Frozen Music (7 page)

She made him tea. She even brought it to him where he sat, slumped on the sofa. His humiliation was complete when she knelt down in front of him and zipped up his trousers and buckled his belt. ‘There,' she said, giving him a little pat.

He stayed up late that night, drawing. The old cinema down at the bottom of the Avenue was being redeveloped and Linus had some ideas. It happened to be one of his favourite buildings in the town, a near perfect example of Art Nouveau. On his walks Linus had come across a small workshop specialising in fireplaces and mouldings. There was a man there who would be ideal for the intricate work needed to restore the façade.

The next morning he showed Bertil his plans. ‘It's good,' his father said. ‘But I'm afraid you're too late. Even if you had been able to back up the drawings with the proper costings and a structural survey.' He allowed himself a small smile at the absurdity of the thought.

‘What do you mean, too late?'

‘I meant to tell you because I knew you were interested, Stendal & Berglund have got the commission for the new building.'

Linus stared at him. ‘New building? Are you saying that they're tearing the old cinema down?'

Bertil sighed and sat down on the kitchen chair. ‘I know it's a pity and I have been a strong voice against this course of action, but the decision has been made and that part is out of our hands. When we were asked to take on the design of the new building I didn't hesitate to accept. It seemed to me the ideal opportunity to influence matters in a positive way. It's called pragmatism, my boy, and good sense.'

‘It's also called betrayal of ideals,' Linus said in a quiet voice. He looked straight into his father's eyes. ‘I can't believe you're doing this. I'm ashamed.' He turned on his heel and walked off before Bertil got over his surprise at his son's open contempt. Linus shut the front door behind him with deliberate care. He ran down the five flights of stairs
and out on to the street into the pale March sunshine. There was snow still on the ground and overnight the brown slush had frozen in the gutters. He walked on through town, for once not looking up at the buildings, but down at his feet and the frozen ground. He walked faster than usual, he was almost running as if that way he could escape from his anger and disappointment. He had trusted Bertil, looked up to him, held him up as an example to his friends, dreamt of being like him. Now he felt as much contempt for himself and his bad judgement as he did for his father.

When next he looked around him he had reached the main city bus terminal. There were two buses standing there, waiting to go. One, engine already running, was going out to the island. Without thinking further Linus jumped on board. He slouched in his window seat but as the journey progressed, out of the city and on to the open road, he straightened up. He couldn't remember the last time he had been to the island in winter. It was a summer place and it might as well have existed only for those brief months for all he and the other summer residents knew. And yet, there it was, less than a two-hour bus ride away.

He stood on the small ferry, its only passenger, looking across the short stretch of water that separated the island from the peninsula. It was the same and yet different, like the face of an old friend after years of separation. The softness of summer vegetation was gone, leaving the craggy rocks exposed, its every crevice bare. The bright colours were gone too, the blues and greens replaced by grey and straw-yellow, but it was the same old friend and Linus felt his spirits lift.

Up at the house he got the keys from the large flowerpot by the back door. But before letting himself in he walked around the garden slumbering under its winter cover of snow and ice. He stared at the naked branches of the rose bushes his mother had planted all those years ago. It was silly, but somehow he had imagined them still in bloom.

He didn't stay long in the house. In the sitting-room the furniture was covered with white sheets and the wicker chairs on the veranda were lined up away from the large windows. He played a game with
himself, closing his eyes and imagining the sounds and senses of summer, then abruptly opening them again to find the dead of winter in their place. He knew that his mother had died out here one winter day all those years ago.

‘She was ill,' Bertil had said.

‘How, ill?' Linus had wanted to know.

‘Sick. We couldn't help her so she died.'

‘Couldn't the doctors help?'

‘No one could. In the end she had an accident. You mustn't dwell on it, Linus. Life is for the living. Leave the dead alone.'

