by Maggie Gee
After
Gerda and Winston burst up, soaked. They are panting like dogs. The light is blinding; they gape and squinny; water shakes off their hair in a fountain. They are in a round house full of water-lilies, pink, cream, purple, with golden stamens, in a round calm pool, in a round calm house. It is all in colour: it’s glorious. The leaves are bronzed green, like giant plates, the largest over a metre across, with a delicate upturned rim like pie-crust. Winston capsizes one by sitting on it. It’s warm in here, as warm as life. One of the visitors strolling round the pool spots Gerda’s shining, heart-shaped face and drenched red hair among the lily-cups, and says to his wife ‘See that? I swear that child just came out of the lily.’
Winston is peering through the windows, which are silvered with moisture, wreathed in creeper. Suddenly he sees his brother: ‘Franklin!’ Winston is off like a rocket, but Gerda, being older, runs a bit faster, and by the big creaking cast-iron doors with their Victorian name-plate, ‘Kew Gardens, London’, she catches him, and kisses him on the lips.
‘Errrhh!’ he shouts, and wipes it off, but when he is reunited with Franklin, he whispers something in his ear, and laughs, and just for a moment Franklin looks jealous. But they stand there, rocking, holding each other, punching and patting, wordless with pleasure.
Out in the sun, it’s a holiday.
Everyone has come for the summer solstice. The yellow-green grass is spread lightly with bodies; people picnic in little groups. Bees drowse over the buddleias. There is a heat-haze of butterflies; Gerda pauses to watch her red one; its velvety eyes are blurred, sleepy. People drift slowly between the families. Ian has his arm round Angela, who looks entirely different today, more human and more animal; she has lost her shoes, her clothes are rumpled, but Ian tells her, ‘You’re beautiful.’ Ian has plans for Angela, later, if he can stay awake in the heat.
The children dart about like gnats, picking titbits from the grown-ups’ picnics, all of them bossed about by Gerda, though Dwayne is nearly twice her age. Gerda has got them all doing handstands: ‘Copy me, I’m the one who can do it!’ The boys jerk gracelessly about like frogs, then Leah, looking at Gerda disdainfully, dips into an effortless series of cartwheels, and instantly has Gerda in thrall.
This is the place of perpetual summer. Harold is watching a V of birds, pointing its arrow in the golden instant; just as he catches it, his lashes fall. Bruno is here; there is room for Bruno. Sent to the island in the middle of the lake, opposite the earth of a pair of foxes, the cubs not ready to be adult, yet, their noses snub, their look a little bashful – he lies in the grass, where no one can get to him, no one can hurt him, no one can judge him, soaking up light, soaking up sun.
Kilda is here. It has all come to pass. She is recognized. She is somebody. Her mother is beside her, smaller than her. Faith’s legs are bare. She stares at the sun. No more cleaning, no more struggles. She is the woman in the Hopper picture.
Alfred stumps back from the distant café, bringing May and her mother a cup of tea. ‘What do you think of Kew, Alfred?’ ‘Not bad at all, duck. Well, a bit showy.’ The two women sit there, quietly. May is stroking her mother’s hair; it is infinitely familiar, but different. May reads, and dozes, half-wakes for a second, gazes into the blue beyond.
Lola and Gracie doze and sunbathe, happy nymphets in bra and pants, rocked to sleep by their favourite Tupac; no one but Davey and Delorice can hear them, because of the magic of the solstice, although they are playing it fabulously loud: I ain’t mad atcha, I ain’t mad atcha …
Every bone and muscle springy and weightless, Davey and Delorice dance in their moment.
No one is mad here, no one is angry. Moira floats with her dog down the river, the sun on its coat as red as love, and Milly and Samuel watch and pray. The greatest of these was always love … ‘Love one another’ is the whole of the law.
Winston (tall Winston) and little Dirk White are playing football with Mohammed, who hasn’t told them he once played for Loya; neither Dirk nor Winston is much good at the game, but they’re having fun, they could play all day –’Nances,’ says Alfred, but very quietly, pausing to watch, and when the ball comes over, missed yet again by Dirk’s left foot, Alfred can’t resist, he traps it, neatly, and dribbles in masterfully from the wing, running, surely, like he did as a boy, but ‘Pass, Dad, pass,’ yells Dirk, excited, and Alfred remembers not to show his son up, passes, and Dirk pokes it into the net. Mohammed, in goal, pretends to look astonished. May puts her book down and gives Dirk a clap. ‘Alfred! Come and sit down with me.’ The heat is terrific: soon they will rest, lie down easily among the others.
Some of the children are already dreaming. Lottie sleeps near the long rose-beds, blonde head lolling in Harold’s lap. She has been happy; that was her gift; she has loved it all, every moment of it, each touch of the hot sun on her body – loved it more than words could say; life in the light was a glory, a wonder; but nobody can bear the day for ever. All over the garden, they are softening, yielding.
Safe in the grass, the bodies lie, stunned by the arc of the sun through the sky.
Dreaming themselves, they are as they wish. All that they ever hoped to be.
Here they come now, arm in arm, flowing like water into their future. They pass without seeing us, homing, home, here in the city whose name is time, glimpsed long ago, across the river, the ideal city which was always waiting – the lit meadows, the warm roof-tops, caught in these steady shafts of sunlight. City suspended over the darkness. Above the waters that have covered the earth, stained waters, bloody waters, water heaving with wreck and horror, pulling down papers, pictures, peoples; a patch of red satin, a starving crow, the last flash of a fox’s brush. City which holds all times and places.
See, here they come, where all are welcome.
Here we come, to lie down at last.
Maggie Gee
The White Family
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002
Shortlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award 2004
‘Maggie Gee’s novel takes flight.’
New York Times
‘Finely judged and compulsively readable.’
The Guardian
‘A transcendent work.’
Daily Telegraph
Alfred White, a London park-keeper, rules his home with ferocity and tenderness. May, his clever wife, loves him but conspires against him. When Alfred collapses on duty, his beautiful daughter Shirley, who lives with Elroy, a black social worker, is brought face to face with her younger brother Dirk, who hates and fears all black people. The scene is set for violence. This ground-breaking novel takes on the taboo subject of race as it looks at love, hatred, sex, comedy and death in an ordinary British family.
‘A triumph of hope over despair, reconciliation over bitterness.’
The Independent
‘One of the year’s finest novels. It deserves the widest possible readership.’
Literary Review
‘Outstanding … tender, sexy and alarming.’
Jim Crace
SAQI
www.saqibooks.com
Maggie Gee
Light Years
‘Sublimely funny and infinitely subtle, Light Years is pure delight.’
Daily Telegraph
‘In the tradition of the best romantic comedy.’
The Observer
Lottie Lucas is the luckiest person she knows. She has looks, money, three houses and a teenage son she adores … So why is her husband Harold walking out on her?
Lottie and Harold track each other across a bizarre mid-1980s Britain and a hot summer in Paris. As the year turns full circle – the time it takes light to travel six million million miles – the power of love is affirmed.
Light Years is also about zoos and the zodiac; the seasons and the stars; and how humans see the natural world. It is a novel about the possibilities of happiness, a surprising and beautiful contemporary love story.
‘Energe
tic and beguiling.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘This is so fine a novel, because so completely a planned and crafted one.’
TLS
SAQI
www.saqibooks.com
Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ in 1983. Since then she has published eight novels to great acclaim, including Grace, The Ice People and Light Years. Her last novel The White Family (Saqi) was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2004. She is the first woman Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.