Caryl Phillips - In the Falling Snow

Outside in the street a car backfires, and then he hears the sound of breaking glass. A visitor might be perturbed by these noises, but he has become accustomed to such nocturnal intrusions. He knows that he is safe in the flat, although sometimes he feels lonely. However, he was never lonelier than the night following dinner with Bruce and Annabelle when he had to walk home by himself and try hard not to imagine Annabelle in bed with her film editor friend. She never again suggested that all three of them get together and, in fact, these days she seldom mentions Bruce. Laurie never mentions him at all, and the one time he pressed his son on the subject Laurie just sucked his teeth and called him ‘the dry guy’. Again he hears a car in the street backfire, and it occurs to him that perhaps this was not a car backfiring after all. When he last travelled north to see his father he told him about the rise in gun violence on the streets of London, but his father had just turned away from him and shrugged his shoulders. That was four years ago, and in the interim their infrequent phone conversations have been similarly frustrating. It was Annabelle who had encouraged him to be more understanding, and who had sought to remind him that for the greater part of his father’s adult life the man had been either hospitalised or struggling in his mind. Despite Annabelle’s entreaties, he has found it difficult to be always sympathetic towards somebody whose stubborn behaviour so successfully obscures whatever sensitive or vulnerable qualities he may possess. Most of the time it simply doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. He puts down his glass on the coffee table and goes into the kitchen to the fridge, where he tugs open the door and removes the open bottle of wine from the top shelf. He returns to the sofa and refills his glass and then puts the bottle on the floor so that it won’t mark the table. Were Brenda still alive he feels that she would be sympathetic with regard to some of the recent decisions, and mistakes, that he has made in his life, but he is reasonably certain that his father’s response would be judgmental. This being the case, he is right to be cautious in his dealings with his father and share little, for even though he is content once again to be in contact with him, it is exhausting to constantly negotiate the emotional mood swings of this unpredictable man and his demons. He notices that there is only a little wine left in the bottle so he decides to drain it. The wine will help him sleep and encourage him to forget the unpleasantness of being exposed to Yvette’s fury. He hears shouting and hands clapping, and he slumps back into the sofa as he realises that it is just the young couple in the ground floor flat hoping to send a cat scurrying into the night.

The following morning he senses that something has changed. As he walks into the office, his secretary glances up at him from behind the computer on her desk, but she doesn’t say anything. Ruth looks alarmed, and she furtively clicks the mouse and changes the image on her screen.

‘Morning, Ruth.’

‘Yeah, good morning, Mr Gordon.’

‘Everything all right, is it? You look like you’re up to no good. And before you ask, I haven’t finished the trans-racial adoption thing, so if anyone asks feel free to give them the runaround.’

Ruth picks up a pencil and begins tapping it nervously against the side of her desk.

‘Mr Gordon, I think you should check out your email.’

‘My email?’

‘I’d check it out if I were you.’

He shrugs and walks past her and into his office, swings the briefcase up on to the desk, and then punches on his computer and watches as the screen flickers and buzzes to life. He shouts through the open door.

‘Ruth, any messages?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not really? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Mr Wilson said he’d like to see you. In his office.’

He clicks on his email account.

‘Any particular time?’

He does not hear if Ruth answers or not, for he is scrolling down the list of one hundred and twenty-seven messages that decorate his screen. There is no reason for him to open any for he has read them already. Yvette has copied their entire correspondence, including his appreciation of her attentiveness in bed, to everybody in the department. He sits down and stares in disbelief. When he looks up, Ruth is standing before him.

‘Well, if it means anything to you,’ begins Ruth, ‘we all kind of knew that something was going on between the pair of you. It was pretty obvious to me, but other people soon guessed, but what’s the big deal here? You’re both single, right?’

He rubs his face in the palm of his hand.

‘The big deal here is that Yvette seems to have it in for me.’

‘Did you two have words?’

‘Well, sort of. Last night I told her that we should cool it a bit.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘What do you see?’

‘Well that’s it then, isn’t it?’

He pauses and looks again at the screen. ‘What time does Mr Wilson want to see me?’

‘He said after you’ve had a chance to read your email.’

He looks up at her. ‘So she sent this to him too? Bloody hell what good does she think is going to come from this? Okay, so I’m embarrassed, is that what she wants?’

Ruth shrugs and throws out a helpless arm.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Gordon, but I don’t know what she wants. I haven’t got a clue.’

He opens the door to Clive Wilson’s office and sees him sitting at the rectangular conference table with Lesley Thornton, his deputy, seated to his right. He sits at the table opposite them, although this makes him feel as though he is being interviewed, and he loosens his tie and undoes his top button. Lesley is careful to betray neither a smile nor a scowl, but her coldness has been a feature of their exchanges since the fateful policy-making retreat in the New Forest. On the third and last night, they had both slipped into the village for a Sunday nightcap, careful to choose a different pub from the one which they had been frequenting as a group. Over a dry Martini she complained about the rudeness of the staff that she inherited on being promoted earlier in the year, and how the table manners of the last guy she dated seemed to have been picked up from the chimps at Regent’s Park Zoo. She even did a quick impression of him eating spaghetti which was genuinely funny. Like many country pubs, come eleven o’clock the place officially closed, but the curtains were simply drawn and the drinks continued to be served and so they both decided to stay on.

Once they returned to the conference hotel, she invited him to her room for a quick raid of the mini-bar, but as soon as she closed the door they began to clutch and paw at each other, tossing clothes in all directions until he pushed her back on to the bed and unzipped her brown leather ankle boots. He didn’t stay the night, although she made it clear that she wanted him to. She pointed to the small digital alarm clock on the bedside table and insisted that it had never let her down. She was sure that if they set it for six in the morning he could easily get back to his own room without being seen by anyone. But he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her and pulled his belt an extra notch tighter before standing up and turning around. It had not been in any way satisfactory, her lust being more desperate than sensual, which made him feel slightly used. She was now wrapped in a white cotton sheet, and much to his embarrassment he realised that he didn’t even feel particularly attracted to her. Before leaving, he placed his hand against her cheek, and then he crossed the room and quietly closed the door behind him. Early the next morning, he called the room of the colleague who was giving him a lift back to London and asked if they might leave an hour ahead of schedule as he had an emergency to attend to. Back in the office, Lesley smiled in his direction and offered him every chance to ask her out, but after a week had passed, and it had become clear to her that he was unlikely to do so, she cornered him by the Xerox machine. She announced that her sister had let her down and was going to Crete with her husband, and she therefore had two tickets to see a revival of a Pinter play at the National Theatre. For one moment he thought about making up a plausible excuse to spare her dignity, but in the end he could think of nothing to say and so he simply shook his head.