Two lovers, Clapham Junction station, Christmastime.
Indulgent, directionless, lovey-dovey purple prose (with all the trimmings), since it IS Christmas.
December 20th; twenty past six in the evening. Clapham Junction train station, nestled in the London hinterlands. The people I am writing about, penning portraits of, were real. I don’t know if it’s important that they were real or made up, though; maybe it is, actually.
To begin with, it had been a day of people watching. Five hours of travel on public transport. Two trains and two coaches, and in between observing a congregation lighting candles and thinking soulfully inside Westminster Cathedral. (Not the Abbey; its Catholic cousin. Filled with antechambers each with different moods—for instance, there’s one reserved for St Andrew, exhorting the visiting churchmice to pray for Scotland. There’s one devoted to a veritable mandem of saints, which includes St Bede the Venerable—who likely drones on at length to his friends about British history, but mercifully he gets a little rusty after about 750 AD.) A father and son duo—two builders—were travelling parallel to me and gossiping undauntedly about their families. But beneath their extremism in discussing family politics, they were all softness underneath. The son was fretting about affording an expensive perfume for his wife and planning to traipse to Primark to find the perfect new trainers for his daughter, who kept calling him, affectionately pestering, and asking him to put his location on.
But yes, in the domain of people watching, absolutely nothing was getting past me, not today.
Accordingly, my eyes roved the scores of waiting passengers wading round gormlessly on the train station platform. Trains this close to Christmas are notorious for being beleaguered with delays or even for giving up the ghost and disappearing into thin air altogether. (You will probably hear one person with a liberal phenotype (…joking) muttering that we should nationalise the railways. You will then hear some contemptuous back-chat from a right-wing man in finance, by way of rebuttal. And if you’re really lucky, this volley fire will escalate into a proper argument. But then again, in London, people’s alacrity for prolonged communication with a stranger is particularly expendable.)
I was like a talent scout, looking beadily to seize upon my next star. Who was going to feature in my daydream? Which of these ordinary wayfarers would I choose to invent a backstory for? I was hunting for my next protégé. Sniper at the ready, barrel cocked, one eye screwed up as I pressed my face into the flank of the gun for precision, steadying my stance. Looking for that delicious target: my up-and-coming songbird whom, under my expert tutelage, I’d lick into shape and thereby lead to red carpets and the plush, comfortable opulence of success. They’d commune with paramours at glitzy events, eat blinis with lily-pads of salmon roe and corpulent olives on sticks, swamps of negronorum spagliato (joyfully, I think this is the plural of the negroni; less joyfully, I’m not sure these are chic anymore). With their first dense pay-check, they could purchase a sprawling condominium in Los Angeles if they so pleased. Well, they could do all this if and only if they got this first encounter right and impressed me.
Then they presented themselves. My darlings!
He was tall—or he wore his limbs as though he were. Limber, with the effortless grace of a young stag. Birds have hollow bones to make flight easier. In a post-mortem, a scalpel bearing down on the angular net of his body, I could imagine that one incision would reveal a similar anatomy in him.
Next to him, she was a head smaller or so. Absolutely perfect.
Hmmm. Forgive me, I’m trying to figure out how to represent with any sort of fidelity the way their bodies suited each other so well. Okay, imagine you were a master chocolatier, pouring the molten ambrosia into a mould, perhaps making a special Christmastime figurine—or maybe an Easter egg, although annoyingly that would be less seasonal. But the point of the description is that the two sides of the mould the chocolatier uses fit together perfectly. The silicone lips purse and join together in a vacuum, sealing the chocolate within. The mould itself is clearly the work of an artisan, a master of his craft. All practicalities thought through, no details left to chance, zero human error. Art and surgery share so much in the domain of precision.
If I were a choreographer, I’d have cast them together for a ballet—without even paying attention to anyone else who showed up for the audition. I’d usher all the unfortunate ones away, and they’d clear out in a stampede of squeaking rubbery plimsolls, packed-up pointe shoes and linty hoodies tugged on over leotards and footless tights. The exodus of disappointment. Sorry. Better luck next time! Two angels from Heaven have materialised instead; they clipped their wings to be able to fit on the crowded London underground, and tried to make it big in the city.
