The Extinction of Snow Page 5

  I remember when my mother asked me to see my father, and she cried at my refusal, that I was heartless to her, dismissive of her facile desire to want to make peace. I didn’t want to make peace, put the past to rest, my anger assuaged. I wanted it to go on and on, the feeling of derision, the desire for revenge. He had made her life hell, a brutalized hell, a shadow of a life, and at the end she wanted absolution, a world made right. Well, I wasn’t the one to do it, to give in. I ridiculed her, told her that her forgiveness stank of hypocrisy, tried to make her see that she didn’t have to do it. I said the dying don’t deserve forgiveness just because they are dying. They should take our contempt to the grave. She didn’t challenge me, just asked me to do it for her. She pointed out that Vivien was there all of the time, and it was only right that I should be too. I despised Vivien’s easy, thoughtless peace. I refused again and again, but in the end I simply ran out of refusals and couldn’t resist her overtures anymore.

  I remember when I went in that he nodded, acknowledging the import of the moment, as I guess we both saw it. And in that nod there was something about wanting but not demanding forgiveness, even a desire to be understood, which I had never considered. His actions, particularly when they were younger, my father and mother, were beyond reason.

  I looked at him sitting in his chair drowning in his own body, his own fluids filling his lungs, yet trying to talk, entertain me with his resilience, and I thought, I want more. I want insight and reasons. I want you to explain what lies behind this. I wanted him to decode the whole human condition – its violence and aggression, its impatience and waste, its acts of charity and dissent, its labours. Instead he struggled on with bland observations about the weather, and accounts of the minor trials of other people’s lives. I left feeling that the answer to the mystery will always be denied us because at the point of knowing the mind is blanked, wisdom annulled for lack of oxygen, clean air unpolluted by sickness.

  Did I manage to forgive him, love him even? Certainly there was no forgiveness, but there was more love than I’d felt remotely possible. It was an abstract, humanitarian love. Maybe, after all, that was wisdom, his parting message. When he died I was glad. My mother remarried shortly after, a much younger man and was very happy for a little while, a decade or so, when she died as well, and I don’t recall that he was ever mentioned again. I always had the sneaking suspicion that she had forgiven herself for something, but for what, and how that worked, I never did understand, and now never can. We either ask too many questions or too few, or simply the wrong ones.

  I watch mother and daughter for a while and then go out to join them, wanting to say something positive to both. I’m sure Sara can hear my approach, besides which Georgia watches me all of the way, but she makes no acknowledgement of my presence.

  “The garden must be lovely in the summer,” I say, “lovely for Georgia to play.”

  Sara stands up, turns to me and calmly says: “I am in prison here. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? I am trapped, and there’s nothing I can do.”

  “I don’t understand Sara.”

  She considers her reply and begins to speak, but any words she might have said fail and instead she purses her lips and shakes her head.

  In some ways it is a more legitimate show of grief, but I am not reassured by it. “Why didn’t you go to France with him if you dislike it so much here?”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Joseph left us. Joseph went to France with another woman.”

  I can’t make sense of the scale of what has been said. I simply look at Sara as if I have been caught out in some acutely embarrassing situation, found naked in the street, not in a dream. Why am I so often naked in company, I asked my counsellor, who smiled, certain that I was conning him. But this is real, demands something of me that I am incompetent to supply. I don’t understand why Sara should seem to be displaying some satisfaction at this moment. Is it one of the worst of human traits to be quietly entranced by misfortune? Do I see myself in that? I would hope not, but can’t deny the possibility. I have no ability but to further the conversation, the confession.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, aware of the absurdity of my words. “He was working. He went to France for the company he was working with.”

  “He left work a year ago, no, more, more than a year. How time flies when you’re having fun.”

  “Don’t Sara,” I say, eyeing her carefully, examining that self-deprecating cynicism. “You don’t have to say things like that.”

  She looks incensed, outraged that I should have an opinion. Perhaps she is right. But I am the mother; I am not immune. “I don’t understand,” I repeat, feeling something wrench within me without understanding it, without being able to say where that feeling rests. The body tears as the mind decomposes. “He wouldn’t leave Georgia,” I insist, saying something aloud that I know has to be true.

