Her little revenge was to seduce Herr Brehme, the young German teacher with whom they were all infatuated. The teachers lived in a building facing the pupils' block and she simply crossed the cobbled square and knocked on the door of his little room. She visited him four times. And four nights she click-clacked her way back across the cobble stones, her heels echoing off the walls of both buildings.
Rumours started up, and she did little or nothing to stop them. When the news broke that Herr Brehme had resigned and hastily taken up a teaching post in Zurich, Ragnhild had beamed a smile of triumph to all the grief-stricken faces of the young girls in her class.
After the final year of school in Switzerland, Ragnhild returned home. Home at last, she thought. But then Johannes's eyes were there again. In the silver fjord, in the shadows of the verdigris forest, behind the shiny black windows of the chapel or in the cars that flashed past, leaving a cloud of dust that made your teeth crunch and was bitter to the taste. When the letter from Chicago arrived, with the offer of a place to study business administration – four years for a BA, five for an MA – she went to Daddy to ask him to transfer the study funds without delay.
It was a relief to go. A relief to be the new Ragnhild once again. She was looking forward to forgetting, but to do that she needed a project, a goal. In Chicago she found that goal. Mads Gilstrup.
She anticipated that it would be simple. After all, she had the theoretical and practical grounding to seduce upper-class boys. And she was good-looking. Johannes and several others had said that. Above all, it was her eyes. She had been blessed with her mother's light blue irises surrounded by unusually white sclera, which science had proven attracted the opposite sex as it signalled robust health and hearty genes. For that reason Ragnhild was seldom seen wearing sunglasses. Unless she had planned the effect it created by taking them off at a particularly favourable moment.
Some said she looked like Nicole Kidman. She understood what they meant. Beautiful in a stiff, severe way. Perhaps that was the reason. The severity. Because when she had tried to engineer some contact with Mads Gilstrup in the corridors or the campus canteen, he had behaved like a frightened wild horse, averted his eyes, tossed his fringe in the air and trotted off to a safe area.
In the end she staked everything on one card.
The evening before one of the many silly annual and, apparently, traditional parties, Ragnhild had given her room-mate money for a new pair of shoes and a hotel room in town and spent three hours in front of the mirror. For once she arrived early at the party. Because she knew Mads Gilstrup went to all parties early in order to pre-empt potential rivals.
He stuttered and stammered, barely daring to look into her eyes – light blue irises and clear sclera notwithstanding – and even less down the plunging neckline she had arranged with such care. She had come to the conclusion – contrary to her previous opinion – that confidence did not necessarily come with money. Later she was to conclude that the reason for Mads's bad self-image lay at the door of his brilliant, demanding, weakness-hating father who was unable to grasp why he had not been granted a son more in his own mould.
But she did not give up and dangled herself like bait in front of Mads Gilstrup. It was so obvious she was making herself accessible that she noticed the girls she called friends, and vice versa, were standing with their heads together in a huddle. When it came down to it, they were all herd animals. Then – after six American lagers and a growing suspicion that Mads Gilstrup was homosexual – the wild horse ventured out into open terrain and two lagers later they left the party.
She let him mount her, but in her best friend's bed. After all, it had cost her an expensive pair of shoes. And when, three minutes later, Ragnhild wiped him off with her room-mate's home-made crocheted bedspread, she knew she had lassoed him. Harness and saddle would follow in good time.
After their studies they travelled home as an engaged couple. Mads Gilstrup to administer his portion of the family fortune in the secure knowledge that he would never have to be tested in any rat race. His job consisted of finding the right advisers.
Ragnhild applied for and got a job with a trust manager, who had never heard of the mediocre university, but had heard of Chicago, and liked what he heard. And saw. He was not so brilliant, but he was demanding and found a soulmate in Ragnhild. Thus, after quite a short spell, she was removed from the intellectually somewhat over-demanding work as a share analyst and put behind a screen and telephone on one of the tables in the 'kitchen', as they called the traders' room. This was where Ragnhild Gilstrup (she had changed her name to Gilstrup as soon as they were engaged because it was 'more practical') came into her own. If it was not enough to advise brokerages' own and, one presumed, professional, investors to buy Opticum, she could purr, flirt, hiss, manipulate, lie and cry. Ragnhild Gilstrup could caress her way up a man's legs – and, if pushed, a woman's – in a way that shifted shares with far greater efficacy than any of her analyses had done. Her greatest quality, however, was her supreme understanding of the most important motivation of the equity market: greed.