Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  Staring at that strange picture alongside Miss Key, Sofie thought of Lars Vogt. She and Nils now travelled to Siljevik every few months, and no visit was complete without a tour through the Vogts’ new acquisitions—blankets or clocks or furniture. On their last trip, Lars had shown them a thick belt made of something dark and ungiving, with a brass holder attached to it and a big loop.

  “No one could call it pretty,” Sofie said.

  “No,” Lars agreed. “It’s the belt a bride wears in the villages around this part of the lake. It must be made of moose skin, and this brass contraption holds her needles, and she keeps her knife in this loop.”

  Sofie thought, So much for our citified, modern idea of a bride’s beautiful dress. These are the important things a woman brings to the house—the needles with which she will make the family’s clothes, and a sizable knife to prepare the food. Is that why Nils so often painted her with scissors and knives? Because women, apparently so soft and yielding, do their work with these dangerous tools? She wished she could believe that was the reason.

  The motto for Ellen Key’s lecture about women’s rights was “Women’s History Is Love.” That was a motto with many meanings, deliberately hard to challenge. Did Nils paint her with sharp, dangerous tools because she was failing at love? Doubtless Nils took so much because he needed so much.

  Once they had finished with Nils’s paintings, they had a stroll through the village, up to the church and its full-skirted bell tower. Then Miss Key took a trap back to Falun and the train. Although Nils had seemed to enjoy her visit, once she left his mood darkened.

  “Nils, come in to supper. The children are at the table.”

  He shook his head, and would not move from the big chair in the studio. But as she turned to leave, he caught her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. An apology. His cockiness bored her, although she knew it was defensive. But his sadness never failed to move her. She knew what was wrong. He did not want to be known as the man who painted watercolours of his house and children. At the start of his career, he’d had difficulty being taken seriously because he had been an illustrator. Now, this unexpected fame. That people admired what he had done with the Askebo house was fine, but it was a sideline. His ambition was to paint monumental frescoes of great Swedish kings, blood sacrifices, the tragic doings of heroes. Those were the subjects a man painted. How curious that he said women lacked the virile spirit to be artists, and now he was beloved for his paintings of children at breakfast, of his wife mending, of toys and dishes and enamel coffeepots full of apple blossoms.

  Chapter Ten

  JUNE 1906

  IN EARLY SUMMER, Cecilia sent a letter to Sofie. She was going to an estate sale at one of the old master miner’s properties around the Falun mine. There might or might not be some interesting things in the sale, but she really wanted to look at the house’s folk murals, which were rumoured to be good. Perhaps Sofie would be interested in seeing the murals? Afterwards, they could have lunch at the hotel in Falun.

  As Sofie rode through the Kopparbergslagen, the copper mining countryside, she watched the incongruous melding of the rural and the industrial—the familiar look of farms with barns and animals interrupted by smelting houses and slag heaps. The master miners were farmers with the rights to take ore from the mine, and many had become rich from the copper they produced on their land. The farmhouse Cecilia wanted to see was a plain eighteenth-century house near Bergsgarden, at the northern end of Lake Varpan. The neglected farm included a smelting house, but from the looks of it, it had never been prosperous.

  As Cecilia had anticipated, nothing in the sale interested the two women. Nils had a wooden box that Sofie kept filled with old dishes, so she sifted through the boxes of crockery as always. He sometimes hammered the dishes into shards and made a small mosaic he affixed in a likely spot inside or outside the house. But today no cup or tureen lid caught her fancy. There was a heap of old tools—planes, chisels, a drill and a rusty saw that Nils would have inspected and Lars would have bought instantly.

  “Thank heavens Lars is not here,” Cecilia said. “We have too many of these relics already.”

  The sale may have been disappointing, but the murals were wonderful, a glowing story of a pilgrim who travelled around the walls of the main room, doing good deeds and minor miracles, inspired by regular visits from a saint they could not identify. A dotted line connected the pilgrim on his deathbed to his patron saint waiting to welcome him in paradise.

