Frozen Music

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘Do you look like your mother?’ I tried feebly. ‘I only ask because you don’t really look much like your father, not facially at any rate.’

  ‘I’m supposed to look like her.’

  A lorry rumbled down the opposite carriageway of the narrow coastal road. As it roared towards us, looking as if it were going to run straight into us, I ducked. I always did that. ‘Reflex,’ I muttered, feeling silly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Ducking inside a car when something whizzes towards you, like a bird, or a stone, or another car.’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘Are you like your mother in temperament?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I don’t remember her much.’ Linus’s voice was polite, but the politeness was stretched thinly across something hard and determined, a resistance to speak. Alas, I knew it well, that kind of resistance. In my job you learn to recognise it and to leave well alone; for the moment. We drove on in silence. After a while Linus said, ‘You must go to the art museum.’

  ‘Olivia said.’

  ‘I’ll drop you there if you like, then I’ll pick you up on my way from the office and we can have some lunch.’

  ‘You know, it’s very kind of you, putting up with me after everything that’s happened,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised you don’t hate me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’ The answer came a little too quickly, as if he had thought about it a lot.

  Later, as we drove into town, he told me his mother had been an opera singer. ‘She wasn’t brilliant or anything.’ He gave a little smile. ‘Her voice wasn’t strong enough for the big stuff, so I’ve been told, but it was exceptionally sweet and she cared about her music. Passionately. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to build the opera house. In my mind, it was my tribute to her.’

  ‘Make me feel really good, why don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. As I said, you did what you had to do. There’s no point fretting about it. Either you believe that the right of those two old people to remain in their home is paramount, or you don’t. I assume you do, or you wouldn’t have done what you did. So, nothing I’ve just said should change that.’

  I looked at his profile, long eyelashes, straight nose; not too big, not too small, firm chin, but a surprising softness about the lips. The tip of my index finger wanted to stroke his cheek and the corner of his mouth, but I told it not to be so silly. Instead I thought how right he was, about being certain and not being swayed by others. It was just that kind of certainty I so desperately needed in my life. I decided that this was not the time to confide to him that I was yet to find it and that I had been instrumental in wrecking the most important commission of his career because I thought I might be right. There were times when you just had to keep your doubts to yourself.

  I looked out of the window, humming a little ditty to myself. When I first arrived, Olivia had bypassed the town centre, driving straight out on to the motorway. This was my first view of the city centre.

  ‘It’s kind of ugly.’ We crossed a wide, tree-lined avenue and turned left up a hill. ‘That’s better.’ I pointed up at a row of turn-of-the-century apartment buildings. ‘You know it worries me that I always like everything old when it comes to buildings. It shouldn’t be like that. Architecture, like all creative disciplines, needs to move forward and not just imitate what’s gone before. We all know that and yet we all, and by all I mean non-architects, admire the old and wrinkle our noses at most of the new. Something is going wrong there.’

  Linus parked the car in a throwaway fashion as if he didn’t care if he ever saw it again. ‘There’s no mystery about it. You just haven’t seen enough good modern architecture, that’s all. Sometimes, too, you have to go inside a building to appreciate what it’s about. It’s like it’s been designed inside out, if that makes sense to you. It’s the proportions of the rooms, the play of the light, those things that make it work.’ He pointed towards the top floor of the large Victorian apartment block. ‘That’s my flat, up there.’

  ‘You’ve got a turret.’

  ‘Only a little one.’ Glancing at his watch he added, ‘I’m meeting this guy in twenty minutes, so I’ll just have time to walk you to the art museum. Then I’ll pick you up at, say, half past twelve and we can have some lunch before we get your mother.’

  We walked back down on to the wide avenue and Linus told me how, when his parents were young, the wide street had been lined, not with yellow brick thirties apartment boxes, but Palladian villas in white stucco. ‘Think about it, the guys who built these are long dead, but the ugliness of their designs lives on to blight the everyday lives of generations to come.’ He was walking again, speeding up. ‘How can you expect people to think good thoughts and do great things when they’re brought up surrounded by soulless crap like this?’

