DAY 4

Babette’s Feast

Bo was teaching me Danish, in preparation for the year ahead in Copenhagen. Not for a moment did he suggest that I shouldn’t go.

‘You’ll go to Denmark. You’ll finish your thesis. And then we’ll get married.’

There was no question in either of our minds. We had already come so far, taken such risks, in four days. Of course we would marry. He was my professor, I was his student. He had been in love with me for a year and I had been half in love with him for two or three years. He didn’t propose, but he talked of the marriage as if it were a done deal, and showed me the kind of house we might live in. A big house with steep gables, mock-Tudor timbering, off the Stillorgan Road. We passed it as we walked to Belfield – we even walked to Belfield sometimes, in the sunny May mornings. When half the world would see us from the 46A bus.

‘It’s very big.’ I couldn’t imagine living in such a house, or in any house. I couldn’t really imagine being married either, in spite of my lifelong ambition to acquire that status. The wedding was the goal, and my imaginings ended there, just where all the fairy tales stopped.

Anyway, although everyone I knew wanted to get married, I was still very conscious of the social rules, the whispered constitution, about who you should marry – you could only marry someone of the opposite sex; you could only marry someone who was single or a widower; you could only marry someone who was a Catholic. You could only marry someone who was roughly the same age as yourself. Some clauses of the whispered constitution were also in the real constitution, the law of the land.

I would only marry someone I was in love with.

Bo satisfied my own main requirement. I was in love with him. I respected him. He was a good match for me and I could spend my life with him. But he did not fit the bill of ideal spouse, as far as the conventions of Ireland were concerned. Marrying the professor might be viewed as a bit of a coup in college. But outside that hermetically-sealed world the age difference would cause general disapproval, even mockery. Was there not a folk custom involving communal sneering at May-December matches? Charivari? The neighbours came to the house on the wedding night and rattled buckets or dustbin lids or something to express their disapproval.

When my thoughts wandered along these lines it was as if all Bo’s other attributes – his lovely voice, his brilliance, his handsome body – were cancelled out by his age. I was terrified of what other people thought. I wanted universal approval. Far from being an Arctic explorer, I was a coward. I think I had been brought up to be a coward, trained to want to please everybody, with no sense of rebelling and pleasing myself.

I wanted to be with Bo forever and apparently he felt the same about me. But I couldn’t think of it as a reality. Anyway, we had been together for just a few weeks. In Ireland, nobody got married after a few weeks, except for one reason. You got married when you had served your time going to the pictures for a couple of years, working and saving for a deposit on a house. You got married, in Dublin, when you had taken out a mortgage and chosen a semi-detached in the suburbs. Marriage and house ownership went together like a horse and carriage. In the referendums in Ireland over the next thirty years, the reactionaries would claim, again and again, that marriage was all about a man, a woman and children. But everyone who got an engagement ring knew that marriage was about a man, a woman and a mortgage.

Bo and I were not going to buy a house right now. But he was thinking ahead. And he longed to get out of that little flat, where there wasn’t enough room for him – or for his books. I, on the other hand, rather liked the flat: the cosiness of it, the sense of being in a little nest of books – and television. We watched Dallas together, on Saturday evenings.

For an hour, every time we met, we had a Danish lesson. Bo gave me a copy of Babettes Gaestebud (Babette’s Feast), in Danish translation. Karen Blixen, who was Danish, wrote this story originally in English, the language she had learned in Kenya. It is said that she wrote it because a friend advised her that if she wanted to be successful in the United States she should write about food. Later she translated her own story to her native Danish; that’s the version we read. We read about half a page, at first, and as time went on a page or more. It’s a novella, rather than a short story or a novel, so it was a good choice for the time at our disposal – six weeks – before Bo would leave Dublin for the summer house in Kerry, to which he longed to go. Nothing would disturb his plans for the summer months in Dunquin. Not love or marriage or me. This was a bit of shock, but one I would get used to.

I didn’t know a word of Danish, so we were starting from scratch. He read a sentence aloud, in an exaggerated Danish accent. (He was a Swede; the languages are very closely related, but Swedish sounds quite different from Danish and Swedes tend to think that Danish sounds laughable. The glottal stop which is characteristic of Danish is especially strange, until you get used to it. It is true that Danish doesn’t sound as musical as Swedish, but it has its own charm. Later I realised that of the Scandinavian languages, Danish is the most useful one to start with. When you have mastered the Danish phonetics, it’s fairly easy to understand the much clearer pronunciation and accents of the Swedes and the Norwegians.) Then he would translate it, word by word, and explain the grammar as we went.

Det bodde engang ved siden af en laenge snaever fjord I Norge två søstrer … Once upon a time two sisters lived by the side of a long narrow fjord in Norway.

Love is the best teacher. I loved the text and the teacher, so I learnt fast and well.

