Where are the Snows E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 647

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Christopher and Alexandra's passion for each other raises eyebrows and invites envy. This beautiful, blinkered couple do the unthinkable and run away from home, abandoning their two teenage children. Their sudden departure is an act of glorious wilfulness. Life in the countries they visit is nothing more than a backdrop to their love affair. Fifteen years later Alexandra is in remote Bolivia with a lover young enough to be her son and Christopher is in Venice, desolate and alone but for the pigeons and prostitutes. Tormented by past mistakes, neither can accept that they may never meet again. ‘The most exhilarating novel I've read all year.' Scotland on Sunday ‘A rich story of the heart told through a harlequin pattern of alternating voices, each of which is a work of real imaginative insight.' Marie Claire ‘Maggie Gee's immense talent catches passion on the wing a romance of a truth and depth that's never without humour.' Mail on Sunday ‘A remarkable and ambitious book, a tribute to Maggie Gee's imaginative power.' Literary Review ‘More erotic than a thousand blockbusters' Mail on Sunday ‘So rich it is almost aromatic ... an impressive and important novel' Nigella Lawson, The Evening Standard ‘Compulsive reading' The Sunday Times

Leseprobe

Maggie Gee

WHERE ARE THE SNOWS

TELEGRAM

This book is for Nick, my dream lover

... mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

François Villion

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt ... Quod petis hic est.

They change their sky, not their soul, who run across the sea ... What you seek is here.

Horace

Contents

Prologue

1: Mary Brown

2: Alexandra: London, 1986

3: Mary Brown: London, 1995

Part One

4: Christopher: Venice, 2005

5: Alexandra: Esperanza, Bolivia, 2005

6: Christopher: Venice, 2005

7: Alexandra: Esperanza, Bolivia, 2005

8: Christopher: Venice, 2005

9: Alexandra: Esperanza, Bolivia, 2005

10: Christopher: Venice, 2005

Part Two

11: Alexandra: Esperanza, Bolivia, 2005

12: Christopher: Venice, 2005

13: Alexandra: Guayaramerín, Bolivia, 2005

14: Christopher: Venice, 2005

15: Alexandra: São Benedicto, Brazil, 2005

16: Christopher: Venice, 2005

Part Three

17: Mary Brown: London, 2005

18: Alexandra: Sao Benedicto, Brazil, 2005

19: Christopher: Venice, 2005

20: Alexandra: São Benedicto, Brazil, 2005

21: Susy: London, 2005

22: Alexandra: São Benedicto, Brazil, 2005

23: Christopher: Venice, 2005

24: Alexandra: Paris, 2005

25: Susy: London, 2005

26: Alexandra: Paris, 2005

Part Four

27: Susy: London, 2007

28: Alexandra: Mexico City, 2007

29: Christopher: London, 2007

30: Susy: London, 2007

31: Christopher: London, 2007

32: Mary Brown: Paris, 2007

33: Alexandra: Paris, 2007

34: Mary: Paris, 2007

35: Alexandra: Paris, 2007

36: Christopher: London, 2007

37: Alexandra: Home, 2007

Prologue

1

Mary Brown

Was it sex, or love, that mysterious thing they seemed to have more of than anyone else?

And why should it bother me so much? The charge in the air, or in me, when I saw him pass close to her, as if accidentally, but really to rub against her back and run his hands across her shoulder-blades.

Stroking my daughter’s silk shirt last week before I sent it to the jumble sale, it began to purr and crackle faintly as if the universe were coming alive. And I thought of Christopher and Alexandra. Alexandra and Christopher ...

2

Alexandra: London, 1986

I don’t look at other people very much, unless they’re beautiful or interesting. But yesterday, as I waited for the money, I looked at the other people queueing in the bank. They were neither beautiful nor interesting, a dozen or so of the shadowy strangers who pass down the margins of life every day.

They were worried, preoccupied, impatient, grey with London air and ordinary ill health, with too many bags or too many papers. The queue was stalled, as usual. They were standing still, of course. But they seemed to trudge uphill as I looked. They were going uphill into the darkness.

The men looked back at me, hard, which is only to be expected; men have always looked at me, all my life – I suppose they always will.

And I thought, every one of you would like to be me. Every single one of you would ditch your life if you could do what I’m about to do.

I’m flying away with my darling.

From the chores and the queues and the dirty light.

We’re going on holiday and never coming back, and life will be a fairy-tale.

The last few days have been made of lists, lists on every scrap of paper. I tried to get Chris to draw up lists, but he said my lists would do for six. I started to get tired and cross. We started to dislike each other, Chris and I, Chris and I who adore each other.

It’s the tension, of course. We’re a little afraid, of other people’s sorrow and too much happiness. We’re afraid we are trying to be too lucky.

I haven’t slept well these last few nights. I’ve nothing on my conscience but I haven’t slept well. Chris has decided to block everything out; he’s slept too well, and snored.

Last night – the very last night at home – was the longest night I have ever spent. The Newsons’ dog howled like a wolf, three gardens away, and a small child sobbed ...

On this final morning I woke feeling frightful and lay for a moment with my eyes half-closed, trying to grapple with a horrible dream. I had to recall it or I’d never escape it. When dragged to the surface it was about a little girl with a pretty smile and an empty suitcase.

She wants me to buy her a Japanese doll. She holds up the doll she wants me to buy, which is puggish, with slanted eyes, not pretty. I say so, and she explains it’s a dog. I tell her the dog has to be put down. She cries, and folds herself into the suitcase. She promises they will follow us.

It’s perfectly meaningless. The morning is beautiful, I smell my bacon cooking downstairs, the dream is no longer frightening.

Things start to seem more promising.

The suitcases, packed but not yet locked, stand in a line along the wall. Joy of the place-names that will fill those labels. The lists have all gone into the waste-paper basket, each with its long smug line of ticks. I’ve had my injections, collected the money, ordered the cab for the airport. I make one final triumphant list. Apple, paperbacks, flask full of brandy, in case we get stuck at Budapest airport and the barman has no Rémy Martin ...

And I start to feel it, a foretaste of fun, a shiver of ecstatic anticipation, the first of a thousand unknown bars, just the two of us alone together ...

