In the Falling Snow (4 page)

After the unscheduled visit to Magnolia Cottage, she resumed meeting her mother for monthly lunches at Harvey Nichols, which were only interrupted by a break shortly before she gave birth to Laurie. Her husband had forgiven her for lying to him and ‘sneaking off,’ as he put it, to Wiltshire, and when he returned after his door-slamming exit he told her that he’d sat in the pub and thought about things and he could understand why she might have wanted to go and see her father after all this time. When she told him what had transpired, and that she had shouted at her father and told him that it was his responsibility to deal with racist abuse, and not wait for a decade and then dump it in her lap, her husband shook his head and bent over and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Fucking wanker,’ was all he said, before announcing that he was going upstairs to get ready for bed. She had asked her distraught mother to call for a taxi to take her back to the station, but her father seemed genuinely annoyed, as though he had made some huge effort that had gone unrewarded. He reminded her that she hadn’t even bothered to have a scone or a piece of cake.

The taxi wound its slow way through the narrow country lanes that were walled on both sides by seemingly ancient bowed trees. Annabelle noted that, according to a neat billboard by the roadside, an archaeological dig sponsored by Cambridge University had recently unearthed evidence of pre-Roman settlement, a discovery which her parents had failed to mention. Once she reached Ashleigh station, Annabelle realised that she had just missed a London train so she would have plenty of time to think about how she was going to deal with this mess when she got home.
Sitting
alone on the empty platform, Annabelle suddenly felt herself convulse into floods of tears. She hated these people, the women with their starched hair and silk scarves, and the men in blazers and slacks, making conversation about nothing, smiling ‘yes, yes’, laughing nervously at their own jokes, trying to be decent, but beneath the façade full of contempt and wanting only to be among their own. What the hell was the matter with them? Jesus Christ, she was pregnant. She was having his grandchild and he wanted to know what ‘it’ was as though he was talking about a dog? Really, what the hell was the matter with him?

It was only after Laurie was born that she felt inclined to ask her husband if it might be all right for her mother to sometimes come to the house instead of them always meeting in town. Twice now, Laurie had screamed down the restaurant at Harvey Nichols, but she also saw no reason why her mother should continue to be inconvenienced simply because of her father’s ignorance. Her husband had no problem with the suggestion, but when she brought this up with her mother, as they sat together in Hyde Park, her mother’s eyes remained focused on the carry-cot and she continued to play with her grandson. Annabelle held out a hand for rain was now falling through the trees, but in drops so fine that it felt as though they were being sprinkled with dew. Eventually her mother looked up at her and told Annabelle, in a semi-whispered voice, that she didn’t think that this would be a good idea, and so Annabelle decided not to pursue the topic. When Laurie was five, and had started to go to school, mother and daughter began once again to meet without the child being present. It was then that she noticed that a considerable loneliness seemed to have descended on to her mother’s shoulders. At first she thought it was just age, and that doting upon her grandson had been keeping her young. However, it soon became clear that, beyond the subject of Laurie, there was nothing occurring in her mother’s life that she might
transmute
into the raw material of conversation. She worried about her, but realised that the best thing that she could offer her was time with her grandson, which suited Laurie for he loved being spoiled by his grandmother. During school holidays, she often let them spend an afternoon together at the zoo or at the pictures, and before Grandma got on the train to go back to the country she always made sure that her excited grandson was laden down with sweets. As he grew older, Laurie began to wonder aloud why Grandma never came to the house, or why Daddy never came to wave goodbye to Grandma at Paddington station, and then he began to ask his increasingly frail grandmother questions about her husband which she found difficult to field. By the time Laurie was ten, his grandmother’s trips to London were becoming infrequent, and Annabelle decided that she had to talk with her husband about the situation. Much to her surprise it was he who suggested that they should make a daytrip to Wiltshire and give Laurie the chance to meet his grandfather before it was too late.

That evening, Annabelle called her mother and said that they were thinking of motoring down on Sunday. There was a long silence on the other end of the telephone and then Annabelle heard her mother’s hesitant voice.

‘Sunday?’ She paused. ‘This Sunday?’

Again Annabelle repeated the plan, stressing the fact that Keith would be driving the car so that there could be no misunderstanding as to what she was proposing. There was another long silence and a worried Annabelle felt compelled to ask, ‘Are you there, Mummy?’ She heard her mother cough quietly and then pull herself together.

