The papers told of snowfall that would be higher than anything in twenty years and I thought how history seemed like a recurring and inescapable dream.
Photograph: © Mawgan Gyles
The Coat Room by Orlando Whitfield
It wasn't until a few years after everyone had stopped thinking about his turning fifty that my teacher actually celebrated his birthday. That is to say, he stopped mourning its passing and gathered people together in recognition of this change in attitude. While the distinction was of course immaterial to us as guests, there was a tangible air of regret that he had allowed himself to crest the wave of his life in full view of so many and that we were there to witness as he looked distastefully, and for the first time, forward to the shorter half of his existence, sloping away sharply like an irregular triangle.
And so, on a Tuesday evening not long before Christmas in the first year that I started work as a junior editor, I arranged to meet a school friend I had had no intention of ever seeing again, outside a tube station that neither of us had ever had cause to stop at before. The carriages had been peppered with passengers whose evening papers proclaimed the depths of cold that the city would suffer that night. Headlines were laid over photographs of cars disappeared by snow and of children in hats disporting themselves in parks. The centre of town had remained largely unaffected by the snow, and what little there had been had melted quickly, as if the city's dark warmth had found the dusting of white unpalatable and had dispensed with winter swiftly so that, as the train came closer to the edges of the city and rose eventually to run over-ground, it seemed as if we had travelled into an alternative reality prepared for us by news desks with little else to say that evening. The papers told of snowfall that would be higher than anything in twenty years and I thought how, more and more, history seemed like a recurring and inescapable dream.
There are those cold days and nights when the notion that the temperature might have anything to do with the Earth's solar orbit can seem absurd; the outrageous claims of charlatans and phoneys; when the cold can buoy you up in its intensity; those days when the cold seems to come from itself, self-perpetuating in a whirling dance of crystalline air, at once joyful and painful and, as I walked down the platform I felt the dry breeze pierce the skin of my forehead and remain there. My friend was waiting for me at the barriers and had in fact been on the same train, a coincidence which was as convenient a conversation starter as any. We smiled and exchanged hearty pleasantries as old school acquaintances, friends for the evening; together again in the face of the scholastic enemy. His sturdy face was the same as I had known it behind the veneer of incongruous tan that he had acquired on a recent trip to South America, somewhere, he told me, to which he would be returning early in the new year, having accepted a good position with a ship brokering firm. Lingering a little too long before pushing our way off the platform, our stiff-legged chat looked out of place among the crowd as they passed us in crushed silence, through the gates and moving away in the street, some to the monolithic supermarket opposite the station and some sliding away down the hill and into the dentine side streets of suburbia.
The pavements had been gritted against the ice and for a few minutes the mutual silence of our makeshift companionship was broken only by the crunch and rumble of wet debris underfoot. As we neared the bottom of a slope that had brought us from the mouth of the station to the high street we were confronted by shops and fast food restaurants glowing like an encampment, blurred by drizzle and passing pedestrians. Still relatively early for the party, we turned left along the road and came to a pub whose commercially festive atmosphere was infused with an anonymous menace. We approached through a queue of cadaverous men smoking in the sleet who swivelled to watch us as we passed and for twenty minutes or so we stood at the bar and drank our way with relative ease through a conversation which gave little of either one of us away; enough to affirm the bond needed for the evening; sufficiently little to confirm the ephemeral nature of our reunion.
Turning back towards the station and making our way once again along the high street, we consulted the directions that I had scribbled in a notebook some weeks before. We soon came to the library, a stolid, unimaginative structure built, no doubt, in those days when well-meaning patrons donated the tools of Christian betterment to the less fortunate areas of the city. Its columns were streaked blackly with damp and pollution and the limestone statue of a frock-coated man missing a hand, gave the place a comic, directionless feel. An alleyway confused with torn and swollen books ran to the left of this and we took our leave of the traffic and shops and moved with gelid purpose into the hidden, streets behind.
It took us five minutes to find the house, but for another five we hovered in the street, smoking a last cigarette, watching the figures of our peers pass through the door. Many of these young men had bulged considerably since I had last seen them at school. There they had been lean, sinewy beasts, hair almost always wet from a post-match shower or lunchtime laps of the pool. Now though, they were, like me, mostly confined to a desk and where muscular shoulders had bulged their jackets, it was now, more often than not, the front buttons of their clothes which groaned silently under an altogether different kind of swelling.
