The Extinction of Snow

by Frederick Lightfoot

  There is no clutter whatsoever in the house of Pierre-Yves Moreau, which is not to say that there is no comfort. The sitting room has a settee and two chairs, high-backed with floral patterns, with plain differently coloured scatter-cushions. There is a small table on which there is an unfinished jigsaw, an extremely difficult jigsaw with hundreds of tiny pieces, the picture one of sea and sky. Pierre-Yves Moreau has obviously discovered a more benign form of preoccupation than wine. I should perhaps learn from him, though I do not have the temperament or inclination to solve jigsaw puzzles. Looking at the unfinished puzzle I am vividly reminded of something that, in the early years of our marriage, John used to say whenever he was asked about his work: A thousand sad and baffling riddles. He told me it was a quotation from a Liberal politician from the beginning of the twentieth century. I miss John, miss him so much. I feel that everything is a sad and baffling riddle. I don’t suppose I will find any answer either.

  The sitting room leads on to a dining room. There is a large pine dining table tucked beneath a window looking out onto a sloping garden. Besides the table and four chairs there is a sideboard, again of pine and very simple, with a single decorative bloom on each of the door panels. A door to the left leads to a small galley kitchen, again meticulously tidy. Pierre-Yves Moreau is making coffee. He asks me if I have slept well, which I am surprised to say I have. He smiles, looking genuinely pleased to hear it. He offers me coffee and croissants. I accept with real pleasure. I comment on how nice I find his house. He tells me that the farm has a larger house and that this used to be rented out as holiday accommodation, but since the death of his wife he has preferred to stay here. He laughs and says he now rents out the big house and gets more money which makes him feel worse. I suggest that there are a thousand sad and baffling riddles. He shrugs, perhaps failing to understand the English. I don’t know how to say either baffling or riddles in French and don’t feel that a thousand-fold sadness is a sensible thing to say.

  We sit down together to breakfast. The garden has numerous empty beds, and clusters of bushes and shrubs. It falls away to a substantial orchard. The birdsong has diminished since earlier. The day is dry and bright, promising spring.

  Having taken a few bites of croissant and sipped some coffee I ask: “What is your interest in Rennstadt?”

  “They poisoned the water. The lake in the forest. The big lake. It is an old crime, an accident they said. They paid a fine, something for each dead fish, each dead thing, but it was not an accident. It was what? Laziness, lack of regard, vandalism. After that I watch and find that pollution is just how this company is, and this is the one I know. The world is full of companies, such companies. I don’t use chemicals. It is how it is intended.”

  “You watch?”

  He smiles. “I know that is not a great thing.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that, not at all. I’m seeing you, seeing you watching, and maybe I’m hoping, and hoping isn’t the right word but I have no idea what is, that you will tell me something about Joseph.” A shadow passes across his expression and he looks at me with his usual sadness and puzzlement. He shakes his head, but I can’t tell whether he is refusing me or making a comment on my behalf. “But you watch,” I go on, my voice more shrill. “You said, so you saw something. I saw you at the place. I saw you on the hill.”

  He skews his face, perhaps embarrassed. “From the time I know you are here, when I saw you near the trucks, I decide to watch for you.”

  I smile at his embarrassment, his clumsy way of saying he wanted to look out for me, keep me safe, a stranger, a grieving mother.

  “But how could you know who I was?”

  “In your face I can see it. It is there.”

  “I don’t cover my loss with any skill.”

  “No, not the loss. Not just the loss. I see him and I know.” I look at him sceptically, disbelieving. He smiles: “But yes, of course, you have that look, his look, purpose, work to do. He was like that, like you. I think very much of him.”

