Sheer Blue Bliss

by Lesley Glaister

  Miss Benson’s face clouds when quizzed about the fate of her partner of many years but she says she feels he has never really gone.

  This week she will leave her home for the bright lights of London where she will be guest of honour at the Private View of her retrospective show. When asked about her reaction to leaving the solitude of her home after so long Miss Benson laughs. ‘It’ll do me good to have a bit of a hullabaloo,’ she says, ‘but I’m looking forward to getting home already.’

  It’s not surprising. The air is so fresh and the setting so tranquil that London really does seem a world away.

  Tony lays the paper down and grinds out his fag. North Norfolk Coast, eh? Thank you – he reads the journalist’s name – Lisa Just. Thank you, Lisa. It is happening, it really is. Sign follows sign follows sign. It is going to be a cinch.

  Tony takes a mouthful of Weetabix and spits it back in the bowl. Bloody mush. Bad omen. If breakfast goes wrong it always is. Have to start again now, the whole thing, fresh tea, fresh Weetabix, fresh fag. The brown mush slops heavily into the bin. Tony rinses the bowl, dries it on a white tea-towel, arranges two more Weetabix one on top of the other, fills and switches on the kettle, rolls another cigarette.

  TWELVE

  The air roars and the plate glass trembles its reflections of umbrellas and traffic. Through the reflection is the bright peace of the window displays, the perfect people in their perfect clothes. They all look so stern, the plastic? plaster? people, stern and attenuated. September and already they are got up for winter. Connie stares at a model in a long grey coat, black fur collar and trim, pale face, smooth as an eggshell, serious, the lips unpainted, the head smooth and bald but each eye trimmed with a stiff birdwing of lashes.

  Connie pulls herself away from the window and in the slipstream of a crowd, enters the store. The air is utterly fake, such a perfumed assault of clashing scents it makes her teeth ring. She goes forward between the bottles and the brightness holding her breath, goes between hosiery and handbags to find the escalator which sweeps her upwards towards Ladies’ Fashions.

  She has not bought a new item of clothing for thirty years but today she will. Like it or not she will be noticed at the private view, noticed in the right way. She’s not having them sniggering at her in her old stuff, daft old bat up from the sticks, not having them humouring her. She’ll knock their eyes out, for Patrick’s sake. It’s just a matter of getting into the spirit of the thing, shopping, dressing up. She’s still a woman after all under all the shabby layers, with a woman’s taste for luxury still there, still stirrable.

  Rising up the escalator she breathes in fabric, electricity, wealth. Purple she is hit by first, silver, royal blue, the colours hum in the brilliant light, mirrors glint back the dazzle of party frocks. Then there are darkness, deep greens and browns and behind everything, more than anything, black: velvet, satin, silk and wool, matt and shiny, pure black and black with a sheen of blue or brown or deep red. She takes a breath. How does a person choose? In a long mirror she catches herself amongst the racks of clothes and turns her head away before the reflection can belt her one. Scruffy old woman. No, only on the outside, no, no. But still she can feel the eyes of an assistant boring into her from behind, critical, accusing, What are you doing here? She fingers some jumpers, aware of the eyes, unable to concentrate, to think. The jumpers are appliquéd with penguins and flowers, scraps of wit and silk. She turns eventually to confront the eyes of the figure behind her and finds it’s only another dummy done up in purple that is looking nowhere, that has, in fact, no eyes.

  Connie smiles at her own foolishness. She relaxes, puts a Fisherman’s Friend in her mouth, tries to think properly. The skirts and the dresses seem enormous, even the smallest sizes are long enough to trail behind her on the floor. People seem to have got so big these days, so unnecessarily, so vulgarly big. The fabrics are luscious, such a long time since she’s felt or smelled new velvet, slithery satin. She finds a rack of silk blouses, muted mauves and pinks with a white bloom on them like a peach – or the tenderest private human skin. She picks up a sleeve and rubs it against her cheek. She gets herself into a dreamy state, a kind of trance, hardly looking or trying to think but rubbing the fabrics between her fingers, smelling the newness of them, getting bolder and burying her face in a velvet dress, nuzzling, finding herself wanting to suck the velvet wet like, as a child, she used to suck the corners of sheets.

