She woke and found the sheet draped tightly around her body, mimicking the kind of evening dress she never wore, the kind that would be perfect with the necklace. It reminded her of the pink dress she had worn at Helena Jolin’s party, when she first met Nils. It is a dream, she told herself, unwinding herself from the sheet, and went back to sleep.
Then she dreamed that she was painting a mackerel sky. But no matter what she did, the painting kept turning into a dark carpet. One minute, she was holding a palette and painting the sky’s cobbled surface; then, with no transition, she was standing at her loom, weaving pairs of birds into a carpet’s black background.
At breakfast, the sons, who knew nothing, said, “Mamma, you look as if you didn’t sleep a wink.” The daughters were kinder and secretly hopeful. They asked solicitously, “Mamma, did you sleep well?”
She hoped that Mac would stop at the hotel in Falun on his way to see her, so that he could read the note she had sent in a car, early in the morning. He would want to come anyway, she knew that, but at least he would know before seeing her. But he had come straight from the house with the murals, and she had to cut through his joyful chatter at once.
“MacDonald, Mac, I am so sorry,” she said, taking his hands and unable to face the hurt eyes and suddenly prominent freckles. She bent her head in shame, but he lifted her chin.
“No, tell me,” he said, his voice dismayed and quiet.
“It won’t work. I should have known that, but I hoped…And now I have hurt you, more than if I had known that immediately.”
Was it the move to Glasgow? Because he would find a place with a fine studio for her. Was it leaving the children, or the house? But his questions were perfunctory and half-hearted, and this time she did not feel that he surrendered too soon. They sat together for a while, sadly, all awkwardness gone.
After Mac left, the daughters were excessively affectionate. Mamma, they said, show us what you are working on. Why is there nothing on the loom? The herb garden is flourishing, is that your work or Anna’s? Sofie let their questions wash over her, feeling her bad conscience throbbing. She wanted to forget Mac’s face, with the freckles like the bottoms of exclamation points standing out in the bewildered whiteness. She knew that, once the memory subsided, she would feel intense, guilty happiness. But now it was painful, and it should be. She looked around at the family, whom she loved greatly when she could think about them in peace, when they were not pressing on her with their talk and their wants. She could hardly wait for the house to be hers again.
Chapter Fifty-seven
SEPTEMBER 1934
EVEN WITH HELP, it had become too difficult to get Lars up and down the stairs. Cecilia and Lisbeth moved him to the first floor, where they improvised a bedroom in the room off the dining room with the built-in china cabinets. This move meant that he would not see his beloved Hall again, but it had to be. Cecilia had the Victrola brought down from the Hall and set up in the dining room, so she and Lars could listen to music in the evenings. They had a short ramp built at the kitchen door, and it was a simple matter to wheel him out for a walk.
But Lars’s bedroom, now empty, continued to cause trouble. Soon after his move to the first floor, as Cecilia and Lisbeth were looking over blueprints for the gallery in her office, Lisbeth had asked, “What would you think of my moving into Lars’s bedroom?”
She spoke casually, as if raising nothing terribly important. At first Cecilia was confused.
“Do you mean for your office? But you are so well set up here.”
“I meant for my bedroom.”
Sometimes Lisbeth’s cheek stunned Cecilia. Yes, Lars had no need for that bedroom, but Cecilia was outraged. Disturbed was probably the better word, she told herself, she should learn to moderate these extreme reactions. But no, she was outraged. She thought of Lisbeth sleeping in Lars’s bed, under Lars’s red canopy, wrapping his green silk coverlet around her fist, as she did with Cecilia’s white one, and it was all wrong.
“No, that’s out of the question.”
“Why are you so upset? It makes sense—I would be much closer to you there, instead of on the first floor in the guest room.”
But Cecilia knew that was not the real motive. She wanted to sleep in Lars’s bed. And that made Cecilia feel trespassed upon, even invaded. On her own behalf or his? Or on theirs, hers and Lars’s? She did not know.
