT WAS A blustery Sunday when the Vogts finally came to Askebo for the day. After the Grand Tour, as the older children called it, and lunch, the men went sketching at a picturesque bend in the river. They pulled their broad-brimmed hats as low on their heads as they would go, so that the wind would not blow them off. Sofie and Cecilia sat down in the blue-and-white parlour with their knitting.
“Lars does not enjoy the sight of a woman knitting,” Cecilia said. “We look so tense and hunched over. A woman can look graceful while embroidering, but I try to do my knitting when Lars is not with me.”
The talk moved to books, and to Charlotte Brontë’s novels. They had both read Jane Eyre over and over, beginning when they were girls.
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��As I get older,” Cecilia said, “I am more and more cross with Mr. Rochester for attempting a bigamous marriage with Jane, while his lawful wife raves in the attic.”
Sofie defended Rochester. “He has been duped into marrying a lunatic, and divorce was out of the question. What is the poor man to do?”
“Well, he is not to take advantage of an innocent, respectable girl, and then coolly propose making her his mistress when she discovers the truth,” Cecilia said crisply. “And”—another affront struck her as she grew more heated—“do you notice that we think nothing of the fact that Mr. Rochester has had an illegitimate child with a ballerina? Suppose that Jane had an illegitimate child, that would make an entirely different novel, wouldn’t it? As a matter of fact, the English are too prudish even to write that novel. It would have to be a French novel.”
This had not occurred to Sofie. Of course, there was a different measuring stick for men than for women, but she took it so much for granted that usually she didn’t notice it. Now she would notice it in Jane Eyre, but she still forgave Mr. Rochester.
“He is a schoolgirl’s dream,” Cecilia insisted. Her irritation was still rising, but the sweater she was knitting needed her attention: she had reached the row where she had to twist the cables. “Passionate, unpredictable and needing ‘a good woman’ to reform him,” she went on scornfully when she had finished the row. “Even the way he flirts with Jane by insulting her is the way you flirt with a girl, not a woman. But sadly, we feel his appeal long after we are schoolgirls.”
Sofie thought, I do feel Mr. Rochester’s appeal but I am not going to apologize for that. Cecilia was enjoying their argument as much as she was. They carried on talking about novels, companionably disagreeing and agreeing. The men returned and, after a last cup of tea, it was time for the Vogts to leave.
But first, Sofie had a gift for Cecilia. Using her new, small loom, she had woven her a handkerchief. Over its red, white and blue plaid, she embroidered a few lilies of the valley, Cecilia’s favourite flower. Cecilia gave one of her croaks of laughter when she unfolded the tissue paper.
“‘A handkerchief red, white and blue!’” she quoted the Irish song Markus had played in the Hall on their visit to Siljevik. “‘But before I could wear it,’” she went on, “‘he tore it in two.’”
“Not this one,” Sofie said. “Keep it safe in your handkerchief box.”
Chapter Nine
MAY 1906
TWO MORE CHILDREN were born at Askebo, in 1902 a girl they called Tilda, and in 1905 the seventh and last child, Felix. When Felix was a baby, Ellen Key came to see the house. “Seeing” made it sound rather casual, Sofie thought: the truth was that Miss Key had come to inspect the house. She was a motherly, white-haired figure who favoured lace blouses, but underneath her mild surface she was one of the most powerful cultural forces in Sweden. She championed Ibsen’s plays, women’s suffrage and the Nordic Museum. Her lectures and essays could single-handedly exalt or sink a writer or a cause. Beauty for Everyone, her latest book, took William Morris’s view that useful things should be beautiful and beautiful things should be useful. She believed that cultivating a simple beauty at home would make people happier and families stronger. So—Sofie thought stoically—a visit to Askebo was inevitable.
Miss Key, Sofie and Nils sat in Nils’s new studio, on easy chairs set around a low table. The studio smelled hopefully of paint and varnish. It felt expansive and far from the family rooms, although that was an illusion. There was a fireplace, a grand piano and a player piano. On the wall at the working end of the room, hundreds of serious, uniformed boys and their teachers stood in prayer, in Nils’s draft of a fresco for the staircase of the Norra Latin Grammar School in Stockholm.
“I got pushed out of the original studio,” he complained half-seriously to Miss Key, while the baby played on the floor with a wooden train.
“All these children,” he said, circling a bewildered hand, as if to ask how it happened that seven children lived here, “all these children wanted to play or work in the old studio. A workbench for Markus, plus Sofie’s loom and two spindles and the sewing machine, gave me no space to paint. So I left it to them, and now I have a bit of elbow room.”
“A bit of elbow room” was modest, considering he had already told Miss Key that this was the largest studio in Sweden. Sofie watched as their guest took in the pictures stacked against the wall, the easels holding paintings at various stages, the stepladder Nils used to reach the high corners of the monumental works he hoped would finally secure his reputation as a serious artist. A white stoneware jug stood on the table between them, its tin lid tipped back to accommodate coneflowers, sweet peas and trailing ivy. It looked as if a busy hand had dropped the flowers in the jug willy-nilly.
