Frozen Music

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘You’re late,’ Lotten said from the drawing-room sofa. She was watching television with her feet up, her hand dipping rhythmically into a bag of dried apricots. He suddenly realised that she didn’t really care if he was late or not, in fact she had not for quite some time. He, in turn, had been too relieved not to be greeted by sulks and dramas to ask what had brought about the change.

  ‘Ivar’s been in bed for ages,’ Lotten said, her eyes still on the television. ‘There’s some chicken in the fridge and some potato salad.’ Linus stayed for a moment, watching her. She seemed unaware that he was still in the room. This was what he had prayed for, a quiet, uneventful evening with nothing to challenge him or confront his guilt, but now he felt let down. He wanted attention, damn it.

  ‘Come and eat with me.’ He smiled at her. ‘Let’s eat together.’

  Lotten glanced up briefly, a slight frown on her forehead as if she was surprised and not altogether pleased to find him still there. ‘I told you, I’ve eaten.’

  Linus strode up to his wife and took her hands, pulling her up towards him. ‘Let’s have a glass of wine.’

  Lotten’s level eyes looked into his. ‘What’s wrong with you? I’m trying to watch this programme.’

  ‘Why should there be something wrong?’ He tried to make his voice light, but had he been singing he would have struck one false note after the other. He tried again. ‘Does there have to be something wrong for a man to want to spend some time with his wife?’

  ‘Yes, in my experience.’

  He had to pause and think about that. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said finally, trying to pull her up from the sofa. ‘Let’s talk.’

  Lotten shrugged free. ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, anything. Just let’s talk the way we used to. Let’s get drunk and talk and be like we used to be.’

  Lotten looked round for the remote. ‘We used to be younger. We used not to have a child. You used to have time to listen. You used not to work every hour God gave you.’

  His guilt made him aggrieved. ‘You told me that you understood about my work. You told me you couldn’t live with someone who wasn’t passionate about what they did and that allowing each other space was essential.’ He gave a joyless bark of a laugh, a million miles away from his usual abandoned giggle. ‘Of course, that was before we were married.’

  ‘I know what you’re implying, you bastard.’ Lotten was screaming all of a sudden. ‘And you’re wrong. I meant what I said.’ She quietened down. ‘I could, because back then, before we were married, you made it seem as if nothing, your work included, could ever mean more to you than I did. That’s why I could say those things and mean them.’

  The anger left him. He had no right to be angry in the first place. He was the one who had cheated. He understood, too, exactly what she was saying. Illogical it might be, but he understood precisely. He held out his hand towards her. She didn’t take it so he let it fall back to his side.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About everything.’ He sat down on the sofa, stretching out his legs, leaning his head against the back. He was dog-tired.

  ‘Why do we live in this place?’ he asked. ‘What are we doing in a dump like this?’

  Lotten too had sat down, but in the armchair. She had stopped shouting and said, quite calmly, ‘We live in this dump, as you chose to call our home, because you refuse, or should I say put off, designing us a real home. It’s like doctors’ families,’ she continued as Linus opened his mouth to protest. ‘They can be dying before the great man gets round to checking them out. If Ivar and I waited for you to design our house we’d still be waiting in fifty years’ time. As always we come a poor second to your work. Well, maybe we don’t care any more. Maybe you’ll just be in for a great shock one day.’

  Later, on his way to bed, he popped in to check on Ivar. All that talk of original sin, he thought and yet, was there a child born who did not look like an angel when he slept?

  Lying back in the bath he got an erection thinking of Katya. ‘Shit!’ He splashed his fist down into the water. ‘Shit shit shit,’ he sobbed quietly.

  The next morning he went over to Katya and told her he couldn’t see her again. As he walked on to the office he felt like a prisoner who had, for a few brief moments, been allowed out from his cell and into the sunlight, only to be led back inside the dark once more never again to see the light.

  Nine

  ‘What is love?’ I asked, the way I had years before.

