Nils would have exclaimed at Hiroshige’s actor in his mixture of plaids and patterns, his legs akimbo and his baggy pants pushed up high, or Kunisada’s picture of a mother bending to slide the heavy baby on her back to a better position. Just for a second, Sofie missed him.
Although John Lavery was only a few years older than she was, his dark, attentive face was lined and his under-eyes pouchy. They scrutinized each other, and she remembered hot summer nights and parties that went on until dawn.
“Your clouds,” he said in a soft Irish whisper untouched by his years in Glasgow and London. “That is what I remember. And the striped stockings you wore at one of our fancy dress balls, when you were meant to be a Moroccan girl. They were a mistake. The clouds were not.”
Mr. Lawrie looked at them quizzically.
“I think perhaps Mr. Lavery means the clouds in my paintings,” she explained.
“Of course I do. Your skies were remarkable.”
A maid in a smart black uniform brought the tea tray, and Lavery asked Sofie to pour. The blue-and-white china was paper thin, and she had a sudden, vivid memory of the much thicker blue-and-white cup she had twisted her body to reach, when she posed for him in the hammock in Grez. As she passed the cups, she put her pleasure at his remark about her clouds off to the side so she could enjoy it alone, later.
He asked about her work, and Mr. Lawrie leaped in with an enthusiastic description of her tapestries and weaving. Lavery listened politely, and when Mr. Lawrie had finished, he turned to her. “And your painting?”
She explained: the children, Nils, the more manageable demands of the textiles.
He nodded, his face neutral. Lawrie and his colleagues in Glasgow, he said agreeably, were doing interesting work in the applied arts. The two men talked of their Scottish connections, the annual Academy Exhibition, John Singer Sargent’s newest portraits of Americans in their novel sports clothes. Mr. Lavery knew vaguely about Nils’s work, but more of Lars Vogt’s, since Lars was a fellow portrait painter. The two men did their best to include her in the conversation, but she let them go on without her.
At the door, John Lavery took her hands in his. He had a powdery, pleasant touch.
“Come back when you visit your sister next time. I would like to introduce you to my daughter.”
“Of course,” she said. “I would enjoy that.”
“And think about those skies.”
She smiled, noncommittal.
On their way back to Martina’s, she and Mr. Lawrie walked through Hyde Park, past the Albert Memorial. It looked like a piece of a great cathedral that had broken off and stood by itself. Perhaps that gave it its forlorn air. More than the crockets and arches and finials, it was the depth of Queen Victoria’s devotion to Prince Albert that impressed her.
“She really loved him,” she said with surprise.
“Something of an understatement, Mrs. Olsson. But you strike me as a devoted wife yourself.”
There was no way to answer that seriously. She said something facetious about not having the funds, when the time came, to erect a Nils Memorial.
That evening, Martina’s children seemed unusually noisy. Francis read aloud at length from the report in the Times about the Sixth Conference of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, to be held in Stockholm next year. We can all read here, Sofie thought, why does he insist on reading to us?
“You haven’t had a fine day,” Martina said, with the acute eye of a younger sister. It was a family half-joke, since their father had always taken his seat at the dinner table while saying, “And did everyone have a fine day?” On the rare occasions when someone told him they hadn’t, he was surprised and disappointed.
“No, I did. It was most interesting.”
Maria Pappadopoula, Anna Foldsone Mee, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Francis and the Suffrage Alliance. John Lavery. It was in no way Mr. Lavery’s fault, but she had hoped that her happiness could have lasted longer. Almost before she had absorbed his praise, his memory of her skies had turned from a pleasure into something else. She must be missing the children.
* * *
—
That night in her room, with her trunk open, she wrote two letters.
Hampstead, London
19 May 1910
My dear Cecilia,
This may reach you before the vernissage, and soon you may be able to tell me about Lars’s show in person. I have had a fine time here, but am cutting my trip short by a few days. Perhaps I have become such a country mouse that life in the city is almost too much for me. You were right about Mr. Lawrie, he seemed more relaxed and, sometimes, even rather graceful here. Our day at the museum was very rich. I fell in love with a skirt embroidered in Crete in the eighteenth century, I learned that women were skilled painters of miniatures, and that Queen Victoria was extremely devoted to Prince Albert. Of course, I knew the last! But seeing the Albert Memorial touched me more than I would have imagined, and made me almost sad. Mr. Lawrie took me to have tea with John Lavery, the portrait painter—we painted together in Grez all those years ago. He admires Lars’s work. This letter is an impossible jumble, I’m sorry. But I must start to pack and I promised Martina a few sketches of possibilities for her refurbished drawing room.
This time I am the harried friend!
And one with fondest hopes of seeing you soon,
Sofie
That letter required a desk, pen and paper. The other did not.
Dear John Lavery,
You remembered my skies. And that is what I have never told anyone. When I awake from a dream of painting, it is always of a sky, on its own in a thin Swedish blue or overtaken by clouds or sliding brazenly into darkness. If I could paint, it would be skies. And you remembered mine.
