Ida Brandt (11 page)

Sofie continued to weep; she was thinking of her own situation.

“Aye, that’s it,” she said. “That’s it, but some people find it easier to get into bed than others.”

Ida sat looking into the lamp; she was so used to Sofie’s confidences. Then suddenly, in a completely different voice, Sofie said:

“You’ll have to get some money this evening. We haven’t got a penny in the place.”

“Again,” said Ida.

“When we never dare say what we’ re buying…and we have to kid your mother that we’ re having everything given to us…”

Ida sat silent for a moment. Then she closed the book.

“Yes,” she said. “Then it’s best we lock up.”

Ida locked the door and put the flowers down on the floor and spread the white sheets over all the chairs. There were sounds of a lot of people talking down there in the street…it was folk going home from the theatre.

Hm, how handsome that man had been who played Palle – that evening when she had been there with Olivia – so slim and dark.

She could always see the actors’ faces for such a long time afterwards – and their smiles – and how they walked.

He had had such beautiful teeth when he smiled.

Ida tiptoed in. She undressed quietly, listening to her mother’s breathing. She was fast asleep now.

Ida lay in her bed and, quite gently, beneath the blanket, she slipped her hand in under her mother’s pillow, where her purse lay. In the darkness she took a couple of kroner coins and put the purse back.

Her mother never kept a check on the small coins.

Everything was quite quiet now; her mother’s groaning was the only sound to be heard in the house. Ida hid the two coins in her stocking.

∞∞∞

Ida was in the pea bed at Ludvigsbakke; she and Schrøder were picking peas and putting them in a large container.

“There,” said Schrøder. “It just struck nine.”

She had seen Mrs von Eichbaum, stiff and straight, turn into the path along the pea bed. After Aix-les-Bains, Mrs von Eichbaum was following a course of treatment at Ludvigsbakke, and she followed instructions to the letter.

She came along the path with precise steps, as though she were counting them, past the bed of peas.

“Ah, it’s little Brandt,” she said without stopping. It was as though, in the most kindly way, she discovered Ida afresh each time she saw her.

“Hmm,” said Schrøder as she watched her go. “She ought to see about getting that little lad of hers up of a morning. God knows what she’s going to make of him now.”

It was a fortnight since Karl von Eichbaum had failed for the second time to get into the Zurich Polytechnic, and now he was resting.

“But he’s good looking,” said Schrøder.

It was quite quiet in the garden, and each peapod could be heard as it fell into the container, while the white butterflies flew in and out among the vines.

“The air is so lovely,” said Ida.

“Ugh, it’s going to be hot and I have to stir the mince for the rissoles.”

Schrøder was always mixing mince. His Lordship, who was almost ninety years old, could hardly eat anything else. There would soon not be a tooth left in the house, said Schrøder. She herself had acquired six new front teeth during the spring, something that imparted a taut appearance to her mouth – otherwise she was unchanged; and on days when she had most to do, the six teeth came no further than to the glass in which they were kept.

“But I’m not going to have him anywhere where there are young girls,” said Schrøder, continuing with the subject of Eichbaum. “He’s the sort that has his eyes all over a girl.” Schrøder probably noticed how the girls swung their hips when Eichbaum set foot in the kitchen.

“I think he has such kind eyes,” said Ida.

There was suddenly a chorus of children’s voices screaming and laughing down by the pond.

“Hm,” said Schrøder. “Now we’ll have to start drying sailor suits again.”

It was all the Falkenberg children who were wading in the pond, and Mrs Falkenberg, née With, came down the path – she had to “keep an eye on the children”.

“Oh, are you here?” she said (speaking in a somewhat faint, rather outdatedly-girlish voice). “Isn’t it lovely here in the sun!”

She seated herself on Schrøder’s kitchen stool with her hands in her lap – she always looked as though her wrists were tired.

“Falkenberg is not coming this year,” she said.

“Is he not?”

“No, he has written to say that there are some reports.” She shrugged her pointed shoulders in her dressing gown; Mrs Falkenberg had actually acquired a child-like figure again by presenting five children to Captain Falkenberg, Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog.

