Ghost Music Page 8

  Tilda shrugged. “They are a good family meal, when everybody is together.”

  “Well, you have a great family. Two beautiful daughters.”

  Elsa and Felicia giggled again, but Axel turned away, frowning, as if he thought he could see something in the shadows that he didn’t like the look of.

  Kate took hold of my hand. “Glad you came?” she asked me.

  “Of course I am. Sorry if I’m a little laggy. I don’t know where you get all your energy from. Did you fly in yesterday?”

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re not going to be too tired to play for us, are you? I love The One-Handed Clock.”

  “Sure, I can play that for you. And I promised Elsa that I’d make up a special song for her.”

  Elsa smiled at me, her eyes bright in the candlelight. Tilda smiled, too. Axel, however, was still staring into the corner of the room, although all I could see in the darkness was a high-backed chair, and a painting of a lighthouse, beside a bleak gray ocean.

  * * *

  In the living room, between the two tall windows, stood a Malmsjo upright piano. I sat down, opened up the lid, and played a few scales. The piano was slightly off-tune, but it was overstrung and underdamped, and had a very sweet tone to it, just right for The One-Handed Clock, and a sentimental song about people who are lost and can never find their way back.

  Kate sat next to me on the long piano stool, while Tilda and the girls arranged themselves on one of the sofas. Axel stood alone by the darkened window, staring out at the harbor lights. He had hardly spoken a word since we had finished our supper, and he definitely seemed to be anxious about something.

  Again, I felt inspired, and the music that came out of my fingers was so perfect and so poignant that I found it hard to believe that I had composed it myself. For Elsa’s song, I plagiarized my own score for Mother Kretchmer’s Frozen Scrapple. Apart from making you want to buy frozen scrapple, it was one of those melodies that make you feel warm and secure, and hopeful, too.

  “I call this song ‘The Pointing Tree,’” I announced, and played a soft, slow introduction. “I wrote it especially for a lovely young girl I met in Stockholm . . . a girl I will always remember for her laugh and her smile . . . and the way that her younger sister was always hiding her prawns.

  “‘I don’t know how it happened . . . I didn’t mean to roam . . . but I was walking through the forest . . . and I lost my way back home . . .’”

  “Oh, Gideon,” Kate teased me. “This is so sad.”

  “It’s meant to be. But listen. ‘I came into a clearing . . . and there in front of me . . . was a tree that pointed homeward . . . and a skylark sang to me . . .

  “‘The Pointing Tree will guide you . . . along the forest track . . . your loved ones soon will weep with joy . . . so pleased to have you back.

  “‘The forest may be tangled . . . but every time you stray . . . you can always find a Pointing Tree . . . to help you find your way.’”

  I played a last gentle scattering of notes, and then sat back.

  “What do you think?” I asked Elsa.

  But it was Axel who answered me. “There is no such tree. Once you are lost, there is no way back.”

  “Hey . . . it’s only a song.”

  “Yes. But songs put hope into people’s hearts. Even when there is no hope.”

  “I’m sorry, Axel. I didn’t intend to upset you. Listen, if you know any really miserable Swedish songs about people who get lost and can never find their way home, I’d be happy to play them for you.”

  “I liked my song,” Elsa protested. “And I think there is a Pointing Tree.”

  “It’s absurd,” snapped Axel. “And look at the time. You girls should have gone to bed an hour ago.”

  “What difference does it make?” said Elsa.

  “The difference is that I am your father and you have to do what I tell you.”

  “Why? What can you do to me if I say no?”

  “You know the answer to that,” Axel told her. I couldn’t believe how agitated he had suddenly become. He was breathing hard and he kept jerking his head to one side as if he were suffering from some sort of spasm. “It is the family . . . it is your mother and your sister . . . you want them to suffer forever? Do you want to suffer forever?”

  Kate stood up and went over to Axel. She took hold of his arm and said, “Axel . . . don’t get so upset. Please. Everything’s going to work out fine, so long as you’re patient.”

  Axel lowered his head for a moment, although he was still breathing like a man who has run up three flights of stairs. “You ask me to be patient? I do not believe that I have a second of patience left in me. Not a second.”

  Tilda came up to him, too, and said something soothing in Swedish. “Du må inte oro så mycket . . . vi all älska du . . . flikama och jag.”

  “I know,” Axel told her, patting her hand. “But sometimes I cannot believe that this will ever end.”

  Thirteen

  That night, well past eleven o’clock, we could hear Axel and Tilda having an argument, although the apartment walls were too thick to be able to make out anything but muffled shouting. After ten minutes or so, their bedroom door was noisily opened, and we heard Axel shouting, “Vill du tro på vad hon saga? Jag inte!” But then the door was slammed shut again.

  “Do you know what he’s saying?” I asked Kate.

  She nodded. “He’s asking Tilda if she believes what I’ve been telling them. He says that he doesn’t.”

  “So what have you been telling them?”

  “I’ve been telling them to keep the faith, that’s all.”

