Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  Lars said lightly, “Cecilia and I have been talking about doing something like that.”

  Nils was still cross. “It’s a terrible, self-conscious idea and very morbid,” he said. “I don’t want any of you to think about it.”

  Sofie gave a small, dry laugh.

  “Nils doesn’t believe he is going to die.”

  Cecilia allowed herself a tentative smile. Well, at least I am not the only person here who is irritating Sofie.

  With that, they said good night. The Olssons were walking across the park to the Berns Hotel and the Vogts, who were staying with Cecilia’s sister Natalie, got into a cab.

  In the cab, Cecilia stared out the window. When they passed a street light, Lars asked, “What are you counting on your fingers?”

  “How few organized, effective women there are in novels.”

  “You mean bossy ones?”

  She gave him the sniff he expected.

  “That is how most people see them. I see them as strong and purposeful.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. And I benefit every day from living with one of those women.”

  She gave him an absent smile, and went back to her list.

  1. Mrs. Proudie, the domineering wife of the bishop in Trollope’s Barchester novels.

  2. Aunt Norris, the sycophantic, snobbish upholder of the status quo in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

  3. Marian Halcombe, the mannish and courageous half-sister of the heroine in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

  4. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who supports herself as a servant, a thief and a farmer but mostly by marriages.

  5. Sophia Baines in Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, who runs a successful pension in Paris.

  She was not very happy with this list, or sure these women had much in common. The only one with a good business sense was Sophia. Moll was indefatigable and ambitious, but there was not much more to say about her. Marian Halcombe was chiefly distinguished by her refusal to marry or otherwise bow to the wishes of men, but why did she have to have a moustache and a face too strong to be pretty? Aunt Norris was horrid, and especially unkind to the poor heroine, Fanny. And yet Jane Austen, scrupulously fair as usual, made a point of saying that the disciplined Aunt Norris would have done better with nine children and no money than her sister, Fanny’s kind but feckless mother, did. The only one Cecilia liked was Mrs. Proudie in the early Barchester novels, decisive and resilient where her husband was weak and vacillating. But by the end of the series she had become a monster.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  APRIL 1914

  WHEN CECILIA FIRST picked up her pen to write to Sofie about the young woman who had applied to become the Vogts’ assistant, she found herself at a loss. No matter how much detail she provided, she could not quite convey what was so extraordinary about Lisbeth Gregorius. Lars, as expected, had turned on the charm. First, because Miss Gregorius was a professional woman, he complimented her qualifications and experience in Berlin. What did she think of the idea of adding a museum of early German art on Berlin’s Museum Island? Was it too ambitious? When he wanted to show how much he agreed with what she had just said, he would extend his arm almost to her arm or hand, as if to underscore his approval, although of course he did not actually touch her. Finally, his suit turned wordless: he turned his body completely in her direction, he held his teacup in the same way that she did, he nodded vehemently whenever she made a point.

  And this was the extraordinary part. Miss Gregorius did not appear to see it. It wasn’t as if she noted Lars’s behaviour and decided to ignore it. She seemed simply unaware of it. She was focused on the work that needed to be done, the archiving, the conservation, the design of the museum she was envisioning, the presentation of the exhibits. Not on the man in front of her. Cecilia had never seen anything like it. Did they teach that at the university?

  She felt sorry for Lars. She had never seen him at such a disadvantage. He kept trying to start again with Miss Gregorius, and Cecilia was reminded of how, in the early days of the automobile, people tried again and again to crank up the balky engines of those self-propelled wagons. But Miss Gregorius took no notice.

