The Ice is Singing

by Jane Rogers

  For a while, as I tried to relax, as I tried to imagine pain ‘doing its work’, pulling open clenched muscles, pushing back tight fearful walls of flesh to make space enough for a baby’s head, I understood her. I knew what she meant by going with the pain; I allowed myself, briefly, to be open to it. I don’t like pain. It is a hard thing to open yourself to. It is hard to surrender control.

  But now I am here. It has all come roaring and tumbling about my ears. I thought, a great ball, like a planet, careering after me across the countryside. Now it has caught up with me it is a wave not a ball; a giant wave which has broken over me and engulfed me in a flood of memories and emotions, a swirling mass of flotsam and jetsam, days of my life. It is hard to surrender control.

  The surf – on honeymoon with Gareth. We went down to the beach every day; the wet-suit-clad surfies had been out with their boards since dawn. The first morning I watched them with glee and imagined myself riding and swooping among them. Then I waded out into the sea. As I got to waist height I began to realize the size of those waves. They were breaking well before they reached me, but still the frothing torrent of broken water was half as high as me, and had the power to lift me off my feet and carry me backwards. Unbroken, what would the force of such a wave be? I swam on out with a mounting sense of exhilarated terror. There was a lull in the sea. I managed to get out quite some distance without meeting any big waves, only unbroken mounds of water not yet cresting, which I slipped up and down like a fast car on a humpbacked bridge. I was enjoying the cool freedom of the water. Then, looking ahead, I saw it. It looked as though the whole sea had gathered itself up, drawn itself together to make a giant vertical wall of water, which was racing towards me as fast as a train, blocking out the sky. I watched in terror. It was impossible to know whether to go back or forward. No way would I slide up this like a humpbacked bridge: already it was cresting at the top, frilled with a curl of white, gleaming teeth poised at the top of a giant jawbone which would come crashing, clamping down with the force of hundreds of tons behind it. It was as high, I think, as a house – a normal, two-storey house. It seemed as high as a block of flats, as it towered over me, and the crested white rim at the top curled over more swiftly, still suspended in air but caught in the pull of gravity. At the same moment the swell running before the wave lifted me towards the curling wall of water, and I realized that it would break, exactly, on top of me. That molten iceberg which hung in glassy suspension would break, the surface tension which held it together during its arched triumphant race towards the land would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of water it had amassed, and that mountain of water would collapse, with the force of an avalanche, on my head.

  I don’t know how I came by the knowledge that saved me; whether I had been told it years before, and stored it unconsciously in the life-saving depths of my skull, or whether I worked it out on the spot; but as that wave hung timelessly over me, I took a huge breath and dived as deep as I could, into its base. Underwater, I heard the roar of its collapse, and felt the planes of water shifting and trembling around me. When my breath was used up and I fought out to the surface, it was gone, tearing away towards the beach in a seething, frothing, broken mass.

  I did get caught by one later that day – not such a big one. I underestimated it, thinking it was not quite going to break and that I could just slide up it. I slid up to its crest then the crest turned, curled, and dropped me to the depths. The water falling on me pummelled and pounded me and swirled me about at the bottom of the sea, bruising and scraping my shoulders and legs. It tumbled me over and over below the surface till I had no sense of which direction was up; the fine balancing channels of my head were awash and awhirl with salt water. It carried me up to the shallows, though, and from there I was able to crawl to dry land, stunned not to be drowned.

  If I try to set it out, resolve it on paper – what form can it take?

  Resolve.

  It’s a pleasing word, a good fit. Resolve; to find a new solution. Resolve; to dissolve the lumps and chunks that stick in my maw, to turn them to a sweet and palatable liquid. ‘O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.’ Resolve me, then let me be resolved. What a beautiful, meaning-flowing word it is, how generously it encompasses all the hints and drifts of thinking I would like it to hold.

  Be brave, melt, solve again.

  It doesn’t though, does it? Resolve.