  “I like the way his landscape obeys no botanical or biological rules,” Sofie said, “tropical plants and trees living side by side with northern species, leopards walking along with penguins.”

  Cecilia nodded. She had the look in her eye collectors get when they must have something.

  “We cannot stand by and let this be destroyed. But how to save it? Removing the frescoes from the walls is possible, but expensive and time-consuming. We would probably have to import the craftsmen from Italy, and their work takes months, while the new owners want to raze the building and build another house. It would probably be cheaper and definitely faster if we bought the house and moved it to Siljevik. I know that is what Lars will want. Luckily, we have a little time…so we can talk about it.”

  At lunch in the hotel restaurant, where the French aspirations included Louis XVI chairs and an almost comically formal service, Sofie tried to divert a distracted Cecilia by telling her about Ellen Key’s visit. As a young woman, long before she had become a national figure, Miss Key had been one of Cecilia’s and Hanna Hirsch’s first teachers. Jewish children were allowed to attend the public schools by then, but the Isakssons and Hirsches had sent their daughters to a small private school for both Jews and gentiles. Miss Key had taught them history and Swedish literature.

  “She inspected everything in the house,” Sofie said, “including the children’s rooms.”

  “Yes, she would,” said Cecilia, amused.

  “And at least part of this was your fault. Miss Key said, ‘Cecilia Vogt tells me your designs are very clever.’ That meant I had to show her all the curtains, the tapestries and the bed coverings I had made. She admired them, more or less, but then she turned over the fabrics without any apology, just as if I were her pupil. You know how chaotic my work is on the wrong side.”

  “Our samplers and other embroidery had to be as neat on the wrong side as the right side.”

  “I got that impression,” Sofie said. “My designs are one thing, but my messy execution is another. Something else that she probably didn’t appreciate—Nils is very proud of a little eighteenth-century spice cabinet on which he has written in Gothic script, ‘Nils Olsson bought this old cabinet to put junk and other things in.’ Miss Key had nothing to say about that.”

  Cecilia sniggered.

  “She takes old furniture, especially folk furniture, very seriously, so she certainly would not find that funny.”

  “I’m not sure she knew what to make of the children’s free-and-easy ways, either. Only Felix still has his meals in the kitchen, so there were six children who sat in the dining room for dinner. Lately, Nils has instituted a new rule—they sit in alphabetical order, beginning at his right—the only way to stop their constant bickering about placement. Nils keeps several reference books beside him on the bench, so he can look up facts under discussion. He has painted a big ‘Empty!’ at the bottom of the soup tureen, so the children compete noisily to get the last spoonful of soup and expose the ‘Empty!’ Poor Miss Key watched all that without comment.”

  “Well,” Cecilia said, “she has written that the twentieth century is going to be the century of the child.”

  “That is the theory,” Sofie said. “She seemed a bit disconcerted by the reality. Miss Key told the children that until she was twelve, she and her brothers and sisters took their breakfast and supper standing at a table without chairs. At those meals they ate only bread and milk. It was a question of discipline, not economy. She never spoke at the table unless
she was spoken to until she was sixteen.”

  “How did the children take these medieval reminiscences?”

  “With a mixture of disbelief and sadness.”

  Cecilia laughed. Sofie, who could still find her slightly formidable, thought, We are getting on.

  When they finished the main course, Cecilia signalled the waiter. In a voice so low and confidential that he sounded almost ashamed, he told them about the desserts.

  “What do you recommend?” Cecilia asked him. He was young, and only partially successful with the dishes that had French names. Now he looked slightly alarmed, but Cecilia smiled at him encouragingly.

  “I know you are well known for your cheesecake. Unless I am mistaken, it has a hint of almond flavour, doesn’t it?”

  He thought it did. He ventured to suggest that, if she had the time to wait until they were prepared, the crêpes Suzette or the soufflés au chocolat were very popular.

