Ida Brandt (3 page)

“Yes and quite a lot of bother,” said Sister Koch.

Nurse Berg could not imagine herself without a fringe.

“Aye,” she said, “if one had Brandt’s hair. Good Heavens, Brandt, I can’t understand you don’t try to wave it a bit.”

“It’s always been like this,” said Ida.

But Nurse Berg wanted to try to wave it and started to ruffle Ida’s fringe with a pocket comb. “I can hardly recognise you,” she said, going on ruffling: “otherwise you just look as though your hair’s been plastered down with a wet comb.”

Nurse Krohn, sitting watching, with both arms on the table, said: “Oh, did you see the new man in the office? My word, that’s some back parting he’s got.”

They discussed Mr. von Eichbaum, and from over in her chair Nurse Helgesen said: “Mr. von Eichbaum seems to me to be a very nice person…”

Sister Koch pushed her glasses more firmly on her nose as though to see better.

“Well,” she said, “he gives me the impression of being something of a philanderer.”

“I know him,” said Ida, sitting there quite quietly with her ruffled hair. “I knew him at home in Ludvigsbakke.” She always said “Ludvigsbakke” rather more gently than the other words she spoke.

But, drumming her fingers on the table as though dancing a waltz with them, Nurse Krohn said:

“The man wears straps on his trousers.”

Sister Koch spoke about Ludvigsbakke, which was in the part of the country from which she came, and about His Old Lordship and Her Ladyship.

“But surely she was already dead by that time.”

“Yes,” replied Ida. “Her Ladyship was dead.”

“She was a lovely woman,” said Sister Koch. “She still used to hoe her own flowerbeds when she was eighty, with farmhand’s socks pulled up over her shoes.”

Sister Koch laughed at the thought of Her Late Ladyship and her woollen socks.

“But that must be almost thirty years ago. Well…” – Sister Koch shook the front of her skirt. This was a habit she always had when she rose – “we all of us come to that.”

“Are you going upstairs, Brandt?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go up with you,” said Sister Koch. “Good night.”

They let themselves out on the stairs near the quiet ward and stopped at Sister Koch’s door.

“Yes,” said Sister Koch in a quite different tone, and they stood by the door for a moment. “It was a splendid place.” She was thinking of Ludvigsbakke. “Good night, Brandt.”

“Good night.”

Ida went up and made her way across the loft to her own room. She lit the lamp, which was covered by a butterfly-shaped cloth (there were so many little things scattered about in the room that she and Nurse Roed made while on night duty to decorate their rooms), and she stood for a time in front of the chest of drawers looking at the picture of Ludvigsbakke with the tall white house and the lawn in front of it with the new flagpole, and all the children sitting on the steps all the way up.

There
was Mr von Eichbaum as well. Yes, it was he, she thought it was a long time since she had noticed him. But she could well remember that the picture was from the year when he had come home from some school in Switzerland and spent his time stretched out on the lawn.

And His Lordship was standing by the flagpole.

She went across to the writing desk and let the flap down and took out a couple more pictures. That was the one of the lake and she stood there holding it and smiling: hmm, it was from when it was dry and the water was low as well, and all the gentlemen and Agnes Linde waded out with bare legs, splashing around among all the fish. How they enjoyed themselves. But a pike had once bitten Agnes Linde on the calf so that they had to send for Dr. Didrichsen.

There was Mrs von Eichbaum sitting under the white parasol.

She closed the drawers again; they were full of so many of mother’s old things, and while she undressed she took Olivia’s letter out and put it over by the bed. She had a habit of taking letters to bed and keeping them under the pillow as though to have them with her.

She sat up in bed and looked through all the sheets of paper. Olivia always started with quite small writing, which then became bigger and bigger and went all over the place:

Aye
,
those were the days, and who can understand what became of them…Here I can see us in church, at our confirmation, when we all wore white dresses and were flushed with crying and with our hair all smoothed down. Old Mr Bacher, poor thing, he’s going downhill, and they all go to Mr Robert for their confirmation classes now; he had twenty-seven last time round.

