Frozen Music (9 page)

‘And the bras. There's nothing wrong with 36D, but with the elastic gone and those cups just sagging at you from the radiator…' Sophie said.

‘The thing is, Beth's back from France and she's dying to move in with us.' Arabella looked pleadingly at me. ‘Just think of having Beth here. It'd be absolutely perfect. Honestly, I don't think I could stand another week with bloody Gillian.' She paused, then said, her high brow furrowed as if she'd just remembered something, ‘Who the hell invited her to share with us in the first place?' We all looked at each other and shook our heads. ‘So how did she end up here?' Arabella insisted.

‘I suppose she just tagged along.' Sophie sounded vague.

‘Well, I vote we tell her to move out at the end of term.'

‘She'll be upset,' I said.

‘Not as upset as we'll all be if she stays. Honestly.' Arabella had a determined look on her soft face. ‘It's for the common good…'

‘… and the will of the majority,' Sophie chipped in.

‘Then I think that's it. Who shall tell Gillian?' Arabella asked.

We all did. Gillian did not protest, which made us feel worse, she just hung her head, her lank hair flopping across her chubby cheeks. When she looked up to say ‘OK' there was a resigned look in her round bovine eyes that made me wince. Why didn't she scream and shout, and tell us we were bastards, instead of getting up from the sofa, pulling her grubby dressing-gown closer round her lumpen body as if for comfort? ‘I'd better get packing, then,' she said.

Why didn't she tell us we had no right to treat her this way, instead of padding off to do as she was bid?

‘There's no hurry,' Sophie called after her.

Still, it has to be said that life in the flat improved no end once she was gone, which didn't stop me from feeling ashamed. The will of the majority it might well have been, but what of poor old Gillian?

Donald told me not to be wet. ‘It's Sophie's flat, isn't it? Or her
dad's, anyway. And you all wanted Gillian out?' I sighed and nodded. ‘Well then? There's nothing more to say.' He stretched out on the sofa and kicked off his shoes. ‘Snap' went one of his red braces. ‘You can always move in with me.' He smiled at me and I smiled back. ‘We make a good team, don't we, Esther, old girl?'

I could smell his feet. I wanted to smile indulgently and think,
Dear, sweet boy, his feet don't half pong
. Something like that. I didn't want to turn my head away in disgust, but I did. ‘Yeah, we make a good team,' I said, forcing myself to smile back.

I got an invitation to Linus Stendal's wedding. It was to be held in Gothenburg on the seventeenth of July. Audrey was fretting. ‘Your father can't get away. Oh darling, you know how I hate travelling on my own. It would be so lovely if you could come. And you'd meet them all at last.'

I would have liked to, but how could I go away in the middle of my finals?

I was told afterwards that it had been a beautiful wedding.

Lotten had refused even to consider getting married on the island. ‘That's
your
place,' she had said to Linus, as if that very fact ruled it out. So they had married in the small stone church on the road to Saro where her parents lived. It was a traditional affair: a late-afternoon service followed by a dinner and dance, white tie and tails, speeches, three hours of them as it turned out, and singing, both in the church and at the dinner.

This is the happiest day of my life
, Linus kept thinking.
This is the beginning of a new life filled with love and contentment
. And there he was now, in the hotel where the wedding feast was going to be held in just a few minutes, waiting for his bride who was in the lavatory.

Uncle Gerald wandered past on his way to the ballroom and gave him a pat on the back. ‘Cheer up, old boy,' he whispered. ‘It can't be that bad.'

Lotten was taking her time in there. He knew he was being silly, but it felt wrong somehow, that she would be going to the bathroom
right then. It was like when he had been little and it was Christmas Eve. He hadn't even liked his father glancing at the papers, let alone making a telephone call or going out for some cigarettes. Those things were in the realm of the everyday and as such had no place at moments of magic. And this was their wedding day. He realised that he had half expected all normal life to cease while it lasted. Still, how could he quarrel with his new wife's need to use the bathroom?

