The Extinction of Snow Page 14

  I tell Bill that I don’t want to do anything today. I have something I need to do alone. He asks me if I can share this task with him. I tell him he knows fine well how I feel about it. He injects a note of passion into his voice and tells me he wants to help. I shake my head. This is for me to do. He looks furious and remonstrates with me. Surely I owe it to him to let him help. I find his choice of words preposterous. I tell him that I don’t owe him anything. He looks crushed, suddenly like an overgrown boy, awkward and uncertain. I should explain that I have to do this alone. I am the mother, a woman, strong in purpose and character. I have grown up believing in women. My destiny lies in this. The music is mine. I make connections. It’s what I do.

  I say nothing of the sort and instead change the subject and ask him how it is he can afford so much time from work. He shrugs and says it’s just the nature of the job. I ask him what it is he does. He shrugs again and says it’s just something in import and export. I smile and say he makes it sound mildly criminal. I have succeeded in making him smile. When we part he asks me to keep him informed. He says he cares, wants to help, wants the opportunity. I smile but say nothing except that I’ll see him later. He says I will, emphasising it, insisting on it. He makes the insistence sound slightly menacing, but that’s me, my interpretation. We kiss and part. It strikes me as strange. I wipe my mouth which has become a habit.

  Paris remains bitterly cold. Over recent years February in London has been like spring. I wasn’t prepared for this. It keeps attempting to snow but doesn’t quite materialize. I don’t know whether it has snowed elsewhere in the country. I suppose it is likely. I obviously take no notice of the television. I only put it on as a challenge to see how much I can comprehend. I’m improving with each new day. Maybe that is another reason for delay, postponing the important call, vanity, my need to do it right, grammatically speaking. I go down to Trinité, towards splendid Paris, a stone’s throw away from Opera and Galeries Lafayette, a normal world of expensive retail. I feel I am doing something very strange indeed.

  I go into a telephone booth. I read the instructions three times. I take deep, difficult breaths. I can feel my heart-beat thumping inside my chest. I am tempted to walk out, go to the shops, lose myself, but resist. It is too late for such minor indulgence. I am committed.

  Finally I call the number. A high-pitched young woman’s voice announces: “Allo, Médecin Sans Frontières.” I don’t immediately reply. I expected to talk directly. I feel flustered, all my carefully prepared phrases lost. She impatiently repeats: “Allo, Médecin Sans Frontières.”

  Eventually I stammer: “Allo, est ce que je pourrais parler à Dominique Dufour, s’il vous plait.”

  “Ne quittez pas. Je vous la passé.”

  I wait nervously, dizzy with concern, struggling against the desire to break off, to abandon the mystery, leave it in a phone booth in Trinité, and then she comes on the line: “Allo, Dominique Dufour.” Her voice is hushed, rather husky, full of richness.

  “Je m’appelle Madame Tennant, Louise Tennant.” There is a period of silence, silence in which my heart floats, no longer beating but quite stilled. “Je suis la mere de Joseph.”

  “Yes, hello Mrs Tennant.” The sound of English calms, eases the tension. At least I will be able to talk.

  “I was given your number.”

  “Yes, that is all right. Where are you?”

  “I am in a phone booth in Trinité.”

  “You are here, à Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not know.”

  “I was told that you would talk to me.”

  “Not now. Meet me for lunch. You are at Trinité. Let me think. Go to Madeleine and then Bastille. I am in Rue St Sabin. But don’t come here. I will meet you in Bastille.”

  “But how? How will I know you?”

  “Do not worry. I’ll stand at the corner of Rue de la Roquette, outside the Metro. I have a pink and white coat, the pattern in squares. Say to me, excuse me but do you know Paris.”

  I repeat the words, my voice feeble, disbelieving: “Excuse me but do you know Paris?”

  “Yes, good. And you have the street?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Rue de la Roquette.”

  “It is a nice street. All right?”

  “No wait.”

  “What?”

  “When? You didn’t say when.”

  “Sorry. Yes, of course. At one o’clock. At the corner. Don’t be late.”

  The line goes dead, the termination abrupt. There is something fearful in that, something that causes a woman to forego formalities towards another woman. It implies a message that isn’t ordinary. But I am seeing everything second-hand, gradually being brought to the reality of something I am only seeing in a mirror at the moment. The reality terrifies me. How far from known things will this reality take me, my dead son, killed on continental soil. Is that what broke Frank into pieces, fear of the real thing. In his case that of a naked woman. He never seemed afraid of me, not in bed, beneath him, subject to him. He didn’t complain about women, he complained about everything. But Frank was a drug head, his brains disconnected. And they would have me believe that of Joseph. Well I refuse it.

  Perhaps I have never known him as I once fervently believed I did, but they can’t make a complete stranger out of him. There was a bond, there was a commitment. I don’t believe the story as it is constructed. There must be other reflections. I am ready to brave whatever Dominique Dufour has to say. The trouble is, looking at the time, I have three hours to wait. I don’t want to stray too far. My directions are from Trinité. At that thought I almost burst into laughter. The idea is ridiculous. I know my destination. I will know it from anywhere. I know Paris. I head for the shops. After all, they are warm.

