A Bit of Earth (3 page)

Susannah's mother Elfie had been Swedish. Her name had been Elfrida, but with her cropped blonde hair (which turned to thistledown as her final illness took hold) and her slightly sticky-out ears, Elfie had suited her more and more. She had died a year before Guy and Susannah had met. But now Guy remembered how, when he'd been shown photos, he had wondered if she might be half elfin, a changeling who had belatedly been reclaimed. He had always got on well enough with Susannah's father, Kenneth Ingram, a research chemist whose beard looked as though it had been knitted from the unravelled grey wool of school jumpers. Originally from Northumberland, work had taken Kenneth to Sweden, and then to Germany where he had remained. Guy also remembered remarking to Susannah that Sweden and Northumberland were not that far apart, and how she had laughed and said that her father was a constant pickle-eater, that he had wanted to immerse himself in a culture that had raw fish for breakfast, but then discovered a place where cheese and salami were standard wake-up fare.

If only Guy could hear her laugh, her voice again. Often it was too painful to think, but sometimes he sat and tried to think of things she had said – exact words, her accent and inflexions – if he could recall things exactly, might she come back?

Susannah's brother Jon was a research botanist, and a much higher flier than Guy. Resolutely single, he lived in Geneva and took energetic, purposeful holidays. Guy had never got to know him that well. Once, before Felix was born, they had joined him on a skiing holiday. Guy still felt diminished by it. Before they went, he had resolved to try to like skiing, but how could he really enjoy anything that involved such silly outfits and day-long bonhomie? On the first day he had ventured onto the slopes with them, but the snow had been much too slippery, and he'd had to take an ignominious ride back down on the lift and in an empty cable car. For the rest of the holiday he had walked in the forests and looked at mosses. Susannah had just laughed and said it didn't matter.

Although they had rarely seen Jon, Susannah had had long telephone conversations with him, usually in German or Swedish, conversations that Guy would never have been able to keep up with.

Now contact with Jon would be reduced to presents sent to Felix at random times of the year. Jon wasn't a rememberer or observer of other people's birthdays, or even Christmas. But Felix loved the presents: a book about rocks and minerals; a book of maps of the Alps (perhaps Jon was imagining that he might take Felix on holiday with him one day); a box of huge seed pods (which Guy and Felix worked out were from starnut
palm, Mary's bean, crabwood, and sea coconut); the shed skin of a viper; an Amazonian soldier ant pickled in a bottle (Guy said it was lucky that Grandpa Kenneth hadn't seen it first); some sharks' teeth from a sailing holiday off Australia …

‘Do you think Uncle Jon will ever come and visit us?' Felix would ask each time something arrived.

‘Maybe,' said Guy, but he couldn't imagine what might bring Jon to their dull city, their shire-bound backwater. There were no dangerous sports to be had, no rapids to shoot.

‘Then maybe we could go and visit him,' said Felix.

‘Maybe.'

After the funeral, Kenneth would stay in touch only by letter, often enclosing some Euros for Felix. Guy knew that Kenneth had his own swallowed grief to cope with – first his wife, then his daughter – and that they should be sticking together. Perhaps Kenneth blamed him for the accident, thought that he could not have been taking proper care of Susannah. Words seemed to turn to pebbles in their mouths.

There must have been other relatives of Felix somewhere in Sweden. Elfie had had siblings. There must have been cousins somewhere, but Guy gave them no thought. He and Felix might appear as an English Misselthwaite dead end on that branch of the Swedish family tree. It didn't occur to him to be concerned.

Guy's parents and his sister Jenny arrived for the funeral. They only mentioned the cost of their last-minute flights from New Zealand a few times. They stayed in the same Travelodge as Jon and Kenneth, and all carefully avoided having breakfast together. Guy was deeply grateful that nobody stayed with him, and didn't mind that Susannah's family made their stay as short as possible. He found Jon's physical resemblance to Susannah disturbing.

Jenny's usual heartiness was muted, but only slightly. She found it hard to step out of her role as a tour leader of trekking holidays in the Tongariro National Park, the sort of vacations that are advertised in the back of the weekend papers and are supposedly designed for intrepid souls. Footloose in walking boots. Guy didn't think that it had been very independent to follow your retiring parents halfway across the world, and set up in their spare bedroom. He didn't hear his mother persuading Jenny not to wear her cargo shorts to the funeral.

They only stayed a week, and they hardly mentioned Susannah. They had all thought that she was so nice. They kept remembering the wedding, when they had been so impressed; it had been as though a Misselthwaite had managed to bag the blonde one from Abba. On the last night of their stay Guy's mother cornered him in the kitchen.

‘But will you and Felix be all right? Would you like to come and stay with us? Maybe you could have a year's sabbatical? Compassionate leave? I'm sure your department would be very flexible.'

‘Um,' said Guy. He didn't want to say that actually he more or less
was
the department, and that if he left there probably wouldn't be anything to come back to. ‘Felix is
starting school in September. It's all organised.' Pictures of Susannah smiling as Felix modelled his new school sweatshirt flashed into his head. She had made him a PE bag already. ‘I guess for, um, continuity for Felix, it would be better to stay here.' Even as he said this he thought, continuity, how could this be continuity? And what would be so good about continuity here anyway?

‘Well, let me stay then.'

‘Mum, it's really kind of you, but we'll be all right.' He knew that they had a holiday in Australia booked, that they had a whole life on the other side of the world. His mum had a part-time job as a museum guide, which she loved. His dad would be worrying about the garden. Their dogs were in kennels.

‘Well, you must promise to come and visit us.'

