She moved slowly, because the dream had soaked to the heart of her and was nesting there, sad and heavy. It was waiting to return as soon as she closed her eyes. What had she dreamed of? Footsteps. What was there to be afraid of in that, when people were walking around the world all their lives long? Down in the kitchen she’d warm a cup of milk, soak pieces of black bread in it, and sprinkle sugar on top. He never noticed what she took. She’d heard of houses where they marked the place where the bread was cut, and marked the milk jug to be sure none was drunk, and locked sugar in a cupboard.
When she was dressed she knelt by the bed, lifted her mattress, and swept her hand beneath it, over the wooden slats of the bedstead. Her hand knew the three books that lay there. It touched all the covers before it chose one.
Three books, out of all his books. Her father had had fifty at least. He’d sold some to pay for medicine. These three were all she’d been able to bring when they took her away from Lauri’s house. She’d hidden them in her clothes and then under her mattress in the House of Orphans, the same way as now. Kirsti knew, because she saw Eeva reading in secret. She would have given her away except that she had her own secrets. Sometimes Eeva gave Kirsti pieces of bread to keep her happy. She never said why she did it, but Kirsti kept the bargain. Kirsti had a way of holding bread with her fingers wrapped round so you could hardly see it. Even at table she did that. And if you went too close she would glare.
Eeva’s finger touched the worn, soft cover of the book she wanted. It was bound in dark blue leather, with the title in gold on the spine, although the gold had been fingered away. It was her father’s Pushkin, the one he had bought in Petersburg when he was young. He had brought it back to Finland and kept it with him wherever he went. He had taught Eeva from this book. Every page of it they had turned together at some time.
She let the mattress drop. The dream was sweeping over her again, and she couldn’t push it back. She clutched the book tight, holding it in front of her body like a shield, but the dream surged through it.
Yes, it was her father she’d been dreaming of. He lay in bed, his nose a sharp prow, his brown eyes sunk. His hair straggled on the pillow. His voice had changed. It creaked and rasped and she had to bend low to hear it. A foul smell came from his lips.
‘I’m no good to you,’ he said. ‘I’m a failure.’
‘What d’you mean, Dad?’ she asked in terror. Her father never talked like this.
‘Everything I’ve done.’
He paused to get breath. His hand struck feebly on the blanket in frustration.
‘My life’s gone. That’s it. Over.’ He looked at her coldly, in a way he’d never looked at her before, almost as if he disliked her.
‘I’ve wasted my life,’ he said.
‘No, Dad, no!’
She couldn’t look at him any more. She fell forward and pressed her face into the grey blanket, sobbing. After a while she heard his voice again.
‘Eeva, my girl. Eevi, look at me.’
She lifted her head just a little, as if the full sight of him hurt her.
‘I’m leaving you. You know that.’
But the way he was looking at her was as if he was on a train and the train wouldn’t leave, and she was on the platform waving and waving with a bright fixed smile on her face, both of them wishing that the train would leave and put an end to it.
‘A few more days of this, and it’ll be all over for me.’
He said it with strange satisfaction. He had no pity for himself, and none for her. He had never talked to her like this before.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said, and she realized that tears were running down the sides of her face and trickling into her ears.
‘I’ve got nothing to leave you,’ he went on in a detached voice that cut her like a knife. ‘The landlord will be round the same day they carry me out. He’ll give you your marching orders. You’ll go to Mika’s – you’ve always got on well with his boy, Lauri. It’s all arranged. Mika’s been very good to me,’ he added, with the same cold, fixed smile.
‘But he’s your friend, Dad!’ she protested. ‘They’re our friends.’
She wanted to bring it all back: what he’d lived his life by. That they all belonged to each other, that they were linked by ties deeper than blood. Solidarity, unity, comradeship: she wanted to throw the words at him, the words that had got into her head almost before she was born.
