Frozen Music

by Marika Cobbold

  Charlie took on a look of Patience Barely Endured. ‘We are continuing our campaign of justice for the Wilsons, yes. Oh, and did you know?’ He had called me back from the doorway. ‘Barry Jones, you know the guy; used to be someone in television…’ I winced at the ‘used to be’ bit. ‘Apparently he lives near the Wilsons and he called up to say he’d like to back our campaign in any way we’d want. He’s attempting a comeback and I think it might well happen for him. He’s been to a sex addiction clinic (that’s for learning not to need sex, not how to do it).’ I thanked Charlie for that explanation. ‘And’, Charlie had continued, ‘he’s on the wagon. His family is right behind him, and he and his wife are renewing their marriage vows in a moving ceremony near their country cottage, so I think all the pieces are in place for him. See if you can get him “Having tea with his good neighbours Dora and George in their farmhouse kitchen”-type thing. Get on it right away.’

  I pulled up another daisy from the uncut lawn. ‘Integrity, no integrity, integrity…’

  Back inside I read John Donne: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

  I read it again, out loud, to Posy. I thought that no more beautiful words had been written or worthy sentiments expressed. ‘What is one woman’s unrequited love for a man compared with that?’ I asked her. ‘And the clod, or clods in question right now are the poor Wilsons. Could I just stand idly by and watch them being washed away on a tide of progress?’ Before she had a chance to reply I answered myself. ‘Yes, yes I could, but I won’t. Maybe there have to be victims for progress to be made, but if I know nothing else I do know that I don’t want to be part of a society where the victims have no voice. I’m the attorney for the defence.’ I looked at up at her. ‘That’s an important job, isn’t it?’

  Posy nodded. ‘Yes it is, but what about Linus?’

  I slept badly that night. My mind was just one big, aching mess. I missed him. I missed the sight of him and the smell of him (salt air and a faint trace of the vanilla-scented soap that Ivar had given him as a present). I even missed his laugh. When I faced myself in the mirror in the morning I half expected my cheek still to burn from that one touch, and my hand to wear the imprint of his lips. It didn’t. I knew about lust, but love… that all that aching of the heart and longing of the soul could actually hurt? I even missed the island. And as I walked through the London streets, adjusting my pace according to that of the pedestrian traffic jam ahead, trying not to inhale the air, which was still and so heavy with fumes it felt as if at any moment it might drop like a metal sheet on to the ground, I closed my eyes and imagined a cool breeze from the sea and the crying of the gulls. At night I went to bed again, wondering in whose arms Linus rested right now, as I lay alone.

  Silly question; Pernilla’s, of course.

  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee. I rose, bleary-eyed and heavy-brained, and with that line ringing in my ears. I showered and had some coffee and two cigarettes, then I picked up my bag and went down to Rookery Cottage.

  It had taken Ivar two days to admit to having disobeyed his father, fishing out the tissue from that bottle of pear juice instead of chucking it away as he had been told to.

  He had sidled into Linus’s room on the morning of their departure from the island and held out his hand with the tissue crumpled in it. ‘I think it’s for you. It says your name.’

  Linus was packing, but he had reached out for the paper, smoothing it out and reading the message.

  ‘It just fell out of the bottle.’ Ivar shrugged. ‘Just like that, plop.’

  His father wasn’t listening, but kept on staring at the paper and Ivar made his escape.

  Later Linus asked Pernilla if she had written the message in the bottle. Pernilla laughed until he thought she was going to choke. Then she coughed and through the coughing she said she thought it was probably Esther.

  ‘Esther?’

  ‘Of course Esther. Don’t tell me you never noticed that she’d fallen for you in a big way. God, men are so blind.’

  ‘It was probably some joke of hers,’ he had said quickly, hiding his embarrassment.

  Now Linus had returned to work and Ivar was back with his mother. The Swedish summer was all but over and autumn was in the air.