  And then there is an assistant, real and breathing, a towering girl all legs and lashes, small sharp head perched up there somewhere near the ceiling. ‘Need any help, madam?’ she says polite enough but with an eloquent flick of her eyes over Connie’s shabby coat.

  ‘Purple, do you think?’ Connie says. ‘I want a whole new get-up. Would this suit me?’ Indicating the dummy. ‘Dress, coat, hat, the lot.’

  The eyes travel down to the splitting shoes. Connie looks down, too, her best shoes but obviously they’ll have to go. She’ll have the works: shoes, stockings, underwear.

  ‘I’ll leave you to browse, shall I?’ the girl says, and bolts. Connie grins. This could be quite a lark. But even underwear is not as simple as it sounds: racks, shelves and stands of difficult straps and scraps of lace, shine and sheen and peep-show stuff, Wonderbras, strapless, nude-look, uplift, balconette – the thought of her old vest makes Connie come over queer. She needs a rest before she can think straight. She goes to the coffee shop for tea and a bun. The nearest thing an extortionate pain au chocolat, all greasy flakes and bitter sludge, not ideal, but fortifying, at least.

  As she munches she reads a leaflet advertising beauty products. Twenty per cent off our Exclusive Range for Store Card Holders. Open a Customer Account today. Ho hum. Gel de Bain Moussant, Gel Exfoliant Moussant, Gel Minceur, Galbe de Buste. Breast cream? She could do with some of that, frowns at the memory of her breasts in the hotel bathroom mirror looking so … forlorn.

  And then the memory hits her, the deep memory brought back by the sensation in the hotel room, the sensation of air on naked skin. Her nails cut into her palms as it comes back. The studio. October, the sky a blaze of blue, the fire lit, flames pale in the sun. Sacha wanted to paint her nude, standing and looking out of the window, paint her from behind but slightly turned, head almost in profile, hand on the window frame. She had never been naked except for the quick shivery duck between bath and bed, between clothes for night and clothes for day. Strange to let her dressing gown fall and for her limbs, her buttocks, her belly, her breasts – which nobody had ever seen since they had grown – her neck and most of all somehow the vulnerable place between her shoulder blades to be naked, to be seen. She was aware that the air Sacha breathed was able to travel freely and to touch her skin. But Sacha was so businesslike, almost brisk, that she was hardly embarrassed. Actually after a little while of the interesting warmth of the fire on one side of her, the slight chill through the glass on the other, she began to enjoy the bareness, looking down at her pretty body, its creaminess, thinking, This is mine, this is me.

  A happy moment before.

  And now the other memory, the bad one, the one that will always be attached.

  Patrick coming up the drive, head down, approaching the house. She watched his long-legged scissoring stride, thought, Something is wrong. He stopped and looked up, quickly before she had time to withdraw, looked straight at her nakedness through the glass and though it was too far for their eyes to meet, Connie felt a flinch as their gazes intersected, a sudden hotness on her front, almost a flushing that Sacha might have caught with her paints, a fleeting rosiness.

  Patrick on the stairs, then Sacha saying, ‘Have a break, I’ll make tea.’ Connie pulling on the gown and settling on a low stool by the fire. Patrick in the room, the fresh raw-air smell of him as he approached. A feeling of shyness, pride, what would you call it … coquettishness? so, so foolish, before he opened his mouth and told her the worst. Words that are not in her memory, that her mind rejected. The heat of the fire against her left
shin the last sensation, the last coherent memory before a period of confusion in which there were things, of course – an egg in a yellow egg-cup for some reason, Sacha’s tweedy arms, stars needling frostily through the curtain gap … oh this and that … but most of all there was loss.

  Mother and Father and Alfred gone, the house gone. Just gone. A direct hit and why were they not in the shelter what oh what oh why … Gone. Her mind stopped still at that.

  ‘Finished, madam?’

  What? Connie trawls her mind back to here and now, to the leaflet advertising Galbe de Buste, to the empty teacup. ‘No,’ she says as a girl with a tray stops at her table. She grabs her cup and holds it against her chest. ‘No. I haven’t finished.’

  The girl squelches a mouthful of chewing gum at her and shrugs. ‘If you say so.’ She goes off with her loaded tray. Connie watches her little bottom under the green nylon overall. That girl must be about the age she was then. She sighs and lets go of the empty cup.

