There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [67]
The first year the knock had come at the door May hadn’t let him in. The next year he did it again, same boy. That time May did let him in. She gave him a cup of tea. He always brought something. Chocolates, flowers, bulbs for the ground. Once he brought a little china figurine of a chaffinch. He’d noticed, maybe, how she liked them of birds, from the ones already in the cabinet. After he’d gone May had put it on the ledge at the back of the Hoover cupboard where she wouldn’t have to look at it. Loyal as January. When he first came he had long hair, and a look about him of that boy who’d been in the film about Oliver, the artful one, not the little prissy one. They sat opposite each other, May and the boy, every year. He grew up, like her girl would have, before her eyes. One year he missed the day, but he sent a card from Canada written on in neat handwriting. Sorry I can’t be there, kind of thing. It was the kind of postcard a man would choose, not pretty at all. On the front it said Toronto, above a colour photo of people walking in sleet, a snowy street of shops. Shops were the same the world over. But he’d paid for it so it would arrive at the house on the exact right date. It was nice of him.
One year, when it was nearly the day, she told herself she’d speak.
But when he came, she couldn’t say anything.
All she could say was, Are you all right, then, son?
Fine thanks, Mrs. Young, how are you?
What else could he say? What else could they say?
I don’t know how else, I don’t see how else I could have been about it.
There had been nothing to do but put an extra biscuit on the side of his saucer, and tell him they were the luxury biscuits, and make sure he ate it, which he did.
She said all these things not out loud but in the confines of her own head.
For when May thought of her youngest child she saw her pure, fixed in time at the age of ten, no older, and enthralled thin-armed thin-legged on the rug in front of a brand new television watching her favourite programme in colour for the first time. Her favourite programme was full of clean untouched kids, shiny from being born well after the war, and they all lived in a scrapyard full of old British junk and sang see you next week around the pole of an old London bus, and for the first time, a miracle, Jennifer saw the bus was bright red. For the first time the kids in her favourite programme ran about in unbelievable colour. They chased a little dog across a graveyard, they were trying to catch it for a lady in a sports car, and their colours were even more colourful against the graves and so on. The whole room smelled of new TV. Jennifer kept getting up and putting her nose to the place where the sound came out. I’m just smelling what colour smells like.
It was a blessing, thank God and all the angels, that Jennifer got to see colour before she went. Her brother and sister worked as a team for weeks, going through the new Radio Times every Thursday lunchtime at the dinner table and reading out the name of every single programme that had the sloped word Colour printed next to it; for weeks they did this, until May could stand it no longer and made Philip buy the new one, though the black and white one was still fine, went on working for years. But if Princess Anne was going to all the bother of getting married, the least they could do was make sure their children got to see history happen in colour.
All three of her children ran about in May’s head in colour turned up too-high, on a throbbing green lawn bordered with throbbing yellow roses. They ran between the front garden and the back, appearing and disappearing from view like it was they themselves, running about like that, that gave grass and roses colour in the first place. It was a time when the smell of your clean child in your arms was a sort of dream smell, like when lime trees threw their scent ahead of themselves so you walked through it and by the time you reached the tree itself there was no smell left at all.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, though, remember the smell in Patrick’s house when he moved