Frozen Music (24 page)

‘Indian or…'

‘I don't know,' I snapped. ‘But I really do wish you'd all stop asking me these things. Indian or China? Condom or plain? Train or plane? Black or white? Interfere, don't interfere? Do the right thing and get a kick in the teeth. Do the wrong thing and get a kick in the teeth. What do I know? Could you please get it into your head that
I Don't Know
!'

‘I'm sorry if I upset madam, but there is no need for madam to shout.'

Was madam shouting? Apparently. Now that kind of thing can't be allowed to go on. But what to do about it? I lowered my voice to a polite level and said, ‘Now would you please just bugger off and leave me in peace.'

‘I'd rather madam didn't use language like that.' The young waitress had metamorphosed into an officious young man with a moustache. It was a real skill they possessed, these restaurant managers; disappearing and reappearing with such immaculate timing. Never there when you wanted them, always there when you did not. ‘Our customers don't like it.'

What was that old joke?
Mother wouldn't like it. That's all right, mother ain't gonna get it.

‘And I don't think it's a laughing matter.'

Who was laughing? Whoops, I was.

‘You're not feeling well. Why don't you let me help you to the door. A nice little lie-down in the comfort of your own home would do the trick I shouldn't wonder. Shall I call you a cab?'

I was bustled through the door of the café and out into the
street – where was that cab? – and I began the walk home, slowly. ‘Tread softly,' I heard a voice in my head. ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.' So I trod very softly, all the way back to the house, where I was met by Angus and Posy. Angus was livid and Posy just looked pained in a wilting-flower kind of way.

‘Where the hell have you been?' Angus grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me inside before I had even had time to wipe my feet. ‘Do you know what time it is?' He sounded like a wrathful father, but he looked genuinely frightened.

‘We've been really worried,' Posy chimed in.

‘What time is it?' I asked, taking my coat off. Looking at my watch I answered myself, it was half past seven.

‘We should be at the theatre by now,' Angus said. ‘We'd agreed I was to pick you up here at half past six. Where have you been?'

I shrugged my shoulders like a child. ‘Nowhere.'

‘Oh, that's great. You waste tickets to the hottest show in town and you worry us half to death and that's all you have to say.'

I walked into the kitchen and poured myself some water from the tap. Angus and Posy followed me in and Posy put the kettle on. She looked beautiful in her long brown cotton trimmed with white lace and her large green eyes were full of concern as they fixed on me. I was sweating and I pushed my damp hair away from my forehead. ‘I'm sorry,' I said, looking at them both, brother and sister, my lover and my friend. ‘I think I'm going mad.'

For once in my life everyone seemed to see things my way. No one disagreed with me.

Chloe: ‘I thought something odd was happening.'

Mary: ‘Anyone so completely lacking in romantic sentiment must have serious problems with herself.'

Posy: ‘She's a tortured soul.'

Angus: ‘She really has been rather odd lately.'

Audrey: ‘Esther seems perfectly normal to me.'

I thought that the most damning statement of all.

My GP gave me a certificate to enable me to draw sickness benefit and he also suggested I saw a therapist.

‘I wanted to be a psychiatrist once,' I said conversationally. The therapist, whose name was Anthony Peel, looked me straight in the eyes as we sat facing each other. He said nothing for a long time. At first I stared back, then I felt ill at ease and glanced over his left shoulder. When I got bored with that view, and that was pretty soon since there was nothing to see but an insipid watercolour of a beach, I looked over his right. I wasn't one of those people who can't stand a silence. I liked them, in fact. They were either restful or embarrassing and either would do me. But this was different. I was paying this man – and very expensive he was too, at fifty pounds an hour – to sort me out. This silence did nothing other than bore me, apart, of course, from costing me money.

‘Decisions have begun to worry you to the point of paralysis,' he said finally. ‘You are a doubter. This led to a nervous breakdown in a café the other night.' Well, full marks to him for reading the letter my GP had sent him.

