Highlights
6.
Colin’s mood of anxiety, going up to Nino’s salon, was heightened by the large framed photos of women that lined the staircase, and by a stifling smell that he associated with his mother, and her formidable perms. Staunchly unfeminized, Colin had the feeling, as he was greeted and gowned, of seeing something he wasn’t meant to, like a glimpse into the ladies’ lavatory at a theatre. Sunday, too. In his Rome you couldn’t have done this, but new European Rome seemed perpetually open for business. Archie had looked into it: now he was talking confidentially with Nino, and responding to the dapper old man’s remarks with Italianate gestures of his own.
‘It’s my hair,’ said Colin firmly into the mirror, ‘and I’m just having it trimmed a bit. I’m not having any highlights —’ and here his voice jumped, so that he wondered if he was about to make a scene.
In a minute Archie went away, like a prudent parent, leaving Colin to brave it out. What was Archie going to do, unsupervised, Colin wondered — he seemed to disappear with a sense of purpose. Nino approached, smiling remotely, and fingered Colin’s bushy grey hair, which was, in truth, a bit longer than usual because he’d thought Archie might find it more romantic; though what he meant by romantic was as vague as it was ineradicable. Nino, like any professional, wanted to flatter him but also to suggest there was serious work to be done and paid for. He pursed his lips and pushed Colin’s hair around, then nodded competently before sending him off to be washed.
Half an hour later, Colin was sitting with a large art book in his lap and numerous twists of silver foil in his hair. Nino, it turned out, was a member of a special Borromini society devoted to restoring the master’s works, each one of which was the subject of a beautiful scholarly book. He brought out several of these from his office to keep Colin distracted as the colouring took hold; Colin said how much he liked the buildings, and found himself wanting to impress Nino, who, he saw now, was a rather distinguished old man. He spoke to him as though what was happening on top of his head was not a pathetic surrender, to Archie’s will and to some tiny speculative vanity of his own; as if it was normal and indeed benign. After all, who would say no and mean it when offered the chance of growing ten years younger, which was Nino’s casual prediction? They would just be highlights, very subtle, very natural, as if the signore had been in the sun. Then the signore was left alone with a cup of coffee, hardly daring to look at the freak in the mirror. Behind him, in the white salon, women were reading under driers or chatting candidly with the stylists. He wondered, with sudden horror, what the people at work would say. From time to time Nino drifted back, peeped cautiously inside a silver tress, then wrapped it up tight for a further baking.
When Colin was back in the street, it was nearly lunchtime. He went hurriedly towards the hotel, knowing everyone was looking at him. The whole treatment had cost 190 euros, to which, in complex embarrassment, he had added a handsome tip. He couldn’t quite look at what had been done to him, but now, as he glanced in a dark shop window, he saw the effect, architectural as much as painterly, that Nino had produced with his scissors and heaters and silver foil. Still, he managed a tense grin for Archie, who was hurrying the other way, perhaps to meet him, and who walked straight past without recognizing him.