under the newly fallen snow

part one

Marian Wagner

Friday, late May 1951

The streets were wet with dusky rain but the air was warm. He was holding Anita's hand walking her home. It was coming up to eleven. He still thought of it as two hours after curfew, although the German guards were gone from the streets now for more than six years. They were all fighting the routines that had befallen them during the five years of occupation, all their ways of making do behind the blackouts. It was a silent conspiracy of the now redundant fears and cautions, still keeping a grip on their daily lives. There was no reasoning with the fear. Instead they busied their minds discussing politics and felt caught out when the sun shone through the curtains in the morning, or when over-indulging in butter on their bread and real cream in real coffee. They could not yet quite trust that life had hit the restart-button. The 'banana-boat' had still not arrived! He hadn't been able to taste them again until he went to America in the autumn of -49, the autumn he and Anita had met.

A cat moved in the dark, smoothly down from a fence and across the pavement in front of them into the street. Fred thought he saw the German uniforms wherever his eyes fell in the night. He grabbed Anitas warm hand more firmly. He preferred to think about the feeling of her woollen green checked coat flapping so softly around her body, and the unpredictability of her shapes bouncing off his side were he least expected it when they were walking. His own tight athletic body moved fluently while Anita moved unevenly, always with too much nervous energy, like a skittish foal on too long legs. It irritated him a little that she could not fall into step with him, but exited him also. She leaned slightly towards him as they walked making his body acutely alert to the contact, now the electricity was fizzing along his arm, now zapping his hip. He started peeling her clothes off in his thoughts, tried to imagine the curves he had only ever felt with his hands in the dark. Now that they were nearly married.., he had some rights surely? If he asked to see her now she would not be offended? It was the trust and openness in her eyes that had kept him from asking of her what he would have asked of any other girl a long time ago. He could not get himself to violate the trustfulness. There had been others but there had never been the trust, the immediacy and honesty he felt between them. Anita could not lie if she wanted too, it was not in her nature. She was not like his family, always telling you whatever they preferred you to believe.

Whatever Anita was thinking of so easily slipped through her lips and shone from her eyes. He had longed for this honesty, this simplicity of being for so long. Although she was tactless also, and he sometimes took offence. I seemed to her everything was black and white. He would spend a couple of days on his own nursing his wounds when that happened, when she offended him, failed to see the nuances of things, but he always forgave her, he needed her. He had accepted that. She was to be part of his life forever. And he knew if it had not been for the fear of her mother, and what others would say, he would have known the secrets of her nooks and crannies a long time ago. She was too good a girl to say so but he knew she was ready to have him.

"Will you see me in? I hate coming back to an empty house. I think the others are still at the theatre."

"Of course," he nodded reassuringly. He would take care of her always.

She bent her neck to find the keyhole in the dark porch his eyes following the sleek of her nape, her curly hair falling forwards over her cheekbones, covering her face. It was as if the white skin of her neck suddenly unfolded for him the whole white surface of her naked body, made him a promise he could not resist. He felt a bit shaky and followed her sheepishly upstairs to the flat, into the kitchen.

"Noone home," she confirmed, her pale eyes flickering towards him in the half-light of the scrubbed clean room. He was not sure if he should go or she wanted him to wait a little. Make sure there were no intruders in the house. Only the light over the cooker was lit.

She left the lights down.

"Anita," he reached out for her. She peeled her coat off and managed to slip it over the back of a kitchen chair as she came towards him and slid warmly into his arms. It puzzled him how she would walk so skittishly, so seemingly out of balance, but then suddenly manoeuvre so smoothly at will, how she seemed to be able to harness all of her uncontrollable nervous energy into one decisive move when she wanted to. The purposefulness with which she had made it over to him made him back off very slightly and he saw the sudden caution in her as she checked herself. He spoke quickly to close again the gap between them. He did not want her devotion to go away. He had to keep her open, keep her wanting him. "Anita, I cannot take my thoughts off..hm, your skin", he confessed. "Your white smooth skin, all over you." His voice was getting thick. He looked at her quickly to see how she took it, he was feeling already the ground swaying dangerously underneath him. He could get himself into her bad books if he was not careful. She was so willing, he could feel her softening through his coat, but she was so moral too. He never knew how she would take things. "I would so love to see you," he whispered through the curls into her ear. She hesitated. "Now that you are going to be my wife?"

"O K."

She said O K! So simply!

She let go of him and walked towards the door adjacent to the kitchen, it would have been a scullery or a maids room when the house was built. It was her mother's sewing room now.

"I'll take my clothes off." She smiled and closed the door between them and he did not know what to do, was she expecting him to take his clothes off, too? He was standing in the kitchen in front of the window, although dimly lit, surely she could not expect him to take his clothes off here. He stayed as he was, in his coat.

"Freddy?" Her voice was faint from behind the door. Then it slid gently ajar. "I am naked," she whispered at him through the opening. "You come here, I can't go in the kitchen or they will see us." It reminded him, the blackouts were gone now.

He thought she sounded like an exited little girl up to some prank and was a little shocked at the lightness in her voice. Of course it was just a bit of fun, they wouldn't do anything, not in her mother's sewing room with the family expected back shortly.

There was no soft lighting in the sewing room. Only a fluorescent tube (R)high on the wall over the sewing machine. It blinded him momentarily as he stepped onto the creaky gray lino. Still the room was so small he could sense the confines of the four walls and he knew he was instantly near her. There on the opposite wall was Mrs Pedersen's mannequin on it's cast iron foot, it's carefully measured body tightly bound in beige calico. The cutting table besides it was scattered with bits of ivory silk, he knew it was Anita's wedding dress in the making. She and her mother were sewing it. The dress, still with it's sleeves loose, was smoothed to a flat white cross, shining like a bastion to innocence and purity.

Shining at him whiter still than the pile of white fabric on the table were Anita's naked breasts. There was no way he could miss them even through the gleam of the blinding fluorescent light. He giggled nervously. Her large round pendulous breast were spread across her wide chest, not at all like he was used to seeing them, in the bolstered up-pointy bras she would wear. They rolled gently as she was sidestepping the pins on the floor. He had not thought the nipples would be so red. He had thought of them as little rosebuds, small and pink and tight, pointing to his face the way they normally did. He could see the blue veins in the stark neons, on her neck, down the upper arms, finally hanging her breasts in fine meshed blue woven nets. Her waist was small, a little pink skin showed through her dark triangle. Her long pale legs. She looked at him lifting her arms towards him, poised. She was proud. He sensed it suddenly that she was about to flow into one of her elegant purposeful moves coming towards him. She was not ashamed at all, but smiling widely, nearly triumphant: There it all was for him, her full warm marbled glory, her womanhood flowing across the pins on the lino. Nothing could stop her! He felt his throat tighten and waves of heat rolling over him, wildly up and down his body, clouding his eyes til he could not see her any more. Something was holding his breath stuck too, he could not breathe out properly! Now his vision was blackening and he thought in a moment he was going to pass out. He had to get out! Had to get some fresh air! In an instant he was out the door and down the stairs, across the shingle with the garden gate slamming behind him. He was running along the pavement into the dusky rain.

On purpose he chose a side street leading nowhere, nowhere they both knew where Anita might follow to look for him. Not til he was several streets off his usual track did he stop. He was sure she would not follow him here. He sat down on the kerbstone, shaking like a frightened rabbit in the drizzle. The shining lights from the midnight windows were averting their gaze, one by one until the street was left in darkness. After a while he calmed down. What had got into him? He was feeling cold. He was feeling a little ashamed, too. Maybe he was not very well. He had been with girlfriends before, during his year out in America. He didn't know why it was so different with Anita? He looked again quickly up and down the street to be sure he had not been followed. He had to be alone, couldn't talk to her, couldn't explain himself. Anyhow she had been all naked, she would hardly come running after him. He chuckled a little to himself at the vision in his head of his fiance thundering down the streets in her full womanly glory trying to catch up with him . What a fool he was!

After a while he got up from the kerbstone where he had been sitting. The cold from under the tarmac had risen into his bones and he started along the pavement walking stiffly like an old man. As his eyes sought along the pavements on all sides he could see only the grey streets with their wood panelled suburban houses and their pretty wooden painted fences and gates. Oslo, the Norwegian capital, was a modern free-thinking city, he thought, but without much imagination. Things didn't change, not because people were against change but because they found nothing wrong with the old. Even the war did not seem to have altered people's outlook. As soon as the occupation had ended and the gardens were allowed to be gardens again, not utility fields to save them from starving, they had been planted over with the same plants as before. Now the big green lawns were again maturing. Peonies, roses, jasmines, lilacs, spirea, apples and berry bushes, the same traditional plants grew wherever he looked.

Norway had been a newly independent country, free of Swedish rule for only 45 years (R), they had been busy building their lives on the crest of their new found national pride when the war had reminded them again that there was a greater world out there, people who thought differently from themselves, passions and hungers they had chosen to close their eyes to. They had been a free people one day, under occupation again the next. Noone had seen the German warships coming up the fjords in the night.

The Norwegian people's will to combat adversity had been honed for many generations. They had grown up with strategies for fighting the harsh conditions of the Nordic climate, icy fjords and windswept mountain planes had not stopped them prospering. They were not a people to cow down and give up. The resistance movement had been strong throughout the five years. They had won. Freddy sighed, he was a little disappointed at how quickly they had all sunken back into their traditions and comforts. Was it only himself who still saw the uniformed shadows slipping around corners at night? Here in the city he saw them everywhere. He saw them in people's eyes, too. His year in America had been a huge relief to him. The Americans had the same hardiness as the Norwegians, they had fought many battles too, but they did not seem to be stuck with the shadows.

The Holst Nurseries had introduced a new flower to the Norwegian market, the new freesia, grown from a tuber instead of seed, an excellent cut flower. Apart from the annuals for pots and window boxes in the spring the Holst's business did not cater for the gardens. The nurseries were located on the outskirts of Oslo and the land there was expensive. Growing for the cut flower market demanded less space and gave a quicker turnover. Besides people only bought plants for their gardens during the short summer months. They died and got married the whole year, and not any less because a war was on. His father had done well. The new freesia had a long slim stem topped with rows of trumpet shaped flowers and came in all kinds of colours, red and maroon as well as white, yellow and lilac and a warm dusky blue. The scent was wonderful, feminine and fruity with a tinge of honey and vanilla. It was a popular flower with the retailers.

It had been his family's contribution and had made their business what it was. and he wanted Anita to carry them in her bouquet for the wedding. He wanted roses and freesias lining the aisle of the church, cream and purple edged Italian Coburg roses and white and yellow freesias everywhere!

Fred started walking along the pavements looking for his way home. The houses stood around him in the overgrown gardens. They were guardians of both past and future, of continuity. Germans left. Lawns and bushes grew as before. Listening he thought he could hear all around him in the quiet night a very faint thunder. It was the thunder of his future that was about to embrace him. It was his heartbeat, the dark tumbling sound that was so hard to detect, you had to listen so carefully, and who had the wherewithal to listen so quietly, so intently, all the time? He feared the future would come and he would not be ready for it. Something new would surprise him, overtake him, just as the Germans had done, something he had not even thought could happen. He shuddered in the dark drizzle. They had paid dearly for their national complacency. They all needed to stay alert to the dangers, to keep the evil from their doorsteps for ever. Only noone wanted to listen now. Their childhoods and teens had been trampled on by marching boots, they did not have time any more for waiting and watching. They wanted to live! They wanted to swim midstream! They had to believe that nothing and no one could stop them ever again!

He did not know why he had such a feeling of foreboding. His wife to be, he smiled to himself at the thought, Anita still had the spark. The shadow of war had not managed to settle on her. He was never sad in her company. Their wedding was only eight days away, so close! Monday they were already due in church for rehearsals. He would have to make light of their encounter tonight, when he saw her again, make out it was nothing, that she was just a little overwrought if she thought it mattered. Or maybe pretend it had been a game? He would give it a few days, let the whole thing cool down. Anyway, she and her mother would be busy sewing her dress and the bridesmaids dresses. When the time came for him to be with her, naked again, he could keep the lights down. He could have a drink, maybe make sure to pour her a glass, too. He would keep his nerve. He would get used to her, it wasn't that he didn't want her. It was her fearlessness that scared him so, it thrilled him too. She did not foresee trouble the way he did. He couldn't quite understand how she could seem so vulnerable and still be so fearless at the same time. It made him want to take care of her, although he was never really sure that she needed him to. He just couldn't figure her out. He was never vulnerable himself, not so anyone could see it. Still he was always scared somehow, mostly of himself. His own emotions were stalking him, made him run for cover sometimes, like tonight. The next time she was naked with him he might have to close his eyes, he thought, and it might be best if she didn't see that.

Anita remained standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the sewing-room her big eyes staring at the blue kitchen door across the room. It had just slammed behind Freddy. Now he was running down the stairs. The front door was closing. He was across the yard and out the gate. For a moment she looked down at her long white body, her soft round belly shining in the half-light. She was expecting to see some horrible blemish, some alien growth to have put the fear of God into him. But there was nothing there, a small mole above her left hip bone. Her eyes grew wider, paler, expanding in puzzlement trying to take in an explanation that she could not locate. Then they sprung full with tears. What now? He had not liked her. What if he did not want her any more? What if he did not come back? Her wedding dress in the sewing room...she tried to keep the sobs from coming and tiptoed along the wall over to the window , blinking, searching through her tears along the yard. Was he there still? Maybe he had gone out to get a rubber, although surely he should have asked her first?

She pressed her face all the way up to the window trying to hide her naked body from the shine of the street lamp out on the road. She thought she could hear his footsteps again. Lots of them! Dear God! It was her parents and her sister Eva coming back! Backing away from the window she wiped her tears quickly. What would they think seeing her standing here in the kitchen naked and red eyed? Desperatly she pulled her face into a wide grimace, trying to get the muscles to perform a more cheerful face. It had only been moments since she had been standing there proud thinking she had all the reason in the world to smile. The keys were in the front door now, and she bolted for the sewing room again, half shutting the door behind her so they would not see her straight away. On the floor next to the prim calicoed mannequin was her bra and knickers. She slipped them back on with nimble determination, her mother was not going to know a thing! Then she took the sleeveless wedding dress from the table and pulled it over her head making sure first that her cheeks were dry to protect the silky fabric. Trying on her wedding dress, of course, it was why she was in the sewing room in her underwear. Her parents and sister were in the kitchen now, she could hear father continuing into the lounge to sit down and smoke his pipe of Petteroes Extra before going to bed. She hoped her mother would follow through, that there hadn't been any mess left in the kitchen for her to stop and get her hands into. If she had just a few more moments on her own she could get her composure back. She grimaced again into the mirror as the door to her refuge slid open, her smile was not quite convincing but she hoped it would do. It was her sister Eva winding her face around the door frame. She raised her eyebrows smirking at Anita as she usually did: "Hello starlet". She and Eva were only a year apart, she had been there as long as Anita could remember. She knew her sister didn't like the wedding dress. Too outre, too silver screen Eva had said. She was sewing it in an ivory coloured satin , one of the new synthetics, with a three-quarter length sleeve and a fashionable butterfly collar. She had wanted a modern short length dress and the fabric had anyway been far too expensive.

Whoever got married in a short dress? Eva had demanded. Who did Anita think she was, some Hollywood film-star? Besides, the dress symbolised the end of their union, Anita and her's. She knew it would never be the same again now that she had Freddy. Her sister was leaving her, so what was she expected to feel? What did Anita care how she felt anyway? Anita was always concerned with herself.

"What's the matter with you?" Eva said. She had seen it at once!

Anita stared with defiance at her sister hoping a counter attack would distract enough to save her from explaining the red-faced calamity in the mirror: "Don't push your hair back like that, it looks so awfully dreary", she retorted feebly. The damned fluorescent worklight, it did not hide a thing! If she had been crying, so what? Was it so strange if a girl got a little emotional trying on her wedding dress? God what would happen now? Would she ever be wearing the dress up the aisle? She jabbed her lover lips with her teeth trying to bite the tears back but she could not stop herself bursting out crying again: Did Freddy not want her any more now that he had seen her? Her mother had always pressed how she should save it for her wedding day, but times had changed, she thought stubbornly, being engaged these days gave people license to do a lot of things, and they were as good as married. Besides, they all knew her mother had been pregnant with herself at her own wedding, although it was never spoken of.

"What's the matter with me?" Anita was shouting. "Look, now my lip is bleeding!" She blamed it on Eva, if she hadn't appeared just then..! "Help get the dress off me! It will ruin the dress!" The pitch of her voice was bordering on hysterical. Eva backed down.

"OK, OK, stand still then!"

There was their mother in the doorway, her black hair shining like a beacon, watching them both, her brown almond eyes serious under raised eyebrows, their lovely, youthful mother who they both adored. Somehow the hardships of the war had only set Liv Pedersen's features more calmly, more cooly. It had stretched the canvas a little tauter and perfected the brush strokes, a little softness and roundness that had used to blur the lines had been straightened out. Now shining with acquired timelessness, nearing forty, her beauty so defiantly preserved was greater than before. The girls both knew it. They knew none of them could ever compete with her. She was the measure of everything in their lives and no hardships would ever break her. They could not even imagine time in the end having to catch up with their mother, it seemed impossible. Nothing and noone could bend her will. They counted on it.

Liv Pedersen did not say anything on seeing her red-faced daughter. Like her serene beauty her even temper seldom if ever spilt over the edges. Anita had always been a trial of her strength, from the time onwards when she had laboured for a day and a half to give birth before finally expelling her first born from her body. When she had got through it and survived she had wowed never to have another child. It was like they had endured the deciding battle at their very first meeting, and in the process none of them had won. She had felt wary from the start of the little screaming girl by her bed, knowing somehow that the birth of her first baby was in as many ways an ending as a beginning. Her husband she knew how to get around. This little girl's and her own differences would weigh more heavily; she thought she was going to have to live with another will as strong as her own under her roof.

When she took the tiny girl home and found herself for years guiding her, comforting her in her sudden storms, she always felt the child with her small but firm embrace was taking something from her, never giving. It was a paradox, spontaneous Anita who shared her feelings so easily never really gave herself. She always came to her mother in some way or another needy, hungry for more. Liv thought she had looked after the child well. She was a mother, it was her own "enfant terrible". She had completed her own creation as best she could. But from under the surface she and Anita were always watching each other uneasily, the child anxiously, the mother resignedly, both always taken aback by the diametrically opposite logic of the other. All the effort and understanding the relationship had required, her investment in the girl, it had been so great, in a way she loved her more for her contrariness than she could ever love any other child.

She had vowed after the birth that had nearly killed her never to get pregnant again, but they were both healthy and young, her husband and herself, and she could not be a wife any worse than she could be a mother. Liv had dreaded the birth of her second daughter. To her surprise Eva had been completely different all along. She had been calm and thoughtful, a quiet little warrior. Eva and herself had got along without effort.

Still, Anita was the one that noone could resist, her temper and dimpled smile endeared her to everyone. Eva had the same dimples and it was curious to the mother how people just did not seem to notice them on Eva's cheeks.

Now Liv Pedersen was marvelling at the sight of her daughter in her wedding dress, the one she had always been able to rely on to spill the drink on the tablecloth. Her grown up girl was standing barefoot on the lino on long legs, blood from her lips and tears from her eyes dripping onto the dress, the precious fabric! Anita had not changed. Why on earth did she try it on in such a state?

Liv Pedersen's eyes sidestepped disapprovingly to the pile of clothes on the floor. In 21 years she had not managed to teach her daughter to fold them as she undressed. She handed Anita the handkerchief from her purse and sighed nearly inaudibly as she disappeared from the sewing room. Someone else would take care of her from now on. Fred Holst was not a bad man and there was money in his family.

Anita was always high and low, she would be OK in a couple of minutes. They had enjoyed a good evening out at the theatre, Liv Pedersen thought, Eva and herself, and her husband.

Eva helped Anita get the dress off in the sewing room before following her mother through to the lounge, to the welcoming spice of her father's tobacco. Enveloping their light evening chatter the smoke was making white swirling circles in the air hovering like a large transparent meringue, before gradually unravelling and sinking into a gentle blanket under the green floor lamp. From the lampshade's swell of magical green light it got the strength for another reincarnation, rising again in the corner clothing the room from the far wall. They were a family together, at home in their smoky micro universe.

Anita stood behind in the sewing room on the cool lino, her feet feeling numb and cold. She thought she could barely move them! She was relieved that they had all left her alone but disappointed too, was nobody paying attention? Did they not care about her, about her marriage, that her life was coming crashing down! The wedding dress was ruined! She wanted to be safely in bed under the duvet, still and feather all the thoughts that were hammering her. But to get to bed she would have to transverse the livingroom, were the three of them sat so peacefully together. The unfairness of her situation made her feel angry. So what if they sat there in their smug cosiness shrugging at her anguish? So what if she made a fool of herself again, she was not going to let them stop her! Why was it always her life that was falling apart? And why did this kind of disaster never befall Eva?

She did not bother getting dressed. Sweeping her heap of clothes up from the lino she covered her front and marched herself stubbornly towards her bedroom, pretending not to notice her sister and parents enjoying their nightcap in the lounge. It was hurting her eyes, the evening smoke that she usually enjoyed so much, the scent of her father's presence with the late night family comforts and togetherness. They were having biscuits and coffee. "Hello Pappa," she muttered. "I must be coming down with something." She could not stand their familiar calm in the green lamplight. Her limbs were growing so heavy as she sauntered through the room, hovering on the outskirts of their cosy world, her feet were barely obeying her. Managing to shuffle through to the bedroom at last she dropped the clothes again onto the floor and slipped under the cold puffy duvet. Mother always left the window open. As long as they were busy and left her alone, she did not care. She started sobbing into the pillow. She could not let anyone see her face. She thought the memory of her excitement and anticipation in the sewing room such a short time ago was still showing. How could it all change so quickly? She could not have met her parent's eyes without revealing what she had been about to do, or at least been willing to do, if Freddy had insisted. He had run away! Now she did not even know if he would still have her, his own fiance. He had taken one look at her naked body and headed for the door, as if he had found her repulsive. Surely she did not look that bad? Surely he had seen naked women before, at least in the magazines the boys shared. She had caught them group together looking, in the middle school, under the staircase. The boys always tried to hide the magazines away from her but she knew what they were doing.

As she was drifting into sleep her mother appeared to her in the doorway . She floated quietly across the room, in her quick gentle steps on soft slippers, her thick black hair tied in a hoop at the nape. She had come to close the window, to make sure Anita was warm enough. Anita could see her mother clearly for a moment as she let herself sink further into the puffed up pillows. She felt like a little girl again, she wanted to reach over to embrace her beautiful mother, tell her how much she loved her, that seeing her happy was all that mattered. It did not even matter about Freddy any more, but the bed was too huge to crawl across. It was engulfing her. Now she could feel her mother's strong arms lifting her up, putting her safely right in the middle of the bed between mother and father. She could see the ice-cream pastel shades of their nightclothes leaning like towers of Piza over the steep hills of eider-downs, the duvets were like a gentle vice keeping her still on all sides. They were smiling, saying it would all look quite differently in the morning. The thought rolled through her mind as she eased herself over on her side that she could phone Freddy up straight away, have it all cleared up there and then. It was late and the Holsts would be alarmed maybe, her mother would never let her phone anyone after ten in the evening, but when it came to matters of the heart...? She realised in her sleepiness that matters of the heart had never come up before, there never seemed to have been a crisis in their family that could not be contained to before ten o'clock. It was their watershed for pain and trouble. She frowned at this for a moment but then slid back into gratefulness, she could rely on her mother always to handle matters. Still, she thought, feeling surprised, she did not think her mother could handle this one. She had to talk to Freddy herself and it felt urgent!

Not knowing what to do she fell asleep. She fell into dreaming of crisp white linen. There was a curious room in her dreams, a ward full of beds, but noone was lying down in them. People were just standing around pretending the beds were not really there. They were all dressed up in their finery, and there was her wedding dress! It had been finished and looked fabulous! Someone else was wearing it!

When Anita woke at eight fifteen the summer sun had been up for four(?) hours. Her mother had been up for two. At the age of five it had been Liv Pedersen's job to feed the dogs twice a day, at six she was given the added duty of keeping clean and in order the annex where the dogs slept. It was a dirty job requiring frequent use of buckets of water and sticky green soap, as the dogs, the small grey and white elkhound and the German shepherd had a flap enabling them to access a run. The run was a half acre of land between the main house and the road, too stony for growing anything on. But it was a good run for the dogs, both for the purpose of exercising them, when they were not with father on the hunt, as for having them guard the front door to the house and the gate to the smallholding.

