In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  ‘Annabelle, that doesn’t help. I wish it did, but right now it doesn’t, okay.’

  He slammed the front door as he left, rattling the letterbox. Annabelle listened to the exhausted splutter of the boiling kettle as the switch eventually tripped off, and she lowered her head and closed her tired eyes as the kitchen fell silent.

  On the train journey to Wiltshire few words were exchanged between mother and daughter. Annabelle was relieved when her mother finally stopped sobbing, but as they left London behind, and accelerated out into the countryside, she had to fight hard to keep her memories of this journey from overwhelming her. She smiled to herself as she recalled schoolgirl Saturday outings spent browsing the trendy, but overpriced, shops along the King’s Road, followed by clandestine meetings with boys in Chelsea pubs, before hurriedly dashing to the tube so that they could get to Paddington and catch the eight o’clock train back home. It had all been very innocent, even the time she went off with an Italian boy and they sat together on the sofa in his parents’ London flat and listened to Duran Duran while he tried, and failed, to roll them both a joint. In the end they settled for a menthol cigarette, and later in the day, when she met Gemma and Lisa at the train station, they didn’t believe her when she said that nothing had happened. In fact, nothing happened until she went off to university and introduced herself to Richard Coombs at the university drama group’s stall at the freshers’ fair, and he asked her if she’d ever written any sketches. She lied and said ‘yes, of course’, and three days later she trekked up Crowndale Road to his digs and the pair of them sat on the floor while she read out a spectacularly unfunny piece about Chaucer manning the gates of heaven and choosing not to admit various people from The Canterbury Tales. Richard Coombs was a third-year, and well known in university circles as somebody who was probably going to end up at the BBC. Apparently there were rumours that he had already been approached by a script editor from Birmingham’s Pebble Mill studios. When he laughed at her unfunny jokes she felt grateful, but as she continued to read, and self-consciously switch voices, she could feel herself turning crimson. Then she felt his hand on her leg and she heard him say ‘put down the script,’ which she did. She raised her arms above her head so that he could peel off her jumper, and then she lay back on the scatter cushions and closed her eyes. It was over in minutes, and he hurriedly asked her if she would like to use the bathroom first. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you can go ahead.’ Once she heard the door close she sat up and was relieved to see that there was only a small trace of blood on the inside of one thigh, and it was possible that he might not have even noticed. It had hurt, but at least it was over, and she already knew that it was unlikely that Richard Coombs would ever contact her again. All she had to do now was negotiate the awkward conversation about her sketch, and then endure his clumsy request for the phone number of her hall of residence, and that would be it. In fact, that was it with boys and sex, until the end of the academic year when she found herself sitting in the next seat but one to an awkward-looking boy at a semi-professional production of Sweet Bird of Youth.

  As the train pulled into Ashleigh station she scanned the platform for any sign of her father, who she expected to be waiting eagerly for them. Her mother seemed to have retreated further into herself as they drew closer to ‘home’, so Annabelle decided not to ask her how best to handle the forthcoming encounter. She assumed that if her mother knew then she would have said something, but the silence between them was eloquent and so she opted to leave her mother to her reverie and resigned herself to dealing with the situation as it unfolded. There was a single taxi waiting outside the small country station, and she was surprised to see that the driver was an Indian. She looked around and blinked slowly, in an owl-like fashion, as she took in the full reality of where she was. ‘Magnolia Cottage’, said her mother, ‘off Willoughby Lane.’ The man smiled and started the engine, and as the taxi gently crested the stone bridge which spanned the river her mother slipped her gloved hand into that of her daughter.

  Her father was standing by the window when the taxi pulled up, and he watched impassively as his wife and pregnant daughter passed through the wrought iron gate and began to make their way up the garden path towards him. He showed no interest in waving to them, or in any way acknowledging their presence. For her part, Annabelle looked at the newly planted flowers and plants that edged the path, and she blocked out her mother’s twittering voice which rose and fell with a feverish anxiety. The door was never locked so her mother simply ushered Annabelle inside. They moved into the living room where her father continued to stare out of the window with his back to them both. She noticed that the antique occasional table was set with three cups and saucers and a cake stand which held a half-dozen scones and three slices of Madeira cake. Carefully arranged around the base of the cake stand were delicate glass dishes containing various jams, and one that held two dollops of clotted cream, so she could see some evidence that she was expected. ‘William?’ said her mother. Her startled father turned around and blinked, as though only now becoming aware of their presence.

  ‘Annabelle, it’s so good to see you after all this time.’ He came towards her with his arms extended and kissed her once on either cheek without seeming to notice her protruding stomach. ‘Please, take a seat. Goodness, we have so many.’

  He gestured in the direction of a number of comfy chairs with overly plumped cushions, and he continued to seem somewhat disconcerted, and a little embarrassed, that there was so much choice available to his guest. Unfortunately, her father seemed to have aged cruelly, and there was little evidence of the military man with whom she was familiar. He had not only lost his hair and his posture, but she could clearly see that his hands were shaking.

  The civilised gentility of tea offended Annabelle, who soon understood that this was a world that, inadvertently, her husband had helped her to escape from. The fact that she had called their home from Paddington station, and left her husband a deceitful message about a play opening in Watford, made her feel sick. Her mother tried to keep a tight grip on proceedings by repeatedly bringing the conversation back to the subject of flowers, but then the kettle began to whistle and she hastily stood up and announced that she would make another pot.

  ‘Mint? Jasmine? Or should I just bring more of the same?’

  Annabelle smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She watched as her mother retreated to the kitchen.

  ‘Your mother likes to blather.’

  Annabelle looked at her father, who was staring intently at the scones without showing any real inclination to pick one up. Her mother returned almost immediately and began to flutter nervously about as she served the tea, and then she asked Annabelle if she wanted to see what they had done with her old room, or perhaps she would like to see the new conservatory, but all Annabelle wanted to do was go back to London and resume her life with her husband. Eventually, the conversation touched upon urgent matters relating to local efforts to block the motorway extension, and her father’s success with turnips and beetroot at the county’s agricultural fair, and then her visibly fatigued mother asked her when exactly the baby was due, although she knew full well, practically to the hour, when she was likely to become a grandmother.

  ‘Do you know what it is yet?’ asked her father.

  Annabelle shook her head. ‘No, we’re not sure.’

  ‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘it will be one thing or the other, that’s for sure.’

  Her father pursed his lips. ‘Yes, quite. I’m afraid your mother and I had no idea what you would be, that is until we had you, of course.’

  ‘I had her, William,’ smiled her mother.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course you did, but I was involved,’ insisted her father.

  ‘I think Keith would like a son.’

  ‘Would he, indeed?’ mused her father. ‘I see.’

  She looked at her father and could see his mind working rapidly, so much so that his lips began to move as though he were rehearsing the o
pening of a sentence. Then he hummed reflectively and knitted his fingers together in what she assumed to be an imaginary golf grip.

  ‘You see, Annabelle, I received a note, anonymous of course, shortly after we last saw you in Bristol. In your salad days, as it were. Your mother may have mentioned something to somebody at bridge, or perhaps I blabbed to Walter or Barry in the pub, but some chap, or woman for that matter, wanted to know what it was like to have a “nigger-lover” for a daughter. He wrote that he hoped I would never have the ill manners to pollute our village with my mongrel family. Now then, what do you make of that?’

  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.’