My Animal Life(40)

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.)





Me being annoying at Oxford


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.