Frozen Music

by Marika Cobbold

  I reminded myself that I was fighting, not only for my career, but for what was right, and that this therefore was no time to weaken. ‘Still.’ I sat back in the chair, the glass of wine in my hand. ‘You should think long and hard before you accept this commission. The old defence of “I was only following orders” has lost its ring of late.’

  Linus narrowed his eyes at me and I realised I had been mistaken: Linus Stendal was no more vulnerable than any other amoral environmental vandal. He stood up. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve suddenly remembered an appointment. I’ll see you this afternoon, Stuart.’

  I followed him with my gaze as he manoeuvred his way out between the tables, then I turned back to Stuart Lloyd who said, ‘Now don’t forget to tell me the name of your Charm School before you leave.’

  I smiled as sweetly as I could. ‘I would really appreciate it if you would outline your side of the story to me, give me an idea of your vision, because that’s what this is all about.’

  Stuart Lloyd pushed away his empty plate, but he didn’t relax in his chair, remaining forward in the seat, one elbow on the table. He spoke well. He had passion as he told of his desire to leave something behind that would benefit people, ordinary people like himself. ‘Opera was my father’s solace and his inspiration. He slogged away in a dingy office all his life, working nights in a warehouse just to pay the bills. But when he sat down in his own front room and listened to his music he felt like a king. He never saw a live performance; the mere thought of it was beyond him. By the time I was able to get him tickets to every performance he’d ever wish to go to he was dead. So you see, it’s precisely the elitist label you spoke of that I’m trying to remove. And Linus Stendal’s design is as exciting a piece of modern architecture as anything I’ve seen. It stands up to the best you come across in places like New York and Chicago. It’s perfectly in tune with its lakeside setting, and with the existing house.’

  ‘But what of Dora and George Wilson?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry, but nothing you’ve said has convinced me that you have a right to cause them to be evicted from their home. Anyway, I would have thought it’s green belt.’

  Stuart Lloyd shook his head. ‘Nope. They might be keeping a few animals, but it’s not designated farmland and it’s not green belt. Years ago there was talk of a bypass going through and it was all dealt with then, although the council ran out of money before the bypass could be built.’

  ‘And the access road and car park absolutely have to run through that particular piece of land, the Wilsons’ land, and nowhere else? Not just a bit to the left or right?’

  Stuart Lloyd stifled an impatient sigh. ‘If you had been down there and seen the layout for yourself you wouldn’t have had to waste either of our time with questions like that.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Well, there we are. I’ve explained my position and that’s all I can do. I can’t force you or your paper to agree with it. Still, I would hope that you’ll give it some more thought before you write your piece. There are more nuances by far in this world than the black and white we see on the pages of newspapers.’ He signalled for the bill. ‘Now I must get back to the office. It was a pleasure talking to you, Miss Fisher.’

  Once home, I faxed an outline for a feature to Chloe at the office. I got a fax back saying, Are you sober?

  I faxed back, You want sober, you go somewhere else.

  The machine whirred out, Fine!

  I sent my grovel by return: What I meant to say, of course, is if you want sober, you’ll get sober.

  And sane?

  What do you want? Blood?

  Cut the crap and get writing!

  OK.

  I had found out that Linus was staying at the Metropolitan so I faxed him there asking if I could see the proposed plans for the building. Next I called Directory Enquiries for the Wilsons’ telephone number. It turned out that they were not on the phone. There was nothing else for it other than to get across to Kent to see them. There was no time to write to ask for an appointment so I just hoped for the best and got into my car. Well, Audrey’s car, really, but she was always on at me to use it. I had my road map and the drive down looked pretty straightforward. I was a good map reader. Both my parents had taught me that women were congenitally unable to read a map, Madox by telling me so and Audrey by example, so years ago I had set about learning. After weeks of study I had found myself secretly agreeing with them, but I had persevered. Just because a prejudice was justified, there was no need to give in to it. Once off the motorway the road narrowed, from dual carriageway to single-lane B road, to narrow lane that wound its way through countryside that seemed forgotten by the developers. The small industrial estates and neat mock-Tudor housing developments gave way to farmhouses and barns. The sun was shining, but it was chilly for late April. The lane snaked its way up a hill and over a small railway bridge and a few yards after that I spotted a neglected wooden sign saying Rookery Cottage. I turned left off the road and on to a mud track leading up to a rusty iron gate. I parked and got out.

