Frozen Music (10 page)

‘I go with the flow,' Arabella said, turning off the video. It was Friday evening and we had just finished watching
Casablanca
.

‘You can afford to. Your flow goes in one direction. You've got serenity. You're at peace with yourself and the world. I'm not serene, I'm not at peace. It's as if I've got a whole courtroom in my head, judge and jury appraising my mind, judging and evaluating every thought: the bad, light-fingered thoughts that barge through the walls of decency with crowbars. Indecent ones. Cowardly ones that turn the other way, the lot. I tell you, I get really tired of it sometimes.'

‘I'm not surprised you've always got a headache,' Arabella said. She picked up one of my little wooden animals, a cicada, from the coffee table. ‘Pretty.' She turned it round in her small, strong hands. ‘Feels nice.'

I nodded. ‘That's down to hours of sanding.' I had taken up wood-carving the summer after I left university. I'd been in the States teaching English to underprivileged Spanish kids and one of the boys carved. Apparently he had taken a lot of persuading to stop carving people's chests and take up carving wood, but once he'd made the transition he never looked back. (There was that time with the parole officer, but it was a one-off so everyone said.) Anyway, he was a wonderful teacher and at the end of my time there I was quite good. I liked working with my hands; it gave me a measure of peace. Right now I was working on an ark.

‘Although I can't remember any cicadas on the ark,' Arabella said.

‘Someone simply forgot to mention them. But they were there. I'm doing the animals alphabetically. So far I've got Anteater, Bee, Cicada…'

‘Do insects count as animals?'

I nodded. ‘Sure they do, just as much as Mr and Mrs Noah. Anyway,
then there's Dolphin and Elephant…' I brought the rest out from a small wooden box and lined them up in front of her on the table. ‘And right now I'm working on Giraffe.'

‘I'm on G too,' Arabella said. ‘George. He's so cute. And he's got a really nice friend, Holden, I meant to tell you about him for ages. He's half American and a barrister, so you'd have a lot to talk about, what with you having worked over there and almost married someone who did law.'

Two days later I was off to dinner at Arabella's flat in Notting Hill. She had only recently moved in and there were still packing cases by the window at the far end of the living-room.

‘You have no idea, have you, Esther.' Arabella tucked her arm under mine. ‘That's not a packing case, it's my new dining-table. A friend of mine, Boris – he's to die for, by the way – is a cabinet-maker. This is one of his pieces.'

‘You're quite sure that isn't what the actual table came in?' I asked. Arabella rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘Only checking,' I said hastily.

Holden turned out to be a large, ruggedly handsome man of about thirty, with the kind of look about him some American men have, of making you feel he loved his mother. ‘So what do you do?' he asked me as we sank down on to low chairs round the table I still suspected of being a packing case. ‘If that's not a boring question.'

‘It isn't to me,' I answered politely. ‘How could I possibly think that anything which gives me an opportunity to talk about myself was boring?' I went on to tell him about my work on
Chic and Cheek
.

‘Sounds like a porn mag,' George, Arabella's alphabet boyfriend, said.

‘Well it isn't.' I looked at him, irritated. ‘It's a magazine for “The Woman of Today”.'

‘Same thing,' George said, making me wish that Arabella would hurry up and move on to H. Holden maybe? Holden, in the meantime, was looking interested in the way people did when they didn't know what the hell was going on. ‘At the moment I'm assistant to the features editor. I look out for stories that would make good features
and do the preliminary research, that kind of thing. But eventually I want to do my own features. I love finding out what makes people tick, seeing inside their heads.' Warming to my subject I went on, ‘Give me a really interesting internal landscape to delve into and I'll be happier than a honeymooner at Niagara Falls.'

‘Esther also spends her Christmas holidays serving food to the homeless,' Arabella interjected, as if she was trying to advertise me and I glared at her, embarrassed. ‘In fact,' Arabella went on, undaunted, ‘the only thing stopping Esther from being a modern-day saint is a bad temper and a slight tendency towards sin.'