‘Yes,’ he murmured, humouring her wearily. ‘You’ll go to Mika’s. I should have looked out for you better. But it’s too late for that now.’
It wasn’t a dream. Or only partly a dream. Some of those things had happened. At night they came back to her and walked around her mind. Lauri knew. He heard her crying at night, and he came padding across the floor to her.
She couldn’t tell Lauri all of it. She couldn’t risk Mika ever coming to know that her father, whom Mika looked up to, had talked like that. Mika would have said she was throwing dirt on the memory of her father. He would have kicked her out, maybe. She was there in his apartment, not because she was Eeva, but because of those other things. Solidarity, unity, comradeship.
Lauri put his arm around Eeva’s shoulders, in respect for her grief. He didn’t try to offer words of comfort. Just his arm, quite heavy around her, making her feel that whatever happened she wouldn’t fly off alone into the dark nowhere that had swallowed her father.
‘Lauri.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
The footsteps in her dream were her own. After her father died it was silent. Mika had stayed by his bedside. Eeva had got up and begun to walk, from the window to the door, from the door to the window. The tap of her boots on the boards was all she let herself hear. All she had to do was turn and walk, and turn and walk again, and that way she’d been able to think of nothing.
Eeva went down the attic stairs with her boots in her hand, and stopped to listen. Nothing. No one slept on the bedroom floor. Imagine a whole layer of a house kept empty. That one floor of the doctor’s house was three times bigger than the apartment she’d shared with her father.
‘It’s not a big place,’ the doctor had said when she arrived. ‘I live quite simply.’
‘Yes,’ she’d said.
Down again, down the back staircase to the kitchen. The narrow wooden stairs were friendly. The warmth of the kitchen was coming up to meet her, and the faint smells of yesterday’s food.
In the kitchen she put on her boots, and lit another candle. Why not, she thought, defying herself. Why not have light. Why not scoop the creamy top of the milk into her own cup.
She sipped the milk and it tasted rich and thick in her mouth. She crumbled her black bread into pieces, dropped them in the milk, let them soak and swell. Then the sugar, and a dusting of cinnamon from the spice rack. She snuffed the scent rising from her bowl, and began to eat, quicker than she wanted to but she couldn’t help herself. Soon it was gone, but she still wasn’t full.
No, better take no more. He seemed not to notice, but maybe he was taking note of everything, and had counted each one of the jars of preserves ranged in the larder. Or if he hadn’t, that woman who came round poking into everything would have. He called her Lotta, but her name was Mrs Eriksson. She came into the kitchen as if she lived here, looking around with bright sharp eyes, watching Eeva without comment. But there was plenty of comment in her head, Eeva knew. She read those looks which said, The doctor is only a man, he doesn’t know what’s what. But you won’t put anything past me.’
Eeva imagined Mrs Eriksson naked. When she was little, Lauri had told her this was a good thing to do when someone was telling her off, and he was right, it always worked. There would be deep marks in her flesh, from her corsets. She had the blue-white skin that bruises easily, and sandy Swedish hair.
As she thought of naked Lotta, malice curled inside Eeva and licked her heart like a cat. The dream was distant now. How good it would be to make coffee, but the scent of it might rouse him. There
are people who can smell coffee through their sleep.
She sat at the table, drew her candle close and opened her book.
Something woke Thomas, he didn’t know what. He reached over, lit his bedside candle, and fumbled his watch towards him. Four in the morning. No good trying to go back to sleep now.
He rolled over on his back, thinking about the Nordström birth. In the final stages of labour she had kept trying to roll over and get up on all fours, grunting and panting. It had shocked Silja.
It had shocked him, too. Between them they had returned her to a safer position, lying on her back. But she had shrieked with pain and arched away from the mattress.
Maybe – yes, maybe it had been better for her, the position she had chosen. It would have taken the pressure off her spine. But how could he attend a woman on all fours, like a dog?
He shifted in his bed, going through the stages of the labour again in his mind.