  I arrive far too soon. Of course I had the injunction not to be late. It makes me wary of Dominique Dufour, the fact that she feels able to command me like a recruit; though with her husky, exquisite voice I can’t really think that she will overpower me. My thoughts are running wild, my heart racing, my stomach churning, body and mind suffering together. I am absurdly early, thirty minutes to get through. Maybe I don’t really know Paris, the time required, the distances that can be covered. I pride myself that I came here from Chausee d’Antin not Trinité which is a petty bit of vanity and entirely misplaced. I am learning too much about mother and son.

  There is nothing for it but to wander around Place de la Bastille. John says that for him history began with two revolutions, one industrial and one political, the first thanks to a peruke maker from Compton, the second thanks to the release of seven bemused prisoners from the fortress here. He says the enjoyment of history is that it is possible to move freely between centuries seeing entire movements of thought, the constructions of religion, the nation state and empire, revolution and revision. He reads in it an endless struggle for freedom. He cares a great deal about freedom. I don’t suppose he would be pleased by the freedom I have shown.

  The sky has turned blue, the sunlight hard and brittle. The air is cold but bone dry. There is still some wind but it has no strength, though it remains sharp and biting. The sunshine makes Place de la Bastille seem larger. I feel less hemmed in. Naturally the Bastille is a symbol of release. It seems a worthy feeling to have prior to my meeting. I might actually have some courage, a residue of strength. I start to look for her, even though it is still early. For a second or two I think I see Bill across the square. It’s absurd, of course, revealing my need for an ally, one that I shunned, a need I told myself was unwomanly. If he were here would I welcome him? It is too early to say. Whoever it was is gone in a flash. I stroll towards the corner of Rue de la Roquette. Five minutes ahead of schedule she appears, a woman in a very smart pink and white checked coat. Coming close to her I can see she is above medium height, has auburn hair brushed back from her forehead and hanging loosely around her ears. Her face is an attractive oval, her parted lips delicate,
well defined. She has a roll-neck top, the collar braided and beneath it a string of gold. Dominique Dufour is a striking creature. I approach her, smile, and say: “Excuse me, but do you know Paris.”

  “Hello, Mrs Tennant, Joseph’s mother, it is very good to meet you,” she replies, her voice thick and contained. She looks around, and shivers a number of times as if the breeze were penetrating deeply into her. “Come, we’ll have a drink and a sandwich, two friends meeting for lunch.”

  She turns and directs us down Rue de la Roquette. As we walk she asks about my stay in Paris, how long I have been here and what I have been doing. I lie, saying that I have been here a couple of days only and that I have taken in the sights. I make no mention of Bill. She wonders why I waited before contacting her. I reply that I was scared. She doesn’t question that word at all, but rather purses her lips as if it were entirely understandable. The café she chooses is large and open, spread over two levels, five steps leading to the upper. There is music playing loudly. There are posters across one wall advertising forthcoming bands. The place is full of young people, students I suppose, given the bags, the files and the way they are. She tells me it is a safe place to talk. What am I to make of such a pronouncement? I smile. The gesture strikes me as ludicrous, but Dominique Dufour takes it as meaningful and returns it in kind.

  “I was told that you would speak to me,” I begin, having come this far wanting to hurry things, hear whatever she has to tell me about Joseph.

  She smiles airily, raises her hand and wafts her fingers in front of her like a delicate basking fish, suggesting caution. At this moment the waitress comes to take our order. Dominique takes charge, suggesting that a sandwich is probably enough, sandwiches and tea. I comply with everything. I have no appetite, no feeling in my body. “It’s good to eat,” she says, as if she knows my feeling, though she might mean something else entirely. I want to reply but can think of no suitable response. She waits until the waitress has gone away and then asks: “Who told you to speak to me?”

  “I was told you would speak to me.”

  “But who?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it was someone called Amy, Amy Tomlin, but she said not.”

  She sighs quietly, her expression mildly downcast: “You see, that could be a concern or nothing. I don’t know. That is always the problem, things which don’t exist, things which do. I do not know the percentage. Is fear just a fragment or the most? And you Mrs Tennant, how do I know about you?”

  I am surprised to be asked to prove myself. I can’t immediately work out the enormity of that. I feel the stirrings of anger, but know that is misplaced. My loss, my grief, my being adrift, my being here, state everything. But I can’t bring myself to blurt out such things, not because I have made them private, but that they seem threatened. I simply say: “I don’t know.”

  “No, don’t worry Mrs Tennant, I accept you.”

  “Can you tell me about Joseph?”

  She shrugs and skews her face: “He was angry, an angry man, sometimes an angry boy. Sometimes it was like a little boy tantrum, and then grown-up, but you will know that.”

  I know that he had sad tantrums, outbursts of frustration when something was over. He had tantrums after Christmas, because he hated it being over, Christmas and his birthday, the excitement, the pleasure. I shake my head. “What was he angry about?”

  “His work.”

  “I know that he had lost his job.”

