pink

AN old man sits in a room, alone. He lives in the country, in a house set apart, grey and silent. Autumn’s infringing sadness billows the turquoise curtains with earth-cooled air and invades the house with spores, invisible moulds and nostalgia; another tired year is turning over in bed. Time has tipped to over-ripeness.

The old man feels sad. After dinner, in an infant gale which doesn’t know its own strength, he watches the Sunday afternoon film without moving once – without taking a sip of water or nibbling a biscuit. Of all the films in all the world, it’s Casablanca. He considers the great romantic films. He can’t remember many.

After tea on his own, sardines on toast and a tin of rice pudding straight from the can, cold, because he can’t be bothered any more, he sits down in his deep armchair and imagines his own Love Story. A strong evening sun, beating through the window behind him, projects a yellow screen onto the wall in front of him and he sets his own film in motion – his own Cinema Paradiso, or maybe The Last Picture Show.

Then, in his imagination, he stops the film and makes a few telephone calls. Still sitting there, he looks at the yellow screen on the wall and invites some friends round to watch his film. He needs a Love Committee: a handful of people who’ve been around him for a long time, to sit in the room with him and mediate.

He mumbles to himself as he picks his Love Committee. He chooses them in the way playground captains pick their football teams at school, instinctively and cunningly.

Big burly Tom the policeman, red with effort and drink but still functioning in the upstairs department – Tom will be able to jog his memory and remind him of his first days of love. Primavera. They’re the same age; he rewinds the tape some fifty years, to the time when Tom was a rookie copper on the night shift. Every night for a summer, when the town clock struck twelve, Tom would rap his friend’s bedroom window with his truncheon to wake him up so that he could run barefoot across the dewy fields to Morfudd in her father’s barn.

He will need Frances there – the librarian: proud, punctilious, much too frank with the drink inside her, tragically dismayed at her own marriage. Impeccably dressed in plum or serge, her perfume armorial, not an invitation… her miniature affairs dotted on her skin, freckles of ardour. Three decades of calm punctuated by a handful of brief volcanic eruptions; frantic couplings separated by years of formality and politeness, her inner heat invigilated by the lifeless books in her library. Her passion was governed by the laws of diminishing returns, since every Heathcliff or Darcy in the town had aged or gone grey with doubt. But real love was all in the mind; real love was different. She mourned it and put a spade in the ground every night, wanting to find it like a crock of gold.

And who else should be there in his Love Committee? Jonty, undoubtedly. A haggard man, thin and secretive – retired from the sea but still in love with the waves. He seemed to live in a crow’s nest near the top of the cliff, a niche on the path which dropped to the shore, his berth a double seat carved into the rockface. He sat there every day with his binoculars, on a waterproof cushion which he stuffed into his coat when he left the place, if he ever did. He knew about the creatures of the deep, and their watery romances. Whales tended to be promiscuous. Dolphins copulated belly to belly after lengthy foreplay. Like humans they had sex just for fun occasionally, and got fruity with other animals, even humans. Dolphins could be gay, too. Jonty divulged all this in a sad monotone, never looking at the listener, his eyes forever scanning the sea for fins and spumes.

Why was Jonty invited to the screening? Because maybe he had a woman in every port once. No, that was unlikely. Because he watched and waited so patiently? The old man has no idea why he wants Jonty there, but he does.

The old man sits in his crimson chair, watching the square of yellow moving slowly along the wall. He clears his throat politely and addresses the phantom Love Committee in a level, dispassionate voice. He no longer smokes, but feels the event would be more atmospheric if Frances – perhaps – smoked moodily in the corner, looking like Anais Nin, fresh from another wanton sexual encounter. He would watch the curls of smoke wafting across the screen – yes, that was appealing. They would need plenty of drinks on his long low table, in glinting decanters; a bucketful of ice and some tumblers.