This morning I’m avoiding the children – postponing the children, shall we say – until I have enough caffeine inside me.

Yesterday evening they both became suddenly (strategically?) sad, though they weren’t a bit troubled when we’d told them we were going.

– They are just being sad to upset me. Isaac’s nineteen years old, after all, and studying art at St Martin’s. You’d think he’d be glad we are going away, you’d think he’d be glad of a bit more freedom ...

Isaac doesn’t talk a lot, or not to us, but he has a way of hanging about that I find intensely irritating, partly because he’s a clumsy boy; there are always little thuds and crashes and sulky muttered apologies, and the carpet is covered in coffee stains, and I haven’t the energy to replace it. He sighs a lot as well. You can’t see his face with those gigantic blue glasses. I’ve tried encouraging him to buy lenses but he thinks the glasses are fashionable, which they probably are, but he looks a fright. He sits there reading his art books, which he could perfectly well do upstairs ... or he watches James Dean on the downstairs video, he has an obsession with James Dean which is probably an art student’s thing about style; we gave him a VCR of his own for his eighteenth birthday, but he didn’t take the hint, he likes ours better. Well now he can do whatever he likes, now he can have the run of the house, so why must he give us a hard time for leaving?

I suppose the children are secretly green with envy, just like everyone else ... It’s nothing to worry about. They’ll be celebrating the minute we’re gone, inviting people for an all-night party ...

– A moment’s qualm, which I dismiss. Mary Brown will keep an eye on things – dear Mary, she’s a good friend to us. Though I hope she’s not going to fuss too much and bother us with every little detail. She said she would write, I hope not too often ... The daily will come in three times a week, the best china is stored in the attic ...

They’re sensible children, in any case.

I’m quoting my own bland statements to friends. No one could call Susy sensible. Limited yes, sensible no. She’s nearly seventeen but she seems much younger. Thank God for the unconditional place she’s been given at the Poly of Central London by a tutor who said sotto voce that she looked like a Rubens woman.

It was Isaac who assured her this was complimentary and meant she was certain to be offered a place. ‘They’re gormless things with enormous bottoms. Rubens women are quite disgusting. But most people seem to think they’re beautiful.’

Yes, the children are certainly fond of each other, we know they’ll look after the house and each other, they’ll thrive on independence, it will be good for us and good for them ... All quotes from my public statements. Not that I don’t believe it. Oh yes, and we’ll be back in September, in any case, in time for the beginning of Susy’s first term – Chris has more or less promised the children as much, and I haven’t the heart to contradict him.

Nothing too much can go wrong by then.

Ah, here’s Chris with juice and coffee and a plate of over-cooked eggs and bacon. That wonderful cock-eyed smile. I still find him devastatingly handsome, tall and thickset with thick dark hair and a great bear’s chest I can rest upon. He kisses me slowly, tenderly, as always, forgiving me for all the lists, the timetables, the worry, the temper. He must feel just like me; ready to be free and happy. No breakfast to cook for a very long time. We’ll lie in state and be waited on and make love twenty times a week.

11am. Time ticking away. Cases in the hall, hand luggage packed. The telephone never stops ringing; people wanting to say goodbye. Isaac’s gone out to take a video back. He loses track of time in video shops. I emphasised that we were leaving in an hour and his father would be most upset if he’s not back in time to say goodbye ... He stared at the ground and said nothing. Possibly irritated, possibly sad, it’s so hard to know with teenagers, I normally don’t bother to analyse but leaving home makes me take them seriously, thank Christ you only have to do it once.

I’ve promised Chris to make time for a long talk with Susy. I don’t begrudge her it, though talks with Susanna always seem twice as long as they really are. Talking to sixteen-year-olds is never plain sailing. But today I grudge her nothing; impending freedom always makes me generous.

I hear her slopping around upstairs in Christopher’s slippers, which are much too big, though her feet are big enough. Slap, slap, an unharmonious sound, a nagging reminder that she’s there.

(While we’re away she’ll never bother to get up. She’ll answer the door in her dressing-gown. Must talk to her about that. Isaac will have to answer the door – for the vision of Susy, flushed from sleep, a pink and nubile teenage girl, clutching her dressing-gown half-heartedly round her as she answers the door to the goggling milkman, is not a calming one.)

11.45. Put down the phone. I’m travelling in the cream shantung which, despite appearances, does not crumple. And the cream silk blouse, and Chris’s pearls, the ones he gave me on our wedding day. Instead of going up to deal with Susy, I find myself polishing my beige kid shoes, which don’t need polishing. I put them on, and tap upstairs.

Even with those heels on I’m smaller than her. Sometimes she makes me feel flimsy.

‘Susy?’ I stand outside her door. No answer, just a shuffling, like an animal at bay.

‘Susy, I want to talk.’

‘Oh.’ The tone is heavily neutral. A few seconds pass before I hear her push back her chair and pad to the door. She opens it. She is a very large girl. Her yellow hair springs out like straw.

‘Do you want to come in? Or do you want me to come out?’ She implies she herself is eager for neither. And yet, she’s shy, as well. And perhaps there is a hint of wistfulness in the downcast eyes, briefly lifting, falling. And she’s got some clothes on, before twelve o’clock, on a day when she doesn’t have to go to school, as if she is making a last-ditch attempt to convince us of her maturity. Black mini-skirt and straining t-shirt – never mind, she’s dressed.

‘I’d thought perhaps we’d have a chat ...’

The children never like it when we say things like that. I perch on the bed. She inspects my clothes. Those long green eyes can look very sharp.

‘You look terribly smart.’ Said like that, it’s an insult.

‘Susy, are you going to be all right? – with your work and everything? You know, all right?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be all right? You and Dad think I’m a cretin.’ She yawns elaborately, and fluffs her bright hair.

‘Of course we don’t. But your father worries ...’

‘Maybe he could come and talk to me himself.’ Pain shows through; she bites her plump lips. She’s right of course, he can’t face her.

‘Of course he will, before we go. But he had to make one last trip to the office ...’

‘He always has a good excuse.’

