The Lily Pond (7 page)

Stephie is seized by a sudden longing to be Alice’s friend. Now they have something else in common, a shared secret.

“I promise …,” she begins, but Alice has already turned her back on Stephie and walked off in the other direction.

Sven has breakfast in the kitchen with Stephie. Elna makes them oatmeal and prepares Sven’s lunch sandwiches. Stephie makes her own.

The doctor has coffee in the library before going to his office. His wife is almost always still in bed when Sven and Stephie leave for school. Sometimes, though, while they’re eating, a loud bell rings and the number-five window on the panel by the door pops open. When that happens, Elna hurries to make up Mrs. Söderberg’s breakfast tray.

The panel by the door is there to tell Elna what room the person is ringing from. Each room has its own button and its own number, which shows up in the kitchen when the bell rings. Stephie’s room is number eight, but there is never any question of her ringing the bell. As Elna says,
those bells are for the master and mistress. If Stephie wants Elna, she’s supposed to go find her in the kitchen.

Stephie sees very little of Mrs. Söderberg and even less of the doctor. Some afternoons Mrs. Söderberg knocks on Stephie’s bedroom door to ask if she’s all right, and whether things are going well at school. But she never comes into the room; she stands in the doorway, as if she just happened to be passing.

About once a week Stephie is invited to the dining room for dinner. The rest of the time she eats in the kitchen with Elna. Sven thinks Stephie ought to be allowed to have dinner with the family all the time. He and his mother have quarreled about it.

Stephie doesn’t really think it matters. Dinners with the doctor and his wife are stiff and formal and make Stephie feel bashful. When Sven’s parents are around, she and Sven can’t talk the way they usually do. She actually prefers sitting in the kitchen with Elna, at least on the days when Elna’s in a good mood.

One afternoon Mrs. Söderberg knocks on Stephie’s door. Stephie recognizes her knock, short and emphatic:
tap, tap, tap
. Elna knocks only once and then waits for a bit before knocking again, while Sven usually pounds out the rhythm of one of the swing melodies he plays in the evenings on the little portable Victrola in his room.

“Come in.”

Mrs. Söderberg opens the door. “How is our little Stephie faring?” she asks.

“Fine, thank you.”

“How is school?”

“Just fine.”

That’s usually the end of the conversation, but today Mrs. Söderberg doesn’t leave.

“Incidentally, Stephie, we’re having a dinner party on Saturday.”

“Yes?” Stephie asks hesitantly. “I was thinking … I was planning to go home this weekend. I’ve been here for a month already.”

“I expect that could wait,” Mrs. Söderberg says, not even formulating her remark as a question. “We’d like so much for our friends to meet you, Stephie dear.”

Stephie considers. She was really looking forward to going out to the island for the weekend. She’s already phoned Aunt Märta to say she’ll be coming, and her timing is good, since Uncle Evert is going to be spending both Saturday and Sunday in port. Fishermen can’t let the days of the week govern their work.

Aunt Märta has surely told Nellie she’ll be coming. And Vera’s expecting her as well.…

But a real dinner party! She hasn’t been to one in several years. A white tablecloth, folded napkins, candlelight, and floral centerpieces. Fine food, and wine gleaming in the grown-ups’ glasses. Like in the old days, when Mamma and Papa had people to dinner.

“Yes,” she hears herself say. “It can wait another week.”

She phones Aunt Märta to say that she has to spend the
weekend in Göteborg. If Aunt Märta is disappointed, she doesn’t let on.

The company is coming at seven o’clock, Elna tells Stephie. Early Saturday morning the cook arrives, and even before Stephie and Sven have left for their half-day of school, she and Elna are squabbling in the kitchen. Elna rushes out of the room, her face flushed.

When Stephie comes home, calm reigns in the kitchen. Elna asks her to help set the large mahogany table. They begin by inserting an extra leaf. Then they lay a soft felt protective cloth on the table and cover it with the shiny, ironed damask tablecloth, with its pattern of vines and bunches of grapes. Elna sets out two branched silver candleholders and a crystal vase that will later hold flowers on the table.

Stephie starts getting ready in good time. She puts on her flowery dress, the one Aunt Märta made for the final day of school last spring, and brushes her hair until it’s shiny and smooth. She spits on her fingertips and curls her eyelashes, then pinches her cheeks to give them some color.

Mrs. Söderberg knocks while Stephie is standing in front of the mirror. She turns around, hoping for a compliment on her dress. Looking displeased, the doctor’s wife raises her eyebrows and sighs.

“Don’t you have a dark, solid-color dress?” she asks.

Clearly Stephie doesn’t look right.

