Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

— Nearly forty years ago. You see, it is possible; forty years of fucking.

Aged eighteen I sat incredulous when my mother tried to tell me the facts of life, a lot of which focused on ‘not working men up’. There was nothing I enjoyed like working men up, nothing so exciting as their desire.

It’s hard to get used to the lessening of that, as the hormones taper off, in my fifties, though Benjy still says I’m beautiful… but that merely annoys me, it’s sentimental, he didn’t know me in the days when people stopped talking when I walked into a room. In Paris when I was twenty-five a taxi-driver passed me in the Latin Quarter, screeched to a halt, jumped out, staring, ran to a flower-stall, snatched up some roses, thrust a note at the gaping stallholder, ran back to me and went down at one knee as he gave me the flowers; kissed both hands; and ran back to his cab without another word, where an amazed passenger sat waiting for him. If I was alone, men sent over champagne; I never had to wait at a zebra crossing; customs men never searched my luggage, which generally contained a surprise or two, and policemen were lenient with me for speeding… A lot of it was crass and boring, but all the same, when it goes, you miss it.

Sexual love; romantic love. Chris kept it going for a quarter of a century. We went round the world to keep it alive, we fucked in Athens, Rome, Berlin, Mombasa, Lusaka, Tripoli, in Santa Fé, in Amsterdam, in a tiny hut on Mount Kilimanjaro… we did unspeakable things to each other in a cable-car swinging up a Swiss mountain, we gorged on each other in the cabin of a boat that swayed along the River Nile. We knew every inch of each other’s bodies; Christopher always rejoiced in that.

‘No other man could ever make love to you as often as I have now. Even if you left me tomorrow. Of course I’d kill you if you did… no one could ever know you so well. No one could make you come as much…’

Desire seemed irrevocable to Chris, a way of programming himself. He saw our love as fated. ‘No one else but you could have made me happy.’

What does he say now, I wonder?

Mrs Simpson and the Prince of Wales. They get most people’s vote for sticking it out, making the original gesture worth it. For marrying and staying married, remaining, the while, good-looking and young. She was even romantic in extreme old age, romantic in her senility, for she was still thin, still tragic…

The world well lost for love.

No one could say we were unwordly… we travelled first class to first-class hotels. But Chris gave up a world, I suppose. His family, his job, his will to win. Not that there was ever a race worth winning down those hateful fluorescent corridors. His friends. Our friends, but he cared about them more. Mary and Matthew; he thought he would miss them, which seemed strange to me at the time we left when there was so much to look forward to, though they were perfectly agreeable. More than that. But you can make new friends… I wonder why we didn’t manage it?

Chris gave up the old life for love of me.

I’m telling you he loved me. I tell you that as a preliminary. And I was grateful, and loved him back, and didn’t stop loving him for twenty-five years, and I can’t think of anything more real than that. I loved him, you hear, for a quarter of a century. What I say next can’t alter that.

— We loved each other in different ways. Not at first. It was after we left home that I became so much more of his life, replacing the children and the office and all those glamorous lunchtime women… Things changed, for then I felt sure of him. He said I was everything to him.

And part of me was humble and grateful. I did realise how lucky I was to have a man who loved me so. But my love wasn’t like his. I won’t concede that he loved me more, but certainly more totally. His love was based on one idea. This is the woman that I love. Love, in this world, for me, means her.

It was how he justified the choices he’d made. Leaving his wife and upsetting the children. It wasn’t just a fantasy, though, he lived the emotion day by day. He couldn’t bear me to be hot, or cold. He would never have brought me to this stinking place… He never shopped without buying me gifts, roses, a beautifully textured sweater, a pair of pale yellow ballet-shoes with the absurdly low vamp I loved. He ordered raspberries and cream for breakfast. He said he loved me nine times a day. And he did make me happy, he did, I’ve never forgotten that we were happy…

But how do you protect it, last year’s present, sucked into the howling tunnel of the past? How can I explain myself?

For me, romantic love means desire, and desire means longing for something over there, something utterly delicious, almost out of reach, enjoyed but not possessed.

And when I think about romantic love, it isn’t Chris I’m thinking of.

(And yet I loved him, I did, I did.)

There was another man (there were other men, but only two who mattered, in the end, and the other one was Benjamin).

There was another man. His name was Stuart. Stuart is such a hopeless name, a prunes and prisms Scottish name with no acceptable abbreviations, a name that makes you purse up your mouth. He was married, of course. After thirty, all the men worth having are already married. No wonder people feel smugger in their twenties, when there are more free agents and more room for virtue.

Stuart’s father was Scottish. He’d never lived in Scotland and yet he had chosen a Scottish wife, partly, I’m sure, out of loyalty to some dim conception of Scottish blood. Stuart denied that; he said that he loved her, but men aren’t perceptive about their motives. His two children were caricature Scots, a tough little girl with scarlet hair and oatflake freckles and sky-blue eyes, a ferocious boy with the small neat nose and heavy black eyebrows Stuart had, the features already cut from granite although when I first saw him he was three years old.

I met them in Toledo, just Stuart and his son. I wonder how much I’d have saved myself if my very first view had included Kirsty, still big from the two young children, her hair a brighter red then mine, cut in a tight cap round her head as if hair might spread diseases… Perhaps it would all have been different if Stuart and his son had been protected by her motherly figure, forever bent to child level, always stooping to soothe a pain or pick up a ball or replace a sunhat, a low-based, gentle triangle who usually stuck to her man like a shadow.

When I think about her, which is rare enough, I try not to see her eyes. Naked eyes which screwed up at the sun. The whites were pure as albumen. Kirsty didn’t drink, unlike her husband, and I never saw a hint of red in those eyes, not until later when the weeping began… The irises were a severe grey-blue, or they seemed severe when they turned on me, but I suspect they were only shy. All the same, they were nun’s eyes, and unprotected, and please God keep those eyes away.

Don’t think I feel guilty. Why should I feel guilty? Preserving a marriage is the business of the married; whatever happened was Stuart’s fault, I had no obligations to Kirsty.

She wasn’t with them, that first morning. It was my first morning in Toledo, too, on the first of so many visits. It was early for me, before 9am; I’d left Chris in the swimming pool and taken a cab across to the city.

I remember waking up that day. A tide of sunshine flooded the room, and I got up rubbing my eyes and went over to the balcony. We’d arrived in darkness the day before. A mile away on the opposite hill the long slope of the city unfolded upwards, a miraculous sequence of pinks and golds, not a modern building to jolt the eye. ‘Come and see this!’ I’d called to Chris. ‘Come and see this,’ he answered. What he had to show me was a lovely erection, so I wasn’t frustrated on that morning walk, indeed I was glowing with everything good, a good sleep, a good fuck, a good big breakfast, a great new city to explore…