Frozen Music (41 page)

I pressed my hands against the sides of my head.
Easy does it
, I told myself.
Think cool and calm
. I obviously wasn't hearing properly because I was still panicking.

Decision, indecision, bad decision, where were the rules now? Ivar sobbed. I sat down on the cliff's edge and lowered my legs down towards the ledge. ‘It's all right, I'm coming down. I'll have you safe in no time.' Scrabbling with my heels I tried in vain to find a foothold, but there was nothing. If I jumped I would land right on top of Ivar.
I looked down at the sea. What if I dived in and climbed up? But the cliff was smooth for the last few feet running down to the water and I would have no more chance of scaling it than I would a bare wall.

‘Esther, I feel sick.'

I felt sick too. ‘I should go for help.'

‘Don't go,' Ivar screamed. ‘Don't go, Esther.'

‘What shall I do?' I screamed back. ‘I can't get to you.'

Please God, tell me what to do
.

A gull circled overhead like a vulture, squawking. Ivar wept. I took a deep breath and then I clambered over the edge of the cliff and down towards him. ‘I'm coming,' I said, forcing out the words. ‘I'm on my way.' It was getting dark fast now and I peered down to see where to place my sandal-clad foot. Next thing I knew I was sliding down the cliff, the thorns of a wild rose tearing at my hands and wrists. I scrabbled wildly for something to hang on to, to stop the slide, and got hold of the thin branch of a tiny tree. I dislodged a piece of rock with my foot and moments later there was a piercing scream from Ivar.

‘What happened?'

‘It hurts.' Ivar's voice reached me from below. ‘My head hurts.'

I stayed where I was, unable to proceed downwards. Another false step and next time I might kill him. What to do, oh what to do?

‘I'm feeling dizzy.'

‘It's going to be all right, Ivar. Just stay as you are, absolutely still. No wriggling. If you stay still nothing bad can happen. I'm not leaving you on your own and you are not going to fall. I'll get down to you somehow.'

‘Ivar, Ivar are you all right?' It was Linus and his voice was coming from the path above.

‘Daddy, Daddy I'm here!' Linus had already run back down the path towards the bathing area, then he jumped. He fell down before me like a giant icicle in his shirt and trousers, and hit the water with a splash. ‘Jump, Ivar,' he called as he surfaced. ‘Jump into the water and I'll catch you.'

‘I'm scared.'

‘Don't be. Jump and I'll catch you.'

‘I've hurt my leg and my head hurts too.'

‘Just let yourself drop into the water. Daddy is here.' There was a silence, then a splash as Ivar rolled like a large caterpillar into the sea. From my vantage point, clinging on to the tiny tree, my feet steadied against a narrow ledge, I watched as Linus swam over to the steps, holding Ivar in a lifeguard's grip. He climbed the steps, Ivar safe in his arms, and at last I dared open my mouth to call for help. But nothing happened. I tried again and all that came out was a small croak as I watched them disappear into the distance. By the time I managed a good loud ‘Help!' they were gone. I stayed where I was, clinging on. I didn't have a lot of choice.

‘Ivar! Yohoo, Ivar!' It was Ulla's voice reaching out to me in the darkness.

‘I'm over here,' I called.

‘Who's that?' It was Gerald.

‘It's me, Esther. Ivar's all right. He's with Linus.'

‘So what are you still doing out here?' Ulla wanted to know.

‘I'm stuck.'

‘Where?'

‘Cliff.'

Two faces, lined and pale in the sparse moonlight, peered over the cliff's edge some feet away. ‘Over here,' I called again. The two heads disappeared and reappeared, huffing and puffing, muttering to one another in Swedish.

‘Esther, what are you doing down there?' Ulla asked again.

Before I had the chance to answer something witty, like
Just hanging around
, Gerald had said, ‘Don't ask such damn stupid questions, woman.' He pronounced it ‘voman', Swedish style. ‘I shall get a rope.'

‘And what will you do with the rope?' Ulla asked. ‘You haven't got the strength.'

‘Then I shall get help.'

