26. Sep, 2021

'The Red Scarf'

Gay stood back to admire the picture she had just hung on her wall. It wouldn’t have been to everybody’s taste, but she had found something extraordinarily vivid in it. It was an amateur’s oil painting with a merry vigour in its bright colours, showing little figures skating on a winter pond. She had found it in a local bric-a-brac shop and been attracted by it. From a distance, the artist’s naively crude technique was disguised by the effect it gave. It had probably been the product, once, of somebody’s art class in retirement, so the seller suggested. Gay half closed her eyes, almost imagining she could hear the excited squeals of children, shrieks of happy laughter, the cut of blades through thick ice, the cold tang of the air in your nose. It made her remember being a small child herself in a snowy past winter, rolling a huge snowball with woolly mittens, the snow crumping together, the frozen chill from it stinging her face. She opened her eyes with a start, peering at the painting, where it had seemed that one of the figures had just turned to look at her in a quick, sharp movement – a little head with flying dark hair, a red tam o’ shanta and the flick of a red scarf, as a child sped by. Of course, there was no such realistically drawn figure, just the suggestion of one which her mind had made into a little girl, flitting about like a fairy. On her radio, tuned to Classic FM, the Nutcracker Suite’s ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ was playing. No doubt that had helped to create the illusion. She laughed at her fanciful idea.

“Well, W.T.,” she told the initials on the bottom of the picture, “I like your painting. It’s got something and I’m glad to give it a new home.”

Gay went downstairs and put on her coat, heading out for a walk along the esplanade by the saltmarsh on the estuary, towards the white windmill with its stalled sails which made it feel somewhere quite other than the west coast of England in Lytham. As she walked, ahead of her she saw a little group, a woman pushing a carriage pram and a child darting ahead, up and back, her cherry red clothing making a bright splotch against the white cone body of the windmill. It made Gay think of her picture and she smiled. The group disappeared beyond the windmill and when Gay reached it herself, she could no longer see them. She looked out at the estuary, where the tide was out but channels of water criss-crossed it, busy with wading birds. On the left was a high land hill. To the right, it led on to the sea and the windy beach of St Anne’s, where  people flew kites and the pier’s cast iron legs went striding out across the dunes down to the beach. When the tide was out, the sea was so far away it was like a mirage you could never reach, it seeming to take forever to walk down the sands to the waves.

A man passed her, and said ‘good afternoon’. She smiled and responded with the same greeting, so that he stopped and said,

“Eerie, isn’t it? Out there.”

“I think its peaceful but strange. Stranded in between land and sea, like the windmill. It makes me feel as if I’m in a Dutch painting.”

“I know what you mean,” he replied.

“Oh, look!” exclaimed Gay. “She’s dropped her scarf.”

She bent down to retrieve it, a hand knitted red woollen one with tasselled ends.

“Who has?” asked the man.

“The little girl. She was just ahead of me. I’ll follow on and see if I can find them.”

The man looked both ways along the promenade.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “There isn’t anybody there.”

“They can’t be far away.”

“You never know,” he answered, both remarks striking her as a little odd, so that it made her want to get away from him.

“Well. Goodbye,” she said firmly, moving off beyond the windmill in the direction the child and woman with the pram had gone in.

She glanced back after a moment or two but could not see him either now. He was probably just hidden by the body of the windmill, broad at the base, its sails forever still now, since it had not been a working one for a very long time and was really a museum, when it was open. This was not the season or the day for that, though. Usually there were plenty of walkers, but this was a dull and cold day and perhaps not many were enticed outside to enjoy it. Gay walked quickly now, seeing if she could catch up with the little girl who had dropped her scarf, but there was no sign of the small party. Perhaps they had turned off and gone up one of the streets of houses behind the long esplanade? She passed an old ship’s anchor, stuck into a concrete block like the sword in the stone. There was a plaque attached to it explaining its history – found in in the fishing net of a trawler, but it was not known what ship it had come from, adrift on the ocean bottom until it was accidentally dredged up as what remained of some bygone wrecking.

