My Animal Life (15 page)

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, 1966 was an eventful year. The good thing I learned, slowly, piecemeal, gathering it as inefficiently as fragments of gold from a dirty river, was that life will save you, if you let it. I saw no doctors, took no pills, talked to no one until years later. But grain by grain, second by second, I began to forget, to be distracted. One night the terror did not come, and I slept till morning with a steady heart beat, even though that was followed by twenty more nights of torment. There were mornings when I managed a couple of hours before the grey veil closed over the day. Then we went camping: there were lots of things to do. I had to be normal for my cousin, loving, cheerful, athletic Susan. We sang on walks and in the tent at night, and even though for me the song had lost its joy, performing it, filling my lungs and sounding the notes of ‘My Favourite Things' in the clear blue air, made my body remember the feel of being happy, and my body started to save my mind. My animal body. My animal life.

What finally pushed me back into normality was leaving home. Of course, as I said, I was unready, but
if I had stayed, I would never have been ready. I might have been disabled for life. What do children need? They need to leave home, even if home will always come with them. I was nervous, but in a different way, and that normal nervousness, that fear of gaffes, that intense busyness of the first term at Oxford, trying to make friends and fathom the system, going to lectures, joining clubs, slowly crowded out the blankness, the bat's feet, and made me so tired that I slept at night. Fear came back at Christmas, in my narrow bed, and less strongly in the vacations that followed. Was it the dreadful quietness of the Sussex night, without the happy cries of drunken young people? Was it the oppression of life at home?

And let's not forget the deep task of parents is to see that their children
can
leave home, are enabled to have a life of their own. My parents somehow made it possible. Even my father let me go. There are too many children who never leave. I left, ineptly. I was able to. Though if they had not pushed me so hard at school, I might have been older, and better equipped.

I see this chapter reads like an indictment of my father, and maybe it should. Maybe he deserves it. Maybe it's time to recite the charges.

But if so, I have to defend him too, because he is dead, and I am the writer.

I hated him, and yet we recovered. I recovered, and he recovered, and one day he would say ‘Sorry' to me. My mother told me that after they had seen me off at Horsham for the train to Oxford with my vast brown trunk, hand-initialled by Vic in his over-careful lettering, M. M. GEE, my father came home, went straight into my bedroom, and cried for an hour, could not stop.

I was nineteen years old when I first had full sex with a man, which seemed shamefully behindhand. I think we were all eager not to be virgins, we clever girls at Somerville, but men were not allowed to stay overnight, and college rooms had thin walls like eggboxes. So it couldn't really happen till I moved out of college. The man, also, had to be vaguely right, though the muddle and chaos of those times, and my life, is shown by the fact that to this day I am not quite sure which of two men first went ‘all the way'. One seemed to get quite far up my way, and it didn't hurt, and felt fairly pleasant; I was glad it was happening at last; but then the second one went deeper, further, and I liked it, and him, a great deal better. On balance I decided the second was The First, and told him he was, and I think he felt betrayed when in the course of a quarrel a few years later I chose to announce it wasn't him after all. The truth was perhaps that a girl who's been a tomboy and done a lot of hurdles races at school has little physical virginity left.

I found I had no shyness about sex. It seemed perfectly natural and very exciting and I wanted to try out
more of it. The fear I had felt that evening in France (which came back again when on two more occasions I was physically attacked by strangers, once in Italy, once outside my house in Oxford) never affected consensual sex. I think I came across as rather highly strung and difficult in ordinary human intercourse, because I was shy, so men were often pleasantly surprised to find that in sexual intercourse I was quite different (my animal luck: my luck, again. Though of course it is also about both partners, and I can think of four or five times when I didn't enjoy it; once when the man was very much older, and something in me felt it was wrong, and shrivelled; twice when there had been a lot of begging and drinking but I still in my animal heart did not want it; once when the man in question and I had spun an overstretched myth of romance and the sex was doomed to be a disappointment, for my body was truthful when my mind was not.)

There followed more than a decade of practising before I found my lifetime partner. The sex, in itself, was enjoyable, and yet I never knew what lay behind it, and nor, I think, did my male partners. I was on the pill, so the obvious biological point of sex was missing, and besides, we were all deaf and blind to that aspect. I wasn't really pair-bonding. What was going on? I don't think we knew. The late sixties were an astonishing time. We were no longer using a rule-book. What did men want? What did women want?

What do women need? What do men need? I didn't have a clue in my twenties.

I don't have an answer even now. Except that the sexes intertwine. I have always felt both male and female,
have always known I could be bisexual, though the love I cleaved to was heterosexual. Women need men; men, women. In my novel
The Ice People
, set forty years hence, in the middle of this century, I wrote about what I called ‘segging', a segregation that comes upon the sexes as fertility drops and each gender turns inward, suspicious and hostile, resentful of what it is no longer being given. We aren't there yet, and I hope we never will be.

We need our own sex, especially as we grow up, to learn from, to relax with, to nurture and be nurtured; to form alliances that last a lifetime. (I went to a girls' grammar school, an all-female college.) But we also need our opposites. Gay men need mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female friends; lesbians need fathers, their own and their children's, grandfathers, uncles, male pals. Even hermits need someone to bring them food and drink, someone to admire their sacrifice.

I went through hermit phases in my twenties and very early thirties, trying to escape the messy relationships with men I had unconsciously pursued in the first place: not answering the doorbell, or the phone, or letters, not talking for days as I read or wrote. A reaction to sending too many letters, making unwise phone calls, seeing too many men, who sometimes turned up at the same time on my doorstep. I hadn't a clue how to deal with them. (Now I wouldn't touch men like those with a bargepole. What was I thinking? Alcoholics in the making, actors
manqués
, serial adulterers, glamorous but faintly sleazy men, the opposite of my upstanding father (which must have been the point. Of course it was the point.) Though most of them were also handsome and clever and fun, often from a higher social class than my own, ex-public school boys who knew
restaurants and taxis. I was young, upwardly mobile, fond of sex. But why didn't I expect them to love and marry me? Was I trying to avoid a constricting marriage, or simply lacking in self-confidence? Trying to punish Vic, perhaps? Trying to prove I was as bad as he feared? Or avoiding the virginal path of my mother? I really don't know. A combination, surely.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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