Wardrobe

THE WARDROBE

A short story by Anjali Paul.
Copyright by Anjali Paul 2001.

He was ten when his mother bought the wardrobe.

His name was Giles Peter Robinson, and she called him Gillie. At
school, they called him Jilly. That was because once, when he was
seven, his mother had come to pick him up in the family Volvo. She had
seen him standing twenty metres away, and called out:
"Gillie! Gillie, I'm over here."

He did not have any friends. He was shy, and furtive; his teachers
always had the feeling that he was up to something; he did not excel in
any particular subject; he was bad at sport. When the other children
were tired of picking on him, they ignored him.

Gillie's mother went to auctions on Saturday mornings. They lived in
Epsom but she travelled all around Surrey; she even went to London.
Their house on College Road had three bedrooms upstairs, a drawing
room, dining room, kitchen, utility room and cloakroom downstairs, and
a garden with apple trees in it. Every single room was full of stuffed
animals, china ornaments, vases, carved tables, chairs, paintings,
cameos. There were antique sculptures in the garden. 'At least they're
not gnomes,' Gillie used to think, surveying the collection of angels
and Venuses outside.

She put the wardrobe in his room, which looked out over the road. She
said:
"You can hang your shirts in it," but he never did.

When he could not sleep, he stared at the designs carved on the
age-stained wood. In the half-light of night, (orange neon shining
through the thin curtains pulled across his bedroom window), the
carvings sometimes seemed to move. There were creatures with furry
goats legs and horns, leering through foliage. There were ships
surrounded by snaking sea-monsters; there were castles; there were men
and women dancing naked under star-hung trees.

Gillie's father was a doctor. He worked in the Surgery on The Parade,
diagonally opposite the Town Hall. Dr. Robinson was a large, loud,
lively man. He was full of jokes and anecdotes; his patients loved him
because he knew how to make them feel as though their symptoms
mattered.

Gillie mostly tried to keep out of his father's way. Sometimes on
Saturdays his
father would take him out to play football on Epsom Downs, just the two
of them. Gillie would desperately chase the muddy ball, his legs
aching, hoping it would end soon, while his father boomed:
"Run boy! Good God, put some oomph into it!"

Gillie wished he was like his father, and sometimes he felt ashamed
because he was not. He was more like his mother. Like Gillie, she had
light brown hair, hazel eyes, long white pliable fingers and very soft,
very pale skin.

He spent a lot of time in his room, especially when his parents were
arguing. The arguments usually began the same way. His father would
accuse his mother of pampering her son; she spent too much time running
after him, she was making him soft. His mother would call his father an
insensitive brute; she said Gillie was sensitive, artistic, and needed
to be nurtured. Gillie just felt guilty, because it was all his fault.
He was too young to realise that the arguments were not really about
him at all.

He did not know exactly when he first sat inside the wardrobe. There
was no catch on the doors, so he could close them and push them open
from the inside. Once inside, he could never hear anything at all from
the outside world, neither the droning traffic nor his parents' raised
voices. At first he felt as though he was enveloped in a bubble of
silence; he pictured it in his mind like one of those plastic bubbles
that children with no immunity to disease live in. He had seen one on
television once. Then, gradually, he realised that there were sounds in
the silence, like the lapping of waves, or the rustling of wind through
trees; soft sounds that lulled him into a kind of trance, until, after
a time, he could enter the myriad worlds of the wardrobe.

He would be a pirate, capturing strange ships on stranger seas, filled
with sea monsters and sighing, singing mermaids. He would be an
explorer, hacking his way through lush jungles, discovering ancient
cities carved in gemstones. He would find himself in the ice deserts of
the North Pole; he would have to sail across an ocean full of giant
squid on an iceberg, navigating it into warmer waters, and when the
iceberg melted he would ride a hump-backed whale to a tropical island
where parrots and macaws flashed through palm trees and humming birds
sipped nectar from tiger lilies and a tribe of beautiful strangers
would make him their honorary king.

When he was outside the wardrobe, Gillie read books about the places
that were like those that he had imagined; and after a while, the grey
world of school and his parents arguments did not seem all that
real.

He was sixteen when he got A's for his Geography and English Literature
'0' levels, and failed the six other subjects that he had taken.