Thank you.
Sofie Falkner Olsson
Chapter Fifteen
OCTOBER 1910
SHE WANTED TO weave a storm, a fury of destruction. She wanted to weave the sound of paper ripping, of feet kicking at a door, of a voice shrieking until it ran out of sound. A tapestry of anger and fear. But why was she paying any attention to servants’ whispers? Anna should not have left the kitchen door open while she gossiped with the new maid. Sofie had been passing through the dining room, looking for her needlepoint, when she heard Anna talking about how much Markus and Oskar resembled their father.
The new girl replied, “And they say there are more little Olssons, with the same sharp features and coppery colouring, running around Stockholm’s back streets.”
Her heart had begun pounding before her ears fully heard or her brain comprehended. At first she thought confusedly, But Nils has no nephews or nieces, what can the girl mean? Then she felt a thirst beyond any she’d ever known. Perhaps she heard Anna murmuring that she didn’t know anything about that. Perhaps she’d only imagined that. The thirst stayed with her. She was parched, parched, parched. No matter how much water she drank, her throat was unspeakably dry.
It was obviously untrue. But where had the girl heard that?
That day the children were quarrelsome and Nils spoke sharply to them and then retreated to his studio. The sky was bright blue, with smoky clouds inside a thin outline of metallic white, but it was too cold for them to play outside for long and too crowded inside. When Tilda would not stop pushing her doll carriage into a town Felix was building with his bricks, he tripped her. Tilda fell onto Felix’s favourite toy omnibus, which Nils had made from wire and thin sheets of wood, and it broke.
She left the crying children, one with a skinned knee, the other with a ruined omnibus, and shut herself in the workshop, hoping to weave herself into some calm. She was working on a wall hanging meant for the library, an abstract design of the four seasons. When all seemed to be going well, the maroon thread snapped.
Anna cooked Falun sausage with fried potatoes for supper. Nils began telling the children about the oxen who powered the Falun mine before they had steam power. When the oxen got too old to work any more, the
ir hides were used for rope and their meat was smoked and became Falun sausage. Birgitta put her hands over her mouth and looked at the fat sausage on her plate.
“Oh, the poor ox!”
Markus was less tender-hearted. “Think how tough the meat would have been.”
Birgitta was not to be distracted. “Is this ox?” she quavered, torn between pity and disgust.
“Of course not, darling. The mine doesn’t use oxen any more,” Nils said.
“What’s the difference?” Sofie said sharply from her place at the foot of the table, by the door to the kitchen. They all started: her voice was so different.
“The sausage is from a pig, or a cow or a baby cow,” she said. “Animals we eat every day.”
No one said anything. Birgitta flicked nervously at her braids.
Nils hated it when she withdrew behind a closed face, sitting at her mending after supper without registering his presence. Once the house was quiet, he tried to woo her back with perceptive remarks about the children, with jokes, with questions about his sketches for the theatre murals in Uppsala. She was civilly, sullenly unresponsive. Finally, when they went upstairs, he took her hand and pulled her, indifferent, onto his bed. He used every trick at his disposal, slowing down until she sucked her lips inward to keep from moaning, moving his hands from breast to thigh, prolonging things until the inevitable. And then, when she could bear it no longer, and pleasure triumphed in long waves, she burst into thudding sobs. All the water with which she had tried to quench her thirst left her body in tears and cries.
“My little bird, what is it?”
She would only say, “Everything is broken. Everything is broken.”
“But darling, it’s only a toy. I’m sorry, but they were misbehaving. And the thread in your weaving just needs to be plucked out back to the edge, and you can attach a sound one. You know that.”
“Everything is ruined.”
It was all she could say.
* * *
—
“Sofie, I don’t understand why you are sending the new girl away.”
“You needn’t put it like that, I am sending her to work for your parents. The housework is getting to be too much for your mother.”
“But why? I thought Anna was pleased with her.”
“That’s not the point. Your parents need help, and we’ll find someone else.” Not that she believed a word the girl had said. Not for a minute, now that she had come to her senses. It was only a vicious little rumour, like the worm making its deliberate way up the stem of the rose, but she did not want it under her roof.
Chapter Sixteen
JANUARY–JUNE 1911
Falun, 20 January 1911
Dear Mrs. Olsson,
As you no doubt are aware, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance meeting will be held in Stockholm this summer. It is a great honour for Sweden, and we of the Falun Suffrage Society look forward to marching in the opening day parade with women from all over Europe and the Americas. We would like to distinguish our band of some thirty women by commissioning something special for the parade—a banner designed by you.
We all know your Askebo dress, and the blankets being woven to your design. We feel sure that a banner by Sofie Olsson would not be like that of any other society, and that it would be as progressive as our cause. Some of our members are excellent needlewomen, and they would do the embroidery. I would be most happy to discuss the details with you at your convenience. We all hope that we can interest you in this project.
