Uncle Tom

I've realized that fascinating stories exist much closer to home than one would imagine and sometimes searching further afield is a waste of time. We trooped up the rocky path to my aunt's house for supper last night. It was a very pretty evening, calm blue seas, a few white sailing boats in the bay, a sky tinged pink, and she'd laid a blue and white table on the terrace where my grandmother used to grow flame-colored nasturtiums. Oystein was trying out his new Weber and was effortlessly flipping marinated lamb, pork and spiced sausages on the grill while we were given the familiar gin & mix (Gordon's, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, ice, lemon), which was quite delicious as I don't think I've had one since I was about 19 and my grandfather made them in his milky glass jug. The table seemed to underscore our island life - white benches with navy blue cushions, a blue and white checked cloth, blue plates, white candles - and the øyene stretched impossibly far, almost all the way to Sweden. I was lucky enough to be seated next to my aunt at dinner and after a couple of glasses of red wine, the family secrets started to be spilled. Not secrets exactly but it's interesting how with each year one's understanding of the series of events in your family history becomes deeper, and one's awareness of the minutiae more acute. My aunt's almost perfect English became more fluent too. As a sidenote, I could kiss my children and Ramsey for behaving so beautifully. I am so very proud of them. At one moment there was a lull at the other end of the table and my aunt's boyfriend of twenty-five years (and to call him boyfriend is far too slight a word for it, but life partner sounds so dorkey) was looking out to sea, Miss Mink looked at me and I mouthed the words "talk to Bjarne" and the very next moment I could see her leaning in towards her host and saying sweetly "so, what have you been up to this summer?" I could have died with pride.
(J is playing a game with me and I know he's doing it. It's a form of chicken except without the car racing part. He has put the kettle on and it has most definitely boiled and now it's a waiting game to see who's going to get out of our nice warm bed to get the tea. It's so cold and wet and miserable today I think I could stay in bed all day. I guess I lost.)

My uncle, my mother's brother, was by all accounts the intellectual heavyweight of the family. He read Danish philosophy, loved Zola, Bromfeld, Lessing, Gide, loved to sail and ski. He really was the blue-eyed boy. In high school he dated a beautiul girl, Berit, who was considered by his parents to be beneath him and he was encouraged to find a girl of his own class. It was always expected that he would follow in his father's footsteps and go into medicine and so he was shipped off to medical school in Basil and dropped out after two or three years. He met Nini Anker Dessen, an artist from a good family ("the Anker name is like royalty, better than royalty perhaps" said my aunt) and married her at an elaborate ceremony followed by a white tie wedding breakfast. It was quite the society story of that summer (maybe 1964? I should ask Mamma this). Nini dutifully gave birth to a beautiful blonde baby boy -- Tom-baba I think I called him, who died at age three or maybe younger. The marriage then fell apart. Up until now the story was that the tragedy of the child's death is what tore them apart, but I now discover that it was his drinking and the crazy behaviour it encouraged in him (climbing out of windows and hanging of sides of buildings, etc.) that made her leave him. After that his whole life crashed around him. Funded fully by my ever-loving grandparents, he became a professional alcoholic, did very little but inherit houses and fortunes from rich maiden aunts, and managed to piss his way through some extremely valuable antique chairs. He still skied sometimes, showed up for family dinners at Christmas, was lovely with children and was utterly hero-worshiped by my brother and I (he once sailed us across the fjord with a string of about twelve bottle of beer towing gently behind us, with maybe two cokes for us tied on or good measure). In 2005 he called my aunt to let her know he would not make it for dinner at Easter, and a month later, May 5, 2005, he died of what appeared to be a heart attack. Interestingly, his liver was in fine shape and never showed any signs of distress. Next to his bed my aunt found a framed picture of his high school sweetheart, Berit, and a pile of his favorite, obscure and dusty books. On the wall was a drawing by Nini, a self-portrait, nude, nursing TomBaba. Everything else had been lost or sold to feed his habit.