Everyone settles into a chair. Frances lets the ice clunk and swish in her glass then she sucks neat vodka from a hole in her cube – a little trick of hers; a trademark drinking habit. She looks round at the old man and her eyes gleam in the murk. They’re ready. He starts talking…

My friends – the fragrance of new-mown hay is the nation’s favourite smell, I’m told. But did you know that only one type of grass leaves that distinctive tang in the air?

He hears Frances whisper its name.

Yes Frances, sweet vernal grass. When it dies it leaves a wonderful fragrance. Once the old people made bonnets from it, and whenever the bonnets got wet they gave off the same sweet smell, months or years after the plant’s death. And that’s what I want to show you first, on my screen – an evening in a garden, many years ago. It has stayed in my mind, vividly. As soon as I think of it the smell of a freshly mown lawn seems to fill my nostrils, and I’m taken back to that time. My memories of one particular aspect of the evening are as powerful as they were then.

Jonty sits in his chair unmoving, staring at the screen with an intensity he usually reserves for the boundless sea. He considers an unlikely fact: ambergris, expelled from the intestines of the sperm whale, is a powerful source of perfume. Jonty knows he’ll get drunk and quite probably aggressive… will he make a fool of himself in this place too? Will he have to move on again, to another solitary cliff in a strange place, full of people who won’t know him? His secret crouches inside him – a ship in a bottle, broken and irreparable. Wife beater. Child bruiser. He blocks it out again, sinks another finger of Scotch and listens to the old man, his ridiculous testimony. How could anyone his age be so naive, so romantically stillborn?

It was summer. A warm evening in June, in the Marches, where Wales meets Shropshire, by a river. I’d walked along a water meadow by the Severn, picking my way through marsh marigolds and thistle clumps. At some point I was surrounded by a herd of young heifers: I was enveloped in a cloud of milky cowbreath, with insects buzzing and chirring, the smells of warm mud and cowpats on the riverbank…

Frances closes her eyes and joins him on the screen, walking by the river. She sketches in a kingfisher darting from the bank and a trout rippling the water, then she adds some sound effects – the swish of the heifers’ tails, the suck and gurgle of the river, a woodpecker cackling in a spinney above…

The old man continues...

I was on my way to a party thrown by the editor of a local newspaper, who lived in a large Victorian manse – crumbling a bit, with a portico and balustrades, plinths and statues. Catholic family, used to be posh but struggling to keep it all together – I think perhaps the party was a big family effort, their once-a-year attempt to stamp some order on a place beyond their energies or bank balance. The terraced garden fell in folds to the riverbank. I remember a row of weeping willows, and yellow roses in full bloom. Old English, probably. We were coming to the end of a long hot summer, and when I arrived the event was in full swing. Butterflies and silky insects shone in the air around us. This was about thirty years ago, so most of the people were formally dressed – the men in white shirts and grey slacks, many with ties… most of the women in print dresses, with pastel patterns or flower designs. Diaphanous in that light – quite exciting for a young man. People were in motion everywhere – moving between groups, forming into clusters then disbanding, veering erratically from one centre of attraction to the next.

Tom grips his glass and contemplates the party on the lawn. He thinks of water coming to the boil, atoms becoming more and more volatile under the influence of heat. The people on the lawn are over-excited atoms, coming to the boil under the influence of alcohol. Tom hates parties and leaves them as soon as he can. People became unpredictable, ungovernable. He seemed to bore them. Standing with his back to a pillar or a wall, he’d await a darting visit, try hard to be interesting, then watch crestfallen as the visitor darted away again without probing him for his meagre nectar. What did they feed off? They perplexed him. He eavesdropped on conversations, hoping to pick up some know-how, but the conversations seemed trivial and vapid. Perhaps it was the delivery and presentation that counted. He should giggle and wiggle his eyes around, perhaps. He couldn’t be bothered any more, didn’t even try.

He looks at the screen on the wall and mulls gloomily on the old man’s magical party. What will happen next? Will a female guest tear off her clothes and dive into the river? Will there be a hush as everyone else turns to watch her surface in a ring of foam? Will the rest of them join in? He imagines a wild bacchanalia, a writhing mass of pale flesh tuna-threshing the water, laughing and squealing… orgiastic sounds from a couple on the bank, their entwined limbs mermaid-green in a willow’s watery shadow…

The old man continues...

