Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

She made me feel it was all our fault.

And it probably was. If not then, perhaps later. After all, there were hardly any problems to speak of in the period I am talking about, compared with the nightmares that followed, the awfulness after we went away.

But Drusilla would have said it’s an illusion that life can be chopped into different parts. Our ends are in our beginnings, she said.

— More terrible when you know those ends.

I was not sentimental about the children, yet I could never bear to think of them dying. So maybe I loved them more than I thought. Or maybe everyone feels the same wrench, imagining the death of a younger generation.

Nothing they do should be irrevocable. They should be given more time, at least. Time to do things better than us. Time to realise some of their dreams.

That was what I used to think, when I knew that one or other of them was going out driving with another teenager, when the clapped-out sports car screamed to a halt outside our door, and off they went. Please God no, not tonight. Give them time to leave home and be happy.

Unbearable to recall it now, five years after the millennium.

Isaac dreamed of being a painter. He always… never mind.

Did Susy have dreams? I can’t imagine. I think she slept too much to have dreams. That peculiar mist rises up and blinds and deafens me when I try to remember.

Yes, I suppose there was something, though hardly what one could call an ambition. Very long ago. A lifetime ago.

There was one thing she used to say, the only plan I can ever recall, though she wasn’t much more than five when she said it, a round-faced child of five or six. They don’t know what they’re saying then. It couldn’t have been serious.

I didn’t let her have dolls. I’m not a hard-line feminist, but I think there’s something disgusting about them. Little dead babies in female clothing, stillborns waiting to be looked after. I didn’t want dolls in the house with us. We had just moved into the place in Islington and there seemed quite enough dependents without them.

So I threw all Susy’s dolls away. They were scruffy things, in any case. I gave her farm animals, and lots of books, and encouraged her to be strong and active.

We played on the climbing-frame every day. I played; she sat on the grass and stared.

She said it as a prayer at bedtime, praying loudly when she knew I could hear her, and sometimes I couldn’t get out of earshot. Sometimes I had to suffer it.

Please God let me go and live with my mummy again and we’ll have another baby, a sister. I want to go back and live with my mummy.

Benjy is snoring fitfully, and mumbling a little, not happy. I don’t seem to make people very happy. And I don’t always notice when they’re not happy…

Today we were walking down the main street, looking for someone who sold chancho sandwiches, although it was suffocatingly hot I was starving for the tenderness of hot fried pork, and when I’m hungry I have to eat — and a mud-splashed truck drove past us with bananas and a dark-skinned chola woman on top. It was going fast, and I almost felt that the driver was trying to frighten us, but in fact it was the woman who lurched to one side, her heavy skirts and bright apron flapping, and her bowler hat suddenly went skidding sideways and bounced across the dust towards us. Benjamin saw, ran like a sprinter, scooped up the hat, dusted it down on his trouser leg and as the woman wailed and the lorry slowed he tossed it back, briefly black against the sun, she caught it, smiled, waved the hat at him. He stood there until they disappeared, in the middle of the road, panting a little, and the sweat ran down his enormous smile as he watched the woman getting smaller and smaller.

When I saw his smile I realised it was rare. When I saw him run, suddenly charged with energy, I realised how hangdog his walk had been.

Too bad. The young are so easily depressed, I’m sure I was never depressed at his age.

All the same, I’m not happy he’s not happy. Tomorrow I might try to cheer him up. After all, he’s my travelling companion. Sometimes I think he’s my only friend. And we’re still in this together. Because I haven’t given up, I shan’t give up till we’ve tried every town in this shitty continent. I wouldn’t stand a chance of a child with no husband. To be strictly practical, I still need Benjamin.

Maybe in other ways too. He did look — sweet, as he threw that hat. Gallant, as he used to be to me before I got impatient with his gallantry. And his smile, so warm, with such white teeth…

Bodies get cold in the early hours, as if the night’s draining away their life. We’re covered with the lightest manta which seemed unsufferably hot when we went to bed but does nothing to protect me now. My hands are cold, my heart is cold, my teeth begin to ache with cold…

Reluctantly and then gratefully I crawl over to Benjy and cuddle up next to him, burrowing under the blanket so I can fit my knees under the curve of his knees and press my belly against his warm buttocks. My face touches his back; from habit, from affection, I kiss it, very lightly so he doesn’t wake up. I sneak my cold feet between his calves and my fingers inch under his elbows, stealing the warmth from his sides.

Benjamin, I love you after all, I love you for being here with me. I’m glad I’m not alone in this vast blackness. How did I ever come so far, did I ever mean to come so far, did I ever intend to end up here? Why can’t I sleep, and dream of the past…

What did I do to deserve all this?

We only went back to paradise once. We went back to Portugal in the late 1990s, when many things had changed, between Alex and me, as well as in Iberia.

As usual when May was drawing to a close she’d wanted to go to Toledo. But we were wintering in Tahiti; it seemed absurd to go back to Europe. I resisted, I was bored with Toledo, the magic had gone out of the city for me. We always saw the same people. Besides, I didn’t want to go so near home.

‘I need to see Europe once in a while, I’m European, ’ Alex sighed, as if I were a Maori, or a Solomon Islander.

‘Since when have you had a good word for Europe?’

‘I’ve always loved Paris.’

‘OK, we’ll go to Paris. Not Toledo. I’m up to here with Toledo.’ Paris was where we had honeymooned; she was so young, she shone with youth, I couldn’t quite believe she was mine. I half — felt I was still running after her, that I would pursue her till the end of our lives, panting behind her burnished hair past the silvery statues and lopsided fountains… the spring winds blew my words away. But she was mine at last, I took her home. It was all too easy to go home from Paris. We flew home together from innumerable weekends, to the children we had left with the nanny or the Browns — ‘Forget it, Paris is too near home.’

Yet I wanted to get back to the good things we’d shared in the early days of travelling. I wanted Alex to love me again.

Naturally I thought of Portugal. Alex resisted, yet I could feel she was less keen on Toledo than in previous years, and eventually she agreed, if we could stay in places we’d never seen, and pop across to Spain for a week or so — I assumed that she meant both of us.

We decided on Lisbon and Sagres. My spirits rose once it was decided. We’d only ever spent one weekend in Lisbon, and that was nearly twenty years before; I remembered it intimate and slow, a good city for lovers. And we’d never been right down in the west to Sagres and Cape St Vincent, the south-west tip of Europe, the nearest point to America, the place where Henry the Navigator once trained his sea-captains to travel the world, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus… the starting-point for so many great voyages. I was full of hope. It meant a new beginning. It would carry us on into the twenty-first century, the dangerous voyage towards old age, she would be at my side, we’d be happy together…