AlanWrite

Heralds of Spring

2011-06-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since I posted anything into this blog but i hope you enjoy this one.

Heralds of spring.

Kevin and Karen did as their parents had asked; scattered their ashes from the bridge at the edge of town beside their old home. The request, made just after the golden wedding celebrations had, surprised them a little but their mother had explained in her usual soft yet firm tone,
“One day you will both understand.”
Their father had merely nodded his head, and said nothing. Although older than Lily once their mother had her mind made up on anything it had never been in Stephens nature to either question or try to alter her decision.
They had been born within six weeks of each other to parents who lived at the opposite ends of the same town. It was a small country town with a small close knit community and Stephen and Lily grew up together, They attended the same schools and, except for the few years Lily spent away at college qualifying as a teacher, until their final days, they never knew what it meant to be separated. They had also known, since Stephens eighth birthday, that one day they would marry.
It was Stephens home that stood beside the bridge spanning both river and water meadow at the edge of town, and Lily was spending the afternoon helping him prepare for his party later that evening. She loved flowers, especially the early ones that heralded the approach of warmer days, and she had talked Stephen into going with her into the water meadow where snowdrops had just appeared.
Leaning forward to reach something trapped among the riverside rush’s, while still holding her bunch of snowdrops in one hand, she lost her footing on the damp river bank, stumbled sideways, lurched forward, then tumbled headlong into the swollen river.
Stephen higher up the slope saw her disappear from view but, in seconds, he too was in the water struggling to pull her out. The current lapped over his chest and his arm wrapped tightly around her tiny body almost crushed the air out of her lungs, but finally he managed to haul them both up onto the bank.
She’d lost the flowers she’d been carrying and was sobbing and gasping as if her lungs would never inflate again. He became terrified she might still be about to die on him so he held her in his arms, and rocked her until her retching spasms ceased. Finally she looked into his eyes and gasped almost wonderingly,
“ But Stephen… you can’t swim either!”
Something in her tone, and the way she looked at him both thrilled and embarrassed him so he muttered, “So what!…”, then jumped up and picked her a fresh bunch of snowdrops.
It was when he pressed them into her hand that she clambered to her feet, stretched up on her toes, and gave him a sudden kiss. A grown up kiss, straight onto his mouth. After that it never occurred to either of them that they might ever spend their lives with anyone else.
“ Like two breaths onto a single window pane,” was how parents and friends described them.
They married after she qualified and returned to teach in the local infant school; a post she held without any apparent desire to move or rise higher until she retired forty years later.
They moved in with Stephens parents not just because, as the only and late child, Stephen never wanted to live anywhere else, but because the house with the family grocery store occupying the ground floor was a big one. In addition Stephens parents had always doted on Lily seeing her as the daughter they never had. Indeed, sometimes in those early years Stephen would wryly observe that if he and Lily ever had a serious disagreement over anything, it would be he who was shown the door. When his parents went to live out their final years by the sea, Stephen took over the business.
Karen, their eldest, was born in the year before his parents retired, and Kevin came two years later. In almost every respect they were opposites.
Karen, whose birth was an easy one, resembled her father in both physique and temperament. Tall, well built, and easy going whatever she lacked intellectually she made up for in physical ability. It was no surprise to anyone when, in her final college year, she announced her intention to enter the police force.
Kevin, on the other hand, was tiny like his mother with her blond hair and blue eyes, and her apparent lack of any personal ambitions, other than to be liked by everyone. Even at his parents golden wedding people were still asking him,
