My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  (Yet there was something else: it was about the work. All about the work. I would return to that.)

  Of course, some good writers do well in the jungle. Of course, reviewers sometimes get it right. But it isn’t inevitable; it isn’t even normal. If you want to know where the best writers are, you can’t tell by reading the literary pages, or going to big bookshops, or looking at prize lists. You must read for yourself, and think for yourself, or listen to voices you know and trust: private readers: truth-tellers.

  I still think most of that analysis is true. And yet it left out a lot of ‘human nature’, it left out the joy and pleasure people get when they find something they genuinely like, and publishers, booksellers, critics are people; it left out the fact that, alongside the conformism that biologists tell us serves most people well (which direction do you run in when a flood is coming? No time to think, just follow the others), there are always people who like to be different, who are sceptical and original. Independent publishers like Saqi and Telegram, Profile and Tindal Street Press, Salt and Comma; independent booksellers like Foyles or John Sandoe’s or my locals, Willesden Books, Kilburn Books, the Queen’s Park Bookshop.

  And then there is the work. Come back to that. Get up on the wire, walk the line in the sunlight. Breathe, concentrate, find the nerve. What is it about? Something says ‘my soul’, and I am uneasy, and turn away, embarrassed. My being-in-the-world expressed as performance. The rhythm of my body imprinting on the page, what my eyes have seen, what my heart has lived. And the movement of my hand lets me share it with others. I am here, now. I am writing the truth of it. For most writers, work is not just a product.

  My book had fallen foul of the market, but rereading it, I believed in it. The question was, where could I go? How could I get my portrait of Britain out to the British?

  Once again, friends of mine stepped in, Moris Farhi, the Turkish writer, campaigner and intellectual, and his wife (and editor) Nina Farhi. Nina: it is still hard to write about her, those intelligent brown eyes and bird-like profile under a Greek girl’s thicket of curls: with whom I would talk passionately about novels while Moris (‘Musa’) cooked succulent chicken, his deep voice interjecting knowledge from the stove. Nina: who played football with us in the garden, lithe and laughing but a deadly opponent. We discussed Fay Weldon and Anita Brookner and our beloved only daughters, and our central theme was often writing, though Nina was a well-known psychoanalyst (she died, alas, most fierce and beautiful and missed, her mind still the mind of an eagle, a claw-hold on life as the sky went dark, while I was finishing this book. How can such presence become an absence?)

  Moris and Nina with Rosa—Nina once saved Rosa from falling downstairs with a magnificent goal-keeper’s dive

  Nina and Moris both loved The White Family and discussed gravely what to do about it. Moris showed the book to his friend and publisher, the Lebanese sculptor and writer Mai Ghoussoub, co-founder with André Gaspard of Saqi, which had been in existence for over twenty years. I am sure Moris encouraged her in certain expectations; probably he told her it was wonderful; in other words, the ‘frame’ was right.

  She read it expecting it to be good because she loved and trusted Moris. I knew she had the manuscript. I dared not hope.

  Only my diary can truly tell the story of those unforgettable three days in late April.

  Tuesday April 17 2001 was just an ‘ordinary’ day. My daughter was ‘grumpy’, I went on trying to write ‘a new book’ (it was the start of The Flood, in fact), but the diary says ‘a mere 650 words so far’. Then the page breaks into big, bold, type:

  Oh happiness, oh unimaginable happiness that may yet turn into absolute bliss, for this afternoon … the phone rang, and it was a melodious woman’s voice, foreign. I stood in the grubby hall and took it in. ‘Mai … Mai Ghoussoub … We have a friend in common, Moris Farhi … I have phoned to tell you I have finished reading your book, and I have enjoyed it very much … It was such a pleasure. It is literature. Literature does not judge … All your characters are human. And the end. I liked it very much, the end. Because it moves it outside of London and makes it universal … Very touching. I think I enjoyed it more than any manuscript I have read in a long time …’

  Then there was apparently a note of caution, for she said the book would be discussed at a meeting they would have over the next day or so, and her last words were disquieting: ‘I hope we meet, at any rate.’

  Once I had put the phone down, though, I was ‘suffused and energised with hope … someone likes my White Elephant!’

