In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  Outside in the street a car backfires, and then he hears the sound of breaking glass. A visitor might be perturbed by these noises, but he has become accustomed to such nocturnal intrusions. He knows that he is safe in the flat, although sometimes he feels lonely. However, he was never lonelier than the night following dinner with Bruce and Annabelle when he had to walk home by himself and try hard not to imagine Annabelle in bed with her film editor friend. She never again suggested that all three of them get together and, in fact, these days she seldom mentions Bruce. Laurie never mentions him at all, and the one time he pressed his son on the subject Laurie just sucked his teeth and called him ‘the dry guy’. Again he hears a car in the street backfire, and it occurs to him that perhaps this was not a car backfiring after all. When he last travelled north to see his father he told him about the rise in gun violence on the streets of London, but his father had just turned away from him and shrugged his shoulders. That was four years ago, and in the interim their infrequent phone conversations have been similarly frustrating. It was Annabelle who had encouraged him to be more understanding, and who had sought to remind him that for the greater part of his father’s adult life the man had been either hospitalised or struggling in his mind. Despite Annabelle’s entreaties, he has found it difficult to be always sympathetic towards somebody whose stubborn behaviour so successfully obscures whatever sensitive or vulnerable qualities he may possess. Most of the time it simply doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. He puts down his glass on the coffee table and goes into the kitchen to the fridge, where he tugs open the door and removes the open bottle of wine from the top shelf. He returns to the sofa and refills his glass and then puts the bottle on the floor so that it won’t mark the table. Were Brenda still alive he feels that she would be sympathetic with regard to some of the recent decisions, and mistakes, that he has made in his life, but he is reasonably certain that his father’s response would be judgmental. This being the case, he is right to be cautious in his dealings with his father and share little, for even though he is content once again to be in contact with him, it is exhausting to constantly negotiate the emotional mood swings of this unpredictable man and his demons. He notices that there is only a little wine left in the bottle so he decides to drain it. The wine will help him sleep and encourage him to forget the unpleasantness of being exposed to Yvette’s fury. He hears shouting and hands clapping, and he slumps back into the sofa as he realises that it is just the young couple in the ground floor flat hoping to send a cat scurrying into the night.

  The following morning he senses that something has changed. As he walks into the office, his secretary glances up at him from behind the computer on her desk, but she doesn’t say anything. Ruth looks alarmed, and she furtively clicks the mouse and changes the image on her screen.

  ‘Morning, Ruth.’

  ‘Yeah, good morning, Mr Gordon.’

  ‘Everything all right, is it? You look like you’re up to no good. And before you ask, I haven’t finished the trans-racial adoption thing, so if anyone asks feel free to give them the runaround.’

  Ruth picks up a pencil and begins tapping it nervously against the side of her desk.

  ‘Mr Gordon, I think you should check out your email.’

  ‘My email?’

  ‘I’d check it out if I were you.’

  He shrugs and walks past her and into his office, swings the briefcase up on to the desk, and then punches on his computer and watches as the screen flickers and buzzes to life. He shouts through the open door.

  ‘Ruth, any messages?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Not really? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Mr Wilson said he’d like to see you. In his office.’

  He clicks on his email account.

  ‘Any particular time?’

  He does not hear if Ruth answers or not, for he is scrolling down the list of one hundred and twenty-seven messages that decorate his screen. There is no reason for him to open any for he has read them already. Yvette has copied their entire correspondence, including his appreciation of her attentiveness in bed, to everybody in the department. He sits down and stares in disbelief. When he looks up, Ruth is standing before him.

  ‘Well, if it means anything to you,’ begins Ruth, ‘we all kind of knew that something was going on between the pair of you. It was pretty obvious to me, but other people soon guessed, but what’s the big deal here? You’re both single, right?’

  He rubs his face in the palm of his hand.

  ‘The big deal here is that Yvette seems to have it in for me.’

  ‘Did you two have words?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Last night I told her that we should cool it a bit.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Well that’s it then, isn’t it?’

  He pauses and looks again at the screen. ‘What time does Mr Wilson want to see me?’

  ‘He said after you’ve had a chance to read your email.’

  He looks up at her. ‘So she sent this to him too? Bloody hell what good does she think is going to come from this? Okay, so I’m embarrassed, is that what she wants?’

  Ruth shrugs and throws out a helpless arm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Gordon, but I don’t know what she wants. I haven’t got a clue.’