‘OK,' said Guy, but he really couldn't see the point.

‘I don't want Felix growing up not knowing his grandparents.'

‘No. Of course not.'

‘There is email,' said his dad coming in, hoping for a little something savoury on crackers.

Jenny joined them.

‘You could get a web cam rigged up.'

‘Good idea,' said Guy. He imagined the pictures it would send: himself and Felix standing there against the backdrop of his dingy study, opening and shutting their mouths but not being able to think of anything to say.

One of the things that Guy did manage to keep up after Susannah died was the bedtime story. It had always been
one of his duties, and was often then, at fifteen or so minutes, the longest time that he spent alone with Felix each day. Felix chose the book, and there were many to pick from. Books for Felix had been one of Susannah's few extravagances, they were one of her priorities. Susannah and Felix had made regular trips to the local library, something that Guy would find out, to his cost in fines, some weeks after she died. There had been no stories on those first few days (those days that Guy could now barely recall, that had passed in a fug of tears and disbelief, and noisy, uncomprehending, half-strangled grief). But then, on what must have been the fourth or fifth day, sometime before the funeral anyway, Felix had reappeared in his pyjamas, which were stained with cereal and who knew what else. He was holding a book. It was ten o'clock. Guy hadn't seen Felix for several hours. It was a ‘biggest, tallest, fastest' book of facts about animals.

‘Please, Dad. We haven't had any bedtime books.'

It wouldn't have been possible for Felix to choose something where emotions were flatter and more absent. Eventually Felix fell asleep and Guy carried him up to bed, then lay down with him and slept too.

A day or so later a health visitor called with some leaflets for Guy and an illustrated book for them, as she said, to share. It was called
When a Parent Dies.
Guy couldn't bring himself to look at any of it, he couldn't even open it. Just the cover was bad enough. He remembered how Susannah had once referred to those sorts of colours as ‘bright pastels'. The bedtime books continued, and they were one of the closest connections that they had each day. Usually it was some non-fiction. Guy wondered if Felix was making deliberately
tactful choices; unlikely, he knew, in a four-year-old. If it wasn't animals, vehicles or dinosaurs, it might be
Thomas the Tank Engine.
Suddenly Guy was grateful to the Rev. W. Awdry for his plodding prose and plots, the engines' banal expressions and characters. Sometimes Guy would think he was being cowardly, and failing Felix in what they were reading, but he would still stick to Felix's choices. There was so much to be avoided. As they climbed the stairs at bedtime, and Felix brushed his teeth, the words

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three …

would sound so loudly in his head that he feared Felix might hear them. How could A.A. Milne have written such a poem? Huh, The wisdom of bloody Pooh.

Then he thought, perhaps I'm doing this all wrong. Perhaps I should be choosing books that will make us cry. And there were many. At least when Felix was a bit older most parents in books would be dead, absent or dysfunctional. Guy reckoned that in books for seven-year-olds and above it was deemed to make for a better story. Bring them on!

Lots of new books had arrived, and so had some puzzles, stickers and drawing things. Felix liked opening the presents, but he didn't really want to read any of the new books. He liked his old books better. Some of the puzzles were too
easy and some were a bit too hard. He hated it if people gave you things that were too hard and you were going to have to wait until you were older, or things that were too big that you had to grow into.

One of the presents was a kit for making a dinosaur skeleton out of wood. His dad said that they would do it later, or another day. Felix was bored of always waiting. He pressed the pieces out all by himself. The trouble was that some of them had splinters, and then he couldn't see how they all went together. He tried to build it, but it didn't look much like a brachiosaurus. He thought that his dad might be cross that he hadn't waited. He smashed it up and hid the bits in a bag under his bed. He had a go at drawing a brachiosaurus instead, but it kept going wrong. He tried out all the new pens, and then left their tops off to see if his dad noticed. He drew tiny pictures on the wall beside his bed. Dad didn't even notice that either. The next day he put all the lids back on the pens because he didn't really want them to run out. He watched videos. Dad didn't mind if he watched them again and again.

Guy tried to talk sense to himself. Terrible, stupid, random things happened. And one had happened to them. If Felix had been the one to die then at least Susannah and he could have swiftly killed themselves. Everything hung by a thread, all life, all happiness.

Sometimes the thoughts bored him, but he could not stop them. He wondered whether anyone had ever managed any original thoughts when something like this happened to them.

The world was full of stupid random events.

He remembered a friend of Jenny's who broke her neck when she slipped on a pencil, and a case he saw in the paper of some poor soul being accidentally electrocuted in a metal-walled public loo on a seaside promenade.

Think of history, the untimely demise of so many kings and queens in so many ridiculous ways, to say nothing of all the millions of ordinary, undocumented people. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap. Everything was an accident. One big cosmic accident. These sorts of things were to be expected. They fitted. In this universe, the nonsensical and the random were to be expected. They should not even be remarked upon.

Guy hadn't seen the piece on
South Today.
Somehow he was aware that there had been articles about the crash in the local paper, but he didn't read them, and would never have deliberately kept them. Worst of all for Guy, there was an article in the university's own glossy publication. A short account of what happened, then a long glowing obituary of Julius East. It seemed that he was a professor in his prime, with a long list of publications and contributions to text books and journals. There was a short piece about Susannah who, the reader was left to surmise, had just a minor part in the tragedy; after all she had only been a part-time university library assistant, and had no publications at all to her name. She was only an MA. And wife of Professor Guy Misselthwaite, Department of Botany. It added that she had left a four-year-old son. The publication extended its sincerest condolences to both of the families involved.