The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (32 page)

This gently distrait air about Amalie ruined Carl Laurids’s appetite; it made his world contract until she was all he could see; and it filled him with a wild, childish, reckless desperation which at one point in the evening, when they came face-to-face in one of the deep-set bay windows, prompted him to lean toward her and bark, as though giving an order, “I love you.” It was the first time in his life that Carl Laurids had ever uttered these words, and it goes without saying that even he—even such a cynic as Carl Laurids Mahogany—was hoping for an appropriate reply. But the momentous nature of the moment was lost on Amalie. With pouting, heavy-lidded indifference, she said, “Fetch me a glass of champagne, darling.”

They left the restaurant just as dawn was breaking, by which time the party had burned itself out. They stopped for a moment in the doorway and scanned all the figures slumped in chairs, or lying across tables, or propped up against one another in corners. Carl Laurids noted, to his satisfaction, that no one was in a fit state to throw rice after their cab. Then he switched off the big chandeliers and they walked together down the stairs, past guests who were no longer capable of recognizing them, out to the waiting car—and away.

*   *   *

The house into which they moved had belonged to a bankrupt estate that Carl Laurids had taken over a year earlier. A large white villa with a black-glazed tile roof, it overlooked the fishing village of Skovshoved; lying about halfway between the large residence of Queen Louise, the Queen Mother, and coffee merchant P. Carl Petersen’s mansion.

It was a big house. Even for the area around Skovshoved it was immense, with its balconies and sculleries, its garage and chauffeur’s apartment and stylish, asymmetrical garden. And of course it had been designed by Meldahl—who else?

Carl Laurids had planned the decor. The large drawing room with the big bow windows overlooking the Sound was called the Hellas room. Here homage was paid to ancient Greece with two large pillars decorated with grapes and vine leaves—all in imitation marble—and an ornate stucco ceiling on which the flora of Greece bloomed in white plaster. The library evoked memories of far-off China, with its black bookshelves and blanc de chine paintwork and lacquered folding doors and fine porcelain—acquired, one way and another, through Carl Laurids’s connections with H. N. Andersen and the Danish East Asia Company. The dining room, still on the ground floor, was decorated in the Moorish style with sweeping arches painted on the walls and a marble floor worked in the same pattern as the Court of Lions in the Alhambra. Then there was the billiard room with its wood paneling and hunting prints and, on the walls, rifles that had never fired a shot—supposedly reminiscent of an English country house; and the smoking room, which harked back to ancient Egypt. All these rooms were open to view, filled with guests, at the countless parties given by Carl Laurids and Amalie; and since they were also photographed, we can, today, reconstruct them right down to the position of every little knickknack. In addition, some of the second floor was on view to guests—but there the line was drawn; that was as much as anyone saw, so far and no farther.

The fact is that the house was sharply divided into the visible side, of which we have spoken, and the invisible—the toilets and bathrooms and kitchens and the tiny servants’ rooms and the long corridors and empty nurseries and, most invisible of all, Carl Laurids’s office, which lay on the third floor and which he cleaned himself because he would not even allow the chambermaids to enter it.

Carl Laurids designed his home in this fashion to suit the taste of the upper-class circles in which he moved. The people he met there had a need of such vast rooms; rooms designed for flaunting, in which they were surrounded by the treasures of good, solid civilizations—reminders that their lives really did have substance, and that history was on their side. They also had a need for someone—in this case, Carl Laurids—to keep the doors closed on everything to do with the preparation of food and excretion and hygiene and servants and cleaning. Everyone knew very well that these things were there—after all, their own homes were arranged in similar fashion—but no one ever mentioned them, since they had all entered into that unspoken European upper-class convention of living in a world divided into what they could see and what they pretended they did not see.

