‘There are no colours,’ said Anita
The street was monochrome, its houses a sequence of black and white snapshots pasted in a photo album. Trees stretched out their bare grey branches to tap her shoulder. She shivered.
‘It’s February,’ said Stephen, as if this should explain everything. His key scraped in the lock and loose flakes of paint drifted onto cracked paving. Together they lurched into the gloomy hallway.
There was no colour in the bedroom either. Utility furniture blended into sepia walls; twin beds squatted under frayed, faded cotton. In contrast Anita glowed like a beacon. With a practised flick of his finger and thumb Stephen spun her free from her silk cocoon. He gathered her vibrant warmth into his embrace and considered himself the luckiest man alive. They had been married a month: the time it had taken for their passage from India and to find a house near Stephen’s new job. They had been together every moment, indulging in a feast of intimacy. Anita treasured the feel of his skin beneath his corduroy jacket, the touch of his lips on her neck. When he went back to work she knew she would feel quite limbless, as if her arms had been wrenched off.
‘You’ll soon meet people,’ he reassured her, ‘The days will fly past.’
But in those first few February weeks the days flew only because they were so short, because dusk settled early. The doors of the other houses remained firmly shut and if she passed her neighbours in the street their shoulders seemed to shift against her. There was a sourness in the air; sometimes, despite the cold, she found the milk curdled on the step.
Stephen tried to cheer her up. First to arrive from the proceeds of his pay cheque was a double divan with a crimson satin eiderdown. Next, two men in overalls appeared with a vast bulky box which they tugged and shoved across the threshold. White and shining, it loomed monstrously in the kitchen. It swallowed the corner between table and sink and gobbled up the contents of their store cupboards.
‘Whatever is it?’
‘The very latest technology,’ he said proudly. ‘A refrigerator.’
She draped her arms around his neck. ‘I suppose you think if you buy me a machine that hums I can pretend I’m not alone.’
In the beginning her passion for Stephen had filled the space left by family and friends, by noise and chatter, by slow savoury meals and the gleeful laughter of children. Now the blankness was creeping up on her, the hours of repetitive household tasks, the quiet isolation.
She invited the woman next door for tea and a demonstration of the ice-box. Joan’s tight perm bobbed around her small pale eyes; her rabbit teeth clicked against the edge of the teacup. ‘Well it looks very advanced,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure a contraption like that is more use in a country like yours than over here.’
By now, with the spring, tints were starting to creep back into the road. Gaudy daffodils and flaming tulips clashed in tubs and borders; white waves of blossom foamed on the plum tree in their back garden. Anita took this as a sign. She bought a can of paint from the chandler’s and painted their peeling front door an intense cherry red.
‘Gracious me,’ said Joan. ‘I hope you’ve asked the landlord’s permission.’
Anita, crestfallen, hid behind her cherry door and hesitated to go out except for essentials.
Stephen had expected his new bride to be entirely mistress of her world: to test recipes or arrange flowers, to go to coffee mornings or whist drives. He was bewildered to see her retreat into the shadowy recesses of their home and tried to think of ways to counter her loneliness. Cycling home one evening through a forest of telegraph poles, inspiration came to him: he would install a telephone. Already he could imagine her rich disembodied voice in his ear.
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