THE MAN HE COULD HAVE BEEN

He was an ordinary man — beige shoes, terylene trousers, sweat-inducing poly-something shirts, usually in insipid pale blue under the checked acrylic V-neck jumpers his wife brought home from M&S. His only adventure with colour was a thin stripe of red at the top edge of his beige socks. His light brown hair teetered perilously close to a comb-over, his glasses bordered on the horn-rimmed. He had always worn a tie to work, but lately had abandoned it without quite slipping into the open-neck shirt mode, so that the absence of a tie simply left a void, a blank, as if he had simply forgotten to finish dressing. The bow tie had appealed, of the clip-on variety that he had worn for the wedding of his only son Lawrence. It was dark blue with tiny white spots, falling short of a true polka dot. But when he looked into the mirror he couldn’t muster the debonair smile of an Alan Whicker, nor raise the rakish cad-like sneer of Terry Thomas. The optimism of the dickie bow was so eye-catching that his face could not keep up with it; in fact, he could not see his face at all, so he laid the bow tie to rest in its red Marks and Spencer box and forgot about it.

Muriel now sat, the little red box in her lap. It glared too brightly on her black dress. After the funeral she had roamed around the house, picking up objects at random, as if to test if they were real. She stood in front of her wardrobe but felt revulsion at the floral patterns of every single one of her outfits. Everything was too bright, too gay, stung her eyes with indecent ferocity.
 ‘For heaven’s sake, Mum,’ her son Lawrence said, when he came to the house weeks later, ‘you can’t spend the rest of your life in black.’
 But colours were now as offensive as food for which she had also lost her appetite. Anything brown or beige on her plate was tolerable — porridge, toast, potatoes, Uncle Ben’s rice and Heinz cream of mushroom soup. But carrots and tomatoes and even tinned peas screamed at her and she tossed them into the bin. Had she been able to watch black and white television she would have done so. She sat alone at night with the TV sound switch on mute, just to get the illusion that something was moving in the house. She had turned her armchair to the side, so she wasn’t following a programme at all, but simply got some comfort from the flicker of the images in the corner of her eye.

The day after the funeral she had opened his clothes cupboard and nearly fainted. A pungent scent escaped from it, a mixture of smells she had never noticed while he was alive — Old Spice Aftershave she had foisted on him, thought now she could not recall whether he had ever used it, Imperial Leather soap, the scent of wool that had once been wet, the acrid smell of the log fire, caught somewhere in the synthetic fibres of his jumper imbued with his perspiration — talcum powder, what was that doing there? — and a trace of pipe tobacco which he only ever sucked on during summer Sundays, after lunch in the presence of rare visitors when they sat in the garden. She suddenly found the mixture of odours left behind by the man who was no more unbearable.

The next day she summoned Lawrence and asked him to take all his father’s clothes to the nearby charity shop. The only items she had kept, hidden from her son, was a pair of tan brogues, a tweed jacket, and the bow tie. None of these he had worn more than twice.

The following week she bought a pair of rust- red corduroy trousers. These were the clothes she had wanted him to wear, the style she now wanted to remember him by. She locked the new cords in with the jacket and brogues, to season as salmon does in a smoke house.

She brought the little red box with the bow tie to her nose, inhaled. It didn’t even smell of him, he had not worn it often enough, but somehow the butterfly shape of it sitting on the satin lining of the box, smiling back at her, was everything he could have been.