  Siljevik, 30 April 1914

  Dear Sofie,

  Miss Gregorius has been with us a few weeks now, and I must admit, life is quite different. She slipped into the office we gave her, the room next to my study, as if she had always been there. Almost immediately she ordered, without apologies, a very large quantity of office supplies from Stromberg’s Stationers in Stockholm. She likes the oak filing cabinet and desk we brought into the room, but asked if they could be moved to the opposite wall, so that she could overlook Lars’s studio and the churchyard. I assumed that she would live with us, or perhaps with Lars’s mother next door, but she said, with thanks, that she would prefer to live elsewhere in the village. That was a surprise, but I saw her logic. I made inquiries, and gave her a few likely addresses. She chose a room in the schoolmaster’s house. I hope she will be warm enough: Mrs. Turesson is well known as a “careful” housekeeper.

  She usually eats the midday meal with us, although she insists that it is not necessary, or not necessary every day. But I persist, because while Lars relaxes over a glass of wine, Miss Gregorius acquires useful information. With very little prompting, he reminisces about his work with the animals as a boy in his grandparents’ summer pasture, or about his youthful belief that he would be a sculptor of horses.

  When Lars is away, I use the mealtime to ask Miss Gregorius—her Christian name is Lisbeth—about herself. She is the eldest child of a professor of philology and his wife, and grew up in Uppsala, in an old house near the cathedral. As a little girl, she loved pictures, and when no one could find Lisbeth, someone would be sent to the professor’s library. There she would be, wedged into the corner of the window seat, with a book of reproductions bigger than she was. “The book is having a look at Lisbeth,” they would say, rather than the other way around.

  But enough of this. As you can see, I am enjoying having her with us.

  I wonder how things are at Askebo—what is your latest project? How do you and Nils like Marianne’s beau, and has he banished all thoughts of Torchon lace from her head (not to mention the more challenging patterns)? But here is Miss Gregorius standing at my door with what looks like an engraving she wants identified, so I close hastily.

  With love from

  Cecilia

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  JUNE 1914

  CECILIA LOOKED AT Sofie, who was watching Mr. Lawrie look at Miss Gregorius. Perhaps Sofie was sensing a spark between Mr. Lawrie and Miss Gregorius? The two had just met, here at the Wallace Collection in London. Cecilia’s first thought was that a match between them made great sense, and might be delightful. Then she realized that Mr. Lawrie would have to wait a long time before Miss Gregorius would be free to move to Glasgow. She and Lars certainly could not do without her until the museum was open and all the other arrangements were in place. And even then, Miss Gregorius might have to stay in Siljevik for a year or so, perhaps more, for the sake of continuity. So no, it was not a good idea after all.

  While their little party walked through the Wallace’s galleries, Miss Gregorius making careful notes that related to the Vogts’ future museum, Lars was talking salacious nonsense about the source of the museum’s collections, the marquesses of Hertford and Richard Wallace. Cecilia could hear Lars assuring Mr. Lawrie that the marquesses were famous libertines, and that the fourth marquess’s illegitimate son, Richard Wallace, had followed in his father’s footsteps. He had met the future Lady Wallace when she was a saleswoman in a perfume shop in Paris. She bore him an illegitimate son when Lord Wallace was twenty-two, but his father refused his consent to their marriage. Lord Wallace waited thirty years, until his father died, and then they married.

  “Well, that shows a degree of fidelity, at least.” Mr. Lawrie was clearly less interested in this gossip than Lars, but seemed to feel he should
make some response.

  “Oh, there were many other women along the way,” Lars assured him. He radiated the certainty that, given wealth and the tolerant atmosphere of France, where the marquesses mostly lived, any normal man would do as they did, following their sensual appetites wherever they might lead. Mr. Holcross, the pleasant, well-informed young man who had been assigned by the Wallace Collection to accompany the Vogts as they inspected the museum, affected not to hear these revelations. Cecilia walked by his side as he led the way.

  At times like these, it felt particularly demoralizing being married to an old roue who tried to charm everyone except his wife, and whose magnetism still worked. When that happened, Cecilia would sometimes find herself trying to beguile someone—almost to see if it were possible, and usually unsuccessfully. Mr. Holcross’s manners were irreproachable and, unsurprisingly, there was no answering flicker.

