Frozen Music (23 page)

As Angus moved inside me, his warm sweat-damp chest pressed hard against mine, I saw our daughter receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine after discovering the definitive cure for cancer. Then, at the moment of triumph, accepting the honour from the King of Sweden himself, she grew transparent and vanished altogether, and with her the hopes and salvation of millions, and I let out a moan of despair. Angus thought it was a moan of pleasure and got even more excited, quickening like a crab in boiling water. OK, I thought, it was quite possible that the child would have turned out to be a perfectly harmless minor player, working as an inspector for the water board, for example, but like most mothers to be, or not to be in my case, I couldn't help having big plans for my offspring.

Angus had shuddered and let out a moan of his own. Then he had
kissed me a little clumsily on the neck before rolling off, on to his back. It was then I arched my back and looked up at the cardboard sign.

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

I had to admit that when the fairy godmothers were busy doling out gifts at my christening, the gift of taking myself, or anything else, lightly had not been on their list. Then I remembered that I wasn't christened.

‘Did you have a nice time?' Angus's voice reached me, fuzzy and a little coy.

I mumbled something vague, hoping to convince him I was still in the throes of post-coital ecstasy.

‘So how is it going, you and Angus?' Posy asked over breakfast, her eyes wide with the expectations of good news, lovely news, life's-young-dream kind of news. She must have been listening at the door last night.

‘Not too good,' I said, pouring myself a bowl of All-Bran.

Posy didn't lose her starry gaze. She could afford to be chirpy, I thought, breakfasting as she was on crusty white bread with butter and apricot jam. Posy looked at me, her head a little to one side. ‘I expect you're only
saying
that.'

‘What do you expect me to do?
Write
it down? Tap dance it in Morse code? Send a singing telegram?'

Posy bit into the soft thick bread and the golden orange jam rose over her even white teeth. ‘You old grouch you,' she mumbled through her mouthful.

What could you do with someone like that? Kill her? ‘If you ever get caught in the waste-disposal unit again,' I said, ‘don't call us, we'll call you.'

Posy giggled. ‘Always joking.'

‘Not always,' I said, putting the spoon into my bowl of All-Bran.

I was having lunch, that day, with Mary Swanson, the editor of
Modern Romance
. We had decided on one o'clock at her office in Covent Garden. I arrived at quarter to two. Mary was in the grip of
one of those controlled furies which make the sufferer speak very slowly, stringing out each sentence as if it were a straining leash. ‘I was expecting you an hour ago.'

‘I had problems getting here.'

‘Traffic?'

I sighed and shrugged my shoulders. I didn't want to lie. The traffic had been its normal demented self and anyway, I had taken the tube. No, it was simply that nowadays everything took so long: where to cross the road, which route to take, which charity box to put my money in… every step was hounded by the need to make a decision about something and it all took time.

I tried to explain it all to Mary, but she wasn't interested. ‘Let's get on, shall we?' she said, nudging me towards the door. ‘I called and the restaurant is keeping the table.'

Once there (it was intimate and Italian, and I forgot the name of it as soon as we left) we ordered and Mary got down to business. ‘Normally I don't talk business over lunch, as you know, but with the lack of time' – here she looked pointedly at her watch – ‘at our disposal, we'd better get down to it straight away. I like your stories. A lot of us do, but there are rules in romance writing, particularly in magazine stories such as ours.'

‘Rules,' I interrupted. ‘I like rules. I spend my life trying to find some. The problem is that as soon as you do find one, what you think is a nice firm one, to hang your principles on, it turns out to be as soft and yielding as a branch of pussy willow.'

‘Well, the rules for our kind of writing are quite firm. Our readers demand it. One of these rules is that the hero and heroine actually meet.' She stabbed a rocket leaf with her fork and looked expectantly at me.

I looked back, not quite sure what response exactly she was waiting for. Then I remembered the story she must be referring to. ‘Oh, that one. I kept putting the meeting off because I got fond of the characters. I just couldn't bear to see them disappointed.'