  How will I ever be able to thank Pierre-Yves Moreau for those words? At last someone has said something good about my beautiful boy. At the same time they burn me for the witch I am. If I had never burdened him with task and work he might never have come here. Why couldn’t he stay in his estate house in Leeds, a good father and husband, enjoying the privileges of inactivity? Why fight such a big fight against such a big opponent? I know his response, the smile, the condescending grin and the nervous superiority. He did it because it had to be done. He was instructed in the possibility of right and wrong, and the certainty of grey areas. We educated him as we thought right. We never strove for outrageous things, just a good society encompassing all people. We never wanted to overthrow everything – though maybe John does, and tries to explain it to me – just make it better, make it right. Yes, reclaim water, air, seeds and genes; reclaim land and shelter, forest and ocean; reclaim health, education and humanity. We just wanted the answers to a thousand sad and baffling riddles.

  I remember Joseph used to scoff at my ribbon days, all of my solidarity ribbons. I thought he was being childishly cynical, but now, knowing that he has the same face as me, I know that he knew it never amounted to activism. I never told him that I knew that as well, it was just that I believed in awareness too. Unfortunately, Joseph and I have so much to say to each other. Could any death be called good because everything had been said? There is no end of saying. I have much to tell John, so much to hear. I have been such a neglectful wife. “Thank you,” I tell Pierre-Yves Moreau. “Thank you.”

  Again a shadow crosses his features. Of course he knows the magnitude of loss. He can’t even continue living in the same house, though nor could he entirely abandon it. It is next door, his old life, his old self. Maybe it is a burden, this cement of memory binding us together into a single entire being, but how could we survive without it? Everything brings into existence its opposite. My pain is my joy. I have loved as a mother does, without calculation, desire or need of reward. I have known absolute love, known its scale of difficulty, its destructive lash. I need to say something to Pierre-Yves Moreau, something about what he and I both know. He must suspect something of the like because he speaks up, deflecting it, laughing with tense deliberation: “It was good you appear because I had minds to deal with them.”

  A sudden chill passes through me. The words of Pierre-Yves Moreau stop me dead. I can see John’s father banging his fists in his room, calling out over and over again, I thought, I thought, I thought. Of course it was the wrong word. He was saying, I mind, I mind, I mind. The poor man was perfectly aware of his situation, of the walls closing around him at all turns, and no one to advocate on his behalf. I mind too. I smile at Pierre-Yves Moreau and ask: “What were they doing that night?”

  “I have seen them dispose of effluent into the lake and the canal. The fish in the lake have no eggs. They say everything is clean now, the problems solved, but it is not the case. At least here there are laws, people to stand up, make these things stop, but they will just go. They will devastate everything, leave poison sumps and toxic wells just to make money, but money for what, for the sake of money. The world has three tribes, the ones destroying, the ones trying to stop them and the ones who have their heads in the sand. Unless the second tribe is successful then it is all over.” He shrugs and smiles: “Maybe there are always good things, I don’t know.”

  There is something beautifully wistful about Pierre-Yves Moreau. He is a man of scale in all respects. I have no doubts about my trust. My only doubt would be failing him.

  “You suggested that I will see Joanne.”

  “Of course you will see Joanne. She is in the house, but she comes here,” he replies, his voice lowering. Evidently he doesn’t even like going back into the house. Maybe that is because it has another woman, Joanne, whoever she is. I must admit to a certain trepidation at meeting this woman. My son abandoned his wife and child to be with her. She signifies him, his final choices.

&nbs
p; “When will I see her?”

  He looks at his watch, and then looks at me, his great sculpted features appearing austere, his passion withheld. He recognizes the difficulty in all things. He nods. His voice comes from a very low register. “She will be here soon. I said at nine, but she is not a perfect time keeper.”