“That is Sofie,” he said, following Miss Key’s look. “In case I have no other inspiration, she makes sure there is always one here on the table.”
Miss Key glanced at Sofie, who looked at the bouquet. The second-highest coneflower was a few millimetres too tall; she would cut it down before lunch. On the floor, Felix found that banging his train cars together made a very satisfying noise. When he found a bullying rhythm he saw no reason to stop. Sofie picked him up with a few cars and the engine and took him to Berta.
When she returned, Nils and Miss Key were braiding their similarities together—which in Nils’s case meant retelling anecdotes he had already rehearsed to perfection. How he had wanted his watercolours of the rooms at Askebo to be exhibited in the industrial arts section at the Stockholm Exhibition, rather than the fine arts section, so that people could learn from his example when it came to setting up a home. How he began painting pictures of the house and the children after a dismal summer when it rained every day for six weeks, and even the sketching umbrella would not allow him to paint out of doors. Fed up with his sulks, Sofie had told him to paint what he saw indoors. As usual, he exaggerated Sofie’s impatience and his own subservience. Sofie and Miss Key smiled at each other, two women indulging a man’s dramatics.
Miss Key talked about how the way the Olssons lived had become an ideal, not just of a new way to furnish houses, but of family life. Nils’s devotees were growing in Germany as well as Sweden, and the German translation of How We Live had added many more. She and Nils negotiated their differences, which mostly involved women’s rights, as pleasantly as possible.
“Your lecture caused quite a storm in Stockholm,” he said, sitting a little further back in his chair.
She moved a little forward in hers. “Do you mean the one I called The Misused Forces of Womanhood? Yes, they liked it better in Copenhagen.”
“No doubt, we are more conservative here. We don’t like hearing that marriage puts a woman into a kind of prison.”
Miss Key repeated what she had said and written many times. “But I want equality for women only so that they can be better mothers.”
Sofie was no stranger to Miss Key’s views on motherhood. She was devoted to motherhood beyond anything. She supported equal property rights for women and female suffrage because, she said, women would never become perfect mothers until society allowed them their full development. Nils agreed with her that motherhood was a woman’s highest calling, but he did not see why a mother would want to vote, or why it would be better for society if they did. Watching the two of them, their determined cordiality only occasionally fraying, Sofie’s thoughts wandered to the unspun wool she had taken to the dyer in Falun. Half of it she wanted dyed the palest green possible, and the other half a dark grey. Then she would mix them in the spinning to make various shades for her tapestry, as you mixed colours on a palette.
The talk she heard at a remove, threading in and around her plans for the wool, was abstract. Miss Key, for all her good intentions, was neither a wife nor a mother. And Nils was probably more interested in a woman’s wifely function than her motherly one. Or was there any difference? Sometimes it felt as if she had eight children, not seven.
Now they were
talking of property law, which brought Sofie back to the threshold of the house and Nils’s sign, “Welcome to the house of Nils Olsson and his wife.” Although the house had been in Sofie’s family for generations, according to Swedish law it now belonged to Nils, not her. If Miss Key knew more about the two of them, she might decide he had taken her house as well as her name. (She would not accuse Nils of taking Sofie’s painting life, because Miss Key believed that mothers should devote themselves only to raising their children.) If she knew more, would she still agree with the Germans that they were a model family? As for the vote, if getting it would enable Sofie to find the perfect grey-green she wanted for her tapestry, with a hint of lustre like a piece of Chinese celadon, she would support it. Otherwise, it sounded like a distraction.
After dinner, the adults looked at Nils’s watercolours of the house. In At the Window, Marianne watered the plants on the windowsill in the drawing room. The room’s colours were pale blues and off-whites. The aunts’ old rag rug lay muted on the floor, and the sofa was loosely covered in blue-and-white stripes. As happened often in Nils’s pictures, Sofie had apparently left the scene just before the painter took up his brush. The creases on the chair cushion still showed the weight of a body, and her knitting had been left behind on the round table. In this pale, well-behaved room of rectangles and circles, with Marianne in her faded grey dress and the terracotta flowerpots dusted with powdery mould, the stocking Sofie was knitting was an inky black blob. It was ungainly, ill-mannered, even menacing. Its four needles stabbed into the ball of wool and announced, “Don’t touch me. I don’t accord with this soft, relaxed room, but I must not be disturbed.”
They looked at another painting where Sofie had just left the scene, a nighttime picture of the dining room. Nils’s book was open at the head of the table, and at her place on the side there was an open newspaper, a bit of black ribbon, and a pair of scissors, opened to an X, balancing on the edge of the table. These things looked like the clues in a murder mystery. But who was killing whom? Was she the murderer or the victim? It would have been pointless to claim—to whom? to the judge?—that she would never go off to bed with sharp scissors threatening to fall off the table.
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