My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  Me being annoying at Oxford

  And I simplify, I simplify. We were all very young. Some of them were certainly fond, and romantic, and wrote me poems, but took their cue from me. One bought me my first adult perfume, in a pale coffee suede box: Calèche, by Hermès. He was poor, and a student, and it smelled of Paris, and I loved him for years, though we were wrong for each other. Some of them by now are reformed characters, kindly citizens, fathers, grandfathers (though some are dead, divorced, or drunks). We all got what we wanted, at least some of the time, and the rest of the time, we got what we deserved. But that sounds punitive. I don’t want to punish my old raw self, so fresh from home, where nothing ever happened to prepare me for all this. I feel pity for that self, as well as shame. I had lived in a house where boundaries weren’t respected, where the women placated an angry man. I tried too hard to please, at first. Slowly I learned to reassess what I deserved.

  Something glorious I gained: a new name. The perfume-giver always called me Maggie. He knew actors; perhaps he was thinking of Maggie Smith. But almost as soon as I heard it, I liked it. I had always found my name burdensome. The ‘Gee’ was a problem, at Billingshurst Junior School, linking me to my head teacher father, making me mostly ‘Gee-gee’ (bearable) but sometimes the dreadful ‘Dobbin’s Daughter’ — (unbearable, as I have said). ‘Margaret’ had come from Princess Margaret, but you needed the ‘Princess’ to carry it off. It had too many consonants, and wasn’t beautiful, though I liked the meaning: pearl or daisy, as my mother told me when I asked her rather crossly why they’d called me that. But ‘Margaret Gee’ was all angles, assertive and solemn and rather smug, the name that was read out in school assemblies when I won a prize for something dull. When the chance arose, I couldn’t wait to get rid of it. Maggie was my new self: racier, happier. Every time I hear it, it sounds affectionate. ‘Maggie Gee’ was an excellent name for a writer, three short, rhythmic feet, with that pleasing rhyme and definitive rhythm: Magg-ie-GÈE, this-is-ME. It was one of the best things those years yielded.

  The late 1960s were not monogamous. I found it all too possible to love two men at the same time. It is possible, but it never works out, is a recipe for excitement and confusion, followed by farce, conflict, sadness. One at a time is a very good rule, but of course it is the risk of conception that enforces it, and for the first time in the history of our species — think what that means: in the blink of an eye, they flower and die, a thousand generations of lovers — I and my friends did not fear it. In retrospect, though never at the time, I see that this changed everything. We were surfing the first wave of foolproof contraception, and the dark tide of AIDS was still far away, out in the ocean, unimaginable: neither death nor adulthood would ever come (they would, they did, but we were oblivious). We had few worries, we swam in the sunshine and played, and if it went wrong, moved on.

  That was the theory, at any rate, though I often didn’t want to move on when they did, or they didn’t when I did, and it all went wrong; suddenly we were back on dry land; scenes on stairs, or outside stations. These often seemed to involve transport, which was fitting, given the men’s fleet-footedness. I remember one scene (though not the narrative context) when one gloriously dashing and polygamous swain, made voluble and highly persuasive by whisky but also insane and uncoordinated, was trying to persuade me we should leave an Intercity train, by the door, as we sped through the Oxfordshire countryside. I stopped him; at a deep level, despite my superficially risky behaviour, I always wanted to survive, and I did. Only once did I get to the point of asking for tranquillisers when something went wrong, for I have always been shy of medication, have never even taken a sleeping pill, though I go through phases of not sleeping. I remember sobbing on the floor at home, with the Valium pills in their packaging inside a paper bag three feet away on the table. I would go to the table, pick up the bag, open the packaging, take the pill. And the nearness of the possibility was so shocking that I stopped crying and got up off the floor. At some level I still loved my consciousness, even though it was a consciousness of pain and folly, and feared changing it, and losing myself.

  I remember sex in a churchyard; in a garden; in a room at a party where no one else was; with a famous male-to-female transexual and his friend (not half-way concluded, for obvious reasons). And yet I daresay I was having less sex than people who had quietly married at twenty. But the rest of the time I read and wrote, and I never did anyone’s washing or cooking, which left me much time to get on with my writing, which I did in a solid and serious way, and I did not even think about babies. I was learning, very slowly, more about men, and something about what it meant to be a woman.

