Eighty Days White

by Vina Jackson

  We normally traded in violins, but most of our demand was for electric guitars and bass guitars, so none of our stock was actually on display in the window, but was kept behind the till in a glass-fronted cabinet.

  The man seemed anxious, as if he had come to the wrong place, but he gifted me with a broad, warm smile when I pointed out the tall unit standing behind me and confirmed we also hired instruments in addition to selling them.

  My first instinct with men is to look at their fingers and I can usually recognise a musician from miles away. He wasn’t one, but his fingers were the right length and thin enough. It made me wonder what he did for a living, but it was a bit too early to ask as I unlocked the cabinet with one of the keys from the heavy bunch we kept chained to the cash register.

  He advised me the violin he was seeking to hire was not for personal use, which confirmed the fact that he didn’t actually play, and politely enquired whether I happened to play myself. The friend on whose behalf he was there worked in the classical field. I mentioned in passing that I was more of a rock’n’roll sort of gal, which raised a faint smile.

  When I handed over one of the instruments we had available, he picked it up carefully, almost weighing it, calmly watching with fascination how the shop’s strip lighting reflected against the orange burnish of its wood, then passed his fingers sensually across its body as if it were a woman.

  I shivered before I could stop myself. No man had ever caressed me the way he was caressing that violin, and I suddenly felt both terribly aroused and jealous at the same time. He briefly looked up from his examination and our eyes met. It felt as if he had X-ray vision and could see right through my clothes. He looked pensive for a brief moment, as if he was speculating about the appearance of my concealed nudity. I blushed and looked away.

  The fleeting connection we had shared broke and he turned back to the violin, telling me he wished to arrange the rental we had discussed earlier, and I then had to busy myself with the paperwork and the necessary calculations.

  He filled out the forms and settled the deposit and the rental fees by credit card. His name was Dominik.

  I watched him stride out of the shop onto a windy Denmark Street and soon he was lost in the ebb and flow of the crowds.

  That night, back in my small room at the shared flat, I lay alone in bed, feeling cold but too lazy to get up and switch on the heater. I wondered endlessly about the woman Dominik had been getting the violin for, with my imagination veering off in all sorts of directions. I couldn’t understand my agitation. Why had such an insignificant encounter triggered such curious reactions in me?

  It was a night full of uncommon dreams. But no nightmares.

  David, who worked for a big firm of accountants a few streets away from the Denmark Street shop, rang me the next morning, suggesting we go on a date. I swiftly turned him down. It was as if this brief encounter with a total stranger had opened a window in my mind to new possibilities, to life being different. It made no sense, I knew as I argued with myself, but that was just the way I felt. And I didn’t have a clue as to what the next step should be.

  It happened with the next violin to cross my path.

  I had spent several weeks since my encounter with the enigmatic Dominik immersing myself in music again. I’d made a visit to my parents’ house to touch base, as I did occasionally for the sake of propriety, and taken advantage of the trip to pick up my old guitar and a couple of boxes of LPs and CDs I had left in my bedroom there, records I had spent much of my teenage years singing and dancing to in splendid isolation, and which had felt alien once I had left for Brighton and uni.

  It was like getting back on a bike again and my guitar-playing chops returned, rusty but not too unmelodic, even if I could only strum a few dozen tunes properly. But the music of Alice Cooper, Kiss, Free, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and all my old favourites was truly joyful all over again as I reacquainted myself with their loud sounds, albeit on headphones in deference to my flatmates.

  I would rush home from work whenever I wasn’t part-timing at the fetish club and spent whole evenings in my room listening to the forgotten music of my youth. Initially I had never been keen on punk but now, listening to much of it with a new perspective, I discovered a new appeal in the songs of the Clash and the Jam and others which I had seldom seen before.

  I was communing with music again and it was a blissful feeling. Like finding something that had been lost for ages.

