Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  Sofie hoped she was not being rude. But the blue section was crucial.

  Then Cecilia said something Sofie could not have predicted.

  “Work is a balm, Sofie. Work is a balm.”

  Sofie cocked her head to one side. So, once again Cecilia understood. And she, Sofie, understood that this was not a comment on what she was doing now, but a promise for the future. Thinking about that, she moved the shuttle a few more times, slowly. Then she put it down and said, “Yes. But now we must go to church.” They came out of the workshop together, Cecilia holding her hand. Sofie thought wryly, Perhaps she thinks I will try to escape. But she stood quietly as Cecilia and Marianne helped her on with the black cape and the widow’s cap.

  When they returned from the burial, there was no more weaving. She put on Nils’s red robe, and sat at her desk, or in the Old Room, or in the library, doing nothing by the hour. Sometimes she even came downstairs in the robe. About a week after the funeral, no one could find her for a time. Then someone spotted a moving clump of red in the big bulb garden that faced the river. It was Sofie, still in the robe, uprooting lilies by the hundreds. As soon as she exposed one mass of bulbs, their sickly-looking white roots upended in the air, like a part of the body that should be decently covered, she moved to the next, tripping over the robe and the shovel, wreaking destruction on the carefully tended garden that had produced flowers for Nils’s pictures for decades.

  “Because they’re no good!” she panted, without pausing in her work, when Marianne and Sonja begged her to tell them why she was doing this. “No good at all!”

  Only when she had taken out the entire bed and thrown the bulbs on the lawn would she agree to go back in the house.

  Chapter Forty-three

  APRIL 1924

  CECILIA AND LISBETH never discussed it. Lisbeth came to her in the night, or she did not. It surprised Cecilia at first that there was so much of her. Not, of course, that Lisbeth was as big as Lars, but a woman’s body has so much more geography. Concave, convex, tapering calves, delicate wrists and meaty hands, full upper arms interrupted at the elbow and then meagre lower arms, breasts, cul-de-sacs, sudden broad expanses. Lars was a prairie, Lisbeth an intense place of mountains and valleys.

  Even now, eight years after that first night together, she could still be surprised by Lisbeth’s body. Still surprised to be in bed with Lisbeth’s body. Partly, Cecilia knew, that was because it was secret, and illicit. And not as frequent as she wished. But partly, she thought—because she was in love—it was because of Lisbeth.

  Lars was often away, in Stockholm, or at his fishing lodge, or travelling. Lisbeth slept in the guest room more often now; it was the press of their work, she told Mrs. Turesson.

  In the beginning, the adultery seemed more important to Cecilia than the fact that Lisbeth was a woman—perhaps because it was easier to understand. She made a list of married women who had affairs in novels and poems.

  1. Anna Karenina

  2. Emma Bovary

  3. The unnamed wife in Meredith’s Married Love

  4. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

  She stopped there, because she could not remember any others, and because the list did not raise her spirits. Anna Karenina threw herself under a train, Edna Pontellier walked into the sea, and the other two poisoned themselves. Perhaps one day a writer would imagine an adulterous woman who survived. As for Lisbeth being a woman, either thinking about it did not interest her much, or perhaps she simply did not know how to think about it. If she had written out, “I am in love with a woman” (which she did not), the words would have looked very strange. But, as she lived it, it seemed normal. The only thing she knew with certainty was that she loved Lisbeth in the way she had loved Lars at the start of their years together.

  These days they were busy with the Old Farm, as they called the land near the Folk School where they had placed fourteen top-heavy log houses, storehouses and shops, some dating from the fourteenth century, and arranged them in a rectangle, mimicking a Dalarna village. Lisbeth and Cecilia had been working on the interiors, which they wanted to put in order before the weather warmed up and people began asking to see them.

  One morning when Lars was at the fishing lodge, Cecilia stood in the clockmaker’s shop at the Old Farm, looking at Lars’s overflowing collections of tools and clocks.

