The Extinction of Snow Page 9

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to, as his mother, but it doesn’t make it untrue.”

  “You can’t know the conversations we had, the things he said.”

  “It is tragic Mrs Tennant, tragic that such talent is wasted.”

  “It isn’t true.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come here, Mrs Tennant. You insisted on knowing. Remember that.”

  “I know my son, Mr Davidson, and I know that what you say can’t be true.”

  I sound melodramatic, a woman playing a mother’s part. But what is left to me but to resist, stamp my foot and say it isn’t true. I can’t have known him so little, been so clouded and befuddled by love that I couldn’t see the grown-up he was. I am a mother, not an imbecile. I would have known, seen clues, picked up hints and give-aways. Every parent knows something of their child’s failings. Mine was slightly arrogant, over confident, didn’t take criticism without retaliation, didn’t always know when teasing passed over into insults. For the rest he was good, a model human being, tender-hearted, and despite the trivia of his sometimes shallow world motivated by decent thought. They cannot and will not take that child away from me. He cannot have been a lie, a made up sham. I will not accept it. I still have a responsibility.

  Mr Davidson is eyeing me, his attention sympathetic and annoyed, both I’d say in equal measure. He obviously feels that my protectiveness, as he reads it, is misplaced. He wants me to accept that my child moved on and became the man he insists he knows. I have to draw a line.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Davidson, I know you think I am blind to who my son is, but I’m not. I just know there’s something not right about this. My son would never abuse drugs and he would never leave his wife and child.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs Tennant. None of this is easy.”

  “I can’t leave it like this.”

  “I really am sorry, Mrs Tennant.”

  “I know you are a busy man.”

  “Yes, I am in fact.”

  “Don’t worry I can find my own way out.”

  “Mrs Tennant,” he calls when I reach the door, “believe me, I wish it were otherwise.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mr Davidson, I know more than I did.”

  “Goodbye Mrs Tennant.”

  I know that all this is a lie.

  Chapter Seven

  I close the house door, having achieved sanctuary, and stand with my back to it as if resisting intruders, my mind reeling, turning over and over in its own indeterminable space. I can’t remember much about the journey home. It comes to me as a sequence of scenes.

  On leaving Rennstadt I found myself on a dual carriageway. I obviously shouldn’t have been there as there was no proper walkway just the grass verge. The grass was wet around my ankles, the morning having been cold, at the edge of the city probably frosty. Some cars hooted. Were they mocking me, appreciating me or trying to frighten me? It was fear they provoked. And fear built up. It took over my thinking, disordered and exposed me. I felt I should run. At one point I did. I ran along the grass verge, the traffic rushing past me, large lorries creating sudden shade and cold. I found myself at a roundabout and really didn’t know how to negotiate it. I must have seemed like an escaped mad woman as I demanded directions to the station of a man with a Labrador. I told myself that there was something safe about a man with such a dog. I can’t remember his answer, but I must have registered it because I managed to end up on a train, managed to return to known places.

  There was confusion at the junction of Leighton Road, traffic snarled up back on Fortess Road. Of course it always is. Every day is the same. But a van driver mounted the pavement in front of the Assembly Rooms pub and went around a number of stalled cars, bullied another car to go into the side then sped away along Highgate Road, sounding his horn a number of times as he did. And then it was all over, and the former confusion went on as if nothing had happened. So much about living in London is like that, about simply coping with it. People feel successful just because they can cope. I rushed away, certain that I was not coping. The ways I have learnt no longer work. I need a different knowledge altogether. At that moment I sought seclusion.

  Lady Margaret Road with its Georgian doorways, columns and arches, its stained glass windows and yellow brick walls, is a haven. I love its peace, its relative quiet and its domesticity. I love the thought of its humanity, its myriad lives taking place with only narrow walls between. I love crowded London, its cluttered spaces, its out of sight proximity. I feel safer in its mass than out of it.