  Just as Lars’s pleasure in the marquesses’ debaucheries was becoming intolerable, he stopped in the West Room, and looked around. “You can see how their sensuality informed their collection,” he said, extending his arms to embrace the cherubs and beautiful women captured on canvas, tapestry, enamel and porcelain. “How their pictures and statues and even their small things, the snuffboxes, the porcelain, are perfectly finished, pretty, sensuous things. The taste of the eighteenth-century French court, in other words. There is not much work here that shows ugliness, violence or sadness. No unfinished work, no experiments. This collection is designed around pleasure.”

  There was the Lars she could never leave. Although it was infuriating wading through his dross—like an adolescent boy who had just discovered the pleasures of the flesh, he never tired of talking about it—there was always the promise of gold. She could see Miss Gregorius nodding.

  In the Oval Drawing Room they found Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour in her garden. She was relaxed, standing with one arm extending over the base of a statue, her hand holding a closed fan. The frills on her sleeves and skirt were furled like the leaves on the trees behind her. It was as if a particularly lovely shrub had taken human, female form. Miss Gregorius told them that Madame de Pompadour had commissioned the portrait to announce to the court that, although she was no longer Louis XV’s mistress, she was something perhaps equally impressive—the king’s confidante.

  “How do we know that?” Sofie asked, sounding more skeptical than Cecilia thought was necessary.

  “From the statue behind her, which is called Friendship Consoling Love,” Miss Gregorius said, “and from her little dog perched on the garden seat, a symbol of fidelity.”

  Well, there was no denying that Miss Gregorius was very knowledgeable.

  Cecilia turned back to the portrait. When passion ended or love changed in other ways, there was always a passage to be negotiated. If the Frenchwoman was feeling forlorn now that the king’s passion had waned into friendship, her poise belied it. That, of course, was the point of the portrait, to demonstrate to the court that she was as powerful as ever. Besides, Madame de Pompadour had work to do—and work, Cecilia told herself, is a balm. Wilier than the king and more knowledgeable about politics, Madame de Pompadour was intent on shoring up his fading popularity. And yet…and yet. Some sadness would be natural.

  Sofie did not look as if she were having a particularly good time. After a last glance at Madame de Pompadour, Cecilia followed her into the room with the Dutch pictures.

  “Mr. Lawrie seems very nice,” Cecilia said. “He and Miss Gregorius are getting on well.”

  “Yes, apparently,” Sofie said.

  Mr. Lawrie joined them in front of a strange Dutch picture. At the edge of a forest, a woman dressed for a ball in white satin held a dead hare over her lap while her husband and daughter ignored her. According to Mr. Lawrie, shooting game was prestigious, so the fact that the woman was chosen to flaunt the dead animal was a mark of favour. In theory. She didn’t look as if she regarded it as any sort of privilege.

  Married life, thought Cecilia. Someone always had to pay. Were the woman’s white satin and the peaches the little girl carried on a platter worth the price?

  “At least this time it is the hare that has been sacrificed,” Sofie said.

  Mr. Lawrie looked mystified, but Cecilia nodded.

  “Instead of the woman, you mean.”

  Chapter Forty

  1915

  MISS GREGORIUS HAD already decided that her first task would be to catalogue all of Lars’s works in Siljevik, from the house, the studio, the fishing lodge and even the Folk School, where his paintings were hung in rotation. After that, she would move on to the textile, pottery, silver and art collections, but first, Lars’s works. He helped her with dates and provenance, if he remembered them. On occasion, he would lose interest in Miss Gregorius’s precision and hazard a random guess or two. She paid no attention to these transparent inventions. Cecilia, who understood the need for accuracy, had kept records of sales. When Lars was away, Cecilia and Miss Gregorius worked together in his studio.

  One day, they were sorting through some pictures, Miss Gregorius wearing the cotton gloves with which she rummaged through paintings or files of engravings. She extracted a painting called Midnight from a stack leaning against a wall. A woman, her dark blonde hair caught up in a knot, her heavy breasts straining at her blouse, rowed a small boat on a bright midsummer night. Her head turned toward the approaching shore, and her brawny arms wielded the oars as if the effort cost her nothing.

