Garrad was three-quarters down this long street when he met his match. A dozen houses or so from the end he turned his head towards one wide window and saw – himself. He was set up like all the rest of them, handsomely framed and mounted – the same for size, the same for clarity. His background glowed out stronger and redder even than the fisherman’s. He was looking into a mirror which stood squarely in that place where in all other rooms he had looked for the TV set. It was an old-fashioned mirror set up on a stand, like a picture on a short easel, and placed on a side-table well away from the wall. The room itself was identical to all the other rooms of the street. Yet in atmosphere it was different. It lacked the sealed-off, all absorbed look of the others. There was no spellbinder here – only two young women who, backs to the window, were bending over the end of a long table. It wasn’t easy to see what they were doing. They might be wrapping and tying a dumpy parcel from the look of it, or pressing and persuading a yeasty lump of dough. They stood aside for a moment and he saw a baby being zipped into a nightsack. Its head rolled on the tabletop. Its furious feet made the corners of the bag squirm like a flame-curled envelope. Garrad watched the performance. For more than half the street he’d been an invisible screen-watcher, familiar only with the backs of heads. But now one of the women, catching sight of his head in the mirror, twisted round to face him. This double look fascinated Garrad. At one blow he was twice hailed, twice identified as a living man. Now the other woman had turned. As though aware of some oddness in their background, lacking a TV, they did more than turn their heads. They seemed amused at the man gaping in at them. One of them swung the baby in its bag up off the table and both came to the window and pushed it wider open. Garrad leaned on the gate. The baby was placed on the window-ledge, its white woollen bag absorbing sunset like a sponge.
‘Talk about fire!’ exclaimed the young mother leaning out. ‘That sky is quite something!’
‘The best I’ve seen for years,’ Garrad replied.
‘He’s never seen one yet,’ she said, hitching the baby further up. ‘It’s his first, I believe. This is his first.’ Garrad felt that only with reluctance had the baby let his fury subside. At any moment it might burst again. Meanwhile it continued to stare out.
‘It’s not the sky that interests him,’ said the other, who was obviously a sister. ‘I don’t believe he’d so much as blink if the sky turned suddenly green or black or whatever. People interest him.’
‘He loves colour. And I believe he even looks at distance,’ said the mother. Stern and impassive, the baby hung between them while they bickered gently behind his back. There was some jealousy around. Even Garrad felt jealous for himself. He had alerted them to colour. He was colour. His shoulders and back were saturated with it, his hair pronged with pink. Between their shoulders he got a glimpse of himself in the mirror with great streaks of fire behind his head.
‘Yes, it was seeing you in that,’ said the sister following his glance. ‘If you hadn’t stopped just where you are we wouldn’t have noticed until too late. It’s past its best already, isn’t it?’ Garrad was appeased. He was about to move on when there was a flash of lightning and some moments later a distant rumble of thunder.
‘Oh I knew that was coming!’ said the girl holding the baby. There was another flash behind Garrad’s left shoulder followed directly by a much louder boom. The women at the window were now staring at him transfixed. He was something now all right with his flaming sky and lightning springing between his shoulders. For a moment all three were satisfied to stare – the women at the sudden drama outside, the man at the scene indoors. But the baby, peeved by the momentary withdrawal of attention, began to girn and twist in its bag.
‘You’ll excuse us if we shut the window now,’ said its mother. ‘But thanks – thanks for drawing our attention …’
Garrad waved. He saw his own hand move in their mirror and again got the double response, as they faced him and as they turned inwards and saw his image. He moved away, past more family groups, past couples and single viewers. The fisherman had long ago packed up and a dozen soldiers were galloping with spears poised through a narrow gorge between mountains. Thunder was rumbling very far off. Garrad walked slowly though he was still a long way from his own part of the town. The fiery sky was already half extinguished, yet for a short time the colour down in the streets seemed deeper than ever, as if trapped and richly mixed with dark stone or floating through the dust and soot in the air. By the time Garrad reached his district the whole upper sky had faded to a yellow-green, but here and there between the distant cranes and spires on the town’s horizon there were still some streaks of orange light. He turned another corner, walked up a long street of empty offices and shops and out into the part where the double villas and careful gardens began. He was near home. A few steps further and he was looking into his own front room. The place was lit but deserted and the square of emptiness where the TV had stood seemed more conspicuous than ever. Yet as soon as he was in the door he knew the heavy atmosphere had fractionally lifted. A moment later his wife came through from the back of the house.
‘The colour’s coming back!’ she said.
‘It’s what?’
‘They phoned soon after you left. And there’s not all that much wrong. We’ll have the colour back first thing tomorrow.’