All of the many, many functions for which Amalie and Carl Laurids’s house was to provide the setting had, like the house, their visible and their invisible sides. The visible proceedings were conducted in the dining room, drawing room, billiard room, and smoking room. And what did they involve? Has any reader wondered about that? What went on at these parties, with all these nobles and army officers and high-ranking civil servants and
parvenus
and famous artists? Well, they were not, as one might expect, discussing business. These people kept their work and their private lives strictly separate. As they said, we don’t get together to talk shop but to enjoy ourselves. And that is precisely what the visible side of Carl Laurids’s gatherings was about: it was about enjoying oneself; about getting the
feel
of one other. Across the green baize of the card tables and over cognac and liqueurs and across the big Steinway, these men and women
feel
their way toward one another. They reenact the convoluted rituals of middle-class culture, designed to foster that heartfelt, tingling sense of belonging; combined with the realization—and the impression—that at least we here on the inside, we who have come in from the cold, stand united. There, outside, glint the lights of Copenhagen, and this year alone the longshoremen have been out on strike, and the bricklayers, and the federation of unskilled workers, and the deckhands—and that is just between Carl Laurids and Amalie’s getting married in June and their throwing their first party here at the end of July. And in the northeast, beyond Sweden—which they can, of course, see from here—the Bolsheviks are committing their atrocities; and then there’s the war they have just come through, and the political situation on the domestic front, with the Social Democrats now forming the second largest party. All of which is just awful. Ah yes, but it is out there.

Over and above this, there was an invisible side to the party, carried on at the invisible side of the house. Although perhaps “invisible” is not the right word, since everyone sees what was going on; everyone sees it anyway: gentlemen and ladies throwing up in the toilets after eating and drinking like pigs; men in evening dress chasing housemaids along the corridors; married couples swapping partners and withdrawing into the empty nurseries—while out by the summer house in the grounds someone is crying as though her heart will break. But this is all par for the course in Copenhagen. Carl Laurids and Amalie’s parties are not debauched, it is not as though they have a bad reputation—quite the contrary. Just now there is an aura of respectability around Carl Laurids—as there has been before and will be again—and these parties simply typify the dreams harbored by certain sections of the Danish upper class just after the First World War. But if we are interested in finding out what made these parties
special,
we will have to look elsewhere. If we want to know what made them different from so many other parties held along Strand Drive, then we will have to examine a number of details of which very few people, if anyone, were aware at that time. Only because we have so many descriptions of Amalie and Carl Laurids’s house have we been able to reconstruct them; and because I know Carl Laurids so well that I know what to look for. Of course, once again it comes down to cynicism, to the uncanny synthesis with which Carl Laurids observes all the social norms and conventions, abides by all the rules, even as he is looking straight through them; as though he never does anything because he actually needs to do it, but only because it might be worth his while. As, for instance, with a series of tiny, searing breaches of etiquette of which only he and we are aware, but which leave his guests with a vague niggling sensation at the back of their minds and help create a myth about Carl Laurids that will swell and swell, just like his balloon—until the day in 1929 when he suddenly disappears. These breaks with form are, in fact, very small; almost invisible. The house’s mélange of cultural styles, for example, a mix that even by the standards of the day is possibly a mite overdone. It is as though Carl Laurids is saying, “You want culture? Well, that’s what you’ll damn well get. Here’s Greece and the Etruscans and the Far East and Islam and ancient Egypt; that ought to make you feel really secure.” And then there are the toilets, which are situated far too close to the living apartments. Thus, whenever anyone goes in or out, it is impossible not to see the toilet bowls—which Carl Laurids has had painted with rose petals and mounted on small platforms, all to satisfy some obscure wishes on Amalie’s part. Carl Laurids never understands these wishes, but feeling the way he does about Amalie, he nevertheless complies with them. And then there is Amalie’s bedroom, occupying what is really a
very
exposed position; with its double doors seldom closed, its Arabian Nights–style decor, and the erotic Indian miniatures on its walls clashing fiercely with the Raphael angels and Sistine Madonnas of the ground floor. And all of this the guests
see.
If it were not that they are but mere details within the greater whole, if Carl Laurids were not such a brilliant host and Amalie such a sparkling hostess, then their guests might have found it all pretty hard to swallow—both with what I have mentioned and a few other bits and pieces. But as things stand, no one apart from us is any the wiser. It never occurs to any of those invited to the house, not even regular visitors, that Carl Laurids occasionally seems like a very shrewd musician fiddling speculatively with the instrument of their souls.