  Dominik returned the rental violin on one of my days off a fortnight later so I never saw him again. Maybe it was for the best.

  It was late on a grey Saturday afternoon and Jonno, one of the other assistants at the store, and I were eager to close. It had been a miserable sort of day, drizzly, with customers few and far between and mostly indecisive or rude.

  A man came through the door and the two of us heaved a sigh of exasperation – we probably wouldn’t be able to close down for another quarter of an hour or more until we had dealt with him. Jonno ignored the new customer and walked down the stairs to the basement, leaving me to deal with the man.

  He was in his mid or possibly late forties, dark-haired and melancholy, wearing a brown corduroy jacket and clean, tapered jeans, a combination that somehow seemed just right for him. Under one arm he was holding a battered black violin case.

  I had always been unimpressed by the blank canvas of younger men’s faces. Older men were different: the life they had led could sometimes be deciphered in their features. As if the experiences and the emotions they had confronted had formed them, given them an added layer of attraction. Not all of them, of course. I had, for example, never been attracted to most of my school teachers or even the dashing lecturers at university. But this man was different. His face was like a book that I wished to read, a fascinating combination of sorrow and animal magnetism that took me by surprise and hit me in the gut.

  He looked at me enquiringly and I could see how his gaze settled on my small tattoo. But it wasn’t a look of disapproval, which I often got from older people, but one of gentle amusement and fascination.

  ‘I was told your shop sometimes acquired second-hand instruments. Another store a few doors away said you might.’ He raised the violin case he was holding onto the glass counter behind which I stood.

  ‘We do,’ I replied. ‘But only the managers are in a position to appraise them, and neither of them is in today. You would have to come back, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  And just stood there.

  Surely he could wait until Monday. He didn’t look like a person in need of urgent cash.

  ‘I can look at it if you want. Give you my personal opinion. Maybe even a rough valuation, though I can’t guarantee the shop’s owners would make an offer if you came around again,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a question of money,’ the man said. ‘I just sort of wanted it to find a new owner. Someone who would enjoy playing it. It was my wife’s.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘She recently passed away.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’d even be happy to give it away if I knew if would end up with someone who could make good use of it,’ he added, almost apologetically.

  ‘That’s a nice thing to do,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come back next week? I’m sure we’ll find a way.’

  He was about to pick up the case from the counter, but I leaned forward, took hold of it and unzipped it. The violin was in good condition, not an antique, but a good-looking and well-maintained instrument.

  ‘I’m confident we could find a buyer for this,’ I told him.

  His features relaxed. ‘That would be nice.’

  I passed the violin case back to him.

  Our fingers touched. His skin was warm, and surprisingly soft.

  ‘I’m Lily,’ I said.

  ‘Leonard.’

  He did return the following week, and agreed a reasonable price with one of the owners. Both parties appeared satisfied wit
h the outcome. I sold the instrument at a small profit just under a fortnight later to a young student about to begin her first year at the Royal College of Music.

  As part of the initial transaction, Leonard had been obliged to sign some necessary paperwork and I had his email address on record as a result. Following the sale, I thought it would be nice to inform him who had ended up with his wife’s violin. I knew the outcome would please him.

  We began to correspond.

  Initially, our exchanges were mostly about music. What he liked, what I didn’t. Our memories of certain pieces or even songs – he was a surprising fount of knowledge about rock ’n’ roll from all eras, although we heartily disagreed about the Clash, whom I had recently learned to appreciate so much more, but whom Leonard had a particular disdain for.

  Nor was he much enamoured of heavy metal in all its varied incarnations, which made for a healthy exchange of views that we both enjoyed, although I was often irritated by his frequent conclusion to an argument whereby I would come to increasingly appreciate his tastes and side with his sharp opinions as I grew older.

  On some days we would exchange up to a dozen emails, and soon I began looking forward to getting up in the morning and rushing to see my messages and invariably finding Leonard’s final mail of the day, usually sent around the stroke of midnight. He was a faithful creature of habits.