Life was easy still for little Liv at six, she had been able to go about her duties at her leisure. Her mother would wake her at eight fifteen as the older children were leaving for school. She had been allowed to sit by mother's side in the kitchen having bread and warm milk before slowly assisting in the unrolling of the day.

The summer she was seven and due to start school, her duties changed. The early shift in the outhouses feeding the livestock and mucking out was from then on left entirely to her and her older siblings. She was to muck out the henhouse and collect the eggs every morning, before leaving for school. From that age she had been considered not a child any more, she was now part of the general rhythm of the smallholding, being up early with the others.

Then as now she would step out of her bed at six in the morning, both summer and winter the floorboards cold and smooth under her feet. Now, living in their centrally heated flat on the first floor she made a point of always keeping a window open at night. It gave the cotton rug next to her bed just the right feel, the chill under her feet that belonged to her mornings. In the full size mirror on the wardrobe she brushed her hair rigorously twenty strokes before smoothing it backwards and rolling it up in a bun at the nape. She had been both teased and admired for her hair. It was a shiny bluish black like her father's, but straight, not curly like his. Although her father had grown up on a farm not far from where he and her mother had settled it seemed to Liv they had maintained a lack of clarity as to from whom he had inherited his dark sultry looks. It was an uncommon trait in the Norwegian east-country communities. The only people you saw sporting shiny dark curls were the Romanies passing through in the spring and autumn, plying their wares at the farms, maybe stopping for a few weeks giving a hand with the hoeing or the harvest. They were not unwelcome as they brought extra hands during harvest and goods often much needed at the farms, kitchen-ware and tools and good fabric for clothes. Still they were infamous for their passionate talk and hot tempers, with their company often followed squabbles and thieving. The settlers made sure the dogs were handy when they saw the gypsy-wagons approaching.

Liv's black hair and her father's curls had been a source of speculation and amusement more than derision in their small community, but it had made her wary of deserving her place. Just in case she was not as good as the others she had made a point of working harder than the rest.

In the bathroom she washed in the basin and put on clean clothes.

She had managed to add two new dresses to her wardrobe since the goods came back into the shops after the war. Her weekend attire was a cotton dress printed with rectangles in a variety of green shades, it had the front buttoning and slight shoulder-pads that had been the fashion carried over from the war, influenced by their menfolk's uniforms. The green colours in their small angular shapes were clear and lush and the dress had small tortoiseshell buttons, eight of them going down to just under the knee. She thought it looked efficient and orderly and still pretty. It showed a little of her strong slim legs. Liv slipped her feet into the soft and well worn tan moccasins and walked through the lounge to the kitchen. In the living room she drew the heavy hand-woven curtains, her stints at the loom had been one of the chores she had liked the most as a child. She had enjoyed the process of the soft woollen threads slowly covering the string (R), the colours blending together into new shades and shapes, weaving sometimes eclectic but more often traditional patterns. She loved how blue and yellow created green, red and blue became purple, how the colours could cool you or warm you. At the loom she had been able to slip away into another world. She had imagined herself sometimes with these strange exotic people, a traveller along the potholed roads through the endless woodlands, never knowing what would be around the next bend. She was surrounded by painted wagons and the black-haired women in their flowery full skirts, the jewellery from their ears and around their necks rattling on the bumpy ride in between the tall trees. She could feel the heat of their campfires, in a clearing or on the corner of a farmer's field in the evenings, hear their melancholy singing. She had sometimes sneaked up close enough to watch and listen on the warm half-lit summer nights when the sun never properly set and mother forgot about calling her in. At the loom she felt a drawing out out some exotic mystery from deep within herself, though still the mystery was not quite hers. The most colourful fabrics she had woven had never looked right on the floor or at the window in her home. It did not blend with the pragmatic Norwegian blue skies and the pious dark spruce forests guarding their farmhouses. In the end she had fallen in with the traditional colours and patterns: red, blue and white, a little dark green or grey.

The rugs on the wooden floor in the livingroom, too, they were all her own work. They were mostly in greens and blues, it worked well with the golden wood in the floorboards and the pale birch in the settee and the coffee table. There was a dresser under the south facing window, it was where her husband kept his pipe and tobacco and a little liquor. The wall towards the bedroom had bookshelves in the middle flanked by cupboards for their Sunday dinner set and the silver cutlery that had been in her husband's family, handed down through generations.

Liv made sure the wood was dusted and polished at all times. If there was ever any mess lying around it was not hers and it did not stay long. She liked everything to have it's own place, it was like a puzzle to her, a game where every bit slotted into another. She delighted in her puzzle always being completed. She admired it. Their home was her creation as was her children, and she felt, even her husband. She was grateful for the man she had managed to mould out of the raw clay that had been her young spouse.

Her weaving had stood them in good stead when there were no cloth for new coats during the war. She had made the girls new coats from the winter curtains. They had the blackouts anyway for the windows and along with the summer-curtains they were enough to keep the cold at bay. She had become a competent seamstress.

In the kitchen the magazine on the AGA was waiting warm and welcoming. She lifted the heavy lid and put the enamelled kettle over the hot iron hob. She could drink her coffee in peace because she was holding all the pieces of their lives neatly together. Life and death outside did not affect her. Within her home she knew life and work to be the same, life did not stop and neither did her husbands and her children's needs for care and food. As long as she did not stop working nothing bad could affect them.

Time provided stows, she kept putting the wood in, as she had done when her mother got ill and could not any longer get out of bed early enough to do breakfast. She had passed on her duties at the henhouse to her younger brother and had taken over the stoking of the fires in the morning making them all breakfast. She was never ill herself, she could not afford to be. When she was fourteen and the elkhound had been crushed under the tractor, or when her youngest brother lay dying in the guest room from the polio, people and animals got fed and watered as usual. It was the only way. Her baby sister was born, or her father came home with a whole elk from the hunt and there was feasting for several weeks. The animals got fed and watered as normal. Noone ever took a day off. As long as the family was eating within the white panelled wooden house, so where the animals in their pens in their red painted outhouses. The farm and the livestock, her brothers and sisters, they were her stability, her order and her defence against death and destruction, even the smelly henhouse had offered consolation. She had known every feather on the hens, every eye in the wooden roost. She was a cog in the machinery, alongside her siblings always happy at work. The sun kept doing it's own thing, teasing them always being up before them in the summer, mocking as it lay in til ten in the winter, while they struggled through their chores and transversed drifts of snow on their long walk to school in lingering darkness. Little black-haired dark-eyed Liv was as constant as the fir trees in the yard. Like them she had grown taller and stronger, unmovable, unbendable, as seasons came and went.

In the City, in her home, with her husband and her daughters she had forged her roots equally deeply. She had become impervious to outer circumstance, the rhythm of her days had become her own, had become physical, it was as much a part of her body as her bones and muscles were, it was the power by which she breathed and slept.

Throughout her personal trials: Her husband entering her life, her children being newborn, she had not let them dictate her days and nights to her, but had expected them all to fall in with her, to comply. It had been necessary, it was not just her own way of life she was asking them to comply with, it was the rhythm of survival, of life itself, the fine timing of things that decided whether you lived or died. You fed the animals, they fed you. There was no refusing nature, no lying in on Sundays.

She had circumvented the fact that there were no animals to feed in the city by letting her own children stay in their childhood patterns. She woke them at eight fifteen and they had breakfast together in the kitchen, before she fed the dog.

She made herself an open sandwich at the kitchen counter and cautiously put the radio on trying to dull her nagging fear that it might spoil the air of calm and order she had so meticulously created. It was from the radio that the announcement of the war had leapt out at her.

Filling hot water and green soap in a bucket she started getting about her chores. She had clung onto the rhythm of her work through the Gremans' scattering of terror and loss around their streets, even in the households of their neighbours. She felt her strict discipline was what had saved her and her own.

At twelve past eight Liv had finished cleaning the bathroom and the staircase down to the front door. At eight twenty-seven Anita was still in bed. When she was still not up at half past eight her mother came in and asked if she was ill.

"I'm fine" She turned away from her mother towards the window, pretending to be not quite awake yet. She did not want to talk, especially not to her mother, she had a vague sense that her troubles must all somehow be her mother's fault although she could not quite figure out how.

"Are you sure you are quite well, maybe we ought to check your temperature?"

"I need to sleep."

"There's still quite a lot of sewing to do, Anita" her mother carried on. All she could get in reply was a groan from deep within the girl's pillow. Liv Pedersen relented, her daughter seemed in an odd way, she was sure she could not be quite on form. "I'll come back and check on you in a while," she said. She could hear Eva getting breakfast ready in the kitchen.

As consciousness of the imposing morning grew in Anita so did the pain she had been feeling in the pit of her stomach, it was a dulling ache that was now spreading up into her chest and out in her arms and legs making her feel as if she could not move, she was without will or force. She was obviously in need of rest, she must have been working herself too hard lately, she thought. The dress! She could not bear the thought of it! She buried her head in her pillow trying to stop the tears that were coming back, she did not want her mother to see them. She had to phone Freddy, as soon as her mother was not around.

Having a plan she felt a little better and got out of bed wiping the last few stray tears from her cheeks. She would get dressed and have her breakfast to stop mother fussing.

Sliced bread, coldcuts and cheese was on the kitchen table, it was her favourite breakfast of the week. On Sundays there were eggs and bacon and on weekdays the endless porridge, she could not any longer stand it! Since the war when the only oats they could get hold of was green and bitter and not yet ripe, and there were no alternatives if you wanted to eat at all, she had hated the morning porridge with a passion. It had not been uncommon for her to slip it under the table to the dog, although it meant she would go to school without having eaten at all. But Saturday morning they would have whatever meat and fish that could be found in the house, with pickles and cheese and conserve that her mother had made. They could feast on their open sandwiches, although still not pile the toppings too high, moderation was in all things a virtue, drink strong coffee and chat without worrying about work and school.

"Feeling better?" Liv Pedersen was inquiring with a smile. She was glad to see her daughter out of bed, even if nothing serious had been the matter. With her daughter in bed one of the cogs in her machinery was disengaged, the engine of her daily life faltered."We need to finish your dress today."

Anita shook her head her mouth full of her mother's home-baked bread and cured ham."Last chance to go shopping today." She declared. The wedding was next Saturday and apart from the rehearsals on Monday morning she was working all week."I need to get some hairpins, and stockings. If I could have 10 krone, maybe, from the wedding budget?"

Surprisingly her mother did not argue. "OK. We need to get on with it this afternoon though," she said. The shops would be closing at twelve on a Saturday, there would be time enough for sewing later. She wanted most of the work on the wedding dress and the two bridesmaids outfits to be finished this weekend, Anita would be back to work during the week and she didn't want to be stuck with finishing the dresses off herself.

"Oh, and hair spray." Anita added. She excused herself from the table and slipped away. A moment later she was out the front door, glad to be out of her mother's range of observation, pulling her coat on and pinning her hair back from her face as she hurried down the road to the tram stop at St Berner's Place. She could hear the shins of the tram-tracks squealing as the tram was approaching and she bypassed the newly restored phone booth on the Trondheims road. She needed to catch the tram to get to the shops, Saturdays they could be up to half an hour apart. She would phone Freddy from downtown.

On the tram she lit herself a Cooli and lent back on the warm vinyl seat enjoying the day rolling by. The lighting-shop on Carl Berner's place was twinkling with it's display, fully lit in the clear day, as she slid past it across the square. She had always liked the lighting shop and it would not be too long, she hoped, before she would have a home of her own to furnish. To start with though, they would have to live with the Holsts. Her in-laws to be, Georg Holst and Freddy's stepmother Katrine, had a large house in the garden suburbs and had offered her and Freddy the basement, a livingroom and conveniences consisting of lavatories and a washbasin. They would share Katrine's kitchen and the large bathroom upstairs when they needed it. The housing market had been an even worse squeeze since the war, there was no hope of them finding a property for themselves for a while yet. Something would come up. The thought of starting her married life with Kat and George around made her feel gloomy again and she flicked the last tip of her cigarette onto the floor under her shoes and lit another one. Her mother did not like her smoking, but everybody did it these days, and she always made sure she did not appear unfeminine with it, she smoked only ever when sitting down.

The tram was picking up speed as it hummed along the long and straight Storgata, the wagons rocking from side to side on the worn and weary old shins. The soft rhythmic movement comforted Anita somewhat and she fell into soothing visions seeing herself in a ballroom full of elegantly attired men and women, dinner jackets, taffeta and ruffles sweeping past her as the tram progressed past the haute couture houses lining the far end of the street. She hadn't told Freddy about her encountering Hugo, the proprietor of the largest model school in Oslo. He had told her she ought to have a go at being a model, with her height and good stature, Anita giggled, he had meant her large breasts. He had said it could turn out a good career for her. She had dismissed the idea. Her chest was too large, she thought, and her shoulders too broad, and anyway she was marrying Freddy. She would soon have children to take care of and modelling was a life of late nights and travelling. There were those who became international celebrities and made a fortune from it. She envisaged herself for a moment as the new face of Dior, her hair elegantly swept backwards and her blue eyes enhanced by carefully laid make-up. Maybe if Freddy did not want her, she would go and visit Hugo. Perhaps she was destined for a more glamourous life then being a wife and mother? The tram rocked left around the circular surrounds of the great church at the end of Storgata. It was the church where the king had married his English princess. She stayed on for another three stops finally disembarking in Prinsens Gate. She would go to the large department store 'Steen og Strom'. It had the latest fashion for the summer and she could get everything she needed from under one roof, maybe try on a few dresses for fun. Outside the store she stopped for a minute on the pavement to admire the display. The mannequins had softly rolled back short hair, a bit like her own although she found it hard to get as much height on top. Her curl was natural and a little too tight. She loved the wide round necklines and the three-quarters length sleeves, the Dior style, it was feminine and elegant at the same time. Some of the outfits had matching little pillbox hats. The skirts were ankle long, full and gathered. She had not been able to make the skirt on her brides dress quite as full, fabric was still so expensive. White satin more than anything else seemed to be in short supply. The style of her dress was anyhow more upright and slimmer, having a low wide skirt simply made her look frumpy. The standing butterfly collar and short skirt drew the focus to her neck and head and to her long legs. It suited her figure better.

Inside the department store doors was a phone box and she felt her heart sink again and her stomach churning remembering her predicament. She had to talk to him, she had better jump to it. Lifting the mouthpiece she put her coin in and dialled his number. The long complaintive ringtone was torpedoing her high spirits as she counted fifteen signals before putting the receiver back on the hook. He was not home. She would have to try again later.

In the end she did not bother trying any dresses on. Instead she sat in the cafe on the top floor looking out over the summer-clad city in the company of a strong cup of coffee and her favourite apple Danish with icing. Maybe she was a hopeless case as her mother seemed to think. Too emotional, too scatty, too untidy, not disciplined enough? Now maybe she was too loose as well, maybe she had made a big mistake taking her clothes off for Freddy. If she was on the slippery slopes already would she be able to handle a modelling career? She would perhaps end her days all alone in some seedy bar in Berlin or Paris, taking her clothes off for money. She finished off her ten-pack of Cooli with another cup of coffee before trying the phone again getting only Katrine's voice on the line: "Oh no he's not here. Freddy has gone to work, dear, he is doing the retail round for the nurseries. "

She frowned. He should have finished that hours ago.

Anita tried the nurseries but he was not there either. There was no way she could reach him. She thought perhaps he would have left her a message at home by now, with her mother. The shops were already near to closing, she would hurry and pick up the bits and bobs she needed, but maybe still not go home quite yet, she didn't fancy much working on the brides-dress, it really didn't seem much point.

The tram rocked her homewards on the cobblestoned streets. The midday sun had come out throwing it's light into the coach like a stratocaster as the tram wobbled on it's whining shins up and away from the busy city centre back towards the hilly suburbs. Closing in on her destination Anita felt again in her stomach an ache, a growing resistance towards reaching it, and in the end she could stay on the tram no longer. At Hasle fields she gathered her shopping and jumped off a stop early. She would take the long way around under the railway bridges and up across the green between the two school, the infant school where she had enrolled and the high-school, tall and imposing on the far end of the lawns where she had not been allowed by her parents. They did not think a girl had any need for a higher education.

Still the road did not seem long enough and she made a detour past the shop fronts with the hosiery and the sweetshop and wandered in between the four story tower blocks behind it. At the back was a walkway leading between rose borders and patches of grass onto the large sandy playgrounds. They were the playgrounds of her childhood. Two little girls, maybe four or five years old, were playing on the swings. They did not yet have to worry about schools and marriage and careers Anita thought jealously. She sat down on a bench opposite the children where the sun was reaching down between the tall buildings and swung her shopping onto the seat besides her. The sun was warm here. Closing her eyes she could feel the rush of the air under her skirt as she remembered the swings taking her up and down and up again, the accompanying scent of roses and the sunbaked sand in the sandpit, faintly spiked with the odour of the cats that had visited it. It was just as it had been. She was on her way home with the shopping, stopping for a little carefree relief before returning to submit to her mother's watchful eyes. She roamed through her bags: Two pairs of shear stockings shade of 'mother of pearl', a garter; it had not been on the shopping-list but she hadn't been able to resist it, four pretty diamante hairpins, hair spray, medium hold. No milk or slices of ham that could go off today, she did not have to rush. And she would not forget it under the bench. It was here behind the tower blocks she had found her father's rationed tobacco, one night after black-out, in the darkened playground on her own. The cat's pee smelt stronger in the dark although the night-scent of the tall spruce next to the swings freshened the air somewhat. She had heard the screams of the tram-shins in the distance, and then the faint voices, getting nearer. They were calm and deep voices, men, conversing in a hushed staccato tongue, not the language she understood. It was the German night patrols.

The day had been a carefree warm sunny day and she was still in her light dress, a cotton cardigan thrown over it. It was a yellow cardigan that she had liked a lot, only there in the dark with the German guards approaching she had wished it had been dark, black or navy, and not so visible in the quiet night. What would they do to her if they found her here, on her own? If they caught her, she thought she could maybe make them let her go if she gave them her father's tobacco. Father would be cross, it was his only luxury, his small weakly ration, and she had already mislaid it once, forgetting it as she stopped to play when doing the shopping. It meant a lot to him, so much that he had sent her out in the dark to pick it up. It was after black-out, there was not a glimmer of light from the dark musty gardens along her way. She knew she was always forgetful and she had to be thought a lesson but she saw goblins and ghosts around every fence and hedge. She had been told she would not have supper until she had fetched the tobacco and she didn't really care about supper but they were too cross and she just had to go. Now back in the playground she was ten and trembling in her light dress, crouching under the bench praying to God that the guards would pass without noticing her. And they did, they passed, slowly, still talking. They did not hear her quick frightened breath against the benches leg or the beating of her heart drumming so loud inside her head. She had sat very still for a very long time until not another sound of the guards passing could be heard. In the end she was losing the feeling in her legs, and she was having to lie still on the cold ground and stretch and wiggle her toes in full view of the night before she was able to run on them home to her parents and safety. Finally home she had burst out crying, but they had laughed it away. Did she really think they would have sent her out after the tobacco if there had been any real danger to her? She had just been foolish.

After that she had got the scarlet fever. She had simply resolved deep within herself not to get the polio. Her uncle had died from the polio and she could not have coped going through the rest of her life with a limp. So many people got the polio that year, they said it was something on the fruit that autumn so she had scrubbed every bit of apple or pear she had put in her mouth. It had been her biggest fear during the war, the polio, and she had managed to avoid it. She had resolved to firmly exclude it in her mind as a possibility. It had worked. She still had two strong long legs, her best feature even now, she thought. But she did get the scarlet fever. She had it very badly but did manage to pull through in the end. Her mother had stayed by her bed night and day, cooling her off, washing her down diligently with her scented water. Tossing in her deep hot haze Anita learnt to trust her mother's unbendable will again, and her father's provisions. They were determined not to let their daughter go after all. So they had not sent her out for the lost tobacco, to the playground in the night with the German guards to die. Mother wanted her to live, she was convinced of it again and she finally pulled through. Still she had never understood, why they had fought so hard for her during the fever but risked her life so easily for the sake of a pouch of tobacco. She did not understand why a little forgetfulness should be punished so severely. It seemed they had brought her to death's door, for a smoke. Still, her parents were always there for her.

The thought of her parents' persistent presence rather than cheer her up made her a little more depressed and she gathered her bags and started the walk towards the underpass with the railway-bridges leading up across the green. It was a quarter to three. With any luck her mother was planning an elaborate Saturday dinner and would have started preparing it by the time she got home. She did not feel ready yet to continue the work on the brides dress. She was not sure she would ever wear it. She would pull herself together tomorrow. Perhaps she would hear from Fred before then. Maybee he had already phoned her.

*

Liv Pedersen sat at the kitchen table for nearly a whole hour drinking a cup of coffee and browsing through the morning paper. For this her usual furnace of energy had been forcibly quenched low onto a very slow burn and she did not enjoy it much. Had there been any other job she could have put her hands to she would have started at once but her mind was set on the fabrics waiting in the sewing room and she simply could not think of anything else to do. She never left work sitting around, the housework had been taken care of yesterday as they had planned to sew today. She had hoped to as good as finish the dresses, maybe have a Sunday free for once to visit her parents and tend to the grandparents graves. She was depending on Anita to try the dress on for the next step of the sewing so there was nothing she could do. The clock above the cooker was edging it's way past three o'clock. If her daughter did not show in the next fifteen minutes it would be time to start preparing dinner. Where on earth had Anita got to, the shops had been closed since midday? The realisation drew her lips a little tighter. It was the kind of disruption to her life she had become accustomed to through the years, however hard she worked and however well she planned there was always some point where other people came into the equation and decided to do their own unpredictable thing. The only one she could rely on to flow with her own meticulous rhythm was Eva, she somehow seemed to see the need for order, just like herself.

There was no news from Freddy that afternoon. Anita quietly endured her supper cowing under her mother's cloud of dismay. She was feeling tired and confused. It seemed the only thing that could clear her mind up was talking to Freddy directly, yet she could not make herself call him again. She spent the rest of the afternoon and evening secretly circling the phone, circles that only she knew about, covert manoeuvres in and out between books and dishcloths, news on the radio and visits to the bathroom. The phone was always in the middle, right there to the side of her path. It remained silent and she did not know how to take a step into the circle and pick up the receiver, phone Freddy up and ask for an explanation, it simply could not be done. It bore all the signs of a crises, and crises did not have any room next to her mothers determination. To her mother there was still an indisputable wedding seven days away. It was a fact and Anita could not sow doubt on it. She was not sure anyway that it was really up to her and Freddy any more.

The clock passed ten in the evening. It had passed quicker than she had anticipated, and it gave her a jolt but also brought with it a sense of relief realising it was anyhow too late to phone now. It would have to be resolved tomorrow.

She turned the light out in her bedroom and crept under the towering quilt. It was early but she had nothing more to do staying up. Lying under the downs neither could she sleep. She was feeling as if she was afloat, drifting, but where to? Something new was happening to her, she was suspended between the past and the future, waiting at a fork in the road. What alarmed her the most was that it did not seem to be up to her which direction to take. She had always relied on her mother's judgment and now for the first time she realised that there might be other ways,that she could possibly make a different choice. Her mother had always warned her against herself, against her impetuous and impulsive nature, her lack of discipline. And she had let it get the better of her the other night in the sewing room stripping off for Freddy. There hadn't seemed to be anything wrong with it at the time. But now she realised even Freddy had disapproved. Now she was already on the slippery slopes like her mother had predicted. She hoped Freddy was not as strict as her mother, that he might forgive her the frivolity and take her back, but she did not feel certain. She suddenly realised she did not know what Freddy was expecting of her at all. He had never elaborated on what he liked about her. They had just both known that they somehow belonged together. She sighed, she had always found it hard to live up to people's expectations. What might married life be like living under the eyes of Georg and Katrine Holst. What did they expect from her? And Freddy's sisters in their beautiful, expensive clothes? Her own parents had grow up on east-country farms, strong health and ability to persist, to work hard, to rise early, those were the values she had grow up with. She had no artistic flair, no college education. She did not have jewellery. Would Freddy's family be able to accept her as one of their own?

Maybe she would meet Hugo again, do some modelling for him. She would not have a home and children, she could feel her heart sinking at the thought, but she would be in the forefront of fashion, of culture, of society. She could be admired for her glamour, be something for everybody to look at, not just her husband. Maybe the right clothes could make her bosoms look smaller?