I remain, with best wishes,
Otillia Lundeborg,
President, Falun Suffrage Society
Askebo, January 23, 1911
Dear Mrs. Lundeborg,
Thank you very much for your letter and your kind invitation. This is an honour I did not expect. Unfortunately, this year is a very busy one for me, mostly with my family and commitments at home. So I must decline your invitation, with regret.
Wishing you good luck in finding another designer, and all the best from
Sofie Olsson
Sofie put down her pen, and took an envelope from the drawer in her desk. She heard shouts from below and looked out the window to see the children at war in the snow. Felix, as usual, had lost a mitten and was playing on, his bare red hand inviting frostbite. She ran her hand over the curtain she had woven, with its austere, modern decoration. Most of the banners she had seen in parades and demonstrations were florid, nineteenth-century things. It would have been interesting to design one that suited the new century. She reread her note, and picked up her pen again:
P.S. But, dear Mrs. Lundeborg, I would like you to know that I think it is a very clever idea, and very disarming to some who are wary of female suffrage (as I was for some years myself). A beautiful banner, made by women, shows that we would not give up our home-loving hands and hearts if we became full citizens. I agree with you that a clean, simple design would suit your forward-looking cause. I am sorry I am unable to help, and again, my most sincere good wishes.
She wondered why the letter had come from Mrs. Lundeborg and not from Selma Lagerlof, who had been active in the Falun Suffrage Society for years. She was their neighbour, now that the older children needed a better school than Askebo could provide and the Olssons lived for much of the school year in a yellow house on Blindgatan in Falun. Nils had painted Miss Lagerlof’s portrait when she won the Nobel Prize. Perhaps she knew something of Nils’s opinion of female suffrage and wished to spare Sofie any embarrassment.
* * *
—
That night, Sofie lay in the bathtub and tried to rest her head on the leather strap suspended at one end. She was not completely comfortable, as the strap was either too thin or too low-slung. But she marvelled at the bathtub—the pipes that travelled importantly down the wall, the faucets that produced hot and cold water, the perfect whiteness of the baked enamel finish. No more heating water on the kitchen stove, no more balancing on your haunches in a tub the size of a large mixing bowl, no more piecemeal washing in the bedroom with a basin and ewer. Nils was fiercely proud of the house’s first bathroom, recently converted from the smallest bedroom. He had painted its portrait, posing Marianne next to the tub, in a Japanese-style robe, with her sandals discarded on the slatted wooden floor. The thrillingly ugly plumbing was front and centre, along with a menacing brush and scraper in a holder on the wall. As part of the picture’s mock-Japanese look, a potted lily stood on an overturned milk pail.
The lily was long gone, but a gardenia had taken its place. Sadly, the blossoms had died almost overnight. The leaves were brittle and the defeated flowers were brown at the edges and hung head down, yet their perfume remained. Strange that its rich-smelling heart still beat. The maid had wanted to remove it, but Sofie hesitated. Which was more important, the looks or the perfume?
The evening sky had arranged itself in irregular stripes of pink, turquoise, blue. Show-off, she thought. I could weave you.
She gave up on the strap, unhooked it and accepted that her hair would get wet. It was probably time to wash it anyway. It had been a few months since her last shampoo and people were beginning to advise washing the hair more than three or four times a year. She bent her knees, two bare mountains in the soap-slick water, thinking back to a dream she’d had recently. In it, she and Nils lived at the top of a hill. Climbing up to their house involved sinking her feet into mud, then laboriously freeing each foot with a revolting sucking sound. She wanted to leave Nils and their remote house, and the dream-Nils offered to show her what he called “our treasure.” If she left him, he said generously, as if speaking of a distant possibility, she could use it to support herself. He produced a leather box with hinges, filled with rubbishy paste jewellery, gaudy and obviously fake. She stared at the jewellery, thinking, could he really believe this was valuable? And yet, peeking in and out of the paste jewels, she could see some real ones. Separating the real from the counterfeit would take forever. Thinking of it made her tired.
* * *
—
In June, at breakfast one morning, she and Nils read in the paper about Selma Lagerlof’s address to the suffrage convention in Stockholm. Backed by tiers of women students dressed in white, she read her speech, which was called “Home and State.” Home, created by women, was a gentle, loving place that tried to make use of every talent, and State, the creation of men, was “great and strong but not happy.” The State’s problems would not be solved, Miss Lagerlof claimed, until men accepted the help of women in the public sphere.
Nils rattled the paper. “She is a curious choice for their main speaker.”
Here we go, she thought. “Why do you say that?”
“There is so much gossip and innuendo about her relationship with that writer Miss Elkan and now Valborg Olander. I doubt she will help the suffragists’ cause.”
Miss Lagerlof shared her Falun house with a woman named Sophie Elkan, and also had a great friendship with Miss Olander, a teacher of Swedish. People said the two women competed to be Miss Lagerlof’s favourite.
Sofie finished buttering her bread, and applied a thin varnish of lingonberry jam.
“Surely people talk much more about the fact that Selma Lagerlof is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that she bought a sizable estate with the profits from her books, one that employs many people, yet she cannot vote.”
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