Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I won’t make that mistake again. I try and value all my friends. My family and my many friends. I am grateful for them. Thanks to them, I don’t feel like someone who’s been left behind.

And now because for once I am on my own I start to glimpse them everywhere, a head turns and I think it’s Dan, his gaunt boy’s face, his dear thin neck; over there is surely Henrietta Pickering, laughing at a satyr and shaking her hair; that woman bent over two young children is Susy, not long in the future; there’s Christopher, an old man, haunted-looking, arm round a woman who might be his daughter.

I think I could have a perfectly nice time just wandering about and looking at people, but I see EDVARD MUNCH announced over there, so I leave them behind, my crowd of friends. If I don’t see the Munchs my daughter will be furious.

The first dozen pictures are an unpleasant shock.

All the women on the walls are Alexandra.

Munch has painted her again and again, a sinuous siren with flaming hair. Great heavy heads of crimson hair you would think would make their shoulders ache.

Why are so many men obsessed with redheads?

Why are painters obsessed with redheads?

He loves the body, this Munch, like me. He paints beautiful, joyous, sexual bodies. But the soul always seems to weigh them down, staring out of the skull behind their eyes. Most of the men are lustful or jealous; the women are seductive or haunted or sad… actually everything in life seems sad. I really don’t think I like this painter.

I don’t believe all life is sad… but then, I’m a body person, not a head person.

‘The Frieze of Life’, the caption reads; the blurb underneath is full of superlatives. Apparently these are his master-works…

Alexandra. Always Alexandra. I didn’t come here to see bloody Alexandra. All the muses are Alexandra. She’s always the figure at the centre of the story, right in the thick of the drama, radiant. Aware that everyone’s eyes are on her but not looking at anyone. Not bothering. She doesn’t have to, she’s there to be seen. And she makes all the other people shadowy, they all fade away into her penumbra.

I hated her when Matthew wanted her. In my heart I hated her. I disapproved of myself, but I wanted to kill her. She had Christopher, she held him as tightly as if they had married the day before, he was a great dog panting after her, and I wanted him, his big heavy body, his hotness, the roughness of the kiss I once saw him give her when she had been limbo dancing at a party, oblivious to him and all of us, with another man, a handsome black boy, and he stopped her laughing with a passionate kiss, crushing her thin body against his body — I wanted him then, not now! I wanted him then, and she had it all! I say I believe in faithful love, but now I burned to make Christopher unfaithful.

Only he wouldn’t have wanted me then. Whereas Matthew wanted Alex. She could have had Matthew if she’d lifted her finger; perhaps she thought him not worth having, how dare Alexandra despise my husband? But in the end she tired of everyone; she tired of Christopher. Even him. And then he came running back home to me, a thin old dog, beaten, exhausted.

‘The Dance of Life’ from ‘The Frieze of Life’. What a strange picture… and yet, when I look back over my life, it is like a dance, with us all changing partners.

A dozen people at twilight dancing by the sea, with the moon carving a path over the waves. There are couples and a few single people. In the foreground, there are two women watching, one on the left, young and pretty, obviously just waiting to join in, but not quite ready to make her move. The other on the right is a lot older. Munch has made her a straight black column, her face not unbeautiful, quite beautiful really, but desolate because she has already left the dance. She must have been replaced by someone else, or else her partner has died and left her… She’s staring in a steady, melancholy way at the couple at the centre of the picture.

And there centre-stage is that accursed Alexandra, with her red-gold hair, her scarlet dress. And the tense dark figure of the man who holds her. He’s unsmiling, in a trance, a dream of love, and their linked bare hands at thigh level somehow suggest they are already fucking, his arm and hand invade the shape of her dress, but her eyes seem to gaze away over his shoulder…

That must be me, the tall woman in black. The widow watching them. Knowing it’s too late. It’s too late for me, Alexandra will come back, in triumph, still red-headed and beautiful, and Christopher will have no time for me…

Rubbish, nonsense, what self-pitying rubbish. The picture makes me impatient too.

The air of tragedy hanging over them all. They are dancing, for God’s sake! They are in love! They are all dancing by the moonlit summer sea! Why must they look so sad about it? Is life really such a tragic business? I’m a happy woman. I’ve led a happy life. If Matt were still alive I’d be completely happy.

I walk hurriedly on into the next room and at once I see the peculiar thing, the thing that is wrong and out of place, but the room is so big, and my eyes so imperfect, that I can’t quite make out what it is, and I think it’s of no importance.

The room holds the largest pieces on display, murals Munch did for Oslo University, photographs on canvas, since the originals can’t travel.

At the far end is a magnificent sun, rising in glory over the sea, brilliant, dazzling, holding my eyes, the rays painted in as broken lines of gold, red, orange, pale lemon, blue, the centre of the sun a burning white. That must be what they mean by ‘incandescent’. The moment after the sun has risen, but as if the painter had half-closed his eyes to protect his brain against the light. The light is so stunning; can it really be painted?

I love that painting. I don’t know if it’s good, I don’t know if art critics think it’s good, but I, Mary Brown, think it’s wonderful. The best painting in the whole exhibition, the most important, surely. The sun gives life to everything, after all. It giveth, and it taketh away. The meaning of life isn’t those self-indulgent dancers.

There are no human figures in the mural; nothing could stand up to the heat of that sun, anything else would look trivial, pathetic.

Like the thing on the floor in front of it. The thing I half saw when I first came into the room. The bundle of dark clothes at its feet, which I can now see is person, not a thing.

It’s a kneeling person, head down on the floor. The head was invisible from the door and even now I can only see the back of it, a grizzled old head lying flat on the marble, the hair partly hidden by the dark cape which covers the rest of the body. He has fallen, or he’s praying — is he in some kind of religious trance? Is he in pain? Is he doubled up with pain?

Why is everyone staying down the other end of the room? Oh God, I’ll have to help, as usual, because no one else can be bothered to help. — Is he having a breakdown? Is he crazy?

I’ve really had enough of other people’s problems. Today I am supposed to be having a rest. Having a rest and ‘recharging my batteries’. That marvellous sun might be doing it for me if I didn’t have to worry about that poor man…

If I try and speak to him, he won’t understand me. I’ll leave it to a native to sort it out.

Still I stand a moment, undecided, my eyes drawn down from the sun to the body, from the glory above to the wretched thing below. As I stand there hovering three apparent natives pass by without a single glance, their eyes fixed firmly on higher things, and in the end I have no choice. I am human, whatever that means — what if it were Jessica kneeling there, giving birth with no one to care for her…?