  He opens the door to Clive Wilson’s office and sees him sitting at the rectangular conference table with Lesley Thornton, his deputy, seated to his right. He sits at the table opposite them, although this makes him feel as though he is being interviewed, and he loosens his tie and undoes his top button. Lesley is careful to betray neither a smile nor a scowl, but her coldness has been a feature of their exchanges since the fateful policy-making retreat in the New Forest. On the third and last night, they had both slipped into the village for a Sunday nightcap, careful to choose a different pub from the one which they had been frequenting as a group. Over a dry Martini she complained about the rudeness of the staff that she inherited on being promoted earlier in the year, and how the table manners of the last guy she dated seemed to have been picked up from the chimps at Regent’s Park Zoo. She even did a quick impression of him eating spaghetti which was genuinely funny. Like many country pubs, come eleven o’clock the place officially closed, but the curtains were simply drawn and the drinks continued to be served and so they both decided to stay on.

  Once they returned to the conference hotel, she invited him to her room for a quick raid of the mini-bar, but as soon as she closed the door they began to clutch and paw at each other, tossing clothes in all directions until he pushed her back on to the bed and unzipped her brown leather ankle boots. He didn’t stay the night, although she made it clear that she wanted him to. She pointed to the small digital alarm clock on the bedside table and insisted that it had never let her down. She was sure that if they set it for six in the morning he could easily get back to his own room without being seen by anyone. But he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her and pulled his belt an extra notch tighter before standing up and turning around. It had not been in any way satisfactory, her lust being more desperate than sensual, which made him feel slightly used. She was now wrapped in a white cotton sheet, and much to his embarrassment he realised that he didn’t even feel particularly attracted to her. Before leaving, he placed his hand against her cheek, and then he crossed the room and quietly closed the door behind him. Early the next morning, he called the room of the colleague who was giving him a lift back to London and asked if they might leave an hour ahead of schedule as he had an emergency to attend to. Back in the office, Lesley smiled in his direction and offered him every chance to ask her out, but after a week had passed, and it had become clear to her that he was unlikely to do so, she cornered him by the Xerox machine. She announced that her sister had let her down and was going to Crete with her husband, and she therefore had two tickets to see a revival of a Pinter play at the National Theatre. For one moment he thought about making up a
plausible excuse to spare her dignity, but in the end he could think of nothing to say and so he simply shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I can’t.’

  A surprised Lesley Thornton smiled weakly and slowly nodded, and then she gathered her composure and said, ‘Oh well, I tried.’ She turned and walked away, and for a week or so her icy silence in his presence made him feel uncomfortable. And then he told Annabelle what had happened and his life changed. During the nightmare week in the Travelodge, Lesley began again to smile in his direction, having heard the rumours of his changed circumstances. But once he moved into the flat in Wilton Road, and studiously refused to meet her eyes at work, or reply to her email messages with anything but the tersest of responses, their frosty relationship was once again re-established.

  Clive Wilson begins.

  ‘Keith, Keith, Keith. What have you got yourself into now?’

  Clive Wilson is the chief executive of the council, and effectively his boss, and these days he works increasingly closely with his boss. However, he has come to understand that Clive Wilson loves only Clive Wilson and the thrill of wielding both actual and imagined power. He is generally quite good at reining in his smug bonhomie, but occasionally he gets a glint in his eye and crosses a line, at which point his tone becomes both over-friendly and admonitory.

  ‘Tell me, Keith. Why would she want to do this to you?’

  ‘I wanted to break it off and I suppose this is her way of trying to slap me in the face.’

  ‘And, as it were, shoot herself in the foot.’

  ‘Well I don’t know if she’s bothered about that.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Clive Wilson steals a glance at Lesley, whose detached demeanour betrays no emotion, and then he rocks back in his chair.

  ‘She’s been a researcher in your department for three months now, right?’

  He nods.

  ‘And how long has your affair been going on?’

  ‘It’s not an “affair”. That makes it sound like there’s been some kind of secretive thing to it. We’ve been having a relationship. It’s all there in the emails.’

  Clive shakes his head and stands up. He turns and walks a few paces, then he stares out of the window.

  ‘Well, Keith it’s a bit of an awkward one.’ He turns around to face him. ‘What do you want me to do about this? I can have a word with her and tell her not to wash her dirty linen in public or something like that, but I don’t think I’ve got any grounds for dismissal.’ He laughs now. ‘I’d have the bloody unions all over me like a Bangkok rash.’

  ‘Technically,’ says Lesley, corkscrewing her body around to face Clive, ‘she hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s been stupid, yes, but she’s obviously feeling hurt and rejected.’

  ‘Well I don’t know what she’s got to be hurt about.’

  For the first time, Lesley looks directly at him. She uncrosses, then crosses, her legs and he can hear the rasp of her tights as she does so.

  ‘Well maybe you should find out.’

  Clive Wilson takes his seat again.

  ‘Lesley’s got a point there, Keith. Maybe you should talk to her and try and bring her to her senses.’

  ‘According to Ruth, she’s not come into work today. I can go and see if she’s at home.’

  ‘Have you called her?’

