My Animal Life by Maggie Gee

Author:Maggie Gee
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Saqi

Barbara in Paris in 1982

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.