The Storm Sister (The Seven Sisters #2) (67 page)

On the night of his twenty-second birthday in October, Pip came home from the theatre after an evening performance to find Karine, Elle and Bo standing in the sitting room.

‘Happy birthday,
chérie
,’ said Karine, her eyes dancing with excitement as the three of them moved aside to reveal an upright piano that was placed behind them in the
corner of the room. ‘I know it’s not a Steinway, but at least it’s a start.’

‘But how . . . ?’ Pip asked her in astonishment. ‘We haven’t the money for such a thing.’

‘That is for me to worry about and for you to enjoy. A composer must have his own instrument available at all times in order to pursue his muse,’ she said. ‘Bo tried it and
says it has a good tone. Come, Pip, and let us hear you play.’

‘Of course.’

Pip went to the piano and ran his fingers over the fallboard that protected the keys, admiring the simple inlaid marquetry that decorated the golden wood on the panel above it. There was no
maker’s mark, but the instrument was well constructed and in excellent condition, and had obviously been lovingly polished. He lifted the fallboard to reveal the gleaming keys and then
searched around for something to sit on.

Elle stepped forward hastily. ‘And this is a gift from us,’ she said, producing an upholstered stool from its hiding place behind a chair and placing it in front of the piano.
‘Bo carved the wood himself and I sewed the seating pad.’

Pip glanced at the finely turned pine legs and the intricate needlepoint pattern on the cushion. He felt overwhelmed. ‘I . . . don’t know what to say,’ he said as he sat down.
‘Except thank you, both of you.’

‘It is nothing compared to what you and your family have done for us, Pip,’ said Bo quietly. ‘Happy birthday.’

Pip lifted his fingers to the keyboard and began to play the first few bars of Tchaikovsky’s
Capriccio in G Flat
. Bo was right, the instrument did indeed have a beautiful tone,
and he thought excitedly how he could now work on his concerto at any time of the day or night.

As Karine grew larger, her due date only a few weeks away, Pip sat at his beloved piano, scribbling frantically and experimenting with chords and harmonic variations, knowing
that once the baby arrived, the peace of the household would soon be disturbed irrevocably.

Felix Mendelssohn Edvard Halvorsen – his first name given after Karine’s father – arrived into the world happy and healthy on 15th November 1938. And just as Pip had suspected,
after all Karine’s fears, she took to motherhood like a duck to water. Whilst Pip was glad to see her so fulfilled and content, he had to admit that he sometimes felt excluded from the
close-knit mother-and-baby bond. All his wife’s attention was focused on their precious son and Pip both adored and resented the change of focus in equal measure. The thing he found hardest
to cope with was that in the past, Karine had always encouraged him to work on his composition; but these days, it seemed that every time he sat down at the piano, she shushed him. ‘Pip! The
baby is sleeping and you will wake him up.’

However, there was one particular reason that made him glad that Karine
was
in a maternal cocoon – it meant that she did not care to glance at the newspapers, which every week
seemed to reveal escalating tensions in Europe. After the annexation of Austria by Germany back in March, there had been a glimmer of hope at the end of September that war might be averted: France,
Germany, Britain and Italy had signed the Munich Agreement, which conceded the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia to Germany, in return for a pledge from Hitler that Germany would make no further
territorial demands. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had even announced in a speech that the agreement would lead to ‘peace for our time’. With all his heart, Pip
prayed that Mr Chamberlain was right. But as the autumn wore on, the talk in the orchestra pit and on the streets of Bergen was increasingly gloomy – few believed that the Munich Agreement
would hold.

At least the Christmas festivities provided a welcome hiatus. They spent Christmas Day at Horst and Astrid’s house with Elle and Bo. On New Year’s Eve, Karine and Pip held a small
party in their own home and as the midnight bells rang in the new year of 1939, Pip took his wife into his arms and kissed her tenderly.

‘My love, all I am I owe to you. I can never thank you enough for what you have been to me. And given me,’ he whispered. ‘Here’s to all three of us.’

On New Year’s Day, Karine – who had been persuaded to leave Felix in the tender care of his grandparents – together with Pip, Bo and Elle, boarded the
Hurtigruten ship in Bergen harbour and they set sail up the magnificent western coast of Norway. Karine even forgot her maternal pangs as she gazed at the countless stunning sights they passed. The
Seven Sisters waterfall, suspended on the edge of the Geirangerfjord, was her favourite.