After the first day, I prepared for the lessons by trying to translate, at home with the dictionary. I had to look up every single word, and I listed them all with translations at the back of the little book. In pencil – Bo would never deface a book, any book, in any way. His library was a working library, containing books he was interested in for their content – folklore, Irish literature, Icelandic literature, Swedish literature, anthropology, classics, and much else. He was not a collector as such or a bibliophile who bought books for their dates, their value, or their bindings. But he was an obsessive book buyer. And he had a fine bibliophilic sensibility. The pages and the bindings were the bodies that contained the souls of the books and he respected them.

I was much more careless. Dog-ears never bothered me – my mother had showed me how to make them when I was a child of seven – and I occasionally used a biro to underline something if I couldn’t find a pencil. And I was the kind of person who could never find a pencil, whereas Bo had a few in his breast pocket at all times, and a few on his bedside locker, and a dozen in a special container, made for him by his mother, on his big desk.

Danish is not a very difficult language for an English speaker. It’s a Germanic language, like English, so many of the words have a familiar ring to them. Mand for man. Maelk for milk. Hus for house. And so on. The grammar too is not so different. Nouns and adjectives are gendered, and nouns and adjectives and articles agree, which is a bit more complicated than English, but it’s not a highly inflected language – less inflected than German, or Icelandic, and much less than say Finnish or Irish or Bulgarian. The thing that seemed very odd was that the article came after the noun, tacked on to it – manden instead of the man. If the article came in front, it was indefinite – en mand, a man. En barn, a child. Barnen, the child. The same system applies in Swedish and Norwegian and Icelandic (and in other unrelated languages, such as Bulgarian). Bo was surprised that I found this strange. It was so natural to him that he didn’t see the problem. And after a few weeks I got quite used to it and did not see it either.

The Danish lessons gave our meetings a purpose, apart from kissing and making love and having dinner. They put our relationship back on the familiar footing, student and teacher, and as a result we were totally at ease with one another. My progress delighted me. The new language unfolded in front of my eyes, step by step, word by word; I was learning to read it, with a beloved teacher to guide me. Our life together would involve many ordinary aspects, but this aspect, teaching and learning, was at its heart. In these hours we were most at peace, most ourselves.

For the first week we met every day, and for the second, every second day. Sometimes Bo had engagements in the evening, or work that he could not put off. I had nothing to do except go to work during the day and ‘work on my thesis’, an ongoing task that was already becoming a chore rather than an exploration. Since breaking up with Oliver I hadn’t cultivated new friendships to any extent. During the two or three years I had been with him, we had spent most of our time in one another’s company. Parties and group activities we had attended together, the way young couples, married or not, do. After the break-up, it had surprised me to notice that some people who had been mutual acquaintances dropped me while continuing their friendship with Oliver. I supposed he was more interesting, more promising. And he was male, which gave him status I simply couldn’t have in the academic circles we moved in. In 1978, the Irish academic world was completely, and completely unconsciously, biased in favour of men. The vast majority of lecturers and professors in UCD were male, although in the Faculty of Arts a majority of students were women. Nobody seemed to find this state of affairs in the least bit anomalous – although they would, quite soon.

On the evenings when I was not seeing Bo, I sat in my bedsitter and translated chunks of Babettes Gaestebud. I placed myself on an armchair by the long sash window, open to the air. Outside in the garden a huge chestnut tree flaunted its fresh spring green leaves, growing bigger almost by the minute, and its cones of creamy blossoms. The evening sun bathed the weathered slate roofs of the sweet old brick houses; light traffic hummed a soothing melody on its way from Rathmines to Harold’s Cross.

I looked up the words in my Gyldendal’s red dictionary and slowly, like ice melting, the symbols on the page were transformed into a story I could understand, people I began to know, a place that grew familiar, word by word, line by line, page by page. A new country, a new language, new people. On the evenings with Bo, I was beginning to know him, his past, his country, his people, and on the other evenings I was beginning to know Denmark.

No Swedish, as yet. Bo’s own language – it was close to Danish, but one thing at a time.

My worries about what other people would think had faded, or I had pushed them away. Anyway, since we had told nobody about our relationship for the moment they didn’t think anything. Besides, we were now in a cocoon of love, in a private world that transcended everything else. When I was away from the flat I walked on air. The world around me – Rathmines with its red library building on the corner, the bridge over the sparkling waters of the Grand Canal – shimmered and sparkled and I walked with a light step everywhere. Magical, magical, the month of May played a bright and lovely tune wherever I went. My eyes were aglow, my heart was light. The ordinary world of work, family, community, the streets, the customers in the library, the catalogues to be checked, had become the unreal world. The real world was the story I escaped into – the work on that book – by the long, elegant window in the light of evening, and the flat I escaped into with Bo, that little space filled with books and with Bo himself, his voice, his laugh, his bear hug when I arrived at six o’clock.

It was a time out of time. A summer of love.