And Sofie: knitting a stocking without taking her eyes off the youngest girl, who was drinking from a glass her mother clearly regarded as too fragile. Sofie—Cecilia thought of her as “Sofie” although they were still at the Mrs.-Olsson-Mrs.-Vogt stage—dressed like a New Woman, in loose dresses, but she did not act like one. People said Nils Olsson did not want another artist in the house, so his wife had given up painting when they married. Perhaps that was all right, Cecilia thought. After all, she has five children. But perhaps it was not.
Lars was winning over Sonja, the older of the two smaller girls, by covering a sheet of paper with drawings of her doll driving the carriage, drinking coffee and reading to the children. Captivated, Sonja demanded more drawings and Lars, not for the first time, fell victim to his own charm. Cecilia found it hard to take her eyes off the smallest girl, Birgitta, who was trying to get the Vogts’ dog Mouche to shake hands, but her duty lay with Sofie. After a few false starts, including the usual disparaging remarks about the Swedish climate and the late spring, the two women settled on gardens. Cecilia knew Sofie’s natural, almost wild plantings from Nils’s paintings. But Lars did not paint gardens, so Cecilia’s rectangular beds, lined up with military precision on the broad front lawn, were new to Sofie. Looking at their formality through her guest’s eyes, as they sat together on the porch, Cecilia said, “It is a French garden, I suppose. And yours reminds me of the English herbaceous borders, that look so relaxed and no doubt need a great deal of work.”
“Which I never have the time to give them,” Sofie said, “so the weeds outnumber the flowers. Whereas I cannot see a single weed in your perfect beds.”
Cecilia thought, I hope she is not always so self-deprecating. She said, “You must come back later in the season, or in September, when the rose garden at the back of the house is at its best. I make a bit of a specialty of old-fashioned roses, and they give that garden a more informal look.”
Their talk wandered to an early portrait of Sofie with Marianne, her first baby. Nils, who had been chatting with Lars at the other end of the table, turned to them at the mention of his portrait. He joked that, these days, Sofie accused him of painting her sun bonnets instead of her face. Cecilia suspected that this was a regular part of his repertoire, including a wife who laughed on cue. Making a show of extravagant devotion to his “darling muse,” he fussed over cushions and drinks for her and fretted about her comfort.
Sofie seemed entertained by this, but when Nils was not drawing attention to her, she looked abstracted, the way she did in his paintings. Sofie’s looks and the clothes she designed appealed to Cecilia—the advantage of beauty was unfair, but it was undeniable that it gave pleasure. And it was not only Sofie’s beauty that drew Cecilia: there was her good-humoured calm and, perhaps most attractive of all, something enigmatic at the heart of her.
Lars led the tour of the house, he liked doing that. The two couples had a shared taste for Swedish antiquities and peasant handcrafts, but Cecilia could see that some of their collections, the silver and pewter, for instance, interested the Olssons less. Perhaps they found the house dark. Judging from Nils’s paintings of their own house, it was filled with light as well as eccentric touches. She was curious to see it.
In the Great Hall, the children began playing Vikings under the high-pitched roof. That left Sofie free to walk the length of the room, admiring the weavings hung along the walls. But it was Cecilia’s books that loosened her tongue. Lars occasionally mentioned Cecilia’s first editions in his tour, but never the rows of English novels that had Sofie exclaiming and questioning. Both women loved Dickens, with all his faults, but that was only a start. They began trading likes and dislikes, opinions and recommendations. Sofie thought Charlotte Brontë was a far better novelist than her sister Emily, and Cecilia held strongly to the opposite opinion. But both agreed that the third sister, Anne Brontë, was undervalued, especially her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Bored by this talk of novels, Lars and Nils had moved on to the bedrooms. By the time their wives joined them in Lars’s bedroom, the men were standing in front of Nils’s portrait of himself and his nude model, Margit.
“Lovely thing,” Lars said, nodding at the painted Margit as if she could hear.
