The House by the Fjord (24 page)

I know he is annoyed with himself for not having insisted at the time that we stay longer in Geiranger, where we could have enjoyed ourselves just as fully, but I have promised him that we shall make a return trip before long and then he will be able to paint the views that still linger in his mind. This time I am determined that I shall appear in more detail. Meanwhile, he has had a studio built that stands a little higher up the mountainside where he can paint undisturbed
.

It had soon become clear to Anna in the next few pages that the marriage, although a love match, was a stormy relationship. They quarrelled over many things and made peace again by making love wherever they happened to be, whether it was in the mountains or at the house, and once in the snow, making an indentation that remained until the next snowfall.

Ingrid was to become Magnus's model for many of his paintings. He painted her both nude and clothed, at work in the house or in some local terrain, and once when she was tending her two beloved sheep. One day he made her sit so near the waterfall, wanting to capture the mist of spray around her, that inevitably her garments became damp and cold.

It was probably due in some part to her earlier illness having left her with a weakness in her chest that she caught a chill from sitting so near the waterfall and an inflammation went to her lungs, which then developed into pneumonia. She was seriously ill and Magnus was in a panic that he would lose her. Marie came forward to care for her again, with the aid of a retired nurse from the valley. Eventually, Ingrid began to recover, although her convalescence was likely to take some time. Privately, Marie believed that she and the nurse had saved Ingrid's life by sponging her down with cool water and constantly changing cold compresses on her forehead when the fever was at its height.

‘Ingrid is going to take much longer to recover her strength than last time she was ill,' Marie said coldly to Magnus. ‘So when she is well again, you'll not make her sit by the waterfall or anywhere else that could be dangerous to her health.'

‘No, I promise you!' he vowed, his eyes still stark.

In the days that followed, when Ingrid was still lying weakly in bed, Magnus tried to think what he could do to make amends for being the cause of her illness. Then he remembered her love of rosemaling and immediately knew what he would do. A carpenter made him an easily erected platform on trestles and, lying on it, he began a great task, which was to cover the whole ceiling of the large living room with the old traditional designs. He thought to himself that he was like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, except that he did not put himself in the same category.

On the day that he carried Ingrid downstairs at the beginning of her convalescence, she looked up in amazement at the ceiling, and tears of joy trickled down her cheeks at what he had done for her. She put the palm of her hand against his face as he lowered her into a chair before tucking a rug over her knees.

‘Now this is truly a house of beauty!' she said quietly, her weakened voice catching emotionally in her throat. ‘I'm going to live the rest of my life under a bower of roses!'

When she was fully recovered and Magnus felt able to leave her again, he selected some of his paintings and took them with him to Bergen, travelling from the nearby port of Alesund on the
hurtigruten
, which was the coastal steamer service that plied the length of the west coast. He had given the first of the many paintings in which Ingrid featured the title
The Quiet Woman
, which was the very reverse of her nature. It was a private joke, which they both shared, she being only too aware that her exuberance was overwhelming at times. He kept to this secret joke in all subsequent paintings of her, never anticipating that over the years these
Quiet Woman
works of art would become extremely collectable and eventually fetch astronomically high prices at the world's auction houses, even when she was sometimes reduced again to a speck of oil paint.

She never did get back to Geiranger with him. When a trip was all arranged for them to travel by coastal steamer to the port of call at the village, she found that she was pregnant for the first time and so she sent him off to paint on his own. When he had captured on canvas all he wanted from Geiranger, he had gone direct to Bergen and the gallery that sold his work, making it a long time before he returned home.

Ingrid soon began to hate the times when he was away. Early in their marriage, she had made two trips to Bergen with him, mainly to see his rooms and his studio, but he was so busy during their stay that she hardly saw him while she was there. Although she walked all over Bergen, lingered in the fish market, went to a service in the ancient Stav Church and managed to get tickets for herself and Magnus to hear Ole Bull give a violin recital, she was soon impatient to be home again. What finally made her decide never to go to Bergen again was that she was horribly seasick on both voyages almost as soon as she stepped on to the coastal steamer's deck.

She gave birth to a fine son in the summer when she was nineteen. It took place the day before Magnus returned from one of his Bergen visits. She had been attended in her labour by Marie, who was always on hand in any kind of crisis, and also the local midwife. Before the birth, Ingrid had tried to talk to Magnus about a choice of names for their child, but when he had a project on his mind, or a painting that was not going exactly as he wished, he scarcely listened to what others were saying, completely preoccupied. Ingrid finally made the decision by herself. If the baby should be a boy, he would be called Haakon after her late father, and also this had been the name of a brave Viking king, which she thought was also in its favour.

When Marie heard Magnus dismounting from his horse upon his arrival home, she hurried to tell him the good news.

‘Your son has arrived!' she announced happily.

He gave a shout of joy and rushed upstairs to kiss Ingrid heartily, and then went to the cradle and pick up his child. He loved his son on sight, carrying him around the room while she sat back against her pillow and watched him contentedly. She knew him so well that after telling him her choice of the baby's name she could see that he would have liked his firstborn to be named after him. So on the day of the christening their first offspring became Magnus-Haakon.

In order not to create any confusion, the child was always addressed or spoken of by his full name. He grew strong and fearless, climbing the mountains at an early age with or without his parents, and becoming a fast skier of champion potential on the slopes before he was twelve years old. By then he had a sister, named Liv, who was born a year after him. Emma arrived a little too soon and spent her first three months in hospital, but she thrived and Ingrid always had an especially soft spot for her. Nils, unexpectedly copperhaired, was next to arrive and brought his own sense of fun into the family. Following him was Anders, who was to become a keen sportsman. Then came the twins, Christofer and Erik, who had arrived just eighteen months later. Then came Kurt, who even as a toddler hero-worshipped the twins, always following after them whenever possible.

