Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

‘Don’t be silly. I’m so happy to see you. And I like to show off my flowers — I’m getting the garden straight at last… but actually I am expecting someone else later. Someone you know. You’ll have to guess.’

But I couldn’t guess, and she wouldn’t tell me.

‘Let’s have some food,’ she said. And there was some food — real lunch-time food! Though she’d asked me to lunch, I expected no more than coffee and apples as I listened to her problems. But she laid out bread, cheese, salad, fruit on the sunny tablecloth, and actually ate some, a normal amount of it, wonder of wonders, and didn’t witter on about her latest diet or gorge compulsively.

Because I’m a mother, and conventional in some ways — not all ways, I may surprise people yet — I couldn’t help hoping that the ‘someone’ she expected would be a boyfriend, or manfriend, rather, some nice boy I had known in the past, a friend of Dan or Jessica, someone who would marry her and simplify her future — I knew too much about the messes of the past. But Susy didn’t seem to want her future simplifying. She had finished her teacher training course at last, the one I never thought she would finish because she’d taken endless time off for illness; she was very enthusiastic about her first job, teaching two- and three-year-olds; I suppressed the wish that they were her children.

She was very interesting, actually. I think I know a lot about children from having brought up my two, but she had some ideas I had never considered. I began to look at her in a new light. We were eating Brie, and she was telling me why you couldn’t ‘teach’ children how to draw, when I heard a key turn in the lock and feet came bounding down the hall.

The male ‘someone’ I was expecting to see turned into a frighteningly glamorous girl, with chestnut dreadlocks and a big red mouth and white cotton shorts on long, strong legs — in the old days we never wore shorts in October! — but with something familiar in the eyes and cheekbones, and she was smiling widely at me, big white teeth — ‘Mrs Brown — Mary!’ — and coming round the table to give me a kiss which I found uncomfortable; lots of perfume, hard bangles, soft skin.

‘You remember Madonna,’ Susy said. ‘She’s come to live in the basement. It’s great. You can’t imagine how empty the house felt before.’

I did remember her then, of course. My Dan’s girlfriend. The heartbreaker. She had come on holiday with us twice, and the family were poor so we didn’t let them pay (she was adopted, and the father had abandoned the mother when Madonna was only twelve); she had always been a lively, lovely girl; then my Dan fell in love with her in their twenties and she broke his heart when she left for New York with a man old enough to be her father. I had to pick up the pieces. She was a journalist; she’d been mad for New York. I hadn’t seen her since. Yet here she was back in London again, glowing with health and prosperity, looking quite different with her new long hair, and Dan was married, so I mustn’t bear a grudge, yet for some reason the shadow which fell on me as she crossed the sunny window to embrace me made me shiver; it was darker in the kitchen for a moment.

Silly, because she was entirely charming. She asked after Matthew, who she’d always liked, and listened sympathetically to what I had to tell. She asked after Dan, and even his baby. In fact, she was delightful, as she always had been — Matthew always had a soft spot for her — and I was soon back under the spell of her charm.

When she went into the garden we talked about her. I could see her through the window, bending to pick up fallen apples with lithe athletic movements. ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she,’ Susy said. ‘I’d forgotten how to have fun, before. And she’s done so well. She’s practically famous. She was on telly last week, and they’ll ask her again. She’s deputy editor of Karma Q —’

‘ What? ’

‘— it’s a really cool on-line magazine. And she works so hard. She can dance half the night but she comes back and slaves away till morning to get her pieces in. Why are you frowning, Mary? She’s been good to me. She encourages me with what I’m doing. Even though she’s so busy. And she’s really fond of children —’

The eulogy began to annoy me, and I asked meanly ‘Has she got any, then?’

‘You don’t have to have one to love them. I love them and I haven’t got any. She’d love to have one if she had time. But neither of us has got time at the moment.’

‘Don’t leave it too long. How old are you and Madonna?’

‘I’m nearly thirty-seven.’

Perhaps she’d never have children. ‘How old is Madonna?’

‘Same age, of course.’

I didn’t say She looks so much younger. Madonna looked not a day over thirty. But I had both my children before I was thirty. I changed the subject; it wasn’t my business. The main thing was Susy was back on her feet.

It was the only slight damper on a marvellous lunch. ‘Marvellous lunch,’ I said as I left. ‘Wonderful to see you looking so well.’

As I walked to the buzzerstop I realised who Madonna reminded me of. It was partly the new long hair and the confidence. She reminded me a little of Alexandra — but warmer, larger, and kinder, I hoped. Perhaps that was exactly what Susy still needed; a decent mother-figure to replace her stepmother, to make good the harm that Alex had done. I’d done my best for her over the years, but I had my own worries with Matthew and Dan — I wasn’t around when the worst things happened.

I do believe women can help each other. My women friends have saved my life. We keep things ticking over, we oil the wheels, we worry about the environment, we collect the waste and do the gardening and write the letters and look after the dying.

Matthew’s asleep, so I can write my letter. I wish Christopher had been there that day, he would have loved to see his daughter and Madonna talking, with the light from the table-cloth bright on their faces. That special loud cheerfulness of the young. The older we get, the more muted and careful… and the more we love youth, for a breath of fresh air…

Why don’t I write on this lovely yellow paper that Jessica gave me for my birthday? Christopher, Dear Christopher. I want him to realise I’m not old.

I’ve been warned to be patient; it doesn’t make me patient. Benjamin is much more patient than me, probably because he feels things less.

I’ll hold you in my arms, little girl.

I’ll never want to put her down. Whenever I sit down and think about her my arms move instinctively into a rocking, cradling shape, touching each other and holding each other because there is nothing else to hold, there is a space between my linked arms and my body, an emptiness aching to be filled. I sit and rock and think about her till I drive myself crazy and have to go out, walking for hours up and down the streets no matter how hot it is, no matter how humid, no matter how much weight I’m losing, no matter how much the locals stare at the gringo woman pursued by demons.

If I were younger with this burning hunger I could satisfy it quite naturally, I could make a baby from my own flesh to still the torment my body feels. But I wasn’t hungry soon enough. I only wanted what I could no longer have. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let my childbearing years slip by? How could Christopher have let it happen? He should have known that I needed a baby.

I forgive him, though. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. The very first glimpse I had of Anna Maria I knew this was my baby. I was talking to her mother, yesterday; I saw her through the door, sitting on a stone, pulling at her hair which was glossy blue-black like a blackbird’s wing, and I longed for babies and blackbirds and home, I longed to be young again and her mother. I couldn’t speak; tears filled my eyes; I thought I have always misunderstood, I have always got everything hopelessly wrong, now at last I see my future. In her hand was a flower like a marigold. Her skin was golden, her cheeks were round, she sat in a frame of brilliant sunlight and I stared at her from the stifling dark. When we actually met she seemed indifferent, but I’ll never forget that transfiguring moment when I saw her and knew she would be mine. My baby. Mine. Come back to me.