Mathilde looked down at the straggle of snowdrops clutched in Ole’s small fist, their petals drooping.
‘Here, Mama,’ he said.
‘Thank you, darling.’ She reached for them.
Ole drew his hand back. ‘Not for you. For Papa.’
Mathilde checked herself and took a breath against the pain of the words. ‘We’ll take them tomorrow.’
‘No. Now.’ Ole looked up, his chin jutting out. Mathilde had to look away from that stern expression, a miniature of his grandfather glaring at her.
‘But we went yesterday,’ she said.
‘Now.’
Mathilde sighed and the fight, what little there was of it, ran out of her. ‘Oh, all right. Where’s your sister?’
The three of them left the house by the back path, bundled up against the cool afternoon. Ole held the gate open for her and then ran ahead, trailing petals. Aase clutched her hand. Mathilde could have walked the path with her eyes closed. Every step of their way was imprinted on her body, along with the feeling of Aase’s childish weight at the end of her arm, and the hole that lived in her chest, weighing down her footfalls.
At the cemetery Ole brushed the snow off the gravestone and laid the bedraggled bouquet next to Jakob’s name. Both children turned and wandered off while Mathilde stared at the unchanging surface of the black granite. She wished she could weep. At least tears would bring some kind of temporary relief, a sense of something happening. A second winter had almost passed since Jakob was killed in Venezuela – a place that sounded so exotic she simply couldn’t form a mental picture of it – and it had been no easier than the first. Time heals, everyone said, but time was doing no such thing. Time led to more time, more empty time stretching ahead, years of time to be filled.
In an attempt to help herself and the children move on, Mathilde had cut back on their daily cemetery visits. Now it was only every second day they climbed the hill to lay flowers or nuts or sweets on Jakob’s grave. But it seemed the children couldn’t imagine a life beyond this either. All three of them were frozen fast in the small world of Sandefjord. It was just as well that her mother’s grave was on the island of Nøtterøy, Mathilde thought. It would have been too hard to have all her losses laid in the same ground.
Ole and Aase eventually came back to her. Ole took her hand with a sternness she would have found heartbreaking if she’d had any heart left to break.
‘Let’s go to Grandpa’s,’ he said, tugging at her.
‘Not today.’
‘Please!’ the children begged in unison.
She gazed down at their faces. They looked afraid at the prospect of another long, dark afternoon alone with her and the fact of their fear cut into her. They pulled, one on either hand, and against their combined weight she stumbled and took a step. Their faces lit up at their success and she took another and another, and before she knew it the steps had led out of the cemetery and down the steep hill and then along the winding street to the house of Jakob’s parents, Ole Senior and Gerd.
Gerd’s face was unsmiling when she opened the door to Mathilde. She looked out and up at the afternoon sky. ‘I didn’t expect you.’
‘Grandma! We found snowdrops!’ Ole said, dropping Mathilde’s hand and pushing forward. ‘Have you got buns for us?’
Gerd gave them the smile she reserved for her grandchildren and they pushed past her into the house.
Mathilde was marooned on the doorstep. She made a hopeless movement with her hands. ‘I’m sorry. They wanted to come. I couldn’t seem to stop them.’
Gerd opened the door wider and gestured for her to come in. Mathilde passed her and went through to the parlour, warm and smelling faintly of cooking, so unlike her own, and she wondered if she should agree after all to leave the children with their grandparents. Gerd asked often enough. Perhaps not realising the children were the only thing keeping her alive. Or perhaps she did realise.
‘You should start teaching again,’ Gerd said when the maid had poured out coffee and laid down a plate of fruit buns, lavishly spread with margarine.
Mathilde took a mouthful of coffee, scalding herself. Their visits, like all of her days, ran to a routine and she had to steel herself to repeat the same sentences. ‘Soon,’ she murmured. It was a lie: she’d never sing again, let alone teach anyone else.
‘The Christensens were here today,’ Gerd continued. ‘Asking after you. Ingrid said you don’t answer the door.’
‘Of course I do,’ Mathilde said. ‘I must have been out.’
‘They want you to come to dinner next weekend. She asked me to pass on the invitation.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mathilde said. ‘I’ll be with the children.’
‘We’ll have the children here,’ Gerd said. ‘It’s a hard time for us too, Mathilde, without Jakob. We’d like to see more of the little ones. You should go.’
Mathilde put down the bun she was nibbling. Her hand was thin and her wedding ring hung so loosely on her finger that she had to be careful not to lose it. ‘I’m not ready for dinner parties.’
Gerd poured her more coffee. ‘You can’t go on like this. It’s not healthy for the children.’
Mathilde nodded and sipped her drink. She could feel it travelling down her throat, hot and alive, and her body felt dead in comparison.
‘Leave them here tonight,’ Gerd said.
Without the children to fill her empty kitchen, Mathilde was terrified of the merciless night approaching. She looked up at Gerd in mute appeal.
