Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She would discover him when she came down in the morning. She would notice the glass but she would fail to see the diazepam. She would check his pulse and his breathing but she would know from the look of him that he had been dead for some time. She would call an ambulance and wait outside for it to arrive. She would call Bunny’s mother. She would call Bunny’s sister. She would say, “He seemed so happy.” She would wrap the owl and the apostle spoons and the wall plate in newspaper and put them at the bottom of her suitcase, but she wouldn’t leave town till after the funeral. The idea of him being rolled through those curtains without a friend in the room was almost unbearable.

It is late afternoon on Christmas Eve and the predicted snow has begun, a long front of white teeth sweeping down the weather map of the Baltic and fastening itself into the curved rump of England. Kelmarsh, Clipston, Sibbertoft: red sandstone and rolling green hills, thatched roofs, cattle farms and boxy Saxon churches. Scattered flakes at first, whiter than the darkening sky behind them, that magical childhood silence settling on everything, only the peal of church bells and the chatter of distant trains being carried in the cold, clean air.

Madeleine Cooper is cooking a smoked salmon quiche with honey-glazed carrots and broccoli, getting everything ready for the final bake and steam when the three children and their respective families have safely arrived. There is a chocolate and raspberry pavlova in the fridge.

Her husband, Martin, has completed his allotted, minimal task of setting the table and is now sitting in his study listening to the St. Matthew Passion (the 2001 Nikolaus Harnoncourt recording) and reading Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521–1580 . He has set the table wrong, laying nine places instead of ten. It is a drama they play out so often they hardly notice anymore: his feigned incompetence followed by her feigned exasperation (“Can you honestly not count the members of your own family?”) which makes her feel more important and him more justified in not providing any further help. He retired two years ago after thirty-six years of neurosurgery, at St. George’s, Tooting, then Frenchay in Bristol, then out into the sticks for a final few laps at Leicester Royal Infirmary. She worried about him falling to pieces in the time-honoured manner of returning Vietnam vets now that no lives were on the line but he applies to books, music, golf and grade 5 piano the same unsentimental rigour he previously applied to leucotomies, aneurysms and pituitary adenomas.

Madeleine worries about most things. She has been anxious for the greater part of her adult life. She rarely talks about this to anyone, though it is obvious to those around her, Martin included. He believes that she suffers from a basic flaw in her psychological make-up which has been exacerbated by a life in which she has taken very few risks and spent too much time in her own company. It being something he is powerless to change he sees little point in discussing the subject.

Just after four o’clock their eldest daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Robert, arrive. Sarah is the service manager for business development at Hampshire County Council, a job which used to involve building children’s homes, rolling out broadband and getting social workers into GP surgeries but which now mostly involves sacking employees, closing down projects and saving money. Robert is the fund manager for Appalachian, a small wealth management company he set up three years ago with two escapees from Deutsche Bank, which they run from an office in Reading to which he commutes from Winchester three days a week.

They have one child, a teenage daughter, Ellie, who is spending Christmas with her boyfriend’s family in Winchester because she and Daniel are still in the honeymoon period and his parents are “so, so, so much more relaxed than you,” meaning, presumably, that she has not yet had a meltdown in their presence.

Sarah is bloody hard work. That’s her father’s blunt diagnosis. Sarah puts it down to her being a woman and, unlike her mother, having a job and opinions, some of which are not the same as her father’s.

Robert likes the fact that Sarah is argumentative and opinionated, though this is made easier by the fact that he agrees with most of those opinions and most of the arguments are therefore had with other people, but he dislikes visiting his parents-in-law in whose presence Sarah can sometimes regress to the teenage girl he guesses she once was, a teenage girl not unlike their own teenage daughter in her less charming moods. It is a subject he has tried to broach with Sarah. It is not a subject he is going to broach again. There is a constant and generous supply of alcohol at the Rookery, however, which he treats as a medical necessity, like a morphine drip on a low setting.

“Hello, darling.” Madeleine hugs her daughter.

Robert gives Madeleine their traditional uneasy embrace. There is a surge of choral music (“… Ich will dir mein Herze schenken …”) and Martin appears from the opened study door for the golf-club handshake which always strikes Robert as too muscular for a man who previously worked inside the brains of living human beings. He waves the cordless in his free hand. “That was Leo and Sofie. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

“And Gavin?” asks Sarah.

“No news yet,” says Martin.

“So,” says Sarah, “if the weather keeps up…”

“Now now,” says Madeleine, “don’t start before he’s even got here.”

“He was an arse last year,” says Sarah, “and I’m sure he’ll be an arse this year.”

Martin looks at Robert and rubs his hands together. “Drink?”

The sky is blacker now. Snow deepens in sheltered corners and on the windward side of walls. It lies in Advent calendar curves on windowsills. It blots and softens the top of every object like icing on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.

Martin tells Madeleine to stop fretting and insists that Gavin and Emmy will be fine, because it is one of his guiding principles that everything is always fine until occasionally it isn’t and you should therefore save your energy for coping with that rare eventuality. In the back of his mind he ponders the satisfying conundrum of what he would do if he were stuck in a car overnight in weather like this. How long would the engine run in neutral to power the heating system, for example? The snow would act as an insulator of course, but you would have to be wary of carbon monoxide poisoning.

A green VW Touran turns off the main road, two cones of halogen light swinging through the slowly falling flakes. The car slides briefly sideways then finds traction again, compacted snow squeaking as the tyre treads bite. Leo, Martin and Madeleine’s younger son, is driving. His wife, Sofie, is in the passenger seat and David (eleven) and Anya (ten) are in the back. Leo decides against attempting the potentially ruinous bottleneck of the stone gateposts and leaves the car at a jaunty angle halfway over the hidden kerb. He rests his head on the steering wheel. “Jesus. I am knackered.”