‘Yes, dear, of course I’m here. And Sunday should be fine, but I’ve been meaning to tell you, Annabelle, that things with your father are a little difficult. Apparently the doctor thinks he might have the dreaded big “c”. She paused. ‘Cancer. Of the lungs, he
says,
but that doesn’t make any sense for your father hasn’t smoked a cigarette since he left the army, and that was aeons ago.’

On the journey down from London, Annabelle kept twisting around in her seat and dabbing Germolene on Laurie’s bruised lip where the boy who had called him a ‘halfie’ had hit him. Clearly, Laurie didn’t like his mother’s attention, so he kept squirming away from her and jiggling the packet of sunflower seeds that he had bought as a present for his grandmother. He was excited that they were finally going to visit Grandma’s home, where he would also meet his grandfather, but even happier to know that she had a big garden, as opposed to their own tiny one, and lots of space in which she could plant flowers. Annabelle had just helped Laurie with a school project on the different uses of sunflowers, and because the teacher had told him that sunflowers needed a lot of space to grow Laurie had decided that he wanted to bring sunflower seeds for Grandma. When Laurie dropped off to sleep, Annabelle finally had the opportunity to tell her husband what she had wanted to say since he had suggested that they make this trip. First, she wanted to apologise again for what she had done all those years earlier when she had lied to him about going to the theatre, but more importantly, even at this late stage, she wanted to let him know that she really didn’t need to see her father again. His use of the term ‘nigger-lover’, while knowing that she had an unborn child in her body, had irreparably broken something between them. As she sat and cried on the platform at Ashleigh station, and waited for the train that would take her back to London, she had finally come to accept that her father was weak, pathetic even, and she felt not a jot of hostility towards him. In fact, once the flood of tears had subsided, she finally understood that what she felt towards him was a remote indifference, which she knew she could cope with. However, what caused her a real shock was the realisation that
she
was experiencing a rising tide of admiration for her mother who stoically, over the years, had been living with a man she feared, and for whom she clearly had little affection.

Annabelle looked across the table at her gaunt father, who was propped up under a heavy blanket that reached to his chest, then at her husband, and then she stood up and left the two men at the table and joined her mother in the kitchen. Her mother passed her a wooden mallet and Annabelle slapped a bulb of garlic and watched as the cloves collapsed into a flower. Through the window they could both see Laurie on the expansive back lawn, wheeling around in circles and chasing butterflies. Back in the living room, neither man would look at the other. Annabelle’s father pointed out of the window towards Laurie.

‘How old is the boy now?’

‘Ten. He was ten last month.’

‘I see.’ Annabelle’s father began to nod as though approving of the fact that his grandson had crossed this threshold. ‘And the name, Laurie. Is that with a “w” or with a “u,” because there are two ways of spelling the word, or so I’m led to believe.’

‘It’s with a “u”. We named him after Laurie Cunningham.’ He paused and looked at his father-in-law, whose strangely dull eyes seemed to have lost their ability to reflect light. He felt sorry for him, for the man seemed to be permanently thrashing about in his mind. ‘He was a footballer who I used to like a lot. He played for England, but died young in a car crash. In Spain in the late eighties, I think.’

‘I see. Did you know the chap?’

‘Know him? You mean personally?’

‘Was he a chum?’

‘I didn’t know him, but Annabelle and I both liked the name.’

‘Well, given the bruise on the boy’s face perhaps you should have named him after a boxer. Henry, maybe. He’s got to learn
to
stand up for himself. No feather-bedding. People can be very cruel, you do understand that, don’t you?’

Through the window he could see his son charging happily about the vast expanse of the cottage’s neatly manicured lawn.

‘Yes,’ he said, transferring his attention to his ailing father-in-law. ‘I have some understanding of how cruel people can be.’

‘Well jolly good. I’m pleased to hear it.’ For a moment they were enveloped in a cheerless silence that was punctuated by the sound from the kitchen of clean cutlery being dropped into the appropriate sections of the silverware drawer. ‘Now then, you do love my daughter, don’t you? I mean really love her.’

