“Good morning, Mr. Eklof. I’d like to borrow Wuthering Heights, please.”
“I believe it is out, Miss Isaksson,” he said, looking doleful. “But I’ll just look.”
He consulted his ledger.
“Why, no, we have it, returned the day before yesterday. But…but it was you who returned it.”
“Yes.”
There was no point explaining her need to read and reread.
Although he seemed to regret the necessity, Mr. Eklof was running his finger deliberately down the B’s, where the Brontës’ titles were listed with their borrowers. Speaking of her in the third person, he said, “Miss Isaksson likes the Brontë sisters’ work.”
“Yes. I like all that emotion and property.”
He nodded, wrote down her name and went off to fetch the book and some brown paper and string.
Thinking of Lars, she began a mental list of fictional couples with disparate fortunes.
1. The maidservant in Richardson’s novel Pamela, who marries her wealthy employer, Mr. B.
2. Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who move up the social scale by allying themselves with Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy.
3. Fanny Price, from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, who marries her cousin Edmund, from the rich side of the family.
4. Another master–servant couple, Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Although, with Charlotte Brontë’s usual originality, Jane comes into an inheritance before she accepts Mr. Rochester, now blind and missing a hand. In other words, she makes them more equal.
5. Amy March in Little Women, who marries her rich neighbour Laurie.
But it was easy to find wealthy men marrying poorer women. Wealthy women marrying poor men were hard to come by, and that inequality was often a sign of corruption. Dickens, for example, seemed to favour couples whose fortunes were roughly equal, and fallen. Little Dorrit gives up her inheritance rather than hurt Arthur Clenham, and Dickens rewarded the couple by making Clenham rich by the end of the book. Less romantic, George Eliot solved the problem—but why was she thinking of it as a problem?—in Middlemarch by having Dorothea Brooke renounce her fortune to marry Will Ladislaw, and no rescue was forthcoming. And, of course, there was Wuthering Heights. Cecilia found the passion and social inequality between Catherine and Heathcliff exciting, but finally there was too much madness in the book for her.
Her family’s money and Lars’s poverty worried her, but she had to trust that Lars’s talent would narrow that gulf.
* * *
—
Now that the family had judged Erik’s portrait a success, Mamma had mentioned a few times that perhaps Mr. Vogt should paint Cecilia. Mamma was capable of a momentary enthusiasm that she later forgot, but when she said something two or three times, she generally acted on it.
When it became clear that she was persisting with the idea of the portrait, Cecilia knew it would be wrong to take more advantage of her innocence. She and Lars had to tell her how things were. In fact, it was not a question of telling, it was a question of Lars asking her brother for her hand. When he went into the parlour with Fredrik, Mamma assumed they were settling the price of the portrait. Cecilia took her mother into the little family sitting room and explained. Her mother’s face went blank with pure astonishment, followed rapidly by a combination of fascination and something softer. Guileless, she loved a shocking story, preferably also a romantic one. Like almost every woman, she felt Lars’s appeal. Then reality set in. She had been a widow for six years, determined to honour what she knew would have been her husband’s wishes. The Isakssons’ liking for art did not mean they imagined their daughter marrying a painter.
Lars was having a harder time in the parlour, Cecilia was sure. After that first discussion, she insisted that the four of them meet together. It was silly to imagine that the men could decide this. Fredrik tried to impersonate Pappa during their meetings, but without his warmth. Later it seemed strange to Cecilia that Mamma and Fredrik made nothing of the fact that Lars was a Christian. She cared more than they did that she would be leaving the family’s comfortable Jewishness—comfortable, no doubt, because it was so loose and undemanding. It was not Lars’s religion that concerned her mother and brother, it was his poverty. Fredrik mentioned his illegitimacy, of course, but even he seemed to realize that this was not an insurmountable obstacle for a painter.
Privately, she insisted to Fredrik that it wasn’t her money that interested Lars. Fredrik probably disagreed, at least in the beginning. But Lars never asked anything from her family, and as it turned out, he never needed their money.
