The Ice is Singing (6 page)

Alice sat on the sofa opposite the bed. She would empty the dirty water in a minute.

She was sitting there still when Dr Carter arrived that afternoon. He greeted her kindly, offered her some sleeping pills, and enquired when her brother was coming. For the funeral, she replied,
on Friday. Another doctor came in from the car to sign the certificate, then they both left. Alice went back to the kitchen and sat at the table. It was very cold. She would have got up to make a
cup of tea, but it hardly seemed worth the bother.

In the night she roused herself from her chair, and hobbled into her mother’s bedroom. The cold had sent her feet to sleep. Ellen was still there. She hadn’t moved. She didn’t
need anything. There was nothing to do.

Alice returned to the kitchen. She switched on the light, but the curtains had not been drawn and anyone could have seen in, from that blackness outside. She switched off the light again,
steadying herself against the cold wall in the dark. Perhaps she should go to bed? But she couldn’t remember what hours today was running to. And if she went to bed – when should she
get up? And what do then? Ellen would not want changing, or giving a drink. The fire would not need making up. Nappies would not want soaking, nor sheets washing, nor food buying. There was nothing
that needed doing. There was nothing for her to do.

When Tom arrived on Thursday night the house was in darkness. Alice must be in bed, but it was thoughtless of her not to leave a light on for him. The door was not locked but he tripped and hurt
his gammy leg because he forgot the way the door sill stuck up out of the floor. The house was chilly. Rubbing his ankle irritably he switched on the light and called her. There was no reply. He
went though the house room by room, switching on all the lights. His mother lay dead in her bed. In the kitchen he paced up and down, swinging his arms together for warmth, waiting for Alice to
return. He’d had a four-hour journey, for God’s sake. The grate was full of cold white ash. Angrily he riddled it, sending choking clouds of dust into the air, then laid and lit the
kindling stacked in the fireside basket. The flames were reluctant and he spread a sheet of newspaper over the fire to draw it up. A fine bloody mess. Maddy might have come with him, instead of
leaving him to sort it out all on his own; his mother dead, this filthy old ruin of a house, and Alice playing at silly buggers.

The roaring fire sucked in the paper and it blackened and burst into flames before he could let go of it. Shaking his hands in pain he stumbled back. A car drew up outside. Tom opened the door
as Dr Carter came up the path.

‘Mr Clough! Glad to see you. Is your sister here?’

‘No. I don’t know where the devil she is.’

Carter followed him into the kitchen. The fire had gone out again and the charred wood smoked sullenly.

‘She phoned me,’ the doctor said. ‘About an hour ago. She sounded upset. I thought I’d come and see if she was all right. She’s not on the way up from the
phone.’

‘I haven’t even seen her.’

Carter nodded. ‘She was saying that she’d killed Mrs Clough. Overdosed her with painkillers.’

Tom stared.

‘There’s no truth in it, of course,’ the doctor said sharply. ‘Your sister kept Mrs Clough alive for many years longer than she would have survived in hospital. She was
an excellent nurse. Her reaction to your mother’s death is one I should have predicted.’ He paused. ‘I blame myself.’

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
splatterings 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.