  “But why? What’s bugging Axel so much? They seem like a perfectly happy family to me.”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  I was sitting up in bed, watching Kate brush her hair in front of the dressing table mirrors. I could see three Kates—four, if you counted the real one as well as the reflections. She was wearing a simple white nightdress with a scalloped lace collar, which made her look even younger and more enchanted than ever.

  The bedroom suite that Axel and Tilda had given us was huge, and dimly lit. We had a massive four-poster bed, with green tapestry hangings, and a couch like a Viking longboat heaped with cushions. Next door, the bathroom was vast, more like a green-and-white-tiled cathedral than a bathroom. We had sat together in foaming pine-scented water, right up to our necks, and sung an echoing duet of “love . . . ageless and evergreen . . . seldom seen by two . . .”

  But now that we were alone together, there were so many questions that I needed Kate to answer for me; and as tired as I was, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep tonight until she did.

  I climbed off the bed and stood close behind her, so that there were three of me as well as three of her, and I laid my hands on her shoulders. They were so bony, under her thin linen nightdress, and she smelled of flowers.

  “I know what you’re going to ask me,” she said. “You’re going to ask me the real reason why I invited you to come here and meet the Westerlunds.”

  “That, and a few other things, yes.”

  “Will you be angry if I ask you to wait and see?”

  “Angry? I don’t know about angry. Confused, yes. And more than a little spooked, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Spooked? Why should you be spooked?” “Well . . . you’re probably not going to believe this, but I met Elsa and Felicia in the living room, about five minutes before you guys got home from your shopping. You don’t think that’s spooky? Because I sure do.”

  She turned around and looked up at me. “Is that what happened?”

  Now, if somebody had told me that, I would have said, “Say again?” or “You’re shitting me,” or “How many glasses of schnapps did you drink at supper?” But Kate seemed completely calm about it.

  “I thought I might have been dreaming,” I told her. “Or jetlagged, maybe. Or God alone knows what. But I swear on my mother’s life
that when I first arrived here, I walked into the living room and there were Elsa and Felicia, playing chess.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “Sure. Felicia told me that she had won a singing prize at school, and Elsa told me that she wanted me to write a song for her. Then the front door opened and you came in, with Axel and Tilda, and with Elsa and Felicia, too. I looked into the living room, but Elsa and Felicia weren’t there anymore—and the chessmen were right back where they had been before. Now is that spooky or is that spooky?”

  Kate turned away for a moment, the same way that Axel had, at supper. Then she said, “What’s your explanation?”

  “My explanation? I don’t have an explanation. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  She looked back up at me. “You didn’t mention it to Axel or Tilda.”

  “Are you putting me on? I didn’t want them to think that I was out on license from Bellevue psychiatric wing.”

  “Perhaps it was a dream. Or a kind of a dream.”

  “Oh, yes? And maybe I can fly back to New York and get there before I leave.”

  Kate stood up, and gently touched my face, as if she were blind, and she was trying to discover what I really looked like. God, I loved those eyes. They reminded me of gray days and walks along wintry seashores, and that time of day when it gradually grows too gloomy to read, and you don’t switch on the light, but close the book instead.

  “Do you trust me?” she said, and there was a little catch in her throat, which she had to cough to clear.

  “Of course I trust you. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t? It’s just that this is all so goddamned weird. You giving me the Westerlunds’ keys like that. Flying here separately. Elsa and Felicia. Two Elsas, for Christ’s sake, and two Felicias. And I was talking to Axel, too, and he kept saying stuff about children, and how you had to make sacrifices to keep them safe. And then he was staring into the corner, all through supper, didn’t you notice that? It was like he could see a ghost standing there.”

  I paused, and gestured toward the door. “And then Axel and Tilda arguing like that. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Kate, what’s really going down here?”

  “We’re here to help,” she told me. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  “We’re here to help? How? If you ask me, this family needs therapy.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it, as a matter of fact. Therapy brings healing, doesn’t it? Or closure. Or an acceptance that things aren’t going to get any better, no matter what.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I’m asking you to wait and see. Before you understand, you have to know.”

  “But come on, Kate. How the hell can you expect me to know, unless you tell me?”

  “Because you have eyes, Gideon, and you have ears, and unlike most people you’re very aware of everything that goes on around you. But you have much more than that. You have a very rare gift.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked her, suspiciously. “What kind of a very rare gift?”

  She kissed me, on my cheek, and then my lips.

  “You have music in your whole being. You don’t even realize how much. You don’t just write music, you live music. You are music. There are so few people like you. I’ll tell you one very famous one: Mel Tormé. He could hear a plate dropping in a restaurant kitchen and tell you precisely what key it was.”

  “I still don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Since you and I have been together, don’t you think that you’ve been writing better?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I have. Yes. I mean, I don’t like to boast, but eat your heart out, Mozart.”

  “And can you think why?”

  “I don’t know. I put it down to being happier, I guess.”

  She kissed me again. “I’m pleased. But it’s more than that. You can feel me. You can feel the emotions inside of me—my grief, and my affection, and my hope, in just the same way that you can hear music. Like Elsa and Felicia. You can feel their resonance, too. What they were, what they wanted to be. What they are now.

  “When you see them, when you touch them, they come to life. They appear because you’re here.”

