‘Esther also spends her Christmas holidays serving food to the homeless,’ Arabella interjected, as if she was trying to advertise me and I glared at her, embarrassed. ‘In fact,’ Arabella went on, undaunted, ‘the only thing stopping Esther from being a modern-day saint is a bad temper and a slight tendency towards sin.’
Holden’s handsome face, square-jawed and tanned, took on a keen, focused expression. It was hard to tell whether it was the word ‘saint’ or the word ‘sin’ that caused it, but the world being what it is, I could guess. I longed to tell him I was celibate as well, but that would be a lie and I tried not to lie.
‘No one could accuse you of being a saint, could they, my darling,’ George cooed at Arabella, taking her hand across the table. He looked as if he wanted to eat her then and there, and who could blame him? We were all starving as Arabella was a shocking cook at the best of times and tonight she had surpassed herself with a bouillabaisse, which proved beyond all doubt that fish didn’t keep well.
Holden walked me home. ‘I won’t ask you in,’ I said as we reached the flat, ‘because…’
‘… because you’re tired,’ Holden filled in with a little smile, as he raised his hand and touched my chin with the tip of his middle finger.
‘Because I’m all talked out for one evening and I don’t know you well enough to sleep with you,’ I corrected him. He left pretty quickly after that.
‘So what was Arabella’s place like?’ It was Saturday and Audrey had popped in on her way from buying silk flowers from a small shop on the edge of Parsons Green. (‘The secret is to mix them with real ones, darling.’)
‘Arabella’s new flat,’ I said vaguely. ‘Oh, it’s nice. I didn’t like her dining-room table, but otherwise it’s really nice.’
‘Bad taste runs in that family.’ Audrey sniffed. ‘Arabella’s mother completely ruined that beautiful mews house she got in the divorce settlement.’
‘Big windows,’ I said, trying to be helpful. But try as I might, all I could see were pictures of Arabella’s mind, all cosy and rosy and rounded, with comfortable thoughts floating gently around against a baby-blue background. ‘Really nice.’
‘Nice. That word says nothing.’
People always said that, but I didn’t agree. Nice meant what it said: pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory, kind, good-natured. Now what was wrong with that?
I was working late one evening, finishing off some research on a new American woman novelist, when the wail of a siren interrupted my thoughts. As I looked out of the basement window an ambulance blasted into the narrow street, screeching to a halt outside the house. I rushed to the door to see the men hurry inside the Bodkins’ door. Within moments they were back out on the street, their stretcher weighed down by the elderly frame of Mr Bodkin. Mrs Bodkin stood on her front-door step, frozen, while her husband was being loaded aboard. As the last of Mr Bodkin disappeared she seemed to snap into life and, walking towards the ambulance, she was helped inside. I turned back from the window, tears in my eyes. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, I wailed to myself. I prayed he’d be all right. They were such a sweet old couple. Jim and Elsa Bodkin, forty-three years together in that same house. Jim and Elsa Bodkin, inseparable, wandering down the road to Safeway, hand in hand, gardening, feeding the birds, taking a stroll in the spring sunshine.
The next day I heard from another neighbour that Jim Bodkin had died. I knew that the Bodkins had no immediate family and that most of their friends had died or moved from the area, so later that day I rang Elsa’s doorbell to ask if she might need some company. She opened the door wearing a bright blue jogging suit with pink socks and brilliant white trainers, very different from her normal tweed skirt and cardigan. ‘Oh no, dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about me. I quite like my own company.’ And that was that, she practically pushed me out of the door, closing it quickly as if she was afraid I might force my way in with tea and sympathy. I still kept an eye out for Elsa; grief could do strange things to people’s minds, but apart from her clothes, one brightly coloured jogging suit after the other, she seemed fine as she pottered down the road to Safeway or worked in the garden. She was mostly indoors, though. Then the music started. Always opera, always loud. It began to get on my nerves as I came back from work or sat reading on a Sunday afternoon. When she started playing it in the middle of the night I had had enough. The next morning I rang her doorbell. ‘I’m all right, dear,’ Elsa said impatiently, barely visible through the crack in the door. ‘But thank you for asking.’
