Frozen Music (35 page)

‘He doesn't know. He thinks it was just a bad bout of colic, but
we're to call him immediately if it happens again. Your father's had his appendix out, otherwise he would have said that was what the problem was.'

I helped a grumbling Audrey into the small bedroom at the back of the kitchen, the maid's room as it was once. ‘I'm sorry it's so poky but we were told no stairs,' Olivia, following behind, said. ‘The loo and shower are just the other side of the passage, as you know, and you're close enough to the kitchen for you to be able to make yourself a cup of coffee when you feel like it.'

As she neared her bed, Audrey grew happier, like a horse scenting its stable after a long hike. ‘You go and see to Bertil,' I said to Olivia. ‘I'll look after Audrey. That's why I'm here after all,' I added, glaring at my mother. I still wasn't sure that her fall hadn't been a ploy that got out of hand, to get me across.

Audrey read my thoughts. ‘Surely you don't think I'd fall and nearly kill myself just to get you to go on holiday with me?'

‘Of course not,' I lied. ‘Then again, there was the time when you made Madox call and say you thought you had a brain tumour, just to stop me going on that trip.'

‘I was worried about you, Esther. You know I never liked that girl, what was her name? Jemima.'

‘Katherine.'

‘And India… Anyway, that was completely different.' My mother settled back in the narrow bed with the crisp white cotton sheets. ‘Would you be a dear and see if you can rustle me up some more pillows. Oh, and maybe a little plate of sandwiches, you know the kind I like, and one of those delicious pistachio and jam buns.' She leant back against the bed-rest with a contented little sigh; a horse back in its box with heating, hay and a bucket of oats. ‘I am glad you're here, Esther,' she said. ‘It's a big comfort.' She wasn't quite looking at me, though. Expressing fine sentiments made us feel awkward, in that we were alike.

‘You lose so many people when you get to my age. The links that anchor you to your past snap one by one. That's another reason why Olivia is so important to me. I never had any sisters or brothers and
so many childhood friends are gone, and my parents, of course. When there's no one left who remembers you as you were, each time someone from your past dies, the part of you which they remembered, the person you were to them, is buried with them and lost. In the end, you are left with the people who only knew you as this wrinkled old lady. With Olivia I'm still this other person too, the girl I once was lives with her. Does that make sense?'

I stared at her. Of course it did. I just wasn't used to her making much sense at all.

‘So you see,' my mother continued, ‘she loves Linus and I love you. It is important to us both that there should be no bad blood.'

‘You don't have to worry about that any more. Linus understands that I did what I had to do. We get on perfectly well.'

‘He's a very good-looking man, don't you agree?'

I felt my face softening and tried to stop it, but it was like trying to prevent a block of butter melting in the sunshine. ‘He is when he isn't laughing,' I said and I left the room in rather a hurry.

Audrey refused to get out of bed for dinner. No amount of threats or attempts at persuasion could change her mind. Bertil, too, stayed in his room. The rest of us had supper in the kitchen. Olivia wanted to be within earshot of her ‘two invalids', as she put it. Gerald told three sexist, fatist, smoker-friendly jokes, all of which offended his daughter. He told them in Swedish, but Kerstin's reaction needed no translation. She went for a walk, a lonely walk of martyrdom for all women. Linus went off to fetch Ivar who had been staying with a friend, and Ulla, Gerald, Olivia and I played whist. Ulla and Gerald lost four times in a row before Ulla departed, wrapped in ill temper as if it were a shawl. The others followed soon after and I was left feeling much like the last of the ten little Indians, alone.

On my way to my room I paused a while in the garden, taking deep breaths of the cool, fresh night air. I looked up at the star-strewn sky. It looked higher somehow, here on the island, further away. Maybe that was why the Swedes were prone to melancholy,
vemod
, they called it; they knew better than anyone how far away heaven was.

I had spent the morning reading in the garden and listening to the bees humming in the forsythia shrubs. Bees, busy bees, when they minded their own business and left you alone, were restful little creatures to have around. I yawned and stretched, and got up from my chair, placing my book on the seat. (I was reading Socrates because lately I had decided that without a sound grasp of philosophy I'd never even begin to get the hang of life.) On my way to the house I paused by Astrid's roses, the roses of Astrid, Linus's mother, and bent down to inhale their scent.