But goodness knows how often you had to test me on hymns.

Mamma always said: ‘I always think that Ida is the smartest of the confirmation candidates…there is something special about that girl with the way she holds her head, looking down a little…rather different from the others.’

And the dress you wore the next day was blue with tiny white dots.

We attended our first ball that Christmas. I had slept with gloves on for three weeks:

‘You simply can’t go to a ball with those hands,’ said Mamma. ‘Ida helps in the house, and yet she has nicer hands than you.’

We went there in Jensen’s carriage, you and I on the back seat, with two skirts up over our heads, sitting on the canvas ones while Mamma squeezed into the front seat and your Sofie sat proudly up on the box with your shoes, all wrapped in paper.

Every mother gave her own orders and tidied us up. And there we stood, in the middle of the floor with red arms and all frightened and smiling, while Mrs Ferder rushed all over the place:

`My word, Mrs Franck, yours are lovely,’ she went on; she had an open packet of pins fixed on her breast to straighten up Inka’s dress. There was a loud knock on the door: ‘Open up, open up’. It was Nina Stjernholm in her fur coat.

‘Good evening, good evening, children, children, I’m far too late,’ she shouted, shaking her head and making her curls fly all over the place, and then she shouted to Mamma:

‘Dear Mrs Franck, where are the fillies?’ And she scrutinized us and pushed fat Mrs Eriksen aside: ‘Charming, charming,’ she said as she bustled about.

‘Have you a partner for the first dance?’ she said turning to us.

‘Ida hasn’ t…’

‘Good, then stay with me, Miss Brandt; I’ve got a couple of new lieutenants from Fredericia…and I will take His Lordship.’

The master of ceremonies knocked on the door and asked whether the ladies were ready, and the music started.

We danced. I heard Captain Bergfeld say to Mamma:

‘That quiet young lady is so charming.’

That ‘quiet young lady’ was you, my girl, and the captain was a connoisseur.

Oh, yes, those wonderful early days: when summer arrived and the ‘sewing club’ moved out into the grove and we sat there in a circle, behind the pavilion, beneath the trees, while one of us read aloud.

But then came the autumn when your mother was taken ill.

You were over at our house, I remember, when Sofie came running across and shouted for you from out in the corridor. You had got up from the table and you left, without a word, without saying goodbye, running along the street after Sofie. You met Miss Fischer and took hold of her and spoke to her and then went on, faster and faster.

I stood at our window and wanted to go after you, but I don’t know…I was afraid, so frightened…that perhaps she was dead already, and I said to Mamma:

‘Are you not going to go with her?’

And we put on our coats and went along and arrived in your living room, where all the furniture had been moved because they had had to lift your mother and carry her; and the doctor came and the room was full of people until the doctor said they should go, and Miss Fischer came running in with a bowl full of ice, and she was crying and kept on saying:

‘But she would never do as anyone advised her to do; she would never follow anyone’s advice.’

I stayed with you that night, and we sat and kept watch in the living room and heard all the clocks ticking and announcing the slow hours with the bell whirring and striking.

And we heard the night nurse whisper to Sofie and change the ice, and we sat there again, listening to the clocks.

But you, poor thing, sat up for many nights after this.

Goodbye for now, my dear. May the new year bring you much joy. You know that we in the Villa all wish you that.

And then a kiss to mark the occasion, although you know how I hate all this kissing between friends. The children are shouting to me to give you their love.

Yours,

Olivia

Ida turned round and was about to put the letter, which she had slowly folded, under her pillow when she heard three sharp knocks on the door.

“Open up,” said a voice from outside.

It was Nurse Kjær and Nurse Øverud from the women’s ward, who darted in and quickly closed the door again.

“We’ve got something to drink,” said Nurse Kjær in little more than a whisper; she was carrying a brown bottle: “to celebrate her sister.”

“Of course,” said Ida. “They were getting married today.”

“Yes,” said Nurse Kjær. “She’s married now,” (they all three continued to speak quickly and in subdued voices as though the
crème de cacao
was something they had stolen): “Well, Sister Koch had gone to bed…”

Still in a half whisper, she said: “Øverud, where are the glasses?”