“ Well Kevin old chap, what are you up to nowadays?”
He replied with vague descriptions of doing something in the ‘performing arts’, and then knowingly added to his enquirers subsequent confusion by adding an oblique reference to ‘ conceptual dimensions of future diversions!’
His birth had been a difficult one as if he was loathe to leave his mothers womb, as if sensing how much she enjoyed having him inside her. In consequence Lily was advised that further pregnancies would be unwise.
Yet Kevin was the one in the years following the anniversary who noticed his parents failing mental health, and it was he who persuaded them both to sell first the shop, then the house, and use the proceeds along with their pensions to finance secure and sheltered accommodation.
By this time Karen was married to another policeman and living with him and her four children at the opposite end of the country and he, Kevin, as well as being constantly on the road with one project or another was in a single sex relationship which even Lily had difficulty dealing with. So a home where they could still be together, but cared for and safe appeared the most sensible option.
It was neither Kevin, nor Karens fault that the brochures issued, and the preliminary visits arranged to the ‘Happy Days Retirement Home’ were so misleading. Especially the Home’s claim that resident couples need to remain together would always be respected. In fact for the first time in their married lives Stephen and Lily found themselves occupying separate bedrooms.
At first it wasn’t too bad. The bedrooms were on the same floor and next to each other. In his lucid moments Stephen even amused himself planning how he would install an adjoining door, but then after a while and for some reason never clearly explained to either of them, they were both moved to rooms which were not only not adjacent but in separate wings of the building. It reminded Stephen of their childhood. Then he found that in the evening he could no longer take a walk to Lily’s part of the Home.
They had a new matron, a large officious woman with a growth of hair on her upper lip which prompted Stephen to nickname her ‘Mother Adolph.’ She carried a bundle of keys everywhere and at night locked the corridor door dividing off the two wings. It bothered him.
“Something to do with fire regulations,” he complained in a letter to Kevin but then, when he didn’t receive an answer immediately, he began to wonder if his mail was being censored, or even confiscated. He found it very hard to trust Mother Adolph. She seemed to have a problem with any residents touching however innocently…. and lately his need to touch Lily whenever they met had become anything but innocent!
One afternoon in the residents lounge he had managed to reach around Lily’s shoulder, under her armpit, and then press his palm against her breast. At first she had tried to move away but had then started to giggle and cough. They were still laughing together when Mother Adolph walked in and, in a loud voice, ordered Stephen out of the lounge.
He became so upset he forgot where his own room was--- even where he was supposed to be going, and ended up standing in a corridor he didn’t remember ever seeing before. He started to cry.
One of the trainee carers: ( he realised she was a trainee because she had glasses and was wearing one of those green pinafore things over what looked like a white gown,) approached him.
“ Where are you going?” she asked not too unkindly.
“I don’t remember,” he tried to explain, but the damn gulps got in the way.
She was still interrogating him as she took a firm grip onto his arm. He remembered Karen telling him that she had to interrogate people sometimes as part of her job…. but she didn’t wear glasses! Not even when her mum advised her to for the sake of her eyes.
“Can you not sleep?” the carer asked.
At least when he got angry he didn’t gulp. “ Of course I can’t bloody sleep!” he shouted.
So later the trainee carer, who actually did care, wrote three words at the top of his file. Three words that signposted his and Lily’s escape route.
‘ Needs help sleeping.’
It took him some time to formulate his plan so that he wouldn’t forget anything, or get so confused that the details went out of focus, but he found that now he had a purpose again his forgetfulness and confusion decreased. He hid the white tablets they started giving him at night in a small pill bottle inside one of his shoes in his wardrobe.