  My best relationships then were with girls. My friend Barbara Goodwin, for example, a funny, brilliant, reed-thin redhead who knew more about everything than me, and taught me I could go to art galleries and theatres, and drove us to Yugoslavia, where I cooked hideous fry-ups of mackerel and we looked at huge stars over the unlit sea, and talked about Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy, and slowly revealed to each other the truth about our childhoods, as growing distance allowed us to discern it.

  At first I read her comically wrong. She was a Somerville Scholar, like me, and with the tact of Oxford education at the time, we not only had different gowns from the ‘commoners’, we were also housed separately in swanky new rooms. (Commoners! The tactlessness was unbelievable. Well done, Oxford! At the time, though, I was thankful to be a little queen. I came from Billingshurst, I had to have something.) But Barbara had a room further up the corridor, and came in and out quite late at night. She was beautiful, with her pale heart-shaped face and thick red hair waving over her shoulders, and dressed exquisitely in 1960s fashion, velvet and ruffles, long boots and long earrings, a floor-length patchwork coat, beady-eyed fox furs. When she spoke, her voice was thrillingly aristocratic, with glowing oval vowels like small stained glass windows. I was in love with her; I longed for her to be my friend, but wouldn’t that always be impossible? She swept about alone and dated young dons. At the beginning of the second term, she was coming upstairs as I was going down. A small smiling man, balding and cheery, was carrying up her cases. I thought, I suppose it is her butler. I tolerated this amiable representative of the working classes but I wanted him to leave me alone with Barbara. Only after he was gone did I learn, amazed, that this man was in fact Tom Goodwin, her father, that the peerless Barbara was from my own class, was naturally stylish, and had taken elocution. We were class congruous. I need not be afraid! Our friendship came on by leaps and bounds. She drove down to Billingshurst; she met my father. She knew all about me and still liked me. She would be my friend for the rest of my life.

  Barbara in Paris in 1982

  In 1985—I was married, she wasn’t—we went on holiday à deux to a lovely old Victorian hotel in Swanage, and on a whim, visited a fortune-teller, Katina, who had a booth on Swanage pier. I have visited more than one fortune-teller, but Katina was in a class of her own. She was young, and though she said she was a gypsy, had no robes or earrings, no affectation or spookiness or mystery. She grasped my hand, looked into my eyes, and then spoke brightly, specifically, swiftly, without hesitation, in a down-to-earth voice that told me many things: my husband would work for the BBC (he had shown no signs of it, but she was right); our house would get subsidence; I would care for my mother. In retrospect I wish I had taken up the offer to tape her predictions, as Barbara did. Almost everything Katina told us came to pass. For Barbara she saw, and described with eerie accuracy, the husband she would meet two years later, a much older man in a powerful position, witty, erudite Michael Miller, QC, who would adore her, as Katina promised, and was married to her until his death last year. I enjoyed writing it on envelopes: ‘Professor Barbara Goodwin and Mr Michael Miller, QC,’ because part of me could never quite believe that life would bring such substance to the girls we had been; that we would end up with serious men, good men who wanted to marry us.

  My precious cast of women friends, mos
t of them made during those vital years for same-sex friendships, that time between leaving home and pair-bonding. Hilary Soper, my girlfriend from the age of eleven at grammar school, an identical twin of five foot ten; an accident of geography meant we lived only a few miles apart from seventeen to twenty-one. Hilary, with whom I’ve never had a cross word in nearly fifty years of friendship; who makes sure a sprinkling of cakes and jokes, postcards, small treats and kindnesses, are there to sweeten life’s lemon-peel spiral. When I think of Hilary, I see us wandering down a succession of long light rooms in the galleries where we often meet, looking at pictures as we tell our stories in a relaxed, amicable rhythm, for we have known for decades that we have our whole lives to explain ourselves; but when friends tell all, there are sadnesses, and our eyes meet, we feel it together, we want nothing bad to happen to each other, but we know the gallery stretches on past, we cast about for another picture, some sunlit Dufy or golden Bonnard. When we were girls, we seemed to have nothing, and the whole mountain range was ahead of us. Somehow, by the miracle of days becoming years, Hilary became a head teacher, raised a kind son, Luke, on her own, and now lives with an art expert, her gentle, handsome husband Alistair, in an old Sussex cottage full of books and pictures. How did it happen? How do things work out? How do men and women ever find one another?

