Gastro's

Today, Monday, I joined hands with a lost habit, afternoon coffee at Gastro’s. It must be two or three years. Parking the bike in Sainsbury’s car park, nodding to the old clock at Clapham station, 4.40pm. The same as before. The habit was there waiting for me and I too was suddenly the same as before. The table inside right by the window of course, as if slipping back into the contours of myself, when I used to be myself so perfectly and without thinking.

I catch my reflection in the window and, surprisingly, I look exactly as I would want myself to look. Dark and saturnine, curls falling over my face, the brow creased; the eyes downcast, serious but long-lashed and therefore almost boyish, innocent, protecting themselves. Like a little allegory of Contemplation, I think to myself, then laughing at the phrase.

A woman comes in with her girlfriend. The sunlight streams in through the open door, silhouetting her in brilliance at the same time as it darkens her already dark hair. She has eyes only for the girlfriend. She suggests the table outside, and so they sit together on the other side of the glass, right under my nose. The thick arc of her eyebrows. But then the sun goes behind a cloud and the face is suddenly different, scarcely the same person.  

An hour later and I’m still there. There’s now a man on the next table. Completely bald, short, with a large grey hat that he’s placed in front of him. His small blue eyes animated and vigilant behind round thick rimmed glasses. His voice is too loud, insensitive to context, and he himself, in his whole body, is awkward and keen to assert himself. “It’s a non-sequitur!” he’s yelling, “a complete non sequitur”! He’s with a younger nodding man. A few drinks later they’re laughing. They too leave in time.

This was always my little corner of France, right here in London. That was my fantasy, that I stepped through the magic portal into France, and drank café au lait and ate the sweet pain au raisin, and looked at my face in the window, with a stripe of sunlight running down it. And Cooka the waitress bringing me a second coffee without my asking. And the old snow-haired man always sat at the bar as he might do in Paris, and morning coffee served in bowls and the French onion soup and soft baguettes.

Everything real that we are most attached to, the reflected face in the window, the small French café, is simultaneously the furniture and habiliments of our inmost fantasies. Fantasies to which we are fastened even as - and because - time carries us off elsewhere