My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  What do women need from men? What do I need to be happy? Many of the same things, of course. Love, tenderness, not to be belittled (though I like to be teased. It’s a conundrum.) A child, friendly companionship, a home.

  I know my mother craved recognition for the care she gave to men and to children, to Dad and to Grandpa, after his stroke, to all of us: she cooked every single meal, shopped and planned, paid bills and made appointments, did the washing and ironing. To be fair, my father often said thank you, and so does my husband, which is very important, though he has much less to thank me for, because nobody irons, and there’s a washing machine.

  Sometimes women need care from men in return. There my own father did less well. When Mum was ill for a month after giving birth to my younger brother, he cooked soft-boiled eggs at furious speed: shuddering whites, still transparent, with the coiling cord fully visible, and would not learn, though no one could eat them, and the eggs ended up on the side of the plate, small crumbled abortions, viscous and gleaming, stuck over with messy mosaics of shell: alternating this treat with ‘Vermicelli Cheese’, his favourite dish, which he cooked quite well, but its regular wormy gleam made us hate it. Whereas my husband cooks fluently and cheerfully, modern, interesting food with lots of ginger and garlic, chopping vegetables with the radio on, not fussing, asking only to be left alone; and always brings me cups of tea in the morning, when I am obtuse and drugged with sleep, having fizzed and gabbled in the early hours while he is dropping off like a baby.

  I like appreciation of my female virtues: making things beautiful, seeing to the details. Mostly it’s women who do the flowers, tracking them down in the winter garden, the last peaky rose, a red geranium leaf, a Japanese lantern minus half its blazing orange but revealing the elaborate lace of its structure; together on the table, they’re a small miracle. Lovely when a man enjoys it. My green-fingered mother expressed herself by growing African violets from seed, and had Africa in bloom in every corner of her bleak ’60s kitchen, white, pink, mauve, lush and plump-leaved, insubordinate, and another year, the toothed hearts of coleus, flame shooting out of the pink Formica.

  Is it mostly women who notice when people are unhappy? Maybe. Maybe we’re more porous to other people. That gives us a chance to offer comfort. (But sometimes it’s better to glide over things; if you see what’s going on, it becomes harder for the sufferer to choose to hide it; and men know that instinctively.)

  We show realism when dealing with dreams, though this can also be the vice of small-mindedness. And women are funny in a different way; we enjoy telling stories against ourselves. We find ourselves ridiculous.

  We endure hardships, and remember dull things—dates, schedules, responsibilities. But no one is ever going to thank us for this, particularly when the tasks are to be done by others. ‘Have you written that thank you letter to your sister? Did you remember your maths homework?’ I am sometimes the Lexicon of Other People’s Duties. Nobody likes a lexicon.

  We need forgiveness for our female faults: obsessing about detail, worrying too much, talking about feelings when men don’t want to, criticising, thinking about the past, cleaning up when we could be having fun. Guilty on all counts, your honour. (But of course men do all these things too.)

  We need to be seen as individuals, people who exist outside the home. I have always taken this for granted; I shouldn’t. My father didn’t want my mother to work.

  Loyalty as we age from a good lover, who goes on wanting and desiring us. To be made to feel beautiful, however old we are.

  If many of these primal needs aren’t met, love turns to enmity, tenderness to meanness, the couple shrinks in lemon juice.

  Living through time in a couple isn’t easy. Lives have become very long. Deep and friendly love between a man and a woman is not the easiest thing to find. I can think of a bare dozen happy couples among the many I have known.

  But then, it’s 2009, as I write. These are still trying, transitional times. Only in 1919 did British women get the vote. Ninety years ago: that means women are alive who remember their own mothers being unable to vote. Is the problem that we still haven’t got over the war? It is very recent, the period when women were not allowed to graduate, nor to have a claim on their children when marriages broke down. It amazes today’s confident young women to hear that, less than a lifetime ago, women were allowed, as a concession, to go to university, but were not allowed to take degrees. The rage and scorn women show to men—the contempt of female columnists, the boring venting against ‘hopeless Harry’—might just be an unconscious mirror image of the scorn men formerly showed women, when they forbade them half of life.

  All the same, scorn helps no one. If you want to get the best from someone, you have to be ready to see something good in them.

  (Easy enough to say, but I wish I was always kind, and loving. I know that I am not. I can be cutting, irascible, unfair. The war is in me, and in all of us. We fight for recognition, for freedom from the boredom of small duties—who does what?—for respect of our needs, for space, for money. We fight to be equal, though we know we’re not the same. There are no servants any more to liberate middle-class women from household drudgery; and in any case, when servants were the rule, my family were the servants, I would have been a servant, as my maternal grandmother was. I am still fighting not to be downtrodden like my mother, though no one has ever trodden me down, in fact. Because of my father, I can’t bear my husband shouting, and yet I sometimes shout at him. He has never hit me. If he did, I would leave him.)

  As I write that, I see it’s just showing off. I would assume he had gone mad, and find a way of forgiving him. There is so much love and friendship between us. So many years I can’t live again with someone else. And there’s our daughter: in her our love goes on into the future.

