The Ice is Singing Read online

  Tom rubbed his leg and tapped his feet, which were like blocks of ice. ‘So what happens now? Where d’you think she’s gone?’

  The doctor shrugged. ‘Probably wandering about. We’d best notify the police. My guess is she’ll make her way back here, though.’ The doctor moved back towards the door and grasped the handle.

  ‘She’ll get over it,’ Tom said, not quite a question.

  The doctor tested the door handle, as if he were about to repair it. ‘In my experience, I doubt it. My guess is she’ll follow your mother fairly quickly.’

  The doctor and Tom stared at each other.

  ‘Well, she could come and live with us. My wife used to be good friends with her,’ said Tom defensively.

  Dr Carter shook his head. ‘This was her world, Mr Clough. It’s like those Egyptian mummies that last for centuries in air-tight tombs. Perfectly preserved, centuries old, good as new. As soon as you open the door and let the fresh air in they disintegrate – they simply fall apart.’

  He opened the door and looked out into the black garden. ‘I suppose you could say your mother did her a favour – lasting so long.’

  Wed. 12

  When I thought of her – of Alice Clough, sitting in her kitchen, over the years, waiting for her mother to call her and complain – I thought she would long for children. But perhaps she wouldn’t even have thought of it. Perhaps she was still so clearly, in her own eyes, her mother’s child, that having children of her own did not occur to her? And then I thought, she must have wished she’d broken the rules. She must have thought all the rules so crazy and evil that there could be no reason for good behaviour left. Because if she’d done what she shouldn’t have done, and made love with Jacko in the fields – then maybe she would have got pregnant, and maybe they would have been glad to let her go and marry him and have a life of her own. Or if Jacko had refused to marry her, and they’d turned her out – at least somehow, somewhere, she’d have had a life of her own, and a baby to love. Instead of nothing.

  But I don’t think she would ever have thought it didn’t matter what she did. Or that it could have been right to grab what she wanted for herself. Did she really stay with Ellen all that time out of filial duty?

  Yes. There was no question in her mind. Not out of love. She hated Ellen. But she knew what she ought to do. And she had never been taught it was a virtue to put your own needs first. She believed the opposite; that it was a vice, selfish.

  Thur. 13

  I have been lying in bed luxuriously smelling the sheets. I don’t know how she’s done it in February, but her sheets smell as if they’ve been dried outside. They smell of sunshine.

  ‘Lying in bed luxuriously.’ I am outside the pale. A woman who has left her children.

  My children have left me. Ruth and Vi have left me, and the twins aren’t old enough to choose.

  The twins need you.

  No – the twins need someone. And they are of an age, and a cuteness, to arouse that protectiveness in anyone. The last person they need is me, mother of Ruth and Vi. ‘Where’s smother?’ One of their giggly girly jokes.

  That’s enough.

  Alice Clough. Trapped in that crushing routine of housework, the awful lists of tasks to be done and each day renewing them. Because we eat today doesn’t mean we don’t need to eat tomorrow. In fact not eating today could, eventually, be the solution to tomorrow – starve ’em long enough and they’ll never eat again. (Does she make jokes, this woman who abandons children?)

  She was set against it, and it wore her out. She hated the chores: soaking, washing, wringing, hanging up to dry; removing the clothes, stiff and bent from their positions on the clothes horse; folding, ironing, piling away. Cooking little messes of easily digestible slop, broth and scrambled eggs, and then the dishes to scour. Sweeping the floor and scrubbing the floor, disinfecting the bedpan, cleaning the toilet. Pushing back the tide of overwhelming dirt and chaos for a day, a week –

  But now her efforts are forgotten. Her windows are streaked with dirt, mice and spiders scuttle in her cupboards, the heaps of freshly laundered clothes are rags. On dusty shelves there stand a few pots of fermenting jam. And the mouths that consumed the food are dead.

