Portrait of an Old Man

He saw an old man sitting alone in a café on a little cobbled street off of Hampstead High Street. The man read a newspaper, and he sat at the back of an empty café in front of a frosted window which had old gilded designs on it. The frosted window’s gilded designs made the observer think that the café hadn’t always been a café but instead used to be a milk parlour or a barber. The low chandelier which hung above the old man made the old man’s shadow strong on the newspaper he was reading. The strength of the shadow made the observer wonder whether the old man could read the newspaper at all, half of it being in darkness. The observer could not see the old man’s face, because the old man was bent over his newspaper and his face was obscured by a tweed hat. The only way the observer knew that the old man was an old man was that he could see he had a white moustache and wrinkles around his mouth. Maybe the old man had his eyes closed under his hat, and was asleep in the warmth of the café. The old man seemed warm to the observer, as he had a big dark coat on, a scarf and beneath the sleeve of his coat the observer could see the old man had another, knitted sleeve, which implied a jumper. The old man must’ve been thin to not be hot under all those layers in this warm cafe. One of his hands was settled on the newspaper, while the other rested on his right knee. His hands had little brown spots and traces of blue veins on them, and those veins seemed like the thin veins of an old man. Beneath his newspaper was a little circular table. The newspaper took up all of the table, and the newspaper’s edges spilled over the edge of the table and fell down its sides. There were five other stools around the old man and his newspaper and his table, which implied that more people were just coming or had just left. The observer did not know which. The stools were in a perfect circle around the old man’s table which implied that nobody had sat on them and left, because when people leave stools they leave them in a mess. There were no used cups on nearby tables, no cigarette butts on the floor. It seemed to the observer that the old man was alone, and would be alone. Despite sitting in a café, the old man had not bought himself a drink. Whether he could not afford one or whether he was simply not thirsty, the observer did not know. The old man kneaded his lower lip between his teeth and turned the page of the newspaper. When he turned a page, the old man licked his finger and that saliva provided ballast to which the thin page of the newspaper would stick. He turned the page slowly and deliberately. Perhaps he didn’t want to finish the newspaper and go back outside, because it was cold out there. The observer could see that the old man had turned onto the stock pages, and was delicately reading every company’s gains, losses and profit, all of which were in tiny print on a double page spread. Perhaps the old man was a wealthy industrialist, and he was checking his stocks in that day’s paper. Yet from the worn cuffs of the old man’s coat, his frayed scarf and his untended white stubble, the observer knew that that was not true. The old man seemed to read each stock listing carefully. As he read, the old man followed what he had read with his middle finger. As it got darker outside, because in winter it gets dark so early in the evening, the old man’s shadow on his newspaper became more pronounced, until it was as if he had etched his shadow in ink. Still the cafe was empty. The old man went on reading his newspaper, licking his finger to turn every page, reading every page to its completion. Around him, the café began to fall asleep. Somebody packed away the stools which had surrounded the old man’s table, and put them upside down on other tables around the café. The stools seemed vulnerable when they were upside down. The light on the frosted gilded window behind the old man turned off, and the light above him turned off, so that the old man was left reading in semi-darkness. Even in semi-darkness he still moved his finger to follow his eye, he still read the newspaper. Once the old man drew his right thumb and forefinger to his mouth and traced his lips. Nobody told the old man to leave the café. They didn’t have the heart. Soon it was fully dark outside and the street lights came on. The light of the street lights shined on the cobbles of the cobbled street. The light of the street lights seemed crisper because it was cold outside. The observer walked out of the café, dug his hands into his pockets and looked through one of the café windows. He saw an old man sitting alone, reading the newspaper in darkness.