“And Gavin?” asks Sarah.
“No news yet,” says Martin.
“So,” says Sarah, “if the weather keeps up…”
“Now now,” says Madeleine, “don’t start before he’s even got here.”
“He was an arse last year,” says Sarah, “and I’m sure he’ll be an arse this year.”
Martin looks at Robert and rubs his hands together. “Drink?”
The sky is blacker now. Snow deepens in sheltered corners and on the windward side of walls. It lies in Advent calendar curves on windowsills. It blots and softens the top of every object like icing on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.
Martin tells Madeleine to stop fretting and insists that Gavin and Emmy will be fine, because it is one of his guiding principles that everything is always fine until occasionally it isn’t and you should therefore save your energy for coping with that rare eventuality. In the back of his mind he ponders the satisfying conundrum of what he would do if he were stuck in a car overnight in weather like this. How long would the engine run in neutral to power the heating system, for example? The snow would act as an insulator of course, but you would have to be wary of carbon monoxide poisoning.
A green VW Touran turns off the main road, two cones of halogen light swinging through the slowly falling flakes. The car slides briefly sideways then finds traction again, compacted snow squeaking as the tyre treads bite. Leo, Martin and Madeleine’s younger son, is driving. His wife, Sofie, is in the passenger seat and David (eleven) and Anya (ten) are in the back. Leo decides against attempting the potentially ruinous bottleneck of the stone gateposts and leaves the car at a jaunty angle halfway over the hidden kerb. He rests his head on the steering wheel. “Jesus. I am knackered.”
He teaches history at Durham. When he was a small boy he wondered regularly whether he had been adopted and the suspicion has never entirely gone away. Family gatherings of all kinds are purgatorial, leaving him longing for a solitary walking holiday in some remote corner of the earth. In truth he is like his mother, or like the person his mother might have been if she were not warped by the deforming gravity of the husband around whom she has orbited for nearly all her life. He listens more than he talks. In most rooms he has a good sense of what other people are feeling, and if any of them are uneasy he cannot help but share that unease. A family Christmas is a guaranteed generator of unease.
Sofie translates from Icelandic and her native Danish, mostly business, a bit of crime writing over the last couple of years. She feels no closer to Leo’s family than he does but she keeps her distance by pretending to be more foreign and less intelligent than she is, misusing words and faking bafflement at quirky native customs, and is both insulted and relieved that none of them see through the blatant subterfuge.
Anya is going through a period of ferocious conformity that both Leo and Sofie find deeply dispiriting (Sims, Frozen, One Direction) though not as dispiriting as David’s rank oddity which Leo, in particular, fears may be an expression of the same car-crash genes which have yo-yoed Sofie’s uncle in and out of a psychiatric hospital in Augustenborg for his whole adult life. All the books Leo has read on the subject suggest that psychosis only rears its ugly head in the late teens for boys, which is some reassurance. Still, it’s hard not to be disturbed by the collection of dead animals (crow, mouse, stag beetle, toad) that he keeps wrapped in tissue paper in a line of cardboard boxes on his bedroom bookshelf like so many little coffins, and by the incomprehensible language in which he talks to himself sometimes, which he claims to be Tagalog but isn’t because Leo has checked.
They take their luggage from the boot. Anya has a yellow, black and white rucksack in the shape of one of the Minions from Despicable Me. David has an antique leather satchel given to him by his Danish grandfather which he dubbins regularly and which gives him the air of a tiny Renaissance clerk.
Leo stops and looks around at all this crystal, blue-black darkness and listens to…absolutely nothing. Apart from his son and daughter arguing about who knocked the bagged-up duvet into the snow the silence is fathomless. He forgets it every year until some detail brings it back (the eggshell glass of a broken bauble, a Salvation Army brass band playing “I Saw Three Ships,” thick snowfall…), how extraordinary Christmas once was, how extraordinary everything once was all year round, each individual moment a thing to be swallowed or solved or suffered. But now…? So much coasting, so many blanks, as if there was an infinite supply of time and those same seconds could be brushed from the table like spilt salt.
“I know you’d like to spend all night standing out here.” Sofie touches his arm. “But it really is very cold.”
They trudge up the drive into the sudden glare of the intruder light. By the time they reach the porch Sarah is opening the door with its two stained-glass panels (a shepherd on the left, three sheep on the right). “Hey, little brother.” It is a thing she does in one way or another every time they meet, gently but firmly asserting her superior place in the pecking order, but with enough warmth to make a complaint seem churlish.
Deep breath. Ten seconds down, thirty-six hours to go. “No Gavin yet?” says Leo. “I didn’t see the car.”
“With any luck they’ll be spending Christmas in a Travelodge on the M1.”
Sofie stamps the snow off her boots while Sarah gives the children mock-regal handshakes. “Anya…David…”
“I greet you in the name of the seven kingdoms,” says David. “I feared that we would not make it through the mountains.”
But Sofie is looking over the top of his head. “You spoke too soon.”
They turn as one to see Gavin and Emmy walking up the drive and even in the dark it is possible to tell from her weary, Scott/Shackleton gait that they have been forced to leave the car some distance away.
“Ahoy there,” shouts Gavin. “I hope you have a blazing log fire and large whiskies waiting.”
Gavin is an extravagantly gifted man whose critical shortcoming, aside from his monstrous ego, is that he has never been struck by a passionate interest which will direct his manifold talents and offer him the prospect of achieving something which matters more than achievement itself.
Leo’s theory is that since his preternatural growth spurt at twelve a natural magnetism has made him, always, the centre of a group of people who want to be in his presence and he has never been sufficiently free of their noise to hear what is going on inside his own mind, nor bored enough to discover what genuinely pleases him.
Deep down Gavin believes that he should now be head of the family — Sarah’s gender disqualifies her so completely that he never thinks of her as his older sister — and he resents the fact that his father has not ceded his position by dying or slackening his mental grip on the world. The simple fact of driving to his parents’ house at Christmas is an act of obeisance which he finds demeaning and which the inclement weather has only made more irksome.
Eighteen years ago he got a rugby Blue at Cambridge, played briefly for the Harlequins, had his jaw shattered in his seventh game and experienced a rare moment of revelation lying in St. Thomas’ Hospital, to the effect that he would never get an international cap and should therefore take the job Ove Arup had offered him four months previously. He got back in touch and, being a man into whose lap so many things simply fell, it seemed only natural that the woman who had taken the job he spurned had been killed in a light-plane crash on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast only the week before and that his prospective departmental boss was a rugby fan who bore no grudge for Gavin’s initial rejection.