Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

She retained into adulthood one unusual feature, her long green slanted eyes, a direct import from her mother’s face where they looked fierce and intelligent. But Penelope had a triangular face, cat-like, not at all like her daughter’s. As Susy moved through her teenage years and grew larger and riper by the hour, her face stayed childishly round. She had melon-like breasts which made people boggle and profuse yellow hair which didn’t darken till she was fifteen or sixteen, by which time she’d learned how to dye it. She was a statuesque blonde; men stared at her. Possibly it annoyed me a little.

My slenderness annoyed her too. Her green eyes, rather diminished in size by the heavy pink cheeks underneath them, would stare at my thigh in tight black trousers pressed flat on the table where I perched, pressed out to twice its normal width but still only the size of one of her arms. Her eyes would narrow, then she’d look away, and yawn dismissively.

At least in her teens she was not too lazy to take a bit of interest in her appearance. She favoured mini-skirts and fitted tops, which never did quite fit her. Perhaps I should have praised her more, for her interest in her looks didn’t last. Later on, to judge from photographs and the rare and sorrowful times we met, she just grew bigger and bigger while continuing to dress in the fashions of the 1980s. On Susy’s flesh this somehow looked tarty and cheap, not dated and spinsterish.

Naturally I was anxious when the breasts began to impinge on me. She was so immediate, so lush — she made me feel bloodless and insubstantial. And her transformation from a pretty little girl was so startlingly quick, leaving the rest of us thinner, paler.

It was Chris I was worried about. Here we were suddenly living in a house with an immensely nubile woman. She didn’t stop sitting on his lap. She didn’t stop giving him six kisses at bedtime; look at it another way, he didn’t stop her. And her total lack of modesty!

I met her one morning skipping down the landing in nothing but a pair of pants, with a towel flung inaccurately round her shoulders so that two astonishing new-grown breasts stuck out towards me as she stopped to talk. The nipples were three times the size of mine! Susy didn’t seem to know they were there.

‘Is there any shampoo I can borrow?’

‘No. I mean yes. You’ll get cold like that.’

‘You’ll have to tell her,’ I said later to Chris. ‘She can’t go round the house with no clothes on. It’ll upset her brother.’

‘You tell her. You’re a woman.’

‘She’s your daughter… she’ll think I’m jealous… I am a bit jealous, actually.’

Chris stared at me amazed. ‘Jealous of my poor clumsy daughter? You must be mad. Of Susy? She was such a pretty kid, but she’s turning into an elephant.’

‘An elephant with tits.’

He winced. ‘I don’t like you talking about her like that…’

‘ You said she was an elephant!’

‘I don’t like the word “tits”, not about my daughter. Oh come on, Alex, she’s still my little girl, I feel protective about her…’

‘Quite right. She’s going to have to be protected. To start with, she’s going to have to wear some clothes.’

His preceptions were oddly blinkered, I suppose because he censored any thought of sex.

One time we had Chris’s boss Darryl to dinner. He was superficially loathsome, with no hint of depths beneath, and delivered his trite opinions in a loud unfunny monotone.

He delivered them to Susy, or Susy’s forehead, since she stared at her plate, or tried to wiggle his opinions under her chin and towards the amazing shelf of flesh she was attempting to hide under her salmon salad. When he wasn’t addressing her directly, he stared at her with that dreadfully embarrassing fixated glare which seems to consist of compressed sperm that will have to get out before they kill their owner.

But Christopher had noticed nothing amiss. ‘Darryl was just being kind to her.’

‘You’re blind,’ I said. ‘He was crazed with lust.’

‘I think you’re weird, Alex. But I did notice that her clothes didn’t fit. We don’t want her to let the side down.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘she was a triumph. He couldn’t have been more impressed.’

As she grew older she must have known her power. The boyfriends came in an endless stream. I’m sorry, that sentence was unfortunately phrased, and unfair to her; I am sure unfair — and yet all these years later I’m sure of nothing. Were they innocent, all those eager visits from boys bearing gifts of flowers and chocolates?

I think they were. I believe they were. I know now that I insulted her when I kept talking to her about contraception, and pointing out how important qualifications were in the modern world. She wasn’t stupid, we told ourselves, not always convincingly. She had a sense of humour, and good taste in movies, and seemed to like boys and small children… she was brilliant with the toddlers our friends brought round, but there wasn’t much else which seemed to hold her interest. She floated along in the middling stream of her middling private school.

‘Maybe she’ll do something with children,’ Chris said.

‘Yes. Have them,’ I answered.

‘Well — why not? There’s nothing wrong with having children. Once she’s grown up, I mean. Most women want children.’

I didn’t pursue that one. I didn’t like to be reminded that Christopher once wanted to have children with me.

— We had enough problems with the two he’d got. I did try with Susy, honestly. My feminism made me want to help her. I tried to tell her about feminism, too. She wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t an outdated extremist movement which hated men. That was what all her schoolfriends thought, if what they did could be dignified as thinking. They thought it meant not shaving their legs. She pointed out that I shaved mine. A terrible boredom sometimes overcame me when the children tried to discuss things with me.

In the end I gave up on feminism, but I occasionally tried to make her think. I didn’t want her to sleep-walk into the world, eyes half-shut, half-naked, like the helpless girl in all the fairy-tales… Cinderella, Gretel in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood… I was a stepmother, OK, but I was never wicked.

Sleeping Beauty. How she loved sleep. Perhaps that was her passion. On school-days I had to drag her out of bed ten minutes before she was due to leave the house. She looked so happy, sprawled on the pillow. Hauled back to life she seemed bruised and lost, catatonic for the first few hours of waking.

We’ve come back to where we started. She was, or seemed, inveterately lazy. She was labelled ‘lazy’ by her father, her teachers, me every morning, even her boyfriends, who from time to time could be heard attempting to take her for a walk or an outing… But if she were forced to go outside, she preferred to lie in the middle of our lawn on a blue chaise longue, a dusty blue which made her look even more golden, entirely ripe to be swallowed whole as she swam in the shade of the monkey-puzzle tree, like a great soft peach sliding down into the darkness.

‘Stop,’ I wanted to shout at her. ‘Wake up! This is the only life you’ve got!’

But maybe we were all just stupid. Maybe I somehow missed the point. Whenever I try to think about Susy I feel her slipping softly away.

I talked about her to my friend Drusilla, a psychotherapist, and terribly bright. She bridled at the word ‘lazy’.

‘There’s no such thing as lazy, really.’ She sifted me through the fine mesh of her gaze. ‘People are “lazy” for a reason. They’re unhappy, or unconfident, or unable to decide what they want to do. People go to sleep when they want to escape.’