  Sweetheart, what is there to resolve? So much melodrama, this Marion, who does she think she is? What’s her problem anyway?

  You make me sick.

  Leave. Time to sleep.

  Fri. 21

  I slept well last night. I think I have slept for most of the time I’ve been here, waking occasionally, feverishly, to have a drink and remember where I am, before dipping back under the surface of sleep, to be tumbled and rolled through time. I feel as if I’m travelling in my sleep, over landscapes where I have lived – through time as well as space. To talk of resolving is silly.

  There is nothing to resolve. Nothing so concrete. Just images, some familiar, some forgotten. Just times, moods, impressions. An undigested life – a ragbag. It’s all ordinary enough, except for leaving the children. Not many women do that.

  What kind of a mother leaves her children? An inadequate, a selfish, an unfulfilled? Or a possessive, a demanding, a clinging, a smothering?

  OK. I’ve stopped. I’m not running. I’m not hiding. I’m not David or Alice, I’m not in someone else’s story, I’m in my life, and there won’t be a resolution. There isn’t the structure for it. It’s not a story, it’s a list of days.

  All right. Make a list. It is after all the most sensible, housewifely thing to do. Make a list, tidy up. You can at least manage that, if not to resolve.

  List

  When Ruth was a baby, each new skill she mastered was a gigantic milestone. Sitting up, crawling, standing, walking: her first word. I crowed with delight when she did it, then I waited for Gareth to come home and see it. There is a flavour to that waiting that hangs in my head like a smell: the pride, the excitement, the determination that his pride and excitement should equal mine, the keen anxiety for the child to perform to order, the nagging sense that his smiles and applause may be feigned, that he may have preferred to have his tea first, that he’d rather have taken my word for it. My disappointment when she couldn’t walk for him, didn’t talk to him; my swallowed anger that both of them weren’t behaving exactly as I wished them to.

  And yet I was so happy, so proud, so loving. It lingers like a smell.

  * * *

  At night in their bedroom. I would go up during the evening to check on them sleeping, Ruth in her bed, Vi in her cot. Not just one but two of them, incomparably precious, sprawled carelessly under and over covers, limbs flung in abandonment, faces clean and sweet. When he was out in the evening (he never knew this, no one did) I sat by their beds and watched them sleep. Regularly – sometimes for an hour or so. I see their faces now in the dim light; the way Ruth often slept with her eyes not quite shut, her relaxed face as simple and sweet as a baby animal. She would move suddenly, as if impatient of my watching, and then become completely relaxed again, and roll back to her previous dent in the pillow. Vi slept on her belly, back hunched, bum in the air – face squashed sideways on the mattress. Sometimes watching through the bars of the cot I felt it was only my concentration that held her there, in life. I wondered why I should be so blest as to have her stay.

  * * *

  The first time I took Ruth swimming, she was eight months old. Everyone I passed smiled at her or said hello. I lowered her into the pool and she beamed at me – then I held her hands and pulled her through the water, and she began to scream with delight. Literally, she screamed, fierce loud screams of absolute excitement and delight. Her pleasure made me laugh so much I nearly fell over myself, and had to sit on the side with her till we both felt cold enough to be less hysterical.

  * * *

 
; Ruth at thirteen, going on a school trip to Stratford, couldn’t decide what to wear. I was chopping onions, didn’t look up as soon as she came into the kitchen – and when I did look, my eyes were watering. She stood aggressively in the doorway, looking suddenly older and also like someone else. I couldn’t think who, till I realized she was wearing my favourite jumper, a black angora with a deep V-neck. She wore it with nothing underneath.

  I told her she looked like a tart. I made her take it off.

  She looked beautiful. It was my jumper. I didn’t tell her she could try it on.

  Now I don’t wear it any more.

  * * *

  Gareth. Coming home and looking at me. Pressing me. And in answer I held up a child, talked of children, insisted that he share the revelling in children – myself hidden behind the wall of their achievements and demands, myself more secure than a nun in her cell, rung and hung about with children.