He father could not look him in the eye. His mother was worried about
his future. Gillie knew everything would be all right, that one day he
would be famous. His father said that he had better get a job. When
Gillie thought about it, he realised that he did not know what he
wanted to do for a living, so he applied for a job in the Civil
Service. He was taken on as an Administrative Assistant in the
Department of Customs and Excise. He lived at home and commuted to
London to work; the Customs and Excise Offices were behind the South
Bank Centre. He spent his days filing, sorting post, running errands,
sending faxes, and learning how to use the computer system. It was easy
work.

He enjoyed having money. He liked the people he worked with, they all
went for a drink after work sometimes. After he had worked for a year
he had saved enough money to buy an inter-rail ticket, and to live on
for three weeks. He was going to start travelling, and see the world,
but Gillie knew how important money was, and he did not want to go
hungry, so he had planned it all quite carefully. He would start with
this short trip through Europe, then when he came back, he would start
saving for a round the world air ticket. When he had enough money, he
would take a year off work, and while he was travelling, he would write
a book.

He had never been out of Britain. His parents hated the idea of going
abroad: they took their holidays in Wales or Scotland. He had a list of
youth hostels in Europe, he had a rucksack and a calor gas stove and
some tinned food; he had a pair of hiking boots and three weeks
holiday; he was ready to go.

He took a train to Dover, a ferry to Calais, and another train to
Paris. He stood in the huge Parisian railway station, and happiness
welled up inside him, flowing from his eyes in tears like rainbows. It
was July, early evening, the air was effervescent with the scent of
coffee, perfume, fried meat. Even the stop and go signals on the
pedestrian crossings seemed jauntier than their Anglo-Saxon
equivalents.

He walked through the city , savouring it as though it was an exotic
meal, he reached Notre Dame as the sky fell softly into night. There
were steps going down the hill from the Cathedral, he walked down them.
At every stage there were groups of people, sitting, talking, singing,
strumming on guitars. He walked down until he reached the banks of the
Seine, and there were no more people. Huge walkways defined each bank
of the river, bridges arched over it, nothing was reflected in the
dark, slowflowing water that evening.

'It looks like the Styx must have looked,' Gillie thought. ' Even the
starlight is quenched by it. Tomorrow, I'll find a place where I can
swim in it, I'll submerge my whole body in it, and when I come out
again, I'll be invincible like Achilles almost was.'

He didn't feel like going to a youth hostel tonight. He would sleep
here. He found a place on the walkway near a bridge, and unrolled his
sleeping bag. Curled up inside it, he stared at the rust-coloured sky
until he fell asleep.

"I can kill you, you know."
Gillie heard the whisper through the sleep fog in his head. It wasn't a
dream. He knew that because he could feel cold steel pressed against
his throat, and a hand twisting his hair. He opened his eyes and met a
doleful stare. The man was unshaven. He looked dangerous.

"I won't kill you," he said, "because I am a nice boy. I am a nice boy
but a poor boy. I have to eat, like you, you know."

Gillie nodded. The man seemed to want reassurance, and looked as though
he was capable of killing to get it.

"I knew you would understand. If you give me your money, I will not
hurt you at all."
He jerked Gillie's hair painfully to let him know what would happen if
he did not give him his money.

"Urr." Gillie said, as the man shook him out of the sleeping bag. He
rolled it up and tied it to the rucksack. Then he took Gillie's money
belt and his watch too.

"Mmm...travellers cheques...good...ah good...passport," he said,
checking the contents of the money belt. "That will fetch good money. I
will be able to buy nice presents for my old mother and my four
sisters."
"I'm so glad," Gillie said dryly.
"Bless you," the man whispered as he melted into the shadows of the
embankment.

Gillie sat down, and stared at the river for a long time.

'If he hadn't had a knife,' he thought, 'I would have wrestled him to
the ground.'
He did not really believe himself, and felt guilty for being such a
coward. When it was light, he set off to find the British Embassy. He
had no money, no passport, and no rucksack. Paris was all wrong.

He phoned his mother from the Embassy.
"For God's sake come home," she said. "I'll wire you the money at once.
You could have been killed."
He was back at home that evening.

He had dinner, a hot bath, and went to bed. He could not sleep. He got
out of bed and stepped inside the wardrobe, sat in it with his arms
around his knees.