  What if she’d taken pleasure in the scent of freshly laundered sheets? A woman taking pleasure in woman’s work; preparing, preserving, waiting. Penelope and Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Ophelia, Snow White all waited: for rescue, for marriage, for their men to return from battles, adventures, and changing the world. Their virtues are passive: patience, chastity, fidelity. Waiting. We all wait. But in the waiting –

  Alice sits in the garden top-and-tailing gooseberries to make jam for the summer fair. The sun is shining and her bare arms are hot. She itches her nose with her arm and feels the heat and smell of sun on skin. Her fingers touch the fat rounds of hairy gooseberry flesh. There is a heap of dark gooseberry tops like spiders and curved green tails the length of eyelashes, in the empty basket between her knees. To her left a half-full basket of red-green gooseberries; to her right, a shiny tin colander where the prepared fruit is mounting up. The farmer’s wife comes up the lane and calls hello to her. She leans on the wall and asks after Ellen’s health. They discuss the weather. She watches Alice and asks if she’ll be making blackcurrant this year as well?

  ‘That blackcurrant of yours I got last year was lovely. Too good for toast. I put a bit in a sponge cake with a layer of cream on top. Ooh, it was a treat.’

  Alice’s flying fingers finish the gooseberries; she leans back a moment, tilting her face up under the hot sun. Then scrambles up and takes her fruit into the kitchen. While the cold tap runs over the colanderful, she searches in the scullery for jars. Some are dusty; she fills the bowl with hot soapy water and washes them thoroughly. She leaves them to drain on the wooden draining board; tips the colanderful of gooseberries into the iron jam kettle. Puts the gas on low, adds a little water. As the gooseberries begin to soften, their strong sharp scent fills the air. She stirs, adds sugar, stirs. Looking out of the window she sees ox-eye daisies sway in the wind, the petals fall from a full-blown rose. She feels the grittiness of sugar dissolve beneath her stirring wooden spoon, and turns up the heat to boil her jam.

  When she has finished twelve jars cool on the top shelf in the scullery. Twelve clear shining jars, each neatly topped with Cellophane sucked down in a taut semi-circle over the bright green jam; each labelled in black copperplate on white: GOOSEBERRY August 1971. When she tips one the contents do not shift. It has set well. She steps back and counts the jars again, with satisfaction.

  Yes. On that day and on other days. Satisfaction. Though the jam goes to the church fair where she may not go, and thence to breakfast tables across the parish where it may be left in preference for marmalade, or put away without the Cellophane and wasps get in it. No matter. She has made it and it’s there, shining and green in bright sealed jars.

  Satisfaction. In pegging out the washing between showers and having it dry before the next rain. Satisfaction running out as the sky darkens, to gather it into the basket and hurry back to the house, to shake and fold it in neat piles on the kitchen table: for Ruth, Vi, Gareth, me, airing cupboard. Satisfaction in its fresh-air smell, the rough texture of clean dry towels. Satisfaction in my airing cupboard piled high with clean sheets and blankets, extra bedclothes for visitors, outgrown clothes for jumble sales. The house and its order were mine. Gareth owned nothing, worked for nothing in our lives. Only himself, his advancement, and money. All the things that were washed and polished, grown and cherished, fed and cared for – children, garden, furniture, floors, the bricks and mortar that sheltered us from space – were mine. I made them, I loved them, I earned them.

  But Ruth and Vi are not mine. They have chosen to go to Gareth. Away from me.

  And for the tiles and furniture and chattels of the house – who wants them? The house is no more than a pit of work, an endless drain for labour. The floor is littered with the crusts and splatte
rings of food the twins have dropped.

  It’s indulgence, Marion. Everything was precious then. The gleam of a floor you no longer have the heart to sweep. Alice Clough can’t have been unhappy always. Only in the story of her life, not in her days.

