Hanna, who did not read novels, had nothing to contribute. The trio passed the rest of their time in half-hearted news of friends and acquaintances, until finally the cheque came and Sofie left for the train.
That night, in the Stockholm hotel, Lars said little about his meeting with his new dealer. Cecilia did not take much notice, still preoccupied with her lunch. Briefly, she considered which was worse: a wandering husband or one who forbade you to paint? She had no experience of the second, but it sounded important. When they got home, she would sit down with Lars and a calendar and fix a date to visit the Olssons at Askebo.
Chapter Thirty
NOVEMBER 1901
TWO PREGNANT WOMEN were knitting in the parlour at Askebo. That is, Cecilia was almost sure they were both pregnant. Sofie was the more certain case, with a rounded belly that not even her loose dress could hide. Cecilia had not yet seen a doctor, but she was counting on her sore breasts and two months without her courses.
My goodness, she thought, looking at Sofie’s fingers playing effortlessly over the four needles of her stocking. Another stocking. Another child, her sixth. Of course, neither woman mentioned her condition.
It was the Vogts’ first visit to Askebo. As soon as they arrived, Nils had given them a tour, mimicking Miss Zickerman from the Homecraft Association until Sofie ordered him to stop. For Cecilia, the house was a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar. As Sofie said, visitors who knew Nils’s paintings (and everyone knew Nils’s paintings) were surprised at how small and unpretentious it was. Many of the house’s improvisations were famous—the portraits of the children on door panels, Nils’s self-portrait as a gargoyle under the roof, the caricature of himself painted on the soup tureen. Some of them were too clever by half, Cecilia thought, and many of them were about Nils. But the blue-and-white parlour, the dignified Old Room, the intimate library and even the big, barn-like nursery were as engaging as their painted likenesses.
It was Sofie’s curtains, table coverings and other textiles that stirred Cecilia. These made their way into the paintings as details, but in person they were as original as anything in the house. Some of the designs, like the needlepoint bestiaries with which Sofie had upholstered the seats of antique chairs, were exuberant. Most were knowing and spare—Japanese seals embroidered on a hand towel, stylized animals parading gravely around the edges of a child’s blanket, the diaphanous curtains for Nils’s bed, embroidered in one of Sofie’s signature motifs, a consummately simple alchemy of circles and straight lines.
Now the men had gone sketching, and the children had scattered. Sofie and Cecilia talked about books while they knitted. As before, Sofie’s reactions took Cecilia by surprise: where did she get her soft spot for the grouchy, tyrannical and dishonest Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre? Cecilia could find no excuse for Mr. Rochester.
Their talk moved seamlessly from characters in books to real people, from the Yorkshire moors to the afghan Sofie was making from the scraps in her wool bag. “Are you expecting a new niece or nephew?” she asked, nodding at the white baby cardigan Cecilia was knitting.
“Not that I know of,” Cecilia said nonchalantly, stopping to count her rows. She sometimes knit past the row where the cables had to be twisted and then had to pull out the stitches. “But I like to have one or two things on hand for happy announcements.”
Oskar made an appearance, with a partially undone diaper that trailed behind him like a short train. He was in the care of a maid, but he preferred his mother and had escaped. His nose ran and his hair stuck up on one side, a casualty of his nap.
“No, you do not want to kiss him, Cecilia. He has snot all over his cheeks.”
Sofie kissed him instead, briskly, redid his diaper and passed him back to the maid. Oskar made a pro forma protest but accepted the inevitable. Cecilia watched hungrily, supposing that, as with other great joys, you gradually grew used to living with these small, miraculous beings.
As the Vogts were leaving, Sofie pressed a featherweight package into her hands. She had woven Cecilia a gift whose inspiration she recognized as soon as she unwrapped the tissue paper.
“‘He gave me a handkerchief red, white and blue!’” she crowed, “‘But before I could wear it he tore it in two.’” It was the Irish song Markus had played on his fiddle on the Olssons’ visit to Siljevik.
“‘He bought me a handkerchief,’” Sofie corrected her, laughing. “Keep this one safe in your handkerchief box, and no one will tear it.”