Or she might just carry on staying here with her mother, continuing her work at the telephone-exchange, learn to cook well and end up an old maid. She had never had much patience for cooking though her mother had tried to teach her. She did always loose interest before it was properly seen through. She did not have that little extra effort to give, that last bit of staying power that mother was master of, that made everything she did next to perfect. She had tried, but it seemed inhumane to her to be called in early on a sunny summers afternoon for the sake of washing the cooker, or to miss the cinema trip on Sundays for the sake of perfectly ironed shirts at work during the week. Sometimes she wondered if her mother really knew how to live at all. Was it true that all living ought to be ordered and thoroughly thought through, just like following a recipe? Whenever she tried following a plan or recipe herself it never worked out as expected. She was not sure of the value of planning everything. Her life always worked out differently from what she planned.

She knew she would never be as good as her mother at cooking or at keeping the house spotless or at making cushions and quilts and sew her own clothes, all she could do was try her hardest. She could still do her best at living a descent and good life, earn some money and be of help to the family. At least she and Freddy had not gone all the way. She would avoid being frivolous, she had her family, she did not need to fall prey to loneliness and desperation, or her mother's biggest fear, drinking. She would not stay out late at night with men she did not really know. She could even give up the cigarettes. She yawned. The idea of smoky bars and late nights partying with strangers, had a strong appeal. She would be wearing high heals and smoke a cigarillo in a long cigarette-holder. Wear some make-up and a low cut dress and charm everyone with her childlike dimpled smile. She knew her own strengths.

Still the road ahead was not up to her. She did not understand all of her mother's many rules and regulations but she had always been a good girl and in the end Freddy or mother would decide. Both alarmed and reassured at her own conclusion she fell into a light restless sleep.

A bright Sunday morning sun broke through the hazy argument of her night. She just knew there was something wrong with the way mother went about things but she could not put her finger on it. Wearily she filled up the washbasin and dipped the flannel into the hot water, dabbing her eyes with the warm cloth. She did not bother washing anywhere else, it was weekend after all.

The family gathered around the breakfast table as always on a Sunday. Anita made light conversation as she buttered the home-baked bread and hacked the top off her boiled egg. She always lived up to other people's expectations so poorly. Her mother had endless reserves of strength and calm and logic. She went by her days like clockwork. Anita's own days were woven in strands of imagination, mysterious, unpredictable threads that suddenly sparkled and glittered but also frequently snared her neck to choke her, made her sad. Her mother's rules hooked into her magical weave like reminders of a different world, remnants from a dusty past. She dragged them along through her day because she had to. They were like chicken wire woven into her magic cloth, it was her mother's subversive work, or maybe it was just the need to survive, she conceded. Maybe it was really true that a good life was constructed of all these little tasks performed at their optimum time. She had been thought not to complain, to be positive and disciplined and work hard and she couldn't see any wrong in that. Still she wasn't sure. Mother seemed to see this grey metallic structure as being life itself. Getting up at eight, brushing your hair 20 strokes, washing and changing your knickers and socks, putting the dirty clothes in the linen basket, folding and putting away clothes that were still clean, putting slippers on, drinking a cup of coffee, listening to the news on the radio, buttering bread for her lunch-packet, eating a slice of bread, clearing off the table, cleaning the dishes, brushing her teeth. The structure was tight. There were tasks belonging to every moment of every day, the netting a little tighter for the weekdays, a little looser at the weekends, but still it was there, holding her prisoner within their cosy little chicken run. The cloth that Anita wove for herself, that kept her warm, it flickered with hope and imagination. It was all her dreams. It was her home of her own with parties in golden lamplight, there were people laughing in it, joyously, not politely. They were allowed to spill their drinks if they wanted to. It was Freddy's deep glittery green eyes when he said something clever and smiled towards her as if they were fellow conspirators in a world of hopeless dimwits. His self-assurance and arrogance fascinated her always, and it thrilled and surprised her that he considered her to be on his side of the divide. The divide between the dumb and dreary and the dazzling few. Still Freddy got on so well with her mother, he teased and flattered her and she seemed to enjoy it, to sparkle momentarily in her serene beauty. It was the only time Anita could remember ever having seen a glint of girlyness in Liv's eyes. Everybody loved Freddy.

The lack of Freddy's presence, realising the uncertainty of his return, sent Anita's spirits tumbling again and she settled down to eating her bread and boiled egg. Obidiently she cleared off the table when their breakfast was over and did the dishes with Eva. She could hear her mother behind her switching the lights on and readying the sewing machine. Today there would be no escaping. She did not feel like fighting. She would let the netting imprison her, hold her until her duties were done and her mother was satisfied.

" Anita! The fabric is snagging! You really need to keep your eyes on it love, and keep the foot-pressure nice and loose on the pedal."

"Yes. Sorry.I'll unpick it."

"I think you'll need to loosen the pressure on the spool a little."

"Yes" Her mother always told her what to do next. Her parents loved her of course, she knew that.

Anita bit her lip and sewed on. She knew her fun-seeking nature had made her mother weary always, but she had thought her daring and mischievousness was what had appealed to Freddy. She had felt he had thought her special for it, but she was not sure any more.

"I need a break, mamma. A cup of coffee and a cigarette. Would you like some coffee?"

"Just let me finish this side so you can try it on first please. I want to see if it needs taking out a little at the bust."

Anita sighed. Her mother always needed her to do a little more, always had to push her that little bit further, when she was tired and she had already had enough, until it hurt inside. She was not trying to abscond, she just needed a little relief. She put the dress on obediently, gingerly not to get jabbed by the many pins that were still holding the front together, and let her mother make the adjustments.

She could not tell mother why she was so upset, that she had doubts about the wedding. Whatever was to come she had brought it on herself. Freddy would have to let her know how he felt about her at some point. They were supposed to be meeting for the rehearsals in church tomorrow at half past eleven. If he was not there she would know.

She would let her mother discover for herself that he had deserted her, she could not bear telling her for fear of her disapproval and of her wanting explanations as to why. She would not be the one who let everybody down again. It was true that Eva was better at following through the tasks she was given, but was discipline the only important things in life? Where was the fun in it? She herself was warm and affectionate, spontaneous and alive. She got on well with people, liked listening to their experiences. Was hard work and tidiness more important than friendliness and understanding? What of tolerance, compassion, and being appreciated for what you were, even if you were scatty and lacked somewhat in patience and calm. She did not know. She could only see the forbiddingly small measure of conciliation in her mothers cool but friendly face. It demanded a smile on her face always and a steady and positive work ethic. It was all that she had to do and she would have her parents love and support for ever. She knew they would always be there for her. They knew best. Her mother could never stand people complaining, and maybe she was right. Maybe the only solution was keeping a cheerful face and finding some satisfaction in your daily work. She quite liked the work at the telephone-exchange. The switch desks had ashtrays and people were friendly. She chatted with everybody and they liked her there, it was at home that she was always the poorest performer on the team.

Liv Pedersen sensed her daughter's resignation and restlessness. "Only another minute", she assured, her voice a little sharper than she had intended. Anita was so impatient and she had seen so many times in her life what happened to the once who did not do any work. Their farms did not yield and the children did not have winter coats to wear to school. Alcohol often followed in it's wake. It was as if they had given up the will to live, the will to fight for their survival, and there was nothing that scared her more. Everyone knew that the good things in life did not just land in ones lap. There were times when you had to struggle through, and in the end going on was simply a duty, it could not always be fun. When people gave up it was all down to laziness and sloppiness, she thought, and it was not to happen to any of hers, not as long as she was alive. She would instill in them forever how hard work was in the end the only thing they could rely on.

*

Freddy and best man to be, Erlend, stepped down from the nursery van. Throwing a quick glance in the wing mirror Fred tightened the knot of his tie. Then he stretched back in for his blue jacket and carefully picked away strips of packing-twine and bits of carnations. It had hung over the back of the passenger seat as he had been serving at the wholesale market. The van was his 'salesroom' during market and the inside of the white Volkswagen was scattered with debris, leaves and petals and twine and cut off stems. Now in front of him was the 19th century stone church where the wedding was to take place on Saturday. He wanted to look his very best on seeing Anita again for the rehearsal, he was wearing a blue suit. It was a well cut, expensive, poplin suit. It had been made by their family tailor and he thought he looked rather handsome in it, he had even put a tie on because he knew Anita liked them, even though it made him feel like choking. He was hoping she had forgotten about last time. Thankfully there would be a few other people around and they probably wouldn't get any time on their own. It was just that he could never be sure what Anita would do or say. Her emotions so easily burst through the confines of the conventions of good behaviour. It was a little unnerving if you were on the receiving end.

The green lawns of the Ulven cemetery where sloping lazily towards the east like a shirt-cuff surrounding the pointing finger of the church spire. There were always many visitors to the pleasant cemeteries, the hilly lawns were punctuated with benches and rose borders and mature trees between the rows of polished gravestones. He came here regularly himself, not for Sunday service but to put fresh flowers on his mother's grave, she was on the east facing lawn just a hundred or so yards down the hill. She had died after the birth of his younger brother. He was not sure if the memories he had of her were real or imagined, he had photos. It had just been a habit of his since childhood to tend the grave with his father. He always thought of his mother as young and very pure, the way she looked in the faded monochrome wedding picture, her eyes so innocent and clear, so much like Anita's. Fred felt he had regained some of the innocence of his childhood again in his young wife to be, he longed for her. He was coming home finally.

Elated at being so close to their union but also nervous at her reaction to him, he entered through the large wooden church doors butterflies fluttering in all directions of his stomach. Stranded inside in the sudden dark he could feel the tingling for a moment all the way out into the tips of his fingers. The darkness of the large hall was cut through with rays of coloured light from the stained glass high above and as his eyes adjusted he could see the movements of people at the far rows of pews and hear the rustling of clothes and soft steps coming towards him. Getting accustomed to the patchy light he stretched his hand out as he was welcomed by the sexton:

"We're all up here, Sir, if you would come this way. Father Sofus will go through it all with you first step by step. And then you will get a chance to...hmm...try it out... hm.. so to speak."

Fred followed him up the aisle towards the others. There was the vicar and Mrs Pedersen, Anita's maid of honour Lisbeth, and Eva who had come along just for the performance. And Anita, she was not meeting his eyes. He took her hand and squeezed it firmly trying not to look into the pensive lines on her face. It made him feel guilty. Gently he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. He could feel the tension of her skin softening lightly and noticed large warm tears rolling rolling down the corners of her eye. For a moment he was afraid the worst would happen! Then she turned away towards the pews, embarrassed, and wiped the tears off her cheeks. Freddy wanted her after all! She could not ask him here what had been going on but she was so relieved that he had forgiven her, she felt like a stone had been lifted from her shoulders. So he had not deemed her too frivolous to be his wife. She would do her very best to behave appropriately in the church, she did not want to embarrass him ever again. She was just grateful that he had taken her back. She turned away from the others for a moment and discreetly powdered her face, producing a big smile turning back to Freddy. She was still feeling like screaming but she would not let him down with her unruly temper. If he would only have her she would not ever cry in front of him again. She would make both Freddy and her mother proud. She would do her little rehearsal with flying colours and only think about their big day ahead.

On Saturday at two fifteen in the afternoon August Pedersen walked up the aisle with Anita's arm in his and calmly handed her over to Fredrick Holst. The fanfares of Mendelhson's bridal march blew any lingering vapours of doubt out of the high stony arches of the church, the vibrant tones filling the bows and chambers. Honeyed scents from freesias and roses in sparkling cascades in lilac, yellow and white, were numbing and lifting the senses in the colourful church with its fully packed pews. Even Anita's colleagues from the telephone exchange had come and Freddy's college mates were all squeezing in at the back. Outside the sky was high and blue. It had taken no time at all for Anita to finish her dress, the stylish eggshell satin smoothing the long sleek lines of her body as she walked on her father's arm up the aisle. Every pew had lavish flower arrangement, it was no meaner spectacle, she thought, than on a Hollywood set, it was one of the perks of marrying a nurseryman. The silky edge of her dress was bobbing gently around her knees, her sleek calves and ankles in full view in their white shimmering nylons. She knew it worked. She had only a small heel on her shoes although heels of six or seven centimetres was the latest fashion. She was a tall girl and she wanted to look just right next to Freddy who was a shorter more athletic build. She had never seen him so handsome, his black tailored morning dress with the snugly fitted waistcoat. His hair was combed up carefully and jelled into a thick black quiff, for once it was not hanging into his eyes. There was the bright green sparkle in them that she loved, and the comfort of his strong warm hand finally reaching for hers. He looked at once taller and manlier than usual, but also softer, more humble, she thought. She was sure everything would be all right now. They took the last few steps up to the alter and she leaned against him fleetingly and whispered in his ear: "Do you like the dress?"

"You look fantastic! Beautiful!" Her face lit up. He never said much, but when she asked him he always came good. "Anita, you always look good." He added. It took the edge off her happiness a little. She didn't want to look 'nice as always' but glamourous and special like never before.

They were at the alter and the priest's voice was sounding loud and clear in the full church, a hush falling over the teeming pews. She was in the middle of everything now, it was finally happening, everything she had craved for so long. She was the centre of everybody's attention, they were a good looking couple and there was nothing any more that could get her down.

In the taxi on their way to the Grand Hotel, after dinner with its endless speeches and the dancing, in her tiredness she lent against his shoulder. A little tension she had not sensed before was seeping through the confines of his jacket crawling under the silk of her dress. It made the little fine hairs on her arms stand on edge, the silky fabric of her dress suddenly feeling rough and foreign against her skin. She knew his skin against hers would feel even smoother, even softer than any fabric could. The thought calmed her somewhat.

Inside their suite as she felt herself tumbling against him instantly he quickly gave her a squeeze and let her go, to her disappointment, taking his jacket off meticulously and looking around the room for the champagne he had ordered. It was on the table by the window. The city was wide awake outside partying the Saturday night away. The nights in midsummer never properly fell dark, they clung onto the daytime, only hung suspended in half-light for a few hours until the sun cheerfully crawled back up again. He drew the curtains tightly to keep the light out.

The time had come, Fred was thinking to himself, from now on he would be sleeping with Anita, there was no turning back now and he would make everything go all right. He popped the cork off the champagne and poured them both a glass doing his best to keep her entertained while she drank. He could not touch her yet or see her naked or he might loose control of himself. Filling their glasses up once more he loosened his tie. There was no other way than turning the lights off. He did so much want to see her, his head had been filled with images of her nakedness for a long time, both before and after the revelations in the sewing room. But he was not quite ready to let her see him. It was not his body he was worried about. He had a good strong body. It was his eyes. They always revealed too much, his vulnerability and his longing for comfort, for the security he hoped she would give him. They were hiding the longing for the arms around him that he had been missing his whole life.

In the end she had drunk too much champagne to manage undressing herself and he helped her undo her clothes and turned the lights off. He could trace the soft contours of her body in the light that was seeping in at the sides of the curtains. Her breasts were not patterned and angry in the dark room, but soft like gently rolling waves. It was all he had ever wanted. There was no need to wait now, she was so ready and had drunk far too much champagne for her comments to require any answers. He could not really make sense of what she said any more. But he could still sense her courage, even now her lack of hesitation was imposing. Again it rattled him somewhat, made him nervous and sent a shudder through him and he entered her quickly, it was the only way he could do it. He was shivering with the danger and the thrill of her forthrightness, he could never understand nor could he resist it. He would need to have her again and again until he got used to her.

The wholesale fruit- and flower market was held on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. As soon as the first cool rays of sunlight were climbing the pale velvet of the short summer nights or while the icy dark still prevailed in the winter, long rows of vans and trailers would gather outside the new market hall. The hall was a flimsy construction of steel beams and corrugated iron put up in haste to give protection to the increasingly exotic and perishable goods for sale in the quickly expanding capital.

Waiting for the doors to open at 6.00 AM the drivers switched off their engines and turned up their radios or abandoned their cars altogether for a breath of fresh air and a chat. Some had travelled a short distance from the smaller and increasingly specialised hothouses within the borders of Oslo city. Others had been on the road throughout the early hours, coming from faraway flower-farms growing mainly dahlias, asters and chrysanthemums. All had started their day early and all were they determined to capitalise on a growing demand for flowers amongst the inhabitants of the ever more sophisticated capital.

Freddy arrived at ten to six just as the caretaker was sliding aside the tree-tall metal sheet doors. It was carefully timed, it suited him to be one of the last to enter the hall. He didn't like hanging about and liked chatting to all and sundry even less. His allotted space was just inside the doors so he found it convenient to be one of the last to drive in. Although the Holst Nurseries was one of the larger businesses at the market Fred's father had insisted on renting only a small space, just big enough for their volkswagen van. They had been given a place by the doors were the smaller van would not unduly obstruct the passage in and out of the hall. It had the advantage of all the retailers having to pass their sales stall on the way in and gave them a lot of extra trade, as his father had shrewdly anticipated. Freddy had become an expert at packing the van to the brim. For the rest he took orders that were delivered directly to the shops later in the morning. The Holsts stall was usually sold out by the closing of the market.

At ten past six Fred and other latecomers had found their places, and the bubble was closed up again in expectance of the retailers. Fred unlocked the side doors of the van and pulled out the large black buckets of various sizes from the bottom shelf. He would fill them up with water now. Then it would take him only a minute to ready his display before the market opened up. In the mean while he would visit the canteen for breakfast. It was a quarter past six and he was well ahead of schedule.

It the smoky canteen he purchased his customary coffee and two rolls and headed for a table at the far end, paper under his arm. There in the corner by the window he was hoping he might be allowed a quiet moment to himself. He yawned loudly sinking down on the chair brushing away a few strands of thick black hair from his forehead. It was straight and rough and had a tendency to strut out of place no matter how short it was cut. it wasn't like him felling tired at the market but his youngest, his eight year old had got into the habit lately of climbing into his bed in the early morning. She had been suffering from nightmares. He had been lying in an awkward position and his back was hurting. He counted six sugar-cubes dropping them into his black coffee. He needed his sweet strong coffee to get going.

"Mind if I join you?"

Fred looked up in surprise and poorly concealed disappointment and nodded to the man towering above him to take a seat. Although the Holst Nurseries were well known people didn't usually disturb him. He had been accepted as something of a recluse, a little serious and shy. He preferred it that way, people usually left him alone unless he invited to a chat himself. Fred shook the tall ruddy man's outstretched hand as he sat down on the small wooden seat.

"Paul Lundin", he introduced himself, "pleased to meet you, I've met your father a few times at Lions meeteing. We're in the same business,of course, I'm at Odnes Nurseries, near Hamar." He spoke with a Swedish accent.

Fred nodded again, not offering a reply. Most people in the business knew his father.

"It was my brother who started it up in -43. Did pretty well during the war, many funerals", Paul Lundin continued. He grinned.

Fred offered a reserved smile, still hovering somewhere between mild curiosity and irritation at the intrusion. So Lundin had a sense of humour, one man's death another man's bread, it was literally true in the flower business. Reluctantly he put his paper down submitting to the chat, he was still wondering what Paul Lundin really wanted, surely he had not approached him just for company? There were plenty of more sociable fellows in the canteen and Fred thought he could sense behind Mr Lundin's gregarious front a calm eye taking measure of the room and himself. This intangible sense of direction stirred Fred's interest in spite of his tiredness and he brushed his straying tufts of hair away to pay better attention.

"Yes, I have heard of Odnes Nurseries."

Mr Lundin's blue gaze gathered on Fred:

"I am buying a part in it, going in with my brother. I would have liked to start up on my own but I'm afraid I lack the expertise." Mr Lundin smiled disarmingly. He was wondering how much Fred Holst could be worth? Surely his father was more than well off. His thoughts wandered to his own past endeavours, his importing of precious stones from South Africas. It had given him the capital to buy into his brother's business as well as purchase three acres of land under the forestclad hills of Nordmarka, at the Northern edge of the city. It was big enough for building both a house and a row of greenhouses, and with the new towerblock suburbs springing up all around there would be no shortage of customers in the years to come. At forty seven he felt he was getting too old for all the travelling and establishing of new contacts that were required for his import business. The politics of the south African countries were changing. His

sources from many years back were becoming less reliable. And he had never settled down with anyone, he thought maybe it was time.

"I have heard you are an art collector" Mr Lundin changed the subject.

"Not really, barely a novice," Frank smiled. He would have liked to be so lucky, he simply couldn't afford to indulge his hobbies. Whenever he bought something remotely luxurious he was running the risk of upsetting Anita.

"You may be interested in precious stones? I have just received some emeralds this week? It would make a lovely ring and pendant."

Fred threw a stolen glance at Paul Lundin's hand. He wore no wedding ring. Free and single, he thought and surprised himself feeling a twinge of envy. To shake the feeling off he shook his head vigorously. "I was thinking of getting a television-set, he confessed. I don't have the money at the moment. I'm only a waged worked, Mr Lundin," he admitted surely.

People always thought he was flushed, judging him by his father's flash Merc and constant show of wealth. It wasn't worth mentioning that he was trying to save up for a car, too, and with his house and mortgage, his wife and two children and still being kept on regular wages at the nurseries... His father did not even pay him extra for overtime, maintaining that it was better the money was reinvested as anyhow it would all belong to Fred one day.

"Please, call me Paul. Then let me buy you another coffee", he joked. They had another few minutes on the clock before the opening of the market.

Fred nodded and smiled.

Mr Lundin headed for the canteen counter. He wasn't really surprised that Georg Holst was keeping his son as a waged worker in the Holst Nurseries. The old man was known amongst his business associates to have a cautious streak, or a good business sense, depending on how you saw it. Perhaps he was really run by his hearty wife as the gossip went. He had a gentleness of appearance that made people surprised at the hand of steel with which his business was conducted.

Mr Lundin put the cups on the table and sat down again:

"I am just having a house built myself," he told Freddy. "I had a lucky find of a good property in Grorud, no mining needed." Most of the houses around Oslo where built on Granite, the north, east and west of the city being surrounded by mountains and woods, at the southern end the city ran into the fjord.

We should be starting the excavations as soon as the frost has left the ground, hopefully April.

"What kind of soil have you got?"

It had slipped out before Frank had time to think. He continued not giving Lundin a chance to answer: "Would you need somewhere to dispose of the surplus from the excavations? We've got a patch of bracken land by the greenhouses, I could possibly use the soil in the nurseries if it's not beyond refining?

It couldn't be practical for Lundin to bring it all the way to Hamar, so he reckoned he couldn't have much use for it himself. He might give it to Fred for a pittance. He tried not to sound too eager, if he could get Lundin to bring him the soil at the Nurseries he could enrich it to be used on potted plants, bag it and sell it through the sales department at the nurseries. It would be a big job, but once refined and in the bag good soil would sell at one krone at the wholesale market and twice as much if he sold it bag by bag from the shop. It could be the extra money he needed.

Lundin looked up and nodded having read the thoughts in the young man's eager green eyes. "The entrepreneurs have a site in Nittedal. I could have them leave it somewhere else, the nearer the better. Let's say I'll have a word with them", he suggested. He got up.

"I have a lovely set of emeralds I thought I wanted to show you", he added amiably. "Thought you might enjoy seeing them, extraordinarily good quality."

Fred smiled. It was a deal. Sure, he might find a use for a couple of gemstones, or anyway his father might want to make jewellery out of them for Kat, if it was possible to hang any more on her, he thought spitefully. He would be in for a lot of late night's work refining and packing the soil. If he could afford to have the stones set into a ring and pendant for Anita she might not mind as much. He would pick up a book on gemstones from the library, his stepmother had always had gemstones of all kinds but he wasn't quite sure what a really good sapphire looked like, how he might tell if it was inferior? He had bought Anita a piece of jewellery at the birth of each of their children but so far it had been no life of luxury for either of them.

In his sudden mood of anticipation he longed for Anita and wished for a moment to hold her near, to feel her warm strong body next to him. She had been sleeping soundly when he left the house in the early morning hush. She was not a morning person. Even when she slept she was beautiful. She still had an innocence about her. He wanted so much for her and for their two lovely girls. Wanted them all to have their share of everything life had to offer. He loved them all so much!

