Maggie Gee - My Animal Life

The ‘Disaster’ years came more or less exactly in the middle of my career to date, with my sixth, out of twelve, books (this is my thirteenth). It turned out to be the middle, but it could have been the end. Ever after, my memory of that time has added a resonance, a shading, a depth of pleasure when good things happen; each time a new foreign right is sold, each time I get the chance to travel for my writing. Since the ‘Disaster’ years, I have been asked, for work, to Rome, Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Beirut, Majorca, Ankara, Istanbul, Zurich, Tripoli, Geneva, Copenhagen … so many foreign cities. So little time on this beautiful planet, and writing is helping me travel around it. A new and quite unexpected African connection opened up for me in 2003 when my enterprising editor, Anna Wilson, said the right thing to Cheltenham Literary Festival, and they sent me to Kampala, Uganda, on an exchange with the Ugandan novelist Ayeta Anne Wangusa, which inspired friendships, short stories, two novels. My luck, my luck, sitting writing in Kampala with the weaver birds darting outside the open door. When, in 2004, I became Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, the first woman to hold that post, it meant more to me because, not so long before, I thought my life as a writer might be over.

Yet it is all a castle of air and spun sugar. I know now how frail it is, how quickly it shatters. My publisher is a small independent, one of the midget weightlifters still taking the strain of sustaining serious literature and scholarship here. Small, in their case, means strong and flexible, but flabby giants throw their weight about more, manipulate big sales, monopolise the book chains, pay for the best displays and pre-fixed places in the book-charts. I have not seized the handholds that make you safe ‘for ever’: winning a major prize, having a major bestseller (though as I write, Saqi have just sold the film rights to my first African novel, My Cleaner.) My twelve books look solid enough, on the shelf, with their avatars, in thirteen languages, and there, among them, after long travail, The White Family and The Ice People , paid for in pain, repaying with a lesson … But I take a deep breath, and touch the wood of my desk. There is still a great deal of work to be done.

And I shiver, and stare at the blank page of the future.

en route

for Stardust

In the autumn of 1990, when Rosa was nearly four, there was a phone call to our London flat that sent me plunging down deep deep into a black pit of fear and grief and guilt. Dad came on first: ‘Mum has something to tell you.’

Cancer . My mother’s voice, a little hoarse, terribly truthful, spoke words in my ear that could not be taken back, that were changing life for ever, tick-tocking into my ear in the dark bedroom, while from our front room, sounds of impossible family happiness, suddenly now in the past, floated through — Nick had just come back from a trip to America, he and Rosa were tucked up on the sofa oblivious, watching The Sound of Music. ‘Climb every mountain, cross every stream, follow every pathway, till you find your dream’ .

My mother’s favourite song from the film. But she had deferred all her dreams, all the things she wanted to do, all the places she wanted to go, until my father was dead, when she would be free. Now she was telling me the bitter truth. She had cancer. It would never happen.

Why was I guilty? Because (although this is pure superstition) I had been out of touch for two months, which was for ever, measured by the normal rhythm of communication with my parents. We wrote to each other every week, to reassure each other, we experts in the art of ‘fit and well’. It was my father’s habitual opener in phone calls, a plea or pre-emptive strike, not an open-ended question: ‘So, Margaret, you’re fit and well?’

But for some time I had not been fit and well at all; semi-paralysed, flattened like grass, by RSI. I was wired with pain, sapped of all strength. There was simply no vocabulary for conveying this news to my parents, even if I were able to write a letter, and to phone and say nothing seemed as bad as a lie. So I did not phone. Sudden radio silence.

Till my mother broke it with dread news. She too had stayed silent, while fear turned slowly into certainty. Then feeling for a way, herself, to break our rigid family conventions. To speak about the unspeakable, cancer.

My fault , I thought. All my life I’d half-believed my love had kept my mother alive. For eight weeks I had let her go. And now she phoned and told me she had cancer.

Quite soon my younger brother and I were on a train to Norfolk, coming to visit my mother in hospital after her operation. Afraid of the new unthinkable reality, that Mum might die. Clutching each other’s arms as we walked down the long room towards her, beds of pained strangers to either side.

She did not die.

It was a very long convalescence. She stayed in hospital for months, and my sturdy, physically fit, bike-riding mother for a little while lost all confidence. I remember encouraging her to come out of the ward into the sunlight for a walk. I’d found a door that opened from the corridor onto the hospital garden and a bright fresh day, I wanted her to escape for a moment, and my mum, who had always longed to be up and away, clutched my arm like a different person, a different body — no, her own hurt body. ‘I don’t know, Margaret.’ And came so slowly, her first trip outside after the terrible delvings and cuttings of the surgeon, feeling that her body might simply fall apart if removed from the sealed fug of safety.

A fortnight before she came home, Dad and I were summoned to see the consultant. The operation had been ‘a success’, but the cancer had spread to her liver. ‘Two spots on her liver.’ What did that mean? I asked. He gave us to understand that liver cancer was not considered to be treatable. But were they large spots? I asked. It sounded like such a small thing, two spots. You could take a rubber and rub them out. Then my father was asking how long she had got. The conversation seemed more and more unreal as the consultant, who I remember as thin and bald and blank, a mere cipher for death, was closing all the doors and windows on my mother’s life—‘Between six months and a year.’ I wanted my father to protest, but, probably in shock, he sat there silent. Then the consultant asked if we felt my mother should be told. I started to say that she should, but my father said she should be allowed to recover first, and then—‘You will tell her in your own time,’ the consultant said.

Afterwards we sat outside in the sun. I said, ‘Poor Mum, I can’t believe it.’ My father said, ‘Well with the Parkinson’s’—he had been diagnosed four years earlier, and his mobility had steadily declined, he had suffered mini-strokes and a mild heart attack—‘I’ve probably not got much more than a year myself.’

‘But she doesn’t have to die just because you do!’ I said, outraged. I was crying, he seemed impassive. Did he not love her enough to allow her her own existence, independent of his? Why didn’t he grieve that her life, too, was ending? All I could think was that he was revealed in that moment as horribly selfish.

But of course she was his wife. What he spoke was just a reflex thought, a measuring out of their lives, side by side. He was probably asking himself the question that is posed by all long marriages: who will grieve for whom? Who will be alone? He said, ‘We needn’t tell her yet.’

In me there was just a voice howling Mum, Mum . Whose wit and intelligence and strength had always been fatally compromised by her fearfulness. Who could not stand up for herself and so had put off every — thing she hardly dared to hope for into the future, when Dad would be dead. And now her future was shrivelling, vanishing, gone, like the food in the fridge she had saved too long for it ever to be eaten. All an illusion.