Sofie & Cecilia

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Sofie & Cecilia Page 23

by Katherine Ashenburg


  After a certain point she could almost turn a blind eye to Lars’s dalliances with his models. For a painter, it was what the French call a déformation professionelle. When a man spent dozens of hours concentrating on the shadow on a throat, or the exact way light falls on a rosy haunch, perhaps only an angel could resist. Even Nils Olsson, the patron saint of family life, at least as far as the Germans were concerned, was rumoured to stray in that way.

  Cecilia dared to hope that she had achieved a hard-won resignation, even an equanimity. She could expect that Lars’s transgressions would be minor and would take place far from her sphere. It turned out she was wrong about that, at least about the latter part.

  By 1911, the maid Hedvig had gotten too old for the house’s heavy work and Cecilia sent her off to the Folk School, where they kept the textile collection. Hedvig could do some careful washing and stain removal and some basic mending. The girl who was to take her place stepped into Cecilia’s study wearing the dress of her village—a white kerchief, a black skirt and a waist-length black jacket outlined with a thin red cord. Her yellow apron, banded in openwork stripes, announced she was in mourning. Although not particularly tall, she seemed in danger of bumping her head on the ceiling, as if a large but timid beast had been penned inside a Louis XVI cage.

  “Sit down, Sigrid. Yes, right there. I see you are from Leksand.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And my condolences.” Cecilia nodded at her apron.

  “Thank you, ma’am. My father died just before Easter.”

  “Why is it you want to learn to be a maid?”

  “To earn money for my passage to America, ma’am. All my brothers have left the farm and are in Minnesota. My sister works at a cloth factory in Stockholm to earn her passage, but the work is hard. The women have to do most of the hauling of the big bolts of cloth, and they work from seven in the morning until six in the evening. I’d rather stay in a small place like Siljevik than move to Stockholm.”

  “What factory does your sister work in?” Cecilia asked, dreading the answer.

  “I think it’s called…Ideal something.”

  Really, she thought, Fredrik should be ashamed. People were not going to tolerate these conditions for much longer.

  “And how long do you imagine it will take you to earn your passage to America?”

  “They say about two years, ma’am.”

  The girl seemed sensible enough. Mrs. Holm would show her over the house, explaining about the central heating and electricity, the room with a big bathtub fixed to the floor, and next door to that the room with a toilet whose bowl was always full of water. And the separate bathroom and toilet for the servants. Cecilia insisted that the maids who served dinner must bathe before putting on their blue dresses and white aprons trimmed with broderie anglaise. Lars laughed at her fussiness, but there was no point in using the good china or serving Chablis with the fish if the maids looked grimy or, even worse, smelled bad.

  Sigrid settled in well, and the other servants had no complaints. One day, after she had been with them a few months, Cecilia was looking for the cook. Nils and Sofie were coming to dinner with some English visitors, and she wanted to serve rice pudding with saffron, Nils’s favourite dessert. Normally they would serve something French, and Cecilia knew the cook would grumble at the idea of this ordinary pudding, but it would interest the English as typically Swedish. She put her head in the laundry room and found Sigrid mending the pocket on her apron—not the white one with the broderie anglaise, but her everyday red-and-white checked one.

  There was nothing extraordinary about a maid bent over some sewing in the laundry room. But her face when she raised it and saw Cecilia said everything: fear, guilt, innocence, anger, disgust and, most of all, pity. She drew her arms together in a panic, like a bird pulling in its wings, trying to hide the telltale apron, which told nothing. In a second, Cecilia crossed the room, wrenched the apron away from her, needle and thread and all, and ran out with it across the lawn to the studio. On the way she thought, I should have told the girl she has nothing to fear. But first she had to go to the studio.

  Lars was holding their dog, Mouche, standing back from a portrait of his mother to see what it needed, and he looked up with a smile. Until he saw her face, and the balled-up apron that she threw down on his worktable. A jar holding brushes tipped over when she banged the table, and an oily yellow-green stain began moving across the apron. The needle and thread swung from it like a pendulum.