“I am not upset. But I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
* * *
—
Sofie came to Siljevik for the day, in time to see the roses’ early September bloom. Cecilia met her on the porch, and they went looking for Lisbeth. They found her in the kitchen, where she was annoying the cook by arranging roses in the sink. She was trying to coax some white ones into a cut-glass vase.
“Why do people grow these cruel things?” she complained, carefully choosing a safe spot on a stem around which to place thumb and forefinger. But the thorns seemed to know she was afraid and no matter what she did, the branches whipped this way and that, hooking themselves into her blouse and skin.
“For their beauty,” Cecilia said.
“And their scent,” Sofie said. Neat-handed, she took up a few stems and dropped them in a tin beaker, where they looked better than in the glass vase. Stop showing off, she said to herself, although pleased with the effect. This is not a flower-arranging competition.
She atoned by passing likely-looking stems to Lisbeth, who persisted with her formal bouquet.
At lunch they talked about Selma Lagerlof, whom Sofie had visited in Falun. Her books had had great success in Germany, but now her outspoken opposition to the Nazis had affected her fortunes. “Germany has become vengeful,” Sofie said, “making things difficult for her publishers. They will not forgive her for helping the Jews.”
From there it was a short step to the Swedish Farmers’ League, with their pro-German, xenophobic attitudes. As usual, Sofie and Lisbeth tried to temper Cecilia’s darker view. Looking for a fresher subject, Sofie asked about some sketches propped up on the buffet. They were interiors of some of the buildings in the Old Farm where folk objects were displayed—blankets, wall hangings, wooden bowls.
Lisbeth, being of a different generation, was less partisan about folk art than Sofie and Cecilia. The older women remembered the early struggles to get people to see its value, while Lisbeth took that for granted.
“I suppose,” she said, looking over a sketch showing shelves of jugs and bowls, “one of their attractions is that there are no surprises.”
Sofie and Cecilia disagreed hotly. There were tremendous surprises! Just think of Carl Winter Hansson and his unexpectedly delicate flowers. Or the earthy humour in some of the biblical mural paintings. Or the anonymous potters and carvers who made deft and sometimes mischievous adjustments to everyday objects.
“All right,” Lisbeth put up her hands in surrender. “There are surprises, but the vocabulary is very limited.”
“Of course.” Cecilia was impatient. “And that is probably what appeals to me, the order and the system, the doing much with little. The frugality.”
Lars sat at the table, apparently paying no attention. Cecilia thought back to their visits to Professor Hazelius’s first little museum on Drottninggatan. In those early days, Lars had been such a patient teacher. Yes, he had been courting her, but he genuinely loved those nameless craftsmen and the sturdy, homegrown things they made, and he had wanted her to know their worth. For a strong minute, she loved him more than anyone else in the room. How had this terrible thing happened to him, while the obstinate young woman across the table wanted to sleep in his bed?
“No doubt, the idea of a simpler life is part of the appeal of folk arts,” Sofie said, conciliatory. “And that simple life wasn’t all pretty.”
She was thinking of Nils’s painting of the king who sacrificed himself to end a famine while the dazed women danced.
Lisbeth turned toward her to show that she agreed and said, “Everyone kne
w his place. And there was no way out of your place.”
Cecilia said crossly, “This is all too much theorizing for a simple piece of lace or a milking stool to bear.”
But Sofie was thinking about what Lisbeth had just said. It was obvious once you heard it, but she had never heard it put so baldly. Everyone knew her place—that was reassuring, at least at first. But there was no way out. That was the important piece that was often overlooked.
Lisbeth was busy with the builders’ contracts and sample materials for the gallery, and returned to her office after coffee. Clearly, things were not perfectly easy between Lisbeth and Cecilia, but Sofie was grateful for some time alone with Cecilia.
They sat in the garden, hemmed in by roses, all their colour and perfume. Cecilia had brought out the tin beaker with the white roses, and now she put it on a low table in front of them.
“The more complicated the architecture of the flower,” Sofie allowed herself to say, “the better it looks in a simple container.”