The four of them had a few long meetings in which Mamma alternated between looking troubled and fond, and occasionally teared up. Fredrik remained stern. The secret engagement, just within the immediate family, was Lars’s idea. There would be no public engagement until he had proven that he could support Cecilia in a fashion that Mamma and Fredrik considered proper. If he had not accomplished this within a certain time, the engagement would be broken. Then they bickered about how long that would be.
“One year,” said Fredrik.
No, that was impossibly short.
“Two, then,” said Mamma, relenting.
“Lars is not just trying to establish his reputation in Stockholm,” Cecilia argued. “He will have an international career, and that will take time.” She continued, talking about the gradual growth of an artist’s career as if she understood those things. Five years, she bargained.
“Five years, darling,” Mamma said, patting the circles under her eyes with her handkerchief. “You will be twenty-six in five years.”
“You mean I will be too old then to make a more advantageous marriage,” Cecilia said shortly. “That does not worry me at all. Lars and I will marry then, if not before.”
Lars stuck to one point, that he would work immensely hard to win her hand. He and Cecilia prevailed, because Mamma yielded. On July 2, 1889, they were secretly engaged.
* * *
—
Although most Swedish painters began their careers with a sojourn in France, Lars chose to try his luck in England and Spain. Once he had left Stockholm, Mamma suggested, brightly, that Cecilia needed a diversion. Wouldn’t she like to spend a month or two in Baden-Baden? How hopeful she is, Cecilia thought. As if the tedious one-two-three, one-two-three waltz of life there—sipping the disgusting sulphurous waters, stepping gingerly into the mosaic-lined baths, drinking coffee and eating cake in the Kurhaus while admiring the fancywork of other ladies and insisting that one’s own was very simple in comparison, making polite conversation with boring young officers—would not make her long all the more ardently for Lars. To please Mamma, she agreed, that would be nice. She and Mamma went to Baden-Baden, and she longed for Lars more keenly than ever.
For the first year or so of Lars’s absence, Mamma and Fredrik clung to the strong possibility that he would not earn enough money to support Cecilia. But Cecilia knew better. He was soon busy in London with commissions from Swedish expatriates and wealthy Londoners. In Spain, his ambition was to paint the king, and he got as far as the Duchess of Alba. His engagement to Cecilia was announced publicly on July 2, 1893, four years to the day after their secret agreement.
Once it was official, Lars took Cecilia to Siljevik to meet his mother. It was like travelling to another century, and almost another country. The village was not particularly charming, being just as flat as Lake Siljan, which it bordered. There was a fine, austere church and not much else of interest.
Mona, Lars’s mother, showed Cecilia the parts of the local dress—a black skirt, always, with different-coloured aprons depending on the occasion or the time of the church year. Red for weddings and christenings, blue for funerals and Lent, green for spring and summer. The bonnet strings were important: unmarried women wore red-and-white ones, married women blue-and-white. To Cecilia, all this was like penetrating a secret room hidden behind a mirror or painting. Smiling inquiringly at Cecilia to see if she un
derstood, Mona used the dialect words for the colours. She had not spoken Swedish until she went to work in Uppsala, and her Swedish vocabulary was still best when it came to brewing terms. She and Lars always spoke dialect with each other.
Finally, Lars painted the portrait Mamma had wanted. It was a watercolour of Cecilia in her bride’s dress, an ivory figured silk, with an overlay of glass beads. It was rather sentimental, she supposed, the bride in profile, her eyes cast down as she contemplated her new station. The dress was made by Stockholm’s best dressmaker, Mme Akkerman. Mamma had some extravagant thoughts of Worth or another Paris couturier, but Cecilia and Fredrik agreed that Mme Akkerman was quite good enough. As for Lars’s wedding suit, Mamma and Fredrik assumed that he would buy it at Uncle Goran’s shop, the Englishman’s Tailor. They were perhaps a little hurt when Lars told them he had already had his suit made by a real English tailor, in London. And perhaps a little impressed.