  I look towards her. She is entertaining herself, trying to peddle her way across the heavy grass, trying to gather momentum that she doesn’t have. In my mind’s eye she is not capable of entertaining herself. I only see her demanding attention, demanding that any momentum she needs is supplied. I am guilty of ludicrous insinuation and judgement. But would I not also insist that there are Tennant – and Shore, never completely losing myself – genes that are better controlled, less selfish. It’s all nonsense. I’m just bitter at my exclusion, at the prized position the other grandparents have, Sara’s domination.

  Sara is looking at me, weighing up my gaze on her daughter, and there is something akin to pity in her expression. “He stopped being himself. He stopped some time back. He got like you, serious and pious.” Somehow she has managed to say it without rancour.

  “Is that how you see me?” I ask without excitement. She shrugs. “It’s not the whole picture,” I go on in the same tone. I can see protest in her features. “I know, it doesn’t matter. Of course it doesn’t matter. Not now, but all the same, just so you know.”

  “You never made any effort to make me feel comfortable.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “I know I’m right and nothing will make me think otherwise.”

  There is something petulant in her self-assertion, something that suggests that being right is more important than any other consideration, including sympathy, charity, even bland pity. Surely it isn’t so simple. Does she not consider the line drawn between us when she looks me up and down, from head to toe, judging me: does she not see the distance she creates when she dresses my granddaughter like a teenage model; does she not see the reversal she causes when she makes my son into an arrogant, trivial fool. Except he got like me, serious and pious, and presumably with secrets as well. Of course Sara, we each have our secrets, our dreadful dark remains. And you are telling me that Joseph had his. He went to France with another woman. He had left his job. How can anyone ever be right when there is so much hidden, undisclosed, kept grudgingly secret?

  “I don’t want to make you think anything, Sara.”

  “I know I’m right.”

  “Yes, you said. I’m sorry.”

  “Joseph could have done more. Between you, you should have made me feel more comfortable.”

  “I don’t understand,” I respond, aware that I keep saying it, aware that this time it has no meaning.

  “You had it between you, something you hung on to, something that you kept together.”

  “He was my son.”

  She frowns, though not with temper but displeasure. “So, of course there was no life assurance, no benefits from work, because he wasn’t paying, hadn’t paid for eighteen months. So I’m sorry Mrs Tennant, they said, there is nothing for you.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “Of course you didn’t realize. How could you know? Unless he confided in you. Did he? Did he tell you what the hell got into him that he would treat us like this?”

  “No he didn’t con
fide in me. I don’t think he has confided in me since he was a little boy.”

  “I’m sorry but I don’t care. I know what you must be feeling, but I can’t help that. Do you understand? He has done too much, too much harm.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What choice have I got? My parents said to go back to them. It’s an option, but I can’t do that. I can’t live with them again. I could try and sell this and find something, but this is mine, mortgaged to the hilt but mine. And there’s Steven. You never know. So I work, engage very expensive childcare and get by. It isn’t the life I had planned, not the one Joseph promised, but that’s how it is.”

  “I could help out.”

  “No, no you can’t.”

  “She is my granddaughter.”

  “She? She is okay, fine, doesn’t really remember Joseph, doesn’t remember you.”

  “Are you excluding me?”

  She considers for a moment, no more, her mind quick, decisive, alert. She shakes her head. “No, I’m not,” she says, her voice lowering, “I don’t have that complete right. But you’ll always be Joseph’s mother.”

  I nod my agreement, without knowing what I’ve agreed to. To play the wicked witch probably, though more likely to play nothing at all. The child will be hers, created of like materials, dressed in her garments, seeing the world through the lens of her eyes, free to be her. Well, Mrs Tennant – our borrowed identities have made so much of us – I am sure that the child will have something to say about that. There are secrets that are so large they refuse to lie dormant. The child will wonder about herself, want to fit her jigsaw pieces onto the board, and when she finds that so many don’t fit, she will ask questions. You might have readymade answers, but she’ll see through those, see through to something that has to be opened, excised like a festering wound. It will never be enough for her to know that her father left. It isn’t enough.

