‘We’re counting on it. I know I said Audrey is my dearest friend, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend my holiday nursing her. I bet she’s a shocking patient.’
‘Shocking,’ I agreed.
Olivia turned her attention back to the cupboard door. ‘It needs something.’
I gazed at the white surface. ‘Roses.’
‘Roses?’
‘You should paint a yellow rosebush all across it.’ I paused, my head a little to one side, thinking. ‘And while you’re at it, I’d paint them on the walls of the veranda too.’
Olivia turned and looked sharply at me. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Innate bad taste, I expect,’ I said airily. Then I saw that she was serious. I shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. The name of the house, I suppose. Villa Rosengård. Or just a feeling.’ I shrugged again.
‘When Astrid, Linus’s mother, lived here, she papered the veranda with pictures of roses she had cut out from books and catalogues, every inch of wall, apparently. Bertil removed it all after she … after she died.’
‘What did she look like, Astrid?’ I asked. ‘Is there a photo somewhere?’
‘Linus has a couple. He was only tiny when she died, poor little mite.’
‘So what happened? What did she die from?’
Olivia climbed down from the stepladder and went across to the sink to pour herself a glass of water. With her back turned to me she said, ‘I’m not quite sure. Some accident. It’s all a very long time ago.’
‘Ulla says she adored this place.’
‘I expect she did.’ Olivia made it clear that she wasn’t going to pursue the subject. I walked out on to the veranda and stood there for a moment, trying to imagine it in Astrid’s day, when the walls were covered with paper roses.
At lunch, in the kitchen the following day, I sat next to Linus. ‘Why is the Lloyd commission so important to you?’ I asked him. ‘From what I hear you’re very successful. You’ve won prizes, for heaven’s sake. You’re earning lots of money. I’m the one with the problem. I’ve just got my old job back, minus some pay and status and freedom. I’ve never been married and I have no children. I’m the one who should be desperate. I’m thirty-four years old and sometimes I feel as if I’ve spent my life reading the instructions upside down.’ I regretted saying it all as soon as I had spoken because, put like that, it really depressed me. And Linus didn’t seem to disagree with anything I’d said, which depressed me even more. What’s the point of being self-deprecating if no one disagrees with you?
Then he smiled. ‘Can’t I be desperate too?’ He fixed his dark-grey eyes on me. ‘You know, I’ve yet to see a building I’ve designed that I’m proud of. I spend my life creating what I know is second-best in order to get the work you’re speaking of. Have you any idea, any idea at all what it feels like being forced, over and over again, to create second-rate work when you know you can do first-rate? I tell you.’ He hadn’t raised his voice but he spoke each word with such emphasis that he might as well have been shouting. ‘Sometimes I think it will kill me.’
Then he smiled again, straight at me, eyeball to eyeball, and I found myself smiling back idiotically.
‘Pernilla gets very impatient with me,’ he went on. ‘She never whinges. She says that only privileged people have time to worry about things like that. Try being a single mother on inadequate state support, or terminally ill. She says I’d soon stop worrying about whether or not a building was good, bad or great. She’s right, of course. You know, I think that’s what I admire most about her. Her life hasn’t been easy, but she never wastes time complaining. Instead, she’s got this amazing ability to make the most of everything, of living entirely in the present. She never spends a moment on regrets.’
My smile stiffened, then cracked. ‘How lovely,’ I said. ‘But I don’t actually agree with her. If you were a single mother architect living on the breadline, you might have other pressing needs, but I still think you’d worry about some of the same things that bother you now. It’s not just a luxury, reserved for the privileged few, it’s universally human, in my view. In fact, it’s what makes us human. I’ve interviewed people who’ve been through the most horrendous experiences and all the while they’d still care about a line of a drawing or a word in a poem, or the state of their hair for that matter. It seems to have been what kept them sane, alive even. Other animals content themselves with survival. A lion who’s eaten well and who has shelter from the hot sun lies down to sleep. He doesn’t dash about with renewed vigour thinking up how to improve on raw impala or, for that matter, how to build himself a really aesthetically pleasing den. Human beings never rest at the level of survival, or even comfort. We strive on. That’s what makes us human.’
