In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  ‘Do you have a job in Poland?’

  ‘I work with young children. Before they go to school.’

  ‘Kindergarten. That’s what they call it here. A kindergarten school.’

  ‘The word is similar in Polish. I am a teacher, but I want to open an international kindergarten, for foreign children too. Children of businessmen and diplomats.’

  ‘More money, right?’

  ‘Of course, more money. But first I must improve my English. It is good to have conversation.’

  ‘Is that why you agreed to have a drink with me? For my conversation?’

  ‘Perhaps this is the reason.’ She grins, and then she bursts out laughing as though unable to contain herself any longer. ‘You are a very stupid man.’

  He smiles quickly, and then he stands and takes the empty glass from her proffered hand. In the kitchen he refills both glasses, and then replaces the nearly empty bottle in the fridge. He catches a glimpse of himself in the dark kitchen window. He should know better. Where is all of this leading to? A quick fumble on the sofa, and then into the bedroom, leaving the lights on in the living room, the music playing, and the wine glasses still full? Perhaps they will scatter a trail of clothes behind them, or will they both have the discipline to wait until they get into the bedroom before they start peeling off the layers? And then what about all that confusion with the lights in the bedroom? Will they go for dim lighting, which will mean a quick timeout and crossing to the bedside lamp; or no lighting at all, which is maybe too weird; or perhaps a compromise and leave the door ajar so that some light from the living room is able to leak in? And then immediately afterwards, the sudden panic about contraception and disease. And she is probably the type of girl who after sex likes to roll up on to her elbow for a cigarette and talk. And will she be staying the night, or will he want her to leave straight away so that he can read or watch television? And what will she expect? A relationship? A phone number? Dinner? Suddenly it all seems extremely complicated, and as he continues to stare at himself in the kitchen window he wonders if indecision really is a sign of ageing.

  ‘Would you like to stay?’

  He hands her the refilled glass of wine.

  ‘What do you mean “stay”?’

  ‘I mean longer. We could order some food. Chinese. Indian. Whatever you like, they’ll deliver.’

  ‘I think I have to go now. But I like this music. It is very nice. May I know the name of the man who is playing?’

  ‘Wynton Marsalis.’

  He crosses to the CDs that are neatly stacked in a revolving tower. Skimming down from the top he identifies, and then plucks out, seven CDs by Marsalis and shuffles them like a deck of cards. He squares their edges, and then hands them to the girl. He wants her to be fascinated by the music, to ask him more questions, to give him the opportunity to share his knowledge with her. The more he gazes at this Danuta’s mop of blonde hair, and her chewed nails and nicotine-stained fingers, the more he wants to know about her. She looks at the artwork on the covers and then, one at a time, she places them down on the coffee table before eventually reclaiming her glass of wine.

  ‘You say you do not have a wife, so who is this woman in the photograph?’

  She points to a small headshot in a stainless steel frame that is tucked away on the windowsill behind the television. He is surprised that she has spotted it, but he is coming to terms with the fact that she seems far more interested in her surroundings than she is in him.

  ‘That’s Brenda. She’s my father’s wife.’

  ‘But she is not your mother.’

  ‘No, she’s not. To be more accurate I should say she used to be his wife.’

  ‘But you do not have a picture of your mother, and you do not have a picture of your father, but you have a picture of your father’s wife?’

  He has noticed that she likes to phrase her questions as mildly accusatory statements of fact, but he is unsure if this reflects her combative character or if it is just evidence of her inexperience with the English language. He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘If you do not wish to talk about these things then this is good with me.’

  ‘I’d rather talk about you.’

  She laughs now and reaches both hands up to the top of her head, where she bundles her hair together and then holds it in place with one hand as she takes the plastic clip from her pocket. The girl then pulls her hair back and secures it so that her whole face seems brighter and more attractive. The young can do this. He has noticed it on the tube, in the street, in his office, young women who by undoing a button, or putting on some lip gloss, or hooking in a pair of earrings can suddenly, and dramatically, transform themselves as though they have plugged themselves in to an energy source. She walks to the window where she picks up the small framed photograph and looks closely at the image of Brenda, before replacing it and then peering down into the darkness. He notices the irritating flicker from the faulty streetlamp that is clearly visible through the window. Last month he urged Ruth to write to the appropriate department of the local authority and suggest that they immediately send somebody out to fix the problem. Apparently, either Ruth forgot to write, or the email landed on the screen of somebody who must have deemed his request low-priority. Danuta turns from the window and appraises the small flat as though considering whether or not she should buy the place. And then her eyes alight upon the present occupant.

  ‘You like women or you like men, or both?’

  ‘I have no interest in men.’ He pauses. ‘Well at least not in that way.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never seen the point. I have enough trouble with women.’

  He realises that she has teased out of him a little more than he intended to say. He will have to be careful for, until the night he told Annabelle about the encounter in the New Forest, he had no idea that the urge to confession played any part in his character. She leaves the window and sits back down.

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’d like you to stay.’

  ‘I work, Mr Keith. I have to go to work or how else do I pay for my English lessons.’