He couldn't remember if his mother had looked ill the last time he saw her. He couldn't remember what she had looked like at all. His image of her face was formed entirely from photographs and from a hazy memory of fair hair and a fur coat. Once, out here on the island, when he had been left crying from the effort of retrieving his mother's features from the dim depths of his memory, Aunt Ulla had taken him by the shoulders and swung him round to face the mirror in the hallway. ‘Look in there,' she had said, her voice harsh. ‘Look in there and you'll see your mother.' Terrified, he had begun to scream, his eyes clamped shut, his fists hammering at Ulla's side to make her let go. Afterwards, when he had calmed down enough to speak, he had told his father that he thought he was going to see his mother's ghost in the mirror. Only later had he realised his aunt had meant that he was growing up into the image of his mother.

He walked round the island tripping once on the slippery rocks as they froze over, abandoned by the dying rays of the sun.

He did not return to town until well after midnight, exhausted and freezing cold.

I came to Simon and Garfunkel late. I was seventeen, still only five foot five. Still dark-haired and blue-eyed in spite of a brief flirtation with peroxide and a vague plan to try those coloured lenses and make my eyes bright green and far more interesting.

‘Do you like Simon and Garfunkel?' this guy asked. It was a Saturday night and a group of us were at Arabella Felix's house. Mr and Mrs Felix were away.

Did I like Simon and Garfunkel? ‘I haven't given it that much thought,' I answered.

This guy put out his hand and said, ‘I'm Donald. I'm a friend of Arabella's brother. We're both doing law at UCL.'

‘Law's always appealed to me.' I drained my glass of rosé wine and held it out for more.

‘What aspect in particular?' Donald reached for an opened bottle on the coffee table.

‘All of them. Its humanity, mostly.'

‘Humanity? That's not what most people think of when they think of the law.'

‘I can't help that.' I could see he was waiting for an explanation, so I tried one. ‘To me, the law in a free society shows humans at their best. It's not nature's law, or the law of the jungle, but a law that as often as not goes against those things. A law which is there, set up and adhered to, made to protect the individual and society from abuse. The way a court gives everyone a voice. The way self-interest and revenge are rendered powerless.'

Donald looked at me with wide brown eyes and smiled with firm lips, showing large white teeth. ‘You make it sound quite sexy.
Although I'm not so sure that's how it actually works. In fact, it seems to me that it's often misused.'

‘But it mustn't be,' I insisted. ‘If it is, anything can happen and normally that anything happens to the weakest.' I was getting agitated and I could hear it in my voice too. So could Donald because he gave me a quizzical look from where he stood by the stereo. ‘Then we're nothing but animals and then what's the point?'

Donald put on a tape of Simon and Garfunkel, ignoring the groans of the others and pulling me down next to him on the sofa. ‘So what are you going to do after your A levels?' he asked, making it sound as if he wanted to know whether I was going home that night.

‘Would it surprise you if I told you that I was thinking of doing law?' I said. ‘The only problem is, believing in the law doesn't mean I'm sure I want to spend my life practising it. I think I might want to, but I don't
feel
it. Not here.' I put my hand on the place where I supposed my heart was.

I saw Donald a lot after that evening. I kept waiting for the day when I would fall in love with him the way I kept waiting to fall in love with the idea of becoming a lawyer. Both were so right. Maybe it was me who was wrong? There was no point trying to speak to Audrey about it all. I had tried, once.

‘But of course you can't be in love with Donald,' she had said, her little laugh indicating how ridiculous was the very thought. ‘He votes Conservative.'

‘But
you
voted Conservative in the last election,' I said.

Audrey took on a look of infinite patience. ‘I know I did, Esther, but I'm not a young man. I always think there's something rather peculiar about
young
men who vote Tory.'

My friends all thought I was lucky having Donald as a boyfriend. But then I suspect that they would have thought I was lucky to have had Lisa Hicks's spotty brother Seth as a boyfriend.

