Frozen Music (11 page)

At his desk, Linus sighed and began to put away the drawings he was submitting for a new bridge to join the mainland to one of the islands in the archipelago. On his way over to the large computer screen he passed the plans for a small block of flats left out by his colleague Jonas Berg and, looking closer, he saw the beginnings of a solution to the problem of living space which Jonas had complained about earlier. He slipped on to the chair and picked up a pencil.

A while later Linus looked up at the clock on the wall above the office door. It was six forty-five. Home was a good quarter of an hour's
walk from the office so whatever he did now Lotten would be screaming at him as he returned. He might as well stay and finish what he was doing, it was a matter of getting value for money, so to speak. And there were a couple more things he wished to do with the bridge drawings before the ideas went out of his head. This was a commission he really wanted. The west coast and its architecture was in his blood. He loved the brightly coloured extravagant shapes of the buildings. The turrets and wooden carvings that decorated verandas and balconies, and the way it stood in such contrast to the stark beauty of the surrounding landscape of granite rocks and grey-blue sea. He had visited the site over and over so that all he had to do now was to close his eyes and he would see it in his mind, complete with his bridge. A bridge which swept across the water in a perfect white arch, a cloud walk across the sound. In winter it would stand almost deserted, against the unremitting grey of the sea and the sky and the rocks. Then, in summer, when all of Sweden emerged, bright and vibrant, as from a huge sodden winter coat, it would carry hundreds of cars on a daily crossing to the other side.

Reluctantly, at seven o'clock, he got ready to leave. Turning off the computer with one hand, he doodled on his drawing a tightrope dancer in a pink tutu, a green parasol raised in her left hand as she balanced across the line of the handrail along the side of the bridge.

‘What the hell do you think you're playing at?' Lotten stood, eyes blazing, in the hall, her arms crossed over her chest. ‘Dinner is ruined and I was about to phone the hospitals. Why didn't you call to say you were going to be late, huh?'

Linus, taking off his coat, was about to ask why she had not thought to ring the office before she called the hospitals when he remembered that he had switched on to answerphone and not checked his messages. And how could he explain why he had not phoned himself? The truth?
I didn't call because I knew you would make a fuss and I was far too engrossed in my work to want to bother with all that
. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘Tram tracks iced up again.'

‘Very funny. It's May and you don't take the tram anyway.'

Linus bent down to kiss her, but she ducked out of his way and marched into the kitchen where she removed a casserole dish from the oven, noisily scraping its contents into the bin. ‘I could have eaten that,' Linus protested.

‘So eat it, then.' Lotten fished out a spoonful from the bin and chucked it on a plate. ‘Enjoy.' Suddenly her face crumpled and to his horror she burst into tears. ‘I'm two weeks overdue,' she sobbed, her slanted coldwater-blue eyes brimming as she rubbed at her sharp little nose. ‘I'm never late, never.'

Linus stared at her. ‘I think I'm pregnant, you retard. I'm pregnant with your child and look at you!' Now she stopped crying and began laughing hysterically instead. ‘Just look at you, you great big lumbering…' She broke off, choking, and sank into a chair. Linus knelt by her side and took her hand, patting it clumsily. She did not withdraw it and after a while her sobbing stopped. ‘We're going to have a baby,' she whispered. Linus kept on patting her hand until she straightened up, saying in her normal voice, ‘Well, aren't you pleased?'

Linus got to his feet, then sat back down on the chair next to her. ‘I'm overwhelmed,' he said finally. ‘I don't quite know what to say.'

‘But are you pleased?' There was a sharp note to Lotten's voice.

Linus wished he were not so slow. His thoughts were anything but, racing through his brain, darting hither and thither, but it was precisely because of that that he needed time. Time to weed out the true and real from the bluster. Linus was on a quest for the right word, the sincere reaction, the truest feeling. But time was something Lotten was not prepared to give him. She, like everybody else, seemed to want instant feeling, immediate reaction. He did his best to oblige. ‘Of course I'm pleased. It's wonderful news. I'm thrilled.'