Holden's handsome face, square-jawed and tanned, took on a keen, focused expression. It was hard to tell whether it was the word ‘saint' or the word ‘sin' that caused it, but the world being what it is, I could guess. I longed to tell him I was celibate as well, but that would be a lie and I tried not to lie.

‘No one could accuse you of being a saint, could they, my darling,' George cooed at Arabella, taking her hand across the table. He looked as if he wanted to eat her then and there, and who could blame him? We were all starving as Arabella was a shocking cook at the best of times and tonight she had surpassed herself with a bouillabaisse, which proved beyond all doubt that fish didn't keep well.

Holden walked me home. ‘I won't ask you in,' I said as we reached the flat, ‘because…'

‘… because you're tired,' Holden filled in with a little smile, as he raised his hand and touched my chin with the tip of his middle finger.

‘Because I'm all talked out for one evening and I don't know you well enough to sleep with you,' I corrected him. He left pretty quickly after that.

‘So what was Arabella's place like?' It was Saturday and Audrey had popped in on her way from buying silk flowers from a small shop on the edge of Parsons Green. (‘The secret is to mix them with real ones, darling.')

‘Arabella's new flat,' I said vaguely. ‘Oh, it's nice. I didn't like her dining-room table, but otherwise it's really nice.'

‘Bad taste runs in that family.' Audrey sniffed. ‘Arabella's mother completely ruined that beautiful mews house she got in the divorce settlement.'

‘Big windows,' I said, trying to be helpful. But try as I might, all I could see were pictures of Arabella's mind, all cosy and rosy and rounded, with comfortable thoughts floating gently around against a baby-blue background. ‘Really nice.'

‘Nice. That word says nothing.'

People always said that, but I didn't agree. Nice meant what it said: pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory, kind, good-natured. Now what was wrong with that?

I was working late one evening, finishing off some research on a new American woman novelist, when the wail of a siren interrupted my thoughts. As I looked out of the basement window an ambulance blasted into the narrow street, screeching to a halt outside the house. I rushed to the door to see the men hurry inside the Bodkins' door. Within moments they were back out on the street, their stretcher weighed down by the elderly frame of Mr Bodkin. Mrs Bodkin stood on her front-door step, frozen, while her husband was being loaded aboard. As the last of Mr Bodkin disappeared she seemed to snap into life and, walking towards the ambulance, she was helped inside. I turned back from the window, tears in my eyes. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, I wailed to myself. I prayed he'd be all right. They were such a sweet old couple. Jim and Elsa Bodkin, forty-three years together in that same house. Jim and Elsa Bodkin, inseparable, wandering down the road to Safeway, hand in hand, gardening, feeding the birds, taking a stroll in the spring sunshine.

The next day I heard from another neighbour that Jim Bodkin had died. I knew that the Bodkins had no immediate family and that most of their friends had died or moved from the area, so later that day I rang Elsa's doorbell to ask if she might need some company. She opened the door wearing a bright blue jogging suit with pink socks and brilliant white trainers, very different from her normal tweed skirt and cardigan. ‘Oh no, dear,' she said. ‘Don't you worry about me.
I quite like my own company.' And that was that, she practically pushed me out of the door, closing it quickly as if she was afraid I might force my way in with tea and sympathy. I still kept an eye out for Elsa; grief could do strange things to people's minds, but apart from her clothes, one brightly coloured jogging suit after the other, she seemed fine as she pottered down the road to Safeway or worked in the garden. She was mostly indoors, though. Then the music started. Always opera, always loud. It began to get on my nerves as I came back from work or sat reading on a Sunday afternoon. When she started playing it in the middle of the night I had had enough. The next morning I rang her doorbell. ‘I'm all right, dear,' Elsa said impatiently, barely visible through the crack in the door. ‘But thank you for asking.'

‘I've come about the music,' I said, wedging my shoulder against the door. ‘I don't suppose you could keep it down just a little.' Elsa pulled it wide open. Today she was wearing pea-green. I hadn't seen a pea-green sweat-suit before. ‘Goodness gracious, have I been disturbing you?' she enquired. I admitted that actually she had. ‘Jim never cared for opera either,' Elsa said, beckoning me inside the narrow hall.

