Hubert Wilson, impeccably dressed, sixty-five but looking younger, held out a penny and a halfpenny to the conductor. About to turn the little handle smartly on his ticket machine, the conductor stopped and stared at him.
‘’Ow long since you bin on a bus, mate?’ he said.
Hubert thought. Eight, nine, possibly ten years. He opened his mouth.
‘Where yer going?’ the conductor said.
‘To the park.’
‘Frippence to the park. Frippence is the cheapest ’nless yer under fourteen.’ He zipped the handle round, tore off the length of flimsy paper and handed it to Hubert.
The two women on the opposite seat, clutching shopping bags to their bosoms, exchanged glances. Hubert was upset. He opened his newspaper.
It was all upsetting. For the first time in fifty years he had nothing in the world to do. Yesterday he had been Hubert Wilson, head of ‘Wilson & Sons’, sitting in his pine-panelled office, Dictaphone at his elbow, directing a worldwide organisation. Today he was nobody: Hubert Wilson, man in the street, butt for bus conductors. He had been retired for less than twenty-four hours and already it was making him feel quite ill.
That it was not unjust, Hubert, who was a just man, understood. His three sons, fine men all of them, were perfectly capable of running the business between them. He knew also that they had meant it well and, backed up by his wife, had succeeded in doing him what they considered a good turn. Yesterday, on his sixty-fifth birthday, they had made him retire. They presented a number of irrefutable arguments: he had worked hard for fifty years and was entitled to some relaxation; he had sufficient money not to have to lower his living standards one jot; the business would continue to flourish equally well without him; he would at long last be able to spend more time with his wife. They were faultless reasons, all of them. All the time, though, while his retirement was under family discussion, Hubert had felt unhappy, vaguely uncomfortable. It wasn’t until this morning that he had understood why. They had taken everything away and given him nothing back. They had relieved him of twelve crowded hours and left him with as many interminably long, empty ones. It was unfair and it had upset him.
He would be able to spend more time with his wife! That had come unstuck at the first touch.
‘Muriel,’ he had said at breakfast, which, from habit, he could not help eating hurriedly, ‘would you like me to take you out somewhere today?’
Muriel, drinking coffee in her quilted, peach-satin housecoat, had looked surprised. ‘Hubert dear, it’s the Bazaar. I promised to be on Fancy Goods until lunch; then I’m meeting Annabel at Fortnum’s to help her with a rug for the nursery. I’ve got my hair at three and then I promised Michel faithfully I’d go for a fitting today, so you see …’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I suppose you could come to the Bazaar,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But it will be mostly women.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll find something to do.’
‘It’s a lovely day,’ Muriel said, handing it to him like a consolation prize.
He looked out of the window at the tops of the trees washed with sunlight.
‘Yes. It’s a lovely day.’
Like a small boy on whom she had taken pity, Muriel had given him an errand to do. He was to go to the hand-knitted woollies shop that she patronised and enquire whether the pram-sets she had ordered for their twin grandsons had arrived. It had been a horrible experience. The girl in the shop had called him ‘dear’ before he explained who he was and she had gone to fetch ‘Madam’; with Madam he had had to enter into an embarrassing discussion about the babies’ latest developments; the pram-sets were not ready. Fed up, he had taken the bus for the park, only to be made a laughing stock by the conductor.
Hubert realised that he was out of touch. But it was hardly his fault. If he wanted any shopping done, his secretary had always done it, as she wrote his letters, arranged his travels, booked his theatre seats. If he wanted to go anywhere, he sent for his car and chauffeur. How was he supposed to know it now cost threepence to the park?
In the park he scrutinised the ducks, nodded approvingly at the neat rows of dahlias and looked at his watch. It was still only half-past ten. He felt he had been up for hours and was as weary as if he had done a day’s work. What did other retired men do? He looked about him. Nannies with prams, a few small children feeding the ducks, a tramp with a long, dirty-looking beard, muttering as he walked. The only able-bodied man appeared to be the park-keeper locking up his hut.