Cecilia looked her over as Sofie adjusted the beaker very slightly away from the centre of the table. Her hands were less veined and spotted than her own. Her neck was quite good, and those big French sun bonnets had left her skin unlined in most lights. No wonder MacDonald Lawrie still carries a torch for her, Cecilia thought. She considered asking Sofie about their meeting at Askebo, but decided not to.
“Do you notice,” Sofie said, tipping a rose toward Cecilia that was mostly still a bud, with a double fringe of petals around it, “that the bud has more colour than the opened petals?”
Cecilia bent forward to look. The bud was a delicate pink, like a shell, but when the petals unfurled, they turned white. They opened recklessly, careless of their form. The fully opened flower was less beautiful and more vulnerable than the bud.
“As it opens, both the colour and the shape weaken,” Cecilia agreed.
“So hard to keep the beauty of the new,” Sofie said, as if to herself. “Things always lose their wonder.”
“Except, perhaps, children,” Cecilia said. “But I can only guess about that.”
Sofie thought about it. “I suppose change is always possible with them, even with the grown-up ones you think are finished,” she said. “But they all have patches when they are not wonderful.”
The maid brought them elderflower juice to refresh them into wakefulness, but it was no match for the lulling heat. They inclined the backs of their slatted wooden chairs and closed their eyes. Wanting to keep the sleepy intimacy of the scene, with her eyes still closed, Cecilia said quietly, as if they had been discussing it, “I always thought that when I was old, I would have worked everything out, and I would have no worries.”
“I thought the same thing,” Sofie said in an equally low voice, amused. “Perhaps many people do. The problems change, that is all.”
“What worries you?” Cecilia asked in the same offhand way. But she felt the boldness of the question.
“Oh, that Birgitta may have inherited Nils’s melancholy. That Oskar’s baby may be rather slow, although perhaps I imagine it. He seems to walk and talk later than the other children. That the sales of Nils’s work have slowed, if not stopped, and the house needs a new roof.”
“And…what about your work?” Cecilia had a sense that Sofie was working, but she did not know with certainty, nor on what.
“That does not worry me. It preoccupies me, almost constantly, but it does not worry me. I suppose I am still so happy that I am able to do it.”
Cecilia nodded, afraid to press further. She waited, half-expecting some announcement about MacDonald Lawrie. Like her mother before her, Cecilia relished a love story, but her imagination resisted the idea of Sofie living in faraway Glasgow.
Instead, Sofie lifted her head, rested her elbow on the arm of the chair and looked at her, with two fingers open on her jaw, in the pose that Nils had painted so often. It was Cecilia’s turn.
“Well, there is Lars, of course.” She took a breath and added, “And the worry about Germany.”
Sofie nodded quickly. Plainly, no one wanted to hear more from her on that subject.
“And, naturally, deciding on all the details of the gallery and the house museum, and then seeing that they become reality, is not easy.”
That was as close as she would go toward Lisbeth.
When she was sure Cecilia had finished, Sofie said, “And yet some things are easier in old age. Small things trouble me less. What people think doesn’t concern me much any more.”
“Yes,” Cecilia said, “although I never cared much what people thought of me.” The only exception, which she thought but did not say, was her marriage: she could not bear the idea of people pitying her about the other women.
Sofie thought but did not say, Yes, you are fearless about others’ opinions and that stands you in good stead now with Lisbeth. Although Cecilia and Lisbeth were discreet, there were several people working in and around the house. It would only take one with a suspicion and a weak allegiance to the mistress to set the whole village speculating about Mrs. Vogt and Miss Gregorius. Most likely it was already going on.
“Have you read any of Mr. Lawrence’s novels?” Cecilia asked, breaking their brief silence.
“No, not yet. Do you enjoy them?”
“He can be clumsy and even indelicate, but I find the scenes where a man and woman rage at each other violently and then love each other just as violently are very powerful.”
