Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

My father let us down, of course. He didn’t come back in time to see Matthew. According to Mary they were very good mates. And I remember the four of them when I was tiny, sitting in the kitchen together and laughing, usually at our house because it was bigger, the four of them together on so many outings.

Matthew and Mary were Dad’s friends. So why didn’t he come and say goodbye? Doesn’t he care about anybody? Wouldn’t he come if I was dying?

I did my best, I rang him in Venice even though he hadn’t bothered to answer my letter. I was horribly nervous, but I telephoned him, and I shook like a leaf when I heard his voice, my dad’s voice after nearly five years… but he sounded just the same, plummy and leisurely, and I felt pissed off, he wasn’t pleased enough to hear me, I was brisk and cold and told him the news. I told him Matthew would die within days and he gave me some bullshit about how Matthew had been dying for years, nothing to worry about, he didn’t know if he could make it.

All the same, I couldn’t help hoping he would. I thought he’d think it over, and come. I even tidied the house in case he stayed. Madonna had encouraged me to ring him, but she didn’t help me to tidy the house. Recently I’ve slightly gone off Madonna; maybe I’m jealous because she’s got a man, Madonna always has a string of men though she’s always talking about settling down…

I don’t really want her to settle here. She is good company, but not for ever.

We have a lot in common, though. We talk about babies. Wanting them. Madonna’s got it bad, she loves them to death. That’s why she’s got to settle down. She wouldn’t stop working, of course, but she’d like three children, a year apart. She’s planned it all; she’d stop working for a month, then get a really good nanny to take over. She knows lots of people who’ve done it like that. Of course she’d still spend lots of time with the children, at weekends and after she gets home in the evening, though she often doesn’t get home till ten. But she says it would be fun time, quality time.

Her ideas are much more worked out than mine. With me it’s more of a steady hunger, knowing I want a baby to live with, and being sad I don’t have a father yet. Wanting to love it and look after it. And I’m less energetic than Madonna. I know I’d need at least six months off. We go on and on about all this. It’s almost as good as having the babies. But sometimes I get really freaked out about our age; both of us are thirty-seven, getting on, though Madonna says that’s irrelevant with all the breakthroughs in IVF.

— Thing is, I don’t want IVF… I want a baby the old-fashioned way, I sort of want to complete the cycle I kept cutting off when I had the abortions. I’m sure it will happen, some time soon. I don’t know why; I just feel it will, and even now with the funeral on my mind I’ve got this secret, growing happiness deep down inside me at the thought of it, tingling my breasts, tickling my belly. To have a family of my own.

I suppose I’m still trying to replace my family.

On the phone Dad wasn’t sure, and I half-thought he’d soften, but Matthew died on Wednesday and no word had come. Dad didn’t even telephone me or Mary.

The funeral is his last chance to make it up to the Browns, but I remember he and Alex didn’t like funerals, it reminded them of stuff they preferred not to think about. They went together on sufferance when they couldn’t possibly get out of it, overdressed, ridiculously smart, and when they came home they went hysterical with laughter and made horrible remarks about the other guests.

Silly to kid myself. There’s no chance he’ll turn up at the funeral. I wasn’t even going to tell him about it but Madonna said I might as well. So I rang him in a fury and got a strange man — a contract cleaner who was cleaning the flat — I just left a brief note of the time and place. He was Italian, I don’t s’pose he passed on the message.

Poor Mary. She looked like someone else. She looked like an animal, actually. Mary, who’d always looked so clean and careful. As if she’d been beaten half to death. As if she would have just fallen down at our feet if she’d had to suffer another bit of pain.

‘I’ve known for years,’ she said. ‘I’ve known he was ill since the late 1980s. Since just after… your parents… went away.’ (I’ve told her I don’t think of Alex as a parent, but she can never think what else to call her.) ‘He was deaf and half-blind. It wasn’t fun for him. So why am I being so silly? Why do I feel — why am I so —’ She couldn’t get it out, she was sobbing again, the snot was all running down, and tears.

I don’t know why I was surprised she was like this; Matthew and Mary were happily married… but I knew she was fagged out with all the nursing, and she didn’t want Matthew to suffer any more. She had talked so calmly about him dying. But now it had happened she was mad with pain. Jessica sat with her arm round her shoulders. She seemed OK, but her eyes were wet. Dan’s son George was trailing a battered teddy bear round behind the sofa, making ambulance noises, and every now and then saying ‘Poor Grandpa. Grandpa go to heaven. Amb’ance take Grandpa to heaven now.’ Anne was in the kitchen, making tea, Dan was upstairs going through his father’s clothes; when we were quiet downstairs I heard another noise, like a motor throbbing or an engine chugging a long way away, but it was Dan, upstairs, the whole house was at it, they couldn’t stop bawling.

I was desperately sorry for them, I swear. Mary had always been so nice to me, and Matthew, in his more distant way. And yet I felt jealous. Sick with envy. They were a family, even in this. They were still together. They could cry together. It made me feel lonely, and hate my father.

Tonight I can’t sleep. It’s the funeral tomorrow. I know it’s stupid, but I’ll never learn, I’ve been watching the clock getting later and later, some part of me still hoping Dad will ring and say Don’t worry, I’ll be there. Don’t worry, we’ll go together. But now it’s midnight. Hope’s run out.

God! The phone! I nearly died, I can’t find the bloody receiver in the dark, but it’s him, it must be, now I’ve dropped it on the floor…

‘Susy? It’s Phil. Sorry to ring so late. I just wanted to ask you, what should I wear? I don’t want to let you down.’

It isn’t a big funeral. Thirty or so expected. We got there early to show solidarity. I told him not to worry, but Phil’s wearing a suit, a fairly dreadful suit I suppose, though I’ve never been very up on these things, it has a vaguely ‘90s air, but I think he looks terrific, actually, I’m proud he got out his suit for me.

The family are gathered in little knots, quiet-ish but livening up every now and then as they see someone they haven’t seen for years and forget for a moment that we’re here to be gloomy. Most of these people I’ve never seen; I knew Matthew and Mary and Dan and Jessica, but otherwise only the occasional aunt who came to London on a shopping trip — ah, hallo, you must be Aunty Katharine, we met a year or two ago, sorry I don’t know your proper name…

She was a Smith. That’s Mary’s side. There are Smiths and Browns, basically, whatever name they go under now. Alexandra thought it was unspeakably comic that Mary was a Smith who ended up a Brown. But then Alexandra was a Stoddy, so nothing she says has to be taken too seriously…

I explain some of this to Phil, under my breath. It means I have to tell him a little bit more and then a little bit more about my family… At first he doesn’t seem to be taking it in.

‘Mad how women used to change their names,’ he says. ‘My mother was a Windsor, of all things. Not that kind of Windsor, of course. But she married Dad, and became a Sparrow. I ask you. Would you change your name to Sparrow?’ Then he runs on in the same breath, ‘I think what you told me is appalling. To be abandoned at seventeen. And I want to say — I think you’re remarkable. You’re absolutely remarkable. To have survived something like that, and be like you.’ That like you is said in such a lovely way that I think confusedly he’s sorry for me. He is ever so sorry for me. How comforting. And I really am in a muddle, because another part of me’s still thinking about what he said before, and enjoying it: Would I change my name to Sparrow? Yes, because I hate being a Court. And Yes, Susy Sparrow… I could marry Phil.