Ali Smith - Autumn

Who’s Mr Gluck? her mother’s new friend Zoe says.

Mr Gluck is a jolly old gay man who used to be our neighbour years back, her mother says. She was very fond of him, he befriended her as a child. She was a difficult child. Pity me. A very difficult child to read.

No he isn’t. Yes I was and still am. And no I wasn’t. In that order, Elisabeth says.

See? her mother says.

I like a difficult read myself, Zoe says.

She smiles at Elisabeth with genuine friendliness. She is in her sixties maybe. She is handsome and unfussily stylish. She is now apparently a pretty well-known psychoanalyst. (Elisabeth had laughed when her mother told her this, at last you’re seeing someone after all the years you’ve needed to, she’d said.) She bears a fleeting ghost of a resemblance to that girl dancing with the phonebox in the film back then; the girl-ghost is a technicolor shimmer somewhere still about her person. Her older self is warm, bright like an apple still high up in a tree after all the others have been picked. Meanwhile Elisabeth’s mother is making an effort, wearing make-up and a set of brand new looking linen clothes like the ones they sell in the expensive shop in the village.

And you’ve kept in touch all these years, Zoe says.

We’d lost touch, actually, her mother says, till a neighbour tracked me down on the net and let me know he’d packed up his house, sold his old Barbara Hepworth piece of holy stone –

Maquette, Elisabeth says.

Oh my goodness, Zoe says. He’s got taste.

— and signed himself into a care home, her mother says. And I happened to tell Elisabeth, who’d been out here to see me a total of, I kid you not, once, in a total of, I kid you not, six years, I told her on the phone, I said oh by the way, old Mr Gluck. He’s in this place called The Maltings apparently not far from here. And I kid you not. She’s been here every week, all this summer. Twice, sometimes. And now she’s living here for a while. Nice having a daughter again. So far, anyway.

Thanks, Elisabeth says.

And now I’m looking forward to a bit of fine-tuned attention myself in my later years, her mother says. All those books I’ve never read, Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, War and Peace. Not that I’ll be able to do my later years quite like Mr Gluck has. He’s a hundred and ten by now.

He’s a what? Zoe says.

She always gets his age completely wrong. He’s only a hundred and one, Elisabeth says.

Zoe shakes her head.

Only, she says. Blimey. Seventy five’ll do. Anything after that, bonus. Well. I’m saying that now. Who knows what I’ll say if I get to seventy five?

He used to set up a projector and a screen in his back garden on summer nights, her mother says, and show her old films, I’d look out the window, it’d be a starry night and they’d be sitting in a little box of light. That was back in the years when we still had summers. When we still had seasons, not just the monoseason we have now. And do you remember the time he threw his watch into the river –

Canal, Elisabeth says.

— and told you it was a time and motion study? her mother says.

What a fine friendship, Zoe says. And you go and see him every week? And read to him?

I love him, Elisabeth says.

Zoe nods.

Her mother rolls her eyes.

He’s pretty much comatose, she says in a more hushed voice. I’m afraid. He won’t.

He isn’t comatose, Elisabeth says.

When she says it she feels the edge of anger on her own voice. She calms her voice down and speaks again.

He’s just sleeping, she says, but for very long times. He’s not comatose. He’s resting. It’ll have tired him out, packing up his house, all his things.

She sees her mother shake her head at her new friend.

Me, I’ll be throwing it all away, Zoe says. Canal, river, wherever’s nearest. Or giving it away. No point keeping any of it.

Elisabeth goes through to the sunroom and lies flat out on the sofa. She’d forgotten the film nights, Chaplin getting a job at the circus as an assistant then pressing by mistake the button he’s been told not to press on the magician’s table and the ducks and the doves and the piglets coming flying out of all the hidden compartments.

So I stood in the hall and phoned the number every week, I was desperate, her mother is saying through in the kitchen, 01 811 8055, I still remember it off by heart, it meant I hardly ever saw the programme, I was always in the hall. But once I’d had the idea, I thought it was so funny, I thought I was the height of wit. So, every week. Then one week I actually got through. And the switchboard girl, they used to sit at the back of the studio and take the calls and write the swaps down, she came on the phone and she said the magic words Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, and I said it, I’m Wendy Parfitt and I’d like to swap my kingdom for a horse, and they put it up on the screen and showed it as one of their top ten swaps, Wendy Parfitt, OFFERS kingdom, WANTS horse.

I once met him, Noel, her friend says. Well, thirty seconds. Very exciting. In the staff canteen.

Our whole life, her mother is saying. My whole life, as a child. The night after our father’s funeral, our mother — I suppose she didn’t know what else to do — switching on the TV, and we all sat there, her too, watching The Waltons, as if it’d make things better, make everything be normal again.

All as mysterious to me, all as exciting, as comforting, as it was to you, her mother’s friend is saying. Even though I was meant to be being such a part of it. And now all anyone wants to know is whether there was any abuse. Did anyone ever do anything they shouldn’t have to us. The people who ask, they’re longing to ask, not just that, they’re longing to hear something bad, they want it to have gone wrong, they always seem disappointed when I say no, when I say that it was a great time, that I loved working, I loved above all being a working actress, I loved it too that I got given the most fantastic clothes, that I taught myself to smoke in the back of the car that picked me up for work and took me home from work — and if I say that , the thing about cigarettes, the eyebrows go up and it’s like that ’s an abuse of innocence, the urge I had to be my older self. The urge we all have to be older, to not be the child any more.

Elisabeth wakes up. She sits up.

It’s getting dark outside.

She looks at her phone. It’s near nine.

She can hear the low murmur of conversation across the hall. They’ve moved to the sitting room. They must have had supper without her.

They’re talking about a particular room they went into in one of the shops on the Golden Gavel shoot. Her mother has told her about this room. It was huge, the room, her mother told her, with nothing in it but thousands of old sherry glasses piled inside each other.

Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility, Zoe says. One kick. Disaster. Careful where you tread. And all the old dial-phones.

The ceramic dogs, her mother says.

The inkwells. (Zoe.)

The engraved silver matchboxes, Anchor and Lion hallmark, Birmingham, turn of the century. (Her mother.)

You’re pretty good at that stuff. (Zoe.)

I watch a lot of TV. (Her mother.)

Got to get out more. (Zoe.)

The butter churn. (Her mother.) The wall-mounted coffee grinder. (Zoe.) The Poole pottery. The Clarice Cliff fakes. The tinplate Japanese robots. (Elisabeth can no longer tell now whose voice is whose.) The Pelham Puppets, remember them, still in their boxes. The clocks. The war medals. The engraved crystal. The nests of tables. The tiles. The decanters. The cabinets. The apprentice pieces. The plant-stands. The old books of photographs. The sheet music. The paintings. And paintings. And paintings.