There was the real Paris. He was standing shivering on the walkway by
the Seine, while the man tied his sleeping bag to his rucksack. Faster
than light, he kicked the man to the ground, knocked him cold. After
contemptuously tucking a hundred franc note into the unconscious man's
shirt pocket, he picked up his rucksack and went to find a cafe that
was open early. He found one, ordered pain au chocolat and coffee. A
beautiful girl came in. Their eyes locked as he was lifting his cafe au
lait to his lips. Her name was Jeanne. She took him to her attic flat,
gave him lunch, dinner and her body. Gillie sent her out to buy him
paints, canvas, and an easel; he painted her nude by an open window
with the afternoon light streaming over her olive skin. He became a
celebrated artist, and Jeanne always sat at his side, silent and
adoring, in the crowded cafes where other artists, writers, poets,
gathered to listen to his opinions on life, art, politics,
women...

When Gillie was tired of his life as a bohemian artist, he stepped out
of the wardrobe, and went to sleep.

***

He was twenty when his father developed cancer. He was still living at
home, and he had almost saved enough for a round the world air ticket.
In another two years he would be able to go. He had been promoted at
work - he was an Administrative Officer now. He could have afforded to
rent a room in London, but his mother cooked his dinner, washed and
ironed his clothes, and still thought he was special, so he saw no
reason to move. He was comfortable at home. Until his father developed
cancer.

Gillie's mother fell apart. His father grew thinner, paler, quieter;
his mother could hardly bear to be near him. His father moved into the
guest room, his mother did everything for him though she felt sick at
the thought of touching his decaying flesh. Gillie's father watched his
wife denying him, and he would not give up. He gave up work, he gave up
his social life ( he found other people's pity embarrassing, even his
wife's unspoken distaste was easier to bear); but he would not give up
his life.

In pain, he insisted on walking around the garden every morning, his
head up, his shoulders back, his step brisk. Gillie and his mother went
to bed every night wondering whether they would find him dead in his
bed the next morning.

Gillie watched his parents' relationship disintegrate as inexorably as
his father's body; his father was dying alone.

Gillie stayed out most nights; on his way home from work he would stop
off at the Kings Arms on Church Road and stay there until closing time.
He struck up a kind of friendship with a group of the regulars. They
went to nightclubs in Sutton and Kingston on Saturdays, and tried to
pull; Gillie went with them but he usually just stood at the bar and
drank.

He lost his virginity to a drunken girl after closing time one night,
in St. Martin's churchyard, across the road from the Kings Arms. Up
against a tree, he pushed himself into her, and it was over before it
began. They both staggered off in different directions afterwards, and
he was so drunk that night that he was never quite sure which girl it
was afterwards. In reality, he had lost his virginity years ago to a
beautiful girl in the wardrobe, in a garden where the scented petals of
summer drifted around their naked bodies, and fireflies sparkled in the
air when the blue dusk dropped over their spent limbs like a quilt of
eiderdown.

He could not remember the name of either girl, and it did not really
matter, because his father was killing Gillie and his mother by
refusing to die.

When the pain was unbearable, Dr. Robinson's doctor gave him a morphine
injection. One day - it was a Sunday - the doctor said:
"You know, you can let him go on like this until the end, or you can
make it easy for him."

Gillie and his mother avoided each other's eyes. The doctor continued
kindly
"I think it would be for the best. I can give him an injection right
now that will save him from maybe another week, maybe another month of
agony. He really is not likely to last any longer than that."

Gillie thought
'He doesn't want to die,' but he didn't say anything.

His mother stared at the doctor s shoes.
"The doctor knows best," she said.
She was talking to Gillie, but she was not looking at him.

Gillie said nothing.

The doctor said;
"That's settled, then," and he went upstairs.

Gillie waited until the doctor came downstairs. His handshake was warm,
firm, and
trustworthy.
"It was for the best," he said reassuringly, going into the drawing
room.

Gillie walked up the stairs. It took him so long that he thought he
must have aged a year before he reached the landing.

His father was lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling.
"I came to see how you were," Gillie said. His father said
nothing.

'He knows,' Gillie thought. 'He knows,' and shame and guilt flooded
through him. The man in the bed watched him, his eyes tired and
resigned to the inevitable.

'We forced him to give up,' Gillie thought.
His father closed his eyes and Gillie crept out of the room.

It did not take him long to die.

