by Sue Watson
‘I can’t believe you were ever so young, or so trendy.’ Anna’s now rummaging around in the tin, producing random photos from down the years, and I tell myself I must make some albums, the photos are all mixed up.
She sighs, lifting up a photo of me taken at art college – I was seventeen and wearing a black polo neck and tight jeans.
‘Look at you, all Kate Moss with your long hair and skinny legs,’ she laughs.
‘I thought I was more Marianne Faithfull. Kate Moss hadn’t even been born then, that’s how old I am.’
‘I can’t imagine you being so young . . . you look just like Emma.’
‘I can’t believe I was that young either! And yes, I can see Emma – I never realised how pretty I was. I wish I had, I’d have made so much more of myself,’ I say, studying the serious girl with the straight blonde hair and the skinny legs. ‘I thought I was so cool, very existentialist in my black polo neck . . . I never really understood what “existential” meant, and I still don’t. I remember a boy I knew trying to explain it to me: “I exist therefore I am,” he said, and I just nodded. Between you and me I also wore polo necks so your nan wouldn’t see my “disgusting” love bites.’
‘Love bites! You were quite a goer then?’ Anna laughs and waves another photo at me. ‘Was this one your boyfriend before Dad? You’ve told me about him. He broke your heart, didn’t he? Did he give you the love bites?’
‘Yes,’ I laugh, ‘he was a dangerous boy.’ I gaze at his picture, thinking of his blue eyes, dark, wavy hair, and Salford carnival on a muggy day in August. It was in 1968 . . . a year etched deep in my memory.
‘He was very good-looking.’ Anna nods, apparently impressed, admiring it as she puts the picture back in the tin.
As the photo mixes back in with all the other memories there, I glimpse the smile that once made my heart beat faster. I see those blue, blue eyes that twinkled and it feels like yesterday – I also feel the ocean of pain that came after. I want to tell Anna all about the boy, but she isn’t up for an evening of ‘all our yesterdays’, and she’s now closing the shortbread tin on my past. I take my cue, and keen to push it to the back of the cupboard and the back of my mind, I offer to put the kettle on.
‘Come on then,’ I say, closing the cupboard door on the past and brandishing the rediscovered notebook. ‘I’ll make the coffee and we’ll sit in the other room and talk about this wedding. Did you say the bridesmaids are wearing blush pink?’
After Anna leaves I go to bed and try to relax, but I feel like I’m caught between the past and the present, both pulling me in different directions, vying for my attention. Unable to sleep I go downstairs in the dark. It’s so quiet, except for Lily’s paws clicking behind me on the wooden floor. I’m still not used to being alone in the house in the middle of the night so I put all the lights on downstairs. ‘I know, Lily, I’m daft, aren’t I?’ I say, half-smiling at my own silliness. My head is filled with blush-pink gerberas and black and white memories and I soon find myself opening the cupboard, taking out the tin again and sitting at the kitchen table nursing a mug of hot tea.
I look at the unopened tin. Is this my personal Pandora’s box? Dare I open it and release the butterflies from my past? Can I bear to see the vivid colours flooding back to life after all these years? Recalling splashes of love and pain like paint on canvas, I run my fingers along the embossed edges and wonder if I dare open it again. My impetuous side (the one that took me down slides with my grandchildren, raced them to the ice cream van and joined in all their party games) wants to lift the lid, but the seventeen-year-old scared Rosie wants to keep the tin firmly closed on the past.
Finally, by the second cup of tea, the ice-cream-van-racing granny has won and I open it – and even after all these years I’m afraid of what’s waiting for me. I pluck a few photos out from the middle: a sad bride, no white lace and promises, just a cream suit and blind hope; my mother’s tight lips and a finger buffet at the local working men’s club – not the stuff little girls’ dreams are made of. The groom was young and handsome though, and he was so in love – how I envied him, how I wished I could match his love. Back then it didn’t matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t feel it, and wished someone else was waiting for me on the registry office steps. I hate myself still for those feelings. Mike knew I didn’t love him, but he married me anyway and over the years our love grew, but it was a slow burn, nothing like the fireworks of passion I’d felt with Peter.
