My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  Now I look at my daughter’s generation, and things have changed again, but I suspect there is more in common between my nineteen-sixties and Rosa’s two-thousands than there was between my generation and my mother’s. I talk to my daughter. We talk to each other. I can at least tell her the mistakes I made, though she, of course, will learn from her own, a better way of learning than by hearing advice.

  Better but more painful. I learned through sorrow. Pleasure in the short run, tears later. This is what I learned. If you want to have children, choose a marrying man, and the choice of those is wider when you are younger. A marrying man, not a married man. There are men who want to marry and have children, but they tend to get snapped up before the others. By twenty-five, a lot of them have already gone. Around thirty, the last proto-dads are homing keenly in on the proto-mums. If a woman doesn’t start searching till she’s in her thirties, the odds are less good, and the search more desperate.

  It’s crude, it’s glib, but it’s roughly true. I do believe we learn from other people’s experience; it must be one reason why language skills evolved.

  (Only two of my close friends began their families in their twenties. Most of us girls never gave it a thought. One of those two was Pippa, a doctor’s daughter. ‘My father always told us, have your first child before you’re thirty.’ This piece of advice from an elder bore fruit. Uniquely among my clutch of graduate friends, Pippa has three grown up children.)

  Mum gave no advice about marriage or children, but her folk wisdom came into play when I told her that Nick and I, who had been dating for four months or so, were helping my friend Barbara to refurbish her Holland Park flat. We were spending days happily artexing ceilings and painting walls together, side by side. ‘Nest-building,’ Mum said. ‘You’re nest-building.’

  Before long we came to stay with Mum and Dad for the weekend. Nick had borrowed a little yellow Beetle car from his friend John. My parents were welcoming—no wonder: I hadn’t brought many boys to meet them. I didn’t trust the boys to like them: nor was I sure they would agree to come. My mother was captivated when we went for a walk and Nick worried in case I would be cold, and made me put a jacket on. I wasn’t so sure about Dad’s reaction; Nick had admitted he didn’t like football. My father loved football. All men should like football.

  Things took a major turn for the worse next morning when Nick and I set off for the sea. On our speedy way out Nick barged the yellow VW into our neighbour’s low chain fence, flattening a post or two. ‘Oh god oh god,’ I said, but Nick was already driving off, at high speed, had gone, by now, too far to turn back, leaving the evidence of our guilt behind us. I was shocked, but giggling with panic and excitement. Nick has always had an antic self, a self of rash or dashing acts and surreal invented voices, improvistos. And yet, on the small white beach at Weybourne, his arm sheltering me from the breeze, we had a short talk and agreed we would get married, and when we went home, he asked my father.

  They had been amused, thank God, by the fence, which could only mean one thing: they really liked him. My father was capable of turning that into a crime, but instead he had seen himself in Nick’s shoes; it was the act of a nervous, eager suitor. ‘Vic, I would like to marry your daughter.’ My father laughed soundlessly and tossed back his head in the way he did when he was happy, but he guarded himself against sentiment. ‘I expect you will whatever I say,’ he riposted, robustly, but he shook Nick’s hand. Nick would do for his unmarried daughter.

  He did more than ‘do’. They both came to adore him. My mother loved his good looks and charm, and of course, the way he did not bully me. She did not worry that he was poor; she was right, he became a good, steady earner, though we Rankin-Gees have never been rich. They both loved his humour, especially the absurd characters he suddenly improvised from nowhere, a heritage from his ancestry—Sarah Siddons, the famous eighteenth-century actress, was his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother—which sent them into paroxysms of laughter. Later, when he became a BBC broadcaster, they listened loyally to his programmes, bent over the radio in the kitchen, though World Service reception was bad in Norfolk, and wrote him long appreciative letters.

  ‘I love young men,’ Mum said to me, in much the same words that I use now. ‘There’s something lovely about young men.’ He was there when she was dying, only nine years later, making her laugh in the hospital on the very last evening of her life with a joke that plays upon a less romantic side of tenderness across the generations. It has to be said with a strong Norfolk burr:

  ‘Arrr yew goin’ ter com up Weely Woods with me tonoight, gurl?’

  ‘No-ow! Moy mothuhr wooden’ loik it.’

