A Bit of Earth

by Rebecca Smith

  ‘A university professor and his companion were killed this afternoon in a horrific crash. Police have named the pair who died as Professor Julius East, and Susannah Misselthwaite who worked at the university library. Experts at the scene of the crash say that no other cars were involved. It appears that Professor East may have swerved to avoid something, probably an animal, and this caused their car, an Alfa Romeo Spider, to crash into a tree. The police are appealing for any witnesses to come forward.’

  Judy gasped. It could not be true. It really could not be true. Her book fell to the floor. Surely there must be a mistake. She could not think of anyone to ring. She knew Professor East only by sight. She didn’t know Susannah’s husband at all. She had occasionally said ‘Good morning’ to him in the botanical garden, but that was all. Oh, that poor little boy. That poor man.

  The next day it still appeared to be true. She wrote to Susannah’s husband, saying how sorry she was, and sent it (really very tackily, she thought) through the internal mail, because she didn’t have his address. She tried to think of something she could do to help. Presumably relatives would arrive to help look after Felix. It was all too appalling.

  A few days later she went to a toy shop and, after much deliberation, bought a puzzle for Felix. It had thirty-six pieces. The box said that it was for ages four and over, she remembered that he was about to start school. The picture was of an arctic landscape with an improbable number of species visible. She thought that there couldn’t be anything too upsetting in that. So many of the puzzles were too jolly, or of the emergency services, or both. She put it in a jiffy bag and sent it through the internal post to Professor Misselthwaite. She enclosed a note saying that she hoped Felix would like it, and that she did not need any acknowledgement. It seemed so pathetically inadequate. What use was a new puzzle to a little boy who had lost his mother? Afterwards she wondered if she should have sent Felix something for starting school.

  It was a week after the crash, but still before the funeral (and how dreadful to think of her lying there, the terrible cold wait in the mortuary; it should be done, as in some other cultures, the next day, before sundown). Guy thought that he should see where it had happened. Perhaps if he went there he could undo it, turn back time, find some secret switch to unhappen it. He could not believe that it was permanent, that there was no negotiation with its finality. Felix was taken to nursery by another child’s mother. This woman was also going to collect him and have him for what remained of the afternoon. Guy could not remember her name. He saw that she had a sad, blotchy face and frizzy hair. He understood that he was to trust her with Felix. He didn’t tell the woman where he was going.

  When Felix had been taken away (Guy noticed with relief that they were on foot) he went out into the garden and picked some flowers, some Susannah herself had planted, and others that had been there when they moved in – forget-me-nots, French marigolds, roses, sweet williams, standard suburban garden fare – and tied them into a bunch with twine. Then he got into the car. He drove through the city and out towards the forest. This must have been the way they came. What was she doing? What the hell was she doing with that lecher? Good God, Guy thought, even I know about him. Julius East, whose tastes had often run to final-year students. Susannah was several years older than his usual prey. What the hell had been going on? And for how long? Always the last to know, they say, always the last to know.

  Guy realised that he could hardly see the road. He pulled over and punched himself in the thigh to stop himself from crying. He drove on a bit and stopped at a garage. Got petrol and some vile coffee. He scalded his mouth and his fingers as he drove.

  Now he was in the forest. They must have come this way. The limit was forty, but people always went faster. Some animal, probably a deer. He expected that was it. The bastard probably swerved to miss one and went into the tree. If he weren’t dead, Guy would kill him. He thought of the joke that parents make to their children: ‘Come back safely or I’ll kill you.’ Of course, it didn’t make him smile. He drove on through a village. This must have been one of the last places she saw, these houses and shops, the shop selling beach things where she always wanted them to stop, but somehow they never had.

  Soon he was through the village and driving past fields and hedgerows. Suddenly he saw it – he saw the bright colours first – oh God, a bloody roadside shrine. He saw the tree. A hateful sycamore, the trunk hideously dented and broken.