Gay was still getting used to it here, she and Oliver having retired and moved away from the inland city they had lived and worked in. Oliver had spent childhood holidays in Lytham and had an attachment to the place. Gay found it strangely old-fashioned, with something ancient and alienating about the great stretch of saltmarsh across the silted estuary where choked tides ran in and out up to the walkway. They had sold their own city house for a ludicrous amount due to rising prices there, and bought one here quite reasonably by comparison. Giving up her pursuit, she returned back home herself, taking the scarf with her and thinking she would come back tomorrow for her usual afternoon stroll, to see if she could return it to its owner, if she were out and about too. Ollie had taken to ‘doing’, either at his allotment or making hobby things in his shed, YouTube videos being a great source of inspiration for him. Gay still hadn’t really decided on doing anything, and was rather enjoying that aspect of life for the time being.

“I’m happy pottering,” she would say, to anybody who asked.

Oliver had returned from whatever he had been doing himself after lunch and said accusingly,

“You’ve put that picture up in the bedroom!”

“Yes. I like it. Don’t you?”

“It’s a bit of a daub,” he shrugged. “But if that’s where you want it…”

“I do,” she said decisively, so that he gave up his half-hearted protest, only saying,

“I was going to put a shelf there.”

“What for? You’re putting shelves up everywhere. And then, we have to get things to put on the shelves. I’m saving space.”

Ollie laughed good-humouredly enough.

“They’re useful.”

“You just like making them.”

“Well…” he said. “Want a coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

She went upstairs to change her shoes and put the scarf in the pocket of her warm coat, hanging it on the back of the door. From here, she glanced at the picture again to see if it would make its winter scene come alive from where she was standing. She could see the red blob her mind had made into a tam o’ shanta  and the black smudges for legs and feet of the skating figure she had seen as being a little girl. But this time, no illusion of a face turning and a scarf flying came to her, only the thought of a name – Elia – and with it, the feeling of noise, a crowd of people jostling, laughing on the ice where hot chestnuts would be sold, sweet and powdery in your mouth when you ate them. Yes, a winter fair, that’s what it made Gay think of.

“Well now, Elia,” she said, amused by her own imaginings. “if you have lost your scarf, I think I have it.”

Gay and Oliver made dinner together, a Thai curry. Oliver was proud of his skill in chopping ginger, onions, carrots and lemongrass into thin matchsticks, wielding his chef’s knife deftly while Gay browned some chicken in aromatic sesame oil. Jasmine rice, with a couple of cloves in it for good measure, bubbled alongside.  Oliver poured them each a glass of wine.

“Ah!” he commented, as he always did. “This is the life! Cheers, my love!” and they toasted each other with a glass of Aldi’s best, described as containing notes of brioche on the palate.

They always chose a bottle with a description which made them smile as being fanciful. The kitchen was tiled in seventies style, warm browns and creams with a design of sprays of wheat, and they hadn’t changed it because it was retro and comforting and something which reminded them of their parents’ décor when they were growing up. An Alhambra dome shaped archway knocked through led into the small, square room where their dining table was. They hadn’t done much but paint shabby bits of the house in shades of white, leaving the rosebud wallpaper on their bedroom as it was, because it felt cottagey and pretty. They felt welcomed by the house and so they had left it as it was.

The next afternoon, Oliver headed out to the allotment because things needed ‘digging over’ now, he said. Gay, the scarf in her pocket, went along to the saltmarsh walk and began to stroll along the promenade path. At around the same point as yesterday, the same man passed her, said good afternoon and stopped.

“We must stop meeting like this,” he said predictably, and Gay smiled. “I’m Nathaniel,” he said.

“Gay,” she returned, and they shook hands, then both looked out at the vista before them as they had done yesterday, on which a curlew made its plaintive cry, rising sweetly into the stillness.

Then Gay heard a woman’s voice, somewhere in the near distance.

“Eli-i-a! – Eli-i-a!”

The rise and fall call was musical too.

“Goodness!” exclaimed Gay. “That’s my little girl from yesterday! Can you hear?”

“Yes. Sometimes I can. I can’t always see them though, although we come to the same place.”

“Them?”

“The others who come here. It all depends.”

“What on?” she laughed. “A trick of the light?”

“Something like that,” he answered.

“I must go after them!” said Gay, “with the scarf!” She waved it at him from her pocket. “I knew she was called Elia. Isn’t that strange?”

“Rather, if you didn’t know it before. It means ‘gift from God’, the name Elia. Only, that isn’t always true, is it?”

“You do say some strange things!” said Gay, “I must go, anyway.”