‘I think Ivar will have told Linus that I'm here by now,' I said. ‘Ivar fell, you see, and I found him, literally clinging on to the rocks and…' I paused. I could feel their anticipation in the air. What did the clever girl do?

‘And I, I… Linus dived into the sea and swam round to just below where Ivar was, then he got Ivar to jump in too. He caught him and swam round to the steps and that was it. They should be home by now.'

‘And Ivar is all right?' Ulla asked.

‘I think he hurt his leg in the fall and a small rock fell on his head, that was my fault, I'm afraid, and of course he's had a shock, but I think he's fine otherwise.'

‘So you jump too,' Ulla said. ‘And then you swim round to the steps.'

Now why hadn't I thought of that? I was simply no good in a crisis, that's why. ‘OK,' I said, getting ready to slip into the water. From where I was, it looked awfully far down. Then Gerald shouted at me to stop.

‘Don't! It's shallow where you are. You'll kill yourself. No, you stay there and I'll get help.'

I clung on to where I was, getting used to the thought that I had been but Gerald's breath away from death. ‘Linus should be on his way,' I said eventually. ‘Ivar will have told him I'm here by now.' I paused. ‘Then again, Ivar might have forgotten to mention it. He's probably in shock, poor little mite.'

‘I'm off,' Gerald said. I heard him stomp away and I was left with Ulla, the summer sprite of ill will.

For a while we said nothing. I was feeling cold and my arms were aching.

Then Ulla's face appeared over the edge of the cliff. ‘You weren't much use then, were you?' For once she didn't sound disapproving, but more like she was making chit-chat to pass the time.

‘No,' I said. There was another pause.

‘Still, I suppose you did your best.'

‘I tried to. I'd like to think that me being here prevented him from panicking and falling further. And I did tell Olivia where to look for Ivar.'

‘Astrid wasn't very practical, either,' Ulla went on. ‘But you wouldn't expect her to be.
She
was an artist.'

It was obvious that I had no such excuse, but I tried. ‘I write short stories, occasionally. And some people would call journalism an art form.'

‘Really?'

I twisted a little to one side, making myself more comfortable. ‘Why
did
she kill herself?'

There was a pause, which Ulla filled with sighs, before saying, ‘I don't think now is the time to talk about it; you're hanging from a cliff.'

‘I'm not really hanging, more perching. It would take my mind off it.'

There was another pause, then Ulla asked, perfectly politely for her, ‘Are you mad?'

I told her that I wasn't. Not really. Disturbed, maybe, I mean who wasn't these days? But mad, no, I didn't think so. ‘I'm just really curious. I want to know. I hate not knowing. It's by way of being a compulsion. But I'm being rude. I should respect your wish not to talk about it.' I looked up. The clouds had cleared and there were stars everywhere, little holes of light as if a thousand moths had eaten away at the fabric of the sky. I could smell the sea. No wonder Astrid had loved this island and her home on it. What had made her leave it all behind? And what about her child? How could she have done it, abandoned him so completely?

Ulla's head appeared again, gargoyle-like in the moonlight. ‘We all failed her. None of us understood.'

In the silence that followed I tried to imagine her, Astrid of the full-blown, heavy-scented roses, Bertil's young bride, Linus's mother.

‘She was a singer, you know that. They say her voice wasn't strong enough ever for her to have made the big league, but what do they know? It takes time for a voice to mature and she had so little time.' Ulla's voice had been brittle, coated in ancient resentments, but now it softened and became dreamy. ‘Her parents died in an aeroplane crash when she was just a baby. The poor little thing grew up being passed from relative to relative like an unwanted parcel. Then my parents took her in and gave her a home. My father and her mother were brother and sister. Of course I was almost grown up by that time. She was happy with us, but her early childhood had left its scars. A feeling of being in the way, of being unwanted. She felt her parents' death as an abandonment. Logic had nothing to do with it. “Why
wasn't I with them?” I remember her saying. “Why did they go off without me?” When it came to love she was like a leaking vessel; she could never have enough. I think she thought that having a home and a family of her own would be the solution to everything. Bertil offered her all the things she needed so badly. He was older, steady and successful. He was ready to have children and had the money to look after a family. And at first everything was good. Then she met
him
.'