“I think I am happy to be done with that,” Sofie said. “I am happy now to rage at my work, and enjoy the rapture that comes afterwards.”
Aha, Cecilia thought. Poor Mr. Lawrie.
Chapter Fifty-eight
APRIL 1935
SOFIE INVITED THE family for Sunday lunch. Afterwards, while the mid-afternoon light was still strong, she ushered them into the workshop. She had placed her paintings all over the room, taking down Nils’s pictures and using the same nails to hang hers on the walls, leaning them against the long window and the benches, even standing a few on her loom. She had not told any of the children that she was painting, and she had put away the paints and pictures whenever they visited. Now, she expected general astonishment.
Instead, they walked into the room lined with her work and although admiring were not surprised. They began appraising, and the grandchildren chose their favourites. Felix’s little girl, Malin, asked her why she did not paint dogs, and she promised to paint her a dog. Birgitta’s Filip said of a tree on a windy autumn day, “Look, it’s snowing leaves.” For that, she decided she would give him the painting for his name day.
Sonja, the only one with professional training, looked closely, and finally said collegially, “These are lovely, Mamma. You have a good eye. But then we knew that.”
“But,” Sofie said, not quite accepting defeat, “aren’t you surprised that I have been painting?”
“We knew what you were doing,” Oskar said.
“How did you know?”
“Well, there was nothing on the loom or the spindles.”
“None of us have received tablecloths or blankets or wall hangings for Christmas or our name day for the longest time.”
“As a matter of fact, you forgot a few red-letter days altogether.”
“Anna dropped a few hints.”
“You were so happy.”
Sonja found some purple in a picture of a stormy day and told Felix, “Mamma invented this colour.”
Sofie laughed at Felix’s mystified face. “I never said that. I said that I discovered it.”
That had been another clue, Sonja pointed out. It was easier to discover a new colour with paints than when spinning wool or buying embroidery thread.
Sofie felt cheated of the drama she had anticipated, but also relieved. Apparently no one was going to accuse her of disobeying their father’s wishes. If that sounded like a scene from a nineteenth-century novel, it had not been out of the question. At a conscious level, her children probably knew nothing of Nils’
s feelings about her painting. She had never painted as long as they had known her, or almost never—a couple of them, perhaps, remembered her pictures of Markus after he died—and now she was painting. No doubt she had more time on her hands. In their minds, it could be as simple as that. At a deeper, unspoken level, they might well know how their father had felt about her painting. But their father, whom they loved, was dead, and their mother, whom they loved, was alive. Sofie had noted before that children were rarely as curious about their parents’ private lives as the parents expected them to be.
That evening, after the family had left, Sofie looked again at her work. Something was missing. She’d had an inkling of it when she showed her paintings to Miss Helmersen, and now the feeling was stronger. Something was not quite as it should be. Something, now that she saw it all together, looked overworked or fussy. She hoped that was because she was still so new at it.
Chapter Fifty-nine
SEPTEMBER 1935
SOFIE HAD TO go to Stockholm for the name day of Mikael, Tilda’s second son. He was a sweet boy, but all these family gatherings took time from her work. If Nils were alive, he would have said, “That’s what happens when you have so many children,” as if he’d had nothing to do with it. Cecilia was also in Stockholm, for a doctor’s appointment and other business, so they arranged to meet at the National Museum, where there was an exhibition of Dutch painting.
In the entrance hall, under Nils’s painting of Gustav Vasa, Sofie felt a throb of gratitude toward Lisbeth. She had become less like a lover and more like a spouse, in the important sense that her place in Cecilia’s life left plenty of room for Cecilia’s friendship with Sofie. While she waited for Cecilia, she watched as people met and parted, studied the map of the various galleries and looked up at the mural of the victorious king on his white horse. Women’s hemlines now fell between the knee and the ankle, after the giddiness of the twenties’ short skirts, and many of their suits and dresses were cut on the bias. From across the rotunda, she admired an old woman’s finely tailored suit and veiled hat, until the woman was swallowed up in the swirl of people.
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