In the Falling Snow

by Caryl Phillips

  He had been warned, for when he and Annabelle went for coffee after the Tennessee Williams play, she had confessed to him that her father could be a ‘difficult’ man. She told her new friend that her father was an ex-army officer who had resigned his commission because he was distressed at having to associate with fellow officers who he regarded as being a cut below by birth, but who behaved as though they were a cut above by divine right. Her father had used his old school tie contacts and forged a successful career for himself in banking, but he had recently retired to the tranquillity of the countryside. ‘I’m it,’ she said, ‘the only child they were able to have so they dote on me, but they also kind of resent me a little for not being two, or even three, and that way they wouldn’t have had to put all their eggs in the potentially disappointing Annabelle basket. Of course, he wanted a boy, so the daddy’s little girl thing never really worked for me.’ He listened to Annabelle, but he found it difficult to hear anything that she was saying for he couldn’t take his eyes from her stunning, almost perfectly oval face. Her wispy brown hair was tied back with an elastic band, although unruly strands sprouted out from all sides so that the overall effect was a weird bohemian self-possession. When he entered into the second year of the sixth form he had a girlfriend of sorts, but that solitary relationship was more about sexual confidence-building than any kind of affection, or even attraction, and once he was accepted at university their friendship gradually petered out. For most of his first year at university his energies had been thoroughly invested in football and drinking, and the notion of pulling a bird seemed so vaguely remote that he spent a great deal of time affecting a lack of interest. However, from the moment during the interval of Sweet Bird of Youth when the girl looked up from her theatre programme and leaned across the empty seat between them and asked him if he was enjoying the play, he was intrigued. At the end of the performance, as they were both putting on their coats, he found the courage to ask her if she was a student, and she not only told him ‘yes’, she also scribbled down her name and the number of the phone in her hall of residence and handed the piece of paper to him saying, ‘I thought I was the only one who went to see Tennessee Williams’s plays on my own.’ As she smiled and turned to leave, he heard the words emerge of their own volition. ‘Would you like to have a coffee?’

  Two days before the end of his first year at university, he waited for Annabelle outside Lecture Theatre One in the English department, and showed her the letter which effectively undid his summer plans. Despite Brenda’s urgings, he had consistently made it clear to her that he had no interest in spending the summer building any kind of a relationship with his father, for he felt that the effort should be coming in the other direction. In fact, he had already made plans to spend the late summer travelling around Europe on the trains. The university authorities had agreed that he could stay in the halls throughout the early summer, and so he had set himself up with a part-time job pumping petrol in a garage on the edge of the campus. He reckoned that by mid-August he would have saved enough money to fund a month of Inter-Railing, and perhaps have enough left over to be able to spend maybe another two weeks in Spain, or Portugal, or anywhere that was warm and cheap. After he and Annabelle had shared their first hot and stuffy night squeezed up tight in his single bed, he asked her if she wanted to join him ‘on the road’. She laughed and wondered if he was deliberately trying to sound like a hippie, but before he could answer she said ‘yes,’ she would love to join him but she would have to meet him in late August as her father had fixed up a job for her as a lowly dogsbody at the Wiltshire Times so she could acquire some journalism experience. However, just as he was beginning to feel happy and safe with their arrangements, everything came apart when he got the letter from Brenda. He walked over to the English department, and once Annabelle had read the letter he explained to her that this woman had pretty much raised him by herself and that if she needed his help then he had to be there for her as she didn’t really have anybody else in her life. Annabelle nodded and smiled. He assumed that she might be annoyed because he was changing their summer plans, but she slipped her arm through his and laughed. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘we can do it next year. Europe will still be there. If she’s become ill then you must go and be with her. Maybe you could take me too, or maybe I can come and visit when it’s convenient?’