  But what if I’d never met Nick? What then? I was awkward, and damaged, and weird enough not to have lived with anyone. Not to have had a child. I feel I would have missed the point.

  Then the gift of Nick’s unconditional love changed everything for me. A man loved me completely, and I became a woman. In a world of two, and then three, I could grow.

  He needed me. I needed him.

  My animal luck (v)

  my advice:

  very unwise to give it

  As the reader may have noticed, life tends to rush upon me, new and shining, out of the blue, and I am dazzled, and only grasp the meaning of it decades later, as I relive the days. The good things that befall me seem to come by luck and, more especially, the kindness of others. I have realised it more as I write this memoir: how very little we can do alone.

  I met Nick in early spring 1981, in a pub-theatre, the York and Albany, an isolated building at the end of one arm of Camden Town, squeezed between roaring roads and the horse chestnut buds of Regent’s Park. It was all thanks to my friend Kitty Mrosovsky, who invited me to a performance of a play by ‘Mouth and Trousers’. She was writing theatre reviews for a journal called Quarto, and her last piece had been about a play called Arrest: Nick’s first play, whose run had just finished.

  By chance, the young playwright was there that night. He was thin and intense, with fine Celtic features, strong jaw and expressive eyebrows, blue-grey eyes, narrow well-shaped nose. Tall, handsome, dark, serious; simple traits I attached to him. Of course, he wanted to impress us. This was the first time he had met Kitty, and she had admired his work in print. I thought theirs would be a match made in heaven, and found something to do so they could talk on their own. They were both in the same idiom, somehow, though he was in jeans and navy pea-coat, and she in something relaxed and classic (whereas, I, as usual, was dressed like a vamp, in a black zipped jump-suit, diamante drop earrings, and an old black fur with a shot-silk lining, pink lipstick and long blonde hair). Perhaps I picked up something else as well, for though no one mentioned it, they’d both gone to public school—that mad English usage where public means private. Shrewsbury was talking to Benenden. And Horsham High School
made herself scarce.

  Nick, in 1970, aged twenty, when he lived just across the road from me in Oxford—had we met then, it would never have worked

  But at the end of the evening, he had both our phone numbers. Chance: pure chance that I met my beloved, and that I met him then—when the timing was perfect; he was at the end of a long relationship. He was thirty, and I was thirty-two. We were friends for eighteen months before we started dating.

  I showed zero perspicacity about the future, because I brought sense and logic to bear, whereas Nick knew we were right together by physical instinct. I told my friend Barbara, ‘He’s very attractive, I fancy him madly, but I know I could never fall in love with him. He talks all the time. He’s not my type.’

  Whereas the very first time Nick was alone with me, not many weeks after we met in the theatre, he walked me to the local pub, sat me down, and said, about ten minutes into the conversation, ‘I’m going to take you to America. In fact, I think we should get married.’ Even he looked surprised as soon as he had said it. As he told me much later, he had never said anything like that before, to anyone, but something came over him, or spoke through him. I laughed and ignored it, thinking, ‘He’s mad,’ little knowing that just over two years later I would stand by his side, trembling but happy, in a white Victorian satin nightdress, as we said our vows in a Cambridge registry office.

  I didn’t have a clue about any of it. Yet still I am tempted to give advice. Still I believe I’m a bit of an expert.

  Viewed benignly, advice is just sharing tips, a habit of female gleaners and gatherers. While male hunters silently stalk their prey, not deigning to ask which way is north, the women back at camp are telling each other which herbs best flavour the flesh of a mammoth.

  How I thirst to pass on knowledge. My last chapter, about men and women, was stiff with advice, stuffed with it. I persevere despite the boredom of my listener. I must simply advise with more pep and vim! I must improve the lives of others! I crash boldly onwards through their thickets of unease. A good spot for a holiday, a dental insurance plan, the perils of putting lemons in the compost …

  I hand out my tips like elaborate, generous gifts from one life to another. But by middle age, people don’t want gifts. Their houses are already loaded with stuff, they know about holidays, teeth, and lemons (pancakes with lemon and sugar. My tip is, avoid them: a double hex on your dentine.)

  In my family—meaning me, Nick, my daughter—the most annoying advice is given when someone has just started on the recommended course of action. ‘Why don’t you dry the glasses/put your shoes on/bring a coat?’ ‘I’m doing it, I’m doing it!’ the wretched advisee cries.

  Of course, sometimes people ask for advice. That’s when it’s important to hold back, because they are vulnerable, and may take it. But can I hold back? It is so tempting.

  So flattering when someone consults you. The belief that life’s actually taught you something. Suddenly you feel useful, which doesn’t often happen to a writer. Yet other people’s lives are just that, other. Most useless of all to advise on people’s lovers. Of course Y is trouble, or Z is appalling, but don’t advise Y to give Z up. They will get married, and never call you.