This time Lotten did not pursue the subject. All at once she seemed to have lost interest in him as she sat picking away at the congealing food, chewing the cold mushrooms and carrots and pulses, a far-away look in her eyes. Linus was left to try to work out what he really felt about the possibility of a new life, his and Lotten's child, growing inside her. Put like that, it scared him. The thought of a foreign body making itself at home inside that of his wife. How must that feel, to be two
people all of a sudden? And one of them a stranger. And what does he say when he sees his pregnant wife come towards him? There go my wife and child, hello you two. But no one else seemed to see it that way. The convention was to ignore the person within the person until it was on the other side. Lotten pushed the plate closer towards him. ‘Have some.' Obediently he picked up the fork. Was he, he wondered, at that precise moment having dinner with one or with two people?

‘Do you love me?' Lotten asked suddenly.

‘Of course I love you,' he said.

‘You never say so any more.'

‘I don't think about it very much, that's all.' He was immediately aware that he had said the wrong thing, again. Furious with himself he watched Lotten's face harden into that familiar air of dissatisfaction: small mouth pursed, eyes narrowed.

‘What I meant to say was that loving you is so much part of my life that I don't have to give it much thought, I just take it for granted and I suppose I expect you to do so as well.' His voice trailed off as he met his wife's stony glance.

‘Yes, you do take it for granted. You take me for granted and our marriage for granted and I'm fed up with it, do you hear?' Her voice rose dangerously. Linus moved closer to her and put his long arm round her shoulders. He felt desperate. It was always the same; she wanted him to express his feelings, but when he did, something always went wrong. He knew what he wanted to say, in his mind he did, but before Lotten's clear-eyed gaze the words seemed to slip off in all the wrong directions like the legs of a calf on an icy road. Then she'd challenge him and he was lost, no match for his wife's verbal dexterity.

‘You know that's not what I mean,' he tried once more. ‘It's not taking for granted in the way you seem to think, more like, well the way you take the pleasure of the feel of your favourite pencil for granted, or your favourite sweater, the one you can't do without,' he added hastily, but he knew even before she tipped the plate with the remaining casserole over his lap that as usual he had failed to explain himself.

His plans for the bridge were rejected as too costly, but instead of handing the commission to one of the other firms of architects, the council asked if he could modify his proposal. His boss, Lennart Karlsson, sighed and shook his head. ‘You do this every time. Why? Why do you submit something you must know will be deemed unsuitable? You do it over and over and then, when you have to, you go back and redesign, effortlessly it seems to me, producing something to everybody's satisfaction.'

‘Not to mine,' Linus said tiredly. ‘Never to mine, not those second compromise drawings.' He looked up at Lennart. ‘Those first drawings, they are from the soul of an architect. The second ones, well, they come from the mind of an engineer.'

‘I understand about being true to one's vision.' Lennart looked up with a small smile. ‘Don't think I don't. We've all been there, more times than we care to think about. But things have changed. You know that. The architect has had to step into the background as rational architecture and industry take over the building process. We are co-ordinators, technicians. We have to learn to leave behind the creative side of our work for most of our working lives. It's the way things are, Linus.'

Linus had stood hunched over his desk but now he straightened up and looked Lennart in the eyes. ‘Not for me, they aren't.'

Lennart put his hand on the younger man's shoulder. ‘Be content, Linus. You've already achieved more in your short career than many in the profession do during a lifetime of work. Take my advice and quit the tortured-genius routine.'

‘How can I? I detest seeing my work, my vision, turned into a crude caricature of its original self. If you think getting prizes for some of those caricatures makes it any easier, think again.'

By the time the revised drawings for the bridge between the mainland and the small island off the west coast were being turned into reality, Lotten was nearing the end of her pregnancy.

‘Not long to go now,' Bertil said during lunch with his son in a small restaurant equidistant from both their offices. He raised his
glass of light beer and he was actually smiling, not that thin, unpractised twitch he usually reserved for Linus, but a broad grin. ‘Olivia is getting positively clucky. I even caught her pressing her nose against the window of Erik & Anna, her mouth watering at the sight of all those baby clothes.'