  Linus sat at his table, drawing. He was doing it the old-fashioned way, with a pencil on paper – the computer would come later – and with each stroke of his pen he demolished the picture in his mind of his mother’s anguish, erecting in its place a monument to his love for her.

  The week of reading Astrid’s diary he had been carried forward on a tide of anger; anger at Esther, a comparative stranger, knowing so much before he did and at Ulla, paradoxically, for sending him the letter telling him where to find the book. Most of all he felt fury towards the two men, Bertil and Jonas, who had driven his mother to take her life. He had felt her agony seeping from the pages and he had wanted to murder the bastards, both of them, his father and Jonas Aminoff. But slowly the rage had subsided.

  It was Esther he had forgiven first. In spite of everything that had been going on between them, he liked her. He liked her a lot and as soon as she had left the island he had missed her. Was it she who wrote that note? Was she really in love with him? He kept thinking about her and bit by bit, things came back to him, things that had not meant anything much at the time: that night, for example, when he found her in his bedroom. The way she had looked at him the next morning in hers. How he’d look up sometimes and find those big, serious eyes fixed on him. Of course he had seen longing, but he’d never thought it was longing for him. If Pernilla was right he had been blind indeed. So in the midst of all the confusion and pain over Ulla and Bertil and Astrid, and the betrayal of all of them, thoughts of Esther wouldn’t leave him alone, like a sweet but annoying tune you just couldn’t get out of your head.

  Once, when he was at his angriest with her, with Bertil, Ulla, his mother, the lot of them, when he felt that all he could rely on was the stones he fashioned into buildings, her small face had appeared before him. Suddenly he wasn’t angry any more, instead he wanted to touch her pale cheek and kiss her grumpy mouth. He liked the way she looked; the fragile-looking body that hid the stubborn mind. She was really very pretty, in spite of the crabbiness that seemed to hover, almost permanently, just at the back of the blue eyes. He liked her sense of humour and the way she moved, neat and awkward both at once. She was kind, too; he had seen her with Ivar. And she was bright and she thought about things.

  God! he hoped she wasn’t going to start that campaign of hers again. Old dears or no old dears, newspapers or no newspapers, this time the building was going up.

  Architecture in general is frozen music. And another picture appeared in his mind, that of his mother walking across the ice until it gave way under her feet and she fell into the freezing water. Had she been frightened or had she given in to death with relief? And where had he been, her son who loved her so much? Too small, too helpless and pathetic. Well, no more. He, Linus, was what she had left behind and he was going to make her proud.

  It had taken longer to get through his anger towards Bertil. For one, he had realised that the anger was not new, but that it had been there for as long as he could remember, lurking in the shadows of his heart and never allowed to come out in the open; not until now, that was. How could he forgive him? The cruelty to Astrid, the way he had refused to tell his son the truth about her death. All the little half-truths, all that rewriting of history. It had been years before he knew that Astrid had killed herself. At first it had been: ‘Your mother had an accident. She had been ill for a long time.’

  ‘But Bosse says my mother did
n’t love us any more so she ran away,’ Linus had cried one day after school.

  Bertil had told him never to listen to gossip. ‘Your mother met with an accident, she died. There really is no more to say.’ But there had been, lots more, and Linus had always known it and that knowledge, unadmitted, had worn a hollow at his very centre where love and security should have been.

  Had Bertil really acted out of concern for Linus when he took custody of him, or had he been motivated by pique and a need for revenge? Bertil himself seemed unsure of the answer and the truth no doubt lay somewhere in between. When confronted, Bertil had shied away as if he’d been struck. ‘It’s such a long time ago. Attitudes are different now.’ His old-man’s voice had been pleading and his old-man’s eyes had turned moist. ‘As far as I’m concerned she was ill. There was no need for her to run off with that man. And as for taking her own life… It was all madness.’

  Madness seemed to run in his mother’s family. Look at Ulla. And what about him, Linus? He had certainly worked like a madman these last few days; seeing the engineer and the surveyor, the lighting and acoustics experts, and drawing, sometimes all night so that he was still in the office, bleary-eyed and stubbled, when the others arrived for the next day’s work.

