‘It’s all a matter of landscape,’ Bente’s mother Greta wrote to her daughter from her apartment in the outer suburbs of Copenhagen, there where the land tilts gently and gracefully towards a flat northern sea, and the birch trees in spring are an almost unbearably brilliant green, and at night the lights of Sweden glitter across the water, with their promise of sombre wooded crags, and dark ravines, and steeper, more difficult shores altogether. ‘The English are dirty because they are so comparatively unobserved. They can hide behind hills from their neighbours. Dirt is normal, Bente, all over the world. It’s we in the clean flat lands who are out of step.’
Bente’s mother was fanciful. It was one of her many charms. Men loved her absurdities. Her folly made them feel strong and sane. Greta had wide grey eyes and flaxen hair, a good strong figure and a frivolous nature. Her daughter had inherited her mother’s looks, but not her nature. Bente’s father had been Swedish-born. He had passed on to his daughter, Greta feared, his deep Swedish solemnity, his high Swedish standards. He had been killed in the war. After that, neighbours said then, and still said, Greta had slept with enough German soldiers to man a landing raft: she was lucky to be accepted back into the community. Greta said she had only done these things on the instructions of the Resistance, the better to gain the enemy’s secrets. Be that as it may, there was no arguing but that Greta had gained a taste for sex, somewhere along the line; and Bente had not, even by the age of twenty-three, not even with her mother’s example to guide her. Bente was glad to get away from Copenhagen and the tread of male footsteps on her mother’s stair, and to come as an au pair to London, the better to learn the language. And Greta was glad enough to see her stunning, unsmiling daughter go.
But within a week Bente rang in tears to say that the Beavers’ household was dirty, the food was uneatable, she was expected to sleep in a damp dark basement room, she was overworked and underpaid, and the two children were unruly, unkempt, and objected to taking baths.
‘Then clean the house,’ said Greta firmly. ‘Take over the cooking and the accounts, move a mattress to a better room, and bath the children by force if necessary, or better still get in the bath with them. The English are too afraid of nakedness.’
Bente sobbed on the other end of the line, and Greta’s sailor lover, Mogens, moved an impatient hand up her thigh. Greta had told Mogens she’d had Bente when she was seventeen. ‘But I want to come home,’ said Bente, and Greta said sharply that surely Bente could put up with a little dirt and discomfort. Adrian Beaver was a Marxist sociologist/journalist with an international reputation and Bente should think herself lucky to be in so interesting a household and not abuse her employers’ hospitality by making too many long distance calls on their telephone. Greta put down the phone and turned her attention to Mogens. Lovers come and go: children go on for ever!
There was silence for a month or so, during which time Greta, feeling just a little guilty, sent Bente a leather mini-skirt and a recipe for steak au poivre using green pepper, and a letter explaining her theories on dirt and landscape. Bente’s next letter home was cheerful enough: she asked Greta to send her some root ginger, since this was unobtainable in the outer London suburbs where she lived and she had only four hours off a week, and that on Sundays, and could not easily get into central London where most exotic ingredients were available. Mr Beaver was developing quite a taste for good food. Mrs Beaver had objected to her wearing the mini-skirt, so Bente only wore it in her absence. Mr Beaver worked at home: life was much easier now that Mrs Beaver had a full-time job. She, Bente, could take over. The house was spick and span. When she, Bente, had children, she, Bente, would never leave them in a stranger’s care. But she, Bente, liked to think the children were fond of her. She got into the bath with them, these days, and there was no trouble at all at bath time. Mr Beaver, Adrian, said she was a better mother to the boys than his wife was. She was certainly a better cook!
Greta’s new lover, Clifton, from the Caribbean, posted off the ginger without a covering letter. Silence seemed, at the time, golden. Greta knew Bente would just hate Clifton, who was probably not yet twenty, and wonderfully black and shiny. Greta told him she’d had Bente when she was sixteen.
Bente rang in tears to say Mr Beaver kept touching her breasts in the kitchen and embarrassing her and she thought he wanted to sleep with her and could she come home at once?
Greta said what nonsense, sex is a free and wonderful thing: just sleep with him and get it over. There was silence the other end of the line. Clifton’s hot breath stirred the hairs on Greta’s neck. She knew the flax was beginning to streak with grey. How short life is!