“I will return the favour,” Cecilia said, “and make you a lace handkerchief in Bockarna.” It was a fiendishly difficult pattern, with a bearded ram seen in profile, his horn an upside-down comma. She had the patience for that, and Sofie did not.
The pains started in the carriage on the way home. She ignored them as long as she could, but by the time they got home, she knew it was no good. Telling Lars that she would explain later, she went immediately to the second floor. She had not told him about the baby, not wanting to rouse his hopes in case it turned out to be a false alarm. Sitting on the shiny new toilet, she rested her elbows on her knees and held her weeping face in her hands. The little cabled sweater would go to another baby.
Chapter Thirty-one
SEPTEMBER 1902
LYDIA BARNES LOOKED as if she were born to wear the Siljevik folk dress. Or no dress at all, one of Lars’s full-figured, rosy-bodied nudes. But she was American to the core, a red-headed descendant of Congregationalist ministers and theologians. Lars and Cecilia had met her a few years ago in Paris, where she was married to Benjamin Barnes, a sculptor whose work with a bronze casting process called “cire perdue” interested Lars.
The Barneses were unhappily married, as it turned out, but the Vogts, or at least Cecilia, had not known that. They had visited the Barneses at their house in Passy and enjoyed themselves. Except for Lydia, who was about ten years younger, they were all in their early thirties. Benjamin Barnes had been helping Lars cast some of his bronzes, and Cecilia and Lydia walked in the woods while the men worked. The Barneses’ little house was decorated with Japanese embroideries and prints, but Cecilia thought that Lydia Barnes was the most decorative thing in it.
Once Cecilia and Lars returned to Sweden, they learned that the Barneses were divorcing. That was a surprise, and so was Lydia’s recent appearance in the Stockholm archipelago, staying with some friends. Lars ran into her there, while Cecilia had stayed in Siljevik, arranging the last details of the fall courses at the Folk School.
About a week after Lars had returned to Siljevik, he came to the threshold of her study, where she was writing to his dealer. He said casually, “I’ve had a letter from Lydia Barnes. She is coming tomorrow.”
She lifted her head. She wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.
“Lydia Barnes? Is that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“But Lars, we’ve had too many guests. We agreed there would be no more until November.”
“Well, she was so curious to see our place. And of course I owe Barnes a great deal for his help with the casting.”
Since they had separated, this seemed an odd way of thanking Benjamin Barnes.
Cecilia never liked the centrepiece of the house, the Great Hall. Its bloated height and scale, its lumbering darkness, its Viking trappings struck her as foolish. And when Lars made an etching of Lydia at the billiard table there, looking like a blowsy, old-fashioned rose, bending over her cue so that they could all admire her figure, she liked it even less. For years afterwards, when Cecilia was in the Hall or even thought of it, the etching came to her mind.
Lydia and Lars played game after game of billiards during her visit. Cecilia gave up the pretense of waiting them out, and went to bed alone. In the early hours of the morning, she could hear the creak of the stairs as Lars tiptoed up to his bedroom. The Hall was on the second floor, along with their bedrooms, but the guest room was on the first floor.
If she had decorated the guest room with Lydia in mind, it could
not have been more perfect. Lydia’s red head like a flame in all the cool beige and ivory upholstery, the white and gold furniture. The broad planks of the floor with its few sheepskin rugs made Cecilia think of Lydia’s forthright American personality, and something of Lars too. In addition to the canopied bed, there was a small sofa and even a chaise longue. Plenty of spots for dalliance.
Because the weather was fine, they ate their breakfast on the little second-floor porch. Lydia talked about Ibsen and his ideas about women. How marriage stifled a woman, turned her into a piece of property, and how in the new century these unjust arrangements would no longer be made. Lars looked bored. He liked it better when Lydia exclaimed about the beauties of Siljevik’s church or the Viking look of their roofline. In his carelessly genial way he responded by talking about Strindberg’s belief in the profound antagonism between men and women, how women tried to consume men and destroyed their art. In these circular arguments about the rights of women and men, women invariably quoted Ibsen and men Strindberg. Cecilia concentrated on trying not to think of how Lydia had looked playing billiards in her black lace evening blouse. How her breasts spilled like melons as she angled her arm and considered her shot.