  The tree itself was now bleeding to death. You would think that the authorities would have come and cut it down straight away and taken it off to be burnt. It seemed central to the horror, and all around it, the floral tributes.

  He stopped the car on the verge and, gasping and sobbing, loped over to it. He began to tear down the stiff, plasticky ribbons. There were florists’ cheap vile bows in all colours, loops and loops of the stuff. The villagers must have done it out of spite, they must have thought it was funny. And there were carnations and chrysanthemums, some hideously dyed, too bright, and some with their petals turning brown already. Some were in supermarket and garage cellophane, with prices and sachets of flower food still attached. He tore at them and began throwing them over the hedge. He was unaware of the cars going by, some slowing slightly, some speeding up to get away from the madman who was shouting and crying and howling. Then he was grabbed from behind and he felt his face hit the mud.

  ‘Says he’s the poor woman’s husband,’ the policeman said as he accompanied Guy into the station.

  ‘Reckon he must be, by the state of him. Better get psych over here and give him something.’

  ‘I do not need to be given something,’ said Guy. ‘It was disrespectful.’

  ‘With all due respect, mate, looked like you were the one being disrespectful. A lot of local people spent good money on those flowers and teddies.’

  ‘There weren’t any teddies,’ said Guy. ‘I really don’t think there were teddies.’

  ‘Probably been nicked. It happens.’

  ‘And you don’t understand,’ said Guy. ‘My wife, Susannah, she, she … hated flowers in cellophane.’

  They pushed a box of Kleenex Mansize across the desk to him, and ten minutes later a mug of tea.

  At last Guy looked up.

  ‘I have to be back for my little boy,’ he said. ‘Can I go?’

  The original officers had now gone.

  ‘Can you just show us some identification?’ said their replacement.

  ‘I do have ID. I’m a lecturer at the university.’ Guy felt for his wallet and realised it must be on the floor of the car, which presumably was still there, open on the verge. ‘I have to go. My little boy…’

  ‘All right, mate. Take care. Check out with the guy on the desk. We’re all really sorry for your loss.’

  It seemed that they didn’t have the officers available to drive him back to his car, not for at least three hours. It was a three-mile walk. When he got there a council lorry was taking away the sycamore. What remained of the flowers had been piled on the stump. When no cars were passing he flung them over the hedge. His own flowers were wilting on the passenger seat. His wallet was there too, and his keys were still in the ignition. He quietly put the dying flowers beside the stump and drove away.

  When he got home, the frizzy-haired woman was waiting outside in a car with Felix and three other children.

  ‘Only been here ten minutes!’ she cried, all bright and breezy.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Guy, ‘I am so sorry for the trouble.’ He held Felix very tight.

  ‘No problem!’ she said, and drove away. He went into the empty, dusty house. Letters of condolence were piling up, opened but unread, on top of the silent piano, on the kitchen table, and on the floor in the hall, just where they had fallen from his hands.

  Chapter 3

  Susannah’s mother Elfie had been Swedish. Her name had been Elfrida, but with her cropped blonde hair (which turned to thistledown as her final illness took hold) and her slightly sticky-
out ears, Elfie had suited her more and more. She had died a year before Guy and Susannah had met. But now Guy remembered how, when he’d been shown photos, he had wondered if she might be half elfin, a changeling who had belatedly been reclaimed. He had always got on well enough with Susannah’s father, Kenneth Ingram, a research chemist whose beard looked as though it had been knitted from the unravelled grey wool of school jumpers. Originally from Northumberland, work had taken Kenneth to Sweden, and then to Germany where he had remained. Guy also remembered remarking to Susannah that Sweden and Northumberland were not that far apart, and how she had laughed and said that her father was a constant pickle-eater, that he had wanted to immerse himself in a culture that had raw fish for breakfast, but then discovered a place where cheese and salami were standard wake-up fare.

  If only Guy could hear her laugh, her voice again. Often it was too painful to think, but sometimes he sat and tried to think of things she had said – exact words, her accent and inflexions – if he could recall things exactly, might she come back?