I find the postcard Peter sent me from Italy and my heart dips a little.
Having a great time, the pasta is amazing, the galleries are wonderful.
See you soon, all my love,
Peter xxxx
I smile to myself – how could he write about pasta when my heart was breaking? Reading his teenage words my eyes fill with tears and my mind screams ‘What if?’ After a while I pick up the old black and white photos of us at college – there are only a few, it wasn’t like the selfie age we’re living through today – and in those few snaps I’m transported back to my youth and a world filled with possibilities. And I return, as I have so many times, to the summer of 1968; students were rioting in Paris, the Vietnam War was raging and I, Rosie Draper, was in love for the very first time.
*
I remember it like it was yesterday, that crisp, September morning when I arrived for the first time at Salford College of Art. The sun was low in the sky as I walked briskly along the pavement, the air veiled with autumn mist and expectation. I was sixteen years old, so young, so vulnerable and so easily impressed entering the art room and seeing the riches before me. Easels everywhere, enough paintbrushes for everyone, soft B pencils and pots of paint in every colour from ochre to aquamarine. I was in heaven as I gazed around me – art all over the walls, stacks of thick white paper and . . . Oh God, a naked woman standing in the middle of the room.
I was alarmed – we didn’t do that sort of thing where I came from and I barely knew where to look. Averting my eyes from the nonchalant unclothed form in front of me, I realised this was our life model and not only would I have to look at her pert breasts, I was expected to study them in detail, along with the dark intimate shading of her upper thighs. I’d read about such things in my mother’s Reader’s Digest but didn’t think real people actually posed like this for a living. Everyone else seemed to be taking this in their stride, gliding to their seats chatting and laughing like there wasn’t a completely naked woman now lying across a chaise longue right in front of us.
Then, amid all this madness, I saw him.
Even now I remember him in Technicolor. He was sitting back in his seat, one foot up on the chair in front, surveying the rest of the room, like he owned the bloody world. It was clear from that first glance that here was someone who was sure of himself, of his place in the world, and this was heady stuff to a gauche, scared young girl taking her first steps. I was a working-class teenager, thrashing around, not knowing where I fitted in, desperate to make something of my talent but unable to visualise a future for myself in a middle-class world of art and easels. But here was someone who knew what he was doing, where he was going, and to me that was special, different. Everyone else was new and nervous but he had this laid-back air and a lazy, sexy smile that began in those blue eyes, slowly sending a spark to his lips, and lighting his face up. I remember watching his laughing eyes gaze idly around the room looking for mischief and excitement and I was immediately taken. I settled at my easel looking discreetly under my fringe at the gorgeous boy while averting my eyes from the bare woman Mum would no doubt consider ‘a hussy’. I could almost hear her voice: ‘It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah,’ she’d say. ‘Get your coat, you’re leaving.’
My mother had shaken her head in despair when I’d told her I was going to art college. ‘I don’t know why you don’t get a nice job as a shorthand typist – you’ve got your head in the clouds. An artist? It’s not for the likes of us.’
I was the first in my family to do somethi
ng different, to want something more. My two brothers, both older than me, worked in jobs my mother and father approved of – David was a car mechanic and Mark had gone into what Dad laughingly referred to as ‘the family business’, at the local factory. But I was considered a rebel because typing or a job making tea at the local bus depot hadn’t appealed to me. No, sixteen-year-old Rosie had big dreams, she wasn’t going to end up in a little terraced house in Salford like the rest of them, she was going to see the world, paint the world and then go round all over again.
Chapter Two
After my solitary reminiscing over photographs from the past I was ready to get back to real life again, and a week later I turned up at the shop. It was slightly daunting after a year away, but I needn’t have worried; old customers seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and there were a few tears, but so much laughter.
