Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Alexandra, you must answer me.

Was it in New York, in the burning heat, with the klaxons blaring and the petrol fumes drifting sourly in through the open window, with the deafened silence after the blast and her thin voice screaming from another planet — was it then that everything went wrong? Or was it long before? Have I forgotten, did I not understand, was I blind? — You used to say all men were blind.

Did something happen, long ago in Toledo, that I should have seen and understood? Did you want me to be jealous, did I fail to be jealous, was there something real to be jealous of?

(Maybe I was jealous, and have forgotten. A decade ago, or a dozen years, make it thirteen, that’s more unlucky. It starts to leak back, a taint of jealousy, that unforgettable, metallic taste. An old foul taint of fear and need.)

Last question. Answer and I’ll let you go. I won’t wrap those cords around your neck, those strong silk cords, twisted cords, and tighten, tighten so you’ll never leave. Answer, my love, and you shall go.

Was our end in our beginning? Was it my stupidity in taking you away that led at last to this loneliness? Did I plot to keep you to myself and delude myself that it was what you wanted?

— There is the nightmare; that she wasn’t ever happy.

How can I sleep till she answers me?

The beginning was so simple, such wonderful fun. Looking back on it now it’s hard to believe that life ever felt so light-hearted. That incredible sense we both suddenly had that the future was now, that we didn’t have to wait…that’s how I remember the beginning. A dizzying shift from feeling bogged down and frustrated by duties and domesticity — not that I was ever domesticated, but I felt bogged down by all I didn’t do — into another life where everything was light. Freedom, freedom. We were going to be free.

Houses and families are deadly I think. They’re what everyone wants, but they eat you up, they waste your time, they weigh you down. It’s why the very young are so delicious; they’re not dragging all that dull baggage around.

We both suddenly knew that we had to get away, which didn’t mean three or four weeks in the sun but a real journey, a real escape. We’d both lived in England since we were born, after all (what a penance, to spend so much time in England! What a waste of planet, what a waste of life!)

All our adult lives there had been too much clutter and we’d gone on expecting it would clear away, one day, any day, it couldn’t last, the muddles were purely temporary. Soon there would be more time and space. But since we’d been married things had actually got worse; the phone rang non-stop, the callers kept calling, the irrelevant letters kept dropping through the door, outdated friendships we couldn’t evade, outdated promises we had to abide by, bills, ads, requests for donations, the endless bleat of good causes at breakfast, plant more trees, save the whale, give to the starving, the sick, the crazy, fill another form in to save the world …Great fat envelopes bulging with virtue. No one sends letters like that to hotels.

The children were another problem. Chris’s children, that is, since they never felt like my children (I won’t know for sure till I have one of my own, but I’m sure my child will be adorable). Susy and Isaac were five and eight, and rather sweet, when Chris and I married, but later they grew larger and greedier, for time and love and money, for advice on acne, help with their calculus, admiring responses to their thoughts on life.

— Not that I gave them all this without a fight, except the money, which was easy to give. I was adept at being both cool and jolly, and I made a tactic of being too young. As they grew older, I grew younger; by the time they were ten I was much too immature to do their washing or ironing.

But Christopher did his best, and tormented himself that it wasn’t good enough, trying to make up for leaving their mother. Weekends were a whirlwind of educational outings, which the children outgrew long before their father; he didn’t notice they were growing up, they didn’t bother to tell him what they wanted. They didn’t seem to want to go out at all. They preferred to stay at home and be bored, and blame us because home was boring. I watched Chris grow more tired and drained as the children grew surlier.

Home was boring, they had a point. Home-owning is a monumental bore. The house made dully insistent requests to be looked after. Things I haven’t had to think about for twenty years, but I still get a headache when I try to remember, or else I have drunk too much pisco , which is Benjamin’s fault for being late, I shall lose my looks, it will all be his fault, I shall have to get out…

There was an endless whisper of things decaying. Paint, plaster, drainpipes, gutters… things one should never have to waste one’s time on. I remember the despair when I looked into a cupboard and saw my beautiful black feathered hat had a faint frosting of mould, and I knew I had to worry about the damp when all I wanted to do was buy a new hat…

Each week there was more rubbish, old shoes, old coats, old jewellery, outdated timetables we never used but never threw away… Chris spoke the truth for both of us one day, as he craned out of the window trying to see if a crack had spread and the house was subsiding; suddenly he exploded, ‘Alex! My neck is bloody killing me! I can’t spend the rest of my life in this dump!’

— It was hardly a dump, by the way. It was a five-storey house in Islington, London, crammed with rather good furniture and pictures and plants. (I still miss three tiny Burra drawings I bought in the early ‘8os when they were still cheap.) And then there were all the electrical goods which Chris bought compulsively and then got bored with, the latest VCR, the latest CD player, the latest — what was it? — camcorder (how dated all those terms sound now!)… they were such fun new, and such hell when they broke, and gathered dust mournfully, waiting to be mended. Every corner of the house had its ghosts, my ‘Speak Russian’ cassettes, my trampoline, Isaac’s skating boots, Susy’s oil-paints, things I had half put away, half-used, and paper and dust and old-fashioned dirt.

The piles of paper multiplied after Red Gold. Each draft was the hardest work of my life, and I couldn’t yet bear to throw them away, any more than I threw away my fan letters or the invitations to open supermarkets which lay in the study in dusty sacks.

The cleaning women, naturally, never stayed, and I had no talent for housework. Chris got home much too tired, and of course his mother never taught him how to do it, any more than I taught Chris’s son.

‘I wish we could live in a hotel,’ I said. ‘We could almost afford it. We could afford it. It would leave more time for the important things.’

‘I wish we didn’t live in London. I wish we didn’t live in England.’

‘Of course, there’s your job. We have to stay here.’

It wasn’t strictly true. After Red Gold and Gold Cards we had enough money to keep us comfortably till we died. But neither of us quite believed in that money. It had come too easy, and we were too used to Christopher being the breadwinner.

Then fate pushed us hard in the right direction. Chris’s mother died, which was a pity in a way since she was vague and amiable and very fond of me, and didn’t expect me to be a housewife. She was suddenly dead of a heart attack, and the house was left to Chris. It turned out she hadn’t been totally vague. The farm had twenty unused acres, and just before she died she’d got planning permission to build an ‘exclusive’ modern estate… the land sold for over two million. Now no one could deny that we were rich.