‘Mind you,’ he thought, ‘ I mustn’t let see me getting any better.’ So her started pretending to be even worse than he suspected he really was. What really started to worry him though was how quickly Lily seemed to be deteriorating now that Mother Adolph had even issued instructions that they were not to sit next to each other in the recreation lounge, But at least that separation prevented him accidentally letting slip the surprise he was planning.
He started grinning at the matron whenever he met her, and began following her around without ever answering her frequent demands to know,
“What do you want Stephen?”
What he wanted, of course, what he needed for his plan to succeed, was to find out where she kept her keys when she went off duty every night. When he finally found out by following her late one evening straight into her office on the ground floor, he couldn’t believe his luck. She actually hung them onto a hook beside her black gaberdine overcoat.
‘Hitler had a coat like that,’ he thought as she shouted at him to get out, called him a few names including ‘ silly old pervert,’ and slammed the office door in his face. ‘But he didn’t leave his keys around the place!”
The following day Lily didn’t appear in the dining room at teatime and Stephen asked the trainee with the glasses where she was?
“Don’t tell matron,” he whispered, “ But I’m worried about her. She isn’t ill or anything is she?”
There was just a hint of hesitation in the trainees reply.
“Well, just a bit poorly Stephen,.. But we’re looking after her and she’ll be right as rain in no time.”
Alarm bells rang in Stephens head, and he found it difficult to eat anything. One thing seemed absolutely clear. He couldn’t delay implementing his plan any longer.
It was after midnight when he crept down the stairs, and collected the keys from Mother Adolph’s office.
“ Door wide open,” he murmured under his breath, “ There’ll be trouble in the morning!”
He unlocked the door into what he noticed the staff had now officially labelled the ‘ Female Wing’, climbed the stairs to the third floor, ( ‘lifts make noise’ he thought,) and almost skipped along the corridor to the door of Lily’s room.
He didn’t knock, saw no need to, but turned the handle and stepped quickly inside. He had expected her to be asleep in bed, in the dark; but her bedside light was on and she was sitting on the bed fully clothed, and staring up at him.
“Oh Kevin,” she exclaimed, “ Thank god you’ve come.”
“ No Lily… it’s me Stephen… it’s not Kevin…. It’s Stephen..”
For a moment she looked confused and then it seemed that something within her lit up, her blue eyes focused on him and she began, ever so slowly to sob and then gasp for breath. Sob and gasp as she had another time now lost in Stephens distant memory but experienced as if it was now.
“Ooooh yes… Stephen?…. You’re Stephen aren’t you? ….. Yes… I remember you now!”
He sat on the bed beside her and wrapped his arms around her thin little shoulders.
“Oh Lily what’s the matter? What have you done this time?”
Her head fell forward onto his chest.
“ Ooh Stephen,…. Please..,” she sobbed, “ Please… I want to go home!”
He let her cry like that for a while, rocking her in his arms and stroking her thin grey hair. Finally he turned her sideways, laid her onto the bed and, despite it being so narrow, managed to climb onto the green coverlet beside her. Then he held her once more, their legs and arms entwined and wrapped tightly around each other. When her sobs finally ceased and her eyes closed,… when she was barely breathing at all he whispered into her ear,
“ That’s why I’m here Lily…. to bring you home.”
Ironically it was Mother Adolph who found them both the following morning when, discovering her keys missing from the hook in her office, and realising that ‘security’ had been breached. she ordered a full scale search of the Female Wing.
She found them still fully clothed, but so tightly locked together that she needed two trainees to help her prise them apart. Before summoning help though she took care to dispose of the two empty pill bottles, and the tumbler of water from beside the bed
There would, she knew, be repercussions, and if the press got wind of what had happened, as they almost certainly would do, she would probably have to resign, be thrown into the bear pit of public opprobrium as a sacrificial offering.
She was so angry! Not just at herself, but at what she now considered the selfish, ungrateful pair lying on the bed!