Fred Holst and Paul Lundin got up from their seats and exchanged addresses and numbers. Paul Lundin would direct the lorries to dump the soil at the Holst Nurseries. It was an advantage to him, it was near and would be quicker than bringing it to Nittedal. And he couldn't deny that the Holst Nursereies were a powerful force in the net of dependencies and loyalties that ruled the lucrative and rapidly growing flower trade. His brother's trade had been weakened when he failed to cultivate the right connections. Now that he was getting in with him at the nurseries in Hamar Paul would make sure that mistake was corrected. Besides he had plans of his own. There would be more buildingwork to follow the new house. He was more than pleased to be of use to young Fred Holst. He would see to it that the favour was well returned, in time.

In the new settlements on the winding dirt-roads by the woods, the cooking smells were seeping out of the kitchens, transversing fences and drives. In between the newly painted wood-panelled houses the scents mingled with specs of snow and fragrant spruce, infiltrating the clean cold air. It was hanging like an invisible film over the gardens and the tumbling play in the afternoon. School had finished at a quarter past two as usual, leaving an hour and a half before the sun set and parents called the children home. Home to set dinner tables with boiled fish, meatballs or fried sausages. Boiled potatoes, there were always boiled potatoes, with everything, and maybe peas and carrots or stewed white cabbage.

Pudding. The mothers were labouring over the stows subversively sowing the seeds of hunger in the back of their children's minds. It was just lingering there at the very back, hardly noticeable at the minute, the children breathing in the freshly fallen snow and the last hour of daylight. It could not be wasted. They were playing tag, more under the snow than over.

The black and white Buhund, it belonged on the other side of the gravelly snowed over road, was familiarising itself with Lita, the family terrier. Lita was in heat and had been happily won over. Now she was rotating her hind quarters towards the dog flagrant with interest. Holding her tail to the side she waited impatiently as her smaller mate struggled to get into position. He was a younger and less experienced dog. The bitch was already four and had born three litters, reared under the staircase in the cellar. They really should put a gate in the drive!

It was already late March but winter was not yet willing to loosen it's grip, it had given them two feet of snow in the last week. Underneath the last few inches of sticky fresh snow were the older, drier, more crumbly layers. The children had dug out caves in the larger snowdrifts, the snow lying four and five feet deep where the wind had blown it into a ridge or the plough heaped it up high. It was many weeks worth of white heaven! From the dug out caves tunnels had sprung and then more tunnels meticulously added, links made to larger snowdrifts with larger caves. There was a whole city under the snow. The children's city.

Intermediate thaw was the only threat to the children's white world, they did not wish for spring with it's warm air to come. It would eventually be sweeping up over the country from the sout-west, the sudden warmth shrinking their subterrestrial world. Tunnels tightened and roofs sank, or collapsed altogether. Once thaw had done it's damage there was no reversing it. If it finally gave way to cold again the sunken walls and ceilings were permanently glazed in a hard slippery crust, unmouldable, and everywhere a little tighter to squeeze through. The little people inherited 'Old Town'. The larger children who could not get in left for other games, until snow fell again and the plough threw up new islands of soft malleable white bliss. Then they were back in business, constructing!

In the half acre of garden, to the south of the white wood-panelled house belonging to Anita and Fred, the children of eight and ten were 'kings' now in tunnels and caves. The most resent resizeing having excluded the bigger children from down the road, Fred and Anita's girls Monika and Linnea were in charge. They had brought chase-master Tom with them home from school. And Tormod, his mate, who would sometimes join in the chase, too, but the girls had the upper hand, they knew the tunnels like the back of their hand, where they widened and narrowed, the dead ends and the secret exits.

The canines in the yard had separated finally, the dog salacious, the bitch perky. Linnea peeped out of the tunnel into light snowfall. Their Airdale terrier Lita, too, had heard the slur of the car wheels on the loose snow. Little dirt roads like these were not priority with the plough drivers. The residents would have to dig their own cars out for the next couple of days, til the plough drivers caught up. Now the bitch was on her way out the drive. Not many car's came here, but when they did she could never resist the chase!

"Lita, back here!"

Seeing the Airdale head for the drive Linnea for a moment forgot the play. She could hear the panic in her own voice. It was in a pinch, weak and thin in the cold air. It would not carry through to the dog. They really must put up a gate!

"Lita, now! Come! Back HERE! Stupid dog!"

She was already out on the road full throttle towards the car!

Then the front door opened and the dog made a u-turn galloping cheerfully towards Anita on the steps, overtaken by visions of a full dish of food, tail bobbing. Cooking smells have a short-cut to the dogs attention. Anita had not seen Lita nor the impending disaster. Smiling she held her hand up in greeting to the man stepping out of the car. He opened the back taking out a large grey bubble tray: Two dozen eggs from the smallholding in the woods.

In a minute the rest of the children too had scrambled to their feet outside the caves, the chase having dispersed into toe-tapping unease. A teasing comment, a frozen rope of hair pulled, it did not bring wind back into the game. Instead the adult presence across the yard had left the children standing, bemused. The girls watched their own version of the chase, the female version playfully unfolding. They could not help but tune in : Linn and Monika's mother lightly touching the egg-man's arm. The tilt of her head, brushing a strand of hair back from her forehead as she smiled. She said:"Come inside while I find you the money."

Sway in her hip, see-saw skirt swinging as she turned and closed the door with her tray of twenty-four eggs. They were sucking it in like air. Breathing in their future.

In the snow Tom and Tormod staged an ambush. Monica was down on the ground, struggling to slip away. Tormod the biggest boy in class had pinned Monica into the snow. But she wriggled, she was good at it, and soon he had got only a leg, then a bit of trousers. She was free and they were on their feet, down the little slope from the drive to the tunnels opening on the flat lawn. Now it was Linnea he was chasing. She wriggled in and he slid after. In the deepest cave there was nowhere further to go. They could hear the others giggle, muffled by the frozen walls. They were somewhere, closer nearby than they sounded. Tormod got a good grip on Linn's leg as she turned her back against the cave wall and looked for him in the dark. Having her face to face mad him feel a little embarrassed. He slowed down and slid up to her, but she only laughed and fell sidelongs pulling him along on her ride down the icy wall.

Their mouths together were frozen at first, then tinglingly hot and wet. The ground was hard and cold, Linns legs curled up against the curve of the small icy enclosure. Not much light in here, just his breath and hers in the thick quiet. Soggy woollen mittens and his warm weight leaning over her, but not hesitantly, the weight of his body was increasingly leaning onto hers. She was getting squashed. And he was not gentle, he had kissed girls before, he knew what to do.

Now she wanted to get out and he didn't want to let her go, after all that chasing! His mouth was all over her face. His tongue all over, everywhere, inside her mouth! Yuk!

Linnea could hear the other's crawling by and quickly kicked Tormod in the shin.

"Ouch!!"

The boy realised the snog was over and the chase back on. She was already out in the tunnel, hot on the heals of the others. In her nylon suit Linnea slid through the tunnel easily. Monika was wearing woollen skipants that tended to get stuck where the tunnels pinched. As the chase stagnated again, she was waiting impatiently for Monika to ease herself through a particularly sunken passage, she could hear Tormod behind her. There was nothing to do but wait. Turning was impossible and backing too cumbersome. Inside the tunnels they were all confined by each other's progress, held by the darkness in the icy quiet and the stuffy smell of wet mittens and candle wax. No light got through here. They were heading back where the play started. To the big cave by the exit. There they had candles burning in niches in the walls.

At last after ealing through on their tummys the girls could with relief crawl on all fours. They stopped for a moment to catch their breath. Where the tunnel widened into the cave candles were shining along the walls, pale quiet flames sucking in the thinning oxygen. From here there was only a short passage out. They could see again! And hear! In the muffled distance children's voices were riding like kites on the air. There was the cheerful hello of a car horn nearby, herding the play out of the icy road.

"That's Pappa. Let me through, Linn, that's his car!"

Monika looked back at Linnea as she was squeezing past. Tom was already way ahead out in open air . Then the alcove lit up with a curious yellow glow, just a hesitant flicker at first, then a halo of yellow waves around Linnea's shoulders, hissing along her hair and tugging at the home-knitted Hardanger hat. Linnea's frightened scream filled the tunnels as the air swelled with the thick stench of burnt wool and melted nylon.

"Roll over! Roll over!"

Monika was screaming at her and tugging her onto her back, hitting out as much as space would allow trying to quench the flames with her wet bemittened hands. She had pushed Linnea too close to the candles in the niche as she squeezed past! Now the back of Linn's nylon jacket was on fire!

Monika's woollen mittens were hammering down around Linn's shoulders and head. She had to stop them, had top put them out, the hungry tongues flashing on and off around Linnea's back, the hiss of the snakes of sizzling hair jostling the edges of her woollen hat!

The icy wall was in an instant melted, hollowed out around Linnea, the white of the afternoon air shining through , circularly and framed in black fuzzy ridges of soot. The sickly smell of the melting wind-jacket overtaken by the sour stench of scorched wool and hair. Monika's hammering hands were getting to the flames, finally! Or the melting snow. It didn't matter, it had stopped burning. Still wriggling against the melted wall Linnea finally burst through the black-speckled frame on the white garden, projecting herself through the gaping sooty whole, out into gentle snowfall. Large tender flakes now, teasing and drifting towards the ground. The horizon was hazy.

"Pappa!!!"

Fred was walking slowly, peacefully towards them, he had not heard the fracas, muffled from under the snow. Linnea lifted her hands in agony. The lovely white on blue knitted snow crystals in the Hardanger borders were edged in burnt brown around pink skin. Linnea's red jumper was beaded with melted nylon haphazardly lumping and ridging over the neck pattern. Her hair was curiously short, frizzled as if shorn with a blunt and dirty knife. But the fire had been stumped out! Thank God for busy mothers churning out woollen knits to keep their children smartly warm through the winters in the biting unforgiving cold of 10 degrees below, when acrylics and polyesters just wouldn't do! Whole natural wool did not burn well. The woollen layers had saved Linnea!

Fred lifted her up. She looked small and childish, the boys watching in horror. Her father's face was pale but contained, a deep frown on his forehead. He checked her over quickly. "Your jumper saved you."

He pulled gently on Monika's scorched mittens to get them off her hands. The skin was pink and raw around her wrists.

"Monika, come along!" He bundled the two girls into the car. Someone else has parked their car in the drive.

"Better take you both to Casualty." He looked for a sign of Anita behind the windows. She was elsewhere, he would give her a ring from the A & E.

When Anita passed the gravy her tongue was pushing out from behind underneath her closed lower lip. It created a funny bump above her chin and made her face look long and disfigured. It was not a good sign to the children, their mother was pondering something.

"You can count yourselves lucky," she said at last. "It could have been a lot worse."

There was no warmth in the statement. They were to blame. They should have known better. Monika had got her wrists bandaged and was numb from the aspirin. Linnea was fighting back the tears. It was hard to eat, her tongue felt funny and her jaw ached. The meatballs and gravy tasted odd! Phuh! It was the last time she was kissing a boy!

"Is it a good idea to give them candles for outdoors?" Fred tried.

"They're big enough to know not to put candles in dangerous places! " Anita retorted. "Don't you think I have enough to do, I certainly don't have the time to sit and watch them play all day."

She had been drinking coffee with Harald, the delivery man. She just needed some company, Freddy knew the boy too, she figured it was all right. He was a nice boy. She always had the coffee simmering on the stow and it would have been rude not to offer him a cup. Harald had such a long round and it was a cold day. It had given her an excuse for a cigarette. She felt a chill creeping up her neck watching Linnea struggle with the knife and fork with her bandaged hands.

"I have told you time and time again, Linnea, to be careful with candles and matches! Just be thankful that your luck was better than your sense this time"

Linnea looked harder at her potato. The bit in her mouth was getting stuck. She couldn't eat. Mother was noticing: "Now, eat up your dinner! Do I have to worry about you, big girls that you are, all the time?"

Anita rose from the table and quickly cleared Fred and Monikas dinner plates away. She put her own plate buy the sink, she had only eaten half. She felt more like a cup of coffee and a cigarette than food. She had put aside an apple Danish. On the AGA was the crumble she had prepared for the children's pudding. She put in on the mat on the table and brought dishes down from the cupboard. Fredrick declined and got up, he had to get back for a couple of hours of cutting in the nurseries, tulips and daffs for the market tomorrow morning. She followed him into the hallway. For how much longer was he going to be working overtime?

Monika scoffed her crumble down and shouted after mother for permission to leave the table.

"Linn finish your dinner!" Linnea was always the last to finish. Always meticulous with food.

She sat slumping and despondent, the potato was just growing in her mouth, she couldn't eat. Then Lita sauntered into the kitchen in anticipation of the leftovers. The girls looked at each other, a little smile as they listened out for mother still talking to father in the hallway. Quickly Linn slid the potatoes under the table. They were gone! She listened out again and the girls giggled. The kitchen had two doors, one from the dining room and one from the hallway where mother was. Noone was approaching either side. It was safe. Quickly the rest of her dinner went the same way.

"Good dog," Monika whispered, patting the dogs golden head. "Good girl." The girls slid off the chairs. Linnea ran outside to give father a big hug on his way out. "I've finished," she said to mother. She skipped upstairs.

Anita returned to the kitchen and cleared off the table. She dumped the dishes in the sink and filled new fresh water in the kettle. Shaking the tablecloth off she grabbed the dishcloth and wiped the table-top before throwing the cloth back on. It was a green and yellow cloth with rabbits and daffodil. She was hoping for spring. The water came to the boil and she spooned the ground coffee in, the rich aroma spreading, again instantly bolstering her good humour. She waited a few minutes to let the coffee steep while she rinsed sauce and crumbs off plates and dishes. Then the coffee was ready and she poured her cup full, a dash of double cream, two cubes of sugar. After a couple of cigarettes she felt tired and decided to have another. She shouted to the children to put their pyjamas on and go to bed. It was near to eight o'clock. She finally got up and started filling hot soapy water in the sink. There were plenty of time for the chores, Fred would not be back for at least an hour.

Anita put the radio on and soaked her fingers in the hot water, her feet were doing a mini-jitter-bug to the music while she scrubbed the dishes. Oops! She had dropped a glass on the side of the sink, it shattered at the edge of the work top and shot like fireworks through the brightly lit room. She checked herself for a moment, it was only one of the kitchen-glasses, no big deal really. Smiling she fetched the dustpan and brush out from the broom cupboard. Her mother would not have approved. Dropping the broken glass in the bin she turned the radio up louder.

When Fred finally came home Monika was lying awake listening out for him. He had worked a lot of late hours lately cutting daffodils and narcissus in the nurseries but he always came up to the girls bedroom to say good night. As he slid open the door there were white bandages shining at him in the dark room, it made him hold his breath a little tighter, his little girls! What could have happened if the worst..., scars, disfigurements, he stopped the thought, it was making him feel shaky.

"Hi sweetpea. How are your hands?"

Fred sat himself down at the end of the bed.

"Oh, Pappa, it really hurts!"

"Really?" Fred put on a mock surprise? "I can't feel a thing."

"Oh Pappa, you're being stupid, not your hands, mine!"

"Oh, well if they're bothering you, maybe I should get a knife and cut them off for you?"

"Stupid!" Now Monika was laughing. She kicked him off the bed in exasperation.

There was Linnea, she was awake too, in the other bed, behind the chimney-breast:

"Pappa, am I old enough to have a bike now, when the roads clear again?

"Linnea," his voice was a velvet ribbon. Soft and deep blue.

"I think you are."

Then he kissed them both and left the room.

Linnea had lost her jumper and hat, they had been scorched by the fire. Her thick brown hair had been cut short. The Emergency Room nurse had bandaged both of Monika's wrists.

For another while Monika lay awake looking out into the grey wide space that was her and Linnea's room, it was two-thirds of the whole first floor. The radio was playing downstairs. She was waiting for Anita to bring more aspirin. "In a minute," she had said, a long time ago.

Linnea was in her bed across the room, was she sleeping? She was very quiet. She was not breathing. She might have died from the shock of their accident? The only sound now was of mother clattering dishes in the kitchen. Then father's steps were on the stairs. Father's steps on the landing. He was in the doorway and had brought the aspirin.

"It will be all right. Get a good night's sleep, now."

"Will Mamma come and say good night?"

"She'll be up in a minute."

Mother did not appear in the strip of light in the doorway. There was the clattering of the kettle being put on. Now she was talking on the phone. Linnea heard father going to bed, he had to get up at half past five for the early market. She heard Linnea sigh in her sleep, so she was not dead.

The snow was falling outside. It was slowly covering the tunnels and caves. The sooty hole in the tunnel wall and the children's tracks to and from had already nearly disappeared. No one looking into the garden over the white-painted fence, onto the wooden panells of the white-painted house in the white snow, would know now that the tunnels were even there. All they would see in the grey snowy nightfall would be the blue door and the warm glow of the lamp through the window. The red hat that Monika had lost, Tone's spade, they were hidden now. The cones that had fallen from the spruce, the ones they had been throwing at each other. The candles left behind in the caves. It was all grey, under the newly fallen snow in the quiet night. Only when spring came, when it finally all melted away would it be there again for everyone to see, scattered on the frozen yellow lawn.

When Monika woke again, it was suddenly pitch black. She knew father would get up early. He was having to make wreaths for a funeral. She slid off her bed and tiptoed quietly out of the room. Monika was sleeping in her bed behind the chimney. The chimney was a square pillar through the middle of the room. It was wallpapered with comics from floor to ceiling. Linn could faintly make out the Donald Duck cartoon strips in the dark.

The door to mother and father's room was closed, but not locked. They were both in bed, asleep. All that showed of mother was a tuft of hair sticking out from under the quilt. She was curled up under the warm downs. Father was stretched out on his back. Pale and clearly drawn in the cold air. The window was always ajar at night.

The child slid under the duvet next to her father pulling the nightie down around her feet. His body was solid and steady in his resting position on his hard orthopaedic mattress. He felt warm and cool at the same time. Half asleep Fred put his arm under the child's neck as she was trying to ease a dent in the firm pillow. Finally she was resting her head besides his, breathing the faint aroma of shampoo and aftershave, the clock ticking away quietly. Fred and Mon were on their backs, side by side, like lookouts on a ship. In the end the alarmclock rudely intruded on the child's reveries and the man's sleep. Fred got up rubbing his aching back, careful not to hurt Monika's bandaged wrists. She looked a little better now, smiling to him sleepily in the dark in the cold room. There was colour in her cheeks.

Mon watched the pyjama flapping behind him out the bedroom door. Then she tucked the duvet in against the cold winter air. Her mother, from inside her eitherdown swamp was soundly snoring. Anita drew in a loud barking noise, finally turning over. The quilt opened up and drew the child under into the warm soft hollow of the mother's grasp.

Her husband was never there in the morning. He left so early, even at the weekends. Anita noticed Monika moaning and realised she was squashing her wrist with the bandage. Moving out of the way she made the mattress sink under them both making an even bigger hollow for the child to slide into. Maybe she should not have got angry with the children, it had been an accident after all. But they really were old enough to be sensible with candles. And she had got so frightened realising what had happened. She could not be there all the time to watch them. Anita sighed in her sleepy state. It was always the same, it was not her fault but she would be the one everybody blamed.

Fred made his way along the flower beds towards the sales department . The long rows of tulips were a lovely sight now they were all just ready to be cut. The nurseries had hedged their bets on a new variant, it had been a bit of an experiment and had been Fred's idea. He had read an article about it in the Chronicle and had talked his father into trying them. They were a particularly stout and fast growing sort which meant they had to be cut and sold within a short span of time, before passing the saleable stage. It had meant a lot of overtime most of which had fallen on him since the whole thing had been his idea. It had been well worth the gamble for the nurseries. Having good strong stems and large brightly coloured heads they had been popular with the retailers. For himself he was not sure it had been such a good idea. His father had refused to pay him overtime for the long evenings and weekends of work when rapid harvesting had been necessary. Anita had not been pleased.

From the green houses he continued into the packing room, and dug a brochure and a large apple out of the pocket of his overalls. He rubbed the apple against his sleeve to clean it and spread the glossy paper out on the desk in front of him. It was about television-sets, a device that could receive live pictures being transmitted from a central, broadcast they called it. It would be just like the movies but in your own livingroom. He found the idea fascinating. It had already been around for a while abroad, but the Norwegian government had been slow introducing it, they had just started sending the first trial pictures a few months ago. So far there were only transmissions at the weekends. He had seen them at his dad's house, Georg had of course already got himself a set. There were a large broadcasting central being built on the other side of town. Oslo was meant to have regular transmissions within a year. They were saying there would soon be a television set in every house. Frank pulled down a sheet of wrapping paper from the shelf above the table and fished a pen out of his pocket. He was spending a lot of time at the nurseries lately, the black gleaming heap of soil was a constant reminder to him of all the things he wanted and of all the time he was not with his wife and children. He sighed. He didn't see much of them packing and refining compost every evening for as long as the daylight lasted. He didn't mind, for a while, Anita would have to manage. There had been many more loads coming from Lundin's excavation site than he had anticipated, money that neither he nor Anita had counted on. Encouraged by the thought he started doodling designs on the rough grey paper, rings and pendants inset with sparkling stones. He drew the jewellery complete with Anita's slim neck and beautiful hands, his father had always dabbled in painting. He had often thought he might be an architect or a designer himself. He had painted a couple of oil paintings after his eldest was born, lovely blue-eyed Monika. He ought to have been an architect or a designer, he thought to himself, even an artist, not a nurseries dogsbody. He really had to get a book on precious stones.

There were so many things he wanted to do , so many places and things he would have liked to see. He loved his Anita and their children so and wanted for them all the best that life could offer: Art, travel and education. But right now he had work waiting, four long rows of tulips to be cut and bunched before he could leave. Anita would have dinner ready at seven. On the grindstone by the table he sharpened hid knife and tested it on the edge of the old worn table top. It was nice and sharp. He picked a pair of padded gloves out of the cupboard and stuffed them in his pocket. He would only wear them if his fingers got cut or too sore. He worked faster with his bare hands. Slipping through to the greenhouses he wondered to himself why Paul Lundin was letting him have the compost for free. He would be expecting something in return surely, it was always the case. He had never been given something for nothing.

He watched another dumpertruck arriving and depositing it's load, there was his father too in his black Mercedes. It was rare seeing him in the nurseries before lunch.

"Ah, there you are."

Fred ignored his father's less than welcoming greeting. He nodded towards the truck departing.

"It makes good compost with a little sand and manure added, I'll continue refining and packing it in the evenings", he assured his father."You won't have any trouble with it. Well, better get back to work." He slapped his dad's shoulder lightly as a close to the conversation and set off for the greenhouses leaving the older man standing. His shoulders were lightly stooped and his hands clenched behind his back. His face gathered around a deep furrow between his eyes. Fred sighed quietly. His father was thinking, no doubt sceaming again. Now what was he up to? Opening the door to the warm humid hothouses he tried to shrug the sudden gloom off. He was too happy about the soil to worry about his parents. His father had been bending the rules getting himself into some corner? It was nothing new, he would bend another rule to get himself out, it was their speciality, his and Kat's. They had always done it and somehow they always came out of it landing on their feet, they were good at it. Katrine was the most cunning woman from here to hell! He chuckled to himself, relishing in his stepmother's devilish reincarnation posturing in his mind. He had often damned her in his younger days when she was sceaming at his expense. These days he expected it, he had no sympathy any more for her and his father's dilemmas,they could solve their own problems.

Talking of the Devil! There was another car in the drive, it was Kat's little Ford. He had better take five minutes and put the coffee on, with his father already in a bad mood he would be better off keeping them both sweet.

Katrine spotted Fred through the glass doors and opened them with a large red smile: "Hello, Freddy", her voice-box chimed, the sound of her voice always seemed somehow disconnected to the rest of her face. "Good to see you, dear. How are Anita and the girls? Don't bother with the coffee , darling, I've only come to have a word with your father. And I must take some flowers for the chairman of the Flowertrader's. There's the General Meeting this evening." She nodded approvingly at her own intention and waved at Fred as she scuttled over to her husband on her spiky heels. Fred had to admit it, in spite of her slightly ridiculous air, her heels being slightly too high, her hair a little too blond, that she was a handsome woman, a lot younger looking than her 48 years. She had the Norwegian vivid-blue eyes, nearly as bright as Anita's but the shape was slanted and always smily, like leaning half-moons. Kat had always been good at making her own bed, with nothing less than silk sheets and eitherdowns. She did not believe in letting her long nails break by doing things others could do for her. A smile came to Freddys face as he watched his parents talking and gesticulating out in the yard. Katrine was a Nordic beauty but had the temperament of a Mediterranean. It had never been dull growing up with her. He watched her leaving again and put the coffee on anyway, helping himself to a cup, pouring another for his father who was returning to the sales room. Georg accepted and lit himself a cigarette, but continued to pace the sales department up and down until finally stopping in front of Fred.