  ‘Yowur mothuhr ain’ goin’ ter geddit!’

  (‘Are you going to come up Weely Woods with me tonight, girl?’

  ‘No! My mother wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Your mother ain’t going to get it!’)

  Many people would be doubtful about deathbed jokes, but it was exactly the right thing for Mum. Nick knew that, as he knows so many things, whereas I waste hours debating and doubting. It must be why, when he wants to sleep, his breathing changes and he’s gone within seconds.

  Mostly it’s the really big things he gets right. In 1986, he had just finished his first book, Dead Man’s Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson. Nick had delivered to Faber, but got no word. Then Beverly died, and though I agonised, we did as Andy kindly urged us, and went on the holiday we had planned. It had a special significance: we were meeting my parents there, to celebrate Dad’s birthday, in the Algarve that they loved, where they spent every winter, the treat that, mysteriously, saved them money. I had never been to Portugal. We had our flights booked, and a double room at a strange hotel I must have found in a brochure.

  It sat on a strip of Algarve coast which was in the throes of savage butchery as huge roads and sewers and foundations for skyscrapers were forced into the earth, which lay spreadeagled, wounded. We tried to walk at night, and parts of the town were like another planet, grassless and treeless, inhabited by big silent machines.

  Our own hotel had been dropped here, at random, from somewhere in Scandinavia. It was white, vast, almost uninhabited, like an uglier version of the Snow Queen’s palace, blank, pointless atrium after atrium, with silent rooms to either side. Everything was new: the grass had not grown. There were water-features everywhere. Perhaps that was why the whole wintry fantasy smelled overwhelmingly of pine disinfectant, a terrible, sharp, chemical greenness inimical to anything growing.

  We managed to bear it for two days or so, and strode down the coast a mere half-hour’s walk to have a memorably happy, vinous lunch with my parents in a local restaurant whose owner they loved. They were so proud to introduce us to Alfonso: our daughter the writer and her handsome husband. Yes, he is a writer too! The pride was two-way; I was touched and surprised to see the owner knew them and seemed fond of them, as if they ate out often, and were accepted. All through my childhood, ‘going out’ had been dangerous, and my nerves had been jangling, that morning, as we walked by the sea, but age had smoothed enough of Dad’s combativeness away for them to be happy, and us to be happy. For a few golden hours, we sat and enjoyed the new symmetry that came from my marriage and the mysterious specialness that family acquired by being hundreds of miles away from home, in a strange bare landscape where all else was new. What were these tendrils of connectedness, this sudden warm familiarity that clung around us in a world inhuman as the moon? What did family mean? Something new was stirring.

  Afterwards I remember standing in the blaze of heat by the wayside, waiting for my parents’ taxi to come. It took half an hour longer than expected. They looked small and old in the ferocious light. Once they would not have needed a taxi. But Nick was in high good humour, and for some reason he began to impersonate a Teddy Boy going out on a Friday night, walking down the road with chest absurdly inflated, ape arms swinging, knees doing a springy dance of self-importance. Instead of worrying about the taxi, m
y parents laughed and laughed, especially my father, who shook and wept, yielding to the moment, free of all anxiety, shoulders soundlessly heaving, pale eyes streaming in the sunlight. Nick marched up and down: we couldn’t stop laughing. ‘He’s very funny, duck,’ Dad said as we parted. ‘He’s a real comedian, is Nick.’ It was high praise, the gift of a tribute.

  I think perhaps that lunch was important. It was all leading somewhere, but I didn’t know where. I did know we couldn’t stay a moment longer in the ice-white Viking monstrosity I’d chosen. Despite the glassy-eyed despair of the staff, who sat there paralysed, with nothing to do, servicing international emptiness, we checked out, and walked towards the sea, and found ourselves something more ordinary, cheaper. It had coaches outside, but at least there were people. The breakfast was economy class, with orange squash and white rolls and jam, but what mattered was the room. And what happened inside it.

  At first they showed us to a room with single beds. ‘No,’ I said, and they swiftly moved us. The next room, at first, seemed equally bad, though at least it had a double bed. But it looked over a blank field of rubble. ‘What’s this?’ I asked the man who had brought us here. ‘Ees a factory,’ he said. ‘But they knock heem down.’ He made it sound as if this was a bonus.

