Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

‘I didn’t want to try and usurp your mother. But I was very fond of you…’ False to my ear, and to his. I was panicking. I hate being attacked. I wanted to appease him; I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to die and leave us alone.

‘How sensitive and considerate,’ Isaac sneered, lip curling to show faintly dappled teeth. I had never been strict about chocolate, even his teeth I had not looked after. ‘My mother’s been dead for twenty years. So you needn’t restrain yourself any more.’ Another deep swig of white wine. A little ran down his chin like lymph, as if essential fluids were leaking away, deep wounds opening to let it all out. ‘Everyone knows you killed her, in any case, you and Dad between you.’

‘Isaac! That’s enough! You don’t know what you’re saying!’ Chris was angry now as he scarcely ever was, big hands clenching, face drained of blood. I knew quite certainly he wanted to hit Isaac. I hoped for one mad second he would. Then I imagined Isaac’s plump weak body collapsing. The ultimate horror; he killed his son.

I had to help. I had to make peace.

‘We have to stop this. Please. Both of you. It’s horrible. Forgive me, Isaac. I understand. I think I do. You and Susy must feel… I took your father away. And your mother’s death… I suppose… it’s inevitable you feel that. But I didn’t break up a happy marriage. There are things your father wouldn’t tell you. She was a manic depressive. Clinically. And she had affairs with his friends. Because she blamed him for her unhappiness. Then when she knew she was losing him, she suddenly wanted him back. And that was too late. He was in love with me. And everything else followed.’

‘Please,’ said Chris, no longer angry. ‘It’s all so long ago.’ He reached out across the cluttered tablecloth and took my hand. The salt fell over, a small landslide of snow, but we were holding hands, life crept back between us, a quiet promise that we would survive. But what about Isaac… what had we done to him?

He sat deflated, scraping at his dish, the very last slivers of creme Chantilly. Even his hands were plump. Yet the awareness recurred that he had grown smaller, somewhere, hiding underneath the flesh. And Isaac was homosexual. The boy I had lived with was not as I imagined. Chris’s son was gay.

‘Why have you really come?’ I asked. ‘Let’s have some coffee and some Armagnac.’ I released Chris’s fingers, and patted Isaac’s hand. To my surprise he didn’t brush me away.

‘You have understood, haven’t you?’ he asked, and his tone was no longer aggressive, not even defensive, it was plain tired. ‘Alex, you know I wasn’t joking. I’m gay. I couldn’t put that in a letter.’

‘So that’s why you came,’ said Chris. He sounded as flat as his son.

‘Not really.’

Over brandy and coffee the whole truth came out. We talked about Susy as though she were dead. Her story was dreary and predictable enough. The most recent abortion was two days ago, and this time the father was the cult’s grim leader. I had somehow always known that she would get into trouble, but I’d envisaged babies rather than abortions. Isaac emerged well from it all, if his account was to be believed. He’d left various messages we never got, he had bribed the cultists to leave for good, and now he had come out to find us.

We had all grown quieter, almost formal. Chris asked remarkably few questions. Whatever had flared between us had gone. I caught Isaac looking at his watch. The blonde Swiss children had all gone home.

I sat almost serene, sipping my coffee, considering the problem in its abstract form. One thing was clear, to me but not Isaac; we wouldn’t go home, I was sure of that. It was too late in the day for me to face Susy. Facing up to Isaac had aged me ten years…

But soon he would be gone. We could lie together and comfort each other in the velvety dark of our hotel room. We could try for a baby again. Our own child, our new beginning…

Then Chris astonished me. ‘I’ll go back tomorrow,’ he said slowly to Isaac. Then he turned to me, his eyes met mine, perhaps asking me to understand, and he instantly jerked his head away, a movement of hopeless irritation, as if I had never understood a thing, and I suddenly felt he must be right, for this was unheard of, astonishing; the world rolled over and tipped me off. This was the great betrayal — we had promised each other… we had vowed to each other… and I had just given up Stuart for ever… At that moment I wasn’t sure what we had promised. I sat there, listening to distant voices, and didn’t say a word. I could feel a pointless, untethered smile floating across my face, and dying.

Something very odd had happened to me. I have never been able to control myself; I see no point in controlling myself. Yet when we were finally alone I hardly said a word to Chris. We were drunk and exhausted, but it wasn’t that. I felt stunned, wounded, beyond saying anything. We took off our clothes like zombies.

That night as Chris lay in bed and snored I stood by the window in our hotel bedroom, naked in centrally heated darkness, touching the glass, which was icy cold, looking across at the vanished peaks and the random pinpricks of hard white stars. Night was out there, and emptiness. And the snows, where no one talked, or suffered, where everything slept in frozen silence, and we wouldn’t have to keep moving on. Maybe the edges were melting; the hotels were worried; the newspapers fretted; but the snowy heartlands were still there. They waited there, enormous, beyond the glossy little town, the expensive shops, the chic hotels, the ski-lodges and glow-worm trains which edged across the precipice.

There should have been a moon, three-quarters full. It was cloudless, and the moon had been big last night. I peered round the edge of the window-frame. I found myself praying it would be there; it would mean good luck, it would be a sign. If it wasn’t there now it must rise soon. I stayed there hoping and growing colder.

I smoked one of Chris’s cigarettes, though I hadn’t had a smoke for many years. I did it to see the red glow in the dark, I did it because I craved nicotine. I did it because Chris had fallen dead asleep and I desperately needed something alive. I did it to make the moon appear. I felt I could draw down the moon with my breath, dragging in deeper, more desperately, reduced to stupid magic.

But the moon had already come and gone. I couldn’t accept it; I stood and grieved. You need a man to have a baby. I couldn’t have a baby on my own. How could he leave when I needed him?

By the time Chris woke, slurred ‘Come to bed,’ and fell heavily asleep again, I was shivering in violent spasms.

But I don’t believe in suffering. I went and lay down.

And now I see that none of it mattered. We were never meant to have a child. My child was waiting somewhere here, in the teeming cities or the tiny villages, somewhere on the vast subcontinent, wriggling, waving, crawling towards me.

For everything has changed in the space of a morning. Benjamin is back, bringing good news.

I hardly dare hope after all the disappointment, but Benjamin thinks — Benjamin belives –

The signs are good. The signs are good! Movement at last after this terrible paralysis. Benjamin’s so cheerful, a different man, sober, tender, making jokes again.

This time perhaps — this time I know –

We’re due to meet her tomorrow.

Too many acqua altas this week. Can’t be bothered to decline it right. Duckboards in use day after day. The steps are a nightmare of slithering weed. Fogs like blankets; you can’t see your ankles.

Acqua alta. It quacks and gurgles. Acquae altae? Decline, decline… Everything declining, settling lower. Surely this year will see us subside at last into our wrecked foundations.