After this outburst she quite literally sat in silence for a few moments, stewing. The first cigarette was lit, which had a calming effect.
‘Apologies if I appear to be over the top, but I have been hounded by whispering voices ever since the war. It is of course a source of immense frustration to me that I could be so stupid as to get involved in all that to start with. But one,I have never been a Nazi and, two,I most certainly did not kill my brother.’
I noted that the latter was said with more conviction than the former, and that what she told me now was pretty well in accordance with what was written in the case file from the treason trials. So I moved swiftly on and asked her to tell me about her broken engagement.
This prompted an unexpected change of mood. A shadow of a smile played on Magdalena Schelderup’s lips when she replied by asking: ‘Which one?’
I knew nothing about either of them and so said that I would like to hear about both.
‘The second one, the one to which you are perhaps alluding, was no great loss at the time. He changed his mind only days before we were due to walk down the aisle, because of all this nonsense with the war and my NS membership. I didn’t shed too many tears. I had realized some time before that he was not the great love of my life, and he was neither charming nor particularly good-looking. But he was a decent, presentable man with sound finances, who would no doubt be a good father and husband. I was thirty-eight years old when he broke off the engagement. It somehow felt too late and too complicated to start looking for a new husband afterwards. So perhaps in retrospect the loss was greater, now that I know he was my chance not to end up alone, a childless spinster.’
‘And the first one?’
She nodded, and straightened up in her chair.
‘That was a great loss. It was my first, greatest and only young love. A short and intense romance that lasted the summer and autumn of 1925, but which left its mark on my life for another decade. He was irresistibly handsome and charming, in my eyes and everyone else’s. It was as though everything stopped the moment we met by a cafe table, one day when I was staying with a friend in Bergen. It would be safe to say that I did not see very much of my friend for the rest of the summer holiday, but all the more of him.’
A smile slid over Magdalena Schelderup’s face, but soon froze to a bitter grimace.