  “I don’t know that he had lost his work, I think perhaps the work lost him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he was caught . . .” Just as she is beginning to explain herself the waitress brings our tea. Dominique asks for a pot of boiling water, and says to me that if she drinks tea it has to be very weak. The tea is for me. I tell her that I prefer weak tea too. Such trivia will either bind us or break us. The waitress goes again and Dominique picks up her thread. “I know he really wanted his work and I think believed in it very much. I think he was proud actually. And I would ask, why not? We should never let our concerns and scepticism blind us to the truth of things. His work was very good. I understood that to be the case. But the things he was asked to work on made him change.”

  “Change?” I ask, already feeling the weight of the word, its permutations of altered identity, a lost son, someone removed from me, becoming a vagrant exile. And I suppose that change has made me an internal exile, sentenced to my own confined wandering, caught in a world without substance, its realities glass.

  “I mean he couldn’t ignore some of the corrupt practices that went on. He wasn’t able to continue. In the end he had to go. That was difficult for him.”

  “You mean he left his job voluntarily?”

  “It is not the right word, but yes, of course. He came to us and said he could give details of research being cancelled because the company thought it would threaten profit, and research being suppressed because it would damage the launch of a drug, damage the whole company.”

  “Research that Joseph was involved in?”

  “Yes his research. At least to begin. At first he was in London and it was his research. He was looking at proteins in the brain and how they form plaques that lead to dementia.”

  “He was working on dementia?”

  “Proteins, yes. Something to stop the protein developing in the first place.”

  I feel a great surge of sympathy and concern. Of course he would want to research the proteins and plaques of Alzheimer’s disease. It was only natural. But does that reveal something of how he saw his grandfather, and then his father and himself in turn? I always play the game of continuing personality, disregarding anyone who suggests loss and bereavement. I get angry at the carers in the home for the facile way they jolly John’s father along and take no account of his mind.

  On one visit he told me that everything was white, the walls white, the floor white, the people white, even the bread white. There is a theory, a theory of love, that states that human beings need comfort, attachment, inclusion but also occupation. I’m sure he is dying of boredom. Of course I make out that his dementia words are next to mystical, but would I have him back, master again of his wooden sky-blue sea house, of course I would.

  “Was his research successful?”

  “No, no, I do not believe so. His research wouldn’t do anything for those with the disease, so the company saw no profit in it. But the work on proteins revealed something else, something about the mechanism of autoimmune response, the way proteins triggered certain reactions at the neural synapse. Some work was instigated to look at the relief of pain in arthritis. Joseph was asked to work on that, but very quickly he started finding problems. When they managed to inhibit the autoimmune response they found small deposits building in the brain. They might have been nothing but they might have been something.”

  “But what did Joseph conclude?”

  “He didn’t. He was moved. He had to leave London. I don’t know where he went after that. I was told, but I forget.”

  “Leeds.”

  “Yes, that is it. Leeds. I have no experience.”

  The waitress brings our sandwiches and pot of hot water. Dominique stops speaking. She immediately reaches for a sandwich and starts eating, only nodding her gratitude as the waitress departs. I find I have no appetite at all. We have ham and salami sandwiches. The thought of the salami almost makes me retch. I don’t know why that should be. I have learnt nothing of Joseph that is taboo or disturbing. It is understandable that he hadn’t told me what he was working on. He probably thought it impossible to tell me. I was always telling him his grandfather was just the same, going on about the beautiful things he said. It was obvious he would want to work on it, why wouldn’t he?

  Eventually Dominique dabs her mouth with a napkin and continues speaking: “I don’t know what he was supposed to be working on in Leeds but he heard things from London, rumours, stories. Things were not quite right with the results.”

  “Who
told him?”

  Dominique smiles, eats another piece of sandwich, and then sips her tea before continuing. “The food here is very nice. You should eat something. I have no idea who told him. A colleague, a friend.”

  “Dr Tomlin.”

  Dominique raises her hand in objection. “If the person in question has not spoken to me I don’t want to know.”

  “Why not? If research is producing adverse results then it is in everyone’s interest to have that data known before . . . Well, before too much money is wasted for one thing, and before something terrible happens.”

  “Can you imagine the amounts of money involved, Mrs Tennant?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “The figures are colossal. Something to address the pain of arthritis would take any company into the bracket of the very richest. They are not going to halt research on the evidence of a few speculative protein deposits.”

  “But these things would come to light. Research standards are rigorous. Joseph said things had to be tested and tested again, proven to work by others, open to peer review.”

  “I’ll tell you how it works, Mrs Tennant. A new drug can make a company phenomenally rich and therefore also anyone involved in getting that drug to the market and off the shelves. A new drug creates a lot of noise, miracle cure, miracle drug, claims which the companies do nothing to dampen. The advertisers from the company tell a journal they’ll give it say, $100,000, to run a special edition on the particular drug, plus they’ll give the journal so much per reprint. The company suggests the so called best experts on the drug and also the editor for the edition. The company then contacts everyone who has ever said anything good about the product and invites them to fly first-class to, let us say, Madrid or Chicago to a symposium with the guarantee that their paper will be published in the special issue of the journal, so another publication for the c.v. After that the company can show doctors a digest of the work of the symposium.