In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  ‘It’s all right, Keith. You can have some of my chicken vindaloo and fried rice if you like. I’m not that hungry.’

  These days they don’t bother with the television. They sit in her remodelled kitchen on the two designer barstools, and he opens a bottle of Sancerre from the case of wine that he arranged to be delivered to her house. He has tried to tell her that she should put a couple of bottles in the fridge, but she doesn’t seem to listen. He passes her a long-stemmed glass of warm wine and realises that in her own way Yvette is trying. However, he recognises that their relationship must occasionally be difficult for her, for he can be private to the point of being hermetically sealed and, in the past few months, Yvette has been offered little more than enigmatic smiles and semi-educational gestures, such as an introduction to the world of wine. As a couple they have shared nothing, except the temporary convenience of her former marital bed, and no matter how attractive he finds her he knows full well that there is no substance to their relationship. He worries that the wine might be too dry for her, but she takes another sip and appears to be waiting for him to say something. They can’t even listen to any music together for she finds his passion for Stevie Wonder, and for American soul music of the seventies in general, as tedious as he finds her love of independent northern bands, particularly the Arctic Monkeys. Once it was clear that the television was not going to work she did attempt music, but why anybody would choose to listen to the mindless lyrics of a song called ‘Balaclava’, or a discordant cacophony with the unlikely title of ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’, was beyond him. When he finally expressed his distaste she simply shrugged her shoulders and turned off the CD player. She has never again suggested that they listen to any music, for which he feels a mixture of relief and guilt. He has tried to talk to her about the social significance of soul music, and he did confess his desire to one day write a book about music, but he quickly recognised that their conversation was rendered positively one-sided, and somewhat uncomfortable, by the undeniable fact that the music he was enthusing about was recorded before Yvette was born. Indie bands, or hip-hoppers with acronymic names, suggest to him not a new generation of music, but the evidence of a general cultural malaise. This being the case they have accustomed themselves to sitting in silence on the steel and chrome barstools and drinking their warm white wine before he is once again ushered out of the door.

  ‘You know,’ he begins, ‘I’m not sure that we should continue to see each other.’

  Yvette puts down her glass of wine, making sure that it is centred on the circular wooden coaster that she imagines will protect the kitchen work surface. He doesn’t wait for her to say anything, choosing instead to press ahead with his unrehearsed words.

  ‘I don’t want things to become difficult for either of us and, to be honest, I’m beginning to feel as though we either have to take it to the next stage or accept the fact that we’re not able to move forward. Am I making sense?’

  ‘What do you mean by “the next stage”?’

  Yvette runs her tongue along the full length of her bottom lip and stares at him.

  ‘No, it’s just that well, for a start, you work for me. Or with me. Whatever, you know what I mean. And then we don’t have that much in common, do we? I’m a bit of a downer compared to you. It’s not like I can come with you to some Club 18–30 in Spain, or on a piss-up to the Canary Islands.’

  ‘You’re worried about the age difference? Is that it?’

  ‘Yvette, that’s part of it. I’m just trying to be sensible about everything. I don’t like mess, and so I’m just thinking that it’s best to be honest.’

  ‘And what about how I feel? If it doesn’t feel right to you, that’s one thing, but how about working together to fix it? You know, saying, “okay, it’s not perfect” and then just trying to sort it together, or do you just want out?’

  He moves to top up her wine, but without taking her eyes from his face Yvette covers the glass with her hand. He pauses, unsure whether to prolong this encounter by pouring himself another drink. He lowers his eyes and looks at the canary yellow and white label on the bottle, and then he pours himself a small amount.

  Two hours later he is on a Hammersmith and City train to Shepherd’s Bush. He peers through the window at the low horizon, which is ragged with rusting fire escapes and abandoned buildings, as the train passes quickly through the desolate parts of the city. He changed at King’s Cross, but luckily he didn’t have to spend any time on the platform. These days it doesn’t pay to linger anywhere in the city, and being dressed as he is only serves to mark him out as prime mugging material. As he reached the top of the second escalator, he called Annabelle but the line went almost immediately to voicemail. He thought about leaving a message, but the idea that she might be with her friend Bruce annoyed him so he closed the phone. Then he realised that he was being petty, and this was really about his son, and so he opened his phone and for a moment he was rooted to the spot with indecision. It was then that he heard the dull roar of an approaching train so once again he flipped the phone shut and tumbled rapidly down a neighbouring escalator and squeezed through the carriage doors as they were closing. Three teenagers sit opposite him, and when the train plunges into a tunnel he can see his reflection in the window behind their heads. He can see that, like his son Laurie, all three kids are partly white, but it is clear from their baggy dress sense, and from the way that they slouch and speak, that they identify themselves as black. Gone are the days when, sitting on the tube at night, he would feel perfectly safe if a posse of black youths got into his carriage. Back then he often took silent satisfaction in seeing how their exuberance made older white people somewhat uneasy, but today’s teenagers no longer respect any boundaries. Black youths, white youths, mixed race youths, to them all he is just a middle-aged man in a jacket and tie who looks like he doesn’t know shit about nothing. He lowers his gaze and tries to figure out the genders of the gang of three, whose faces remain shrouded beneath oversized hoods. A few seats away, an elderly white lady with a blue silk print scarf, and wearing expensive designer flats, sits by herself with two carrier bags of groceries balanced delicately between her feet. Bloody hell, couldn’t she find a better time to do her shopping? By the time the train sways and lurches its way out of Paddington station and back into the evening gloom the three teenagers are on their feet. The smallest one, who he now realises is a girl, has had her iPod snatched by the older of the two boys. She begins to chase him, but the boys toss the iPod to each other and the girl’s frustration mounts.

