The Extinction of Snow Read online

  What do you want to do, he countered, underlining the pronoun in his question? If you are saying that you want to decorate the house for Christmas – again emphasising the pronoun – that seems to me a wholly different matter. What could I do but agree with him. Yes, I said, with shyness and a modicum of embarrassment, as if truly caught out, I want to decorate the house for Christmas. And in my mind I added, because I owe it to Joseph. Can a counsellor really be so naïve to think we ever do anything entirely for ourselves, or entirely for others? There is no such freedom on the face of the earth. The germ of every thought was planted somewhere, sometimes in fertile soil, sometimes on scrubland. We are subject to too many cords and binds to be anything but prisoners with privileges. But maybe he knows that well enough, after all he is always trying to get me to talk about my father, something I steadfastly smile away.

  Our usual beautiful objects have been packed away, replaced by temporary seasonal ones, but of course all of our Christmas things are beautiful too, painted wood and brass bells, ornaments and candlesticks, nothing ho ho ho, our taste one of a former age. There is a tree in the hallway, not as large as usual but still impressive, decorated with small wooden ornaments, brass pendants, small intricately painted baubles and white lights. We are obviously serious and sober-minded people, if not entirely sober, nothing gimmicky allowed.

  Beneath the tree I’ve put Joseph’s letters he left for Father Christmas together with the sketches he did for him. It was a tradition to leave sherry for Father Christmas and a carrot for his reindeer. John would drink the sherry whilst I bit into the carrot, leaving a chewed end. It was Joseph himself, just a child, who started leaving thank you letters and a present of a sketch, usually of Father Christmas himself, a portrait improving year by year. The letter always said thank you for last year’s presents, and began by listing them, faithfully recalling the twelve month’s previous offerings, but as he got older his memory wasn’t quite as good. Either he had more on his mind or got more used to receiving things. We were never averse to spoiling our solitary offspring. I always left a little note in reply, saying what a good boy he’d been and how pleased I was with him and letting him know how much I loved him. I wrote it with my left-hand hoping to disguise my handwriting, maintain the illusion. I was very happy being the left-handed Father Christmas. Joseph was quite happy to let the illusion go on forever. I don’t recall that he ever let on that he didn’t believe anymore. I wonder if that was for my benefit, a sentimental left-handed Father Christmas, who wasn’t a father at all but Mother Christmas, though John was always beside me resplendent in a red dressing-gown.

  The first joke Joseph ever got was a Christmas joke. What do you call Father Christmas’s wife? Mary Christmas. I remember his face lighting up, and his saying: Oh, I get that one. Of course, Joseph needn’t have worried about me. I never did believe in Father Christmas. My sensible, hard-nosed sister Vivien ensured that. On the very first Christmas I ever remember she took me into our parents’ room and disclosed the presents hidden beneath the bed, jeering at me for being so stupid. I’ve never believed in anything, not God, not angels, not Father Christmas, Mary Christmas or ghosts – sadly not ghosts, though I am haunted. We always made a big thing of his birthday, never mixing it with Christmas, one big present or anything like that. He had to feel special. We were that sort of parents.

  Have I been a good parent? Was I? I never felt I was. I always seemed to be playing catch-up. No sooner did I feel that I understood something, than it was over and he was doing something else, being someone else, moving away from me and constructing an identity I couldn’t influence. I was left high and dry, moonfaced, without a moon’s ability to conduct the seas and oceans. The world proved just too big. I remember once when he went on a school trip, all the way to York to see the Vikings, during the five days he was away there was a coach crash involving school children close by and two children died. At the same time two children were caught up in a shooting incident close to a nursery. I remember asking myself how I could ever protect him. The forces ranged against me were so great, too great. I knew even then that I was destined to fail.

