My Animal Life (16 page)

In 1985—I was married, she wasn't—we went on holiday
à deux
to a lovely old Victorian hotel in Swanage, and on a whim, visited a fortune-teller, Katina, who had a booth on Swanage pier. I have visited more than one fortune-teller, but Katina was in a class of her own. She was young, and though she said she was a gypsy, had no robes or earrings, no affectation or spookiness or mystery. She grasped my hand, looked into my eyes, and then spoke brightly, specifically, swiftly, without hesitation, in a down-to-earth voice that told me many things: my husband would work for the BBC (he had shown no signs of it, but she was right); our house would get subsidence; I would care for my mother. In retrospect I wish I had taken up the offer to tape her predictions, as Barbara did. Almost everything Katina told us came to pass. For Barbara she saw, and described with eerie accuracy, the husband she would meet two years later, a much older man in a powerful position, witty, erudite Michael Miller, QC, who would adore her, as Katina promised, and was married to her until his death last year. I enjoyed writing it on envelopes: ‘Professor Barbara Goodwin and Mr Michael Miller, QC,' because part of me could never quite believe that life would bring such substance
to the girls we had been; that we would end up with serious men, good men who wanted to marry us.

My precious cast of women friends, most of them made during those vital years for same-sex friendships, that time between leaving home and pair-bonding. Hilary Soper, my girlfriend from the age of eleven at grammar school, an identical twin of five foot ten; an accident of geography meant we lived only a few miles apart from seventeen to twenty-one. Hilary, with whom I've never had a cross word in nearly fifty years of friendship; who makes sure a sprinkling of cakes and jokes, postcards, small treats and kindnesses, are there to sweeten life's lemon-peel spiral. When I think of Hilary, I see us wandering down a succession of long light rooms in the galleries where we often meet, looking at pictures as we tell our stories in a relaxed, amicable rhythm, for we have known for decades that we have our whole lives to explain ourselves; but when friends tell all, there are sadnesses, and our eyes meet, we feel it together, we want nothing bad to happen to each other, but we know the gallery stretches on past, we cast about for another picture, some sunlit Dufy or golden Bonnard. When we were girls, we seemed to have nothing, and the whole mountain range was ahead of us. Somehow, by the miracle of days becoming years, Hilary became a head teacher, raised a kind son, Luke, on her own, and now lives with an art expert, her gentle, handsome husband Alistair, in an old Sussex cottage full of books and pictures. How did it happen? How do things work out? How do men and women ever find one another?

Women friends, though, came easily. First Elan, Joy, Lydia, who lived with cats and dogs and rabbits and sewed the wing back on to a goose, and could have
run a bank or a global company, then Pippa, Lesley, and shortly after, Grania, Nina and Rachel, Fatima, Carolyn; then Caroline, Hanna, Penny, Bernardine; most recently, vivid Ana, the dancer. So many kind and clever women. They are mostly still here: our story goes on.

Two other women's names from my rackety twenties make me pause longer and look away. Tiny Australian Beverly Hayne, my friend when I finally staggered to London, delivered by Pippa in a rented van. Bev was a journalist for glossy magazines, with short red-gold hair, fine skin, a small bird-nose and neat little bird-feet, a husky voice, a breathless laugh—perhaps too breathless? She found me a job as a hotel receptionist, since I was sick of doing degrees, and paid for my first publishing party (and made so light of it I hardly noticed, but now I am amazed; so much kindness, though she also tended to quick bouts of annoyance: ‘Doncha just hate it when …?')—the funniest, perhaps, of so many funny women, passionate, short-tempered, creative, inventive. She was irritated by my messes and excesses, but she thought I had talent, believed in me, and wrote a spoof autobiography for me, decades before this one, longhand, for my birthday, ‘My Life' by Maggie Gee, complete with witty drawings to which she attached scraps of coloured satin, sequins, a feather, and bound it in cardboard sheathed in black silk. She had the drive and wit to become famous as a writer—but her Australian family were too poor and too rural to fix a faulty heart-valve when she was young, so the doctors forbade her to risk having children with sweet-tempered Andy whom she married in London, and though she had escaped from poverty, though her pluck and will-power took her halfway round the
world, she died, one morning, getting up too quickly when her loving husband was away on a trip, in their chic modern flat, of a heart attack. She was in her mid-thirties, painfully young.

We had booked the first holiday of our married lives, but the dates clashed with the funeral. Andy said ‘Go'. Guiltily, we went to Portugal; I knew I shouldn't, but oh, I wanted to, and we had little money, so the air fare we had already paid seemed enormous. I wrote a poem to be read at the service. I should have been there, to speak up for my friend, but Andy and destiny sent me somewhere different. On that holiday, in that fierce spring light, urged on by death, which made the shadows sharper, far away from rational considerations (we had nowhere to live, no security, but I was thirty-seven, time rushed onwards), I became pregnant with my daughter. It would never have happened if we'd stayed at home. You could see it as the final gift from Beverly's friendship.

Girls, my girls,
mes soeurs
, my sisters.