I rush on. ‘Look will you be all right for money? Up to a hundred and twenty pounds a week. Just draw it from the bank. The bills are all paid by standing order. Your father would hate you to be short of money.’

(You see, we haven’t been irresponsible; we’ve nothing to feel guilty about, yet it’s as if Susy can smell our guilt. Not my guilt, his guilt; I’m not their mother. Stepmothers aren’t supposed to feel guilt.)

‘Thanks.’

Silence. How to begin?

‘Are you getting on all right with Tim?’

Tim is Susy’s current boyfriend. There have been others worse than him. He’s smaller than her, but so are most people. He has a job. He doesn’t smell. He doesn’t appear to be a heroin addict.

‘Yeah. Thanks for asking.’

She’s not going to help me, that much is clear.

‘Susy. When we talked before ...’

She doesn’t say a word. She stares at me, green eyes perfectly blank, then her full lips open, as if to speak, and I am just willing her to do so, quick, when I see it is turning into a yawn, another monstrous slow-motion yawn, glittering adenoids, a sexual tongue, rows of tiny regular teeth.

‘You remember ... when we talked about babies.’

‘Yeah. Well we talked about it, didn’t we.’ She gets up from her slumped position on the bed with an uncharacteristically decisive movement and pretends to look out of the window, at the browned rhododendrons and the monkey-puzzle tree and the flaming hibiscus, my pride and joy, which I planted to make the garden less boring, flaunting its flowers like red silk birds by the gate through which I shall fly away ... our view, our garden, which we’ll soon be leaving, no longer boring now it’s touched with nostalgia, the scattering of sparrows on the telephone wires, the distant silver of the Jennings’ poplars.

– Her front is voluptuous but her back is plain fat, the back of a fat sulky adolescent girl, the back of the sort of girl who’d get herself pregnant. I suddenly feel brisker, stronger, crosser.

‘What did you decide about contraception? If you are going to sleep with Tim.’

She talks to the window, not me. ‘It’s none of your business, is it? It’s horrible, your going on about the pill. My mother wouldn’t have gone on about the pill –’

Her mother is dead, and can’t help her, and I’m in a tearing hurry to be gone. ‘ – I just want to know if you went to the doctor.’

‘I asked her about the pill.’

‘And?’

‘She doesn’t advise it.’

‘Why the hell not? You’re very young. And it’s practically foolproof –’

‘– Meaning I’m a fool.’

‘Susy. I was on the pill myself till I was thirty-five or so. It didn’t do me any harm.’

‘It’s not very feminist to go on the pill.’

She’s the least feminist girl alive, but she likes to use it to needle me since she knows I am a feminist. I begin to lose my temper.

‘Forget the fucking pill. What else did she suggest?’

She stares at me levelly to show she hates swearing.

‘She was keen to know if I really loved Tim.’

‘I suppose you sneered at her for that.’ Too late, I try to pull myself back. We mustn’t have a row just before we leave.

‘Well you’re wrong. I like Dr Larch.’ (Clear implication: I don’t like you.)

She half-turns to deliver this deadly thrust, and as her mouth turns down and her round face flushes she suddenly looks so very young, a giant model of a six-year-old, that I soften; this scene is ridiculous; she’s innocent; she isn’t grown-up.

‘I like her too. I’m glad you went to see her. Whatever you decided is fine.’ I go over to where she is sitting on the edge of the table and put my arms round her broad shoulders and my cheek against her prolific hair. It doesn’t feel comfortable, but we hug. She doesn’t move away.

I want to tell her, let’s drop the subject. At least I’ve established that she’s been to the doctor, at least I have a crumb to offer Chris on the plane ...

The plane. Chris will have to come back soon. He might have slipped in while I’ve been upstairs ... and my heart starts to lift with happiness, for there we shall be, in the sky, side by side, with nothing to do but talk to each other, and laugh at the toytown food on trays, and be a little pissed, and a little romantic, and all this nonsense will be left behind.

Now I’ve dropped the subject, Susy feels thwarted.

‘If you want to know –’ she says, ‘– but don’t pass on any details to Dad –’

‘Guide’s honour,’ I say. I was sacked from the Guides for having two boys in my tent.

‘I haven’t ever done it,’ she says. It’s obvious what she is talking about. ‘I sort of – want to know – if I love Tim. Like Dr Larch says. I really want to know. And if I decide I love him. If he hasn’t given me up by August. I think we might start after my birthday.’ A long pause. I will her to speak. ‘Only ... I know this is wrong, I mean I know it’s not right. But I sort of feel that if I love him ... I might want to ... well, don’t get annoyed ... but I might want to ...’ (she is blushing furiously) ‘... I might want to have his baby ...’ Her eyes dart up, agonised, see my horrified expression, fall in shame. ‘I know it’s wrong,’ she repeats, dully. ‘I will make sure I don’t have a baby.’ I nod, frantically. She presses on. ‘I think that – you know – rubbers are best. If he agrees, if he can use them. He hasn’t ever done it, you see ...’

I feel pity and irritation and worry; if she’s telling the truth, she’s younger than I’d dreamed. She hasn’t ever done it despite our fears. And, she’s going to do it when she’s seventeen, if he hasn’t given her up, that is, as if all boys would give her up ...

But that isn’t funny. It’s what she feels. It must be our fault, her bad self-image (and again I have a flash of the inside of a plane, the kind stewardess who will erase all worries, filling my glass with oblivious gin; blank blue windows, smiling strangers).

‘Anyone can use them if they try,’ I say, attempting to sound crisp and encouraging, but not too crisp, or immoderately encouraging.

‘That’s not the thing that worries me most ...’

– The physical contact, so rare between us, seems to have released a different girl, a confiding, dependent, needy girl we might have been grateful to know last week ... Now, however, is a bad time to meet her. In under ten minutes the cab will arrive.

‘... Do you mind if I ask you something?’

‘Please.’ (But why didn’t you do it before?)

‘How do you know ... don’t laugh. How do you know if you love someone?’

Suddenly feet bound up the stairs. Her door swings open, and Chris rushes in. He looks amazed to see us cuddling each other. ‘The cab’s outside. Are you ready? And where the hell is Isaac ...’

‘You’re interrupting. Go away.’