  “No, thank you. I love those things in France, but we have so many delicious Swedish desserts, I will stay with them today. I think I would like the apple cake.”

  “Very good, madame.”

  “And please don’t forget to bring me some of your lovely vanilla sauce,” she said, as if he made it himself.

  Sofie stared at her friend. Where did she find room in her small frame for all that food? And why was she being so friendly with the waiter?

  “Nothing for me, thank you. I do not have what the English call a sweet tooth.”

  “And I do,” Cecilia said happily. There were still important things like this that they did not know about each other. They agreed that “a sweet tooth” was a nicer expression than the blunt Swedish sockergris, “sugar pig.”

  When the waiter returned with the apple cake and a silver boat of sauce, Cecilia asked him if he would mind pouring it.

  “I have a bad habit of drowning the cake, the sauce is so good,” she said, smiling at him as if pouring the sauce herself was quite beyond her capabilities.

  My heavens, Sofie realized. She is flirting with him.

  The waiter retreated, after pouring a shallow pool of sauce around the cake, and Cecilia returned to her normal self.

  “Speaking of your work,” she said between bites, “the Swedish Homecraft Association sent Lilli Zickerman to see our collections and the Folk School, and she was full of praise for the aprons and bonnets and cloths we have been buying. It all seems so normal now, collecting these folk things, but I remember when my mother was astonished that anyone would want what she called ‘the belongings of the poor.’”

  She helped herself to more sauce.

  “But about your own pieces—I must warn you that Miss Zickerman is very curious about your most recent weaving and designing, and you will hear from her.”

  “Well, that is fine,” Sofie said. “She means well.”

  “A word to the wise if she comes to visit: she is dead set against aniline dyes, which she regards as a prime example of what she calls ‘industrial degeneration.’ You might want to put any guilty fabrics or threads out of sight if you aren’t in the mood for a lecture.”

  “I will never please the purists,” Sofie said. “What they see as gaudy and artificial, I see as vibrant. Now I hear they will not even admit rag rugs into their sacred canon because the rags come from cloth made in factories. The problem with the Folk people is that they want everything to stop, and stay as it was before factories came to Sweden. Much as we love the old things and admire people like Miss Zickerman—and Miss Key too—that’s not the way the world works. Nor would I want it to. And I’m impulsive and not at all methodical: if I see a pink or green thread that pleases me in a shop or market, I take it without asking about the dye, rather than ordering a season’s worth of vegetable-dyed threads. Miss Zickerman will not approve, but there it is.”

  Over coffee, they began talking about Vanity Fair.

  “I stopped reading,” Sofie said, “I got so annoyed with Becky Sharp. All those heartless flirtations with rich men.”

  This was another of the differences they were discovering about each other. Once Cecilia started a book, she had to read to the last page no matter what she thought of it, but Sofie walked away when she got bored or irritated.

  “Becky is in a bad way,” Cecilia objected. “She has no money or position, and she has to earn a living or find a man who will support her.”

  “I don’t really blame her, I blame Thackeray,” Sofie said. “Are there only two kinds of women in the world—either a selfless Angel in the House or a temptress who is willing to destroy everyone who gets in her way as she climbs her selfish way up the ladder? Thackeray’s male characters come in many colours other than black and white. Why can’t he tell the story of a normal woman, with strengths and weaknesses, who has to make her way in the world?”

  “And why is it,” Cecilia interrupted, coming round to Sofie’s side of the argument, “that in so many novels—not just by Thackeray—the woman who has to leave home to go to work often comes to a bad end?”

  “You mean, in so many novels written by men.”

  Sofie could not deny that Nils would sympathize with Thackeray’s suspicions. He distrusted women who had ambitions outside the family, although he made exceptions—Miss Key, for example—for older, single women who admired his work.

  Sofie thought for a few beats, and added, “Do you think women novelists do any better at imagining real women?”