He sat down on a bench. It wasn’t kind and, what was more, he wouldn’t be able to stand it. The inactivity would kill him. He had heard of it happening. It was not even as if his health was bad, or his faculties were failing, or his business acumen. He was sixty-five, it was true, but he had never felt better. Suddenly he came to a decision. He was going to the office and would tell the boys that he had changed his mind. He was going back to his desk and would review the situation in ten years’ time when he might begin to be feeling his age; five if they liked, anything at all! But he must get back to work. Pleased to have come to a decision, he stood up.
‘Oh, please don’t move! Please.’
Hubert looked round. The voice had come from a girl, a modern girl, wearing long black trousers and her hair tied back in a ponytail. Her hands were black from the charcoal with which she had been sketching him.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, ‘but I had practically finished. Couldn’t you sit down again just for five minutes? It’s a lovely day,’ she pleaded. Hubert sat down.
‘Would you like to see it?’ the girl asked, after a while. She handed her sketchblock to Hubert.
With a few black lines she had drawn a man staring into space; a man with lifeless eyes; an aimless, empty man who looked older than his years; an unhappy man.
He handed it back.
‘It’s good. Very good. I wish I could draw.’ There was nothing he knew how to do except to run his business.
‘Anyone can draw,’ she said, ‘but first they have to learn to see.’
‘How do you mean?’ he said.
‘Well,’ she was packing her papers into an old canvas satchel and fastening her tin of broken charcoal sticks with an elastic band, ‘you’ve got to look with more than your eyes. You have to put your heart into it.’
He waited for her to go on. She was very young but self-assured.
‘When I was drawing you,’ she said, ‘I saw more than a man with grey hair, an expensive overcoat, a pearl tiepin, and handmade, recently polished shoes. I saw a man with a look in his eyes as if he was lost – didn’t know where to go. I saw money in the bank, an elegant wife in an elegant home. I saw a pure silk dressing gown with a monogram, a dressing room, Mediterranean cruises …’
‘Stop,’ Hubert said. ‘It’s uncanny.’
‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s merely a matter of training oneself. I tried to put all that I saw into my picture.’
‘And was that all you saw? ‘Hubert said. ‘The shoes, the dressing gown …?’
‘I looked for happiness,’ she said carefully. ‘But it wasn’t there.’
‘You should have come a week ago,’ Hubert said, and sighed, then pulled himself together. ‘So you really think,’ he asked, interested, ‘that if I learned to see, really see, I too could learn to draw, to paint perhaps?’ It crossed his mind that here might be something he could do if they really wouldn’t let him go back to the business.
‘Why not?’
‘How do I start?’
‘Turn round,’ she said, ‘and look at me.’
Hubert turned sideways on the bench and looked at the girl. He had a granddaughter of her age. She came closer and, raising her chin, looked into his face.
‘Tell me what you see.’
Hubert was embarrassed. She was pretty. One of the prettiest girls he had seen. He waved his arms vaguely.
‘Hair,’ he said. ‘Hair. And eyes. Long eyelashes.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘We’ll start with that. Describe in your own words my hair, my eyes, my lashes. Tell me what they look like to you.’
Hubert looked at her amber hair, soft and gleaming, drawn back from her face.
‘Moonlight,’ he said.
‘That’s good. And the eyes?’
It wasn’t difficult. He remembered them growing in the garden beneath the trees when he had been a boy.
‘Violets,’ he said firmly.
They smiled at him. She closed her eyes and the unbelievably long black lashes lay straight against her smooth cream cheeks.
‘Park railings!’ he said.
She opened her eyes and laughed. ‘You’re wonderful.’ Hubert laughed too. He was enjoying himself.
‘If you keep on at this rate,’ she said, ‘you’ll very soon be able to take one long look at me and say to yourself: ‘Eighteen, art school, bedsitter in Bayswater, engaged to be married.’ She waved the tiny stone on her left hand. ‘Lively disposition, flat broke.’ She looked at him, not smiling now. There was something very sweet about her face.