Ulla was addressing me in her precise and accented English: ‘I’m telling Olivia that she’ll miss this place more than she imagines.’ She wagged her finger in Linus’s direction. ‘This place is in your blood, Linus. This was your poor mother’s home. You must see that it’s a bad decision, selling. Astrid loved this place. How can you even think of letting strangers take over?’ She went on about dirty French beaches, syringes in the sand, condoms floating on the waves. ‘And what about Ivar?’ But Linus wasn’t listening any more. He was staring straight in front of him, past Ulla’s right shoulder and out at the garden. His cheeks had turned bright pink.
‘I know what a condom is,’ Ivar said. Today he was wearing pale-blue shorts, a blue-and-green striped T-shirt and a straw hat decorated with daisies and forget-me-nots. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t tell anyone, because it’s rude.’
At the sound of his son’s voice Linus had turned round. ‘It’s not rude, little man. It’s very useful sometimes.’
‘But Mummy says…’ Ivar looked confused.
Linus sighed. ‘Well if Mummy says…’
‘Don’t be so weak, Linus.’ Ulla glared at him.
‘Well, we’ll just have to visit Ivar, if Ivar can’t visit us,’ Olivia said. ‘Bertil and I are looking forward to the change, especially the weather, condoms or no condoms. Anyway, we only want a very small place. Of course you’re all welcome to come, but we want something that suits us. Something we can just up and leave if we want to travel. Something that doesn’t require much upkeep. We’re not young and this place is becoming a burden, not least financially.’
‘It makes sense to me.’ Linus smiled at her, then he turned back to me. ‘I have to admire Pernilla,’ he went on, obviously not realising when he’d lost the sympathy of his audience. ‘She’s not had an easy life.’ That perked me up a bit. ‘Her first husband was a notorious philanderer. Everyone knew of his affairs, but she stuck by him. The second one – her divorce has just come through – was abusive, not physically, but mentally. He too had affairs. As if that’s not enough, she lost her job and her boyfriend, who was also her boss, both at once. Still she manages to be positive and full of enthusiasm. She’s a real inspiration, an example to us all.’
I nodded. I suppose she was. But of what, exactly? Courage? Attitude? An inability to learn from past mistakes? But I said nothing. Audrey had always told me that men found envy and spite very unattractive in a woman. Until now I hadn’t cared and I always felt that envy and spite were things I did rather well. But now it was different. I wanted to please and the feeling confused me.
‘Anyway,’ Olivia was saying, ‘we might not go that far south. Normandy is lovely.’
Next to me, Linus was still prattling on about Pernilla. ‘I feel, well pale, compared with her,’ he said.
I looked at him and heard myself simper, ‘But you’re not pale. You’ve got a lovely tan.’ A look of impatience crossed his face and I could have bitten my tongue off. ‘Of course I know that’s not what you meant,’ I added hastily. Inside I was one big complaint. I wanted to be an inspiration. I wanted yellow hair to toss and a brave, sunny attitude. Why couldn’t I be light-hearted, damn it? Instead I sat there, dark of hair and dark of mind, inside my own little cloud of e
nvy where no amount of Swedish summer sun could reach, longing… for what? His approval?
‘You’ve got a very peculiar expression on your face again, Esther,’ Olivia said. ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’
‘Love.’ It was out before I could stop myself.
‘Oh dear,’ Olivia said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’
‘I did tell you that my side was to the right of the bath taps, didn’t I?’ Ulla asked in a voice with a silky top note but with a sharp undertone, like cheap scent. I looked questioningly at her. ‘I thought I saw your flannel on my side,’ Ulla explained. She sounded as if she was determined to be patient whatever the provocation.
Fuck your side, I wanted to say. But I had manners. Suddenly I realised that I really cared what these people thought of me, even Ulla. I actually wanted them to like me and to like having me there. ‘I’ll remove it,’ I said, getting up from the table, bringing my empty plate across to the sink.
‘Don’t be so petty, Ulla,’ Olivia scolded.
