Frozen Music (20 page)

‘I can live with the thought that the likely consequences of a bad act are bad. That obviously makes sense, there's a logic and a fairness in that. But when doing what you think, after due consideration, is the right thing, or when you commit some seemingly small act of neglect and all hell breaks loose, then the confusion starts all over again. I've always tried to do the right thing and look where it's led to. And responsibility, how far do you take it? Think about it. You cross the road which makes a car slow down, which in turn makes that car reach some point seconds later than it would have otherwise. In turn, that means this same car gets caught up in a fatal crash which, if you had not crossed the road in front of it, it never would have done. You walk blithely on, wheeling along your shopping…'

‘You don't use a shopping bag on wheels?'

‘I most certainly do. I'd kill myself lugging those heavy bags around. Anyway, you walk blithely on, with or without a shopping bag on wheels, and meanwhile this poor sod who let you cross the road is lying in a morgue.'

‘That's life and destiny; that kind of thing. You can't hold yourself responsible.' Chloe put her hand over mine on the table. ‘Look, Esther, you're a friend as well as a colleague, I want nothing better than for you to get back on form, but quite frankly, right now you're sounding like a lunatic.'

I liked people to be straightforward, that way you knew where you stood, but just then, I thought I might have preferred to have been kept in the dark. ‘Are you saying you're sacking me?'

Chloe sighed, withdrawing her hand. ‘I thought you might like to go freelance. Have a break, check yourself in somewhere…'

‘Broadmoor?' I suggested helpfully.

‘A health farm, that type of thing. Then use your contacts to spread yourself around a bit. There's a huge market for your kind of “portraits” and I'll obviously use you as much as I can, once you're back on form.'

‘What do you mean you've been sort of sacked?' Audrey asked. I wished she wouldn't talk about private matters in front of the manicurist. Lisa came to do my mother's hands and feet every Friday
morning together with her friend Abigail who did my mother's hair. Abigail had left a few minutes earlier. I liked Lisa, she was a sweet girl, but this was private.

‘Coffee anyone?' I asked brightly.

‘Tea would be lovely, dear.' My mother waved a completed set of left-hand fingers in my direction.

Once Lisa had gone, Audrey asked again, ‘How can you be sort of sacked?'

‘I've been sacked as a feature writer and asked to write for them as a freelancer.'

I was back living with Audrey, back in my Audrey-designed childhood bedroom. It was only a short-term measure until I found a new place of my own, but I had found it unbearable to remain in my old street in Fulham, with the gaping hole that was once the Hamilton residence almost next door. I had found a buyer for the flat, but I was yet to find a place where I wanted to live myself.

‘You were so rigid as a child.' Audrey sighed. ‘I always knew you would break.'

I glared at her across the pale-blue counterpane of her bed. ‘I don't know what you mean, “break”. In fact, I'm doing a piece on Lydia Garland. There's an ill wind, etc. Apparently she's only agreed to an interview because I've got a reputation for being “nice”. For nice read harmless and ineffectual, but it'll do for now. It's work.'

Lydia Garland wrote heart-warming and hugely popular novels about ‘people like us', holding up a mirror, it was often said, reflecting our everyday lives and struggles. It was interesting to see how many people saw themselves as ‘people like us'. Judging by her sales, most of the population. Her latest novel, due out next month, was called
Charlotte Alone
. On the dust jacket it said that the author lived in a converted windmill on the Sussex coast with her dogs, Heidi and Gretel, and her husband. It didn't mention her husband's name.

‘I quite like her books,' Audrey said. She read a lot these days, in between television soaps and films, and she read widely, novels, travel, biographies, popular history, with the result that, since taking to her bed, my mother knew more about the world than ever before in her life.

But she didn't know everything. ‘What do you mean break?' I asked again. ‘For that matter, what do you mean rigid? I just thought then, as I do now, that an ordered life was the best way of freeing your mind for greater things.'

