In the dim, tea coloured morning that passes for daylight in mid March, there sat not quite a man, and certainly not yet anything else entirely a person of careful middle years before an antique dressing table that had once belonged to his wife. The table itself had the air of something that knew far more than it was ever going to tell, its mirror clouded with the gentle patina of decades spent reflecting other people's private negotiations with gravity and grief.
Across his lap lay a black satin headscarf, arranged with the solemnity one might accord a papal bull or a very good slice of funeral cake. It spilled over his knees like ink that had decided, upon second thoughts, not to dry. Tucked inside its generous folds was the ghost of lavender, that most patient and reproachful of scents, the sort that waits years to remind you of drawers you have not opened often enough.
From the wardrobe door depended the veil layers of sheer black chiffon so fragile they appeared to be made of regrets that had been ironed flat. It trembled whenever the wind, that notorious sneak-thief of March, found the loose sash and slipped inside to have a look round. Outside, the town lay under a sky the precise colour of yesterday's dishwater, quietly convinced that nothing interesting was ever going to happen again.
He or possibly she, depending on which angle the light chose to take ran a lace gloved finger along the jet beading that marched across the bodice like a procession of tiny, well behaved mourners. The beads were cold at first, as beads will be when left to their own devices, but they warmed almost at once, as though the heat of long ago skin had been stored in them the way a teapot remembers tea.
Why this? The question rose inside him with the regularity of a heartbeat and about as much chance of being answered.
It was not, he reflected, merely crossdressing that brisk, modern word with its clipboard and its forms to fill in. No, this was something older, something chosen with the same deliberate care one might use when selecting the right sort of gravestone. To put on these heavy black satins was to grieve properly, not merely for the wife who had gone ahead into whatever lay beyond the last curtain call, but for the self that had spent decades locked in the attic of his own ribcage, tapping politely and being ignored.
Memory flickered like lantern slides: his grandmother's photograph album, those stern Victorian and Edwardian women staring out from behind veils and crepe as though sorrow were a particularly fetching hat. He had lingered over those pictures longer than any boy with a respectable future was supposed to, feeling something nameless turn over in his chest like a sleeper disturbed by moonlight.
Later much later, during the long, comfortable decades with his wife the secret had grown in perfect silence. Lengths of satin acquired at antique fairs with the furtive excitement of a man buying rare first editions; a chiffon veil ordered at three in the morning from a seller who asked no questions and probably knew all the answers anyway. His wife had never known. Or possibly she had known perfectly well and elected, with the generosity of those who love deeply and sensibly, to let the matter lie undisturbed.
She would smile when he returned with yet another silk scarf, tease him gently about his "fancy tastes," and he would laugh along, the laughter both balm and small, exquisite knife. Had he stolen something from her by never speaking the truth aloud? Or had the silence been kinder the careful preservation of Sunday dinners, hill walks above the fields, the kettle's comfortable whistle while the afternoon play murmured from the wireless?
The clothes themselves seemed to have an opinion on the matter.
The satin was cool against his skin when first it touched him, cool and slightly disapproving, like a maiden aunt meeting a disreputable nephew. Then it softened, warmed, accepted. It wrapped itself around the shape he had always carried inside the shape that had never quite fitted the available tailoring of masculinity, no matter how many times the measurements were taken.
When he wore it, properly, completely, he became not a man dressed as a widow, but simply the grieving widow he had, in some quiet corner of chronology, always been meant to be. The mirror regarded him without surprise. Mirrors, after all, have seen far stranger things than this between breakfast and bedtime.
In the dim, tea coloured morning that passes for daylight in mid March, there sat not quite a man, and certainly not yet anything else entirely a person of careful middle years before an antique dressing table that had once belonged to his wife. The table itself had the air of something that knew far more than it was ever going to tell, its mirror clouded with the gentle patina of decades spent reflecting other people's private negotiations with gravity and grief.
Across his lap lay a black satin headscarf, arranged with the solemnity one might accord a papal bull or a very good slice of funeral cake. It spilled over his knees like ink that had decided, upon second thoughts, not to dry. Tucked inside its generous folds was the ghost of lavender, that most patient and reproachful of scents, the sort that waits years to remind you of drawers you have not opened often enough.
From the wardrobe door depended the veil layers of sheer black chiffon so fragile they appeared to be made of regrets that had been ironed flat. It trembled whenever the wind, that notorious sneak-thief of March, found the loose sash and slipped inside to have a look round. Outside, the town lay under a sky the precise colour of yesterday's dishwater, quietly convinced that nothing interesting was ever going to happen again.
He or possibly she, depending on which angle the light chose to take ran a lace gloved finger along the jet beading that marched across the bodice like a procession of tiny, well behaved mourners. The beads were cold at first, as beads will be when left to their own devices, but they warmed almost at once, as though the heat of long ago skin had been stored in them the way a teapot remembers tea.
Why this? The question rose inside him with the regularity of a heartbeat and about as much chance of being answered.
It was not, he reflected, merely crossdressing that brisk, modern word with its clipboard and its forms to fill in. No, this was something older, something chosen with the same deliberate care one might use when selecting the right sort of gravestone. To put on these heavy black satins was to grieve properly, not merely for the wife who had gone ahead into whatever lay beyond the last curtain call, but for the self that had spent decades locked in the attic of his own ribcage, tapping politely and being ignored.
Memory flickered like lantern slides: his grandmother's photograph album, those stern Victorian and Edwardian women staring out from behind veils and crepe as though sorrow were a particularly fetching hat. He had lingered over those pictures longer than any boy with a respectable future was supposed to, feeling something nameless turn over in his chest like a sleeper disturbed by moonlight.
Later much later, during the long, comfortable decades with his wife the secret had grown in perfect silence. Lengths of satin acquired at antique fairs with the furtive excitement of a man buying rare first editions; a chiffon veil ordered at three in the morning from a seller who asked no questions and probably knew all the answers anyway. His wife had never known. Or possibly she had known perfectly well and elected, with the generosity of those who love deeply and sensibly, to let the matter lie undisturbed.
She would smile when he returned with yet another silk scarf, tease him gently about his "fancy tastes," and he would laugh along, the laughter both balm and small, exquisite knife. Had he stolen something from her by never speaking the truth aloud? Or had the silence been kinder the careful preservation of Sunday dinners, hill walks above the fields, the kettle's comfortable whistle while the afternoon play murmured from the wireless?
The clothes themselves seemed to have an opinion on the matter.
The satin was cool against his skin when first it touched him, cool and slightly disapproving, like a maiden aunt meeting a disreputable nephew. Then it softened, warmed, accepted. It wrapped itself around the shape he had always carried inside the shape that had never quite fitted the available tailoring of masculinity, no matter how many times the measurements were taken.
When he wore it, properly, completely, he became not a man dressed as a widow, but simply the grieving widow he had, in some quiet corner of chronology, always been meant to be. The mirror regarded him without surprise. Mirrors, after all, have seen far stranger things than this between breakfast and bedtime.
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