Only in certain limited areas was Carl Laurids blinded by his love for Amalie. Where all—more or less all—practical considerations were concerned, his perception was crystal clear. Thus he knew right from the start that Amalie would never be capable of running a house. They had been there only a week when he appointed a housekeeper. He chose an African woman who went by the name of Gladys. Her skin was so smooth and shiny and she moved with such easy grace that it was left to her eyes to betray that she was probably more than half a century old. She came from Kenya and had been in service in Lord Delaware’s house and, later, with Baroness Blixen; until, in 1915, she came to Denmark with this lady—later to become such a famous writer. And in Denmark she had remained (but don’t ask me why; I have enough on my plate without trying to discover how Gladys ended up on Strand Drive), and here was Carl Laurids appointing her as his housekeeper. His gray eyes bored straight through the warnings given by his associates and all the talk of how much trouble one always had with servants and how Negroes were so unreliable and how there was no telling what might happen. He saw beyond the way Gladys mixed up Danish with English and her native tongue; homed in on her strength of will and her imperturbable air of authority. On her first day at work, he gathered all the staff—the three gardeners and the chauffeur and the housemaids and chambermaids and the two footmen and the cook and the kitchen maids—in the entrance hall, in front of the big fireplace. Carl Laurids’s wealthy friends would have been surprised if they could have seen and heard him on this occasion. Gone was the affability, the charm, the confidence-inspiring manner; these Carl Laurids had quietly folded up and shelved. With the denizens of the house’s invisible side he adopted another tone of voice, both paternal and threatening and much like the one he had once used with the staff at Mørkhøj. He said, “I have taken on Gladys here as housekeeper. You all know that you must honor me as you would Our Lord, and love my wife as you would Mary, Mother of God. And I tell you now that you must fear Gladys as you would a general. And if anyone here has any remark to make about her being a Negro, then you can go to your rooms now, this instant, and address your remarks to your trunk and then you can carry your trunk out to the driveway and I’ll see to it that you’re picked up by a cab and driven straight to hell—because you’re fired, so get out!”

No one had any remarks to make, neither then nor later.

I should warn everyone against imagining that there was anything philanthropic about Carl Laurids’s conduct on this occasion. There is nothing to suggest that he had any particular soft spot for foreigners, or took any special delight in the exotic, or had any desire to challenge the prevailing belief that the farther south from the Alps one traveled, the more inferior were the beings one was likely to meet. Carl Laurids acted in such an unprejudiced manner for one reason only: the usual one, that it was worth his while. With his unerring instinct for his fellowmen he had discerned in Gladys the gifts necessary for running a house such as his, on Strand Drive, firmly, efficiently, economically, and discreetly.

And so it was. In little or no time the house and its grounds seemed to be running themselves. Carl Laurids could be sure of seeing the staff only twice a month—because he insisted on paying them their wages personally. In fact, so effective was Gladys’s understanding of how to respect and exploit the dividing line between the visible and invisible sides of the house that several days could elapse without even Amalie—who spent a fair bit of time at home—seeing any of the staff except her own maid, the chauffeur, and the footman who served her meals.

I would like to point out that Amalie is the first woman in the cast of characters to whom we have been introduced who does not need to lift a finger in her home; nor is there anything at all in her life that she
has
to do. It is tempting to say that here, for the first time, we come across the term “free time.” And yet it can be difficult to say whether Amalie’s time really is free—although I can say what she did with it: the same as her friends from Ordrup and Charlottenlund. Like her, these ladies lived in houses that cleaned themselves and where meals materialized without their having to give them a thought. They attended art classes and music lessons and took courses in the most attractive way of sticking flowers in water. They went riding—in summer, at Matt-son’s stables in the Dyrehaven park; in winter, at the Christiansborg Palace riding school. And always in a body. On second thought, I do not think we can say that these women spent every minute of their days in leisurely pursuits. Of course, it is tempting to get all hot under the collar and say, what are they anyway but a bunch of upper-class hothouse flowers, all wrapped up in cotton at a time when, in Copenhagen, people are still dying of starvation in the streets and in the tenement where Anna and Adonis have been living for some years. But it would not be fair. There is no doubt that all the riding lessons and tea parties and flower arranging and trips to the races and to Fonnesbech’s department store served several important ends, the most important of which was that these women had a particular task in life: to show the world, and themselves, the true meaning of “femininity.” In those salons and parlors and drawing rooms that others kept clean; in a world where the image of femininity changed from day to day—virtually from one day to the next—it was the heroic duty of these middle-class ladies to take, as it were, lifelong lessons in how to be real women. By frequenting the same riding schools and the same shops as former generations of the well-to-do and by making up bouquets like those created by Hans Christian Andersen, they did their best to exorcise newspaper items on the increasingly outrageous bathing-suit fashions and the fact that more and more women were smoking cigarettes.