The Word Cloud

Recent postings around here have prompted me to drag this effort of mine out of my archives. I'm posting it as a blog because (a) the market for such stuff being mininal to nil, I'm not aiming for publication, and (b) I haven't done any critiquing lately so I don't feel I have the right to expect any back. All I'm hoping for is that one or two of you may find something in it to enjoy.

It having been originally rather longer, sharpening it up to post here has also been a useful exercise in editing.



Daybreak



‘Glue,’ I say. ‘That’s all it is.’

‘All what is?’

Hell, I didn’t even realise I was speaking aloud, much less that there’s anyone near enough to hear me. No wonder I jump.

Truth to tell, I’ve been well out of it. I’m not used to parties that go on all night. Come to that, I don’t go to many parties at all. I’m not in the habit of drinking more than moderately, either; but, having had nothing much better to do for the last couple of hours, I’ve been hitting the whisky bottle to some purpose. Gazing absently out of the window, lost in my thoughts, I’m really not ready for the voice that speaks behind me.

Not that it’s an unfamiliar voice. Oh, no, quite the opposite: it’s a voice I’d recognise among a thousand. That startling deepness without huskiness, that precise, slightly drawled speech tells me at once that it’s my hostess who’s standing behind me. Jennie.

Jennie, or Jeanne Marie Roland, to give her her right name – she’s of Anglo-French parentage – is the light in my life, the leavening in my dough. She wakes me up, she makes me smile, she brings a little bit of glamour into my humdrum life. For, while I’m one of the masses who spend their working lives behind a desk, Jennie is an actress, and a good one.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not envious. Well, maybe just a little bit, but most of all I’m glad for her. There never was much chance of Jennie being able to settle down to any run-of-the-mill job. She has always made her own rules and gone her own way; she has a low threshold of boredom and hates rote and routine. If it’s something that doesn’t interest her or that she doesn’t want to do, you might as well try to move a mountain; but if it’s something that lights her fire she’ll go at it with ferocious commitment. And I’ve only got to see her vibrant stage presence to know what it is that lights her fire, to know that Jennie was born for this. That’s why I love to go and see her act.

Tonight there was another pleasure to come, once I’d managed to get backstage after the show; and it wasn’t just Jennie’s obviously genuine gladness at seeing me again. After enthusing about the show, what an unexpected success it had been, and how delighted they all were at the way it had turned out, she invited me to the celebration party they were having at her place – for not only was this was the last night of the run, but they’d had an offer to take the show to the West End. ‘Come on!’ she said, seeing me hesitate. ‘It might be years before we see each other again!’ Which was true enough, and, anyway, it’s hard to say no to Jennie at the best of times.

But an hour or so into the festivities it didn’t seem such a good idea. For one thing, what with getting back to her place it was after midnight before the damn party even began. For another, despite my friendship with Jennie, I’m not in the habit of hanging out with theatrical people; and, not knowing anyone there except her, I felt a bit out of it from the start.

I’d hardly expected Jennie to give me her exclusive attention, but she seemed to be too busy to find any time for me at all, what with all her celebrations and congratulations. Heaven forbid that I should begrudge her that, in fact I was delighted to see her so joyous; but it did get a bit lonely just standing and watching. The presence of her resident boyfriend, a bloke quite a few years younger than me called Matt, didn’t do a lot to improve my mood either, no matter how much I told myself to grow up and be realistic and mature about it. It was as I watched her leaning against him, talking and laughing with a couple of her colleagues from the company, that I began to feel myself pulled towards the delights of the whisky bottle.

I think I was on the fourth one when I finally turned my back on all the socialising and wandered over to the window. Jennie has a flat high up in a big Victorian house near Crystal Palace, on one of the steepest parts of the hill. When challenged about choosing to live in such a funky neighbourhood, she says: ‘Tell me where else I could get a view like this for such a ridiculous rent?’  Now, seeing South London spread out before me, the distant street lights strung out like rope upon rope of glowing amber beads, I could see what she means.