  Inevitably, certain personal subjects were never discussed: his late wife and the circumstances of her death, our sexual selves or why we had somehow connected in such a special way, the oddity of our increasing closeness, or the fact we stood two decades apart.

  But as we jauntily skirted around them, the concentric circle of our unsaid words tightened and every successive mail seemed more charged than the one before. Although neither of us mentioned it openly, we were both becoming aware of the elephant in the room, that if we were to carry on conversing in this way we would have to meet up soon, for the first time since he had left the shop after selling his wife’s violin and never expected to see me again, as it should have been in a right and proper world.

  Leonard travelled a lot. He worked in the export trade, a field I barely understood despite his efforts at educating me. He was away a week or more every month, and while our exchange of emails continued while he was out of the country, it often took on an extra urgency as I sensed his loneliness as he wrote his rambling words in the darkness of foreign hotel rooms and the anonymity of airport lounges. It wasn’t that he was gloomy; his mails were often wonderfully humorous, as he described the people he had to work with or the idiosyncrasies of the overseas cities he was passing through.

  Our separate loneliness brought us together.

  Our mails crossed across the electronic wasteland.

  Maybe we could meet up for a coffee? Would be nice to be able to chat and have a longer and uninterrupted conversation.

  I’ll be in London next week. Would you like to actually get together in person?

  He was in an identikit Marriott hotel room somewhere in the US Midwest and I was in the Denmark Street shop’s basement as we both pressed SEND.

  Life is sometimes an unlikely tissue of coincidences.

  Ten days later, we had agreed an evening and a place, the bar of a large international hotel near Marble Arch. He’d pointed out that in a pub we wouldn’t be able to hear each other speak.

  I hadn’t told a soul that I was planning on meeting up with Leonard. Certainly not Jonno, nor Neil, who I still spoke to from time to time. Not even Liana, with whom I remained in frequent telephone contact, if only to compare the diverging paths our lives were taking. I hadn’t told anyone that we had met or been exchanging emails. I knew that Neil would be disapproving, Jonno would tease me and Liana just wouldn’t understand. She would have found the age gap wonderfully rebellious, but would have thought Leonard too sensible and not nearly charismatic enough for her tastes, which clearly tended towards the extreme.

  After spending a good ten minutes staring dismally into my wardrobe and wondering what would be an appropriate outfit to wear to meet a man twice my age in a central London hotel, I opted for simply dressing as myself in a pair of black jeans, flat ankle boots and a pale-blue cardigan to ward off the chill. The cardigan was cut wide at the neck and so displayed the orchid tattoo on my shoulder.

  Now was not the time to try to be something that I wasn’t or to slip into a cocktail dress and pretend to be twenty-eight instead of twenty-one. I wanted Leonard to be fully aware of the situation. The difference between us.

  For Liana, getting dressed was a ritual. She chose her clothes based on the way that the fabric felt in her hands or wrapped around her body, and had once described shopping as a sexual experience.

  For me it was a chore. Despite my goth leanings I still felt like a fish in the wrong water, as if I hadn’t quite yet figured out where I fitted into the world and I didn’t know what skin to put on when I left the house. Surprisingly, I now felt most comfortable in my latex at the fetish club. At least there I knew exactly what role I was expected to play and the rules on looking the part were perfectly clear.

  Meeting Leonard was an entirely different situation. There were no rules for this.

  He was sitting on a high stool at one end of the long, polished mahogany bar when I arrived. He hadn’t seen me enter, and was leaning forward with both elbows resting on the bench in front of him, typing into a smart phone with a look of intense concentration on his face. He was wearing suit trousers and a white business shirt with the sleeves rolled up, as if he had just come from an important meeting. His jacket was hung over the back of the chair.