A photograph remained from that visit, taken in the Hall. Cecilia could not remember who had taken it. Lars was in the foreground, bent over his cue at the billiard table, his back to the two women. As if he wanted nothing more to do with their tiresome rivalry. Lydia sat by the window in the morning light, reading her mail. Cecilia struck an oddly theatrical pose by the great fireplace, holding onto the mantel with one hand as if she needed its support, staring into the empty hearth. Had her heart been in her mouth? She supposed so. Both women wore full skirts, high-necked white shirtwaists and jackets with leg-of-mutton sleeves. Looking at the photograph, Cecilia could hear the clink of Lars’s cue when it hit a ball, and the thunk when the ball went home to a pocket. She could see the set of his shoulders that said, leave me alone.
Lydia Barnes had been pursuing him, no doubt. And Lars did not like being pursued. After Lydia left for the station, Cecilia walked by the lake in the late afternoon. The waves hurried in to shore, and the sun on the water hurt her eyes. Apparently, Lydia had left in defeat. But this victory, if it was a victory, had a sour taste, or maybe no taste at all.
In the end, she and Lars did not have much of a scene. Perhaps it fell flat because it shamed her. Beyond the usual humiliation, it was mortifying to realize that she felt threatened by Lydia because of her class. She and Lydia were from roughly the same class, and that made her a rival in a way that a model or a maid could not be. And that was an unworthy idea. A Brontë heroine would not have made that distinction. Nor for that matter would Lars.
* * *
—
The next day Cecilia also left by train. She got off at Stockholm’s Central Station, hot-eyed, pale, not having slept or eaten for two days, and took a carriage to her mother’s flat on the Stureplan. Ignoring Mamma’s questions, she went straight to bed. Next morning, after twelve hours’ sleep, in which she dreamed she was a girl again and woke to find the wallpaper all wrong, and then fell back to sleep and dreamed that Lars and Lydia were playing billiards with her head, smaller and glossier than it really was, she sat in the familiar dining room. Everything was as usual, from the view out onto the square to the table laden with platters of cheese, meats and smoked fish that could feed eight, not just two small women. Two of Lars’s Spanish paintings hung on the wall over the buffet, the shy senorita with her fan and long earrings, and the two black-haired girls gossiping by a well. A thick Iberian sun poured over the paintings, while the light on the Stureplan was thinner, a sun tinged with blue.
She drank some coffee and ate a roll. Mamma, who had worried that something was wrong with her health or Lars’s, was relieved to hear the truth.
“Darling, that is very unpleasant but nothing to make yourself ill about. That is what men are.”
They had never had this conversation before, but her mother’s reaction did not surprise her. She felt obliged to protest.
“How can you say that? Pappa didn’t have affairs, and certainly not with the wives of his business connections.”
Neither of them remarked on the illogic in the last sentence. Mamma looked up from the slice of cheese she had chosen, as if she were considering that possibility for the first time.
“I have no idea whether he did or didn’t. We certainly never discussed it.”
Cecilia wanted to say, “But wouldn’t your heart have been broken?” But that was not a question she could ask.
Instead she asked, “Wouldn’t you have felt terribly humiliated?”
“I suppose. That’s why we never discussed it. Besides, your father was a businessman. Lars is an artist, and it’s only natural…”
Cecilia set her cup down on her saucer rather too smartly, and Mamma looked startled.
“Don’t. You always take his part, and you make too much of artists. They’re not exempt from the normal rules.”
Suddenly, she missed Lars piercingly. He would be the first one to resist Mamma’s glorification. Artists? he would say. We’re just whittlers or daubers or makers of mud pies. Any fellow who can slap a fruit border on a jug gets to call himself an artist.
“Cecilia, men don’t have the same rules as women.”
“But we didn’t start out like this. We started out as equals in love, not wanting anyone but each other. When did the rules change?”