‘But what about his wife?’ asked Bente, doubtfully, presently.
‘Knowing the English as I do,’ said Greta, ‘they’ve probably worked it out between them just to stop you handing in your notice.’
‘So you don’t think she’d mind?’
Clifton’s sharp white teeth nibbled Greta’s ear and his arm lay black and thick across her silky white breasts.
‘Of course not,’ said Greta. ‘What are you getting so worked up about? Sex is just fun. It’s not to be taken seriously.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Bente, primly.
‘Bente,’ said Greta, ‘pillow talk is the best way to learn a foreign language, and that’s what you’re in England for. Do just be practical, even if you don’t know how to enjoy yourself.’
Clifton’s teeth dug sharply into Greta’s earlobe and she uttered the husky little scream which so entranced and interested men. After she had replaced the receiver, it occurred to Greta that her daughter was still a virgin, and she almost picked up the phone for a longer talk, but then the time was past and Clifton’s red, red tongue was importuning her and she forgot all about Bente for at least a week. Out of sight, out of mind! Many mothers feel it: few acknowledge it!
Bente wrote within the month to ask if she should tell Mrs Beaver that she and Mr Beaver were having an affair, since she didn’t like to be deceitful. Adrian himself was reluctant to do it, saying it might upset the children and it should be kept secret. What did Greta think?
Greta wrote back to say, with feeling, that children should not begrudge their parents a sex life; you had to take sex calmly and openly, not get hysterical. Sex is like a wasp, wrote Greta. You must just sit still and let it take its course. It’s when you try and brush it away the trouble comes. Fanciful Greta!
Bente wrote to say that Mrs Beaver had moved out of the house: simply abandoned the children and left! What sort of mother was that? She, Bente, would never do such a thing. Mrs Beaver was hopelessly neurotic. (Didn’t Greta think her, Bente’s, English had improved? She had been quite right about pillow talk!) Mr Beaver had told his wife she could continue living in the spare room and have her own lovers quite freely, but Mrs Beaver hadn’t been at all grateful and had made the most dreadful scenes before finally going and had even tried to knife her, Bente, and Mr Beaver had lost half a stone in weight. Could Greta send her the pickled-herring recipe? She enclosed a photograph of herself and Adrian and the boys. She and Adrian were to be married as soon as he was free. Wasn’t love wonderful? Wasn’t fate an extraordinary thing? Supposing she and Adrian had never met? Supposing this, supposing that!
Greta studied the photograph with a magnifying glass. Adrian Beaver, she was surprised to see, was at least fifty and running to fat, and plain in a peculiarly English, intellectual, chinless way, and the Beaver sons were not little, as she had supposed, but in their early adolescence and ungainly too. Her daughter stood next to Mr Beaver, twice his size, big-busted, bovine, with the sweet inexorable smile of a flaxen doll. Greta did not want to have grandchildren, especially not these grandchildren. Greta, one way and another, was in a fix.
Greta had fallen in love, in a peculiarly high, pure, almost sexless way – who’d have thought it! But life goes this way, now that! – with a doctor from Odense, who wanted to marry her, Greta, save her from herself and build her a house in glass and steel where she could live happily ever after. (Perhaps she was in love with the house, not him, but what could it matter? Love is love, even if it’s for glass and steel!) The doctor was thirty-five. Greta, alas, on first meeting him, had given her age as thirty-four. Unless she had given birth to Bente when she was ten, how now could Bente be her daughter?
‘You are no daughter of mine,’ she wrote back to Bente. ‘Sex is one thing, love quite another. Sex may be a wasp, but love is a swarm of bees! You have broken up a marriage, done a dreadful thing! I never wish to hear from you again.’
And nor did she, and both lived happily ever after: the mother in the flat, clean, cheerful land: the daughter in the dirty, hilly, troubled one across the sea, where fate had taken her. How full the world is of bees and wasps! In the autumn the birch trees of Denmark turn russet red and glorious, and the lights which shine across from Sweden seem hard and resolute and the air chilly, and the wasps and bees move slowly and sleepily amongst the red, red leaves, and how lucky you are if you escape a sting!