Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

— Mary turned round and smiled at me. There was no shadow; she smiled at me. She’s accepted me back, right from the start. There’s a clear radiance about her thinking, a total inability to lie or waste time. She knows what she wants. But she wants me! And she could hardly believe I wanted her.

She was looking beautiful that day, classically dressed in her funeral blacks, with her hair pulled back from that milky forehead. (I wish she dressed like that more often; most of the time she looks a mess; occasionally it irritates me.) After the service I went to Susy; she took my hand, she held my hand, then she put her arms round me and leaned against me. Phil stood beside us, smiling all the time, smiling the smile of an idiot, actually, but now I know him I know he’s quite normal; athletes are probably never super-bright… (that’s unfair. He’s just different from me. Not educated at Oxford in the last century.) Most of me was wrapped up in my daughter; I was truly moved by our embrace, but my eyes still strayed over to the corner of the room where the elegant widow stood among her children, Jessica weeping, the magic circle, I longed but feared to speak to her…

Then she caught my eye, hugged Jessica, said something to them and they all came over; as simply as that; I went to shake her hand, her pale hand with all the rings, square and lined but smooth to the touch, and instead she reached up her face and kissed me, her cool soft mouth, right on the lips, the gentle kiss I did not deserve, for I hadn’t got back in time to see him…

‘Mary, I’m so sorry…’

‘Christopher, you’ve had a terrible time…’

And that set the tone of things, right from the start; she worried about me; she cared about me. Perhaps it distracted her from her grief, for Susy says she was half-mad with grief, but perhaps Susy exaggerates, for Mary seems very fond indeed of me.

I’m afraid I talk and she listens. She’s led a very quiet life, you see. Nothing’s happened to her; she says so herself. Whereas I have decades of drama to talk out. The horrors of the prison. I’ve told no one. One particular warder who hated limeys, who spat whenever he heard my voice, who went in before me when I had to clean the latrines and peed on the floor, spraying all over, as steady as a mechanical sprinkler, and then he showed me his big slack penis and said ‘Don’t complain or you’ll have to lick it up, and you’ll have to lick this, you stuck-up asshole…’ There are too many things like that to tell. She’s lived a sheltered life, but she seems unshockable; she listens, and her mild blue eyes fill with sorrow.

Of course I don’t want her to pity me. Well, only a little, when I need pity. I talk about all the other things too, the marvellous years of travelling, the things we saw, the things we did… I try not to talk about Alex too much; I don’t entirely like it when she talks about Matthew, and I don’t want to make her jealous, though she shows no signs of jealousy…

She doesn’t talk about her feelings. Admittedly I don’t pry. But she’s happy with me. I think so; I know so. She sits half-smiling in the window and listens, perhaps sewing something, perhaps knitting something, perhaps shelling peas for a light summer lunch, any one of her quaint twentieth-century habits which I admit can sometimes get under my skin; but most of the time they’re soothing…

One day I had somehow strayed on to the topic of Alex and how she had deceived me. It does no good to go on about it, it isn’t tactful, I know I shouldn’t, but nevertheless it’s a painful subject and the rhythm of her fingers, inexorably shuttling, pausing not at all as I stripped my soul, suddenly became unbearable to me, and I broke off my story and said a little sharply, ‘Why do you always have to do that?’

She looked up steadily, but didn’t stop knitting. ‘Because I don’t like to waste my time.’ For a moment I saw a glint of something steely, but then she was smiling; I’d imagined it. After a life like mine, one imagines things.

In any case, I know she loves me.

— The question of love-making. At our age, the issue is not a simple one, for all I knew she had given it up, Matthew had been ill for a very long time, for all I knew she would slap my face, she had never struck me as libidinous woman… I, alas, am a libidinous man, but I wouldn’t have risked upsetting her. I have adequate ways of relieving my lust, more than adequate, of which more later, but fantasy cannot supply a friend, and she was my friend, and precious to me. I wrestled with the problem; best not to ask her. I left politely at the end of each evening.

Until four or five months after Matthew’s death. I had just moved into the house in Chelsea, a long way away from Islington. I kissed her as I made for the door, as usual, warmly but respectfully on both cheeks… when she took my head between her two hands, looked me in the eye, smiled at me, and said, ‘You don’t want to trek back all that way. Stay the night. Sleep with me.’

I was flabbergasted. I swallowed hard. But I was already pulling my coat off. ‘Do you mean it, Mary?’

‘Why else would I say it?’

In the bedroom she delighted me with the grace of her heavy body. I had always been attracted to thin women, but now I saw the beauty of solid flesh, her big pale breasts, her curving hips. Indeed I felt too thin myself. I was uneasily aware of my bony knees. Maybe less fashionable women aged better.

And she was passionate! Why had I feared she was not sexual? She was tender and direct, and very active. I took her in my arms; she took me in her arms. Her arms were big and strong and smooth. I pulled her to the bed; she pulled me to the bed. I kissed her passionately, masterfully, and felt her tongue push between my lips. Then Mary climbed on top of me.

It wasn’t just duty; she wanted to come; I wasn’t used to her, remember, and after all I am seventy-two, and I didn’t move quite fast enough for her, leaving her panting with desire, and she made me finish her off with my fingers when I was lying stunned by my own orgasm, so contented that it made me forgetful.

(Which never happens with virtual reality. Sometimes it spoils you for real life.)

I felt triumphant, all the same, that night. Now I had a mistress. Perhaps we would marry. Admittedly I was still married to Alex… why the hell was I still married to Alex? She was infinitely small and far away, and Mary was here, and she smelled of lavender, not chemical lavender but garden lavender, for that night she’d been making lavender bags as we sat in the lamplight and talked of the past, her gentle fingers sorting and bunching…

‘Are you happy, Mary?’ I asked her later. She wasn’t asleep; the light was still on; we were in the double bed she must have shared with Matthew. I was smoking, and she was staring at the ceiling; her large blue eyes looked far away. I was happy, so she must be happy.

‘Uhn.’ Her grunt evaded the issue.

I had to know that she was happy; could I still make a woman happy?

‘But are you? — I feel completely happy.’ Perhaps it wasn’t true, but I believed it.

She sat up abruptly and stared at me. Her steady eyes could be unnerving. ‘How could I be completely happy? Matt only died a few months ago.’

— I had the sudden sense of being nothing, nobody, the merest bit-part in a mighty opera. Silly, of course. I know she adores me — it was just a case of post-coital blues.

No one has mentioned marriage yet, though we’ve been going out together now for nearly two years. No one has mentioned living together. Perhaps it’s because we’re both so busy. I wasn’t happy in the Chelsea house; I was lonely in the Chelsea house; I stuck it for less than eighteen months; a year or so ago I gave it up.