‘You're really very pretty when you're not scowling,' Arabella had said only the other day. Behind her was a row of nodding heads. ‘But you don't seem to have any idea of how boys like their girls to be. You're so… so argumentative. Aggressive, even. You know when you
argue a point? You just never give up.' She had looked at me with a mixture of reproach and concern in her soft hazel eyes. ‘Boys don't really like that kind of thing.'

‘It's not for them to like,' I said. ‘If I want to argue a point I argue a point.' Behind Arabella the group – Posy, Fee, Lisa and Beth – looked at each other and sighed.

‘There you are,' Arabella had said, sighing with the rest of them. ‘That's just the worst attitude when it comes to boys. You can think like that, but you must never ever show it. Don't you know anything about how to handle a man?'

I told them I had watched my mother handle my father.

But now I had Donald and all my friends were pleased and surprised, in almost equal measure.

That April I turned eighteen and on my birthday Donald asked me to marry him. Shortly afterwards, while I was still on holiday from school, Olivia Stendal came over for her spring visit.

‘What a coincidence, Linus and Esther both getting engaged at the same time, both at an unsuitably early age and both to people of whom we don't approve.' My mother smiled, making out that she was joking, but the smile was brittle as she poured Olivia another glass of Chablis. These days, I thought, as I held out my own glass to be refilled but was ignored, everything about Audrey was brittle: her hair, which seemed finally to have rebelled against years of perming and bleaching and backcombing and lacquering; her voice, pulled thin after years of reaching out to be heard; her laugh, running away from the ever-threatening tears. Audrey herself said it was all due to a decrease in hormones, but personally I put it down more to the constant struggle to keep reality at bay, the strain of stretching truth just that little bit further. She had, in her time, been a painter and a poet, and an interior designer, she had been a garden designer and a student of Post-modernist paintings, but each time the brightly coloured butterfly of success had eluded her. So she had told herself and the rest of the world that she was, at least, the adored wife of a great intellectual. Lately, though, she'd had to resort to statements like
‘Men need time to themselves', as Madox went away for yet another vague-sounding weekend or research trip. ‘Give them a long enough leash and they'll always come running back in the end.' To me it sounded as if she had already half given up.

‘You don't think he might be seeing someone else?' I had asked the other day. It wasn't that I wanted to cause trouble for my father, or that I wished to cause my mother more pain. Far from it. But this was the eighties, a decade for strong women. I wanted to tell my mother that she didn't have to put up with it any more. I couldn't bear to watch as she spent yet another day in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

My engagement to Donald had not helped. Donald had short hair and wore suits. There was also that thing about him being a Young Conservative. And when Audrey flittered around the room wrapped in mental chiffon, engaging him in talk about the latest play or concert or exhibition, he would just smile engagingly at her and explain that he liked art when he had time for it, which sadly wasn't often. He, in turn, tried to speak to her of what he termed Real Life, assuming incorrectly that Audrey would have some idea of what he referred to. Worst of all, to my mother, he was planning to go into… hum, ah, there was no getting away from it… the City. ‘A money man, darling!' Audrey had shuddered – Audrey who loved money and spent more of the stuff in a month than most people got through in a year. But she was born to dissemble. I was sure, for example, that she had convinced herself that there were two completely separate things known as lamb; the white fluffy baa ones that frolicked in the fields as you passed by on the motorway and the garlicky pink-in-the-middle ones that lay very still on your plate.

Olivia had finished her smoked chicken salad and put her fork down. ‘It's their beds; they made them, now they have to lie in them.'

‘But why have they made those beds?' Audrey lamented. ‘There she is, my only child, four A levels, university offers coming out of her ears, the world at her feet, announcing out of the blue that she's got engaged to this… this rather ordinary young man and saying that she would take a course in…' Here Audrey had to pause and refresh herself with a sip of wine, ‘… in typing.' It was all too much, it seemed.
Audrey sank back against her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘It's as if you're deliberately setting out to be ordinary yourself,' she said, turning to me.