I Can't Begin to Tell You (11 page)

Could Tanne?

When she inherited, it would be to care for the land, the house, the farms, for the duration. A curious position to be in, but she enjoyed it and resented it, sometimes with the same breath. Adults of her parents’ generation regarded her with approval, for she possessed future status. Yet if she confessed to her friends what her future entailed her words were met with indifference and, occasionally, contempt.

Nils was correct. She wasn’t free.

But she could be. She could be.

Sometimes she lay in bed and plotted escaping to Rome or Paris. To live in an attic and behave disgracefully.

‘Most women in the world don’t even have the vote,’ her mother had pointed out, more than once, when Tanne voiced her misgivings. ‘Let alone the right to take possession of their inheritance. Denmark is ahead of the world.’

And I should be grateful?

At those moments she hated her mother, who was so settled, so in the mould. Had her mother ever rebelled? Or ever considered that there was another kind of life, that no one should be in thrall to bricks and mortar? Did she ever get angry, as Tanne so often did?

Who knew? Her daughter didn’t.

Then, in the aftermath of strong emotion, stole the calm of passions spent, the familiar image of the beautiful house and land lodging uppermost in her mind. She remembered the times riding out with her father, rising at dawn for the duck
shoot, the boating parties, the family eating and talking together. It was, she told herself, a Platonic ideal of rural life – a utopia, a benign autocracy – where it was possible to live the good fulfilling existence.

Pausing to look through the large window at the turn of the stairs, she saw the knife-sharp, frozen lines of winter had formed like the first exploratory strokes of a drawing. Where the late sun hit the lake there was an explosion of light and icy dazzle. She grimaced. Those summer vistas, the radiance of trees and lawn, were now only memories.

As usual, tea was served in the small sitting room overlooking the garden and lake. Nils was already installed in a chair by the window doing a crossword.

Tanne sat on the arm of the chair. ‘Am I annoying you?’

He did not bother to look up. ‘Yes.’

‘Did you ring for tea?’

‘No idea.’

‘You probably did.’

The door opened and, in rubber boots over her bare legs, as was her wont, Arne’s wife, Birgit, appeared with the tea tray. Nils leaped to his feet – he could be quick when he wished to be – and captured the tray. ‘It seems I did.’

He put the tray down on the table, and flicked Birgit’s plait. ‘You’re going grey, Birgit. It suits you.’

As she left the room, Birgit smiled at him over her shoulder and said: ‘Go on, be as rude as you like.’

The habit of taking tea had been imported into the family by her mother. A silver teapot. Bone china so fine you could see your fingers through it. A plate of cake. Kay always specified Victoria sponges and boiled fruit cakes. So English. If Tanne had anything to do with it, Danish favourites such as
kekstorte
and Napoleon’s Hats sneaked onto the cake stand and, of course, their father’s favourite gingerbread. It was civilization, tricked out with lace napkins. A small ritual knitted up into the greater one of Rosenlund’s daily existence.

Their
father arrived. He had been out for hours riding the boundaries to check on the winter arrangements, which meant endless checking up on fodder, silage, fuel and cattle shelter.

He was still in his riding clothes and was moving a little stiffly. He went straight over to Nils and dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Nice to see you, Nils. Are you staying long?’

Nils was not as tall as his father. The family joked about a distant troll ancestry sneaking into the warrior Ebersterns. Nils pretended he thought it was funny, too. The joke had rippled along through the years until the day their mother said, ‘Have any of you considered that it might be my ancestry?’ shocking them all into silence because their mother’s background never seemed to come into it. ‘Whoever it was,’ said Nils, who minded about his lack of height, ‘was no friend of mine.’

‘Until tomorrow,’ he answered. ‘I’ve things to do.’

Translated, this meant Nils yearned to quit the beauty and elegance of Rosenlund and return to his hermetic, dusty, comfortless set of rooms.

‘Don’t you want to know what’s going on here?’ her father asked.

‘To be honest, not particularly.’

He was disappointed. ‘It would be nice if you stayed,’ he said. ‘Won’t you?’

Nils got up and wandered over to the window. ‘No,’ he said flatly.

‘No interest at all in what’s going on?’