  Fri. 14

  A Nightmare

  It’s two in the morning, I’m sitting in bed with my jumper on. A nightmare. Devastated landscape. Hot sunshine. Flat empty grassland – to my left the ruins of a city, jumbled skyscrapers tilting at crazy angles, some snapped in half, with jutting broken edges against the skyline. Over to my right, near the horizon, the old dilapidated huts of a tribe – perhaps the original inhabitants of the plain. I thought South Africa. It was still and hot, a huge pregnant silence. I started to walk towards the ruined city, afraid of what I would find but not daring to stand there alone. I became aware of a noise, and very gradually – slowly, as if I were hearing in my sleep and couldn’t wake up – I began to recognize the children’s voices, Vi and Ruth shouting at me, and the twins crying, screaming in terror, at the tops of their voices. I ran towards the city as fast as I could, hurling myself across the level distanceless ground, running on the spot. Their voices were in the air all around me, resounding in my ears, and as I drew near to the first gigantic cracked wall, and saw the sun shimmering on glass and metal surfaces, I knew there was no one alive in the city. I spun round in terror, looking for them – by their cries, they were trapped and in pain. When I turned the cries grew louder, and I realized that all this time I had been running away from them. I started to run back, through the hot still air; in the distance the grass and tin roofs of the huts shimmered in the heat, and the cries reverberated in the air so that I could feel them pounding my ears in waves. As I neared the village silence fell again. The cries had stopped. I ran into the deserted dusty place at the centre of the huts. All around me they stood silent, empty, doorways facing me. Some were half-collapsed, their corrugated tin roofs slipping drunkenly to one side. I ran into the largest hut. At the far end there was a low stool, and on top of it, balancing like an egg, a head. As I approached it I saw the eyes following me. It was Gareth. His eyes were moving. Though he had no body, he was alive. I must have cried out – I remember falling to my knees before him and staring into his face. There was no blood, no cut – his head was perfectly rounded at the base. I stared at him and then I put out my hand to touch the side of his face. His head rolled backwards and I jumped up quickly to save it from rolling off the stool. As I caught it, its eyes still watching me curiously, it came apart in my hands. In two perfect halves, like a chocolate easter egg. It was hollow inside. Perfectly clean and hollow, like an eggshell.

  I was running across the grass landscape again, sweating and sobbing, with the renewed clamour of the children’s voices rising up around me. There was nothing – flat grassland, not a bush or a hillock for a body to hide behind. And each way I turned, on all sides, the cries – ‘Mummy! Mum! Help me, Mum’ – and shrieks of fear and panic from the twins. My heart was hammering in my chest, my head was bursting. I crouched to examine the ground more carefully, then I started to look for them in the grass.

  It was logical, for me to bend and hunt for them amongst blades of grass no more than two inches high. Indeed, as I searched, and the hot sun beat down on my neck, I was reminded of the time, years ago, that Ruth and I spent an afternoon cricket-hunting. She noticed their whirring noise when I took her and Vi (still a sleeping baby in her pram) along a sun-hot lane in France on summer holiday, and I parted the grass at the roadside to search. As luck would have it, I uncovered one immediately, and we both stared in fascination as the little green insect rubbed his wings together in a blur of speed. Then he suddenly leapt out of sight. We parted more grass, and more – no luck. We walked on along the lane to a spot where their noise was particularly loud, and searched the grass again. But though we searched on and off for the rest of the afternoon, we didn’t see another one – only heard their noise in the air all around us.

  And so it was in my dream, only my useless searching in the hot sun was warped by a terrible anxiety, and my children’s voices cried and pleaded and came and went in the air around my ears, above my head, in front of me and then behind me, imploring me to save them, to help them. Gradually as I searched I felt the dream slipping away, I was filled with anxiety, I couldn’t remember what I was looking for or why. I couldn’t remember what I had to do.

  I managed to claw my way into wakefulness, and when I did, the beginning of the dream came back to me.

  I shall leave the light on, as I try to go back to sleep.

  Fri. 14, evening

  It took me a long time to fall asleep again, and I woke with a jolt at quarter past nine. I felt anxious and confused, as if I had forgotten something or was late. My head ached badly. I needed to get moving as quickly as possible, to feel the smooth steering wheel turning in my hands and see the scenery slipping by. As I opened the front door the landlady called me back. I had forgotten to pay her. Standing at the desk trying to count out the money, I was afraid I might be sick; the floor and desk seemed to be moving slightly, as if on a sea swell, and I could not prevent myself from breathing quickly and shallowly. I needed to get into the car.

