Free Frozen Music by Marika Cobbold

assuming incorrectly that Audrey would have some idea of what he referred to. Worst of all, to my mother, he was planning to go into… hum, ah, there was no getting away from it… the City. ‘A money man, darling!’ Audrey had shuddered – Audrey who loved money and spent more of the stuff in a month than most people got through in a year. But she was born to dissemble. I was sure, for example, that she had convinced herself that there were two completely separate things known as lamb; the white fluffy baa ones that frolicked in the fields as you passed by on the motorway and the garlicky pink-in-the-middle ones that lay very still on your plate.
    Olivia had finished her smoked chicken salad and put her fork down. ‘It’s their beds; they made them, now they have to lie in them.’
    â€˜But why have they made those beds?’ Audrey lamented. ‘There she is, my only child, four A levels, university offers coming out of her ears, the world at her feet, announcing out of the blue that she’s got engaged to this… this rather ordinary young man and saying that she would take a course in…’ Here Audrey had to pause and refresh herself with a sip of wine, ‘… in typing.’ It was all too much, it seemed.Audrey sank back against her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘It’s as if you’re deliberately setting out to be ordinary yourself,’ she said, turning to me.
    â€˜What’s wrong with ordinary?’ I wanted to know.
    â€˜Nothing, Esther, for ordinary people.’
    â€˜Why are you in such a hurry to get married?’ Olivia asked me. ‘And can’t you go to university first?’
    I explained that I no longer wanted to do law and that university would just be another waste of time, like childhood. There are too many people already aimlessly cluttering up courses because someone has told them they
should
have a university education. ‘I want to get on with real life and I want to know where I’m heading. Donald and I are right for each other, so why wait? And with all that dating and searching-for-love stuff over with, I can concentrate on what I really want to do with my life. In the meantime, I’ll learn to type.’
    â€˜Think about what you want to do while you’re at university,’ Olivia insisted. ‘And why marry? There’s plenty of time for that later. Being so young, you really are stacking the odds against it working in the long term.’
    â€˜That’s what I keep telling her,’ Audrey said. ‘Why can’t they just live together? And anyway, I don’t even think you’re really in love with the boy. Not that I can blame you.’
    I looked sternly at her. ‘You’re my mother, allegedly. You’re not supposed to talk like that. And anyway, as I see it, all long-term relationships come under threat sooner or later. It really doesn’t matter who you are, what age you were when you got together or even, to an extent, who you’re with as long as you’re good friends and have stuff in common because in the end it all boils down to much the same: you fall out of love. So why put so much emphasis on being
in
love to begin with? It all comes down to an act of will. I see it as a very exciting challenge.’
    â€˜You call that exciting?’ Audrey looked at me as if she were trying to figure out where she had picked me up and why.
    Olivia sighed and shook her head. ‘You know so much for one who has lived so little.’ I couldn’t work out if she had just insulted me orpaid me a compliment. ‘Still,’ she went on. ‘At least you
seem
to have it all worked out. With Linus, I really don’t know. Lotten, his fiancée, is his first girlfriend. She’s as determined as hell and he, well it’s like he’s two people, this fey, almost slow young man who looks as if he’s just stepped off at the wrong planet, yet, when