  The image of myself running alongside an unknown dual carriageway fills me with dread. My son died on the road, his body run over three times. I hear the slamming of breaks, a scream, the sound of impact. Lives are taken, in haste, pitilessly. I see myself the driver, face agape. I hear notes of music. I can’t make sense of that. I must be going mad.

  I understand that people often feel they are going mad when they are in pain. My counsellor tells me it’s extremely common. He regularly reminds me, with a great flourish of emphasis: You have to remember though, that you are not going mad. I look at him coyly, my girlish habits not easily ditched, and smile. Would going mad not be easier to deal with than incessant grief? How much can my body and mind stand? I am being shredded, left in pieces. I can’t be expected to emerge unscathed. And yet madness is portrayed as the worst of all solutions. Madness is not to be permitted. Everything I experience is normal. Well, if that is the case, is it normal to feel that I have been followed? I’m sure that a car came out of Rennstadt and patrolled the dual carriageway while I made my fitful, amateurish escape. And then again on the train, I’m sure there was someone watching me, at times openly, his eyes straight on me. If I tell my counsellor will he say that these are perfectly normal manifestations of the grieving process? Process! To hell with process! I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in healing. I believe in chaos and break up. I believe in hostile fate. Whoever said the world had to make sense? It doesn’t, doesn’t add up at all.

  Joseph used to try and convince me otherwise, determined to take in hand his artist, sceptical, all over the place mother. He described the ability of mathematics to glimpse new worlds, trying to find a language I might comprehend, one that my closed mind wouldn’t dismiss. He said: If you draw a circle – catching my attention immediately – and surround it with equally sized circles so that they all touch the number is always six. If you keep expanding you can work out mathematically how many circles there will be with each increase. Turn the circles into spheres, two dimensions into three, and the maths can still predict the necessary number. But when image stops, say at four, five or ten dimensions, the maths can still continue where the eye can’t. Maths can reveal hidden dimensions, new worlds, a new concept of space time, completely new versions of reality.

  He laughed all the time he tried to explain such things to me, attempting to take me to visionary worlds where the eye couldn’t penetrate but theory could, casting me in the role of naïve disbeliever, delightful but ill-informed. He loved those games we played, the two of us trying to outdo each other – my retaliation being that art can reveal how all space is produced, created as much by looking as being – the artist and the scientist jousting, playful and friends. My son was my friend. We had managed that compact. We understood nothing of what the other said but understood each other impeccably. I know my son. He would do no harm. I am being told a lie and I don’t know why. And now I am being followed. Of course, it is possible that I am going mad and nothing is real, neither what the eye sees nor the mind reveals, all of it a trick, a con, played out for someone else’s fun. With a thought like that I really must be losing my marbles. I am becoming a match for Frank in his most drug-induced states. My counsellor is right, that would never do.

  I move away from the door, throw down my jacket and pour myself a drink, despite the fact that it is still early and way before even my time, then work my way through the house, looking down
into the street from each window that allows it. I insist to myself that I don’t expect to see anyone looking back but can’t stop myself from doing it. Besides, if surveillance really were taking place I imagine it would be more sophisticated than seeing someone lurking about on Lady Margaret Road. I think to call John. I need him, need him so much. I am being followed, which I admit must be very unlikely, and don’t know what to do. I need help. I need to be taken in hand. Perhaps I should call my counsellor.

  At the same moment as I think that the telephone rings. The sound startles me. It seems an alien sound, as if it hasn’t rung for such a long time, which is absurd: of course the telephone rings, rings all of the time, John calls, Vivien calls, Vivien acting out the part of Vivien, sister and rescuer, cold calls, salesmen and crooks, though not colleagues or friends, not really, perhaps someone from the support group. But at this moment it sounds as if from a different time altogether, a much older time. Eventually I rush and pick up the receiver and hesitantly say hello.

  “Yes, hello,” a woman’s voice responds. I don’t recognize the voice. It is hushed and slow. After the introductory two words there is silence. I find it disconcerting.

