Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Chris was bored with his job, in any case. The more promotions he got the less creative he felt. He no longer went out on stories, no longer wrote scripts, no longer made programmes. Instead he advised about other people’s programmes; he sat in endless meetings talking about nothing, took decisions about ‘balance’ and ‘political judgement’ and hated himself for knowing the rules. He had watched his contemporaries get older and sadder and told himself it wasn’t happening to him, until one day he couldn’t pretend any more.

I remember the day we decided. He had come home early, which wasn’t like him. The kids weren’t even back from school, and I was dozing on the sofa in the drawing-room when I heard his feet on the stairs. I asked him if he was all right, but he didn’t say anything, he wouldn’t sit down. Then without warning he was saying what mattered.

‘You once said you married me because I was honest…’

‘— Two liars in one family would be too much.’

‘— Listen to me Alex, this is important. I haven’t been honest for years and years. Everything is trimming, playing by the book. I can’t go on like this till I die. I’m fifty-two, I’ve only got thirty years left…’

I hated to hear him talk like that. I went and put my arms round him, but he wouldn’t be deflected, he wouldn’t even look at me. Normally he liked to look at me. Light from the side made him lined but handsome as he started at the sea-green velvet of a chair over which his son’s pajamas straggled mournfully, thin and twisted as a long-drowned corpse. Everyday chaos, everyday mess…

‘I wish we were in Venice,’ I said.

‘We have to get out,’ Chris said. ‘I mean it.’

I was a little frightened, for surely he was happy… surely he had been happy with me? Happier than I was, surely? I hadn’t noticed that he had grown desperate.

We talked about the pros and cons. There were our friends. It’s not easy to make new friends. Mary and Matthew were our best friends. True, she was dull (Chris didn’t agree), but terribly kind, a wonderful listener, and ‘far from stupid’, Chris said. And Matthew was witty, and adored me. Probably still does, if he hasn’t died.

But friends aren’t enough to keep you at home. They improve your life, they don’t live it for you. That day Chris was perfectly certain what he wanted. ‘I loathe living here. The kids don’t need us. They can’t stand us. Let’s go on holiday and never come back.’

It was partly bravado, of course. Chris didn’t mean it, about never coming back. It isn’t so easy to lose the past. When he thought of the children, he vacillated, and asked the company to take him back. I wasn’t having it, I said I would leave him… I was already making our travel plans, I was already enjoying a foretaste of freedom. I admit I pressed him, for his own good. I knew better than he did what he wanted.

Terry Fraser rang up drunk one day and tried to tell me that Chris was going through the male menopause, and when I said it was none of his business he said I had always been a ballbreaker, and I told him to fuck off and dry out.

Chris resigned again, this time for good. I was happy again; we were happy again. But I think the question of how long we were going for was fudged, between us and the children. Not in my mind, though. I knew this was it. I had decided to say goodbye to little England.

When Chris promised the kids we would be back in September I didn’t say anything. Nor did they. They didn’t seem to mind, at first.

We went away that summer. I can’t recall exactly how many years ago. A mist came up between us and home, a mist came up between us and the children…

I thought about them over the years. Even before they pursued us, I thought about them. I’m not as hard-hearted as people say. I thought about Isaac’s awful degree and whether what happened was all our fault.

And I thought about the other folks back home. I think about them sometimes still. Mary and Matthew, our friends. I try to visualise Matt twenty years older. He made me laugh, which is wonderful. I think I missed him at first, I’m beginning to forget. And now perhaps he is dying — dead.

I remember good old Mary. I suppose by now her hair is quite grey. I wonder what they thought about us, and if they forgave us for what we did, since a lot of the problems fell on them. She has gone on writing over the years, affectionate letters in that mouse-grey hand.

I wonder if I’ll ever see her again…

The pisco makes me melancholy.

I want to be touched, I want to be fucked.

— Toledo was every human shade, an encyclopaedia of flesh colours. The city was on a hill. From the opposite hill where our parador stood you could look across the whole sweep of it. At siesta time there was no one about, just rose and fawn, peach and pink, tawny gold and dun and brown, a vanished painter’s dream of flesh. The doors and windows were little dark eyelets, but we knew no one to ask us in.

— So we were free, of course. Chris said ‘That’s what freedom is.’ Knowing nobody, not being known.

I wasn’t sure, I think I wanted something else, I’ve always wanted everything…

We first went to Toledo in ‘92, an early summer of glorious heat. I saw Stuart sitting in a cafe with his son. He was beautiful. I wanted him. After that I made sure we went back every year.

(My head starts to ache. It wasn’t my fault. My heart was always true as steel. The swords of Toledo are remarkable, thread-thin steel which can bend full circle.)

Outside in the dark the cicadas go crazy, breeding like locusts in the savage heat. Rats and insects are happy now, coming into their own in the twenty-first century… Toledo seems so long ago.

A warm breeze blew between the parador and the opposite hill where the city stood. I think of that breeze with longing here where the heat is three times as intense and for days and weeks not a breath of wind and I’ve nothing in the world to do but wait, in the sticky bloody heat, cooped up with a boy I no longer love…

And I think about love. Romantic love.

People tell you romantic love is ‘unreal’. ‘It’s just the icing on the cake,’ they say. They assume they’re confirming what you already know, that all right-minded folk agree.

They must have different blood. They must have different bones.

There are women who live their lives for their children who would be appalled by what Chris and I did, leaving the kids for each other… Because ‘you can always get another husband. They don’t need you like your children do.’ And if I turned and said to them ‘They weren’t my children, they were his children, I have no children of my own,’ they wouldn’t know whether to feel pity or outrage, and once I would have said ‘Go fuck yourselves, bitches, what do you know, you withered old cows,’ but now, curse them, I’m beginning to agree with them about the pity of childlessness. All the same, I think most women are virgins, and jealous of the ones who are truly loved…

You see how hard it is to talk about love without all the other shit breaking in; wifehood, motherhood, responsibility, notions that turn me rigid with boredom.

I’m trying to talk about passion. Adult love, sexual love, between a woman and a man (Isaac would bridle at that, poor boy).

I think about love because I know about it, even if it has deserted me. In other areas my knowledge is patchy. There are facts about the world which escape me, yes, but I know about people. I know about life.

There have always been those who call me ignorant. Men, I mean. They clutch at it, to protect them from my intelligence, which was measured when I was eleven years old and had a mental age of twenty-one, an IQ of something near genius level. I’m not a genius, I know, and the teachers at secondary school all said I was lazy and cheeky and wasted my promise… but I’m quick; I’m sharp. Not many men like it. Quicker and sharper than most of my men. And so they fall back for reassurance on my ignorance of this and that — the stock market, computer science, positions of the continents upon the globe, politics, moral philosophy, the kind of thing I should have acquired at school when I was too busy doing gym and dancing and waiting for the bell at ten to four when I’d be picked up just outside the school gate by young men with motorbikes or (preferably) sports cars, giggling wildly when they asked me to marry them, considering the matter when they asked me to fuck. Not that they ever called it that. Learning a lot about love. That they loved me, but I needn’t love them.