  ‘I don’t want a view of a demolished factory!’ I said to Nick, who was staring out of the window. He didn’t want to move again.

  ‘OK,’ I sighed, and the man left us.

  ‘Look,’ said Nick. ‘Look again.’

  Some obelisk or pole had been left standing out there, alone in the middle of a muddle of rubbish.

  No, it wasn’t a pole, it was a chimney.

  With something large and black on top.

  As I watched, I saw something was moving in that dark disk, small flickering changes to the sharp silhouette. And then a huge bird swooped down from the blue, with wide white wings, elaborate, angelic, catching the sunlight, transforming the view.

  ‘It’s a stork,’ I said. ‘Of course, it’s a stork’s nest.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nick, ‘and there are young.’

  We watched them whenever we were in the room. We made jokes, of course, about the storks bringing babies. The rest of the time, we discovered how much of the Lagos peninsula was still unspoiled, if you got away from the mangled centre. We walked for hours along tiny goat-tracks; goats fled ahead of us, a flash of light coats, bells clanging erratic, melancholy notes; the herbs on the slopes down to the sea were aromatic; there were lemon-trees and mimosa trees and tiny spring flowers—rock roses, tiny golden pea-flowers, miniature indigo irises, dark tongues in mouths of speckled flame. The light made everything unnaturally clear, as if we were being shown something, as if God had pulled a grey curtain away, and here it was, dazzling and complex, his handiwork. There was something almost brutal about so much beauty that we in our studies did not usually see. At night we walked along deserted beaches. They were not romantic; they made me shiver. The waves crashed hard upon great black rocks that blazed red by daylight. The moon was full, unbelievably large, and stared at us, hard, effortlessly burning our eyes with silver. I thought about Beverly, whose life was over. Nick, who had just given up smoking, was in an uncharacteristic mood, his system disrupted by the lack of nicotine, and feeling wild and rootless now his book was finished and he had nothing definite lined up.

  I was ready with good advice, as usual. ‘You need a niche somewhere,’ I said. ‘Something that isn’t me, or writing. I think that men need somewhere to go.’ I must have based that idea on my father, who set off every morning at half-past eight. I wasn’t entirely wrong, as it happened, but in another sense I was completely blind, for there was something else that we both needed, which stared us in the face, and only I couldn’t see it, something that was happening all around us in the dazzling display of plants and animals.

  Ever since we had been a couple, we had used contraception, but Nick had long ago suggested I come off the pill, and he was right, for I had been on it for a decade. We had never taken risks; I’m a cautious person, who likes to make logical decisions. I had told him when we married that I didn’t want children, because I thought they would stop me writing, and he seemed surprised, but he didn’t argue. (Of course I didn’t know what I was saying. He was probably right to take no notice. I was just reluctant to grow up.)

  One day we were making love in the daylight, with the curtains open and sun streaming through. It was the very end of my period, which was safe, but not entirely safe. It was time for him to put a condom on, and I thought he would, but suddenly he didn’t, he came inside me naked as the day, and I didn’t entirely want to stop him, and I didn’t stop him. Heat, blue sky, the avid spring of Portugal. We lay there, spent, in the gaze of the window, with the blank panorama, the tall chimney, the nest where small dark outlines tussled and wrestled, gaping their tiny beaks at the sky, trying to feed from the awkward white bird which hovered above them, wings sighing with longing as it beat, beat at the April air. Slowly, our breathing and heartbeats steadied; we thought we were the same as before; we dozed and dreamed and idly bickered; we might not get to the sea today. But in fact, something fundamental had happened, and we weren’t drunk, and we had both assented, though the impetus, the boldness, came from him. It was the first time in seventeen years of love-making that I’d given my body the least chance of getting pregnant.

  But I soon forgot. It didn’t happen again.

  Back home, back in the world, a lot was going on. In Iran, Jimmy Carter lost patience over US hostages and sent in a plane to get them out; the mission failed; the situation worsened. Faber accepted Nick’s book, with some edits, and he started teaching in a language school. He paid for me to go to a hotel in Eastbourne to get on with a thriller I had planned, called Grace, whose dénouement took place in that Victorian resort. I had a narrow single room which looked over the sea, a tamer, greyer sea than Portugal’s. Spring was coming, even here, but everything seemed sour and grim; I missed Nick; what I wrote was dull.