  I looked at her narrowly. I was gradually beginning to get some germ of what she was talking about. I was gradually beginning to realize that I could only understand what was happening to me if I understood myself, and what I was capable of. And according to Kate, I was capable of much more than I had ever dreamed.

  “It’s not just your music that’s blossoming,” she added, with a smile. “It’s you.”

  “Oh, yes? How, exactly?”

  “Take me to bed, and I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  I was woken by the sound of somebody running past our bedroom. Somebody with bare feet, running very fast. I sat up but it was so dark that I couldn’t see anything at all. Nothing, just total blackness.

  I heard the runner again, and then another one. It sounded like children, both running in the same direction, from the bedrooms toward the hallway.

  “Kate?” I whispered, and shook her shoulder. “Kate!”

  But Kate continued to breathe deeply and steadily and didn’t stir. I reached out toward my nightstand, trying to locate my wristwatch, but I knocked over my glass of water and I heard it pouring onto the carpet.

  More running, and then bumping noises, too, as if the children were colliding with the sides of the corridor.

  “Kate!” I said, and shook her again.

  She stirred, and said, “Wha . . . ? What is it?”

  “Listen! It sounds like the girls are running all around the apartment!”

  “What?”

  I found the lamp beside my bed and switched it on. My wristwatch said it was 3:11 AM. Kate was blinking at me as if she had never seen me before in her life.

  “What’s happening?” she said.

  “It’s the girls. They keep running up and down.”

  “What?”

  “Listen—there they go again. And they’re bumping into the walls, too!”

  I started to get out of bed but Kate took hold of my arm. “Gideon—leave them. Whatever they’re doing, it’s no concern of ours.”

  “Come on—what if something’s wrong? Supposing there’s a fire or something?”

  “There isn’t a fire. You don’t smell smoke, do you?”

  “So what are they doing? Sleepwalking? Or sleep sprinting, more like.”

  We heard bare feet rushing up the corridor yet again, and this time one of the runners banged right into our door. There was a wail of pain, and then a high voice shrilled out, “Inte röra jag! Låta jag gå!”

  This was followed by more running and more bumping.

  I swung off the bed and went across the room to the door. “Gideon—” said Kate, reached out her hand toward me, but then she lowered it again, as if she were accepting that I was going to take a look outside, no matter what. Which I was.

  I opened the door. The corridor itself was in darkness, but the hallway at the far end of it was illuminated by cold white moonlight, shining in through the window that overlooked the harbor. There must have been clouds passing across the moon, and passing quite quickly, because the light faded and brightened every few seconds. One second brilliant and blurry, the next second nothing but shadows.

  Standing in the hallway in a white nightdress, her arms outspread, was Elsa. Her hair was no longer braided, but waving loose. I thought at first that the window was open, because her hair kept rippling, as if the wind were blowing it. One moment I could see her staring at me, and the next her face was completely obscured. But her eyes when I could see them were like milky glass marbles, pale blue, rather than eyes, and her mouth was tightly closed, as if she were trying to prevent somebody from force-feeding her.

  “Elsa?” I called out. “Elsa—are you okay?”

  I started to walk toward her. As I did so, she began to shake her head from side to side. She did it slowly at first, but as I app
roached her she shook it faster and faster.

  “Elsa—listen—you’re sleepwalking. You need to get yourself back to bed.”

  I held out my hand to calm her. Abruptly, she stopped shaking her head, and stared at me with those colorless eyes, as if she couldn’t understand who or even what I was. But now that I was really close to her I realized that she was just as tall as I was, if not taller. Not only that, she was much bigger than she had been before.

  I began to feel distinctly unnerved. But I thought to myself, this is some kind of optical illusion, that’s all. Perspective playing tricks on you. You know how small this girl is really. Maybe it’s something to do with the window or the sight lines in the corridor. Maybe I’m the one who’s still asleep.

  “Elsa?” I said.

  She came closer, so that she was almost touching me, but she appeared to do it without actually taking a step. I saw then that she was soaking wet. There were drops of water clinging to her eyelashes, her hair was bedraggled, and her nightdress was drenched, so that it clung to her.

  “Elsa, what’s wrong? How did you get wet like that?”

  She paused for a moment, and it seemed as if she were swaying slightly.

  “Hjälpa mig,” she said, in a high, thick whisper.

  “What? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Hjälpa mig! Jag kan icke andas! Jag er drunkna!”

  “You’re drunk? Is that it? Listen, sweetheart, I need to wake up your parents. You just hold on here for a moment. Kate? Kate, are you there?”

  I turned around to see if Kate was following me. As I did so, both Elsa and Felicia came running toward me along the corridor, both wearing nightdresses, both barefoot, both panic-stricken. They stumbled and collided with the walls, as if somebody were pushing them, and Felicia ran into a tall three-legged display stand, so that the bronze statuette on top of it went flying across the floor.

  They scrambled past me. I shouted, “Stop, Felicia! Stop!” but she didn’t seem to hear me. I snatched at her nightdress, but she spun around and twisted herself free. For a split second, though, I saw the look on her face, and she was wide-eyed and white with terror.