  “Three quarters of this stuff needs to go into storage,” Lisbeth said in a tone that forbade argument. “I’ll get Ingerson and his son to move it this afternoon.” She began tying red strings around pieces that Ingerson could take away.

  “But not those,” Cecilia said of some tall clocks. “That group shows the evolution of the Dalarna clock. And not these,” she said, less convincingly, of a heap of saws and clamps.

  Lisbeth gave Cecilia a look.

  “Then what will you choose?”

  But Cecilia could not choose, so she said, “You can be infatuated with one of Lars’s most unimpressive sketches, but I see you are more judicious when it comes to his collections.”

  Lisbeth ignored the sting in that. “Cecilia, fewer examples will allow people to see them better. Right now this is like a junk shop.”

  She knew Lisbeth was right, but paring down the collection was impossible for her. Lars loved these well-used tools and painted clocks so much that putting them in storage felt like banishing him. Tired of the argument, Cecilia left Lisbeth rearranging the stoneware jugs and made her way outside.

  Winter hung on stubbornly, although there was no snow. The ground was hard, with a springy crunch to the grass. The lake sparkled near the leaf-drying barn, the malting house and the other buildings planted on the broad lawn. Many of their rooflines were decorated with the traditional row of Nordic pickets, which left scalloped shadows on the sides of adjoining buildings. The biggest building was the boathouse, probably from the seventeenth century. Lars had bought it long ago, one of his first buildings, and eventually filled it with a vast church-boat that held thirty or more villagers. Eventually Lisbeth found her there, a small, dark bundle in the dark boat.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you all over. We need to decide about the milking stools so that the Ingersons can move them.”

  Cecilia remembered how bewildered Mamma had been by the idea that Professor Hazelius would collect milking stools. And yet by the time she died—five years ago now, and Cecilia still missed her—Lars had won her over to the belief that these things were important.

  She said nothing.

  “Cecilia, what is it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “But what are you doing here? Are you ill?”

  “No. I’ll meet you at the tithing house. Please.”

  Lisbeth left. Cecilia wrapped her hands around her knees as she huddled in the boat. When spots had first appeared on her hands, she liked them. She had always wanted freckles, and these were the closest she would come. But as they got bigger and more irregular, they looked less like freckles and she no longer enjoyed them. Now they were liver spots, an ugly name that belonged to an old woman. She was fifty-seven, and she needed reminding that she was an old woman. Lisbeth’s hands were completely spotless. More and more, Cecilia noticed other differences between Lisbeth’s body and her own. Compared with Lisbeth, she was thin but flabby. Lisbeth’s skin fit her flesh perfectly, there were no dimples, no little lumps, no skin pocked like orange peel such as she was discovering on the inside of her upper arms. Lisbeth was a plum; she was drying into a prune. But Lisbeth did not seem to care.

  While she sat in the boat, small, hard tears, like apple seeds, came out grudgingly. The boathouse, ancient, dark pine built with sober purpose and unfathomable strength, decorated only by the long logs that formed an X at its gable ends, summed up so much that Lars treasured. There was so much of him here. His years of self-indulgence were showing, but unaccountably, it was Nils who was dead—although older, he had moved as though he were younger than Lars.

  A
nd there was Sofie. What was life like for her in a house where many of the door panels, windows, walls and lintels were Nils Olsson paintings? Where Nils’s inventiveness had touched everything from the weathervane to the doorknobs? Cecilia and Lars had visited her last month and Lars, the optimist, described her afterwards as composed. Cecilia said no, she was numb. Some things were moving too quickly, while others seemed cast in stone. She thought about Lisbeth, who loved her, and who also loved Lars’s art but not his old tools and clocks. She thought about things and people and even marriages being put in storage. Finally, she went out to find Lisbeth in the tithing house.

