Since the conversation was taking care of itself, Sofie composed a letter in her mind.
Dear Mrs. Jorgensen,
I congratulate you on the founding of the Swedish Female Folk Dress Association. Such an organization is so important, especially at this strange moment when we are losing so many traditional ways at the same time that a minority discovers them and tries to save them.
I am curious why, when I designed the Askebo dress, you invited my husband and not me to join the association. Of course, he is known throughout the country, and his name will attract others to your cause. I understand that. But why not invite both of us? Surely an association devoted to female folk dress, founded by a woman, should welcome female members.
With every wish for the success of your work,
Sofie Olsson
Later, in her corner of the bedroom, she would write out the letter, just for the pleasure of seeing it on a page. But she would not mail it.
As Mrs. Jorgensen was saying her good nights, she had a request for Sofie.
“I’ve seen some of the posters you designed for the Swedish Homecraft Association,” she said. “I wonder if we could prevail upon you to design the letter paper for our association?”
Sofie smiled regretfully as she handed Mrs. Jorgensen her wrap.
“Now that is flattering,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’ve already taken on too much work for the coming months. Some of the nearby villages have seen the Askebo dress and asked me to design one for them.” She opened the door to the porch, and went outside with her guest. “Perhaps a student in graphic arts in one of the new vocational institutes might help you.”
After Mrs. Jorgensen left, Nils wanted to spend a few minutes with his day’s work. Sofie and Mr. Lawrie walked out to the water. Long streaks of pink lit up the sky, then disappeared, leaving it inky blue with a creamy edge in the west. They were both interested in the Wiener Werkstatte and their attempts to reform the applied arts. Sofie disagreed with their idea of throwing out every influence from the past, but she and Mr. Lawrie were taken with their designs, especially Josef Hoffmann’s. They were still talking about Hoffmann’s severe teapots and silverware when Nils came out to find them.
Once they had shown Mr. Lawrie to his room, Nils read the paper at the dining room table and Sofie let down the hems in Tilda’s and Sonja’s Sunday dresses.
“Mr. Lawrie was very impressed with your designs for the Comedy Theatre fresco.”
Nils nodded, without looking up from his paper. His jaw seemed to lengthen, as it did when he was displeased. Apparently their moment of camaraderie over Mathilda Langlet’s cookbook was over. The Glasgow School of Art specialized in applied art, so it was only natural that Mr. Lawrie would be interested in textiles and furniture. But she could not say that. They sat in silence until Nils rose to go to bed. He stood with his fists on the table, until she raised her eyes from her sewing. Then he winked and turned his head toward the stairs. Logically, the gesture meant nothing, since his bedroom and her bed in the nursery were both located at the top of the stairs, but it had always been their sign. And he had not used it for some time.
In his narrow bed, hung with Sofie’s curtains and covered with the blanket she had designed (Mr. Lawrie had been garrulous in his admiration of its American Indian motifs), Nils took her with something that verged on a cold fury. He battered into her, digging his head into her collarbone as if he were marking out a territory, or re-staking some claim he had let lapse. She knew, without being able to see it, the set of his chin. There were no words, only the rasp of the bed on the bare floor. There was no thought of pleasing her, but she was pleased. And she knew better than to show it, because it would have diminished his sense of having evened some score.
* * *
—
In the morning, there was sour milk, Falun sausage, a ham, crisp-bread and lingonberry jam for breakfast. Mr. Lawrie was charmed, it was so Swedish. He said to Nils, “I cannot get your Sunday Afternoon out of my head; I thought of it for a long time after I went to bed. The way you have cut Mrs. Olsson up, if I may put it that way, and not put her back together—so that we see nothing of her, as she sits hidden behind the little room divider, except for her folded hands, her skirt, and her feet resting on the table leg. And then, the coup de grâce, the portrait of her head on the door, is a masterful stroke! Your fine black outline is so Japanese, and yet you make it so Nordic, and so your own.”