Mrs. Söderberg walks decisively over to the closet and searches through Stephie’s clothes. That doesn’t take long,
and she obviously doesn’t see the kind of dress she is hoping to find.

“Just a moment,” she says, leaving the room.

She returns shortly with a dress on a hanger. It’s a woolen one, so dark blue it looks almost black, long-sleeved and with a little white collar.

“This,” she says, “will do, I think. Try it on!”

She stands just inside the doorway as Stephie wriggles her way out of her dress from the island and pulls the dark blue one over her head. Mrs. Söderberg helps her with the clasps at the neck and cuffs. Taking a step or two back, she surveys the results.

“Perfect!” she exclaims. “Elna has an apron for you in the kitchen.”

“Apron?”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Söderberg. “For serving. I did say, didn’t I, that I want you to help serve the meal? Don’t worry, it’s not difficult. Elna will tell you exactly what to do.”

Stephie’s eyes burn with humiliation. She hasn’t been invited to this dinner party as a guest; she’s expected to be a serving girl in an itchy woolen dress that is much too heavy for this time of year. She feels like tearing the dress off and shutting herself in her room for the evening. But she doesn’t. At six-thirty she’s in the kitchen, where the cook has pointedly scattered dirty utensils for Elna to pick up and wash. Elna is muttering.

Stephie gets a little white apron to tie around her waist,
and Elna helps her pin a protective bib over the front of her dress. She’s wearing the same getup herself, with a starched white embroidered band in her hair. Fortunately there isn’t a second one for Stephie.

The guests arrive and are served sherry in the living room. Elna carries the glasses on a silver tray. When Mrs. Söderberg has clapped to get everyone’s attention and has bid them all welcome, she tells them that dinner is served in the dining room. Now Stephie must collect the empty sherry glasses and carry them back to the kitchen. She tries to make herself as invisible as possible, and apparently no one notices her. Not even Sven, who’s guiding an elderly woman by the elbow into the dining room.

Head bowed, Stephie serves the hors d’oeuvres, little sandwiches she offers from the right, as Elna has repeatedly instructed her: “Plates from the right, platters from the left!”

When she gets to Sven, she expects him to speak to her, but he continues his conversation with the elderly lady next to him, saying no more to Stephie than a simple “thank you.”

Hors d’oeuvres, soup, main course, and dessert. Sherry, Madeira, red wine, and port. Gold-rimmed plates, silver cutlery, and crystal wineglasses.

Elna and Stephie do all the carrying in and out while the guests eat and chat.

“Yes, please, just a little more.”

“No thank you, I’ve had quite enough.”

As dessert is being served, Mrs. Söderberg claps everyone
to attention once more. Stephie is pouring liqueur into one of the ladies’ glasses.

“The hostess doesn’t normally give a speech,” Mrs. Söderberg says, “but I would very much like to introduce someone. This is little Stephie, our lodger. She’s the foster daughter of the fisherman’s family we rented from last summer.”

All eyes are suddenly on Stephie. She feels herself blushing. Although the glass she was pouring is full now, she can’t seem to stop the thick liquid from running out of the bottle. The glass overflows, a sticky puddle forming on the tablecloth.

An instant later Elna has taken the bottle from Stephie’s hand. Stephie escapes in the direction of the kitchen, hearing fragments of the conversation as she is leaving:

“Oh, the poor refugee child … She’s not accustomed to this kind of dinner.…”

“No, from Vienna …”

“They couldn’t afford to let her go on with her schooling. We’re so pleased to be able to help.…”

In the kitchen she unties her apron furiously. Nothing Elna says can persuade her to go back into that dining room to offer seconds on the dessert.

in the evening Stephie hears a knock on the door that separates her room from Sven’s. By now Stephie has long since taken off the dark blue dress and gotten into bed in her nightgown, but she’s not sleeping. She’s sitting in bed with the light on, legs pulled up under her.

“Stephanie, are you asleep?”

Reluctantly, she answers. “No.”

“May I come in?”

“No,” she says again. “Leave me alone.”

“Please, Stephanie, just for a few minutes. I have to talk to you.”

“No.”

“Stephanie! Don’t be so obstinate. Just give me one minute.”

“All right, then, if you insist.”

Sven opens the door and closes it quietly behind him.

“I know you must be angry with me,” he says. “You’ve got to understand, though, that there was nothing I could do. I’ve tried talking with my mother about her foolish decision for you to have your dinners in the kitchen—you know that. I didn’t have the slightest idea she was planning for you to serve tonight. And in Karin’s old funeral dress at that.”

“You might at least have said hello,” Stephie replies.

Sven is silent for a few minutes.

“You’ve got to understand, I’m dependent on them,” he finally says. “Them and their accursed money. They support me and in return they expect certain behavior from me. Don’t you see?”