Probably not even that, it’s probably just an ill-informed costume choice. Or an attempt to look like Manhattan — those long, uptown awnings with cheery doormen underneath them, white gloves and peaked caps.
For whatever reason, there they are, set out like breathing bollards. And a whole tribe of human beings who cannot alight from any vehicle without offering up their packages, making the faces of tired children, expecting that every dreadful burden will be removed, looking out of their windows and over their shoulders and seeing wilderness.
‘Jon? Are you not well?’
Jon had been aware that the one thing he shouldn’t be here was a bringer of more trouble and that he mustn’t be in any way unwell. That kind of vocabulary should not be allowed.
‘I’m fine. I’m … I’m clearing my thinking … It’s …’
‘Take your time.’
And — ridiculously — he’d ended up holding Rowan’s hand. He’d reached out and held the man’s hand and tried not to find himself pathetic, tried and — being truthful — he’d resisted crying, not because he was brave in any way, or still functional, but because Rowan was the only one there who’d had a true cause for crying.
‘Take your time.’
‘I really am fine, it’s, ah …’
One’s previous aloneness only absolutely clear when one is holding someone else’s hand and realising that all day, all day, all day, one has been holding the lack of someone’s hand, the awful fact and dreadful burden of exactly that.
‘I will, Rowan, take my time … I’ve been stupid, is the thing. I have been …’
I don’t care about the doormen, sod the doormen, why think of doormen … And I can appreciate the wider benefits in the personal accumulation of significant wealth.
Keeps the doormen in business, jewellers, shoemakers … tailors …
It’s not that I don’t possess more than the majority of people do. The statistics on that are clear.
I have a tailor …
‘Rowan, it’s … I see them walking about, these men whose minds have torn away from who they were, away from the world, from facts … The way they think of themselves, the things they expect to see — they move inside that — what they must have been at some point, what must have … Men with consciences flapping out behind them like bloody flags.’
‘You’re not one of those men.’
‘I try to think and I can’t … If I’d … It would be like … When you have care of a child — and we’re all supposed, I think this is true, to have care of children — and you don’t … When you reach in and … You can’t hurt them. You can’t be permitted to hurt them. You can’t steal what they’re going to be because you have appetites and they warm you and you like them, you can’t … There are so many things that you can’t, but they happen anyway.’
‘You’re not one of those men.’
I’m not a man, I’m an old boy.
I went to a quietly acceptable school. I attempted to play rugby — run like a bastard or else they’ll catch you — bolting on the terraced playing fields, way up on high, de facto orphans trying to operate sportingly under the gaze of Machu Picchu, or so it seemed. Only we were in Cumbria. Not an especially notable institution, but we had the requisite crests and colours, debates and a cadet corps, traditions and the long, long run and rolls of honour in careful gold leaf under which to eat our meals, a vastly arched war memorial to celebrate our particular and generously given dead and to cover the sneaking of outdoor cigarettes during the rainstorms.
I never have wanted to smoke since I’ve been allowed to.
And working hard in lieu of loving and being loved and making it all the way to a decent college — more colours: this strange adoration of clashing candy colours amongst the authoritative classes, this need for babyish discordance — and then knowing that cosy, tidy, end-of-the-day relief when the gates were closed for evening beyond the lawns and honey stone, the nation’s significant thoughts tucked up behind oak, with No Admittance signs to check the tourists. Toast at the gas fire. Cloistered.
I should have been a monk. Easier all round.
I was taught to be avid for information, accurate. It was implied this would be a gift and of assistance. I was encouraged to be fastidious.
I did have a vocation.
I was—
‘Jon?’
Rowan, don’t make me think of your hand, of holding a hand, and that without it the undertow that’s everywhere will sweep on in and get me.
‘Rowan … The letters they caught me writing … The love, sort of love, letter thing …’
I am an old boy. That’s what they made of me. I am not a man, I am an old boy. Boys can only cope with so much and then no more.
‘It was a preposterous thing to do …’
But I would come here and see you holding happiness and having it stay with you and I would smile as a grown man should.
‘It meant I felt less … I didn’t seem to be so completely … When I wrote to them, the women, I was …’
And on paper I was a man who could be of assistance, who eventually had the words for each occasion.
I know that you ought to be loved every day … You should know how beautiful you are … People notice but you may not understand what sweetness others find in you and please believe I find you sweet, as sweet as anything … I was so sorry to hear your news and, if I were there, you would be in my arms and at peace, I promise … Kissing you was all that I thought of today — the only thought of significance … In your heart there is so much that’s kind and kindness isn’t often referred to, only it should be all the time and there’s a miracle’s worth of kindness in you … You make sure that others are comfortable and that rooms are centred and it passes them by, but without you they’d be lost. When I open the envelope around your letter, you’re there … My touch on the paper where yours will be soon, as if we are holding hands …
If you would let me I would be more than proud to hold you, it would be an honour. I don’t wish to sound foolish and don’t feel I am being foolish when I say that it would be my life.
Sentiment and support. Not sex. None of the vileness of sex. Hardly any mentions of sex, nothing overt: just these mentions of holding and kissing and skin and looking. If anyone asked for graphic scenarios, conjunctions, then I’d be gone. I wasn’t angry, only gone. I was giving tenderness, adult tenderness.
I did get irritated once by this one woman — an intelligent woman, but she was always demanding smut, and so I tried … And it got such an immediate response, the dirt. I was encouraged to be abusive — slapping and urination, ugliness you’d pray your daughter would never want. I discontinued our correspondence, refunded the fee.
My aim was the generation and perpetuation of gentleness.
I wanted to write about holding hands.
While intending to never, ever do any such thing.
‘It obviously …’
And Jon slowly, it seemed inevitably, had slid from his seat in Rowan’s garden, Filya’s garden, and had kneeled on the terracotta paving, pressed his forehead against the tiles around the pool — their placid surface, the idea of the blue and white and crimson soaking through into his mind and improving its pitiable condition.