‘I’m so glad you came!’ Spotted, happy hands clap together as Velma opens the door wider.
Maya smiles nervously.
‘Well I didn’t know if you meant it,’ she says, as Velma beckons her into a treasure trove of clutter, where a seat isn’t adorned without at least three mismatched velvet cushions and you can’t see the walls for books.
Velma looks puzzled. ‘Why would I say something I didn’t mean?’
New York attitude meets British reserve.
‘Oh, sorry.’
Maya feels bad. Firstly for imposing on a Sunday afternoon, and secondly for trying to second-guess someone who was just being nice. But something made Maya visit today, although she’s not sure what. As she walks sheepishly into the apartment, she worries she might be breaking a teacher/pupil code that doesn’t apply to volunteers or their septuagenarian students. Especially not two who warmed to each other so naturally.
Velma takes Maya’s pink cocoon coat and throws it onto a threadbare chair piled with three plump cushions at a console table under an open window. On the other side of it window boxes tell tales of frost and neglect. Gardeners’ Question Time blasts from the radio in the kitchen just off the living area where two mismatched camelback sofas reveal elegant wooden ankles below colourful tasselled throws and more velvet cushions.
‘Cup of tea?’ Velma says with affected British propriety.
Maya would never say no to such beautiful diction. ‘Yes please.’
‘Hang on, let me switch that off. I don’t know why I listen to it, I don’t even have a garden!’ Velma chuckles as she kills a switch at the plug next to the kettle and the Sunday lunch bustle from the pizzeria underneath them starts to rise. ‘Company, I guess.’
Maya studies the bookshelves and wraps her arms around her ribs to warm up. An arctic blast is coming through the window Velma obviously keeps open all year round.
‘This is wonderful, Velma! I’m amazed you live here.’
Here is the noisiest sixty-five square metres in the entire town, above Hazelworth’s most bustling Italian restaurant and next to its old corn exchange, where merchants made their money and a town was built upon the grain trade. Nowadays drunken girls tumble out of the old corn exchange in miniskirts and bra tops, onto the market square, where they might end up plying a less wholesome trade.
‘Are you kidding? In London I lived on Old Compton Street, in Paris it was Pigalle, and you couldn’t tear me away from San Telmo in Buenos Aires. This is eerily quiet.’
Maya laughs.
‘But I was born on Broadway. I adore noise. Why do you think I’m moving to South Beach? I am not a country mouse.’
‘So how did you end up here?’ Maya’s nose crinkles as she says it.
‘In suburbia?’
A kettle rumbles in a battle against limescale Velma refuses to remove, lest it make for a quieter boil.
‘Conrad and Christopher thought I should slow down. When I hit seventy, I agreed. So they came over and wheeled me out to the sticks. Actually it was prompted by my being mugged in Soho, which was particularly mean since I had lived there for so long and never once encountered a bad word or a single ruffian there, until the day a tourist snatched my purse. But the flat on Old Compton Street was pretty run-down and hard to negotiate, I needed something…’ She looks around at organised chaos and waves an arm, ‘Calmer. Conrad and Christopher are strapping boys – you’ve seen them! – but they’re not much help over in New York. So I promised them I would try a quieter pace of life.’ Velma raises an eyebrow above a thick lens.
‘Do you hate it?’ Maya winces, feeling guilty that Hazelworth – her Hazelworth – isn’t as exciting as Soho or Manhattan.
Velma busies herself in the kitchen beyond glass doors that look like they’re made of ice cubes, and are propped open with towers of books.
‘I don’t love it. Hence the Florida plan. It’s fun there, it’s warm there, I can continue my work… and it’s in the same time zone as my sons.’
‘And grandchild!’ Maya calls, turning around from the bookshelf to a beaming old lady in the kitchen.
‘And grandchild,’ Velma smiles, rubbing her hands together. ‘Plus Florida is where we middle-class Americans go to see out our lives in the sunshine. It’s the right move for me now.’
‘Oh don’t say that!’
‘It’s true.’
‘So you still work?’ Maya asks, staring at the spines of the books on the shelf, as she did in her parents’ bedroom as a child. Wuthering Heights, Shantaram, Strangers On A Train.
‘I will work forever, my darling, it’s all I know.’ Velma carries a tray through into the living space, and perches it on the coffee table in front of the camelback sofas. She edges magazines out of the way with a shaky elbow.
‘Ooh let me help you,’ says Maya, holding out two hands.
‘I got it.’
‘What do you do?’ Maya feels bad for assuming Velma was retired. She’s known her for five months now, and didn’t even know that she worked. From looking around the apartment, Maya assumes Velma must be an academic, and feels somewhat embarrassed about the fact she comes up with silly names for clothes for a living.
‘I’m an agony aunt.’
Maya’s mouth hangs open. She’s never met an agony aunt before. ‘Wow!’
‘Radio, magazines, books… Less radio now, as I am finding it harder to get to the studio, but that was the same when I was only travelling in from Soho. My old legs need that Florida sunshine!’
Now the tea and sympathy make sense and Maya feels a little, well, exposed.
‘How do you take it?’
‘White, no sugar thanks.’
Velma tilts the chipped Royal Albert teapot towards one of the mismatched china cups, then lifts a floral milk jug, pours, and stirs with a fragile hand. Clank, chink, splosh.
