Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

(He worships Becky. He actually worships her. He babbles at her in a voice I’ve never heard him use before, his own kind of singing, I suppose, but he never sings in everyday life. It’s soft, playful, higher than usual. ‘Little little little,’ he sings. ‘Who’s my little little little?’)

The first time I ever took her out in her pram, which I didn’t dare do till she was six weeks old, lying on her sheepskin, wrapped against spring winds in a soft white coat with a tiny hood which held her little head like a hand, I watched her staring up amazed at the blue and white splotches above her. They say they can’t focus, but I watched her take in the wonderful blue stretch of light, and I’m sure she knew there was a world opening up, a world without any walls or curtains… her small blue eyes had the sky inside. And as I watched her I held it too. It was as if I found the world again through Becky.

Nothing can change the past, people say, but Phil doesn’t agree, and I’m undecided. You can change what it does to you, he says. The past can be shifted as you understand it better. Some of the pain and heaviness go out of it. You can be kinder to who you were. You can be kinder to other people. If you hate yourself less, you can hate them less too.

— Becky should have had three brothers or sisters. I should have been a mother of four. Phil has listened to me for hours about this; in the end he thinks enough is enough, enough grieving, enough suffering. Nothing will bring them back again. He’s wrong on that one, I know he is. I’ll always have to talk about them. I think I do believe in penance. I’ve suffered enough over those babies, I’ve wept enough about their unlived lives. I suppose I’ve purged my guilt, though on two occasions when Becky’s been ill, once crying for days with persistent diarrhoea, once with a sudden astronomical temperature, so just for a moment I feared she would die, the shadow crept back. The horrible shadow. I no longer torture myself with blame but for the rest of my life I’ll miss those children.

Looking back, the shadow that came with the abortions seems to stretch down into the distant past. As if I was always unhappy, and the abortions just happened to confirm it. As if I’d always lived in the dark. Perhaps it was when Mum died. Perhaps the shadow was my terrible anger. Because if parents run away, or kill themselves, what hope is there for the children? Even after that there were sunny patches, times with Isaac or times with Dad, or even occasionally with Alex, or days when I had fun with my friends, but then they went away and I had to grow up and the shadow came over me for good.

Except now I know it wasn’t for good. It’s like crawling out from under a stone. I’m just like Becky, amazed by the view.

And it’s not all down to Phil and Becky, either. He didn’t save me, I was saving myself. He just happened to come along at the right moment. I’d finished my training. I’d got my first job, I was enjoying living in the house with Madonna, the garden was getting over years of neglect, I’d done a lot of pruning and planting… Phil came to Matthew’s funeral. That was the start. Quite slowly, really, we fell in love. I was ready for it, you see.

And now my life is glorious. She grew inside me. I kept her warm. My size was absolutely right for her. Madonna had gone on at me to try and lose weight, and she was just the last in an endless line. All through my teenage years people said I was plump, Alexandra could hardly bear to look at me, Dad got embarrassed and suggested more salads, even Phil once teased me about my belly… but my belly was a good home for Becky. I put on weight in a steady curve which the doctors approved. Nobody criticised! My belly stuck out and my breasts were big like all the other pregnant women waiting at the clinic.

And all of us were bursting with female hormones, but nobody fucked us with their eyes. Our great big bellies protected us. I became a person, not a thing that provoked.

— That was when I really knew there was goodness in me. That discovery has changed so much… — whatever it means, to be good; I can’t define it, I was never intellectual, but I know what it feels like. I feel what it means. Being good for people, or good to people. Good for the baby, good.

I missed my darling when she first left my body. I cried on the day when they told me I’d cry, but I wasn’t depressed, as they’d warned me, how could I be depressed when Becky lay there asleep, on my pillow in the hospital bed? In twenty-four hours the tears had gone. And it stayed, the sense of completeness, and the knowledge that my body is a good body.

Now I start to miss her in a different way because it’s possible for me to leave her. I’m glad I can be alone for a bit because it proves my happiness isn’t an illusion, it doesn’t disappear when Becky does. Actually I enjoy a few hours of being freer. Then I start to miss her. I long for her, the nice kind of hunger when you know you will be fed.

It’s four o’clock. Nearly time for her feed. My breasts are full. They’re aching, prickly. I think of her mouth, so tiny and fierce, and a trickle of milk leaks out of one nipple. Becky, my darling. They’ll be home soon.

Then I hear them coming up the garden path, three floors below but the sound carries up on the hot midsummer wind with the grass and the pollen; I sneeze, as she calls me, there’s a heavy scent of roses, he’s singing to her and she’s singing back.

Yes, there they are. I can see them now. His snow-white head bent over the pram adjusting the flowered canopy. Her grandfather, my dad. Dad dotes on her. He adores her. Mary stands slightly to one side, head cocked, laughing a bit at the fuss he makes. They look like parents who’ve suddenly grown old, but he is the mother, and she is the father.

People are amazed to hear he’s back after all these years, and living in the basement. We did convert it after all, but into a flat for Christopher. He’s been living here since I was three months pregnant. He bought a house in Chelsea, but he was lonely. I let him be lonely, just for a bit. I thought it would be good for him to be lonely. But because I was happy, I began to forgive him. When I didn’t hate myself, I couldn’t hate him. Besides, I was on my own. Madonna had gone; she’d found a new man, the married man who’d bought up her firm, a rich Japanese, Yukio Oshima, and I still hadn’t decided to live with Phil, I didn’t dare risk it till the very last moment. I thought my Dad would be company.

Besides, he was seeing Mary. I didn’t quite know what ‘seeing’ meant. I still don’t quite know what ‘seeing’ means. Surely they don’t — but surely they must. It isn’t proper — but of course it is. I live near Mary. I wanted to encourage them. If they got married, I’d have a real mother. How funny; just when I don’t need one so much…

Dad’s deeply conventional, in his way. Odd when you think what sort of life he’s led. He said of course I should live with Phil. Phil loved me, and he’d love the baby. Dad said we should get married before she was born (but we didn’t — still haven’t. I haven’t quite dared…).

Dad’s a different man from what he was. Older, humbler. Slower, not so strong. Phil’s very fond of him, and can’t quite believe me when I tell him how much I used to despise him. To Phil the whole story is fantastic, unbelievable, the world travels, the shooting in New York… It’s a novel, or a film, to him. I think he half-thinks Dad is a hero.

I don’t press the point. The anger is going. The man in the garden is a different man. I hear him laughing. An old man’s laugh. Of course, my Dad is seventy-two — The great lover is seventy-two.

And now he’s come home to be a grandfather. I run downstairs on a tide of love. For Becky, but there’s some left for him.