  “No,” I say, “I don’t suppose she is.” I have no idea why I should say such a thing.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Joanne is surprising. She is small, slim and striking, younger than I expected. She sets up contrasts of black and white. Her hair is black, raven black, down to her shoulders, her face pale, the skin porcelain white, her eyes dark, her features small but perfectly shaped. She has a black jacket, white top, black skirt and black boots, big boots like hiking boots. She strikes me as both fragile and fierce. I am aware that I am studying her, taking in details – small details like the black mascara, the pink lip-gloss – without having spoken a single word. Of course the process of looking is a quick one, mother quick and artist quick, discriminatory. What does it say about her that she uses time to put on make-up? Does it mean that her grief is a minor grief, that her relationship with my son is not the one I have imagined? But, of course, the inquiring mother would also usually have her carefully applied make-up. We do things by custom and habit; I at least should concede her that. But in reality I am conceding her nothing, nothing other than that the woman in the Paris suburb was right and she is pretty, very pretty; given a different script she could be as pretty as a little angel, but I am being deliberately sardonic. I can’t escape the fact that this is the person for whom my son abandoned his wife and child. There can be nothing right in that.

  “I was told you had rows,” I say, my voice flat.

  She screws up her face, her torso stiffening. She is still standing, framed by the kitchen door. “What?” she says, incredulous and annoyed.

  “A neighbour of yours in Paris said she heard rows. She thought you had rows. I just wondered, that’s all.”

  She eyes me fiercely, and then snaps: “Sometimes yes, sometimes real shouting matches.”

  “She was worried that you’d wake her kids, but they never did. Parents worry about things like that though.”

  “Are you for real? Have you come all this way to tell me off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we don’t have anything to say to each other.” She looks towards Pierre-Yves Moreau and gives him a flustered frown of farewell. I catch his response. He seems dejected and disappointed. Yes, I have come all of this way to be disappointing. I think I stand by my right to be disappointing. My son died here, and this girl is in on it, instigator and partaker. They had rows. She pushed him, drove him to this reckoning.

  “What were your rows about?” I call, my tone demanding that she remain and see this thing through. She looks enraged and embarrassed. I wonder on whose account she is. “I just want to know, my son and you. I just need to know,” I continue, underlining the word need, the need that goes into saying it.

  “I don’t know what you want.”

  I catch her eye and in an instant let her see the scale of that need, the scale of distress that leads to clumsy openings, disordered questions, raw anger. “I just want my son. I lost him,” I say, my voice dogged, unsentimental. “I’ve come to find him.” She frowns, listening carefully, possibly concerned for my sanity. “I used to know him very well. I never knew he had rows in a Parisian suburb.”

  “The flat was a mess, a pigsty, and sometimes it got to us, one or the other. But it wasn’t ours to clean up. It was borrowed, just a meeting place, but we had to live in it. So we rowed sometimes, each wanting the other to be the cleaner, but neither of us was that.”

  “So what are you?”

  Again her eyes flash towards Pierre-Yves Moreau, perturbed and infuriated by me. I just keep looking at her. I don’t want to see his disappointment, don’t want to face it. She throws up her arms: “I’m a chemist, if that matters.”

  “You look so young.”

  “So? Look, and I’m only saying this because you’re his mother and I feel for you, sometimes we rowed about tactics. Joseph wanted to publish material before we could substantiate anything. That would have been a disaster. We could easily have been discredited and then nothing we later said would have any credence. He used to get incensed by it all, just wanted to take it all on.” She pauses for a moment and a small smile forms on her pink glossed lips. “He was passionate, you’ll know that.”

  I shrug. Do I know that? Do I know anything of the forces that drove him, what his sense of justice and injustice was, his versions of right and wrong? I know what I wanted, what I trusted in, what I felt was right as a parent and wanted him to aspire to, but do I really know how it all turned out? No, I don’t know anything. “Yes,” I say, “he was always passionate.”

  She turns to Pierre-Yves Moreau again and holds up her hands as if surrendering something, and then addresses her next comments to him: “But we hardly ever rowed. I’m being made to say all of the wrong things. It’s not how it was.”

  “Then how was it?” I demand, my voice shrill and impoverished.

  “It was lovely if you want to know.”

  “Of course I want to know.”

  “It was special. We really had something, something special.”

