Cold Earth, page 24
When the lamb was anointed with olive oil and honey and rosemary and garlic I washed up. I even dried and put everything away. I turned the letter back over. She’d have written it at the kitchen table, with the icon behind her and the olive tree tapping at the window and the sea Aegean blue in the background. It would have taken a while, in English and on that blue ricepaper, and then she’d have folded all the sheets and licked the envelope and maybe walked down to the village with it straight away, before she changed her mind. I pushed it away and began to make a rhubarb and polenta cake with a honey syrup, leaving an exclusion zone around the envelope as if it were leaking toxins. When the cake was in the oven I washed up again and sat down. It was past lunchtime, almost time for The Archers, and usually I’d have made a sandwich and caught up with Ambridge, but I didn’t feel much like eating. The smell of vanilla began to drift from the oven. The letter lay on the table. I reached out and opened it.
At first I felt sick. My hands shook as I turned the tap on, refilled the blue mug with cold water. I leant against the counter. There was a child in the yard below, walking up and down bouncing a red ball as if her bouncing were keeping us all alive. She’s usually here at weekends, staying with her dad on the other staircase. There used to be a little brother as well. She nearly missed a beat, lunged sideways and kept going. The slap of ball on tarmac bounced off the walls, amplified. We promised we’d never go back, you know. All of us, when we said our final goodbyes at Nuuk. Cat and I sat together on the plane back to Copenhagen but Ben was barely talking to me by then and the last I saw of him was the back of his head as he elbowed his way out into the arrivals hall. I guess the risk of meeting either of the Americans again must be small, and in some ways the knowledge that Jim is out there in the world is comforting, but British academia being what it is the likelihood of bumping into Ben again, back home and at someone’s launch party or by the lockers in the BL, is horribly high. It’s like knowing you committed a crime and living in fear of meeting a witness but I didn’t, did I? I brought you food until the storm came and I couldn’t walk any more. If there’s a criminal, it’s Ben, the only one who was still mobile when we heard the boat. He went straight past you on his way down to the beach.
I finished the water and wandered into the other room. Dust drifted in the sunlight. My laptop gazed from the desk like some kind of surveillance camera run by my superego so I went out onto the balcony with my id, where the noise of traffic and the light glinting off the leaves of the plane tree across the road offered refuge from both the laptop and the letter. David’s wanted to see the dig all along and I know he thinks I should stand there again with him, incorporate what happened into my life. Our life. We haven’t talked about the Greenlanders. They went away in the end, when the snow came and the river froze, and I’m not quite sure, from here, from my balcony with its view of the bus stop and Sam’s newsagent, through the prism of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor I swallow with the first cup of Earl Grey every morning, if they were there or not. I’m not quite sure I want to find out.
I took a deep breath of London air, the sort that makes you sneeze in black, and leant over the railing. Wherefore art thou, Romeo? (Valuing paintings in Chalfont St. Giles, that’s where.) There was a queue at the bus stop, an old lady with a shopping trolley and a mum with a pushchair and a couple of disaffected youth with wires coming out of their ears, just the same as before. And mostly it is like that, you know, in London. I’d always wondered how Virginia Woolf could be so flippant about the 1918 Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke between Lytton Strachey’s sore finger and Lady Murray’s invitation to lunch, when the death rate in parts of London was higher than it had been in the trenches and people who had been well at breakfast were dead by bedtime and deadly as plutonium to everyone who saw them in between, but I think I understand it now. When you’re not dead, life goes on and there are buses to catch and lamb to cook. Doctoral theses to write. And letters to read, and answer. I thought I would phone Cat, who has given up her doctorate and is painting in Skye, and see what she thought of your mother’s request.
Cat said, predictably, that it was an insane idea, but I never claimed to be sane, did I? So here I am. The river is still wavering over the stones and the dark screes where the watcher waited are unchanged. The sky is grey today and so low over the black sea that everything’s horizontal and it feels as if there’s not much space. The flowers are different from the ones that were out when we arrived last year, fragile white bells that remind me of porcelain cups so thin you can see your fingers through them. There are so many I can’t help treading on them. Things came true for you here, your mother says. This is the place that makes sense of your life, by which I think she means your work, or maybe your death. Despite the little pills, I still see the valley in my dreams, hear the wind whistling over your tent and fight my way through snow to reach you because in my dreams it is not too late. To dream of cold and wake to a down duvet and the cotton-scented warmth of your beloved is a pleasure even greater than dreaming of crime and waking to innocence. In some ways Ruth was right, you know, about what haunts the mind. Even our fucked-up and terrifying reality is only very rarely as bad as our dreams. Though you, of course, like her, are one of the exceptions, and I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t dream about that too, about those final days when you lay alone in the dark as if no one cared when you took your last breath. Hypothermia, Dr Jackson assures me, is among the nicer ways to leave, especially when the brain is already out to sea with hunger. I hope someone has told your mother.
The sea is empty as usual. The grass has grown back over the robbed graves, though the traces of our fire still stain the stones of the house. I thought of cleaning them off for you, engaging in some kind of reconstructive archaeology, but I’d only leave some other trace, wouldn’t I? Even hiding traces leaves traces. And we were there. We are history too. There’s a boat bobbing by the rocks again, but this time it has an outboard motor and the bright figures down on the beach are David and Nils the pilot, who will take us back to the farmhouse for a supper which will be, happily, neither authentic nor, in essentials, based on local ingredients. I am not stupid. I have no intention of spending a night here. But I sense no presences now, not even yours, and it’s time to go.
I open the box, empty your ashes onto the wind and watch them drift and settle like dark snow on the pale flowers of West Greenland.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to everyone who read and responded to drafts of this book, especially Anna Webber, who has been much more than an agent for Cold Earth, and my editor Sara Holloway, who sees what I mean and saves me from myself with endless grace. Thank you to everyone else at Granta for everything, and especially Amber Dowell for cheering me up when I needed it.
I thank my colleagues at the University of Kent for all kinds of support, and especially Scarlett Thomas, Jennie Batchelor and Rod Edmond. The final drafts of this book were made while on study leave and I thank Malcolm Andrews for protecting this time at some cost to himself. Early research took place with the support of a doctoral grant from the AHRC and the Blaschko Scholarship at Linacre College, Oxford. I am grateful for Katharine MacDonald’s expert opinions as well as the gift of her friendship.
Hannah Ludlow made it possible for me to concentrate and Anthony Maude, as always, gave me time and space to write.
Copyright
Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books, 2009
This ebook edition published by Granta Books, 2010
Copyright © Sarah Moss, 2009
Sarah Moss has asserted her moral right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84708 287 9
Sarah Moss, Cold Earth
