"A Long Dark Rainbow" by Michael Tappenden

 An absolutely wonderfully delightful story about love between two old people.

Alex has never really fulfilled his potential. He felt inadequate as a young art student and abandoned drawing to become an art historian; he had an academic career but never became head of department. His love life lies far in the past and he now doubts his potential virility. Nevertheless, he talks to a statue of Dionysus and gains sufficient confidence to pursue Samantha, a divorcee, who is herself convinced that her her body can no longer attract men and that her days of romance are over. Can these two old people, emotionally and physically marked and shaped by their experiences, find shared sexual satisfaction and love?

There is a certain amount of plot involving people from Alex's unhappy past who threaten his present and future happiness but the core of this story (perfectly paced with turning points precisely at the quarter, half and three-quarter points) is an intense exploration of the developing relationship between the two protagonists. Towards the end there were even flashes of Lady Chatterley's Lover!

I was captured right from the start by the brilliantly drawn character of Alex who has an inner monologue that is fundamentally self-deprecatory and at the same time can be astute and sometimes very funny:

• "Fear. Embarrassment. Ignorance. What effective contraception they had been." (Prologue)
• "It was as if his brain and key parts of his body were no longer talking to each other. Not that that was anything new. In the past they had often ignored each other, preferring instead to go their separate ways, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Maybe now, they were sulking."  (Prologue)
• "From flaccidity to awareness to virility to ignorance to repression to chronic masturbation to lust and fever to permitted access and more ignorance to mutual disappointment to adultery to abstinence and back to flaccidity. That’s how it was destined."  (Prologue)
• "Coming up to seventy. Didn’t feel like it though. As long as he kept clear of mirrors and passport booths and didn’t bend to stroke pets. Sometimes he forgot his own age."  (Prologue)
• "Sometimes he would talk to younger friends or relatives, see them laugh and chatter and wonder if they would be at his funeral. Which ones wouldn’t get the time off? Which ones would have the flu? Which ones would just make excuses?"  (Prologue)
• "It’s all in there. He tapped his head. Just a bit reluctant to come out."  (Prologue)
• "‘That’ll be seven pounds please. Special rate for senior citizens today.’ Oh God. Is it that obvious? You could have lied. Pretended you couldn’t tell. Charged the full amount and hoped my vanity would pay it." (1. In the Beginning)
• "Bloody memory. You spend your life filling your brain. Hour after hour after hour, learning and understanding, feeding its voracious appetite, packing tons and tons of knowledge into the bottomless pit of brain cells and then later, when you want something back… nothing. Maybe his brain was now feeding on all that information piled inside it and would only let you have the scraps it doesn’t want, like bacon rind and cherry pips. Maybe it was simply composting." (1. In the Beginning)
• "And that jaw – once it had the clean, sweeping lines of a racing yacht. Now look at it, bumbling around the coast, lumpy with barnacles." (1. In the Beginning)
• "Do I need to find my higher self? If I’m honest, I’m having enough trouble with this lower one." (2. Samantha and the Wolf)
• "Courting? That sounds so old fashioned. Do they still do that, or do they simply go to bed and conduct a road test?"   (6. Journeys)
• "No wonder old people don’t smile much. Not because they’re miserable. Just trying to keep it all taut." (7. Steam)
• "I just walked about following what felt like a permanent hard-on. It was an obsession that stirred me constantly. An all-consuming driving urge. I felt like a permanently on-duty pole vaulter."  (8. Tantra)
• "They seemed to have wall-to-wall foreplay crackling in their minds. It had nothing at all to do with age or having a young, smooth body. It was like being in the middle of a permanent Cole Porter song laced with liberal doses of Viagra." (12. Sad News and a General)
• "Now, however, he felt as if he was learning again, learning to swim again. Not convinced he wouldn’t drown. Still needing to hang on to the pool side." (14. Clues and Confession at last)

The author is particularly good at using actions and observations to represent a character's thoughts. For example, when Alex draws, his drawings represent his manhood. For example, he looks at some sketches he made when he was younger and he thinks: "This was a different me. So confident, so strong, so aware. Suddenly he felt a wave of panic wash through him. I can’t do this anymore." (6. Journeys) Later, he decides: "It will come back. Maybe the line, the marks I make will be different, not so confident but maybe I’ll see things differently now, after all this time."  (6. Journeys) And Samantha wonders: "Did his pencil, long and hard and penetrating, really represent much more to him?"   (6. Journeys)

Even furniture and washing up can be used to trigger thoughts regarding the effort required to start up an new relationship: "Samantha’s chair was quite different. Soft, young, excitable, waiting for the next walk in the park. Welcoming? Yes, or was that devouring? And now I’ll have to learn it all over again."  (6. Journeys) "On the large oak table were the remains of their meal. She stood and looked for a while. Those were the clean, bright plates she had proudly carried in, to be enjoyed. All now stained and cold and empty. She moved to the sink, turned on the tap and placed the plates and cutlery in the hot soapy water. Something ticked nervously in her throat. She picked up the plates and slowly washed them clean; washed away every trace, made them new." (5. Secrets and Understanding)

Other selected quotes:

• "The flame of the nearest candle, startled at his appearance, moved abruptly, and then settled, reassured."  (Prologue)
• "The flotsam of kitsch washed up here." (1. In the Beginning)
• "He had stared at the colourful students each dressed in their own non-conformist palette" (1. In the Beginning)
• "I do try to be tidy and I am in my own way. Just… not your way. I do know where everything is, trouble is, it’s usually underneath something else." (5. Secrets and Understanding)
• "there was that woman with the heavy make-up that stopped at her neckline. Undressed, it looked like a sunset over a polar icescape." (6. Journeys)
• "Without doubt it was her, but it was not someone she had ever seen before. It was not the portrait of an old woman that she had expected but of a woman who had matured with experience and understanding. There was a strength that she never knew was there and yet a softness at the same time. A few marks, carefully selected, indicated the passing of time but in a way that was sensitive, almost celebratory and without flattering." (6. Journeys)
• "He stopped and then very carefully ran his very fingertips over her shoulders, feeling the tiny blemishes left by the sun and wind and time that made her who she was. A human patina of priceless experience." (7. Steam)
• "People see that and all the other blemishes as faults. Imperfections. But they are her journey. Her experiences. Bit like that old oak table downstairs. Full of cracks and knot holes and covered with age. And people love that in a table. But not when it comes to each other. How fickle. How strange." (8. Tantra)
• "She could see the brown patch on his crown where his hair had retreated and red points on each elbow as if the bone was trying to push through."  (8. Tantra)
• "‘Just be smart and relaxed.’ ‘I do have problems with both of those concepts.’" (11. Father and Daughter)
• "Ejaculation City. Frequent visits but never stayed long.’ (13. Funeral and Suspicion)
• "Above them, the same stars looked down on this man and woman, two incongruous bodies, creased and roughened, their bones and blood worn and weakened by time, learning at last to be themselves." (14. Clues and Confession at last)
• "How easy it had been to get lost, to follow the stony path trodden by so many other elderly feet, not to query, simply to accept. He had wanted to move, heard the old stallion whinnying desperately but had ignored it." (14. Clues and Confession at last)

This was an utterly delightful character-driven look at love from a perspective that is all-too-often ignored. 

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God