  His salt-and-pepper hair was wavy and he wore it just a raffish inch too long for a man of his age. It was not affectation, just a natural way of showing he didn’t follow fashion or convention and was at ease in his own skin. There was always a faint curl lurking at the corner of his lips, and I was unsure whether it was the sketch of a smile or the actual way he looked at most things with a degree of irony. An aura of peace emanated from him and it made me feel warm.

  This is his life, I thought. Hotel bars and emails. I wondered briefly how many other women he engaged with in this way. Surely it couldn’t just be me. Did he have dates booked every night of the week with strangers that he met in shops or online to distract him from the loneliness of international business travel?

  He raised his glass to his lips and took a sip. Gin and tonic, I noticed as I saw the small bottle of soft drink next to him. Slimline. His glass was full of ice and I imagined how cold the tips of his fingers must be.

  Finally he looked up and smiled.

  ‘Lily,’ he said, ‘good to see you.’

  He slipped his phone into his jacket pocket, slid off his seat and touched his hand lightly against my arm. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Come, sit down,’ he added, pulling the seat next to him out. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

  He had barely looked up before one of the bartenders hurried over to take our order.

  ‘I’ll have a whisky sour,’ I said, feigning confidence and ignoring the look the waitress gave Leonard as she asked him if he’d like another round. She called him ‘darling’ and brushed her fingertips against his for a moment too long as she handed him back his change.

  At my choice of drink he had raised an eyebrow and tried but failed to suppress a smile. I wasn’t even sure what a whisky sour was. I’d once overheard Liana ordering one when she was out on a date with a third-year student that I knew she had been trying to impress in her own, nonchalant way. It had arrived with a bright red cherry floating on the top of the glass and I remembered how inviting Liana’s mouth had looked as she had taken the sugared cherry between her lips and pulled the stalk off with her fingertips. The third-year student hadn’t stood a chance.

  I hoped that I might be able to mimic a similar effect, but when the drink I arrived I was too shy to attempt to be sexy and just left the cherry floating like a lost buoy.

&nb
sp; Our knees brushed as I hoisted myself onto the bar stool. I always felt so small sitting up high, like a child with my feet dangling in mid-air a foot or two off the ground. Leonard was easily over six foot and lounging comfortably.

  ‘Would you prefer to sit on one of the couches?’ he asked politely as I squirmed, trying to get comfortable.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied breezily, eyeing the sofas with some trepidation. Two enormous leather monstrosities sat in the front of the bar area, with a sleek glass table the size of a small island between them.

  Leonard picked up his jacket and folded it over his arm. I lost my balance briefly as I tried to stretch my leg out to reach the floor and he caught me by the elbow as I almost fell against him.

  ‘Not accustomed to whisky?’ he asked as he pulled me upright.

  ‘Not accustomed to bar stools,’ I replied. ‘I prefer to sit closer to the ground.’

  There was an awkward moment when we reached the couches and it became apparent that we could not sit either on opposite ends or on opposite sofas, as both of those options would put us so far apart we would need to shout or have a conversation in semaphore. Instead we would have to sit directly alongside each other with the rounded edges of the cushions pushing us even closer together, practically snuggling like a real couple.

  From this angle I was able to study his profile. Square jaw, not a hint of stubble, and a recent nick from shaving that I felt a sudden desire to press my lips against. He had the slightest flecks of grey hair running down behind his ears and in the lock that fell stubbornly over his forehead. It occurred to me that he was older than Liana’s father. Her parents had been teenagers when they had her. I was glad that my parents had me late, and my own father was in his late fifties so at least I did not have that comparison in my mind’s eye.

  ‘How was America?’ I asked him.

  ‘Fine,’ he replied. ‘The travelling isn’t as glamorous as it sounds. The inside of chain hotels is the same the world over.’

  We continued to make small talk and he quizzed me about my life in London and how I had ended up in the city working in a music shop after growing up as I had in suburban Berkshire. Eventually I found myself relaxing and opening up to him in a way that I hadn’t before with anyone else.