  “Did they say anything at work about why Joseph left?”

  “I spoke to some of the people he worked with but understandably they didn’t want to say anything. I imagine they were too embarrassed or too frightened.”

  “Frightened?”

  “Yes, frightened, abandoned wife with abandoned child asking why, wouldn’t you be frightened? Who would want to get caught up in something as pathetic as that? His close friend Gareth said that he thought he was bothered by some research grant, but I should really talk to his line manager, and that Amy who he loved to work with, and I bet he did, said she didn’t know anything and I should talk to his line manager.”

  “And did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Talk to his line manager.”

  “Yes, of course. Mr Davidson was very polite, sympathetic and useless. He didn’t see how he could help over a former employee. He did say that he was personally very disappointed when Joseph left. He was very good at his job. That made me feel so much better knowing that Joseph was good at his job.”

  “It’s strange that no one should speak to you.”

  “Is it? I don’t think I would want to say to someone’s wife that they knew all along that he was involved with another woman and planned to leave and go away with her. Funnily enough, I don’t find that strange at all.”

  “But presumably they’d been your friends too.”

  “No, not really. They came to parties in the house, but I wouldn’t say they were my friends. They were the people Joseph worked with, but that changed, changed all of the time.”

  Georgia begins to cry, seemingly frustrated by her feeble tricycle that she has been dragging rather than riding along the lawn. Sara smiles, amused by her child’s temper, and responds to her immediately. The child wants pushed, wants speed and excitement. Sara obliges, making engine sounds, the sound of cars skidding, braking, going fast. I am frozen, my hands numb with cold, my legs shaking. Cold is the same as fear, produces the same effects. I remain completely still, rendered inert, watching mother and child at play, somehow the two of them immune to either cold or fear. If I was a proper grandmother I would be the one doing the pushing, talking her up as I did, making big of her, celebrating her amazing and sensational success as driver, pilot, or whatever we might decide together. I’m hopeless. My toddler language has all dried up. It is reserved for memory, for a boy who was destined to abandon wife and child. I should be ashamed, ashamed in so many ways, and maybe if I could feel, I would be. I rub my hands wanting to stimulate my reluctant circulation. I must cut a poor figure just standing, watching them at their play, a figure who has strayed into the wrong place.

  I have played before, played for hours, enacting so many imagined realities, games of sleeping and stalking tigers, crawling, prowling and leaping through all the rooms of the house, encountering hostile plains and savage hunters, though we always escaped and came through even after separation, meeting again in the dining room, on the landing, somewhere in our jungle house. But now that beautiful reunion can’t happen. I’m sure he was never too old for it. Surely I should be able to take his child on the same journey; though of course the mother would forbid it, and perhaps she’d be right. Joseph ended up dead, the hunters triumphant after all.

  Georgia has grown bored with her tricycle and wants to bounce on the trampoline, but Sara has to bounce with her. Sara obliges without question. They hold hands and giggle, at first like bathers bobbing in waves, and then like acrobats, rising ever higher, sleek as two arrowheads. After a while Sara calls for a rest but Georgia will not allow it. She wants to bounce ever more violently. Sara doesn’t refuse. It seems she never does. Why do I find fault in that? Why not pleasure in it, the primacy of the young, given the attention we all deserve. Surely the world that loves its young is a good world. The trouble is I don’t trust it. It is like so much art, fashion before function. Fashion before everything. Besides which, I am heavy sore. I go up to the trampoline and stand there trying to enliven my expression with the character of an audience, a well satisfied, well pleased audience of one.

  Sara looks at me as if I’ve outstayed my welcome, the enjoyment she is feeling withering on her face. I suppose I bring her bouncing figure banging back to earth, the terrible reminder that she may be bouncing like this, alone, for many years to come – though there is always Steven, someone I logically should be warming to. “You’re a wonderful mother, Sara,” I call, wanting to reverse that declension.

