“There’s a lady who’s sure/All that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.” I am reminded of that opening line to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven every time I see this woman.
She is like a character from a Dickens novel, a caricature of herself. Dressed impeccably, if seasonally inappropriate, she likes dramatic reds and blacks and teeters step by step in shin-high boots with ostentatious but robust heels.
Gaunt as a marathon runner or famine victim – there being little difference – she walks as on a high wire, every step taken with such self-aware deliberation it is hard not to conclude that she is directing herself in some private performance.
In the coffee shop her entrance is low-key, as she picks her way to the usual table where she sits ramrod erect, her dark hair carefully coiffed up at the back and held high by a comb.
She sits stiffly, takes out a lined copy book and begins to write in longhand as though at a distance, arm extended. In time she will get up and order an Americano bringing it back to her table slowly, as though picking her steps to avoid lines in the wooden floor.
She is not old, or young, and is generally alone, speaking only to staff and then briefly. Yet she appears more solitary than lonely, it being an important distinction as not all solitary people are lonely whatever our social saviours say.
Recently she was one of three people at a showing of The Two Popes in a local cinema; me, her, and a devout elderly lady. It was before word spread about what a good movie it was.
She laughed loudly and not in the right places while making frequent exits and returns for no obvious reason, taking her bag with her each time.
Hers would appear to be a self-contained universe of which she is at the very centre directing herself in a movie of her own making and without any obvious conclusion. Not an unhappy world in which just being is the very all.
I wonder what she writes in that lined copy book.
Maybe it’s about us, the strange people in that coffee shop.
Lady from Middle English lafdi, lavede, literally "one who kneads bread". Evolved by medieval period to mean "woman of superior position".
