Ever nearer the end

(Still Sunday in Port Brokeferry and we move ever closer to the end of the project ... and already there is another project taking some sort of shape... that feels good (sh!). For now we have a few 'chapters of PB left before Sunday is done.)

LIKE IZZY WAS A CHILD AGAIN

It was like she was a child again. That was what she thought. There was singing coming from her mother’s room and it had been a long time since that was so. Seemed to Izzy that her mother singing had not been heard since her father had gone and now there was a song hung on the day.

‘What’s put a dance in your step?’ her father used to say. ‘What’s set all your words to music? Your thoughts all kicking and pirouetting?’

Izzy wondered if he knew. About the soldier boy still writing to his wife. About Johannes sending cologne-gifts from a place called Ursulaplatz. Izzy recalled a day when the house smelled of cologne, always more in the air when a new bottle had arrived, and always a song from her mother on those days, too. And Izzy crept through to her parents’ bedroom this remembered day. The door was not full-closed and Izzy heard her father say that he loved her and how much he loved her. And that smell, he loved that, too. And Izzy put her face to the crack of the open door and she saw them. Her father standing behind her mother and his arms holding her, close as close. They were looking out of the window and rocking gently from side to side, like they were dancing.

Izzy left her bed and still in her nightdress she tiptoed through to her mother. And it was like being six again, for Izzy smelled 4711, breathed it in. And it had been a long time since it was like that. And like before the door of her mother’s bedroom was not quite closed and like the child she had been Izzy peeped in on her mother.

Izzy’s mother stood at the window looking out on the day. No father there. But it was like there was: Izzy’s mother wrapped in her own embrace and swaying, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. And Izzy thought again that it looked like dancing, like it had looked all those years back.

‘I love that smell,’ said Izzy. And she said it quiet, not wanting to break the spell. ‘I love that smell.’

The singing stopped, but Izzy’s mother continued with her dance.

‘Your father loved it, too,’ she said.

Izzy knew that.

‘Said it was always summer when he smelled that cologne on my neck. Or maybe it was Johannes who said that and I misremember.’

And there it was, the shock of his name in Izzy’s mother’s mouth. She had never heard that before and the six year old child in her started.

‘It is a German cologne. From a place called Koln. But then you know what I am telling you otherwise I would not be wearing it again. And your father loved that smell and said that he did. And I have missed it, as I have missed your father, as I still miss him. But this morning it is like he is back again. Here in the room with me. Funny that smells can do that.’

Izzy held her breath. Stood at her mother’s bedroom door and tried to make sense of what was her mother’s words.

'Thank you, Izzy,' said her mother.