  “Who is it?” I ask. “Who is it you want?”

  “Mrs Tennant?”

  “Yes, it’s Mrs Tennant. Can I help?”

  “No, well, no . . . I don’t mean that.”

  “Sorry, what is it you want?”

  “There is someone you should speak to.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Dominique Dufour, she’ll talk to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can give you a number. She’s in Paris. Ring her.”

  “Who is this?”

  “You’ll need to write the number down, but keep it safe. Maybe don’t put her name with it.”

  “I need you to explain.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Is that Amy?” There is no reply. “Is it, Dr Tomlin?”

  “Do you want the number or not?”

  “Yes, I want the number.”

  Without waiting she gives me it, pronouncing the digits in pairs: “01 47 07 77 77. Just ask for her. If she’s there, she’ll talk to you.”

  “Dominique Dufour,” I repeat quietly, wanting confirmation that I’ve got it right, got the whole conversation right, the strangeness of it, perhaps confirming that I’ve accepted it for what it seems.

  “This isn’t Amy. I don’t know anybody called Amy,” she replies and hangs up.

  I hold the phone at my ear for a while, wanting the conversation to continue, wanting to verify the substance of it, until the phone alarms. I check the number that called but it was withheld. I can only guess. I sit down, shaken and disturbed. The terrible reality is that there is something mysterious about Joseph’s dying. I have been advised to talk to someone in Paris. The advice suggests that there is something to hear. A shiver runs through my body. I am being drawn into something very real that seems entirely without reality. I don’t know what to make of it. I go to a window and look out. It is turning dark and there are people making their way home. I don’t trust them, not one of them. What is happening to me?

  Chapter Eight

  It is bitterly cold in Paris, with occasional snow flurries. I am staying in a grubby hotel in Rue de la Roche Foucauld, between Pigalle and Trinité. The street seems to connect two distinct worlds, one of sex shops and sleaze and the other of chocolate and pastry shops. In all honesty I vacillate between the two. I have a tourist’s eye for trade of all kinds. In the night time, returning from dinner and the wine of numerous cafés I turn into a positive voyeur. The discreet character of the street becomes explicit. During the day it is the pharmacy and the small grocers that stand out, in the night the girls. They sit in the windows outlined by fluorescent lights, blue, red or orange, live goods. The Blue Cat I find particularly alluring, its blueness the blueness of stained glass, deep and meditative. Paris creates juxtaposition, its cultures rubbing shoulders. On my second night one of the girls from The Blue Cat waved. The gesture seemed devoid entirely of sarcasm, though I don’t know. I waved back and then we went about our business, mine to return to the hotel, hers to whatever a shop-window girl does. She had stately thighs, milky and rounded like a lunar surface beneath cold space.

  I don’t know what John made of my garbled explanation that I was going to France. He seemed angry, which I couldn’t understand.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said, quietly, but with impatience.

  “Any more ridiculous than being in America?” I asked, not accusing him, wondering.

  He was quiet for a while and then firmly stated: “I am working. I have a contract. I have to work. It’s what I do.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “it’s textbook stuff, you should work. I just have to go to Paris.”

  “But why? Why now? Why Paris?”

  “We used to love Paris,” I said.

  “We still do, don’t we?”

  “No, I don’t think we do, we lost the habit.”

  “Don’t go,” he insisted.

  I thought for a while before responding, hearing the command in his voice. I shook my head and simply uttered: “I have to.”

  “No, no you don’t, you’re making it so much harder for yourself, for us.”

  Again I said nothing. For some reason I didn’t tell him what Sara had said, what Mr Davidson had said, about being followed, or that Dominique Dufour would talk to me. I don’t know why I left John out of that. I don’t know if I was protecting Joseph or him, or perhaps myself. It was too difficult to understand. Eventually I whispered: “No, John, I’m not making it harder. It will be easier, I promise.”