‘It’s so good to have you back, Mum,’ Anna said, bringing me a mug of tea while I grappled with an anniversary bouquet of red roses, secretly jealous of the recipients reaching fifty years of marriage without dying.
But being back here and busy is the best thing for me. I’m amazed at how quickly I’ve slipped back into my old life. It’s good to be in the shop doing what I love, my daughter at my side, chatting again to customers I’ve known for over thirty years. I love the bustle and the way, as a florist, I’ve played a small part in people’s lives over those years. From births to funerals there are always flowers. Yes, it’s good to be back, yet I can’t help but wonder, now I’m alone, is this it? Is the rest of my life going to be devoted to making floral tributes celebrating other people’s weddings and watersheds? Do I have any watersheds to look forward to apart from a seventieth, an eightieth and if I’m lucky a ninetieth birthday? What’s left for me now? It’s a fleeting feeling, an intangible yearning for something, yet I don’t know what it is. Of course I miss Mike and that may have something to do with these sudden dips, these overwhelming feelings of ‘Where am I going?’ But there’s something else: I need to know what will be the next page in my story . . . are there any pages left?
‘Mum, you’re doing great. I can’t believe how much you got through, we’ll be able to leave early tonight at this rate.’ Anna smiles at me as we wrestle with the last of the flowers for a big funeral tomorrow.
‘Great, but I see from a note in the book that Mrs Parker’s coming in at four – do you mind dealing with her?’ I ask. ‘I don’t know I’m quite ready for the Wedding of the Year. The Bridezillas are bad enough, but the mothers and grandmothers can be positively venomous.’
I still have my moments of fragility, but being back at work has helped to dilute my loss and I’m starting to smile again. I think about the past a lot these days and remembering him helps, but I’m also readjusting to the idea of a tomorrow without Mike. It isn’t a future I’d envisaged, and I don’t know what it holds any more. There are no certainties now, no anchor to secure me. Sometimes I wake in the night, alone, petrified afresh at the prospect of never seeing my husband again. We’d been together for over forty years, knew everything there was to know, shared every wonderful and every awful moment of our lives – this wasn’t meant to happen. Where do I go from here? I can’t share my fear with Anna or Isobel, it would upset them and they’d worry about me. I’m supposed to be the one supporting my children, not the other way round. And they are grieving too – losing Mike was the hardest thing any of us have had to deal with, and though the girls are adults with their own lives there were times when they cried like little girls. For my grown-up children to sob in my arms was probably the most painful part of Mike’s dying. And like a layer cake of grief, my own loss was laid on top of it all, over and over again, until sometimes I really couldn’t see the light.
I’m the first of my friends to be widowed, which makes life even more difficult because I am now the ‘odd’ woman. Before Mike was ill we’d often spend an evening with the small group of friends we’d known for years. We’d met when the kids were young and spent many summer barbecues and family bonfires together, then the kids all left to live their own lives and we were all about being grown-ups again. We’d returned to our ‘couples’ status, the evenings went on later and louder and more alcohol was drunk. Our social lives morphed into something slightly different, as did our friendships; secrets were shared, sex discussed without sign language and we now laughed with each other about getting old. There’s something comforting in having friends the same age, your aches and pains, worries and disappointments similar, if not the same. Most of all you learn to laugh together about the difficulties in life and I valued those friendships.
Looking from the outside I can see we were all quite smug in our M&S dinner party lives. Untouched by any major tragedy, we were always moving forward, another child’s wedding, a birthday, a wedding anniversary. Our families kept safe, with nothing to disturb our cosy, suburban social lives.
They didn’t totally abandon me after Mike’s death, but I felt the fraying of those friendships early on. They sent cards, made the odd call, and tried in their way to bring me back into the fold; I was invited to Stella and Dave’s dinner party just a few months back, but everyone sat round the table with long faces, talking in serious voices. I know it was because they wanted to respect my loss but I felt like the spectre at the feast. I should have said something, but the way they behaved around me made me feel self-conscious and brought it home to me how together Mike and I had been, and I didn’t feel strong enough to say anything without bursting into tears. I realised that evening, as Stella served up the fruit salad and Dave poured the wine and made corny jokes, that this wasn’t what I needed any more. We’ve all moved on, this was my life with Mike and now I can’t do that, and to them I am a reminder of loss and what’s still to come. It will never be the same for them – or for me.