  ‘People create all kinds of beautiful things out of ugliness,’ I said.

  ‘Of course they do, and thank God that they do, but somewhere, some time, they will have seen real beauty. But the problem right now is money. Money, as in refusing to spend, and lack of vision. Some of the earlier modernist designs were very much part of a vision, just not one that most of us share today.’

  ‘But you’re a modernist.’

  Linus smiled down at me. ‘Modernist, functionalist, classicist: all these ists. For me it’s about designing something that perfectly fulfils its purpose, whether that purpose is that of a hospital, a library, a school, private house or indeed an opera house. Beauty is integral to that function and light is what unites it. I don’t try to design something new just for the hell of it. I believe in learning from the work of the past, but again, that knowledge has, to my mind, to be used to bring architecture forward. The proportion of a Gustavian room is second to none. You’d be a fool if you didn’t study the buildings of that age. The Baroque builder would design, not just doors, but the perfect entrances. You learn and absorb all that knowledge, all those ideas, but if, in the end, all you do is copy you stagnate and we end up living in a world of pale imitations. Anyway, here we are.’ He pointed up at the vast pillared museum entrance. ‘Have fun. I’ll meet you at the bottom of the steps at half past twelve.’

  ‘Don’t forget Pernilla’s present,’ I called after him.

  ‘I won’t.’ He raised his hand in a salute as he went.

  I walked through the vast heavy doors of the museum and up the wide marble staircase towards the rooms, eighteen to twenty-one, that Olivia had recommended me to see. I wondered what Linus would buy Pernilla. What did one buy a moon-spun blonde who lived her life as if it were a permanent audition for the filming of a Scott Fitzgerald novel? Nothing, if you ask me, but of course no one was, so I went on my dark-haired black-thoughted way, up the wide stairs and into room number eighteen. I looked at the pictures: bright blue rooms bathed in sunlight, long-ago celebrations around a table in a garden of tall fresh green trees, beaches and rocks like the ones around the island, and for a while I shed my burden of guilt, my resentments and my petty jealousies, one by one as if they were parts of some tatty and unbecoming costume. For now, life seemed to need no other explanations than what I saw before me. That was art, of course, when it did its stuff. Then my thoughts travelled, uninvited, to Linus’s opera house, and I grew muddled and unsure once more. That state of grace, the kind induced by beauty (or a health scare) never lasted very long.

  I just had time to look into room fourteen where the picture hung that had once belonged to Bertil’s parents. As I looked at the still life of goggle-eyed fish, their rubbery lips puckered as if ready to kiss, their moist scales so real-looking I could smell them, I felt Bertil’s parents should not be blamed for preferring a week in Paris to a lifetime of gazing on dead fish.

  It was time to go. I looked at my watch, twenty-five minutes past twelve, and began walking towards the exit. Was my hair all right? Lipstick fresh and not all crumbly and dry-looking? I blew into my cupped hand, sniffing the air; breath OK? Yup. Everything was fine as I hurried off to meet
my lover.

  It was a fantasy, of course, the bit about meeting my lover. Pathetic, really, I thought, so I straightened my shoulders and raised my chin, sprayed myself with romance repellent and hoped for the best as I walked out of the museum. This is Linus you’re meeting, I reminded myself. Linus, the environmental vandal. Co-evictor of old dears, giggler of high-pitched giggles… admirer of Pernilla the moon goddess.

  ‘Hi Linus,’ I said as he came walking towards me up the front steps to the museum entrance.

  ‘Outside all right for lunch?’ he asked, waving his arms in the direction of the terrace restaurant next door. I nodded, although I was cold. The sun was still shining, but a strong wind was blowing from the sea. Yet, all around me, people were walking about looking for all the world as if they lived in a warm country, in their bright-coloured shorts and bare tanned arms. They played summer by the rules in this place. On the first of June they donned light, preferably pastel-coloured, clothing, lit barbecues and spent every available moment outside, exclaiming joyously if it happened to be warm and sunny, and exclaiming joyously when it wasn’t. This continued until the middle of August when the schools went back for the autumn term and summer was declared officially over. Right now we were lucky to get a table outside, it was so crowded. Most of the others were already well into their meals at the rectangular tables beneath the row of bright blue-and-yellow flags.