  Two years later, as they stood on the threshold of graduation, they were an inseparable couple. They both realised that it wasn’t going to be possible to go forward with their lives until the situation with Annabelle’s parents had been confronted. It was Annabelle’s mother who telephoned her hall of residence and suggested that they would like to come up and take her for a pre-graduation dinner, and when Annabelle made it clear that she would not be alone she heard her mother’s flustered voice agree wholeheartedly that she must, of course, bring her ‘friend’. She left the choice of restaurant up to Annabelle, and then began to babble unceasingly, leaping from one topic to another, as though terrified to submit to a lull in conversation. The young couple decided upon the Madras Bicycle Club which was Indian colonial in décor, but the cuisine was far more eclectic. As he sat on the bed in Annabelle’s room, and watched as she put on her lipstick in the mirror, he had a sense of foreboding about the forthcoming meal with her parents for he knew that his girlfriend had been struggling with a kind of double life for the past two years. ‘Well,’ said Annabelle, dropping the cylinder of lipstick back into her handbag and then turning to face him. ‘I’m ready if you are.’ They had been in the restaurant once before, when Annabelle’s Wordsworth and Shelley tutor had missed two tutorials because of a three-week fellowship in California and wanted to make it up in some way. While that meal had passed off pleasantly enough, and Dr Stewart had treated them more like colleagues than students, the evening with Annabelle’s parents began ominously with Mr Johnson, having limply shaken hands with him, being visibly reluctant to make eye contact with anybody at the table. However, by the time he had downed his third Scotch and water, and the servers had cleared the main course plates from the table, he had introduced finger-wagging into his conversational style and decided to redirect his hostility away from his daughter and towards her boyfriend. Her father practically demanded of him that he take responsibility for his people’s ‘ill manners’. ‘You’re rather like the Irish aren’t you, with loud voices that get on one’s nerves and always protesting about what exactly? Mind you, at least you people are not bombing innocent civilians. Well, not yet.’ When he tried to explain to Mr Johnson the frustrations of his generation, the man laughed in his face and signalled to the waitress to bring another drink. A mortified Annabelle attempted to intervene and support her boyfriend’s argument, but when she was shouted down she simply removed her mother’s hand from her arm and left the table. Having neatly folded his napkin, he asked to be excused and climbed to his feet. He found a distraught Annabelle outside, standing bareheaded in the rain on the pavement in front of the restaurant. ‘I can’t believe my bloody mother. She actually leaned over and whispered to me, “He seems like a nice boy.” I mean, in the face of his ranting and raving, that’s the best she could come up with? Whispering to me.’ He held Annabelle’s hand for a few moments, and then he dried her tears with the back of his hand and realised for the first time that Annabelle was more than just a girlfriend. Standing in the rain outside the Madras Bicycle Club it occurred to him that he was probably going to know this young woman for the rest of his life. He looked at her, then slipped an arm around her shoulders and tried to persuade her that she should return to the table.

  Although the rest of the meal was a predictable failure of communication, he now clearly understood why local authorities up and down the country had started advertising for race relations liaison officers, people who could help explain black anger to white people, and white liberal do-gooding to disgruntled black people, although he knew that anybody reckless enough to attempt to explain anything to Annabelle’s father risked incurring
the full force of his smug indignation. Had he not been in a hurry to leave the table and comfort his girlfriend, he might well have continued and calmly explained to Mr Johnson that because he believed that he might be able to help people understand one another, he had put aside all thoughts of a Ph.D. and had recently started to apply for jobs in social work. While most of his fellow students had no idea of what they were going to do upon graduation in a couple of weeks’ time, he was suddenly aware that he had the opposite problem. He had filled out six application forms and had been offered six jobs, which was far too much choice, for location aside, the job descriptions and the respective starting salaries seemed pretty much the same. That night, after Annabelle’s parents had left, and she had come back to his room and finally stopped crying and apologising, he gently changed the subject so that they were soon talking about where they might relocate after graduation. It soon became clear that Annabelle would go wherever he wanted. He told her that now that he had a selection of jobs from which to choose, his only restriction was that he didn’t see any reason to go north and back in the direction of his father, particularly as he no longer had Brenda. By the time they cuddled up together in his single bed, they had pretty much decided to stay where they were and accept the job that he had been offered in Bristol. Not only was it a place they both knew, but things being what they were in the city they assumed, rightly as it turned out, that Annabelle would have little difficulty in also getting a social work traineeship with the local authority. As he drains what remains of his pint, he now remembers that rather than spending his Sunday night in the pub he should be at the flat reading up and preparing notes in order that he might begin drafting his department’s policy report regarding the supposedly ethical question as to whether or not a white couple should be allowed to adopt a black child, but he knows that this is a banal place, intellectually and professionally, for him to find himself marooned in after all these years of white collar bondage. The lilting strains of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Living for the City’ start to fade, and then he listens carefully as the clanking arm levers the seven-inch disc back into place before he stands and eases his way out from behind the circular wooden table.

