‘It might have,’ said Jonas.
‘Well, you always did have bloody awful taste,’ said Sir William, to Jonas’s satisfaction stuffing another forkful of deadly mushrooms into his mouth. ‘This is delicious, Rakel. I really think marriage has been the making of you.’ And the food truly was worth remarking on; if anyone had served filet de boeuf en croûte at a family get-together when Jonas was a boy it would have been considered every bit as bizarre as those dishes said to have been served in Ancient Rome, where whole roasted oxen were slit open and live birds flew out.
There was one reason, and one reason only, for Sir William’s ridicule of Dagny M. and, through her, Jonas: that reviewers had slated her exhibition. In fact, they had well and truly torn it to shreds, as they say. And as far as Jonas Wergeland was concerned, this just about summed up his uncle, that is to say Norway, in the guise of an expensive blazer and a flamboyant silk cravat: that it was quite beyond his grasp that a painter who had received bad reviews might, nonetheless, be good.
All in all Sir William had the ability constantly to amaze Jonas and fill his head with questions and thus was forever challenging his notions of what was actually possible. His uncle lived up on the hill next to the Heming sports stadium, on Gråkammen — ‘the best part of the west side’ as he put it — in a house where the books were arranged by colour and the pictures on the walls purchased by an interior designer with a flair for harmonious tonal schemes. Whenever Jonas visited this part of town there were two things in particular which fascinated him: one was the garages, which spoke of an interest, totally alien to Jonas, in all things sporty, crammed with everything from dozens of pairs of slalom skis to obscure accoutrements for sailboats and even, now and again, a real live horse. The other was the rooms of the houses, so stuffed with traditional rustic furniture that Jonas could not help thinking that every stick of old furniture from every Norwegian farmhouse for centuries must have found its way to this area around Holmenkollen Heights. Jonas had been given some little insight into the enigma which was Sir William on the day his uncle opened the door of an age-old rose-painted cabinet to show off his new set of golf clubs.
‘Well all I can say is, buying one of those pictures would be a really rotten investment,’ said one of the Brothers Grimm.
‘There’s absolutely no way of knowing what those daubs are supposed to represent,’ said Sir William, who had happened across a couple of reproductions in the newspapers. ‘A dose of realism would have worked wonders there.’
‘Realism ought to be defined as the opposite of art,’ retorted Jonas quick as a flash, and suddenly all eyes were on him. ‘The only thing which could save realism from being something other than an empty word would be if all people had the same idea and were of the same opinion on absolutely everything.’ Although he did not say so, Jonas was quoting the French painter Eugène Delacroix, from an entry in his diary for 22 February 1860, if anyone is interested.
‘Yes well, you always were so bloody smart,’ said Sir William. ‘I don’t know where you get it all from. Funny that you’ve never amounted to anything.’ Jonas dropped his eyes and bit his lip. This was one of his uncle’s favourite hobbyhorses: belittling Jonas for his shilly-shallying, harping on about him being ‘a perpetual student’, quizzing him, cross-examining him on how things were going with his music studies, his plans for the College of Architecture, while Veronika and the Brothers Grimm hugged themselves with malicious glee. ‘You’ll never get beyond the bloody Entrance Exam,’ he confined himself to saying. ‘Pity you had to get such a prize wimp for a son, our kid,’ he said to Jonas’s father.
I do not intend to delve much deeper in my attempt to describe Jonas Wergeland’s uncle and his three children, not that it does not, for all its brevity, say something about these people, but because Jonas — who is, after all, my main concern — did not really know these relatives, a fact which never ceased to intrigue him, all through his life. Take, for example, the Brothers Grimm at the dinner table, plying their toothpicks so one could be forgiven for thinking that they were afraid that even the tiniest morsel stuck between their teeth would be regarded as a blot on their immaculate facade. Jonas never did discover what they did, whether they were in shipping or property or what, whether they were speculators or in business in some way. All he knew was that they belonged to the ranks of the paper brokers, people who made their money by ways other than through the production of goods and who could make a fortune simply by being in possession of the right currency at the right time. The Brothers Grimm did not move stones or steel about, they moved money; they did ‘light labour’, as Rakel called it, ‘legitimate fraud’. For this reason these two also seemed abstract in Jonas’s eyes, and every time the two families were together it was this particular aspect of them he studied, his relatives’ indeterminacy, their indefinable contours, their extraordinary impenetrability, their limp handshakes which somehow made him feel as if he were shaking hands with a shadow.
At this point in the dinner Jonas asked his sister, as they had agreed and just by the way, as it were, whether she had also put into the stuffing some of those other mushrooms, the little ones which they had not been too sure about and had been meaning to have an expert to look at, just out of interest. Rakel replied, resisting the temptation to glance in Sir William’s direction, that yes, she had used them, but what harm could it do, there were so few of them.
Sir William’s eyes flickered ever so slightly. He had not realized that they had picked the mushrooms themselves, and he had been thinking they tasted a bit odd, but he pushed this thought away, not wanting to let Dagny M. off the hook so easily: ‘D’you know what I call people like her? Parasites. Living off the rest of us. It’s a disgrace. Who pays for her oil? Daylight robbery if you ask me. Grants and all that. She doesn’t know how lucky she is to live in Norway.’ Sir William knocked back half a glass of red wine, made a face. ‘God-awful bilge water,’ he muttered.
‘Has it never occurred to you,’ Jonas said, ‘that you are actually stealing the oil from which you make such a packet?’ He just threw the comment in purely on instinct; he knew nothing for sure. Sir William just laughed, did not even bother to reply.
But Jonas Wergeland was actually onto something here: an important point. While people in Norway were ranting and raving about the EEC, the really crucial moves were, as always, being made on the quiet: in this case, the setting up of Statoil, Norway’s very own government-run oil company. Jonas’s casual accusation was prompted by the fact that Sir William was now working for Statoil, in fact not only working for them, but practically running the company, one reason why he was also toying with the idea of selling the house on Gråkammen and moving to Stavanger for good. And here I would like to insert my second little discourse on the subject of Norway and its good fortune, the ‘lucky sod’ syndrome, this time as it relates to the nation’s oil. It was just around this time that Norway, believe it or not, suddenly and inconceivably began to show the highest level of economic growth in Europe, and it started to dawn on people what fabulous wealth the oil represented, so great that fairytale metaphors were all they had to fall back on, talk of the Ash Lad and the like, in endeavouring to explain what was going on. You see it was not only that Norway, due to its situation on the outskirts of Europe, was able to share in the more or less blatant tapping of resources in other parts of the world without getting its fingers dirty, as it were; in addition Norway discovered oil, thereby adding — if you will forgive me — yet another unspoken crime to its national record.