  ‘Did you find something for Pernilla?’ I asked as we sat down at a table for two in the furthest corner.

  Linus told me he did. ‘I especially asked them not to wrap it so that I could show you.’ He hauled a box out of his canvas bag full of papers and opened it. Inside was a small glass sculpture in black and gold and midnight-blue, of a head with horns, or was it ears? ‘Do you like it?’

  I looked some more. ‘Can I pick it up?’

  Linus nodded. ‘Sure.’

  I held the head in my hand, turning it this way catching the reflection of the sun. I really didn’t like it. I was about to say something honest but tactful, but as I looked into Linus’s dark-grey eyes those words came out sounding like this: ‘It’s lovely, really beautiful. I just love it!’ Mercifully Linus didn’t pursue the matter, but asked me instead if I had enjoyed the museum.

  I showed him the tiny book about one of the artists, Ivar Arosenius, whose work I had particularly liked. ‘He died young of course,’ I said. ‘It’s such a smart move, if you take a long-term, posterity kind of view of life.’

  ‘Only if you’ve achieved your ambition. Nothing is a worse insult than dying before that.’

  ‘Did you call your Ivar after him?’

  ‘No,’ Linus said. He scanned the menu before putting it back down on the table and signing to a waiter to take our order. ‘But like you, I adore his work.’

  I thought how seldom men used words like adore and divine. Linus did, all the time, just as he put his hand up to his cheek in an unconsciously feminine gesture when he was perplexed or deep in thought.

  ‘I used to love painting when I was a child,’ I told him. ‘I was quite good in a plodding, unimaginative kind of way. It used to drive my mother to despair. “Why is your sun always yellow and your sky always blue or grey and your grass green and your people clean and smiling?” she used to ask. “Where is your imagination?” I told her that was it. That was my imaginary world. A place where the sky was always blue and the sun was shining, and where the people were happy and smiling (I wasn’t that bothered about the grass, but green seemed the obvious choice). I knew perfectly well that in reality the sky was black and the sun was an angry orange, and people walked with their heads down so you didn’t see if they were smiling or crying.’

  ‘Cheery little soul you were. But I know what you mean. I drew endless cartoons. Ridiculous illustrated stories that I collected in these elaborate notebooks under the heading,’ Linus shook his head and smiled, ‘My Life as It Ought to Be: A Young Boy’s Wonderful Adventures. I found the lot in a box in my parents’ attic the other day. Cringe-making. The drawings weren’t bad, but the stories accompanying them, I tell you.’ He shook his head again. ‘The dreams and aspirations of a podgy, clumsy, rather lonely little boy, so at odds with reality.’

  As he spoke, a worry line had appeared between his eyes and suddenly I wanted to reach out and smooth the line away with the tip of my finger. It was a baby-talk feeling, a desire to soothe and to comfort. It was a feeling of… of yes… of tenderness. My hand lifted from the table and reached across towards him.

  Linus had been looking at the menu and now he snapped it shut and said, ‘I think I’ll have the mushroom risotto.’

  My hand dropped back down and I glanced at the list of dishes before me. ‘I’ll have the fried plaice,’ I said, making a quick decision out of pure confusion. But I was soon back into my bad old ways. ‘Then again, the risotto sounds delicious. Maybe I should have the risotto. Then I can have red wine, which I prefer.’

  ‘You do find it very difficult to make a decision, don’t you?’ Linus said.

  I looked, shifty-eyed, around the restaurant, then at my right foot that stuck out under the table. I looked up at the sky and a passing seagull. ‘Yes,’ I said at last, still not looking at Linus. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been able to meet anyone’s eyes straight on for a long time. I had noticed in my career that neurotics never looked you straight in the eye. Seriously disturbed people had a funny walk too; head down, feet quite wide apart, as if they were checking the ground between them. But, pray God, I wasn’t a neurotic, just someone who had had a slight misunderstanding with the world.