A flicker of a smile passed across his long face. ‘It's perfectly normal for you to feel hostile towards me initially.' Now that was perceptive. ‘But that hostility will disappear as you gain confidence in your therapist.'

Wanna bet? Then I smiled at him. It was intended to be a nice smile because it had occurred to me, suddenly, that everyone was a smart aleck with their shrink and that it wasn't remotely clever or funny, just banal. Again he said nothing for a long while. He obviously counted on no one being able to remain silent for long in the presence of another mortal, be it man, cat or therapist.

Finally, I cracked: ‘I know this isn't an original thought, but it's struck me that my breakdown, although I don't think it was as bad as that… no? Yes? Well. Anyway, that it was more a result of my seeing the world and my place in it for what it was, rather than any illness. But as I said, that's probably what all your loonies say. The mad are the only sane people, that kind of thing.'

Sitting back in his chair, Anthony Peel said, ‘We prefer not to use terms like “loonies” and “mad”.'

‘Right,' I said. ‘Well, maybe I've just gained a painful degree of
insight into the buggering-up factors of life. Maybe it's God's way of silencing you when you've seen the light, or the dark, rather; make you a gibbering wreck so no one will listen to you. An old trick, no doubt.'

‘Do you believe in God?'

I shook my head. ‘No, not really.'

‘So why did you talk just now about God silencing you?'

‘Well hearing it like that, it does sound a mite pretentious. I mean, why should God bother to silence me? I'm really not that important.'

‘But you just told me you don't believe in God.'

I looked at Anthony Peel. ‘You must have heard of agnostics?' I said. ‘So anyway, what do you think?'

‘It's not for me to tell you what I think. We're here to discover what
you
think.'

‘But I know what I think already.'

‘Ah, but do you?'

There was no answer to that other than, ‘I thought I did.'

Anthony Peel rested his clasped hands on his tummy and raised his chin a little as he spoke. ‘You're not “mad”, to use your phrase. You've had a breakdown precipitated by certain events.' He waved my GP's letter at me and the form they had made me fill out. ‘Events which were aggravated in your mind by a personality and background which already dispose you towards an exaggerated sense of responsibility for people and events. You have to learn to let go. To trust in something other than yourself.'

‘But I, and I alone, am responsible for what I do and say. I mean, if I'm not, what's the point? And', I said, feeling a ten-year-old again, ‘who else is there? For as long as I can remember, I've known, deep inside me, that there's no one you can trust but yourself. Then I found that I can't even trust me. I make one lousy decision after the other, causing mayhem as I go. So here I am, with nothing to hold on to, not even myself. Have you any idea how terrifying that feels?'

‘You tell me.'

I didn't approve of this aspect of the session:
he
gets paid and
I
give the answers. Surely it ought to be,
I
pay and
he
answers? ‘No, no, you tell me,' I insisted.

‘I'm not here to hand out answers.'

‘Well that's exactly what…'

He ignored me. ‘I'm here to help you find them within yourself.' He looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Same time next Thursday?'

It was a fine day; cold, but sunny with a light breeze from the west. The leaves on the trees in the park outside Linus's rented flat were in bud. The long dark Scandinavian winter was on the wane at last. Linus was standing by the window, waiting, and when he spotted Lotten's car he rushed out of the front door and down the two flights of stairs. He had not seen his son for almost three weeks and had missed him badly.

Ivar was wearing blue jeans and a fluffy pink sweater. Apparently he still had problems with his ‘gender identity', as his mother put it.

‘You like pink, darling, do you?' Linus made his voice casual.

‘Not really,' Ivar admitted, putting his hand in his father's. ‘But it's a good colour for little girls.' He sounded matter-of-fact. Linus thought about pointing out to his son that he was a little boy, but Lotten had expressly told him not to broach the subject. ‘It will just confuse him further. It might even make him feel a failure,' she had said. (Lotten had started a course in child therapy and was, by all accounts, doing very well.) So Linus said nothing, but just picked up the child's overnight bag, and hand in hand they walked upstairs to the flat. It was Maundy Thursday and Linus was taking a week off. He and Ivar were going to the island. He turned to his son and grinned. ‘We're going to have a lot of fun.'