‘Funny to think of these roses, bought for a few kronor years ago and not much regarded by anyone these days, being alive still and she dead.' Ulla had come up behind me, her feet soundless on the soft grass. ‘Yet whose life would you have rated as more important? No, she's been dead for all those years, dead and buried with worms crawling through the space where her lovely eyes once shone.'

I straightened up. ‘No one will talk about her.'

‘At the time it was a huge scandal. The Stendals are a very old Gothenburg family.' She paused, looking at me with those pale-brown eyes. ‘You know, I practically brought Astrid up, me and my parents. The poor girl wanted nothing more than a home and a family of her own. That's why I thought she'd be happy with Bertil.' Her voice hardened and went snappy. ‘But it was not to be.' She turned on her heels and was gone in her usual puff of black smoke.

I was in the kitchen of what was now the Invalid House, with the hushed atmosphere and sweet stale air of a place where people walked softly and kept the windows shut. I was making Audrey and me some
coffee, having removed an apple core and two banana peels from the tray next to her bed, when Olivia came downstairs. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, but she wasn't concentrating and the kiss ended up at the side of my nose. ‘Did Audrey have a comfortable night?'

I shook my head. ‘Not terribly. And Bertil, how's he?'

‘Much better. We're convinced it was a one-off.' She wiped a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘I tell you though, Esther, I never want to see anyone in that kind of pain ever again.'

Ulla slid past, something clutched to her bosom; a baby demon possibly, when Olivia stopped her. ‘You're not trying to smuggle Bertil food again, are you?'

There was a small pause. ‘
Lite mjölk bara
(Just a little milk).' Then she added, ‘Dear.' I hated it when Ulla used endearments; it made me feel as if the world really was upside down. Olivia rolled her eyes to heaven and made a grab for the milk carton.

‘No milk. Dr Blomkvist said no dairy produce whatsoever. Water, weak black tea or Coke,
no
milk.'

‘Milk lines the stomach,' Ulla protested as Olivia returned the carton to the fridge.

‘Milk feeds the harmful bacteria. Forgive me if I take the doctor's word over yours.'

‘Bacteria,' Ulla muttered as she stomped off. ‘Who said anything about bacteria?'

Linus had been upstairs reading the papers to his father but come noon I heard Gerald call him down. I was on my way into Audrey's room with an old transistor radio I'd found in the cottage.

‘Linus,' Gerald called. ‘
Pernilla är här
.'

And Pernilla was indeed there, fair hair dancing round her shoulders as she turned this way and that, greeting us as if she were a princess on a visit to a slightly backward country. ‘I heard that Bertil was sick,' she said to the watching masses: Gerald, Kerstin, me, and Olivia who had just appeared from the kitchen. ‘I was in the stores getting the groceries and they said that you'd had to have Dr Blomkvist out.'

The Prince of the Slightly Backward Country descended the stairs and the visiting princess turned animated and spoke to him in Swedish. She frowned a pretty frown. She put a comforting hand on his arm. She smiled a rapid smile that cleared the pretty frown.
I
was a bitch. I looked at them, then I looked at Olivia's drawn face, and at Kerstin's, scrubbed and permanently pressed into an expression of hope, and at Gerald's sallow cheeks, and I thought I belonged with them, however much I wanted to be like the moonlit ones.

‘Excuse me,' I muttered as I squeezed past with the old transistor in my hand.

‘I wish my Swedish were better,' I complained to Audrey as I plugged the radio into a socket by the bed. ‘I understand a fair bit, but not enough. I hate not knowing what's going on.'

‘You always did,' Audrey said. ‘But what's the point, learning more Swedish, I mean. I thought you weren't staying a minute longer than you had to.' She was in a bad mood because there was no aerial for a television in her room. ‘They've got the dish so I could get all my programmes,' she complained. ‘But not in here.'

‘You could get up.'

Audrey gave me an outraged look, as if I had suggested she walked through the house with her nightie pulled up over her head.

‘Read,' I suggested.

‘I've read everything.'