"Shouldn't you be on your shop-round, Ah , it is Olav doing the round." He was doing his 'friendly distracted' act, something had to be up! Fred knew his father's various tactics, and he knew there was never anything helpless or flaky about him. He had a sharp mind and always knew what he was doing.

"It is a problem, it is a problem, he was muttering, conversing into the air, not looking at his son as he was pacing the floor again. Fred's suspicion grew, what did his father want?

"It is getting urgent with the tulips," he finally said, they will need harvesting now within the week."

"I know, dad, I'm onto it."

Was that it! Fred gathered his knife and gloves up and waited for Georg to move out of the way to let him through the misty door to the west wing. No time to hang about.

"This compost of yours, it is a bit of a problem, upsetting our usual thrift somewhat. Of course we do sell bags of compost," he said."You will be offering this for sale..." he hesitated, "maybe sell it from here?"

Fred saw the point: His father was going to loose a few bob selling compost in the shop, the odd bag or two that he would normally be selling directly to customers himself.

"OK, I'll sell you my own compost wholesale price for sale in the shop, it will be lower than your usual brand, we both win?" Fred suggested.

"Half of wholesale price." His father negotiated. Another lorry load was backing through the drive and onto the adjacent field.

"An eyesore," his father muttered.

"You will have no trouble with it, dad, I'll go out and buy what I need on Saturday and do all the packing in the evenings.

Fred considered the conversation for ended. If there was such a hurry he had better get on with the cutting.

His father moved to the side letting him through: "Ah, well yes..", he said "We are somewhat behind with the cutting. Well, as long as you have cleared the soil by next Friday, we are lending the land out to a Lion's bazaar, one of Kat's little charities, you know how much they mean to her."

Fred stopped in the doorway. There it was then, the impossible term. The usual pettiness. He was convinced it was an invention, he had heard no talk of a bazaar before, and who wanted to hold a bazaar in a field in the middle of nowhere? They knew very well there was no way he could have all the soil cleared in ten days. There were another three or four loads to come, it would be an ongoing job taking him the best part of the summer, a couple of months at least and after that he would still need somewhere to store it. It was a ridiculous term. They had planned it all, pushing him into a corner, then pretending to take pity on him, making a little profit on his behalf. Always trying to milk him for a little bit more. He knew how they worked.

Standing stiffly in the doorway he knew what was coming. "One week? You know I have work out there for at least a month"

"Oh, well, I guess Katrine will have to find them a different location," Georg continued. You could maybe give her a little something, to compensate her, she will have to rent another field, a couple of hundred I guess should do it. All for a good cause." He chuckled goodnaturedly and winked at his son. Fred raise his eyebrows in irony only, it was not worth offering a reply.

"Mr Lundin was wondering if you'd be interested in a set of emeralds? I'm sure Kat could do with a little cheering up?"

He let the door slide quietly behind him, his parents were not worth a tantrum, and continued across the moist tiled floor under the glass ceiling. He knew them all too well, they had worked it out between them out in the yard, how to squeeze another drop of blood out of their own son. He had given them years and years of hard work and what had he got in return, not even a partnership in the business. Freddy had learnt a long time ago not to oppose them, he had learnt the hard way, Katrine and his dad were always one step ahead. Kat had never liked him much the dark eyed eldest son of Goerg's first wife. All the opportunities his half-sisters had been given she had cunningly denied him always waving the big carrot in front of his face: The Nurseries were all to be his one day. One day! He was sick of the whole bloody business, his ball and chain. While his sisters had graduated at university and had good years of travelling he had always been indispensable in the nurseries. What did he need an education for, he was learning it all on the job? His business? It had to be his in the end! It had happened to him too many times, Katrine steeling his piece of the cake! There was always something keeping him down!

How had he ended up spending his time picking flowers? There were so many things he could have been good at. All he needed was to be given a chance. Fred clenched his jaws trying to chase away the feelings of melancholy rolling in over him. Seeing the bright rows of red and orange ahead of him filled him only with resentment. One thing he knew for sure: He would never allow his own children to enter the family business. He would see them in well paid independent profession: Architects, dentist, lawyers and doctors, people being masters of their own lives. His girls would have the freedom his parents had denied him. He bent down letting his frustration whistle out between clenched teeth. He had four rows of tulips to cut, sort by colour and bunch before the end of the day, he had to get on with it. He wanted to get home for dinner. One by one he started cutting the bouncy green stems with his sharp knife.

The tenth of June was Anita's 30th birthday. She was having a big dinner for all her family and friends. In the morning Anita's mother and Eva were helping Anita set the table. The house that Fred had built for his family had a through lounge, it made it an excellent space for big traditional family dinners. The menfolk were all there, sweating and swearing as they were struggling with the two and one piece of the three piece settee. The heavy furniture were to be stacked in the bedroom next to the lounge. The door frame was just big enough for squeezing through the chair, and hopefully the two piece, as well. If they raised it up vertically, and slightly diagonally, armrest towards the ceiling, and lifted it a little...

The table for the big dinner was to be a C-shape, for seating about thirty guests, so both lounge and dining room had to be cleared. As the menfolk were sweating and swearing Mrs Pederson's mouth was getting thinner. A slight twitch of the head and a downwards disapproving glance, directed slightly to the side of Eva did like magic, for a split second, collapse the daughter's stature. She quickly regained herself. "But Bjorn!" she said to her spouse in a voice expressing both her faith in and her disapproval of him. There was only one way to do things, the right way.

There was the reply, the exasperated: "Women!!" on Bjorn's lips, but he didn't say it. Instead Eva's husband minded his language.

"Fredrick couldn't be here, then?"

It was Anita's turn to cringe: "No, mother, he couldn't get away from the nurseries."

"Saturday morning, you would think they could do without him!" Mrs Pedersen held on. She did not approve. She and her husband had always put their family first!

"Yes, you would think so. He'll be back this afternoon."

The table had finally gained it's C-shape, put together by the extended dining table and six fold-up tables borrowed from the local community centre. Six places in the middle: Anita and Freddy, then their parents, Liv and August Pedersen and Georg and Katrine Holst. Then extended family and friends, two tables times four places either side, and a table seating five at either end. Thirty two places. Liv Pedersen was happy. She enjoyed the planning of a family do and had worked it out in the smallest detail. Enough chairs, table cloths, crystal glasses, silver cutlery, candle holders, trays, serving dishes, napkins. Liv Pedersen had done it so many times in her life she didn't even need lists. She would never leave something as important as a family birthday to her daughter, she was in no doubt that something would go wrong if she did. Fred, Anita's husband, he did not get involved like the other men, but at least he would be reliable with what ever little he did. He would bring the flowers from the nurseries. And they were always extravagant.

In the nurseries the air was hot and humid. Fred had to raise his voice just a little, like a string of steel running through his usual deep warm timbre, to outsound the humming of the pumps. Linn was helping him cut the tulips. He had sharpened a good knife for her, a good knife with a black handle.

Through the glass wall they could see whoever came and went. Now a lady in a pink suit was entering. It was Katrine. Grandmother. Kat flung the door open but stopped in the doorway on her high pink heels in case she might slip on the moss. "See you later, dearie, at mum's party! Are you looking forward to it?" There was always a little barbed wire in Katrine's voice. It carried well over the hum. Linn's mouth felt tight like a strawberry, it was sort of in a smile but she couldn't talk. Instead she nodded eagerly and waved. Pink suit. Wish mamma would wear something like that! Not just navy and white. Or zebra.

Katrine left again. Now Grandfather was there, too, next to dad.The girl put her knife carefully on the wooden edge of the tulip bed and made her way, around heaps of bunched tulips, around wooden trolleys, over soft moss, through the door. Phew! It was cool and dry in the salesroom and the sweet scent of flowers was deeper than in the tulip house. Grandad's arms were strong and warm. He gave Linnea a good squeeze. "Linnea, Linnea", he muttered, "How are you?". Without expecting an answer he and father turned their attention to a square of deep blue velvet on the packing-table. Grandad held onto Linn and showed her gently in front: "Diamonds!"

"Mmm, I'll think about it," Fred says. "Anita would never agree to me investing money in diamonds."

"You'll have no problem extending your mortgage. We'll have Mr Kristensen from the bank over for supper." Georg winked. "The quality of these stones is superb. You can't loose. We're in the middle of a boom. It's a great time to invest."

"I'll need Anita's consent." There was a sour tinge in father's voice.

" There are ways, there are ways. "

Grandfather, Linn noted, always said a lot of things twice, in a mild humorous kind of way. As if everybody was fuzzing and he was there to calm people down. And then he winked at you, as though you knew already that it was all a bit of fuzz and nothing to worry about. He was a very wealthy man, although he always said he was poor when she asked him.

"You could talk to Anita.", he suggested. "Put the flowers for the table-decorations on a note, we'll sort that out later." He left through the glass doors for his black Mercedes. Fred shook his head. Anita did not understand money.

"I'd better get on with the decorations for mum's dinner table," father said. His voice was still a little sharp although there was no humming machinery in the sales department. "Do you want to do some drawing? Or cut more tulips?"

Linn stayed in the salesroom. Fred gave her paper to draw on, large white packing-sheets of paper. "Promise me, Linn," he said. "When you grow up, become a doctor, or an architect, or lawyer. Never start you own business! And never, never work for your dad!" She looked at him incredulous. Then why was he doing it?"

Anita and Fredrick's house had two walk-in wardrobes, one in Monika and Linn's room and one on the landing. The children's wardrobe had two doors closing towards each other, with a forty centimetre pillar of wall dividing them. Behind the pillar their clothes were hanging on a rail. The shoes were on shelves along the sides. The clothes and shoes could be got to from either door. Two of everything, every pair of shoes, every dress, every jacket. Anita always dressed Monika and Linn the same.

The one on the landing, next to Anita and Fred's bedroom, was Anita's walk-in wardrobe. It had got a single door only but the room behind it was twice as big as Linn and Monika's. It had handbags and shoes, there were greens and blues and leopard prints, and black stilettoes and pumps in blue with white stripes. In a corner there were round boxes with hats. There was a whole wall of suits and dresses. The odd bit and bob only in pastels, mostly it was blues and greens, a lot of navy and many animal prints. Anita loved her animal prints.

Linn and Monika were fond of the yellow kimono dressing gown. It was hanging at the far end of the rail next to a dark brown mink coat. Anita's fox-head collar was always staring at them, vacantly, off the shoulder of a green coat, behind the brown mink. It was wonderful feeling the silks and gliding against the smooth furs. It has to be done quietly. No clattering about in the stilettoes. The wardrobe was forbidden territory to the children, no one was allowed inside here, except dad. It was his wardrobe, too, but he had got only a few dull suits hanging on the opposite wall. The last nanny Linn and Monika had was sacked for going out in Anita's clothes.

It was finally the evening of Anita's big dinner. As the food arrived a hush settled over the room, eager clattering of knives and forks against porcelain. Words floating in light conversation here and there. These dinners always started late, and everybody was hungry.

Starters were served. It was half a crayfish with green leaves and dressing. Fred and a couple of friends had been out crayfishing all night last week. The crustaceans had been kept alive in water, in the square black clothes washing basin in the washroom of the cellar, but the children had found them crawling around the house all week. They were relieved to finally see them immobilised on the plates, although not too keen on eating them. They had given some of them names.

Frank tapped his glass and wished everybody welcome before handing over to the toastmaster, his brother Finn. There was a first toast to Anita: Who could believe she was thirty?

Anita smiled. There were speeches to come, a whole round of them, but they could wait a little. Stomacs had to be filled. It was 6.45 in the afternoon, the day was still bright, just fading from white hot to warm cream. It was still much too bright to light the chandeliers and the candles. But there were four courses on the menu, speeches and a lot of singing at the table. The dinner would be stretching well into the early evening.

Anita closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. It had all come together, Fred turning up with the table decorations at nearly ten to six. She was sure he had stayed away as long as he could to avoid helping. She did even have to dress the children herself. He had left it so late she had been rushing when putting her make up on. Painting her eyebrows they came on a little to sharply. Though with her green dress it looked about right. The dress revealed a terrific cleavage. It was a little daring but she thought she could get away with it. It was her big day after all. She knew there was not a man around the table who hadn't had a peak, wandering eyes, young and old. Breasts had a universal appeal. She found it a little amusing. She had had a few admirers in her time, but there was noone like Fred for her. She had got to thirty and her days were taken up with her children. She sighed, she was in need of a little fun, she deserved a good party.

Her guests were tucking into the delicacy. The hired cooks had got the crayfish just right! Fred had helped throw them all in the big boiling pot. They had to be cooked alive.

The net curtains were flapping lightly in the afternoon breeze, floating through the open windows. They were throwing playful shadows on freesias and heavy mauve roses in silver dishes, their heads dipping like in an old-fashioned dance. White brocade cloth and diamond cut crystal glasses: Rays, shining golden from the wine, were flitting carelessly across the tables. And of course, there was the family silver, they had their own , now, although with more than thirty guests they had had to use the kitchen service for the children. Anita leant back in her chair, she could finally relax. She was taking in the sundrenched flower-scented scene. She had a new ring on her finger, a sapphire ring. Where on earth had Fred got the money for that? She was never able to get a clear view of their finances. Whenever she thought they were skint he turned up with something extravagant. But she was not going to worry about it now. There were songs and speeches, a barrage of admiration and praise to come! Then an ice cream gateau.!

After dinner the guests drifted outdoors to admire the garden and to sip their drinks and chew their conversation on the terrace. The clock was getting towards eight and the late sun was still lingering above the forest clad hills around the capital, reluctant to loose its grip on the sloping roof tops of the city. Margaret, Fred's half sister, took hold of Freddy's arm stepping out onto the tiled terrace. "Oh, it feels good stretching the old legs! Couldn't take another minute on that chair!" Fred nodded. He had begun to feel pretty uncomfortable , too.

Just as the dinner table the garden was tastefully arranged, dotted with bushes and perennials. The jasmines along the garden fence, Fred had planted them when the house was being built, had during their last few summers grown large and lush. Now in the middle of June they were at their peak of blossoming marking the large flat garden with their sweet heavy scent. There was honeysuckle along the wall. Fred took a deep breath filling his nose and lungs with the spiced air. A Norwegian summer didn't have many days like this, full of warmth and colour. He sighed deeply, his sister offering him a penny for his thoughts.

"To think we are nearing mid-summer. Then every day a little shorter again." Margaret looked back at him shrugging. "You always had a philosophical streak," she teases. Fred gave her a melancholic look in return. Mags certainly never did!

Mags was a healthy girl. Strong and cheerful and pretty, too. She had that naive fatal charm that had always helped her mother get whatever she wanted. Kat, his stepmother, had turned Georg's head completely. She still had him eating out of her hand. He wondered what kind of women his own little girls would grow up to be. He had always thought that his own biological mother must have been something like Anita, athletic and idealistic, and vulnerable. Soon after her death his father had married Kat. He couldn't remember exactly when Katrine had appeared. She had been blond and lively, and there had been noting immaterial about her either, the old dragon! He swallowed a chuckle not to be asked to reveal his thoughts again as he turned towards Margaret handing her the drink.

As the guests moved onto the terrace and into the garden Liv Pedersen followed Anita into the kitchen where coffee and cakes were being organised. The waitresses had done a good job with the dinner. They were being paid and sent home.

"Eva and I will start doing some of the dishes while you are getting the cakes ready, Anita, " her mother offered. "Hand me an apron, will you?"

"Oh don't worry about that, mamma. I've got the whole day tomorrow for clearing up. Have a rest and a drink in the garden with the others."

"We'll do it now. You'll be glad to have it out of the way in the morning."

Anita concealed a sigh. It was her party but there was no point contradicting her mother. She was always insisting, always helpful, making herself indispensable. And really, what would she do without her? With the children, she would have plenty to do in the morning. And Freddy, no doubt would have somebody's wreaths to make. There were always funerals on Sundays. She smiled handing over the aprons to her mother as she caught a worried gaze from Fred out in the hallway. He turned away from her handing his brother and brother in law, Finn and Erlend their coats. Finn was waving from the hallway: "Skeid playing the archenemy tonight, you know. Unmissable game!"

Anita got a sinking feeling as she heard her mother gasping: "I've never...! Never had any manners that family!"

Oh, shit! Fred's family had never quite caught on that leaving a family party was a mortal sin! "Why don't you stay for coffee, Finn, Erlend?" Anita tried in desperation. "I haven't served coffee yet! Freddy?" Wasn't there something he could do?

Fred stepped aside quickly and hurried towards the veranda. "Better check on the drinks," he ventured. He wasn't getting into one of Anita's families small-minded dramas. Who cared if they wanted to see a game? Who would miss them? He wouldn't mind getting off to see the match himself. But he knew his limitations.

Liv Pedersen and her daughters stayed in the kitchen until the washing up was done. Over the clatter of dishes being stacked away they could hear cheerful voices from the dining room. Katrine's newly powdered face appeared in the doorway.

"Oh Anita, what a marvellous dinner it was!" She chanted. "And you are all so industrious, and you have made all these cakes yourself! Is there anything I can do, dear?"

"No thank you, we are just about to finish," returned Liv Pedersen. Anita smiled bravely trying to take the edge off her mother's reply. She held the chocolate glazed almond-cake up for Katrine. "Perhaps you wouldn't mind taking this outside for me, Kat? Just put it on the large table on the terrace." She handed the cake over and lifted up another for Mags appearing behind Katrine in the doorway. Mags was just finishing her drink and handed the glass over to Anita. Seeing her sister in laws manicured red nails Anita suddenly felt painfully aware of her own red rough hands. Her mother had never approved of nail polish, it was one of the things Anita has given up on wearing. She knew the cleavage and painted eyebrows were bad enough. She was glad she had not put on any today, she had had just enough of her mother's disapproval. And why could Freddy never behave, could he not be the perfect husband for just once in his life? Could he not help, and for God's sake why had he taken off his tie? The new silk tie she had bought him, it was hanging on the hook with the kitchen towels.

Oh damn! The sauce from the whipped cream pudding. It was all over her chest. Suddenly tears were in her eyes. Damn! Damn! Damn! She smiled bravely.

Mrs Pedersen had seen it all of course. "You go upstairs and see what you can do about the dress," she said. "I'll have the rest brought into the garden in no time."

"Thank you, mamma. What would I do without you?!" Where would she be without her mother?

Anita slipped out the door and climbed the stairs to the walk-in wardrobe. She would have to find another dress to wear. She sat down on the seat in the wardrobe as she wriggles to undo the sip. Damn it! She was not going to cry! Not on her thirtieth birthday! There had been so much going on lately with the children, and with Fred working ever longer hours in the nurseries. She would be all right in a minute. She had got everything a woman could want. A nice home. Beautiful children, the dog. She had eight rapidly growing puppies to clean up after under the staircase in the cellar. The thought made her a little angry, agitated. When would she ever get Freddy to put a gate in the drive? She couldn't keep the dog indoors all the time just because she was in heat.

Leaving the zip stuck half way down she roamed through her handbags and found a packet of cigarettes and some matches. She had always wanted a large family. Flicking the match alight she sat down on the little velour-covered stool in the closet sucking in the nicotine greedily. It made the air in the wardrobe go thick with white smoke. Peace was sinking back into her foggy hideaway between the clothes.

The windows were kept open the whole night! The wooded walls were alive, with breezy sunlight from the outside and the heat of the people on the inside. The dinner tables had been been put away again , and the lounge returned to it's normal state! After coffee and cakes, Monika and Linnea put the records on and did the jitterbug, that Anita had thought them, and all the adults stopped talking and started watching. They cheered and clapped the rhythm until the record was finished. Then it became very quiet. The faces were empty, just waiting for more. "Sing one of your songs for us, Linn", aunty Ingrid suggested. She was Tone's mum and not their real aunt, she had often heard the girls practising in her house. So Anne joined Mon and Linn and the girls lined up. Tone counted down: One, two, three, four: The first tones came out multilayered. There were a couple of voices still, chattering, it was Mags and Anita in the two-seater, but in a moment their chatter went vacant, too, they were looking towards the girls. Linnea was holding the song up in the air Monika and Tone's voices hanging on underneath. It was a clear tone, like a sheet of coloured glass, floating above the others. It made the room go quiet. People's faces opened up, their mouths and jaws loosened, lines around their eyes evened out. The whole room now, was staring at them, the song spreading out, saturating the room, sieving into the breathing, pulsating walls. Again it was very quiet. Auntie Ingrid had tears in her eyes. Only the jitterbug record was still stuck at the end making a swiching sound. Then people started clapping and thoughts came back into their eyes. Little bits of conversation started jumping back into the room. Grandfather smiled and said: "Linnea, Linnea, what a voice !" He gave Monika a big hug that nearly squashed her. "A natural performer," auntie Ingrid said. Anita shot in: "Leave the adults in peace for a while now!" The girls squeezed past to get out of the room. They realised their mother was not so pleased, now Linn was feeling a little embarrassed. As she brushed along the pretty tablecloth it got stuck to her tights and she toppled uncle Bjorns drink. Anita got up in irritation. "Linnea, can you watch where you're going! I'll get a cloth, now you children go and play somewhere else!"

As it got darker Fredrick lit candles in every room. It was the party Anita had been dreaming of. Her friends were all there in the warm orangey glow, in her home. She had changed her dress into a leopard print one with lots of frills around the edges, and she swung out on the floor the music playing again on the gramophone. She was a rocking and jiving cat-queen! All the uncles and neighbours husband's were dancing along, even Freddy got up, he had to queue up to dance with his wife. He was holding her very tight, so tight that she got annoyed and said she needed some fresh air. There were guests in the garden. Outside the sky never really got dark ! It was summer.

In the early hours, when they had all finally left, Anita made her way from room to room switching off the lights and blowing out the last candles. The children had dropped off to sleep one by one. She hesitated for a moment at the staircase and continued instead towards the kitchen. She needed just a moment of peace and quiet and a cup of coffee before going to bed. She could hear Fred getting ready for bed. She would join him in a second.

The coffee came to the boil and she poured herself a cup sinking down on a chair next to the cool window. She took her ring off and puts it on the table. Her head was still buzzing after the party. She just needed to get her thoughts into some order. All the time she had spent on her own, all the time when Fred has been working in the nurseries. The late nights. How much money, did she wonder, had gone on the ring? emeralds! Whenever she has needed help with the kids she had had to bother her mother. It was clear to everyone how little Fred took part. He was a workaholic.

She switches off the last light and hurried upstairs. Freddy was already in bed. The light was on. "What are you doing?" She saw him startle at the question looking up at her uneasy. She had heard the sharpness in her own voice but she just wasn't able to curb it."I'm just tired," she explained. "I need some help in the house."

"I know." He tried to make his voice interested. To calm her . He was too tired for discussions.

"You bought this ring?" She put's it on the bedside table, just a little too hard.

"I thought you liked the ring!" He was hurt. All the work he did, it was all for her and the children, so they could have a good life, a beautiful home. It was a sapphire ring, part of a set, he had not dared give her the rest yet, and it was his own design. He had had it made for her especially. He had finally decided to buy the stones off Paul, had enlisted expert opinion. They were good stones. Clean. Nearly a carat and a half.

"The ring is wonderful, darling. It is just not what we need. You hardly see the children any more, they are always asleep by the time you are home, and I need some help with them." She was nearly shouting. "Anita," he was raising his voice, too. Did she not know what it was like for him working all hours in that wretched business? Always curtailing to Kat and his father. "I am too tired for this. We'll think about it. I'll find someone to help you."

"We need you, not someone! You're their father!" They had a good life but what was all the wealth for if she didn't have Freddy around?

"Come to bed," he said. He pulled her inn under the duvet to comfort her. "I am trying my best, Anita." His voice was soft again, weak and helpless like a child's. "I am trying the best that I can to get you and the children all that you need. I've asked dad for a wage increase but he want's me to put in more hours at the weekend. I said no. That was his condition and I know you don't want that. I have to take the extra work that I can get during the week."

Anita exploded: "What sort of family is it you have? Everybody knows Georg is flushed! You are one of the major driving forces in the business and they treat you like dirt! How long are you going to put up with it?"

"They'll hand it all over to me one day."

He said it feebly. It was what Kat and Georg always kept telling him and he hated it. Anita was shouting: "They are just using you and you know they'll keep using you for as long as they can. They keep making you promises. Wage rises, cars, being part of Georg's shady deals and there's always a snag to it. Longer hours, doing sales in the morning. Why are you letting them? Why are you on their side?" She leaned out grabbing her nightie from the floor and pulled it down over hear head.