"Oh God," his mother said. "Oh..."
Gillie heard the words she did not add out loud... 'thank God.'
She stared at the carcass that had been her husband, then hugged her
son fiercely.
"You'll always take care of me, won't you?" She asked desperately.
Gillie nodded. He could not trust himself to speak, and his skin
crawled at her touch.

Afterwards, he and his mother went through the motions, avoiding each
other's eyes, because neither of them wanted to admit what they felt to
each other. It was over.

After the funeral, Gillie went up to his room, and sat at his dressing
table, and stared at himself in the mirror, wondering if he was wholly
human, hating himself for feeling relieved.

***

He was twenty-five when he met Ellen. He had long since given up the
idea of going around the world, because his mother needed him to look
after her. He had joined an amateur dramatics group in London instead.
At first he just helped them to paint scenery, or build sets, then he
started playing small parts in their productions. Ellen was thirty,
divorced, with a four year old son called Sean. She was Irish, she was
a teacher, she was attractive rather than pretty, but she was one of
the best actresses ever to audition for the Ealing Players, so she got
the part of Wendy in their forthcoming production of Peter Pan. Gillie
was one of the lost boys.

Ellen was different from anyone else he had ever fancied. He felt as
though she would like and accept him whatever he did, so he felt
comfortable with her, and after he had known her for a few weeks he
felt as though he had known her for years.

He even told her that he had wanted to be an explorer once (though he
could not tell her about the wardrobe). She laughed and told him that
he had the look of a poet in his eyes. Ellen called him Gill, with a
hard G. It made him feel like a man. It made him feel as though he was
special to her, because everyone else, apart from his mother, called
him Giles. He started to think of himself as Gill.

Ellen had her own house in Ealing, she was still on friendly terms with
her ex-husband. Gill's mother hated Ellen; she said she was too loud,
too old, too divorced, and too much of a single mother for him. Gill
never said anything to his mother when she started criticising Ellen,
but he stayed in Ealing most nights, and he got on well with Sean. He
even managed to be polite to her ex-husband, though he hated Ellen
spending time with anyone but himself.

Ellen had a large circle of friends, and she forgave him for spending
whole evenings sulking at their houses because she was not paying
enough attention to him. Gill hated himself for doing that, for causing
uncomfortable atmospheres at dinner parties, but he could not help it,
especially when he was drunk. Ellen saw him as a lost boy, and in her
arms he felt safe, but he never believed that she would stay with him
until she asked him to marry her.

He said yes, and they bought a diamond ring together, and Gill's mother
looked at him as though he had stabbed her in the back when he told
her. Gill moved into Ellen's house, and his mother threw out all the
things he had left behind in his room, she even sold the wardrobe. Gill
did not say anything when he found out about that, but there was a
curious empty feeling in the pit of his stomach afterwards, which never
really went away.

Gill and Ellen were married in August, the year Gill was twenty-six. He
had never been happier. Ellen was a divorced catholic but they still
managed to find a church they could get married in. His mother came to
the wedding; they called an uneasy truce. They had the reception in
Ellen's garden, and Sean had too much ice-cream and was sick, and
Ellen's family - three brothers, two sisters, assorted husbands and
wives, poured whisky down Gill's throat until he passed out on the sofa
at nine o'clock.

He woke up at one o'clock in the morning, and found that they had
festooned him with condoms blown up like balloons, hung them in
garlands around his neck and tied them to his arms and legs. Gill
staggered up to the bedroom where Ellen lay asleep and collapsed onto
her in an explosion of rubber; she woke up with a scream that turned
into a shout of laughter and they made love until dawn.

Gill still had the money he had saved up to go around the world, He had
spent some on the engagement ring and some more on the wedding, but
there was still enough left over for a honeymoon in Paris. This time,
Paris was almost as good as the wardrobe. They stayed in a three star
hotel, and for a week they made love, ate, walked around the city, and
drank sparkling white wine. By the end of the week Gill was exhausted -
he also had a ferocious pain in his back because he had started smoking
unfiltered Gitanes. They came back tired and happy and for a while the
glow lingered about them.

Ellen started to spend more and more time at the theatre where the
Ealing Players were based. Gill was content to stay at home, watching
Sean and the television. At first, Ellen wished that he would come out
with her more often, after a while, she preferred to go out without
him, because socially, he was awkward, and he still lapsed into a sulk
if he thought she was not paying him enough attention. When they went
out together she found it difficult to talk to anyone else, in case
Gill felt left out.

