Maggie Gee - My Animal Life

As I write that, I see it’s just showing off. I would assume he had gone mad, and find a way of forgiving him. There is so much love and friendship between us. So many years I can’t live again with someone else. And there’s our daughter: in her our love goes on into the future.

But what if I’d never met Nick? What then? I was awkward, and damaged, and weird enough not to have lived with anyone. Not to have had a child. I feel I would have missed the point.

Then the gift of Nick’s unconditional love changed everything for me. A man loved me completely, and I became a woman. In a world of two, and then three, I could grow.

He needed me. I needed him.

my advice:

very unwise to give it

As the reader may have noticed, life tends to rush upon me, new and shining, out of the blue, and I am dazzled, and only grasp the meaning of it decades later, as I relive the days. The good things that befall me seem to come by luck and, more especially, the kindness of others. I have realised it more as I write this memoir: how very little we can do alone.

I met Nick in early spring 1981, in a pub-theatre, the York and Albany, an isolated building at the end of one arm of Camden Town, squeezed between roaring roads and the horse chestnut buds of Regent’s Park. It was all thanks to my friend Kitty Mrosovsky, who invited me to a performance of a play by ‘Mouth and Trousers’. She was writing theatre reviews for a journal called Quarto , and her last piece had been about a play called Arrest : Nick’s first play, whose run had just finished.

By chance, the young playwright was there that night. He was thin and intense, with fine Celtic features, strong jaw and expressive eyebrows, blue-grey eyes, narrow well-shaped nose. Tall, handsome, dark, serious; simple traits I attached to him. Of course, he wanted to impress us. This was the first time he had met Kitty, and she had admired his work in print. I thought theirs would be a match made in heaven, and found something to do so they could talk on their own. They were both in the same idiom, somehow, though he was in jeans and navy pea-coat, and she in something relaxed and classic (whereas, I, as usual, was dressed like a vamp, in a black zipped jump-suit, diamante drop earrings, and an old black fur with a shot-silk lining, pink lipstick and long blonde hair). Perhaps I picked up something else as well, for though no one mentioned it, they’d both gone to public school — that mad English usage where public means private. Shrewsbury was talking to Benenden. And Horsham High School made herself scarce.

Nick, in 1970, aged twenty, when he lived just across the road from me in Oxford — had we met then, it would never have worked

But at the end of the evening, he had both our phone numbers. Chance: pure chance that I met my beloved, and that I met him then — when the timing was perfect; he was at the end of a long relationship. He was thirty, and I was thirty-two. We were friends for eighteen months before we started dating.

I showed zero perspicacity about the future, because I brought sense and logic to bear, whereas Nick knew we were right together by physical instinct. I told my friend Barbara, ‘He’s very attractive, I fancy him madly, but I know I could never fall in love with him. He talks all the time. He’s not my type.’

Whereas the very first time Nick was alone with me, not many weeks after we met in the theatre, he walked me to the local pub, sat me down, and said, about ten minutes into the conversation, ‘I’m going to take you to America. In fact, I think we should get married.’ Even he looked surprised as soon as he had said it. As he told me much later, he had never said anything like that before, to anyone, but something came over him, or spoke through him. I laughed and ignored it, thinking, ‘He’s mad,’ little knowing that just over two years later I would stand by his side, trembling but happy, in a white Victorian satin nightdress, as we said our vows in a Cambridge registry office.

I didn’t have a clue about any of it. Yet still I am tempted to give advice. Still I believe I’m a bit of an expert.

Viewed benignly, advice is just sharing tips, a habit of female gleaners and gatherers. While male hunters silently stalk their prey, not deigning to ask which way is north, the women back at camp are telling each other which herbs best flavour the flesh of a mammoth.

How I thirst to pass on knowledge. My last chapter, about men and women, was stiff with advice, stuffed with it. I persevere despite the boredom of my listener. I must simply advise with more pep and vim! I must improve the lives of others! I crash boldly onwards through their thickets of unease. A good spot for a holiday, a dental insurance plan, the perils of putting lemons in the compost …

I hand out my tips like elaborate, generous gifts from one life to another. But by middle age, people don’t want gifts. Their houses are already loaded with stuff, they know about holidays, teeth, and lemons (pancakes with lemon and sugar. My tip is, avoid them: a double hex on your dentine.)

In my family — meaning me, Nick, my daughter — the most annoying advice is given when someone has just started on the recommended course of action. ‘Why don’t you dry the glasses/put your shoes on/bring a coat?’ ‘I’m doing it, I’m doing it !’ the wretched advisee cries.

Of course, sometimes people ask for advice. That’s when it’s important to hold back, because they are vulnerable, and may take it. But can I hold back? It is so tempting.

So flattering when someone consults you. The belief that life’s actually taught you something. Suddenly you feel useful, which doesn’t often happen to a writer. Yet other people’s lives are just that, other. Most useless of all to advise on people’s lovers. Of course Y is trouble, or Z is appalling, but don’t advise Y to give Z up. They will get married, and never call you.

The problem is, I myself long for advice. I seek it, eagerly, from everyone. I want to learn lessons from other people’s lives. It’s part of my essential optimism. I really believe I can make most things better, if only I can find out enough about them. When pregnant, I brooded over pregnancy books; as a young mother, baby books; though adolescence books always seemed a pale shadow of the storm and glory we were going through. I read all the health pages in newspapers; I study New Scientist for new ‘work’ on anything touching the human condition which I can pass on to my husband or daughter (she defends herself with ribald humour. ‘Oh God, Mum, don’t tell me you’ve found more “work”. My mother thinks there is work on everything,’ Rosa tells her friends, when I try to educate them on, say, the effects of black chocolate on cholesterol. ‘ Work! Work !’ she shrieks, and she is laughing so much she chokes on her milk chocolate).

But her grandmother, like me, was a fund of useful tips. ‘Never leave washing-up until the morning,’ Mum said (and ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’) And ‘This won’t buy the baby a new bonnet.’ ‘Always do the bed, it makes the room look tidy.’ ‘Don’t forget to tie a knot in your cotton.’ ‘Tie a knot in your hanky to remember something.’ ‘Don’t trust people who show the whites of their eyes under the iris.’ (Did this mean my mother distrusted the blind?) ‘You don’t want to be mutton dressed up as lamb.’ ‘Don’t drink from the bottle, it looks bad.’ (She had a point, since we were driving through respectable streets, it was before midday, and I was swigging British sherry, but she was leaving my father, temporarily, and the pressure was getting to me.)