  In the fridge at his flat in Wilton Road, there is an apple, a carton of yoghurt, and two bottles of white wine, one of which is uncorked but still three-quarters full. He balances awkwardly on one leg and holds open the fridge door with his knee while he pours a glass. When he bought the fridge he failed to notice that the door was hinged on the left-hand side. The two Nigerian guys from the superstore had already finished installing it, and were lingering by the front door waiting for their tip, when he saw what the problem was. He asked them if they could help him out and change the door around, but they laughed and said, ‘it ain’t our job, mate’ and then insisted that they were in a hurry because Arsenal were playing at home. He had left his tools at Annabelle’s house so he had no choice but to make an excursion to the local hardware shop and buy a small screwdriver kit. When he returned he cleared a space and wrestled the fridge down and on to its back. To begin with he carefully followed the instructions in the manual, but after a while, feeling that he had got the hang of it, he stopped looking at the small booklet. Eventually he hoisted the fridge back upright, and although the door was now hinged to the right it didn’t stay when opened: slowly, but determinedly, the door began to swing back closed. However, he judged the operation to be something of a success and decided that later on, if it didn’t settle down, he could always look again at the manual and if necessary troubleshoot the problem.

  But he has never re-read the manual, and occasionally when he goes to the fridge he has to practise what feels like a yoga position in order to return an item to a shelf. He sits on the sofa in the semi-gloom and sips at his wine. A car alarm begins to wail beneath his window, but he assumes that it has been triggered by the wind. The flat was unfurnished, so he had to buy everything at Ikea, although Annabelle did offer him one or two pieces from the house. He politely refused, for once he realised that Annabelle was not going to change her mind and take him back he decided that he would rather make a clean break. However, he did take the two poster-sized black and white photographs of Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, even though they had bought these items together. After a week living in a Travelodge out towards Heathrow, and attempting, and failing, to work out how to operate the toaster oven in the kitchenette section of his suite, he was relieved to be given a lead on a flat that was less than a mile from Annabelle and Laurie where he might finally establish some kind of domestic order. The lettings agency down the street from his office had called to let him know that a clean and tidy new conversion had just become available and, as long as he was willing to pay slightly above market rent, and three months’ key money in advance, he could move in at the weekend. When he telephoned Annabelle, she announced that she and Laurie would be visiting her mother on Saturday afternoon, so this would be a good time for him to come round and get his things. During the following few weeks he worried that she might question him about the two missing posters, but Annabelle never mentioned a thing. She would eventually redecorate their home, and he imagined that framed photographs of American jazz musicians would probably play no part in Annabelle’s design scheme. On their final night under the same roof, as he lay on the sofa and tried again to fathom what on earth had made him ‘confess’ to his only act of infidelity, he pictured Annabelle upstairs busily planning her Keith-free life. He lay awake for hours hoping that she would miss him, but he had no confidence that she would. In the morning, a resolutely silent Annabelle drove Laurie off to school in her hatchback, and then presumably continued on to her new job at the BBC. Meanwhile, he knotted his tie and took one final look around what had been his home before pulling shut the door behind him and heading off towards Hammersmith Grove and in the direction of the office and then, at the end of the day, on to a depressing Travelodge.