  Women friends, though, came easily. First Elan, Joy, Lydia, who lived with cats and dogs and rabbits and sewed the wing back on to a goose, and could have run a bank or a global company, then Pippa, Lesley, and shortly after, Grania, Nina and Rachel, Fatima, Carolyn; then Caroline, Hanna, Penny, Bernardine; most recently, vivid Ana, the dancer. So many kind and clever women. They are mostly still here: our story goes on.

  Two other women’s names from my rackety twenties make me pause longer and look away. Tiny Australian Beverly Hayne, my friend when I finally staggered to London, delivered by Pippa in a rented van. Bev was a journalist for glossy magazines, with short red-gold hair, fine skin, a small bird-nose and neat little bird-feet, a husky voice, a breathless laugh—perhaps too breathless? She found me a job as a hotel receptionist, since I was sick of doing degrees, and paid for my first publishing party (and made so light of it I hardly noticed, but now I am amazed; so much kindness, though she also tended to quick bouts of annoyance: ‘Doncha just hate it when …?’)—the funniest, perhaps, of so many funny women, passionate, short-tempered, creative, inventive. She was irritated by my messes and excesses, but she thought I had talent, believed in me, and wrote a spoof autobiography for me, decades before this one, longhand, for my birthday, ‘My Life’ by Maggie Gee, complete with witty drawings to which she attached scraps of coloured satin, sequins, a feather, and bound it in cardboard sheathed in black silk. She had the drive and wit to become famous as a writer—but her Australian family were too poor and too rural to fix a faulty heart-valve when she was young, so the doctors forbade her to risk having children with sweet-tempered Andy whom she married in London, and though she had escaped from poverty, though her pluck and will-power took her halfway round the world, she died, one morning, getting up too quickly when her loving husband was away on a trip, in their chic modern flat, of a heart attack. She was in her mid-thirties, painfully young.

  We had booked the first holiday of our married lives, but the dates clashed with the funeral. Andy said ‘Go’. Guiltily, we went to Portugal; I knew I shouldn’t, but oh, I wanted to, and we had little money, so the air fare we had already paid seemed enormous. I wrote a poem to be read at the service. I should have been there, to speak up for my friend, but Andy and destiny sent me somewhere different. On that holiday, in that fierce spring light, urged on by death, which made the shadows sharper, far away from rational considerations (we had nowhere to live, no security, but I was thirty-seven, time rushed onwards), I became pregnant with my daughter. It would never have happened if we’d stayed at home. You could see it as the final gift from Beverly’s friendship.

  Girls, my girls, mes soeurs, my sisters.

  Then there’s Kitty Mrosovsky, the aristocratic, literary beauty whose Russian father was a friend of Nabokov’s, president of Somerville JCR when I first saw her, hurrying gracefully against the daylight, in a narrow-waisted coat, her long dark hair pulled casually up under a Russian fur hat, calling to some out-of-focus girls in her wake. I never thought she would become my friend, yet she liked me, and invited me, later, to her tiny icy house near Arsenal, full of books and pictures and elegant poverty, because she had, I think, a minute private income which encouraged her to give up a prestigious university job and wager everything on being a writer. Perhaps all her life she gave up too much. She completed the definitive translation of Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony, with notes: but it was the study of a hermit. She wrote difficult novels, played piano sonatas, and banished grief with hot baths and yoga, and I was a little in awe of her, though she welcomed me, and was amusedly fond of the chaotic, excitable child I was. Like many of these friends, she mothered me, perhaps sensing there were things my own mother couldn’t give me; but she died of AIDS, too early to be wary, infected by a brilliant American boyfriend who was bisexual before anyone knew the dangers. He was African American, he taught at Yale, he was handsome and muscular and full of life. He wanted to marry her, but she refused. She was obstinate, reserved, fastidious, tender. She grew thinner, and withdrew from her friends, not wanting to bother them, not wanting to be ill, still hurrying down the street, still light-boned and graceful, and then too light, and suddenly gone. Her fate seemed bizarre, impossible. Her voice was beautiful; a light silver singsong. She had two sisters who adored her. That dangerous freedom. Death crept in from the horizon. We thought we knew everything; we didn’t see the future. We needed men, but men could destroy us.

