Frozen Music

by Marika Cobbold

  One of the things that had always annoyed me with Posy was her tendency to dither and not get straight to the point, but just now, a little dithering would have been quite nice. ‘You’re not really glad to see me go?’ I asked as I dragged the suitcase downstairs.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ She gave me a hug. ‘Now look after yourself and I’ll be praying for your mother.’ She opened the front door. ‘You’re sure you can manage?’ she asked.

  I was walking to the tube station to catch the train to Heathrow. ‘Yeah, it’s got wheels.’ I kicked the case with the toe of my canvas shoe.

  ‘Off you go then.’ Posy gave me a little shove out of the door.

  Once down the three front-door steps I turned round. ‘Anyone would think you’d like to get rid of me.’

  ‘Get on with you.’ Posy blew me a kiss.

  I had brought along my old Swedish books to study on the journey. On the plane to Gothenburg I sat between two silent and unsmiling Swedes, one who asked for, and received, a steady flow of miniature bottles of brandy, which he either drank or hoarded in his attaché case. Liquor is very expensive in Sweden I had heard. Every time the hostess handed him one he nodded gravely and said ‘tack’. That’s the Swedish for thank you. Apart from that, the journey was spent in restful silence.

  Everyone knows that Swedes are serious-minded, hard-working and very gloomy – we’ve all seen those Ingmar Bergman films – so I had been confident that I would feel right at home among them. I was ill-prepared, therefore, to find the arrival hall at Gothenburg airport thronged with chatting, laughing people looking like extras in a Kodak ad in their brightly coloured summer clothes. Not one of them seemed an even half-decent candidate for suicide. Never mind, I thought, trying to cheer myself up; from what I had heard of Olivia’s family, things were bound to darken.

  ‘Your mother is doing all right,’ Olivia assured me as soon as we had greeted each other. ‘It’s done her a power of good, you coming.’

  ‘And she really has got concussion and a broken hip?’ I asked as I pushed my trolley along the polished floor of the arrivals hall towards the exit.

  ‘Really, Esther, I don’t know what you mean. Why should poor Audrey have made something like this up? And there are such things as X-ray machines, even in this northern outpost.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Tack, tack,’ I went on, to show willing. ‘It was just that she was so keen for me to come with her… you know after this business with the opera house. She had this bee in her bonnet about bad blood and stuff.’

  ‘She was keen, but not that keen, believe you me. She’s in a great deal of pain.’

  That really worried me. Some people withstood physical pain better than others. Audrey, most definitely, belonged to the ‘others’ group. ‘Are we going straight to see her?’

  Olivia nodded. ‘The hospital is about halfway between here and the island.’

  As she manoeuvred her dark-grey Volvo estate out of the car park she asked, ‘So how are you doing, in yourself? Audrey told me you have been having some problems.’

  ‘I’m much better, thank you,’ I said, shielding my eyes from the bright sunshine streaming through the windows of the car. ‘I’ve been told to fight indecision at every turn. To embrace uncertainty and learn to accept that nothing is perfect, or even ordered.’

  ‘Why, it sounds defeatist to me.’

  ‘I have to, because otherwise, apparently, I will go mad. Or as we say in the trade, my anxieties will deepen.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Olivia said, turning on to the motorway.

  As I counted the lakes, three already in the first few miles of our journey, I thought that Olivia seldom argued, she just accepted that you had a right to your opinion. Audrey never kept up an argument for long, choosing instead to ignore your opinion until it went away. Neither of them had had a nervous breakdown. Perhaps there was a lesson in mental hygiene somewhere there.

  ‘They are giving her pain relief?’ I asked as we passed lake number four, just at the outskirts of town.

  ‘Of course they are. Now don’t fret so. Anyone would think you were fond of your mother. Now let me tell you who’s staying at the moment. There’s Linus and little Ivar. Bertil’s Uncle Gerald and Gerald’s daughter Kerstin, and Aunt Ulla, of course. Ulla is Astrid’s, that’s Bertil’s first wife’s, cousin. None of us quite knows how, but she sort of slipped into our summer holidays and now no one can shift her. Actually, someone should warn Ivar; you see, I have this theory that Ulla will outlive us all and end up being handed down through the generations like some cursed parrot. Anyway, they all speak excellent English, even Ivar. Bertil and I speak English between ourselves and we’ve spoken it to Ivar since he was born.’