  “Sometimes,” Cecilia said. “For example, Dorothea in Middlemarch.”

  Sofie nodded. “Yes. George Eliot teases her, if I can put it like that, about some of her blind spots, and takes her other shortcomings more seriously—but always with affection.”

  “So it is all the more disappointing,” Cecilia said, “that Dorothea is quenched, if that is the right word, by marriage. Her first husband resents her intelligence and youth…”

  “Fears it, really.”

  “Yes, he sees she could be a rival. Or expose his mediocrity. And then she marries Ladislaw, with whom she is happier, no doubt. But the young woman who had grand hopes of reforming society settles for life as a wife and mother. Ladislaw goes into politics, and she helps him behind the scenes.”

  “A bit of a comedown,” Sofie said.

  She felt Cecilia looking at her keenly.

  “But Dorothea is happy,” she added.

  “Yes. But George Eliot says very plainly in the Finale that society turns idealistic and original girls into women whose work is to support their husbands’ work. It reminds me of the end of…”

  “War and Peace!” They said it together, triumphant at having recognized the same thing.

  Cecilia leaned across the table, with her index finger raised for emphasis. “I’ll tell you something about War and Peace. When I read the ending for the first time, when I was around seventeen, I was horrified at what had happened to Natasha. It seemed such a betrayal of all that vivacity and promise, the transformation of that quicksilver girl into that matron completely absorbed in her husband and children. I never got over the picture of her emerging from the nursery in her untidy dressing gown, happily brandishing a diaper stained with healthy yellow rather than worrying green—a sign that baby was better. That enchanting girl grown dull and dishevelled. But each time I reread it, every four or five years, I suppose, I grow more reconciled to the mature Natasha. Partly because I am more mature, no doubt. But also because she is doing something that is undeniably important, raising all those children…”

  Sofie waited until Cecilia noticed her skeptical look and stopped.

  She said, “Now you sound like Tolstoy.”

  “But surely you can appreciate what Natasha is doing,” Cecilia said.

  “Not entirely. Her family is an extension of herself. Loving her children is a combination of instinct and selfishness. She is spoiled and demanding, she allows Pierre no life of his own…”

  “Except his work,” Cecilia interjected.

  “All right, I agree, and
that is important. But Natasha has no opinions or interests—she agrees with everything Pierre says, mindlessly, because Pierre says it. Her fate is a sadder decline than Dorothea’s.”

  “George Eliot and Tolstoy seem to be in agreement about marriage and its effect on women.”

  “But there is a difference,” Sofie insisted. “Tolstoy celebrates the narrowing of Natasha’s horizons. But George Eliot regrets that something fine in Dorothea will never be used, never find the opportunity she craves.”

  How did I end up on that side of the argument? Sofie wondered. They sat silent for a few seconds. Then she asked, so that things did not become too dispiriting, “How did we get from Vanity Fair to marriage?”

  “Is marriage the problem, then?” Cecilia responded, and they laughed, to show that it was not their problem. “And if it is, is there anything we can do about it?”

  “Pay the bill,” Sofie said, “and get home to our husbands, I think.”

  Chapter Eleven

  JULY 1907

  SOFIE WANTED TO do something with a sunflower: the tremulous yellow petals, each individual one weak but with a multitude of fellows, the rough black centres densely packed with seeds. Unfortunately, sunflowers were ubiquitous. Mr. Morris and his followers had strewn them all over their fabrics, wallpapers and carpets. But she could not stop sketching them, some in profile, with the thick, bristly stalk humped into an upside-down U, others full-face. How to make something fresh with a sunflower? Perhaps if she cut one in half. No, it was inert, unwieldy. It did not beg to be a part of a tapestry or a table runner or anything in particular. But—and here the patient hours of sketching suddenly took flight—what about cutting it in quadrants? Each quarter of the seed head became the corner of a cushion, and the golden petals fanned out from the seeds’ nubbly darkness.