Despite many aspects of my life with Mike now closed off to me, I still have my flowers. Almost instantly, I fall in love again with the exotic blooms, stunning colours and delicate shades of my craft. I wander through the flower market in the cold darkness before dawn, breathing in the full, rounded scent of roses and the almost sickly sweetness of lilies. The fragrance of flowers brings with it memories of happier times and reminds me that buds are still growing, life is continuing, moving forward. I choose my blooms, running my fingers along the satin of petals, the waxy whiteness of camellias, imagining the celebration they are destined for.
It’s a month before the big Parker wedding and I discover a cloud of pastel hydrangeas at the market. There was a time when I couldn’t bear to look at hydrangeas, but now I hold a bunch in my arms, gazing into the tiny, heartbreakingly pretty faces. Each bud jostles for attention, no two the same with their own unique hue, from deepest blue to lavender pink to pistachio – I suddenly want to paint them. I haven’t picked up a pencil or paintbrush for years, since the girls were little and we’d sometimes draw together, when I’d remember how good I was. With the girls we’d draw houses, dogs and stick people, but now I want to get back to ‘real’ sketching and capture the subtlety of changing shades, the delicacy of tiny starry petals. And thinking about sketching takes me right back there again.
I loved being immersed daily in the business of drawing and painting at art college; I also enjoyed gazing at the gorgeous boy with the blue eyes. He didn’t even know I existed, yet he filled my tummy with apple blossom. I didn’t have anyone to share my ideas with and I longed to talk to someone like him, tell him my dreams of living in Paris, wandering through Monet’s gardens at Giverny, sketching the places and people in ‘the City of Light’. I knew he would understand because he was an artist too – and he seemed so open, so easy, and when I learned that he was called Pierre I wondered if he might actually be French. If so, I felt this might be a sign that we were meant to be friends. I hadn’t yet been close enough to hear him speak, but I had enough imagination to conjure up his delicious French accent.
Recently the past has come to find me, whispering long-forgotten name
s and places and bringing with it vague sketches of what happened, of who I used to be – and I wonder where he is now. I imagine he’s a great photographer, or a bohemian artist, living the life we once dreamed of together. I’ve been tempted to dabble, to find out where he is, who he became, and recently I went as far as to put his name into Google, but something stopped me pressing search. I can’t explain it but to go there felt wrong, like opening up the Ouija board and disturbing something that’s died and shouldn’t be brought back. For all my yearning and wondering, the past wasn’t always a pretty place to be and I’m not sure I want to return there. Along with the fun and freedom that comes with the package of youth there are always dark times, so why open up old wounds?
I loved my husband and I have a wonderful family, so there’s no need to go meddling around in my past. And yet it seems the older we get the more we are drawn back to snippets of memory. Like magazine cuttings on a cork board they are pinned inside my brain and I find myself taking them down and looking at them.
I remember a girl with long dark hair and thick eyeliner. Her name was Avril. She wore red lipstick, and looked like a model. I once watched her slowly take a Gitane cigarette from Pierre’s lips and put it to her crimson mouth. Their eyes locked as she sucked in the smoke, never taking her eyes from his. And I had never been so jealous in my life.
I remember a mousy-haired girl called Anita. A fellow art student and the most colourless person I’d ever met. She talked of her boyfriend Brian the car mechanic pressuring her to ‘do it’, in his van. She would list Brian’s scandalous demands over a lunchtime sandwich whilst I nodded in all the right places.
‘Pierre and Avril are practically “doing it” over there at the table,’ she once remarked, outraged over her mother’s egg and cress. ‘It’s like something from one of those pornos!’