‘Why should I?’ Nils turned round to face him. ‘You and Tanne have it all sewn up.’

‘But there’s a war on.’

‘I know,’ said Nils in a very deliberate manner. ‘I know.’

Nils may have been shorter than his father, but they shared the same colouring and cast of features and, when they were angry, similar expressions. There comparisons stopped and contrasts began, for their characters could not have been more
dissimilar. Difficult people, both of them; difficult to gauge and, Tanne suspected, a mystery to most.

But she loved them.

She stepped into the breach. ‘Nils, some of the stock died last winter because of the cold. We don’t want that to happen again.’

‘So? You’ve stocked up. Simple.’

‘But the milk yields are down,’ said her father.

Nils shrugged.

Don’t push too hard, Far
, Tanne told him silently.

He gave up. ‘What’s going in København?’

‘The usual,’ Tanne replied. ‘Shopping, theatre, eating.’ A man was shot dead. ‘I went to the ballet.
Sleeping Beauty
. It’s on all the time.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Nils. ‘Denmark kissed awake by Prince Charming. The question is: who is Prince Charming?’

Something went click in Tanne’s head. So? The arch of the ballerina’s foot … she had been balancing not on an aesthetic pin but a political one. How stupid Tanne had been not to have seen that the ballet was being used as a coded message of defiance. No wonder
Sleeping Beauty
was being performed all the time, and how irritating that it was Nils who had pointed it out.

‘København is stuffed with Danes eavesdropping on other Danes,’ continued Nils. ‘The
stikker
who report things to the Germans. The atmosphere is most peculiar and jumpy.’

‘Surprised you notice.’ Tanne was a little sour.

He flashed her a look as if to say:
That was not worthy of you
. ‘No one feels safe to speak their mind. Even I’ve noticed.’

No, it wasn’t worthy of her, and she was annoyed with herself for allowing point-scoring habits from their childhood to resurface. Tanne made a face at him. It was so unlike Nils to comment on anything other than his immediate concerns. These, he once informed her, were formulae, theories of computable numbers, academic papers.

Her
father snapped his gingerbread in two. A fine dust fell to his plate. ‘Be careful what you say about the Germans.’

‘We know what side you’re on,’ said Nils, goading. ‘It must be increasingly difficult to square it with Mother.’

It wasn’t like Nils to be malicious. Amused, disdainful, removed … yes, but malice did not often figure. It was the war, she thought, with increasing desperation.

Her father elected not to notice. ‘Perhaps the
stikker
are necessary. Order must be maintained. Rebellion and resistance make life impossible.’

Tanne heard herself exclaim. ‘
Inform
on your fellow citizens?’

‘We have to consider Denmark’s position,’ he said, not unreasonably.

She stared at him. ‘But that’s it,
Far
. We do have to consider.’

It was true – and she had not done so. Not properly. Not in depth. Worse, she did not possess the political vocabulary to describe what she felt.

‘We have to deal with Germany,’ her father was saying. ‘It’s not what Denmark asked for but we’ve done it. You must consider that the communists could be as much of a threat.’

‘Overdoing it,
Far
,’ said Nils from his perch by the window.

Her father swung round to face him and Tanne read in his expression both disappointment and a baffled irritation.

‘Do you two understand anything? Have you seen what Stalin is up to? First he joins in with Hitler and overruns Poland. Why? Answer: because he reckoned he could snaffle a piece of it. Now he’s fighting on the side of the Allies, but it isn’t for love of peace and democracy. It’s because he has his own plans for expansion. Denmark might well be among them. Do you want to live in a communist country? Better the devil you know … And there is Rosenlund.’

‘Oh, Rosenlund,’ said Nils in a sarcastic voice. ‘Rosenlund …’

There was a long awkward pause. Her father pushed his cup
and saucer away and lit a cigarette. ‘Whatever you think, Nils, it is worth saving. And I will.’

Why, oh why, did he say such things? He wasn’t a fool and he certainly wasn’t a bad man.

Her gaze sifted over familiar things: the secretaire with the bowed legs, the chair with the curling back, the long pier glass painted bronze and decorated with a lotus-plant design, the china pots under the window patterned with blue agapanthus and fiery geraniums, the bone china on the tray, the fine Danish landscape over the fireplace of a clearing in a birch wood covered by spring anemones.