  Wednesday April 18

  Still fizzing. I wrote a little more on the new novel, diary, fun with Rosa—but the weather is cold—‘It’s winter again,’ said Nick. No phone call from Saqi yet at 5 pm.

  Thursday April 19

  What a day. Fear started to replace joy some time around the end of the morning, Nothing could protect me from gloom … as the afternoon went on in the empty house. Had Mai’s meeting been on Wednesday? Had it been this morning? No call meant bad news. I hate the feeling that I can do nothing, nothing to help myself—not my busybodying nature to do nothing and accept what comes.

  I tried to read and got—next to nowhere. Nick rang [from the BBC] around four—any news? No. He was full of love. ‘Go and read outside,’ he said—then, ‘Maybe not, it’s raining.’

  Actually I did go outside and read, in the garden, on the step, though it was splashing with April rain which dimpled my pages, and there was April sun, too. Wild violets where the grass had given up. Magnolias in the next-door garden. I thought, ‘I mind terribly about this, I’ve just been kidding myself that I would understand if Saqi turn me down.’ In the end the rain drove me in and I sat in my armchair testing the phone at intervals to see if it was working. Picking it up, putting it down. Random absurd compacts with fate—‘If when I look at my watch it is past 5 o’clock, there’s no hope.’ And yet in part of me hope was very strong. Another voice inside me said loud and clear, ‘This will work. They will take it. It will come right.’ But time slipped on, past 5.15, past 5.30 … Too late, I thought. They have gone home.

  But sometimes hope is stronger than the dead fall of failure, the weight in the heart, the bitter taste rising. Because at 5.40 the phone rang again, and there was Mai’s singsong voice: ‘We have had our meeting, and I am ringing to say Yes, we would like very much to publish your novel, if we can come to an agreement …’ We finished off with compliments—looking forward.

  In fact, I was ‘struck down, pole-axed. Floored by emotion, almost exhaustion, almost blankness, something I could hardly give a name to, but which possessed me, beyond words. I didn’t know what to do with myself.’ (I see now it was like the aftermath of the endoscopy which began this book: my body was left behind by my mind; it had to find itself again.)

  I felt I had to move, to go out, to walk, to find people, to shout, to dance, to sing. I ended up walking down the road under an extraordinary thunderstruck black-and-sun sky, in the teeth of an icy wind, headed for my friend Hanna’s, bits of whose life and wisdom are in that book—rang at her door, the doorbell was run down they—were out. Maybe in a way that was better, because I was in such a strange stunned state …

  Then I walked through hard cold rain to Willesden, foraging for my fair folk—I had a ten-pound note and some change in my pocket; bought a bottle of cheap fizz, a pizza for Rosa, mushrooms, good bread—thinking ‘feast-time, feast-time, happiness’.

  Walking back home from the bus down Liddell Gardens there was a blaze of late warm-toned sun and suddenly the Victorian school for the disabled was lit with red beauty—warm, warm, reaching up to the rain-cleared sky. I just stood and gazed; the sun, which had already set at my eye-level, shone above me in a high red band; it caught and lit the top of a tree of blossom; as I looked at the heights of the burning school, a small dark bird swooped up and over, made for the tower on the roof with a weather vane, and before my eyes landed on the very top in the sun—Hurrah, bird of my
heart, well aimed.

  And then down the long straight street of gardens towards my home, and everything was all at once illuminated with the joy I was too overcome to feel at first. The sky—such a sky. Pearly complicated clouds with a patch of warm sandy-gold and high fans of whitish silver, too bright to look at long, and behind them the pure thin blue—cherry trees that looked black against the sky until you got close and looked up and there as your blindness peeled away they were, deep maroon leaves and keen pink blossoms, nothing was black, everything swam with colour—and the sharp fresh smell of the altar of redcurrant flowers pulled me across the wet road to bury my face in them—I wanted to live for ever.

  Yes: the joy. I can still feel it. It was not about money. It was the work. The work, in which I’d put my soul and my heart, the bird on its arc across the thin blue sky.

  (But what if I had not had a friend? What if Moris Farhi had not known Mai?)