  “He had a wife and child.”

  “I know that.”

  “Does it mean nothing?”

  Again she looks towards Pierre-Yves Moreau, wanting to know whether she has any obligation to respond to my probing. She turns back to me and fixes me with a look that is both tolerant and defiant and then quietly says: “If someone has to be hurt why should it be the two people who love each other?”

  “You loved each other?” She just stares at me, refusing to enlarge, refusing to face that love in these circumstances, in this company. She is right of course. I have no rights to be admitted to the details of their love. I have been denouncing it, calling it invalid. “But he had a child,” I say, speaking to myself as much as her. She simply shakes her head, her eyes closing briefly. “It can’t be right leaving your own daughter.”

  She repeats the same gesture, a simple, uncertain negative. “I’ve got nothing else to say.”

  “No,” I say, “I understand.”

  For a third time she shakes her head, her eyes closing but this time with a minor explosion of breath, perhaps denying me, perhaps denying herself.

  Pierre-Yves Moreau speaks up, telling Joanne to sit down. She has been standing throughout our exchange. I made her stand, as if she’d come to the headmistress’ office. I should be ashamed, but I can’t feel that. Pierre-Yves Moreau stands and says he’ll get more coffee, leaving his seat for Joanne. We will face each other across this great pine table, presumably with Pierre-Yves Moreau between us, protecting us, which he no doubt has accepted is his role.

  We sit opposite each other at the same eye level, casting glances at each other, after which we turn to the window pretending to study the dormant garden. The sun is higher, the day brighter, the sky a pale springtime blue. Birds flit to and fro continuously. There is a bird-table and numerous feeders. The widower must still find that he has a mind for nature. At the moment everything seems such an absurd comedy to me, nothing worth anything. My son gave up his life for the girl opposite me. She is pretty, a flawed angel, mildly eccentric, testy and truculent – which is justifiable, given my treatment of her. I am struck by the similarities between us, her scale, her sense of style – which is not mine, but we both have one, deliberate and distinctive – and our love of the same man. I have not congratulated her on that but condemned her. I parade my loss as if it outdoes hers. There is something vulgar about allowing loss to become competitive but I think I have become vulgar. Grief has made me common and commonplace, my love of all that was beautiful absent. I could still expound the theory of line, chiaroscuro and colour but it is a sterile knowing. I could quote Klee saying it is the realities of a
rt which help lift life out of its mediocrity, but that is lost with my loss.

  I am adrift in this cottage, devoid of connections, making senseless assertions, abysmal statements, feeling abused by the reality of the figure opposite me. I need the unseen and the seen, the personal and the public, the past and the future to come together and form a coherent whole, which they never will. I am abandoned to my own mental wanderings, tortured by the insubstantiality of reality. What is the purpose of birth and death if it is to be measured solely by the time between?

  I look directly at Joanne, trying to be calm and measured. “Are you still working?” I ask.

  She looks at me, understandably suspicious. “As a chemist in a laboratory, or someone continuing the work we set out to do.”

  “Either, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I am still working.”

  “I find that I can’t. I can’t find any motivation.”

  “I find I need occupation.”

  “Yes, occupation is important.”

  “I find it so.”

  “It comes with the human need to be loved.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.”

  “That is the theory anyway.”

  “Which theory is that?”

  I smile. “A theory about love.”

  “I feel close to him when I’m working, because it was his work too. They can’t destroy that, can they?”

  “Have they not?”

  “I don’t think so. If I thought that then they would have won. I would have let them, and I refuse to give in like that.”

  “And have they not won?”

  “Not if we expose what he wanted exposed.”

  “Which is?”

  “The truth.”

  “And after the truth?”

  “After?”

  “Yes, after the truth what comes then?”

  “I’m not naïve. I’m a scientist. After this truth there will be other lies to expose, truths to tell. It will go on and on. What we do in our lifetime might seem very small indeed. But we do something. We do something useful.”