Nils nodded briskly. The gangly Scotsman was sharper than he looked. He would take him back into the studio after breakfast and show him more of his sketches for the National Museum mural.
For lunch, in spite of the heat, Sofie had asked Anna to make pea soup followed by pancakes.
Nils came to the table all smiles.
“So it’s pea soup, it must be Wednesday.”
“Pappa!” the children howled, delighted at his ignorance, even though they knew it was a show. “Pea soup is for Thursdays!”
“And why would that be?” he asked, lifting up the big reference book of Swedish customs that sat beside him on the bench.
Markus raced to get the answer in before the book snapped open. “Because it’s the maids’ half-day holiday in Sweden, and you can make soup ahead of time.”
“But why pea soup? Why not lamb-and-rice soup or beet soup?”
No one knew the answer to that one, so Nils read from the book that Thor, the god for whom Thursday was named, was associated with peas. That was all they wanted to know, but Nils read on, in his comic schoolmaster voice. Humans had offended Thor in some way, and he sent dragons to ruin the world’s wells by filling them with peas. But the dragons dropped a few, by mistake, and they fell on fertile ground. Voila, a new vegetable grew, and Thor was more furious than ever. The humans tried to placate him by dedicating the vegetable to him and only eating it on his day, Thursday. The children were quickly bored by this, but Mr. Lawrie was enchanted at the spectacle of the artist in his uniquely decorated dining room, with his progressively raised children, who shouted out answers and behaved as if they belonged at the table as much as the grown-ups.
Sofie looked down the crowded table, thinking about dragons and pea vines. Bright green dragons, scaly and spiny, with transparent wings. As they flew on to destroy another well, a pea vine grew up behind them, tremulous but unstoppable. The vine, with its modestly drooping pods and thread-thin tendrils, was rooted to the earth, while the dragons mounted to the sky. An embroidered table-runner, perhaps? A tapestry cushion? The length of a runner would give her more scope to show the vines clinging to houses, fences and bridges. The brilliant but slightly disgusting crackle of the dragon skin would be the hard part—and also the most interesting.
Glasgow, 15 September 1907
Dear Mrs. Olsson,
I take the liberty of writing to you, and so soon after my bread-and-butter letter (another strange English expression), because I have been discussing your work with a few of my colleagues at the Glasgow School, textile designers named Ann Macbeth and Jessie Newbery. Of course, you know Mrs. Newbery’s work from The Studio. I wish I had been able to take photographs while I was in Askebo but my camera is far too bulky to carry on a walking trip. Instead, I took the liberty of sketching the table covers in the library and the Old Room, and the cushions and tapestry in the dining room. Miss Macbeth and Mrs. Newbery were most impressed. They are interested in showing a few of your pieces in their forthcoming exhibition here in Glasgow next spring.
I will send more information when you assure me that you are interested.
Meanwhile, best wishes to your husband and all the children at Askebo,
MacDonald Lawrie
Glasgow, 7 October 1907
Dear Mrs. Olsson,
There is no need to apologize. Of course you must do as you see fit with your work. But please believe me, there is nothing amateurish about it. It holds its own with that of the best-known modern designers. It would have been a significant asset to the forthcoming exhibi
tion.
I could not agree with you more about Mr. Olsson. He deserves a greater audience outside Sweden and Germany, and I too hope that he will find one in Britain.
I remember all the good times at Askebo, including fishing with Oskar and playing hide-and-seek with Markus and Sonja. Naturally, they had me at a disadvantage, and showed no mercy.
The current Studio has a piece about the mingling of folk traditions with modernist ideas, and I thought of your work, especially the curtain near your desk. The author claims that when the folk tradition relies on angular, geometric forms, there is often little that needs translation into a modern idiom. I wonder if you agree? If you have a chance, I would be most interested in your response.
With greetings to your husband and the hope that the National Museum appreciates his mural as it deserves. I imagine him in his splendid studio, extending his neck to see even better.