‘You haven’t had your coffee.’ Linus put his hand out towards me.
I looked at it, an artist’s hand, long-fingered and strong. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I have to do some reading, anyway.’
‘Work?’
I shook my head. ‘Just reading.’
‘But you have to do it?’
I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’ He didn’t sound argumentative, just as if he really wanted to know.
‘Because I have to. We have one miserable life…’
‘There I don’t agree with you,’ Gerald put in. ‘I’ve made a lifelong study of the theories of an afterlife, including reincarnation, and for every year that goes by I get more certain that there is one, an afterlife, that is.’
‘For every year that brings you nearer to death you believe in an afterlife, you mean,’ Ulla said. ‘Anyway, people always assume they’ll come back as something worthwhile. But why should they? You might turn out to be a dung-beetle or a fly. Personally, I’d rather stay in my grave than risk returning as something ghastly.’
‘You don’t have to worry on that score,’ Gerald said. ‘You never come back as the same thing twice.’
‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a deeply unpleasant old man?’ Ulla glared at him. The two of them continued their argument in Swedish.
‘When I first came here,’ Olivia said, ‘I used to think how funny it was that everything spoken in Swedish sounded like an argument. Then I realised that in this family it was.’
‘That’s a little unfair, don’t you think?’ Bertil protested.
Ivar informed us that it had stopped raining and was now a Perfect Day. ‘You should never waste a Perfect Day,’ he told no one in particular. No one in particular ignored him.
‘I just feel that whatever happens, my chances of returning as something even remotely literate are extremely small,’ I ventured. ‘I just can’t bear to think of the tons of books I will never have read, the places I won’t know about, the music I haven’t heard, the knowledge that will have passed me by. I don’t know why we are here. Who does? But I do know that while I am, I might as well learn as much I can. How else can one even begin to hope to make sense of anything? Once I’ve saved up some money I’ll start to travel. In the meantime, reading and looking at pictures and snooping around other people’s minds will have to do.’
‘I just want to build good buildings,’ Linus said. ‘Actually, I want to build great ones.’
‘And I stopped you?’
Linus looked up at me with a small smile. ‘I didn’t say that.’
I exited through the back door to the sound of coffee cups clinking and Ivar chatting on about it being a Perfect Day.
I was sitting by the open window in my room, reading a book on European history, when there was a knock on the door. It was Linus. I put it down, hoping he hadn’t come to talk about the fair, the moon-spun Pernilla because, quite frankly, the mere mention of her name made this tight little ball form in my chest. For a moment I wondered if that tight little ball could be my missing heart, but I quickly dismissed the idea. It was jealousy, more like. My stomach simply couldn’t digest it. Heartburn, that was it.
Linus had been on his way to sit down in the small white-painted chair by the dressing-table, but instead he straightened up again and turned back towards the door. ‘I’m disturbing you, I’m sorry.’
‘No, not at all. Sit down, please.’ He did as I had asked, legs crossed, leaning back, relaxed. ‘I’m just in a bit of a mood,’ I explained. ‘I often am.’
Linus smiled politely. ‘Really, I never would have guessed.’
For a moment, there, I felt pleased. Maybe the step was shorter than I thought to me being described as an inspiration. Then Linus laughed. That figured. He had been joking. And as usual, the sound of his laughter brought everyone, including Linus himself, to stunned silence.
‘Olivia asked me to give you a lift to town tomorrow to pick Audrey up,’ he said eventually. ‘I have to go in to Gothenburg in the morning, I’m meeting a prospective client from Japan and I want to get a little something for Pernilla’s birthday. Foreigners don’t quite understand the Swedish habit of emptying every office and factory for five weeks of the summer. Anyway, if you’d like to take the opportunity to look around town, we can go and pick up Audrey on our way back. Four o’clock they said, is that right?’
I nodded. ‘Thanks, I’d love to have a look around. Gothenburg, city of canals and shipyards, of ancient families cursed with syphilis, of sky-blue trams and of the heavy beating of metal from the shipyards.’
Linus looked at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Where did that come from?’