As the train leaves Ladbroke Grove station and begins to sweep left in a wide arc towards Latimer Road, he notices that most of the empty carriage seats are covered in discarded crisp packets, empty cans of Coke, and abandoned free newspapers. Kids, he thinks. Every day now he witnesses packs of these youngsters on the street, or on the tube, or on the buses, swearing and carrying on with a sense of entitlement that is palpably absurd. Each of them seems to believe that he or she is an ‘achiever’, and that they deserve nothing less than what they call ‘maximum respect’. Thank God, Laurie isn’t like this, although Annabelle appears to be increasingly concerned by his behaviour. He has tried to explain to her that all teenage boys go through some form of rebellion, and that she shouldn’t take Laurie’s surliness as evidence of anything more than his ongoing, turbulent, passage out of childhood and into the no man’s land of young adulthood. The urgency of Annabelle’s recent messages speaks both to her disappointment with him as a husband and father, and to her concern for their son, although he senses that some other anxiety is troubling her which she will most likely never reveal to him or, he suspects, to this new friend, Bruce. He stands to get off the train and he glances again at the old lady, who appears to have neither accepted nor totally rejected the
ill-manners
of the teenagers, but rather to have achieved an enviable place of quiet serenity. She raises her eyes to meet his own, and she smiles. As the train pulls away he can see her, still smiling at him, through the filthy carriage window.

He steps out of the tube station and into the frigid November air. It is Sunday evening, so the traffic is not nearly as heavy as it might be on a weekday, but he assumes that there must have been a gig at the Empire for people are impatiently sounding their horns and he can see that there’s some kind of bottleneck at the roundabout. Across the street he sees the blue and white neon lights of the new Cineplex that he once went to with Yvette. He cannot remember the name of the romantic comedy that they sat through, for he fell asleep soon after the opening credits. After the film, her sullen silence at Pizza Express spoke volumes about her sense of disappointment. The trip to the cinema took place before he began visiting her north London terraced home, so in a sense she had no right to be irritated with him. As he forked the last slice of margarita into his mouth, he looked across the table at her but she would not meet his eyes. For Christ’s sake, he thought, these things happen and it was hardly a criticism of her. She, more than anybody else, should understand that he has been working hard, and he was just tired, and that’s all there is to it. End of story. As the waitress placed the stainless steel tray which held the bill to the side of his now empty plate, he reached for his credit card and wished that she would get over her disgruntlement and grow up. Her sullen demeanour had managed to cast a cloud over a perfectly nice evening and a pretty good pizza. He turns towards Uxbridge Road, and wonders how the atmosphere will be when Yvette comes to work in the morning. He had tried to explain to her that all he wanted was for things to return to how they used to be before they got involved, but as he nervously redistributed his weight on the designer barstool, then sipped at
his
warm white wine, the look on her face made it clear that she was in no mood to end their arrangement amicably.

He dashes across Uxbridge Road before reaching the pedestrian crossing, and moves towards the building society cash machine. He really doesn’t need any hassle at work, especially not now when the local authority seem determined to make his life an administrative nightmare by merging his Race Equality unit with Disability and Women’s Affairs. He was pleased when Clive Wilson called him in and told him that as the chief executive he had decided that a certain Mr Keith Gordon should be the one to head up the merger, for it meant more money, a bigger office, and double the number of staff to manage. He soon discovered that it also meant learning about the problems of wheelchair accessibility, understanding why rape crisis centres could not be funded if they excluded male rape, coming to terms with the irony of being an able-bodied black man speaking on behalf of disabled white people, and being the highly visible male spokesperson for feminist groups, many of whom appeared to despise men. The workload was such that it was no longer possible for him to leave the office early and go back to the flat and work on his book. These days it was also unlikely that having surreptitiously scanned
Time Out
or the
Guardian
and discovered that some refugee from the seventies such as George Clinton or Sly Stone was playing in Tooting or Brixton, he could just shoot off early from work and go down to the gig with his notebook. After the announcement of the merger, most evenings were taken up with his trying to digest the contents of thousands of pages of printed policy reports, and then adding to the rubbish with short directives of his own. Then he noticed Yvette, who had recently been recruited as a research assistant in his unit. As he tried to tell her over pizza, he didn’t fall asleep at the cinema because he was bored, but because these days he simply has too much work to do and he often finds himself still awake
at
two o’clock in the morning trying to make sense of endless reams of local government bureaucracy.