  * * *

  Gareth. As time passed, becoming the cipher that I lived with. The cipher of my creation, the cipher for whom I lived. In that bright innocent world when we were young and the children were young, that was the first worm, wasn’t it, to insinuate itself to the heart of the rose?

  It is hard to repossess the beautiful, absolute young Marion, in all her clarity of blinkered innocence. Not I, but she.

  One spring evening, for instance. Gareth is working late (she has no idea. Where ignorance is bliss why should she want to be wise? She does not want to know him. She would not like him if she did) and she has put the children to bed. He is due home at nine. She tidies up, then prepares a meal, sets the table. She slips into the garden and gathers some flowers, arranges them on table and mantelpiece. Then she takes a bath and puts on pretty clothes, something she could not wear while the children were about. Preparing for Gareth’s return.

  Innocent Marion. Everything she does is for Gareth. She does not take pleasure in cooking, nor in eating the delicious food she has prepared; nor in the tranquil beauty of the home she has created. She does not enjoy lingering in the cool darkening garden, selecting long-stemmed pinks, breaking the twigs of fragrant orange-blossom. Nor does she wait for and take pleasure in the stillness of the house with sleeping children: the running bath and room filling with steam, the slow pouring of luxurious bath foam into the rushing water. She does not enjoy the sight of her own healthy body in silky, flattering garments, nor the feeling of her warm pampered flesh tingling with satisfaction and anticipation.

  Oh no. She does it all for Gareth. And Gareth’s interest and pleasure are her reward. In fact it was not even necessary for him to show interest and pleasure. He simply needed to exist, like a chair, to give meaning and purpose to all her actions, and to enable her to be happy. He didn’t even need to speak. But if he should take himself away, when she is doing all this for him? She will be wronged, her joys ruined. And he will be guilty.

  * * *

  Vi accusing me. The night is clear, and the date, November 5th, the year before last. I was three months pregnant with the twins, feeling sick and slow. I remember I sat by the bedroom window in the dark watching the fires and distant rockets. There were patches of red sparks and that orange glow reflected in windows, of fires burning in gardens and on waste ground. In different areas of the sky there were spates of business, as different parties let off their rockets, their golden rain and shooting stars. I was out of it. We used to have a bonfire when the girls were little; now they were out together at Jackie’s, Gareth was going to bring them home. I was at peace up there, with my precious bellyful, and the whole of London dark and lit up outside my window. Twice I heard the sirens of fire engines hurtling to fires that had got out of hand; their urgency accentuated my calm. I had no need to worry.

  Then there was a flurry of noise in the hall, the door slamming, sharp breaths and footsteps running round the downstairs rooms. I sat and waited, part of me feeling that I was invisible, and invulnerable – the other part, paralysed with fear. The footsteps thudded upstairs – I recognized them.

  ‘Vi?’

  She came running, and stopped just inside the doorway. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes. What’s the matter?’

  ‘What are you doing? Why are you sitting in the dark?’

  ‘I’m watching the fireworks. What’s the matter? Where’s Ruth?’ Slowly she came over to me. As she approached the window the orange light from outside showed me that her face was blurry with smoke and tears.

  ‘Where’s Ruth?’

  ‘She’s OK. She’s at Jackie’s.’

  ‘What’s the matter then? Why have you come home on your own?’ She stood hesitating in the darkness for a minute, then knelt down next to me. She was looking out of the window, at the fireworks. I began to stroke her hair. We both watched in silence for a little while. Her breaths quietened and I heard her swallow a lump down a couple of times.

  ‘It’s quiet here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you mind being on your own?’

  ‘No. It’s peaceful.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s – well, I think he’s at a meeting. He told me he’d pick you up from Jackie’s but it’s not ten yet, is it?’

