We also visited Webb’s famously upmarket garden centre at Wymondham where I succumbed to my recurring ailment - legs simply not working, groans pitiful. OS guided me to a seat in the café and bought fizzy water to aid my pill-swallowing. When I opened the bottle super-active fizz spilled water all over my trousers. Surprisingly I didn't groan. Instead, played Solitaire on my smartphone until the hurt subsided.
An elderly couple joined me at the table and it was clear the man wanted to talk to his spouse. She neither wanted to talk, nor to respond. He launched a chain of non-sequiturs, possibly fragments left over from other aborted conversations. Stolidly she poured tea and sipped, staring into the middle distance.
Sitting allowed my mind to roam. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the man’s utterances other than they seemed domestic. But the gap between husband and wife spoke volumes. How long had her silence endured?
Lacking pain I was able to consider my own good luck. VR and I still talk to each other. Avidly. After more than half a century. Conversation dispenses with the need for lovey-dovey professions - the mere exchange of thoughts is sufficient proof of mutual interest. I was alone in the café while OS and VR shopped for table presents. But I had a conviction - possibly delusional - that if I thought hard enough I could communicate with VR. Wordlessly.
Abruptly the couple got up and left. In silence.
I'm sad for that elderly couple; however, one could write quite a few shorts stories trying to explain what led up to that event. Nice to hear you are spending time with your family, I'm sure they adore you. And if you are able to communicate wordlessly with VR, please let us know.
ReplyDeleteI do a lot of people watching on my long walks, especially in pubs when I'm having my evening meal. I have seen that scenario often, and sad it is. One time I was surprised by a guy who had apparently been watching me - he came up to me and said "I like the way you were eating your soup, you don't often see that these days." I have often puzzled about that since.
ReplyDeleteColette: I think adoration would be pitching it a little too ambitiously. I'd prefer to say "we get on" - one of those deliberately understated judgments typical of middle-class England. Boiling it down still further I can make them laugh and they can make me laugh. Unfeigned laughter is possibly the best visual proof of a satisfactory relationship.
ReplyDeleteWhich is just as well. I come from a family of three sons. And, through marriage, have two daughters. It took me quite some time to get used to seeing the world through their eyes and I can't pretend I was a wholly attentive father. Things are a lot better now they're both in their fifties.
I agree that the elderly couple were good raw material for a short story. Almost too good, since extremes of behaviour tend to force an author's hand. It would also be important to avoid a cliché reaction - eg, that the couple had previously been great talkers, that they had lost a child to death, that the trigger had been the smallest of matters and had subsequently been propelled by stubbornness.
Should telepathy occur you'll be the first to know.
Sir Hugh: I think I'd have responded jokily to the admirer of your soup technique. But perhaps his manner discouraged this.
I have always been a secretive observer, especially in pubs and restaurants where people remain under your microscope for longish periods. As you know on mornings when the cleaning lady comes we leave the house to her and spend time in Tesco's café over "two small Americanos, no milk" and some form of light breakfast. Never cake, though. The café looks out on to the car park, a constant arena of public behaviour - all the better since the participants are unaware they are under scrutiny. Alas for Britain, many are morbidly obese.
Aha! A closet café visitor "comes out."
ReplyDeletePerhaps the wife had onset dementia and he was trying to stimulate her responses. I have seen partners in that situation.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Hardly a closet anything. We've been going to Tesco's café on Tuesday mornings for over two years to escape the hustle and bustle of the house being cleaned. Posted about it (The New Galvanism) on July 5 2016 and have referred to it several times in later posts (as recently as April 26 this year) and comments. What we ate there has been negligible, what we've observed has been regularly recycled.
ReplyDeleteAvus: It's a nice thought but I don't think it applied in this instance. The wife looked serenely composed; the chap on the other seemed manic, the flow of his subjects disjointed. Perhaps it was her therapy for him.