  “She looks familiar.”

  “Yes,” Cecilia said. “You may well have seen her in Siljevik. She is Clara Dahl, one of my husband’s favourite models. She lives on Persvagen.”

  “Any idea of the date?”

  “Yes, I have it here. 1891. We bought it back from a Gothenburg collector, Kasper Lennart, and he had taken it soon after the paint dried.”

  Miss Gregorius wrote the date in her notebook.

  “And this?”

  It was Clara again, braiding her hair in folk costume, with a red ribbon held in readiness between her teeth. In the background, a woman naked above the waist bent down with her back to the viewer, one breast swinging low.

  “Pictures of Clara, with this pinky-orange colouring, are probably all from 1891. The Dahls needed money that summer, and she was happy to pose. My husband never sold this one. He was pleased with the way the light turned that long fall of her hair into copper.”

  Miss Gregorius peered at the half-nude woman in the background.

  “Clara keeps her clothes on.”

  From someone else, Cecilia might have found that remark verging on impertinence, but she laughed.

  “Yes. The Siljevik women who posed for Lars did not care very much if strangers in Stockholm, which is a world away to them, saw them in the nude. But once they realized that many of the pictures would stay here and be shown every once in a while in the village, it was a different matter. Clara’s husband is a respectable working man, and their children went to the village school. The nude is not a local woman.”

  Miss Gregorius bent and detached another canvas from the pile.

  “Nor are these two, I suppose.”

  It was a nude scene of a mother and daughter, titled In the Bathhouse. The daughter leaned down to dry her legs with a cotton towel, but the picture belonged to her mother. Slick with sweat, she planted herself in front of the fire, all glistening curves and globes, from her round head wrapped in a kerchief to her reddish buttocks to the calves that seemed almost too slender to support her stocky body.

  Miss Gregorius tipped the painting into the light, as they studied its heat and lassitude in silence. A glowing line, the reflection from the great fire, traced the mother’s breast, ribs, inner thigh. Finally, Cecilia said, “No, I don’t know these women, or when this was painted. I must have been visiting in Stockholm.”

  Miss Gregorius put a question mark after the painting’s title in her book.

  Next they came to a portrait of Cecilia with her dog. Mou
che brimmed with life, willing to sit on his mistress’s lap but ready in an instant to spring up if activity, recreational or protective, were called for. Cecilia, on the other hand, looked careworn, all but swallowed up in her voluminous red coat and floppy red beret. The festive colour underlined her sallowness.

  Sometimes when they had worked together for hours, lost in the look and smell of canvases and drawings, Cecilia heard herself say something that sounded more as if she were talking to herself than to another person. The contrast between the previous paintings and this one seemed to call for comment, and she said, “Here, Miss Gregorius, we have a change from his usual models.”

  She hoped her tone was dry, and far from self-pity.

  “This is from 1902,” she added.

  Cecilia was looking at the portrait, so she did not see Miss Gregorius’s expression, only heard the intake of breath. Then she felt a gloved hand placed briefly on her own.

  “Please, call me Lisbeth.”

  * * *

  —

  Lars noticed the change.

  “I see you call Miss Gregorius by her first name.”

  “Well, we work together so much. There doesn’t seem to be any point in formality.”

  He nodded, but knew better than to attempt less formality himself. Cecilia wondered if part of Lisbeth’s appeal was that she was oblivious to Lars’s allure. She saw it and saluted it in his pictures, but not in his person. It was one more thing about her that was distinctive.

  At first, Miss Gregorius doled out the stories she told Cecilia with care, but as the two women worked long days together, she told Cecilia more. The only girl, with two younger brothers, she had been the best scholar in the family. Unlike most fathers, hers was not inclined to ignore his daughter’s promise.