My Animal Life(51)

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.





Why do I write?


dancing


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.