  THIRTEEN

  Tony wanders between his own flat and Donna’s, trying to pace away a morning that drags on and on. He turns on Donna’s TV, just gibberish for kids, tries music but he can’t stand Donna’s taste in music. Can’t stand music anyway the way it goes on and on wordless, on and on and tries to mess up your brain with all its tricksy rhythms. Quiet is best, or the sound of traffic. Traffic is OK.

  It’s gone cold. Rain lashes the window. A yellow leaf splayed like a hand sticks and slides down the glass. Tony piles Donna’s post neatly on the table. All junk. Tragic. He touches the compost in the plant pots, moist still. You don’t want to over-water, that’s worse than letting them dry out, she says. No need to be here then. Funny how he prefers being here than in his own place. Means to keep out, but can’t. Women’s things. Should he go and visit her in hospital? Should, because once he’s gone that might be it. Might not see her again and she is, he supposes, a friend. The nearest thing he’s got. Never been good at friendship, Tony. Doesn’t need people, that’s the thing. But Donna likes him. And he can like her … can he? Because there’s no … doesn’t fancy her at all. No danger there.

  Getting sorted in his head. Not in actuality sorted but he has a strategy. First off, see Benson, go to the Private View. If he can’t get in he’ll hang about outside and get a glimpse of her at least, introduce himself, at least, begin the process of knowing her. She won’t trust him till she knows him, she won’t give him a thing till she trusts him. They must not be strangers, not when they’ve so much in common. Patrick in common. Then go to the exhibition, have a look at the new portrait of Patrick, find out what there is to know. There will be a sign. Find out exactly where she lives. There is sure to be a sign and then he can go there. And it will all fall into place, he can practically feel it inside him, starting to fall.

  He cooks his meal in Donna’s kitchen with Donna’s pans. His own food though, he wouldn’t stoop to nicking food. A simple lunch, pasta with anchovy sauce, delicate, salty, a ten-minute meal and stunning. Does Benson like pasta, like anchovies? Soufflé, that’s the sort of thing, for an old person, old but sophisticated he guesses, cheese or mushroom perhaps? In one of Donna’s cookbooks he finds a recipe for a prawn and asparagus soufflé. Ah, comforting and posh, that’s it. What could be more right than that?

  Picture me as a boy of thirteen, pale, puny, interned. I had been all but forgotten by my friends. My only companions were my parents, my tutor and the gardener with whom I spent much time. Except for interminable Sundays, my days had a similar pattern. Each morning my tutor came and we trawled wearily through Latin verbs, algebra, capital cities. After luncheon I had to rest. My free time I spent in the garden or in the greenhouse.

  ‘Do you think it natural,’ I overheard my mother say to my father, ‘a boy of his age so transfixed by plants? What does he think he’s going to grow up to be – a gardener?’

  ‘Oh leave him to it,’ my father replied, ‘he does no harm. And the fresh air will do him good.’

  I had an image of my weak heart like a mouldy plum, with a soft brownish place into which one could push one’s finger with no resistance. The rest of it beat in a weak fluttering way, not the regular strong boom-boom, boom-boom I had heard when, as a smaller child, I had pressed my head against my mother’s chest.

  During my convalescence I had overheard the doctor say, ‘If he catches a chill or strains himself … well …’ An unspoken warning that had left me acutely aware of the softening of my heart.

  The garden was long. There were stone steps that led down to a lawn edged by herbaceous borders, a shrubbery, the greenhouse and behind the shrubbery where the garden narrowed there was a triangle of scrubby soil and weeds, a compost heap, a gloomy laurel bush with leaves that looked spattered with whitewash, a privet hedge, a stench of cats. This became my private place.