*******************************************

Kevin and Karen scattered their parents ashes at night when they knew nobody would be crossing the bridge and see what they were doing. Just in case anyone was they both assumed innocent looks and both leaned nonchalantly over the stone parapet. They lowered the two urns they were carrying and let the ash’s slide gently down into the cold night air.
Kevin released his mothers while at the same moment Karen, still weeping, released her fathers.
Apparently from nowhere, yet they were sure from somewhere, a sudden light breeze lifted the now mingled grey cloud away from the flowing river and settled it instead onto the sloping bank of the water meadow beside their parents old home.
Kevin wondered aloud if the mantle of grey dust would be visible in daylight, but he needn’t have worried, Overnight a light fall of snow covered everything and, thawing by lunchtime, filtered the ash’s deep into the damp soil.
That afternoon they stood once more on the bridge before driving away to resume their now different and very separate lives. But in that moment together, just as their mother had promised they would, they understood.
In a few short weeks, and perhaps in every year thereafter, the first heralds of spring would appear in the water meadow. The purest, whitest snowdrops they, or anyone else, would ever see!

The End.

Susan's Friend

2011-03-31T07:41:00.000-07:00

Susan’s friend.

My latest piece for the writers group inspired by some children who had just buried their pet cat Pedro.

It was Susan who saw the kitten. It was sitting under the ‘fairy hedge’ watching her. Her younger sisters Lorraine and Mona had christened that part of the garden the ‘fairy hedge’ because they claimed they could see fairies dancing through it. They’d even managed to convince their sceptical parents not to cut back those particular straggling branches for fear that the hedge trimmer might damage the fairies glittering wings.
“ And without their wings,” Lorraine had patiently explained to their father, “ Fairies can neither dance nor fly!”
Lorraine and Mona were inseparable five year old twins, and both were very protective of their friends in the hedge. Their older brother Thomas, who was seven and liked dogs, thought that fairies were a ‘girly’ thing, but claimed that he could hear a puppy barking under the hedge.
Susan, who was nine and therefore a lot older and wiser than either of her sisters or her brother had never actually seen any fairies dancing in the hedge, or ever heard any puppies barking, but she was still young enough to realise that didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t there. She had noticed that the older people became, the more difficulty they had believing in anything they couldn’t actually see …. and now she definitely could see the kitten.
It was tabby coloured with short almost stumpy ears, and it was sitting watching her as if it had always been there, and had just been waiting for her to recognise its existence. She noticed that unlike her other cats, this one did not watch her with an unblinking stare. In fact its eyes kept closing and opening in a quite regular but inviting way as if it were already conversing with her.
“ Oh, what’s your name?” she exclaimed bending forwards and reaching out her fingers towards its flat little head.
“ I have no name,” the kitten replied dismissively; rather surprising Susan because she heard no sound, not even a purr. The voice seemed to be inside her own head. “ It’s humans like you who insist on calling me something when in fact I’m just…. well …. me!”
“ Who is …. you?” Susan persisted.
“ Well that’s rather up to you isn’t it? I’m whatever you want to make me.”
“ I need you to have a name so that I know what to call you.”
The kitten, who Susan already realised was obviously an animal with a mind very much of its own, raised one of its rear paws, leaned sideways, and began to scratch feverishly behind its ear; scratched so furiously in fact, that it fell over onto its side.
Susan, who knew how offended cats can become when humans laugh at them rather than with them, managed to maintain a serious expression until the kitten had reassumed a dignified sitting posture. Then she remembered that kittens are much more playful than grown up cats so she risked a short laugh,
“Oooh you are quite funny,” she observed.
“ Well that’s probably because you’re quite funny too. Now, what are you going to call me? You’d better tell me and then I’ll know when it’s me you’re talking too.”
It was obviously intended as a serious question by the kitten, and Susan thought it only right that she would think about it for a long time. In fact she thought about it for so long that the kitten almost lost interest in the answer, and gave an enormous yawn instead.
“ I thought I might call you Coco after the clown because you made me laugh, but instead I’m going to call you what you are, “ Susan finally announced. “For now I’ll call you ‘Kittycat’, and then… when you’re a lot older, and much bigger, I’ll just call you ‘Cat.’”
The kitten too thought about this for a while and then stood up, arched it’s back upwards and then stretched forwards each of its front paws in turn.
“ Well I certainly think ‘ Kitty’s’ preferable to ‘Coco,’” it murmured.
“How long have you been here?” Susan wondered aloud.
“I’ve been here as long as you have,” Kittycat stated.
It seemed to be trying to decide if all humans were this stupid? But went on to explain in a noticeably patient tone, “ You sisters have their fairies, Tommy has his puppy dog,…. and you have me! It isn’t my fault you’ve taken so long to notice me. You just haven’t been looking properly. Far too busy being the older and cleverer sister I suppose.”
“ And will you stay?” Susan asked. Now she too had a friend under the fairy hedge she didn’t want to lose it.
Kittycat sighed. Some humans obviously were this stupid!
“ I have to stay as long as you want me to.”
“Until I’m grown up?”
“ I have to grow up with you.”
“ And when I’m really, really old?”
“ Then I’ll be really, really old too wont I?”
Kittycat who was getting a little tired of all these silly questions turned and made as if to disappear back into the tangled undergrowth, but Susan asked it one more question.
“ Will you ever grow wings like the fairies, or bark like a puppy dog?”
Her new friend stared at her, but this time with unblinking eyes…. and this time Susan did hear a purr.
“ Certainly not. That would make me ridiculous!”