“Darling, beginnings are always like that. That’s why they’re called beginnings. They don’t last.”
“Then why didn’t someone tell me that?”
“Because you wouldn’t have believed it.”
Cecilia looked at her bone china coffee cup, ivory with a gold rim and her parents’ interlaced initials, also in gold. Why were bones used in bone china? So much cruelty combined with fine feelings. So much fragility in things meant to endure. Hurling it on the floor would not be satisfying, because the thick Brussels carpet would muffle its fall. It would lie on its side, dribbling out the last vein of coffee. She concentrated on pressing it hard but not crushing it.
Mamma finished her bread and butter, extended her hand briefly to the meat plate and thought better of it. She had a last swallow of her coffee, and checked that her rings were in place.
“Why don’t we call for a carriage and visit Natalie? She has a new étagère in the dining room she would love you to see.”
Later, Lars would always deny that he and Lydia Barnes had had an affair. But while she fumed in Stockholm, he went to France and visited Lydia Barnes in Passy. He wrote coolly to Cecilia that she had converted her husband’s studio into a library and a billiard room, “Siljevik style.”
It was better to be away from him, because in these aftermaths Cecilia was usually torn between fury and the need to feel she could still attract him. It was an indigestible, slightly nauseating mixture. Back in Siljevik, he was in the last stages of packing for America, a trip that she had organized meticulously and that promised to be extremely profitable. She stayed with Mamma for a month and wrote him a letter full of a sense of injury and what she considered indisputable claims. He answered from the ship:
You made me melancholy with what you wrote. You are of course correct when you say that you are what no other woman can be for me. I certainly miss you and care for you. But I’m feeling calm being away from you. It is as Strindberg says, that we come together in order to torment each other. Let’s see if a winter’s separation will make us both more reasonable.
Chapter Thirty-two
1903
NO DOUBT LARS was telling the truth, and he was calm without her. Cecilia was not calm, at least not at first. Nor was she able to forget his doings in America, as she got frequent letters from him complaining about difficult clients and sometimes asking her to intercede. As his prices escalated, now to the giddy heights of four thousand American dollars for a full-length oil portrait, his clients became more vocal
and he became more headstrong. His stay was limited, so there was rarely time for a long argument about the set of a head or the amount of grey in a moustache. Cecilia’s transatlantic letters and telegrams to the painter, and occasionally his clients, calmed some of the storms.
As the winter progressed, she found she could attend to Lars’s business problems without thinking about their own struggles. His painting was just that, a business, and her tormented feelings about their marriage had nothing to do with it. She craved order, and if she could not have it in her private life, she could produce it when it came to Lars’s career. She had always been organized. Now people were telling her that she had a gift for persuasion and diplomacy. Not only was she rather skilled at all this, she was enjoying it.
Siljevik, 18 March 1903
Dear Sofie,
Forgive my silence. I have been having a particularly busy time with the Homecraft Association, the library and the school. On top of that, Lars’s mother had a fever and cough that needed attention—and caring for such a self-sufficient woman demands large reserves of tact and patience. Which I do not always possess. At the same time, I succeeded in buying quite a large piece of land on the lake, to display the old log buildings Lars seems to be collecting. He bought the first few almost on a whim, but their timber construction absorbs him more and more. Now he has a dozen barns, storehouses and houses, some dating from the Middle Ages.
I’m writing today in the hopes that you and Nils will be coming to my exhibition and sale next Saturday. The roster of art and books could not be better, and I have high hopes of making enough money to buy new tables and chairs for the village library—so far we are using castoffs from deserted farms. My stroke of genius was to concentrate on artists from Dalarna, beginning with Lars and Nils. There are a few exceptions—although they are not from Dalarna, I couldn’t resist asking my cousin Eva Bonnier (and she would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t) and Prince Eugen for donations. They obliged, of course. Then, although she is a writer—but she does live in Dalarna—Selma Lagerlof donated a few of her first editions. After that, no one dared say no to a show with so much cachet, and the walls and tables are already gratifyingly full.
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