Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I don’t want to die. I’m not ready yet. You don’t have to tire of life in your seventies. But damp and darkness infect my bones. I shall have to fly to the sun again.

Maybe I should go home.

An odd little voice, not really mine, for I have no home to go to… but you see, it never used to feel like that. Every hotel in the world was our home. Wherever Alex was was home for me –

Quick, the whisky. Pour it down. I shall not think of her again.

The house in Islington still stands. Susy lives there. We aren’t in touch. Last time she wrote was a year ago to ask for money to spend on the garden. And she was thinking of taking a tenant; the rent would ‘help’, she said. Any other news was confined to a postscript. ‘Have job, am managing. Hope you are too.’ A postcard seemed on the terse side, considering how much money she wanted. Of course I said fine, and do take a tenant — no God squad though; perhaps a nice friend? Frankly I envisaged disaster — she would let it to criminals or hopeless cases, people who would never pay rent… But the house was far too large for her. It must have rattled round her ears. It must have been full of emptiness.

I know all about that, of course. My two lofty floors hang above the black waters, and on days like this is seems the emptiness sucks in the sour green smell of the canals and exaggerates the echoes of each small sound, so a cat tips a pebble with one cold paw and I hear things falling from great heights and drowning. Inside the house. Inside me.

When we were all at home in the house in Islington everything was so different. We felt we could hardly move without tripping over an adolescent limb. Kids start small, but they’re soon too big. And Alexandra needed space. She had tremendous physical energy, whereas I’ve always been a bit lazy. She loved to dance, and run. Running upstairs, dancing down the hall, when there was room to dance down the hall… She hated clutter, it got in her way, and other people sometimes seemed like clutter, to her… she sat in strange, elaborate positions which gave her physical pleasure, stretched like a cat, flexing and turning, moving from one chair to another on incredibly light feet. You could never hear her in the house unless she was wearing high heels, which was only on high days and holidays, wasn’t it, my cat-like darling, so lithe, so swift, so silent that you might still be here, prowling the marble above my head…

Of course she had to travel. She couldn’t stay still.

I’m through with travelling now. Most of us are through with travelling now. Most of us accept that there’s nowhere left to go. I’ve holed up here in this city of water because it’s tired and old like me, with no painful dreams of paradise. There’s beauty here, but it’s in the past, it settles deeper but it can’t disappear; having once existed it will always have existed. Whereas hope for the future can shrink to nothing.

These thoughts possess me on days of fog when life contracts to a nugget of ice, when the acqua alta outside the walls swirls with human cries and bones, a tide of lost people sweeping past the window, all the people we failed to notice…

The letter. Where is it? I must have it. The letter. Somewhere in this bureau. Began and abandoned months ago after my epic day with the tart, Caterina, that stocky little girl with the split-peach arse and the leathery nipples I tweaked and pinched till they were hard as walnuts…

Aha, I’m not dead yet. A little rise on a day of gloom. But the letter. Where is it? More real than sex. I started it that day after supper. When I picked up my pen she was clear in my mind, Mary Brown, a half-smiling Madonna, but her flesh pink and solid, not at all translucent, her eyes a straight path of china blue to a safe destination near at hand… a faint shine in the dark, I can see them again, eyes which perhaps spell ‘warm’ and ‘home’.

— She always liked me, Mary.

The letter! I have it! Wonderful…

Strange, it seems to peter out at line two, I’d remembered something of an epic… But now I recall that I lost heart. It suddenly seemed rather pathetic to be writing to someone who might have forgotten my existence. A woman in her sixties, moreover. That day I was proud, with my three great feats; did a hero like me need a woman in her sixties?

Dear Mary and Matthew,

Friends! After all this time, and many sad changes…

Today I am sadder, and less great. Today I’ll finish and post the letter.

The ‘and Matthew’, of course, is just a courtesy. It’s the oval-eyed madonna that I’m writing to, with her large pale hands and nut-brown hair which now is probably silvery-grey. Even that thought isn’t unpleasant. She’ll draw it back in a queenly bun, and I’ll have to persuade her to let it down…

No no. I run ahead of myself.

… After all this time, and many sad changes, I am writing to you from Venice, without Alexandra, alas…

The terrible baldness of the words on the page. I feel my eyes prick with tears of self-pity to think how sorry Mary will be. But would she already know about all the disasters which have come upon us? They didn’t come to the funeral. I didn’t do the invitations, of course. I suppose they couldn’t have afforded to have flown to New York, in any case, just to watch a body burn. I wonder what Susy has told them…

… to say greetings, old friends, I hope all is well. I hope the floods will soon abate in London…

(don’t be pompous, it will annoy Matthew, if Matt’s still alive enough to be annoyed)

… The Italian newspapers loved your floods, it makes them feel less despair about Venice. How are…

Now I am really stuck. Their children. Alexandra would remember their names. Their children have turned out better than ours. But then, they had a better mother, and the same mother from beginning to end.

How are the children? By now perhaps there are grandchildren. I do hope so…

I am sick with envy, thinking about it. Six stout grandchildren for Matthew to dandle, parade, play football with, confess to, if that starchy bastard has anything to confess. Six fine grand-children to give him hope. And Alex and I haven’t even got one.

… though of course they must make you worry even more painfully about the future. None of us ever envisaged these times, did we, in the far-off days when we were all young.

Do you remember the fun we had with the children, on Jessica’s birthday…?

(That was it — Jessica! A freckled mouse, knock-kneed and brilliant, who went on to float an internet company and made millions before she was thirty. I shudder to think what she’s doing now.)

… Way back in the mid-‘80s, I suppose, when we went down the Thames, still a river, in those days, not a flood-plain, on a river-boat, and we took a monumental picnic (which must have been Mary’s doing!) and four bottles of champagne, and the boys were not in the best of moods but they all started dancing to the piped music, Isaac and Jessica and Susy and —

(damn — I’ll never remember it, put it in later)

… swooping round the other stodgy families in a glorious parody of Victor Sylvester, and Alexandra started dancing on her own…

— A more precise memory stays my hand. Actually the two boys weren’t dancing, they were sipping champagne, which was quite against the rules since they were only fifteen or sixteen, but Alex had given them her blessing — ‘Oh Mary, for God’s sake, it’s a birthday party!’ — and they slumped in their seats, sneering and giggling as the two girls did their spirited tango, which parodied sex and yet yearned for it. Some way down the road to intoxication the strain of sitting still and watching other people dance proved too much for Alex, and she got to her feet, slipped off her shoes and some spotted skin jacket which I hope was fake but fear was not. She began to dance like a siren, with her blowing hair and skin-tight dress and the wind off the water caressing her body, holding an empty champagne bottle, the sun very bright on its green side and her red hair whipping against her bare shoulders… every man on deck was looking at her, everyone wanted to be that bottle. The boys stopped laughing and the girls stopped dancing and I knew all the children were ashamed but I still adored her; she was mine, all mine, and I knew that Matthew wanted her too. Susy’s round flushed face, now sucking down smoked salmon with a steady, vacuuming motion, was a study of sour distaste, no longer transformed by her innocent tango. I remember something else; Mary moved over and rested her bulk on the back of the seat, just behind Susy, and started to stroke her curls very lightly, and Susy stopped eating, and leaned against her, her eyes closed so as not to see her stepmother.