Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  Suddenly the veiled hat and the suit, a periwinkle blue that matched the wearer’s eyes, stood before her. My goodness, Sofie thought, how we are getting on. Cecilia had a fine beading of perspiration where her hair met her forehead, but it was a warm day. Sofie put a steadying hand on her arm, but she brushed it aside.

  “Everything is fine,” Cecilia said briskly. “It’s just that, as usual, I tried to squeeze too many appointments and errands into one day. But now I’m here, and we can enjoy the pictures.”

  They walked to the rooms with the Dutch paintings. They both loved the orderly scenes of quiet courtyards, black-and-white tiled front halls, children being combed, linen being stored away.

  “It’s because we are Protestants,” Sofie said, an old joke, and Cecilia smiled.

  The religious paintings interested them less than the domestic ones, but they stopped at one from the seventeenth century with a strange title—The Annunciation of the Virgin’s Death.

  “I thought an annunciation always referred to the Christ Child’s birth.”

  “So did I,” Cecilia agreed. “But this is an end rather than a beginning. And this angel looks like a hearty Swedish husfru, the kind of sensible neighbour whose advice you would ask if your bread failed to rise.”

  The angel wore a red-and-gold priest’s chasuble that left her goose-like white wings free, and she held one hand on her heart, the other on the wrist of the Virgin as if she were taking her pulse. The Virgin, also a square-faced Northern type with a well-developed chin, had been reading, her thick book propped on an overturned chair.

  “And look how matronly the Virgin is.” Sofie pointed to the upside-down chair. “Why in the world doesn’t she turn the chair right side up?”

  “Baroque painters loved untidiness, even mess. Upheaval outside mirrors upheaval inside.”

  Cecilia knew so much. It could be annoying or, as now, interesting. The Virgin looked distracted, as if she had not absorbed the angel’s news enough to be worried. Of her approaching death, she seemed to be thinking, Well, all right, if you must. But not before I finish my book. Sofie sympathized. Not yet. Not when she was just getting started.

  As they were leaving the museum, a round, excited man recognized Sofie, and shook hands with her. He was perspiring freely and reminded Sofie of her old drawing teacher in Hallsberg.

  “Norberg,” he introduced himself. “Ministry of Culture. How marvellous to meet you here, under your husband’s magnificent…” He waved his arm upwards toward Nils’s painting. He never quite finished a sentence, but it was easy enough to follow him as he ricocheted from one idea to the next. He flew from the picture to the Olssons’ house, and “how much it means to people all over the…and the furnishings, how…and what a genius Olsson had been to mingle the old Swedish things with other, more…”

  Sofie cut through his burbling to introduce Cecilia. His eyes widened and he began at once to talk reverently about Lars’s Dancing at Midnight upstairs and about the work of the Folk School. “And it’s so important, isn’t it, just now, that we remember…as Swedes, we must stay true to the…”

  Sofie felt a prick of apprehension. She had a wispy memory of reading in the newspaper that Mr. Norberg was a strong supporter of the Third Reich’s cultural programme. He carried on. “And we must strengthen our national…you know, as your husbands did, rather than welcoming all these foreign…And it’s not in the city…but in Askebo, and in Siljevik, that we find our real Swedish heart.”

  He stopped abruptly and looked at Cecilia, perhaps only now remembering her citified, even arguably foreign origins. She looked pale and small, unlike the beating heart of Sweden that was to be found in the countryside.

  Cecilia stared back at him, impassive, while Sofie answered.

  “But surely Stockholm, too, is part of Sweden, Mr. Norberg, and a rather important part. And our heritage includes a long history of accepting other people, and of tolerance.”

  “Silly man,” Sofie said, after he said his effusive, unfinished farewells. Cecilia nodded dismissively.

  “Let’s go to the Grand Hotel for some coffee.”

  Leaving the museum, Cecilia thought, Sofie thinks I am taking that foolish man too seriously. But he speaks for many people in Sweden. Nothing would make me happier than to find myself wrong, and Sofie and Lisbeth right. But I do not think that will happen.

  As they made their way to the Grand Hotel, Cecilia saw people staring surreptitiously at Sofie. In the country, she still looked charming in her usual clothes. But here, in a city crowd of people wearing modern clothes, her long, loose dress was odd. Sofie did not notice. Her cheekbones were sharp and her thick eyebrows a tweedy mixture of brown and white, but she moved easily and looked happy.

  Sitting in the hotel’s old leather chairs, they toasted their work with the Grand’s good coffee.

  “I will say this only to you,” Cecilia said. “The thought of my name on the spine of Lars’s catalogue thrills me. I have to think hard and write very well, to be worthy of that.”

  Sofie nodded. For a bookworm, there was nothing better than a book with your name on it.

  She had told Cecilia about Mac Lawrie’s proposal in the winter, but now she told her in more detail and was rewarded with Cecilia’s distinctive, clattering laugh. Sofie joined her. The reason she too could laugh was that Mac had married the copper enamellist after all. An announcement had arrived, in the best Glasgow School typography, with a note from him. She sent him and his bride her warmest wishes and a tablecloth and napkins, woven and plaited in the Dalarna patterns he admired.

