Frozen Music

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘Rules,’ I interrupted. ‘I like rules. I spend my life trying to find some. The problem is that as soon as you do find one, what you think is a nice firm one, to hang your principles on, it turns out to be as soft and yielding as a branch of pussy willow.’

  ‘Well, the rules for our kind of writing are quite firm. Our readers demand it. One of these rules is that the hero and heroine actually meet.’ She stabbed a rocket leaf with her fork and looked expectantly at me.

  I looked back, not quite sure what response exactly she was waiting for. Then I remembered the story she must be referring to. ‘Oh, that one. I kept putting the meeting off because I got fond of the characters. I just couldn’t bear to see them disappointed.’

  ‘Esther, that’s the problem. It’s up to you to create characters who are suited to each other. Characters who will not be disappointed in each other but who will live happily ever after. That’s the job of the writer of romance fiction. That’s what we pay you to do and that’s what our readers pay us to provide. And you can do it. I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t think you could. Often, when your characters do meet, it’s all fine – up to a point.’

  ‘Which point?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Mary had to ask. I had had my mouth full of pumpkin risotto.

  I swallowed. ‘At which point exactly?’

  ‘Oh, well, passion. Our readers like their passion.’

  How? I wanted to ask. Black, white with one sugar?

  ‘There’s a coldness at the base of your writing, a distance. Look, Esther.’ Mary leant closer to me across the table. ‘I like you and you’re a good journalist, a good writer, I’d like to go on using you, but you have to change gear.’ She moved back again in her chair. ‘Think of your boyfriend. Sit back and close your eyes and think about him when you write your heroes and your love scenes.’

  A couple of hours later I was back at my desk, thinking of Angus. Closing my eyes, I tried to think passionate thoughts. Angus undressing in front of me as I lay waiting in bed; shirt, socks, trousers… those crumpled Popeye boxer shorts. I opened my eyes. After a few minutes I tried again. ‘I want you,’ Angus said, unbuttoning his trousers. They fell down to the floor and… Now it wasn’t that I expected him, or anyone, actually to iron their boxers, but one would have thought that he could at least fold them as they came out of the dryer.

  Just after five, I turned off my computer and went outside for some air. (When did we drop the ‘fresh’ part of that phrase?) I used to walk fast, paying appropriate attention to what was around me. On the King’s Road I would be mindful of carelessly wielded umbrellas, avoiding, as best I could, getting my feet caught up in the spokes of a basket on wheels emerging from the general direction of Waitrose. I looked in the shop windows and when I drew money from the cash machine I peered about me furtively to make sure that no one was standing by to pounce as I left, my purse replenished. When I returned home at night I would have my keys ready and glance around the quiet little back-street and down the basement steps to make sure that there was no dark figure lurking in the shadows. In the streets around the office I used to put my arm protectively around my large bag. London streetwise, no more, no less. As for the rest of the time, I looked up at the sky at the sound of birdsong. I glanced at the face of a good-looking man or the legs of a fat girl in a short skirt. I gazed into shop windows and in summer I checked out the people sitting at the pavement cafés. I looked up endlessly at the buildings I passed, finding a plaque new to me here, or a gargoyle I’d never noticed there. Like any big city, London was a cache of delights in a dustbin, and I paid as much attention to it as most people and more than some.

  But lately it had been different. Now, almost every step I took brought its own problem. Pass a beggar without a second glance and you might turn your back on genuine suffering and need – or you might not. It was cold for March. The scruffy, ginger-haired boy, slumped on a heap of blankets in the shop doorway, might die that very night from the effects of malnutrition and exposure, his body found the next morning, lying like the Little Match Girl by the window of the Body Shop, his unseeing eyes turned towards an unobtainable paradise of apricot bubbles and strawberry washes and goat’s milk cleanser, none of it tested on animals. And he was so young. Poor, poor, wretched boy. On the other hand, give him a wad of cash and he might leap up from under his mound of blankets and head straight for the nearest drug dealer and would end up every bit as dead.

  I spent more than ten minutes just walking up and down and round the block deciding whether or not to give him some money, before dropping five pounds in the glass jar by his side.