While it had at first seemed strange for our teacher to want to celebrate a birthday at his parents' house, from where I watched, this reminder of the rapid and unsparing passage of life appeared wholly appropriate and I wondered if the choice had been intentional; a timely warning against hubris, a bringing-down-to-earth for all our youthful confidence. To make us visually aware of our inevitable decrepitude by inviting us to his childhood home was perhaps just another lesson, a continuation of the education he felt should never end. In his classroom he had revealed to us things of great beauty and grace; tonight we would learn a darker lesson.
From the street it was difficult to tell that there was any gathering of people inside at all and, had I not seen the gradual influx of half-familiar faces I might have thought I had written the address down incorrectly. The basement room, which had been decorated in dour reds and greens, was visible from the front garden and as we climbed the steps to the front door, we could see tables charged with food: cold cuts of ham and beef, an entire salmon, cheese and fruits and, at the far wall, a well stocked sideboard from whose lip there hung a haggard tail of silver tinsel. The room though, was quite deserted and as I rung the bell, I could imagine the smell of all that food, lying in wait.
A small, rotund girl, whose bleached blonde hair was struck through with hot bands of pink dye, opened the door to the pine-floored hallway. Her face was a dot-to-dot puzzle of dark brown moles and her thick, rimless glasses all but obscured blue-grey eyes. She wore the white shirt (through which I could discern a small tattoo on her upper arm and the sturdy strap of her bra and the soft cleft that it made in the flesh of her shoulder) and the ubiquitous stretchy black trousers of the young woman in work; the service industry equivalent of blue collar. She took our coats upstairs and we were ushered into a room at the end of the hall where about fifteen people stood and sat, drank and talked.
On a low side table just inside the door were two dishes of cold canapés and a silver-plated tray with a few half glasses of champagne. By this time separated from my friend, I took one of the glasses and walked into the room. Our host was holding court in a somewhat embarrassed fashion in the middle of the room, clutching a cold bottle whose condensation dripped down his thumb and onto his wrist, matting together a path of dark hairs along the length of his inside forearm. He, unlike many of the former-pupils who surrounded him, had lost weight since I had seen him last and now wore a small goatee which, on a younger man, might have been a distinguishing feature, but on him had the unfortunate effect of being puerile without being youthful. It seemed almost stuck on, like a bad disguise, and behind it his face looked askew. His shirt, too, had the air of a failed attempt at youthful loudness: a riot of heavy-coloured vertical stripes and a playfully large collar. He and I talked briefly of this and that: of my new job, my recent graduation and about changes in the school where he had been promoted from department head to deputy headmaster. Soon though he moved on to greet other guests and, left alone, I had a chance to properly look around me.
The room was sparsely, if ornately, decorated and as I stood I could feel myself sinking into the thick carpet underfoot. The back wall of the room was dismembered by two unsightly windows, through which an amber light was cast by the streetlights outside. A large green sofa was bulbously prominent in one corner and took up a large part of the space under one window while under the other, a glass-fronted cabinet held a dozen or so porcelain ladies and gentleman, posed in various stages of dance, the gleeful faces of both sexes delighting in their motionless gaiety. On the opposite side of the room, where more people had now congregated, standing in twos and threes like the figurines, I could see a stout round table covered in photographs and silver ornaments. Having no one to talk to immediately, and, hoping to postpone the inevitable moments of false-fraternal reconciliation with the small number of my contemporaries present, I moved over to this table and inspected the photographs. The majority were colour pictures whose tone and vibrancy had faded so that the effect was now of sepia prints daubed with water paints. A few though were black and white and it was on these that my eye first fell. They were not unusual, of course; some holiday shots at English beaches and a wedding photograph taken outside a small, brick chapel in what looked, if one were to judge by the cars in the background of the frame, to be the late 1940s. The bride was considerably smaller than her groom and his arm rested on top of her shoulder in a way that looked paternal more than anything else. He wore wire-bound spectacles, the glasses of which rode so close to his eyes that his eyelashes must have licked them, and with each blink, pushed them in increments down to the bridge of his nose. This was a photograph of a couple content to be nothing more than they would appear in the picture: ordinary and content, fearfully controlling their exuberance in this moment of forever. Other frames on the table only emphasized what I already knew; that this had been the house of an only child, my teacher: graduating from university and, in another, a poorly printed digital image of him in a line up at school, shaking hands with some local dignitary, come to open the new laboratories there.
