The Ice is Singing

Jane Rogers

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857869500
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

The author of Mr. Wroe's Virgins "writes about a woman writing about writing and gets triumphantly away with it . . . a novel of tremendous readability" ( Independent).
 
Driving through the snowbound Yorkshire countryside, stopping at anonymous hotels, Marion is prepared to do anything to escape her memories. She begins to write stories, stories that take her into other people's lives. But as she is drawn back into her own world, she must face the things that made her long for escape.
 
"A brilliant and concentrated piece of writing." — The Guardian
 
"Her style is terse and ruthlessly graphic: her attitude is one of implacable honesty." — Times Literary Supplement.
 
"The writing sings and lives and spins its own magical life." — Financial Times

List

When Ruth was a baby, each new skill she mastered was a gigantic milestone. Sitting up, crawling, standing, walking: her first word. I crowed with delight when she did it, then I waited for Gareth to come home and see it. There is a flavour to that waiting that hangs in my head like a smell: the pride, the excitement, the determination that his pride and excitement should equal mine, the keen anxiety for the child to perform to order, the nagging sense that his smiles and applause may be feigned, that he may have preferred to have his tea first, that he’d rather have taken my word for it. My disappointment when she couldn’t walk for him, didn’t talk to him; my swallowed anger that both of them weren’t behaving exactly as I wished them to.

And yet I was so happy, so proud, so loving. It lingers like a smell.

* * *

At night in their bedroom. I would go up during the evening to check on them sleeping, Ruth in her bed, Vi in her cot. Not just one but two of them, incomparably precious, sprawled carelessly under and over covers, limbs flung in abandonment, faces clean and sweet. When he was out in the evening (he never knew this, no one did) I sat by their beds and watched them sleep. Regularly – sometimes for an hour or so. I see their faces now in the dim light; the way Ruth often slept with her eyes not quite shut, her relaxed face as simple and sweet as a baby animal. She would move suddenly, as if impatient of my watching, and then become completely relaxed again, and roll back to her previous dent in the pillow. Vi slept on her belly, back hunched, bum in the air – face squashed sideways on the mattress. Sometimes watching through the bars of the cot I felt it was only my concentration that held her there, in life. I wondered why I should be so blest as to have her stay.

* * *

The first time I took Ruth swimming, she was eight months old. Everyone I passed smiled at her or said hello. I lowered her into the pool and she beamed at me – then I held her hands and pulled her through the water, and she began to scream with delight. Literally, she screamed, fierce loud screams of absolute excitement and delight. Her pleasure made me laugh so much I nearly fell over myself, and had to sit on the side with her till we both felt cold enough to be less hysterical.

* * *

Ruth at thirteen, going on a school trip to Stratford, couldn’t decide what to wear. I was chopping onions, didn’t look up as soon as she came into the kitchen – and when I did look, my eyes were watering. She stood aggressively in the doorway, looking suddenly older and also like someone else. I couldn’t think who, till I realized she was wearing my favourite jumper, a black angora with a deep V-neck. She wore it with nothing underneath.

I told her she looked like a tart. I made her take it off.

She looked beautiful. It was my jumper. I didn’t tell her she could try it on.

Now I don’t wear it any more.

* * *

Gareth. Coming home and looking at me. Pressing me. And in answer I held up a child, talked of children, insisted that he share the revelling in children – myself hidden behind the wall of their achievements and demands, myself more secure than a nun in her cell, rung and hung about with children.

* * *

Gareth. As time passed, becoming the cipher that I lived with. The cipher of my creation, the cipher for whom I lived. In that bright innocent world when we were young and the children were young, that was the first worm, wasn’t it, to insinuate itself to the heart of the rose?

It is hard to repossess the beautiful, absolute young Marion, in all her clarity of blinkered innocence. Not I, but she.

One spring evening, for instance. Gareth is working late (she has no idea. Where ignorance is bliss why should she want to be wise? She does not want to know him. She would not like him if she did) and she has put the children to bed. He is due home at nine. She tidies up, then prepares a meal, sets the table. She slips into the garden and gathers some flowers, arranges them on table and mantelpiece. Then she takes a bath and puts on pretty clothes, something she could not wear while the children were about. Preparing for Gareth’s return.

Innocent Marion. Everything she does is for Gareth. She does not take pleasure in cooking, nor in eating the delicious food she has prepared; nor in the tranquil beauty of the home she has created. She does not enjoy lingering in the cool darkening garden, selecting long-stemmed pinks, breaking the twigs of fragrant orange-blossom. Nor does she wait for and take pleasure in the stillness of the house with sleeping children: the running bath and room filling with steam, the slow pouring of luxurious bath foam into the rushing water. She does not enjoy the sight of her own healthy body in silky, flattering garments, nor the feeling of her warm pampered flesh tingling with satisfaction and anticipation.