Cecilia thought, A painter and his nude model was a typical subject for Lars, not Nils Olsson. But one of Nils’s more characteristic paintings, of his house and children, would not look so at home in the manly retreat that was Lars’s bedroom.
After lunch, Cecilia walked Sofie across the graveyard that bordered the garden, into the village church. As always, the church’s bright whiteness and severity daunted Cecilia. The synagogue in Stockholm had a brown coziness, like a parlour, but there was no comfort here.
Sofie murmured something about how exposed she felt in the space and light. Surprised, Cecilia thought: She senses it too. This constant burden of looking into one’s heart. The wish to forget, if only temporarily—which the austerity of the place made impossible. What did Sofie want to forget? Cecilia did not know, but clearly there was more to this woman than embroidered cuffs and hand-knitted stockings for her husband. She turned to smile in fellow-feeling, and saw that her guest’s eyes were filled with tears.
“Mrs. Olsson, can I help you? What is it?” She unlatched one of the pews, which opened with a small, complaining wheeze, in case Sofie wanted to sit down.
But no, Sofie said it was nothing, she was sorry that she was being so silly. She did not need to sit. Cecilia did not know what to say, so there was silence. Finally, Sofie said that she was weaning her baby, and it made her tearful. She apologized again.
Cecilia thought, Well, perhaps that is it. Neither she nor Sofie had anything more to say on the subject, so she retreated to the architecture, pointing to the preacher’s golden pulpit, high up on a column.
“It is the only colour in the church. No wonder my husband prefers the churches in Spain and Italy.”
* * *
—
In the early evening, in the hall, the Olssons’ son, Markus, played an Irish song on his fiddle, while the two older girls sang the words.
When I was single I wore a plaid shawl
Now that I’m married I’ve nothing at all.
He came up our alley and he whistled me out
But the tail of his shirt from the trousers hung out.
Ah but still I love him I’ll forgive him
I’ll go with him wherever he goes.
Another unruly husband, another forgiving wife, Cecilia thought. She tried without success to think of a song or a poem in which a husband forgives a demanding, irresponsible wife. After the Olssons extracted a promise that the Vogts would return the visit, and the Vogts insisted that the Olssons must visit again when the roses were in bloom, the guests left in a blur of sweaters, shawls and tired children.
Once they were alone, Cecilia and Lars sat for a while in the Hall. They had left Sofie’s birthday present for Lars, a cushion, on an easy chair. Cecilia straightened it and said, “She studied with Malmstrom at the Academy of Fine Arts, and now she embroiders cushions.”
Lars didn’t agree with her dismissal. “No, I meant what I said to her. She has talent as a designer.”
Cecilia looked again at the cushion. Its balance of the usual motifs with the unexpected, its slightly off-centre sensibility. Perhaps he was right. He usually was about things like that. It could be interesting to see more of Sofie Olsson.
* * *
—
A few days later, a thank-you note arrived from Sofie. After the usual compliments, she asked an abrupt question.
“Do you ever look back on your wedding day and feel surprised at how your life turned out? I was so young, and so sure that Nils and I were making a new kind of marriage, something that my parents, for all their care for each other, hadn’t known. But perhaps they too thought they were at the start of a new thing. Maybe everyone who gets married thinks that.”
Quickly, Cecilia put the
note face down on her desk, as if that would erase it. Surely she does not think that I would discuss whatever people may whisper about Lars and me. Then she told herself, Your imagination is running ahead of your common sense. You are too thin-skinned, at least on this subject. She read the letter again. Poor woman, she thought, this is something to do with her. I wonder whether it is related to those overflowing eyes in the church.
Surprised at how your life turned out? She was not sure that was a useful question even to ask yourself, let alone another person. Probably Mrs. Olsson meant it innocently enough, but this was a bud that needed nipping.
