The Ice is Singing Read online

  by the same author

  SEPARATE TRACKS

  HER LIVING IMAGE

  MR WROE’S VIRGINS

  JANE ROGERS

  The Ice Is

  Singing

  First published in 1987

  by Faber and Faber Limited

  3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU

  This paperback edition first published in 1988

  This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012

  © Jane Rogers, 1987

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 950 0

  www.canongate.tv

  Marion’s journal and stories, February 2 – March 8 1986

  Leaving home

  The snow

  First story: A Natural Father

  Towering passions

  Chemicals

  Lips

  Buried

  Second story: The Spinster Daughter

  Satisfaction

  A nightmare

  Help

  Opening up

  The list

  Third story: What Sort of a Mother

  Cautionary tales

  The twins

  Continuing the list

  Fourth story: The Perfect Parasite

  The list again

  Bodies

  Review

  Hop o’ my thumb

  Ruth’s project

  The ice is singing

  Part of The Ice is Singing was written while I was Writer in Residence at Northern College, Barnsley, in 1985–6. I would like to thank Northern College and the Arts Council of Great Britain.

  The characters in this book are fictional, and bear no relation to any person living or dead.

  Jane Rogers

  Sunday February 2 1986

  There were a lot of cars. It took me by surprise. Moving very fast. They swerve in and out. Or stop, or turn. As if they know exactly where they’re going.

  I was clear. The twins were asleep. I was perfectly clear. I started the engine, and backed on to the road in one manoeuvre, clean and mechanical. Moved the gearstick from first down to second, up and across to third, straight down to fourth. No sticking or crunching. Needle creeping across the clock. When I got to the end of the road I had to turn right, towards the motorway. But the bright headlights were moving too fast. I couldn’t judge their speed. I stopped there watching. A car behind me hooted repeatedly. After a while I accelerated forwards into the road, and turned into a lane. More of them hooted at me, one screeched its brakes.

  I tried to drive a straight line. Dazzling lights appeared quite suddenly out of the blackness both in front of and behind me, making me wobble. Those behind came up fast and just when I thought they would burst right through the back window they swerved out and roared past me. Their red tail-lights dived into the dark space of road I was driving towards.

  I thought it would be best to stop. It was not possible to reach the side because they were passing on my left and right. I stopped in the middle, switching on the hazard-lights. The stream of cars divided easily around me and flowed on. Their moving lights made lines across the darkness. Ruth has a time-lapse photo of New York at night. The moving lights of vehicles have left trails across the picture. I thought, it would be easy to drive those streets, following the red and gold threads that hang suspended in the black air. To be strung in place like a bead.

  Later on the traffic died down. When the road behind me seemed empty I started off again. It’s like riding a bicycle, you have to keep going. I can’t have driven at night for a long time. Gradually I built up speed.

  It’s warm in here. Someone’s vacuuming the corridor. Outside it has snowed, quite heavily.

  Monday February 3

  I drove on up the motorway. There is snow lying, it makes the light strange. I’m driving through fluorescent tubes. The motorway was full of cars and slow. In places, like a conveyor belt. At a garage I filled the tank.

  Driving is more like skating now. At times I can pull out and swoop past someone, skimming gracefully back into position in front of them. The car seems more responsive, it likes to swoop and glide quickly. It is engaging my concentration, I do not think about anything else. I feel well; I feel quite clear. I do everything right. Eat, go to bed, eat. When I slept I dreamed I was still driving.

  My head is full of emptiness, a white eggshell. I drive in silence to keep it so. The radio is trouble. Snow light is filling up my eyes, they are scoured white. I drive blind, but the road is a clear black line and not hard to follow. Keeping moving seems the best thing to do. I move to keep blank (it works); driving all day with a ball of thoughts and feelings rolling along behind me, ready to crush, a carelessly chucked giant’s marble.

  Tonight I am staying in a small cluttered room, with a china dog, amongst other things, on the mantelpiece. There is no phone.

  Tuesday Feb. 4

  Today I drove around smaller roads. They are clear, wet black ribbons twisting over a white landscape. On these country roads I notice that the snow does not cover the land so much as reveal it. As if it was stripped naked. You see its curves; the way a field rim turns up in a pout to a hedge; the slow undulation between two hilltops; the sliding curve of flank in a huge white expanse of field. The snow strips it of distractions and colour, flattens weeds and tall grass, and absorbs back into the shape of the surface the harsh outlines of rocks, ruined ploughs, piles of fencing and rotting bales. All detail is concealed, to reveal the sensuous shape of the whole. Trees and stone walls are all that show up, the trees bare, black and scratchy-spindly, shocking tufts of coarse black pubic hair in the folds and valleys of the body. Stone walls make black lines fractured by white, outlining shapes, emphasizing the creases between limbs. The body that lies around me is huge. I crawl across it like an ant on a Henry Moore figure, lost between voluptuous swellings.

  A story.