‘And what greater things would they be?' Audrey asked gently. She could be so cruel.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘I suppose we all imagine we're destined to do great things, it's just the time when we accept we're not that varies.' I reached out for another of Audrey's doughnuts and bit into it, not really noticing I was doing it. ‘Right now I would just settle for some rhyme and reason,' I said. ‘Some justice and order and system and meaning.'

‘Don't be silly, Esther,' my mother admonished me. ‘If God had wanted us to see any of that he would have given us a bigger brain.'

‘So you believe there are all of those things, but we just can't see them?'

‘Oh, yes,' Audrey said. ‘Now it's time for my Open University class so you'd better run along.'

‘Open University?'

‘I'm sure I told you. I'm doing Renaissance art at the moment. Fascinating,' she said, her eyes already on the television.

‘But what's the good of there being a point and order and a system and rules and justice, if we can't ever see any of it?'

‘I don't know,' Audrey snapped. ‘Why do you ask me?'

‘You're my mother. I suppose that the forlorn hope that mother knows best, or at least something, is hard to quell. It's inborn, no doubt.'

‘Well, I know nothing. Now run along and frown at someone else.'

The next morning I had a call from the estate agent about a house newly on the market. ‘It's bijou,' she said. ‘And it does need some work on it.' Everyone joked about the language of estate agents, but at least you knew where you were with them; they were consistent. Every child knows that ‘bijou', in estate agent speak, means tiny, and that ‘in need of work' means it's about to fall down. ‘But it is in Chelsea, just off the King's Road.'

‘Is it in my price range?' I asked.

‘As I said, it is bijou and you will have to do some work.'

My house, because I knew straight away that it was meant for me, looked as if it had elbowed itself in between its taller, more elegant neighbours. Narrow and squat, it was badly in need of paint; in fact, as I went inside, it was obvious that the list of things the little house was not badly in need of would be short.

‘This is a rare opportunity', the estate agent said, scenting success with a near telepathic ability, ‘to acquire an unmodernised house in this sought-after area.' Say what you will about estate agents, and people did, but you had to admire their almost lunatic ability to see the best in a situation.

The house consisted of a kitchen, sitting-room and cloakroom downstairs, and two and a half bedrooms – two double, one single to my cheerful friend – upstairs. ‘What about a bathroom?' I asked.

The estate agent looked at me as if she was just a teensy-weensy bit surprised that I should want one. ‘I suppose you could turn bedroom three into one, well a shower room anyway.' She suddenly got defensive. ‘I did warn you the place needed some work.'

‘I like it,' I said.

‘You do? I mean, that's great. Great!'

Back home I did my sums. The purchase price was not much more than what I had received for my flat, but then there was the modernisation. My savings would hardly cover that. I could do most of the decorating myself, but things like gas and electricity worried me, especially since you know what. Then again, the upkeep, once the work was done, would be minimal. What were the chances of a freelancer getting a mortgage?

I was planning the colour of the sitting-room walls as I drove up and parked in front of Lydia Garland's charming windmill home. Lydia herself greeted me at the door, hands outstretched. I recognised her handsome, strong-featured face from countless publicity photographs, but she was much taller than I had expected and the hands she proffered were large and strong. She had not, to my knowledge, admitted to a particular age, but was believed to be in her late
forties. She chatted on amiably as she led the way through the house and into the large farmhouse kitchen at the back. As we sat down at the huge oak kitchen table I asked her what had happened to her toe; the big toe on her right foot was bandaged and she was limping slightly. ‘Just a silly accident,' she said breezily. ‘Gardening.'

I brought out my pad and my pencils, and my list of prepared questions and Lydia Garland quotes from previous interviews and articles.

‘You're very organised,' Lydia said.

I nodded, gratified. ‘I try to be.'

We chatted a bit about her
Charlotte Alone
.

‘I'm just an ordinary English countrywoman who happens to have a gift for telling stories,' Lydia confided charmingly, as she poured us both some tea from a brown earthenware pot. ‘Milk? Sugar?' There was milk on the painted tray in front of us, but no sign of a sugar bowl. Like ashtrays, they were an endangered species these days.

