Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Dan has his arm round Mary. She’s a bit like me; doesn’t care about clothes, and she usually dresses in scrappy layers that seem to have sort of blown on by accident, and make her look fatter than she is. Today she’s in a plain black dress and coat and I see she’s actually not fat at all; she’s very upright despite Dan’s arm, it’s as if Dan’s hanging round her neck, not holding her up at all. She looks — solid, and calm again, and graceful. She isn’t red and raw, any more. She’s pale and almost radiant, her skin with a sort of milky shine.

‘Who’s that woman? The beautiful one,’ Phil asks me, and I see he means Mary. Mary Brown beautiful! Alexandra always used to laugh at Mary; if Dad tried to get Alex to go out with him in a hurry and she wanted time to make herself glamorous (though even at home, she was always glamorous), she would say, ‘For heaven’s sake! I can’t go out looking like Mary Brown!’ And it was Mary’s name Alex flung at me when she thought I looked particularly horrendous: ‘Susy! Do you want to grow up looking like Mary Brown?’ — and then she would add, but it can’t have been true, ‘Of course I’m very fond of her.’

‘That’s Mary Brown. The widow,’ I say. What a horrible word, sort of pompous and queenly, whereas Mary had always been — ordinary, extraordinarily ordinary, really, safe and comfortable and warm. And linked to people; never on her own. All the same, I’m amazed to see that what Phil says is true; Mary looks beautiful today.

It seems to have been a good week for dying. Outside the window we see the lot before us shuffling away, awkward, embarrassed, an old man cracking up with laughter, two old women with their arms round each other, the wind and the sun making a halo of their white hair… Not so many people as there are at Matthew’s. I’m glad people have bothered to show up. It might make Mary feel a bit better, that people loved Matthew and turned out for him.

Off we march towards the chapel. But of course my family hasn’t bothered to turn out. Nor Madonna either, not that Mary would care… I’m really glad that Phil has come. I shall introduce him to everyone afterwards. Now Dan and Anna and Jessica are all pressing close around their mother, the door creaks open, and organ music — ooh, I love it, it’s ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’ — flows sweetly out to draw us in, and at once I feel my eyes going prickly, my heart starts thudding, I want to cry, not just for Matthew but for everyone lost, even Dad I suppose, even my father, he’ll die in the end and who will care?

— Not Alexandra, that’s for sure, not my ‘loving stepmother’. With her toyboy and her new Brazilian baby.

I’ll let the family go to the front, I don’t want to seem pushy. These must be sister and brothers I suppose, they’re really old, same age as Matthew. He was something like a dozen years older than Mary. How ancient they look. All stiff and slow. It’s like a queue lining up for the grave.

— Would my Dad look as old as that? I last saw him properly six years ago, and he was already old of course, in his sixties at any rate, but he wasn’t all twisted and crabby and bloodless, he didn’t look like these people. He looked quite good, in an actorish way. He always was a bit of an actor. That thick silver hair, and his queer hooded eyes. And still tall and solid, not dried out.

But prison dries you out, I expect. And being alone. And missing your wife. Dad lived for Alexandra.

Massive shufflings of bags and shoes and hymn-books. The priest looks like a bloodhound but with black beetling brows. He stares at us as if we don’t come up to scratch. I squeeze Phil’s arm and want to giggle, but I also want to cry as I look at Mary’s straight strong back in her black coat, the column of her neck and her grey-streaked hair in the unflattering bun she always wears, but somehow with the black it looks — well, aristocratic; Mary, the least grand and nicest of people; Mary who so often fished me out of trouble; all the same her bare neck looks sort of defenceless, it’s almost like watching someone asleep, now she can’t look after herself, so we have to. I really love Mary.

We stand up to sing Hymn № 134. The organ crashes. So does the door. Dad, it could be, my heart lurches and I half turn round, I can’t see the door between the shoulders of pensioners searching their hymn-books, please may it be Dad, it’s his very last chance…

Then I see her, and feel very cold. Encased in immaculate black velvet, skin-tight; she is matchstick thin; a black hat with a black spotted veil that completely covers her long hair, and her face underneath it is a blur of white, coal-black eyes, blood-red lips. I have to sit down, my knees won’t hold me up, and Phil looks anxiously at me; it’s the ghost who came to my brother’s funeral, it’s her, the bitch, it’s Alexandra.

Then the door bangs again. This time I know exactly who it will be, I see that everything was fixed from the start, I know they will get back together, my heart is drowning in sadness and terror and the surging, soaring chords make it worse, and in he comes, looking thin and hunted, eyes darting round the dark interior, handsome as ever, but oh, so much thinner, my white-haired father, Christopher. I want to kiss him and stroke his white hair.

Christopher and Alexandra. Not together yet, but I know it’s going to happen. Alexandra and Christopher. And everyone else will be fucking irrelevant, no one else will get a fucking look-in.

The hymn is over. Everyone sits down. Three things happen in quick succession. The black-veiled woman turns to stare at Dad, who’s sitting by himself three pews from the door; Dad is peering at Mary’s back; Mary turns, as if she feels his eyes, sees him, and gives a small half-smile, a shiver of shock then a small Mary smile, and Mary’s smiles are lovely, the best; the black-veiled woman raises her veil to get a better look at him, and I see it’s not Alexandra at all, it was just the clothes that confused me for a moment, it’s Madonna, my friend Madonna, for Christ’s sake, dressed to kill, and staring at my father.

We killed someone. I have to live with it. I ran off with Benjamin to escape.

— In the year 2000, we killed someone, Christopher and Benjamin and I. Christopher and I. Christopher.

Christopher killed, but I drove him to it.

I don’t want the pills. I have to remember.

What have I done. What have I done.

We had just unlocked our little room. They had got to know us at the hotel, the thin receptionist smiled at us –

The thin receptionist. I know her name, I should know her name, it was Consuela Harbert, her name is stamped upon my brain. She was narrow, Latin, fiftyish — even now I don’t think of myself as fiftyish, even now that I’m fifty-five, but Consuela Harbert looked prematurely elderly, boot-blacked hair and fans of wrinkles. After an initial sharpness she grew kind to us; she liked Benjamin; she would try to give us the room we had first because we said we liked the window, the steel-framed window we could open wide. ‘You again,’ she always said, in a grainy, humorous voice that we grew to like because we associated it with love-making. I suppose that’s why I noticed her. She was the sort of woman I didn’t notice; the sort of person I never notice, not particularly beautiful or interesting, a marginal figure in my life.

That day we talked. I arrived alone because Benjamin had stopped for cigarettes; she said, ‘He’s a handsome boy,’ as if we would understand each other, and I realised she thought she and I were the same age, which was blatantly ridiculous (until the court case proved it was true) but I didn’t protest, I was proud of possessing him.