Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Usually Alex would scribble a poste restante where I could reach them, and I wrote at once. Yet I never felt sure my letter had arrived. The next card from them never seemed to respond. I suppose our news wasn’t earth-shattering, whereas they were travelling all over the world.

So we weren’t really talking to each other any more. It didn’t matter, they were still our best friends. We longed to see them, though. Twice Alexandra sent photographs.

We were happy to have the first one. Alexandra in Malta with a pigeon by her foot, crouching in the sun. That enviable red-gold hair. Christopher smiling, crinkling up his heavy-lidded eyes at the brightness. All Matthew said was ‘I’m glad she hasn’t cut it.’ I didn’t like that. I’d cut my hair that year. I thought I was too old to have long straight hair, but I fear it looked even more ordinary, chin-length.

It was the second photo that upset us. A snap, not quite in focus, of the two of them sitting on a low yellow rock that looked a bit like a sleeping lion. Behind them, one of those long white bays that seem to go on for ever. The light was so bright that their faces were bleached. It made them young, almost featureless, and Alex’s hair was like blown sand; the sun had taken away its red. She had cupped his hand between her two paler ones, their feet were touching, they were looking at each other…

I enjoy sex more than my husband does, but it’s not in my nature to be jealous. Matthew and I would feel silly holding hands.

Chris had scribbled something on the back which seemed rushed, or careless, and perhaps that’s what accounted for the disappointment. As if he didn’t mind what he wrote.

‘Turkey is great. Photography by a maniac Alex found hiding in the dunes. Alex says I’m a bullshitter. So you see nothing has changed. Love C.’

Matthew stood and looked at it. I remember it was raining great heavy drops. It was sixish, a summer evening, but we had to have the light on.

‘What does he mean, “ nothing has changed ”? What rubbish! They’ve just buggered off. We haven’t seen them for years —’

‘Matthew —’

‘— I haven’t even told her about my kidneys.’

‘That’s not their fault. I couldn’t put it in a letter.’

‘I didn’t say it was their fault. But I miss them. Alex used to brighten things up. Oh hell. It’s just the weather.’

That year it was grey and overcast in England. A volcano had exploded somewhere in the world. Perhaps we minded that Chris and Alex weren’t there to suffer with the rest of us.

Or perhaps it was the hands and feet that upset us, the way they couldn’t stop touching each other. Everyone wants to be loved like that.

As time goes by, I think Matthew minds less. He still dreams about Alexandra, though. Perhaps even more than he tells me he does. We are very good friends; we tell each other things. I’d rather he told me. I understand…

Indeed, I wish I could dream about Chris, but I tend to dream about supermarkets, with occasional attacks by wild animals, and yes, I do know what that means. Chris is a ‘dish’, or used to be a ‘dish’ — my daughter tells me my language is dated. His jaw was always blueish dark, although he claimed to shave twice a day, and he had lots of black hair, whereas Matt is bald… I admit I regret that Matt is bald… but by now Chris is probably balding as well. And despite that photo with its blank young face, Alex must have wrinkled like the rest of us. That very fine skin, I’m sure it would wrinkle.

I must sit down and write to them now at once. It must be six months since we last heard. They’d flown to Tasmania for Christmas, and I wrote straight back, but there was no reply. She had said they were going to spend summer in Toledo. They often seem to spend summer there.

Summer in Toledo. It’s another world.

And I suddenly wish I could join them, never mind the garden and the grandchildren, fly off and join them just like that. Pack one small bag and go, the plane headed straight into sun like a swallow.

But of course I couldn’t leave Matthew behind.

We could go together… we could.

But we never had the thing that links them. That weirdly intense romantic thing. Or perhaps it’s just sex, something tangible, electrical, that rustle in the air when they moved close, something I know they will never lose, and hell oh hell I’m jealous.

I miss my darling. I miss my love.

I lived for love. Love left me.

The sheets where she once lay beside me, the lip of sheet where her thin arms lay, always one arm outside the covers, thin gold fingers plucking, pulling, turning the sheet to a fold of skin — her part of the sheet is flat as snow. Desolate, untrodden snow.

I never wander across the bed towards her ghost; I stay this side, staring across at the stupid whiteness when I wake up and look for her.

I can’t help it. Too old to learn. She slept beside me for a quarter of a century. Now she sleeps with — madness. Madness to think of her now.

Alexandra left me. Or I frightened her away. A messy, humiliating scene with a gun. She should have understood. I was desperate. What else could I do? We no longer talked, but she was my life.

All the same, what I did was stupid, wrong. I knew it was over when I glimpsed her face, the split second that I pulled the trigger and changed our lives for ever; amazed, disgusted, embarrassed, afraid, but not, as in my dreams, admiring, not a vestige of sexual thrill, no hint of the look I’d known so well and longed above all to see again, the narrowed bands of hazel light she turned on me when life was young.

Better to pretend Alexandra is dead. Better drink my brandy, then another brandy, then droning with golden noise to bed, deaf to the cries I sometimes hear, Chris, come and find me, Chris, I’m lost, Chris, you promised we’d never part, Christopher, what happened to us?

Because if I hear those terrible cries. Coming from the other side of the world, from Brazil, perhaps, from Bolivia, from the land-mass where I would never take her because I knew she would only suffer, heat and flies and cruelty and children begging for the last of your steak, swarming over each other like frantic bats, dirty shirt-tails held out as a pouch for leftovers — if she calls to me from the land of fire, if I hear her cries on the edge of my dreams, I shall start to believe she will come back.

I know my darling will come back.

— I know that I know nothing.

I sit in Venice, in Guido’s bar, dark and hot but with windows on the sea and enough loud flies to disquiet the tourists.

Tourists. Scum. They will cover the earth until there is nothing left that shines. We were never tourists, Alex and I…

But there aren’t so many as there were last year. Not half so many as five years ago when we last came to Venice together, in 1999, the year before she left me. There had been great works in the early 1990s, drainings and diggings and shorings-up and spectacular quarrels in the world press. Then things quietened down and it was business as usual. Around the millennium, the world flocked to Venice.

I remember she panicked in St Mark’s Square. You could hardly see the red colonnades for the sweaty press of jostling bodies, snapping away as if the world were ending. She was sickly white beneath her tan, her pupils shrank, her mouth was a hole, her nails were pincers on my arm. ‘Help me, help me.’ She needed me. Later, of course, she forgot all that; she only wanted to get away.

Now the tours are bypassing Venice again, with the water-level rising and grave men telling us our half-drowned ballroom will slide into the sea. My beautiful, poisonous, turquoise sea. It stretches away from this rotted window, dazzling under the lemon-bright sunlight… will that cloudless sky really see us vanish?