‘I’ve come about the music,’ I said, wedging my shoulder against the door. ‘I don’t suppose you could keep it down just a little.’ Elsa pulled it wide open. Today she was wearing pea-green. I hadn’t seen a pea-green sweat-suit before. ‘Goodness gracious, have I been disturbing you?’ she enquired. I admitted that actually she had. ‘Jim never cared for opera either,’ Elsa said, beckoning me inside the narrow hall.
I told her I liked opera very much, but in its place. Then I saw it, the object on the wall above the stairs. Elsa followed my gaze.
‘What do you think?’ she asked me.
What did I think about a huge pink plush penis? ‘It’s very interesting.’
‘I don’t intend to keep it in the hall,’ Elsa said. ‘People might think it odd.’ She led me into the small front room. In pride of place, on top of the cabinet where before there had been a fish tank, stood a pair of lush cherry-red lips. A pair of soft plush hands were mounted like antlers on the wall above the fireplace and on an opposite wall hung one huge perfect ear. On the hearth, a hollow foot on a hollow leg housed the fire tongs and poker. ‘All my own work,’ Elsa stated. ‘I always had a mind to do something artistic, but while Jim was alive there never seemed to be the time. He wasn’t what you’d call a difficult man, he just liked things his way. They do, men. Then, when he passed away, I thought, well at least now I can get on with it.’
‘It’s an interesting choice of subjects,’ I said. We were sitting down and Elsa had made us a pot of tea.
‘Well I’ve never been one for landscapes myself.’ Elsa sipped delicately from her Royal Albert china cup. ‘And maybe it’s my eyes, but I’ve always seen people in bits: a mouth or an ear, a nostril even. I’ll be honest with you, if you ask me to describe someone I’d be giving you just one bit.’
My mind went to the large plush penis.
‘Jim and I were very happy together,’ Elsa said as if she had been reading my thoughts.
Before I left I asked her if I could do an article on her for the magazine. Elsa and her ‘Plush Pieces’ was included in the Christmas issue. The feature made her quite a celebrity. Within days of it appearing it had gained her a spot on breakfast television and an offer of a one-woman show at a well-known gallery. In the new year I had a phone call from Chloe Sidcup, the features editor at the Chronicle, inviting me up to her offices for a talk.
‘Don’t be fooled by all that “I’m just one of the girls” act,’ a colleague at Chic and Cheek warned before my interview. ‘She’s as tough as they come.’
Chloe Sidcup got up from her desk and put out her small hand to greet me. She was around thirty-five, bottle blonde, red-lipped and dressed in an electric-blue trouser suit with the kind of padded shoulders that made me think she would have to walk sideways to get through the doorway. She looked me up and down. ‘Love the jacket,’ she said. ‘Whose is it?’
‘It’s mine,’ I said, momentarily piqued. To be fair, she was right to ask because it had once belonged to Madox. When he didn’t want it any more I had appropriated it, thinking it lent me a kind of Annie Hall chic. Chloe explained that she had meant who was the jacket by. I was about to take it off to check the label for the name of his tailor when Chloe stopped me: ‘Never mind.’
We sat down and I showed her some of my work. We talked about various ideas I had for future pieces and a week later I got a call offering me a job as a feature writer for the Chronicle.
I toasted my success with Arabella and Sop
hie. As I looked across the Carl Larsson room at my friends I felt content with the world, just for once. I had done a good job and I had not had to compromise my principles. I hadn’t had to dish the dirt, instead I had brought recognition and a following to someone I respected. It seemed to me then, as I poured us out another glass of champagne, that there was, after all, some order and justice in the world. I raised the glass, my third, to them and said, only half joking, ‘To virtue and its rewards.’
‘To virtue,’ Sophie echoed.
‘To rewards,’ said Arabella.
