Frozen Music (33 page)

‘Don't be so petty, Ulla,' Olivia scolded.

‘You haven't had your coffee.' Linus put his hand out towards me.

I looked at it, an artist's hand, long-fingered and strong. ‘It's all right,' I said. ‘I have to do some reading, anyway.'

‘Work?'

I shook my head. ‘Just reading.'

‘But you have to do it?'

I nodded. ‘That's right.'

‘Why?' He didn't sound argumentative, just as if he really wanted to know.

‘Because I have to. We have one miserable life…'

‘There I don't agree with you,' Gerald put in. ‘I've made a lifelong study of the theories of an afterlife, including reincarnation, and for every year that goes by I get more certain that there is one, an afterlife, that is.'

‘For every year that brings you nearer to death you believe in an afterlife, you mean,' Ulla said. ‘Anyway, people always assume they'll come back as something worthwhile. But why should they? You might turn out to be a dung-beetle or a fly. Personally, I'd rather stay in my grave than risk returning as something ghastly.'

‘You don't have to worry on that score,' Gerald said. ‘You never come back as the same thing twice.'

‘Has anyone ever told you that you're a deeply unpleasant old man?' Ulla glared at him. The two of them continued their argument in Swedish.

‘When I first came here,' Olivia said, ‘I used to think how funny it was that everything spoken in Swedish sounded like an argument. Then I realised that in this family it was.'

‘That's a little unfair, don't you think?' Bertil protested.

Ivar informed us that it had stopped raining and was now a Perfect Day. ‘You should never waste a Perfect Day,' he told no one in particular. No one in particular ignored him.

‘I just feel that whatever happens, my chances of returning as something even remotely literate are extremely small,' I ventured. ‘I just can't bear to think of the tons of books I will never have read, the places I won't know about, the music I haven't heard, the knowledge that will have passed me by. I don't know why we are here. Who does? But I do know that while I am, I might as well learn as much I can. How else can one even begin to hope to make sense of anything? Once I've saved up some money I'll start to travel. In the meantime, reading and looking at pictures and snooping around other people's minds will have to do.'

‘I just want to build good buildings,' Linus said. ‘Actually, I want to build great ones.'

‘And I stopped you?'

Linus looked up at me with a small smile. ‘I didn't say that.'

I exited through the back door to the sound of coffee cups clinking and Ivar chatting on about it being a Perfect Day.

I was sitting by the open window in my room, reading a book on European history, when there was a knock on the door. It was Linus. I put it down, hoping he hadn't come to talk about the fair, the moon-spun Pernilla because, quite frankly, the mere mention of her name made this tight little ball form in my chest. For a moment I wondered if that tight little ball could be my missing heart, but I quickly dismissed the idea. It was jealousy, more like. My stomach simply couldn't digest it. Heartburn, that was it.

Linus had been on his way to sit down in the small white-painted
chair by the dressing-table, but instead he straightened up again and turned back towards the door. ‘I'm disturbing you, I'm sorry.'

‘No, not at all. Sit down, please.' He did as I had asked, legs crossed, leaning back, relaxed. ‘I'm just in a bit of a mood,' I explained. ‘I often am.'

Linus smiled politely. ‘Really, I never would have guessed.'

For a moment, there, I felt pleased. Maybe the step was shorter than I thought to me being described as an inspiration. Then Linus laughed. That figured. He had been joking. And as usual, the sound of his laughter brought everyone, including Linus himself, to stunned silence.

‘Olivia asked me to give you a lift to town tomorrow to pick Audrey up,' he said eventually. ‘I have to go in to Gothenburg in the morning, I'm meeting a prospective client from Japan and I want to get a little something for Pernilla's birthday. Foreigners don't quite understand the Swedish habit of emptying every office and factory for five weeks of the summer. Anyway, if you'd like to take the opportunity to look around town, we can go and pick up Audrey on our way back. Four o'clock they said, is that right?'

I nodded. ‘Thanks, I'd love to have a look around. Gothenburg, city of canals and shipyards, of ancient families cursed with syphilis, of sky-blue trams and of the heavy beating of metal from the shipyards.'