  A Natural Father

  The school playground was fenced with green plastic-coated wire mesh, in diamond shapes, eight foot or so high. To prevent intruders, perhaps – or stop the children, like creatures in a zoo, from escaping. He stood right next to the wire, close enough so that each eye was looking through a separate diamond-shaped space. As he leant forward to stare, silently imploring the clusters of children by the wall, and round the boilerhouse, to break up and reveal themselves, his hands came up and gripped the wire either side of his staring face. She wasn’t there at first. His clenched hands were sweating. He stood rigid, willing her to appear.

  Then from around a corner – or skipping out from the middle of a crowd right under his nose – would come the yellow-white fluff of hair, framing the terrible sweet face. There she was.

  She never looked at him. She seemed to be happy, engaged with other children. Laughing, or being chased, or intent in intimate conversation. Once he had spotted her it was impossible to lose sight of her; she was the only child in the playground with hair so blonde it was nearly white – silver in some lights, a warm pale-yellow silver, like early morning sunshine, not the sad grey-silver of old age. Silver Top, Duck’s Fluff, Dandelion Clock, were names he had called her. Now she was bigger, with knobbly schoolgirl knees beneath her pleated skirt.

  He hung immobile against the fence, hot and weak, till the bell was rung at one. The children ran to the doorway and he watched her light till the crowd of taller children pressing round her blott
ed it out.

  Miss Haughton had been headmistress of Castle Hill Primary for eighteen years. She had seen most things, in her time. And she had seen men who hung in the shadows at the far end of the playground, following her children with eating eyes. This one was different because he came right up to the fence. In fact from the window of her office it looked as if he were lying, spreadeagled, against the fence. Like a man in a prison camp, she thought.

  They should all be in prison. They should all be in prison, the filthy creatures, with their beastly appetites. Besides, he was damaging her fence. His whole weight was pressing against it. Soon it would begin to sag between its supports and have to be renewed. The children knew they mustn’t lean or climb on it. You’d think a grown man would have more sense.

  The next time she spotted him she put down her roll of sugar paper, took the drawing pins from between her teeth, and marched straight out to send him packing.

  ‘If I see you loitering here again I shall call the police. Do you understand? These children are under my protection.’

  The man turned pale when she spoke to him. The children had fallen in behind her and semi-circled her, iron filings round a magnet, as she faced him. A little girl with white-blonde hair stood there open-mouthed, staring at the strange man. He turned and fled.

  His wife had been animated, like the child. It was one of the things that had attracted him to her. She was always engaged, laughing and chattering to other people. She seemed to have boundless energy. When they married he found it less attractive, because she was such a fly-by-night. She would start one project with all the enthusiasm in the world, and then lose interest. The house was full of half-finished things: half-made curtains, half-knitted jumpers, half-written letters. Being slow and thorough himself, he was finally irritated by her wilful skittishness. And, of course, vice versa. By the time he had painstakingly finished off the fitted cupboards in the kitchen, two months after she’d helped him choose the design, she could no longer stand the sight of the wretched things.

  A couple of years passed. They both wanted children. They had planned to start a family as soon as they married, but nothing happened. Sometimes when things were going badly between them he thought it was just as well. At other times he thought a baby might help. She went to the doctor’s and a slow round of tests was started up. Odd hospital appointments here and there, and people telling them there was plenty of time yet. She seemed to make it more her concern than his; and when it would not be solved in a day or a single visit to the hospital, she lost patience. They rarely talked about it, though they made love often – it was the only activity in which they didn’t exasperate each other.

  He began to long for a child. Not knowingly, but with a dull subconscious pang of loss. He wanted something he could watch and cherish and receive warmth from, like the slow steady glow of a fire; instead of the intricate, inanimate objects his life was devoted to at work, and at home in the car, the decorating, the fitting of wardrobes. He wanted someone who would grow in his warmth, to whom he could give the slow burning love which was locked away from his wife’s impatience. Loneliness was like an absence following him. There was no security between himself and Elizabeth.

  Their lives were locked in a pattern of separateness. During the week they each worked; in the evenings he watched telly and she went to her evening classes. At weekends he tinkered with the car and worked on the house, while she shopped, visited friends, came and went untidily, leaving doors open, and half-finished cups of coffee, and dishes in the sink. Knowing that she was as unhappy as he was the only thing that made him able to bear her behaviour.

  When she told him she was pregnant he was past believing it. It was too good to be true. They had been trying for three and a half years.

  He was so happy he didn’t know how to express it, and hardly dared to for fear of it vanishing. He started work on the baby’s room, stripping, sanding, painting; slow and thorough. She was quieter and often seemed tired; being able to wait on her and bring her things eased his desire to love her. He thought she was never so beautiful as when she pregnant.

  He went to the hospital with her when she started in labour, but towards the end they sent him out, because they needed to use forceps. The midwife said Elizabeth wasn’t pushing hard enough. He stood in the room where they put him in a blaze of fear, praying to the God he hadn’t believed in since junior school. If you let them be all right, I don’t care what happens. You can do anything you like to me afterwards, I won’t mind. Just let them both be all right, please God.