  Well, he thinks, you’ve just had a free conversation class. Perhaps you can skip work tonight and keep me company.

  ‘One for the road?’

  He stands, picks up her glass, and gently touches her shoulder as he passes behind her. He tops her up and then quickly washes out the bottle and puts it by the sink with the empty Perrier and Gatorade bottles ready for recycling. The metal cap he pushes into the tall swing bin, and then he carefully carries her glass back into the living room. As he hands her the wine, he ignores the wooden chair and sits next to her on the sofa. They clink glasses, drink, and then he replaces his glass on the table and turns to face her. He reaches over and gently cups the right side of her face in his left palm and feels the softness of her skin.

  ‘You know, you’re quite beautiful.’

  She looks at him, but says nothing. He stretches out his other hand so that her face now sits in the chalice that he has created. His eyes lock with hers, but he is conscious that he must not hold this pose for too long. He leans forward to kiss her, but at the last moment she twists her head offering him a cheek and withdrawing her face at the same time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to do anything to cause offence.’

  Suddenly, the confidence seems to have drained out of her and she stares at him, her eyes moist with what he imagines is disappointment.

  ‘At night I am a cleaner. I work in an office building so I must go and do my job.’ She puts down her glass of wine and stands. ‘I do not wish to be late.’

  To be misunderstood, and thereafter disliked, is always hurtful. At work he is a boss, and his colleagues have not always appreciated his gestures of authority, no matter how sensitively he has tried to bestow them. Clive Wilson has occasionally reminded him that he is not paid to win popularity contests, and the discomfort of being misunderstood comes with th
e privilege of being a decision-maker, so he just has to ride it out. Sometimes he can repair the damage of a comment or gesture that is offered in innocence and received with indignation, but more often than not he has learned to say nothing further and trust that time will heal any temporary distress in the workplace. However, as far as women are concerned, he has little experience of how to navigate such awkwardness, and the unfortunate episodes with Lesley and Yvette speak eloquently to this fact. Really, he asks himself, why push it and cross a line with this young woman? He could have waited and seen how things developed and discovered how she wanted to play it, but instead he stupidly does something which makes him feel like he is taking charge and now she is rightly outraged. She moves quickly to pick up her rucksack, and he finds himself stricken with anxiety. Okay, he does want to kiss her, and yes he doesn’t want her to leave, but he also doesn’t want to have full-on sex with her, at least not yet. Jesus Christ, he’s already seen the mess that can get you into. Perhaps some kissing and fooling around, but her eyes indicate that she thinks he wants more than this, and maybe she is even a little saddened that their promising friendship should have been sabotaged by his pitiful impatience.

  ‘I am sorry, but I must leave.’

  He stands and walks with her to the door.

  ‘Will you be getting a cab? There’s a minicab place on the corner, I can walk you there.’

  ‘No, it is not necessary.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

  She silently follows him back down the stairs and he scrambles around in his mind for something to say. He unlocks the front door and holds it wide open so she knows that she is free to go.

  ‘I don’t have a car. It’s just too much hassle in London.’

  He wants to reassure her that he earns more than enough to have a car. That he is a respectable middle-class professional man, not some leering jerk who preys on women. He wants her to know that the attempted kiss wasn’t a clumsy gesture of foreplay, with the next stage already programmed in his seedy mind. He likes her, even though she is a little bit chippy. She is a single woman from another country, on her own, learning English. Of course, she has to be a little bit chippy to survive. He understands, he gets it, it’s fine.

  ‘Thank you for the drink, Mr Keith. And the conversation.’

  She tosses her rucksack up on to her shoulder and deliberately avoids any eye contact as she sweeps past him.

  One hand holds the edge of the open door, while his other hand is jammed flat against the wall as if to steady himself. She doesn’t look back as she turns right at the gap where there should be a gate, and he watches as she walks up towards the main road. No hug, no peck on the cheek, no wave, just withdrawal and retreat. Poland. Back at college watching Wajda’s Man of Steel and Man of Marble. Solidarity buttons. Lech Walesa as a cool guy before it became clear that he was an anti-Semite. But it’s Poland, right. Home of Treblinka and Auschwitz. You don’t change people’s minds in a couple of generations. What else did he know? Kielbasa sausage, but he’d never tasted it. And Chopin, the man she probably thinks of when she imagines a real composer, not Wynton Marsalis. He closes the door and listens as the metal letterbox rattles noisily, and then he is suddenly enveloped in darkness as the sixty-second delay expires and the light clicks off.