Chapter Twenty-five
1888
ALTHOUGH CECILIA HAD spent her life with paintings, beginning at her parents’ house in Stockholm and after that with Lars, as a child she loved lists more than paintings. Her parents said that when she was about six, she began classifying their art, sorting it into oils, watercolours, drawings, etchings and engravings, with separate pieces of paper for each type, before giving up. There was simply too much of it. Just as she would think she had finished a room, she would find another stack of engravings in a drawer.
Her grandfather Isaksson collected the Swedish painters and made a specialty of pictures with Viking themes. Even the smallest ladies’ sitting room in her parents’ house had paintings that climbed the walls from the wainscoting to the ceiling. When her widowed mother moved from the house on Drottninggatan to a big flat on the Stureplan, Bukowskis auctioned off more than two hundred pictures.
It was the Isakssons’ fondness for paintings that first brought Lars to their house. Cecilia’s sister Natalie’s house, more exactly, which was a flat on Master Samuelsgatan. In the winter of 1888, Natalie commissioned a rising star from Dalarna named Lars Vogt to paint her son Erik. The young painter had recently made a sensational debut in the Student Exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts with a watercolour of a pensive woman in a mourning veil. Not only had the reigning art critic, Carl Rupert Nyblom, praised it in the Dagens Nyheter, he’d engaged the student to paint his son. Stockholm society took up the young man and, flush with commissions, he left the Academy without a diploma. At the time, it looked like hubris. In retrospect, there was nothing more the Academy could teach him.
“Cecilia, could you possibly help me out?” Natalie had asked her when the family gathered for Friday night dinner at the Stureplan flat. “Erik needs some entertainment while Mr. Vogt paints him, and I have meetings for the Orphanage Benefit almost every afternoon now.”
Cecilia agreed that she would go to Natalie’s two afternoons a week after Erik’s nap. On her first visit, when he woke and discovered Aunt Cecilia, the two-year-old was more than happy to build bridges and towers on the parlour floor with her. His face clouded over only when Mr. Vogt entered the room: he already knew what that meant. Cecilia got to her feet and wiped her hands on the sides of her skirt, although Natalie’s floors were impeccable. She and the artist shook hands.
“Mr. Vogt. How nice to meet you.”
“Miss Isaksson. Your sister told me you would be here to amuse Erik. I’m afraid Erik finds me very boring, so we both thank you.”
He was tall and serious, not from shyness but because he had work to do.
“Well, better save your gratitude until we see if I can make things any easier for you. Erik, would you like me to read you a story while Mr. Vogt paints your picture?” Not a flicker of enthusiasm. “Should I bring out your puppet theatre and put on a little play for you?”
What Erik wanted was to slam his toy coaches and streetcars into his mother’s gilt-edged commodes, or to move the Turkish runners aside and slide on the glassy floors, not to sit perfectly still while a man painted him. No wonder he trembled on the edge of a pout in the finished picture.
Gradually, Cecilia found a rhythm that worked—short sittings interspersed with frequent treats and breaks. Later, when she told the story of meeting Lars, she always said, “Lars painted, and I made a fool of myself to distract Erik, with mimes and silly games and outrageous stories.” And Lars always said, “I was more diverted than Erik was by this uninhibited girl who worked so hard to keep him still.”
People often remarked that Lars was a cross between a yokel and a gentleman. He could have enormous savoir faire and courtliness and then erupt without warning into a joke fit for a barnyard. But in those days, when he was still making his way in the world, the gentleman prevailed. He called Cecilia “the charming aunt” and told Erik, “If your lovely caretaker permits, we will stop soon for a cup of chocolate.” Cecilia wasn’t fooled. She saw, at the edges of his politesse, something brusque and coarsely woven. Something unpredictable.
They were both twenty-one.
After they married, the only painting by Lars that she kept in her bedroom was that watercolour of Erik, with his dark blond curls and weary, long-suffering gaze.