Later, on his way back from the bathroom, he crossed to the window and opened the shutters. It was still dark. Darkness everywhere, a whole winterful of it at his back. He longed for it to end. Well, at least he could end this night now, and make the day begin. He’d go down to the kitchen and make coffee, and then go to his desk.
As he went down the kitchen passage, he saw a line of light under the door. He stopped still, shielding his own candle to be sure. Yes, someone was awake. It could be no one but Eeva. But why had she got up this early? Surely she didn’t think he expected her to rise at four, as if they were living on a farm?
No. Eeva’s no country girl. She’s from Helsingfors, remember? There must be something wrong. Maybe she’s ill, or homesick. She seemed so used to the house already that it was difficult to remember how short a time she’d been there.
He felt a surge of fellow-feeling. She woke in the night, like him, and couldn’t sleep again. What thoughts were crowding in her head? She was so light and quick you wouldn’t think that anything weighed on her. He had never seen her look distressed.
He reached for the kitchen door handle, but stopped. He would frighten her. And besides, he was dressed in an old woollen dressing gown that Johanna said was a disgrace and ought to be thrown away. No, he wouldn’t open the door.
But he ought to make sure that she was all right. She was under his roof, after all. And not much more than a child. Years younger than Minna. At the thought of Minna his eyes screwed shut in pain.
He would just walk around the outside of the house to the kitchen window, and check. The shutters would be closed, but there was a knot-hole in the wood that he used to spy through on winter evenings when he was a boy, standing on tiptoe to peep in at old Gudrun making ginger cake. If she was singing hymns to herself he’d know it was worth going in to beg a spoonful of the cake mixture. The old knot-hole would still be there. He made sure the shutters were painted regularly, so they didn’t need to be replaced.
Yes, he would just check that she was all right.
Thomas slid back the bolts of his house like a thief. They moved easily in their oiled sockets, and made no sound. He stepped out into the cold, tying the cord of his dressing gown more tightly around his waist. The leather soles of his slippers slid on the new frost. Lightly, setting his feet so the snow would not crunch, he made his way around the side of the house. There was enough starlight to see the outlines of trees, the white ground and the bulk of the house. The kitchen window was beside the back entrance. There was a small wooden porch, and a stoop where Gudrun sat in summer to shell her peas.
He came alongside the window, and moved stealthily forward, as if the girl could see him. But that was impossible. He was in the dark and she was in the light. Even if the shutters were open she’d be unlikely to see him, and they were closed.
The ground-floor shutters of his house were always closed at night. Why it was he couldn’t be sure. He only followed the pattern set he didn’t know how many generations back. Perhaps his grandfather had decided that it was good to close the shutters. Even on summer nights it was done, last thing before they went to bed, when the garden was still light. The hooks that held the shutters back against the outside walls would be unfastened, someone would lean out from inside and pull the shutters together, and the iron bar that closed them would slide into place. The embrasures were deep, so it was possible to leave the windows open for the air to circulate even when the shutters were fixed. That was the way the house had been planned, long ago, by men who looked like him.
In the old days it was said that a starving wolf might hurl itself through a glass window after food. And there were robbers in the forest then. And so Thomas kept to the old way, whether there was need for it or not.
He was thinking all these thoughts to put off the moment when he looked through the knot-hole. Frost wrapped itself around his legs. He was a fool to be out like this. He would make sure that she was all right, and then he would go back to bed and get warm.
Thomas leaned forward. At first he could see nothing, but then he moved and his eye found the bright sliver of light. He pressed right up against the shutter, to widen his field of vision. And there she was. Sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, with her back to the stove. Her chin was propped on her fists. She was looking down, frowning in concentration. What was she doing? He craned but he could not quite see what lay on the table before her. And then her hand moved, and he caught the blur of a turning page, and he knew. She was reading. Eeva was quietly reading, in his kitchen, in the middle of the night.