  Dear girls of my youth. What talk, what laughter! Only death has parted us. We shared so much as we struggled to be adults; ordinary cheerfulness, everyday intimacy, luck, disaster; we cared for each other. Talking about men, sharing knowledge, telling stories against ourselves, helping each other to find our way in a world where marriage was no longer obvious. In those days, I was married to my female friends. Yet I needed those badly-judged relationships with men. How else could I have made the transition from the oppressions of home to my own, freeer marriage? If you behave for too long, in the end you break out. I carried a burden of anger and sorrow, sorrow for my mother, anger with my father, though I should have felt sorrow for him as well, and I do, now he no longer weighs on me. He didn’t teach me what was tolerable, how much or how little I should yield to men. I found that out, through a decade of conflict. I slowly worked towards a way of being happy.

  And now I am no longer young (though I feel it), so if I am to answer this chapter’s questions, it had better be now, before I start forgetting the scraps of knowledge life has left on my sleeve. I grew up with men. I always knew them. But I learned more slowly how to deal with them.

  I like men, as friends, as colleagues, as fathers—it moves me to see men with their children, especially since I have entered the world of parents and children—as sexual partners and objects of desire. I love young men for their maleness, their angles, their shiny skins and their firm jaws, their hopefulness and brashness, their risk-taking, their certainty, their shyness mixed with confidence, their courage and light-heartedness. I like the clear line of their necks and shoulders, the bone and muscle jutting bravely at the sky. I’m not sexually attracted to young men; what would I do with one, if I got him? I wouldn’t enjoy feeling elderly stretched out alongside some dazzling Apollo. But I would have loved to have a son, as well as a daughter. I would have loved to give Nick a son.

  From my family of men, of brothers and fathers and uncles and boy cousins, I learned to love men, and to see them as touching, though I also learned they were explosive and needy. I mustn’t give everything. Stand my ground. Yet sexually, I yielded too easily. I wanted to please them, as well as myself. I wanted to please them, or I wanted to placate them?

  What
do men need from women? The answers I grope for don’t come from having got this right, but from getting it wrong, and seeing others get it wrong.

  I think they want appreciation of their male virtues. There are lovable traits which I do see as male, not that they are exclusively so. Being brave or rash or funny, devoting themselves to single tasks or causes. Being physically strong. Having big ideas. Dreaming, carrying, and making. Founding states or cities, being ready to die for them. Forgiveness for their male faults: being one-track minded, forgetting the details, not noticing what’s going on emotionally, disliking being told about it, not wanting to talk (though sometimes that’s a virtue), thinking they are sick when they are not, being too ready to fight and die or send others off to do so for a cause. (Of course many women also do these things.)

  But what if men use their strength the wrong way? What if they prevail by violence, or fear? Then they need a woman to stand up to them, or leave them. A sad fact: most of us behave as badly as the people who live with us allow.

  I have seen how men like to have motherly care. Acceptance, rather than amused, sneering toleration, of their masculine bodies. Sex as an expression of that absolute acceptance and tenderness, which often means oral sex. Men want to be wanted, just like women. Some have been amazed when I wanted them. Emotional closeness—when they feel like it. Friendship. To be listened to. To be admired for the efforts they make, and respected.

  Not to be belittled, in public or private. A home where the father is truly welcome, not excluded, plotted against, marginalised. Children who are encouraged by the mother to love them. It sounds obvious, but it doesn’t always happen. This was the guerrilla war my mother fought, because she didn’t dare do anything braver. So she kept Dad in the dark, and laughed at him. Not always, though: ‘Your dad’s a good provider.’ And ‘Don’t upset Dad.’ But also ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ So the kitchen would fall silent when Dad came in. It wasn’t a good feeling. It didn’t make him happy.