‘Esther, that's the problem. It's up to you to create characters who
are
suited to each other. Characters who will not be disappointed in each other but who will live happily ever after. That's the job of the
writer of romance fiction. That's what we pay you to do and that's what our readers pay us to provide. And you can do it. I wouldn't bother if I didn't think you could. Often, when your characters do meet, it's all fine – up to a point.'

‘Which point?'

‘What did you say?' Mary had to ask. I had had my mouth full of pumpkin risotto.

I swallowed. ‘At which point exactly?'

‘Oh, well, passion. Our readers like their passion.'

How? I wanted to ask. Black, white with one sugar?

‘There's a coldness at the base of your writing, a distance. Look, Esther.' Mary leant closer to me across the table. ‘I like you and you're a good journalist, a good writer, I'd like to go on using you, but you have to change gear.' She moved back again in her chair. ‘Think of your boyfriend. Sit back and close your eyes and think about him when you write your heroes and your love scenes.'

A couple of hours later I was back at my desk, thinking of Angus. Closing my eyes, I tried to think passionate thoughts. Angus undressing in front of me as I lay waiting in bed; shirt, socks, trousers… those crumpled Popeye boxer shorts. I opened my eyes. After a few minutes I tried again. ‘I want you,' Angus said, unbuttoning his trousers. They fell down to the floor and… Now it wasn't that I expected him, or anyone, actually to iron their boxers, but one would have thought that he could at least fold them as they came out of the dryer.

Just after five, I turned off my computer and went outside for some air. (When did we drop the ‘fresh' part of that phrase?) I used to walk fast, paying appropriate attention to what was around me. On the King's Road I would be mindful of carelessly wielded umbrellas, avoiding, as best I could, getting my feet caught up in the spokes of a basket on wheels emerging from the general direction of Waitrose. I looked in the shop windows and when I drew money from the cash machine I peered about me furtively to make sure that no one was standing by to pounce as I left, my purse replenished. When I returned home at night I would have my keys ready and glance around the quiet little back-street and down the basement steps to make sure
that there was no dark figure lurking in the shadows. In the streets around the office I used to put my arm protectively around my large bag. London streetwise, no more, no less. As for the rest of the time, I looked up at the sky at the sound of birdsong. I glanced at the face of a good-looking man or the legs of a fat girl in a short skirt. I gazed into shop windows and in summer I checked out the people sitting at the pavement cafés. I looked up endlessly at the buildings I passed, finding a plaque new to me here, or a gargoyle I'd never noticed there. Like any big city, London was a cache of delights in a dustbin, and I paid as much attention to it as most people and more than some.

But lately it had been different. Now, almost every step I took brought its own problem. Pass a beggar without a second glance and you might turn your back on genuine suffering and need – or you might not. It was cold for March. The scruffy, ginger-haired boy, slumped on a heap of blankets in the shop doorway, might die that very night from the effects of malnutrition and exposure, his body found the next morning, lying like the Little Match Girl by the window of the Body Shop, his unseeing eyes turned towards an unobtainable paradise of apricot bubbles and strawberry washes and goat's milk cleanser, none of it tested on animals. And he was so young. Poor, poor, wretched boy. On the other hand, give him a wad of cash and he might leap up from under his mound of blankets and head straight for the nearest drug dealer and would end up every bit as dead.

I spent more than ten minutes just walking up and down and round the block deciding whether or not to give him some money, before dropping five pounds in the glass jar by his side.

And you don't have to look far to come upon more problems requiring decisions. There was a woman outside Boots. She was young, early twenties maybe, with lank, greasy hair down to her shoulders and a pinched, pale face. A small boy with a crew-cut was pulling at her hand and whining, and at first the woman didn't seem to notice, then all of a sudden she twirled round and whacked him across the back of the head. The child opened his mouth and cried in that heart-rending abandoned way that children do. Was the woman his mother? She could be the nanny from hell or even an abductor.
Was she a habitual child beater? Was this a case of abuse? Should I report the incident? I hovered for a moment, watching. The woman knelt down by the child and shook him. ‘Be quiet, you little sod, do you hear me? Just shut up!'