  Rookery Cottage, built in a dip between two small hills where even now, at midday, the sun didn’t quite reach, looked like the gingerbread house after the witch had fallen on hard times. I opened the gate and narrowly avoided stepping on a large hen picking its way through some debris. Free range, I thought happily as I continued up the dirt track and into the small front yard. Two rusty old tractors stood in an open-sided corrugated-iron shed and what would once have been an engine was piled in its component parts right outside. As I approached the house I saw a net curtain move in an upstairs window. Good, someone was home. People say that the quiet of the countryside is a myth, but it seemed pretty quiet to me as I looked around, drawing in another breath of country air, quiet until a large dog appeared from nowhere, bounding towards me barking hysterically. There was nowhere to run.

  ‘Back, boy.’ I heard a voice, a man’s voice with a countryman’s accent. It sounded beautiful to me. A small elderly man emerged from the broken-down greenhouse at the back of the main building. The dog gave one last shrill bark, as if to say ‘I’ll deal with you later’, and loped back towards its kennel.

  ‘Mr Wilson?’ I called to the man.

  ‘And who might you be?’ The old man had stopped some ten yards away and stood looking at me.

  ‘My name’s Esther Fisher. I work for the Chronicle. I wondered if I could ask you and your sister some questions regarding the building of the proposed opera house?’

  There was a silence while George Wilson, because I was pretty sure it was he, thought about it. Then, remaining standing where he was, he called back, ‘You better come on in, then.’

  ‘Dog happy where he is?’ I asked as I approached.

  ‘Dog’s not there to be happy.’ George Wilson’s voice was puzzled. ‘Dog’s there to do a job.’

  ‘What I’m saying is, he’s not going to attack me?’

  Again, George Wilson seemed surprised at my question. ‘Not unless I tell him to,’ he said.

  The narrow hall was dark and damp smelling. A carved oak chest, black with old polish and grime, stood against the back wall and above it hung a photograph of the cottage in happier days. There, roses bloomed round the door and the fowl picking in the yard looked like ladies browsing through their favourite store, not harassed mothers desperately searching for bargains at the local jumble sale like the hens I’d just seen.

  ‘You’ll want to meet Dora too, then,’ George Wilson said.

  ‘I’d love to meet your sister.’ I followed his stooping figure into a medium-sized square kitchen. It too was steeped in gloom and the light from the one small north-facing window was filtered through a pair of grubby net curtains. Dora Wilson was standing by an old Rayburn stove, stirring a pot. She was as round as her brother was skinny and she smiled, showing a mouth that made do with only a small selection of teeth, as she turned to greet me. George told her who I was and what I’d come for, and Dora’s smile grew wider. ‘Has Mr McKenzie sent you?’
Mr McKenzie, of course, was Posy’s father, the Wilsons’ MP.

  ‘Not exactly.’ I smiled back. ‘I did see your letter, though. I’m a friend of Mr McKenzie’s daughter. I’ve spoken to Mr Lloyd and to his architect already, and now I would really like to hear your side of the story.’

  Dora Wilson took the pot off the stove and replaced it with a huge kettle. ‘We’ll have some tea,’ she said. We sat down at the stained Formica table and Dora pointed to the carved dresser, as black and ornate as the chest I’d seen in the hall. ‘Our father made that.’ Her voice, with its soft country accent, was proud. ‘That and the bed we were all born in. I’ll show it to you upstairs. He worked for old Mr Merrick up at the farm all his life. Never owned this place, though. Our family never owned anything much, not until now, that is. We bought the cottage off old Mr Merrick’s son only five years gone. Bought it, lock stock and barrel, and no help from anyone. There’s been Wilsons in Rookery Cottage for over a hundred years but we, me and George, were the ones to buy it. There was talk once before of us being thrown out. Nearly killed our old ma. Then George bought it and he said, “It’s ours. Now let them try and evict us.”’ She nodded at her brother. ‘That’s what you said, George, I remember it as if it was yesterday. But now they are. They’re coming here and telling us that they can just throw us out. How can they?’ She twisted her red swollen hands in her lap. ‘This is our home.’