  ‘And you’re sure that Linus is OK about my being here?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine. He was dreadfully disappointed at first, still is, I suppose, about the cancellation of the project, but he’s a very fair-minded man. He knows you were only doing what you thought right. And he knows how fond I am of your mother.’

  ‘I’ll keep out of his way,’ I said. In the distance an old fort rose up on a hillock, guarding the entrance to the small town of Kungälv half-way up the wide, lazy river. We turned left off the motorway, following the signs to the hospital.

  I hadn’t realised that it was possible for a fat person to look as small as Audrey did, lying there in her hospital bed. It was odd, because the bed was narrow compared with her own at home; you would have thought she’d overflow like a cuckoo in the nest. Her head was bandaged and her right hip and thigh were set in plaster. At least she wasn’t wearing one of those humiliating hospital gowns, but a striped yellow-and-white cotton nightdress, shaped like a long T-shirt. Still, it was nothing like her beloved négligés. Olivia said she had lent the nightdress to her: ‘More suitable for a public ward, I thought.’

  My mother raised a chubby hand and smiled weakly. ‘Hello, Esther darling. You came.’

  I bent down and kissed her dry cheek. Where was she, I thought, as I looked into her tired eyes. Where was the old bat from hell, my dear enemy? Gone. Replaced by this frail old lady. I blinked, worried that she’d notice the tears in my eyes.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Esther,’ my mother said. ‘I’ll be fine. Especially now you’re here.’ She patted the side of her bed for me to sit down. ‘You take the chair, Olivia,’ she added in passing. ‘They made a huge fuss when they heard I hadn’t been up, to speak of, for over two years. Apparently, you break easier.’

  The painkillers made her drowsy so we didn’t stay long. I left, promising to take the bus in to see her the next day. We got back in the car and drove on out towards the island. Both windows were down, but it was still hot with the sun shining straight into the passenger side. I forced myself to stay awake, to take in the passing landscape. Now we had passed the town of Kungälv, the industrial estates that had lined the road gave way to fields and meadows, and isolated wooden houses painted mostly in a deep coppery red, and sometimes in the softest pastels, lemon-soufflé-yellows, heavenly-blue, baby-pink. We turned a sharp bend and Olivia’s gold bangles clanged together as she changed gear. In my first memories of her a single bangle twinkled round her left wrist, but as the years went by they multiplied until they reached halfway to her elbow. I had always admired them, imagining a collection of my own, but strangely I had never bought even one. It was the same with kitchen gadgets. I had noticed how much easier life seemed for people who owned Magimixes and blenders, but somehow it never occurred to me to buy them for myself. Certain things, it seemed, one just didn’t get oneself: gold bangles, Magimixes, true love.

  ‘Not far now,’ Olivia said. ‘As we round the next bend, prepare yourself for a great sight.’

  I did as I was told. I opened my eyes so wide that they were stung by the sun. And there before me lay the west-coast archipelago, a landscape that seemed to have been formed from an explosion scattering fragments of land across the thunder-blue sea. And taking centre stage was the isl
and of Kilholmen.

  Villa Rosengård: summer home of the Stendal family since the turn of the century; constructed from clapper-board like almost every building on the island, painted blue as a summer sky, sprawling at odd angles and with a turret rising from its eastern side. ‘Here we are.’ Olivia flung the gate open just as a hedgehog crossed our path. ‘Only emergency vehicles and delivery vans drive on the island,’ she said. ‘So we’re unusually blessed with hedgehogs.’

  I stepped inside the gate, on to the immaculate gravel path, my shoulder aching from carrying the largest of my two cases up from the quay to the house.

  ‘Bertil wanted to meet us at the ferry,’ Olivia said, seeing the discomfort on my face, ‘but I told him to go off to his golf.’

  Golf? Where on this small and hilly granite island did Bertil play golf? Olivia read my thoughts. ‘There’s a golf course half an hour away, on the mainland.’

  The gravel path leading up to the house was flanked on either side by raspberry-red roses. Creamy-white ones, even larger and more lustrous, grew in beds against the blue walls of the house. ‘Roses don’t seem to thrive anywhere else on the island. Hence the name of the house: Villa Rosengård. Not very original, but then the Stendal family has not been known for its flights of fancy, not until Linus that is. That man has enough flights of fancy to take him to the moon. Now, I’ve put you in the cottage. You’ll have to share the bathroom with Ulla, I’m afraid.’