  Maybe that’s why I collected everything he ever did, trying to keep him safe, securing each step of the way. I kept it all, splodges, toddler sketches, nascent shapes, his first interpretation of his world, the budding scientist revealed in every line: collages of witches done in charcoal, calendars, mother’s day cards, father’s day cards, Easter cards, Christmas cards – the growing skill and accumulation of a life dear to me. I secreted it all away in the loft like an archivist.

  Everything is still there, along with all the small gifts he brought into the house, tea-cups from Brighton, models of Leeds castle, soldiers from somewhere or other, and a bust of Shakespeare from Stratford, silly socialised objects too tacky to keep, too precious to dispose of, relegated from shelf to cupboard and then to loft, the lumber of a lifetime’s trivial marvels. A lifetime’s! It doesn’t seem possible. But adulthood was there, waiting with its ceremonies of initiation: the first time drunk, first experience of sex, and whatever new experience this generation invented that mine knew nothing of. For my part there was never any shock, which shocks me now, simply wonder. Where will these irreversible experiences lead the no longer innocent? The fearful world never barked or hollered, never let on about its pack mentality, it just waited licking its lips.

  At times it didn’t feel as if I was bringing him up but trying to tame him, make him fit into a world over which he had no choice. As parents, or maybe as a mother dragging the father along, we were obsessed by outcome, too obsessed by it. How would it all turn out? The outcome of personality, the outcome of education, the outcome of this, that and the other. We thought as long as he was settled and secure, clean and prosperous, socially conscious, a good person, then we had done well, done our job well. Well, outcome is lying dead on a back road in France. So what was it all fucking well for?

  I am sacred, comfot me. What was he saying? How can it all end with that? I should have let him be, not tried to make him anything. The outcome might have been different. It all could have been different. I would so much settle for mediocrity now. I inhabit a house of misconceived purposes.

  I put down his notes and sketches, which I’ve held, I suppose, as if it were his flesh I could hold, and the replies of a left-handed failure, without reading them. I can’t do it again. The pleasure is too great and liable to blow me to smithereens. I can’t deal with such pleasure at the minute. Besides, they all signal that final note, I am sacred, comfot me, and I have no reply to that, only questions, concern. Oh God, what was he asking, what was he saying, and why am I so incompetent in knowing? There is something wrong, something very wrong, something to be discovered.

  I rush back to my wine and drink as if it were life sustaining medicine, greedily, with far too much drama for my liking. I hold up the bottle and find it is three quarters gone and it is still only mid-evening. Another drink and I’ll be fit for nothing but another, and then another until there is only sleep. If I pause now – I’m not fool enough to say stop – I may manage to read something, or at the very least collapse in front of the television and take something in. There might be something worth watching, it’s the season for entertainment, television keeping it going almost as well as John and I. But who am I trying to kid. I top up my glass but walk away from the bottle as if I were successfully achieving two things at once.

  I think about how else I might have constructed my life. I have resisted the thought for a long time. It seems disloyal. I don’t want any other past life, though I would admit the present is not something of which I’d boast. The thought is one of accidents and choices. I see it in imagination like a child’s construction game, building new shapes, alternate shapes, one after the other like so many pieces of crazy sculpture. What if I’d moved somewhere else, trained differently, married a different man, where would I be tonight? Everything about me has been built gradually, brick by brick, until I’m
fixed in my own woman’s twenty-first century. And it might never have been, might never have existed. What if I’d stayed with Frank?

  He said he knew the precise moment he went mad – he called it madness. It was a brief moment, a tableau, I suppose, during a life drawing class. He caught sight of the model, standing in a rather bored, classical pose, in a mirror, and his mind instantaneously ran wild with the question as to whether he had really seen her naked or not. From that catastrophic moment he could never believe he was seeing anyone naked – I think he meant it both literally and metaphorically, but he never enlarged on ideas, ambiguity and paradox being everything. I guess that was why he seemed so desperate when we had sex, determined to feel the reality of something that eluded him. He was right of course. Sex is the most consensual act of which we are capable, allowing someone to penetrate you beyond the mirror – a gift so easily squandered. Of course he was using a lot of drugs at the time, but so was everyone.