Nurse Øverud carefully took three small glasses out of her pocket, and the two sat down on chairs in front of the bed with the light shining down on Ida’s duvet.

“Good health,” said Kjær.

All three of them took a drink, while keeping the bottle on the floor as though to hide it, and Nurse Kjær said slowly as she sat there holding her glass, “There are forty of them there today.”

“Well,” she continued (she had acquired the same habit of moving her hand up towards her nose as Sister Koch), “it was certainly about time they got married…they’ d managed to stick together for five and a half years now while Poulsen was working in the post office…Then last summer while I was at home I was sent up into the woods to find them. Poulsen had the Sunday off (Kjær laughed), as he had every third Sunday, and
there
he was, asleep with his head on Marie’s shawl, while Marie, poor creature, was tiptoeing quietly around picking raspberries, aye, aye,” she said and chinked glasses with Nurse Øverud, who was laughing.

“It’s not easy to stay awake when you have had to drool over each other for five years.”

“But is it right they are going to move to Samsø now?” asked Ida.

“Yes, with sixteen hundred and a pension.”

They sat for a while, and then Nurse Kjær said in a quite different tone:

“Henriette wrote that the girls were going to decorate the church. It is so beautiful” – she paused for a moment – “that church at home, when it is decorated.”

The last time Nurse Øverud helped to decorate the church, she told them in her Funen lilt, was for Anna Kjærbølling’s wedding.

“Anna Kjærbølling, you know her, of course, Nurse Brandt. She comes from Broholm.”

“Yes,” said Ida. “She has two delightful children.”

“Yes, two lovely children.”

Nurse Kjær still sat looking at the wall.

“And I think, too,” she said slowly, “that children are the best thing of all.”

There was a moment’s silence while they all three stared into the light with changed and, as it were, sharper faces.

“Oh well, let’s wish them all the best,” said Nurse Kjær as she emptied her glass.

“Yes, all the best,” said the others, chinking their glasses with hers.

Nurse Kjær suddenly rose:

“We must go over,” she said, walking across the floor with the bottle; but her thoughts were still with her sister, and in the same voice as before, as though she was watching them go, she said: “And they will be on Samsø tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.”

Ida locked her door again, and she heard them hurrying across the loft as she returned to her bed. She was so wide awake now, although her head was heavy. She was thinking of Olivia and her children and of Nina with her four tall boys, whom she had seen last year, and about her father and her home – at home in Ludvigsbakke.

She could see the big white wing of the bailiff’s farm and the rooms in which everything was so clean and tidy and so quiet, and then there were the flowers, four in each window and four in the painted flower pots; and father’s shells, which she was never allowed to touch, were resplendent in the corners.

And she saw the office as she knocked on the very bottom of the door when she was quite small and went in and said that dinner was ready. Her father was sitting at the green table in his long canvas coat and wearing his old straw hat – for he always “covered up” when he was in the office – and she clambered up in the big armchair and waited: all “father’s birds” were perched around them, in their big cases, behind glass.

Until mother opened the door:

“Brandt, dinner is waiting.”

“Yes, dear. Is Ida here?”

And he absent-mindedly caressed Ida with a pair of loving hands:

“Yes dear, yes my dear.”

They went in. Ida toddled along beside her father, who held her so close to his knee that she stumbled over his boots.

“Brandt,” said her mother, “that’s no way to walk with the child.”

After dinner, father sat down in the sofa with a handkerchief over his face; mother sat in her chair by the window. Before long they were both asleep.

Ida tiptoed around quietly – she wore carpet slippers at home – and left the doors ajar. Then she sat down on a stool while her parents slept.

After dinner, Ida went with her mother to have coffee at the Madsens in the school. This was up by the main road to the north, along which carriages would be driving. One of them was that of the pharmacist’s wife from Brædstrup.

She had bought herself a sewing machine in Copenhagen now.

Yes, Mrs Madsen had been over to see it. But
she
thought that things would last better if they were sewn by hand.