Gill did not mind Ellen going out without him, unless he got drunk.
When he was sober, he trusted her. He wished that they could just go to
places together, just the two of them, without a crowd of unnecessary
people around them.

Ellen started criticising him for something that he could not
understand. She said he did not do enough around the house. He should
be able to fix door-knobs, broken catches on windows, the plumbing; he
should be able to keep the house looking beautiful.

"We can afford to pay people to do that sort of thing," Gill
said.
"But it's your job. That's what husbands are for," Ellen said.
"You should have written out a full job description before we got
married," he snapped.

Gill could not understand why Ellen did not accept him as he was
anymore, now that he was her husband and not her lover. When he thought
about that, he sulked, and Ellen would not know what was wrong. She
could not have any more children, she had had to have a hysterectomy
due to excessive bleeding after she had had Sean, and sometimes when
Gill was sulking she would ask:

"Do you regret marrying me? Do you want children of your own?"

Gill did not. He had never seen the point of having children. Ellen
never really believed him when he told her that.

They never really argued, because Gill would not. If he sensed an
argument brewing, he would go to the pub, hoping it would have blown
over by the time he got back. Ellen had started taking sleeping pills
for her insomnia, so she was always asleep when he got home. Once; a
woman in the pub invited him back to her flat, he accepted her
invitation and they had awkward sex on her sofa, he left after an hour
and a half without asking her name, and when he got home at one o'clock
Ellen was asleep, so he never felt guilty, and after a while he forgot
about it.

They stopped making love. He would reach out for Ellen in bed and she
would turn away. He did not know what to do. He felt her slipping away
from him as he lay awake at night, words swirling in his head, words
that seemed to come from nowhere.

'I rush over her like a waterfall crashing against the steel green
granite rocks below,' he thought, 'I want to merge with her, mesh with
her, I want our disparate atoms to create intricate patterns out of the
chaos of our flailing flesh but she won't let me in. She holds her
shape like a shield, I crash against it, she sends me spraying into the
damp air. Like a glacier chilled by a vision of eternity I could carve
a shape into her, little by little, so she could hold me in her time
worn grooves, but she has polished her shape like armour to defend
herself against me, and defenceless, I slide over it and evaporate in
the moonlight, alone and still myself....'

Words flooded through him, into his body and out again into the long
cold nights. He did not know what to do with them, so he let them
go.

On his thirtieth birthday Ellen went to the theatre to rehearse a new
play. Gill did not know what it was. He put Sean to bed and sat up,
drinking whisky.
"You hate me, don't you?" he said, when she came back. "No," she said,
"but it doesn't work, and I want a divorce." Gill said nothing.

"I can't stand the loneliness anymore," she said. "I miss romance.
You've never once bought me flowers. I miss having someone I can talk
to. You're not even useful around the house."
Gill was surprised, because Gill thought he had been the lonely one. He
had thought loneliness was a fact of life, he thought everybody had an
empty feeling in the pit of their stomachs, he had never expected not
to feel lonely.

He finished his drink, and Ellen went to bed. He slept on the sofa;
somehow, he thought he ought to. The next day Ellen took Sean to school
and went to work, and Gill phoned in sick. He sat in the kitchen for a
long time, waiting to feel something. He was surprised to find that he
had been waiting for Ellen to leave him for a long time, and now that
it had happened, it was as though a weight had lifted from him. He
wondered if he was wholly human, and hated himself for feeling
relieved.

Gill moved out, of course. One of the members of the Ealing Players was
looking for a lodger; he was called Herman, and Gill had been to his
house before, he got on reasonably well with him, as well as he got on
with anybody, so he felt comfortable about moving in.

Gill's mother was glad . She had the grace not to say 'I told you so,'
but the words hung in the air over her head like a neon sign whenever
they met.

'Oh well,' Gill thought, ' Ellen never really loved me anyway,' and
that is when the pain started.

Gill and Ellen stayed on friendly terms, it was so much easier once
they had separated and only had to meet for leisurely lunches. He took
his anger with her out on a succession of women who could not wait to
ease his loneliness; one by one they found him unreachable; he hardly
knew that they existed.

Two years rolled by. Gill was promoted at work, to Executive Officer.
He was in charge of seven people. He started putting some money into a
savings account again. Maybe one day he would go around the world after
all.