Then there's Kitty Mrosovsky, the aristocratic, literary beauty whose Russian father was a friend of Nabokov's, president of Somerville JCR when I first saw her, hurrying gracefully against the daylight, in a narrow-waisted coat, her long dark hair pulled casually up under a Russian fur hat, calling to some out-of-focus girls in her wake. I never thought she would become my friend, yet she liked me, and invited me, later, to her tiny icy house near Arsenal, full of books and pictures and elegant poverty, because she had, I
think, a minute private income which encouraged her to give up a prestigious university job and wager everything on being a writer. Perhaps all her life she gave up too much. She completed the definitive translation of Flaubert's
Temptation of St Anthony
, with notes: but it was the study of a hermit. She wrote difficult novels, played piano sonatas, and banished grief with hot baths and yoga, and I was a little in awe of her, though she welcomed me, and was amusedly fond of the chaotic, excitable child I was. Like many of these friends, she mothered me, perhaps sensing there were things my own mother couldn't give me; but she died of AIDS, too early to be wary, infected by a brilliant American boyfriend who was bisexual before anyone knew the dangers. He was African American, he taught at Yale, he was handsome and muscular and full of life. He wanted to marry her, but she refused. She was obstinate, reserved, fastidious, tender. She grew thinner, and withdrew from her friends, not wanting to bother them, not wanting to be ill, still hurrying down the street, still light-boned and graceful, and then too light, and suddenly gone. Her fate seemed bizarre, impossible. Her voice was beautiful; a light silver singsong. She had two sisters who adored her. That dangerous freedom. Death crept in from the horizon. We thought we knew everything; we didn't see the future. We needed men, but men could destroy us.

Dear girls of my youth. What talk, what laughter! Only death has parted us. We shared so much as we struggled to be adults; ordinary cheerfulness, everyday intimacy, luck, disaster; we cared for each other. Talking about men, sharing knowledge, telling stories against ourselves, helping each other to find our way in a world where marriage was no longer obvious. In
those days, I was married to my female friends. Yet I needed those badly-judged relationships with men. How else could I have made the transition from the oppressions of home to my own, freeer marriage? If you behave for too long, in the end you break out. I carried a burden of anger and sorrow, sorrow for my mother, anger with my father, though I should have felt sorrow for him as well, and I do, now he no longer weighs on me. He didn't teach me what was tolerable, how much or how little I should yield to men. I found that out, through a decade of conflict. I slowly worked towards a way of being happy.

And now I am no longer young (though I feel it), so if I am to answer this chapter's questions, it had better be now, before I start forgetting the scraps of knowledge life has left on my sleeve. I grew up with men. I always knew them. But I learned more slowly how to deal with them.

I like men, as friends, as colleagues, as fathers—it moves me to see men with their children, especially since I have entered the world of parents and children—as sexual partners and objects of desire. I love young men for their maleness, their angles, their shiny skins and their firm jaws, their hopefulness and brashness, their risk-taking, their certainty, their shyness mixed with confidence, their courage and light-heartedness. I like the clear line of their necks and shoulders, the bone and muscle jutting bravely at the sky. I'm not sexually attracted to young men; what would I do with one, if I got him? I wouldn't enjoy feeling elderly stretched
out alongside some dazzling Apollo. But I would have loved to have a son, as well as a daughter. I would have loved to give Nick a son.

From my family of men, of brothers and fathers and uncles and boy cousins, I learned to love men, and to see them as touching, though I also learned they were explosive and needy.
I mustn't give everything. Stand my ground
. Yet sexually, I yielded too easily. I wanted to please them, as well as myself. I wanted to please them, or I wanted to placate them?

What do men need from women? The answers I grope for don't come from having got this right, but from getting it wrong, and seeing others get it wrong.

I think they want appreciation of their male virtues. There are lovable traits which I do see as male, not that they are exclusively so. Being brave or rash or funny, devoting themselves to single tasks or causes. Being physically strong. Having big ideas. Dreaming, carrying, and making. Founding states or cities, being ready to die for them. Forgiveness for their male faults: being one-track minded, forgetting the details, not noticing what's going on emotionally, disliking being told about it, not wanting to talk (though sometimes that's a virtue), thinking they are sick when they are not, being too ready to fight and die or send others off to do so for a cause. (Of course many women also do these things.)

But what if men use their strength the wrong way? What if they prevail by violence, or fear? Then they need a woman to stand up to them, or leave them. A sad fact: most of us behave as badly as the people who live with us allow.

I have seen how men like to have motherly care. Acceptance, rather than amused, sneering toleration, of their masculine bodies. Sex as an expression of that absolute acceptance and tenderness, which often means oral sex. Men want to be wanted, just like women. Some have been amazed when I wanted them. Emotional closeness—when they feel like it. Friendship. To be listened to. To be admired for the efforts they make, and respected.

Not to be belittled, in public or private. A home where the father is truly welcome, not excluded, plotted against, marginalised. Children who are encouraged by the mother to love them. It sounds obvious, but it doesn't always happen. This was the guerrilla war my mother fought, because she didn't dare do anything braver. So she kept Dad in the dark, and laughed at him. Not always, though: ‘Your dad's a good provider.' And ‘Don't upset Dad.' But also ‘Don't tell Dad.' So the kitchen would fall silent when Dad came in. It wasn't a good feeling. It didn't make him happy.

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

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

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