They married in September, in a civil ceremony at the Stockholm Town Hall. The synagogue would not have accepted Lars, of course, nor would a church have married Cecilia. So there was no chuppah to stand under, and no crown, which the Swedish Church lent to its brides. Pretty customs both, but they did not miss them. Mamma gave a dinner the night before at Hasselbacken, and a reception after the ceremony in her flat. Next day, she made good use of her handkerchief at the train station, alternating between waving with it and wiping her tears. When Cecilia and Lars settled into their seats, as the train slid off to Paris, they reached for each other’s hand. They had done it.
We have come to the end of the novel, Cecilia thought. Now what?
Chapter Twenty-seven
1893–1895
SHE KEPT A picture from their honeymoon, taken in a photography studio in Constantinople. What a shame that the backdrop was a conventional scene of trees, not the Hagia Sophia or some other extraordinary sight from that mirage of a city. Wearing a bowler hat and carrying a cane, hooking his hand in her arm, Lars looked serious. She looked happy. Her suit, a navy serge, was in the latest fashion, the skirt a complication of drapes, the fitted jacket made so that it buttoned only once, at the breastbone, then fell open down to her waist and hips, as if to suggest that she was too well endowed to be able to button more of it. That was not the case. All that showed of her hat was a fall of dark feathers atop her head, like a bird’s tall crest. She and Lars looked surprisingly well matched in size. Of course he was taller than she was, but not by so much.
She saw herself as meagre, with hooded eyes and a mouth that turned ever so slightly down. Lars said she was not meagre, she had a beautiful delicacy. But he preferred to paint women who bloomed like apples, round and firm, creamy and rosy. Or like peaches. He liked them out of doors, without clothes. When he painted her, it was indoors, dressed a la mode—as in her portrait in red silk with pale yellow polka dots, sleeves like pillows to the elbow and then tight to the wrist. That one was painted at their apartment in Montmartre, as she posed looking through a portfolio of his work. His paintings of models were timeless because they were nude. She could date his portraits of her by an out-of-style collar, an exaggerated shoulder, a hat that shouted its year.
Once, soon after they were married, Lars did paint her out of doors. Seen in profile from the back, in a forest, she wore a tailored lavender walking dress. Her hat was small and feathered, very smart at the time. She might have been a skittish, easily frightened bird turning into a woman, or a woman, timid but resolute, becoming a bird. A thornbush caught her skirt, lifting it slightly to show her high-heeled boot, and she turned to see what was impeding her. Later, what struck her about that picture was the love with which it was painted.
In Paris, they rented an apartment in Montmartre, on the Boulevard de Clichy. They lived, and Lars worked, in a space smaller than Mamma’s drawing room. He was careful about money and his books were in order, but why should he keep accounts when she could do that? Within a month, she had taken over the business side of his work. She learned how to shop for his paints and materials, and she cleaned his brushes. Such an easy job when he used watercolours, and such loathsome work when he painted in oil. But Lars’s customers wanted oil for their portraits, and she could not deny that it was his metier.
She introduced him to the Wallersteins, who were a distant family connection, and the Levertovs, who in turn introduced Cecilia and Lars to the Hallers and the Salmons. They had large families and cousins everywhere, so the commissions multiplied. Not that it always went smoothly, because a proud father would insist that his boy’s mouth did not really purse in that sour way or that he himself was by no means so heavy, and Lars would only compromise so far. Sometimes he did not compromise at all. Cecilia was the one who had to satisfy both parties.
They had a very small maid, Françoise. She had to be thin, they said, because there was so little room in their flat. Most artists’ wives in Montmartre cooked the meals. Cecilia considered it, and Mamma’s cook had shown her how to make a few things, but there didn’t seem to be much point to it. She was busy enough managing Lars’s affairs. So Françoise arrived each morning with a baguette, and Cecilia made the coffee. They kept a little cheese and meat in the cold box for Lars, who did not think much of the French breakfast. Or, as he put it, “The French breakfast does not think much of me, or any man with a normal appetite.” At midday, Françoise would collect a hot meal for them from one of the nearby restaurants, and they would go out for dinner, to a restaurant or to the apartments of friends or clients. Cecilia saw that she was better dressed than most of the wives, partly because she had brought her trousseau from Stockholm, and partly because every once in a while Mamma would send her the money to buy something new.