“I don’t understand these things,” she said. “It is his duty.”

“Yes,” said Schrøder. “A man has so many things to think about.”

“Yes,” Mrs Falkenberg nodded. There was an expression in her eyes as though she was sitting there looking in wonder for something that had disappeared:

“They have
their
problems as well.”

There were sounds of laughing and shouting from down by the pond and then one boy started to cry.

“That’s Edvard,” said Mrs Falkenberg, making as though to get up.

“I’ll go,” said Ida, and she rose.

“Oh yes, Ida dear…would you…” And Mrs Falkenberg remained seated.

Schrøder sat down on Ida’s kitchen stool and continued to shell the peas, while Mrs Falkenberg looked on through her pretty eyes.

“Oh, so you have a lot to think about,” she said, with her eyes on Schrøder’s hands. “Yes, it must be lovely to be strong…”

Ida returned: it was nothing – they were merely quarrelling over the barge.

“Was Erik there?” asked Mrs Falkenberg.

“No, Mrs Falkenberg, I didn’t see him.”

“Hm,” Mrs Falkenberg shook her head. “Heaven knows what that boy gets up to…”

Erik was a gangly seventeen-year-old who spent his holiday in some loft or other surrounded by modern novels and who, on leaving the heated hiding-places where he spent his time, always looked as though the light hurt his eyes.

Mrs Falkenberg continued to sit there, lost in the sunshine.

“Oh dear,” she said, “It’s a funny thing to have children. It’s lovely while they are small but then they have to be sent to school…”

As long as the children were small, Mrs Falkenberg spent the entire day singing with them, but once they went to school it was as though the big door closed behind them.”

“It is not easy to keep up with them,” she said.

“No, they all go their own way,” said Schrøder. “Get hold of this now.”

She took one end of the tray and Ida the other and they went.

Mrs Falkenberg stayed where she was. She could stay like this for hours sitting in the sunshine, looking up in the air as though she were staring up into some enormous holes into which everything in life disappeared.

Miss Rosenfeld was reading up on the veranda at the end of the house.

She raised her head and nodded to Ida and Schrøder before continuing.

As Schrøder and Ida entered the kitchen, Karl von Eichbaum put his head in through the other door. “I would like a cup of tea, Schrøder,” he said and Schrøder, putting down the peas, murmured something to the effect that there was presumably going to be tea with the meal. But Ida prepared a tray of tea and biscuits and took it out to von Eichbaum, who lay stretched out on the lawn.

“You are always so kind,” he said – he had his own straightforward and polite way of speaking to Ida – and he turned over on to his stomach, with his head over his tea.

“Thank you,” he said.

Ida offered him the biscuits.

“Is it Wednesday today?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Ugh,” said Eichbaum, stirring his tea. “Then I’ve got another three weeks…and…” – he looked up at her – “God knows what’s coming then.”

Karl von Eichbaum turned over on to his back again.

“No, it’s incredible,” he said.

He continued to stare into the sunshine and presumably reflect on “what was coming then”.

Ida gave a hand in the kitchen. She was thinking of Karl von Eichbaum: there was nobody he could look to, not really. He used to have Herman Reck…but now he, too, had settled down, in Aalborg, and was no longer at home.

Ida suddenly smiled.

She thought of the time when Karl and Herman were boys and Karl borrowed her few coins to buy cigarettes in Brædstrup.

Karl always used to go in through the window into Schrøder’s room after dinner:

“Have you any small change?” he would whisper saucily.

With the help of a knitting needle they would wheedle a few coins out of the piggy bank.

“Thanks,” he would whisper before jumping out through the window again.

But on one occasion, when he was a little older, he had also taken four kroner wrapped in paper and intended for tips that he found lying on the bottom of her suitcase…and on that occasion she had wept, for now she had nothing to use as tips when she travelled anywhere.

There was a knock on the ceiling. It was His Lordship, knocking from upstairs in “Her Ladyship’s sitting room”; he could no longer get up from his chair and so he called for help by knocking with his stick.

“Oh, is it you, Ida dear,” he said. “Are they all out?”

“Yes, Your Lordship.”

