A House Without Mirrors (9 page)

T
he days after everyone had left felt unreal. The empty rooms in Henrietta’s house were in constant shadow, in spite of the late summer sun outside the windows. A strange silence rolled through the halls and corridors, and even the smells were gone.

Not until the third evening did I understand. I was sitting alone in Wilma’s empty room, where the bedding was still folded neatly on top of the mattress, when I realized that it was not the silence that was alien, but everything else that had been and gone: the sounds and voices that had occupied the house while the cousins were there had been the exception. The silence was familiar, like an old cardigan.

The silence was me.

I know that I cried a little there on Wilma’s bed, but I actually can’t remember at what point I
decided to go back to the wardrobe with the mirrors. I can’t even be sure that I actually made any decision at all. Suddenly I was just sitting there in the house of mirrors, on the sofa under the stained-glass window on the first-floor landing.

Hetty was sitting next to me and on the table in front of her were half a dozen paper boxes full of photographs. A couple of empty photo albums were opened up and she had placed a glue bottle with a brush lid on a napkin.

She was almost an adult now. A young woman, wearing beautiful clothes. The blouse was made of cream silk, and the skirt of a soft, grey woollen fabric. She had kicked her light-coloured pumps onto the carpet and she sat with her legs curled under her on the sofa. She was so beautiful that I almost started weeping again.

“Have you been crying, Thomasine?”

I shook my head, but realized that of course she didn’t believe me. My eyelashes were still straggly and I was sniffling all the time. I hadn’t been aware that Hetty knew my name.

She didn’t ask anything else and for a while we sat quietly as she picked up bundles of photographs, flicked through them and put them down again.

“Well, what are we going to do about all these?” she sighed. “I have been thinking for a long time that I should sort them out, but I don’t know where to begin.”

I picked up the bundle she had just put back into the box. They were old photographs, black-and-white with a funny serrated edge. Most of them seemed to have been taken outside, in a garden or some kind of park, and in one of them a young man in white trousers was doing a handstand on a chair. He had braces over his shirt and his trouser-legs had slipped down to reveal a pair of tartan socks. I didn’t know who he was; I didn’t recognize him even when I turned the photo upside down and saw his face the right way up.

“Why not start from the beginning?” I said. “Is this the oldest box?”

Hetty shook her head.

“There are many that are older,” she said, pulling one of the boxes towards her. “The year and month are written on the back of each one.”

“Well, then,” I said. “Why don’t we just sort them from the oldest to the newest?”

Hetty’s face lit up when she looked at me. She
wasn’t smiling, but there was joy in her eyes, which made her look as if she was.

“You’re so clever, Thomasine,” she said. “What would we do without you?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Ah,” I said. “It’s just what you do, isn’t it?”

In silence, we sorted through the photos of these strangers.

Neither of us said anything, and the sounds we made when we grabbed another bundle and sorted through them were so faint that you could hardly even hear them.

The oldest pictures were from the end of the nineteenth century. They were mounted on thick cardboard, and all of them had the names of photographic studios on the bottom. In that box there were no exteriors or photos of actual rooms. Single men and women, children in groups, and large families had gone to the photographer to get their pictures taken. They had old-fashioned clothes and hairstyles, and sometimes somebody wore a uniform or a student’s cap. A young man in a suit, with a centre parting as straight as a nail, rested a glowing white straw hat on his lap. Everybody
looked thoughtful, almost dreamy. I once asked my dad if people were more serious back then, but he answered that it was probably more to do with the fact that you had to sit still for so long in front of the camera.

There were only a few dozen cardboard photos from each decade to start with, but then, as we got into the twentieth century, something must have happened. Suddenly there were bundles of twenty or thirty pictures a year, and the photographs were thinner and smaller. They no longer showed just people, but streets, houses, beaches and boats. Some were photos of pets, especially a little black dog, and those pictures were blurry, as if they had been taken by children.

“Look, they are off to Denmark in this one,” Hetty said as she showed me the photo. “They had taken the night train to Elsinore.”

It was a photo of two men and three women standing in front of a white railing on a ship, with the sea in the background. They all wore hats, and the men were dressed in suits and ties. A little boy in shorts and a sailor shirt was sitting on the deck in front of them, and on the back of the photo it said
June 1922
.

“Who are they?” I asked, handing it back. “Do you know their names?”

Hetty looked surprised, but that invisible smile remained brightly on her face.

“Of course I know their names,” she said. “I’ll write them down when we stick them in the album.”

A little later, she started gluing the photos into the album, writing a few lines under each photo.
Benjamin and Gottfrid on their way to scout camp in Furusund
, it might say. Or
Margot and Asta with Spot under the pergola
. She seemed to know the name of every single one of them.

I carried on sorting through them for a while, but then I got fed up and opened up the album that Hetty had just finished. To begin with I flicked through it mechanically, but after a little while something made me stop. I went back to the beginning and studied each photo carefully, and then I realized that the same faces appeared again and again. They were reproduced on page after page, but with variations. The younger people in particular changed so much within a few years that I had to go back and check their names to know that they were really the same people. They were in the country stroking cows, they
went to the funfair, they graduated from school and university, they got married and did their military service, had children, moved, travelled. Lived.