‘Why are you unhappy?’ she asked.
‘Because I retired from business yesterday and I’ve nothing to do. I’m not used to it.’
‘Are you rich?’
He nodded.
‘Not a care in the world,’ she said incredulously, ‘and plenty of money. Good-looking, too.’
He smiled at her youth. ‘What would you do? In my position.’
She took a deep breath and stared with her violet eyes towards the lake where a white swan glided silently by.
‘I’d go to Rome,’ she said, almost reverently, ‘and I’d look at the achievements of men who lived and died for their art. I’d stand in the Borghese Gallery before Pauline and her golden apple and stroke her gown to see if it was really marble; and I’d look upwards at the ceiling to which Michelangelo gave years of his life, working under the most trying conditions, regardless of himself, to leave something of his greatness to posterity. I’d look at all the wonder and the splendour and the majesty of art, which knew nothing of pleasing society but was an expression of the very soul of man. And I would probably cry.’
Hubert watched the violet eyes – gazing at the lake but, seeing the Sistine Chapel, fill with tears – and reached for his handkerchief. It wasn’t necessary because just then she smiled, and he almost looked for the rainbow.
‘And when I wasn’t doing that,’ she said, ‘I’d ride on the buses with the natives, breathing in the garlic, pushing back when I was pushed. I’d eat tagliatelle in the trattorias, where the menu would be written in ink on a piece of cardboard, and see moonlight silhouette the Colosseum; I’d put on my best dress and watch the smart women meet their lovers in the Via Veneto and at night dream by the fountain in the Barberini.’
Hubert thought of the countless holidays he and Muriel had taken: the luxury cruises with the deluxe cabins on A deck; the best hotels in Monte Carlo, Paris, New York, where the maîtres d’hôtel knew how Muriel liked her steak (two-thirds cooked) and that he always had two boiled eggs for breakfast. Pushing on the buses, the girl had said, the menu written in ink; it might be interesting but …
‘I don’t think my wife …’ he began doubtfully.
‘Of course, you don’t have to rough it,’ she said. ‘It isn’t necessary, and you’re too old …’
Hubert winced.
‘… But I bet you’ve never even looked when you’ve travelled around. Not really looked. Have you? Take Paris,’ she said. ‘I’ve been there once.’
Hubert thought of Paris. All he could call to mind was the inside of Maxim’s and the suite they always had at their hotel.
‘Have you ever wanted to paint the children on a Sunday morning in the Parc Monceau? Listened to the roadsweeper’s brush against the cobbles as he swept the water from the early morning gutters? Felt the sadness of the Rive Gauche or watched the sunlight in the Champs Elysées sprinkle the tops of the cars with diamonds?’
He couldn’t in all honesty say he had, but he was suddenly excited. The girl made him feel that he hadn’t perhaps done everything, seen everything. She made him feel, in fact, as if he, Hubert Wilson, widely travelled, rich in worldly goods, was a small child standing naked before an undiscovered world.
The church clock struck one sombre note. He waited for the others. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘It can’t be one o’clock!’
The girl laughed. ‘It is.’
‘Come and have lunch,’ Hubert said, wondering for a moment what Muriel would think, then not caring. ‘I’ll take you to the Ritz.’
She laughed. Her teeth were white, he thought, then checked himself. Not white. Like … well, like pearls; small, even pearls.
She showed him her hand, black from the charcoal and shook her ponytail. ‘You’re awfully sweet, but I’m sure they wouldn’t welcome me at the Ritz.’
He was determined not to let her go.
They had lunch at a coffee bar where it was he, in his too well-cut overcoat and his pearl tiepin, and not the girl with her trousers and her suede jacket, who looked out of place. She taught him to see that the bearded man in the corner was waiting for his girlfriend because every time the door opened his eyes grew wide, expectant, then disappointed, sad again, and that the waitress snapped at them because in all probability her feet hurt. Hubert had never, ever, considered such matters.