  Susannah’s brother Jon was a research botanist, and a much higher flier than Guy. Resolutely single, he lived in Geneva and took energetic, purposeful holidays. Guy had never got to know him that well. Once, before Felix was born, they had joined him on a skiing holiday. Guy still felt diminished by it. Before they went, he had resolved to try to like skiing, but how could he really enjoy anything that involved such silly outfits and day-long bonhomie? On the first day he had ventured onto the slopes with them, but the snow had been much too slippery, and he’d had to take an ignominious ride back down on the lift and in an empty cable car. For the rest of the holiday he had walked in the forests and looked at mosses. Susannah had just laughed and said it didn’t matter.

  Although they had rarely seen Jon, Susannah had had long telephone conversations with him, usually in German or Swedish, conversations that Guy would never have been able to keep up with.

  Now contact with Jon would be reduced to presents sent to Felix at random times of the year. Jon wasn’t a rememberer or observer of other people’s birthdays, or even Christmas. But Felix loved the presents: a book about rocks and minerals; a book of maps of the Alps (perhaps Jon was imagining that he might take Felix on holiday with him one day); a box of huge seed pods (which Guy and Felix worked out were from starnut palm, Mary’s bean, crabwood, and sea coconut); the shed skin of a viper; an Amazonian soldier ant pickled in a bottle (Guy said it was lucky that Grandpa Kenneth hadn’t seen it first); some sharks’ teeth from a sailing holiday off Australia …

  ‘Do you think Uncle Jon will ever come and visit us?’ Felix would ask each time something arrived.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Guy, but he couldn’t imagine what might bring Jon to their dull city, their shire-bound backwater. There were no dangerous sports to be had, no rapids to shoot.

  ‘Then maybe we could go and visit him,’ said Felix.

  ‘Maybe.’

  After the funeral, Kenneth would stay in touch only by letter, often enclosing some Euros for Felix. Guy knew that Kenneth had his own swallowed grief to cope with – first his wife, then his daughter – and that they should be sticking together. Perhaps Kenneth blamed him for the accident, thought that he could not have been taking proper care of Susannah. Words seemed to turn to pebbles in their mouths.

  There must have been other relatives of Felix somewhere in Sweden. Elfie had had siblings. There must have been cousins somewhere, but Guy gave them no thought. He and Felix might appear as an English Misselthwaite dead end on that branch of the Swedish family tree. It didn’t occur to him to be concerned.

  Guy’s parents and his sister Jenny arrived for the funeral. They only mentioned the cost of their last-minute flights from New Zealand a few times. They stayed in the same Travelodge as Jon and Kenneth, and all carefully avoided having breakfast together. Guy was deeply grateful that nobody stayed with him, and didn’t mind that Susannah’s family made their stay as short as possible. He found Jon’s physical resemblance to Susannah disturbing.

  Jenny’s usual heartiness was muted, but only slightly. She found it hard to step out of her role as a tour leader of trekking holidays in the Tongariro National Park, the sort of vacations that are advertised in the back of the weekend papers and are supposedly designed for intrepid souls. Footloose in walking boots. Guy didn’t think that it had been very independent to follow your retiring parents halfway across the world, and set up in their spare bedroom. He didn’t hear his mother persuading Jenny not to wear her cargo shorts to the funeral.

  They only stayed a week, and they hardly mentioned Susannah. They had all thought that she was so nice. They kept remembering the wedding, when they had been so impressed; it had been as though a Misselthwaite had managed to bag the blonde one from Abba. On the last night of their stay Guy’s mother cornered him in the kitchen.

  ‘But will you and Felix be all right? Would you like to come and stay with us? Maybe you could have a year’s sabbatical? Compassionate leave? I’m sure your department would be very flexible.’

  ‘Um,’ said Guy. He didn’t want to say that actually he more or less was the department, and that if he left there probably wouldn’t be anything to come back to. ‘Felix is starting school in September. It’s all organised.’ Pictures of Susannah smiling as Felix modelled his new school sweatshirt flashed into his head. She had made him a PE bag already. ‘I guess for, um, continuity for Felix, it would be better to stay here.’ Even as he said this he thought, continuity, how could this be continuity? And what would be so good about continuity here anyway?