As if falling in a dream, I realized that what I was flicking through was the lives of human beings. Only tiny slivers of each one, of course, but still real lives.

As real as my own.

Hetty had put the cap back on the glue bottle and was sitting watching me. She saw that I had understood, and this time she really smiled. At that moment the sun shone through the stained glass of the hallway window and the rays fell across the room like tiny twirls of colour and light.

Life is always there around us. So many human lives that they are impossible to count, and yet we can always perceive the unfathomable space in each one of them.

“I know,” Hetty whispered, although I hadn’t said anything. “I know, Thomasine.”

Her whisper pushed me across an invisible boundary, and suddenly I collapsed. I collapsed into the soft pillows, and cried.

It wasn’t the usual type of weeping, the kind that only goes on for a short while and makes little
difference. This was like a spring flood, a hot wash with many rinses, the draining of a water tank until it was empty. I cried so that my whole body shook, I yelled and sobbed, and all the time I was thinking: Now. This is when it happens. Everything is changing now, this is when I become new.

I think it took quite a while. Afterwards I felt clean, but when I sat up and looked around I realized that the room hadn’t changed at all.

Hetty was sitting where she had been sitting before; I was in just the same place, too.

“That felt good, didn’t it?” Hetty whispered as she offered me a hankie. “You needed that.”

I wiped snot and tears from my cheeks until they were dry.

“It only helps for a while, though,” I said. “And I can’t go on crying forever, can I? I thought something would happen.”

Hetty looked at me curiously.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said, patting my eyes dry with the hankie. “That I would change like Wilma. And Signe and Erland.”

Hetty got up and slipped her feet into her pumps.
They fitted her so well that she only had to wriggle her foot to get them on.

“That all depends,” she said as she glanced at her watch. “Wilma and Signe and Erland all had things inside them that they needed to discover.”

“And what about me?” I said. “Have I… haven’t I got things inside me that I need to discover?”

It felt really horrible to know that. Was there really nothing worth discovering inside me? Was what you saw all you got?

“I’m sure you have,” Hetty said. “But you are not the problem here.”

I looked at her. I really didn’t get it.

“What do you mean, I’m not the problem?” I said. “Why not?”

Hetty was already on her way down the stairs. Just before turning the corner, she halted and looked back, one hand resting on the banister.

“It’s not you who’s standing in the way of your life, as it was for your cousins,” she said. “It’s someone else.”

And then she was gone.

I
must have wandered several miles through Henrietta's house that day. For the first time I really paid attention to the rooms; I saw that somebody had figured out how everything went together. The hallway and the hall led to the dining room that led to the parlour and onwards up the stairs to bedrooms and bathrooms. Everything was in perfect order for following a person's movements through the day, through the night and into the next day.

For the first time I saw that Henrietta's house had been built with one single purpose: that people should live in it.

And Dad and me, what were we doing here? Were we alive? Dad didn't come down from Henrietta's room until late in the evening, and by then he was so tired he could hardly speak. We ate a bit of whatever
was in the freezer, mainly cocktail sausages and frozen vegetables that I had fried up before. But at least it wasn't pizza.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Dad said when he had finished. “Leave the dishes and I'll do them when I come downstairs.”

“Are you going back up to Henrietta again?” I said, glancing at the clock, which had just turned ten. “Shouldn't you try to get some sleep?”

He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips.

“I can't,” he said. “She won't last long now.”

He had never talked like that before. I realized it must be serious.

It was probably just a matter of hours.

“Go to bed,” I said, standing up. “I'll sit with her. I'll wake you if anything changes.”

Dad looked at me with red-rimmed, blank eyes.

“But you need your sleep,” he said. “You are a growing girl.”

I turned on the tap and put the dishes in the sink.

“I'm not sleepy,” I said. “It feels as if I've been sleeping for far too long.”

Henrietta was lying in the same position as the last few times I'd seen her. On her back, her hands clasped over her stomach, her mouth half open and her eyes closed. You couldn't tell whether she was dreaming. Her face looked calm, so at least she wasn't having nightmares.

I knew Dad turned her over sometimes so that she wouldn't get bedsores, but most of the time she lay as if she were already resting in her coffin. She looked comfortable, and suddenly I realized how envious I felt of her.

The thought made me sit up straight.

Was it true? Did I really envy somebody who was about to die? In perhaps just a few hours?

Yes, I did.

I wished my face could have been as free of longing as Henrietta's, that my hands lay as still as hers. At least then I wouldn't be wishing for a lot of things that would never happen.

I finished the albums, Thomasine. Would you like to see?

It was Hetty's voice, and it came from somewhere in the room. Or else it only existed in my head. But I didn't care either way.

“Yes,” I said aloud. “Where are they?”

There was no answer. My gaze wandered from Henrietta's white bed to a stool by the bedside table. A pile of old leather-bound books were lying there—they looked familiar. Were they what Hetty meant?

