SHE was the only love of my tender, cold-nosed and pyjama-chested years. I had held her pale hand through jungles and carried her over malarial swamps, silently passing the midnight sentries of hunting armies. Now, on this strange night, she lay dying, as a fog settled like old man’s breath on the rutted and frozen fields of our own land.
And the moon, which once lit our untouched romance, was hidden in that big sky. But I didn’t know then, in those moments when the taxi crept into the dark, that she was being called away to some other place, where beauty is forever and everyone is young.
Orange headlamps pierced the gloom, but the fog swirled and gathered to cut off their beams like a wall of ghosts. “It’s thick out there,” said the driver, wiping the windscreen with his shammy cloth and tightening his eyelids in concentration over the steering wheel, “but we should be clear on the other side of this dip.”
We weren’t. The fog deepened and we crawled along, staring. “We’ll just have to take it really slow, this one’s with us for the night,” the driver said. So he began to tell me a little about his life. He was a plumber by trade – one of the best in the business, he insisted, and that wasn’t just idle boasting. This was a man who could make pipes gurgle and flush, filling the taps of towering buildings. But he had to drive a taxi at night to support his children. There had been three with his first wife and five with his second.
“A big family,” I said and he nodded slowly in that meditative way, which tells you so much. “The youngest is just a few months and the eldest is 16,” he said. It was my turn to nod slowly, as I considered the amount of support needed for a young family of that size. “By Jove,” I said, quietly.
“By something or other,” he added with a smile and a shrug.
The car was approaching town and the faint glow of the stalkless streetlights appeared to float in a fading parade over the shroud of fog. We changed the subject to the marvels of nature. I told him that in the garden of our new house, we had a little pond, where we were hoping to keep frogs. Did he know where we might be able to find some frogspawn? I judged from his long-smiling face that he was the sort of fellow who would have picked up such information on an elbow-polished table in a bar or canteen, somewhere down the line. “No need,” he replied. “Frogs find ponds by themselves. They are directed by an inner sense. Maybe God guides them.”
Frogs must be canny, I thought. If you left me in the middle of Birkenhead without a map, I wouldn’t be able to find a fishmonger, never mind a pond. My wife wouldn’t be able to either, though she would have no difficulty unearthing a wallpaper shop or a perfumery in the Kalahari Desert. It’s all about instinct. I can see her now pressing her ear to the sand to hear the distant trill of a cash box.
The following evening, I was sitting in my armchair dreaming of mountains, where free men can walk, when the TV newsreader said that Jean Simmons had died. She was my first love, the most beautiful girl in the world. Many years ago, I had seen her in a picture palace in Birkenhead, playing Varinia, the slave girl, in the epic film, Spartacus. Outside, the fog had been as thick as a funeral veil, but it held the promise of romance. Inside, the murmur of anticipation rose. I sat back on my sprung seat. Men and women sucked cigarettes. Boys and girls crunched popcorn. The curtains rolled back and I was drawn into the great slave rebellion. And, after his army had been crushed by the Roman legions, Varinia showed their baby son to Spartacus (Kirk Douglas). Still proud, he was hanging from a cross on the Appian Way. I wept for her beauty, as she vanished from his sight. I saw her many times after that in the high flights of imagination, but she never saw me, not once – until one day when I was sitting at a bar, dreaming as usual. I sensed her eyes gaze on me with a quizzical expression. I looked up and saw the girl who would become my wife.
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