  I told him that I loved him. I meant it. He angrily replied that he loved me. It was heart breaking to be on different continents, so far apart, to have so many secrets that I didn’t understand.

  For days I have been a tourist, taking in the usual sites, the obvious ones for me: Musée du Louvre, Musée D’Orsay and Musée Marmottan, the artist paying homage, revisiting scenes of former passions, where I invested love in canvas, in two dimensional realities. Grief nullifies such passion, though, and takes significance away. I have berated myself so many times, telling myself that I am here for Joseph, not on a sightseeing tour. But I can’t do it, not immediately. I need to orientate myself, learn confidence in the language again. I’m sure my counsellor would applaud and tell me it is right to spend time on cherished things. The trouble is it all wearies me. I weary me. Trying to remember the enthusiasm with which I celebrated twentieth century art wearies me. I seem a sham. It didn’t prepare me for human trial. And yet love has not turned entirely sour. Love just seems insubstantial, the object world insufficient.

  By night I drink and watch the night slip by, watch it in the eyes of the other watchers, and that is restorative. There is life in that. It is so cold that everyone is wrapped up, covered in grey layers. I have never known Paris to be so grey. It seems quite spiritless. A newspaper hoarding says there have been riots in the suburbs. I feel the tension of that. Maybe I am conscious of being a woman alone. The people on the metro seem wary and distrustful. Is it real – the riots must be real – or is it all down to me? Maybe I am making Paris up as I go along, drawing it in my own drab image. On the first night I was here I walked up from Pigalle toward Montmartre but couldn’t find a restaurant that was open. It was like a winter ghost town. Eventually I found one. The waiter spoke the most perfect, idiomatic English. He was quite self-effacing about it. His girlfriend was Australian, he explained, so he had picked bits up. I was pleased. I was weary of trying to speak French.

  Je me débrouille en Francais – I get by in French. I have said that so many times already, to waiters, ticket-collectors, anyone generous enough to comment on the fact that I am speaking French. They invariably say my French is excellent, but I know that is flirting. (The flirtation is not without certain pleasures. I am so shallow, so needy.) John speaks very well, particular about tenses a
nd the correct prepositions, even mastering the subjunctive. I want simply to be understood. I have perhaps set my ambitions too low. I have that usual shambling whisper of the English trying to speak a foreign language, the general lack of confidence forcing me to take any short-cut I can. I get flustered whereas I should enjoy my ability. I used to speak well, once upon a time, and wonder where it has gone. Maybe I am losing skills, losing words the way John’s father lost words, drip by drip, the brain becoming atrophied. What other deficits am I developing?

  I try to imagine a world without language, and wonder how much would cease to exist? Abstract nouns would have no basis whatsoever. So, what of love, faith and grief – and the greatest of these is? Yes, what would we make of love in a world without words, in our cognitively privileged world? How to express the message? But, what message? There would be no message in a world without words. There would be no notion of love at all. My wordless son would never say: I am sacred, comfot me. (Is that the dyslexia of the hardened drug-user?) What worlds we have constructed with our words – world of laughter, world of shame, world of hope, world of waste, world of wait and see.

  When Joseph was here he would send funny, entertaining emails about his ridiculous inadequacies with the language and how he regretted his lame attempts at school. He reminded me that I was always pestering him to persevere with French, pointing out to him how useful it would be to be able to say, a slice of, a little bit more of or less of, this, that and the other. And guess what, he wrote, mother was absolutely right. (Surely, a little bit more, said to a drug-dealer, couldn’t be the phrase which highlighted his shortcomings, could it? And, surely I do not have doubts about that?) He said he ended up saying things because he could. In one conversation he was trying to say that he made experiments, meaning chains of chemicals, molecules, compounds, and worded it as: Je fais les jouets. I make toys, playthings. I could hear his laughter in the message. Jouet was a word he remembered. It came out. The woman he was talking to was thrilled and thought he was a toymaker. She even took him home and showed him her collection of dolls. He never said what happened after that.