  “Well, she is my child,” she snaps breathlessly, her tone quietly inflamed.

  I nod my agreement, my acceptance of her claim and all that it means, and all that stems from it, the flowering it suggests. “I wish things were different,” I say.

  I’m not sure she has heard me, nor indeed am I at all sure that I wanted her to. She releases Georgia’s hands, seizes her beneath the armpits and swings her up and brings them both down onto their backsides. Georgia shrieks with pleasure and demands to do it again. Sara deserts her for a moment and crawls to the edge of the trampoline, to the opening in the safety net where I am waiting. Her face is flushed, the skin enriched, her torso heaving. She looks striking: young, attractive, brave and full of need. I want to stroke her face, touch its burning surface but wouldn’t commit such an indiscretion. What on earth would she do if I did?

  “But things aren’t different, Louise, and we have to live with that.

  She is lecturing me, measuring her youthful grief against mine and finding mine wanting, wallowing in pity. I can’t defend myself. Yes, she outdoes me – except there is Steven and John is nowhere near.

  Georgia is demanding Sara’s attention, in fact quite quickly seems to be on the verge of a tantrum. “I think you’re wanted,” I suggest.

  “Yes, I am,” Sara quietly agrees, and turns on the child roaring like a roused bear. I leave them to it, their laughter trailing me. I know I should leave a note, something short and to the point, something like, Call me, whenever, but go straight through the house and let myself back out onto the paved drive.

  I wander away from the ho
use, knowing that I am not going to be called back. I presume she will see my decision to go as an insult. She’ll condemn me for not taking a proper leave of my granddaughter, knowing full well that she doesn’t want us to have any such doting relationship. For her own part she’ll be beneficent. She can do without my offices, good or bad; they leave her cold. She will not see my leaving as the desperate escape of a disintegrating woman. How many shocks is a body able to withstand? I feel certain that I have been mortally wounded. The last thing that sustained me is leaking from me like blood. All I can do is lie to myself or call Sara a liar. I can’t reappraise my son, change my relationship to him on the strength of his outrage to her, but how do I hang onto the character I have made him, the one he has to be? I wish I had never come to this God forsaken place, but what then?

  For the moment I can’t think with any coherence. I just want to go home. I’m grateful for the taxi driver’s card. I didn’t take it with any thought. Without it I’d be lost on this estate forever. Thank God I brought my phone, which is not something I routinely do. He says he’ll be twenty minutes or so. I stand on a corner, impervious to everything.

  The taxi driver asks whether my trip was successful or not. I tell him that it was all right, and surprise myself with my willingness to assume niceties. Of course it wasn’t successful. I have learned terrible things. My son is a monster. But that cannot be. There has to be a mistake that I can decipher. The taxi driver announces that we are coming to the station and I tell him I’ve changed my mind. I want to be taken to the offices of Rennstadt.

  Chapter Five

  The taxi driver laughs and calls over his shoulder that it would be so easy to be lost, which is an announcement that startles me. It is like being woken up, surprised into reality. His face is in the mirror, or at least its centre, the heart of it, mouth, nose and eyes. He is still laughing, his swarthy cheeks raised, his eyes crinkled and his mouth open. He is laughing because it would be so easy to be lost, but then he is a pathfinder so presumably immune and therefore amused. Should I tell him that he is exactly right and I am lost, that his taxi driver intuition has picked it up correctly? But the conversation seems too strange to countenance. I simply shrug, indicating my lack of understanding. He laughs more loudly. He means the gridiron roads, all the same, the endless repetition of business units, set back from the road behind aluminium fences. He remembers it when it was marsh and woodland and people used to walk their dogs, play football and the like. Now there isn’t a person to be seen, no one to ask a single direction. He has known people drive around for hours looking for unit A1 or ZK, whatever it was, and never find it yet. So, I respond, if we see men with beards we should rescue them. He is delighted. He laughs more than necessary. I am delighted too. I have made a friend.