Maggie Gee - My Animal Life

Where have they gone, who were so alive? Ubi sunt . The lament of generations, the poets grieving for us all.

What is a soul? When my mother died, around 5.30 in the morning, just before the first light leaked into the ward, there was an absolute sense that someone had gone . Wherever she was heading, she had quietly set off, leaving nothing on the bed but a pile of clothes. Her breathing had gradually grown quieter. It was a far gentler death than my father’s. I kissed her cold face, I kissed her hand, but of her it was the merest simulacrum. As the long night ended, she slipped from the stage, and I began the decades of my life without parents.

We are each other—

‘we are each other’s parents’

1

It was because of Nick that I did not feel an orphan, though I missed my mother painfully. He was there in the tiny cubicle room that the hospital provided for relatives, and as I slipped into the single bed we were sharing, at 6 am, as morning began, there was the wonder of his warm, tender body, and I cried against him, my tears on his skin, and we made love, and I fell asleep exhausted, but when I woke up, the worst horror had gone. When my mother-in-law died, his lovely, lively, unconventional mother Peg, we were still relatively recently married, and her death made me realise how much I loved him as he trusted me with his grief, and we shared it.

In a way I had always missed my mother, ever since childhood when I took her for granted. So many times in my adult life she could not be there, because of Dad’s rules, because they always had to come as a pair, and as a pair, they made me anxious. When I gave birth, when I got married, I loved my mother, I missed my mother.

I shan’t write very much about my marriage, because it is dangerous to write about the living. I have asked my daughter, and got her permission for ‘anything between birth and adolescence’: I tell my two brothers I will love them and leave them out, because their stories are theirs, not mine. My husband has given me carte blanche , but how can you write about a twenty-six-year marriage? It is a space where we are safe to love. I love having it, and fear losing it, or Nick losing me, leaving him alone.

I say that as an offering to the universe, conceding that happiness is always perilous, and I am grateful for what we have. Yes, quarrels, explosions, days of stormy temper, days when I can’t imagine why I married this man, and he can’t imagine why he married me. And yet, such animal happiness, such fun and permission, such infinite freedom. The joys of insults, and friendly abuse. The times when we are like jostling siblings, and the times when lots of incest is nicest. Long sunlit mornings in the marital bed. The constant pleasure of talking, listening, sifting the beaches of each day’s meaning. That he is me, and I am him.

When I was little, I used to wish my bed was a boat, rounded off to a prow that would float through the night, bob over the waves, rock me awake in the morning. My boat was male, my boat was female, it blended adventure and the arms of my mother, holding me tenderly whatever happens. Though Nick is a very masculine man, in some ways he is both my father and mother, a better father than my father was, as good a mother as my mother was.

I cradle him. He cradles me. Our marriage is a boat where we bob together. We have passed many rocks, many bleak landscapes.

Reader, I meant to leave it at that. But my mother’s dying left a long shadow. I had been too close; death breathed too hard. As I write about it, I long for life.

Reader, come with me, out of the dark. The blazing heat of full summer.

August 6, 1983. The sun shone down; we were touched by the gods. I took a train from London and met Nick in Cambridge. We had both dressed like cultists, without prior discussion, me in a long white satin antique nightdress, the only white thing I possessed, Nick in a loose white Indian overshirt and cheesecloth trousers, gathered at the ankles: to the casual observer, we were both in our pyjamas, but I was gilded at hand and foot, with a small gold bag, gold bangles, gold sandals. Like everything else, we did it by instinct. We had two witnesses, John Waite and Barbara Goodwin: he a youthful best man, she a mauve-and-silver bridesmaid.

The props were all in place for us. We needed flowers, had forgotten them, but a stall appeared by the side of the road we were tearing along to the registry office; our best man stopped his yellow car and I saw the gold chrysanthemums, great heavy-headed things on proud straight stems. I bought half a dozen, they were meant for me. They matched my hair, my gold haloes of bangles.

Our animal selves were jostling with the angels. My chaste white nightdress clung to my breasts. My yellow hair reached down my back, and Nick’s was thick and deep brownish-black, long for a man, and he was bearded. He is very handsome, the camera shows, but what surges up still from the photographs is our hunger, our yearning; the love is palpable, a summer heat that shimmers off the skin of the image. We are drugged, drowning, drenched in each other. In one photo he is kissing me and I am pressed back, we are arched together, a bow of longing pointing to the future.

We were tender, frightened, serious as we stood side by side and made our vows. Utterly possessed by the day and each other, although the meaning of what we had done was still mysterious to us. Oh animal life! Oh human ritual, striving to point our passions upwards. But it had a point, for we were also two souls, asking for a sign from the universe.

Barbara made the perfect photo as we half-ran, laughing, from the registry office. She asked John to throw a shower of confetti; it floated like blossom past the ugly brick, it stays there for ever in the eye of the camera, a canopy of stars over our frail bodies.

From the square modern building we fled back to nature. Our ‘reception’ (for four) was at a wooden picnic table in the summer-green Botanical Gardens. There must have been other people passing by, but they were pale silhouettes, invisible, silent. In the photographs, we four are alone. Nick and I have left the table and wander through the trees, or stand gazing at each other, amazed, a tiny couple in a lost savannah of sunlit grass and big sheltering trees. We are deaf and dumb; we are the first humans; life stretches all round us and will go on for ever.

Our wedding day

1 From a poem by Christopher Reid.

each living instance

Rosa was only five when they died, Grandpa and Grandma, in the same year. 1992 cast a little shadow across her life that is perhaps still there today; the ghost of a shadow, the knowledge of death. In the ‘Autobiography’ her secondary school encouraged her to write, aged thirteen, she wrote a chapter called ‘The Year of Tragedies’.

Of course you have to say goodbye to the past. But that year, we also said goodbye to the future.

The year began with a lost child. No funeral, no body, just a burying of dreams. I miscarried on my father’s birthday, February 14, a Saturday, at nine or ten weeks. Not my last miscarriage, my second. I was almost used to it, knew it from before, a gathering dread that things weren’t going right — the sickness lessening (for sickness is a good sign), the dull return of normality, my breasts no longer throbbing: the failure to transform. Another D and C. Forcing the anaesthetist to acknowledge my grief, for he had been laughing with me (in kindness) on the way to the ward, as the needle slipped into a vein on my wrist I said to him clearly and urgently, feeling it must be recorded or whoever had been precariously alive would twice die, ‘I want you to know that I wanted this baby.’