  I forced myself to meet Linus’s gaze and to hold it until I had counted to ten. ‘I used to be very decisive,’ I said. ‘Bossy even. I lived my life according to the rules, albeit my rules. But I had decided early on that you could rely only on yourself. I was very reliable, most of the time. Then stuff happened. I made some seriously flawed decisions. I realised that there were no rules, or if there were, I was damned if I could see them. There are no rules and there are no certainties, we live in the kingdom of randomness and I just can’t seem to deal with it very well. It’s like I’ve only just learnt what everyone else seems to have known and accepted all along. So why am I so slow-witted? And why can’t I deal with the situation now I know it?’

  ‘You are dealing with it,’ Linus said. ‘You’re trying to work out a way of living your life receptive to the changes and the uncertainties, willing to adapt and learn. That’s all you can do.’

  ‘Is that all?’ I smiled at him.

  He nodded gravely. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘And you have done all of that?’

  He shrugged. ‘No, of course not. But you’re wrong to think everyone else has the answers; they don’t. I think it’s wrong, too, to say that there are no certainties. There might not be any external ones, but you can have your own. I know I love my son. I know his welfare is paramount. I know I care deeply, passionately, about my work. I don’t know why I do and sometimes I despair because it seems so futile and so pointless. But most of the time I care. That’s one and a bit certainty in my life and that’s just about enough to get on with, I think.’

  ‘You’re talking about an inner core, aren’t you?’ I asked suspiciously. ‘I don’t have one any more. It’s crumbled under the weight of my mortal coils. As you’ve seen, half the time I can’t even make a simple decision. It’s as if I’ve got one of these opinion pollsters living inside me. Someone who has to ask a thousand people what they think before knowing what opinion to give. It was quite a gradual thing at first, little things like refusing to be the official executioner at the Tower of London…’ Linus looked momentarily confused. ‘Only joking,’ I said hastily. ‘Don’t worry. My jokes are never very funny.’ I paused again as it occurred to me that in that sense we were perfectly matched: I made jokes that weren’t funny and Linus was a man who should never be heard laughing.

  Our food arrived. As we ate, the sun got hotter. A sky-blue tram rattled past
sounding its bell to warn a cyclist who looked as if he was about to hurl himself out on the track.

  ‘You don’t become a journalist to win popularity votes,’ I said, once we were back in the car.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘One has to stand up for what one believes in.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘There’s no room for compromise.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘If you don’t speak up when you know you should, where will it all end?’

  ‘Where indeed.’

  ‘People need to be kept informed about these petty injustices perpetrated on voiceless people like the Wilsons.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You don’t agree with me.’

  ‘I’ve agreed with everything you’ve said.’

  ‘Not really, you haven’t. For heaven’s sake, Linus, what do you think, really think?’

  ‘I think that I want to build my opera house.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you’re a blinkered idiot.’

  Audrey was in pain. Her concussion had healed and the bandages had been taken off her head some days earlier, but her broken thigh still hurt. She had dressed in a pink velour gown, the nearest thing to her beloved dressing-gowns she could get without being arrested, I thought, and her faded hair was tied up in a wide white towelling bandanna. ‘They’ve told me to keep moving,’ she said disgustedly. ‘Exercise, they say. They’ve even got a physiotherapist coming over twice a week.’

  ‘Welfare Sweden,’ I said. ‘Most impressive.’ But Audrey was not impressed. She sat there, like a bad-tempered powder-puff, in the back of the car, mumbling complaints.

  The flag was hoisted at Villa Rosengård in a welcome-back greeting for Audrey, but the household was in turmoil. Bertil had been taken suddenly and violently ill with stomach cramps. The doctor had been called out and had just gone, leaving Bertil resting in bed. ‘I don’t understand it,’ Kerstin said, as Olivia fussed around my mother, a tense-looking Olivia with an overlay of grey across her freckled tanned face. ‘Bertil is so fit. Regular exercise, a healthy diet. He doesn’t smoke, drinks only in moderation.’