‘Well, thank God for that.’ His gratitude for the returning colour-box sounded thin to his own ears. The very flatness of his tone gave the lie to it. Yet when it did come tomorrow wouldn’t he welcome colour back with open arms? He didn’t doubt it. At this moment, however, he was loaded with the stuff himself. The new substance. The real thing. His clothes were soaked in it to the skin. The whole gamut of reds had penetrated to his bone marrow and was now thickening his blood. But he was not, as far as he could see, radiating any of this spectacular colour himself. His wife looked blank. The hall was dim and getting dimmer. On the right hung a large mirror and on the opposite side a smaller one reflecting into infinity a square of biscuit-toned wall. Between these Garrad moved forward carefully but stopped at the foot of the stairs. His wife was watching him closely.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.
‘Colour, of course.’
‘Are you thinking about the missing colour?’
‘No, just colour.’
‘Not the missing colour?’
‘No. Colour.’
‘What, to be exact?’
‘The usual. Starting with that odd tree that sticks out into the road. Never noticed before but it’s got half its bark peeled off. Every boy that passes tears a strip. It’s dead white on the pavement side, black on the other. It’s a cartoon tree now.’
‘Black and white? Are you still talking about colour?’
‘I went past the market. Rails and rails of red, blue and yellow dresses. Who buys them?’
‘What’s so new?’
‘Nothing. I went as far as the school with the glass. There’s actually a palm-tree in the corridor. Imagine it! There’ll not be much stripped off that one. And back again. The stalls were packing up. People fingering huge piles of bashed plums and split tomatoes.’ He paused.
‘What else?’
Garrad had his foot on the stairs. ‘The sky.’ He drew his breath with a slight hiss. ‘There’s still a patch.’
‘A patch?’
‘Of red. Of pink now. You might still see something from the back room. One patch left, and getting smaller every minute.’ He started to go up. His wife who had been staring at him as though expecting the knobs of his backbone to light up, now stood reluctantly pondering the pale pink patch, her foot on the bottom stair. Slowly she went up after him.
Waiting for the Sun
‘I DON’T KNOW whether you’ve seen this one before,’ Mr Shering would say, passing the photo round a company at his fireside. ‘A fellow at my hotel took that – never seen the man in my life. He bobbed up in front of me one day – and that was it! Not so much as “by your leav
e”.’ Walking across to the lamp he would study another one for a long time, murmuring to himself: ‘I haven’t an idea where this one was taken. Wait a minute though. Wasn’t I just stepping off the boat at Marseilles? It must have been the mother of that child who took such a fancy to me for some unknown reason. And here’s another. Believe it or not, this time I simply haven’t a clue. As likely as not some complete stranger took it when I wasn’t looking. These things happen to me!’ But his sideways glance as he passed between two handsome mirrors which hung on opposite walls clearly showed that he saw every reason why such things should happen to him. In these glasses he was reflected, diminished but shining, within an infinite number of gilded frames – a tall, heavily-built man in his sixties who carried himself as though he had, in the past, held his chin up over a series of stiff collars and was now keeping it that way, no longer supported by the formal neckwear but simply by the memory of these people who had once turned to stare at him as he went by and wondered who he was. An actor, a visiting conductor, some distinguished man of letters? Once he had kept them guessing. Nowadays he thrived only on a few upturned faces staring at him from his own fireside, or the brief turning of heads as he laboriously boarded the trains and buses of out-of-the-way towns. He had to make the most of these rarer and rarer occasions when he believed himself recognized for what he was.
This need was greater now. All the same, he was hard put to know what he was himself. He occasionally referred to his ‘full life’, but somehow he had missed doing anything which gave him the right to display a label or put out a sign. Moreover, since he was a young man there had grown up a much greater demand for exact self-description and the clear listing of virtues and vices in black and white. Confident ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to quick-firing questions were now expected as a matter of course. In the days when he had money it had been different. It was enough then to set out a tray of ornaments before his visitors and to keep a silk polishing cloth and a magnifying glass at hand for studying details and inscriptions. In no time he would find himself described by at least one of the company as an antiquarian. He had only to unhook one or two dark brown oil paintings from the walls and study them under the light, or thumb reverently through a worn leather-bound book – and he was unlucky if two or three did not refer to him as a connoisseur of painting or collector of rare books. It was a matter of picking the right company and keeping them at a certain distance so that there could be no question of disillusionment on either side. He respected other people’s feelings and was extremely tender with his own. He deplored the growing tendency to probe and question. Born sceptics were nothing more or less than bores to his way of thinking, and he had a particular dislike for those who, in season and out, were avid for the truth. He looked on them as selfish people, greedy for a special form of nourishment which had always been hard to procure, and was in any case a luxury which he himself had been able to do without for years on end.