  ‘Give me my fucking iPod you pair of cunts.’

  The boys laugh and throw it to each other like a cricket ball, the earpieces and cord trailing like a cartoonish jet-stream, and then one of the boys fumbles the iPod and it bounces on to the seat next to the old lady. He feels his body tense, as though suddenly understanding that he might now have to be drawn into this conflict, but the old lady simply looks at the iPod, and then at the teenagers, and then back at the iPod. She picks it up, wraps the cord around it as though balling wool, and then offers the iPod to the girl.

  ‘Might I suggest that you take better care of your personal property.’

  For a moment the girl looks at her, as though genuinely shocked that this apparition has the power of speech. As the train slows and pulls into Westbourne Park station the two boys begin to kick the carriage doors, but the girl does not take her eyes from the old lady. The doors eventually open with a well-rehearsed clatter and the two boys leap out on to the platform.

  ‘You coming, or what?’

  The girl begins to move off, but she has not finished with the old lady.

  ‘You better keep your fucking hands off people’s stuff, all right?’

  The girl turns now, and as the doors begin to close she quickly jumps and joins her friends on the platform. Through the window she gives the lady two fingers and mouths ‘fuck off’. The train speeds off again, but this part of the Hammersmith and City line is overground an
d so there are no longer any tunnels to plunge into. He glances at the old lady, who seems totally unruffled by the encounter, and he wonders how this woman is able to maintain such poise with these hooligans who are probably the same age as, or even younger than, her grandchildren. Does she understand and maybe pity them, or does she simply feel contempt? Though only a generation removed from the brutes, he finds their ill manners mystifying. As a child, Brenda would never have allowed him to get away with such behaviour. After his father was readmitted to the hospital, and it was just the two of them alone, she drilled him in the importance of always saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and if his tie wasn’t straight, and his socks pulled up all the way, and his shoes properly polished, he wasn’t allowed to leave the house. ‘There’s people out there, Keith, who think they’re better than you, but never mind what they say, they’re not. However, I’m not having you giving them some reason to think they are. Keep your chin up, love, your clothes nice and tidy, and your language decent, and you’ll be a credit to yourself and your mum and dad. Now get yourself off to school and mind you come back with As on that report card or don’t you bother coming back at all.’ Brenda knew that good manners were important, and he had tried to pass these values on to Laurie who, as a small boy, was so timid that at times he wondered if he had not overdone it with the manners thing. In fact, once boys started to bully him, he was sure that he should be encouraging his son to be more assertive, but Annabelle disagreed, and insisted that Laurie was right to walk, or even run, away when boys pelted him with stones and called him a ‘halfie’. He and Annabelle had words, and he tried to explain to his wife that his own understanding of how to survive an English childhood had involved knowing that there was a time when it simply didn’t make sense to run, and that you sometimes had to stand up and fight. While he could not persuade his wife that Laurie should be encouraged to occasionally scrap it out, it was, ironically enough, his father-in-law who ended up agreeing with him, for the man’s military background meant that the idea of his grandson backing down from a scuffle filled him with something akin to shame.

  The subject of Laurie and bullying came up on the only occasion that Annabelle’s father actually met his grandson. It was an uncomfortable encounter, but Annabelle had been both courageous and unambiguous about where her loyalties lay. If her parents disapproved of her choice of a partner, then her relationship with them would have to change radically. She was still at college when she first found herself trapped awkwardly between her boyfriend and her parents, and although she had no desire to be disrespectful towards them, her parents’ intransigence eventually forced a choice upon her. Some years later, but before the uncomfortable encounter between her new family and her father, Annabelle made the mistake of attempting to keep something about her relationship with her parents a secret from Keith. Annabelle was in the middle trimester of her pregnancy, and her mother had met up with her for their regular lunch at Harvey Nichols, followed by a walk in Hyde Park. After six years of post-college non-communication, when he and Annabelle had lived first in Bristol and then in Birmingham, actual face-to-face relations had been re-established with her mother once they moved to London and Annabelle started working for the theatrical agency. After three years of monthly lunches, during which time Annabelle’s mother was always careful to ask after her son-in-law, but without ever expressing any interest in spending any time with him, Annabelle waited until they were strolling by a stand of beeches near the Serpentine before announcing her pregnancy. Her mother’s anxious smile collapsed, and the well-disguised wrinkles began now to spider around her eyes. Annabelle helped her mother to a seat on a bench and watched as the older woman began to cry. Then she sat next to her mother, and for a few moments she looked helplessly at the space between her feet before slowly placing an arm around her mother’s heaving shoulders. The occasional walker ambled by, and a small group of children on the grass continued to play with their kites, but the mother and daughter were largely oblivious to any activity. They sat together for nearly an hour before the older woman finally reached into her handbag for a handkerchief and carefully wiped her nose then dabbed at her eyes. Annabelle tightened her arm and pulled her mother an inch or so towards her.