  “No. No! Not in my house, and not with one of my maids.”

  He nodded, and hesitated only briefly.

  “No. Of course not. I beg your pardon.”

  Plainly, he hoped that it would end there, but she had more to say. How dare he interfere with the smooth running of the house, which he depended upon! These girls were given into their care, and now this one was no better off than if she had worked at Ideal Textiles—worse off, in some ways. She wanted to humiliate him, to make him contrite, to make him see it from her point of view, from Sigrid’s point of view. That had always been fruitless and was still fruitless, and she knew it but could not stop. Lars paid extravagant attention to Mouche, stroking her, checking her mouth. Cecilia took no notice.

  “Not in my house, not in the Folk School, where I see you have your eye on the weaving instructor, not at the orphanage, no one from the Homecraft Association, nothing in which I am involved. In your studio, I know nothing of your models, nor do I wish to. But not there”—pointing across the way to the house. “Not ever.”

  “Of course, my dear. I knew better.”

  What struck her most was the expression on his face. He did not look sorry, nor ashamed that he had humiliated her, nor angry that she was trying to curb his masculine liberty. He looked bored. Bored that they were wasting their time talking about something that was not going to change. Something that was going to happen again and again, and pretending otherwise was silly. Fine, she could draw a boundary beyond which he could not go, but that was all. It was nothing to make a scene about. Now he wanted to get back to his painting.

  That moment when she saw his boredom was the moment when the whole thing tore—not on a seam as with Sigrid’s apron, where it could be mended unobtrusively, but right in the centre of the garment. It could be repaired, if the wearer needed shelter from rain and cold and public shame, but the mend would be ugly and crooked, an unwholesome scar. The piece might still be serviceable but would never again be beautiful.

  She had one more thing to say.

  “Nor will I socialize any more with Klara Mertens. I will not invite her or her husband here, nor dine with them in Stockholm.”

  If he was surprised that she knew, he gave no sign.

  * * *

  —

  After Sigrid, they retreated into an old-fashioned marriage. No, that was wrong. Lars had gone there ahead of her, and now she joined him. They had his work and their family. Although there were no children, there was Lars’s mother and her mother as well as the nieces and nephews. He depended on her and cared for her. But their original promise of being “all in all to each other,” as silly Flora Finching says in Little Dorrit—of being a new kind of couple—had come to nothing. Perhaps Lars never made that promise, in spite of the years he worked to win her hand. Perhaps she had just assumed it. Mamma, if she were here, would say that was a childish idea. “New kind of couple, old kind of couple,” she imagined Mamma saying, “they all come to the same thing in the end.” Looked at from Mamma’s point of view, she could understand the bored look that had crossed Lars’s face. Men were going to have affairs, and their wives were going to be more or less unhappy about it. And that was going to continue. Probably their parents had got that right. Somehow her generation, or at least the women, had come to expect more of men than human nature could bear.

  Mamma would also have said that she had great freedom in her own separate realm: that that was something new, since she was so bent on newness. But freedom was not w
hat she’d had in mind when she pleaded with Mamma and Fredrik to let them marry.

  Sigrid took the money for her passage without comment. Looked at cynically, she had earned it more quickly than she had planned, but neither she nor Cecilia were cynical. After the Olssons and their English friends left the next morning, Cecilia spent the day in the storeroom of the Folk School, where they kept the textile collections. So many baby shirts with big upstanding collars, white bonnets with a woven blue-and-white ribbon covering the back seam, blankets for the carved cradles. There was an infant’s shirt very like the one they had seen in Professor Hazelius’s museum years before, with a simple ring of rosebuds around the neck. Lars came up to see what she was doing. They were still wary and sensitive with each other, but on the surface they behaved normally. Usually he left the textile collections to her, but now he looked at the pile of baby shirts and said, “My dear old woman, don’t you have enough of these?”

