by Mark Haddon
Sofie translates from Icelandic and her native Danish, mostly business, a bit of crime writing over the last couple of years. She feels no closer to Leo’s family than he does but she keeps her distance by pretending to be more foreign and less intelligent than she is, misusing words and faking bafflement at quirky native customs, and is both insulted and relieved that none of them see through the blatant subterfuge.
Anya is going through a period of ferocious conformity that both Leo and Sofie find deeply dispiriting (Sims, Frozen, One Direction) though not as dispiriting as David’s rank oddity which Leo, in particular, fears may be an expression of the same car-crash genes which have yo-yoed Sofie’s uncle in and out of a psychiatric hospital in Augustenborg for his whole adult life. All the books Leo has read on the subject suggest that psychosis only rears its ugly head in the late teens for boys, which is some reassurance. Still, it’s hard not to be disturbed by the collection of dead animals (crow, mouse, stag beetle, toad) that he keeps wrapped in tissue paper in a line of cardboard boxes on his bedroom bookshelf like so many little coffins, and by the incomprehensible language in which he talks to himself sometimes, which he claims to be Tagalog but isn’t because Leo has checked.
They take their luggage from the boot. Anya has a yellow, black and white rucksack in the shape of one of the Minions from Despicable Me. David has an antique leather satchel given to him by his Danish grandfather which he dubbins regularly and which gives him the air of a tiny Renaissance clerk.
Leo stops and looks around at all this crystal, blue-black darkness and listens to…absolutely nothing. Apart from his son and daughter arguing about who knocked the bagged-up duvet into the snow the silence is fathomless. He forgets it every year until some detail brings it back (the eggshell glass of a broken bauble, a Salvation Army brass band playing “I Saw Three Ships,” thick snowfall…), how extraordinary Christmas once was, how extraordinary everything once was all year round, each individual moment a thing to be swallowed or solved or suffered. But now…? So much coasting, so many blanks, as if there was an infinite supply of time and those same seconds could be brushed from the table like spilt salt.
“I know you’d like to spend all night standing out here.” Sofie touches his arm. “But it really is very cold.”
They trudge up the drive into the sudden glare of the intruder light. By the time they reach the porch Sarah is opening the door with its two stained-glass panels (a shepherd on the left, three sheep on the right). “Hey, little brother.” It is a thing she does in one way or another every time they meet, gently but firmly asserting her superior place in the pecking order, but with enough warmth to make a complaint seem churlish.
Deep breath. Ten seconds down, thirty-six hours to go. “No Gavin yet?” says Leo. “I didn’t see the car.”
“With any luck they’ll be spending Christmas in a Travelodge on the M1.”
Sofie stamps the snow off her boots while Sarah gives the children mock-regal handshakes. “Anya…David…”
“I greet you in the name of the seven kingdoms,” says David. “I feared that we would not make it through the mountains.”
But Sofie is looking over the top of his head. “You spoke too soon.”
They turn as one to see Gavin and Emmy walking up the drive and even in the dark it is possible to tell from her weary, Scott/Shackleton gait that they have been forced to leave the car some distance away.
“Ahoy there,” shouts Gavin. “I hope you have a blazing log fire and large whiskies waiting.”
Gavin is an extravagantly gifted man whose critical shortcoming, aside from his monstrous ego, is that he has never been struck by a passionate interest which will direct his manifold talents and offer him the prospect of achieving something which matters more than achievement itself.
Leo’s theory is that since his preternatural growth spurt at twelve a natural magnetism has made him, always, the centre of a group of people who want to be in his presence and he has never been sufficiently free of their noise to hear what is going on inside his own mind, nor bored enough to discover what genuinely pleases him.
Deep down Gavin believes that he should now be head of the family—Sarah’s gender disqualifies her so completely that he never thinks of her as his older sister—and he resents the fact that his father has not ceded his position by dying or slackening his mental grip on the world. The simple fact of driving to his parents’ house at Christmas is an act of obeisance which he finds demeaning and which the inclement weather has only made more irksome.
Eighteen years ago he got a rugby Blue at Cambridge, played briefly for the Harlequins, had his jaw shattered in his seventh game and experienced a rare moment of revelation lying in St. Thomas’ Hospital, to the effect that he would never get an international cap and should therefore take the job Ove Arup had offered him four months previously. He got back in touch and, being a man into whose lap so many things simply fell, it seemed only natural that the woman who had taken the job he spurned had been killed in a light-plane crash on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast only the week before and that his prospective departmental boss was a rugby fan who bore no grudge for Gavin’s initial rejection.