She did not miss Sweden in those Paris years, at least consciously. But occasionally she could not sleep, and as she lay there, she took to reciting the names of lace patterns. Some were designs she had learned as a girl, and some Lars’s mother had taught her. Jerusalem’s Gate would run through her head, a densely crowded pattern. Buske, Krakspark, Halrad, Gunsud, Gullviva, Buskra. Buske, Krakspark, Halrad, Gunsud, Gullviva, Buskra. And Bockarna, of course, the most difficult of all. Some designs were purely abstract, others tiny pictures as detailed as Lars’s carvings. Over and over she repeated those names and summoned up those designs, until she woke to the slate roofs outside the window and the pewter light of a Parisian morning.
* * *
—
Wearing her red suit and a new hat, Cecilia was trying to look nonchalant. The occasion was Lars’s first Stockholm show of work done in Paris, and he had made a beautiful little bronze that could be held in the hand, of a faun and a nymph embracing. Standing behind her, the faun planted one leg between the nymph’s two, grasped her breast, and she cupped his hand with hers. Her head was thrown back in joy, his was bent forward on her collarbone in concentration. Cecilia found it very strange to have her husband sculpting intimacies that only their bedroom had seen. Even more strange to watch clients and friends and family walking around the bronze, appraising it.
Aunt Bette and Aunt Rosa arrived together and Cecilia thought, Oh dear. She began walking away from the statue, which by now was the piece that had attracted the largest crowd, but the aunts were too quick for her.
She need not have worried: they ignored the statue and assessed her outfit.
“Cecilia, you look so well. Is your hat from Paris?”
“Come closer, so I can see how they attached the veil. Is this single feather the latest thing?”
“And is this suit new too?”
No, she said, it was from her trousseau.
“Very bright,” Aunt Rosa said. Not a compliment.
The aunts turned her around so that they could see her bustle, but Cecilia knew they were really looking her over for signs of pregnancy. Once they were satisfied that nothing showed, they moved away to talk with Uncle Goran.
As they left, Aunt Bette said over her shoulder, “You must be taking good care of your husband—look a
t all the work he’s done.”
Mamma arrived, and was enchanted by the faun and the nymph. “Lovely, just lovely,” she said, shaking her head in appreciation and congratulating a quietly triumphant Lars. The confetti of red dots on the price list, indicating the pieces that had been sold, pleased Mamma too. Lars’s prices were always high, and that seemed to encourage, rather than discourage, sales.
Mamma’s friends rushed over to greet her and to tell Cecilia what a brilliant artist she had married. As soon as Cecilia saw that she was not expected to say anything but the vaguest pleasantries—or even to look closely at the pieces—the evening became much easier.
Chapter Twenty-eight
APRIL 1896
A FEW MONTHS after their return to Paris, Cecilia received a letter from her sister. Mamma was not to know about the misconduct of her darling son, Natalie warned her, but she had to tell someone. Fredrik’s family was in a terrible state. The children’s nursemaid, Inga, was going to have a child, which was upsetting enough. But it was worse than that. It seemed the father—Cecilia stared at the letter, at first unable to take it in—was Fredrik. Poor Inga would never have told her mistress the identity of her seducer, but the manservant had gotten drunk and out tumbled something about “the master’s by-blow” in little Jorgen’s hearing. Jorgen didn’t understand what a by-blow was, but he repeated it to his mother. Cecilia was shocked and very sorry for her sister-in-law. But what disturbed her most, although it was far from the most important part of this calamity, was Lars’s reaction. “What’s all the bother?” he said. “These things happen.”
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