All visitors to Ludvigsbakke were sent out to get some fresh air.

“Fresh air is good for young people,” said His Lordship, “so that they can feel their blood flowing. Young people must have big lungs and strong hearts.”

He nodded.

“Would you just open the doors.”

Ida opened the doors through the sun-drenched rooms. “Thank you,” said His Lordship. Now, seated in Her Ladyship’s chair, he could sit in peace and look through all the light-filled rooms he had built and in which he had lived.

He turned his head towards the window; he could see into the bailiff’s garden through the opening.

“
They
are a colourful crowd,” he said with a nod.

Four ladies dressed in an array of colours were running around on Reck’s croquet lawn together with three young men with their trousers rolled up.

“They are not like your father’s people, Ida,” he said.

“Well, there we are.” He turned his head again towards his tranquil rooms: “You see so many things when you grow old.”

“But,” said the old man, “the world witnesses a great deal of madness, my girl, and yet it survives.”

Ida, too, remained there, looking out across the garden towards the bailiff’s wing. She so rarely went there now: what a lot of trees they were felling every year…there were so few of the old trees left.

“And how are things at home?” asked His Lordship.

“It is kind of you to ask, but I have not had a letter recently,” said Ida.

“Oh, well.”

His Lordship sat there in silence, pondering like someone who has lived a long time.

Ida returned to the kitchen, but Schrøder sent her away.

“You’ re on holiday, my girl,” she said. “Go out and get some fresh air. It’s so hot in here that you need to take your clothes off.”

Schrøder was mixing the mince, and she had taken hers off.

Ida went. She intended to go over to the Lunds. But she stopped out on the main steps: a carriage was just leaving the Home Farm. It was all the children, who were going bathing. The carriage looked like a white nest full of chickens in the sun.

Then the voices moved away, and all was quiet again. Lawn and fields with the cows resting on them like lazy patches, and the houses in Brædstrup – everything seemed to be dozing in the sunlight.

“It is lovely here today,” said Miss Rosenfeld, who was walking along slowly, with her book under her arm.

They stood beside each other on the steps.

“Just look how straight the smoke is,” said Miss Rosenfeld.

Smoke was rising from the houses in Brædstrup, slowly and straight like pale blue torches in the pale blue air.

Ida and Miss Rosenfeld rarely had much to say to each other. But they often stood together in this way for a short time, looking at the same things. Miss Rosenfeld fetched Ida when she wanted to go for a walk, especially when it had been raining and the trees were still dripping – then they went along together, without saying much, on the damp paths, for a long time.

Ida went down through the garden – she did not really like the road past the “wing” – and she turned in on the path through the forest. The birds were no longer singing, and the only sound she heard was that of her own steps on the soft ground.

At the forester’s house, old Lucy was sitting in front of the kitchen door peeling potatoes, and the watchdog, which knew Ida, wagged its tail in front of its kennel.

“Is there anyone at home, Lucie?”

Lucie raised her palsied head.

“They are inside,” she said and then sat there and said no more.

All the doors in the house were open and the sun shone on the floors and the well worn furniture. Mrs Lund was sitting in the hall in a basket chair, surrounded by linen, her large glasses on her small face.

“Oh, is it you, dear,” she said. “I’m mending sheets, love…We wash and we mend, you know…with all these visitors. But they’ re welcome, they really are…Oh, could you just give me a hand…”

Ida gave her a hand and threaded needles while thinking how Mrs Lund’s hand had really started to shake.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs Lund as she pored over the sheets, for there was hole after hole in them. “I think these must be the oldest ones. But during the holidays it’s as though they still have a bit of their old home dear, and who knows how long it will go on.”

“The children are in the garden,” she said and set about her sewing again.

They could hear that; a chorus of bright voices rang out down there. There were a lot of flies buzzing around in the sitting room, and the whitewashed ceiling bore clear traces of where they had been.

“O dear, no,” Mrs Lund went on: “His Lordship is failing…and who knows what is going to happen then?”

Ida did not know why she had suddenly had the same thought. But she said:

“But the forests will still be there, Mrs Lund.”

“Oh yes, dear, but it will be others felling the trees.”