“Go carefully, then. If you must,” he answered, raising his hat again.

He wore a long brown raincoat and a brown trilby hat, under which his hair was silver white, one of those people it was hard to tell how old they were, quite, but Gay thought him older than she by a decade or two, although he was spry enough. She hurried along in the direction in which she had heard the voice and saw, before the windmill, the carriage pram, which looked to be on its own. Approaching she looked around, puzzled, for the woman and the little girl. They rounded the windmill from the other side, the child running as before and Gay called out,

“Excuse me! You dropped your scarf!” but they didn’t seem to hear her and went on ahead. Gay draped the scarf on the stone platform of the windmill and called out again, pointing, “Your scarf!”

This time the child ran back towards the windmill as Gay waited at a slight distance and snatched up the red scarf, her woolly hat’s pompom dancing, then darted away again.

“You’re welcome!” Gay called out but there was no answer from anyone.

She looked behind her for Nathaniel but he had gone too and when she turned, so had the woman and the child, along with the carriage pram on its high, bouncy wheels. An old-fashioned kind of thing for these days but a new baby in the winter needed to be kept warm, Gay supposed. Back at the house, she looked at the picture from the same distance as she had the first time, waiting for the little dabs and splashes of colour to coalesce into the figures she conjured them into.

“There you are, Elia,” she said, nodding. “You have your scarf back now, don’t you?”

Once again, the child’s figure seemed to flit along with her scarf flying. The smell of ice was like sparks of cold in the air, and the sound of distant merriment seemed to come to Gay. This time, she tried to describe it to Oliver later on, but he frowned and did not really like it.

“I think you’re spending too much time on your own, Gay,” he said. “You’re imagining things. And that bloke sounds weird, old man or not.”

“Maybe,” she answered. “In a way, he doesn’t seem old, just – I don’t know – timeless. It all feels like that, as if its been going on forever, the woman with the child and the pram, Nathaniel walking on the promenade, and somehow, I’ve got into the middle of them passing through.”

“Good grief, Gay!”

“Nathaniel said ‘Elia’ meant gift from God but that it wasn’t always true. I wonder what Nathaniel means?”

Oliver looked it up on his phone.

“Well, according to this, Nathaniel is the angel of lightning. Did he look like an angel?”

“No – but then I wouldn’t know what one looked like, not in the every day,” laughed Gay. “But why did I think the little girl in the painting was called Elia, and then I heard the mother call out that very same name today?”

“Perhaps she didn’t, your mind just made it into that. They were a bit of a way off, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m coming with you tomorrow. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to take that painting down. It’s giving you some very odd notions. I don’t want to keep it.”

“All right,” agreed Gay, because she was quite perturbed by it herself.

“‘W.T.’ he had said, taking it down and looking at the artist’s initials. I wonder what they stood for?”

“Winifred Thompson,” said Gay. “Wasn’t that the name of the old lady who lived here last?”

“Oh, now you really are being ridiculous!” exclaimed Oliver. “I can’t see anything at all in this except great dabs of oil paint – I don’t see any images on it. Horrid thing.”

The painting was taken down and Oliver quietly removed it from the house to his smallest garden shed, where he put things they didn’t want, intending to return it to where it had come from, or somewhere like it. Of course, when they walked on the promenade the following afternoon, they didn’t see anything or anybody at all, no Nathaniel, and no woman with a pram and little girl in a cherry red hat and scarf. It was a very lowering day and a storm broke before they returned home. When they did, after taking shelter in a café for an hour or so, they found their new neighbours in some consternation at their gate.

“Lightning struck your smallest garden shed out there, Oliver. It’s gone I’m afraid.”

A fire-engine they had called out had doused the worst and it had not spread.

“How strange,” he said. “Well, I’m sorry, Gay, love, but that’s the end of your painting. I put it in there last night.”

Neither of them remarked on his finding that Nathaniel was the name of the angel of lightning on the previous day, as that was one ridiculous coincidence too many…besides, they were not religious and had no belief in guardian angels, nor in children who were dangerous sprites from some other world. If Gay wondered about how Elia had come into being in W.T.’s painting and whether W.T. had seen Elia too on the promenade back in her day, she made sure not to mention it, and if, for a time, the house felt rather less welcoming than it had done before, then that was no doubt because having your garden shed burn down was rather unsettling, wasn’t it?