  “I did feel sorry for him,” Cecilia said, wiping away tears of laughter, “but I worried you would move away to Glasgow.”

  Putting her handkerchief back in her purse and treading cautiously, she asked, “Were you reluctant to start again? I mean, to live again with a man.”

  Sofie understood what she meant.

  “I don’t think that was the obstacle,” she said, “but there are other things, now, that I want to do more.”

  She thought about the unstable red dye the Japanese and Chinese connected with young, passionate love. Since she and Cecilia were on forbidden ground already, she dared to ask the unaskable.

  “Did you ever think of leaving Lars?”

  “Yes. But probably not until it was too late. By then I was so tied to his work, or to my work, which was easing his work. It was what younger women call a career, and you don’t walk away from a good career. And with Lars…there was always something that connected us, even when things were at their worst.”

  “I suppose we were too bourgeois to consider leaving a marriage,” Sofie said. “Think of Strindberg’s wives—Siri, Frida, and what was the name of the third one?”

  “Harriet Bosse.”

  “Harriet, yes. Separation, divorce, remarriage, living together without marriage—they did it all without any qualms.”

  “But they were bourgeois too!”

  “Not really. Siri was an aristocrat and Frida on the fringes of the aristocracy. Things were looser for them. Do you remember that Siri’s first husband came to the wedding when she married Strindberg? They took it all in stride, in a way we couldn’t have. And Harriet Bosse was an actress.”

  An actress, that was different. They fell silent.

  “What about you? Were you ever tempted to leave Nils?”

  “He needed me too much.” That was true, but it sounded martyred. And not quite right. “And I loved him, sometimes as a husband, sometimes as a child, sometimes as a marvellous painter. I never could have abandoned any of those people.”

  “Sometimes I still wonder”—this was harder for Cecilia to say than anything so far—“if my family’s money was not an attraction for Lars.”

  Sofie lowered her cup.

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t a drawback! For either of us. I can’t imagine a painter who wouldn’t prefer to have a wife with some money. Not that they ever needed our money, as it turned out.”

  Well
then, that was all right. Cecilia had fretted about this for so long, and Sofie had erased it so simply. Why hadn’t she mentioned it earlier?

  Sofie added, “And it didn’t mean they didn’t love us.”

  “In their way.”

  After a pause, Sofie nodded.

  “Yes, in their way.”

  So. If you lived long enough, Sofie thought, these astonishing conversations were possible. It was something she would never have dreamed of when they had begun to know each other.

  Love, the bodily love they had each had for their husbands, and which Cecilia had for Lisbeth, felt like fate. It could distract you, or decide you on a course that might or might not be right. Sofie remembered hesitating in Grez, when she had first seen Nils’s need. It was the body that had convinced her to accept him. That kind of love had an element of destiny. The love of friendship, on the other hand, felt more like a choice.

  * * *

  —

  On the train to Siljevik, Cecilia thought back to the painting of the Virgin’s death. It reminded her of the painting of another Annunciation, the one that had come into her head when she and Lars had had that scene in Paris about the contraceptive in his inner pocket. Those two serious Jewish girls—the Virgin, who spilled her sewing at the Angel Gabriel’s news, and Cecilia, whose life had also turned upside down—had been so horrified. How hard it was now to summon all that racking feeling.

  Unlike Gabriel with his terrifying wings, the motherly angel announcing the Virgin’s death in this afternoon’s painting had looked encouraging, as if she were saying, “Trust me. It won’t be so bad.” Still, the Virgin seemed reluctant, or maybe, as Sofie said, she hadn’t taken it in yet.

  Cecilia was like the Virgin. She wasn’t ready, either.

  Dr. Persson had tried to be reassuring, saying that, with a rest in the afternoon and perhaps less salt in her diet, she might be fine for some time. In her own mind, at the very least, she needed to finish the catalogue. But really, that was not enough. Although Lisbeth was devoted to Lars’s work, Cecilia needed to be there to rein her in. No, she had that wrong: it was because Lisbeth was so devoted that Cecilia needed to rein her in.

  The painting had put her in a retrospective mood.

  Dear Sofie,

  Once again I turn to the question you asked me in your thank-you note more than thirty years ago: Do I feel surprised at how my life has turned out? Some parts of my life seemed to have been there all along—from the small girl bent on classifying her parents’ art to the woman in her sixties trying to do justice to Lars with the catalogue. But, of course, other things surprised me greatly. When Lars and I set out for Paris after our wedding, I thought I had come to the end of the novel. I never suspected that the hard part of the story was still to come. And not only the hard part, but the most surprising thing of all. Lisbeth. The friend and the beloved.

  She broke off there, because the train was nearing the Siljevik station. And this was the merest outline of what she wanted to say. She needed to fill it in and she would, as soon as she finished the catalogue. It was time to answer Sofie’s question properly.

  Chapter Sixty

  SEPTEMBER 1935

  SOFIE HAD TAKEN a cab to Tilda’s house from her coffee with Cecilia. Before the party—and now she was glad she had come, because Mikael really was a sweet boy, and it was an efficient way to see all the family at once—she wrote a note.