‘Who's him?'

‘We're here.' I heard Bertil's voice. ‘We'll have you up from there in no time.'

‘So then what happened?' I asked Ulla as we trailed behind Bertil and Gerald on the road home.

‘I'm tired,' Ulla snapped. The spell had been broken and she had turned back into a toad. ‘Is it not an English expression
Curiosity killed the cat
?' she said.

‘It was a car,' I said. ‘I have it on good authority that it was a car. Anyway, you've told me so much, you can't just leave it like that, all up in the air.'

‘Oh can't I,' Ulla muttered into the night.

I was in bed, still cold under the thin duvet, when there was a knock on my door. ‘It's me, Linus. Can I come in?'

I sat up in the bed. ‘Yeah, sure.'

There he was. I would like to say that he was framed in the doorway, but he was too big, it was more as if he were prising it apart to get in. ‘You're in bed, I'm sorry.'

I could have pointed out that it was to be expected that I was in bed at one o'clock in the morning, especially after the night I'd had, but I didn't. Instead I sat up straight and pulled the duvet up under my chin. ‘Did Ivar get to sleep all right?'

‘Like a lamb.'

‘I'm afraid I was pretty useless.'

‘You weren't useless at all,' Linus protested. It was the kind of polite throwaway line one reaches for to avoid embarrassment (unless one's Ulla, of course) but coming as it did from Linus, I plucked it out and
held it close, smiling with unexpected happiness. ‘You really mean that? You don't think I was useless?'

‘By what Ivar tells me we've got you to thank that nothing worse happened. I'm the one who's sorry, leaving you quite literally hanging. Ivar was in such a state he didn't think to tell me until he was safely tucked up in bed. I can't believe I didn't hear you calling.'

I shrugged, still smiling idiotically as if the air between us was made up of illegal substances. ‘I was in a bit of a state myself. At first I didn't want to deflect you from getting to Ivar and then, well I kind of lost my voice, temporarily. You know I'm no good in a crisis any more. It's like any action has to be put before a judge and jury residing permanently inside my head, examined and argued over until no reasonable doubt remains.'

‘Can't you just accept that life is a bit of a muddle?'

‘No.' I banged my fist down on the bed, forgetting for a moment that I was in love with him.

Linus, leaning against the doorpost, gazed down on me like some benevolent deity, or so it seemed to me because I had remembered again. ‘Try looking at it this way…'

‘What way?' I interrupted in my eagerness to follow his every word.

‘Think of it like this vast mural covered in so many layers of grime that you can't actually see the picture underneath. But you know it's there, all of it, that's the important thing and that all you can do is to get on and rub away at your own little corner, cleaning it up, making it clear. The thing is, you know the picture is worthwhile, just from the glimpses you get as you work away. The chance of you ever getting to see the whole is infinitesimal, but you know you have to keep going even unto your last gasp of breath.'

I had been busy visualising that darkened mural – I'd always enjoyed listening to stories – but now I had to ask why. ‘Why should you keep trying when you know you'll never get there?'

‘I told you, because otherwise all there is is darkness.'

‘That's a cop-out ending,' I complained. ‘It's like saying, “and the hero and heroine lived happily ever after… unless, of course, you know differently, in which case we'd like to hear from you on e dot lin dot inc dot.”'

‘What do you want me to do? Lie?'

I sat there looking at him and thought I could always say yes, then ask him really quickly if he loved me.

But before I got a chance he said, ‘But all that matters right now is that you're both all right.' All at once there was such unexpected tenderness in his eyes that I had to look away. It was either that or throwing off my duvet and rushing into his arms. That would have been a high-risk strategy at the best of times, but tonight especially, because Kerstin had lent me her warmest pyjamas and they were baby-blue and had the legend
Cute and Pretty
embossed on the chest. Personally I think a black-and-white striped number with Alcatraz printed on it would have been more alluring.

‘But you're tired. I must leave you to get some sleep.'

‘No! I mean, I don't think I could sleep. I'd like the company.'

Linus smiled at me, then perched on the empty bed opposite. He looked funny, sitting there among all that lace. ‘What are you grinning about?' he asked.