I picked up the top album and opened it carefully. No, it must be wrong. The pages were yellow and smelt old, and Hetty's albums had been as good as new. Without thinking, I turned to the first page.

The face in the picture almost made me jump. That centre parting, as straight as a nail.

The straw hat, white like cream cake, rested on the young man's knee. I had seen the same photo before.

It was me who'd pasted it there.

I only had to turn a few pages to be sure. The worn album I was looking through now was the same one I'd helped Hetty fill with pictures. But just a few days ago the covers and pages had been brand new.

It was the same with the other albums in the pile. I recognized every single picture and hardly needed
to read Hetty's wriggly handwriting below each photo to know who the people were. In a group shot of children on a lawn from around the time of the First World War, I noticed a chubby girl with plaits. She might have been five years old, and she wore a white dress and apron. Henrietta, it said.

I turned my gaze from the album to the old woman in the bed. There was no similarity at all between Henrietta in the photo, taken on a summer's day in another world, and Henrietta beside me. Had that wrinkled face on the pillow really been hiding under that rosy child's cheeks that the camera caught almost a hundred years ago? Well, yes, I think it probably had. All our future faces are hiding behind the one we see in the mirror each morning. Even this evening a change will occur, so tiny we can't see it.

But the camera does.

With renewed interest I flicked through the albums looking for the stages of Henrietta's transformation, and found them at varying intervals. Henrietta as a schoolgirl, dressed up as a witch for Easter, as a girl scout with a sooty nose, in a rowing boat surrounded by white water lilies. In the next album she was suddenly dressed in grown-up clothes,
she was bicycling, laughing with girlfriends who were probably long dead. Then came the photos from drama school, the plays, the films. The photos of Henrietta increased in number each year, some private, others taken by film studios and magazines. The rest of the family was there too, growing old and having children, but it was as if they were lurking in the shadows while Henrietta was standing in the light.

When I reached the Sixties, shortly before Dad and Uncle Daniel were born, the photographs of Henrietta stopped abruptly. The last photo showed her sitting at a café table in a piazza in some warm country. Italy, perhaps. She smiled into the camera one last time, untouchable and blindingly beautiful.

Then she disappeared from the pages of the album.

Instead of photos of Henrietta there were photos of children. Tiny, round, smiling kids caught in fading colour photographs. To my surprise, I recognized some of them from Dad's album at home. There were baby photos of him, Uncle Daniel and Kajsa, holiday photos and school photos, sometimes a postcard with a child's handwriting and arrows pointing to a specific hotel window. They must have sent them
to Henrietta, and she must have collected them. She, who had never had any children of her own, had preserved the photographs of the youngest members of the family as carefully as if they had been her own.

There was Dad, smiling over the handlebars of a moped. His fringe was hanging down over his eyes and he had long points on his shirt collar. In the photo below, Kajsa was sitting in the sun on some steps. She was wearing flares and a white T-shirt with a smiley face on it, and she looked about Wilma's age. Even Uncle Daniel looked young standing on a jetty somewhere, proudly holding a perch impaled on a stick.

I flicked through the pages faster. I had never seen these photos before. There were quite a few of Dad, as a boy, a teenager, a young man. Mum appeared in a holiday photo at the end of the Eighties, and right at the end of the last album was a photo of a laughing, dark-haired girl who'd lost her front teeth.

It was me.

I could even remember when Dad took the picture. At the funfair, the summer before Martin was born.

With fumbling, frightened fingers I turned the very last page of the last album.

And there it was.

The photo, the only one that existed of all of us together. Mum and Dad younger and close together, me with Martin on my lap. Our smiling faces so open that it hurt me on the inside.

At that moment, in that fraction of a second when the photo was taken, we'd believed that we'd always be happy.

“Thomasine.”

The whisper ought to have frightened me, because it was real. It came from within the room that I was sitting in, but I wasn't afraid. I did not even flinch when Henrietta's scrawny hand left its nest on her chest and shakily settled on my arm.

“I'm here,” I said as I leant closer towards her. “Would you like me to get Dad?”

Henrietta's head moved a few millimetres in either direction, indicating a no.

“It is…” she breathed, and I had to put my head right by her mouth in order to hear her. “It is you I want to talk to.”

I sat up.

“Me?”

My surprise was real. Even when Dad and I
had first visited, while Henrietta was still up and about, she had seldom talked to me. Not that she was unkind—on the contrary—but she was already entering her own world.

Sometimes I hadn't even been sure if she knew who I was.

“You have to bring him in here,” Henrietta whispered. “Now, tonight.”

Was she awake, or was she talking in her sleep? I studied her closed eyelids, as if they could give me a sign.

“Show Thomas the mirrors,” she breathed, every word a sigh. “Take him to the conservatory and ask him this…”

The last words were so faint that I would never have heard them if I hadn't put my ear right beside her mouth. But I heard, and nodded that I had understood.

Henrietta's eyes opened for a second, and when her gaze met mine I drew a deep breath. The world shook beneath us when I realized.

Henrietta was Hetty. Hetty was Henrietta.