‘Have a rest,’ Gerd said. ‘A break from cooking. Put your feet up. Read a book.’
‘No, I –’
‘You’ll be fine. Go on, while it’s light. Come back for them in the morning.’
Mathilde hardly knew how she came to be standing out on the street in the gathering twilight, alone, the fur of her collar failing to keep out the cold, and the front door of the Wegger house firmly closed. She wondered if she’d come back in the morning to find her in-laws had left in the night and spirited the children away, leaving a barred door and an empty house.
She shook her head to dispel the thought. Foolish. Ole Wegger was one of Sandefjord’s pillars, one of the town’s coterie of powerful businessmen, a tight group with fingers in the pie of every industry and interests stretching far beyond Sandefjord, or even Norway. Not the sort to slip away in the night.
Poor dead Jakob had expected to be one of them, though his progress had been slower than he’d hoped. She wondered if he’d have succeeded. Jakob was a good man, and clever, in his way, but he was old fashioned and, she had to admit, staid. You only had to look at Lars Christensen to see his entrepreneurial mind and inexhaustible energy. Jakob’s own father, Ole, was another powerhouse of ideas and drive, but Jakob wasn’t like that.
She felt weariness stealing over her at the thought of Lars and Ingrid, their busy household, their dizzying achievements, their flock of attractive children. It was true; she shushed Ole and Aase and crawled under the table when Ingrid came knocking. The glare of her sympathy was too brilliant.
A motorcar came down the road, its headlights boring into her, and the toot of its horn made her jump. She stepped onto the pavement to let it pass. The long twilight lay heavily on the afternoon, the temperature dropping. She could see down to the docks, crowded with Sandefjord’s whaling ships. Every last one had been forced to stay in port for the season. Sandefjord’s married women all had their husbands for winter.
Mathilde started walking, her hands thrust deep in her pockets, her head down. The air was full of white dots, minuscule precursors to snowflakes. She reached the house and opened the front door. She’d let their one maid go after Jakob died, ostensibly for the cost, but in reality because she couldn’t bear another adult observing her. It should be possible, she thought, to turn on the electric lights, to start the fire, to cook something. There was nothing physically stopping her. But stepping into the empty house sucked the life out of her. When the children were there with her, she was numb and heavy, without energy. In their absence, her grief became acute; paralysing.
By the bed, Jakob glared at her from his photograph. He jutted out his chin just as Ole had today, but in truth Ole was carved from the same block as his grandfather, while Jakob, sandwiched between them, was simply the means to an end. Mathilde let her coat fall to the floor, kicked off her shoes and sat on the edge of the bed, looking at his photograph. What would he have her do to start something resembling a life again, she thought, with a slight stirring of the emotion she remembered as anger. But he had no answer for her, not even a smile, just his slightly anxious face and the way he clenched his teeth together to appear strong. She’d let him keep his pride and together they’d maintained the fiction that he was stepping up to his father’s expectations and would one day be his equal.
Did he ever know that she loved his vulnerability? Her favourite times were those when he came to her in the privacy of their room and let his guard down. Sometimes, when worry kept him awake, he’d allow her to draw his head down to her breast and hold it there while she sang him a lullaby. It was something they never referred to outside the marriage bed, but it was the time she loved him most, she thought.
Mathilde pulled the covers back and slid into the bed’s cold embrace, not bothering to undress. A widow at thirty-six; not what she’d expected. She’d always been conventional in her life’s hopes, believing if she didn’t ask for too much, she’d have more chance of it coming to her. She wouldn’t have cared if Jakob had never risen higher than managing some unimportant arm of his family’s empire. She could have been perfectly happy with the four of them living in their little cottage on the hill, taking Ole and Aase on the boat trip to Nøtterøy to visit her family every few months and making do with a single housemaid for the rest of their lives.
But just weeks after Jakob’s accident Mathilde’s mother had died too, and her father had hastily remarried, taking in a flock of step-children and a wife who wanted little to do with Mathilde. Whatever haven she thought her old family home may have offered was gone. Gerd and Ole, her parents-in-law, were the closest family she had left.
She reached out, took hold of the picture and brought the hard rectangle of the frame to her chest. As she wrapped her arms across it, slowly the cold thing began to warm. Perhaps Gerd was right. Mathilde wondered if she even remembered how to sing after so long. Jakob had loved the lullaby that Mathilde sang to put the children to sleep, the one that whispered of the dangers in the dark forest and the safety behind the stout walls and the heavy door, barred fast. She took a breath and opened her mouth.
A single note came out, pure and shocking, and she stopped and swallowed. There wasn’t room in the house for beauty. Not yet. She tightened her arms around the picture and lay down.
Spring would be coming soon. The snowdrops were already poking their heads through the ground. Daylight was inching back into her life and Mathilde dreaded its coming. Spring meant she’d have to do something to rebuild her life without Jakob. Another winter like this would kill her.