Ester–Ida relationship

Ester’s relationship with Ida is marked by a sharp contrast between welcome and pressure. During the early visits after her marriage to Bernard, Ida receives her with elaborate care, yet the visits also bring questions about grandchildren, reminders of Bernard’s former girlfriends, and an unsettled history involving Conrad. Ester first tries to belong in Ida’s home; over time, she withdraws from it, leaving Bernard to visit alone while still anticipating Ida’s criticism.

The monthly visits and their remembered strain

Ida sees Bernard once a month, and when Ester and Bernard were newly married, Ester went with him. She was glad to have been invited back into Ida’s home, but the prospect of seeing her mother-in-law was difficult: Ester could not think of Ida without recalling the scrape of a hairpin against her scalp. The memory accompanies the visits even when Ida’s conduct appears solicitous. Ester carried a small bottle of gin in her handbag and drank from it during stops for petrol and when she went to the bathroom. Her drinking marks the visits as an ordeal she prepared herself to endure, rather than a simple extension of married family life.

At their first visit as a married couple, Ida greeted them brightly and praised the flowers Ester had brought. She displayed them in her best vase, made coffee herself, and declined Ester’s offer to help. In the morning she brought breakfast to the couple in bed, supplied Ester with a magazine while lunch was being prepared, and would not let her wash up. The gestures are concrete acts of care, but they also establish Ida as the person directing the household and deciding what Ester may do there. The welcome is genuine in its form, yet it leaves little room for Ester to participate on her own terms.

Family history and the unspoken place of Conrad

Ester hoped to see Conrad during the visits because he still lived at home, but he repeatedly made himself scarce. Once, in the car on the way to Ida’s, Ester asked Bernard whether he expected his brother to be there. Bernard did not answer at first; the silence stretched through much of the journey. As they approached his mother’s house, he challenged Ester’s interest in Conrad and invoked her decision to marry him. Ester denied having changed her mind, though she privately acknowledged that she sometimes wondered whether she had made a mistake. She did not ask again, and Bernard never brought Conrad up himself.

Ida’s comments later give that silence a history. On one visit, Ester told Bernard that his mother had said at the register office that there had been only one girl he had ever loved. Bernard accepted that this was probably true, then added that Ester had become an exception. Ester also repeated Ida’s suggestion that he had married her partly to take revenge on Conrad for taking that earlier love. Bernard conceded that this may have been partly true at first. When Ester asked who the woman was, he was asleep or pretending to be; the next morning he grew annoyed and would not discuss it. Ida’s account therefore reaches Ester through Bernard’s evasions as well as through Ida herself. The marriage offers no settled explanation of the past: the names and histories surrounding Bernard remain present, but conversation about them closes down.

Questions about children and comparisons with other women

The visits also make Ester’s childlessness a recurring subject of family attention. Over coffee, Ida asked when she could expect grandchildren. Ester replied that they might not have children, although she believed she had already made clear that she did not particularly want them. Ida answered that Bernard did want children, then turned to a recent encounter with Andrea, who had a baby boy. Later she mentioned Susanne, who had asked after Bernard, and Ester wondered whether one of these women was the former love Ida had described to her.

At breakfast on another visit, Ida reported that Therese now had three children, a girl and twin boys, while Ester watched Bernard’s face. Ida also told Ester that she would lose her figure anyway if that was what concerned her. The remarks turn motherhood into both an expectation and a comparison: Ida presents other women’s children as evidence, while treating Ester’s possible reluctance as a concern about appearance. Ester is placed in the position of answering for a future she does not especially desire and observing Bernard for signs of how he receives his mother’s interventions.

On Ester’s last visit with Bernard, Ida introduced Liese at dinner. Liese, a twenty-year-old nursery nurse described as fond of children, brought plates of liver into the room. Ida stressed that Liese was still young and contrasted her age with her own pregnancy with Bernard at twenty. The scene links a particular young woman, her work with children, and Ida’s account of early motherhood. It intensifies the pressure already created by questions about grandchildren without establishing that Ida explicitly proposed a match. For Ester, the dinner belongs to a pattern in which other women and their childbearing are repeatedly brought into the marriage’s domestic space.

Ester’s withdrawal and the visits’ aftermath

Ester and Bernard always argued on the drive back to Hellhaus. Eventually, she suggested that Bernard visit his mother alone. At first she made excuses; after the first couple of times, she stopped giving a reason, and Bernard stopped asking. Her departure from the visits is gradual and largely unspoken: she does not resolve the tensions with Ida or persuade Bernard to address them, but removes herself from the setting where they recur.

Her absence does not end Ida’s influence on the household. Bernard comes home from the monthly visit in a bad mood, with a pile of ironed underpants and paired socks, whether or not Ester has gone with him. Ester imagines Ida criticizing her for being too busy to visit and asking why Bernard did not hire a cheap cleaner to do Ester’s work for a few days. This is Ester’s imagined account of what Ida says, not a reported conversation; its importance lies in how the visits continue inside Ester’s expectations. The clean laundry makes Ida’s care tangible, while the imagined criticism turns that care into a comparison with Ester’s own domestic contribution.

The relationship thus changes less through a direct break than through repeated exposure followed by retreat. Ida’s household offers welcome, practical attention, and family belonging, but it also subjects Ester to questions and comparisons that she cannot comfortably answer. Ester stops attending; Bernard continues going; and the unresolved pressure returns in his mood and in her anticipation of judgment. Their estrangement is lived through silence, omission, and domestic details as much as through anything either woman says openly.