THE END.

Regret can hurt.

2011-03-04T01:23:00.000-08:00

I was given the opening sentence at my writers group, and this is the finished story. Enjoy.

Regret can hurt.

She was sorry now that she hadn’t told him from the very beginning. Standing at her apartment window, drinking her umpteenth bacardi and coke of the evening, Hilary watched a group of young girls, obviously a hen party, but all too scantily clad for a cold night like this, tumble out from the hotel across the street below, and gather in noisy, but shivering groups, to await the arrival of whatever transport home they had arranged.
‘Do they,’ she wondered, ‘Have things they regret not having said?’
She wanted desperately to turn back the clock, make things clear from the beginning; from that first night when he approached her after her talk to the Rotary Club.
“ Inter-personal relations in business,” she snorted into the half empty glass in her hand. “What the hell right have I to be lecturing anyone on inter personal relations,… either in business. or life for that matter?”
Two months ago it had been. Two months during which she’d not only begun to feel more alive than she could ever remember feeling, but two months during which for the first time in her forty one years, she’d learned both the joy and the pain of sharing who she was with another person; and rendered herself vulnerable by admitting him into her carefully guarded privacy, and space. Yet still she hadn’t told him what he had the right to know. So now it was her feeling of regret that was impelling her to drink, and to drink like this alone, perched in her fourth floor luxury apartment overlooking tottering young revellers below.
“I really enjoyed your talk,” he’d said placing himself, as if deliberately, between herself and Jason. “ You made your points very well. I’m sure everyone has learned a lot this evening.”
She’d thanked him, and taken his hand into her own, but found herself fascinated, even held, by his smiling blue eyes. In his early fifties he was well built but without any evidence of fat or middle age slouch. His hair was greying slightly at the temples, but not receding, and his impact was immediate.
‘Oh my god,’ she’d thought, ‘ Whatever charisma is, you have it in spades! You certainly didn’t need my talk tonight….”
“How many of your suggestions will be acted on of course,” he was saying, “ Isn’t for me to judge, but there were a couple of your answers at the end of the talk which left me with even more questions of my own. I’d appreciate the opportunity to explore them further with you over dinner sometime….unless you think I’m being too forward? My name’s David by the way, David Harrison. I attended a talk you gave a few months ago, and it was I who proposed you as tonight’s speaker.”
He was still holding her right hand, but then pointed towards her ringless left hand. “ I had noticed that you aren’t married.”
She remembered glancing quickly past his shoulder to where Jason was lifting the overhead projector she’d been using from the table. He was already frowning and seemed ready to say something.
“ I should have told him then,” she murmured into the almost empty glass. “Got it into the open then….”
Instead she’d enthused like a love struck adolescent how much she would enjoy answering his questions over dinner… how he wasn’t being at all forward, and then… retrieving her hand from his, had rooted feverishly into the folder under her arm for a business card.
“Ring me,” she’d said, “We’ll arrange something.”
Then, as he walked away, shed reflected that those old chestnuts about ‘ heartbeat racing,’ and ‘knees turning to water,’ were apparently true!
They had arranged something, and in no time at all it seemed their dates and arrangements became the single focal points of her everyday existence. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this way about any man before, and she had always intended to tell him the truth… but never ‘right now’. Always she’d waited, just wanting one more time when only she and him in the present moment mattered. As those times became a week, then a month, her fear of what he might do when she did tell him, made the telling more difficult. Turned an uncertain prospect into a possible crisis to be postponed for as long as possible; and now, it seemed, she was forever recalling that awful evening when further procrastination became impossible.