  ‘Love.’ Audrey shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘Love is an illusion. Lasting love is a lasting illusion.’ She bit into her pain au chocolat sending a cascade of flaky pastry down the front of her lavender-blue bedjacket.

  ‘Love is when you can’t keep your knickers on,’ Chloe, my boss, said. ‘Or is that sex?’ She might not have been the right person to ask as she had just been through a divorce.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Holden said. ‘Just relax.’

  LOVE HAS ITS PRICE FOR TV’S BARRY JONES, read one tabloid headline.

  LOVE RAT BARRY GETS HIS JUST FROMAGE AS SECRET LOVE CHILD IS DISCOVERED IN FRANCE, another announced breathlessly.

  It seemed his wife had left him, or rather, she had thrown him out of their north London mansion. His mistress had been offered a job as an agony aunt on Cable.

  I had some holiday due to me so I took a week off to redecorate the flat. I had my schedule already worked out: Monday morning, clear sitting-room and prepare walls. Afternoon, apply undercoat. Call Holden and ask him and Arabella and her new boyfriend, Peter, for supper while still in possession of kitchen. Call Mother and ask how she is. Invite Mother to dinner as there’s not the slightest risk that she’ll accept, but it’ll make her feel wanted.

  By Wednesday I had finished the sitting-room. I was pleased with the result. I had painted the walls in a soft pale brown, which might seem an odd colour to choose, but it worked extremely well with the new pink-and-white sofa and with the gilt mirror I had inherited from Granny Billings, which hung above the fireplace.

  ‘Pink?’ Audrey had said when I described the room to her. ‘I hardly have you down as a pink person.’

  ‘It’s love what does it,’ I had said.

  ‘Oh darling, you and Holden, how marvellous. He’ll do absolutely as well as anyone.’

  ‘It’s not me and Holden, as in love’s sweet young dream,’ I corrected her. ‘It’s love as in absence of. That can turn your thoughts to pink just as much as having it, more maybe. Anyway, I just liked the sofa.’

  The dinner party went well insofar as Arabella and Peter had a lovely time. The problem was they would have had a lovely time in a damp coal cellar. I knew it was serious the minute Arabella told me she had abandoned her plan to go through the whole alphabet and skipped from I for Ian, straight to P for Peter. I couldn’t help comparing the look in their eyes with the look in Holden’s and mine.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Holden asked me over the washing-up. But what he actually meant was: I know something is up, but can you please deny it so we can forget about it and go to bed.

  ‘Peter looks at Arabella the whole time. You hardly looked at me all evening. And I don’t count we-need-some-more-garlic-bread looks.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ Holden inspected a glass for smudge marks after I had wiped it. I snatched it from him and put it away in the cupboard.

  I turned round to face him, gazing into his handsome, mildly puzzled face. It was the face of someone who didn’t know what on earth the fuss was about, but who was determined to be patient. The face, in other words, of a man confronted by a woman wielding words like Emotion and Relationship. I sighed and shook my head. ‘Oh, nothing.’

  Holden smiled and pulled me towards him. ‘That’s all right, then. Anyway, I didn’t have you down as the romantic type. That’s what’s so refreshing.’

  I pulled away from him. ‘It’s not bloody all right,’ I yelled. ‘It’s absolutely not all right at all. And what am I that everyone wants to categorise me?
A novel? Esther is not the type for pink. Esther is not the type for love. What do you know? What does anyone know?’ I was sobbing now.

  Holden looked hurt. ‘What is wrong with you, Esther? Is it your period or something?’

  ‘Don’t you use my period as an excuse,’ I yelled through the sobs.

  ‘This really isn’t like you.’ Holden tried to grab my hand, but I snatched it away. ‘You’re not some hysterical over-emotional female. How much wine have you had?’

  Suddenly I felt calm. ‘There you are again, telling me what I am. No, I haven’t got my period and I’m not drunk, I just want to know what it’s like to be in love. I’m thirty-two years old and I’ve never been properly in love.’