  And you don’t have to look far to come upon more problems requiring decisions. There was a woman outside Boots. She was young, early twenties maybe, with lank, greasy hair down to her shoulders and a pinched, pale face. A small boy with a crew-cut was pulling at her hand and whining, and at first the woman didn’t seem to notice, then all of a sudden she twirled round and whacked him across the back of the head. The child opened his mouth and cried in that heart-rending abandoned way that children do. Was the woman his mother? She could be the nanny from hell or even an abductor. Was she a habitual child beater? Was this a case of abuse? Should I report the incident? I hovered for a moment, watching. The woman knelt down by the child and shook him. ‘Be quiet, you little sod, do you hear me? Just shut up!’

  I stepped forward; I felt I had to. ‘Are you his mother?’

  The woman looked up at me, pushing a lank fringe from her eyes. ‘What’s it to you?’

  The boy stopped crying. ‘Mum, who’s that lady?’

  ‘No one, poppet.’ She got to her feet and took the boy’s hand. ‘Come along now. Dad will be wondering where we’ve got to.’ She shot me a contemptuous glance over her shoulder and off they went, down the road. My heart was beating furiously and I could feel the heat rise in my cheeks. I felt awful: itchy, scratchy, breathless. The more you think about things the more you see the connections. How could one be expected to make any decisions? What was that saying? The best-laid plans of mice and men… Well, what about them? All I knew was that they were a joke, our plans. What was the other one? Men plan and angels laugh? Something like that? I would laugh too if I were safely tucked up in heaven, away from the madness down below.

  Plan? Why, when any seemingly random act could be the one that determined the course of someone’s life? Stop to answer the phone on your way out and because of it, that three-and-a-half-minute delay, you end up bang in the middle of a motorway pile-up. Turn left and walk straight into the path of a killer. Reap what you sow, that’s what the Bible says. I think. I had nothing against that concept in itself, but it simply didn’t work that way. What I objected to was when you went merrily along sowing your furrows of grain only to wake up with a view over a field of poison ivy.

  Deep in thought, I passed a café and suddenly I felt exhausted. I forced myself to walk straight inside without prevaricating, finding an empty table in a dark corner at the back. Someone nearby, a middle-aged man, lit a cigarette and three people instantly turned towards him and pointed to the No Smoking sign on the wall behind him. Kick a pensioner to death on a public highway, I thought, and you’d probably get away with it, but light up in a No Smoking area and you were sprung within seconds.

  Someone cleared her throat, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Were you ready to order, then?’

  I looked up to find a waitress dressed in a floor-length pinafore and with a mob-cap pulled down over her dirty-blonde hair. I hadn’t noticed any of the other waitresses dressed that way, but looking around me I saw that they all were.

  ‘Tea please. I’d like a pot of tea.’ The most difficult thing to come to terms with, I thought, was that you could do absolutely the right thing and still be the cause of everything going hideously wrong. And it never changes. When we are little and our parents’ children we frequently get into trouble for doing the right thing. I remember being about six and hearing Madox talking admiringly of this girl
Ruth, the teenage daughter of a friend of my parents. This wretched Ruth could sing and play the piano. She sailed and skied, and she read novels. She was so brim-full of energy that she got up every morning at five so that the day would be long enough for her to fit everything in. I assumed that the sailing and the skiing were done at different times of year, but still. Madox sang Ruth’s praises. He had been rather irritated with me earlier in the day; something about not knowing my times tables. That night I set my alarm for half past four. I woke with a start in the still dark morning and clambered out of bed. The house was quiet, the kind of quiet you listen to, waiting for it to be broken. But it wasn’t. I wandered up and down the stairs, pausing anxiously outside my parents’ room, looking at my watch. I was exhausted and soon it would be ordinary morning and my father would never know what an early riser I was. In the end I couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ I sang, in a kind of whispery voice at first, then louder and louder. It was the song Janet always sang when she was in an especially good mood. ‘Marching as to war,’ I squeaked. At last the door to my parents’ bedroom opened, and I took on an alert and energetic expression.

  Madox practically leapt towards me. ‘Shut up,’ he hissed. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? It’s half past five in the morning.’

  Something had gone wrong, horribly wrong, but I persevered. ‘I’ve been up since half past four,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’re an idiot. Now go back to bed before I lose my temper.’

  However old we got, we were all God’s children, allegedly, and that kind of thing just kept on happening.

  ‘Indian or China, madam? Madam, I said Indian or China, madam.’ The bored voice of the waitress reached me. I felt other-worldly, other-planety, as if any communication had to travel millions of light years through the ether to reach me. I blinked at her. The girl sighed and shifted from foot to foot.

  ‘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 l
ike 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.