glasses with glacé cherries on plastic cocktail sticks propped against the rims, and her guests – often well-known faces from local arts circles and occasionally from the world of commerce – mingled and chatted until it was time go in to dinner, which never consisted of lamb stew or a casserole with lager on the side – the usual fare when grown-ups had a party – but of some French-sounding dish served with mushrooms that Oddrun had picked herself, and always accompanied by a fine wine, more often than not from the same region as the dish itself, which, according to Silje’s mother, would go very well with the food.
Incidentally, Oddrun could never open a bottle of wine without sighing and shaking her head at the thought of the Wine Monopoly shop in Namsos. They had hardly a single drinkable wine in that place, she had to order almost everything from the catalogue and the staff knew absolutely nothing about the products they were there to sell, she used to say. When she went to the Wine Monopoly she always ended up telling them about wine and not the other way round, as should have been the case.
Unlike Arvid and Berit, my mum had been known to buy a bottle of wine on the odd occasion when she was having people to dinner, but no matter what sort of food was served the wine was always either Bull’s Blood or the Monopoly’s own home-bottled red, because they were cheap and perfectly okay as far as Mum was concerned. If I made the mistake of pointing out that not all wines went equally well with all sorts of food, she would respond with some caustic remark to the effect that she was afraid she wasn’t as sophisticated as I would like her to be; or she would act hurt and sigh something about how she was doing the best she could and she was sorry if it wasn’t good enough. As far as she wasconcerned, being open to and learning new things was as good as admitting defeat, or so it seemed. All the things she didn’t know or couldn’t do were regarded by her as a threat and a reminder that she wasn’t good enough, and not as the key to a richer, fuller life. This was also reflected in conversations around the dinner table. If, for some reason, anyone brought up a subject that hadn’t been discussed a thousand times before, or on which there was a risk that opinions might differ, this would give rise to a sense of unease, rather like the atmosphere generated by Arvid, the local vicar, when he came to call. In such cases, Mum, and everyone else who knew the unwritten rules for appropriate conversation in their circle, would promptly take steps to bring the conversation back onto safe, familiar ground.
At Silje and her mother’s dinner table there was absolutely none of this. No topic was too small and or too big and whether an opinion was voiced by an irate or an ecstatic dinner guest did not appear to matter. While Arvid and Berit and the whole Christian community approved of people demonstrating self-control and never letting themselves get carried away, here the exact opposite was the case; if anything was frowned upon it was a lack of enthusiasm and interest in what was being discussed. “The Lord likes you hot or cold. If you’re lukewarm he’ll spit you out,” as Oddrun the atheist was fond of saying.
And we were thrilled to be included. We did our best to seem as worldly-wise and self-assured as we could, but it must have been pretty obvious that we were very pleased with ourselves and almost grovellingly grateful. We admired everyone there for all their knowledge and their skills and for all the things they’d seen and done. Oddrun had her own studio in the attic, where she painted pictures in which condors were a recurring motif;one lively, talkative character with a Lenin badge in his lapel had taken part in the student revolt in Paris in 1968, and a guy in a suit and bottle-glass specs had been a hippie and driven across America in a rainbow-coloured Volkswagen Dormobile. Our own travels were
Incidentally, Oddrun could never open a bottle of wine without sighing and shaking her head at the thought of the Wine Monopoly shop in Namsos. They had hardly a single drinkable wine in that place, she had to order almost everything from the catalogue and the staff knew absolutely nothing about the products they were there to sell, she used to say. When she went to the Wine Monopoly she always ended up telling them about wine and not the other way round, as should have been the case.
Unlike Arvid and Berit, my mum had been known to buy a bottle of wine on the odd occasion when she was having people to dinner, but no matter what sort of food was served the wine was always either Bull’s Blood or the Monopoly’s own home-bottled red, because they were cheap and perfectly okay as far as Mum was concerned. If I made the mistake of pointing out that not all wines went equally well with all sorts of food, she would respond with some caustic remark to the effect that she was afraid she wasn’t as sophisticated as I would like her to be; or she would act hurt and sigh something about how she was doing the best she could and she was sorry if it wasn’t good enough. As far as she wasconcerned, being open to and learning new things was as good as admitting defeat, or so it seemed. All the things she didn’t know or couldn’t do were regarded by her as a threat and a reminder that she wasn’t good enough, and not as the key to a richer, fuller life. This was also reflected in conversations around the dinner table. If, for some reason, anyone brought up a subject that hadn’t been discussed a thousand times before, or on which there was a risk that opinions might differ, this would give rise to a sense of unease, rather like the atmosphere generated by Arvid, the local vicar, when he came to call. In such cases, Mum, and everyone else who knew the unwritten rules for appropriate conversation in their circle, would promptly take steps to bring the conversation back onto safe, familiar ground.
At Silje and her mother’s dinner table there was absolutely none of this. No topic was too small and or too big and whether an opinion was voiced by an irate or an ecstatic dinner guest did not appear to matter. While Arvid and Berit and the whole Christian community approved of people demonstrating self-control and never letting themselves get carried away, here the exact opposite was the case; if anything was frowned upon it was a lack of enthusiasm and interest in what was being discussed. “The Lord likes you hot or cold. If you’re lukewarm he’ll spit you out,” as Oddrun the atheist was fond of saying.
And we were thrilled to be included. We did our best to seem as worldly-wise and self-assured as we could, but it must have been pretty obvious that we were very pleased with ourselves and almost grovellingly grateful. We admired everyone there for all their knowledge and their skills and for all the things they’d seen and done. Oddrun had her own studio in the attic, where she painted pictures in which condors were a recurring motif;one lively, talkative character with a Lenin badge in his lapel had taken part in the student revolt in Paris in 1968, and a guy in a suit and bottle-glass specs had been a hippie and driven across America in a rainbow-coloured Volkswagen Dormobile. Our own travels were
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