  He was always on edge, always extrovert, unpredictable. He would shout aloud in the street, bizarre slogans, deliberately incomprehensible, determined to shock a public who probably feared violence and were in no way impressed. One day he screamed into the face of a passing teenager, a boy, the insulting sentence: You’re so boring. His face was contorted, the muscles in his neck extended, the final word elongated, snarled. The boy looked bewildered, humiliated. I’m sure, afterwards, he would have considered numerous responses: hitting out, swearing, maybe even something witty, though probably not, but deep down there would always be the burden of that judgement of unjust exhibitionism. Because, it was, of course, exhibitionism. I always felt he was more inclined to that than madness. It didn’t mean that he didn’t end up on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs. Of course, all artists want to exhibit and each chooses the effect they wish and work for: to please, to excite, to shock. It’s a mistake to settle for – to bore.

  He certainly used to bore me with the tedious excitement of his drug life, the stupid details of quantities in a syringe, the absurd vocabulary strictly for those in the know or those who pretended they were, the banal jokes and aggressive humour, the vanity of addiction. He clung to it as if it were an antidote to ageing. How could he be growing old when he had so many of a young man’s paradoxes? But he was old, old and burnt out, old way beyond his years, too lazy to countenance a new thought, too lazy to admit he’d let himself down, so he blamed art, or rather the business of art, the need to get shown and make sales. The truth is his drug images were crass, holy relics of false gods, worth nothing.

  I loved him though, or at least I had loved him. It took me a long time to work that out, and for a long time I failed to recognize the difference. I used to visit him in hospital and listen to his tirades, for many of which I became the butt. It seemed right to persist. Maybe I felt it was part of my correction, to hold him, try and keep him clean, keep him sane, something to amend for my former impatience and fault. I continued to visit him after I was married, at first in a hostel and then in a bed-sit he called his studio. He couldn’t work then, and survived on benefits. I don’t know why I continued to sleep with him. I’d like to say it was an act of charity, an act that disgusts me now, but that wouldn’t be true. Maybe I was just as intrigued by the mirror as he was. I always assumed that John didn’t know, but now I’m not so sure. He certainly knew I went and never discouraged it. He was gentle after my visits, and would touch me tentatively, carefully, as if he understood an old wound was gaping and still liable to pain. He should have put his foot down and made me stop. What would my counsellor say about my infidelity, I wonder, and more to the point, why have I never mentioned it? I’m not supposed to have secrets and yet there are so many.

  I go back to the bottle and drink a couple of glasses quickly. My nerves calm.

  The wind is strong. It blows in the chimney and in the roof space. I go to the window and look out. In the street the bare cherry trees wave spindly branches. The wind makes screeching noises. This is usually a quiet street, a retreat close to the centre of things. The wind is exposing it. It seems visible in the yellow arcs of the streetlights. Bits of rubbish are blown along. I feel myself, my malformed thoughts, tumble with each piece. Of course, I am drinking, my brain turning to mush. I don’t know whether I have started earlier or later than usual. It is after dark and that will do. I am disintegrating into shadow and artificial light, blown to pieces by the elements. If only I could make that feeling complete I might even feel content.

  I go back to the Christmas tree, sit on the floor and clutch Joseph’s notes to me. The feeling is just absence. He isn’t here. He isn’t here and I so badly want him here. I want to see my son, share something, a word, a smile, anything. But, of course, he hardly ever was here, so why should I feel his absence? He usually was absent. He was married, a father; he occupied his own world. His absence is nothing out of the ordinary. This absence is how it was. He has been long gone. My mind sinks at the thought. A dull vegetative state overwhelms me. I feel nothing. A small devil’s voice whispers that maybe this is restoration, recovery. Yes, he was absent, that is what happens between parent and child, one leaves the other, and the rupture is harsh but heals. But almost immediately a greater voice, the mother voice, goes wild and tears that pretend inner sanctuary to shreds. My child is dead. There is no peace, no solace, no hope. I have no word to describe what I feel. It isn’t pain. Pain is one of the non-special senses. Pain tells me where I am, stops me burning myself on fire or ice. What I’m feeling doesn’t tell me where I am just where I’m not. And it is special, very special.