  Back upstairs and in the privacy of his flat, he opens another bottle of wine, this time with a corkscrew, and pours himself a fresh glass. He then scatters a few crackers on a plate and cuts off a hunk of Gruyère, before carrying everything through into the living room. He kicks off his shoes, and puts his feet up on the coffee table, then reaches for the remote control and turns up the volume of the CD player. Strange, but the flat suddenly seems empty without the girl. He again notices the framed image of Brenda’s face on the windowsill and remembers that it was Annabelle who took this portrait. Although Brenda was clearly ill at the time, there is a serene aspect about her in this photograph which he has always liked. At the end of their first year at university, and before Annabelle went back home to do the work experience job that her father had set up for her at the Wiltshire Times, they travelled north together. He had telephoned Brenda as soon as he got the letter and insisted that he would be spending the summer with her, and although she had tried to persuade him just to go ahead with his Inter-Railing plans, his mind was made up. When Annabelle said that she would like to meet Brenda, he called again and having asked her what medicines the doctor had prescribed for her, and checked if she would mind if he did some university work at the city library from time to time, he eventually raised the subject of his previously unmentioned girlfriend. Brenda laughed, then coughed long and hard, before finally asking, ‘Well, is she coming with you or not?’

  Brenda lived in the same modern terraced house in which she had raised him. When his father went into hospital, and it looked as though he might not be coming out any time soon, the West Indian man to whom Brenda and his father paid rent made it clear that he did not want her in his property. He came to collect the rent on a Friday night, and he stood on the doorstep and told Brenda that she had no right to do what she had done so she had better take her white arse out of his place by the end of the month. Brenda slammed the door in the man’s face, but on Monday morning she presented herself at the housing office of the local authority who, having listened to her situation made it their immediate business to find a place for Brenda and her charge on their proud new development. Back then the Whitehall Estate featured tree-lined pedestrian walkways, grassy communal spaces for kids to play in, and concrete benches and tables for parents to sit around and talk with each other. However, within weeks the rope swings and carefully assembled mounds of tyres had been slashed and vandalised, and the sitting areas were defaced with graffiti. Glue-sniffers and clusters of youths with cider bottles seemed now to dominate every underpass and footbridge, and although the model estate was no longer visited by enthusiastic groups of studious-looking men with clipboards and cameras, he never once heard Brenda complain. Their house had underfloor heating, a bathroom upstairs, and out back there was a small fenced garden with a tiny lawn surrounded by a thin border of soil in which Brenda showed him how to plant daffodils and bedding flowers. Brenda couldn’t stand the smell of cat piss, and she was terrified of the neighbour’s Staffordshire bull terrier which occasionally got over the fence, but this didn’t stop her from dragging out a chair on a sunny day, and lighting up a cigarette to accompany her cup of tea, and simply staring contentedly at the world.

  The Brenda who opened the door to the pair of them was not the same Brenda he had last seen almost a year earlier, shortly before he went off to university. The new Brenda seemed stooped, and her hair had been cut short and was styled in a lifeless pageboy cut, but the old Brenda always dressed and looked like she was about to go out on a hen night. Where, he wondered, had her energy gone, but she gave him no time to speculate for right there on the doorstep she immediately folded him into her thin arms and attempted to squeeze him. She eventually let him go and then cast her bright eyes over his companion.

  ‘This is my girlfriend, Annabelle.’

  Brenda smiled and ignored Annabelle’s hand. ‘Well, young lady, don’t I get a hug or don’t you want to crease your fancy togs?’

  He moved to one side and Annabelle stepped forward and leaned in to embrace Brenda, but as they uncoupled Brenda kept hold of Annabelle’s hand. He noticed that the hem was hanging down from Brenda’s housecoat.

  ‘Well, as Keith has no doubt told you, it’s not much of a place but come on in. It’s all I’ve got so if you don’t like it you’ll just have to lump it.’

  She sat them on the sofa opposite her, and she then took up her perch in the armchair that she always occupied to do her knitting, or to watch television.

  ‘I’ll get you a pot of tea in a minute, but I just want to look at the pair of you.’

  As she glanced back and forth from one to the other, he looked around and could see that the house was unch
aracteristically slovenly, with unwashed dishes and newspapers littering both the tabletop and the floor. According to Brenda’s letter, after she was discharged from the infirmary the local authority had apparently provided her with a home help who came in a few times a week, but it was clear to him that Brenda was still struggling.

  ‘Well, isn’t either one of you two lovebirds going to tell me how your journey up here was, or how your first year at university has gone? I am interested, you know.’

  Annabelle stood up. ‘Mrs Gordon, can I make the tea?’

  Brenda laughed. ‘Nobody’s ever called me that, love. Well, not in a good while. How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  Annabelle blushed. ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Well, I reckon you’re old enough to call me Brenda. And yes dear, my throat’s as dry as a dog biscuit, so I’d be grateful if you could make us all some tea while I look at my boy. Everything’s through there in the kitchen.’

  Once Annabelle had passed out of sight, Brenda eased back in her chair and relaxed.

  ‘Have you seen your father?’ He shook his head but wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘You should give him a call.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Because, sweetheart, he’s forty-one years old and he’s still full of anger and confusion in his head. You’re only nineteen. Have a bit of compassion for the silly sod.’

  ‘When he came out of hospital he didn’t have any right to take me away from you or this house.’

  ‘Change the record love, that’s all in the past. He’s your father and he had every right. Anyhow, he was just trying to do what he thought was best, but he’s not perfect. None of us are.’