Frozen Music Read online

  He was about to fish out the key he carried round his neck on a metal chain to unlock the front door when it was opened from the inside.

  ‘Daddy!’ Linus rushed inside pulling his knitted hat off his head revealing dark-blond hair, wavy and damp with sweat. ‘Why are you home so early?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Linus. And please remove your boots, you’re bringing the entire street inside with you.’ Linus’s cheeks turned a deeper pink as he knelt down, clumsily unzipping the boots. ‘When you’ve washed your hands and combed your hair I’d like you to come into the library. I’ve got something to tell you.’

  Linus could not help himself. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  Bertil sighed. It was a special sigh, a mixture of irritation and resignation, reserved just for Linus. ‘I believe that I told you a second ago that I would see you in the library in a minute.’ Bertil turned on his heels and strode off, leaving Linus still struggling with his boots.

  Linus washed his face and hands, and combed his hair, parting it carefully to one side, trying in vain to make it lie flat against his head instead of springing up in those embarrassing curls. On his way to the library he sneaked into his bedroom to take just a little look at his model. On the threshold he stopped, his grey eyes rounder than ever. The blue Formica desk was bare apart from the photograph of Linus as a little boy seated on his mother’s lap, the brown imitation leather pencil case and the large pencil sharpener fixed to the side of the desk top. The carefully laid-out pieces of Linus’s model aeroplane were nowhere to be seen. With an anguished little yelp Linus scurried across the room and up to the desk, pulling out the drawer underneath. There they were, the components of his plane, thrown in just any old way among his tin soldiers, the bits of modelling clay, and the handfuls of marbles and pencil stubs.

  ‘It’s too bad, Daddy, really it is. She had no right.’ Linus was all hot and bothered as he appeared in the library; his cheeks had turned bright pink again and his hair was springing up in those damp curls he detested.

  Bertil Stendal looked up from the business section of the paper, taking his pipe out of his mouth. ‘There you are, Linus.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘She’s ruined it, that’s what she’s done. She had no right. It’s my…’

  ‘Linus, would you please be quiet for a moment and sit down. I’ve got something important to tell you.’

  Linus fell silent, sitting down on the sofa beneath the portrait of his grandfather. Inside, though, he was fuming, churned up with anxiety. In the end he could not help himself. ‘I bet she’s lost some pieces and if she has then everything is…’

  ‘Linus.’ Bertil’s voice held a warning. There was a pause as he collected himself. Before his inner eye Linus saw his father separate into two, one Bertil striding off angrily as the other followed, putting a hand on the angry one’s shoulder and bringing him back to their mutual body. He stifled a giggle as Bertil spoke again.

  ‘Now, you’ll be aware that I enjoy the company of Tante Olivia very much. I have been lonely since your mother died.’ Linus looked up at his father, surprised at the suggestion of him harbouring emotions similar to Linus’s own. ‘And, well, what I wanted to tell you is that Olivia has consented to be my wife and therefore your new mother.’

  ‘You and Tante Olivia are getting married?’

  Bertil heaved that special Linus sigh. ‘Yes, Linus, that is exactly what I’ve just told you. I hope this arrangement meets with your approval.’

  Linus tried to concentrate his thoughts, still hovering anxiously around the question of his model, on his father’s news. He liked Tante Olivia. She didn’t talk down to him or ruffle his hair. She did not talk that much at all, come to think of it, and she left him alone in his room to do what he wished. His father was in a better mood when she was around and once she had cooked him a really good meal, something English with fish and normally he did not like fish very much. She was English but she had lived in Sweden long enough not to be embarrassing like Johan Falk’s mum who came from Argentina. Mrs Falk talked all the time and in a very loud voice and she hugged everyone, even Linus whom she hardly knew. He knew he could rely on Tante Olivia not to be embarrassing like that.

  He nodded to his father. ‘It’s very nice. Are you engaged now?’

  His father’s rather thin lips parted into one of his rare smiles. ‘Yes, Linus my boy, we are indeed.’