‘Oh silly me, I forgot the cake.’ Velma shuffles back to the kitchen in the same shoes-cum-slippers she wears to class.
‘Do you always have cake on the go?’ asks Maya, seeing something of herself in Velma. A sweet tooth and once-adventurous spirit.
‘Uh-huh. In truth I don’t have many visitors since I moved here – my London flat was always bustling, in fact it was hard to get any work done with all the friends I had dropping by. But I’m a creature of habit, I like to have a fresh bake on the go in case I do, and baking is wonderfully therapeutic. Although I’m a little naughty and eat all the time when I’m writing. My hips certainly know it.’
Maya doesn’t think Velma could possibly have any hips under her baggy grey jumper.
‘Here, lemon and poppyseed.’
Maya takes a pale green tea plate with gold trim and tiny white polka dots and inhales the citrus scent and smiles. ‘Oh I totally understand that mindspace you get from baking – and the sweet reward at the end of it.’
‘You bake too?’
‘Yeah I love it. I moved in on my own just before Christmas so I’ve upped the ante since then. I finally bought my own place,’ says Maya as she lowers a brass fork into yellow crumb.
Velma laughs. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘Sweetie, I have never owned my own place, so don’t feel bad. I have lived on my own for a long time though – longer than you’ve been alive in fact, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Not now anyway.’
The teacher and the pupil eat cake.
‘So tell me about yourself, Miss Oh Just Maya.’
Maya feels sad that she has nothing to tell. Velma can tell Maya feels sad.
‘Are you dating?’
‘Not really. There’s no “special someone”.’
‘Anyone not special but just a bit of fun?’ Velma gives a cheeky laugh.
Zingy lemon flavours burst in Maya’s mouth with the realisation that she is having afternoon tea with a kindly woman who clearly wants to know more about her – oh, and who just so happens to be an agony aunt. Her shoulders relax a little.
‘Actually there is someone. But it might sound silly.’
Velma pushes thick glasses down her long nose and looks at Maya with unmagnified, understanding eyes. ‘Honey, remember your audience. Nothing relating to matters of the heart will ever sound silly to me. I have genuinely heard it all.’
‘There’s a man who gets my train to work in the morning. Train Man.’ Maya says his moniker as if Velma must have heard of him.
‘Train Man, I like it, sounds dashing.’
‘Oh Velma he is!’ Maya’s face completely softens. ‘He’s so beautiful. Not in that square-jawed way your Christopher is – who by the way is very hot, well done on making him…’ Maya is going for a laugh to lighten the intensity of her feelings.
Velma doesn’t laugh, her listening eyes open wider. Kind, caring and tiny when not sitting behind thick lenses.
‘Train Man is just the most beautiful man I have ever seen, and from the minute I saw him it was like I knew him, and he felt like home and he looked… right. He looked lovely. He was the man I had dreamed of all my life but not known what he looked like until he arrived on the platform last summer.’
‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to speak to him?’
‘Yes! I want to actually know him. I want to laugh with him, I want to kiss him. It feels weird that we don’t. But he doesn’t even see me. How can we feel so differently when I think we’re meant to be together?’
Velma’s eyes narrow and she looks deep in thought. Maya takes a sip of tea to fill the pause. The punctuation of the slurp in the quiet apartment makes her realise the lunchtime rush must have ended in the pizzeria downstairs.
‘You know, Maya, there’s only one thing you can do and that is make contact with him. I can’t promise that he’ll be interested, although he’d be crazy not to be…’ Velma winks and pushes her glasses back up her nose, ‘But he might be in love with someone else. Or you might not be his type. Or gender.’
‘I did think of that.’
‘But you will never know unless you talk to him, say hi, ask him out for a drink.’
Velma lifts the cake knife to trim another few slices of the rectangular loaf. Crumbs fall onto an already speckled carpet.
‘But no one talks to each other on the train, he barely looks up once he’s found a seat.’
‘Well you need to find a way, Maya. Use your feminine wiles. Do that thing you British people do really well and raise your eyeballs to the sky and talk about the weather. Or just tell him you think he looks like a lovely person and ask him if he’d like to go for a drink with you.’
Maya looks bewildered. ‘I’m not sure I’m brave enough.’
‘Oh I bet you are.’
Silence fills the apartment but for the jingle of the bells on the wind chime by the open window.
Velma lifts the teapot once more and pours.
‘Tea and sympathy huh?’ laughs Maya as she takes the floral cup. ‘How did you know, Velma?’
‘I know a sad heart when I see one. Here, have another slice.’ Maya holds out the polka dot plate again. ‘What do your friends think?’
‘My best friend thinks it’s funny, just a joke really. I don’t think she realises how serious I am about him. And I tell my workmates about Train Man because he’s become a bit of a talking point in the office in the mornings. And my sister, well, I haven’t really told her the depths of my feelings because she’s got her hands full with her kids and she would think I was crazy if I said I loved a stranger.’
‘And what would you say if your best friend or your sister told you what you just told me, with as much conviction and passion in her eyes?’
‘I’d say she should talk to him, ask him out.’
‘Well I think he sounds darling and you already know what to do. What’s the worst that can happen?’