The Lily Pond (9 page)

“No,” she says in the end. “Not just as much. Or, rather, not the same way.”

“What about Sylvia?” Vera wonders. “Are you in the same class?”

“Nope. She and Ingrid are both in the other class. I never talk to them.”

So Vera tells Stephie what she heard from Gunvor, who heard it from Majbritt, who heard it from Barbro: that a week ago, when Sylvia was home for the weekend, she had a note with her from her homeroom teacher, who wrote that Sylvia was going to have to work harder if she expected to pass.

Stephie nods. She’s not surprised. At the island school Sylvia was considered a good pupil. She didn’t have to put any effort into her schoolwork to get good grades. Things are different at the grammar school. Every pupil there was
one of the best in her old class. And they all have to work hard to keep up.

“Serves her right,” says Vera.

“Mmm,” Stephie says, distracted. She can’t really muster up any interest in Sylvia nowadays. To her, Sylvia is a person from the past.

They take a bike ride. It’s a lovely autumn day. The air is clear and crisp. The heather has finished blooming, and the dwarf trees are beginning to yellow. They pick the last of the blackberries from their special bramble and ride along the road on which Vera once taught Stephie to bike. To Stephie, the island and Vera are inextricably linked.

Auntie Alma brings her children and Nellie over to Aunt Märta’s in the afternoon. Stephie notices that when she speaks German with Nellie, Nellie mixes in some Swedish.

“You mustn’t forget your German,” Stephie upbraids her. “It’s really important. What will happen, otherwise, when we see Mamma and Papa again?”

“But there’s no one for me to speak German with now that you’ve left,” Nellie replies sulkily.

“Then read!” Stephie tells her. “Read your old books over again. And I’ll give you mine, too. Write home at least once a week, as well. Promise!”

“I will,” says Nellie. “But don’t nag.”

The grandfather clock on the wall is ticking. The boat back to Göteborg leaves at six o’clock. Stephie hopes Uncle Evert will get home before that. Otherwise another month will pass before she gets to see him.

Auntie Alma and the children leave at four-thirty. Aunt Märta sets three places at the kitchen table, but when the clock in the front room strikes five, Uncle Evert still hasn’t arrived.

“I suppose we’d better eat,” says Aunt Märta. “You mustn’t miss your boat.” By five-thirty they are finished with dinner and the dishes are done. Stephie’s suitcase is packed with her clean sheets and underwear.

“We’d best be going,” says Aunt Märta. “Nothing to be done about it.”

Once again Stephie finds herself on the back of Aunt Märta’s bicycle with her suitcase on her lap. At every turn of the road, she hopes to see Uncle Evert coming toward them.

“You’ll see, he’ll just have come into port and be down at the harbor,” Aunt Märta assures her.

But when they get there, the berth where the
Diana
usually anchors is empty. Aunt Märta leans her bike against one of the boathouses and walks with Stephie onto the little pier where the steamboat picks up passengers.

Just as the steamboat is pulling out from the pier, Stephie hears a dull throbbing noise: a fishing vessel on its way in. It’s the
Diana
.

Stephie rushes over to the other side of the deck. At the wheel of the
Diana
she sees Uncle Evert in his blue overalls and a heavy woolen sweater.

“Uncle Evert!”

“Stephie,” he shouts, waving. “We had some engine trouble. Couldn’t get here earlier.”

“Never mind,” Stephie calls back. “I’ll be home soon again.”

Home. Perhaps the island is home after all, but in a different way.

is he?”

On Monday morning, the minute Stephie sets foot in the schoolyard, Harriet and Lilian pounce on her. Their eyes are bright with curiosity, their voices lowered to a secretive whisper.

“Who is he?” they ask again.

It takes a couple of seconds for Stephie to realize they’re talking about Sven. Just long enough for Lilian to whisper, even more softly, “Gosh, he’s so good-looking.”

And Harriet: “Are you going steady? The two of you?”

“Are you? Don’t keep us in the dark.”