  The following month they met at Harvey Nichols as usual, and over lunch her mother shared with her the village gossip, energising each trivial tale with the drama and intrigue of an international incident. Annabelle smiled knowingly and nodded at the right moments, although it was almost ten years since she had last seen the family cottage in Wiltshire, or set eyes upon her father, and her pre-college, pre-Keith, life had long begun to fade into the general mélange of hazy childhood memories which included attempting, and failing, to learn how to ride a bike, and falling into the stream at the end of the garden. Once her mother had paid the bill and retrieved her credit card, Annabelle gathered up her belongings and made ready to leave the restaurant, but her mother did not immediately get up from the table so Annabelle sat back down. After a few moments of inelegant silence, her mother asked if she would mind sharing a taxi with her to the train station as she really didn’t feel up to a walk in the park today. Having ascertained that her mother was not suffering from light-headedness or about to faint, she offered her an arm and the two of them flagged down a black cab whose driver seemed to know all the backstreets and soon dropped them at Paddington. Once they passed into the loud and cavernous station concourse, her mother reached into her bag and produced a train ticket. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said and then she held on to her daughter’s arm and began to sob. Annabelle led her mother to a coffee bar, and left her at the only free table, which was uncomfortably close to the door, while she ordered two herbal teas from the counter. When she returned to the draughty table her mother had calmed down somewhat, and she appeared to be eager to talk. ‘It’s your father,’ she began. ‘He needs to see you and find a way for you two to make up. He won’t admit anything, but you know he’s always been a stubborn so-and-so.’ Her mother picked up the tea and blew on it, then immediately placed it back on the saucer. ‘Darling, I really don’t know what else to do about it. I suppose I’m begging you.’

  That evening, Annabelle arrived back home at just after eight o’clock. She had left Keith a message on the answerphone explaining that the agency had asked her to attend the dress rehearsal of a play that she had read and recommended, and which was opening in Watford later in the week. She had let him know that there was food in the fridge and she would see him in the early evening. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading the review section of the paper, and he looked up at her as she took off her coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He noticed that small threads of silver were now embroidered into her bob of brown hair, and he anticipated that at some point they would have to sit down for the ‘to go grey or not to go grey’ discussion.

  ‘You look knackered,’ he said. He put down the paper and stood up. ‘Shall I get you a coffee?’

  ‘That would be great.’ Annabelle didn’t meet his eyes as she pulled out a wooden kitchen chair and sat down at the table.

  ‘How was the play? Presumably you did the right thing recommending it?’

  ‘It was all right. Not bad at all. I think it will come into town.’

  ‘Which masterpiece was it?’ He opened the cupboard which held the various jars of coffee and boxes of tea. ‘What do you want, instant?’

  Annabelle nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Well, what play was it?’

  ‘Look Keith, I didn’t go to a play.’

  He spooned the granules into a cup and focused his full attention on the task at hand. The water in the kettle started to make a slow, steamy gurgle, and as the mist began to rise the light from the halogen fixtures passed through the vaporous cloud and created a strangely ethereal pattern on the granite counter top.

  ‘I went to see my father.’

  He turned to look at her. ‘I see. Why did you lie to me?’

  ‘I don’t know
. I think I was just a bit scared.’

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Keith. I didn’t want to hurt you, but I shouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have lied, or you shouldn’t have gone to see your father? Which is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m confused. Both, I suppose.’

  ‘So how long has this been going on?’

  ‘How long has what been going on?’

  ‘Don’t play games with me, Annabelle. How long have you been saying you’re having lunch with your mother, but secretly traipsing off down there?’

  ‘Look Keith, I have been having lunch with my mother. This is the first time I’ve been down there since university. Jesus, I’ve not seen Dad since he took us out for that awful meal just before graduation.’ He pushed the cup, with the granules still in it, away from him so that it slid some distance along the counter. ‘Keith, don’t you believe me?’

  ‘You’ve lied to me once already, what’s to stop you lying again?’

  ‘Come on, you can’t be serious, Keith. I’m not a liar. Look at this situation, I can’t even keep it up for a few hours.’

  He picked up his jacket from the back of the kitchen chair that he had just vacated.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out. I need to clear my head.’

  ‘Look, I know you’re upset and I don’t blame you, but I won’t be going back again. Not ever, if I have my way.’ He moved past her and walked towards the door. ‘Keith?’