I smiled. ‘I used to listen in to Olivia and Audrey chatting. I would curl up in this old chair and nine times out of ten they’d forget I was there.’ He still had that question mark in his eyes so I added, ‘I might have imagined some of it. You know how it is when you’re a child?’
I watched him leave my room and it seemed my good humour went with him, padding along at his heels. At the door, it turned and grinned: Sucker!
Nineteen
It had rained again during the night, but by the time I got up it had stopped and the sun was breaking through the clouds, mixing gold with the thunder-grey of the sky. I walked straight out on to the lawn in just my nightdress, my pale-blue-and-white embroidered nightdress. It was a very pretty and expensive nightdress. I might be turned out, during the day, like the prince of darkness’s younger sister, but at night I chose to look like the daughter my mother had always wanted. Goodness knows why…
The grass was dew-soaked, wet beneath my feet. There was the lightest of breezes from the sea, gently stirring the yellow-and-blue wimple hoisted on the tall flag-pole, and overhead a gull circled, opening its greedy beak to squawk, telling me it was there and watching. (The other day I had made the mistake of peeling the prawns for supper outside in the garden and the gulls had not forgotten.) Otherwise all was still; it was only seven o’clock. I was about to go back to my room to shower and dress when my eye was caught by the sight of a bony behind in cornflower-blue cotton jersey, bent over the bed of moon-white roses: Ulla. I wandered up to her and said good morning. She raised herself slowly and, wiping her stubby grey fringe from her eyes, she smiled at me. Smiled!
‘Astrid planted these,’ she said, and her voice held a softness that I had not heard before, caressing the edges of the name. ‘She had them brought over from Germany. She spent two years searching for the perfect white rose. Astrid was a true artist. Olivia tries, but Astrid was an aesthete to the very marrow of her being. Linus has something of that.’
‘How did she die? Was it a car crash?’
‘Why should it have been? She killed herself. Didn’t you know?’
‘Jesus! Why?’
‘I don’t know that that’s any of your business,’ Ulla said, crouching down over the rose bed once more.
Olivia was in the kitchen making lemonad
e. Her thick dark hair had worked loose from the knot at the back and fell heavy across her face as she forced a lemon half down the white plastic ridges of the juicer. By her side, on the white worktop, lay a weeping pile of squeezed-out lemon halves. I gathered them up and chucked them in the bin. She turned and smiled at me. ‘You don’t mind helping yourself to breakfast? You know where everything is.’
I brought out the pale syrupy bread from the wooden bread bin and cut myself two thick slices. I spread them with margarine and cut some cheese for one of the slices and some smoked sausage for the other. I ate them at the kitchen table while I leafed through the local paper, trying to decipher the headlines. But I kept thinking about what Ulla had told me. In the end I just had to ask. ‘Did Linus’s mother really kill herself?’
‘Who told you? Not Linus? He never talks about it.’
‘Ulla.’
‘Ulla? I’m surprised. The whole family treats what happened as a shameful secret. I had been married for a year before I found out, and I mean found out. None of them actually told me. At the time it happened, of course, the whole of Gothenburg was talking about it, but I was living in Stockholm then.’
‘So what did happen?’
‘Look, Esther. I really don’t think it’s for me to tell you. If Linus or Bertil chooses to speak of it, that’s another matter. Even Ulla, although she’s the cagiest one of all normally. Now.’ She smiled a brisk, ‘all’s well with the world if you just don’t look too hard’ smile. ‘You have a nice day in town. I suggest you go to the art museum; there’re some lovely things there. And do look at the still life by Erik Johnsson in room fourteen. It used to belong to the Stendals, then Bertil’s father sold it to pay for him and Bertil’s mother to go for a week to Paris. It’s worth an absolute fortune nowadays. Oh, and tell Audrey that we’re all set to receive her.’
In the car on the way to town I kept glancing at Linus, trying to summon up the courage to ask him straight out about his mother. Although a very good student, Esther displays a morbid fascination with death and disease that is rather worrying in one so young, one of my first school reports had read. Well, I wasn’t so young any more but otherwise I hadn’t changed.
Frozen Music Page 25