  ‘Mum! He’s a liar –’ She burst into noisy tears, shifting away from me to lean against the wall. ‘He’s a filthy beastly shit of a liar and I hate him!’

  I let her cry for a while. To the south, an expensive party had got under way. They were letting off rockets four at a time, and each one fired – I counted – six coloured flares.

  ‘Look. Isn’t that pretty?’ I reached for her in the dark and touched her cheek. She flinched away from me.

  ‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying, Mum? It’s important.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to tell me, Vi. That he wasn’t at a meeting, or whatever it is you’ve discovered. I know all about it.’

  ‘What do you know? What? WHAT?’ She scrambled to her feet. She was shouting at me, and I felt my stomach turn over, although I knew I shouldn’t be able to feel it yet.

  ‘Don’t shout. Go on then. Tell me what’s upsetting you.’

  She sat on the windowsill, her back to the outside, blocking my view of the fireworks. Her face was in shadow, I could see nothing but an occasional flicker of her eyes.

  ‘Jackie ran out of butter for the jacket potatoes. I went down to the off-licence to get some. I was just walking along – I don’t know – not even thinking – and I looked up and saw the car. Parked. Just parked in the row of cars lining the road, the back of our car, with Ruth’s ‘Save the whale’ and my trainers I left on the window ledge. I just – I started – I went over to it to see if –’

  I waited.

  ‘Dad was in it. With someone.’

  ‘Vi, it’s all right. I know.’

  ‘You don’t know! They were –’

  ‘I know, Vi. He’s got a girlfriend. I know. It’s all right.’ I was feeling queasy, not balancing very well on my raft. I could hold out a hand to her, but I couldn’t pull her out of the shocking cold water.

  ‘What do you mean, you know? What do you mean?’

  ‘Vi. Look, I’m sorry this has happened. It’s stupid and careless of him. But it’s not a major tragedy. It’s not like you think.’

  ‘You know about her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  I might have laughed. If I did I shouldn’t have done. ‘Look, listen Vi. I’ll try and explain it to you. It’s something I – or Gareth – would have explained to you both, fairly soon anyway, now you’re big enough to understand that no one is being hurt. OK? Will you listen?’

  She snuffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. Behind her the sky seemed to throb as the flames leapt and dwindled in the darkness.

  ‘It’s hard for you, you’ll understand it better as you get older. People – adults – don’t stay the same. I mean, they change. You ca
n be in love with someone and marry them and then find out a year later, or ten years later, that you don’t love them at all.’

  I had rehearsed it in my brain often and saying it was like lines in a play: I had no idea what it might mean to her, nor indeed what I meant by it.

  ‘Are you going to get divorced?’

  ‘Let me finish. No. Of course not.’

  ‘Whose is it?’ Pointing at my belly.

  That shocked me. Then I was shocked, in my placid queasy invisible cow-bubble. When my daughter asked me if the baby I was carrying (the twins, had we both but known it) had the same father as herself.

  ‘Gareth’s of course. Stop interrupting me. You asked and I’ll tell you – the least you can do is listen quietly. We changed all right? We were married, we had you both, we loved you both – we cared for each other, but still part of us had changed. You – you and Ruth – are the most important things to us. You know that, to both of us. But having said that – having put that first – there is still room – there has to be space for other things in our lives.’

  ‘Do you?’ she snapped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Screw other people in the back of cars? Do you?’

  I wanted to ask her if it was necessary to put it like that, but I didn’t. ‘No.’

  ‘Have you got anyone? A boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t want one, Vi, I’m perfectly content with life as it is – with you two, and now this baby’s coming – I’m not interested in that.’

  ‘But he is.’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘And you don’t mind.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re married to someone and you don’t mind them sleeping with someone else.’

  ‘No, Vi, I don’t. You’ll understand it better when you’re older. It’s nothing to do with me, and it’s not really anything to do with you. It’s his private life, and as long as it doesn’t impinge on us or hurt us, then . . .’