The Clothes He Wore

NORMALLY I WOULDN’T have found them, because I am an exceptionally lazy housekeeper. Or maybe I’m not so much lazy as inept. I discovered in my teens that if you didn’t know how to do housework, you wouldn’t have to do it, and now that I’m living on my own and have to do it, I don’t know how. Anyway, one summer morning I had the day off. I woke up, saw my messy flat as if for the first time, and got a shock. I fetched the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the bedroom violently; then I pulled the bed back from the wall so that I could suck the filth from the dark, in-between space, and there they were, among the dust and long black hairs (there are always long black hairs, even if you are blond and have no recollection of sharing your bed with a dark-haired person), among the crumbs and lost books and empty ballpoint pens — a pair of his old pyjamas. I switched the vacuum cleaner off. I took his pyjamas in my hands and sat on the bed and tried to think.

He was a man a little older than me and not so good-looking. He used to say I was a “knockout.” I’m afraid his face was too round and pink for me to return the compliment, but he was nice all the same. For two years he would come and visit me. All good things must come to an end, however (Why?), and now all I had was my memories, as they say in the American pop songs, and a pair of his pyjamas.

His initials were embroidered in gold on the breast pocket, and the pyjamas were made of silk: white silk of the very best quality. Lord Byron — who allowed only the whitest, purest, softest silk next to his noble skin — could’ve worn these pyjamas. It was odd to think of him being like Byron, even in such a remote way, and I started to laugh a little, then harder, and then even harder until I was sprawled on the bed, clutching the pyjamas and rolling back and forth. After a few minutes I couldn’t remember what was so funny, and I stopped.

In the movies, after someone dies or leaves, the person left behind will find an article of the departed’s clothing and smell it and start crying softly. I nuzzled my face into the pyjamas and inhaled the fragrance, but they didn’t smell like him. They smelled like pyjamas that had been stuck for over two years between a bed and a wall. I managed to cry anyway. I imagined him coming in and seeing me, and his heart being torn in two, and his saying, “I’ve come back, because I love you with all my soul, and I cannot do without you anymore.” Then I’d raise my tear-stained face to him and say, “You’ll lose everything, everything you hold dear” (meaning, of course, his wife and daughter), and he would take me in his arms and say, “Everything I hold dear, I am holding now.”

Bloody movies. They can completely muck up your mind.

I hung his pyjamas on the line in my grubby little backyard to air them. I won’t say that they looked ghostly and ominous, swinging out there in the breeze, and that I had a terrible sense of foreboding, because they didn’t, and I didn’t. They looked like white silk pyjamas hung out for airing.

Before I went to bed that night, I took his pyjamas off the line and sniffed them. The moldering smell was gone. Maybe the wind peels off surface odors, as though they were thin, filmy layers of tissue paper (rustle, rustle, rustle), leaving only the real scent underneath. In any case his pyjamas smelled like him now.

Most people my age do not own a pair of pyjamas. I sleep in an oversized black t-shirt with a picture of Elvis Presley on the front. That night I decided to wear his pyjamas to bed (my ex’s, not Elvis Presley’s). I was feeling low, and I remembered that the poet Radclyffe Hall used to order new silk underwear from Jermyn Street when she felt oppressed. So I decided that something soft and luxurious was just what I needed to stop my soul from corroding. I slid into his pyjamas and got into bed. I thought I’d dream about him that night, but I didn’t. He was my first thought when I woke up the next morning, however, which was odd, as I’d barely thought about him since the day he’d walked out the door (7:43 a.m., May 17: a sunny morning followed by a cloudy afternoon with periods of drizzle and northeasterly winds). He used to wear beautifully tailored clothes: well-cut trousers, jackets that were works of art, and crisp shirts that I would borrow when I got out of bed to make breakfast. And it suddenly came to me that the clothes people wore told you all you needed to know about them.

I sat on my pillows, hugging my white silk knees hard against my white silk breasts. Then I took the phone from my dressing table and called in sick to work. My supervisor (plain black skirts and neat, unflattering cardigans) said she hoped I’d feel better soon, which meant that she knew there was nothing wrong with me whatsoever.

I got up and drew the curtains back, and the sun poured onto his white silk pyjamas. Epictetus said you should know first who you are and then adorn yourself accordingly. I wondered if this meant that I was lying to myself by wearing a pair of pyjamas that weren’t mine. I wondered if there was any way of getting the pyjamas back to him (my ex, not Epictetus). I could post them, I thought: fold them up neatly, slip them into a brown paper mailing bag, and drop them into the mailbox. They would arrive at his house the very next day. He lived just on the other side of the city in a big, expensive, white, rather ugly house, in a big, expensive, white, rather ugly suburb. (I was about to write, “with his big, expensive, white, rather ugly wife,” but that would be unkind.) I imagined the parcel arriving in the morning. His teenage daughter (dingy-colored smock top and artfully ripped jeans) would get the mail and walk into the open-floor-plan kitchen/living area and hand the morning post around the breakfast table. He would open my parcel, and out would come the pyjamas. “Who on earth sent those?” his wife would ask, and he would reply . . . he would reply . . .

Or maybe the parcel would arrive in the afternoon. Maybe his wife was one of those suspicious sorts who steams open her husband’s correspondence and then glues it up again. Or maybe he would be away at a conference, and she’d worry there was something important in the parcel that he needed for his conference. Maybe she’d phone him, and he’d pick up the phone in Tokyo or New York or Rome, and perhaps he’d have a ghastly premonition as to what the parcel might contain — although, when it comes down to it, a ghastly premonition would be unnecessary if she said, “Darling, there is a parcel here for you. The postmark shows that it is from a suburb in the East End. Do you want me to open it in case it contains some urgent information that you may need?” What would he say?

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE