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.
Seven
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.
I put the note down, watching my mother’s face for signs of distress. My shoulders tensed in anticipation of a scene, screams, fainting fits, threats, tears, but there was nothing. Her face betrayed no emotion. She just sat there in the old green armchair, quite still, only her fingers moving, twining and twisting. After a while she stood up and smoothed down her skirt. ‘At least now I can get rid of this blasted thing.’ She aimed a little kick at the chair with the tip of her Ferragamo-shod foot.
I told her that I’d stay the week with her. She said, ‘At least I can eat whatever I like now there’s no need to worry about my weight.’
‘Not that I think you should worry,’ I said. Having learnt that fat was a feminist issue I added, ‘If you ever did, surely it would have been for yourself, not to please Madox?’
Audrey turned a surprised gaze on me. ‘Why should I mind? But my generation was brought up to believe it was our duty to look good for our husbands; clean and neat, and attractively turned out at all times. It was part of the bargain, that’s all.’
And boy could she eat. She told me that for thirty years she had left the table while still hungry. Now she was catching up. It was as if there were a gaping hole at the pit of her stomach that just couldn’t be filled. I watched her as she had her breakfast: two soft-boiled eggs with white bread soldiers, followed by two slices of wholemeal toast with honey, followed by fruit yoghurt and rinsed down with tubs of Orange Pekoe tea. And lunch… baguettes filled with tuna fish and sour cream and avocado and tomatoes and Beaufort cheese, and apples and pecan nuts. Teatime was an orgy as she munched through platefuls of jam doughnuts, scones with Cornish clotted cream, cinnamon bagels, milk chocolate digestives. She had pasta most evenings, smothered in cream and garlic and Gorgonzola cheese, and at bedtime she brought a mug of hot chocolate and a plateful of biscuits upstairs with her.
‘Stay another week,’ she pleaded with me, turning those long-lashed baby-blue eyes on me, eyes more suited to the visage of a child or a doll than to an old woman whose still beautiful face was creased and sagging.
How could I say no? After work that Monday I went by my flat to pick up the mail and water the plants. There was a message for me on the answerphone from Holden. Holden who? Oh, Holden: Remember me? Dinner at Arabella’s three years ago. Goodness how time flies.
You could say the call was completely out of the blue if you didn’t know that I had
just got an award for journalism and featured in a cringe-making article in Watch Out magazine titled ‘Smart Little Daddy’s Girls’ about women following in their fathers’ footsteps.
‘Not all the way, darling,’ Audrey had said sadly as she read the dreadful piece. It was one of the few times she made a comment about the fate of her forty-year-old marriage.
Anyway, Holden wanted to take me out to dinner, so his message said. I shook my head at the machine. I was too busy and anyway, I wanted a rest from men. Since breaking up with Donald I had had a series of short and ultimately unsatisfactory relationships: a jazz musician, Mike, who wanted to be mothered; a fellow journalist, Chris, who liked me working as long as I wasn’t as successful as he was; and finally David, who turned out to have a thing against breasts, which was tricky since I had two.
Holden was still talking on the answerphone, his voice with its slight American twang warm and deep and, it had to be said, opportunistic: I’ve meant to get in touch all this time, but the days and weeks…
‘And months and years,’ I filled in, speaking to the empty room.
… rush past and suddenly you find, well anyway, it would be just great if you could give me a ring back on 326 4247 so we could fix a date. Beeep!
By the time I got back to my mother’s house, she was in bed although it was only just gone eight. ‘What do you mean he’s opportunistic?’ she wanted to know.
‘I mean that he didn’t ring me after we first met. Instead, he calls now, out of the blue and just when I have achieved some modest professional success.’
‘Don’t be paranoid,’ Audrey said. ‘Anyway, success is very sexy.’
I frowned at her. I didn’t think one’s parents should speak in terms of sexuality. Most people felt like that, it seemed, at least until they became parents themselves. Why children should view the particular act which gave them life with quite such distaste, why they should find any reminder of it so excruciatingly embarrassing, I don’t know. There’s no real reason for it, you simply preferred your parents asexual. I took the view that if God had wanted us to be comfortable with our parents’ sexuality, he would have made us conscious at the time of conception. Luckily, we weren’t.
In front of my mother, resting on her lap, sat a tray with her supper of cold chicken salad, cheese and figs, and a whole tub of Häagen-Dazs strawberry-and-banana ice-cream. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured me. ‘It takes ages for that ice-cream to thaw sufficiently to be eaten. There’s plenty of chicken for you downstairs. Why don’t you bring it up and eat here with me?’
I told her I’d eat downstairs if it was all the same to her.
‘So what is he like, this Holden? Is he handsome?’ she asked as I got up.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Yeah, I suppose so, in a kind of old-fashioned Vietcong-bashing kind of way.’
‘Why don’t you ask him round for dinner?’ Audrey had her bright voice on and I wondered how she could still be so keen on romance.
The next day she had a television installed in her bedroom and she told me they were coming to connect her up to cable. ‘Aren’t you ever going to get out of bed?’ I asked.
‘Why should I?’ Audrey replied. ‘Janet comes in every morning and I’ve got everything I need here.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her silk-clad arm across the array of books and magazines and papers that lay scattered over the powder-blue counterpane. She reached for the television remote. ‘If you don’t mind, it’s Barry Jones Today.’
I was working at my mother’s that day, in my old bedroom, writing up an interview feature with a former Stasi agent, Hanna Holst, who had started a new life working as a vet in the Orkneys. Halfway through the afternoon the doorbell rang and I picked up the entry-phone on the landing. It was Holden. ‘Arabella gave me the address. I’ve been trying to get in touch,’ his disembodied voice told me.
‘I know. I picked up your answerphone message.’
‘You know?’ He sounded amazed. ‘Why didn’t you get back to me?’
I pressed the entry button to let him in and walked downstairs to greet him. ‘I’ve been busy,’ I answered. He still seemed surprised, one dark, heavy eyebrow lifted, a quizzical look in his squirrel-brown eyes. ‘I’m just finishing this article.’ I stepped back to let him in. ‘But would you like a cup of coffee or something?’
‘That’s what I like about you, you’re so gracious.’ I expect he was being ironic. ‘I was just passing on my way to see a client whose offices are nearby. Coffee would be great.’ He followed me down into the kitchen. I put the kettle on and wondered if my mother would get out of bed if I told her Holden really was very attractive. She had always admired the dark, rugged type.
‘So this is where you grew up?’ Holden took the mug from my hand, our palms touching for a second. I nodded and sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. ‘My mother still lives here, but my father has just left.’
‘How do you mean, just left? Gone for a trip? Gone to fetch the newspaper?’
‘Gone to live with his mistress on a small Scottish island.’
Holden’s keen brown eyes took on a compassionate look. ‘I’m so sorry. Really I am. Christ I’d feel so hostile if my dad ever did that to my ma.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘How’s your mother taking it?’
‘She’s eating a lot.’
Holden nodded gravely. ‘Comfort.’
‘No, I really don’t think so. I think she just likes eating and now my father has gone she isn’t worried about her weight.’
‘I don’t think you’re being quite fair to your mother. I’m sure there’s more to it than that.’
‘You don’t know my mother.’ Holden had to admit that he didn’t. ‘I’m not saying she isn’t upset, I’m just saying that she likes eating and she likes television and she likes her bed, and now she can sit in bed and eat and watch television. Maybe that’s what’s known as making the best of something.’
‘It’s not much of a life.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘At least she knows where she is.’
‘Do you have to stay in bed to know that?’ Holden wanted to know.
I told him of course not. ‘But it makes it easier to find yourself.’
‘Now you’re kidding me?’ I agreed that I was, a bit, but secretly I wondered. I had always felt that for your mind to be free it had to exist in a supremely organised body, which in turn lived in an organised environment. Once you were in control of your environment your mind could roam unfettered. Bed was a very controlled environment, as long as you were in it alone of course.
‘What about dinner tonight?’ Holden interrupted my thoughts. I relented.
I asked Audrey if she minded me going out. She hushed me. ‘Angela Andrews,’ she said.
What she meant was that the chat-show hostess-cum-Agony Aunt, Angela Andrews, was coming on with her evening show. It was only six o’clock and I had finished the article, so I perched on the edge of the bed and reached out for a raspberry jam brioche from the plate on the tray. That evening’s show was subtitled ‘Unfathomable Tragedies’. To rapturous applause a small dumpy woman of indeterminate age took her seat on the sofa opposite Angela Andrews. Her name was Karen Dempster and she was thirty-four. Goodness, was that all? She must have had a hard life. She began her story and I could see from the way the camera was already zooming in on Ms Andrews’s tear-filled eyes that this was going to be sad. It wasn’t long ago, Karen told the audience, that she had been a happy wife and the mother of three strapping lads. Then tragedy struck and she was as we saw her now, alone.
What happened?
‘First it was our Gareth.’ Karen looked up under her frizzy bleached fringe. It turned out that poor little Gareth had fallen under a truck. It was a terrible thing to happen, but slowly, as the weeks went by, she and the rest of the family had begun to pick up the pieces.
‘Of little Gareth?’ Audrey asked. She had no heart, that woman. Karen and her family had picked up the pieces of their lives, helped and
sustained by the kindness of friends and strangers alike.
‘It was amazing to see how people cared,’ Karen said. ‘They just couldn’t do enough for us. We had flowers and cards, our local church collected money for us all to go away and have a break. We went to EuroDisney.’ The memory seemed to perk her up, but then her eyes grew moist once more. ‘Then it was little Andrew and his father’s gun.’
I turned away from the television. I could hardly bear to listen. As it happened, little Andrew was all right – for a while. It was his brother Shaun who got shot in the head. Of course Andrew hadn’t meant to shoot Shaun. He didn’t even know his father’s gun was loaded. Again, it was the kindness of friends and strangers alike that carried the remaining family through. ‘We were in all the papers,’ Karen said. I nodded to myself. I remembered the story now.
As it was, little Andrew didn’t have to carry his burden of guilt for long. He was retrieving his skateboard from under his father’s parked Montego when his father got in and drove off. When he discovered what he had done, the wretched man killed himself; an overdose of paracetamol.
Poor, poor Karen. I stared at the pinched little face. How much could one soul take?
Karen was writing a book: Survivor! She was doing it ‘as part of her own healing process’, she told us, but mostly to help others. ‘To show’, she said, a catch in her throat, ‘that however terrible the events of your life, you can survive and come through with a new understanding.’ The audience wept. I thought of the seemingly unquenchable human spirit. Audrey reached for the remote with one hand and a doughnut with the other. I wanted to weep, but somehow I couldn’t.
‘That perm,’ Audrey said with distaste. I longed to believe that Karen’s unfortunate choice of hairstyle was not what prevented me from showing true compassion. So what was?
A couple of months later I saw an advance copy of Karen’s book in the office waiting to be reviewed. I read it twice. I thought of little Karen blinking at the cameras from under her frizzy fringe. ‘I’d like to do a profile,’ I told Chloe. ‘I really want to know what makes this woman tick.’
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