‘What do you mean ...?’ He gazes at me. I project the fictitious desire to be left alone with Susy that the occasion demands. And to my surprise it isn’t wholly fictitious; I almost feel like a mother, for once, yet at the same time I’ve split neatly in two, for another self, overcoat flung round her shoulders, steps out of the door and runs down the path, leaps straight through the taxi and into the sky.

Chris turns on his heel, exasperated.

The mood is broken. She edges away. I look her in the eyes, and try. ‘It’s very hard to say. I love your father. As soon as I saw him I wanted him ...’

‘– You mean, when he was still married to Mother.’

‘Sorry. I’m trying to be truthful. Love is ... oh, it’s everything. Not just wanting someone, needing them. Needing to have them to yourself. Wanting to protect them, sometimes ...’

(Wanting to protect Chris from you and Isaac. Needing to take him away from your mother. Wanting to take him away on a plane.)

‘... Feeling they love you completely. Knowing how much you matter to them.’

Susy is staring at the floor, where the sun makes a brilliant pool on the carpet. ‘I feel I’ll never have all that. You’re the sort of person who gets all that ... You’re the sort of person who’d get Dad. It’s all right. I’m not blaming you.’

And she smiles at me, a defeated smile, looking more grownup than she ever has. I turn and kiss her on the cheek.

‘Look, if you love this boy, you’ll know. You wouldn’t have to ask me.’

– Susy comes down to say goodbye, pounding docilely behind me, Susy who’s never been known to run, and rarely bothers to say goodbye.

(But where is Isaac? Hopelessly selfish. All teenagers are hopelessly selfish.)

Chris hugs her, engulfingly, passionately. His eyes over her shoulder are full of tears. At the very last moment, as we open the front door, Isaac comes panting up the street, an ungainly boy, very slightly knock-kneed, gleaming blue specs and flying hair. He is blowing like a fish, and trying to smile, and shouting something through the noise of the traffic ...

It all turned into a scene from a film. Years later, that is how I remember it. For a brief moment we were all there together, all four of us by the hibiscus bush, blinking and cavorting in the sun, falling over cases, trying to hold each other, trying to say things that might last.

‘Take care.’ ‘Good luck.’ ‘Take care of your sister.’ ‘Take care of each other.’ ‘Don’t drive the car.’

The sun was so un-English (as we thought then) that Chris put on his holiday dark glasses, and the children laughed at him; ‘Poser!’ ‘Rock star!’

– He looked like an actor but he wasn’t acting. For a moment there we were a normal family, standing on the edge of another world, where we would simply have fitted together and gone on together into the future, the children growing bigger and brighter, us getting smaller and fading away; it was not too late, we could have changed our minds...

And then we turned, my eyes searched for Chris’s, a hibiscus bloom was reflected in his lens, then Susy and Isaac, smaller, distorted; the red silk bloomed on the back of his lens, a giant hibiscus, a tiny family; our fingers met, our fingers twined, we were leaving together for paradise.

In the quiet of the taxi we sat holding hands. The driver was in a tearing hurry and swore at a pudgy little dog who walked self-importantly over a zebra crossing.

It reminded me of the horrible dream with the dog-like doll and the empty suitcase.

But it seemed to come from another country, and besides, the little girl was dead.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Chris asked, as we screeched to a halt at Heathrow airport and he brushed the hair away from my cheek, ran his finger down my cheekbone.

‘You, my darling. Me and you. I can’t believe we’ve got away.’

‘Twenty pounds sixty!’ shouted the driver. Chris still took the time to kiss me, tenderly.

The gins we drank at the airport were large; we didn’t eat lunch; we were too excited. And a little tense, as well, having watched the queues of travellers filing like pack animals to the check-in desks. They were neither beautiful nor interesting; they were harassed beings from an alien planet, the dreary planet we were hoping to leave, people frowning at watches, counting their luggage, checking the papers in their briefcases. When a telephone rang in an empty booth, some of the zombies started staring about them, looking in the direction of the shrilling then casting round helplessly for someone to answer it, as if the ringing were a cry for help, as if it were somebody calling us back; as if it were somehow wrong to be leaving.

‘For whom the bell tolls,’ said Christopher.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s just a quotation. It came into my head, the way things do.’ His smile was insouciant, reassuring.

Christopher: darling Christopher. I decided to ignore everyone but him. He was certainly beautiful and interesting. Perhaps a touch heavy, but I like heavy men, big men who know how to look after themselves. And me of course. I like to be looked after. His bones are fine; they can carry their flesh; a good square jaw, and an aquiline nose with well-cut bridge and nostrils. Sensual lips. Amused, slightly crooked. Frequently bored, but never with me. His eyes are hooded, a clear sea-grey with touches of yellow around the pupil. Sun on the sea: traveller’s eyes. He was my St Christopher ...

I was a little tipsy; I stared at him, the detailed clarity of his face printed on a haze of faceless strangers. Only he and I were real, I knew. Christopher and me, a world of two.

As the plane climbed and the earth receded he pressed his clinking glass against mine. ‘Christopher and Alexandra for ever,’ he said, and his other arm encircled my body, his hand under my jacket gently stroked my left breast, rubbing the silk against my nipple.

‘Alexandra and Christopher,’ I breathed.

And we were away. We had got away. Stepping across into another life, flying away into our dream. This was where it started, the fairy tale. This was where the happy ever after begins.

In the old life we would never have considered making love in an aeroplane. It was something people only did in novels: childless, carefree, fictional people. But this was the new time, fairy tale time.

We could go anywhere, do anything. And so the thought flew into our heads through the blind and brilliant blue of the window.

Alcohol and chance helped it to grow. Our seats were in the very front row of the plane, by the window, and the flight to Hungary was only half full, dotted about with businessmen and people in cheap, outmoded clothes who were probably Hungarian, poor things. The steward and stewardess were less than officious. The ice-cubes in our glasses stayed stranded.

‘Maybe they’re up to something back there.’ They had both disappeared into their little galley way back in the rear of the plane.

‘I wish we were up to something.’ We were kissing idly; no one could see us, though in the row of seats just behind and across, two stolid businessmen discussed aluminium. I pushed up the arm between our two seats. The kisses opened, became less idle.