  It hadn’t taken him long to feel grateful to Ulla for helping him to find the truth. In her letter she had told him everything that was known about how his mother died and she had filled in as many gaps as she could about the time leading up to her suicide. Bertil had dropped all charges against Ulla. That way, the family could re-form, closing up like a jellyfish that had lost a small and unimportant part of its body. Soon everything would be much the same as it always had been. Only a little less. The condition of Ulla’s release from custody had been her voluntary confinement to a mental hospital. That was where Linus had visited her the other day.

  ‘Did you mean to kill Bertil?’ he had asked her because he thought he should. In a funny way, though, he didn’t really care, it was as if all of that episode was buried far down in the past, overtaken by the strange immediacy of his mother’s death.

  Ulla had raised tired eyes to his face. ‘No, of course I didn’t. I wanted to give him a fright, that’s all. Make him stop and think, and see what a stupid idea it was for him and Olivia to sell up and move away.’

  She had paused and when she began to speak again her voice was quiet, her tone even. ‘None of you has any idea what it’s like not to belong with anyone, not really. To be essential to no one. To be tolerated rather than loved. To come first with no one. Why should you know?’ She gave a small smile. ‘Whatever happened to you, you were your mother’s best love and your father’s. Your wife’s, too, before it all went wrong. You’ve had all that and you’ll have it again. In the meantime you’ve got your son. To him, you and his mother are the universe. Bertil and Olivia are sufficient to themselves. Even Kerstin has that old fool Gerald who cares for her. But I, I knew I was only ever around on sufferance. And the worst of it is that in the end you make do with that, with being tolerated rather than loved. You cling to the only thing you’ve got. What I had were those few weeks every summer at Villa Rosengård. For that brief period I could pretend that I was part of a family. Your father was going to take that away from me.’ She had leant closer to him, fixing his gaze with hers. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to know that there is no one, no one at all, who cares that much whether you live or die? Well, I do, only too well.’ As he stood up to leave she had added suddenly, ‘If I had seen the diary in time it might all have been different.’

  He had turned round and looked at her. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Then I might well have killed him.’ She had smiled that joyless smile at him. ‘Only joking, of course.’

  Pernilla had gone back to Stockholm and her job in the PR agency and he was glad to see her go. It had been fun, the time they spent together. In bed it had been sex more than love-making, but that was OK. If she had looked for more commitment from him she hadn’t said so. But in the last couple of weeks of the holidays she had begun to irritate him. It was little things at first, like her constant cheerfulness. No one had a right to be so damned cheerful all the time, it wasn’t natural. And he had thought of Esther and smiled. One could never accuse that woman of being overly cheerful.

  And Pernilla always wanted to do things. She was never content just to be, to look and listen and just be. Esther had that capacity for stillness and for silence. She understood that for the activity to matter there had to be lulls. She was the kind of woman with whom you could just lie back in the grass and watch the clouds on their endless travels across the sky. Pernilla would want to play tennis. And he remembered how, disconcertingly, he had thought of Esther the last time he had been in bed with Pernilla. There she’d been, small, neat and scowling, popping up before his mind’s eye when that mind should rightfully have been busy with Pernilla who at that very moment was lying in his arms, her large, even teeth nibbling his left earlobe, her legs encircling his hips. And all that time she, Esther, had been in love with him, if Pernilla was to be believed. The thought made him curiously happy.

  He worked on, perfecting the details of the design, translating them on to the computer and now, finally, preparing to hand them over to the model makers. And he thought of the old brother and sister, the Wilsons. Every step he took towards the fulfilment of his dream was a step nearer to the destruction of theirs. But this was no time for doubts, so he swiped them away with an impatient gesture of his hand across his forehead and carried on with his drawing.

  The next day, halfway through the morning, he telephoned Esther in London. He asked her straight out if she had written the message in the bottle.

  There had been a long pause. Then: ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘So you did.’ Linus felt himself smile.

