Frozen Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

among pigs,’ my grandmother had said and she was right. Pigotty had teats for a start, little brass buttons running down his striped grey-and-white belly – Audrey had said that that should have told me that
he
was a
she
, but I said that it just made him an even more exceptional
he
. And he was such a sensible pig. He never worried about his weight, for a start, and he had the most even temper of anyone I had ever met. Right now he agreed with me that the pastel-coloured handbells would have been wonderful. ‘But it’s not a catastrophe,’ he went on in his calm voice. ‘When you’re grown up and are a psychiatrist you can buy as many handbells as you like and play them all night if you wish.’ Then, because he was such a sensible and intelligent pig, he added, ‘Although I suspect that by that time you might prefer something like an electric guitar. Now would you care for a drink? Coke or lemonade?’
    â€˜It’s a good report.’ Bertil Stendal gave his son one of his pale smiles and passed the piece of paper to his wife. ‘Fours in most things, but a three in music. Still, five in art and maths.’ Bertil turned to Linus again. ‘Taking after your stepmother, are you? Anyway, well done.’ He allowed a well-shaped hand to rest briefly on his son’s shoulder.
    â€˜Yes, well done, Linus,’ Olivia echoed. But as she looked at her stepson she wondered whom exactly he did take after. Allegedly he looked like his dead mother, the woman whose presence she still felt so clearly in the house on the island and even here, in the large high-ceilinged flat. (Only the other day she could have sworn she heard the keys of the grand piano being pressed, but when she went to check in the library there was no one there.) ‘Typical second wife syndrome,’ she had written to Audrey Fisher in her last letter. The photographs she had seen of Astrid showed a thin young woman, fair and fragile-looking, and with a lost look in her large eyes. It was that look especially that Olivia had seen far too often echoed in Linus’s eyes. Those who had known Astrid spoke of her gentleness and her talent. She could have done something with her life, they said, if only… Maybe she was uncharitable, but Olivia couldn’t help feeling that had Astrid lived until she was a hundred she would still not have done very much more than drifted. In that way Linus was not at all like her. In fact, he never stopped working, especially if you counted the hours he put into those cartoon drawings of his. Now, at thirteen, Linus was tall, taller already than Olivia, slim and ethereal looking like his mother, but inside, Olivia suspected, he still felt like the plump little boy she had first met five years ago. So what had the boy got of his father? A talent for drawing. An abiding interest in his surroundings. But if Bertil was a stern Olympian looking down on the world from a plane of unquestioned success with a serenity which it seemed only his son could shake, Linus seemed to live mostly on a small planet of his own, far away from them all. There, in this other place, he constructed his increasingly complex models, drew and listened to music. According to his teachers he was a model pupil, when, as one of them put it at the last parent-teacher meeting, ‘he chooses to grace us with his presence’.
    â€˜Are you telling me my son is playing truant?’ Bertil had asked.
    The teacher had smiled. ‘Not physically, but there are times when his mind most definitely is. He gets his grades by returning just in the nick of time.’ What could you do with a boy like that? Olivia looked at the child, dressed right then in shocking-pink corduroy trousersand a wine-red shirt and black knitted tie, clothes he had insisted on choosing himself. He might be tall and thin these days, but his hair still curled when damp and his cheeks still turned bright pink at the drop of a hat.