Ingrid had always ignored the discomfort of her pregnancies, thinking only of the new baby she would love as she loved the others she had borne, but now it seemed as if her family was complete. Yet a surprise was still in store for her, and out of the most difficult birth of all she had endured another daughter came into the family, who was named Sonja. She loved music from an early age, attemtping to sing when she was still very little.

Magnus-Haakon, as the eldest, always felt himself to be in charge of his siblings and intervened swiftly if any one of them was in trouble. He was particularly good with the twins, who would never have been parted in their play or on any expedition if he had not made them carry out separate tasks.

‘Now listen to me, Christofer and Erik,' he said sternly to them when they were still very young. ‘We are a family and we all belong to one another. You two must share yourselves with the rest of us and not go off on your own to play.'

His death in a terrible fall, trying to save one of the twins stuck behind a high crag, shocked the whole valley and devastated his parents. At times of joy and sorrow, all of the farming families in the valley became as one family. So many came to the funeral that not all could be accommodated in the little church and the crowd of mourners in their best black clothes gathered outside in the rain. They parted to allow an avenue to form when the casket was borne from the church to its resting place. Anna felt tears come into her eyes as she read the account of the tragedy, and Ingrid's own grief was marked on the page in tear stains that had smudged her ink. She had also drawn a little diagram, showing where in the churchyard her seventeen-year-old son was lying at peace.

By this time, art dealers had long since discovered where Magnus lived and frequently toiled up the slope to his studio, hoping to get the next
Quiet Woman
painting before anyone else. Norwegians were drawn strongly to the new school of painting created by the French Impressionists, many buyers already influenced by the work of their own Norwegian artists, Munch and the sculptor Gustav Vigeland. Magnus's paintings became even more in demand. Always the art dealers took away whatever paintings he had done, not knowing there were a good number that he kept out of their sight. These were mostly of his children, as well as his own favourite paintings of Ingrid, which were displayed in rooms where the dealers never entered, for he always received them in his studio.

As Magnus became more and more prosperous, he began to talk of buying a fine house in Bergen and keeping the old house for holidays. It led to a quarrel with Ingrid of such magnitude that it almost tore them apart. He went off to Bergen in a fury and did not reappear for eleven weeks, during which time she felt she must surely die of heartache. When she saw him coming up the slope again, she ran to meet him. Then they fell into each other's arms.

While Magnus had been away, he had purchased a fine house, mainly as an investment, and had transferred his Bergen studio there, but he was never to live in it beyond a few weeks at a time and then it was entirely for business. He and Ingrid were both satisfied with the compromise.

Ingrid had recorded meticulously the names of her children, their weight at birth, their following accomplishments, as well as their scholarly progress at the little school run by a retired clergyman and his wife in their own home, before they went on to a bigger school nearby. She had also sketched the faces of each of her children. It was clear to Anna that these drawings portrayed a distinct likeness of each child and she wondered if Magnus had ever known that his wife had considerable talent.

Most of what followed in the journal were accounts of family events, including mountain trips and skiing outings, picnics and other social activities, a highlight being when all the Harvik children were in a group photograph taken outside the house by a friend who was a professional photographer. It was taken shortly before Magnus-Haakon's fatal fall, and after the tragedy Ingrid mentioned in her journal that the photograph had been hung in the living room where Magnus-Haakon would always be within the family circle.

Magnus was away when, during the school summer holiday, the children talked about a bear they had named Erik the Red after a Viking king, because although he was dark-brown the bright summer sun gave his fur a reddish tinge. Ingrid paid little attention to their chatter about the bear as they sat for their meals, for they were imaginative children and were always thinking up new games. There had not been bears in the local forests for some years. It was more of a concern to her that a wolf had slain several sheep. She was keeping Klara and Ida safely penned in for the time being and the children had been instructed to keep near the house.

Then one day, when the children were out playing and the front door stood open for a cooling breeze, Ingrid came from the kitchen to see a brown bear on the threshold, looking into the room. She went cold with horror to think that the children had been at the animal's mercy and their talk of a bear had not sprung from their imagination. It was a young bear, but this was the slayer of the unfortunate sheep. Clearly it was making up its mind about entering, probably lured by the aroma of food, and Ingrid backed slowly away into the kitchen until she could just reach out to where a tin tray lay on a cupboard by the door. Seizing it, she sprang back into the living room and with her fist she banged the tray and shouted as she ran forward to confront the bear.

Startled, it backed away and turned tail, but at the same time there came a distant clamour from the valley. The bear was to face a still more bewildering noise as all but the old and infirm were coming to chase it back over the mountains, hopefully over the border into the forests of Sweden from which it had probably come. Cooking-pot lids were being crashed together, tin trays banged and whistles blown, and the local musicians were thundering drums and playing trumpets. Some field guns were fired, but only into the air to add to the noise. Nobody aimed at the fleeing bear. There was an inborn respect for wild life and unnecessary killing was not to be considered except in an emergency.

Ingrid gathered in her children and told them they must always report to her if they saw any more bears in the future, as well as wolves or wolverines.

It was at that point sleep began to overtake Anna. She put aside the journal and it seemed as if it was only a moment before she opened her eyes to a brilliant day, the very one during which she would enter Ingrid's domain for the first time.

Sixteen

Alex arrived at Steffan's house in good time to catch the ferry. Anna was waiting in the porch and went lightly down the steps to slide into the car.

‘I'm excited,' she said as they drove away, while Gudrun waved good wishes for their outing from the window. ‘But I'm full of trepidation too. Suppose Ingrid does not like me?'