Harry

I confess to feeling awe-inspired when I first met Harry. Outclassed perhaps. His off-hand charm – which I would later recognise as shyness, self-distraction or even want of courage – impressed me in the beginning as total confidence.  He would have been handsome in his youth and retained, in his late fifties, some of the associated swagger.

What was it in his pink face, grey hair and aging frame that so distinguished him? His eyes, large and sharply blue, were set in a masculine face. He was of a good height and straight-backed, carrying his clothes well. His jacket of speckled tweed, stretched at the elbows, uneven at the hem, became him better than its crisp new equivalent would ever have done. Beneath it he wore an unlikely shirt of fleecy white with thin blue lines in large squares. That too looked just right, to my way of thinking. Even his woolen tie, knotted awkwardly so that the narrow end was longer than the broad, tempted me to consider foolish emulation of the style.

Embellishing all of the above was his mellifluous voice, in which the softest of Irish twangs soothed the ear the more as the afternoon progressed and the whisky – Scotch as it happened – lent its tenor to the occasion. Harry loved parties and they loved him. Everything he said was positive. A continual smattering of ‘wonderful’s and ‘well done’s augmented the intense interest he appeared to take in everything that was said.

We conversed with a lively Jewish woman. Her name was Lorna, I think. That is to say, Harry and Lorna conversed while I listened. She was clearly enthralled and turned the conversation, naturally enough, to matters of male and female relationships.

‘I was speaking to that woman over there’ she said, with an indicative gesture of her head towards a woman in lustrous pink on the other side of the room. ‘What some poor creatures have to put up with in their husbands!’ So saying, she glanced at Harry as if to add, ’You, of course, would never treat a woman badly.’

I confess to being bored by Lorna. I was in my twenties and of an age when middle-aged women held no interest for me. Who needs mothering? Middle-aged men, on the other hand, represented an opportunity to impress with my manly independence and ambition, and I wanted Harry to myself. 

How fanciful I was, I think in retrospect, to imagine that mimicking Harry would ever be of use to me. What is more, I later learned that the woman in pink was Harry’s wife.