  The cottage, sky-blue with white eaves, like the main house, lay half hidden behind a tall lilac hedge and the door stood open. As our footsteps crunched their way along the gravel path a small elderly woman with a grey pudding-basin haircut materialised like a sullen genie to stand before us, frowning, in the doorway.

  ‘I thought I’d better be here when you arrived, so that I could tell you how we do things,’ she called out in heavily accented English. ‘The bathroom, for example.’ The little woman disappeared inside again, but her voice was carried faintly towards me on the sea breeze.

  ‘That was Ulla,’ Olivia said, leading the way inside. ‘You’d better join her. Get it over with.’

  Ulla was waiting for me. ‘I keep my things on the two top shelves and on the right-hand side of the bath taps. Anything blue will be mine: flannel, sponge, soap dish, tooth mug…’

  ‘Toothbrush case,’ I suggested helpfully.

  ‘I never need one of those. My toothbrush is kept in the specially provided glass, and there it stays, waiting for my next visit, until I decide to remove it.’

  ‘We haven’t really met,’ I mumbled as I followed Ulla out of the bathroom. ‘I’m Esther Fisher. But then you probably knew that.’

  Ulla gave me an impatient look over her shoulder. ‘Of course you’re Esther Fisher,’ she snapped. ‘Why else would I be showing you around my bathroom? You’ll sleep in there,’ Ulla continued, as she pointed towards the door across the small hallway.

  Olivia was already in the room. It was large, rectangular, with a window on the far wall. There were two beds, one on either side, both with brass headboards and white crocheted bedspreads. It was a room with an old-fashioned feel to it, dressed in faded rose-patterned paper, its window veiled in white lace. The white-painted floorboards creaked as I walked up to the bed where Olivia had placed the case she had been carrying for me. ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, and there are two cans of air freshener in the bathroom,’ Ulla announced as she disappeared out of the bedroom. ‘Meadow Fresh and Woodland Breeze. I can only tolerate Woodland Breeze.’

  ‘So that’s everyone,’ Bertil Stendal said, ‘apart from Linus. But of course you’ve met already. Not the most auspicious circumstances, I think one could say, but you both did what you thought was right. Anyway, Linus is in town. Some urgent business he needed to attend to.’ As he spoke, the expression on Bertil’s handsome face changed from frosty polite, to frosty smiling.

  He looked as if he was about to speak again when the child, Ivar, a flaxen-haired little boy with round blue eyes, said instead, ‘Linus is my daddy,’ before continuing to chat in his own peculiar mix of Swedish and English.

  We were sitting in the glass-fronted veranda of the main house: Olivia, Bertil, Gerald, Kerstin, Ulla and Ivar. They were all very friendly, other than Ulla, of course, who behaved like a bear who’d just been told to be nice to Goldilocks. Still, I know what they must all have been thinking.

  ‘I’m really sorry for having mucked up Linus’s commission,’ I blurted out.

  ‘So why did you do it?’ Ulla asked.

  That wasn’t the reply I was looking for. I turned to her and tried to explain. ‘Firstly I was doing my job as a journalist. But also, I really do believe it would be wrong for two old people to lose the only home they’ve known because bigger interests are at stake. I felt, and still feel, that there’s an important principle here. You can build an opera house somewhere else, but you can’t shift your principles around. If you do, you render them worthless.’

  ‘So why say you’re sorry?’ Ulla turned her pale-brown eyes on me.

  ‘It’s not that simple to move the site for the building,’ Bertil said with a dry smile.

  ‘Daddy met a lady,’ Ivar squeaked. ‘She’s called Pernilla and she’s got long yellow hair like a princess. We met her on the quayside and Daddy told me to run along home.’ Ivar turned to me and explained, ‘He meant Villa Rosengård home, not my home with Mummy, or my home with Daddy in Gothenburg. And then Pernilla…’

  A glare from Ulla silenced him. ‘You talk too much for a child,’ she snapped.

  Bertil said something in Swedish to her and Gerald added, ‘Quite. You’re a nasty old woman Ulla Andersson.’

  Kerstin, Bertil’s cousin, smiled at Ivar. She was a woman of about my age, of medium height and build, but somehow contriving to look like a child. Maybe it was her artless hair: mousey-blonde and cut in a severe bob, and with the fringe held back with a clip, a Minnie Mouse clip I noticed. Or her clothes: a pair of wide sky-blue shorts topped by a sweatshirt decorated with pigs on skateboards. ‘Ivar helped me carry the shopping earlier, all the way up the hill. You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Ivar?’