It shocked him. So studious, she was. He had never seen such a look on Minna’s face, not in all those years of tutors. What was she reading?
As if she’d heard his thought, Eeva looked up. He flinched, but she wasn’t looking at him. A moment of intense thought had roused her to look up, that was all. It passed, and her gaze dropped to the page.
Probably it was some pulpy servants’ novel. He half wanted to believe it. Why should she look up like that, as if seized by her own inner life? This was Eeva, who made his soup and whisked his floors with her broom.
But if it were servants’ trash, why should she look like that?
No, he was too cold. He could not watch her any more.
6
Lotta was coming to wash the china. Well, Thomas couldn’t stop her. She had declared her intention.
‘Your mother’s china, Thomas. It must be washed at least once a year. And Johanna’s beautiful china too, of course,’ she added. By this, she meant the English porcelain that Johanna had bought, and preferred. Poor Lotta, she could never hide her opinions.
‘I’ll come on Thursday’ she decided. ‘I’ll bring my own special liquid soap. I’ll need three large bowls, and muslin to line them, and plenty of hot water. You might tell your girl.’
‘Yes.’
‘Eeva, isn’t it?’ Lotta went on, as if she didn’t know perfectly well.
‘Yes, Eeva. Perhaps, Lotta, if she watches you, she’ll be able to wash the china herself next time.’
‘I very much doubt it,’ said Lotta briskly. ‘My mother would never have dreamed of letting a servant wash her china, and nor should I. I’ll be here at ten o’clock on Thursday morning.’
‘Eeva.’
‘Yes?’
‘Mrs Eriksson will be coming on Thursday morning, at ten o’clock, to wash the china.’
‘Wash the china? But I do that.’
‘The stuff in the cupboards,’ he explained, nodding towards them.
‘Oh.’
‘She has a special system, apparently. She’s bringing her own soap, but she’ll need plenty of hot water, Eeva, and three large bowls, and muslin to line them.’
‘There’s always plenty of hot water here.’
‘I know.’
‘I could wash the china easily. She doesn’t have to come here.’
Eeva looked measuringly at the painted figures on the fine plates. She hadn’t smashed them, had she? She’d chosen not to.
‘It’s the way it’s always be
en done,’ said Thomas.
‘Did your wife used to come down here and wash it?’
He thought back. ‘No, I don’t believe she did. I think Mrs Eriksson came, even then.’
‘Oh well, in that case –’ Eeva shrugged, picked up another potato, and started to gouge out its eyes. ‘I suppose it’s a tradition.’
He almost smiled at her cleverness. She had turned it all around, so it was longer a question of Lotta washing the china because she couldn’t trust the girl to do it, but of Eeva respecting a tradition, as she might have respected those of a Trobriand Islander. She was very quick at peeling those potatoes. Her face was rounding out, he thought. The line of her jaw was softer, and her nose was less sharp.
Mrs Eriksson washed the china like the priest at his altar, Eeva thought. She stood up straight behind the table, still wearing her grey velvet hat with its grey velvet rose. Her ruffled collar was tight under her chin. Eeva had asked if she’d like an apron, but Mrs Eriksson declined. ‘It won’t be necessary, Eeva.’
No, it wasn’t necessary. There was no haste, no splashing of soapy water, no drips. Each piece of china was lifted carefully into the water, washed with a soft brush that Mrs Eriksson had brought along with the soap, dipped in one rinsing bowl and then the second. After that, Mrs Eriksson placed the china on more clean muslin cloths to drain.
Her hands were big. She could have done any kind of work, with hands like those, Eeva thought. But they were also pale and soft-looking, because of always wearing gloves. Eeva watched as the hands dealt with a cup, a saucer, a small fragile plate. Mrs Eriksson didn’t seem to mind her just standing there. Maybe she thought it would do Eeva good to watch.
‘Shall I dry those?’ asked Eeva meekly, knowing what the answer would be.