For the next twenty minutes or so I talked with a man who had been my French master for two years. He had left abruptly in my penultimate term, ostensibly to take up the post of headmaster at an exclusive prep school in south London but also to act as carer for his wife who had been diagnosed with the early stages of a muscular dystrophy. Her illness had worsened grievously in the years since I had last seen him and he told me that he was seldom able to leave the house in the evenings. Tonight however, thanks to his sister, a nurse who lived in Warminster, up in London for Christmas, he was able to attend his ex-colleague's party. He asked me about my progress in life and that of my friends and we talked for a while about a book I was editing by a writer he said he had long admired. No sooner had I brought it up than I realized my error and felt heatedly embarrassed, watching as the faux pas I had not yet made hurtled towards me. He pressed me for information about the subject of the book, but I refrained, citing the confidentiality clause of my contract with the publishing company where I worked, but, in reality, I couldn't face telling him about the author's account of his own struggle with his wife's multiple sclerosis which was at an advanced stage and was rendered hauntingly and vilely vivid. I managed, eventually, to bring the conversation round to jovial academic memories and was mercifully interrupted by our host, tipsy and brandishing his mother like a puppet. She was dressed in a shapeless, turquoise dress, which hung sadly over her bosom and the loose flesh of her chin dangled upon her chest like liquid halted in its fall. She was smaller, now, than the young woman she was in the picture but her face beamed the same sadly expectant smile as on her wedding day. Her eyes were wet, her pupils divoted like dice. The skin of her cheeks was stained taupe with make-up and, in the cracks, moles thrust outwards like chrysalises under spiders' silk.
Mother and son stood in front of me in the same pose that she had taken with her new husband, half a century ago; he with his wrist hanging bent over her shoulder and she fixing her eyes up at where the camera had been and I now was. The hesitant exhilaration evident in her face all those years ago was replaced by pride and worry; she talked hurriedly and without any sense that she knew which word she would use next and as each sentence ended without apparent incident, she looked to her son as if for approval or permission to continue. Her gaze came unstuck from mine, too, as it followed the young girl who had been taking coats moving through the room with bottles and dishes.
Do you know, she began, when I was your age, a little younger perhaps, I went to a party like this one, given by a teacher of mine. The teacher, she continued, hadn't been very much older than her charges and had become engaged. The gathering, she said, had been much smaller that tonight's and had taken place at the end of the summer, sometime towards the end of the war. The teacher, Amelia Birch- though whether or not this was her married name, my host's mother could not recall - was living in a small cottage on the edge of a large estate in Wiltshire, the house of which had been commandeered by the army. She had been allowed to stay on in the small cottage and in return she tended the kitchen garden in the grounds closer to the house that eventually provided much of the produce to feed the officers housed there. The plot was not more than half an acre, most of which was permanently in the shade of the house. It was bisected by two threadbare espaliers, which extended from the buttresses of the house and which themselves were covered with a creeper that ran the length of the woven trees in a thickly matted rug and it seemed that the more the garden had gone to seed, the more it had encroached upon the house, blocking out sunlight as the house had done to it. The wild was having its way again with humans and their creations: green pushing back against grey, soft smothering hard.
During the time that she spent coaxing the garden back into production, harnessing again the power that nature had temporarily reclaimed, she met many of the soldiers stationed at the house. Inevitably, as I was told, since Amelia was a beautiful young woman, many of the men became enamoured with her and she frequently had suitors visiting her in the evenings. Politely, she spurned all advances but those of two men, one a Major almost fifteen years her senior and one a clever young Lieutenant. It was generally thought, at least among Amelia's pupils, that her true affection lay with the younger officer and certainly, in the late winter of the year of her engagement, they were often seen together, silhouetted like cranes against the thinning evening light, working and silently smiling in the vegetable garden. He was soon sent overseas, however, and in his absence, the Major persuaded Amelia to marry him and a date was set for the early autumn.
