Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Let me tell you they know nothing at all.

People lapped up the newspaper stories — the wife, the lover, the smoking gun, the white-haired avenger ranting and weeping… Not seeing that the things that happened bore only the thinnest relation to what might have been. To all the potential of that one moment. (I might not have shot. I need not have shot. If I’d simply flourished the gun and threatened… or I might have aimed better, and smashed him to pieces.)

The mystery is always what didn’t happen, but nobody found us mysterious. They thought we were gamblers, high rollers, the rich, extravagant players in bloody dramas.

There you are, you see, I was a hero for them. A cuckold, perhaps, but dashing, violent. I like the image, but it wasn’t the truth. On the day of the shooting I wrecked three lives, and didn’t even manage to kill the intruder… There was nothing heroic about that day. My heroic act had been fifteen years earlier.

I can’t remember any more if it was Alex’s idea or mine to go away and never come back… nearly two decades ago. How young we must have been.

— Young enough to be forgiven, perhaps, by all the people we must have hurt?

No, because fifty-two is hardly young. It starts to seem young, you see, as I nose up from three score and ten… At the time I recall it felt old. So old I was almost panicky. I felt it was then or never if we were ever to do what we longed to do. A last-minute break for freedom, that’s what I thought we’d done.

Before we took the terrific step, in the last few years we were living in England, there were moments when I’d look at Alexandra, perhaps sitting on the staircase, reading a book, at the loose treble clef of her seated body, and I’d think to myself, she’s still young. And I still felt young — I was in love, you see, whenever I had time to notice, which is a way of staying young. And I wanted us to live, not exist, while we were still young enough to enjoy it, while Alex still looked like a swan waking up as her head looked briefly up at the skylight, and my hand still ached to touch her long white neck. I thought, we don’t have to grow old.

I’m not claiming we were so special. Surely everyone must have moments like that, moments of longing, premonitions of regret, when you see life closing in on you, or death, I suppose, to be exact.

(While we’re on the subject of dying, I don’t want anyone to fly me ‘home’. Bribe Lucia’s husband to spirit me away. I want to be scattered over my sparkling, lethal Venetian sea. Or across one of the lesser-known squares at sunset, when all the children run about. They can brush me off their shoes at bedtime. I’d like to be dust on the children’s shoes… other people’s children are sweeter than one’s own, easier to love, less critical.)

My kids said we were selfish to go. Down the years, they must have said it again and again. But maybe selfishness isn’t all bad. Selfless people are empty people. When people say someone’s selfish, they usually mean they’re jealous of them, or wish they had the nerve to act the same way.

— It’s selfish to be true to yourself. Selfish to suffer less than everyone else. It’s selfish to be too happy.

So Alex and I were selfish, yes. Having made our bed, we refused to lie on it. We didn’t accept that we should stay home and grow old. We didn’t accept it was the children’s turn now (because it never would be their turn, would it, if they had children too?) Women have done it for centuries, lived for the future of their children. And where has it got women?

Precisely nowhere. Those tired sad faces.

But Alex and I went round the world.

No, it’s all right, I’m not upset. I’ll pause for a moment to light the candles. But the sky in the window, clear blue, reminds me. I am upset, you can see I’m crying, and I see myself, striking in the ruined mirror, a silver-haired actor with shining eyes, still playing Tristan now in my dotage.

I know I’m absurd, but it’s right to cry. I’m remembering the greatest deed of my life. I’m remembering the triumph we both felt when we realised we had done it, when we sat in a tiny bar in Budapest and looked ahead into uncalendared weeks, weeks without deadlines or dreary duties.

Time was suddenly on our side. Time became ours, and infinite. A bell was ringing in the clear blue night. We looked through the door at a completely new skyline, tender declivities, yearning spires.

That was when we knew we would never die.

Because life, which had been narrow and episodic, endlessly divided into crowded rooms, had opened up, in one effortless movement, into all the world and the air beyond.

Alex, my love. Do you remember?

She must remember.

Alexandra.

I’ve been travelling for twenty years but I still miss the English newspapers. Even the word has a marvellous nostalgic flavour, it sounds like the comfortable rustle of pages and the hiss of a coffee percolator somewhere, lovely sounds from the twentieth century when there were half a dozen decent papers in London… here there isn’t one worth reading. I’ve stayed loyal to my past in that respect, though lazier people and the new illiterates get everything from television.

I hunger for a newspaper now, this evening, which is too hot for walking and in any case unsafe for me to walk the streets on my own, with Benjamin sulking God knows where. I’m too tired (again) to write the letter to Mary Brown that I’ve owed for going on two years. Writing is dangerous, it makes you think, whereas reading fills up emptiness.

I could lie here with my pisco sour and my newspaper, stretched out on the shaky little sofa which is the most comfortable piece of furniture in our room and indeed in the whole Hostal Libertad, the whole wrecked, bald Bolivian hotel so laughably proud of its satellite tv though the lavatories are a disgusting joke and the shower is never more than half-warm — I could put my feet up and spread my red hair over the sun-bleached cushion and look both preoccupied and spectacular to Benjy when he comes back drunk (he’s still in love with me. Poor foolish Benjy). I’d devour the paper cover to cover, politics, scandals, health, psyche, not forgetting the fashion, if you can call the new cottons fashion… what bliss it would be, sipping and reading, though a pisco sour is not the same without ice.

Lovely, lovely print. Of course I love it, it made me rich, print was what I worked at, never awfully hard, until we turned our lives into theatre. Even now I might go back to it one day. Sometimes I jot down a note or two. Names of flowers, or birds. I do research. I walk a lot. I take an interest. I thought I might write a travel romance, but life’s too distracting, and I lose heart. One day, though. One day I might do it… If things don’t pan out. If I can’t have my baby.

So long ago now it all seems like a dream… To think I once made money, instead of just spending it. The most frivolous woman in the world, that’s what Stuart called me a few years ago… Seven years ago. How they stretch out. ‘Alexandra, you were born to be a lily of the field…’ Men always underestimate women. I made us rich, I could do it again, I could do anything I choose, I’m not a back number…

OK, everyone has forgotten me, but one day I shall astonish them. Five years after Chris and I went away the publishers were still begging me to write another book, chasing us from poste restante to poste restante. But I didn’t bother to answer, and the film of Gold Cards was never made.

No one but me remembers now that in 1985, my annus mirabilis, my picture was featured in every magazine in Britain. I still keep the photo they used in my handbag. I get a little thrill of something — shock, pride, grief, amusement? — telling myself that was really me. A sunny photo Christopher took on the lawn after Sunday lunch one day — how fucking English my life once was! I look so innocent and girlish! — I was in my thirties, but I could be eighteen, with a sea of red hair around my face, the living incarnation of Red Gold … I think people were amazed to see all writers weren’t ugly.