What was a little harder to understand, in the irresistible bitterness of that moment, was why I should have wasted a larger fraction of my life than I care to think about squandering my emotions in this waste and barren place. Oh, I may have had my delusions when I first met her, but these days I’m more likely to see myself, as I did now, standing at the window with my whisky, as that traditional butt of scorn and derision, a sad old fool hopelessly besotted with a woman many years his junior – even though I’ve always known that Jennie, with the clear-eyed perception that comes to her as naturally as breathing, has never seen it like that.

As I sat down on the sill – it was a tall, double sash window set deeply into the wall, its sill forming a spacious window seat – I couldn’t help reflecting on what strange places this thing we call love leads us into sometimes. Is there anything, any factor at all in our lives that has a more potent effect on us? It can make us feel as if we could live forever, and it can make us wish we’d never been born.

Which is exactly what tonight’s show was about. A revue, a series of episodes, songs and skits, titled The Old Magic, it portrayed love and relationships from just about every angle, from the side-splittingly comic to the tear-jerkingly tragic. It had been performed with verve and gusto, and I’d enjoyed it immensely; but right now the memories, still fresh in my mind, of the joy and the grief, the euphoria and the despair that had come over the footlights were breaching all my defences. I don’t suppose all that whisky was helping, either.

I don’t know how long I sat there, the vista before me blurring to an orange glow in my eyes, the talking and music and laughter behind me fading to a formless hum in my ears, before I came out with my little pronouncement, the words that evoked the response from Jennie that has just startled me so.

I turn from the window to find myself looking straight into Jennie’s eyes, those wide blue-green eyes I can never meet, even after all these years, without something happening inside me, that feeling conventionally described as the heart melting. She’s looking down at me with a quizzical smile.

And behind her the room is dim and quiet and almost empty. The music has been switched off and there are only a couple of guests left. While I’ve been sitting, lost in my thoughts, the party has run its course. God only knows what the time is.

I stare at her, wondering just how to answer her, but for the moment I’m let off the hook as the surviving woman steps up to Jennie, embracing her and kissing her on both cheeks. ‘Su-u-uper party, da-a-arling,’ she says, making me wince, ‘but we really must fly. Thank you so much.’

‘Thank you for coming,’ Jennie replies. ‘It’s been fun. See you soon, Tash, Joey,’ she adds, as she sees them out to the hallway.

Picking up a glass of white wine on her way back across the room, Jennie plonks herself down on the other side of the window seat, leaning back against the wall and raising one knee to put her foot on the sill. That’s another thing that always gets me about her. She smokes so much I’m surprised her voice hasn’t worn down to a croak, she chews her nails ragged, her hands are never still, her fingers always tapping or fiddling with something. Yet whenever she sits down she always manages to look utterly relaxed, no matter where she is.

‘So where’s Matt?’ I ask. There are quite a few things I’d rather talk about – almost anything, in fact – but I’ll feel more comfortable knowing.

Jennie snorts. ‘Passed out on the bloody bed. Can’t hold his drink.’

So now it’s just the two of us. Not that I’m stupid enough to believe that anything will come of it. With some women there might be an excuse for getting optimistic about a nice cosy little tête-à-tête at the fag end of a party, with the boyfriend out of the way and she hacked off at him, but I learned many years ago that Jennie is a woman to whom normal rules don’t apply.

‘Now,’ she says, grinning across at me, ‘explain yourself, Thomas.’

‘Explain what?’ I stall.

‘Come on!  You can’t go making gnomic utterances like that and not expect to be challenged!’

It looks like I’m on the spot. ‘Well,’ I begin, ‘I was thinking about your show tonight…’

‘So where does the glue come into it?’ she asks, relentless.

I look out at the panorama below, the stilled city whose hush is broken only by the first desultory cheeps of the dawn chorus as the streetlights begin to pale in the first light of day. Awake in our eyrie high on the hill while the millions sleep below, Jennie and I are monarchs of all we survey. Still drunk, somewhere beyond the other side of tiredness, I find myself floating in a fragile, almost hallucinatory trance of peace in which nothing seems to matter quite as much as usual. What the hell: I might as well say what’s on my mind and have done with it.

‘This love thing. Glue, that’s all it is. Isn’t it?’

‘Love,’ she says, ‘is glue?  How do you work that out?’

‘Look, what’s the thing about the way we reproduce that sets us apart from all the other animals?  It’s the extraordinarily long time our children take to grow up, that they’re dependent on their parents, right?  So the pair bond between the parents needs to be strong. Follow me so far?’

