Love and loss in Rachel Joyce's Christmas day at the airport

People used to get united by the very atmosphere of Christmas time, and traditional Christian symbols are meant to bring the remembrance of miracle once happened in Bethlehem, which now enters every house. But a paradox takes place in a story ‘A Faraway Smell of Lemon’ by Rachel Joyce: people are brought together, but not in happiness; a Christian cup, never having been used in a direct joyful way, helps them to find a common ground, but by acknowledgment of irretrievable loss.

A Snow Garden and Other Stories by Rachel Joyce is not another book about mawkish tinselish Christmas time, but a collection of realistic bittersweet stories that hit home. ‘A woman finds a cure for a broken heart where she least expects it’ – that's how Rachel Joyce herself describes ‘A Faraway Smell of Lemon’ in the annotation. Thus, an epiphany moment is expected, yet it performs remarkably offbeat touch to the traditional perception of Christmas.

For the main character, a 47-year-old woman called Binny, Christmas time is not a blissful period. Her partner cheats on and leaves her. She is devastated and hurt, emotionally and literally. She doesn’t feel like commemorating Christmas and doesn’t expect any Christmas spirit in a shop selling household cleaning materials she fortunes up-

on. But this ordinary place will turn her bitter self-pity into something very different.

At first, the place makes her feeling awkward as it offers things Binny do not care at all. Apart from this, a young shop assistant there looks estranged to the point of unfriendliness:

Her skin is a flawless ivory and her deep-brown eyes are like seeds, as if she is studying Binny from inside a porcelain mask .

But it is interesting how the ‘mask’ falls off when she opens herself to Binny, who is described this way: ‘Tall and broad, [... ] she is dressed in something black and shapeless she found tangled on the end of her foot’. Chalk and cheese. The way of life resonates with the way of thinking. Binny’s house is in a mess — and she’s a mess. The young woman is an embodiment of cleanliness — her look, her speech, her household lotions.

Their interaction seems to be pretty awkward: the girl doesn’t get Binny’s humour:

Your Hoover? Maybe all you need is a new bag.’ ‘What do you suggest for the heart?’ The young woman is looking confused again .

In the long run who cares about human bonding between customers and shop-assistants — they must be speaking different languages!? And while the whole world is shining with decorations, joy is in the air, you only smell household cleaners. Nevertheless, it’s the very thing Binny needs. She has to clean her floor after her desperate breaking dishes, but does she really feel like cleaning her whole house?

Where I live, there’s a smell. It’s been there years I can definitely smell my ex-husband’s aftershave and we divorced six years ago. Or other times I’ll get this overwhelming scent of my mother’s jasmine soap’ .

Of all the stories in the book in this one smells play the most important role. Binny has a kinesthetic type of perception, to be more specific, an olfactory one. Smells don’t just run through her life; she remembers her whole life via aromas, scents, flavours… and sometimes stink. Smells differ drastically from images, sounds and even tastes and touches. They are the subtlest, the hardest to describe or reproduce in your imagination. It would remind of something very special you’d never think away. So it is for Binny. Smells are like signal flags or bookmarks for her. They stand for people she loved and lost.

And her memory is truly a blessing and a curse. It imprints the past that will never become future. ‘When her mother died a few years ago, hot on the heels of her father, Binny refused to cry.

You must let go,’ her friends urged. ‘You must grieve.’ She wouldn’t, though. To cry was to acknowledge that something was well and truly over’.

Her parents used to give her a soap on a rope that smelled of lemon. As their love for each other, it was something clear and material. Now it’s no more, but unconsciously Binny won’t resign herself to loss. She struggles to keep the love, but all what’s left for her is a haunting smell of it. ‘So many lives somehow tangled with hers, gone now, or going’. In my opinion, the author chooses the verb ‘tangled’ no only to point the connection between their lives, but also to highlight its complicated character.

