Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I hated her. Oh, I hated her!

She was once my friend. I hated her. Mary Brown. I hated her. She had everything, and she came to crow. They had come to crow. He must be here somewhere, Christopher and she were here together, and would always be together, and I was alone.

I ran from her. I ran away. Once I would have faced her, but now I ran, because I had nothing to face her with. Only the proof of all I had lost.

— Now all of them are hunting me. Death, the doctors, Christopher and Mary, come to throw their happiness in my face, come to stare and pity me. Things are speeding up, time’s running out… my precious seven days are leaking away.

I’ve wasted hours over the last two days getting myself back into battle-gear, getting myself ready to face the camera. My hair is red again, not a bad colour, a fraction too dark, but I look years younger. I’ve bought some lipstick and some new clothes.

To face Christopher. To let him see me. To hide from him what I’ve become. That woman’s seen me, but he won’t believe her, he’ll think she’s jealous, how ironic.

For no one would be jealous of me any more. Once I thought everyone envied me…

She looked so different. Stronger, prouder. Her face had lost its puddingy look. Her hair was grey, like mine, but drawn back in a rather imposing knot. She looked younger than I am. How could that be? She always looked at least a decade older…

It’s a quiet life, I suppose. The quiet life of the virtuous matron. I expect she bakes for him. Bloody sponges. I expect she still makes lavender bags, I remember one day how amazed I was, I dropped round to see her to borrow some apples one Sunday after the shops were shut and she was sitting on the lawn, sorting lavender heads, little grey moth-bodies, hundreds of them, and she said she was making lavender-bags. To go in her drawers! Did she mean her knickers? Are her bloody knickers full of stinking moths? I hope they’re unhappy, I hope they don’t do it, I hope he can never do it again, since I can never have him again…

I don’t want to see him, I daren’t let him see me.

I have to see him or I shall die.

I’ll have to leave Paris; I can’t leave Paris. I can’t leave Paris till I’ve made up my mind.

To fight or float.

Death, or the doctors?

I let two weeks pass before I telephoned him. It was easy not to phone; I was so terribly busy, and besides, he had my number. Christopher could have telephoned me.

And I said to myself, You imagined it. You hadn’t seen her for twenty years. Why unsettle him for nothing?

Or I said to myself, She knew it was you. She didn’t want anything to do with you. It would be a kindness to leave her alone. Leave Christopher with his illusions.

But I didn’t want him with his illusions. With his illusions he would never love me — not properly, not completely.

Besides, I wanted to talk to him. I began to miss him and want him back. It was marvellous to be with Jessica and Sam but I was beginning to get exhausted; at first I had spent the nights with Jessica, since there was no one else to do the nights, sleeping in the same room as them and bringing the child to her when he woke, then changing the nappy and putting him down, but the tiredness was cumulative. I was sixty-four, not a young mother, and as Jessica began to get her strength back I started to feel mine draining away. I wanted to have my quiet life back. I wanted my life with Christopher, the things we did, which were right for our age, the quiet evenings, the little treats, the gentle pace of two elderly people. I missed our love-making, too.

I rang him. He was pleased to hear me, perhaps not quite as pleased as he should have been but the warmth and love in his voice were soothing…

— He hadn’t been desperate, though. He hadn’t been dying to hear me. He asked about Jessica; I told him. I gave him five minutes of Jessica and Sam, more than I usually talked about myself but I had been living it very intensively; babies are absorbing — to parents, or grandparents. Christopher was mad about his granddaughter, of course, but he didn’t show all that much interest in Sam, after checking the address to send Jessica flowers…

I knew I had something of more interest to tell him but I put it off; Chris was mine, for the moment, even if he wasn’t entirely listening. Once I mentioned Alexandra I’d be pushed aside…

And all of a sudden I thought, No. I’m much too old to worry about that. He’s very lucky to have me. If he doesn’t know that, he’s a fool. And she was a wreck. As she probably deserves to be. Wreckers get wrecked, in the end. If he wants her, fine. I don’t care. I’m not lonely. I’ll do fine on my own.

‘Alexandra is in Paris,’ I said.

Together we travelled all over the world, a glittering, shifting mosaic of places. Odd how few end up meaning anything. And so I come back again and again to the same ones, because they have meaning. Not because they are exotic, or strange. Because I loved them. Because life was here. I loved the place in Mexico City, because it was mine, and ordinary. Paris, so banally beautiful. The little place we stayed in in Western Samoa where no one realised we were rich, we were staying in a family home where we shared one small room with a view of palms and the creamy surf through the glass-less window, our tiny, sunlit shanty… But when we went back the fourth year running it had been knocked down to make room for a hotel.

— Looking back now from twenty years later I realise I loved the house in Islington, even though I went round the world to escape it. I did love it. I knew it, I lived there, I could rest there and not notice it. It folded around me like a body. Every corner had memories. The monkey-puzzle tree, the red hibiscus, which always seemed to promise escape and adventure…

And now, in my mind, I come back to them all, the well-known places, and there aren’t so many, for now I can’t escape any more, now I have to find somewhere to die.

Christopher didn’t come looking for me. It was only vanity to think he might. If he’d come looking, he would have found me, for I went to all our favourite places, and at first I looked immaculate, I brushed my henna-ed hair till it shone, I put on my painful high-heeled shoes which went oddly with the fashionable cotton but Christopher always loved high heels, Christopher loved my legs in high heels, and even now my legs are good, long and sinewy and almost too thin… I staggered gamely in my dated high heels to the Ile de la Cité, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Jeu de Paume where the Van Goghs still flamed, and my lips were painted as brightly as them, and I stopped every hour to look in the mirror, for I did not want him to find me defenceless.

In the end I got tired, for he never came. They never came. They had both lost interest. Of course he did not. He would have run a mile. She would have told him she saw me, mad, pathetic, a crawling wreck on the floor of the Louvre.

Perhaps he stayed away because he loved me. Perhaps he wanted to remember me the way I was when we were together. Chrisopher was always a romantic…

But what about me; what about me? I am real, and dying, and need him now. I am all that is left of the woman he loved; surely he owes it me to come and find me? Wouldn’t that be the romantic thing to do?

The ultimatum I’d agreed with the doctors slipped past unnoticed. I had done nothing. After another two weeks of wandering Paris, my clothes less smart, my hair less glossy, the high heels abandoned for walking shoes, my ports of call more frequently a bottle of good red in a friendly cafe than a sentimental point de repère, I decided I had to go home. My real home, not my imaginary home. Hope was exhausting; I had run out. Time to limp back to Mexico City.