‘It is truly breathtaking,
chérie
,’ she said as she stood on deck with Pip, muffled in layers of wool against the sub-zero temperatures. They both stared in awe at
the incredible natural ice sculptures that had formed when the tumbling streams had frozen solid in mid-flow at the onset of winter.

The Hurtigruten sailed on and up the coast, darting in and out of the fjords and stopping at all manner of tiny ports with food supplies and mail deliveries, providing a lifeline for the
residents of the isolated communities dotted along the coast.

As they sailed towards the northernmost point of their voyage, Mehamn, high on Norway’s Arctic coast, Pip explained the phenomenon of the aurora borealis to his companions.

‘The Northern Lights are like the Lord’s very own heavenly light show,’ he said, trying to summon the beauty of the spectacle into words and knowing he was failing.

‘You have seen it?’ asked Karine.

‘Yes, but only once, when the conditions were right and the lights appeared as far south as Bergen. I’ve never taken this trip before.’

‘How is it formed?’ asked Elle, as she stared up at the clear, starry sky above them.

‘I am sure there’s a technical explanation,’ Pip conceded, ‘but I am not the person to provide it.’

‘And maybe there is no need for one, anyway,’ said Bo.

The passage up from Tromsø was choppy and both the women took to their cabins as the ship approached the North Cape headland. The captain announced that this was the best vantage point
from which to see the Northern Lights, but knowing how sick Karine was, Pip had no choice but to leave Bo alone on deck staring up to the heavens and go below to care for her.

‘I told you I hated the water,’ Karine groaned as she crouched over the bag that had been thoughtfully provided for those suffering from seasickness.

Dawn broke over more tranquil waters as they left the North Cape and sailed south back towards Bergen. Bo greeted Pip in the dining room, his features flooded with excitement.

‘My friend, I saw them! I saw the miracle! And its majesty was enough to convince the most fervent non-believer in a higher power. The colours . . . green, yellow, blue . . . the entire
sky was lit with radiance! I . . .’ Bo choked on his words, then recovered himself. His eyes glistening with unshed tears, he reached out his arms to Pip and clasped him in a hug.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

Back in Bergen, so as not to disturb baby Felix, Pip retreated to the deserted concert hall, or to his parents’ house to use the piano there. He found his brain was
foggy, due to the endless broken nights when Felix would scream incessantly from a bout of colic to which he was particularly prone. Even though Karine would get up to attend to the baby and leave
her husband to sleep, knowing how much work he had to do, the high-pitched noise of Felix’s cries reverberated around the paper-thin walls of the little house so that rest was impossible for
either of them.

‘Perhaps I should simply slip some aquavit into his bottle and have done with it,’ said an exhausted Karine over breakfast after a particularly bad night. ‘That baby is killing
me,’ she sighed. ‘I am so sorry for the disturbance,
chérie
. I cannot seem to quieten him. I am simply a bad mother.’

Pip put his arms round her and smoothed away her tears with his fingers. ‘Of course you’re not, my love. He will grow out of it, I promise.’

As the summer approached, both parents despaired of ever having a full night’s sleep again. Then on the first night of silence, they both woke automatically at two o’clock, the hour
when the caterwauling would normally begin.

‘Do you think he’s all right? Why isn’t he crying?
Mon Dieu!
What if he’s dead?!’ said Karine, flying out of the bed to run to the cradle wedged into a
corner of the tiny room. ‘No, no, he is breathing and doesn’t seem to have a fever,’ she whispered, standing over Felix and putting her hand to his forehead.

‘Then what is he doing?’ Pip asked.

A smile began to form on Karine’s lips. ‘He is sleeping,
chérie
. Just sleeping.’

As peace was restored to the household, Pip went back to work on his music. After much thought, he had decided to call it
The Hero Concerto
. The story he’d read
of the priestess who flouted the rules of the temple by allowing her young admirer to make love to her, then, when he drowned, throwing herself into the sea after him, suited Karine’s
dramatic and independent nature well. Besides, Karine
was
his ‘Hero’, and Pip knew that if he ever lost her, he would do the same.