  I had barely wanted to admit it to myself, but until that moment I had had doubts, the all too familiar question mice gnawing away at me. Was the compulsory purchase order justified, after all? Should I interfere? If I did, what would be the consequences? In fact, all those ethical questions that it was fatal for a journalist to consider. Meeting Stuart Lloyd and finding out that it was Olivia’s Linus behind the design had only increased my discomfort. But as I looked at poor distressed Dora Wilson and listened to her words, I felt my old decisiveness return, its tattered standard waving.

  ‘Well, maybe we can stop them. Sometimes public opinion can move mountains, even opera houses.’ I smiled at her. ‘I’d like to start by giving our readers an idea of what your life here’s like. Tell me, how have things changed for you through the years?’

  George scratched his head. ‘We get lots of visits from people wanting to sell us things. We never used to.’

  Dora reached for the teapot, brushing a kitten off the table on the way. The animal landed on the floor, letting out a little mew of distress.

  ‘There’s the man from double glazing, he calls twice a year, regular as clockwork. We did get a television set last year. We pay monthly. We’re thinking of having one of them discs.’ George held his mug out to be refilled.

  ‘We’re by way of being famous for our eggs,’ Dora said, then she cackled with laughter. ‘But these days folk seem to like them better the dirtier they are. In the old days I used to clean them off to make them more appetising like, but not any more. The dirtier the eggs the more folks around here seem to like them. That’s the new people come in. Give them a box of lovely clean even-shaped ones and they turn their noses up, isn’t that right, George?’ She turned to her brother who nodded, joining in with a wheezing laugh of his own.

  They gave me the bones of their existence and I marvelled at the thought that bones were maybe all there was. They didn’t seem to read – ‘Never had much cause to,’ George said. Nor did they have any hobbies other than watching television. ‘Friends?’

  ‘We’ve never been much for socialising.’

  ‘Work hard and sleep easy.’ Dora’s voice broke. ‘Well, that’s what we thought.’

  I left feeling humbled. Back home I sat straight down to work. I headed my piece: THE WAGES OF A LIFETIME’S HARD WORK ARE EVICTION. When I’d finished I faxed a copy to Stuart Lloyd.

  Chloe ran the article and the response from the readers was huge and supportive.

  ‘Come for lunch, darling,’ my mother said on the phone. ‘You’ve been working so hard, I’d like to spoil you.’

  I’d like to see her do it, so I went. As I walked along the narrow hall passage I heard voices, my mother’s fluting tones and a man’s deeper ones. The man, seated in the boudoir chair by my mother’s bed, had his back turned to me, but I recognised Linus Stendal from the hair; the colour of straw and curling slightly at the nape of the neck. As my mother greeted me, he got up from his chair, the look of surprise on his face mirroring my own.

  ‘I felt you two just had to meet each other,’ Audrey said.

  ‘We have met, you know that.’ I remained standing and so did Linus.

  ‘I read your article.’ Linus spoke lightly, but his eyes searched mine, for what? An explanation?

  ‘I’m sorry if it offended you,’ I said, sitting down finally, on the far side of Audrey’s huge bed (I swear it grew with every visit). ‘But right is right, not might.’

  ‘She’s rather pompous, my daughter,’ Audrey explained. ‘Used to drive her father and me up the wall when she was little.’

  ‘Thank you, Mother.’ I shot Audrey a furious glance.

  ‘I can’t possibly argue with right,’ Linus said quietly. ‘So why don’t we talk about something we agree on.’

  I felt small. I racked my brain for anything that would fit the bill. ‘It’s cold for late April.’

  ‘Not if you’re used to Sweden, it isn’t,’ Linus replied with a smile. Audrey just sat there propped against the pillows, wearing an emerald-green velvet dressing-gown and the satisfied smile of a hostess whose party is going with a swing.

  ‘But it is for England,’ I pointed out. ‘And England is what most people in England are used to.’