Open kisses are curious things. Two little animals, wet and warm, tumble out of their caves and fall on each other, sliding and rubbing, naked, juicy, and everything between them is melting, easy, so they send out a message to the bigger animals: this is delicious. You do it too.

The longer we kissed, the louder the message.

Christopher took and squeezed my hand and brushed it across the front of his body. I felt what he wanted me to feel.

‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to wait ... Christopher, we’ve been married twelve years!’ For Christopher’s hand was between my knees, nosing dog-like up under my skirt. I was weak with laughter, weak with gin, weakening as lust ran through my body, rushing faster than alcohol.

Things were confusing; things were confused; drink, desire, a dazzle of sun flaring through the low windows of the plane. On other seats there were only shadows, whereas we were urgent, we were real. In this new life we had only just met, we were only just meeting, 40,000 feet up, flying together near the dangerous sun, soaring way over the storybook clouds.

Christopher draped his beige spy trenchcoat over the gap between the backs of our seats, then his other hand was inside my thighs. His face was familiar, flushed and intent. I forgot where we were, I forgot who I was, I pressed myself down upon his hand, I licked his cheek, I half-closed my eyes.

Almost too late we heard the stewardess’s snappish offers of drinks approaching again, and the hurried tinkle of money and glasses. Swearing, Christopher removed his hand, I turned towards the window, his body cupped mine, he tugged the coat down to cover us up and with one accord we feigned sighing sleep, though my cheeks were hot, and our sighing excessive. The stewardess asked sternly for our orders, but when we said nothing her voice receded.

I half-opened my eyes into dazzling sun. Christopher’s breath was loud in my ear. We were making spoons. We were making love. The enormous blue looked in at us. We were flying together, drunk with light. His finger slipped inside again. Not his finger. Oh not his finger.

I was due to menstruate next day, but he didn’t know, only I knew that; he was an idiot who wanted to make babies, he was an idiot who loved me. I pushed down over him. I took him in. Miles below was a silver fleece of clouds, miles below that a tiny planet existed only for our pleasure. ‘More,’ I sighed. ‘Yes. Oh yes.’ We moved very slowly, then slowly faster.

Hot skin of the seat on my own hot skin, the blazing sun, we were burning, swelling, I squeezed my lids as I started to come, there was only a bright red greedy blindness, then the sun burst through me as I was transfigured, gasping, impaled in thin blue air, staring amazed at a tiny plane which passed below us, diamond-edged, as I shook with Christopher’s dying moments.

We died together. We dozed. We dressed, furtive and sleepy, then dozed again.

Till the chimes awoke us; time to fasten our seat-belts. We cocked a cautious ear behind us; the two grey men were talking tin.

‘What if we just made a baby?’ Chris asked. His tone was playful, but it wasn’t a joke.

I didn’t disillusion him. Let him dream.

We circled Hungary, in fairy-tale time.

3

Mary Brown: London, 1995

My name is Mary Brown. I know it’s dull, but I’m fond of it. Actually Brown is my husband’s name, but before I married him I was a Smith, so you see I hadn’t a thing to lose.

– I prefer Brown to Smith. It seems more solid, and I like solid things. Having been brought up in a feckless family, I’m not very drawn to drama ... at any rate, I used not to be drawn to drama. I’m not so sure of myself as I was.

A lot of things have changed in the seven or eight years since Christopher and Alexandra went away. I’ve suddenly started to think about ageing; my husband Matthew is younger than me, but I never used to think about my age. I still can’t believe that I’ve stopped having periods and can’t have any more children ... my own children are enormous strangers who’ve learned to say ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ at last.

I was always what people call ‘a good mother’. Matthew used to say I was a good wife. When I was young I was told I was a very good student, with composition my forte. I sometimes wonder where my goodness has gone...

But I don’t think about myself much. When I compare my life to other people’s it’s lacking in stature, or substance, or I am, playing a bit part in my own life. So I don’t have a story of my own to tell. I can only tell you about my friends...

Alexandra and Christopher. Because they’re not here their names have somehow acquired a melancholy ring. Yet when they first came to live in Islington, and the four of us made friends – almost too quickly – just the sound of their names on the phone cheered us up. ‘Mary? It’s Alex. You’ve got to come round.’

They were very soon our best friends. Always dropping in, always cheerful and reckless. Especially at first, before Penelope killed herself. They seemed to grow younger as their kids grew up. We had two as well, so that was a link.

Chris and Alex’s two – not really Alex’s, of course, Chris’s children by his first wife Penelope – would have been around six and eight when they first came to live across the road from us. They were just married, and besotted with each other. For over ten years we were as thick as thieves.

Although my husband never admitted it, he was a little in love with Alex. It wasn’t her fault, she seemed awfully young, and a lot of men must have fallen for her ... I couldn’t dislike her for her beautiful face, though I sometimes felt she was a dreadful mother. After a while they were simply there. We saw them so often she became like a sister.

Now they write to us from extraordinary places. The first year or so we heard every other week; we were keeping an eye on their children for them. Then naturally the cards slackened off. No complaints, it was kind of them to think of us at all. But we must have been becoming less real to them, getting smaller, the wrong end of the telescope.

Usually Alex would scribble a poste restante where I could reach them, and I wrote at once. Yet I never felt sure my letter had arrived. The next card from them never seemed to respond. I suppose our news wasn’t earth-shattering, whereas they were travelling all over the world.

So we weren’t really talking to each other any more. It didn’t matter, they were still our best friends. We longed to see them, though. Twice Alexandra sent photographs.

We were happy to have the first one. Alexandra in Malta with a pigeon by her foot, crouching in the sun. That enviable red-gold hair. Christopher smiling, crinkling up his heavy-lidded eyes at the brightness. All Matthew said was ‘I’m glad she hasn’t cut it.’ I didn’t like that. I’d cut my hair that year. I thought I was too old to have long straight hair, but I fear it looked even more ordinary, chin-length.