  Holden slung the tea towel over one shoulder and took my hand. This time I let him. ‘Come and sit down.’ He led me to the sitting-room. ‘Let’s talk.’

  ‘You don’t like talking.’

  ‘What do you mean, I don’t like talking?’

  ‘I mean, you don’t like talking, you like what you call a Companionable Silence. By that you mean me sitting silently, but with an air of rapt attention, in case you should choose to speak, in which case I would answer briefly and uncontentiously before shutting up once more.’

  He laughed softly. ‘Who’s telling who now?’ He stroked the back of my neck. ‘You and I get on so well precisely because neither of us believes in all that in-love stuff. We know that having fun together and respecting each other is what it all comes down to in the end.’

  At that I began to cry again, quietly at first, then louder and with growing conviction.

  ‘I really don’t know what’s got into you.’ Holden pulled back.

  ‘Nothing, nothing’s got into me, that’s the problem.’

  Holden’s puzzled expression cleared. ‘You mean we haven’t had sex for a while. Why didn’t you tell me? It’s nothing personal, I promise you that, I’ve just had rather a lot on at work and…’

  ‘I’m not talking about sex!’ I yelled.

  Next door, the Potters knocked on the wall. ‘I’m not talking about sex,’ I hissed. ‘Please leave now. I want to go to bed, alone.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to talk.’ I heard his voice, complaining, uncomprehending, as I disappeared.

  I kept on with my decorating, trying to take my mind off Holden. I missed him, but at the same time I knew I couldn’t go on for ever waiting to love him the way I thought I should. By Saturday evening the kitchen was finished. It was blue on blue. Pale-blue-and-white striped wallpaper, a darker, grey-blue shade for the cupboard doors and cornflower-blue for the wooden-backed kitchen chairs. On the Sunday, like the Lord, I planned to rest. Holden called just as I sat down with a heap of newspapers. ‘I think we should take a break from each other,’ I said to him.

  There was a long silence. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘You don’t.’ His voice sounded almost playful now.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ His voice was singsong.

  ‘I bloody well do.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t swear.’ There was another pause. ‘If this is about me not wanting to go to all those French art-house movies…’

  I put the phone down and then I sat down and wrote him a letter: Dear Holden, It’s over.

  Back to work after my break and Barry Jones was in the papers again. ‘“I was punched in the face by disgraced TV star.” News photographer tells of moment of fear outside fashionable Knightsbridge eatery.’

  I stared at the picture of Barry Jones’s face, wild-eyed and unshaven as he was being restrained by two dark-suited men from inflicting further damage to the newsman. I remembered him on the ground that morning, pleading with me not to call for help.

  ‘I feel so bloody responsible,’ I told Chloe at the office.

  ‘That’s because you are,’ she said. But as I yelped in anguish she laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. He brought it on himself and you know it. You did your job. If he had stuck to doing his instead of sticking it up his mistress he’d still be the housewife’s favourite. So don’t you go blaming yourself.’ She made a reassuring figure, Chloe, small and compact, looking even sturdier this morning in her fashionable knitted lace tights. She had spent two hours queuing outside Harvey Nichols on her morning off to get her hands on those tights. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘I want you to do an interview with Tammy Jones, the wife. Apparently she’s taken him back.’

  ‘I’d rather not. I’ve done enough damage to that man and his family, whatever you say.’

  ‘You did what you thought was right at the time. Now pull yourself together and get on with it.’

  ‘That’s what worries me. If you can do that much damage by doing what you think is right… God knows what kind of harm one can inflict by just pottering about one’s daily business.’

  ‘Think like that and you’ll go mad,’ Chloe said. ‘Now use your common sense and stop fretting. Where would we be if all journalists thought like you?’

  ‘Karen Dempster’s family might still be alive today.’

  ‘You’re not blaming yourself for that? You were party to bringing her to justice, you had nothing to do with what went before.’

  ‘Not personally, no, but I’m part of the world which created the ethos which in turn bred this type of media monster.’