  Linus liked it when Bertil called him ‘My boy’, but he thought that if his father would only smile a bit more often he would manage to do it better. ‘Practise, Linus,’ his gym teacher was always telling him as Linus’s legs refused to reach up to the wooden bar. ‘Practise and they will stretch.’ Maybe if Bertil practised his smile a bit more, it too would stretch.

  ‘Where is she, Tante Olivia?’ he asked, remembering that he had not seen her for a while.

  ‘She’s been back to England for a visit. She returned this morning. So, have you any more questions?’ Bertil’s glance passed from his son to the stack of papers on his desk.

  ‘If Tante Olivia comes to live with us can we stop having Fru Sparre? She had no right to come into my room and spoil my things like that and just…’

  ‘Linus, stop ranting. I’m going out to dinner in a little while. A small celebration. Fru Sparre left some meatballs for you. You can heat them up in the frying pan if you wish or eat them cold. And there’s lingonberry preserve in the fridge. I especially reminded Fru Sparre to get some.’ Linus cheered up momentarily; meatballs with lingonberries was his favourite. ‘So, my boy.’ Bertil got up from the leather armchair and walked across to Linus, placing his hands on Linus’s shoulders. ‘You’re pleased?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ Linus looked up at his father. ‘The other day I had to have my meatballs without lingonberries.’

  Bertil withdrew his hands. ‘I meant about Tante Olivia and me, Linus.’

  Linus’s high pale forehead creased in concentration. ‘I haven’t had time to think properly, but I think I am. And if you’re happy…’

  Later that evening Linus sat in the light of his blue-shaded desk-lamp painstakingly reassembling the pieces of his model while listening to Bob Dylan singing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ on the record player. Outside his room the apartment was dark and silent. Linus looked up from his work at the photograph of his mother with him on her knee and tears began to fill his eyes, running down his round cheeks and into his mouth. He sniffed and wiped them away with the back of his grubby hand, before bending down over his work once more.

  Two

  ‘The opening of Olivia’s friend’s gallery went well, apparently.’ Audrey was reading her letter, her gold-rimmed spectacles down low on her nose. Now and then she mumbled a sentence out loud, but not loud enough for me or my father to hear, not until she looked up with an ‘Oh God, how awful!’

  ‘What?’ Madox, my father, looked up from the pages of the Guardian.

  ‘That boy, Linus. It seems he pigged out on pop and crisps, ending up writhing in agony on the floor in the middle of the opening party. He’s prone to stomach upsets, Olivia says. Anyway,’ my mother scanned the letter before continuing, ‘“his father carted him off to casualty, but not before the wretched boy had thrown up all over the main exhibit,”’ she quoted. ‘“A Madonna and Child Running in Terror under Attack from US War Planes.”’Audrey shook her head and reached for a cigarette from the black onyx box on the coffee table. My father leant across and lit it, and one for himself too. I wished I smoked. Not smoking was yet another thing to make me feel apart. I was short too, though I knew that was normal for a ten-year-old, and I had to go to bed really early although I was never sleepy, while Audrey, who stayed up on the sofa half the night, kept dozing off in front of the television. Now I watched my parents draw on their cigarettes in unison, identical little smiles of satisfaction on their faces, thin tendrils of smoke spilling out from their lips. As it was Saturday, I had a bag of sweets.

  ‘What was a sculpture of a Madonna and Child etc.
doing at a craft gallery?’ Madox asked my mother. Audrey shrugged. She looked again at the letter. ‘Maybe it was wood.’ She put it aside. ‘The boy is thirteen. You would have thought he’d have grown out of that kind of behaviour.’

  I had finished my sweets. ‘Maybe,’ I said, making my mother turn to me with a slightly startled look as if she had momentarily forgotten who I was. ‘Maybe they should be grateful to him. Maybe the sick looked just like napalm.’

