Snow Garden (16 page)

‘I never heard you sing.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I was rubbish at that as well.’

They laugh.

Then, ‘I don’t mind what you do,’ she says. ‘I’m still proud.’

Sylvia thinks of the roomful of relatives in their party hats. She thinks of the bodyguards outside and Potts in her armoured vehicle and the young girls in their red fleeces. She thinks of all those suitcases she imagined earlier, piled on top of her son, and in her mind she lifts them up, one by one, and returns them to their rightful owners. And there is one that belongs to no one but herself – a suitcase containing all that desire to be bigger and better than her sisters. In her mind, she picks it up. She unpacks it and puts it away.

Sylvia pictures her sisters – Diane in her new suit, Linda with her lopsided hair – and she feels a surge of such love, such tenderness that her throat tightens. She places the egg in front of her son and passes him salt and a teaspoon.

Sylvia’s heart beats very slowly, very calmly, like a regular plain old heart, as her son eats his boiled egg, like any regular, plain old son.

On New Year’s Eve, Oliver’s father phoned and asked an unlikely question. ‘Do you know what I regret about my life?’

Oliver said, ‘I’ve no idea, Dad. Never doing anything?’ He was trying to make light of the question because the last thing he needed was a full-blown conversation. Oliver’s girlfriend was feeling sick again. He’d opened the windows in the flat but the air felt thick. There just didn’t seem to be enough of it. Maybe it was because he and Sal were living all the way up on the fifteenth floor.

Oliver’s father gave a soft laugh and changed the subject. So how was the weather?

‘Well …’ said Oliver, staring at the window. The sky was low and heavy and the grey of soft ash. ‘It’s the same as yesterday. And the day before that.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said his father, turning serious again.

‘How is it with you?’

‘Yes, it’s the same with me.’

‘Right,’ said Oliver.

‘Yes,’ said his dad.

Oliver had always felt let down by his father. He still had a clear memory of asking him to make sandcastles as a little boy and his father failing to move from his deck chair. That was his father, all over. He never moved if he could help it. They had spent a fortnight every summer at the same holiday camp and it wasn’t even in the next county, it was half an hour’s drive away. As Oliver got older, he had clashed with his father over everything. Television, politics, music, clothes, language – you name it. When Oliver told his father he’d been offered a place at drama school, his father had carried on reading the paper. Didn’t he know all actors were gay? his father said later. And Oliver, whose eighteen-year-old mind was constantly on women, who couldn’t get enough of them, said, ‘Great. I’ll get out my leathers.’ His mother acted as a bridge between Oliver and his father, and after her death, Oliver rarely went home. He rang every Sunday and they stuck to traffic news or the weather. With those two subjects they seemed safe. Oliver’s previous girlfriend had said he should visit his father more often. ‘I like him,’ she’d said. ‘He’s just a lonely old man.’ But it was all right for her. She’d only met him a few times.

‘Actually I was wondering if you might come over,’ said his father.

‘Now, Dad? It’s New Year’s Eve.’

‘Yes, I know.’ His father said nothing after that. It was as if he were simply waiting for Oliver to change his mind. From the silence, it seemed he was prepared to wait a long time.

Oliver began to feel cold. He’d avoided visiting his father over Christmas by pretending that he was filming. The truth was, he was out of work; there’d been nothing since he’d been employed to leap about as a giant bran flake for a breakfast-cereal commercial. He had no idea how he was going to look after Sal and their baby. Christmas dinner had been beans on toast in front of the TV; afterwards, Sal had gone clubbing. A girl needed a break from being pregnant, she’d said. Along with, ‘I don’t know why I let you talk me into keeping this thing.’

So what was it that his father regretted so much that he needed to see Oliver on New Year’s Eve? Was he wishing he had read a book, perhaps, or gone to see a film, or travelled abroad, or done anything that might have challenged him to think a little more deeply? No, apparently his father regretted none of those things. Instead he said, ‘I wish I’d planted more trees.’