  I replace his notes beneath the tree. There are telltale damp patches. As so often I have been crying without knowing it. I can’t go on like this. It is impossible. I have to make this stop. I return to the dining room, to the wine bottle. I fill my glass. I need courage. I take it to the window, part the curtain and again look out at the wind, or rather the wind’s action. My face appears in the glass, lines indistinct, a ghost, a thing devoid of substance. I pull the curtain behind me and I disappear, banished. It was simple. The street is empty. Only the wind occupies it and that is only a sound.

  I get down onto my knees and peer out. I imagine snow, a heavy fall, silent, dense and overwhelming. It is the right time for such a fall, such a covering. It would reshape the street, make it glitter, fill it with infinite variety, each crystal unique. I’m sure I remember such falls, such depth, such silence. It’s been a long time. Maybe I will never see it again. It will never exist again. A world without snow. An extinction of snow. What would be real then? Everything would have to be imagined, imagined rather than remembered. Of course, so much is like snow, imagined rather than remembered. But why make so much about snow? It connects me, I suppose, makes me a little girl again, a little girl now, a girl with dreams, a girl with thoughts. And so it goes. I have to touch something real. I have to know what Joseph meant. I am sacred, comfot me. It is so obvious; I have to go to France. I have to know what happened to my son, that is the choice I have, the choice I take. I need to know that snow exists.

  Chapter Four

  The first thing I had to do was see Sara and the child. How is it that I have left it so long? I can’t deny it felt good to call Vivien and tell her that I couldn’t make her pamper session as I had something to do. I whispered that I was moving on, which is true in some respects and a lie in so many others.

  When Joseph and Sara were first married they lived in Chiswick in a nice flat, very modern and pristine, something of a show-home, though perhaps more show than home, fine lines of stainless steel and marble, uncluttered and simple, black and white denoting a very contemporary version of truth. At least I saw Joseph then, though rarely Sara. He worked in a small laboratory in Ealing, separate to the company proper which was somewhere in Surrey. He said they liked to keep the science and the sales apart. He was still partly employed by the university then, funded by the company to research their drugs. I presume he was good at what he did because they wanted him to com
e to them full time. I have never thought about whether he was really happy then, newly married, his career developing, funds apparently no object, because I wasn’t happy for him. I assumed he shared my scepticism. But why should that be? We never exchanged notes, not even a sidelong glance.

  I have to accept that he loved Sara and still would love Sara. Later, when he went to the company full time – I think it was called Polymed then, later PMP and later still Rennstadt – they had to relocate north. They both termed it relocate. They certainly were not moving, which would imply a permanence that they both deigned to despise. Of course they were right. Joseph ended up in France. A country isn’t big enough to hold them now. The market is global – or is it that the globe is a market? I suppose they would have contested the idea of having a home. They had houses, purchases on the road to somewhere that was never quite defined.

  I was surprised when Sara stayed in Leeds. My understanding was that she hated it. They moved three times in a year, from a town centre flat to a large house on the edge of a park to a house in a cul-de-sac in an estate of houses. I would have judged the final choice her least favourite, but that is where she stayed and remains. That is where I shall find her. She has little or no reason to welcome me now. Our ties are very loose, though there is Georgia, my granddaughter. I haven’t seen her for over six months, not since the funeral. On that day I scarcely spoke to Sara. I don’t know how that happened; it just turned out that way. I should be suspicious of such a claim. The unconscious is very good at protecting itself. If two women fail to speak there is something at play. But who was the culprit, me or her, or are we equally culpable. I think our equality is something we struggle with.