************************************

She’d realised as soon as he told her that he’d booked their table at the Royal George that he intended the evening to be one neither of them would ever forget; so she made a special effort to look her most beautiful. She’d even taken the afternoon off, and gone up to town to have her hair done, and buy a new outfit.
He’d picked her up in the new car he’d just bought, and if he was uncharacteristically subdued during the drive to the hotel, she’d put it down to nerves he might be feeling about the night ahead. It was when he seated her at the table that she noticed how his features in the candlelight betrayed a harshness she’d never seen before. Despite the restaurants soothing ambience and background music she’d become suddenly fearful.
Apart from giving their order to the hovering waiter he’d barely spoken until the main course was on the table. She for her part, had chattered incessantly; silly. stupid things she knew in her heart he’d no interest in.
Finally he’d glared across the table and interrupted her with a curt, “ I had a telephone call today from somebody called Jason. I believe you know him?”
She’d nodded and tried to gather her racing thoughts into a manageable sequence.
David was doing the talking now, but in slow deliberate words as if he’d rehearsed them all in his head beforehand. No racing unmanageable sequence there!
“I remember him of course from the evening you gave the talk at the Rotary Club. I’d assumed, because he resembled you so much, that he was your younger brother. But then he started asking me…. No, not just asking, … demanding, as if by right to know what were my intentions towards you? It was almost Victorian!”
She’d thought, for a moment, that humour might help, and tried to smile.
“Well yes… Jason does tend to be a little possessive of me….”
“Possessive is putting it mildly. Fixated would be a better word.”
Her smile had wilted. “Did you ask him why?” she’d enquired.
“I did not. I was so astonished I simply told him to mind his own bloody business, and put the phone down on him. I don’t care if he is your brother… or even one of your former boyfriends. Anyone talking to me like that… I put the phone down on them!”
He spiked a piece of beef onto his fork, and raised it towards his mouth.
She remembered now that he never swallowed it as she finally did what she should have done from the very beginning. Even the white tablecloth seemed to be glaring up at her reproachfully as she whispered,
“Jason’s neither my brother, nor a former boy friend…. He’s my son.”
She could recall clearly the way his expression changed from one of anger to one of pain… even betrayal. She’d wanted to reach for his hand, explain that it had all been a terrible mistake. Not the fact of Jason’s existence, but the circumstances surrounding his creation. That it had been a one night stand… she’d drunk far too much…. she’d been taken advantage of…
“And the father?” David had asked replacing his fork onto his plate. She couldn’t meet his eye. That had been the worst part, the part that, in her heart, she’d always dreaded telling him.
“ I can’t even remember who he was, “ she’d murmured. “ I was drunk… and later on, when I realised I was pregnant… Well I didn’t want to know who he was.”
She remembered how, at that point, she had felt a sudden surge of maternal defiance, and been able to raise her head, look at him directly.
“ But I did want the baby. I know I’d been very stupid, even irresponsible in not taking proper precautions, but I wouldn‘t… no I couldn’t deny Jason his life…. And I’ve never regretted having him… not once. I know sometimes he can be difficult, and overreach himself particularly with men he thinks I’m involved with. He hasn’t had the advantage of growing up sharing me with another man; but I wont regret having him…. not now… not ever… not even for your sake!”
She’d stopped; hoping, that her words might prompt him to understand and forgive her, but suddenly he’d stood up.
“ I have to go,” he’d stated, and put enough cash onto the table to settle not only the bill, but her taxi fare home as well. “ I need time to think…. You should have told me sooner…”
Well, now, she’d given him the time… two awful weeks of it!
For the first few days she’d been sick with confusion. On the one hand she’d wanted to telephone him, tell him how sorry she was, and plead with him not to end their relationship. But, equally, she was afraid that he’d simply put the phone down the way he had with Jason, or even worse, tell her bluntly not to contact him again. Then, when he didn’t telephone or make contact with her, her confusion had turned into anger. Clearly he wasn’t even prepared to let her explain further, so she rehearsed what she would say when he finally did contact her… as he surely would, wouldn’t he?
When, after two weeks, he’d still neither rung nor turned up at her apartment, she went into a downward spiral of self recrimination, self pity, and endless bacardi and coke’s which should have alleviated her pain, but only made it worse.
‘And now,’ she thought, ‘ Here I am at the window hallucinating that his car’s among the revellers transport in the car park below!’ She turned back into the empty room. ‘I really must stop drinking like this… I must put something solid into my stomach, …. get my life back again!’
On impulse she decided to get changed, telephone Jason and offer to buy him a late supper … at the Royal George!
“ I’ll wait until the food’s served before I tell him what I think of him interfering in my life, it has to stop. I’m his mother not his senile grandmother in need of protection from unscrupulous suitors!”
As she went towards the bathroom her mobile on the coffee table rang. The screen flashed ‘David’, and her heart rose.
“ Oh god David,” she gasped into it, “ Oh I’m so glad… I mean I’m so sorry… I should have told you everything at the very beginning…. Please forgive me… let me make it up….”
The silence on the line was deafening, and her heart sank. What was he doing playing with her feelings like this?
“David,” she demanded fiercely, “ Are you still with me?”
She registered the irony of her words and her feelings went into free fall. She wanted to lie down; but then his voice, strong and full of tenderness, penetrated her mental fog. She closed her eyes, and could almost feel his arms closing around her, and his lips press close into her ear.
“ Hilary… where else would I ever want to be?”
Suddenly, an exhilarating realisation prompted her to rush across the room. It had been his car in the car park….. and it was then that her doorbell rang!

