Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I was relieved, of course. I’d had a narrow escape, he was obviously crazy. For a moment I’d thought that my luck was running out, I’d thought my sins were catching up with me. I even made a vow not to be unfaithful again.

I flew into Geneva cool and immaculate, two days earlier than I had first planned, and wept with joy to see Chris at the airport. I said to him, as he took me in his arms, ‘You’re the only thing in the world that matters. I haven’t told you often enough that I love you —’

‘You have told me. I know you love me.’

‘And now we’re going to be a real family.’

How sure I was, how stupidly sure, that he would be able to give me a baby.

Then the thing we had never expected happened; Isaac flew out to see us in Switzerland. Not the family I wanted, the family I had.

We were staying in Montana Vermala, a skiing resort in the Swiss Valais with spectacular views across to the Alps. Cool, cool, so cool and fresh, they still had snow, even in summer, I remember the way it flushed at sunset… It was nearly sunset when the telephone rang.

I was in the bath with a gin and tonic and the door open so I could watch the sunset through the spectacular arched windows in the bedroom. I remember my body felt warm and loose from the water and the day’s first drink slipping into my bloodstream, I was back with Chris, we were safe from Stuart, Chris was reading the paper, everything was calm.

‘Isaac who? ’ I heard Chris saying. ‘Are you sure?… No, tell him to wait…’ The pauses were long. I could hear him breathing. ‘I’ll be down in a minute. Ten minutes. He can wait in the bar. No, not now!’

When Chris put the phone down, he turned towards me, staring through the doorway but not seeing me, and his mouth had a frightening old man’s droop. ‘I’m sorry, Alex,’ he said. ‘Isaac has come out to see us.’

‘My God.’

‘He must have got the address from the bank… we’ll have to see him.’

‘Of course.’

‘He has no bloody right —’

‘Most people would say he had.’ I was shocked, but adrenalin was filtering through, I had to keep cool, I had to be strong. It had caught up with us, what we had done. ‘Don’t worry, darling. You look terrible. We can carry it off. We’ll take him out to dinner.’

‘You don’t understand how I feel,’ said Chris. He never usually said things like that. I got out of the bath with a movement that I thought would be decisive and graceful, like a swan taking off, but I only succeeded in drowning the floor. It wasn’t like me; I hate clumsiness. I snatched up a towel, which seemed too small, it was the hand-towel: what was the matter with me? The skin on my legs was pink, half-cooked. My hair was a nest of dark rats’ tails in the mirror. But I had to think about him, not me.

‘I do understand. You’ve had a terrible shock.’ Perhaps I sounded over-solicitous, for it only succeeded in irritating him.

‘Well how about you, don’t you feel anything? He’s your child too — I mean, he lived with us.’

‘Darling I sympathise. I’m on your side.’

He stared at me as if I were someone else. ‘I feel so fucking appallingly guilty. I feel such a shit. I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of what I’m going to see. I mean, what will he be like? What if he’s horribly changed?’

‘I should think it’s us who will have changed… he’s only, what, thirty, he’s going to look fine. He never looked great in any case. Maybe he will have improved a bit… Don’t feel guilty, darling. I always thought you were a very good father. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine, not yours.’

He didn’t contradict me. His gaze was heavy. ‘Very good fathers don’t go away. And I’ve hardly written. I don’t like letters. In some families it’s the woman who writes.’

This was completely outrageous. He was desperate, of course, he didn’t know what he was saying.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. In any case, I have written, every now and then. Birthdays, Christmases, and so on.’ I looked very naked in the mirror, my serpent’s hair concealing nothing. ‘When I’ve been in particularly wonderful galleries I always sent him a postcard. How often did your son reply?’ (I knew it was false before I finished my sentence. He had written, at first, before he gave up. Every letter asked the same thing; when were we coming home? My cheery postcards never answered him. In the last few years he’d started writing again, but the gap was too long, I couldn’t bear to read them.)

‘So it’s his fault, is it, that we buggered off?’

‘What’s the point of all this? We have to go down… or do you want me to leave you alone with him?’

‘ No! ’ It was a great explosion of anger.

‘For heaven’s sake don’t get angry with me. It’s not my fault your fucking son has shown up. From my point of view it’s a fucking bore. Isaac was always a fucking bore.’ There, it was said at last, the first time I had ever said it.

‘Thanks very much. I happen to love him.’

‘Hypocrite.’

But I could see it was true. Only someone he loved could cause such pain.

‘I’m sorry, my darling. He isn’t a bore, you’re not a hypocrite. I’m just upset. I don’t know what to wear.’

‘That is the least of our worries.’

‘I don’t want to look too… frivolous.’

To my relief, Chris managed a smile, and a little bit of colour came back into his face. I went round behind his chair and kissed him, pressing my bare breasts against his back. But I meant what I said, in a way. My last memory of Isaac was as a first-year undergraduate, with those owlish blue glasses which should have looked modish but merely made him look a swot, reading books about Gaudier-Brzeska at breakfast. That boy had the power to make me feel frivolous.

Christopher and I went down together in the mirrored lift, staring at ourselves under the lurid light. I had put on a totally plain black dress which quite incidentally showed off my figure. I thought we looked nervous, but not really older. I was still very slim (might I have grown too thin?), Chris’s hair was as thick as it ever was, and the wings of white merely looked distinguished. His skin was yellow, but that was fear. We were the same handsome couple we had always been (but there were horizontal lines scored across my forehead, and one of my earrings had fallen off and perched like a hard little tear on my collar).

Chris retrieved it, and kissed me. ‘You are what matters. We mustn’t quarrel. I love you, Alexandra.’

We paused for a second in the palm-flanked doorway which led into the bar. There was only one figure to be seen; a broad square back on a barstool, the head bent over his drink on the bar, greasy brown hair lapping over his collar. He hadn’t seen us. My heart kicked hard. A queer shallow ripple passed over Chris’s features. I had a fleeting memory of a plump little boy with a solemn face and stern blue eyes refusing to say hallo to me, before the divorce, twenty-five years or so ago. And I had felt pity, for he was so small, and trying so hard for adult dignity. Now here was a great heavy grown-up man with a defeated weight of grown-up flesh. Inchoate questions rushed through my mind; how could it already be too late? After a painful moment, we went to greet him.

Small chin, long nose, red incurious eyes, thank God, it wasn’t him.

‘Hallo, Dad,’ said a familiar voice behind us, and an unfamiliar man stepped forward from the shadow of the palm by the door. He had a round pink face, puffily round, though the rest of him was surely smaller, as if his skeleton had shrunk inside a thickening envelope of flesh… This couldn’t be Isaac, but it was. The dome of his head was shiny, with a fringe of brown curls falling round his ears. And the glasses were gone; he must be wearing contact lenses; his eyes looked sharp, and unnaturally large, so perhaps those glasses had diminished them.