The Forecourts of Victoria

I strolled through the forecourts of Victoria. True to the folk tales it was magnificent with tall arches and big open space. Space and spectacle, dainty footsteps and mighty strides, lavish shoes and endless dreams of pleasant luxuries, food, love, plush puppies, proud men in suits and elegant ladies with the cutest tushes walking across the courts like models through a runway.

I stopped at the flower shop. Where else could I take in the view of kings and queens, duchesses and knights?

Inevitably Sally unleashed her sales spiel on me.  “Reds are for love, canary yellow for friendship, orchids are for funerals and violets would suit anyone close to you. ” She chatted away and I just nodded, happy to be regaled with the coarse cockney rhyme of her native Bethnal Green.

I wasn’t going to let her down. I bought violets and just hung around. I waited around her stall, with one eye on the uneven pattern of crisscrossing work, life, relationships and strife that unfolded before me; and the other on my rendezvous spot ,the front of the bookshop, that lay beyond.

As I stood there my eyes followed lady after lady. They all seem to be easy on the eyes; multi coloured, multi-racial and interwoven into the fabric of modern living. “Rainbow girls,” I thought as my mind and my attention disappeared again.

I re-appeared in a world quite, unlike my lonely planet. I had followed, in my mind’s eye, the frizzy golden brown-haired mixed race girl who walked past five minutes ago. There she is getting on the 3.15 to Croydon. That must be wrong! Surely she should be headed in the other direction, the underground to Knightsbridge?

Never mind, there she goes. The soft sleek swish of her skirt tells me she’s meeting someone she hasn’t seen for years. Her mother and brother for lunch! The first one in five years and she’s late already.

The phone goes.  It was Bernard, her boyfriend, calling to find out how she was. “I’m OK. I told you I don’t expect them to be there. This whole trip is just a final goodbye to all the disappointments of my youth.”

It’s been three and a half years since they met Renata and Bernard in a smoke-filled London Bar, in the days when smoking was still the norm. She was way beyond his league but somehow they got on from the very first. He was funny looking, freckled, gangly and proudly Jewish. But he had something she didn’t have, a family that functioned.

And they took to her like fish to water. She remembered so vividly the first time she met them. She was wearing her deep blue jumper on top of her green and white skirt. She remembers how everyone forgot Bernard and fussed over her frizzy golden brown hair before he could get a look in. Then of course Mama wanted to know everything about her. The rest was easy.

They spent five minutes on the phone Renata and Bernard, talking about the arrangements for the care of Charlie on their weekend away to Aldershot. Charlie was their dog. And they were arranging a minder for him.

They were getting married in two weeks and Bernard thought she ought to try one last time to make contact and establish some kind of relationship. Renata wasn’t so convinced. Her childhood had been filled with disappointments,  a largely absent dad and an ever-behind-time mum.

The train pulled up. And clickerty clack, the myriad sounds of stilettos and Clarks walked up the long corridor to the exit where they all stood in wait like the servants at Downtown Abbey. Mum, Tom and the tallest, prettiest black girl she had never seen before, Lola.

It was a picture she had never imagined. The sun shone through the window that day. It seemed to signal a new dimension, a fresh beginning, a voyage of discovery, the family she’d never known before.

I came back to myself and looked at the courts again. Ah! The endless possibilities of Victoria.

I looked up from my dreams to the bookshop. There at the end of the rainbow were the people of my dreams, Julian and Fiona with my ex-wife and children.

I looked up, as if in search of a physical bow of promise.  Under my breadth I mutter words of gratitude and relief. ‘Thank you for preserving my children.’

Photo credit: graur razvan ionut