Linus was working late at the office. He did most days, and most days he returned to be shouted at by Lotten. Lotten always had supper ready at half past six; she was a very organised woman. Half past six was later than she would have liked to eat, later than anyone else eats on weekdays, she pointed out frequently and with a frown, but on this point Linus had stood firm. He could not leave the office before six. Lotten pointed out that the office closed at five. ‘Everyone else leaves at five or earlier.’ Linus tried to explain, without sounding pretentious but simply as the only truth he knew, that he was different from the others. But how was Lotten supposed to understand? ‘You’re different, all right,’ she said bitterly. ‘You’re never home. You walk around with your head in the clouds, half the time you don’t seem to hear what I say, or care. You never want to join the others for tennis or an evening out.’ ‘The others’ being the group of friends of about the same age whom they had mixed with since schooldays.
At his desk, Linus sighed and began to put away the drawings he was submitting for a new bridge to join the mainland to one of the islands in the archipelago. On his way over to the large computer screen he passed the plans for a small block of flats left out by his colleague Jonas Berg and, looking closer, he saw the beginnings of a solution to the problem of living space which Jonas had complained about earlier. He slipped on to the chair and picked up a pencil.
A while later Linus looked up at the clock on the wall above the office door. It was six forty-five. Home was a good quarter of an hour’s walk from the office so whatever he did now Lotten would be screaming at him as he returned. He might as well stay and finish what he was doing, it was a matter of getting value for money, so to speak. And there were a couple more things he wished to do with the bridge drawings before the ideas went out of his head. This was a commission he really wanted. The west coast and its architecture was in his blood. He loved the brightly coloured extravagant shapes of the buildings. The turrets and wooden carvings that decorated verandas and balconies, and the way it stood in such contrast to the stark beauty of the surrounding landscape of granite rocks and grey-blue sea. He had visited the site over and over so that all he had to do now was to close his eyes and he would see it in his mind, complete with his bridge. A bridge which swept across the water in a perfect white arch, a cloud walk across the sound. In winter it would stand almost deserted, against the unremitting grey of the sea and the sky and the rocks. Then, in summer, when all of Sweden emerged, bright and vibrant, as from a huge sodden winter coat, it would carry hundreds of cars on a daily crossing to the other side.
Reluctantly, at seven o’clock, he got ready to leave. Turning off the computer with one hand, he doodled on his drawing a tightrope dancer in a pink tutu, a green parasol raised in her left hand as she balanced across the line of the handrail along the side of the bridge.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ Lotten stood, eyes blazing, in the hall, her arms crossed over her chest. ‘Dinner is ruined and I was about to phone the hospitals. Why didn’t you call to say you were going to be late, huh?’
Linus, taking off his coat, was about to ask why she had not thought to ring the office before she called the hospitals when he remembered that he had switched on to answerphone and not checked his messages. And how could he explain why he had not phoned himself? The truth? I didn’t call because I knew you would make a fuss and I was far too engrossed in my work to want to bother with all that. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Tram tracks iced up again.’
‘Very funny. It’s May and you don’t take the tram anyway.’
Linus bent down to kiss her, but she ducked out of his way and marched into the kitchen where she removed a casserole dish from the oven, noisily scraping its contents into the bin. ‘I could have eaten that,’ Linus protested.
‘So eat it, then.’ Lotten fished out a spoonful from the bin and chucked it on a plate. ‘Enjoy.’ Suddenly her face crumpled and to his horror she burst into tears. ‘I’m two weeks overdue,’ she sobbed, her slanted coldwater-blue eyes brimming as she rubbed at her sharp little nose. ‘I’m never late, never.’
Linus stared at her. ‘I think I’m pregnant, you retard. I’m pregnant with your child and look at you!’ Now she stopped crying and began laughing hysterically instead. ‘Just look at you, you great big lumbering…’ She broke off, choking, and sank into a chair. Linus knelt by her side and took her hand, patting it clumsily. She did not withdraw it and after a while her sobbing stopped. ‘We’re going to have a baby,’ she whispered. Linus kept on patting her hand until she straightened up, saying in her normal voice, ‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’
Linus got to his feet, then sat back down on the chair next to her. ‘I’m overwhelmed,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t quite know what to say.’