  ‘No point. I know her. She won’t answer her phone. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go round and see her.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What’s good about it?’

  Clive laughs now. ‘Take it easy, cowboy. We’re all working to get a resolve here.’

  Clive stands again, but Lesley remains seated and with her right thumb she nervously pops the nib in and out of a cheap office biro.

  ‘Let’s have a drink and a chat at the end of the day, Keith. By then you should be able to reassure me that everything is fine, okay?’

  The walk from the tube station to Yvette’s house has lost whatever thrill it once possessed. Without the prospect of a sexual encounter, he can now see that this part of London is bleakly suburban, and even the temperature seems to have dropped a few degrees in the space of twenty-four hours. It is positively freezing, but he resists the urge to draw further attention to himself by donning the sunglasses that he likes to wear when walking these less than friendly streets. Today, he doesn’t care if people see him staring back at them, he just wants to get this business over and done with, and then hurry back to the office. It suddenly occurs to him that from Colin’s point of view, not contesting the terms of the divorce and leaving his estranged young wife in a mortgage-free terraced house might have been the price he had to pay to escape this dreadful location. He crosses the road and can see that Yvette’s blue curtains are closed. He presses the annoying bell and then waits. He presses again and although he is tempted to open the letterbox and demand that Yvette stop messing about and come down and talk to him, he knows that there is little point in becoming aggressive. He backs up a little along the crazy-paved path and looks at the upstairs windows to see if there is any movement of the thin curtains, but nothing stirs. He closes the gate behind him with a clatter, and then pauses to let a young woman, who is wheeling a child in a pushchair, pass by. He knows that he is imagining it, but he is sure that the young woman looked at him disdainfully. He watches as she wrestles the pushchair down off the pavement and crosses the road, before moving on purposefully in the direction of the local park. Eager to flee the site of what is fast beginning to feel like a crime scene, he walks quickly away from Yvette’s house and back in the direction of the tube station. He knows full well that at the office his colleagues will have spent the greater part of the day studying the one hundred and twenty-seven emails, and he will most likely have already become the elderly Lothario at the centre of a dozen risqué jokes.

  Clive Wilson returns from the bar and slides into the chair opposite him. He hands him a glass of Pinot Grigio.

  ‘There you go, mate. Bottoms up.’

  Clive tips his own glass of red to his mouth and swallows deeply, and then he places the half-empty vessel on the table between them.

  ‘So how about going on leave for a while? It’ll give us a bit of time to work out what to do about the girl.’

  He looks quizzically at his boss but says nothing in reply.

  ‘Come on, old man, she works for you. It isn’t going to be easy with the two of you in the same office.’

  ‘Why not send her on leave? How come you’re asking me to step aside?’

  ‘Whoa, hold on a minute. This is paid leave, Keith. No hint of censure or anything like that. We can even call it a research break.’

  ‘And what about her? Doesn’t she even get a rap on the knuckles?’

  ‘Lesley’s going to sit down and talk with her. Better if it comes from a woman. She’s going to make it clear to her that she’s bang out of order and that whatever the emotional distress that she might be feeling, she has no right to copy your private emails to the whole department.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ He stares at his boss, who shrugs helplessly. ‘Oh come on, she was attempting to humiliate me.’

  ‘Undermine you, perhaps. I can work with that, but I’m not so sure about the humiliation thing. Look, give it a few weeks and then maybe it will have all blown over and you two can re-establish some kind of working harmony.’

  Clive Wilson drains what remains of his wine in one gulp, and then he leans in closer.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Keith, I don’t want to push the girl too much. What if she starts sending these emails to head office or to the local press? At least at the moment it’s all reasonably under control, wouldn’t you say? Right now, we both know what we’re dealing with. Another drink?’

  He watches as his boss gently shoulders his way to the bar. On the positive side, a few weeks’ leave means that he won’t have to write the stupid policy report on trans-racial adoption. He assumes that Lesley Thornton will be put in charge of his depa
rtment, which makes perfect sense given the fact that before her last promotion she used to run Women’s Affairs, and so she at least has some knowledge of his newly expanded responsibilities. Race Equality initiatives will, presumably, be put on hold. Maybe Clive is trying to ease him out, or perhaps he is seeking to increase Lesley’s portfolio? However, the more he thinks about Clive’s motives the more he realises that he simply doesn’t care. Time away from the whole Race Equality, Disability and Women’s Affairs circus is what he needs, and if temporary humiliation is the price he has to pay to escape the clutches of the local authority for a few weeks, then he is ready to pay. A grinning Clive Wilson walks triumphantly towards him clutching two more large glasses of wine, one white and one red. He decides that he will drink his wine quickly and leave Clive Wilson alone in the bar where, as the evening wears on, his boss will no doubt run into old friends or simply make new ones.