I told her I liked opera very much, but in its place. Then I saw it, the object on the wall above the stairs. Elsa followed my gaze.

‘What do you think?' she asked me.

What did I think about a huge pink plush penis? ‘It's very interesting.'

‘I don't intend to keep it in the hall,' Elsa said. ‘People might think it odd.' She led me into the small front room. In pride of place, on top of the cabinet where before there had been a fish tank, stood a pair of lush cherry-red lips. A pair of soft plush hands were mounted like antlers on the wall above the fireplace and on an opposite wall hung one huge perfect ear. On the hearth, a hollow foot on a hollow leg housed the fire tongs and poker. ‘All my own work,' Elsa stated. ‘I always had a mind to do something artistic, but while Jim was alive there never seemed to be the time. He wasn't what you'd call a difficult man, he just liked things his way. They do, men. Then, when he passed away, I thought, well at least now I can get on with it.'

‘It's an interesting choice of subjects,' I said. We were sitting down and Elsa had made us a pot of tea.

‘Well I've never been one for landscapes myself.' Elsa sipped delicately from her Royal Albert china cup. ‘And maybe it's my eyes, but I've always seen people in bits: a mouth or an ear, a nostril even. I'll be honest with you, if you ask me to describe someone I'd be giving you just one bit.'

My mind went to the large plush penis.

‘Jim and I were very happy together,' Elsa said as if she had been reading my thoughts.

Before I left I asked her if I could do an article on her for the magazine. Elsa and her ‘Plush Pieces' was included in the Christmas issue. The feature made her quite a celebrity. Within days of it appearing it had gained her a spot on breakfast television and an offer of a one-woman show at a well-known gallery. In the new year I had a phone call from Chloe Sidcup, the features editor at the
Chronicle
, inviting me up to her offices for a talk.

‘Don't be fooled by all that “I'm just one of the girls” act,' a colleague at
Chic and Cheek
warned before my interview. ‘She's as tough as they come.'

Chloe Sidcup got up from her desk and put out her small hand to greet me. She was around thirty-five, bottle blonde, red-lipped and dressed in an electric-blue trouser suit with the kind of padded shoulders that made me think she would have to walk sideways to get through the doorway. She looked me up and down. ‘Love the jacket,' she said. ‘Whose is it?'

‘It's mine,' I said, momentarily piqued. To be fair, she was right to ask because it had once belonged to Madox. When he didn't want it any more I had appropriated it, thinking it lent me a kind of Annie Hall chic. Chloe explained that she had meant who was the jacket by. I was about to take it off to check the label for the name of his tailor when Chloe stopped me: ‘Never mind.'

We sat down and I showed her some of my work. We talked about various ideas I had for future pieces and a week later I got a call offering me a job as a feature writer for the
Chronicle
.

I toasted my success with Arabella and Sophie. As I looked across the Carl Larsson room at my friends I felt content with the world, just for once. I had done a good job and I had not had to compromise my principles. I hadn't had to dish the dirt, instead I had brought recognition and a following to someone I respected. It seemed to me then, as I poured us out another glass of champagne, that there was, after all, some order and justice in the world. I raised the glass, my third, to them and said, only half joking, ‘To virtue and its rewards.'

‘To virtue,' Sophie echoed.

‘To rewards,' said Arabella.

Linus was working late at the office. He did most days, and most days he returned to be shouted at by Lotten. Lotten always had supper ready at half past six; she was a very organised woman. Half past six was later than she would have liked to eat, later than anyone else eats on weekdays, she pointed out frequently and with a frown, but on this point Linus had stood firm. He could not leave the office before six. Lotten pointed out that the office closed at five. ‘Everyone else leaves at five or earlier.' Linus tried to explain, without sounding pretentious but simply as the only truth he knew, that he was different from the others. But how was Lotten supposed to understand? ‘You're different, all right,' she said bitterly. ‘You're never home. You walk around with your head in the clouds, half the time you don't seem to hear what I say, or care. You never want to join the others for tennis or an evening out.' ‘The others' being the group of friends of about the same age whom they had mixed with since schooldays.