Yours very truly,
Mac Lawrie
Sofie put Mr. Lawrie’s letter into her pocket. She suspected that he was acting more naive than he really was, as British people sometimes did. Surely he realized it was the placement of the folk motifs, the stags and bouquets that appeared in a slightly unexpected place or relationship to each other, that added the element of the modern.
It was not difficult to keep Mr. Lawrie’s letters from Nils. Often she strolled to the mailbox at the end of the lane just before lunch. And even when Berta collected the post, she brought it to Sofie, usually at a time when Nils was in his studio at the other end of the house. Besides, there was nothing improper about their correspondence.
She wondered what Mr. Lawrie would think of Nils’s mural, in his heart, if he were to return to Sweden. Without a doubt, it had all Nils’s wonderful draftsmanship, his affinity with the Renaissance masters, the fairy-tale charm of the victorious king entering the city. Charm above all—Nils was always charming. But it was 1907. Picasso and Matisse and Cézanne were no longer considered so very bizarre in many quarters. Would the Louvre or the National Gallery in London give its main staircase to such a picturesque, realistic painting? Probably Sweden was a little behind the times.
Chapter Thirteen
MARCH 1910
NILS’S PATRON PONTUS Furstenberg had redecorated his Gothenburg gallery and rehung the pictures and was having a party to celebrate. Sofie and Nils travelled there by train. It was March, and the world was mostly white, with heavy, colourless skies and thick snow, black trees and rivers, and the occasional beige stubble of last year’s wheat in a field. Blond grasses stood up abruptly in the river, pressing their feathery tops against the train, as high as the windows, as if they were dusting them.
“I would like to embroider that,” Sofie said, nodding at the matte grasses and the sulking, dimpling river.
“Yes,” Nils said. “A good idea.”
“But how would I stitch the contrast between the water and the grasses? The usual way would be green silk for the water, with black highlights, perhaps in wave stitch, and beige wool or cotton for the grasses, with the tops in Cretan stitch.” Not that Nils knew a Cretan stitch from a wave stitch, but she was thinking out loud.
“And what’s wrong with the usual way?”
“Nothing, I suppose. But it’s so…predictable.”
Nils went back to his newspaper, and she went back to frowning at the river. If she were painting rather than embroidering, there would be all kinds of ways to express the coexistence of the busy water and the calm, superior grasses.
The Furstenbergs lived on Brunnsparken, one of Gothenburg’s most elegant streets, and their party was equally grand. Civic dignitaries, people from the National Museum and artists, many of whose works Nils had encouraged Furstenberg to buy, walked slowly up the broad staircase, past the Furstenbergs’ two private floors, to the big gallery at the top of the house. The Furstenbergs received their guests at the entrance to the gallery, Gothilda in a cut-velvet dress the colour of garnets.
They went first to see the new home of the triptych that Furstenberg had commissioned from Nils around the turn of the century. Each panel was devoted to a different era of art: the Renaissance, the rococo and the modern. Sofie spent her time in front of the last panel, really to enjoy its frame, where Nils had sculpted “the nude with the elbow,” as she thought of it.
The next room was dominated by a large oil portrait Hanna Pauli had painted of her friend, the Finnish sculptor Venny Soldan. The two women had studied in Paris together at the Colarossi studio and the picture dated from that time. Venny, a tall, solid blonde, sat on the floor near a few of her knives, holding a lump of clay in her hand. “Look, Nils, how good this is, the way her black dress is so undetailed, and Hanna saves up all the realism for Venny’s head and hands.”
He looked at it, but not very closely.
“Yes, it’s all right.”
“It’s still very bold, isn’t it—her sitting on the floor, that foot in its slipper sticking out. It was unusual when it was painted and portraits were more formal, and even now…”
Her sentence trailed off as she felt his stubborn lack of interest.
Changing direction, she said, “Hanna and Georg’s children must be very grown up now.”