  Stockholm, 6 September 1935

  Dearest Cecilia,

  You have been very patient with your tortoise of a friend. I am finally ready. Please come and see my work. I will be very glad of your opinion.

  Always yours with love,

  Sofie

  A week later, Cecilia came to Askebo. She had hired a man to drive her, rather than taking the train as usual, explaining to a surprised Sofie that it was easier than changing trains in Rattvik.

  “I hired this fellow last week,” she said, walking with Sofie from the automobile to the house, “when I went to see Miss Helmersen in Falun, and it worked well.” She knew that would shock Sofie, so she said it matter-of-factly.

  “You went to see Miss Helmersen?”

  “Yes. I’m quite impressed with her business sense. I’ve been encouraging her to look for larger premises and to hire a full-time assistant to do the hand-colouring in her pictures. She shouldn’t be wasting her time with that. I plan to lend her some money for the higher rent she will incur—as an investment, of course.”

  Of course. So the visit to the studio in Falun had not been a failure, even if Cecilia was still blind to Miss Helmersen’s artistry. It was more than a year since Sofie had introduced them, and how typical of Cecilia to keep her patronage a secret until now. Sofie beamed at her, but Cecilia was intent on getting to the house. She was in a terrible rush to finish the catalogue, she said, and she did seem very hurried, even flustered, until Sofie took her into the workshop.

  Then she was all concentration, and much more excited than the children had been. When something moved her, she turned to Sofie and raised her eyebrows in conspiratorial joy, as if she had been let in on a great secret. She noticed the wilted piece of paper Sofie had pinned up by the easel, and read the quotation.

  “‘Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers…’”

  Cecilia stopped. “Is that from…?” She tried to remember.

  “To the Lighthouse,” Sofie said. “The painter.”

  “Yes, of course! Miss Briscoe.”

  When she had seen everything, Cecilia took both of Sofie’s hands in hers and pumped them.

  Then she said, “Could you get me a chair?”

  “Yes, of course,” Sofie said. “Are you tired?”

  “No. But I’d like to sit here, in the centre, where I can see them all at once.”

  Once she was seated and had caught her breath and looked again, she said, “I think you want to paint in oils.”

  This had never occurred to Sofie, although painting in watercolours had never been a deliberate choice. It had begun as a question of thrift, since Nils had painted in watercolours and she used the paints he had left. Why would she want to paint in oils?

  “Because they would suit you. Watercolours demand that you know from the start where you’re going and work fast, with no regrets. Nils was made for the short dash of watercolours. You are different. You want to plunge in without planning—remember how weaving frustrated you when you began it?—but you doubt yourself, you change your mind, you want to double back, you want the possibility of reworking and thinking as you go along. That is what you can have with oils.”

  It was one of those ideas that made sense as soon as Sofie heard it. She had lived so many years with an artist who painted in watercolours that it was almost as if she had forgotten the alternatives. She still remembered when leaving oils for watercolours had been a new and progressive choice, but painting in oil did not mean that she would return to painting the trial of Socrates or any other of Professor Malmstrom’s ideas. She would paint her skies and clouds, but in her own way.

  “And now, my dear,” said Cecilia, using the chair’s arms to support herself as she stood, “I must go.”

  “But you came all the way from Siljevik, and we haven’t had a proper visit! And Anna has made one of her special plum cakes in your honour.”

  “Tell Anna I am sorry to miss her famous plum cake. But I must get back to work.”

  “But we have set up a table by the river, where the mums are thriving. We could eat our cake there, and you would have a little rest before the journey home.”

  “And why would I need to rest before riding in a comfortable automobile?” Cecilia asked, almost sharply. At the same time, something about Sofie’s entreaty took her back to the turn of the century and another pastry, another view. On Sofie’s first visit to Siljevik, on the verandah facing the garden, they had made such
stilted conversation over cinnamon buns.

  Cecilia smiled at her and raised her eyebrows again in that conspiratorial way.

  “But this has been a thrilling visit.”

  Chapter Sixty-one

  SEPTEMBER 1935

  AT MATTSSON AND Berg’s Fine Paints in Stockholm, Sofie found all the colour in the world neatly stacked on dark wooden shelves. It had been forty years since she had bought oil paints and now even the names thrilled her—Prussian Blue, Viridian Green, Yellow Ochre. As for the reds, she was incapable of choosing among Venetian Red, Alizarin Crimson, Winsor Red, Permanent Carmine and Quinocridone Red. She wanted them all, and she bought most of them.

  A week later, still intoxicated by the riches at her disposal, she stood in front of a painting in the workshop. It needed more red—Permanent Carmine this time—but she was not sure where.

  She was puzzling about that when Lisbeth called with the news that Cecilia had died.

  That evening, a man driving Lisbeth’s Volvo arrived at Sofie’s house with a letter. He expressed his condolences, handed the letter to Sofie and left.

  Siljevik, 20 September 1935

  Dear Sofie,

  For some time we have avoided calling each other by first names or last names, but now I think we must be Sofie and Lisbeth. At the very least, Cecilia would have wanted it.