There was a website once where people would publish letters never sent. Most were what you’d expect, to a dead parent or unrequited love or estranged sibling. My contribution was to a woman who shared an umbrella with me for less than 30 seconds in a sudden London downpour in 1989, and I contend that it’s no less meaningful a relationship for its brevity and anonymity.
I’m sure you don’t remember the incident at all; it lasted less than a minute, that rainy October morning in London fifteen years ago, barely a wrinkle in the ribbon of your life. By noon, when the sun had returned, it was already a distant memory, crowded out by the boutiques and perfumeries you visited. By suppertime, it may not even have been a clever anecdote worth repeating to your sister or boyfriend.
But for me, it haunted the next three months, dictated my wardrobe that unusually dry summer. No matter how cloudless and warm the air over London was, I carried my umbrella every day, just in case. Even now, a decade and a half after those seconds passed, I feel a flutter of hope whenever it rains and carry my umbrella at the slightest hint of drizzle, even though the moment has never repeated itself.
The umbrella had been mine for about a week, bought at James Smith and Sons for £15. The receipt is still in my scrapbook—the shop guaranteed free repairs for life, though I’ve never gone back to London and the umbrella has been lost for eight years now. Perhaps if I go back with the receipt and tell my story about you, they’ll give me a new one, or sell me one for the price I paid then. It was almost three feet long with a curved wooden handle and when it opened could cover half of London in a rain storm.
That Saturday morning I was on my way to the book shops on Charing Cross Road. My friends were still asleep, or disinterested in the crowded, musty stacks of books, so I was on my own in the metropolis. My best London adventures—Highgate Cemetery, Thomas Carlyle’s house, Ronnie Scott’s—were solitary excursions. I didn’t watch television, and had already drunk my newspaper budget at the White Hart on Friday night, so I didn’t know if the forecast called for rain; I brought the umbrella just in case.
And good for me that I did, because while I was crossing Oxford Street the sky opened up in a sudden burst of rain and I threw open that giant black canopy, glad to be putting it to use. I felt a little smug toward the people who scattered into doorways and covered their heads with the Daily Mail; I was a true Londoner, never without a brolly, the Channel winds being so unpredictable.
And then, sudden as the cloudburst, you were beside me under the umbrella, your right hand above mine on the handle. I didn’t have time to be surprised when you asked, “Which way are you going?” which is how I was able to answer, “Whichever way you are,” and you laughed.
Your skin was coffee-and-cream, smooth, drinkable; your teeth were white as milk and glittered like the electric sign over Piccadilly Circus; your gazelle neck stretched when you put your head back to look into the cathedral ceiling of my umbrella, and for years after I imagined—still imagine—what taste of salt and sweet I would have found if I had pressed my lips against the point where your throat disappeared into the collar of your coat. In that instant, which has lasted me for fifteen years already and may last me fifteen more, might be one of the dozen coins they find in my pockets when I float up on shore in the spring, one of the round stones clenched in my fist when my shallow grave is exposed in a summer storm, in that instant I tumbled tiny and lost into your open mouth and was swallowed by your laugh.
And as suddenly as you appeared you were gone, ducking into a doorway with a whispered “Cheers” and I barely had time to slow down to see the flash of your wave and the back of your head disappearing behind the glass doors while I kept walking, now pointed off my original course but unable to stop, propelled down Oxford Street by the momentum you set, breathless.
I’ve shared that umbrella and others since. At Stratford-on-Avon it sheltered me and my friend John in a tempest until the wind turned it inside out. On High Street in South Woodford I stood under it with Lorraine on my last night in London, and we kissed beneath its black wing. My new umbrella is smaller, more practical, and when I share it I get wet. But I still carry it with me whenever there are clouds, and I become breathless and hopeful and young again when I feel the first drops of rain, and this time we’ll walk farther and faster together, your laugh beside my ear and your fingers touching mine, and we’ll find no doorway to slip into until the storm passes.