‘Hello, darlings.’

Their mother stood in the doorway, dressed in one of her pretty woollen afternoon frocks. She had a heightened colour and looked younger than Tanne had seen her for a long time.

‘Sorry. I was out walking and I had to change.’

All three stared at her.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘I can feel the atmosphere.’ She snapped her fingers and the noise sounded like a gun shot.

‘The war, of course.’ Nils resumed his seat.

Tanne glanced down at her teacup and noticed that the saucer had a chip on its rim.

Her mother sat down in her usual seat behind the tea tray. With a deliberate movement, she lifted up the teapot. ‘I think you were discussing politics.’ She poured herself a cup of tea. ‘Not a good idea.’ She picked up the milk jug and the colour deepened in her cheeks. ‘It’s a subject we should leave well alone.’

Tanne’s gaze shifted from her mother to her father. Neither of them was looking at the other. ‘We can’t,’ she said flatly. ‘The war is happening.’

To her surprise, her mother’s hand whitened with tension as it grasped the milk jug. ‘That’s why we have to make sure we don’t quarrel.’

‘
Never
forget
…’ her mother used to say.

‘
Never forget what?
’

‘
We are a family
.’

It was possible to both love and hate at the same time. Yes, yes, it was. When Tanne hated her mother, she hated her more than she loved her. Sometimes it was vice versa. Her mother was her mirror image – all mothers and daughters were. Whereas her feelings for her father were fixed and constant, like the planets, and driven by the need to protect him, her feelings for her mother shifted like the tide.

Early-ish the following morning, Nils went back to København.

A year ago, the decision had been taken to train Tanne in the running of Rosenlund and she had been summoned to a session in the estate office, which was lined from floor to ceiling with the ledgers. The ledgers went back to the early nineteenth century, and contained a switchback narrative of bumper yields, harsh winters, golden summers and barren harvests but none, apparently, as bad as the past twelve months.

Checking over the accounts with him, she was shocked to hear her father swear under his breath. Dairy yields were down, plus the order had come through from the Town Hall to requisition a number of their precious pigs.

‘What right do they have?’ Tanne demanded.

Her father moved over to the window. A troubled silence followed before he explained that the German Reich and the Danish Protectorate were now one family. Families shared.

‘
Sharing
, yes,’ said Tanne.

This was a new world with new realities and again, Tanne felt ashamed that it had taken so much time for her to realize what was going on.

‘If this winter is like the last one …’ He turned to face her. ‘Tanne, darling, promise me that you will never get involved in anything stupid.’

‘Why?’

He looked at her as if she was mad. ‘Why? Because –’ He gestured at the ledgers. ‘You know why.’

‘I understand.’

He turned back to the window. ‘More important … is your safety.’

Badly bruised from a tussle with a gate in the north field a couple of days ago, his hand rested on the blind. The flesh was green and yellow, the nail blackened. It must be hurting him. It was a reminder that her father could be wounded and her heart squeezed in her chest.

At university, she had talked politics endlessly and, she now acknowledged, carelessly. With Aage, Grete, Hannah, Gooda, all close friends, she had debated the overthrow of the monarchy, putting students into Parliament and turning pacifist. ‘We are articulating Denmark’s future,’ they told each other and thrived on the noisy clash of viewpoints. She remembered Aage leaping up onto a table and managing to look both magnificent and ridiculous.

How pleasurable the long beach walks dodging salt-bleached driftwood had been, and the demanding summer bicycle rides and, when back at university for the autumn and winter, the exciting and messy sessions with printing machines and duplicators.

None of them had understood how their ideas would work in practice. Still less what a war meant. Certainly not the
realpolitik
of guns and greed and killing.

She joined her father at the window and he reached out, put an arm round her shoulders and pulled her to him. Together, they looked out onto the winter landscape.

Very often at this time of year, a light, pretty snow was the first to fall. Then the winds arrived, the sky lowered, more snow fell, packing down the pretty and sparkling surface into a sullen, greyish layer over which could be seen the spoor of desperate deer weaving this way and that.