  Chapter Forty-four

  JUNE 1924

  NILS HAD FINISHED his autobiography, called What I Am, the day before his death. At first Sofie could not read it, but by June, six months after his death, she had. All the children had read it too, and there was to be a family meeting.

  “Mamma, don’t feel you have to come,” Marianne said. “It may be too hard for you.”

  “Don’t be silly, of course I am coming.”

  Marianne looked unhappy.

  They had the meeting at the dining room table, under the picture Nils had painted of Sofie and himself as a young couple travelling in a romantic landscape of castles and hills. At the head of the table, where Nils had sat, her tapestry of the four elements was faded but still strong.

  Oskar began.

  “Of course, we will have to notify Bonniers that there will be no publication.”

  Sofie asked, “And why is that?”

  Several of the children seemed to say at once, “Mamma, how can you ask that?”

  “Well, I am asking that, so perhaps someone might tell me.”

  There were a few different answers. Marianne and Sonja objected to Nils’s candour about the women in his life before Sofie, including the model with whom he had had two children who died as babies. Oskar did not want people to know about his father’s melancholy, his lack of self-confidence, his grief for Markus that never seemed to lighten. Tilda and Felix thought that his long, humiliating struggle with King Domald’s Sacrifice and the National Museum’s final rejection should be kept private.

  To Marianne’s and Sonja’s objection about the women, Sofie shrugged.

  “That’s what the life of a young artist was, in those days.” She might have said, “And no doubt still is, today.” She might have said, “That’s what the life of a man is.” But she decided not to. To the other stumbling blocks, she said, “That’s what your father was. I see nothing to hide.”

  She stood up abruptly, startling them. No doubt they were expecting a long discussion.

  “That’s all I have to say. Good night. Oskar, will you make sure that all the lights are out when you go to bed.”

  Marianne came to her bedroom while Sofie was brushing her hair. It was thinner, although not much, and threaded with white, but she was still a dark-haired woman.

  “Mamma, I’m sorry that you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Yes, you are. I know how you look when you are angry.”

  “All right. Your father had the right to write about himself in the way he found most true. You children don’t have the right to interfere with that.”

  “Mamma.”

  Marianne took the hand that was not holding the brush, that was gripping the dressing table, and held it. This first-born knew her too well.

  “That’s not all you are angry about.”

  She continued brushing, counting on the long, deliberate strokes to temper her rage.

  “Fine, then. You’ve read the book. He writes that I was his angel, his darling, his good Sofie, the person who believed in him when he despaired. He never once mentions that I was a painter. That I studied with Ernst Malmstrom at the Academy. That he and I painted together at Grez. That we decorated the house together, and that many of the ideas…Never mind. Never mind. Not one mention.”

  She wrenched her hand away from Marianne. Now she was past talk but not past putting down the brush, dividing her hair in two hanks with one violent motion, and beginning to braid the right side.

  Marianne was aghast.

  “But…I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt that way.”

  “Of course not, none of you did.”

  And none of them had noticed what was missing from the book. Now she had only a minute to get Marianne out of the room before she fell into a torrent of fury at all of them, at the children, at Mr. Lawrie for coming too late, at Nils for living the way he had and then for dying.

  She swept Marianne into her arms, and said, “Now go, my darling. I’m very tired.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  JUNE 1926

  ON A BRIGHT spring day in 1926, Cecilia received a telegram from Hanna Pauli. Ellen Key had died at Strand, her country house. Incoherent and irascible, she had not been herself for a few years, probably since 1920. She had left instructions that there should be “no frivolity” around her death, and she wanted to lie in an oak coffin on top of bluebells and grasses from the beach, before she was cremated and buried in the family grave at Vastervik. That was fine for Miss Key, Hanna wrote with her usual asperity, but it left those who had been touched by her influence feeling the need of a gathering to mark her passing. Hanna and Georg would welcome those who wanted to remember Ellen Key on June 10, at their house in Storangen. Cecilia would go, of course, to honour her teacher, accompanied by Lars. Sofie wrote to say that she would see her there, for Nils’s sake: she would not forget how Miss Key had celebrated his paintings of Askebo.