‘Ye-es.’

Glancing at Jennie, I can see in her face that I’ve got her intrigued.

‘But we, being the thinking animals we are, can override instinct, so something really powerful’s needed to make that bond hold. So what does old Mother Nature come up with?  The stars in your eyes, the moon in June, the zing in your heartstrings, this bloody love stuff that gets us all dancing to its tune, that turns us all upside down and inside out. My God, we’ve all seen what it can do, but when it comes down to it, that’s all it is: the glue to make the pair bond stick.’

I hear Jennie’s throaty chuckle. ‘Are you pissed, Thomas?’ she says.

‘Indeed I am,’ I reply, ‘but then, drunk people usually tell the truth, don’t they?’

Jennie takes a sip of wine, lights a cigarette, exhales with a long hiss. There follows a long silence, in which I can hear, clear in the dawn stillness, the soft rustle of the tobacco burning as she draws on her cigarette. ‘You know,’ she says at last, her voice low, ‘I think that may be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard you say.’

‘Doesn’t stop it being true.’

‘You’ve got me worried, Thomas. You’re getting bitter in your old age.’

For a moment I can only stare at her in astonishment. I can’t remember the last time she said anything so personal to me. I’m not at all sure that she ever has. And now, all at once, she is close to the edge, too close for comfort.

The thing is, Jennie and I understand each other. She knows how I feel about her and that I know she knows; and she knows, too, that I long ago learnt to live with the hard truth, that the friendship between us will never be more than that. We have, she and I, a tacit agreement on this: we never mention the subject. We can, and do, on our rare meetings, talk about almost anything under the sun, but never that.

‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about me,’ I say dismissively, trying to steer us back to safer ground. ‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you?  You’re still living alone, aren’t you?’ Taking my silence for assent, she asks: ‘Wouldn’t you be better off finding a nice girl and settling down?’

I can clearly hear the satirical quote marks around that last phrase; but then, it is an actress talking.

Accordingly, it seems appropriate to answer with a brief snort of laughter. ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’

‘No, really.’

Surely she can’t be serious?

‘People do live alone, you know,’ I say, my exasperation at her apparent obtuseness putting a sharpness into my voice. ‘It doesn’t kill them. Some people are perfectly content to live out their lives without being stuck with that glue.’

But Jennie is not to be put off. ‘You’re not one of them, though, are you, Thomas?’

In the pearly dawn light the magic I’ve always been helpless to resist, the brightness that sets her apart from more ordinary people, glows soft and clear in her face. Forty-something, lines and all, she is bewitchingly lovely, and I can see the emotions written on those mobile actor’s features: compassion, concern.

Seeing this, I can dissemble no longer. I know we are down, at last, after all these years, to bedrock, that this dawn (in the manner of dawns) is a time for truths. And she is, almost literally, asking for it. Very well, then.

‘You know, I never was very ambitious,’ I begin. ‘There was only one thing I ever really wanted from life. Not success, not fame, not riches. No, it was love I wanted, true love, the meeting of soul-mates.’  I give a mirthless little laugh. ‘Call me a dreamer, a romantic, if you like, but I happen to believe it does happen. Just not to me.’

Even to myself I’m beginning to sound a bit maudlin, but there is not a trace of derision or irritation in Jennie’s voice when she replies.

‘It’s not too late, you know, Thomas,’ she says.

I sigh. ‘Look, if loving is a game most people seem to be able to play instinctively, then someone seems to have forgotten to tell me the rules. Or if there’s a code, then I’m missing the key. And there’s only so much disappointment one man can take. That’s why I have to come on with the cynicism, you see: it’s just too bloody depressing otherwise.’

‘It’s never too late,’ she insists, with quiet vehemence. ‘You mustn’t give up.’

Hah!  It’s easy enough for her to say that. ‘Everybody loves Jennie,’ somebody once said to me, back in the early days when I first knew her, and there’s more than a grain of truth in that. If she were to dump that Matt of hers tomorrow, she’d be able to pick and choose a replacement within days. She can have no idea of what it’s like to stand at the back of the queue, to be passed over when the sides are being picked, to watch the game from the outside.