Among the guests gathered in the cottage were Amelia's parents, two older brothers, both home on leave, and a dozen or so others, all of whom seemed impossibly exotic; the women in lace gloves and hats; the men in linen suits or crisp uniforms, their medals and epaulettes burnished gold in the dying evening. The food at the party had been particularly fine and consisted of many things she had not tried before. There had been soft cheeses and olives brought from London; homemade prunes on cocktail sticks and hothouse peaches. There was Muscovado sugar, too, filling white bowls like ploughed earth. She was at first deeply suspicious, she said, but was soon eating it from a spoon and with her fingers, letting the soft, sandy clods melt on her tongue and dark rivulets melt inside her mouth. Unused to parties and slightly delirious from the sugar and the sudden company of adults and their gay talk, she went outside to sit on the kitchen step and gather her head about her. In the warm evening the Major's wolfhound came to sit beside her and, she told me, it was the only the large dog's tail thumping rhythmically against her back that kept her connected to the reality of the day and banished all suspicions that this had been entirely a dream. Eventually, ready to rejoin the party, she went to wash her hands in the barrel of rainwater at the back of the cottage. Submerging her arms up to her elbows in the cold green water, the sugar that had coated her palms and fingertips came off and left an oily, colourless kaleidoscope on the surface. As she stood watching the fatty crystals disperse and form different allegiances, clinging to the sides of the barrel at the water's edge and to her arms where they broke the surface, she became aware, she said, of the sound of smashing glass and shouting. With her arms still dripping, she walked around the back of the house towards the source of the noise. In the distance she could see frenzied movement inside the hothouse and a figure danced about inside its frame, like a Balinese puppet against an amber screen. Most of the glass, she could see, had been shattered; broken up into greening floes, and there were large asymmetrical pieces still stuck in their metal tracks. The trees, whose branches had borne the peaches served that afternoon were in a terrible state; cracked and twisted on the ground.
In order to arrive at the hothouse from the cottage's small garden, it was necessary to descend a small slope by a path bound by nettles whose fronds she remembered stinging at her knees, and climb its opposing bank bringing one to directly confront the back door of the structure. In that time, she told me, it was impossible not to lose sight of all but the very top so that, by the time she made it to the summit, as the last of the sun drooled over the horizon, the frantic body inside had disappeared from view. When she came fully level with the greenhouse, her pulse beating a soft-hot drum in her ears, she paused slightly before going through the open door. The central aisle, either side of which had run the majestic bowers, was now obscured from view, scattered with earth and glass. And there, among the pink and amber flesh of the fruit that was strewn and crushed upon the floor, some of the skins still bearing the thick symmetry of boot print, she saw a crimson tapestry of blood, spattered among the wreckage. Out of a pure, magnetic fear, she told me, even now visibly nervous at the thought of it, she moved further through the detritus. The stitching of blood became thicker on the floor and then seemed suddenly to break into a run; full globs of rust-red gleaming across the floor and stilly flowing towards the legs of a soldier who lay piled like laundry in a corner. Looking down, she said, at the face of the soldier she recognised it at once: this was the lieutenant. His face, which she had always known as jovial and pink with just-shaved freshness, was crumpled now and rough with a layer of dirt that had so permeated the skin of his neck, face and hands that he looked like a palimpsest of grime. A jagged tooth of glass lay just out of the reach of his hand and was thickly coated with red. She could see instantly where it had been pulled from and the wound that it had made: the underside of his trouser-leg was heavy with liquid and as he saw her and attempted to stand, the wet brown serge peeled away from the floor like skin.
Even by that point he had lost a great quantity of blood and by the time she had run back to the cottage to tell Amelia and her guests, he was completely unconscious. He was taken to the military surgery in the drawing room of the main house where he was given several blood transfusions. Despite the medic's best efforts, however, he never regained consciousness. No one ever did determine whether the young lieutenant had died by his own hand or whether in his rage he had fallen on the shard but, my host's mother finished by saying; a Catholic writer once wrote that while a murder kills one person, a suicide kills everyone around it. And so, she said, when Amelia severed her ties with the Major and eventually left the village altogether in the mid-autumn of that year, it hardly seemed to matter how the man had died.
Feeling ill in the way that I often did at parties and especially as I cleared my throat to comment on her story, I was overcome with nausea. Fully conscious of being back in the room now, I could think of nothing to say to the shrunken woman who stood before me and so for a few minutes I politely said how remarkable it was and what a horrific thing it must have been. I drifted off presently, when it seemed as if anything more I would say could only sound rude, left the room and passed through the hallway and into the kitchen where I drank a glass of water in one draft, filled the glass again, and stood by the sink to catch my breath. In the other room I heard my teacher making an announcement and gradually I saw a flow of people descending to the basement and to the room where dinner had been lying in wait.
The girl who had taken my coat as I arrived came into the kitchen and looked me over as she put a tray of empty glasses down beside me on the counter and left again and went upstairs. She returned quickly, taking the stairs two at a time in gliding strides and gave two coats to a couple by the door. Coming back into the kitchen, she stopped in the middle of the room and seemed to want to confront me with something, to say something to me, but gave a small outward gasp as if she had been holding her breath. An oscillating chatter filtered through the floorboards from the room below us as all the guests, competing in volume with the clinking of forks on plates, raised their voices in full-mouthed unison. Odd phrases and laughter came to my ears and I heard the word 'Amelia' and the story was starting again.