  Nearly a year later, I was in Australia with Rosa, a month or so before The White Family was published. We were happy, on bikes, a late balmy afternoon, tied them up and went into an internet café. I opened Hotmail and saw a puzzling blizzard of emails. Most of them were headed ‘Congratulations …’ The book had been long-listed, pre-publication, for the Orange Prize, the global prize for women writing in English. It came out on that ready-made wave of approval, and gained excellent reviews. Then, to the excitement of my publisher and my triumphant, unreasonable joy, it was shortlisted. And then, again, it was shortlisted for the International Dublin Impac Award of 100,000 Euros, the largest award for a single book, and ran into many editions and translations. I suppose you could say I was vindicated.

  The ‘Disaster’ years came more or less exactly in the middle of my career to date, with my sixth, out of twelve, books (this is my thirteenth). It turned out to be the middle, but it could have been the end. Ever after, my memory of that time has added a resonance, a shading, a depth of pleasure when good things happen; each time a new foreign right is sold, each time I get the chance to travel for my writing. Since the ‘Disaster’ years, I have been asked, for work, to Rome, Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Beirut, Majorca, Ankara, Istanbul, Zurich, Tripoli, Geneva, Copenhagen … so many foreign cities. So little time on this beautiful planet, and writing is helping me travel around it. A new and quite unexpected African connection opened up for me in 2003 when my enterprising editor, Anna Wilson, said the right thing to Cheltenham Literary Festival, and they sent me to Kampala, Uganda, on an exchange with the Ugandan novelist Ayeta Anne Wangusa, which inspired friendships, short stories, two novels. My luck, my luck, sitting writing in Kampala with the weaver birds darting outside the open door. When, in 2004, I became Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, the first woman to hold that post, it meant more to me because, not so long before, I thought my life as a writer might be over.

  Yet it is all a castle of air and spun sugar. I know now how frail it is, how quickly it shatters. My publisher is a small independent, one of the midget weightlifters still taking the strain of sustaining serious literature and scholarship here. Small, in their case, means strong and flexible, but flabby giants throw their weight about more, manipulate big sales, monopolise the book chains, pay for the best displays and pre-fixed places in the book-charts. I have not seized the handholds that make you safe ‘for ever’: winning a major prize, having a major bestseller (though as I write, Saqi have just sold the film rights to my first African novel, My Cleaner.) My twelve books look solid enough, on the shelf, with their avatars, in thirteen languages, and there, among them, after long travail, The White Family and The Ice People, paid for in pain, repaying with a lesson … But I take a deep breath, and touch the wood of my desk. There is still a great deal of work to be done.

  And I shiver, and stare at the blank page of the future.

  The stars leave the stage

  en route for Stardust

  In the autumn of 1990, when Rosa was nearly four, there was a phone call to our London flat that sent me plunging down deep deep into a black pit of fear and grief and guilt. Dad came on first: ‘Mum has something to tell you.’

  Cancer. My mother’s voice, a little hoarse, terribly truthful, spoke words in my ear that could not be taken back, that were changing life for ever, tick-tocking into my ear in the dark bedroom, while from our front room, sounds of impossible family happiness, suddenly now in the past, floated through—Nick had just come back from a trip to America, he and Rosa were tucked up on the sofa oblivious, watching The Sound of Music. ‘Climb every mountain, cross every stream, follow every pathway, till you find your dream’.

  My mother’s favourite song from the film. But she had deferred all her dreams, all the things she wanted to do, all the places she wanted to go, until my father was dead, when she would be free. Now she was telling me the bitter truth. She had cancer. It would never happen.

  Why was I guilty? Because (although this is pure superstition) I had been out of touch for two months, which was for ever, measured by the normal rhythm of communication with my parents. We wrote to each other every week, to reassure each other, we experts in the art of ‘fit and well’. It was my father’s habitual opener in phone calls, a plea or pre-emptive strike, not an open-ended question: ‘So, Margaret, you’re fit and well?’

  But for some time I had not been fit and well at all; semi-paralysed, flattened like grass, by RSI. I was wired with pain, sapped of all strength. There was simply no vocabulary for conveying this news to my parents, even if I were able to write a letter, and to phone and say nothing seemed as bad as a lie. So I did not phone. Sudden radio silence.