  Then two critical events made us all long for dullness. In the USSR, the Chernobyl reactor released its deadly plume of radiation. For days the news was obsessed with the disaster as wind spread the blight all over the world. It would be in berries and reindeer flesh, but also in birds’ eggs, cows, milk. There seemed no way that you could escape it. Some people advocated iodine as prophylaxis; I bought it, but then read somewhere else that it was more dangerous than the radiation. I felt desperate, actually; the planet had been poisoned, the natural world that I loved so much, the glory we had just seen in Portugal. And then there was more news in hushed, urgent voices. One night America bombed Libya, and the planes had flown from bases in Britain. At night I heard engines of planes flying over, bearing down on my narrow hotel room, my single bed. It reminded me of the terrors of my girlhood. Would retaliation come our way?

  And two things happened closer to home. The food at the hotel became sickening. There was too much fat in everything. I couldn’t eat it. It made me sweat, though I loved my food, and I’d loved hotels since my childhood when I wished we were richer, so we needn’t go camping. But I didn’t feel well. The stairs made me breathless. There was definitely something wrong with me … I must be ultra-sensitive to radiation.

  Then I found a small lump on my right breast. It was there, then it wasn’t, I’d imagined it; and then it was definitely there, in the morning, hard and flat, like a sequin or lentil. OK, I had cancer. Dread fear of death. How quickly Chernobyl had done for me. (In fact, it was nothing, just a fibroadenoma, a meaningless lump that goes away on its own, though of course I did not know that then.) My period came, pale and sickly, and then another just as thin and wan while I pushed myself drearily on through the novel, guiltily aware how much this stay was costing. I didn’t want to worry Nick by telling him all this.

  But spring, impervious to radiation, was brightening the Sussex coast. Suddenly, it seemed, the sea was blue. The corporation flower-beds bloomed overnight, a festive
banner of scarlet primulas, golden daffodils, sea-blue hyacinths stretched along the front outside my window. I walked up the road towards the cliffs. I was feeling better, but still slightly breathless. The tiny, disquieting lentil was still there, but now my breasts were doing something different: they ached and were tender. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was sensuous. A swelling feeling like the sea and the blossom. I felt mysteriously happy.

  Something struck me. I stopped in mid-step. It couldn’t be. Could it? Was it possible? I did a pregnancy test in the bleak hotel bathroom. Two clear blue lines stood like staves in two windows. They said I was pregnant. I stared at myself, an uncertain new face in the bathroom mirror. I had to take it in, now, here, alone, before I talked to Nick or my mother. Everything looked different. The words had gone missing. Two halves of a sentence came glassily together, something impossible I could not say.

  I Maggie Gee. The pale face in the mirror, married but essentially still on my own. I had always been this. I was thirty-seven.

  I Maggie Gee was going to have a baby.

  Why do I write?

  dancing

  About two months before Rosa was born, the reality of caring for her came home to me. My days would change. She would always be there. How would I ever write again?

  I asked another woman writer, who said, ‘Don’t worry. My baby slept in a basket on the floor.’ Fortunately I didn’t believe her, as Rosa hardly slept, in the day, from the beginning.

  This baby had already revolutionised our lives. Because of her, because we had to be grown up, we were trying to buy our first property, a two-bed flat in Kensal Green, though there were problems with the freehold, and asbestos in the cupboards. Buying a flat meant we had to earn more money. Nick had acquired a desirable temporary contract as a scriptwriter at the BBC, which with luck would continue, but he wouldn’t be around to look after Rosa, and I would still need to earn money of my own (it is a point of pride that since 1982, when I became a full-time writer, I have always paid my share of the bills). That meant I would have to re-energise the thriller, Grace, that I had slowly and dreamily completed while pregnant, longhand in a lined notebook. There was a lot to be done, but the hormones made me sleepy. With a month to go, we moved in to the flat, the first place we had had entirely to ourselves, with no live-in landlady, no shared bathroom.