It was the second photo that upset us. A snap, not quite in focus, of the two of them sitting on a low yellow rock that looked a bit like a sleeping lion. Behind them, one of those long white bays that seem to go on for ever. The light was so bright that their faces were bleached. It made them young, almost featureless, and Alex’s hair was like blown sand; the sun had taken away its red. She had cupped his hand between her two paler ones, their feet were touching, they were looking at each other...

I enjoy sex more than my husband does, but it’s not in my nature to be jealous. Matthew and I would feel silly holding hands.

Chris had scribbled something on the back which seemed rushed, or careless, and perhaps that’s what accounted for the disappointment. As if he didn’t mind what he wrote.

‘Turkey is great. Photography by a maniac Alex found hiding in the dunes. Alex says I’m a bullshitter. So you see nothing has changed. Love C.’

Matthew stood and looked at it. I remember it was raining great heavy drops. It was sixish, a summer evening, but we had to have the light on.

‘What does he mean, “nothing has changed”? What rubbish! They’ve just buggered off. We haven’t seen them for years –’

‘Matthew –’

‘– I haven’t even told her about my kidneys.’

‘That’s not their fault. I couldn’t put it in a letter.’

‘I didn’t say it was their fault. But I miss them. Alex used to brighten things up. Oh hell. It’s just the weather.’

That year it was grey and overcast in England. A volcano had exploded somewhere in the world. Perhaps we minded that Chris and Alex weren’t there to suffer with the rest of us.

Or perhaps it was the hands and feet that upset us, the way they couldn’t stop touching each other. Everyone wants to be loved like that.

As time goes by, I think Matthew minds less. He still dreams about Alexandra, though. Perhaps even more than he tells me he does. We are very good friends; we tell each other things. I’d rather he told me. I understand ...

Indeed, I wish I could dream about Chris, but I tend to dream about supermarkets, with occasional attacks by wild animals, and yes, I do know what that means. Chris is a ‘dish’, or used to be a ‘dish’ – my daughter tells me my language is dated. His jaw was always blueish dark, although he claimed to shave twice a day, and he had lots of black hair, whereas Matt is bald ... I admit I regret that Matt is bald ... but by now Chris is probably balding as well. And despite that photo with its blank young face, Alex must have wrinkled like the rest of us. That very fine skin, I’m sure it would wrinkle.

I must sit down and write to them now at once. It must be six months since we last heard. They’d flown to Tasmania for Christmas, and I wrote straight back, but there was no reply. She had said they were going to spend summer in Toledo. They often seem to spend summer there.

Summer in Toledo. It’s another world.

And I suddenly wish I could join them, never mind the garden and the grandchildren, fly off and join them just like that. Pack one small bag and go, the plane headed straight into sun like a swallow.

But of course I couldn’t leave Matthew behind.

We could go together ... we could.

But we never had the thing that links them. That weirdly intense romantic thing. Or perhaps it’s just sex, something tangible, electrical, that rustle in the air when they moved close, something I know they will never lose, and hell oh hell I’m jealous.

Part One

4

Christopher: Venice, 2005

I miss my darling. I miss my love.

I lived for love. Love left me.

The sheets where she once lay beside me, the lip of sheet where her thin arms lay, always one arm outside the covers, thin gold fingers plucking, pulling, turning the sheet to a fold of skin – her part of the sheet is flat as snow. Desolate, untrodden snow.

I never wander across the bed towards her ghost; I stay this side, staring across at the stupid whiteness when I wake up and look for her.

I can’t help it. Too old to learn. She slept beside me for a quarter of a century. Now she sleeps with – madness. Madness to think of her now.

Alexandra left me. Or I frightened her away. A messy, humiliating scene with a gun. She should have understood. I was desperate. What else could I do? We no longer talked, but she was my life.

All the same, what I did was stupid, wrong. I knew it was over when I glimpsed her face, the split second that I pulled the trigger and changed our lives for ever; amazed, disgusted, embarrassed, afraid, but not, as in my dreams, admiring, not a vestige of sexual thrill, no hint of the look I’d known so well and longed above all to see again, the narrowed bands of hazel light she turned on me when life was young.

Better to pretend Alexandra is dead. Better drink my brandy, then another brandy, then droning with golden noise to bed, deaf to the cries I sometimes hear, Chris, come and find me, Chris, I’m lost, Chris, you promised we’d never part, Christopher, what happened to us?

Because if I hear those terrible cries. Coming from the other side of the world, from Brazil, perhaps, from Bolivia, from the land-mass where I would never take her because I knew she would only suffer, heat and flies and cruelty and children begging for the last of your steak, swarming over each other like frantic bats, dirty shirt-tails held out as a pouch for leftovers – if she calls to me from the land of fire, if I hear her cries on the edge of my dreams, I shall start to believe she will come back.

I know my darling will come back.

– I know that I know nothing.

I sit in Venice, in Guido’s bar, dark and hot but with windows on the sea and enough loud flies to disquiet the tourists.

Tourists. Scum. They will cover the earth until there is nothing left that shines. We were never tourists, Alex and I ...

But there aren’t so many as there were last year. Not half so many as five years ago when we last came to Venice together, in 1999, the year before she left me. There had been great works in the early 1990s, drainings and diggings and shorings-up and spectacular quarrels in the world press. Then things quietened down and it was business as usual. Around the millennium, the world flocked to Venice.

I remember she panicked in St Mark’s Square. You could hardly see the red colonnades for the sweaty press of jostling bodies, snapping away as if the world were ending. She was sickly white beneath her tan, her pupils shrank, her mouth was a hole, her nails were pincers on my arm. ‘Help me, help me.’ She needed me. Later, of course, she forgot all that; she only wanted to get away.

Now the tours are bypassing Venice again, with the water-level rising and grave men telling us our half-drowned ballroom will slide into the sea. My beautiful, poisonous, turquoise sea. It stretches away from this rotted window, dazzling under the lemon-bright sunlight ... will that cloudless sky really see us vanish?

The tourists are frightened. The old are not. I love this city of cats and secrets. Its endless flux of inhuman tears renders my own more bearable. I am old. I hope my travels are over (but if she called, if I were sure she needed me, I’d go to the utmost ends of the earth. I’d choke my way through the burning forests, I’m coming, Alex, I’m coming ...)