  Here out of sight of the house, I used to do a most curious thing. With the doctor’s warning about the danger of strain ringing in my ears, I tested my weakened heart. I ran on the spot and skipped with a length of old washing line. I have often wondered whether I was trying to die, but perhaps there was no such morbid intention, perhaps it was only an innate wisdom telling me to exercise in order to strengthen the muscles of my heart. After these first tests of endurance my heart would beat fearfully, a stuttering rush of beats that caused me to sink to the ground trembling and exhausted, but the more often I repeated the test, the stronger it seemed to grow. It was secret, this strengthening of my self, my system. I did not speak of it, or speak of how much better I felt because I had grown to appreciate the status and privileges of the semi-invalid. I told the doctor that I still felt faint often, that I suffered palpitations in the night that woke and scared me, because I had no wish to return to school where I would have fallen far behind my fellows. I liked my afternoon rests, my solitude, my tutor who in an occasional fit of frivolity would sometimes agree to lay aside the books and play cat’s-cradle with a length of green string or recite long passages from Edward Lear’s The Book of Nonsense. I was relieved, furthermore, that my father no longer expected heroic feats from me in the realms of sport or commerce and that thus I would not disappoint his expectations. And best of all I liked to have time to spend amongst the plants.

  The more time and attention I paid the plants the more my attention was repaid. I became increasingly aware that they, no less than animals or humans, were sentient beings. I vividly recall my first inkling of this and the experiment that followed.

  First I must introduce the gardener who came to us on Tuesday and Friday. His name was Percy Greengrass – I am not sure to this day whether that was his christened name or whether he adopted it himself. I do suspect the former since he never exhibited a single other sign of whimsy. He was old, near-sighted and bad-tempered. His eyes were small and further hidden between whiskery folds of skin and craggy eyebrows so that I never felt myself to have been seen by him, a feeling that gave me a curious sense of invisibility and freedom. He rarely spoke to me, or even seemed to notice me but did tolerate the dogged way I followed him about without complaint.

  Greengrass had no special feeling for plants, or rather no consistent attitude. Although he rarely addressed a remark directly to me he muttered and mumbled to the plants, mostly a litany of complaint about work, his wife, food, life and the ‘blinding’ world in general. But there was one plant that he seemed to hate, a big scarlet pelargonium that stood on the corner of the bench by the greenhouse door. My mother was particularly fond of this flower and Greengrass was required to make cuttings for plants for the borders and for the house. I fancied that whenever he directed his curses at the plant – he called it a tart, and a stinking whore, expressions which I didn’t understand – it would shudder, fanciful notion you might think and perhaps you would be right. The plant was by the door, perhaps it was the vibration of the doorframe or the breeze that made the plant seem to shiver, but when I entered, speaking softly and affectionately to the plant, there was no such motion. However, explan
ations could be found for this anomaly, perhaps Greengrass’s greater weight caused more disturbance, perhaps he jolted the doorframe more when he opened it.

  However, the notion that attitude might affect a plant interested me and I begged from Greengrass two cuttings. I took two of equal size, both small sturdy plants with between four and six leaves apiece. I kept one on the windowsill of my bedroom and one similarly placed in the spare upstairs room used as a study by my tutor and me. I chose these two positions because the windows were on the same side of the house, with similar levels of light and temperature.

  I watered the plants exactly the same amount and gave them equal amounts of attention – with one difference. I spent ten minutes each morning and evening praising one with great affection, admiring its leaves and stalk, talking encouragingly of the soft roots pressing down through the soil, giving it love. The other I criticised and shouted at, branding it a puny, ugly plant, using the words tart and whore, threatening to kill it one day, saying that I hated it. At first there was no difference, both seemed to grow apace and both attempted to produce a flower-head. One I pinched out gently, explaining to the plant that this was for its own good, that it needed to be bigger and stronger before it flowered, apologising for the discomfort I caused it, the disappointment, saying that one day it would produce the most beautiful flowers ever seen. The other bud I ripped off saying, ‘We don’t want to see your ugly stinking whorish flowers,’ saying I’d never let it flower, sneering at its impertinence in trying.

  After a period of several weeks, to my excited amazement, the experiment began to show results. The loved plant flourished, soon grew too big for its pot, great soft leaves stretched towards the light and it tried again and again to flower, showing great vigour, I would almost say enthusiasm for life. The pace of growth of the hated plant slowed. It didn’t die, it just grew more slowly, the leaves smaller and meaner, a paler green, even a little sickly and yellow round the edges, and the frequency with which it attempted to flower was far less than that of the first until in the end it stopped trying. It hurt my heart to see the sadness of the hated plant but I forced myself to keep up the hatred, let no pity soften my scorn. After about three months I brought the plants together on my own windowsill and saw how astonishing the difference. The loved plant at least twice the size of the hated.