A small girl, not belonging to the wedding party, burst through the double doors that led to the hotel lobby. She was followed by her parents. They played at being annoyed at their child for running off like that, but actually they couldn't help a small proud smile as she stopped to stare at Linus. Taking her finger out of her mouth she said, ‘You look funny.' The parents looked even prouder, smiling at Linus in a way that demanded a smile back. Linus tried to, but he just couldn't. ‘Why do you look funny?' the child wanted to know.

‘Don't annoy the gentleman,' the mother scolded, but her expression said, ‘Come on, admit she's cute.'

A waiter appeared from the ballroom and informed the couple with the child that this was a Private Party. They left, looking disgruntled. At last Lotten, his bride, his wife, appeared from the ladies' room. Linus took a step towards her, hands outstretched and took hers that were cool and a little damp from washing. Together they walked into the ballroom, and a sea of smiling faces and raised champagne flutes.

The outside of my little house in Fulham made me think of lemon meringue pie, bright light yellow with fluffy white mouldings around the door and windows, and a sand-coloured pebble-dash basement. It stood on a tree-lined street of pink blancmanges and blueberry pies and snow-white floating islands. Inside, many of them were camouflaged as country cottages, all pine dressers and cotton sprigs, and in the summer tomato plants grew in terracotta pots in the small gardens. My basement flat pretended to be Swedish, inspired by the Carl Larsson posters that Olivia had given me when I was growing up. I had worked on it, lovingly, doing most of the decorating myself. The walls were painted a pale pink-apricot. White muslin hung like bridal veils across the windows. The sofa was covered in white-and-blue striped cotton and I had bought an old dresser, which I had painted grey-blue and stencilled with dragon-blood red and green flowers. My chairs were painted in the same pale grey-blue.

‘Faux Suedoise,' Audrey called it, until the look became fashionable. Then she said, ‘That child has got her eye from me.' And my other eye? I wanted to ask.

‘But I still think you need some colour,' she said today as she sat down. Then she added, ‘But thank God you took my advice about Donald,' as if this somehow made up for my lack of flair with fabrics.

And what was this about
her
advice? Who was it, after I cancelled the wedding, who had to be carted off to Grayshott Hall for a week of complete mental rest? Anyway, why go on about it still? I glared at my mother who reclined on the blue-and-white sofa, one slender, slightly saggy arm resting gracefully against the back. Her pale-auburn hair fell in loose waves to her shoulders the way it always had,
but the roots showed grey and her complexion had the texture of tissue paper that had been crumpled and carefully smoothed out again. I felt a pang of pity for her; she was too easy a target, and I stopped glaring and smiled at her instead.

On a Tuesday almost five years before I had woken up, asking myself, ‘What is love?' It wasn't an original question, but it was, nevertheless, a disconcerting one less than two weeks before your wedding day. Like some small furry animal from a fable by La Fontaine, I had scurried around asking my question, ‘What is love?' My father didn't seem surprised, but he hadn't appeared especially interested either. Madox seemed to me increasingly like a man whose spirit had taken a long holiday from its body. He went about his business, but the spark was gone and everything about him was thinner, his body and his lips and the hair on top of his head. He was in his study that morning, banging out an article for an American business magazine on his old typewriter and as he answered he barely looked up from the page in front of him. ‘I suppose love is to keep paying off your mother's overdrafts.'

I wanted to enquire, too, whom he loved the most, my mother or his mistress? But I got nervous. Let sleeping dogs, or in this case adulterers, lie was the principle my mother lived by. It wasn't for me to go against her.

Did God create man polygamous before He invented the marriage vows? I wondered. And if He did, was it His idea of a joke or was it just absent-mindedness? Then again, it wasn't Madox's love or even Donald's that was in question right now, it was mine.

‘What is love?' Audrey had repeated my question, turning to face me as she sat at her dressing-table brushing her hair and piling it high on the top of her head. ‘Love is… well, it's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's an ache at the pit of your stomach. It's hope against hope. It's turning a blind eye.' And all of a sudden I felt sad for her and for my father because whatever else love was, it was surely also a disappointment.