A few people remained upstairs at the tail ends of their conversations and I hoped that my friend was among them. I waited in my place by the sink but within a few minutes I had to conclude that he too had gone down to eat. By this point I was feeling very unwell land I could feel tides of nausea ebbing and flowing inside me. Looking over at the girl, I saw her with her face in her hands, her little fingers rubbing the length of her nose and into the corners of her eyes as if trying to force tears back into their ducts. She sat side-saddle on a chair, her body rocking slowly and her feet leaning back and up and pointing towards me and then down again as if she was stretching the muscles of her toes. At the top of each forward tilt her thin shirt became taut over the skin of her shoulders and back and the white material blushed. I could see, too, that the tattoo I had spied earlier in the evening was in fact a birthmark: a dark Charybdis on the pink of her skin. I made a move towards her and towards the door, but when she didn't look up I made to leave the room and into the hall. There, it seemed, I had two choices: down the stairs to where, by now, the scent of salmon mousse would have filled the air, or up, to take my coat and out into the night, abandoning my friend. Looking back once more towards the kitchen and the girl, I made my choice.
The stairs were bound on one side by a banister and on the other by a tan coloured wheelchair lift that climbed the stairs like a hieroglyphic. At the top, four rooms led off the landing: one closet-like room containing a grubby toilet, complete with candlewick beard and, either side, two doors, one of which opened to reveal a neat pastel bedroom. On the bed, laid out in rows, were the presents that guests had brought (mine among them somewhere). The other room, whose door was almost closed, had a long green coat hanging from its corner. With only a small push from the tips of two fingers the door swung open to reveal a cluttered room, a bed covered with jackets and scarves and hats; fur and wool and wax-cloth enmeshed. Pulling coats away individually at first, thinking that my later arrival would mean mine was closer to the top of the heap, I was puzzled when I could not find it. Lifting them off in groups from the foot of the bed and discarding them onto a chair and some falling from my arms to the floor and as I pulled a beige raincoat from what was nearly the bottom of the pile, I felt my hand touch something harder, something distant; a leg under the covers.
Tearing off all the coats quickly now, I revealed the body of a man; tall and white-haired and whose bare arms ended in edematous hands. His face was pale and utterly still with patches of snowy stubble poking through in places and his grey, anaemic nose was twisted like a root. One of his eyes had been brushed slightly open by one of the jackets that had hidden his face and he looked drunk, like the man in that painting by Frans Hals. The long eyelashes were unmistakable - those of my teacher's father.
In the same way that some words seem to caress their meaning - flotsam and jetsam, for example - their syllables and emphases rubbing up against that which they denote, the corpse in front of me (my first) seemed to embrace the notion of death itself. Where not long ago, it seemed, there might have been two of us in this room, there was only me and it; a breathless hump, an inconvenience of barely warm blood and bones. I felt an overpowering sense of elation to be alive in the presence of death, warm in the presence of cold, soft in the presence of hard. Under the bed I could see the flashing red lights of a medical machine and the wire that ran to a clamp on his finger. I took the oxygen mask off his mouth and felt the soft breath of it on my fingers; the feeling of child blowing out the candles on a cake.
It was so close, just there. The low barriers of the hospital-style bed seemed the only thing that separated me from the death contained within them like water baying at the rim of a glass. Behind me the girl stood in the doorway. They turned the sounds off, she said in an accent that I hadn't expected, in case he died tonight. It happened about half an hour ago. They knew it would probably happen tonight but they - and he, too, I suppose - didn't want it to disturb things downstairs. He'd still be dead after everyone had gone home. I moved the coats on top of him, she ended, to keep him warm a little. She left the room as soon as she had said these words and with her last look clearly meant that I should do likewise. But I stayed on a while, I've no idea for how long; time seemed hardly to exist in this room, in the presence of death. I was as unreal in his presence as he was in mine and I found myself sensibly and physically slipping away from this scene in front of me and from time itself.
I moved stealthily down the stairs and through the hall passing the kitchen where the girl with the accent stood by the sink now, looking out into the night. I was out the door and onto the high street. Soon, as I neared the tube I saw the snow start to fall again and its tumble was caught in the lights of an ambulance and everything was calm. Together the flakes and the sapphire bulbs spun a web of light and ice, and sank to the floor like sparks, and disappeared.
Wednesday, 27 January, 2010
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