  ‘I told you we shouldn’t let that child watch the evening news,’ Audrey said to Madox, making me look around the room to see who that child was. Then I got up from the upholstered stool where I had been sitting. I looked pointedly at my watch. It was quite new, a present for my tenth birthday, with a small round face and a red real leather strap. It kept excellent time. My parents seemed to regret having given it to me. ‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ I announced from the doorway.

  ‘Thank you, Esther,’ my father said, not even looking up from his paper. He had switched from the Guardian, now folded on his lap, to The Times. Madox had to read all the papers because he wrote for one himself. He was a political commentator and he went on the radio, too, and twice already he had appeared on television. Audrey had put Olivia’s letter away and now she was studying the flowers she had arranged in an Alvar Alto vase. She frowned at them and I knew how they felt: untidy, in the wrong place, then she put out her hand and tweaked a twig of mimosa. She did that to me, too, tweaked bits of me, my hair, the collar on my shirt, whatever offended her view.

  ‘We were meant to leave at a quarter to,’ I complained. ‘It’s now’ – I looked at my watch – ‘three and a half minutes past.’

  ‘I said be ready to leave at a quarter to, not that we are necessarily leaving then,’ Madox said.

  I looked at him, appalled. Parents were congenitally unfair, every child knew that, but this was going too far. I had to speak up. ‘You know that when you say “be ready to leave at a quarter to, Esther” that means that’s when we’re meant to go and that if I wasn’t ready and you were, then I would get into trouble.’

  ‘Oh, do stop going on and on, child,’ Audrey snapped. Madox carried on reading.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I said. ‘If it had been…’ Madox put down the paper with a little splat, on top of the other one. ‘One more word from you, Esther, and the only place you’ll be going is your room.’ He reached for another cigarette. I felt torn; on the one hand I wanted him to put it out, the cigarette, so that we could leave, on the other hand I knew that Smoking Kills and, right then, I hated him.

  ‘Oh, Esther.’ My mother turned to me, a blue iris in her hand. ‘What does it matter when you leave as long as you do?’

  I spun round and dashed out on to the landing, throwing myself down on the green ottoman by the window. What does it matter? my mother asks. It’s as I suspected for a long time; she doesn’t understand. Madox had said be ready to leave at quarter to eleven and we both knew that meant that was when he intended for us to leave. Then he goes and changes the rules just because it suits him and, worst of all, he doesn’t even admit to doing it. I hated it when people did that. It made me feel that simply no one could be relied on. Janet had said once that it was just as well I felt like that. ‘In this world you’ll have to learn to rely on yourself,’ she had said. That was all very well, I thought now, wiping an annoying tear from my right eye, then from my left, but I was a child, I didn’t have a car, let alone a chequebook, how would I live? From the drawing-room I heard Audrey’s voice. ‘It’s like living with a sergeant-major,’ she said.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Madox replied. ‘At least she doesn’t puke all over our objets d’art.’

  ‘Dear God, make him smoke a whole packet of cigarettes,’ I mumbled. I felt instantly guilty. ‘Actually, just one, dear God,’ I whispered hastily.

  At half past Madox finally appeared on the landing. ‘Oh, there you are, Esther,’ he said. ‘Ready to go? Got your money?’

  Silently I held up my purse, which was red like the watchstrap, but made from imitation leather not real. Inside were five pound notes, payment for my appearance as a tooth fairy in a television toothpaste commercial. It had been a disaster. I had been spotted at Peter Jones by a friend of Audrey’s. The woman, a complete stranger to me, had rushed out from behind a display of sewing machines, bent down and clasped my face in her hands. ‘How darling!’ she had exclaimed. ‘How absolutely darling.’ Then she knelt down on the shop carpet and peered at me. At this stage I expected my mother to intervene; after all, I was not supposed to talk to strangers and this woman was stranger than most, but not a bit of it.

  ‘Darling,’ Audrey shrieked as the stranger got to her feet. Then they kissed.

  ‘She’s perfect,’ the woman said. ‘Is she yours?’ Sometimes, when asked this, my mother seemed reluctant to answer, but this time she said ‘Yes’ rather quickly.

