Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

There was a little cafe at a turn of the road so steep it was like an elbow, the tables crawling out into the road because the angle of the pavement wasn’t wide enough. There was quite a lot of traffic; people going to work, it seemed outrageous that they had to work with the day full of cedars and bells and starlings, the air still cool but promising heat, the sun making sculptures of every surface…

I sat down at a table. The streets were cobbled. I wasn’t wearing sensible shoes. I fancied a giant café con leche while I rested my feet and watched the people, I could do what I wanted, I was young and free.

And I turned to pity a harassed young man who sat in the sun three tables away with a little boy who was making a fuss. Their belonging were piled round the table, a collapsing island of plastic bags. The little boy had a strawberry ice cream. Because he didn’t speak very clearly, it was a minute or two before I realised they were English — no, Scottish.

‘Don’t want it,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t like it. Want a vanilla one.’

‘Don’t eat it then,’ said his father, patient. ‘I told you it was too early for icecream.’

‘WANTA VANILLA ONE.’

‘Have a biscuit.’ The father began to search through his bags, at first hopefully, then in a despairing fury.

‘Wantit NOW! Mungry, mungry…’

So it went on, for quite some time. I gloried in my childlessness — yes, I tell you, I gloried then — my baglessness, my singleness, though of course Chris waited for me in the shadows… Whereas this poor man was perhaps divorced… perhaps a widower.

All I managed to see was his lean muscled back, plus a perfect view of the sexual characteristic I’ve always found obscurely appealing, the back of his neck, a masculine neck, thicker than a woman’s and yet vulnerable when the neck hair is cut short enough to show it. This young man’s hair was short and dark and ended in a minute duck’s tail, curving to the left, not upwards, then pale skin and gleaming white shirt. They must have come away very recently; so home was still there, for people to leave… we had been away from home five years, and though I had recently given up sunbathing my skin had acquired a dense pale gold colour from living in the sun day after day. I wished the young man would turn round and admire me. My hair was pulled back in a tight red bun which I thought made me look like a ballerina.

‘Thass Mummy!’ said the little boy, suddenly very loud again, pointing at me, then with perfect illogic ‘Not Mummy, no. Want Mummy. Want a wee wee. Wanta go home.’

When the young man turned, he wasn’t so young, perhaps my age or even older. I registered his extreme good looks. He hadn’t an ounce of spare flesh on his face; he had a fine-cut nose with a narrow tip, a strong Scots jaw, and heavy eyebrows which hung like pines over large blue eyes. It was a very masculine face, but his mouth was wide, soft, full, and ready to break into a smile, as it did when he registered that this was Mummy. If I’d known what she looked like I’d have seen why it was funny, since she was never out of an anorak, or in summer a rustling cagoule, for she always felt at risk of rain. I wore a brief straight dress of yellow silk and the delectable primrose shoes Chris had given me.

I smiled with all the force of my approval of his handsomeness, all the joy of sun and sex and the morning and my first glimpses of the flesh-coloured city. He smiled back, a marvellous smile (Chris’s one bad feature was his teeth, too small and very faintly discoloured, so I always admired a set of white teeth; these gleamed at me briefly in the sharp sunlight).

‘I’m English,’ I said, to make things plain.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘This kid adopts people. His mummy has red hair.’

My heart sank briefly to know there was a Mummy. He smiled again, and my spirits rose. ‘Do you think your little boy would like one of my biscuits? I mean, if he won’t eat that icecream.’

‘Well — that would be wonderful. He wouldn’t touch his breakfast, and I promised Kirsty I’d make him eat something…’ Kirsty must be Mummy then. Not a very attractive name. I wished very hard they might be something distinguished, something I wouldn’t be forced to find boring. He could be an actor, a painter, a musician… We could ask him to eat at the parador. And his wife and son, all three of them, or perhaps she’d prefer to babysit. We enjoyed distractions. His looks were distracting.

I handed over the vanilla fingers the waiter had brought with my coffee. Unsmilingly, the child took them. ‘Thank you,’ his father said. The biscuits disappeared with remarkable speed; he was Stuart, I was Alexandra, this was Robert, I had a husband called Chris, we ‘lived abroad,’ he was fascinated, he was fuckable, I mustn’t think like this.

I asked him what he did, dreading the answer. But it turned out he taught Film Studies and was writing a book about the cinema of Carlos Saura and Hector Pañol. They had friends with a flat in Toledo; they had lent them their house in Finsbury Park for the summer. So they knew Toledo quite well already. I accepted these items with grateful joy. They were valid credentials to pass on to Chris, who might not have been too delighted if I’d asked a civil servant to dinner.

Perhaps I was giving off that curious miasma that clings to the satisfied flesh after sex. He was watching me very acutely, despite the demands of the child beside him who wanted icecream, Mummy, love. Indeed he had suddenly turned on me an absolute quality of attention, as if I were someone he had always loved and been away from half a lifetime. He looked at my hair, my eyes, my hands as if he were logging minute changes on which his life and mine might depend.

His eyes were very blue. They looked at me, surely, much too hard. Perhaps he was merely cocky, or rude. I stood up briskly.

‘Oh,’ he said, a little moan of unfeigned disappointment that told me he was not smooth, nor rude, nor a womaniser, nor anything bad. ‘Do you have to go? I mean… what I mean is, we’re going too. Come on Robert. We’ll walk with you.’

Walking with them was such a different thing to the sauntering stroll I’d had alone. Robert was tired, and wouldn’t walk, but felt demeaned by being held, so was up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He glared at me. I smiled at him. He put his tongue out. Stuart didn’t notice, and I pretended not to notice either.

Stuart bent down to pick up Robert’s toy plane, and I looked at the tender pale back of his neck, then saw he had paused to stare at my naked legs in the pale Italian shoes. It was only an instant, but our eyes met, he knew I saw, I saw he knew, he had found the plane, he was back on his feet, we walked side by side up a bright cobbled slope that led into a narrow neck of shade, I no longer knew what the child was saying, our arms touched briefly as we went into the dark. It was very cold. I drew in my breath.

The street was only seven feet wide, medieval houses which rose four storeys to an even narrower ribbon of sky. ‘Look above your head,’ he said. Suddenly my eyes grew used to the dark and I saw it was full of garlands.

‘It’s Corpus Christi,’ he said. ‘They carry the Virgin Mary down here.’

But I felt the garlands were there for me, their colours burning into the dark. The Virgin had little to do with it. Stuart and I had met, and the flesh-coloured city broke into flower.

Is it shocking that I felt such sharp desire on a morning when I’d just fucked my husband? But desire doesn’t live in the sexual parts. Desire lives in the mind. Desire lives in the soul… yes, I have a soul like anybody else. I was ready to fall in love that morning, with the new city, with being alive, with being myself and desirable, with being, if not young, not old.