And then it happened. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, moving coolly from the nearest group, towards me. Dressed differently from the rest, in a white muslin dress which ended a few inches above the knee. No hat, so I noticed a difference immediately – her hair, normally kept up in a bun or a chignon, curled and flowed around her shoulders in a blonde cascade. I hardly recognised her.

Frances thinks: God, he’s almost gaga. Lost in the shrubbery of dementia. He’s obsessed with the film he’s directing, the scene on the lawn. He’s dredging his pond for a lost and idealised love. She places another figure on the screen, under a weeping willow: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, about to dig up his wife’s grave to retrieve the love poems he wrote long ago, before she overdosed on laudanum; their child stillborn, like the emotions being exhumed today. Frances contrives a title for the film: Onsra. In a certain language it meant to love for the last time. That’s what he’s doing, she thinks – trying to invoke love for the last time. A young grub of love struggling inside an ancient, decaying chrysalis.

The old man continues, running his last picture on the grainy screen…

I was leaning against a statue. Later I found streaks of old, creamy paint dust on my suit. I was disengaged from the party around me, resting in the sunshine, enjoying the coolness of the stone, the match of its contours to my own body. Feeling nice and relaxed, languorous, drowsy in the summer heat. Cigarette in one hand, glass of wine in the other. She came towards me and slowly I recognised her shape; she was a family friend. An aunt but not an aunt, if you know what I mean. One of those women on the periphery of the family, not a blood relative but still called Aunty by the kids. About forty. Forty-five? Hard to say… she was quite a bit older than me, certainly. Old enough to be my mother, as they say…

Tom closes his eyes and brings up a picture of his mother. He’d never seen her demonstrate a single sexual trait. How many times had she had sex? Just the once? Had she been a human variant which had hermaphroditic sex on a preordained day in her life, hanging upside-down in the attic, merely to reproduce? His father had died in a POW camp. After that, nobody. Perhaps his parents did it once with their eyes closed, and his father in uniform. Full battle dress, trench coat too. Maybe he put it through a buttonhole and sang hymns very loudly to drown out any embarrassing noises. Sex was the ultimate taboo. Even when he was older the TV was off in an instant if as much as a bra strap appeared…

She came up close to me and put her hand on my chest, as if to balance herself. One of her nails, painted pink, played with the top button of my shirt. She leaned on me slightly and looked into my eyes with a warm fuzzy look, slightly myopic. Indulgent. Green pupils with flecks of hazel, and laughter lines, slightly whiter than the skin around her eyes. She’d been laughing a lot… I remember her laugh. She was slightly drunk by now, but still in control. She teased me about something and did up a button – a sort of mock modesty, tutting and fussing about my appearance. I was suddenly aware that this woman was quite different from the one I knew as Aunty Marian. A woman with pink nails, with her hair let down, enjoying herself, confident and talking to me invisibly with her fingers, pressed softly – meaningfully – onto my chest.

Jonty creaks to his feet and shuffles to the drinks table, sloshes himself a large dose of whisky. He must leave after this one, make his excuses. The anger has caught fire inside him, the flames will incinerate him soon. He can feel the roar in the chimney, but he doesn’t know why he gets so damned hot when he drinks. And angry. Prometheus on the rocks. An eagle eating his liver, the past eating his brain. No love for him now, not even his children’s. Didn’t know where they were even. Back in his chair, he takes two big gulps of whisky and tries to focus on the screen. All he can see is a huge bottle with a ship inside it, ablaze…