  That was three years ago, and as he cradles the wine glass in his hand, and stares out through the uncurtained windows at the dark shadows of the trees that line his street, he thinks once more that he may have cheated on Annabelle for the flimsiest of reasons; perhaps he simply wanted to know what it felt like to be single again. Of course, most men in his position have the common sense just to have an affair and keep quiet about it, or arrange to go on a trip by themselves for a week or two. He knows this now because in the past couple of years he has felt moved to flip through the problem pages of GQ or Esquire, or whatever men’s magazine happens to be handy while he is killing time in the waiting room of his doctor or dentist. The magazines address the surprisingly common occurrence of male forty-something panic by insisting that the victim keep his big mouth shut and simply wait for the storm clouds to pass. However, the fact that he actually confessed suggests to him that a deeper malaise was being expressed by his single act of infidelity, and his confusion might well have benefited from some constructive discussion with his wife. But Annabelle’s unforgiving response would admit no conversation, and she immediately closed down any possibility of dialogue on the subject of how he felt or what had motivated him to sleep with his co-worker. His wife had been betrayed and clearly she was in no mood to compromise. Having ushered him out of their house, Annabelle not only secured a promotion and landed a production assistant’s job at BBC Television Centre, she began to repair her relationship with her mother and became a regular weekend visitor at her mother’s assisted-living home. Then, about a year ago, she announced to him that she was seeing a film editor named Bruce who was four years younger than her and who might, from time to time, be spending the night at the house. This being the case, she wanted her estranged husband to meet the man who might have some kind of a role in his son’s life, and she suggested that all three of them have dinner.

  He remembers standing at his own front door, clutching a bottle of wine and feeling apprehensive about how the evening was going to unfold. Eventually a flustered Annabelle opened the door and ushered hi
m through and into the kitchen where he could see three fish crisping in a skillet, their silver skins curling at the edges and the flesh browning quickly. Annabelle had waited until half-term, when she knew that Laurie would be away on a geography field trip in Swanage, before announcing that she would make supper for them all and keep things simple and informal. He looked closely at her as she grabbed the skillet from the stove and recoiled slightly as oil began to spatter up towards her face. He noticed that she seized the pan with her now empty ring hand and he felt a brief surge of resentment. Annabelle didn’t seem to be ageing, in fact if anything she appeared to be getting younger and he wasn’t sure how he felt about this. Bruce, however, looked decidedly older than forty-three, and as the man stuffed a handful of peanuts into his mouth he realised that his wife’s friend had a very unappealing habit of speaking with his mouth full. Bruce’s shirt was open at the collar and his sleeves were rolled up, and he noticed that the man had deliberately left a pile of papers and some DVDs scattered on the kitchen table. Bruce was marking his territory, and before either man had a chance to refill his glass he began to do the same thing conversationally. Annabelle’s friend leaned across the table and picked up one of the DVDs, announcing that he was editing a major documentary series about the three waves of immigration to Britain during the past decade. He confessed to Bruce that he didn’t know that there had been three waves, and Bruce seized the opening and began to explain. What felt like an age later, Bruce concluded his lecture with a flourish. ‘You see the asylum-seekers, and those migrants from the subcontinent who come here to marry their cousins, they have every right to be here no matter how hard some of us may find it to accept them. But this cheap Eastern European labour in the wake of EU expansion, well to Old Labour men like myself this just doesn’t seem fair.’ He listened to Bruce but said nothing, and then he glanced up at the clock as he tried to work out what time they might be eating. Annabelle rescued the situation by picking up the grater and handing it to the speechmaker. ‘Bruce, you’re on cheese duty. Come along, chop, chop.’ Not only did this intervention have the desired effect of sidetracking Bruce out of his conversational comfort zone, it also allowed the man the opportunity to demonstrate his inability to grate Parmesan cheese. However, what really caught his attention was the fact that Annabelle had obviously recently acquired a kind of singsong delivery to her speech, and as he listened to her he realised the degree to which his wife was slowly, despite her youthful looks, becoming her mother.