Nils looked at the picture more seriously.
“She is so homely, no wonder she paints. Did you see Georg’s portrait of her in the other room, wearing spectacles?”
She nodded. So, now only ugly women who wore glasses were allowed to paint. Just as only lame ones, like Selma Lagerlof, were allowed to write. And only unmarried women, for whatever reason, like Ellen Key, could go into public life.
“Apparently, not everyone thinks Hanna is as homely as you do. I heard last week that she and a Sicilian man have fallen in love. They met when she was in Italy last summer, trying to recover her health.”
Nils stared at her as if she had lost her senses.
“Whatever do you mean? She is over forty. She has grey hair. Even when she was young, she was no beauty. Who told you that?”
“Cecilia.”
She could see he was struggling to think of Hanna—intense, driven but self-doubting—as a femme fatale, and failing. “But how does Georg react?”
“They say he is very unhappy, and wants her to come with him to Paris, where he is studying the new painters.”
Nils looked as if he did not know which was more incomprehensible, wanting to keep an unfaithful wife or throwing over a mature style to learn how to paint like those ludicrous French daubers. He turned back to the portrait of Venny Soldan.
“That’s very clumsy, painting her with her mouth open.”
“Maybe she thinks better that way. She is looking at her work, it seems.”
She had heard something recently about Venny Soldan, that she lived in a ménage à trois in Helsinki with her husband and her sister. The husband had sons with both sisters. She was not going to tell Nils, it would only make him more vehement about women artists.
The Vogts approached, Cecilia looking soignée in black and pewter–grey. She wore a long chain Sofie had not seen before, that looped several times around the neck, with oval stones in blue, green and pink topaz at long, irregular intervals.
Lars had designed it, Cecilia said, when Sofie admired it. Not the easiest thing to wear, but she hoped that, since this dress was so simple on top…
A thought like a little worm intruded on Sofie. Lars must have someone new. Or he’d had a particularly fine time with someone who was not new. Were men not embarrassed by their own transparency? When she and Nils had been in Stockholm a few weeks ago, they had bumped into Lars in an out-of-the-way cafe. Pink with champagne and high spirits, he’d been sitting with a few male friends and two women whom Sofie could see were from the demimonde. Now she wondered, as she had before, whether this broke Cecilia’s heart. You’re just a naive girl from Hallsberg, she scolded herself, and turned her attention back to Hanna’s painting. Some of Nils’s former students from the Gothenburg art school had joined them. Lars,
who as usual had effortlessly become the centre of the circle, was appraising the picture.
“Look at the way the woman’s weight rests on the knuckles of her right hand, that is well done. And the way she is half alert, half relaxed, with that big foot in its flat shoe sticking out…Very fine.”
Nils was not interested in hearing Hanna praised, but before things became awkward, his students took him off to explain his triptych to them.
“Walk with me to the buffet,” Cecilia said to Sofie, taking her arm, “before it gets too crowded.”
There was already a tail of hungry and thirsty art-lovers extending beyond the long table at the end of the hallway, and they took glasses of champagne while they eyed platters and chafing dishes full of delicacies. No caviar, thank you, they told the server. It would be too difficult not to spill it on their dresses or on the beautiful new floor.
While they made their way down the buffet, they began talking about Jane Austen. Sofie was reading her way through the novels in chronological order. Cecilia could talk about books at the same time as she scrutinized the provenance and quality of each dish. Sofie could not divide her attention in that way, but she cared less about the food.
“Did you enjoy Emma? I suspect those shrimp may be a little tired.”
“It was very clever,” Sofie said, nonetheless helping herself to the shrimp, “all the farcical twists and turns of the plot, like a long country dance of a novel, with several possible couples—at least in Emma’s imagination!—taking their turns dancing down the middle. And the end could not be more perfect. I don’t know that I have ever been happier at the prospect of a wedding, real or literary. But Emma’s meddling irritated me so much, at points it interfered with my pleasure.”
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