‘Everything? There's a very nice little library on the island and it's even got an English-speaking section.'

‘Whatever,' Audrey said, sulking like a child.

‘Maybe they've got a Linguaphone course,' I said.

The librarian said they could order one in for me and that I could keep it for three weeks. ‘I'll return it before then,' I assured them.

‘And is your mother recovering well?' the librarian asked me in careful English. The islanders knew everything.

‘Quite well,' I said. ‘I hope she'll be fit to travel in the next fortnight or so.'

By the time the cassettes arrived, two days later, Bertil was up and about, and as restless as ever. He spent the morning sanding down the
red-and-white painted garden shed and later he announced that he was doing a barbecue that evening. Olivia was playing cards with my mother and Linus was off helping his father paint, so Ivar and I spent the afternoon digging for human remains in the sandy soil of the little playground on the east side of the island. We had just been told by a friend of Olivia's that the plot of land, caught between the small wood and the walls of the old fort, had been used as a burial ground for the prisoners. There had been generations of those and most had died within its walls. The priest and parishioners of Kilholmen had decided, in their compassion, that they didn't want their own tree-lined and tranquil churchyard cluttered up with the likes of the prisoners and their families. Those unfortunate souls, together with the poorest of the soldiers and officers of the fort, had been dumped on a piece of wasteland at the foot of the northern-most wall of their prison. Now it was a playground, but Ivar, who was bored with the swings and the seesaw, wanted to bring his red plastic bucket and spade to see if he could find some bits of the earlier users of the area. I watched him dig, his solid little shape squatting on the ground, as he worked, humming little tuneless tunes, absorbed and completely happy. Once he looked up at me and gave me one of his father's heart-stopping smiles and for the first time in my life I wondered if being childless was such a great idea.

After a while we stopped and had our picnic lunch: a roll with soft blue cheese each, followed by a cinnamon bun. We stretched out on the tall spiky grass and sipped our cartons of pear juice through a straw. Ivar had told me that pear juice went especially well with soft blue cheese and he was right.

‘To think there are lots of dead people under us,' Ivar said. The idea seemed to please him and I thought how nice it would have been if I'd had a playmate like Ivar when I was young.

‘Look, there's Pappa and Pernilla.' Ivar stood up and waved at the two figures approaching from the harbour.

‘I wondered where you two had got to,' Linus said, bending down and kissing the top of his son's fair head.

‘We're off for a walk round the island,' Pernilla said. I could see
from the way she kept gazing over her shoulder and shifting from foot to foot that she couldn't wait to get away.

‘Stay and help us dig,' Ivar said. ‘It's really exciting.' He turned to me. ‘It's really exciting this digging, isn't it?'

I nodded. ‘It certainly is, Ivar.' And in a way it was. To watch a child absorbed in play was a lot more interesting than I would ever have imagined.

Linus looked as if he was about to say yes, when Pernilla tugged at his arm. ‘We'd better get on. The forecast said rain in the afternoon.'

Linus looked at Ivar, then at Pernilla. ‘You show me what you've found when we get home,' he said to his son. They were off again, up past the playground towards the fort and the cliffs beyond. I watched them go and as they reached the top of the hill, Linus turned, as if he knew I was watching, and for a moment he stopped and smiled, then with a little wave he was gone.

Ivar returned to his digging and I lay back and stared up at the blue cloud-strewn sky. Then he found a bone. Ivar swore it was a man's collarbone, but I thought it looked more like the kind of bone a large gull would leave behind as his earthly remains.

‘It's human,' Ivar said with due solemnity.

‘You don't think it looks more like gull?' I asked.

Ivar shook his head. ‘No,' he said. And that was that. We returned to Villa Rosengård with the bone rattling gently inside the red plastic bucket.

Bertil was already on the deck, cleaning the barbecue. Ivar rushed over to show him the bone and I wandered back to the cottage to wash and change.

My stomach felt fat and bloated, too much herring the night before, I thought, so I put on a navy-blue dress, long-sleeved and loose-waisted. It was comforting to know that were I to fart, it would almost certainly be blamed on Gerald. My stomach rumbling, I worked out which song to sing, just in case: ‘Applejack' by Dolly Parton.