Janet gave the brass-and-ebony candlestick one last flick with the feather duster and said, ‘In my view, it all comes down to socks in the end.'

‘Socks?'

‘If you can live with his dirty socks, not to mention the feet inside, and still look at him tenderly, then you love him.'

Arabella got a dreamy look in her eyes as she turned down the radio in her pink-and-blue bedroom. ‘When my granny got engaged to my grandfather this other young man, someone she knew only slightly, a quiet boy, not the sort to get noticed, drove up outside her bedroom window on his motorbike and shot his brains out. I suppose that's love.'

‘Love is unselfish,' Granny Billings told me over the phone. ‘And if you need to ask what it is, you don't feel it.' She was right, of course. By the end of that day I had known beyond doubt that what I felt for Donald was but love's pale impostor.

When I broke it to Donald he took it well, so well, in fact, that I began to feel as if I had done him a favour. But Audrey was a different business altogether. She took the news of the cancelled wedding hard. Now the last thing I would ever expect from my mother was logic, let alone consistency, but this time I had to ask her why she was so upset that I had cancelled the wedding when all she had done since we announced our engagement was to complain. In the torrent of words that had followed, each chased by a sniff or a snuffle, I distinguished Caterers, Flowers, That Beautiful Little Church, Ridicule, Bridge, Laughing Stock and That Bitch Shirley. I'm sure that Immature, Ungrateful and Irresponsible popped up somewhere too, and I said I was truly sorry. When she said that sorry didn't even begin to cover it, I told her that if I had known how inconvenient my not marrying Donald would be for her I would have gone ahead anyway, in spite of my not loving him. The irony was lost on her, but she thanked me for the thought.

‘Now you can concentrate on getting yourself a decent career,' Madox said and there had been something malicious in the way he looked at my mother, as if he took pleasure in her discomfort.

I had decided some time earlier that I wanted to be a journalist. Donald had not approved, wrinkling his nose and looking pained as if I had been discussing taking up a career as a low-rent prostitute.
When I had got a fetch-and-carry job with
Chic and Cheek
, ‘The Magazine for the Woman of Today', he had turned patronising, referring to Esther's little job. But I enjoyed the work and the atmosphere at the office, although secretly I thought that if I ran a magazine I would make it for the woman of the past, as she was a) seriously under-represented and b) more likely to have the time to read the stuff.

After cancelling the wedding and breaking off our engagement I had to move out of Donald's flat, where I had been living since I graduated, in rather a hurry. There was nothing for it but to return to my parents' house while I searched for somewhere to live. I ended up staying for six months. Then Grandma Billings died and left me fifty thousand pounds, so I was able to take out a mortgage and buy the flat. Now I had a place of my own I could have had Laurence with me, but he refused to move – I had packed his toys in a box and he went straight off and picked them out and put them back next to his basket – and who could blame him? For twelve years he had refused to play the part of faithful hound; why should I expect him to start now, in the evening of his life?

I was happy in the flat. I had my own front door and a tiny paved area below the pavement where I could put a chair and some pots for plants. The couple who occupied the rest of the house, the Bodkins, were quiet and elderly and uncomplaining. We were friendly, but left each other alone. I loved living on my own. When I put something down, it remained where I'd left it until I decided to move it. And no one interfered with my systems. For example, I liked to store my tea in order of strength and the time of day one was likely to drink it: starting with English Breakfast on the left-hand side of the shelf followed by Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang and finally green tea. I liked to use my blue-and-white Spode mugs in the sitting-room and the pink-and-green ones in the kitchen and bedroom. I kept one scrubbing brush for the sink and one for the dishes and I knew no one would mix them up and, best of all, I could use every available wardrobe space myself.

‘You're so set in your ways,' Audrey complained and to her friends
she said, ‘My daughter is twenty-something going on fifty-five.' I didn't bother to explain that I was twenty-something and feeling that if I took my finger out of my particular dyke, in a manner of speaking, I would be swept away on a tidal wave of chaos. I did talk to Arabella about it, though.