Embarrassing. I am on my feet, I said her name. They are looking at me. A cough, that’s all. Since the waiter’s staring, I’ll have another brandy.

We were never tourists. We were travellers. Travellers are people who never go home. Epic travellers, world explorers, although we stayed in the best hotels. We stayed away for half a lifetime. We went on holiday and never came back. Our life was a great adventure, you see, a story to tell our grandchildren, if we had happened to have grandchildren, if I’d managed better with my son and daughter, if we had been – luckier. (I hear Alex hissing that I’m a liar.)

Alex didn’t care about grandchildren then. When we could have had children, she didn’t want them. She always said how lucky we were. She said we had everything – looks, love, money. Soon there will be nothing left but the money ... but don’t underestimate the power of money.

The brandy I drink is the very best. I’m a smart old man, one might say immaculate, a seventy-year-old who could pass for sixty, with a smooth tanned face and a suit of exquisite old-fashioned cream linen, soft to the touch and five times as expensive because it contains no synthetic muck, real breathing linen like they used to make, torture to iron after every wearing ... Lucia tells me this, with a smile, for the money ensures that I never have to iron.

The money means I can be sad in comfort. I have space to be sad, and time to talk, though these days there is no one to talk to ... strangers, servants, I can always find, but they grin and listen without understanding, si signor, no signor, and I’m too proud to make them see.

It’s here, inside me. Maps, pictures. A map of the world, our life together. Seas and mountains and grains of sand. A thousand beds, a thousand bars. I don’t want the images to die inside me, I don’t want our story to be lost.

(Is it just a story? Can it really be over?)

Alex was always the talker, not me. Women often complain that men talk too much, but that’s not how it was with us. I never minded how much she talked. You see, she talked for both of us. She put my feelings into words.

Very late in life I realised I’d let her do too much talking for me. However much someone loves you – and it’s not a delusion that Alex loved me, she loved me a lot, she can never deny it, no, you bitch, don’t you dare to deny it – they don’t see things from your point of view. Why should they? They have their own to look after.

But we felt so close, the boundaries got blurred, we started to think and speak for each other.

– You can get lazy.

– You can get lost.

– You can get so close you are taken for granted. You can trust too much, and be betrayed, though I don’t think she ever betrayed me before ... before the final total betrayal.

A decade ago. In Toledo, in Spain. Those Spanish summers in the 1990s. Alex kept wanting to go back. There was a tall shy man I worried about. He and Alex were friends, I think just friends. Stuart and his wife had a flat out there. Then the fear receded. We were safe again. Years ago he dropped away.

People fall from my life like snow, these days. So many white-haired tiny bodies sinking beneath their obituaries or dying as quiet as snow in letters. Friends who were slightly older than me, friends who were thirty, certain, jaunty, in their prime when I was twenty. There’s hardly a letter without a death.

– Why did I think she would never leave me?

– Why was I sure we should never die?

Now at the age of seventy I want to say things for myself. Maybe she’ll read it, if I manage to write it, instead of mumbling to myself. After I’m dead. She’s so much younger ... She never liked to dwell in the past, but surely she’d want to read our story?

Yes, she’ll read it, and contradict, or add some details of her own. Beware of that; she was always a liar.

I ought to know, I admired her gift, when she started to add to the travel pieces I sent to the papers in England. The details were marvellous, but untrue. She would take these rotting bleached-wood windows; distil the smells of seaweed, sweat and beer; capture one fly, erratically loud; transport the whole to Rimini.

‘So wonderfully vivid,’ the editor would scribble. ‘You never fall into clichés of place.’ I didn’t, he was right – this was Alex’s carefree fictional geography.

If she tries to change our story – my story, mine, it is I who stayed faithful – I hope they’ll have burned and scattered my body so thoroughly that I shan’t have to know. I don’t want to haunt the margins of her fiction, bitterly disputing times and places, bodiless, impotent, a hissing ghost, reminding her of how much she loved me, reminding her she grew up with me and I grew happily old with her, that we grew together, and into each other, how much we laughed, how I made her laugh, how many times I entered her, she took me in, we cried out with pleasure ...

Seventy years old, in a stifling bar, alone among strangers, stiff with longing. Stiff as a boy under my cream linen trousers. The brandy fills my throat with fire. I toss it down, and stand, awkward. My cock feels young but my knees are old ...

If she ever comes back, I’m ready for her.

5

Alexandra: Esperanza, Bolivia, 2005

I saw Christopher yesterday – my husband Christopher.

That phrase was an experiment, but it didn’t sound right, he’s no longer mine, though we’ve never bothered to get divorced, he isn’t anything to me. I’m always telling my lover that.

But that’s a lie, too, I suppose he still means something. A patch of scar tissue in my brain. Even the sparrow on the white verandah means something, pecking the empanadas I throw him ... I lie to Benjy because he’s young.

(I suppose it’s an ant-bird, not a sparrow. They all eat garbage, they’re all the same.)

Christopher’s not my husband, except in name and on paper, and it all happened so long ago, it was all so twentieth-century, for Christ’s sake, so juvenile, so old hat.

In any case, yesterday he looked ridiculous. The wide screen made him look fat and small. He had a thick black fringe and a pudgy face and his hair was almost shoulder-length. He was wearing what they used to call a ‘kipper’ tie, so wide you could hardly see any shirt between the lapels of his velvet jacket, and when he stood up and gestured at the map his hands were stagey and unnatural-looking.

They were showing an extract from an ancient documentary Chris made in the 1960s, before I knew him – God, I’d never have let him dress like that! 1967, they said. It was his first film, which I’d never seen. He must have been in his early thirties, but he seemed adolescent, and so did the title, ‘Path to the Untrodden Snows’.

– What snows there were then, I was amazed to see them, extraordinary expanses of snow, incredibly bright on the black and white screen. I can’t believe we ever took it all for granted. But it’s no good getting sentimental now.

Chris always said he’d take me to those snows one day. It was the last great adventure we had in mind, but we’d started to grow apart, you see, we kept putting it off, and the snow was shrinking ...

Then our future disappeared. In a blaze of gunfire, a mess of heat. The stupid fool, he did everything wrong, it was all his fault, the klutz, the moron!

