Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

He would probably say it was no longer active.

He would certainly say there were no secondaries. It would be treatable by drugs, or by gentle radiation, there would certainly be no need to — no need to. I couldn’t finish the sentence, I’ve never been able to think about surgery. When I was young surgeons cut in through the skin, now the instruments inch along under the surface like tiny insects with razor jaws, but that doesn’t make it less frightening… I was too old for that, and my problem too slight. In two months the little lump hadn’t grown. Indeed I was almost sure it was smaller.

My consultant introduced himself with the kind of smile that still makes me feel beautiful, although I have learned it’s only charm. But he smiled at me as if I were healthy, as if our meeting was good news. I went through that day’s battery of tests without too much discomfort; I felt jaunty, and joked with the nurses, though I was a bit sharp with a glamorous young woman who I assumed was a bossy nurse, until she turned out to be a senior doctor. Even a feminist can make these slips.

It was tea-time before I was brought back to the consultant’s room. I knocked and came in; he was standing at the window, staring out at something fascinating I couldn’t see. I was eager to get this over with, to have my good news and go away, back into the fresh white day again. I wanted him to turn and smile at me.

He turned, and spoke. ‘My colleagues tell me…’

I didn’t understand. It wasn’t good news, it wasn’t the news I knew he would give me. I listened with a growing sense of disbelief. There were secondaries in my spine. He was asking whether I had had any pain. I looked at him, stunned, and did not answer, but I thought about the question, and yes, of course, my back had sometimes been painful, but all backs were painful, weren’t they, all middle-aged backs ached once in a while…

I thought, it’s because I annoyed that doctor; and then, they’ve confused me with someone else, and then, how silly, I’m going to die, just when I’d decided to get better again.

He was eager that I start treatment at once. I said I had to think about things. He said there was really no time for delay; every day I wasted, the cancer was spreading. A terrible phrase; the cancer was spreading…

He had such power. They have such power. They can tell you the thing you most want to know, they are fortune-tellers with scans and scalpels, staring into breasts and hearts and bones, and to someone else he would say ‘You will live,’ he would give them the world with a charming smile, and to me he had said ‘You will probably die. You will die unless you give in to me.’

I resisted him. It took all my courage; I was alone, he was stronger than me, the weight of the building massed behind him, the rows of figures, irrefutable; I told him I needed a week. Not much could go wrong in a week, surely. Perhaps I would decide tomorrow, who knows, but I said seven days; a breathing space; in seven days God created the world, seven days was enough to remake myself.

I left buoyed up by resisting him. I floated the three blocks back to the hotel; through the cotton-wool I was aware it was cold, with the sudden fierce winds that are common now, I don’t remember them when I was younger, they weren’t so cruel when I was young.

Up in the lift. It seemed cold and dark. The door of my room closed behind me like death. My brief buoyancy drained away. I was alone. I would always be alone. No one to tell. No one to care. The maid had been in and made the bed. It was a double bed, but no one would join me. She had turned back the covers in a ruler-straight line, lifting the lid of loneliness.

Once I had thought I would lie with him for the rest of my life, die with him…

Now he slept with… madness. Madness to think of him now.

I missed my darling. I missed my love.

I lived for love. Love left me.

Inside the room I was trapped with loss, a tightening noose of lonely terror, for nothing would change for me now; I had burned my boats, there was no one to turn to… Outside, the winds were freezing cold. I chose outside without a flicker of doubt. I wrapped myself in the black cowled cape I had bought for cool evenings in Mexico City, phoned for a taxi and ran downstairs, down the sweeping Cinderella staircase because I didn’t want to be boxed in the lift, falling through the series of gold-framed mirrors that lined the pale pink walls of the staircase, and I was in the wrong fairy-story, I wasn’t young, I hadn’t been dancing, I was a small black shrivelled thing running from what was hunting me.

I flung myself into the taxi, and realised I didn’t know where I was going.

‘The Louvre’ I said to the bored driver. And indeed there had been something I wanted to see, something I’d made a note of already… I couldn’t remember. My brain had frozen. When I got there, though, the posters were everywhere. ‘Edvard Much,’ they said. ‘ You’re going to die, ’ the thin faces whispered. They reminded me sharply of Isaac’s drawn flesh and the biography of Munch I bought with such joy when for once he’d managed to ask me for something. But he was dying too quickly to look at it. I hurried past the posters into the building.

I’d always liked painters who painted redheads. When I was younger — when I was young — I used to enjoy taking Isaac to galleries and passing in front of the painted sirens, shaking my own prolific red hair — but I’m not a redhead any more. I wasn’t the figure at the heart of the paintings.

There was Isaac’s painting. ‘The Dance of Life’. Once I might have found the title faintly laughable, but now I found my eyes filling with tears. Life was a dance, I agreed with that, I wanted to stay part of it, I wanted so much to go on dancing, I still loved life, although I’d lost everything… — I was no longer the woman with the flaming red hair, locked in an embrace with the thick-set man. I stood to one side, in widow’s weeds. I had become an onlooker. Even so, life was too interesting to die, and the gnawing fear pressed under my ribs and made me walk on clumsily.

I did love life. Looking at life. Very recently I had been looking more. Once my vision was so selective; I looked at what I thought was beautiful, I looked at what I thought was distinguished. I was so sure, you see, that I myself was distinguished, different from the others, better than the others — but age makes everyone ordinary. And so I grew more interested in ordinary things — and found that none of it was ordinary, all of it was life, and life was miraculous, especially now I knew I might have to leave it, I didn’t want to, I didn’t, oh –

I half-ran into an enormous room, and at first I didn’t see what was there because I was too locked in my own terror, I was hurrying straight through to the other side, trying to escape, for it was pursuing me, they were pursuing me, where could I hide? — Then I saw the sun; so beautiful; an enormous sun rising from the sea, the rays coming out to pierce and embrace me, a white-gold sun which was waiting for me, a sun which had been painted for me; it was the sun itself, life itself, I hurried towards it, my hands held out, it held my eyes, it held the secret, we held each other, I was still alive, I knelt at its feet, eyes blurred with tears, and wished as I had never wished before, prayed as I’d never prayed before; help me, help me, I want to live. Perhaps I’m too late, but I want to live. I’m sorry, forgive me for what I have done…

And then she tapped me on the shoulder. I started, expecting a museum guard, I turned, and knew her instantly. She had hardly aged, but she was different. No longer plain. More frightening. She looked strong and tall. Stronger than me. Her face was a torment; pity, puzzlement…