Frozen Music (28 page)

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.

‘I can't guarantee that he'll wish to speak to you, but yes, hearing the other side of an argument does tend to help one form an opinion.'

Not when you're in my profession, I thought. For a journalist, the other side of the story was like the bad fairy at the christening; it buggered things up. ‘I'll make an appointment,' I said, so meekly that Audrey shot me a motherly look of concern. Help me out here, someone, I thought, as I fought off the old doubts with everything at my disposal: rusty old bits of arguments, chunks of therapy speak, sharp and painful memories. ‘Of course one needs to hear both sides. But sometimes, in order to get things done and in deference to the cause of justice, you have to trust your instincts and go with the bigger picture and to hell with the nuances.'

‘I think you'll find that that's how all the great injustices of this world came about, people ignoring the nuances in favour of the bigger picture,' Linus said.

‘But surely', Audrey said, ‘Esther's old things on the farm are the nuances and your opera house is the bigger picture? So you seem to be arguing each other's points.' Linus and I looked at each other and I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Now don't tell me your head hurts,' Audrey warned. She turned to Linus. ‘That's what she used to say when she was a little girl and you argued with her. “My head hurts.”'

Now I saw the point of motherhood. It gave you a unique ability to humiliate under the cloak of sentimentality:
And this is little Johnny when he was three and didn't know better than to stand naked in a sandpit and twist his willie round his finger as if it were a rubber band. Oh and look; there's our Daisy on her fourth birthday; you wouldn't think she'd be able to fit a whole finger into that tiny little button nose, now would you?

‘I would get this funny buzzing sound in my head when my father was having a go at me, as if my brain was hosting a party for a swarm
of bees,' Linus said. A brief look of mutual understanding passed between us.

‘More cheese, anyone?' Audrey offered.

Soon after that Linus stood up to leave. As I sat back down in the boudoir chair by Audrey's bed I felt his absence even more strongly than I had felt his presence.

Audrey sank back against her pillows with a contented little sigh. ‘I think that went very well, don't you?'

I looked at her, appalled. It was just this attitude of hers – this ‘I'm not just looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, I'm strangling it with a rose-coloured ribbon' – that I felt was to blame for my desperate need for clear-cut answers. ‘And', she continued, ‘who would have thought that podgy little Linus would grow up to be such a handsome man?'

I hauled a cigarette from my pocket and lit it. ‘If you like that tall, blond, chiselled type, yes I suppose you could call him handsome. I myself prefer the more earthy look.'

‘You've taken up smoking again,' Audrey said. ‘Why?'

I exhaled a perfect circle of smoke (an old skill remembered). ‘I've fallen victim to the incessant advertising by unscrupulous tobacco companies. And it's something to do with my hands when I feel like strangling you.'

Audrey gazed at me fondly. ‘You always were rather gullible behind that cynical façade.' This was news to me. ‘Anyway,' she went on, ‘I'm not surprised to hear you say Linus isn't your type. You seem to have a preference for men with the kind of looks and personality that fail to engage your feelings too deeply.'

I stared at her. What was it with this motherly insight all of a sudden? ‘I have to prepare for tomorrow,' I said, standing up. ‘I'm going down to see the Wilsons again.' I stubbed out my cigarette on a saucer.

‘You mean after I got the two of you together for lunch and we all had such a lovely time you're still intent on carrying on this silly vendetta?' Audrey was outraged; I knew from the way she gripped the cream silk counterpane so hard that her plump knuckles whitened.

‘It was very kind of you to have me for lunch,' I said, ‘and I don't wish to be ungrateful, but I have to do what I think is right, in spite of having had a nice lunch. It's called principles…' My mother sighed, impatient with the very concept. ‘I don't do these things just to sell newspapers, you know. Obviously I need to get my career going, but I do believe in right and wrong.' I paused for a moment. ‘What else is there?'

I hadn't expected an answer, but I got one. ‘Everything,' Audrey said. ‘Everything between heaven and earth. Linus has a passion, can't you see that? He wants to create something lasting, something of beauty. What do you want?'

‘In this instance, justice. However beautiful the proposed building, it does not justify evicting those two old people. Stuart Lloyd's vision doesn't and nor does Linus's passion. Rookery Cottage is Dora and George Wilson's home and they don't wish to leave.'

‘And that's all there is to it as far as you're concerned?'

‘Yes.' I picked up my tote bag. ‘That's all there is to it.' I stopped in the doorway and turned round. ‘Passion without justice is a dangerous thing.'

‘And so is blind justice.'

‘And what do you know, stuck in your bed for the last couple of years?'

‘It's not where you go but what you see when you're there that matters,' my mother said. That was it, I'd had enough. What did Audrey think she was playing at, carrying on like some cut-price oracle?

‘Shall I tell Linus you're reconsidering your next article?' she called after me.

‘No,' I barked. Looking back I could see her reach for the telephone. ‘And you can say the same to Olivia.' I was out of there.

The entrance to utterly village hall smelt of lavatory disinfectant, the kind you get in a little icy-looking white block and hang on the inside of the rim. As I paid my fifty-pence entrance fee I searched the rows of stalls for Dora and George. There they were, right at the back of the hall, just below the podium. I waded through the scrum of punters, muttering apologies as the tote bag on my shoulder knocked into arms and backs. There did not seem to be a lot of buying going on among the Spanish fans and old patchwork quilts, the old-fashioned dolls, the china coffee cups and the Wedgwood blue vases, but there was a thinly veiled air of excitement generated by legions of
Antiques Roadshow
viewers hunting for a bargain. Their excitement didn't seem to be shared by the vendors who stood or sat behind their stalls. One man was engrossed in a science fiction paperback, while chewing his way through a packet of biscuits on his lap. A woman seated on a low stool was munching a huge sandwich, oblivious, it seemed, to the would-be buyer asking for a music box to be wound up for her to hear. Only when the customer, a middle-aged woman with permed ginger hair, had given up and wandered off to the next stall did she look up, sigh, and return to her chewing and staring into nothing. Dora and George were not eating, but they each had their hands clasped round cups of strong milky tea. George looked up and nodded briefly in my direction. Dora smiled a big, gummy smile.