  Till my mother broke it with dread news. She too had stayed silent, while fear turned slowly into certainty. Then feeling for a way, herself, to break our rigid family conventions. To speak about the unspeakable, cancer.

  My fault, I thought. All my life I’d half-believed my love had kept my mother alive. For eight weeks I had let her go. And now she phoned and told me she had cancer.

  Quite soon my younger brother and I were on a train to Norfolk, coming to visit my mother in hospital after her operation. Afraid of the new unthinkable reality, that Mum might die. Clutching each other’s arms as we walked down the long room towards her, beds of pained strangers to either side.

  She did not die.

  It was a very long convalescence. She stayed in hospital for months, and my sturdy, physically fit, bike-riding mother for a little while lost all confidence. I remember encouraging her to come out of the ward into the sunlight for a walk. I’d found a door that opened from the corridor onto the hospital garden and a bright fresh day, I wanted her to escape for a moment, and my mum, who had always longed to be up and away, clutched my arm like a different person, a different body—no, her own hurt body. ‘I don’t know, Margaret.’ And came so slowly, her first trip outside after the terrible delvings and cuttings of the surgeon, feeling that her body might simply fall apart if removed from the sealed fug of safety.

  A fortnight before she came home, Dad and I were summoned to see the consultant. The operation had been ‘a success’, but the cancer had spread to her liver. ‘Two spots on her liver.’ What did that mean? I asked. He gave us to understand that liver cancer was not considered to be treatable. But were they large spots? I asked. It sounded like such a small thing, two spots. You could take a rubber and rub them out. Then my father was asking how long she had got. The conversation seemed more and more unreal as the consultant, who I remember as thin and bald and blank, a mere cipher for death, was closing all the doors and windows on my mother’s life—‘Between six months and a year.’ I wanted my father to protest, but, probably in shock, he sat there silent. Then the consultant asked if we felt my mother should be told. I started to say that she should, but my father said she should be allowed to recover first, and then—‘You will tell her in your own time,’ the consultant said.

  Afterwards we sat outside in the sun. I said, ‘Poor Mum, I can’t believe
it.’ My father said, ‘Well with the Parkinson’s’—he had been diagnosed four years earlier, and his mobility had steadily declined, he had suffered mini-strokes and a mild heart attack—‘I’ve probably not got much more than a year myself.’

  ‘But she doesn’t have to die just because you do!’ I said, outraged. I was crying, he seemed impassive. Did he not love her enough to allow her her own existence, independent of his? Why didn’t he grieve that her life, too, was ending? All I could think was that he was revealed in that moment as horribly selfish.

  But of course she was his wife. What he spoke was just a reflex thought, a measuring out of their lives, side by side. He was probably asking himself the question that is posed by all long marriages: who will grieve for whom? Who will be alone? He said, ‘We needn’t tell her yet.’

  In me there was just a voice howling Mum, Mum. Whose wit and intelligence and strength had always been fatally compromised by her fearfulness. Who could not stand up for herself and so had put off every -thing she hardly dared to hope for into the future, when Dad would be dead. And now her future was shrivelling, vanishing, gone, like the food in the fridge she had saved too long for it ever to be eaten. All an illusion.

  My own delusion, which became an obsession, was that I must at least make sure Mum knew how little time she had left. I thought then she could decide how to spend it, was determined she should not be cheated, by Dad and the doctors, of this last chance.

  So I tried to tell her. I tried every way I could to tell her the cancer was not cured, there were spots on her liver, her time was short. She refused to hear me. She became, for her, uncharacteristically angry. ‘You could die before me, Margaret.’ To say this to her own daughter whom she loved, her anger must have been beyond bounds. I was wrong, as so often in my life, completely and utterly. If she had known how bad things were, she could not have recovered. To live she needed hope. And I, who loved her, who believed I loved her more than anyone else, so nearly, and wrongly, took that hope away. I saw it as my duty to everything I knew about her, to her dreams, to her secret individual self, to her clear, undeluded intelligence; I thought I owed it to the pact between us, two women in this family of men. I was desperate to be truthful even though every cell in my body was electric with the pain I must give her. But it was like beating a stick against resistant silence; her will not to hear had the invisible strength of rubber. In the end I had the sense to respect it. Sometimes all that you know counts for nothing, because the world has changed behind your back.