‘Are we going right now?'

‘Almost,' Linus said. ‘I'm just waiting for a phone call, a very very important phone call.'

‘What about?'

‘Well, Pappa has designed an incredibly beautiful building for a man in England. The man in England is looking at several different plans made by all these different architects from all over the world, then he'll decide which one he likes best and build it. I'm waiting to see if he's had the wonderfully good taste to pick mine.'

Ivar was looking at his smiling father with a grown-up look of indulgence on his small winter-pale face. He liked it when his father smiled like that. Lately, both his parents had taken to bending down low and looking him in the eyes until he felt embarrassed, and saying, ‘Mamma and Pappa just want you to be happy.' They didn't seem to understand that Ivar wanted
them
to be happy. They weren't very often these days. His mamma cried for no reason at all sometimes, or no reason that she would tell Ivar about, and his pappa seemed to be far away even when he was sitting right next to Ivar and there was a sad look in his eyes even when he laughed. But not now. Ivar's pappa was smiling all the way to the eyes and that made Ivar feel really happy too. ‘Is it a really, really beautiful house?'

‘The most beautiful house in the world.'

‘How beautiful is that?'

‘As beautiful as… as a sunset over the sea.'

‘As beautiful as the Peter Pan grotto at the funfair?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘As beautiful as the girl in
Holiday on Ice
?'

Linus had to think for a moment. ‘There were lots of girls in
Holiday on Ice
.'

Ivar began jumping up and down. ‘You know, the really beautiful one with the blue spangly dress and the hat with fur on.'

‘Oh, just as beautiful,' Linus said, not remembering the girl at all.

‘As beautiful as ice-cream?' Ivar giggled.

Linus put his head to one side and scratched his head. ‘No,' he said finally. ‘Not
that
beautiful.' Then he laughed and Ivar did too.

Suddenly Linus looked serious. ‘You know, Ivar, I really want this to happen. I've dreamt that building, sung it, slept it and eaten it, and I can't believe that it won't be the one they pick. I know I've had problems getting my designs through before… sorry, Ivar, what was that?'

‘I said, why did you eat your design?'

‘I didn't.'

‘You said you did.'

‘I meant it figuratively. And before you ask, figuratively means roughly that I didn't mean what I said, exactly the way I said it.'

‘So why did you say it?'

‘Never mind.' He picked Ivar up in his arms and gave him a noisy kiss on the baby-soft cheek. ‘The point is, Ivar my boy, that your father's design is, if I may say so myself, heaven. It's an opera house, which is a place where people come to listen to other people singing stories. There's a foyer, that's the place where you spend the time before the performance and in the interval, which is built in a semicircle skirting the lake, and the outer wall is all in glass so that you feel as if you're actually walking on the lake itself. That part of the opera house faces west so that in the summer you'll catch the last of the evening sun. There'll be a bridge, a covered bridge, connecting the foyer with the bar and restaurant on a small island in the middle of the lake. When there is no music, when you stand and wait for it all to start, you'll hear water, water from everywhere, but never too loudly. And just as music flows the rooms of my opera house will flow one into the other, over the bridge, through the foyer and finally into the auditorium where the most wonderful music ever written by man is performed.' Linus stopped suddenly, remembering that he was speaking to a six-year-old child.

But Ivar's large blue eyes were fixed on his father's face and he looked as if he was listening intently. ‘Are you an architect?' he asked.

‘Yes, Ivar, that's exactly what I am.'

‘That's what I thought,' the child said. ‘But the other day, when they talked on TV about professions, Mamma said you were a professional bastard.'

‘Ah, well, I expect Mamma was joking.'

Ivar shook his blond head. ‘No, she wasn't.'

‘Anyway, as I said, then you have the auditorium. In that room you have to have all special shapes and materials to help the music to sound its best. And masses and masses of seats for people to sit comfortably, and balconies…' The phone rang. Linus made himself walk up to it slowly. ‘Hello.'