The company, which had worked on the Chinese National Aquatics Centre for the Olympics and the new Terminal 5 at JFK, however, assigned him to the A8 Belfast to Larne dual carriageway and he was soon champing at the bit. Thankfully the benign fates arranged a meeting with an old friend from Peterhouse which led to him doing a few slots of commentary and interviewing for Sky. He was articulate, quick-witted and wholly at ease looking into a camera through which three million people might be looking back at him. He expanded sideways from rugby into athletics and cycling but soon became bored, again, with what he saw as the unchallenging nature of the job, and hungry for more prestige, at which point those same benign fates came to his aid for a third time and placed him and the head of factual programming for BBC4 at adjacent urinals after the Royal Television Society Awards, which led, by a somewhat drunken and circuitous route, to a heated argument about the respective merits of the wealthy, self-promoting Brunel and the lower-class, self-effacing Stephenson and from there, by a less drunken but equally circuitous route, to Gavin presenting a TV series about ten outstanding feats of British engineering (the Thrust SSC racing car, the East Hill funicular in Hastings, Pitstone Windmill…). He wrote the accompanying book without the help of a ghost and began a regular technology column for The Times, the guiding principle of which was that he would write about nothing that had either a keyboard or a screen. He took lucrative speaking engagements and, while filming a further series about great bridges of the world, met and married Kirstin Gomez. She was not, it’s fair to say, the sharpest knife in the box. If she were she might not have married Gavin. But she was cartoon-sexy and one of very few people who were genuinely rude to him. They bought a house in Richmond and had a son, Thom, now eleven years old. He was a surprisingly good husband and father, certainly better than many of those who knew him predicted he would be, until yet again he became bored with what he saw as the unchallenging nature of the job which, in truth, he had only ever done part-time, and Thom now lived with his mother ten thousand miles away within sight of the bridge whose 503-metre arch span had been the cause of their parents’ meeting.
He took legal advice about what the overexcitable young man at Dagmar-Prestell unhelpfully referred to as “the kidnap” but decided, ultimately, that he did not want to run the risk of a settlement which saw him having his son actually living with him for significant chunks of the year. The separation did not cause him the pain and distress it might have caused someone without his geological self-confidence, but there was a part of his memory which he simply did not visit, and of whose existence other people could only guess, like a locked cellar in a large house from which inexplicable noises might occasionally be heard during the quieter parts of the night, the precise nature of which were irrelevant because the door was bolted fast and only a fool would go down that narrow
, mildewed staircase.
His new wife, Emmy, is an actress, and a very good one (the National, the Donmar, some TV, a little film, but still mainly, and passionately, stage), who possesses precisely what he lacks, a commitment to a project larger than herself, and who lacks precisely what he possesses, that solid sense of self whose absence leaves her feeling lost between the job of being one imaginary person and the job of being another imaginary person. He likes her arresting good looks—“Bond Villain’s Assistant” is Sarah’s less than generous description—and the reflected glory therefrom, but in truth it is the mutual absences which have kept their two hearts fond over these last three years. Indeed, thanks to Henrik Ibsen and Gavin’s work schedule this is only the fourth evening they have spent together since early November.
They are sitting now in his parents’ kitchen drinking mugs of tea and wearing makeshift skirts of clean towels while their sodden jeans tumble like acrobats in the dryer. Gavin is feeling jovial. He enjoys a bit of adventure (he is in the process of trying to sell the BBC a documentary series in which he walks the Silk Road) and would happily have trudged five times the distance through snow twice as deep. And if Emmy is not feeling jovial she is warm at last and greatly relieved to have survived Gavin’s overconfident driving.
The good mood continues into and throughout the meal, helped partly by the exceptional quality of the quiche and the pavlova, partly by Gavin’s good humour and partly by the fact that Emmy recently had a very small role in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and is therefore possessed of scandalous gossip about a group of famous actors, some of whom are refusing to age gracefully, and everyone, including Martin who professes to float at some Olympian height above such vulgar tittle-tattle, is agog.
At the end of the meal Sarah insists that her mother stays seated while she clears the table with help from Emmy and Sofie. It is an unspoken tradition that they comply with old-fashioned gender stereotypes while they are here, making a little pantomime of it to show that this is, of course, not how they act at home. They put the kettle on, scrape the leftovers from plates into the green bin below the sink, fill the dishwasher, set it going and return to the dining room with a pot of coffee and two peppermint teas, a small box of which Sofie has brought with her from Durham. They leave the cheese plate in the centre of the table in case the men want to continue grazing.
They take the second set of smaller wineglasses from the cabinet and hand them round. There is brandy, there is Sauternes, a ninety-pound bottle of Château Suduiraut courtesy of Gavin who gets a perverse pleasure from the knowing that no one apart from his father appreciates the extent of his largesse. There is also a three-quid box of After Eights brought by Sarah so as to deliberately undercut the grander gesture she knows her brother was guaranteed to make.
Martin would like some entertainment. It has become a regular thing, a regular thing in which everyone takes part under various levels of duress, a ceremony which dramatises Martin’s dominion over this little court. Reading from a book is acceptable but generally considered a poor effort. Reciting from memory is better. Performing something of one’s own creation beats both if one’s own creation passes muster. Only Sofie is exempted on condition that she does pencil sketches of other family members performing, some of which have been framed and now hang in the hallway beside the downstairs toilet. Emmy never acts because she is too good an actor and no one is allowed to steal Martin’s show. Instead she does low-rent magic tricks, a skill she picked up while performing in an experimental production of The Tempest at the Edinburgh Fringe many years ago (David and Anya still talk about the twenty-pound note which vanished and reappeared inside a mince pie Grandpa was eating). At a low point in diplomatic relations some years back Sarah recited a poem by Sharon Olds which contained the word “cunt,” but her father caught the ball and belted it straight down the pitch into the back of her net by saying he thought it was fantastic and whose turn was it next?