Pivot. Let’s return to our two lovers. I suppose you could call what they were doing PDA.
Although it didn’t feel like PDA to watch—it felt like performance art. No, wait, that’s wrong; writer’s error. For it makes their love seem disingenuous or pantomimed—just two professionals and an intimacy coordinator, working towards a representation of love rather than simply being in love, and acting out the sequence of motions that came of this. Rather they were just art: art as it appears unforced sometimes, an organic compound hewn from the earth.
His clothes were very clean and very well taken care of. An ironed blue shirt, collar surreptitiously poking out from a navy quarter-zip—smart merino wool—which was in turn layered beneath a brown leather bomber jacket. The outfit was completed with corduroy trousers the colour of a cygnet’s feathers. And sprouting from the jacket, like a rabbit poking its head nervously from its burrow, was his smiling face. He had brown hair, a laureate crown of it. She, meanwhile, wore flared black trousers with a soft black coat, out from which a head of blonde hair poked out and emerged in coronation; the ensemble of gold and black all offset with flushed rosebud cheeks. A budding snow queen or a princess excised straight from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale or perhaps a Parisian ballerina, her face warmed ceruse from rehearsal. Or the kind of girlfriend you meet and love in New York City at Christmastime, and you only remember her bundled in scarves, her slim fingers throttling a hot chocolate, smiling toothily, with snowflakes iridescent in her hair; a series of holiday postcards. Wishing you were here. With love. (When you later remember her in the after-years, never having autopsied the breakup because it had only been a fling, lacking the ruddy constitution to last, you will think of her as a wife, but a wife who only appears at Christmas, like a decoration kept boxed in an attic all the rest of the year. You can find her only in daydreams of the fireside après at a chalet, young and sparkling with a velvet bow in her hair. Or maybe later—older, tamed, and broken-in—wearing a gingham print apron and deflowering a turkey of its giblets, or found entertaining guests with a cherub-baby on her hip, snug in the indent between hip and breast.)
I get carried away. Our couple in the here-and-now will not be a Christmastime fling, I hope. They must be the same age as me, though, so perhaps they haven’t known each other very long. I actually couldn’t guess.
At intervals she would look upwards admiringly at him; he’d cup her face and laugh. He beamed. Dimples surfaced in his cheeks—a little boy’s dimples, even after all these years.
And then he’d release her and dare his hands lower instead, encircling her waist and bringing him in close, enfolded in a protective hug. Safe, so safe. It is a pretty good technique to ward off the cold, the one they have worked out.
Because women are generally shorter than their male partners, they usually spend a lot of time in love looking up.
Their praise-giving eyes wash over the cut of his jaw, the light of his eyes, the slight cleft in his chin, the promontory of his Adam’s apple. Adoring him. Not idolatry, no, but not far from worship. When John Milton wrote knowingly: He for God only, she for God in him.1
If he lets go of her, automatically his hands always roam back. Like shutting a door and then opening it again ten seconds later, knowing the other person will still be waiting outside. Both parties capitulate in bashful laughter. This time his arms swoop round her shoulders—a pair of defensive eagle wings, just skimming over where her collar-bones lie beneath her coat. Holding her so dearly, so preciously. Letting her go only to clasp her closely again.
Perhaps this is the last evening they’ll spend with each other until after Christmas; they’re both going away for a week or so, home to their families. To each other they are inching towards something like family, but not quite there yet. They’ve met each other’s parents for dinner once, though, so they’re on each other’s way to that blessed integration.
‘Bring her round again soon. She’s lovely,’ his mother says, the night that the girl came around, after she has gone. He, her own grown up little boy, had ducked outside to watch his girlfriend’s father’s car leave the cul-de-sac, purring away in reverse, and then at length he had slunk back inside. He looked for all the worldlike the cat who had got the cream—well, briefly—but had now to relinquish the cream back to the dairyman. The saucer lifted away whilst his muzzle had still been submerged. ‘I liked her SO MUCH.’ This comes from his much younger sister, adamant that her opinion will be heard in the caucus. She was specially allowed to stay up for the occasion (well, it wasn’t a school night anyway, so no harm done). There are candles left out, lit, on the dining table. Yes. It was such a nice dinner. Everyone liked her SO much.