"They are all just crooks! What sort of family is that?"

Fred felt numb. He was looking pale, nearly ghostly under the dark fringe. She was right! There always seemed to be something holding him down. They were always wheeling and dealing, but he knew their minds and he could handle it. His whole life he had been living by their rules, or lack of it, and he had been successful turning the tables on them as much as they had exploited him. It was swings and roundabouts. What they called enterprise. To Anita it was lying and cheating. How much he loved her pure blue eyes! How much he admires her openness and honesty. But she had never understood them, the Holsts. And how could he succeed in their business, Anita always lumbering him with her conscience? He had to try and make her understand, he had to get on in the real world. His parent's world. "I don't have any choice," he muttered. "I've got to stick with them. I've no other opening, any ordinary job won't pay our bills. And the only chance I have of raising any capital is through dad. If I stick with them I will get my chance." He sighed, "Sooner or later...." Anita laughed at him bitterly:"They'll never let you go, and you know it. They'll keep giving you just enough to keep you hanging on for ever. They'll never give you the business."

He sank back again resting his head on the soft pillow. She was right. He felt the tears forcing their way out and snapped for breath. There was a way! There had to be a way! To consolidate Anita's morals, that he admires her so for, with his efforts to make the money they needed! He was so tired he just couldn't stop the tears from coming. He was suddenly sobbing, and he turned towards Anita. He wanted to pull her in again under the duvet for warmth and comfort. Anita quickly slipped off the edge of the bed and got up as if casually. Out of his reach. How dared he cry! It made her furious! She was the wronged one. He was not a baby. He made his own decisions.

"You're not yourself, I'll get you something to drink."

She slipped out of the room quickly and hurried downstairs. Taking her time she listened to the sighs from their bedroom dying down as she poured him a glass of orange. She returned to their bed. Anita handed him the glass and he swallowed the drink dutifully, his eyes following her. He looked angry. Quite hostile. Suddenly she was shuddering cold and pulled the duvet up tightly around Fred and herself, pressing softly against him. He responds as he always did, they had never lost their passion despite her pregnancies and childbirths. Though tonight there was a different fever in his body, she could feel the anger that was riding him, maybe passion, she wasn't sure. What did he have to be angry about?

One Thursday in midsummer Georg phoned Fred in the nurseries and invited him to come over for dinner after work, he had said he had a business proposition to run by him. Fredrick locked the doors to the nurseries salesroom, he was the last to leave although it was not late. The tulips and bulbs were again out of production, it was the quieter part of the year. He was nearing the end of the work with the compost,too, Anita was just getting used to the idea of having him back home in the evenings. He had made sure to take a bunch of freesias along for her, hoping she would forgive him for being late yet again.

Fred parked the car behind Georg's Merc in the drive and climbed the steps. Pushing the doorbell button he could hear it's chiming of 'Mary had a little lamb' through the door, soon after competing with Katrine's voice:"Just a minute, dear. Hold on. I'm on my way, she chanted from the kitchen waving at him through the window. "Fred raise his hand back. Katrine was never out of steam, always ready to cheer on any losing team. He smiled. She was a good cook, too, he was quite looking forward to the meal. It was difficult not to enjoy his parents hearty pace and good humour. He was still a little sore about the deal they had made him on the compost but somehow it was difficult to be cross with them for long, he thought, whatever tricks they had up their sleeves always unfolded in such a charming and pleasant manner. He often felt he was the ill mannered one for ever being upset. They had managed to build a future for themselves, a nice home and a handsome business while the war was on, when many other businesses were taken over by the Germans or had closed down for lack of trade. He couldn't help admire their achievements.

"Wonderful seeing you, Freddy, come in, come in! "Katrine ushered him in the front door. "How nice for me to have you home for dinner. it's not often I get a chance to cook for you these days, you know." She smiled her best mother-to-son smile and nodded in agreement with herself."I know Anita is a marvellous cook so you hardly miss my cooking any more."

It was an overstatement. Anita was not much interested in cooking and her endeavours were only ever adequate, never wonderful. She did not have the patience.

"You are looking very well indeed, my dear, let me take your coat."

"I am sure you have made one of my favourites," Fred replied and smiled trying to keep up with her enthusiasm. Katrine could when she wanted to, although she hadn't always been too bothered about making him dinners when he lived at home. Nor wash his clothes for that matter. The children had become pretty good at looking after themselves, they knew where the bread bin was. The fridge, though, had never lacked for titbits to put in their sandwiches. And Katrine's coiffured hair and his father's flash cars had left no doubt in anyone's mind as to the wealth of the family. Who cared about clean underwear and hot meals. His stepmother had always had more interest in dressing and showing off her little daughters. He had felt jealous and angry about it at the time but had learnt not to let it get to him, getting his own back on the girls in whatever way he could when Katrine was out of sight. He greeted his father in the lounge and excused himself to go and change out of his dirty overalls. Georg had left the nurseries earlier in the afternoon and was already in his slippers and casuals.

Over desserts, consisting of a banana flambe with ice-cream his father finally got down to business; "I had a phone call today form the vicar in Holmsbu. He sends his regards." Georg was addressing Katrine.

Frank sipped at his glass of sherry. "What did the good man have to say?" Come on old fox, Fred urged him silently, his father was going about it in his usual roundabout way, there was clearly money at stake.

"The vicar has decided to move down to the coast for good, they have a little estate there, as you know, near to our summerhouse. Fruit trees, if I remember right, 30 acres south facing, sitting literally on the harbour. A true gem." his father enthused. Georg always remembered right."He is selling his property here in Oslo," he continued. Three acres of mature gardens with two good size houses, one of them too big for Katrine and me," he continued. "I have to stay in Oslo for most of the year, as you know. On the other hand I wouldn't mind trying my hand at a little free-land production, sweet-peas, that sort thing. Well, one day, one day." He smiled a confidential smile towards Fredrick. They all knew what it would mean if Georg decided to spend more time by the coast, the Holst Nurseries might finally be Freddy's to run.

"We feel the whole property with both houses would be too much for us to take on, on our own," Georg continued. "We thought you and Anita might want a part in it."

"It is a dream for children! "Kat contributed. "It would be so easy for Anita to look after them, a large mature lawn, trees and bushes to climb in. There is just about no traffic at all, such a charming house. It's just a dream!" She was throwing her hand in the air to signify that it was surely of some higher nature. "It is an opportunity not to let slip passed you," she added in a much more down to earth manner."

Freddy thought it was beginning to look interesting. They were obviously intent on having him in on the deal, whatever the deal was. If he said no what alternatives did they have? Letting the second house or having it sold to someone they didn't know? Kat had never been good at sharing.

"Anita and I have been talking about finding a bigger property," he lied. It was the last thing Anita wanted but he could not resist leading them on watching their confidence grow. "Of course if we could afford to buy that would be even better, but you know we have a pretty steep mortgage already on the house. And I quite desperately need a new car." He shrugged his shoulders and turned towards the last of his dessert to signal the end of the discussion.

Georg of cause was not going to let it drop that easily. "Yes, yes, I have noticed that your car is letting you down lately. I have been thinking of providing you with a car on the company."

About time too! Freddy thought to himself.

"And we could do with a couple of new van's for deliveries," he chuckled: "something to claim off the tax."

Ah, the dreaded taxes, his father could not be seen to buy a large property! How would he explain where the money had come from, the vicar of Holmsbu might not be so eager at taking a certain sum 'under the table' which was the way Georg usually did business.

Georg was pressing on:" I have connections in the bank," he assured Fredrick, "Arvid Kristensen is a regular connoisseur of Katrine's marvellous cooking." He smiled. "We will re-mortgage for you to include the new property, very favourably. It will be an investment, you can't loose on it! I have taken the liberty of doing a bit of research for you, I have the papers here."

Georg Holst abandoned his banana and got up from the table fetching a folder from the dresser. He put it on the table besides Freddy's plate. "All the facts and figures are there, a very favourable loan indeed, the best I could possibly get for you. Georg paused and sat down again giving in to his dessert. He smiled to his wife as she put a hand on Fred's shoulder and looked straight at him with her smiling blue eyes in the middle of her artfully painted lines: "Read through it when you get home, dear," she urged. "Money invested in real estate never loses it's value, you know. You will take the larger house and two-thirds of the land, and we are so much looking forward to being closer to you and Anita and you lovely little girls." She sat back again on her chair. "The whole big family nearly under the same roof, just like the old times," she said sincerely. Fred really thought she was looking forward to it. He wasn't sure Anita would though. She hadn't had much good to say about his parent after her big party. Crooks and thieves she had called them. He would never get her consent to buying a new home, and right next to his parents! And extending the mortgage, increasing their bills, it would have her in fits!

Kat got up and started collecting the dishes from the table. She set off towards the kitchen but turned in the doorway: "Don't worry too much about the money," she said in a reassuringly confidential voice. She was about to reveal a secret:"When there's a will there's a way. It is such a good investment, and I hear you are due a bit of a pay-rise by the new year, maybe sooner." She nodded towards her husband, a momentary shadow of displeasure sweeping his face, before finally nodding reassuringly back, he was cross at her for playing his last card. "Well, Georg", she said reprimanding him. "You know Freddy is due for a rise." She smiled cheekily to her stepson and walked off to deposit the dishes in the sink.

When Fred finally got's home it was late, Anita was soundly asleep. He lay awake for a long while quietly in the dark. He did not know what to do next. The extra business that had landed in his lap, his project all spring and summer, it had brought him a bit of money.

But he needed more. And whatever he did he as good as belonged to his parents. They cut his winnings, they offered him deals, like this evening. It had always worked that way in his family, swings and roundabouts, only this time he could not take advantage of their offer. Anita would not let him.

All his life he has needed someone, something to release him from his parent's grip. He had looked to Anita, for what? He sighed. He did not know. Someone who would hold him when he cried? Big warm arms to clasp him, rock him. Tell him everything was going to be all right. He had never had that, and what use would it be anyway? It was money he needed.

Still tonight, he needed her more than ever. A mother's love. Anita did not comfort him. It was always his fault, everything! She had long legs and big round bosoms. Anita had got that.

He could suddenly see it so clearly, he hadn't known love since he was five! He could not remember her. Her face or her hair. Her scent? His own mother so long ago. How could she die so early? She was barely a knowing within him, not even a memory. Just a photograph.

How much longer?

And his beautiful children, how would their lives turn out?

"Anita?" He rocked her gently, he needed her. He needed her now to tell him it would be alright, there would be a way out. It all hinged on her.

For a moment she appeared to come awake in the bed next to him. Then she turned over mumbling something in a heated incoherent way shaking his hand off and turning over on her side: She had a busy day tomorrow.

Fred got up. He would go to his study. He needed a bit of space to think. As the door shut quietly behind him it brought Anita suddenly wide awake. Where did her husband go? Why was he not sleeping next to her? She thought he had been there a moment ago. It would not normally alarm her if Freddy got up for a while but tonight she felt suddenly deeply uneasy. She could not just let it be. She quickly draped herself in the woollen checked gown and stumbled into the hallway down the stairs, a little anxious, a little resentful also at what exactly had shook her awake in the middle of the night?

He wasn't in the kitchen or the diningroom. The door to the cellar was locked too, sometimes when he was unable to sleep he would go to work in his gemstone-workshop in the cellar. She climbed the stairs again, moving a little softer than before, the heaviness of sleep easing out of her body. She did not want to wake the children. He must be in his study, she thought, she wasn't sure why it mattered but she wanted to talk to him. There was a discordant note playing in her, she felt the need for it to be tuned up. She reached the landing and peaked into the children's room. They were sleeping.

She proceeded to the study and gingerly knocked on the door:"Fred?" He was sitting at his desk and didn't answer, but looked up his dark eyes strangely detached as he gazed at her, lifting his eyebrows silently, questioning. She thought for a moment that he had been crying, he was not pleased to be disturbed. The room was only half lit by the shine of the lamp over his shoulder, the streetlight falling in through the net curtains overemphasizing the shadows, painting the room in thickly lined contrasts, light and dark. His pale face was like a mask in marble, frozen in stone under his dark fringe. He was hanging over his desk his shoulders apparently too heavy for his frail back. It created a panic in her seeing him, in the pale morbid light he was so unlike the boyishly athletic, gentle and clever man she had loved and married. An irresistible urge came into her to bring him back to life again, to see his usual warmth and wit returning.

"Are you Ok? We need to talk."

There was an edge in her voice and he heard it straight away and gathered himself together tighter in defence of the outpour of emotions he expected to follow. It was always the same with Anita, she started with and edge and built herself up to a crescendo, he wasn't sure if he could cope with it right now, his will had already disintegrating from the late night, a few drinks from his father's richly filled cabinet, maybe one too many, and the lack of sleep. He felt in a corner, his whole life, in a tight little corner with no way out:

"Talk then!" It sounded sharper than he had intended.

She didn't know what to say.

"Did you have to stay that late at your parents? What are you snapping at me for?"

She was suddenly feeling like the moth at the lamp above his head. She was throwing herself against the warm glass again and again, it was what her life with Freddy had become, the endless flittering against the flame. He kept her at a distance. Did he not care any more? "You cold bastard, you don't care about anyone but yourself," she burst out, "just like your parents and the rest of your stuck up family, they can't even be bothered to invite us all over! Why didn't they invite me and the children along?"

He looked hurt, his parents were the last people he wanted to be like. Besides it had been a business-meeting, although sweetened with Katrine's excellent cooking.

"Well, at least I had a good meal, in peace."

She saw the paleness and hostility on his face growing more pronounced and felt a chill creeping up on her. She had thought criticizing his family was safe ground, something he would agree with, after all he had always resented Kat. Their mutual loathing of his stepmother usually brought them together. Anita stared at him angrily. She could hear the children coming awake and she backed off stumbling down the staircase to pour herself another black coffee. She didn't care if it was the middle of the night, it gave her comfort. "Go back to bed, she urged Linnea angrily, she had slid quietly out of her room onto the staircase alarmed by the adults angry voices. They had managed to wake them. Her little girl's pale and pensive face was shining at her accusatively. It made Anita feel angrier still. She was not to blame, it was Freddy, always so cold, unreasonable! The girl sensed the hostility and turned around, climbing the stairs to her father's room. Anita felt a sting of resentment as she heard Fred letting Linnea into his office, comforting her. She emptied her coffee cup and climbed back up to the landing picking the receiver off the hook:

"I'll tell those bastards what I think of them," she shouted to Fred through the half open door. "Those selfish bastards who claim to be your parents, not to good to let their own son do ..." She squinted at the dial needing to take a deep breath to steady her hand. With intense concentration her fingers found the round slots on the dial one by one.

"I'll tell them what..."

"Anita!"

Fred's voice was inside her head like and explosion and she jumped back as his cold white anger burst out of the door of the study, his marble mask had taken on the features of a warrior. As she stumbled out of his reach, frozen at the top of the staircase the abandoned receiver in his hand, Fredrick watched Anita in slow motion: She was spinning around grasping for the rail. There was a quiet realisation in her face as she saw it disappearing, it was not coming closer but moving further away, just out of her grasp. She was floating into orbit and down, down the stairs, down into sharply protruding steps before finally coming to rest at the end of the staircase.

Fred remained frozen in the stillness that followed. It was going to last forever, he could hear only distantly the children's screams. They were like the complaints of seagulls over the frozen fjords in the winter. The birds were forced to venture inland scavenging for food on the industrial estates and in peoples litter bins. He reached for the screaming children trying to hold them. They were squeezing past him down the stairs, no space small enough to keep them back, and his trance quickly melted as he tumbled after, he had to get there first! Then the muffled sound of Anita's sobbing reached him, tearing into him as if his lungs were about to burst.

The piece of rock in his hand was a light marbled grey, hard and smooth. It was seven or eight centimetres in diameter, from the insides of the earth. Looking up along the hillside in front of him, there only fifteen meters above were the jagged dark openings from where it had come, it was the abandoned emerald mines of Minnesund. The holes in the cliff-face reminded him of graves and he shuddered remembering Anita's lifeless body on the staircase. His beautiful always vivacious wife with her brown bobbing curly hair, how could she lie so quietly? Such a state of being did not seem to belong to her, it was simply not part of her repertoire, she could never be dead. Even when she slept she was never still. For a moment he had believed it had happened.

Anita had been all right, apart from hurting her back. She would be staying in bed for a few days. She and the children were being looked after by her mother, he had to work. He felt oddly relieved that he knew exactly where she was, her incapacity did not seem like a burden to him, but more like a comfort. It was just that recently he felt Anita's presence more acutely then before, she made him feel there was never enough space around him. Space for thinking. He had decided to give himself a day out with Paul. They had taken their pickaxes to Minnesund.

He examined the uneven surface at the back of the piece of stone he had picked up from the ground. The surface was broken with the thin green crystaline hexagons, nothing big and clear enough in colour to be worth hacking out of that stone, but he already had his backpack full of promising pieces. If you looked carefully amongst the rubble from the excavations of the mines it was amazing what good stones it was still possible to find. Emeralds not large enough for commercial use for the mining companies, but for his own little workshop they would do nicely. The rubble he was climbing around on had been brought out by the miners but abandoned, decades ago. He had found four large and clear crystals here in the past, one as big as a carat and a half, all good for placing in rings. Two had been of such good quality he had sent them to Amsterdam for a professional cut. The other two he had used for honing his own cutting skills in his little workshop in the cellar.

After a while his eyes got tired of surveying the grey and green, mostly mossy stones and he turned climbing down towards the banks of the river. The Glomma river made the backdrop to the cool cloudy day, quietly humming along besides him, her song embroidered with little splashes against the pebbles on the shore. Floating southwards looking intransigent, like a sheet of steel, she was taking the clouds with her on her journey. It was a long time since he had travelled, far away somewhere exotic. He and Anita and the children, they had the odd holiday at the south-coast. On the far bank of the river, there was Sweden in the distance, hazily outlined. Too far to swim across. Between the rubble and the river the world was grey all around him. It was the sort of greyness that made you look for something. He did not know what. The something that he needed. He started walking along the bank, southwards. A few hundred meters further down the water-line he could see the back of Paul. It was the big Swede who had told him of the mines and invited him along the first time, a couple of years ago now.

"How is it going up there!" He hollered. Paul Lundin turned instantly, sound travelled well in the cold air. He pointed to a plateau in the hillside, shielded by the overhang of the cliff, it was a good place for a rest and a cup of coffee out of the thermos. They both started towards it. "Found a couple of good pieces," Paul Lundin replied, the friends approaching their resting place. His sack was light on his back, he had been more selective than Freddy who was carrying a heavy load of stone. They both put their rucksacks down and sat on the hard ledge, Paul pouring the black coffee from the thermos into little plastic cups. He brought out a container of sugar and a spoon for stirring. a packet of cigarettes. Fred had given it up, smoking had taken too much of his time. Now he would only enjoy a good cigar once in a while, with a glass of choice cognac from his cabinet. He lifted his hand declining. His fingers next to Paul's looked small and slim, compared to the big swede he looked the size of a boy. It reminded Fred of outings he had had with his father searching the forest floor for moss and cones. His father was always thinking of making money, and moss and cones were expensive items in Christmas decorations. It was free off the land if you collected it yourself. These days his father did not bother, these days he was collecting diamonds. He thought of the deal Georg had offered him. A cheap extension on the mortgage. The house in Linnerud would surely increase in value, in the long run. He was proud of his children and loved his wife, but he was not the homely sort. There were new ventures calling wherever he looked and he had been tied up on the old treadmill of the Nurseries his whole life. He had a fascination with geology, what the earth had produced over millions of years. He could not get enough of it. He would have thought Anita would be pleased about it. His mother and sisters had never complained when his father bought jewellery. Anita was different.

The men drank their cups empty. It was mid-afternoon. It was the time when all excuses Fred could think of for not being at work would soon have exhausted their plausibility. He had to get going. The two men got up proceeding towards the cars.

" Another couple of load of compost for you, that will be it."

It was a good thing it was coming to an end. At last Anita would have her wish and see more of him in the evenings.

"I did a little more excavating than I told you about." Paul laughed a little, apologetically. The lorry-loads had kept coming.

"I thought it best to keep it under my hat for a while, being surrounded by people in the business. I will have my own in a couple of months, business that is. Am opening before Christmas if all goes well." He nodded to Fredrick looking at him questioningly. "The excavations have included a second building, closer to the road. It will be the shopfront, I am having four greenhouses erected at the back. 'Gro Haven Nurseries'." He tasted the name on his tongue. Pronouncing it slowly. It gave him pleasure.

"I could do with a partner. A little cash investment and a lot of know-how. I was thinking of you, of course?"

Fred looked up at his friend. It had been a complete surprise and still he had somehow known it all along, he had known it would happen. Finally there was the opportunity of running a business without his father! And of course it would be Paul coming to him with the offer he had been waiting for, the tall sturdy Swede, ever since he had presented himself into his life at the market Fred had been his constant beneficiary. He did not believe in fate or angels, but if they existed....he thought they must have sent him Paul to make amends for all he had been denied for so long. He would offer a little thank you to the gods just in case!

"Hallo?"

Entering the hallway he was surprised at seeing Anita coming towards him. She was back up on her feet.

"Pappa," It was his eight year old Linnea coming tumbling through the hallway to greet him. She gave her father a big hug.

"Mamma is horrible," she sulked. She added a few sobbing noises hoping to extract from her father a soothing return of commiserations. Fred greeted Anita who was hobbling around gingerly, although she was out of bed and fully dressed. He smiled at her trying to express pleasure and surprise, but felt oddly unenthusiastic at discovering her rapid recovery. Bedbound she had been grateful for any little thing he could do for her. Back on her feet again he could already sense her disapproval. He had not bothered changing the light-bulb in the hallway and his old car, it was Anita's now, was still standing dirty in the yard.

"You're out of bed! How is your back?"

"Sore," she smiled surly.

He tried stroking her shoulder gently but she withdrew.

"Mother has made us dinner, she left early to take care of a few things of her own, said she'll expect us around seven."

Anita directed her attention at Linnea: "I'm not sure you deserve to go anywhere the way you are behaving," she scolded. "Tomorrow you'll go straight to Tone's house and tell her everything and apologise!"

"Mamma!" Linnea objected.

Fred shut the argument out and carried on towards the stairs. He was pondering how to break his own news to her. That Georg wanted them to take on another mortgage and buy a house next to theirs and that he wanted to sell it again or maybe rent it out behind Georg's back to secure a part in a business with Paul Lundin. How could he convince her what a wonderful opportunity it was for them both, how it would finally free him from the shackles of working for his father. They would be running their own business at last. It would still be a nursery and a flower-shop, at the moment that was still the only thing he knew how to do, but there was no telling where it could lead from there.

"I am not going to tell her," Linnea persisted, she clung onto her father as he tried to make his way past them.

"I don't want to play with her any more anyway!"

Anita turned to Fred in exasperation: "She was stealing Anne's bike from her pretending it was her own. They had left them outdoors in the garden overnight and it seems that Linnea's bike was stolen. You know how they wanted exactly the same bikes last spring. Linnea's had a scratch mark on hers," Anita continued. "She made a scratch mark on Anne's bike to make it pass as her own, it was Tone's bike that was left in the garden. I am shocked at your behaviour Linn, how can you play a trick like that on you best friend?" She turned to Fred:"How can an eight year old be so vicked?"

The girl was still clinging to her father and had started crying: "I only did it so I could do the test for the spyclub," She sobbed. "It was my turn to do the test today, you have to have a bike to follow people around. Monika is in it already."

"And Tone who has been her best friend ever since they were small!"

" I had to have a bike today! I was just borrowing it for today."

"Linnea, you will not lie to me!" It was the moral decline that Anita's mother had always tried to warn her of, and she had always done all she could to honour her mother's standards. It could not all have been in vain. She had done what she could to teach her children good morals. Dishonesty and avoiding responsibility, where did it lead next. It was the kind of weakness of character that could see you slide to any debt. It had been made crystal clear to her in her own childhood. It threatened everything they stood for as a family, she would not allow it in her own daughter.

Fred lifted Linn up trying to calm her. "OK, OK Linnea, calm down, nobody has to have a bike."

"If I didn't have a bike they wouldn't let me be in the spy club," Linnea sobbed.

Anita sighed:"Something the kids in the road has thought up."

"You should have told us, Linn," Fred told her as soothingly as he could manage. "We could have sorted something out for you, maybe you could have asked to borrow Tone's bike for the day, until you got your own back."

