In the Falling Snow by Caryl Phillips

he was distressed at having to associate with fellow officers who he regarded as being a cut below by birth, but who behaved as though they were a cut above by divine right. Her father had used his old school tie contacts and forged a successful career for himself in banking, but he had recently retired to the tranquillity of the countryside. ‘I’m it,’ she said, ‘the only child they were able to have so they dote on me, but they also kind of resent me a little for not being two, or even three, and that way they wouldn’t have had to put all their eggs in the potentially disappointing Annabelle basket. Of course, he wanted a boy, so the daddy’s little girl thing never really worked for me.’ He listened to Annabelle, but he found it difficult to hear anything that she was saying for he couldn’t take his eyes from her stunning, almost perfectly oval face. Her wispy brown hair was tied back with an elastic band, although unruly strands sprouted out from all sides so that the overall effect was a weird bohemian self-possession. When he entered into the second year of the sixth form he had a girlfriend of sorts, but that solitary relationship was more about sexual confidence-building than any kind of affection, or even attraction, and once he was accepted at university their friendship gradually petered out. For most of his first year at university his energies had been thoroughly invested in football and drinking, and the notion of pulling a bird seemed so vaguely remote that he spent a great deal of time affecting a lack of interest. However, from the moment during the interval of
Sweet Bird of Youth
when the girl looked up from her theatre programme and leaned across the empty seat between them and asked him if he was enjoying the play, he was intrigued. At the end of the performance, as they were both putting on their coats, he found the courage to ask her if she was a student, and she not only told him ‘yes’, she also scribbled down her name and the number of the phone in her hall of residence and handed the piece of paper to him saying, ‘I thought I was the only one who went to see Tennessee Williams’s plays on my own.’ As she smiled and turned to leave, he heard the words emerge of their own volition. ‘Would you like to have a coffee?’
    Two days before the end of his first year at university, he waited for Annabelle outside Lecture Theatre One in the English department, and showed her the letter which effectively undid his summer plans. Despite Brenda’s urgings, he had consistently made it clear to her that he had no interest in spending the summer building any kind of a relationship with his father, for he felt that the effort should be coming in the other direction. In fact, he had already made plans to spend the late summer travelling around Europe on the trains. The university authorities had agreed that he could stay in the halls throughout the early summer, and so he had set himself up with a part-time job pumping petrol in a garage on the edge of the campus. He reckoned that by mid-August he would have saved enough money to fund a month of Inter-Railing, and perhaps have enough left over to be able to spend maybe another two weeks in Spain, or Portugal, or anywhere that was warm and cheap. After he and Annabelle had shared their first hot and stuffy night squeezed up tight in his single bed, he asked her if she wanted to join him ‘on the road’. She laughed and wondered if he was deliberately trying to sound like a hippie, but before he could answer she said ‘yes,’ she would love to join him but she would have to meet him in late August as her father had fixed up a job for her as a lowly dogsbody at the
Wiltshire Times
so she could acquire some journalism experience. However, just as he was beginning to feel happy and safe with their arrangements, everything came apart when he got the letter from Brenda. He walked over to the English department, and once Annabelle had read the