This year marks a period of détente in that department and tonight’s event promises to pass off smoothly. Anya has brought her violin and is planning to play an unaccompanied piece by Leclair which she is learning for her grade 4 exam while her grandfather is planning to play the allegretto con moto from Frank Bridge’s first set of “Miniature Pastorals.” There will be some Tennyson and some Carol Ann Duffy. Emmy will do some mind-reading.
“So,” says Martin, “who is going to get the evening rolling?”
And Sarah says, “Christing shit!” which are very much not words anyone is allowed to say in this room.
In unison they follow her eyes to the French windows, outside which the intruder light has snapped on to reveal a tall black man in a black woolly hat, sporting a big salt-and-pepper beard and wearing a long black coat over camouflage trousers and big black boots. He is looking in at them all as if they are exhibits in a zoo. Or perhaps it is the other way round.
“Who in God’s name is that?” says Gavin.
“I have absolutely no idea,” says Martin, sounding more intrigued than startled.
“Is he a neighbour?” asks Sofie.
“Of course he’s not a bloody neighbour,” says Gavin.
“Why is that a stupid question?” asks Sofie.
Leo puts a consoling hand on Sofie’s back. He has tried to stand up for his wife in the face of his brother’s rudeness before and it has never turned out well. “Is someone planning to let him in?” he asks.
Madeleine says, “He does not look like the kind of man I want inside the house.”
The stranger knocks twice on the glass, slowly and deliberately.
“Nor,” says Martin, “does he look like someone you’d want to leave standing in your garden.” He does not recognise the man. He has dealt with a good number of eccentric, difficult and unpredictable people in his time, some of them patients, some of them family members of patients. He has on a small number of occasions been threatened. Brain surgery is a risky business and desperate people do not handle statistics well.
“I’m actually quite scared?” says Anya. The question thing is something she has been doing for the last few months, not wanting to be assertive or seem needy.
“It’s all right.” Sofie strokes her hair. “He’s probably just cold and hungry.”
“Grandad is going to kill him,” says David, as if this is obvious and unremarkable. It is precisely this kind of comment that makes his father worry that his son will spend a significant part of his adult life in mental institutions.
“Let’s see what he wants.” Martin gets to his feet.
Madeleine says, “Do not let him in.”
Her husband pauses. “I’m not sure sitting here watching him is a long-term option.”
“Perhaps we should call the police,” says Madeleine.
“And say what?” asks Gavin. “ ‘There’s a black chap knocking on the French windows’?”
“In the absence of any better ideas…” Martin unlocks the door and swings it open. A great belch of snow and freezing air enter the room. A couple of cards fall from the mantelpiece, clattering softly onto the log basket and from there to the floor.
“What can we do for you, sir?”
“Are you not going to ask me in?” The man has a breathy tenor voice. They’d expected Trinidad or Hackney but the accent is from some less obvious third place.
“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”
“It’s bitter weather out here, and I’ve come a good distance.”
“I’m less interested in where you’ve come from,” says Martin, “and more interested in what you’re doing in my garden.”
“That is a poor welcome on a cold night.”
“I think it’s a pretty decent welcome in the circumstances,” says Martin.
“This is freaking me out quite a bit,” says Sarah.
“Better than listening to Leo reading Seamus bloody Heaney again,” says Gavin, just loud enough for Leo to hear.
“Do you want money?” asks Martin.
> “I was hoping for hospitality.”
“Let the chap in,” says Gavin.
“Gavin, for God’s sake,” whispers Madeleine.
“Give him a glass of brandy and a mince pie so he can warm up and tootle off on his merry way,” says Gavin. “Spirit of the season and so forth.”
Leo says, “Gavin, I am really not sure that’s a good idea.”
Anya shifts her chair next to her mother’s chair and squirrels under her protecting arm.
“Five minutes,” says Martin.
The stranger steps inside. He wipes his feet in the same slow, deliberate way in which he knocked on the glass, like someone demonstrating the wiping of feet to people who have not seen it before. Martin closes the door behind him. The stranger takes off his woolly hat and dunks it into a pocket.
They can smell him now, more agricultural than homeless. Leather, dung and smoke, something very old about it, Mongol horses on the high steppe. Yurts and eagles. His greatcoat is Napoleonic, scuffed black serge with actual brass buttons and a ragged hem. Snow melts on his shoulders.
“Compliments of the season.” Gavin hands him the promised victuals. “Made by my mother’s own fair hand. Five stars. Lots of fruit in the mincemeat.”
“Please, Gavin,” says Leo quietly, “don’t be a twat.”
The stranger sips the brandy, savours it and swallows. He takes a bite of the mince pie. He closes his eyes. To an outside observer it might look as if the family were waiting for a score out of ten.