Oliver dug his fingers through his hair. It was what he did when he was confused. ‘Trees?’

‘Yes, trees.’

‘You didn’t plant
any
trees, Dad.’

His father groaned as if he’d been punched. He gave a series of tiny clicks.

‘Dad?’ said Oliver, beginning to worry.

His father blew his nose. When he spoke, his voice was a broken thing, a querulous whisper. ‘
Nobody
has planted enough trees. I need twenty of them, Oliver. I need to put things straight.’

Oliver’s father had never mentioned the need to plant a tree. He hadn’t even mentioned growing a flower. He still lived in the house where Oliver had grown up and the back garden was a mix of crazy paving and buddleia, both of which appeared to look after themselves. Once Oliver’s mother had asked for pots to be put in front of the house, because they were nice, they showed a person had style, and his father had filled the narrow strip in front of the window with cement. ‘I thought you wanted it clean,’ his father said, when his mother saw what he had done and shrieked like a fox. ‘I wanted it pretty,’ she said. And his father had scratched his head as if he couldn’t understand how ‘clean’ and ‘pretty’ weren’t the same. He was not the gardening type. If a plant had a blossom he called it a flower and if it just had some leaves he called it a weed.

By the time Oliver arrived at his father’s house, it was early evening and already dark. His father stood waiting at the bay window. He wasn’t even hidden to one side like Oliver’s mother used to be, as if she just happened to be there in the front room inspecting the curtains for small signs of wear and tear and Oliver’s arrival was the last thing on her mind. His father had lifted the nets and parked himself in full view like a human Christmas tree, only a brown-pullovery one and without any lights.

As Oliver opened the gate (hanging on one hinge) on to the small patch of cement (cracked now) and the latch gave the metallic clunk it had always made, he remembered being a child in that house, waiting for something to happen, for life to get bigger; now it was as if everything had tumbled the other way round and he was the father and his father was the boy. He stooped to pass beneath the doorframe, not because he’d ever bumped his head but because he suddenly felt as if he might.

‘Have you got the trees?’ his father called from the front room.

The hall smelt of chicken soup. It always did. The smell was a sort of thick, cloudy presence you began to forget once you’d spent time with it but which always came as a shock after you’d been away. When Oliver’s mother was alive the house had also smelt of her, a sweet, busy scent, and now that she was gone the chicken-soup smell all on its own was a forlorn thing, as if it too had been widowed.

Oliver said he had. Got the trees.

‘Are they good ones?’

‘They’re trees, Dad. They all look the same. They’re in the van.’

His father’s socks were drying on the radiator. On the shelf above were several bills and three unopened envelopes from the hospital.
TWO DEEP PAN PIZZAS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE (
offer does not include stuffed crust
).
A Christmas card had been propped open with the picture of a girl in snow that had been everywhere since November. Oliver was about to steal a look at the message inside when his father appeared.

‘I was hoping for apple trees,’ his father said. ‘Or silver birch.’ He wore a checked shirt and pullover but he must have done up the buttons wrong because the left side of the collar had got swallowed in his pullover and the lower right corner of the shirt hung down like a flag. His neck was as scrawny as a little bird’s. Had he lost weight? His face certainly had a more solemn look and he had very carefully combed his hair like threads across his scalp. But since when had he become so knowledgeable about trees?

Oliver had already had quite a time of it, with the trees. He’d told Sal about the problem. He’d explained that his father had never mentioned trees before or a need to plant them and that there was something in his voice that had struck Oliver as alarming. She had said, ‘What the fuck? It’s New Year’s Eve. I’m pregnant.’ ‘I know,’ he’d said. ‘I know. But he’s an old man and you’re not due until June.’ It was possibly not a kind thing to say and it had not gone down well. Sal had grabbed her parka and stormed out. ‘Don’t even bother following me,’ she’d hissed. After that Oliver had rung a local garden centre because recently he seemed to have got so many things wrong, he felt the need to do just one thing right. He’d asked the man on the phone all about trees and the man had said he could rustle up twenty if Oliver really wanted them. He seemed eager to talk about trees and promised to stay open for another half-hour, even though it was New Year’s Eve, until Oliver arrived with the van. Great, said Oliver. Perfect. He hung up.