Still Christmas miracle happens. A plastic angel witnesses how the shop with all its mundane products becomes the place of spiritual revelation. All at once the antipodes succeed to find common ground — the painful experience of losing and letting go. The shop assistant pours her heart to Binny telling her that five years ago she had a stillborn baby. At this point, two most important symbols enter the scene. The more obvious one is the smell of lemon.

‘So much love, so much energy, and for what? It all seems to smell of lemon’.

In Christianity lemon symbolizes loyal love. Indeed, the story is all about keeping the image of the loved ones in your heart throughout life. But the phrase ‘And for what?’ provides bitter doubt. Why are these sentences opposed to each other?

There is an antithetical interpretation: in everyday use lemon is associated with its sour taste, which paves the way for additional meanings – failure, disillusion and even a feeling of being betrayed. Besides, Binny sees herself as a dupe – she gave so much love to people, but they're gone. Not only the emotional investment was never paid back, the very connection people have in life is painfully fragile! And the answer comes:

Some things we can have only briefly. So why do we behave as if everything [...] should be ours for keeps?

In my point of view, both interpretations coexist in this sentence, creating a beautifully painful symbiosis of loving and losing.

The young woman lost her child on Christmas — when the Baby Jesus comes to the world, her baby is a stillborn. The grief that must have painted Christmas black for her. But she learned how to live on. From this point of view, she is a holder of bitter experience which she shares with Binny, pretty much becoming a mentor for her. It starts as showing how ‘domestic chores can be therapeutic’ by cleaning the christening cup and turns into a great revelation — a kind of a divine one. By listening to her story and becoming a part of a purification ritual Binny experiences a moment of epiphany:

Binny has a feeling like a bubble in her stomach [...]. With her tears come images from the past, images of people Binny has loved and lost.

The way the young woman shares her experience with Binny is brilliantly depicted in the phrase ‘She tucks the duster into Binny’s right hand and guides it, as if Binny is blind ’.

The second symbol is an important artifact of Christian culture — a silver christening cup. It was designed for the young woman’s baby who never saw the light of day. Bitter irony: according to tradition, it was supposed to help her son grow healthy and strong. The silver cup has the engraving of the name of never borne child. It could have been placed somewhere on a shelf, being a sign of hope fulfilled and beauty of life, it could have been used for drinking… but this particular vessel was never filled. Instead, it was kept in a shoebox beneath the counter.

But the cup began the world anew by helping the young woman to find a peace of mind. Its healing powers seem to be true miracle: when Binny takes it in hands, ‘it touches the cuts on her hands, but it is so light they do not hurt. If anything, it soothes them’. Cleaning the cup echoes with treasuring one’s most precious moments in life, even those which didn’t last for long.

Daria Abasheva

4th year, Linguistics

Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg

Remember vs. Forget in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing and Pat Barker’s Regeneration

A large body of contemporary literature focuses on the topic of memory by exploring this phenomenon in all its complexity and dynamics. This is especially true of such novels as Elizabeth is Missing (2014) by Emma Healey and Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker, which centre around memory’s intricate work. In both novels, the narrative deals with the tragic events of the past that affected the main characters, made them suffer. Interestingly, in both cases these events happened during or just after the war, combining individual trauma with collective one. Moreover, both narratives use real historical facts connected with the period (such as “Digging for Victory” and food rationing in Healey`s novel and real-life prototypes of Regeneration ’s protagonists) placing them along with fictional details and characters.

Both novels make a point of depicting memory as something fluid and unstable, which is done, for instance, through the figures of unreliable narrators (Maud and some of Doctor Rivers` patients). In Elizabeth is Missing , logical inconsistencies, blanks and breaks of meaning that the plot is teeming with are not just memory blackouts caused by Maud’s dementia but the source of hidden conflict (they also make a part of the detective story). This unresolved conflict or unanswered question haunts the memory of the old woman. As for Regeneration , the symptoms of Dr.Rivers’s patients resemble scars which always remind them of their appalling past experiences. They are also haunted but, unlike Maud, who is actively trying to recover