– My temper’s bad today. I have a hangover, the heat’s appalling, the hotel’s never heard of bottled water and the tap water tastes of blood or iron as well as those foul little sterilising tablets. It makes me long to be back in Europe or anywhere that isn’t here ...

Seeing the film brought a lot of things back. Chris must have told me a million times about that’ 60s trip to Tibet, the extreme clarity of the air, so you could see every hair on the head of a horned sheep in the valley below, the sharpness of the edge where the ice met the sky ... what did he call it? – ‘immaculate’. (Imagine it glittering, the blue-cold ice. You can long for ice with such intensity here.) The mountains had a wonderful name, ‘Abode of the Gods’, that was it, and I’d imagined him as god-like, too, young, slim and impossibly handsome, climbing up into the mountain sunlight, climbing away from the old dull life of accountancy and wife and kids ...

I never imagined him grey and uneasy, in fatuous clothes and a shaggy-dog haircut. He was tall, for god’s sake! Not short and fat! I hated him for looking so awful ... it was his first film, of course, he got better later, but I was furious that Benjy laughed at him. (By the way, I loathe the name Benjy, though everyone’s always called him that. It would be perfectly charming for a little boy, but for a six-foot grown-up man it stinks. It makes him seem even younger than he is, and God knows he’s young enough already.)

Benjamin was lying on the bed eating peanuts and throwing the shells on the carpet; he’d drunk too much beer, which makes him aggressive. We’d fucked but he hadn’t satisfied me.

We switched on the tv. There was yet another programme about the dispute over the ice-caps, boring. Then all of a sudden Christopher was there. Chris, who I lived with for twenty-six years.

‘My God,’ I hissed. ‘That’s fucking Christopher.’ (I’m sorry, my language has gone downhill since I’ve been living with Benjamin. One of the boring things about the young is that they swear non-stop.)

Benjy shot upright, spilling his beer. ‘I don’t believe those clothes,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that hair! You really went round the world with that man?’

‘Everyone looked frightful in the 1960s ... in any case, don’t be so fucking superficial.’

He didn’t reply, he didn’t need to, we both know it’s me who’s obsessed with looks. There was Christopher in long shot waving his arms, Christopher with flared trouser-legs flapping. Benjy began to titter and snigger.

He’s insecure, of course, now it’s clear he has failed to make me pregnant. I loved him because he could make me pregnant, I loved him because he would give me a child. I went on hoping, I hoped against hope ... even now the blood keeps coming each month ... less than before, but I still bleed ... all the same, I know, and he knows, he’s failed me. A great strong boy of thirty. I try not to let my frustration show.

He’s insecure, and it makes him spiteful. And we’ve been cooped up together too long in this third-rate hotel in this fifth-rate town, while we wait for news about the most important and beautiful event in my life to date ... shh, it’s bad luck to think about it. I try not to count on it too much.

Benjy is thirty, I’m fifty-five. Perhaps I’m lucky to have a young lover (but I don’t look my age – I don’t think I do, I still get ogled when I walk alone). I ought to be patient, because he is young, but I can’t be patient, I was never very patient. I won’t have him sneering at my past.

I suddenly felt something – crumbling, I suppose. As if, like Venice, my past could slip in a second under the sea, and I’d go with it.

Rubbish, I’ve just got a hangover, it’s not like me to mope and moan. The old life shouldn’t matter now. I’ve a new young lover and plenty to hope for. I’ve always believed in happiness; when it goes sour, you just move on.

But this new happiness, a little voice whispers, the latest happiness has soured as well. Don’t pretend, Alexandra. It’s true. And maybe you can’t move on for ever. Even if you do, you might need your past. Or else you’ll end up aged sixty with nothing.

Even you could be lonely, Alexandra.

Perhaps I need to go over my story. So I’ll have a story to tell the child, when the child I long for comes to me.

My life-story is beautiful, beautiful, an amazing, lucky, adventurous life ... My dad used to tell us stories. Winter tea-times, after our bath, he would tell us about his childhood in Stepney as we dried our hair by the fireside in that poky little house he thought was a palace ... when he was a boy they had been so poor that even his shoes were castoffs. And he told us sagas of my mother’s family, epic stories with monsters and demons and cream-skinned Irish heroines who he said looked ‘exactly like your mother’, though her own face curdled as she tried not to hear and later she’d warn us against his ‘nonsense’. We sat by the fire while he told us these wonders, staring into the friendly flames ... I wish he had known that I would be rich. It was why I loved Sundays, those fireside stories.

Now fire is the thing that everyone fears. Fire is gutting this monstrous land.

Your story’s not suitable for a child, the burnt breeze whispers, the small sour wind.

6

Christopher: Venice, 2005

This is my apartment. She has never seen it, it has never seen her, it is mine, all mine. I never – hardly ever – think of her here. The flat belongs to another age, like me. Tall and cool and elegant.

– Lagoon-like mirrors with a blackened bloom that I’ve asked Lucia to leave untouched. The ornate plaster ceilings are too high to see clearly, ideal pale gardens, unpopulated. The windows soar effortlessly up from the green canal to the pigeon-pocked roof-tops. They are windows taller than the tallest woman and swagged by my orders with umber velvet, tied with strong cords of twisted silk which would hang or strangle the man who took her ...

Get out of it, Alex, it’s my turn now. I’m going to tell the world, you see, I’m going to tell the ones I love, whatever that means, whoever is left. The children – the child – perhaps. My friends. Who are my friends? There is the sorrow; we lost our friends.

I’m going to pretend that everyone cares, that nothing on earth can matter as much as remembering what my life has been.

I do believe it, in a way. I do believe that each life matters. What do they say? Not a sparrow falls ... Christopher Court must count more than a sparrow. I shall sing as I fall, in any case, I shall finish my song to my own satisfaction before the sea swells up and sucks us down.

I have to find out who I am, you see, before I sink back towards non-being.

Christopher Court is an invented name, which isn’t a good start when I want you to believe every word I say. It’s an anglicisation of Czaycowski, a Polish-Jewish name. My father believed in caution, though he refused to believe persecution existed. Desperate to be ordinary, he pooh-poohed anti-semitism.