  She made it known to him that he would be welcome in her bedroom when it was the time of the month when a woman might conceive. Only then. She still had her courses at forty-four, although many women her age did not.

  This arrangement lasted until the courses stopped, and after that there was no point.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  FEBRUARY 1912

  TO CECILIA’S DISAPPOINTMENT, Sofie was too far from her at Walther and Wilhelmina von Hallwyl’s gleaming dinner table for conversation. She sent Sofie a look, and they retreated to the powder room, although neither wore powder.

  Replacing her comb in her bag, Cecilia said, “These Frenchified dinners are when I think your refusal to wear corsets is most brilliant. Even with my notoriously hollow leg, I could only eat a few bites of each course once we got to the vol-au-vent.”

  “I suppose we should go back,” Sofie said. They had installed themselves on two brocaded chaises longues, resting their evening-slippered feet.

  “No, let’s stay here a little longer. It’s cooler.”

  Cecilia wanted to ask Sofie if she had thought again about the American embroidery kits, but something held her back. To bide her time, she asked about the children. Was Markus still saving money for a camera? And were Sonja’s plans settled yet? Sonja, who hoped to study art, was a favourite of Cecilia’s.

  “I finished The Awakening,” Sofie said abruptly, breaking into Cecilia’s questions about the family. Foyles Bookshop had sent Cecilia the American novel that Isabella Gardner had recommended so highly, and she had passed it on to Sofie after reading it herself.

  “I loved the portrait of the summer colony outside New Orleans,” Sofie went on, “the sense of the heat and the sea, and all the details of life in New Orleans—the women’s at-homes, those strange American drinks they call cocktails (I wonder why?), the way the heroine gets around the city, walking or on the streetcars, other small things.”

  “But what about the centre of the book,” Cecilia asked, settling in for the conversation, “the stirring of the heroine’s sensuous life, and her love for the young man?”

  “I suppose that was very well done, too,” Sofie said less enthusiastically, “but I felt sorry for the woman’s husband. He wasn’t really so awful.”

  “Are you serious? He was selfish, inconsiderate, concerned only with his business and how his wife’s behaviour would affect it. Honestly, Sofie.”

  “Well, I did feel sorry for him,” Sofie said. “I can’t help it. And even leaving the husband aside, how could she take her own life when she had two little children? I know the writer tells us she was not a ‘mother-woman,’ but that is unforgivable—even incredible. I cannot believe a disappointment in love would lead a mother to do such a thing.”

  “You make ‘a disappointment in love’ sound very small,” Cecilia said. “But the young man, Robert, was her great love, and he had renounced her. She had nothing to live for.”

  “Oh please, Cecilia. You seem so hard-headed, but you are such a romantic! You would never do anything like that.”

  “No, probably not,” Cecilia agreed. “But while I am reading, I understand her despair. And you always take the husband’s side.”

  Sofie laughed. “That is so outrageous, I’m not even going to argue it.” Cecilia made an effort not to roll her eyes. How could Sofie be so blind to her own bias?

  Sofie continued, “And I suppose you think it is all right, then, the affair she has—what is her name? Edna? yes, Edna—the affair Edna has with the playboy when her husband is out of town?”

  That was rather a bold question. They didn’t usually ask each other so bluntly about things of this sort, but The Awakening was a bold novel.

  “Well, I’m not sure,” Cecilia said slowly. “Her husband has not brought her that kind of joy…perhaps she is susceptible to the playboy because she is really falling in love with Robert…I’m not sure.”

  Sofie looked skeptical.

  “But there’s something else,” Cecilia said. “When she starts changing her life, Edna begins to draw, and even to sell her drawings. It’s a sign of her growing independence, and she works at it. Didn’t that intrigue you?”

  “Not very much. The author is so much more interested in Edna’s romances than in her drawings. And the real artist in the story, the pianist—Mademoiselle Reisz—is the old stereotype, a homely, bitter spinster who lives alone and only for her music. It’s not a happy picture of the artistic life for a woman.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” Cecilia said, reluctantly.

