Caryl Phillips - In the Falling Snow

‘Annabelle, it’s so good to see you after all this time.’ He came towards her with his arms extended and kissed her once on either cheek without seeming to notice her protruding stomach. ‘Please, take a seat. Goodness, we have so many.’

He gestured in the direction of a number of comfy chairs with overly plumped cushions, and he continued to seem somewhat disconcerted, and a little embarrassed, that there was so much choice available to his guest. Unfortunately, her father seemed to have aged cruelly, and there was little evidence of the military man with whom she was familiar. He had not only lost his hair and his posture, but she could clearly see that his hands were shaking.

The civilised gentility of tea offended Annabelle, who soon understood that this was a world that, inadvertently, her husband had helped her to escape from. The fact that she had called their home from Paddington station, and left her husband a deceitful message about a play opening in Watford, made her feel sick. Her mother tried to keep a tight grip on proceedings by repeatedly bringing the conversation back to the subject of flowers, but then the kettle began to whistle and she hastily stood up and announced that she would make another pot.

‘Mint? Jasmine? Or should I just bring more of the same?’

Annabelle smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She watched as her mother retreated to the kitchen.

‘Your mother likes to blather.’

Annabelle looked at her father, who was staring intently at the scones without showing any real inclination to pick one up. Her mother returned almost immediately and began to flutter nervously about as she served the tea, and then she asked Annabelle if she wanted to see what they had done with her old room, or perhaps she would like to see the new conservatory, but all Annabelle wanted to do was go back to London and resume her life with her husband. Eventually, the conversation touched upon urgent matters relating to local efforts to block the motorway extension, and her father’s success with turnips and beetroot at the county’s agricultural fair, and then her visibly fatigued mother asked her when exactly the baby was due, although she knew full well, practically to the hour, when she was likely to become a grandmother.

‘Do you know what it is yet?’ asked her father.

Annabelle shook her head. ‘No, we’re not sure.’

‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘it will be one thing or the other, that’s for sure.’

Her father pursed his lips. ‘Yes, quite. I’m afraid your mother and I had no idea what you would be, that is until we had you, of course.’

‘I had her, William,’ smiled her mother.

‘Yes, yes, of course you did, but I was involved,’ insisted her father.

‘I think Keith would like a son.’

‘Would he, indeed?’ mused her father. ‘I see.’

She looked at her father and could see his mind working rapidly, so much so that his lips began to move as though he were rehearsing the opening of a sentence. Then he hummed reflectively and knitted his fingers together in what she assumed to be an imaginary golf grip.

‘You see, Annabelle, I received a note, anonymous of course, shortly after we last saw you in Bristol. In your salad days, as it were. Your mother may have mentioned something to somebody at bridge, or perhaps I blabbed to Walter or Barry in the pub, but some chap, or woman for that matter, wanted to know what it was like to have a “nigger-lover” for a daughter. He wrote that he hoped I would never have the ill manners to pollute our village with my mongrel family. Now then, what do you make of that?’

After the unscheduled visit to Magnolia Cottage, she resumed meeting her mother for monthly lunches at Harvey Nichols, which were only interrupted by a break shortly before she gave birth to Laurie. Her husband had forgiven her for lying to him and ‘sneaking off,’ as he put it, to Wiltshire, and when he returned after his door-slamming exit he told her that he’d sat in the pub and thought about things and he could understand why she might have wanted to go and see her father after all this time. When she told him what had transpired, and that she had shouted at her father and told him that it was his responsibility to deal with racist abuse, and not wait for a decade and then dump it in her lap, her husband shook his head and bent over and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Fucking wanker,’ was all he said, before announcing that he was going upstairs to get ready for bed. She had asked her distraught mother to call for a taxi to take her back to the station, but her father seemed genuinely annoyed, as though he had made some huge effort that had gone unrewarded. He reminded her that she hadn’t even bothered to have a scone or a piece of cake.

The taxi wound its slow way through the narrow country lanes that were walled on both sides by seemingly ancient bowed trees. Annabelle noted that, according to a neat billboard by the roadside, an archaeological dig sponsored by Cambridge University had recently unearthed evidence of pre-Roman settlement, a discovery which her parents had failed to mention. Once she reached Ashleigh station, Annabelle realised that she had just missed a London train so she would have plenty of time to think about how she was going to deal with this mess when she got home. Sitting alone on the empty platform, Annabelle suddenly felt herself convulse into floods of tears. She hated these people, the women with their starched hair and silk scarves, and the men in blazers and slacks, making conversation about nothing, smiling ‘yes, yes’, laughing nervously at their own jokes, trying to be decent, but beneath the façade full of contempt and wanting only to be among their own. What the hell was the matter with them? Jesus Christ, she was pregnant. She was having his grandchild and he wanted to know what ‘it’ was as though he was talking about a dog? Really, what the hell was the matter with him?

It was only after Laurie was born that she felt inclined to ask her husband if it might be all right for her mother to sometimes come to the house instead of them always meeting in town. Twice now, Laurie had screamed down the restaurant at Harvey Nichols, but she also saw no reason why her mother should continue to be inconvenienced simply because of her father’s ignorance. Her husband had no problem with the suggestion, but when she brought this up with her mother, as they sat together in Hyde Park, her mother’s eyes remained focused on the carry-cot and she continued to play with her grandson. Annabelle held out a hand for rain was now falling through the trees, but in drops so fine that it felt as though they were being sprinkled with dew. Eventually her mother looked up at her and told Annabelle, in a semi-whispered voice, that she didn’t think that this would be a good idea, and so Annabelle decided not to pursue the topic. When Laurie was five, and had started to go to school, mother and daughter began once again to meet without the child being present. It was then that she noticed that a considerable loneliness seemed to have descended on to her mother’s shoulders. At first she thought it was just age, and that doting upon her grandson had been keeping her young. However, it soon became clear that, beyond the subject of Laurie, there was nothing occurring in her mother’s life that she might transmute into the raw material of conversation. She worried about her, but realised that the best thing that she could offer her was time with her grandson, which suited Laurie for he loved being spoiled by his grandmother. During school holidays, she often let them spend an afternoon together at the zoo or at the pictures, and before Grandma got on the train to go back to the country she always made sure that her excited grandson was laden down with sweets. As he grew older, Laurie began to wonder aloud why Grandma never came to the house, or why Daddy never came to wave goodbye to Grandma at Paddington station, and then he began to ask his increasingly frail grandmother questions about her husband which she found difficult to field. By the time Laurie was ten, his grandmother’s trips to London were becoming infrequent, and Annabelle decided that she had to talk with her husband about the situation. Much to her surprise it was he who suggested that they should make a daytrip to Wiltshire and give Laurie the chance to meet his grandfather before it was too late.