  The problem is, I myself long for advice. I seek it, eagerly, from everyone. I want to learn lessons from other people’s lives. It’s part of my essential optimism. I really believe I can make most things better, if only I can find out enough about them. When pregnant, I brooded over pregnancy books; as a young mother, baby books; though adolescence books always seemed a pale shadow of the storm and glory we were going through. I read all the health pages in newspapers; I study New Scientist for new ‘work’ on anything touching the human condition which I can pass on to my husband or daughter (she defends herself with ribald humour. ‘Oh God, Mum, don’t tell me you’ve found more “work”. My mother thinks there is work on everything,’ Rosa tells her friends, when I try to educate them on, say, the effects of black chocolate on cholesterol. ‘Work! Work!,’ she shrieks, and she is laughing so much she chokes on her milk chocolate).

  But her grandmother, like me, was a fund of useful tips. ‘Never leave washing-up until the morning,’ Mum said (and ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning.’) And ‘This won’t buy the baby a new bonnet.’ ‘Always do the bed, it makes the room look tidy.’ ‘Don’t forget to tie a knot in your cotton.’ ‘Tie a knot in your hanky to remember something.’ ‘Don’t trust people who show the whites of their eyes under the iris.’ (Did this mean my mother distrusted the blind?) ‘You don’t want to be mutton dressed up as lamb.’ ‘Don’t drink from the bottle, it looks bad.’ (She had a point, since we were driving through respectable streets, it was before midday, and I was swigging British sherry, but she was leaving my father, temporarily, and the pressure was getting to me.)

  ‘Come to the breast-screening van!’ she bade me. ‘I take any screening I can get. It’s all on the NHS, it’s great!’ It was a common feeling among the generation who saw the Health Service’s miraculous beginnings. I went with Mum, in my mid-twenties, to the breast-screening van in the windy gravel car-park. There my breasts were compressed between two hard metal plates, which were squeezed together till I felt like screaming. Later I discovered that in women under fifty the risk of having cancer is outweighed by the chance of cancer started by the X-ray.

  Never give advice. No one will thank you.

  And yet, in my sex life, and my love life, I needed advice, and my mother couldn’t give it. This is no criticism; she was unequipped. She only ever slept with one man, my father, and she felt completely at sea in the sixties. (Just as the young were; we were making it up. We felt we were free in an enormous playground, and when we spotted people crying in the corners, it seemed like an error on their part; and when we were the hurt ones, we felt at fault, for the new rules, surely, should benefit us all.)

  Why, then, did some of us have bad dreams?

  Mum’s dissatisfaction with her own marriage meant she did not want to foist the same thing on her daughter. Instead she struggled to understand the tortuous comings and goings in my emotional life. It couldn’t be good that I was having a relationship with a married man, could it? Or with more than one man at once? And yet she was reluctant to judge. If he loved me, this might be better than the narrow logic of her own life. Did it make me happy? she asked. I gave her some simplified version of the truth. She only wanted me to be happy, she said. If I loved X, she would too. She never asked me—as my teens sprinted into my twenties, then my late twenties, and I lived on my own; turned thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two—whether I wanted to get married, or have children. And to give him his due, nor did my father. Once I was an adult, they left me alone to make my own mistakes, which I did.

  But now I see we did need some advice, we liberated women, from the elders of the tribe. I was living my life in a piecemeal way, as an individualist, a thinker, a writer. I lived in my head, and had sex with my body, and my heart beat fast when I listened to music, the glorious music of love of the sixties, Motown, the Beatles, the Stones, Soul, the sublime hanging gardens of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. My heart seemed to recognise a longing for love that was not fulfilled by the life I led, but my head came to no conclusions, and my body continued to enjoy itself. The three of us hardly spoke to each other.

  Yet my unconscious was semaphoring frantically to me. I began to have dreams, one of the only two recurring dreams of my life, in which I’d had a tiny baby, but lost it. It had fallen on the floor, or rolled under a chair, and I’d forgotten about it, not fed it, lost it. Sometimes there was more than one midget baby. This dream came again and again, insistent, a few months apart, until it was familiar, and so was the feeling of sadness it brought, the attempt, too late, to find the missing dream-infant, from which I always awoke empty-handed. One day I told this dream to my friend Barbara, who was also on the pill, like me, and having sex, but not getting pregnant. Although she had never wanted ch
ildren, she told me that she had the same dreams. The fine hair on my arms stood on end. And then we both asked other young women. Many of us turned out to share the same dream life.

  We were all guinea-pigs in a chemical war that was being waged in the recesses of our bodies. Of course we didn’t consciously see what we were doing, we clever undergraduates, we liberated women, but the collective unconscious was savvier than us. Our bodies had found a way of talking to us, showing the ghost babies that weren’t being born, for the pill did not always prevent conception; it also stopped fertilised eggs implanting. We were watching our own dramas while we slept, but our waking selves remained strangely unmoved.

  Of course my parents were not able to advise me. What was happening was so utterly different from the world they had known, the war, rationing, the hasty marriages to keep women safe and allow the men to have babies before they faced death. They had been short of everything, including sexual information, in the nineteen-thirties, when they were young. Both of them were virgins in 1944, when they married each other, my father aged thirty, my mother twenty-seven. My mother was pregnant with my brother that year and still thought that babies came out of the belly, which would part down the line from navel to pubis. Her mother had told her absolutely nothing. And then when the straitlaced, family fifties replaced the frenzy of the war, sexual freedom was in short supply. They had too little, and we too much.