  The baby (Amanda) was born with clean white hair, and a screwed-up kitten’s face. David cried when he saw her. And when he dared to cuddle her close enough to feel the living heat of her small, determined body, the cold space of loss that he had carried inside himself for years blazed up with an answering warmth.

  Elizabeth was an erratic mother. She fed the child and looked after her well enough, but sometimes she wanted to do nothing but pet and fondle her – at others the baby must be banished to her cot for hours on end, to learn to sleep and get into a routine. Crisis followed crisis: over feeding (breast, followed after two weeks by bottle), colic, non-sleeping, nappy rash, dummies versus thumbs, and so on. Gradually David gained confidence, and began to infiltrate Elizabeth’s sloppinesses with his own methodical preparations. He cleaned the bottles, sterilized them and mixed up new feeds. With a patience he recognized as scheming – perhaps evil – he waited for Elizabeth to get tired of her new toy. Soon he had taken over the night-time feeds. He was at work all day, and became so tired he often hallucinated, but at night he was awake, ready with Amanda’s feeds, ready to change and cuddle and play with her. Alongside the growing intensity of his adoration for Amanda mushroomed a terrible fear for her. He began to imagine all sorts of things going wrong while he was out – Elizabeth leaving her dangerously near the edge of the bed, or Amanda choking in her sleep and Elizabeth not noticing. He was haunted by tales of cot deaths and infantile diseases.

  Elizabeth, maddened by his fussing over the child, flared up and attacked him.

  ‘Look at yourself. You never sleep. You never even look up. You scuttle about from work to the baby to work again, with great bags under your eyes, like some sort of maniac. It’s impossible to hold a conversation with you. You’re insane.’

  She insisted that he leave the baby to her for a few nights, and he did so, taking sleeping pills to prevent himself lying listening for the cries that Elizabeth might not hear. Amanda survived. She was smiling now, and waving her arms above the blankets when she woke.

  There began to be a balance between David and Elizabeth, as he recognized that she wouldn’t actually let the child starve, and she accepted that it was useful if he fed the child in the evenings and at night. It meant she could go out.

  When Amanda was nearly one, Elizabeth made an announcement which was as startling as the news of her pregnancy had been. David had put Amanda to bed and was having his tea. Elizabeth, who was going out, had already had hers.

  ‘I want a divorce. I’ve met someone else and he wants to marry me.’

  She treated David’s astonished questioning with contempt.

  ‘Well, if you didn’t know you must be blind. It won’t make a damn of difference to you – Amanda’s the only thing in the world you care about anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve known him a while. I’ve known him two years, if you must know – on and off.’

  When she’d gone out David sat staring at the dirty table. He was glad she went out. He wanted to hit her. He wanted to hit her face and punch her belly and hurt her. That was the only thing he could think of. Hitting both of them with all his strength. The want seemed to swell and he raised his fist and brought it down with all his force on the table. Two plates fell off and shattered, and the milk fell over, spilling everywhere. His fist hurt.

  He was not a man to analyse feelings. When the desire to hit her stopped being a physical need, he methodically tidied and swept the kitch
en. Then he went and looked at Amanda sleeping. It was Amanda he cared about. He wouldn’t care about Elizabeth, he wouldn’t even interest himself in what the bitch did. She was finished, as far as he was concerned. It was Amanda he loved.

  When Elizabeth returned later that night he was perfectly controlled. Speaking politely and distantly he began to discuss the settlement of their joint finances. He proposed that she move out immediately. Amanda would continue to live with him but he would deliver her to Elizabeth in the mornings when he went to work, and collect her on his way home. He would stay in the house and buy her half of the joint mortgage from her. Elizabeth, who had visibly been crying, flew into an uncontrolled rage, calling him a bastard and throwing her shoes at him.

  ‘I wish I’d never married you. I wish I’d never seen you!’ she screamed. ‘You don’t know what love is. You’ve never loved me, you’ve never cared about me. Only the cupboards and the car and the fucking wallpaper. You won’t love Mandy either, when she starts to be a person – she’ll see through you. You’re incapable of love!’

  He didn’t see what she had to be so upset about, since she was getting her own way and leaving. He went to bed and when she followed him with her weeping and accusations he shifted to the spare room.

  Elizabeth moved out. The quality of David’s life improved almost immediately. He was an organized man, and with no one else interfering in the house, he could make it run like a machine. He shopped during his lunch-hour, and devoted the evenings to Amanda. She was walking now, and learning to talk. Her company was a constant source of delight. When he called for her she would go into a frenzy of excitement, clapping her hands and shouting, ‘Da da da da!’ She giggled uproariously at him when he pulled faces; they had a game where he would chase her round the sofa on all fours, roaring, and soon he had only to pretend to crouch down, to send her into a paroxysm of laughter.