And then he remembered he no longer had a van.

‘You want to borrow it?’ said Binny. His ex-girlfriend couldn’t seem to look at him. She was very busy concentrating on a spot to the left of his shoulder.

‘I’m really sorry, Bin,’ Oliver kept saying. And he meant it, now that she was standing in front of the house where he had spent the happiest three years of his life, now that he saw her again dressed in her green velvet top and loose trousers with a giant pair of blue-monster-feet slippers, he knew how truly sorry he was. For everything.

‘Bring it back tomorrow,’ she said, passing over the keys.

‘I can bring it back in a few hours if you like.’

‘I’m not going anywhere. Tomorrow’s fine.’ They paused, uncertain what to say next. There was a smell in the house he hadn’t noticed before, so full it was like another person.

‘Rose oil,’ said Binny, as if reading his thoughts. ‘An old friend of mine came over for coffee. I was worried there’d be nothing between us any more, but I was wrong. There was lots. We laughed and laughed.’

‘What’s that noise?’

‘Oh.’ She glanced over her shoulder towards the back door. ‘That’ll be Coco’s goat.’

‘She got a goat for Christmas?’

‘Don’t even ask.’ Binny ran her hand through her thick hair. A wedge shot out above her ear and stuck out like a flap, the way it always did. He knew every small thing about her, just as she did about him. He loved her more than anyone.

‘Could I see Coco?’ he said. ‘And Luke? Say hello?’

‘I think it’s better if you don’t.’ Briefly Binny caught his eye and gave a smile that seemed to hurt, and then she concentrated again on that interesting spot to the left of his shoulder. ‘How’s Sally?’

Oliver had no idea how to say, ‘Binny, I have made a terrible mistake. Binny, she says she doesn’t want to be a mother. Binny, I don’t know what to do.’ He had no idea how to say, ‘Those nights when it was just you and me and the kids and we stayed in playing Scrabble and I cheated and Coco hit the roof, I want them back, Binny. I got it all wrong. I miss you.’ So instead he said, ‘Fine.’ And after that he smiled and shrugged and there was nothing for it except to turn and walk away. He tried to ring Sal to check she was all right but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t, and well, to be honest, it was a relief.

By the time Oliver found the garden centre, it was past five. The owner was furious. He’d been waiting almost two hours. He showed Oliver some twigs in pots, twenty in all. Actually it looked as if he’d shoved a load of dead branches in plastic pots. There wasn’t one scrappy leaf between them. And when Oliver had said as much, the guy shouted, ‘What the hell? It’s winter. Of course they’ve got no leaves. I waited for you. I gave you the Rolls-Royce treatment and now you’re complaining?’ He was wearing a flat cap, like an artist, and one earring. And Oliver said, ‘I didn’t ask for Rolls-Royce treatment, I just asked for trees.’ He added that he didn’t even like Rolls Royces – or any cars, for that matter. ‘The van is my girlfriend’s,’ he said. And then he began to shake because it dawned on him, as if for the first time, that Binny was not his girlfriend. Sal was. An impy girl who blew up at him for worrying about his father and because he liked porridge at half past nine, who would be the mother of his child in six months. He thought of Binny, leaning against her doorframe, her shoulders soft inside her velvet top, her smile that was simultaneously generous and girlish so that it scrunched up her whole face. To his shame, his eyes began to blur.

And the tree guy had said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, mate. It’s been a bad time. What with Christmas and everything. People only want decorations. I run a garden centre and all I sell are nasty home furnishings. It gets to me. And we’ve had no rain for days. It makes my job harder, you see.’

And Oliver said, ‘No, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. It’s been tricky for me, too.’ He didn’t even like trees, he added. The remark was meant to show the man he was over the tears. It was meant to make the man laugh.