Oh no. She does it all for Gareth. And Gareth’s interest and pleasure are her reward. In fact it was not even necessary for him to show interest and pleasure. He simply needed to exist, like a chair, to give meaning and purpose to all her actions, and to enable her to be happy. He didn’t even need to speak. But if he should take himself away, when she is doing all this for him? She will be wronged, her joys ruined. And he will be guilty.

* * *

Vi accusing me. The night is clear, and the date, November 5th, the year before last. I was three months pregnant with the twins, feeling sick and slow. I remember I sat by the bedroom window in the dark watching the fires and distant rockets. There were patches of red sparks and that orange glow reflected in windows, of fires burning in gardens and on waste ground. In different areas of the sky there were spates of business, as different parties let off their rockets, their golden rain and shooting stars. I was out of it. We used to have a bonfire when the girls were little; now they were out together at Jackie’s, Gareth was going to bring them home. I was at peace up there, with my precious bellyful, and the whole of London dark and lit up outside my window. Twice I heard the sirens of fire engines hurtling to fires that had got out of hand; their urgency accentuated my calm. I had no need to worry.

Then there was a flurry of noise in the hall, the door slamming, sharp breaths and footsteps running round the downstairs rooms. I sat and waited, part of me feeling that I was invisible, and invulnerable – the other part, paralysed with fear. The footsteps thudded upstairs – I recognized them.

‘Vi?’

She came running, and stopped just inside the doorway. ‘Mum?’

‘Yes. What’s the matter?’

‘What are you doing? Why are you sitting in the dark?’

‘I’m watching the fireworks. What’s the matter? Where’s Ruth?’ Slowly she came over to me. As she approached the window the orange light from outside showed me that her face was blurry with smoke and tears.

‘Where’s Ruth?’

‘She’s OK. She’s at Jackie’s.’

‘What’s the matter then? Why have you come home on your own?’ She stood hesitating in the darkness for a minute, then knelt down next to me. She was looking out of the window, at the fireworks. I began to stroke her hair. We both watched in silence for a little while. Her breaths quietened and I heard her swallow a lump down a couple of times.

‘It’s quiet here,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you mind being on your own?’

‘No. It’s peaceful.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s – well, I think he’s at a meeting. He told me he’d pick you up from Jackie’s but it’s not ten yet, is it?’

‘Mum! He’s a liar –’ She burst into noisy tears, shifting away from me to lean against the wall. ‘He’s a filthy beastly shit of a liar and I hate him!’

I let her cry for a while. To the south, an expensive party had got under way. They were letting off rockets four at a time, and each one fired – I counted – six coloured flares.

‘Look. Isn’t that pretty?’ I reached for her in the dark and touched her cheek. She flinched away from me.

‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying, Mum? It’s important.’

‘I know.’

‘What?’

‘I know what you’re going to tell me, Vi. That he wasn’t at a meeting, or whatever it is you’ve discovered. I know all about it.’

‘What do you know? What? WHAT?’ She scrambled to her feet. She was shouting at me, and I felt my stomach turn over, although I knew I shouldn’t be able to feel it yet.

‘Don’t shout. Go on then. Tell me what’s upsetting you.’

She sat on the windowsill, her back to the outside, blocking my view of the fireworks. Her face was in shadow, I could see nothing but an occasional flicker of her eyes.

‘Jackie ran out of butter for the jacket potatoes. I went down to the off-licence to get some. I was just walking along – I don’t know – not even thinking – and I looked up and saw the car. Parked. Just parked in the row of cars lining the road, the back of our car, with Ruth’s ‘Save the whale’ and my trainers I left on the window ledge. I just – I started – I went over to it to see if –’

I waited.

‘Dad was in it. With someone.’

‘Vi, it’s all right. I know.’

‘You don’t know! They were –’

‘I know, Vi. He’s got a girlfriend. I know. It’s all right.’ I was feeling queasy, not balancing very well on my raft. I could hold out a hand to her, but I couldn’t pull her out of the shocking cold water.

‘What do you mean, you know? What do you mean?’

‘Vi. Look, I’m sorry this has happened. It’s stupid and careless of him. But it’s not a major tragedy. It’s not like you think.’

‘You know about her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you care?’