They’ll be back together for New Year’s; they’re looking forward to it—how could you not? She’ll dress up and so will he. So will his mother actually—and she so loves an occasion to dress up. She’ll sit down with a pen and paper the day before and figure out her music, and get her son to piece together a Spotify playlist (mostly Take That, George Michael, The Nolans, Oasis, and Destiny’s Child; as pop princess as they come—he’ll try and slip in something he likes; it won’t get past his mother’s politburo). Then, mechanically, she’ll decant champagne into tall, willowy flutes and spill only a smidgen. Set them out on the kitchen counter which has been neatly tidied—anyone deigning to use the kitchen that afternoon was shouted at, though not particularly crossly. Smile—this family loves a smile—flash new teeth and laugh a Dagenham guffaw. Fresh supermarket flowers, spruced up a bit, and her best cooking books stacked in fetching piles (they are glossy and for show, although there are tomatoey fingerprints staining her favourite recipes). Not much you can do with interior design in a kitchen, to be fair. There is also a new candle lit—one of the big ones with three wicks and which came in a box from a department store—a gift from a distant family member who wasn’t sure what else to buy but knew most people didn’t object to olfactory luxury. Such delights do we treasure here in Suburbia. Bowls of ridge-cut crisps had been set out (black pepper, sharp-twanged cheddar, Iberian chilli, salt and lip-plumping vinegar). There were also hot garlicky prawns, tiny charred bruschetta, equally minute tartines with doorstops of brie and unctuous globules of compote, small brisket sandwiches with piccalilli, speared through with cocktail sticks (‘man food,’ she says approvingly, feeling she has catered to all her guests’ likings),—all followed by very rectangular brownies with gleaming sliced strawberries. This spread is surrounded by a minor residential area of towers of serviettes, neat and ready and waiting. Not chancing any greasy hands on the upholstery, thank you very much. The family’s kitchen was remodelled four years ago and quite honestly she’ll take any excuse to entertain. The father, meanwhile, who is slightly more reticent (‘He’s posher than me—forgive him!’ his wife laughs, girlish mischief flickering in her eyes—he looks at her with a real smile and a feigned eye-roll), moves round the perimeter of room, politely asking about people’s children and their children’s new jobs (or delicately avoiding this, when it’s clearly not the move…). Or he docilely queries his guests on their upcoming holidays or last summer’s holidays, should it be felt that all the best anecdotes have not yet been extracted from them.
People talk and talk and talk, indulging in each other’s company. Such a rarity. We simply must have more parties. There’s always a reason not to. But we must make time for more parties, next year. And younger children run around the house, fake-drunk from heady concoctions of lemonade and cordial—hiding and whispering under the dining table, chasing each other up and down and round the stairs, even though they know full well that they are not allowed upstairs. (‘What’s this?’—rifling through the parents’ bedside drawers. Leafing through their books. Sticky fingers grabbing at the clothes hanging (cowering) in the wardrobe, trying them on—hysterics ensue.) The mess they make is the collateral. No one begrudges them this. It is a trivial payment for their memories.
Their train comes, at length. He takes her hand—irrationally afraid of losing her in the bustle of passengers pouring out and others clambering into the carriage. They’ll almost miss their stop because they’ll be so dizzyingly wrapped up in each other’s company.
There I was, on the platform, balancing too many bags of my possessions, wearing my mother’s borrowed coat, my hair wind-tousled and verging on the cusp of matted, but glorifying in them, basking in their radiance, and inventing too particular a story for them.
They were in love; they couldn’t help it—and neither could I.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings—if we don’t speak again, let me wish you well now. Much love. I do hope you take care.
Milton, John. Book IV, Paradise Lost (1667). Modern English version.