One Spring Morning
_________
On the way to the university, even though she was running a little late, she stopped at the Post Office, which was just across the road from the campus. The Post Office was Mallory’s favourite place in the village. On pale November mornings, white and gauzy, it seemed like an Edward Hopper painting and on late golden summer afternoons, it took on the imposing air of an Italian palazzo.
This early Spring morning however, it looked like the uncompromisingly grey damp Welsh building it was, though Mallory rarely saw it that way, largely because two of her favourite people in the world worked there: Alun, who was tall and thin and handsome with damson eyes and a calming voice, and Timothy who was short and round and handsomer, with eyes so sparkly that they really could not be said to have a colour all — and whose voice can never adequately be described.
Once each millennium, perhaps, a voice like this is born. Once in a thousand years do the gods descend to bless the tender throat of a newborn babe. But, in Timothy, that is where it stayed — deep in the throat of a protracted infancy, surrendered to a secret twenty years before – when, Mallory knew, he had lost the career of a lifetime. A life of Carreran splendour, a fame of Pavarottian proportions. All the village knew it, though they knew not why. All kept silence. Except, as it turned out, Mallory.
So. Timothy was the Postmaster and Alun was not.
Although she was drawn to them both, Mallory had always thought she liked Alun better (largely because she had never detected an orbital propensity in him so felt free to like him without consequence) and had talked to him more over the years than she talked to Timothy, who most of the time only looked at her with his radiant eyes and flushed when she said good morning. And yet… The first thing that Mallory, in fact, had noticed about Timothy (to her puzzlement since she had always believed that “eyes were the windows of the soul” and always noticed those first) was his sweet and tender mouth, but as he didn’t use it to talk to her much, Mallory found it easier to talk to Alun, whose chivalry was cellular. They had more things in common any way: two sons each, a habit of sacrifice, and a tendency to laugh at the same time for what seemed like no reason at all. Loyalty was their mutual flaw.
But of course having things in common is rarely why one holds another dear, and the real reason that Mallory would sometimes slip into the Post Office on her way home, after a day that had held some secret sorrow, was just to see that Alun, in his mantle of archaic and invisible grace, was still there. His existence reassured her.
That morning only Timothy was there, star-eyed and straight-backed as usual, so Mallory said simply “Good Morning, Postmaster” because he looked so much like the word “Postmaster” with his perfect posture, impenetrable shirt and serious face that it just came out before she thought about it. “Good morning, Lady,” Timothy answered gravely. This was such a lovely thing to hear on one’s birthday that Mallory’s heart skipped a beat and she counted it as her first birthday present. She smiled at him and, when he smiled back, Mallory knew why she had noticed his mouth first and made a mental note (just as she used to in the days when she was writing) that there are other windows into the soul.
And because it was such a morning with the rain beating around them in the warm, empty Post Office and an unaccustomed comfort between them, she forgot she was late and stayed to talk to him. She noticed then, the tired little lines around his eyes, his copper flecked forehead, his faun-like ears and curiously calloused hands. They were getting on very well, as euphemisms go (for in other stories it would be described differently: little tendrils of feeling had begun to reach toward each other– to brush the sensitive surfaces of who and what they were; to shiver, thrill, recoil, return, entwine, crawl up the casings of each other’s ipseity; unknowing, but sensing new life). Getting on very well, then, in Welsh terms, chatting about the news in town (the newly redecorated café, Meic the fishmonger’s new van, the horse show in Newtown, and how nice it was to have winter picnics) when Mallory suddenly asked, in the direct manner of the country she left (and with the grown up part of her voice), “Why did you call me ‘Lady’?”
The feeling in the room flickered, waned and died.
“I don’t know,” said Timothy unhappily, looking almost frightened that he had done something wrong. His eyes went unsparkly, turned an anxious bluish-grey and it was at that moment that Mallory looked into them for the very first time. What she saw there she never told anyone, not even years later when she was a very old lady and what was between them was illuminated. She kept it to herself. She keeps it now.
O no, she thought, a millisecond later, and fell instantly, wholly, in love. This is where the part about being a couplet comes in. For inside Timothy was the loveliest boy she had ever seen — as lovely as the memory of her children, as perfect as any poem, and as alone as she was now. And Mallory went right to the heart of that beautiful boy and heard his trebled song and something inside her said, “I shall never forsake thee.” And that was when Timothy blinked – and the boy disappeared.
They had been engazed, these two, not breathing, not thinking, not blinking until that moment – when Mallory felt the second wrench of her life and again nearly cried-out, “Come back!!” But she did not. Her grownup self took over and said “One first class stamp please,” right over the scream in her heart. And Timothy, who had a grownup self as well, though not nearly as grown up as Mallory’s, turned white and then red and said “Th – th — thirty two pence, please.”
Mallory took the stamp, forgot to pay, left the Post Office, put the letter in the village waste bin instead of the post-box and said to herself, “I shall take up poetry again.”