He hugged her and put her down. "We will sort something out tomorrow."

He exusd himself and ventured towards the stairs hoping Anita would let the matter drop. Who was he to preach to his daughter, he was not able to tell Anita himself what he was up to. He felt his spirits sink and climbed the stairs quickly glad to be out of reach. She was so damn righteous, how could he tell her that he wanted to go behind his father's back to get what he had wanted for so long. She would never approve, she did not want another house, another mortgage. The pressure that came with it to earn more money. To him it was a challenge, it was what he wanted. His way of proving himself. All Anita wanted was for him to attend around the coffee-table at her parents house on Sundays, to maintain their continuum of family cosiness. It had never been like that in his family and he could not quite get used to it. He knew she did not want his parents for next door neighbours. It had been a strained affair living with them as newly-weds, and these days Anita was a lot more assertive. There was no way she would agree.

It was suddenly clear as water to him that there was no opening for him at all. It did not matter if he told her just a little at the time or if he laid all his cards on the table, what he wanted went against her very nature, her high morals that he admired so much. But he had to try, he turned for a moment in the staircase: "You know dad offered to help us get a loan if we would buy the property in Linnerud, next to the one he want's to buy, maybe as an investment," he started.

"Look Freddy," Anita turned on him.

He had lost. He knew it. He had lost Linnerud. He had lost his chance of starting a business of his own, his new lease of life.

"We have enough bills to pay!" Conversation closed, that simply. It was not on the cards. "Let's get going!" Anita urged. "Mum will have dinner ready by now. Did you bring some flowers for her?"

He had forgotten. There were so many rules for what they could and couldn't do. His heart was sickening by the minute. He had no stomach today for her moralising bourgeois family, he did not feel like getting dressed to please their sensibilities.

"We'll have to stop somewhere along the way and pick up a box of chocolates, I guess the garage will still be open?" Anita shouted after him. "What was the matter with the car?"

"Oh, it stopped on the Ringroad, I had to wait for assistance. I've had a hell of a day, " he lied, "I'm not going out again now."

Frank ensconced himself on the staircase keeping a firm grip on the railings. He looked down on Anita and the girls feeling a twinge of bad conscience but maintained his position. He did not much look forward to getting changed in a hurry to meet her families standards for proper socialising.

"You put the coats on the children and I'll call you a cab," he said, " I have some urgent paperwork that I need to look at."

It was the final straw for Anita, she had not yet forgiven him for his behaviour, ever since the party. Why had he been so broody and difficult lately? He did not tell her what was the matter. Her body was still bruised and aching and although her fall had not directly been his fault, she could not forgive his nonchalance on top of it all"

"They are your children, too," she was shouting. "You haven't spent an evening with the children and me for months! We're your family, remember?! You've been working on that bloody compost every Sunday all summer, what is it going to be next? You promised me you would keep the Sundays off!"

Fred had stiffened under the unexpected shower of Anita's rage. he looked at her icily:"Is it necessary to make a scene, again? I think it is questionable who is the most concerned about the welfare of the children?" He answered stiffly. It was his own brand of panic, when she overwhelmed him he became articulate and formal. He kept his voice alarmingly soft and even as if walking a tightrope, the slightest deviation or lack of focus could slip him up. He knew it took only the slightest laps of concentration and he would have lost again, lost to Katrine's lack of care for Georg's older children, to Georg playing another trick of him depriving him of the reward that was rightfully his. Katrine always got her way. He would not let anyone get the better of him again!

"You know damn well that we need the money, I haven't been shuffling dirt into plastic bags all summer because I enjoyed it."

"Need the money?" Anita was shouting at the top of her voice, her words drowning under Monika's frantic pleading: "Mamma, but mamma aren't we going to nan's now?" Linnea was quiet crouching by the wall, exhausted by her own struggle with her mother.

Anita released Monika's hand from her dress and smoothed the fabric down.

"Need the money, Anita shouted, being aware of Fred turning around heading for his study, "for your little art collection, or sending emeralds off to Amsterdam? Makes you feel like a big fish, does it? 'My own design, especially made for you', " She mocked. Fred felt a heaviness in his stomach. There was so little room for manoeuvring with Anita, everything had to be just as she had been brought up to do it. It was like a prison she was artfully weaving around him. And everything was always his fault. She didn't understand that when he bought art and jewellery it was for the beauty they offered. He did not live by bread alone, he needed these items of excellence and beauty to shine in his ordinary life, he needed them to help him breathe, for inspiration. It was for her enrichment as well. For the children. Every time he turned and his eyes fell on one of his pictures it soothed him and made him happy.

Fred stopped listening and turned climbing the last steps to his study. Inside, in his own space he could think it over, find a way through.

"You just turn around and run away," he could hear Anita shouting behind him. Her voice was at a continuously high pitch, like a mortar-shell set on automatic firing."You are just as weak as your father, blaming him for not standing up to Katrine. You deserve to be exploited by them, you are just as greedy yourself! The only thing that matters to you is money. I don't know why you're teaming up with them. Those parasites are only using you. Why are you humiliating yourself, you think they are going to give you the whole cake one day?"

Humiliate was the word, Fred thought hatefully as he shut the door between them. Was it not her that was teaming up against him. Her snobbish family that had thought her so much about behaving honourably. They were quick enough to point the finger not seeing their own faults. Anita had wanted a big house in the suburbs, the children, a dog, the endless litters of puppies, it was a madhouse. What more was he supposed to provide for her, he was working his ass off on pitiful pay.

He sunk into his chair and slumped over his desk, lately his life didn't give him the strength to hold himself up.

Anita tried pushing the children aside, they were ruining her dress and her back was still fragile, her body still achy and sore from the fall. She did not want them leaning on her. They were already half an hour late for mother's dinner. She had better phone and let her know they were on their way. What was she to tell her mother, that she and Freddy had had an awful argument again? She could already hear her mother's tut-tutting. She was not even sure why they had argued, about money again? Surely they had enough? And Fred knew as well as her that his family was crooked, he had always complained about it, ever since she got to know him. Lately he just kept flying off the handle, storming off and locking himself away somewhere. He had changed, maybe it was the pressure of everything they had to pay for? Still he wanted to buy more, another house for God's sake! He had probably put this whole scene on to escape visiting her mother.

Well, she was going! She collected the whining children and brought them in to the kitchen wetting a flannel under the hot water tap. "Be quiet, now." She said sternly. "It's all right, come on girls, nan is waiting!" She caught down the coats from the hangers in the hallway and ordered them to put them on while she freshened up her lipstick and powdered her face. Her mother could lump it if she didn't like it, she looked so pale, she needed a bit of colour on her face.

Carefully she climbed the stairs and knocked on the door to the study: "Fred? We are ready to go, are you coming?"

He didn't give her an answer.

"I don't have any money, if we have to take a taxi.."

She heard him stirring and the door unlocked. He opened it a few centimetres and put a tenner through the slot. Anita tried smiling to him but he was not looking at her. She felt sheepish. She wanted them to be friends again. She would have to think up an explanation to her mother and she wasn't looking forward to explaining Freddy's absence yet again.

"The children have so been looking forward to going, won't you come as well?"

He kept his arm stiffly stretched out. She could see there was no point in trying. She took the money. He closed the door on her and turned the key demonstratively. He despised her emotional blackmail, her lack of pride. She was only worried what her mother would say. He had a constant heaviness in his body, it had been with him for weeks. He was a strong and practical man, he could put his hands to anything. She liked that, in spite of his parents or maybe because of them, he had not been such a bad breadwinner. Look at all they had acquired over the years! They had more than most people. But the man who craved beauty around him, the man who had been turned off a girlfriend, back in America, forever, by her badly matched clothes. Who had to leave a room with too many patterns because the colours clashed and the discord hurt him too much. He was that man as well, and he needed her. He needed beauty. Thankfully Anita had a basic sense of style, but for that side of him she had only mockery.

So many times when he had felt fragile he had sought into her arms for solace, comfort. He did not find it. She seemed to freeze whenever she sensed his vulnerability. A smile flickered across his face: Still the sex had always been good! Even after all these years there was the same tension between them. Tension always in need of resolution. She was an ongoing mystery to him, beyond comprehension.

He drew the pad on the desk closer and started scribbling down the figures. The folder from his father's bank was on the desk. He opened it. With his father as a guarantor they were willing to extend his mortgage with 170 thousand kroner, to be repaid over twenty years. It was better conditions than he had on the their current loan. At the moment his weekly wage in the nurseries left him with just 3oo kroner for food and bills. Anita often complained that the household money were scarce. She had the Child Benefit for clothes and bits and bobs for the children, when she needed a bit extra she would ask him for it. He had to be careful not to spend any money on himself. It would help with the bills if his father would pay for the car on the company. Then some of the car money could pay for the new mortgage, and then there was the wage-rise that Kat had promised him. He stopped and looked again at the figures, he would need another hundred kroner a week. Was Georg prepared to give him a wage increase that large? He couldn't tell Anita. Not until later, when everything was in the box. He could explain the money shortage with his financing his new car, she didn't have to know that Georg was providing it. That was after all an unprecedented gesture from his father. And of course she wouldn't have to know about the pay-rise. If he could buy the property and let it, or sell it again, maybe make a small profit, it could give him enough leeway to make changes, become partners with Paul. He could finally wave goodbye to his father's controlling his life. He would be free.

He looked down on the application pack on his desk. There was another problem: He needed Anita's signature for the mortgage.

Fred got up and locked himself out of the study. He descended the staircase to the dark wood-panelled hallway with the bar desk and cabinet in the corner. His pride and joy at parties. The house was quiet now, Anita and the children would be chattering over their dinners at the Pedersen's. He unlocked the cellar door and continued down into the cold dusty storage room lined with wooden shelves, boxes and binliners piled high in all directions. Anita was a magpie. There had been such a shortage of everything during the war. Now in times of plenty she could still not throw anything away.

From an old shoebox high on a shelf he pulled out a bundle of letters tied together with a pink ribbon. It was the correspondence between him and Anita from the time when they were just engaged and he had gone away to America. Some of the letters from Anita were still in their envelopes, they had her full signature on the back. He looked at her jagged writing. He hoped it would not be too difficult to copy. It had to be exactly right. He would do it in his study.

When it was done he hurried downstairs again and put the letters back in the box. He tied the pink ribbon neatly around it so as to leave no trace of him having borrowed them. After all half of the letters were rightfully his, although Anita had kept them and claimed them for her own. The signature had come out well, noone would ever be able to prove that it was not Anita who had signed the application forms, as long as they did not see the exact letter he had copied it from. He was please with himself.

He made a detour to his safe in the bedroom and locked the application papers in securely. There in their boxes were the sapphire jewellery he had given her, between them the solitaire in the ring and the two stones in the necklace were nearly three carat, and of an excellent quality. It had been an investment. She had worn the ring only once, for her thirtieth birthday. He would get copies made, he thought, Anita would never know. Selling the real jewellery would give him the money for the deposit he needed to go in with Paul. Renting out the house in Linnerud would see them through if his father got wind of his plans and decided to sack him. He would not be left completely without an income.

In the kitchen he helped himself to the cold cuts from the fridge. He felt calm and suddenly unbearably hungry. He buttered his bread thickly and piled a bundle of cold meats on top. Sitting down at the table he chewed the salty meats heartily. He felt happy and calm. He was glad Anita was not there to tell him how to sit and how many slices of meat he could put in his sandwich. Anita had rules for everything. Rules of custom, moral rules. He thought about the bundle of letters in the cellar. How innocent and naive they had both been, or perhaps they hadn't changed after all. He had been playing around a little in America, she had been so far away. But he had been in love with her all along. She still never suspected anyone of wanting to do harm and in spite of her, having had her serenity and moral guidance around him, her purity that he had so much longed for and admired, he still couldn't help sticking to his own ways. He loved Anita, he just didn't share her naive faith. He had to get on in the real world.

Down in the cellar he had taken care not to read the letters. They were full of her faith in him. Her childlike love. He didn't need to be reminded right now. At last he was doing his own thing. He just wanted to be able to stand on his own two feet. Was he so wrong for wanting to be in charge of his own life? For as long as he could remember Katrine and his father had decided for him. Now at last it would be his own turn.

Fred noticed the time on the clock over the cooker and got up from his chair. He wanted to go to bed before Anita returned. Lately they had too many arguments. She was constantly nagging him about one thing or another, always coming down on him, like a Justitia. He chuckled to himself picturing Anita three yards tall in a toga with the scales in one hand and a sword in the other, her eyebrows meeting in a frown, her long dark shadow falling on him, the little man at the kitchen table with his greedy pile of cold cuts and his wife's emeralds in his pocket.

He switched the lights out leaving the nightlight in the hall burning. Rapidly he climbed the stairs in his easy catlike manner. He felt happy. Releaved. At last he was in the process of creating a space just for himself.

Fred pulled his car up at the bus stop. A well of excitement rolled in over him and he leaned back in the seat taking several deep slow breaths. It was hard to believe, it was finally happening. He reached into his pocket and confirmed that the keys were still there. It was his future, his own shop. They had done it, with mostly Paul's money but Freddy's expertise. They were finally ready to open. He put the whiskers on at the car-window to brush away little twigs and a few yellow leaves having gathered in his view. It was October.

The long summer had been like a noose slowly tightening around his neck, working for his father not being able to let on about his interest in the buildingwork in Grorud. At the end he had thought the whole of the market had known, everyone but Georg Holst. And of course Anita, she kept busy with the house and the children, these days she seldom inquired about his work. It hadn't been necessary to tell her.

Linking his hands behind his head he stretched carefully until his nausea subsided and he could think again. He had to make some order out of the chaos in his head. It was time to bring his family up to date with events, he had to think carefully how to put it. What did his father already know? And Paul, he would have to ask for his discretion regarding the financing. Paul had helped him sell the emeralds. Most importantly of all how much did Anita know of it all? When he told her he had finally got a business of his own, in partnership with Paul Lundin, what were the questions she would be asking him? He had to be sure that he had all the answers, a coherent story. She was sharp enough to spot any little flaw, she was so bloody logical!

Again he went over the situation in his head. He had had to sell the jewellery he had given her to raise the deposit. There was no need for Anita to know about that. She had the replacements and she did not know the difference. He had told his father that Anita was not ready to move in yet and that he would have to rent the house out for just a little while. He had known it would be a matter of time before Georg got wind of the new business he was setting up with Paul, not knowing how he would react he had needed an income to see him through until the new Nurseries and shop in Grorud were ready to open. As it where his dad had not cut him off although he had know of the new project more than a month ago. He had known all too well what good help he had in Freddy, and had kept him on for as long as he could. He had finally left his fathers business to help with the building and furnishing of the new premises. He had not told Anita yet, she would have instantly wanted to know how it had come about. He would have to tell her that it was a private loan from Georg, after all she always believed in the good in people. They just needed to keep away from his parents for a while, that way she would not be hearing their side of the story. If she insisted on seeing them over Christmas he could invent some kind of family feud, it had happened before, or simply tell her his parent's had been rude enough to cancel because they preferred to do something else. She didn't like them much anyway, and it wouldn't be the first time. After a while it would all die down. She would dislike that he had accepted a loan from Georg without asking her but he hoped she would be pleased when she saw them getting on well on their own.

Even now when she could see how well he had done for them both, now that it had all worked out and they were starting their own business he was not sure that she would agree to the means justifying the end. He sighed.

He started the car and swung it back onto the highway. He hoped she would be too pleased about his news to go his story after at the seams. This was what they had been dreaming of, what they had both been wanting for years. He had made it happen! He felt not just a little pleased and proud, too, he had finally got 'his own baby'. He would do well for them and Anita would not have to be at home being bored and frustrated staying with the children all day. They could have child-care, she could work if she wanted to. Fred parked the car in front of the house and climbed the stairs of the porch two at the time in large easy steps. He didn't bother locking the car, he was taking his whole big family straight out to dinner to celebrate.

Late at night when she was lying quietly in their double bed, when the children and Freddy were all asleep the thought came back to her. It had been there before but she had not taken notice. The mid autumn evening had been breezy and warm, warmer than expected for the time of the year. She hadn't needed her coat. They had had a good meal, Freddy had splashed out on champagne, celebrating a new and better time ahead for them all. It was huge. A big change.

The others were all asleep. She opened her eyes and stared into the dark room. The dressing table with the large mirror was barely visible. Only a dim strip of light was falling in through the bedroom door from the hallway, a nightlight for the children. Their domestic bliss, a little light in the hallway keeping the monsters at bay. But a thought had kept her awake, nagging her, growing in her chest. He should have told her! He should have let her in on what was going on. She had been happy all evening not wanting to let Freddy down in his excitement, but what she felt was disappointment. He had said it was several months ago that Georg had agreed to lend him the money. Why had nobody mentioned it to her? Never once in all the time he had known, a life-changing move, never once had he

thought of sharing his excitement and his expectations with her. All that time he had known and not mentioned it with a word! He had gone to meetings, discussed their new business, planned their future, worked on preparing the premises, without her.

Her parents had often had heated arguments about one thing or another, but they had always been together, planned together, coped together. Fred had been planning a business, arranged funding, left his job of eleven years. She would be assisting him in their new business, for how many years, five? Maybe fifty? And if they failed, would that be Freddy's problem too? His alone? Was she not supposed to share both good and bad with him? She was his wife. For better and for worse. For always.

Anita closed her eyes to shut the dark room out. She rolled over and pulled the warm quilt up over her nose. She didn't want to think about it , not any more, he had done what he thought best for them all. Who could know the future anyway? There really was no point in worrying. They would all be fine, she and Freddy and the children,as long as they had each other.

On the winter solstice, the blue light of the sun made it's appearance at 9.20 in the morning. Weakened and bored in it's ineffectual role, it was boosted by the last thaw before Christmas. The unexpected warmth made the snow on the ground soggy and porous, the trees on the forested hillsides creaking complaintively under the yokes of the heavy wet snow on their branches. The sunny day lingered on the rooftops warming the city for a few short hours before finally sliding off and with what seemed like relief, letting it's frozen halo sink down again behind hills and clouds. It was the end of December 22nd. Darkness, the natural state of things, resumed it's grip on it's frozen northern domain. It was barely past three in the afternoon, the temperature was falling.

By the return of the dark and the cooling air the ever prospering capital on the arctic circle was given it's second wind, brought back to life with trillions of electric lights. Fred had ahead of him the longest night of the year.

When the shop finally closed at seven the orders where bulging on the hook, tomorrow morning, the 23rd, would see the last transport of flowers for Greater Oslo. He had to have them all ready by nine in the morning, when the shop would open again for the last full day of trading before the Holidays. Tomorrow they would accept only local orders for the delivery boy to bring out. On the last day, the day of Christmas Eve they would be closing early.

By the time he had tidied the shop it was already half eight, It had started snowing. The temperature on the thermometer outside was reaching minus six. In the yard the snow that had been soft and mouldable all of the warm day was imprinted with a thousand footprints, his customers coming and going, a little heavier as they left. It was dangerous slippery ground now, black ice underneath from the midday thaw, a thin cover of fresh snow on top. It deluded you into thinking you could step with confidence. He smiled to himself. In the sinking temperatures the ground was freezing back into a chessboard of jagged edges, only the odd pawn was still manoeuvring carefully through on their way home to their own last minute preparations for Christmas. Check mate! It was his game this time. He had won over them all. Here he was running his own business, and trade all week had been phenomenal! He wouldn't be going home tonight, there were orders on the hook to last him the whole night, and it did not bother him at all. The large spruce in the yard, lit up in all it's Christmas glory would keep him company through the night. This was what he had been wanting all the long years he had been slogging away for his father.

It had been a tense few months. He and Anita had just managed to get by. The income from the new house had helped for a while but his tenants had left a month ago now and he needed to get new people in. It had to wait til after Christmas, he had too much to take care of here, while the money was rolling inn!

He started filling the large wooden bin under the packing-table with old newspapers from the storage room. With temperatures below zero the regular white wrapping-paper was not enough, being as cold as it was tonight both cut flowers and potted plants needed several layers of newspaper to keep them from freezing. It meant a lot of extra hours of work but in the end satisfied customers was all that mattered. He would do the cut flowers last, towards the morning and wet-wrap them to keep them as fresh as possible. It was already getting cold in the shop, three of the four walls being only glass there wasn't much to keep the heat in. He turned the electric fan heater up full and fetched his coat down from the hook. He was sure he would get warm again as soon as he got going. He would have some dinner in the restaurant down the road while it was still open and perhaps see if he could get hold of some chocolate to keep him going through the night. He had told Anita not to expect him back, if possible he would have a nap in the chair in the staff-room.

At eleven he was at the packing-desk. Side by side on the work-top he put the three piles of wrapping-paper: To his left the transparent tissue-paper that would be nearest to the flowers, then a tall stack of unfolded newspapers to keep the flowers from freezing and at last the finishing white paper sheets. He brought the tape-dispenser over to the side of the table and hung a large roll of twine from the shelf. Now all he needed were the cards and address-labels to go on the flowers and parcels. He would sit down and write them all out before selecting the plants, then put the plants out on the floor by the desk with the paperwork attached. Fred looked at the space he had at his disposal. He would have to do it in several rounds, twenty parcels at the time. The first round would give him a good idea as to how long the packing would take him. After the first twenty he would know if he'd get any sleep at all. He was counting on the coffee simmering hot and strong on the hot-plate to see him through.

After an hour at the packing desk he poured himself a cupful and kicked his boots off. His feet were beginning to hurt, he had been up since half six in the morning. He looked at the clock on the shelf, it had taken him nearly half an hour just to write the cards out and place them with the first twenty plants, it was all begonias and pointsettias which were easy enough to pack. He was nearly through with that lot so he had spent nearly an hour on the packing itself. That meant what he had left would be one and a half hour times four, about six hours of work. It was twenty past midnight already. There would be the odd pause, too, it would all add up but he was determined to finish the job in time. When it was all packed it would go in the staff-room for the transport to fetch it out in the morning.

Fred made his second round of the shop-floor collecting the plants and planted Christmas-groups. The larger groups had to be packed in boxes. If he worked a little faster and didn't take too many pauses he could be finishing by half past six and still get to take a look at the wholesale market for extra bits and bobs they needed for the two next days. On Christmas day they would be selling mostly cut flowers, anything he could get his hands on would go. For tomorrow, the twenty-third he would need a collection of good large plants, for last minute shoppers who still needed a present. It was hard to predict exactly how much he would sell. Nearly a hundred parcels to go on the twenty-third was pretty good for a first year, Grorud was a good location for their new business, there was an extended suburb developing around them, and on the borders of it the woods, no doubt eventually to be expropriated for more houses, other suburbs. Oslo city would keep on expanding.

When he had finished the second batch he stepped over the heap of rubbish accumulating on the floor and sank down on a chair by the lunch-table. The clock was a quarter past one, he had taken in a bit of time, he was doing well. He would allow himself fifteen minutes and a chocolate bar. Never before had Christmas been such hard work to him, though he had often worked late nights packing or cutting in the nurseries as well. They had been better staffed there. He chuckled in his tiredness. Tonight he was on his own. For the days he had employed one girl temporarily and one who was to stay on. Mrs Halldan had been helping them out from the start. He hadn't wanted to pay out for too much overtime this first year. If next year went as well he would allow himself help with the packing, too.

He stretched his legs out and put his feet up on the chair opposite. Leaning back as far as the wooden back-rest would allow he enjoyed the taste of the sweet chocolate. This year he was working harder, but the profits were his. He smiled to himself. This had been all his own achievement, his and Paul's, they worked well as a team. He had outmanoeuvred his parents, pacified Anita. He had finally done it, he had done his own thing and it was working. Now there would be childminders and fine clothes for Anita, he would send her off on a shopping spree after Christmas. In a while he would be able to replace the jewellery he had borrowed, maybe a year or two. And he wouldn't have to drive around in the company van any more, his father had taken his new car back when he left. They would buy an estate for their private use, with room for everybody, the girls in the back-seat and the dog.

Fred got up from the hard seat and collected the paperwork for the third round. He still had plenty of energy.

At six he shut all the lights in the shop, only the tall dark spruce at the drive glittering in morning frost and it's electric lights was shining it's wellmeaning presence onto the shop floor. It stood like a night watch man, Fred thought, it had kept him company throughout the whole busy week and all the late nights of packing. Tonight the tall tree was the guardian of a landscape of white pointed parcels, they spread like of snow-covered mountain ranges leaning across the pale tiled floor. He set his clock for half past six and huddled up in the vicker chair, it was the most comfortable he could find, and pulled his sheepskin coat over him.