Some loss in income made a difference to his way of living for a time. His health was affected, but only enough to keep him mooning about the convalescent wings of nursing-homes and from there to the back gardens and spare bedrooms of various acquaintances during the summer. When after a few years he took up his interests again, he discovered the world was changing out of all recognition. Speed and absolute efficiency were demanded, even for the forming of relationships. On every side there was a gathering in of facts and information, while the tools and mechanical devices for detecting flaws in machines and human beings were working overtime. He suspected that they were contained, when not in use, in the shiny plastic bags and steel-hinged cases which were everywhere being carried about in place of the crushable, bulging ones he had known.
He began to move about in a world of his own, politely ignoring the people who asked him what he did, staring intently over the heads of those who tried to tell him what they did themselves. Long ago he had discovered it was not necessary to listen to every word spoken. Only a few words were needed in order to place the speaker. The rest had been a matter of patience – unending, unquestioning patience. But now, like it or not, he was moving into the sink-or-swim era of experts. Mr Shering realized he would sink without trace unless he found a new and effortless way to assert himself.
It was the necessity to combine being somebody with doing nothing which led him to his new interest. In no time it amounted to an obsession. In place of the prints and paintings and glittering trays of little knick-knacks, fat albums of photos began to pile up on top of his bookcase. When his finances improved and he began to move about again and see the world the interest came into full force. The time came when he could hand round photos dating back over years and point out the details which had a topical interest at the time.
‘This was that town where there was all the rumpus – nine years ago – over the leading councillor. If you look closely I think you might just see his name chalked up in white on that wall there. The abuse was in red underneath – bigger letters in fact, but you’d have to have good eyes to see it. It’s the red against the dark wall does it. And here’s one in Sicily. It’s supposed to be a photo of the volcano of course, but here’s the tail-end of a bus come in the way. Incidentally that same bus was in the news a day or two later – overturned into a ravine with a load of tourists. It’s rather a horrid photo, I’m afraid – the more so when you remember the volcano started erupting six months or so later!’
People looking through these photos were more surprised, however, to see their extraordinary variety. There were all types here from small, blurred, amateur snaps to the studies whose light and clarity approached professional standard. Sometimes at first glance they made the mistake of imagining that Shering was himself the photographer. Nothing could be further from the truth and their mistake was quickly corrected on a closer inspection. While Mr Shering was pointing out the palm-trees, flags, ruins and mountains which marked his travels, his guests were studying the figure, dignified and solitary, standing sometimes in the middle distance but more often in the foreground of each photo. Though his appearance in these pictures changed over the years, though his clothes varied with the summer or winter backgrounds against which he stood – like those animals whose brown coats turn white against the snow – he was always easy to spot. Shering never had to point himself out. He simply referred to the many friends he made as he went about, travellers like himself who’d taken him up on the spot as though they’d known him all their lives. He was lucky, he supposed, to have met the people who took him as they found him.
But the real reason was that though the world had changed he’d no intention of being left out of the picture. The desire to be photographed had grown from the need to be in contact again with persons who could admire him from a distance. This distance, lengthening with each disillusionment, gradually became the space between himself and the person with a camera. There was a fascination about such a contact. It was intimate yet impersonal. It was with people who, except for one sunlit encounter, would remain strangers to him for the rest of his life.
It was not others who took him as they found him. It was he who found and captured all those with cameras in their hands, recognizing them even from a great distance by their surroundings and gestures, as a birdwatcher spots his special birds. He would then come running heavily down some cliff path or down the worn steps of a cathedral, breathlessly descending to the beach or crowded square where someone was balancing their black box against a rock or the rim of a fountain. ‘Hullo there!’ he would shout while still some distance off. ‘Wait a minute! Have you got that quite right? You’re going to spoil a magnificent picture if you’re not careful. Hold on. I’ll be right with you!’
Occasionally he made mistakes in the people he approached. Any other man might have been struck to the ground by the looks certain photographers directed towards him as he came waving and running. He had with-stood some terrible abuse in his time. But such incidents were rare. In any case the skin which appeared to be draw
n so finely over Shering’s well-cut features was surprisingly thick. And years of practice had enabled him to spot the amateur almost without fail. When this happened it was no time till he’d struck up a conversation with someone behind an out-of-date camera, not long either before he was standing, his head turned away, his profile white as marble against some dingy ruin or black as basalt against a sun-whitened archway – waiting for the click which would release him from a casual, dreaming posture. ‘Is that how you want me? Tell me when you’ve got it,’ he would murmur, scarcely opening his lips or lowering his eyelids. ‘Well, if you can really be bothered,’ he would say in parting, drawing out a visiting card with his home address. ‘It would be a memento of a very happy meeting, of a most interesting talk.’ It was in this way that his collection of photos grew.
The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books Page 10