‘Both, I'm afraid,' I said, watching as Lydia Garland made a move to get up. She might stumble and fall, with that bandaged toe, I thought. And break something else, her neck maybe? Cause and effect, cause and effect. I leapt out of my chair. ‘Let me get it,' I offered.

‘Thank you, my dear,' Lydia Garland said, looking slightly surprised. ‘It's in the top left-hand cupboard over the sink.'

Once seated again, I asked her, ‘Your success as a writer is said to be largely due to your extraordinary ability to empathise with ordinary people's lives and struggles. It's a gift that's envied by many lesser writers.'

‘It is a gift, you're right. I put it down to compassion, an open mind and heart, and a firm belief in the triumph of the human spirit.'

I wanted to ask her how one went about acquiring those things when the phone rang. She got up awkwardly from the chair and limped across to it. She mumbled something into it, then moved it away from her ear and turned to me: ‘If you'll excuse me, I'm going to take this in the drawing-room.' She hobbled off.

Chloe had speculated as to the shape of the rooms of the windmill. ‘Round, I expect,' she had said. But the kitchen was a perfect rectangle.
It lay, like most of the rooms, in an extension built on to the west-facing side of the mill. There were plenty of straight walls for the old oak cupboards and the large dresser stacked with blue-and-white china plates and jugs, and Staffordshire figurines. As I sat there, sipping my tea and waiting for Lydia Garland to return, the back door opened and a middle-aged man with a shock of dark hair speckled with grey stepped inside, carrying a basket of onions. He seemed startled by my presence. ‘Who are you?' he asked as he bent down to remove his black gumboots.

I got up from my chair. ‘Esther Fisher. I'm the journalist who's come to interview Mrs Garland.'

‘Oh,' he said, standing the boots carefully on a newspaper that lay spread out on the floor next to the doormat, before placing the basket with onions by the sink.

‘She's on the phone,' I said. The man – I assumed he was the gardener – didn't reply but made his way across the kitchen to the table with the teapot and, grabbing a mug from the dresser, poured himself some. ‘Her toe,' I said, making conversation, still not knowing who I was speaking with. ‘It looks painful.'

The man looked down into his mug of tea. ‘Got a kick like a mule, that woman,' he muttered.

‘Kick?'

‘Like a mule.' He drained his mug and got up just as Lydia Garland returned, two red setters criss-crossing in front of her. ‘You haven't met my beautiful girls.' She sank down on to her chair, patting her knee, beckoning the dogs towards her. ‘This is Gretel.' She pointed to the smaller of the dogs. ‘And this is Heidi.'

I bent down and patted the nearest one, Gretel, admiring her glossy coat. ‘But I have met…' Here I paused. Whom exactly had I met? I looked around for the man, but he seemed to have disappeared. His gumboots on the newspaper by the door had gone too. ‘The man who brought the onions in.'

‘You've met my husband.' She looked surprised at the thought.

‘Dark,' I said. ‘Average height…'

‘Of course it was Bob. I was just surprised to hear he'd come in. He
has his office in the old grain store at the back and he normally doesn't set foot inside the house before five. He's my tower of strength,' she added briskly as she sat back down by the stove.

‘Would you say you were a disciplined person?' I asked. ‘Your productivity is legendary.'

‘I believe implicitly in discipline, discipline and application. As George Bernard Shaw was fond of saying, “Genius is the ability to apply the seat of one's pants to the seat of one's chair.”' Lydia Garland's shrewd grey-blue eyes twinkled. Then they turned steely. ‘I write every day from eight to one in the morning and that includes weekends, then I break for a light lunch, some soup and bread and cheese, usually, then it's back to the desk for another three hours' work. I stick to my schedule religiously, come what may.'

‘And you never get blocked? The inspiration is always there?'

‘Inspiration is just another term for hard work. If you work on it'll be there.' She gesticulated in the air above her head. ‘All around you, yours for the taking. If you sit around waiting for it to appear out of nowhere, it never will. At least that's my experience and that of most professional writers I know.'

‘I read somewhere that you eschew the use of computers, preferring to do all your writing in longhand using a fountain pen. Is this still true?'