My Animal Life (19 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Maggie Gee was going to have a baby.

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

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

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

(Here I need another brief aside on friendship, which will take me from 1979, when I arrived in London, to 1986, when Rosa was born. Because our former ‘landlady', Grania, cannot just be called a landlady. She was a rare spirit who became a friend, her blue Georgian house full of books and paintings, an Irish intellectual who had been to Oxford and worked in a hospice because she believed in it. It was she who had said, hearing we were to get married, ‘Well there is another room free, you know. Nick could have it, if you like.' It hadn't occurred to us to live together. We really were babes in the wood, I think now. I had sent this information to my aunts and uncles: ‘We're going to get married, but not live together'—but of course, the root cause was, we had nowhere to live. He was renting a cupboard-sized room in Paddington, I was Grania's tenant in Camden Town. Then Grania stepped in, mild, amused, with her offer of a room on the floor above mine. Of course he would like it. Yes, yes! Would we have stayed together, had we not lived together?

Looking back, my friends have been guardian angels, though of course they were normal, human, earthbound, fallible people who saw my failings. ‘You
must
know there are spaces after punctuation,' said my kind friend Tony Holden, in despair, after reading the typescript of my first novel. ‘And you
can't
send envelopes like that.' (It was on its ninth or tenth tour of service, written all over, with criss-crossing PSs.) ‘Maggie, pick up your purse and your gloves,' sighed Barbara, watching me scatter my possessions once again, myopically
carefree, all over the floor. ‘Please don't leave the light on in the kitchen,' begged Grania. ‘And perhaps you could be careful not to slam the door.' ‘Your letters are over the top,' said Beverly. ‘You don't have to thank me so much. I don't like it.'

One summer, Grania came down to see us, her steady step on the wooden stairs. She had been thinking about the rent. We nodded, resigned. It was very low, and yet we did not earn much money. But she said, ‘I've been looking at my outgoings. I thought I would put the rent down three pounds.' Twelve pounds less per month! It was a fortune to us.

Pure chance, if there's really any chance in life: I had found her through an advertisement in
Time Out
, in summer 1980. I had survived my rackety beginnings in London, working as a live-in maid in Chelsea where I was expected to dust the carpets and the lady of the house walked behind me, inspecting; the ‘free basement flat' she supplied in return turned out to leak rain all over my books, and the woman was demented, and I was trapped, but my friends, Jim Stredder, Tony, Phil, emerged from the trees when I sent desperate postcards—‘I am enslaved to a madwoman'—and once again helped me, joined forces to get me out of there. Then I fell on the shambling, eccentric sweetness of Maria Iwtschenko's house in Chiswick, inhabited by elderly Russians who had been expropriated in the Revolution, and one embattled but fascinating Polish countess, where I had a green bedsit with a gas-ring and a sink, and paid the rent by doing shifts as a hotel receptionist. When Maria Iwtschenko, by now in her eighties, had to sell the house, I spotted the ad that Grania had placed.

Large sunny room would suit quiet person
. I turned up for the interview looking unfeasibly unquiet, in
cream jacket and trousers with a shocking pink tie, pink belt, pink earrings, and bright pink socks which were the icing on the cake, a very pink, very creamy cake. I was shy, in fact, but I hid it well.

Grania looked at me, and seemed to quite like me. She asked me if I was ‘very sociable', a question perhaps aimed at all that pinkness (I was blind, I think, to the effect of my clothes, which were curiously at odds with my real habits, which were, indeed, mostly scholarly and quiet. I didn't see people for days on end; I read voraciously; I wrote.) I was finishing a PhD, I told her. She already had one, on nineteenth-century literature. She overlooked the pink. She let me in.

On our improvised wedding day, which nobody knew about but Grania (that is, except for Barbara, our bridesmaid, and John Waite, the best man), she left two presents in the kitchen: a large white hat—it was blazing August—and a beautiful unorthodox wedding cake, a sponge cake covered with strawberries and peaches. When we returned from Cambridge we were the house's young marrieds, an exception to the other female poets and students. I am sure we were sometimes noisy and annoying, because two people together laugh and chatter a lot, and there are lovers' quarrels, which is worse, and two typewriters rattled on different floors, but she knew that we loved her, and the tall blue house, and the garden she had garlanded with old-fashioned roses, pale pink, cream, white, Gertrude Jekyll style, among tall blue delphiniums and fragile harebells, and in the morning, she would stand there among them, watching things emerge, weeding, thinking, with her large blue thoughtful eyes and thick hair. ‘Every time you make love, it is a sacrament,' she said.

She had nothing in common with a landlady.)

But now it was 1986, I was pregnant, and a baby wouldn't suit the tiny shared shower room in the basement, and its crying certainly wouldn't be quiet. Now once again they emerged from the wings, my cast of friends, and helped us to move. I had become very worried about our books. I was far too unwieldy to pack or unpack them. The new flat, now stripped of both damp and asbestos, was in many ways delightful, but had no bookshelves. Nick seemed very busy doing who knows what. I was busy growing, slow and sleepy. For the first time in my life, I was probably restful. I swam in hormones. I let things be.

On the evening of the move, he took me over to the flat. I was eight months pregnant and expected to find chaos. Instead, I found the front room completely shelved up, with the books all installed in alphabetical order, and standing in front of them, the friends who had helped with electric drills, know-how, muscle. Musa, Campbell, Barbara. I cheered, they cheered, we drank to each other. There is a picture of me standing, curved out like a pear, by a wall of books, crying with happiness.

But I knew that
Grace
, the novel I was writing, didn't work. No one had told me, no one had read it, but I couldn't fail to see the plot was becalmed, I fell asleep when I tried to read it; and the narrative hadn't even managed to climb from the leisure of my notebooks into the viability of typescript; it was dull, dull, that was the truth, and the baby was coming, and I wasn't ready, except for the physical act of birth, which I'd tried to prepare for with classes and yoga. Would there be a life beyond the birth? If so, I had no idea how to live it. I phoned Brent Childcare Services in a panic. A calm voice told me about child-minders. I only needed
to know they were there. Now I could face the great adventure.