I might have laughed. If I did I shouldn’t have done. ‘Look, listen Vi. I’ll try and explain it to you. It’s something I – or Gareth – would have explained to you both, fairly soon anyway, now you’re big enough to understand that no one is being hurt. OK? Will you listen?’

She snuffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. Behind her the sky seemed to throb as the flames leapt and dwindled in the darkness.

‘It’s hard for you, you’ll understand it better as you get older. People – adults – don’t stay the same. I mean, they change. You can be in love with someone and marry them and then find out a year later, or ten years later, that you don’t love them at all.’

I had rehearsed it in my brain often and saying it was like lines in a play: I had no idea what it might mean to her, nor indeed what I meant by it.

‘Are you going to get divorced?’

‘Let me finish. No. Of course not.’

‘Whose is it?’ Pointing at my belly.

That shocked me. Then I was shocked, in my placid queasy invisible cow-bubble. When my daughter asked me if the baby I was carrying (the twins, had we both but known it) had the same father as herself.

‘Gareth’s of course. Stop interrupting me. You asked and I’ll tell you – the least you can do is listen quietly. We changed all right? We were married, we had you both, we loved you both – we cared for each other, but still part of us had changed. You – you and Ruth – are the most important things to us. You know that, to both of us. But having said that – having put that first – there is still room – there has to be space for other things in our lives.’

‘Do you?’ she snapped.

‘What?’

‘Screw other people in the back of cars? Do you?’

I wanted to ask her if it was necessary to put it like that, but I didn’t. ‘No.’

‘Have you got anyone? A boyfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want one, Vi, I’m perfectly content with life as it is – with you two, and now this baby’s coming – I’m not interested in that.’

‘But he is.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘And you don’t mind.’

‘No.’

‘You’re married to someone and you don’t mind them sleeping with someone else.’

‘No, Vi, I don’t. You’ll understand it better when you’re older. It’s nothing to do with me, and it’s not really anything to do with you. It’s his private life, and as long as it doesn’t impinge on us or hurt us, then . . .’

She was quiet, sitting on the windowsill, fingers clasping the ledge beneath her thighs, face bent forward into the shadow. I watched the sky. Up beyond the range of fireworks, a plane crossed, red landing lights flashing. I thought how many levels there are in the sky, it’s like the sea turned upside-down. How much depth there is in everything. Being pregnant, the secrets of the universe were mine alone. I was less use to Vi than a stuffed dummy.

At last she said, quite quietly, ‘You hypocrite.’

‘What?’

‘Hypocrite. You. Filthy lying hypocrite. You – both of you – how could you?’ She was crying again and not every word was clear. ‘How could you – all lies and lovey-dovey, even having a baby again – how could you be so disgusting – I hate you. I hate you – both of you –’ She half-fell off the windowsill – I think she misjudged the distance – recovered herself, and ran out of the room. I heard her run along the landing and slam her bedroom door.

Outside a new shower of rockets burst into silver stars with a distant pop-pop-pop.

* * *

Sat. 22

The mural. When I was pregnant with Vi I thought, Ruth will feel displaced by the new baby, especially because it will sleep with us, while she must stay in a room on her own.

I decided to make her room nicer. On the wall opposite her cot, I would paint a beautiful mural. I studied her favourite book, nursery rhymes, and made drawings of the things she liked best; the old woman who lived in a shoe, and the cow jumping over the moon. I couldn’t do people so I made the old woman’s shoe-house, with little windows and blobs of children’s heads staring out of them. I spent evenings poring over the book and doing rough drawings; when I had done my final drawing I copied it on to graph paper and measured up squares on the wall, so that I could transfer it accurately. I spent a long time choosing colours and paints – emulsion wasn’t bright enough, and the tins were far too big. At last I got something from a specialist art shop.

And then the work began. I painted while she was asleep at nights. She was always a good sleeper. I brought the Anglepoise from the desk, on an extension lead, and aimed its illumination at the particular patch I was working on. Sometimes the shadows were odd; sometimes I could see my dark, looming, pregnant shape outlined against the squares, as if it too was waiting to be filled in with colours. I was aware of her the whole time peacefully sleeping behind me. I loved those evenings; working quietly, watching the picture grow. The first thing I filled in was the cow, a beautiful black and white Friesian with bent forelegs and stiff straight hindlegs leaping for the moon like a rocket. Then the moon, fat and yellow as a wedge of Edam, lying on its back like a baby’s cradle. When she woke in the mornings I would point out my last night’s work to her, and she would clap and exclaim excitedly.

One night Gareth ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• 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