I stepped forward; I felt I had to. ‘Are you his mother?'

The woman looked up at me, pushing a lank fringe from her eyes. ‘What's it to you?'

The boy stopped crying. ‘Mum, who's that lady?'

‘No one, poppet.' She got to her feet and took the boy's hand. ‘Come along now. Dad will be wondering where we've got to.' She shot me a contemptuous glance over her shoulder and off they went, down the road. My heart was beating furiously and I could feel the heat rise in my cheeks. I felt awful: itchy, scratchy, breathless. The more you think about things the more you see the connections. How could one be expected to make any decisions? What was that saying? The best-laid plans of mice and men… Well, what about them? All I knew was that they were a joke, our plans. What was the other one? Men plan and angels laugh? Something like that? I would laugh too if I were safely tucked up in heaven, away from the madness down below.

Plan? Why, when any seemingly random act could be the one that determined the course of someone's life? Stop to answer the phone on your way out and because of it, that three-and-a-half-minute delay, you end up bang in the middle of a motorway pile-up. Turn left and walk straight into the path of a killer. Reap what you sow, that's what the Bible says. I think. I had nothing against that concept in itself, but it simply didn't work that way. What I objected to was when you went merrily along sowing your furrows of grain only to wake up with a view over a field of poison ivy.

Deep in thought, I passed a café and suddenly I felt exhausted. I forced myself to walk straight inside without prevaricating, finding an empty table in a dark corner at the back. Someone nearby, a middle-aged man, lit a cigarette and three people instantly turned towards him and pointed to the No Smoking sign on the wall behind him. Kick a pensioner to death on a public highway, I thought, and you'd
probably get away with it, but light up in a No Smoking area and you were sprung within seconds.

Someone cleared her throat, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Were you ready to order, then?'

I looked up to find a waitress dressed in a floor-length pinafore and with a mob-cap pulled down over her dirty-blonde hair. I hadn't noticed any of the other waitresses dressed that way, but looking around me I saw that they all were.

‘Tea please. I'd like a pot of tea.' The most difficult thing to come to terms with, I thought, was that you could do absolutely the right thing and still be the cause of everything going hideously wrong. And it never changes. When we are little and our parents' children we frequently get into trouble for doing the right thing. I remember being about six and hearing Madox talking admiringly of this girl Ruth, the teenage daughter of a friend of my parents. This wretched Ruth could sing and play the piano. She sailed and skied, and she read novels. She was so brim-full of energy that she got up every morning at five so that the day would be long enough for her to fit everything in. I assumed that the sailing and the skiing were done at different times of year, but still. Madox sang Ruth's praises. He had been rather irritated with me earlier in the day; something about not knowing my times tables. That night I set my alarm for half past four. I woke with a start in the still dark morning and clambered out of bed. The house was quiet, the kind of quiet you listen to, waiting for it to be broken. But it wasn't. I wandered up and down the stairs, pausing anxiously outside my parents' room, looking at my watch. I was exhausted and soon it would be ordinary morning and my father would never know what an early riser I was. In the end I couldn't stand it any longer. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' I sang, in a kind of whispery voice at first, then louder and louder. It was the song Janet always sang when she was in an especially good mood. ‘Marching as to war,' I squeaked. At last the door to my parents' bedroom opened, and I took on an alert and energetic expression.

Madox practically leapt towards me. ‘Shut up,' he hissed. ‘What the hell do you think you're doing? It's half past five in the morning.'

Something had gone wrong, horribly wrong, but I persevered. ‘I've been up since half past four,' I said.

‘Well, you're an idiot. Now go back to bed before I lose my temper.'

However old we got, we were all God's children, allegedly, and that kind of thing just kept on happening.

‘Indian or China, madam? Madam, I said Indian or China, madam.' The bored voice of the waitress reached me. I felt other-worldly, other-planety, as if any communication had to travel millions of light years through the ether to reach me. I blinked at her. The girl sighed and shifted from foot to foot.