Ellen

Ellen, the elder of Trond Sander’s two daughters, arrives unexpectedly at her father’s remote home after months without seeing him and a longer period without speaking. Her visit makes the cost of his withdrawal visible: she has had to search for his address, while he admits he had scarcely thought about her. At the same time, her persistence, direct questions, and easy physical affection reopen a relationship neither can treat as simply settled or abandoned.

Identity and Distance

Ellen is thirty-nine at the time of the visit, by her father’s calculation, and he considers her attractive. He recognizes her partly by a small, habitual gesture: she holds a cigarette at arm’s length from her body, as if it belonged to someone else or she would rather disown it. The recognition is immediate even though their contact has been so sparse that he has not seen her for at least six months and has not spoken with her since he moved—or, as he corrects himself, well before the move.

The distance is not only geographical. Trond acknowledges that he has given little thought to Ellen or her sister, absorbed by everything else in his life. His account of his earlier absences makes that admission more consequential. When he travelled for much of the year, the girls seemed to have grown each time he returned; he remembers them sitting side by side on the sofa, shy and expectant, watching the door. He recalls feeling confused and sometimes uneasy at the sight, but the memory also shows how often the daughters waited for a father who was away. Later, when Ellen describes fears she had never shared with him, he recognizes the reason: he was not there when she needed someone to talk to.

The Visit to the Forest Home

Ellen has gone to considerable effort to find him. For weeks she has contacted town councils over a wide area—eighty miles and beyond—trying to learn where he lives, because he has no telephone. She sets out around seven after sleeping badly, having taken a day off in advance, and reaches his home in roughly an hour. Her white Mitsubishi is still running when she waits in the yard; Trond, returning from a walk in the snow, has not heard her arrive. He first notices that something about her figure is familiar, then sees Lyra hurry to her. Ellen is fond of dogs, and Lyra trusts her at once. Trond can only vaguely recall that Ellen had a brown dog when he last visited her, another measure of how little he knows about her recent life.

The greeting moves quickly from guarded recognition to embrace. Ellen’s half-smile fades; after Trond explains that he had been in the woods, she stubs out her cigarette and puts her arms around his neck. She holds him tightly and tells him how good it is to see him. Her affection is accompanied by anger: she thumps his back for having disappeared so completely that finding him required weeks of inquiries. The embrace does not erase the grievance; the two arrive together, intimacy and reproach in the same gesture.

Trond invites her inside for coffee and something to eat, explaining that his legs are giving out after the snowy walk. Ellen has skipped breakfast to make the drive. In the house she asks about his life there, and he describes carpentry, chopping wood, long walks with Lyra, and practical arrangements for clearing snow. He also tells her about Lars, a neighbor with whom he can cooperate, and his reading, especially Dickens. The conversation brings his new routine into view, but her question about how he is really doing makes clear that a catalogue of daily tasks may not answer what she came to ask.

What Ellen Asks Her Father to Face

Ellen’s concern is expressed as interrogation as much as tenderness. She asks how he really is, and Trond senses that she is adopting a role while trying to get past his reassuring account of himself. Later, when a household mishap leaves milk on the table and Trond mentions that he has no washing machine, she turns her back and asks whether he would rather she had not come. She wonders aloud whether his move was intended to secure peace and whether her arrival has disturbed the solitude he wanted. The question gives Trond time to recognize the possibility that his withdrawal might exclude her, not merely protect him.

His answer is that he changed his life because he had to; he could not continue as he had without things going badly. That explanation does not amount to saying that he wanted Ellen gone. Still, it leaves the underlying tension intact: the forest home is a necessary refuge for him, while its distance and lack of a telephone have made contact difficult for his daughter. Ellen asks him to get a telephone. He promises to think about it, an uncertain but concrete response to her effort to reach him.

The visit also opens a more inward conversation through David Copperfield. Ellen recalls being frightened by the novel’s opening suggestion that someone might not be the leading character in their own life. She imagined a ghostlike existence in which she had fallen out of her place and could only watch someone else occupy it. Trond is startled that she had carried this fear without telling him. Her confession meets a private anxiety of his own: he too has returned to those opening lines, reading on in fear until the book’s events fall into place. In real life, he admits to himself, that reassurance is less available. He has not had the courage to ask Lars whether Lars took a place that should have been his or lived years that belonged to him. Ellen’s account therefore links her sense of being displaced from her own life to her father’s unresolved questions about his past, without making the two experiences identical.

Departure and Lasting Significance

Ellen stays for several hours. She walks with Lyra by her own choice while Trond rests for half an hour, and by the time she gets into her car it is growing dark. The house and yard feel different to him after her presence. Before leaving, she tells him that she now knows where he lives. Trond says he is glad; she waves briefly, closes the car door, and rolls down the slope. Once she has gone, the kitchen feels somewhat empty, and the dark window gives him only his own reflection.

The visit establishes contact without resolving the distance that made it necessary. Ellen has found her father, seen the place he chose, and asked whether that choice leaves room for her. Trond has welcomed her, listened to what she had never told him, and promised to consider getting a telephone, but he does not pretend that his life in the forest can simply be undone. Looking back, he describes the visit as part of a past that now feels accessible rather than foreign: memory can be entered deliberately, though its scenes are inseparable from what came after. Ellen’s arrival belongs to that altered relation to the past. She brings his present family life into the house for a few hours, then leaves him alone there again, with the knowledge that she knows where to find him.