Maggie Gee: Where are the Snows

— My temper’s bad today. I have a hangover, the heat’s appalling, the hotel’s never heard of bottled water and the tap water tastes of blood or iron as well as those foul little sterilising tablets. It makes me long to be back in Europe or anywhere that isn’t here…

Seeing the film brought a lot of things back. Chris must have told me a million times about that’ 60s trip to Tibet, the extreme clarity of the air, so you could see every hair on the head of a horned sheep in the valley below, the sharpness of the edge where the ice met the sky… what did he call it? — ‘immaculate’. (Imagine it glittering, the blue-cold ice. You can long for ice with such intensity here.) The mountains had a wonderful name, ‘Abode of the Gods’, that was it, and I’d imagined him as god-like, too, young, slim and impossibly handsome, climbing up into the mountain sunlight, climbing away from the old dull life of accountancy and wife and kids…

I never imagined him grey and uneasy, in fatuous clothes and a shaggy-dog haircut. He was tall, for god’s sake! Not short and fat! I hated him for looking so awful… it was his first film, of course, he got better later, but I was furious that Benjy laughed at him. (By the way, I loathe the name Benjy, though everyone’s always called him that. It would be perfectly charming for a little boy, but for a six-foot grown-up man it stinks. It makes him seem even younger than he is, and God knows he’s young enough already.)

Benjamin was lying on the bed eating peanuts and throwing the shells on the carpet; he’d drunk too much beer, which makes him aggressive. We’d fucked but he hadn’t satisfied me.

We switched on the tv. There was yet another programme about the dispute over the ice-caps, boring. Then all of a sudden Christopher was there. Chris, who I lived with for twenty-six years.

‘My God,’ I hissed. ‘That’s fucking Christopher.’ (I’m sorry, my language has gone downhill since I’ve been living with Benjamin. One of the boring things about the young is that they swear non-stop.)

Benjy shot upright, spilling his beer. ‘I don’t believe those clothes, ’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that hair! You really went round the world with that man?’

‘Everyone looked frightful in the 1960s… in any case, don’t be so fucking superficial.’

He didn’t reply, he didn’t need to, we both know it’s me who’s obsessed with looks. There was Christopher in long shot waving his arms, Christopher with flared trouser-legs flapping. Benjy began to titter and snigger.

He’s insecure, of course, now it’s clear he has failed to make me pregnant. I loved him because he could make me pregnant, I loved him because he would give me a child. I went on hoping, I hoped against hope… even now the blood keeps coming each month… less than before, but I still bleed… all the same, I know, and he knows, he’s failed me. A great strong boy of thirty. I try not to let my frustration show.

He’s insecure, and it makes him spiteful. And we’ve been cooped up together too long in this third-rate hotel in this fifth-rate town, while we wait for news about the most important and beautiful event in my life to date… shh, it’s bad luck to think about it. I try not to count on it too much.

Benjy is thirty, I’m fifty-five. Perhaps I’m lucky to have a young lover (but I don’t look my age — I don’t think I do, I still get ogled when I walk alone). I ought to be patient, because he is young, but I can’t be patient, I was never very patient. I won’t have him sneering at my past.

I suddenly felt something — crumbling, I suppose. As if, like Venice, my past could slip in a second under the sea, and I’d go with it.

Rubbish, I’ve just got a hangover, it’s not like me to mope and moan. The old life shouldn’t matter now. I’ve a new young lover and plenty to hope for. I’ve always believed in happiness; when it goes sour, you just move on.

But this new happiness, a little voice whispers, the latest happiness has soured as well. Don’t pretend, Alexandra. It’s true. And maybe you can’t move on for ever. Even if you do, you might need your past. Or else you’ll end up aged sixty with nothing.

Even you could be lonely, Alexandra.

Perhaps I need to go over my story. So I’ll have a story to tell the child, when the child I long for comes to me.

My life-story is beautiful, beautiful, an amazing, lucky, adventurous life… My dad used to tell us stories. Winter tea-times, after our bath, he would tell us about his childhood in Stepney as we dried our hair by the fireside in that poky little house he thought was a palace… when he was a boy they had been so poor that even his shoes were castoffs. And he told us sagas of my mother’s family, epic stories with monsters and demons and cream-skinned Irish heroines who he said looked ‘exactly like your mother’, though her own face curdled as she tried not to hear and later she’d warn us against his ‘nonsense’. We sat by the fire while he told us these wonders, staring into the friendly flames… I wish he had known that I would be rich. It was why I loved Sundays, those fireside stories.

Now fire is the thing that everyone fears. Fire is gutting this monstrous land.

Your story’s not suitable for a child, the burnt breeze whispers, the small sour wind.

This is my apartment. She has never seen it, it has never seen her, it is mine, all mine. I never — hardly ever — think of her here. The flat belongs to another age, like me. Tall and cool and elegant.

— Lagoon-like mirrors with a blackened bloom that I’ve asked Lucia to leave untouched. The ornate plaster ceilings are too high to see clearly, ideal pale gardens, unpopulated. The windows soar effortlessly up from the green canal to the pigeon-pocked roof-tops. They are windows taller than the tallest woman and swagged by my orders with umber velvet, tied with strong cords of twisted silk which would hang or strangle the man who took her…

Get out of it, Alex, it’s my turn now. I’m going to tell the world, you see, I’m going to tell the ones I love, whatever that means, whoever is left. The children — the child — perhaps. My friends. Who are my friends? There is the sorrow; we lost our friends.

I’m going to pretend that everyone cares, that nothing on earth can matter as much as remembering what my life has been.

I do believe it, in a way. I do believe that each life matters. What do they say? Not a sparrow falls… Christopher Court must count more than a sparrow. I shall sing as I fall, in any case, I shall finish my song to my own satisfaction before the sea swells up and sucks us down.

I have to find out who I am, you see, before I sink back towards non-being.

Christopher Court is an invented name, which isn’t a good start when I want you to believe every word I say. It’s an anglicisation of Czaycowski, a Polish-Jewish name. My father believed in caution, though he refused to believe persecution existed. Desperate to be ordinary, he pooh-poohed anti-semitism.

And indeed my beginnings were ordinary. I was the only son of a prosperous Jewish accountant and a pretty, clever, English-woman, daughter of a county family and therefore uneducated (and perhaps that’s why I loved my half-educated wife, for my mother was always sweet to me, my mother loved me till the day she died… I should have killed Alexandra before she could leave me).

An only child; my beginnings were lonely — I longed for someone to make me complete.

My mother and father met in London when she was being finished. He told her the time in a dusty garden square in the 1920s. My mother told me there were starlings and daisies. She forgot her handbag because he confused her with his shiny black hair and curious accent; my father saw the bag and ran after her, catching her up by the dark wood chalet where they sold pink-iced penny buns and tea. They talked about the birds in the garden, and buses, which in fact my mother had never used, but she stared at the icing and talked about buses and thrilled to my father’s Polish twang.