Then she turned away from me and studied the party for a few seconds, taking in the scene. She obviously thought it was funny, because she gave a gurgle of amusement. I was dreamy, looking at the fine hairs on her neck, funnelling into a V of silver before disappearing into her clothes. I looked at the zip on her dress – pink like her nails, and so inviting. I touched it, lightly. The smell of her was the smell of a woman, it made me feel drunk. It wasn’t perfume, it wasn’t soap – it was the smell of a clean healthy woman in the sun, a warm brown smell… I can’t think how to describe it. Hot skin rubbed with aromatic leaves, stroked with sandalwood. No, that’s not right. It was the smell of her whole being – it came off her body as if the fine hair on her skin had been mown, and was sending out a signal like the sweet vernal grass around us on the lawn…

Frances feels a toothache coming on: the ice has begun to hurt her right molar, the usual place. Tender is the right. Abscess makes the… she gets more vodka to dull the pain. The film is coming to an end, she can feel it is ending. Incest in the sun. But it wasn’t incest. A young man waking up to… no, it was something else. Something special had happened that afternoon on the lawn. First love? But hadn’t he described his former wife as the love of his life, the only one? The screen on the wall freezes – she puts the film on hold. The kingfisher hangs in mid air; the whole party becomes a silent frieze of statues. She’s intrigued. Her own past is in grainy black and white. But the old man is showing the first film he ever shot in full colour. Yes, that’s it.

His voice drones on in the corner…

Now she moves back slowly and rests her whole body against mine, but not centrally. She’s a lynx on a branch, using the left hand side of my body as a resting place. I think she closes her eyes for a while. The noise on the lawn is a soft drone in the background. Human sounds are so ridiculous when you remove yourself, listen dispassionately. She relaxes her hip into the waiting groove between my legs. Her head is on my shoulder and her hair drifts against my cheek. Our bodies are almost conjoined physically. There is no sexual tension. She is merely being her: a woman. I am merely being me: a young man.

The old man halts his story to top up his glass. He looks around at the Love Committee, but they’ve disappeared: all he sees is three empty chairs, all askew, as if his witnesses left hurriedly. He tops up his glass with soda: he doesn’t want to get drunk yet. That’ll come later. He wants to finish the film, even if he’s the last one left in the cinema.

She stays like that for five, maybe ten minutes. She becomes part of me, almost. I am rooted to the spot, I hardly move. I flick away my cigarette and hold her bare shoulder with my hand. I feel the almost imperceptible crater of an old smallpox jab. Her skin is so nice to feel. Is there anything nicer? Finally, she rights herself, moves away slightly and smoothes her dress. She turns round and smiles at me gently, slightly woozily. Her hair is disturbed so she flicks it back with her hand, pats it down. She kisses her right forefinger and dabs my cheek with it. Then she says Ciao! and heads for the melee again. The interlude is over. I relax and light another cigarette, but I stay where I am.

The old man gets up, moves to the window. He stands there, looking out at the meadows. He can smell smoke, searches for the source, and finds it drifting from the woods in the middle distance. Autumn is here again, sporing away.

He closes the window and turns to the screen on his wall, but it’s gone. The sun has dipped below the horizon, night is coming on. He sits in his chair, with a full glass, and gets drunk in the gathering gloom. His eyes close and he drifts towards unconsciousness, the glass tilting awry in his hand. Before he goes, he talks to his phantom Love Committee one last time…

When she left me my body felt as if I’d been standing too near a fire, I was burning. It was as if she’d left an imprint on me, branded me with her own flesh. And it seems to me now that she shared something with me that afternoon, without intending to. The woman I thought of as an aunty revealed to me a part of herself that she’d shared with other men over the years – her immense sensuality, the sort which so many women have but which only a few are able to share consistently. It flowed out of her and it left its heat on me for the rest of my life. I can still feel it there now. I was unable to find it with another woman, not even my wife. Strange, that. Perhaps it was all in the mind. But it was powerful, unforgettable. So powerful that I described it to my wife once, and that was the biggest mistake I ever made.

The old man goes to sleep. His glass tilts further and weeps whisky onto his pullover, then slumps onto its side. A dark stain spreads over his clothes, onto his skin, but he feels nothing. The old man sleeps on…