Four doors down from my
childhood home was a cosy foyer inhabited by the Pooles, the happiest
couple I have ever known. Tom Poole was a window cleaner, an exemplar
of his trade. He had all he needed: a selection of shammy leathers
and cloths which he was constantly wringing out into his galvanised
bucket, wooden extension ladders that he would stack on his push-cart
and the ability to whistle tunes loudly enough to announce to an
entire street his trundling arrival. And he had Mrs Poole, above all,
he had Mrs Poole.
Mr Poole always looked
at Mrs Poole with a joyous, almost febrile, intensity, as a boy I
assumed it was because he was a bit mad. I later realized that I was
right and that his was a happy madness born of love steeped in
desire. This small epiphany took place when I overheard my mother
talking to an ex-neighbour (an attractive, leggy woman who used to
live at No 3) a couple of decades after our row of houses had been
demolished, they both agreed that they had been envious of the way
Mrs Poole received such lusty attention from her husband. This
surprised me as I had not previously seen the short, almost spherical
Mrs Poole in a sexual light. I was certainly attracted to her when I
was a boy – any time I called by I would be rewarded with a heavy
slab of home-made cake whose secret recipe made my teeth tingle - but
the way she folded her arms over the horizontal planes of her bosom
had never stirred any carnal longings in my prepubescent psyche. Mr
Poole, on the other hand, found her posture so provocative that his
brow would glisten and necessitate vigorous dabbing from his shammy.
Besides being the muse
of a window cleaner Mrs Poole was also by far the most garrulous
person in the row, not that that bothered Tom; he would stand back
indifferent to the incessant torrent of gossip, all the while
feasting his eyes on the curves – or curve, perfect curve –
of his wife who, by the way, was known as “Winnie”. This was not
a contraction of Winifred, but of Lavinia. Lavinia, the flame-haired
oracle of the Aeneid, Lavinia, a name whose liquid euphony would have
had Nabokov ululating in lingual bliss. My mother felt that Lavinia's
parents were irresponsible to give her such a name, wasn't it obvious
it could be shortened to Lav, outside
Lav...
The Pooles had a
daughter, Joan, an only child some ten years my senior. Slightly
plump she seemed genetically destined to assume the geometric form of
her mother, but, to the dismay of shammy-wringers everywhere, this
wasn't to be. I know this because years later, when in my late teens,
I saw a lithe Joan in a Family Planning Clinic. She was unaccompanied
and seemed troubled, not that I cared as I had more pressing
concerns; I was there with my girlfriend who had arranged a
rendezvous to “go on the pill”, a phrase whose revolutionary
promise took me to the brink of cardiac arrest.
I didn't feel at all
comfortable in the clinic. I was there only because my girlfriend
insisted I be and
I couldn't risk my absence threatening my chances
of having an even better time than I was having already. There was a
grown up feel to the place, lots of posters evoking responsibility
and transmittable diseases and other subjects irrelevant to my needs.
I pretended not to notice Joan as she belonged to a childhood I was
keen to distance myself from, though no doubt Joan, had she looked up,
would have seen little change in the boy who would call by for his
cake, the composition of which he was blithely unaware.