In this sudden unaccustomed bitterness towards her, I know that that tacit agreement between us is about to be broken. And if that breach undermines the foundations of our friendship: well, that’s just too bad. Maybe, after all, it’s better to pull the tooth than to carry on putting up with the ache that’s been nagging me all these years.

‘Jennie,’ I say, ‘you know perfectly well why it’s too late for me, why I can’t find a nice girl and settle down, as you put it. Don’t you?’

I’ve been gazing out of the window at the slowly broadening daylight as I speak. As the silence that follows my words draws out, I glance round at her, and feel my stomach turn over with consternation.

Her cheeks, I see, are, glittering, reflecting the soft light from the window. As she takes out another cigarette and lights up, I hear a catch, a raggedness in her breath as she inhales. I’ve seen Jennie in many moods, but I’ve never seen this. I’ve never seen her cry before.

I didn’t want this. That brightness, that light she carries about with her, is a rare and precious thing, far more precious than any feelings of mine. To put it out, or even to dim it, is the very last thing I want.

‘Thomas,’ she says, her voice low and husky, ‘I do like you, you know, really, but… I don’t… I can’t…. I’m sorry.’

‘I know, Jennie, I know.’

If there’s one thing my ill-starred and ineffectual dealings with women have taught me, it’s that love, the real thing, the true flame, comes only when and where it wants to. The soppy conventions of romantic fiction and the pop song notwithstanding, you cannot force it: you cannot make someone love you. If it doesn’t come of its own accord, it will never come at all.

And compassion, which is what I’m on the receiving end of here, is not the true flame. Heaven help you if you confuse the two.

And heaven help me if I ever bring Jennie down like this again. I look across at her tear-stained face, recalling with dismay the high spirits of a couple of hours ago, the elation that was such a joy to behold. And a dawn begins to break in my head to accompany the dawn outside, a grey and sombre daybreak, an enlightenment that settles like a lead weight in my stomach.

There is no place for me in Jennie’s life. The last thing she needs is a staid old plodder like me to drag her down, to burden her free spirit. It is, after all, only right and fitting that we should never be more than friends.

Along with the inevitable sadness this insight brings, there comes a paradoxical lightening, a sense of release, as I let go of the dream that has been tormenting me for so long.

‘I’m the one who ought to be sorry,’ I say. ‘Spoiling your celebrations like this.’

‘Huh!’ she snorts, ‘one piddling little night. What’s that compared to a whole fucking life?’

‘Jennie, it’s not your fault, okay?’ I say with gentle emphasis. ‘You didn’t make me feel the way I do, except simply by being the person you are; and you can hardly help that. When a moth flies into a lamp and kills itself, you don’t blame the lamp, do you?’

‘But it’s so sad…’

‘Oh, it’s not so bad. I can take it. At my age it doesn’t even seem to matter quite so much any more. And I’ve had plenty of practice.’

I rise to my feet. There’s been something I’ve been wanting to say to her for years, but I’ve never quite got up enough nerve to do it. Now, at last, is the time.

‘Jennie, listen: you are a very special person, the sort of person who brightens the lives of everybody around them. A light in the darkness.’

‘Oh, bullshit!’ she protests, but I can hear a slight catch in her voice, a tremor that tells me laughter isn’t far away. I wasn’t actually trying to be funny, but whatever it takes….

‘No, I mean it. So do me a favour, will you?  You’ve got a good life, a fulfilling life, doing what you really want to do. You just get on with enjoying it. Don’t waste your time worrying about me.’

I bend to place my lips in a soft kiss on the silky hair on the top of her head. As I straighten up and begin to turn away Jennie speaks, and her words stop me in my tracks.

‘You, too, Thomas,’ she’s saying. ‘You are also a very special person.’

‘Oh, am I?  Not just a sad old fart, then?’ 

‘No-o-o!’ she says, and now her voice is clearly husking and wobbling with laughter. ‘You’ve just proved it.’

I look down to see her smiling up at me, the tear tracks still on her cheeks. I have at that moment no idea whether I’ll ever see her again, but I do know that the memory of that smile will never leave me.

I draw in a deep breath. ‘Well, ’bye, Jennie. Thanks for the party. See you some time, maybe.’

I begin to walk towards the door. The early morning buses should be running by now.