When the divorce was due to become final, he thought

'If that's what she wants, so be it.' He discovered that he had been
hoping that she would change her mind. She did not. There was nothing
to say anymore so Gill said nothing, but he never gave Ellen his half
of the money for the divorce, which came to sixty pounds.

***

He was thirty-five when his mother was killed in a car crash, just
outside
Leatherhead . The family Volvo was a write-off. They had almost grown
close
again, since his divorce, though they never talked about his father or
about
Ellen. He used to go to antique fairs and auctions with her
sometimes.

He was still a lodger in Herman's house; they had become good friends.
He was still an Executive Officer at work, where he was respected for
his methodical approach.

He took three weeks off work, to arrange the funeral. Only ten people
came. He stood in the drizzling rain in the cemetery in Epsom where his
father was also buried, and realised that the emptiness in the pit of
his stomach was the one true yardstick by which he could measure his
life.

His mother had left him the house, so he moved back into his old room.
Herman said he would miss him, so Gill said
"We'll still play chess at least once a week," and they did.

The first week of his leave was over, there were two left to go, and
Gill did not know what to do. He could not go back to work early, it
would not look right. He started going up to London in the evening,
walking the streets all night, and catching the early train home. He
searched the faces of tramps and prostitutes for answers to questions
that he did not know how to ask, he sat with the homeless on the
Embankment. One night he found the cardboard city near Waterloo, and
stood at the entrance; a shabby, shambling middle-aged man holding a
bottle of whisky. They thought he was one of them, so they ignored him,
all except one woman with long matted hair the colour of bones and
moonlight.

She caught hold of his hand and led him down the avenue of shanty
shacks that lined the concrete tunnel. They were made of cardboard and
plywood, hardboard and sheets of plastic. Blankets hung over doorways,
dull eyes watched him walk past. His head was spinning with whisky and
a touch of fear, he did not know what she was going to do.

She led him into her own home, pushing aside a grey blanket. There was
nothing much inside, a few carrier bags full of clothes and a sleeping
bag.

"I'm one of the lucky ones," she said lifting up her skirt. The map of
her life was etched onto her face and body in wrinkles, her legs were
covered in varicose veins, he gave her some whisky and took what she
was offering. As he finally shuddered into her, he found himself
weeping. Afterwards, he sat up, while she lay sleeping, reading the
raised veins in her legs with his fingers, as though they were
Braille.

'The secret of life is written in code in thick blue lines on the legs
of old women,' he thought. He finished the whisky but he could not
decipher the language.

He got up, left a ten pound note on her stomach, and staggered to
Waterloo station to catch the first train home. It was Friday. His
leave was nearly over.

He slept the whole day and night through, and on Saturday morning, he
decided to go to an auction in memory of his mother. He felt he ought
to do something like that. There was one in Ashtead at two-thirty. The
first item up for sale was his wardrobe. He breathed a long, shuddering
sigh of relief, and bought it. He hired a van to take it home , he put
it back in his room where it belonged, running his hands over the
carvings that were as familiar to him as his own features, and went
back to work on Monday with a quiet smile in his eyes.

***

He was forty-nine when he realised that he was content. He was a
Principle Officer at work, in charge of a small department that dealt
with training schemes all over Europe; customs officials from Britain
were sent to different European countries to learn about their
regulations. He was not ambitious, which was just as well, it meant
that he was well-liked at work, by his superiors as well as his staff.
He smoked and drank far too much but then most people did, and if he
made the occasional error it was always easily rectified.

Some of his colleagues had become friends over the years, there were
always two or three work related social events a month, and on the
eleventh of June every year, on his birthday, his department gave him a
card and took him out for a drink.

He still played chess with Herman once a week, and he had a steady
relationship with a woman from a different department at work, called
Eleanor. She was forty-five, she had been divorced too, they had been
together for six years and spent three or four nights a week with each
other. Gill sometimes thought uneasily that they ought to get married,
but she never made any reference to marriage, or any demands on him,
and he thought that they were both content with their lives as they
were, so why change?

Eleanor had dark hair and a plump, motherly body, like Ellen, but the
resemblance ended there. Ellen had re-married long since, he had lunch
with her occasionally, but the memories still rankled. He had not told
Eleanor about the wardrobe, though, because he did not really know how
to. He was not sure whether he ever wanted anyone to know, and that was
a good reason for staying single too.