  Linus picked up his glass of white wine from the small table next to him. ‘Well, I suppose everything is relative.’ He looked faintly bored.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Everything is not relative. Thinking that it is is why we’re all so confused these days. Relative religion, relative morality, relative relatives even. But some things just are, whether we like it or not.’ In the background I heard Audrey mention something about lunch being ready any moment.

  Linus didn’t raise his voice or change his expression, the colour just darkened slightly in his cheeks. ‘And rigid attitudes like yours, principles set in stone, are the cause of untold misery through the ages.’

  ‘If you’re talking about your precious opera house not being built, well, I weep!’

  Just then the door opened and Janet appeared with a tray.

  Janet was the reason why Audrey had turned my father’s old library on the ground floor into her new bedroom and bathroom. She had, quite reasonably, refused to climb all those stairs carrying heavy trays any more. ‘Look, there’s Janet with lunch,’ Audrey exclaimed now. ‘And what have you prepared for us today?’

  ‘Exactly what you asked for.’

  ‘You clever thing, how did you guess?’ Audrey beamed at her. My mother was of the surrealist school of conversation, maybe all mothers were.

  ‘From what I hear you’re very successful,’ I said to Linus as I transferred from the end of Audrey’s bed to a chair at the round table by the window. ‘Surely you don’t have to rely on dodgy commissions like this one.’

  There was a chair for Linus too. He sat down, hard, as if he imagined it was me he was squashing and not a perfectly harmless though frilly cushion. ‘I don’t have to do anything. And this is anything but a dodgy commission. Stuart Lloyd is a well-respected businessman, one who does a lot for charity. He is a good employer and above board in every sense. And I happen to believe his idea for a People’s Glyndebourne is an excellent one. I am given an almost entirely free hand when it comes to the design, something of a dream of mine, in fact.’ He turned to Janet who had just poured him some wine. ‘Thank you.’

  He looked so calm as he sat, slightly crouched over the too low table, cutting into his fried fillet of sole. Very Swedish, Linus, I thought. So tall, so blond, so cool and controlled.

  ‘Esther used to guillotine
her dolls when she was a little girl,’ Audrey said conversationally. She had, of course, remained in bed, where she sat propped up against her many pillows, with a papiermâché tray in jewel colours perched on her knee.

  I turned to glare at her when Linus laughed, that high-pitched, abandoned giggle of a laugh, as disconnected as Audrey’s conversation. Maybe, I thought, there had been among all his handsome, dour Swedish ancestors an unusually tall goblin.

  ‘So how’s darling Olivia?’ Audrey asked. ‘She’s so proud of you. I don’t think anyone who knew you as a child could have imagined you growing up to be so handsome and successful.’

  Linus took my mother’s remark well and I decided he deserved a break, at least over lunch. ‘Tell me about your work?’ I said. Linus looked up from his plate and straight at me with those grey eyes. I found that what I really wanted to know was whether he dyed his lashes; they were dark enough.

  ‘When I was quite young, ten or eleven, something like that, I saw this quote in one of my father’s books. “Architecture in general is frozen music.” That was all, but since then that’s all I’ve wanted to do, to create frozen music.’ He looked down at his plate again.

  ‘Your mother, I mean your real mother, was a singer, wasn’t she?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, yes she was.’ Linus’s voice was light, but I saw the tension in his jaw. I wanted to ask him some more questions – after all, questions was what I did – but something in Linus’s expression stopped me.

  Janet came back and cleared the dishes. ‘Fruit and cheese, that’s all we’re having,’ Audrey said, as Janet returned with fresh plates. ‘Nice and simple. You young people insist on being so formal, starters, three puddings and goodness knows what.’

  ‘I’ve never made three puddings in my life,’ I protested.

  ‘I was talking about people,’ Audrey corrected me.

  Linus looked as if he were about to laugh again, but I glared at him and it worked. He cleared his throat and smiled at his plate. Suddenly I found myself wishing that it were at me he was smiling. I was softening at the edges like the weeping Camembert on the dish and I didn’t like it. ‘So you think I should speak to Stuart Lloyd again?’ I asked him.