‘But are you pleased?’ There was a sharp note to Lotten’s voice.
Linus wished he were not so slow. His thoughts were anything but, racing through his brain, darting hither and thither, but it was precisely because of that that he needed time. Time to weed out the true and real from the bluster. Linus was on a quest for the right word, the sincere reaction, the truest feeling. But time was something Lotten was not prepared to give him. She, like everybody else, seemed to want instant feeling, immediate reaction. He did his best to oblige. ‘Of course I’m pleased. It’s wonderful news. I’m thrilled.’
This time Lotten did not pursue the subject. All at once she seemed to have lost interest in him as she sat picking away at the congealing food, chewing the cold mushrooms and carrots and pulses, a far-away look in her eyes. Linus was left to try to work out what he really felt about the possibility of a new life, his and Lotten’s child, growing inside her. Put like that, it scared him. The thought of a foreign body making itself at home inside that of his wife. How must that feel, to be two people all of a sudden? And one of them a stranger. And what does he say when he sees his pregnant wife come towards him? There go my wife and child, hello you two. But no one else seemed to see it that way. The convention was to ignore the person within the person until it was on the other side. Lotten pushed the plate closer towards him. ‘Have some.’ Obediently he picked up the fork. Was he, he wondered, at that precise moment having dinner with one or with two people?
‘Do you love me?’ Lotten asked suddenly.
‘Of course I love you,’ he said.
‘You never say so any more.’
‘I don’t think about it very much, that’s all.’ He was immediately aware that he had said the wrong thing, again. Furious with himself he watched Lotten’s face harden into that familiar air of dissatisfaction: small mouth pursed, eyes narrowed.
‘What I meant to say was that loving you is so much part of my life that I don’t have to give it much thought, I just take it for granted and I suppose I expect you to do so as well.’ His voice trailed off as he met his wife’s stony glance.
‘Yes, you do take it for granted. You take me for granted and our marriage for granted and I’m fed up with it, do you hear?’ Her voice rose dangerously. Linus moved closer to her and put his long arm round her shoulders. He felt desperate. It was always the same; she wanted him to express his feelings, but when he did, something always went wrong. He knew what he wanted to say, in his mind he did, but before Lotten’s clear-eyed gaze the words seemed to slip off in all the wrong directions like the legs of a calf on an icy road. Then she’d challenge him and he was lost, no match fo
r his wife’s verbal dexterity.
‘You know that’s not what I mean,’ he tried once more. ‘It’s not taking for granted in the way you seem to think, more like, well the way you take the pleasure of the feel of your favourite pencil for granted, or your favourite sweater, the one you can’t do without,’ he added hastily, but he knew even before she tipped the plate with the remaining casserole over his lap that as usual he had failed to explain himself.
His plans for the bridge were rejected as too costly, but instead of handing the commission to one of the other firms of architects, the council asked if he could modify his proposal. His boss, Lennart Karlsson, sighed and shook his head. ‘You do this every time. Why? Why do you submit something you must know will be deemed unsuitable? You do it over and over and then, when you have to, you go back and redesign, effortlessly it seems to me, producing something to everybody’s satisfaction.’
‘Not to mine,’ Linus said tiredly. ‘Never to mine, not those second compromise drawings.’ He looked up at Lennart. ‘Those first drawings, they are from the soul of an architect. The second ones, well, they come from the mind of an engineer.’
‘I understand about being true to one’s vision.’ Lennart looked up with a small smile. ‘Don’t think I don’t. We’ve all been there, more times than we care to think about. But things have changed. You know that. The architect has had to step into the background as rational architecture and industry take over the building process. We are co-ordinators, technicians. We have to learn to leave behind the creative side of our work for most of our working lives. It’s the way things are, Linus.’
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