  ‘I am a good boy,’ Ivar confirmed in his fluting English. ‘And when I’m grown-up I’ll be a good girl.’

  No one seemed willing to put him right on this. I was about to, myself, when I thought better of it. Putting people right can have devastating consequences. Just for example, this friend of Audrey’s, Connie Jenkins, had believed that her husband worshipped the ground she walked on, until her sister put her right. The sister told Connie that her husband also worshipped prostitutes carrying truncheons. Poor Connie had killed herself. No, you should always think twice before putting people right.

  ‘I remember Pernilla from Linus’s schooldays,’ Bertil said. ‘Pretty girl, always laughing, forever up to some mischief.’

  I had known girls like that at school. I generally wanted to hit them. In fact, I did once hit just such a pretty, laughing, full-of-mischief girl. This one was called Melissa and she had painted ‘sunny’ faces all over the pages of my new exercise book. I loved my exercise books, especially new ones. Opening the first page was like starting a day full of possibilities. Now Melissa had gone and ruined it. Worst of all, our teacher, Miss Sims, had laughed and said that Esther could sure do with some ‘sunny’ faces. Later, in the playground I walked up to Melissa and punched her on the nose. When it swelled up and turned red, I laughed and said Melissa could do with a swollen face. I was suspended for two weeks. I had thought it very unfair at the time; my new exercise book, the one I’d have to keep for weeks and weeks before it was filled and I could get another one, was ruined, but Melissa’s swollen nose had gone back to normal in a couple of days.

  Around me the conversation had tailed off. Ivar was busy plaiting the tassels on the woven rug that covered most of the wooden floor. A fly buzzed round the sun-drenched ceiling, before making for the open glass doors, and from his rocki
ng chair Gerald, who had been dozing most of the time, farted a small smattering fanfare. Kerstin broke into a hearty rendering of some Swedish hymn and Ivar, glancing up from his plaiting, joined in with his squeaky soprano.

  We ate our dinner in the garden. In Sweden people eat early, around six for everyday, but we stayed outside, talking and drinking coffee until past nine o’clock. The sun was still high in the sky, but the breeze from the sea was chilly, sending us inside, one by one, for sweaters and shawls. Ivar had gone to bed, cross and disappointed because his father had called to say he was held up with work and wasn’t coming home until way after Ivar’s bedtime. ‘Stupid silly old houses.’ He pouted, bashing at the low branch of the apple tree overhead with a small clenched fist.

  ‘Let’s have a game of croquet,’ Gerald said, leaping up from his chair with surprising agility. There was a moment of breathless silence while we all waited for the fanfare of farts. It didn’t come and the conversation resumed. Within minutes he was back, carrying a set of croquet mallets and balls. The hoops were already in place around the side where the old kitchen garden had once been. They seemed to play the game differently in Sweden, and both Gerald and Ulla cheated, edging their balls closer to a hoop or a competitor with the toes of their shoes when they thought no one was looking. Personally I didn’t see the point of playing if you were going to cheat, but no one else seemed to mind.

  ‘Villa Rosengård rules, OK.’ Olivia smiled at me. By ten thirty we gave up trying to distinguish red from green in the fading light and packed up. Before going off to my own room I phoned the hospital. My mother was comfortable and fast asleep, they assured me.

  I was about to go to bed when there was a knock on the door and it was flung open. It was Ulla, garbed in a long white nightdress and with her pudding-basin hair clipped back from her face with Kirby grips. ‘I always hang the lavatory paper loose end out,’ she said and was gone.

  I opened the window and rolled down the blind. I felt lonely. The dark of the night seemed to have driven all the lightness from my mind and turned me morbid and homesick, filled with vague unease. So what? I thought. The lightness had been false anyway, it was borrowed, belonging to people like Posy and, by the sound of things, to the ever-laughing Pernilla. I was better off keeping it at arm’s length, treating it with the utmost suspicion, in case I should get used to it and mourn its inevitable passing. To make myself feel better I mumbled all Ulla’s rules: ‘loo paper loose end out, Woodland Breeze, not Meadow Fresh. Blue for Ulla. Right-hand side of tap…’ I drifted off to sleep.