  ‘I feel like a complete idiot.’ She sounded cross. ‘I mean never in a million years did I imagine it’d actually get to you.’

  ‘Well it did. Ivar found it.’

  ‘Ivar did?’ There was another pause. ‘Oh, well.’

  ‘Maybe we should talk about this,’ Linus said. ‘I mean, this is the kind of thing one needs to talk about.’

  ‘It’s bloody embarrassing.’ Esther sounded as if she were close to tears.

  ‘Well if you’d rather not… so how’s everything else? You heard the news about the opera house?’

  ‘Yes, yes I did.’ She paused and swallowed before saying, ‘I’m working on a piece about it now.’

  ‘You’re doing what? I don’t believe this. You say you love me and then you set about destroying my life.’

  ‘I’m not trying to destroy your life. I’m trying to behave in a way that makes me able to live with myself.’

  ‘God, do you remind me of someone. You write about love with one hand while the other is busy unstitching the very fabric of my existence.’ He slammed down the phone. Bloody women! You couldn’t trust them, not any of them. It was a good half-hour before he had calmed down enough to get back to work.

  At ten o’clock he finally left the office. Buildings, he thought, as he switched off the light behind him, buildings, solid, lasting, they were what mattered.

  Thirty-one

  I would never have thought of myself as a likely suicide candidate. Yet, after that phone conversation with Linus, the one when I added hatred to the list of reasons he could give for never loving me back, there were moments when death seemed an option. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, I kept telling myself. The trouble was that for most of the time it sounded like a load of bull.

  So I worked. I did my pieces for ‘Chronicle Woman’. I did a charming and sympathetic feature on Barry Jones and his newfound passion for charity work. I kept in touch with the developments in the Wilson saga, feeling sick at heart all the while. ‘Linus, my love, this will hurt me more than you,’ I muttered as I prepared to leave for Kent. As if that were going to help either of us.

  The Wilsons’
dog was dead. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘It were in the way,’ George said.

  ‘In the way of what?’ I wondered.

  ‘Machinery,’ George replied.

  ‘Oh. Oh dear, how dreadful. You must miss him.’

  ‘He were an old dog, but I miss him.’

  Maybe it was the newly planted roses blooming against the cottage wall, or the warm sunshine of an Indian summer, but Rookery Cottage looked an altogether different place from the one I had visited two months earlier. The hens were still picking their way up and down the mud-track drive, but their harassed pecking had given way to a leisurely strut and there seemed to be a new shine to their feathers. Even the evidence of George’s scrap business had been tidied away beneath a newly renovated open shed.

  George had been out at the front when I arrived and in the space it took for us to reach the front door a white Ford Fiesta drove up and a middle-aged woman, her ample form clad in a dark-blue track suit, got out and hailed him. Having caught up with us she introduced herself to me, breathlessly, as Penny Perkins, Chair of the Save George and Dora’s Home campaign. I looked at George.

  ‘It’s the locals,’ he muttered. ‘They’ve sort of taken up our cause, if you like.’

  Penny Perkins’s face relaxed into a pleased smile. ‘We had the local TV news down the other day. They were doing a follow-up.’ She pronounced the last words carefully, as if she had just learnt them. ‘It was marvellous, actually. We all gathered round in George and Dora’s kitchen and had a little singsong. Someone said it must have been like that during the war, that community spirit, everyone looking out for everyone else and keeping each other cheerful.’

  She paused and Dora, who had appeared in the doorway, took the opportunity to point at me and say, ‘That there’s Miss Fisher. She’s the one from the paper.’

  ‘Oh, right. Well, we have a lot to thank you for, then,’ Penny Perkins said. ‘Without you Dora and George might have lost their home already.’ A frown creased her brow and she sighed. ‘But I’m almost forgetting. I came to tell you that they’re saying now the building’s going ahead for certain. You wouldn’t believe it, would you, after everything. But Ted was down at the council offices and he heard Mary Trilby tell Joan and that’s how Ted knew.’