  ‘OK, OK. But think about this one. Without us, Cecil Parkinson might be prime minister.’

  ‘All right. I’m not saying we’re all bad. But what about that MP who killed himself?’

  Chloe shrugged. ‘You win some, you lose some. Think of Rwanda, Bosnia, Algeria. Who would care or even know if it weren’t for us?’

  ‘All right, then. So what about the Royal Family? Think of all the famous people, hounded for no reason other than that people love sticking their beaks into other people’s business.’

  Chloe shrugged. ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘All right, then. What about the not so famous people and their families hounded by the press and the rest of the media?’

  ‘I’m still thinking. Now take Watergate.’

  I nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘BSE,’ Chloe said, a note of triumph in her voice. ‘Who makes sure the public is informed? And think back to the time when there was a real threat to the lives of haemophiliacs through HIV-infected factor 8. They tried to gag us, but who was proven right?’

  ‘All right, all right.’ I sighed. ‘I’ll do the interview.’

  I got Tammy Jones, Barry’s wife, on the telephone. The Joneses’ number was ex-directory, of course, but I had got it from a mutual friend in television. Tammy agreed to meet me the following day. ‘You’re sure you want to do this?’ I asked. It just slipped out.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ the wispy little girl’s voice held a hint of sharpness. ‘What an odd question for a journalist to ask.’ Quite. I fixed the time, three thirty the following afternoon. And the place? Her house. Excellent!

  Returning home that evening I thought I smelt gas as I passed the house three doors up from mine, the Hammonds’ place. I stopped and retraced my steps, sniffing the air. Yes, definitely gas. I walked up to the front door and rang the bell. I waited a couple of minutes, I could hear the television from inside, before ringing a second time. ‘Yes.’ Mr Hammond stood glaring in the doorway, in his checked felt slippers and vest tucked into his grey trousers.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mr Hammond, but there’s a smell of gas coming from right outside your basement. I’ll show you.’ I took a step back.

  ‘I’ll see to it.’

  ‘You should probably call the gas board,’ I said. ‘It could be dangerous.’

  ‘Tony, EastEnders’s starting.’ Mrs Hammond’s voice reached us from the sitting-room.

  ‘I said I’ll see to it. Goodnight then.’

  ‘I could make the call if you’re busy.’

  ‘I said I’d see to it.’ Mr Hammond shut the door in my face.

  I could stil
l smell gas as I stepped out on to our street the next morning. I stopped at the Hammonds’ door, about to ring the bell, when I changed my mind and walked on past. I must stop interfering, I told myself. The Hammonds might be unpleasant, but they weren’t idiots. They would have called the gas board by now. Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for an early-morning rebuff; my interfering days were over.

  I went to my mother’s for lunch before setting off to north London for the interview with Tammy Jones. Audrey was sorry to hear that I had broken off with Holden.

  ‘You want grandchildren, I know,’ I said sympathetically.

  ‘No, no, I don’t particularly,’ Audrey said. ‘I just thought he was rather a nice young man. Not much imagination, but let’s face it, neither have you.’

  ‘But I wasn’t in love with him.’

  ‘Who was it who said that as you never end up in love with the man you choose to share your life with, you might as well not be in love to start with?’

  I shrugged. ‘Me?’

  My mother nodded. ‘Now.’ She passed me a plate of asparagus quiche. ‘Have some of this. It’s delicious. Janet made it this morning.’

  I took the plate. ‘I would just like to see for myself what I’ll eventually be missing, rather than take other people’s word for it. I don’t want other people’s second-hand disillusions, I want my own brand-new ones. I want to know what that particular folly is all about. Is that so unreasonable?’

  Audrey sighed. Then she smiled and shook her head. ‘No, no, I don’t suppose it is. But you know, even if you did find it, love that is, you wouldn’t like it. Love is everything you don’t want. Love is the enemy of rules and logic. It’s the Antichrist of order and reason. No, it’s not your thing at all.’