Linus looked at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Where did that come from?'

I smiled. ‘I used to listen in to Olivia and Audrey chatting. I would curl up in this old chair and nine times out of ten they'd forget I was there.' He still had that question mark in his eyes so I added, ‘I might have imagined some of it. You know how it is when you're a child?'

I watched him leave my room and it seemed my good humour went with him, padding along at his heels. At the door, it turned and grinned: Sucker!

It had rained again during the night, but by the time I got up it had stopped and the sun was breaking through the clouds, mixing gold with the thunder-grey of the sky. I walked straight out on to the lawn in just my nightdress, my pale-blue-and-white embroidered nightdress. It was a very pretty and expensive nightdress. I might be turned out, during the day, like the prince of darkness's younger sister, but at night I chose to look like the daughter my mother had always wanted. Goodness knows why…

The grass was dew-soaked, wet beneath my feet. There was the lightest of breezes from the sea, gently stirring the yellow-and-blue wimple hoisted on the tall flag-pole, and overhead a gull circled, opening its greedy beak to squawk, telling me it was there and watching. (The other day I had made the mistake of peeling the prawns for supper outside in the garden and the gulls had not forgotten.) Otherwise all was still; it was only seven o'clock. I was about to go back to my room to shower and dress when my eye was caught by the sight of a bony behind in cornflower-blue cotton jersey, bent over the bed of moon-white roses: Ulla. I wandered up to her and said good morning. She raised herself slowly and, wiping her stubby grey fringe from her eyes, she smiled at me. Smiled!

‘Astrid planted these,' she said, and her voice held a softness that I had not heard before, caressing the edges of the name. ‘She had them brought over from Germany. She spent two years searching for the perfect white rose. Astrid was a true artist. Olivia tries, but Astrid was an aesthete to the very marrow of her being. Linus has something of that.'

‘How did she die? Was it a car crash?'

‘Why should it have been? She killed herself. Didn't you know?'

‘Jesus! Why?'

‘I don't know that that's any of your business,' Ulla said, crouching down over the rose bed once more.

Olivia was in the kitchen making lemonade. Her thick dark hair had worked loose from the knot at the back and fell heavy across her face as she forced a lemon half down the white plastic ridges of the juicer. By her side, on the white worktop, lay a weeping pile of squeezed-out lemon halves. I gathered them up and chucked them in the bin. She turned and smiled at me. ‘You don't mind helping yourself to breakfast? You know where everything is.'

I brought out the pale syrupy bread from the wooden bread bin and cut myself two thick slices. I spread them with margarine and cut some cheese for one of the slices and some smoked sausage for the other. I ate them at the kitchen table while I leafed through the local paper, trying to decipher the headlines. But I kept thinking about what Ulla had told me. In the end I just had to ask. ‘Did Linus's mother really kill herself?'

‘Who told you? Not Linus? He never talks about it.'

‘Ulla.'

‘Ulla? I'm surprised. The whole family treats what happened as a shameful secret. I had been married for a year before I found out, and I mean found out. None of them actually told me. At the time it happened, of course, the whole of Gothenburg was talking about it, but I was living in Stockholm then.'

‘So what did happen?'

‘Look, Esther. I really don't think it's for me to tell you. If Linus or Bertil chooses to speak of it, that's another matter. Even Ulla, although she's the cagiest one of all normally. Now.' She smiled a brisk, ‘all's well with the world if you just don't look too hard' smile. ‘You have a nice day in town. I suggest you go to the art museum; there're some lovely things there. And do look at the still life by Erik Johnsson in room fourteen. It used to belong to the Stendals, then Bertil's father sold it to pay for him and Bertil's mother to go for a week to Paris. It's worth an absolute fortune nowadays. Oh, and tell Audrey that we're all set to receive her.'

In the car on the way to town I kept glancing at Linus, trying to
summon up the courage to ask him straight out about his mother.
Although a very good student, Esther displays a morbid fascination with death and disease that is rather worrying in one so young
, one of my first school reports had read. Well, I wasn't so young any more but otherwise I hadn't changed.

‘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?'