  ‘Well, I want her,’ the stranger proclaimed.

  I began to get worried. I know I complain about my mother, but she was my mother and I was used to her. I think I loved her. All right, there had been that time the other day when I had knelt by my bed and prayed to God that he would strike her dead, but I didn’t really mean it.

  I tugged at her arm. ‘I think we should leave now,’ I hissed. ‘Just tell her she can’t have me and let’s go.’

  Audrey shrugged me off. ‘Esther, I don’t know what your problem is, but this is Mrs Debray. I want you to say hello nicely.’ I glared and muttered ‘Hello’.

  ‘Mrs Debray and I are very old friends,’ Audrey went on. ‘Mrs Debray is in films.’ They decided to go upstairs and have coffee. Mrs Debray ordered a Coke for me.

  ‘I want you to be in a little film of mine, Esther, a commercial, now isn’t that something?’ She had crouched down again, so that her eyes were level with mine across the table. I looked back at her, wishing that I could suddenly telescope, like Alice, right up and away from her sight. Instead I said, ‘Whenever anyone says “Isn’t that something” my daddy always says “Well, isn’t everything”.’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, Esther.’ Audrey frowned at me.

  ‘I wasn’t being cheeky,’ I began. ‘Daddy always says that when people…’

  ‘That’s enough, Esther.’ Audrey’s voice held a warning of unpleasantness to come. But Mrs Debray just smiled and said again how perfect I was. My mother and I both looked doubtful. In the end, I was offered the part of the Bad Tooth Fairy. I rather liked the idea, looking forward to playing the role. I spent hours hissing and grimacing in the mirror, the way a bad fairy would hiss and grimace. I even coloured my front teeth black with liquorice. The day of filming began and disaster struck. Just minutes before I was due to appear, and was trapped in a dressing-room in just my vest and knickers, the director decided that I was just right for the part of the Good Tooth Fairy. ‘All those dark curls and those bright blue eyes. Great complexion. Good teeth too’ (my mother had made me clean off the black liquorice).

  No one listened to my protests. I tried to tell them that good fairies are supposed to have golden hair and that bad fairies had dark, just like mine, but it was no good, they just wouldn’t listen. Instead they milled round me, tugging at my hair, tying ribbons in it, pulling petticoats over my head, and before I knew it I was squeezed into a white tulle frock covered in pink rosebuds. I could feel my face go the same colour, from sheer humiliation, but that only seemed to please them even more. ‘What wonderful colouring. Just like Snow White.’

  Snow White! A well-known drip. The worst of it was that while all this was happening to me my mother just stood there looking pleased. Who, I asked myself, could you rely on in this world?

  But I did earn some money, five pounds which were given directly to me to spend on whatever I liked and I planned to spend it in Hamleys, as soon as my father got us there.

  It was Saturday and the shop was crowded, all five floors of it. Madox got tetchy before we had even reached the second. I had watched a man building a L
ego castle, then I had moved on to the soft toys. It wasn’t often I had that kind of money to spend and I wanted to make the most of it. There was a cuddly giraffe that I liked very much, but it turned out to be too expensive. I didn’t mind. It was better not to find what I wanted straight away, that way it wouldn’t all be over too soon. Next I moved to the dolls. I paused at the Barbies. I hated Ken. As far as I was concerned he was plain ugly; that short, bristly hair. I preferred his friend, Alan. Maybe I would get an Alan? Behind me, Madox cleared his throat; an impatient sound. Now if he had been forced to be a goody-goody fairy on television, I would have said he deserved to spend a really long time to choose something nice for his money. But I had noticed before that adults were seldom as fair as children. What happened on the way? Everyone assumed that children grew into adults, but the more I saw, the more I doubted it. Maybe there was an exchange? Maybe, on the eve of their sixteenth birthday children were snatched from their beds and exchanged for adults? That led me to think that there had to be a very nice place somewhere, where all those children were kept.