When the alarm suddenly chimed he startled, not really sure if he had slept at all. His forehead was throbbing softly but persistently and he had to focus his mind to get his eyes to open. Luckily, he thought, it didn't get light til after ten, he didn't think he could cope with daylight quite yet. He closed his eyes again and stretched all muscles in turn, the night had given him a sore shoulder. He dreaded getting up from the chair but in the end he could delay no longer. His body made the effort his mind still half asleep. Switching the light on he climbed over the clusters of parcels. They were covering half of the staff room and most of the space behind the till in the shop. The van would be there to collect them before they opened at nine. Mrs Halldan would be in to open and get the shop ready at half eight. Passing through to the front door, he surveyed the mess. The shelves and window displays were muddled and bare. It had looked pretty yesterday morning. He shrugged, a little grin lighting his tired face. It would soon be full again, with fragrant red and green in every corner.

The morning outside was cold and crisp, he thought it might be falling towards minus ten. He was glad he had put plenty of newspaper in the parcels. In his car he switched the radio on to keep him company. They were playing old time jazz. Most of the offices and factories had already broken off for the holidays and the roads were nearly deserted. He parked his van outside the large market hall, as he had used to while working for his father. Some of the stock they needed for the last two days would be taken care of by Paul. He was making sure they had potted plants, it was mostly cut flowers he had come to market for. He could easily carry what he needed out to the car in a couple of boxes.

He couldn't see his father's van from outside but he knew the Holst's usual place by the main gate. He would use the back entrance. They hadn't talked much since he had left the nurseries and the old man had discovered that he had rented the house out, that he had decided not to live there himself. Katrine had been furious. There had been no question of the Holst Nurseries supplying his new business with cut flowers, it was too close to home for them both. Freddy shrugged it off and focused on his morning purchases. He didn't need his parents. What had they ever done for him, they had enslaved him in the nurseries for the best part of fifteen years.

Anita looked at the clock and turned away curling up again under the warm quilt. It was ten. She scoffed at the muddle that was Freddy's side of the bed, unchanged since yesterday. He had not made it home at all. This year was even worse than when he had worked for Georg. Sliding back into oblivion an alarm bell rang in her head. The doorbell! Damn! Mother, of course, she was the only person around always inconsiderate enough to be on time! She sighed, she should be grateful, her mother was taking the children to see Santa at Steen and Stroem, the department store downtown. She scrambled out of bed and threw on the dress from yesterday. She didn't want her mother to know that she had caught her in bed at ten o'clock. As soon as they were gone she would have the whole day to herself.

Having waved the girls and her mother off Anita returned to the kitchen and put the kettle on the hotplate. She had the floors to clean and the Christmas tree still sitting on the balcony needed decorating. She could probably get the girls to do that later if she brought the decorations up from the cellar. She had slept so poorly lately, she wasn't sure why. Freddy's routine was so different this year, she had hardly seen him. She had not thought it would be possible for him to work more than he had already done before, but he had proved her wrong. She was spending all her time on her own with the children smoking too many cigarettes and listening to their tedious pop music. When Freddy finally came home he was always irritatingly contented, fired up about the business. She locked the front door and switched the lights off again so that noone would think she was home. Upstairs in the bedroom she slipped her dress over her head and slipped into bed naked. She hardly ever slept naked these days. When Freddy was not there she needed clothes around her. She pulled the quilt over her head and drifted back to sleep.

In the afternoon she had a bath and fixed herself up. Carefully she put on a layer of coloured lotion, to hide the dark shadows under her eyes and dusted a little rouge on her cheeks. Putting the kettle back on the stow she lit a cigarette waiting for the coffee to come to the boil. She was still feeling low, without the children home there was nothing to stop her thoughts going around in her head. The problem was she could not find the beginning or end of her train of thought. When she tried to unravel her unhappiness she always came to the conclusion that she really had no reason to be unhappy at all. She would visit someone, that would take her mind off it, whatever it was that was not right. She opened the front door to gage the temperature, the cold was imposing, and swooped down the stairs to pick up the post from the postbox. A carrier bag stuffed full with Christmas presents had been left in the corner of the porch and caught her eye as the door slid to. She opened it again staving off another bout of icy air and pulled the bag inside. The labels red from Farfar and Grandmother, to Linnea and Monika. It was from Georg and Kat. There was nothing for herself and Freddy. And why had they not rang the doorbell to wish her Happy Christmas? Georg and Katrine were unpredictable at the best of times, but their behaviour lately was quite extraordinary. They had hardly been paid a visit or had a phone call from them the whole autumn. Considering that Georg had helped sponsor Freddy in his new business it was more than puzzling to her, she would on the contrary have expected the Holsts to have kept a close look at it all. Georg was not someone to be careless with his investments.

She read the couple of Chritmas cards she had found in the post box and opened the statement from the bank. It was a yearly resume of their mortgage, the numbers were larger than she had thought. And it was not their usual mortgage account. It suddenly made sense. Freddy always took care of the finances, but from the statements on the table she could see it clearly, they must have another mortgage. It must have been how Georg had helped them and why they had suddenly started using Georg's bank. She had never been clear about why they had opened another account. She had thought it had been on request from Georg for easier payment of wages. But the papers in front of her clearly stated that it was a loan. The more she thought about it the more little things that had been niggling in the corners of her consciousness suddenly spilled forwards and fell into a pattern. It all made perfect sense. A loan for a new business. The only thing she did not quite understand was why it had been an account in their joint names. She had thought it an egalitarian gesture from Freddy to put her name on his wages-account. She was still not sure what it meant, but she thought she knew someone who might. She had to find out.

She hailed a taxi on the Ringroad, the buses were all overloaded and running late, spilling over with suger-fuelled children and bags of shopping at every stop. Freddy's old car had given up it's ghost, it had been a short lasting pleasure for her driving. Bypassing the Holst Nurseries she directed the taxi to take a left at the junction and got out in front of Edna's house. Fred's older sister always knew what was going on, besides she and Edna had always got on well.

"Dad never intended to let him go, the loan was for the new house in Linnerud. You know, when Kat and Georg moved house last year, they expected you and Freddy to move in , too."

"What do you mean, with Kat and Georg?"

"The house that you and Freddy bought, Anita, the house next to them. Katrine was livid when Freddy rented it out, she never wanted to share the yard with a family she didn't know."

"We bought? I had no idea!" She had made clear to Freddy that it had been out of the question!

"Anita, dearest, Freddy could hardly have bought it without your consent, after all your signature would have been needed on the mortgage-application papers."

"I didn't sign anything." Anita was concluding quietly, more to herself than to Edna.

"Don't be silly, dear, a married man wouldn't be able to take a loan on the family home without his wife's signature, the new mortgage included your old house. Your signature must have been on the papers."

Anita looked at Edna who was passing the cake tray. She picked a piece of cake from the tray and deposited it on her plate. She couldn't eat it yet, her lips were quivering. Edna was a tall square shouldered woman, intelligent and practical, motherly in a non fuzzy way. Anita nodded.

"He forged it. He must have forged it. What should I do?"

"Well," Edna shrug her large shoulders and smiled:"If someone forges your signature you can always sue them," she said in a half joky way. None of them were laughing.

Edna smiled disarmingly: "Of course it wouldn't do any good," she said. "After all you and Freddy have finally landed on your feet. Anita dearest, he probably just didn't want to trouble you with it, why make a mountain out of a molehill?"

She thanked Edna and put her coat on. That was the problem she thought to herself as she opened the door feeling the release of the cold air rushing towards her, that she had never understood the Holsts's perception of mountains and molehills.

Anita burst through the double doors and sidled up to 'Enquiries' waiting impatiently for her turn. She finally rang the buzzer vigorously calling the clerk to her attention.

"Hello," she said..she blushed all of a sudden feeling embarrassed at her mission and not being sure how to put her case.

"My husband took out a loan with you a while back, five,six months. Would you have an archive here in the bank?"

He hesitated a little puzzled by her request: "Yes, of course, if it was at this branch, Mam, we would have the papers here.

"I believe it was," Anita said.

"Your husband would have a copy of all the papers himself, Mam."

"They have got lost in a fire," she lied. She managed to look sad without much effort. She wasn't feeling her best.

The young man looked at her across the counter. He was not convinced. She was in her mid thirties he estimated, quite well off. A little tousled and red-eyed. He decided to be helpful. She seemed genuine enough, and determined and he was a little tipsy from an early round of Christmas cheer.

"The name?" He requested.

Fredrick Holst.

He was gone for a minute, then brought the papers to the counter:"Fredrick Holst and Anita Holst, Georg Holst was standing as guarantor. Loyal customer with us for many years, he confirmed, the Holst Nurseries."

The sense of misgivings had disappeared from the clerk's face and he was smiling, obviously glad to be of service. His recognising the names on the deeds had evoked his interest in Anita's problem, she was rapidly flicking through the pages finally to arrive at the last page with the signatures. There it was in front of her! The paper with Fred's signature and her own. "I didn't sign it." She mumbled.

"Pardon me, Madam?"

"Could you please give me a photocopy of this last page?"

"Yes, certainly. Did you say it is not your signature, you are Mrs Anita Holst ."

"Yes of course." She looked at the clerk, her eyes gleaming dangerously:

"It looks like mine," she confirmed, but it is false!"

Freddy's car slid to a halt on the hard packed snow by the porch just as Anita climbed the last steps to the front door. It was late afternoon. She unlocked the door and hurried inside leaving it open for him. She suddenly felt scared, she had not known he was capable of deceit. Maybee she did not know him at all?

"Hello?" The choir of girls voices apprehended her, "Where have you been?" Linnea and Monica came tumbling into the hallway but stopped abruptly, looking embarrassed on noticing Anita's tired and drawn face.

"They phoned from the bank. Are you ill?" Linnea wanted to know.

Anita's answer was drowned out by the slamming of the door behind her. Fred was in the hallway. She took a step back startled by the look on his face, his mouth and jaw was tight, his eyes darker than normal. She thought he looked feverish.

"You stupid bitch!" He hissed.

She shuddered and made room for him in the hallway. "Illoyal stupid fucking bitch!" He never swore!

His hand closed like an iron claw as he gripped her arm and she could do nothing but follow him obediently. He walked her quietly through the hall into the lounge and sat her down in the sofa. She preferred him swearing. Now he was really scaring her. She was gasping from the pain in her arm and dared not move. He let go and turned his back to her closing the door. She glimpsed Linnea's eyes staring at her through the gap, they were wider than ever, their debt and darkness mirroring her fathers, but blackened with fear, as his were with fury. "Go to your room!" He commanded her. "Take Monika with you." The girl started crying but proceeded to haul Monika with her up the staircase as she had been told to. The tone of her father's voice was not one for arguing with. Redfaced Fred turned towards Anita who was cowing on the sofa.

"What do you think you are doing?! Are you out of your mind?" He was shouting. Never before had she heard him shout. He sounded ridiculous, his voice thin and hysterical. It gave her some of her courage back:

"That is what I'd like to ask you!" She retorted. There was still a tremble in her voice. He looked pale again, shivering and feverish, little pearls of sweat breaking out over his brow.

"You will phone the bank now and tell them you were wrong." He uttered each word slowly, as if talking to a child. Being careful not to crush her with the strength of his fury, he pulled her slowly out of the sofa and coaxed her ahead of him across the floor.

"You bastard," she snapped back at him, she felt rebellious but afraid to enrage him. There was a fervour about him as if superhuman, he was the arch-villain in a cartoon. He was holding her arm.

"You liar, you falsified my signature!" she hissed.

In front of the phone he stopped and shook her a little as if to clarify her mind.

"You'll phone the bank, tell them you were wrong, that you just couldn't remember at first. Apollogise!"

"Crook!" She spat it at him hatefully, waving her free arm to wipe the tears away from her red eyes and stripy cheeks.

"I shall phone the police!"

He hit her. Hit her face as hard as he could with his flat hand. Everything he had achieved in his life, she was about to destroy it. He would not let it happen!

Holding her arm in his grip firmly he dialled the number of the bank. Over the numbness of her cheek and the ringing in her ear she heard his voice sounding:"Hello, this is Fredrick Holst. I had a call from you earlier today, well, about a slight problem we had, my wife got very confused and..hmm... came in making a bit of a scene. Well, it has all been cleared up now, if you would let me speak with your manager, please...Mr Kristensen? This is Fred Holst. Yes, yes, as I assured you, just a misunderstanding. We both very much deplore the whole affair. Of course she remembers it all now, having signed the application. She has been very run down. She is here with me.. getting some rest,. Yes. ..Yes, she would like to say a few words."

He put Anita's hand firmly on the receiver and pushed it up against her ear.

"Hello, yes, that's right." She spoke softly, her voice rusty (?)from crying.

"Yes, Mr Kristensen. Yes, that's right. I am terribly sorry about the whole thing. Yes, Of course. Thank you. Goodbye." She hung up.

"There will be no report of the incident because of their good and longs standing relations with your father." She spat the words at him.

Fred let her out of his grip letting her slide down on the chair next to the phone.

She had finally got her hands free. She did not know what he might do to her next, he was a stranger, not her husband any more Without hesitation she swept an empty vase from the table next to the phone. In an instant it jingled onto the floor in pieces, she could see in the corner of her eyes the children coming running to the door. She had smashed the vase over his head. It was just her will to survive. He was still standing, holding onto the wall reeling from the blow, the children were in the doorway. She rapidly scanned the space around her, whatever was between him and herself, anything she could grab hold of to protect herself. She would not let him hit her! Not ever!

Freddy was struggling to spot Anita through the curious patterns that had entered the room, there were blotches of black and blood-red obscuring his vision. He needed to know where she was, he was not sure she would not hit him again, try to finish him off. She was like a leaking can of petrol, he thought, she could blow up again at any time. Still struggling with his vision and balance he managed to back carefully out of the room. The haze had not properly cleared. There was another potentially explosive item in the house. He had to deal with it. His hands were shaking as he unlocked the door to the cellar and he descended the steep staircase holding on carefully. From the shelves in the storage room he pulled down a large cardboard box, his head hurt him when he looked up, he was in danger of passing out. It was filled with old hats and mittens. The children's. He tried another. The letters, where was the box with the goddamn letters? His forgery of Anita's signature on the form, it had been an exact copy of her signature on the back of the letter. It was as good as evidence and she was still pretty hysterical. The state she was in he didn't know what to expect from her next. She was mad enough to tell the police.

Relieved he found the box with Anita's old nik-naks and poured the contents out on the cellar floor. There it was, the bundle with the pink ribbon. He quickly scooped it up and headed back for the staircase, leaving the cellar floor scattered with shoes and clothes, old school books and Christmas decorations and pink babygrows.

It was dark outside as he climbed back into the van, it had already been dusk when he had left the shop soon after three. The roads were busy, it was rush hour. The greenhouses of 'Gro Haven Nurseries' were lit up, they were on a time switch. The shop was still open. He drove around for a while until he was sure it was closed and empty. Then he parked the car on the dark side of the drive, as far away from the Christmas spruce as he could manage. He didn't need anyone watching over him tonight. Inside the shop he picked out a large flowerpot in festive red and green glace from the window display and brought it along into the staff room. He sat down on a chair and placed the pot in front of him on the floor. From his pocket he fetched out a lighter and set fire to the top of the bundle of letters before dropping the burning paper into the pot. The flames quickly took hold. They flickered across the yellowing paper with it's signature, scribbled down nearly fifteen years ago. For a moment the flame hesitated at the pink ribbon before growing tall and fat eating into the dry crisp folded sheets. There they went, the letters. The proof, now it was her word against his, and she had already changed her mind once. Who would believe her? He sighed in relief. The flame rose out of the pot and he backed his chair away avoiding the heat. Sitting still in the quiet evening, between the heat from the pot and the cold from the windows time seemed to stand still, to stop momentarily in order to give him time to breath. He had been in America, they had written to each other for a whole year. He could feel the tears running down his face, strangely alien, he did not know why they were there. He was exhausted and ashamed, but not unhappy. She wanted to ruin him.

When he finally got up from the chair it was blackest night. Only the tall spruce, the night watch man, was still mocking him with it's brilliant cheerful lights. He took his old work clothes and his jacket down from the shelf and spread them out on the floor, wrapping them around himself as he lay down. He would sleep here until the morning. He couldn't go back home. He had to think. Maaybee he was still in a state of shock. He was feeling strangely hollow inside. And he was disgusted with himself. He had hit her, there was no going back now. It wasn't like any other quarrel they had had. A loan five months ago. What did it matter now? Why did she want to harm him, Why his Anita, why did she have to be a Justitia, his Nemesis, his wife? His sweet Anita. His innocent skittish foal.

He wrapped himself up in his sheepskin coat against the cold and lay down. His hip was going numb against the tiled floor. He had never before hit anyone, not in his whole life. He hated violence! Anita had driven him into a corner. Why on earth had she gone to the bank? He didn't understand her. After a while he rolled over on his back and for a few blissful hours fell soundly asleep.

Mrs Pedersen had made all her grandchildren new dresses for Christmas. She was waiting outside the church as usual on Christmas Eve for the service starting at five o'clock. The large bells above were ringing Christmas in. It was the biggest congregation of the year, for the Christmas service everybody turned up, even the lazy ones.

Settling into the pews she looked along the rows at her daughter's and grandchildren. Right next to her was Eva with her husband Bjorn and the children Tommas and Helene, further along Anita with Linnea and Monika. In their dresses in the pretty red woollen fabric the girls looked like peas in a pod. Her husband August finished the line at the other end. She was proud of her family. Of all the grandchildren only Linnea had got her father's brown eyes and dark brow hair. The rest had all turned out to be blond-haired and blue-eyed. They were like her husband's family. Linnea reminded her a little of herself. She was the trickier one of the girls. Monika was always cheerful.

She watched as the pews were filling up, people were sitting down at the end of their line. For a moment she had thought it was Fredrick arriving. Her son in law was always tired on Chritmas Eve, it had not been unusual for him to fall asleep in the chair after dinner. But he had never not turned up for church at all and Mrs Pedersen was a little dismayed. She couldn't get much information out of Anita. She kept saying Fred would get there eventually, that it was different now that he had his own business. How different could it be? Liv Pedersen did not buy that! Christmas was Christmas, it was a time for the family. There was always trouble with Anita.

As the shadows grew long in the afternoon and the last sprinkle of sun on the white snow again finally disappeared Fred remembered his tiredness. At last he was locking the door on the Christmas trade. He locked Mrs Halldan out and the temporary girl, Elsie. Ellen was taking her time getting ready and he still had to pay her. He had the cashing up to do as well.

"Six thousand four hundred," She was reading over his shoulder. "I'd say! What are you going to do with all that money then boss?"

He wished she would stop calling her boss, it embarrassed him. She was a peculiar girl with her yellow brown eyes. But she was not stupid. He smiled finishing his counting. Considering his late arrivals at the market and the staff having been pretty stretched at times they had done better than he'd expected. He had made sure to thank them all for the effort with a substantial Christmas bonus.

Ellen put a finger in his back:"Your money or your life?" She jumped up on the packing-desk sitting her solid behind on the spread out stacks of paper.

Fred handed her the wages: "Don't spend it all at once!" He smiled. He couldn't help but cheer up in her presence, she was always so oblivious to his problems and so eager for a joke and a laugh. It took his mind off yesterday and his fight with Anita. He did not know how to go home and face her and her family over Christmas dinner. It seemed an impossible task.

"I've done all my Christmas shopping a long time ago," Ellen declared, "I'm not getting many, only my mum and dad and my brother and his wife. No kids yet. And no boyfriend."

She let her feet dangle in the air as she chatted on. She thought if she waited til he was ready she might just be able to get a lift home. It was getting dark outside. The buses were slow on Christmas eve and the traffic heavy, everybody trying to get to the cemeteries, and later on to the five o'clock service. She didn't care much for either and she wasn't having dinner at her parents until six.

"Do you want me to lock you out?"

"Well, was wondering what way you might be heading? Whether I could possibly hitch a lift?"

"Yes," it was his turn to be embarrassed. He hadn't really thought of what to do next, he wasn't too sure where he was heading himself.

"Where would you like me to drop you?"

Ellen looked at him sideways. She knew! He realised they probably all knew. Things were not as they should between Anita and himself. Over the years she had become more and more distant. She was there as a matter of course, but not really there for him. He had been acting increasingly like a single man, had stopped taking her advice. It had culminated in today, he was looking tired and drawn. He just wanted to be on his own.

"Come on," he said, I'll drive you home.

It was still busy on the main road. He took a left before the junction at Arvoll to avoid the heavy traffic to the cemeteries, and ended up passing along the road approaching Georg and Katerine's house. It looked quiet and deserted. He thought they would be on their way to Mags and Erlend's. It was their first Christmas at Linnerud, they were still working at alterations to the back of the house, having another bathroom put in.

"That is my house, not the one I live in." He declared. She was so easy to impress! The one I live in? The one we live in.

The house he had bought next to his father's and Kat's sharing the same drive was standing empty and deserted. The tenants had moved out a month ago, because of the Chritmas rush he had not had time to think of letting it out again. Perhaps he had hoped that Anita would finally come around to moving there too, and he could settle the score and be friends again with his parents. Now that he was running his own business he could do with Georg sharing his expertise on avoiding taxes. He chuckled to himself.

She looked at him quizzically with her peculiar eyes.

"Who lives here?"

"Oh no, it is empty, it was let out."

"I am looking for somewhere," she said,"I mean, I realise it's big, but I could share it with someone?"

"Sure, I'll show you around." He didn't have anything better to do. Fred parked the car and got out holding the door for her. Take your handbag, he said, "It could get stolen."

There were often reports of muggings and theft, particularly here in the new suburbs. He blamed the new culture of both parents working the whole time to pay for their well equipped modern houses. There were noone around for the children.

He found the key on his key-ring and unlocked the solid wooden door. The hallway smelled of detergent, but inside the lounge was clad in oak panells and the door handles were brass. The soft carpet was cushioning their steps. He had been hoping to live here. He thought for a moment of his children, Monica was a little on the heavy side but they were both healthy and strong. They wore hairbands and plaited skirts, twin sets and jeans, and expensive down jackets to keep them warm in winter. His children had holidays and girlish gold jewellery. He had done well after all. He was proud of his family.

In the middle of the large room was a sofa group in red, a low oak table nesting in the middle. It looked inviting, he just felt like sinking down in the sofa and forgetting everything. His drinks cabinet was in a different house.

Instead he took her through showing her the kitchen. It was a pleasant well equipped house.

They climbed the stairs to the first floor. There was the master bedroom to the left. It sported a tall bed with brass bedposts and mirrored wardrobes along the wall, an en-suite shower room.

He remembered how dirty and tired he was, the picture of himself splashing cold water in his face in the staff-room the same morning flashing through his mind. He saw again Anita's hand sliding off the receiver as he let go of her, her face swollen from crying, the children with their dark eyes retreating to their rooms. His children. His wife. His house, his other house, by God he could feel his stomach turning!

"What do you think?" She said.

He turned to the window to have a reason for looking away. She was following close behind. He was staring into black night.

"Are you all right?"

His shoulders were shaking. She put a hand on his back but withdrew it as he turned around and looked at her:"I,m..I'm sorry," he stuttered trying to pull himself together."My wife..." His wife had blue eyes and dimples, and a fake tan now, and a new set of jewellery he hadn't given her yet. It was for Christmas.

He didn't count on her any more He was shaking like a child and she pulled him closer trying to calm him a little.

"I don't love her."

It was said now, and he felt instantly calmer. Her peculiar yellow eyes were shining warmly near to her childish little mouth. It was red and round and drawing him in. She undressed herself quickly and pulled him down on the high bed with it's shining posts. They reminded him of the Christmas tree, his 'night watch man'. It was Ellen watching him now, he could feel her rolling in over him like a mild tide. There was nothing else he could do but ride it. It was so long since he had found comfort in a woman's arms, with Anita it was always a battle. He made love to her and cried long and helplessly while Ellen still held on, the way Anita had never let him. He didn't care anyway what Ellen thought. He had lost his family. He couldn't go home now, it was too late to turn around.

He closed his eyes and let his hands fondle the woman in his arms. To confirm that he had really meant it he made love to her again. In her embrace he felt light and strangely numb. She was warm and accommodating. He was at sea, riding his boat through the splashing crests of foam. He was finally on his way. He was winning at last! He was winning!