The Last Tango

As a teenager, having outgrown the poncho and needing something else to hide behind, I adopted a uniform of the plainest, dullest clothes I could find. Black jeans, man-sized black T-shirts and a green cardigan that had been washed so many times it was see through, its cuffs frayed and chewed hungrily - the chocolate cake that formed my staple diet apparently not sufficient.
Thank goodness for editorial control. All photos of those dark years have been destroyed. When one surfaced, like a black, brooding blob, at my 30th birthday party it was quickly shoved down my trousers and then on into the bin.
In the knickers of time.
Not that I didn’t like colour; I did. Just not on me. I loved colour for what it was, pure and uncomplicated and mood-changing. Purple was always my favourite, majestic, chocolate-flavoured purple. I longed for something purple. But no, back to black it was, day in, day out. Which made the bright Tango slap at the back of the cupboard even more dangerously fascinating.
A sleeveless mini-dress hand-knitted in orange scratchy wool with a ribbed turtle neck and marmalade satin lining. Many, many sizes too small for me, it truly was the forbidden fruit.
Sigh. Who could wear such a frivolous, beautiful thing?
Mum, that’s who. It was her mini-dress, made when she was a slender size eight teenager by her grandmother, my great-grandmother, the formidable Meme.
Which was odd in itself. Elegant old ladies, especially devout Catholic ones, were supposed to crochet doilies weren’t they? Perhaps frilly head rests at a push. Not glorified boob tubes.
It made me wish I could have known her properly, been old enough to have a proper conversation but she died when I was still a child. I only had the bare bones of family history to work with - the story of how one Trinidad Bonifacia Aguilar, of Spanish descent and one Rene Devise, a Frenchman of lugubrious face and twirly moustache, met and married in pre-war Algeria and, by the circuitous hands of fate, ended up with five modern English great grandchildren.
Our lives couldn’t have been more different. Yet there were some common threads. Black, for instance.
In every photo of the tiny elegant Meme with her fine cheekbones and salt and pepper hair she is wearing black. OK, so hers was crepe and lace and she was in mourning whilst I was just in hiding but still, it was a thread nonetheless.
A thread that if you tugged on, might unravel more secrets.
‘She had immaculate taste,’ Mum told me when I quizzed her. ‘All her clothes were beautiful.’
Before Grandpere died, what did Meme wear I wondered. What beautiful dresses did the young Trinidad dance the tango in whilst war rumbled in the distance? How long were her hemlines and sleeves, before children or grandchildren or even great-grandchildren came on the scene?
The dress can’t tell me. One day I actually managed to squeeze into it, hoping perhaps for clues to the past. But the wool was itchy, the orange unflattering; more than anything it wasn’t my dress. It was made by someone else, for someone else and I had no place wearing it.
Back in the cupboard it went. Whoever the last tango is for, it's not for me.