* * *
—
When the picture was finished, Cecilia and Lars began meeting in town in the daytime. The evening would have required some kind of chaperone, and besides, Cecilia was busy in the evenings, with family gatherings and the opera and theatre. She had mentioned to Mr. Vogt that she frequently went to the National Museum on Wednesday afternoon with her cousin Eva Bonnier. The cousins were there on a miserable February day, with the sky and the Norrstrom channel both a sullen grey. Eva was poring over some Watteau drawings. Cecilia was looking out the window at the windy channel, where the boats were knocking against each other in the harbour and people hurried by, their faces huddled into their chests.
A voice behind Eva said, “It’s a very good example, but I think you’ll find an even better one over here in the corner.”
Eva was not pleased. She had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and she did not need the guidance of a boy from Dalarna with a German name. Much less one who was having a fly-by-night success because he had dropped out of the Academy. But Mr. Vogt strolled with them through the eighteenth-century galleries, as if they had invited him, and gradually he mollified Eva by taking her opinion seriously. Or at least seeming to. They reached a truce, finally, because they both loved the domestic details in Chardin’s paintings. Afterwards, the three of them walked up the street to the Grand Hotel and drank coffee.
It seemed that Wednesday afternoons were also a convenient time for Mr. Vogt to visit the museum, and the cousins met him there more than a few times. While Cecilia listened to Eva praising or disparaging the paintings on the walls, she eyed the doors, wondering if Mr. Vogt would make one of his sudden, almost silent appearances.
As spring approached, Cecilia and Lars walked in the Djurgarden. She would spend the morning working at Aunt Rosa’s clothing depot near Strandvagen, and afterwards it was a simple thing to meet him on the other side of the bridge for a stroll along the canal or on a wooded path. One day they went to Rosendals cafe, and ate thin cardamom cookies while they traded biographies.
Rumour had already told her the outlines of his. Lars’s mother was a country girl who had gone to work in a brewery in Uppsala and had a child after a liaison with a Bavarian brewer. His father, whom he never met, sent money for Lars’s school fees and died when his son was twelve. Now Mr. Vogt filled in some of the details, with a detachment that was almost amused, as if he knew a mythology was building and he did not want to disturb it.
“I was born in a stable,” he said, straight-faced.
Cecilia nodded, as if most people she knew were born in a stable.
“My grandparents’ farmhouse was full,” he continued, “because the fur skins we needed for warmth in the winter had just arrived. My mother knew her time had come, so she went where there was quiet and space.”
His birth certificate described him with the harsh word oakta, meaning not only illegitimate but shoddy and false. This indictment coloured much of his childhood, but he only talked about that to Cecilia long afterwards. In the early days, he stayed close to the facts.
“My father’s employers punished his indi
scretion by sending him to a brewery in Finland,” he said, tracing the rim of his saucer with his fingers and sometimes pinching it, as if he were modelling it from clay. “My mother’s parents brought me up.”
“Where was your mother?”
“Farming is never easy in Siljevik, my village, because the soil is rocky. That, and a series of failed harvests when I was a boy, made us desperately poor. The first thing I remember is bursting into tears when my mother walked into the main room of the farmhouse carrying her suitcase. Like many of the villagers, she had to leave for work—in her case, back to the brewery in Uppsala. She stayed there until I was in my teens.”
Cecilia pictured a little boy begging his mother not to leave. She asked about his grandparents.
“They were strict. They were touched by the religious revival that swept through Sweden in those years, and games and dancing were forbidden. The only music they permitted was hymn singing. They took me to Bible meetings, where it seemed that the shame of my birth meant that I was damned forever.”
Now he was moving the plate with cookie crumbs around on the wooden table. From what she could see of his face, she suspected he had strayed into territory he meant to avoid.
“And yet,” he said, righting himself, “my grandparents loved me. At one point, my grandfather was ready to sell his summer pasture to pay my school fees. I wanted to help as much as I could, and I learned to sew and knit as well as doing the usual farm chores.”
As a boy, he loved three things above all—whittling animals and people from small pieces of wood, the high summer pasture where he lived in a cabin near the cattle, and his mother, whom he called Mona, the word for mother in the Siljevik dialect.
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