“Look, she’s blushing! Come on, own up!”

“Yes,” Stephie hears herself say, “we are.”

The instant she utters those words, she regrets them. She
feels as if she has exposed her innermost self to public view. Not to mention that what she just said isn’t true. She loves Sven, and she knows that when the time is right, he will love her back. But what there is between them now has nothing to do with what Harriet and Lilian call “going steady.”

“Oooh!” Lilian sighs. “Aren’t you the lucky one?”

“What’s his name?” Harriet wants to know.

“Sven.”

“Is he in high school?”

“Yes, he’ll graduate this spring.”

“When did you two meet?”

“Last summer,” Stephie replies, thinking that if she keeps her answers short, they may tire of interrogating her.

“How?”

“He was a summer guest of my foster parents on the island.”

“No, no,” Harriet says impatiently. “I mean, how did you become a couple?”

Stephie knows she is on thin ice. She can’t figure out an answer they’ll believe. Instead of replying, she smiles as mysteriously as she can. “That’s my secret.”

“Oooh!” Lilian sighs again. “Please tell us.”

“Some other time,” says Stephie.

Stephie sees May making her way over to them. She definitely doesn’t want May to hear what she just told Harriet and Lilian. May knows her much too well; she’d see right through her.

“Don’t tell,” she whispers to Harriet and Lilian. “May has no idea. You’re the only ones who are in on it.”

She feels terrible when she says that, being false and letting May down by keeping a secret with Harriet and Lilian. And a secret that’s a lie, to boot.

“Sure,” they say. “Our lips are sealed.”

May doesn’t ask her about Sven. Instead, she wants to know all about Stephie’s weekend on the island. May was born in Göteborg and has lived here all her life, yet she’s never seen the open sea. Stephie hopes Aunt Märta will let her invite May to join her on the island sometime.

Their first class on Monday mornings is German. By now Stephie, like all the others, knows very well what the accusative and the dative are. They’ve learned rhymes by heart to remind them which prepositions govern each and both.

“An, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor, und zwischen,”
they repeat in unison, Miss Krantz keeping time with her pointer against the edge of the desk.

What not a single one of them has done since the first day of school, however, is say a full sentence in German. They work on their grammar and read out loud from a boring textbook, translating the long sentences slowly and choppily into Swedish.

Stephie does her best to pronounce the words the way Miss Krantz does, but much too often she forgets and says them as she’s accustomed to doing.

“Standard German!” Miss Krantz orders then, banging down the pointer. “In this class we speak standard German!”

After school, Stephie goes to the lily pond to be by herself and do some thinking. The weeping willows reflected in the water have begun to shed their leaves, and the ivy on the brick mansions is bright red. The water lilies are no longer in bloom, but the little islets of leaves still ornament the surface, and Mr. and Mrs. Swan are still floating there.

The bench feels cold against her thighs in the gap between where her underpants end and her stockings begin. She pulls her coat way down so she can sit on it.

All day Harriet and Lilian have been giving her conspiratorial looks, winking and smiling. They won’t forget what she’s said. It reminds her of when Putte gets a bone; they’ll never let it go, not until they’ve squeezed every juicy tidbit out of her. She’s going to have to tell them the things they want to hear.

Well, that won’t be difficult. She’s already pictured it all in her head, images of romantic scenes that will make Lilian sigh and Harriet long to hear more. Scenes she remembers from the magazines she and Evi used to read in secret at home, or from the movie posters pasted up outside the cinemas. Marvelous scenes starring her and Sven.

The hard thing will be not getting caught. She’ll have to be extremely careful and keep herself on Harriet’s and Lilian’s good sides so they don’t stop liking her and use her story as gossip for their mill. And most important of all, she must be sure May never catches on.

The worst part is that she feels like she’s betraying Sven
by telling lies about him. If he ever finds out, she’ll lose all her chances.

She’s entangled in a net of her own making, as helpless as if she were caught in the clutching stalks of the lily pads and being pulled down toward the muddy bottom.