Then, he was offered early retirement. He did not have a choice. The
Government was cutting back on public sector spending; he had to go. He
would get a lump sum of twenty thousand pounds, and he would be able to
draw his full civil service pension. It was a good deal, as redundancy
deals go.

"What are you going to do?" Eleanor asked, wrapping her arms around
him. They were in bed, in her flat in Chiswick. Her bedroom was lit by
a soft pink light bulb, the carpet, curtains and duvet were soft pink
too. She had always been so brisk and efficient at work, that he had
been quite unprepared for the softness and pinkness of her bedroom. The
first time that he had seen it, it had touched him and made him feel
very tender for a moment.

Gill sank his face into her yielding, naked shoulder.
"I'm going to go around the world, and write a book," he said. "Maybe
rent out the house while I'm away."
"Oh Gill," Eleanor said "I do wish you would be serious."
Gill stared at her.
"I am serious," he said.
Eleanor laughed.

"You! Travel around the world! Gill, you won't even go on holiday -
I've never managed to drag you anywhere!"

'There never seemed to be the time," Gill said guiltily, because he had
never wanted to spend more than a few days away from the wardrobe, and
he still had not managed to work out how to take it with him without
arousing a certain amount of suspicion. Anyway, how could he have spent
money on holidays, when he saved a third of his salary every month for
his trip around the world? He had not realised that Eleanor thought he
hated travelling.
"And you know how time consuming work can be," he finished,
lamely.

"If you go, what about us?" She asked, almost nervously.
"It wont be forever."

Eleanor turned her face away from him.

"Come with me," he said, surprising himself, because though he was very
fond of her , he had never given her much thought. She was there, like
his house and his job.

Eleanor smiled.
"Oh Gill," she said, "at least one of us has to work."
Gill laughed.
"So you'll take care of me, will you?"
"Of course," she said.
"Then I'll never have to worry," he said glibly, not really thinking
about what he was saying because her warm body was next to him and her
scent was all around him, but Eleanor took him seriously.

He was due to leave the Civil Service at the end of June. Summer was
light, bright, and delicate this year, it was the second week of June
and people were streaming into Epsom for the races and the fair on the
downs, though the Derby had already been and gone.

"It's happening at last," Gill thought. He was sitting at home, with a
whisky and soda in his hand, on the evening before his birthday. He was
finally going to be able to do all the things he had dreamed of doing
for so long, and he would put the twenty thousand pounds into a high
interest deposit account so that he would have plenty of money to come
back to.

He finished his whisky and soda and stretched his arms high above his
head. Life was perfect. He climbed the stairs to his room two by two.
He felt like a boy. The wardrobe shone in the corner of his room.
Eleanor had only seen it once, briefly, because when she stayed he used
the master bedroom that had once belonged to his parents. She hadn't
really noticed it on the guided tour of the house that he had given her
the first time she came to stay.

He could hear the faint sounds of the wardrobe already, the distant
lapping of those now familiar waves; he could almost smell salt sea
air, laden with the fragrance of jasmine and tuberoses.

He shut the wardrobe doors carefully behind him. That was a good idea.
He would start in the South Seas...and he was on a sailing ship as
light and taut as a kite, the islands spread out before him like jewels
scattered on the azure water, from the hands of the gods

He was fifty when Eleanor found him.

He had not been into work on his birthday, she was worried. She had the
keys to his house, though she never went over without phoning first.
She tried calling all day from work, no-one picked up the phone. Gill
never took a day off unless he was too ill to move.

She caught a train to Epsom after work, and took a taxi to his house.
There was a milk bottle on the doorstep. She looked through the whole
house, until she finally came to his room. It was strange, she thought
she could smell salt sea air, mixed with a hint of jasmine and
tuberose.

She saw the wardrobe in the corner of the room; she had never really
noticed it before. She thought it was an ugly thing, it was made of
plain dark wood, with no carvings or decorations on it at all, though
it had obviously been well polished over the years. The doors of the
wardrobe were wide open, and then she saw Gill. He was sitting inside,
fully clothed, arms hugged around his knees, stiff as a statue. He must
have died exactly like that, she thought.

Hot, angry tears blurred her sight, so that at first she did not see
the look on his face. When she could focus, she saw that he was
smiling, as though at a distant vision, and reflected in his eyes she
almost saw, slowly fading, the glow of the most beautiful sunset that
he had ever seen.

Copyright by Anjali Paul 2001.