In the afternoon they wandered round London. She laughed because he wasn’t used to strolling in the streets and got cross when people bumped into him. She showed him a woodcut in a shop window, a patch of sunlight on a street corner, a Titian in the National Gallery. He bought her an ice-cream cornet and, because she insisted, ate one furtively himself.
Before he realised it, it was five o’clock. She had to meet her fiancé and he had to go home. She gave him her address, which he asked for and, lifting her face to his, thanked him for her lunch and tea.
He dropped a kiss on the smooth forehead, then watched her disappear in her flat-heeled shoes, straight-backed, into the tube station.
The next day he got out of bed with the same sense of urgency as he had had before his retirement. Feeling like a naughty schoolboy, and as young, he kissed Muriel goodbye. He stopped at a stationer’s where he bought pencils and a drawing block, then took a bus for the park.
‘Lovely mornin’!’ the conductor said, taking his threepenny piece.
‘Lovely,’ Hubert said confidently, and smiled. He even hummed a little tune.
In the park he drew a small child with eyes like black diamonds, a nannie with a hatchet face, and a boat. When he turned to the dahlias and noticed for the first time that they were royal scarlet or tender blushing apricot, he wished he had paints.
At lunchtime he thought about the Ritz, his club, the office. He had lunch in a coffee bar.
On the way back to the park he stopped at a flower shop.
‘Yes, sir?’ the lady in the floral overall asked. She had a nervous tic. He wondered what was worrying her.
‘Some flowers for a young lady.’ He looked round the shop, the tall roses, carnations, orchids. None of them seemed right. Then he saw them in a corner, just as he had remembered them as a boy. They were the exact colour of her eyes beneath the hair that was moonlight.
‘I’ll have those,’ he said, pointing, ‘and I want them sent right away.’
‘Violets, sir?’ the woman said.
He understood that they would hardly cover the cost of transport to the bedsitter in Bayswater. He ordered two dozen of the best roses to be sent to Muriel. Red, to contrast with their French-grey walls. He wrote out two cards, paid the bill and went back to the park.
By the time the light began to fail, the nannies had taken their babies home to bed and the scarlet dahlias were turned almost to black, his sketchbook was full. The drawings were atrocious, barely recognisable, in fact, but Hubert was happy. He had seen a child’s ribbon fly as she bowled a hoop, two lovers kiss, a young tree bent by the wind. He hoped that tomorrow it wouldn’t rain.
In the drawing room at home the drinks were ready on the silver tray. He had just poured one for himself when Muriel came in. He looked at her, puzzled, then thought that perhaps it was because of his newly opened eyes. He saw for the first time that her hair was like silver smoke, her skin delicate as the petals of a pale rose, and her eyes the same blue, he could almost swear, as the summer sky.
But perhaps she was different. She was looking at him strangely.
She came towards him.
‘Hubert,’ she said, and her voice was softer, gentler, ‘you sent me violets!’
He followed her eyes towards the mantelpiece. There, in a tiny vase, against the French-grey walls, were the violets he had sent the girl. Taking his drink with him he went over. She had propped the card behind them. He picked it up. ‘For your kindness, sweetness and patience,’ he read.
‘You don’t know how happy you’ve made me,’ Muriel said. ‘All the years that you’ve been sending me flowers, or rather your secretary has. The roses, the orchids, whatever was out of season, regardless of cost … or thought. These are the first flowers for more years than I can remember that are really for me, from you. Thank you.’
He looked down at his sherry.
‘Muriel,’ he said, ‘I was thinking of going to Rome …’
Muriel said: ‘Oh! We’ve missed the spring collections and we’re too early for the autumn!’
‘For what we’re going to see it’s certainly not too early and I hope it’s not too late,’ he said.
Muriel bent her head and smelled the violets. ‘I’ll do anything you like,’ she said. ‘You know, Hubert, you’ve made me feel like a young girl.’