  “It’s the small touches, almost like genre paintings, that I will remember about that book,” Sofie said. “The women and their children on the beach like great white seabirds, the mothers’ white robes and veiled hats blowing in the wind. The glamorous, dimly lit dinner party Edna gives in her new little house, with the oddly matched guests and a feeling—almost—of imminent danger.”

  They sat silent for a minute, each remembering that scene. Then, sighing a little, Cecilia swung her legs over the chaise longue, and Sofie took one last look in the mirror.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, Cecilia was sitting with Sofie on a bench in front of a too-pretty Van Ruysdael, while they waited for their husbands to return from a stroll through the Hallwyls’ private gallery. Their silence was more strained than companionable. After dinner, Sofie had unchar­acteris­tically lost patience with Nils’s usual anti-modernist tirade. Her response—brief, irritated and powerful—had taken all three of them aback. Then, when the men retreated to look at the pictures, Sofie had rapped Cecilia’s knuckles when she had proposed a perfectly sensible idea about Sofie manufacturing her fabrics.

  “Well?” Cecilia greeted the men when they returned. “Have you finished enumerating all the heinous crimes of the new French painters?”

  “We do not have enough years left to finish that list,” Lars said, straight-faced. He could joke about it, but not Nils.

  “The Hallwyls do have a Poussin worth seeing,” Nils said, looking almost reluctant to admit it. “If you go down this side…”

  But Sofie interrupted him.

  “Not tonight, Nils. It’s late.”

  She said this impatiently, a small coda that echoed her earlier testiness. This time Cecilia covered any awkwardness by agreeing that it was time to thank the Hallwyls, get their coats and set out into the night.

  The Hallwyls really had been very hospitable. While they accepted their guests’ thanks in the front hall and asked about Lars’s and Nils’s latest projects, Cecilia felt slightly guilty that the Vogts’ and Olssons’ attitude to their hosts, if not their behaviour, had been rather cavalier. But probably the Hallwyls had noticed nothing.

  A servant laden with furs emerged and lined them up carefully on a large table. After he helped her on with hers, another servant motioned her to a chair, where he fastened her boots. The hall was full of people being shouldered with dark, heavy coats by straining servants, or buttoned into boots, while the Hallwyls made sure the leave-taking was as well organized as
the rest of the evening. A Swedish winter scene.

  Cecilia glanced over at Sofie, who was fastening the clasps on her fur. An ungenerous thought flashed through her mind. Sometimes there was something almost mulish about Sofie. Lars often said that Cecilia was the driving force behind much of Siljevik. Why, then, was she powerless when it came to her dearest friend? Why did Sofie resist her plans—such modest, practical plans—for her textiles? Whether her balkiness was a sign of modesty or arrogance, or something else, Cecilia did not know. Sofie had so much that Cecilia did not—children, artistic talent, a husband who was not famous for philandering. And yet at times Cecilia wanted to protect her, and at other times to wake her up and stir her into activity. Her placidity was so irritating. But every once in a while there was a glimpse—or two or three, such as she had seen tonight—of a more tumultuous Sofie.

  After the door closed behind them, the two couples stood for a minute on the sidewalk looking across the street at Berzelii Park. It had filled up with snow since they had gone in, and fat flakes were still falling at long intervals. The yellow light from the street lights illumined the blue-black sky and the snowy park.

  Lars took a last look at the Hallwyls’ house. Its sober front was dark, although the servants were still cleaning up in the public rooms that faced the courtyard.

  “Well, it’s more than a little old-fashioned.”

  “But they have an interesting plan,” Cecilia said, “which is to leave the house and their collections just as they are, down to the dust cloths and brooms, as a museum. They want to preserve the daily life of prosperous art lovers of their time in amber, and to let the house speak for itself.”

  She turned toward Sofie as she spoke, trying to determine whether her friend was still annoyed with her. Sofie wore her usual peaceful face as she considered the Hallwyls’ idea. “I suppose it comes from a certain self-importance, but it is original.”

 

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