  ‘Well, let me stay then.’

  ‘Mum, it’s really kind of you, but we’ll be all right.’ He knew that they had a holiday in Australia booked, that they had a whole life on the other side of the world. His mum had a part-time job as a museum guide, which she loved. His dad would be worrying about the garden. Their dogs were in kennels.

  ‘Well, you must promise to come and visit us.’

  ‘OK,’ said Guy, but he really couldn’t see the point.

  ‘I don’t want Felix growing up not knowing his grandparents.’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘There is email,’ said his dad coming in, hoping for a little something savoury on crackers.

  Jenny joined them.

  ‘You could get a web cam rigged up.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Guy. He imagined the pictures it would send: himself and Felix standing there against the backdrop of his dingy study, opening and shutting their mouths but not being able to think of anything to say.

  One of the things that Guy did manage to keep up after Susannah died was the bedtime story. It had always been one of his duties, and was often then, at fifteen or so minutes, the longest time that he spent alone with Felix each day. Felix chose the book, and there were many to pick from. Books for Felix had been one of Susannah’s few extravagances, they were one of her priorities. Susannah and Felix had made regular trips to the local library, something that Guy would find out, to his cost in fines, some weeks after she died. There had been no stories on those first few days (those days that Guy could now barely recall, that had passed in a fug of tears and disbelief, and noisy, uncomprehending, half-strangled grief). But then, on what must have been the fourth or fifth day, sometime before the funeral anyway, Felix had reappeared in his pyjamas, which were stained with cereal and who knew what else. He was holding a book. It was ten o’clock. Guy hadn’t seen Felix for several hours. It was a ‘biggest, tallest, fastest’ book of facts about animals.

  ‘Please, Dad. We haven’t had any bedtime books.’

  It wouldn’t have been possible for Felix to choose something where emotions were flatter and more absent. Eventually Felix fell asleep and Guy carried him up to bed, then lay down with him and slept too.

  A day or so later a health visitor called with some leaflets for Guy and an illustrated book for them, as she said, to share. It was called When a Parent Dies. Guy couldn’t bring himself to look at an
y of it, he couldn’t even open it. Just the cover was bad enough. He remembered how Susannah had once referred to those sorts of colours as ‘bright pastels’. The bedtime books continued, and they were one of the closest connections that they had each day. Usually it was some non-fiction. Guy wondered if Felix was making deliberately tactful choices; unlikely, he knew, in a four-year-old. If it wasn’t animals, vehicles or dinosaurs, it might be Thomas the Tank Engine. Suddenly Guy was grateful to the Rev. W. Awdry for his plodding prose and plots, the engines’ banal expressions and characters. Sometimes Guy would think he was being cowardly, and failing Felix in what they were reading, but he would still stick to Felix’s choices. There was so much to be avoided. As they climbed the stairs at bedtime, and Felix brushed his teeth, the words

  James James

  Morrison Morrison

  Weatherby George Dupree

  Took great

  Care of his Mother,

  Though he was only three …

  would sound so loudly in his head that he feared Felix might hear them. How could A.A. Milne have written such a poem? Huh, The wisdom of bloody Pooh.

  Then he thought, perhaps I’m doing this all wrong. Perhaps I should be choosing books that will make us cry. And there were many. At least when Felix was a bit older most parents in books would be dead, absent or dysfunctional. Guy reckoned that in books for seven-year-olds and above it was deemed to make for a better story. Bring them on!

  Lots of new books had arrived, and so had some puzzles, stickers and drawing things. Felix liked opening the presents, but he didn’t really want to read any of the new books. He liked his old books better. Some of the puzzles were too easy and some were a bit too hard. He hated it if people gave you things that were too hard and you were going to have to wait until you were older, or things that were too big that you had to grow into.