  On the appointed day, eminent figures from Miss Key’s various worlds—education, suffrage, aesthetics, literature, among others—gathered in Hanna and Georg’s parlour. A few read appreciations of her contributions to Swedish life and thinking, interspersed with musical interludes on the piano. Hanna’s oil sketch for her portrait of Miss Key stood on an easel by the piano. Then everyone drank coffee, ate spice cookies and chatted in small groups. That’s where the real memories came out. Here was the whole Ellen Key with all her contradictions, Cecilia thought—the Christian turned radical socialist, the feminist who did not believe that mothers should have other work, the teacher who thought the state, rather than husbands, should support women and their children. Eva Bonnier, Cecilia and Hanna reminisced about their days in the schoolroom with Miss Key, and even Hanna was close to tears. Cecilia wondered, Would Miss Key consider all this “frivolity”?

  * * *

  —

  “It was a fine way to remember Ellen Key,” she said to Sofie on the train home.

  Sofie agreed. “I suppose, if people do not want a funeral in a church, there will be more of this kind of thing,” she said. “This was my first.”

  Lars had taken out his pencil and paper and was looking around their car for a subject. The trio would travel together as far as Rattvik, where they would change trains and head in different directions.

  Sofie reached into her carpet bag for her knitting, and her fingers found a book first. She pulled it out to show Cecilia.

  “It’s called Mrs. Dalloway. One of Sonja’s friends recommended it to me, so I ordered it from Hemlins. It’s very modern, written in a style they call ‘stream of consciousness.’ Which sounds horrid, but it just shows one thought flowing into the next thought, which may not have a logical connection to the last thought but always feels right—like the way we think.”

  Listening to Sofie’s enthusiasm, Cecilia thought, She looks well. And she sounds like the old Sofie. It had been two years since Nils died. “And Virginia Woolf is?” Cecilia asked, taking the book to have a better look at its black, yellow and white jacket. Even the abstract cover, she thought, announced its modernity.

  “I have no idea. But her book is wonderful. It’s about a day in the life of a London society woman who is giving a party. She’s complicated and perceptive, but also conventional and sometimes a little snobbish. Some of the other characters think she chose a shallow husband. One of
them…let me find that page, I marked it.”

  She riffled through the pages until she came to a turned-down corner.

  “Here it is. An old admirer of Mrs. Dalloway is thinking about the differences between her and her husband: ‘With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.’”

  Both women liked that, and smiled at each other. They could say anything in front of Lars. He was sketching a little boy across the aisle who was sleeping against his mother’s shoulder, and paid no attention to them. Every once in a while, Lars too dozed for a short time, which concerned Sofie. It wasn’t the simple fact of dozing that worried her, but how unwell he looked when his usual alertness did not mask his heaviness and bad colour. After an event such as the one they had just attended, you noticed your friends’ frailties.

  But not, perhaps, your husband’s. “Lars! Wake up!” Cecilia hissed into his ear, afraid he would start snoring or making other loud noises. Imperturbable, he opened his eyes and recovered the pencil that had dropped onto his lap.

  Sofie went back to Mrs. Dalloway.

  “And yet the husband,” she began to say, but Cecilia interrupted.

  “Let me guess. You’re going to take his part, aren’t you?”

  Sofie gave a small laugh. “But so is Virginia Woolf taking his part! He doesn’t sparkle, like the old admirer, but he loves Mrs. Dalloway, and she loves him…And yet!” Sofie said, excited, as she remembered the unexpected twist. “The thing Mrs. Dalloway calls ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life’ is a kiss she gets as a young woman from her friend Sally Seton—a kiss on the lips. More exquisite than any moment she has had with Mr. Dalloway or any other man.”

  Cecilia struggled for the right balance of curiosity and calm on her face. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, exactly,” Sofie said. “What do you make of that?”