‘Lotten wants everything to be able to be tumble-dried,' Linus said tiredly. ‘I wanted to buy this gorgeous little shirt the other day, but she said absolutely not. It needed ironing too.'

‘And how is Lotten?'

Linus thought of his wife spending her nights seated upright in bed to lessen the effect of heartburn. He thought of her distended stomach that looked as if at any moment it would split open like an overripe tomato and of her poor swollen legs threaded with thick ropes of blue veins. ‘She says she's fine, but I can't see how she can be. She looks so terribly uncomfortable. But she says that everyone at the clinic has much the same problems. God, women are amazing, aren't they? Then again, if they hadn't been I don't suppose they'd have been picked for that particular job.'

‘If she says she's fine that probably means she is.' Bertil looked hard at his son. ‘You look pretty done in yourself actually.'

Linus thought of the endless sleepless hours of the early mornings, lying twisting and turning next to Lotten. Usually she told him to get up and do something useful if he couldn't sleep anyway. ‘The baby's room still isn't ready,' she complained, but he was too exhausted to move. The night before he had woken at four. Lotten was snoring gently beside him, comfortable for once. Outside a man was revving his bike, on and on went the shrill engine noise through the dark winter morning. He lay there, his teeth on edge as the sound stopped for a moment only to start again… and stop, and start again. He could always get up and close the window. It was triple-glazed so few sounds penetrated, but he seemed unable to lift his legs over the side of the bed and on to the floor. The noise had stopped, it had been quiet for a good ten minutes now. Linus felt himself relax as the tension left his body. The bed was soft, moulded to his shape. He floated off to sleep.

Wroom wroom wroom! The motorcycle engine started up again and before he knew it he was lying there in the dark, weeping, for what, he did not quite know.

Two days later Lotten gave birth to a son, Ivar. Linus was at the birth. He had asked Lotten right at the beginning of the pregnancy if she would not prefer some privacy; he knew he would have. She had refused to speak to him for almost a week after that. When she did finally address him it was to ask in a small tight voice if he felt that childbirth was something disgusting, something to be ashamed of, something best kept to oneself? And Linus had known that this was not the time to discuss the mass of conflicting emotions he felt on the subject. Instead he assured her that he would be there. When the time came, he was in the middle of a meeting with the town council on the future of a large development on the western side of town. He had been called in as an expert adviser and was due to make his presentation as soon as the quick coffee break was over. He looked at the secretary who had come into the room with the message that his wife had gone to the hospital, then at the file in front of him. With a small sigh he rose to his feet and made his excuses.

‘I had to force him to be with me at the birth,' Lotten grunted to the midwife between contractions. The midwife glanced at Linus as if he had just tucked into a meal of fluffy puppy dogs. Every time he tried to sneak up to stand by Lotten's shoulders, the midwife shooed him down towards her feet. ‘Daddy doesn't want to miss anything now, does he?' she hissed threateningly.

Daddy jolly well did, Linus thought as, with a concerned look at Lotten's red face, clenched in pain and concentration, he shuffled off to the foot of the bed.

‘Now, Daddy, you hold Mummy's leg.'

Then Ivar was born and Linus fell in love.

You hear people say sadly of someone, ‘He left before I had a chance to say goodbye.' It seemed to me that Madox left before I had a chance to say hello. I stood in the drawing-room of my parents' house, reading the note from him that my mother had just passed me. It was addressed to
My Dear Audrey. Maybe I should have done as the Florida OAP who when asked about the future by his elderly mistress, croaked, ‘We'll have to wait until the children are dead,' but the problem with that is that in the scheme of things so would I be. I have set up generous monthly standing orders for you and the house has been transferred into your name. Tell Esther I love her
.

I realised that I never really knew him. When I had been a child he hadn't had the time or the inclination to get to know
me
and as I grew up and he grew older, it was
I
who ran out of time, and interest too. I had got used to doing without him.