  The woman moved slowly, looking in different boxes for change, talking lugubriously about the weather. I snatched my receipt from her and ran to the door without managing so much as a goodbye.

  Outside it had snowed again, and the clouds looked heavy with more. I crossed the road to the car park on the other side, and for a moment I couldn’t tell which was my car, under the layer of fresh snow. When I started the engine, the windscreen wipers wouldn’t work – there was too much snow on the screen. My head was racing again as I got out. The cold made my fingers ache. I cleared the front and side windows – some snow got stuck under my cuffs and melted before I had time to get it out.

  I revved the engine. Only a few cars had driven in the car park since last night – the snow in front of me was unmarked. But as the car started to move it went into a peculiar bumping motion. It would not steer straight. Already knowing the worst I got out and looked at it. The front left tyre was completely flat.

  I had never changed a tyre, although I must have watched Gareth two or three times. I forced myself to look in the boot. There was a spare tyre, and a long plastic case containing a spanner, an iron rod, and a contraption which I took to be a jack. I lifted the tyre out and laid it beside the car. It sank to its full thickness in the snow. I began to scoop away the snow from around the flat wheel. A car slowly entered the car park, drove past me and stopped. A woman who got out came up to me.

  ‘Are you having trouble?’ I didn’t reply. She bent over me and repeated her question insistently.

  ‘No, it’s all right. A flat tyre.’

  ‘Oh, what a mess. Can I help at all?’ I didn’t reply. When I turned to get the jack, I saw that she was crouching in the snow, fiddling with it. She set it beside me and knelt down to look under the car.

  ‘Yes – you’re better putting it under the front than the side, I think, with this sort of car.’ She slid the jack under the front of the car and cranked it up. I stood watching her uselessly. Then she took off the hubcap and wheelnuts, removed the old tyre and put on the new one.

  She knelt in the snow to force the new wheel on, and when she stood up I saw that there was a hole in her tights, and a little smear of blood where she must have cut herself through kneeling on a sharp stone.

  ‘I’m so sorry – your knees –’ I was not able to finish my sentence, and she stood awkwardly for a moment before slamming the boot on the old tyre and smiling at me.

  ‘It’s no trouble. I’m glad I was able to help. Goodbye now.’ She walked quickly away across the car park, brushing her hands against her skirt as she walked, to dry them.

  When I got into the car I burst into tears. It was a silly thing to cry about. She had been so kind. Helping me, kneeling down in the snow on her bare knees. I hadn’t cr
ied since I came away.

  Wed. Feb. 19

  I’ve been ill.

  She’s brought me a paper. The date says I’ve been here five days now, it feels longer. Or – I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s been so fast and slow, so black and lurid, so hot and cold I can’t really tell. She wanted to get the doctor in but apparently I told her I wouldn’t see him. I told her it was only the flu, and not to bother him. I thought I’d said that, but then I remembered it as intending to but forgetting, so it stuck in my head as another irritation.

  I don’t know what else I said, perhaps not much; the woman, whose name I keep forgetting, is kind and a firm believer in sleep, so she has left me quite rightly to sweat it out.

  I’m tired now, but over it, I think. My temperature’s lower, I’m not hungry yet – even writing is an effort, pushing the pen across the paper. I feel weak – drifting, defences down. Open. I’ll sleep again now.

  Thur. 20

  Open.

  When Ruth was being born, after I had lain in misery for seven hours, contracting without my cervix opening at all, the hospital shift changed and a new midwife came on. She was calm. Although she was efficient, she seemed to be giving only a fraction of her attention to what she was doing – the rest was absorbed elsewhere, in some great mind-expanding well of tranquillity. As if she could calmly have run the world and still had attention over to gaze at the stars. She examined me and said,

  ‘You’re fighting it. Go with it, stop fighting it. Let the pain do its work.’

  At first I was angered – I was doing the best I could. As each new wave of pain rose and mounted I was clenching myself and resisting it, beating it off. I hadn’t let it make me cry or call out, I had the upper hand. I was fighting the pain that was attacking my body: my muscles were tense against it, my spine was stiff to repel it. ‘Relax,’ she told me.