The End.

Your Portrait.

2011-02-15T06:35:00.000-08:00

I painted Alicia's portrait and have it on my bedroom wall. She liked 'tee lights' so I have one burning underneath it sometimes. This poem, written for the writers group refers to something which actually happened shortly after I hung her portrait.

Your portrait.

Your portrait hangs on my bedroom wall,
It glows in the light from a candle below,
But I’m under the covers unable to pray,
Or even to think. Why do I hurt this way?

The candelight flickers as if preparing to die
As you did that once, with barely a sigh.
“ Oh Alicia,” I exclaim, “Leave me some light,
Don’t leave me alone, nor fade from my sight.”

I start to rise up, some matches to find,
When the flame re-ignites, and the candle burns bright.
Cold darkness disperses, as do sadness and pain.
In my heart, your image, glows warm once again.

I slide under the covers, I’m now able to pray;
But a prayer without thoughts, or even words I can say.
For your heart and mine are now lit from above,
In the prayer we two share… the prayer we call ‘Love!’

Before next Tuesday,

2011-02-08T13:29:00.003-08:00

I was sitting in the cafe in Easons bookshop in Dublin some months ago, listening in to two elderly ladies who had just met after many years apart. They provided the seed for the following story though I hasten to add... what follows in no way reflects their conversation. It is also set in my imaginary town, Ashleigh.

Before next Tuesday.

There are 3 people involved in this relationship; my wife Alison, her friend from years ago, Pat, and myself. Because I’m the deceased one, only I am aware not just of the relationships past and present truths; but its future realities as well, and it’s those aspects of the relationship I’m precluded from revealing.

********************************

Alison and Pat are sitting at a table in Murray’s restaurant on Ashleigh’s High Street. Alison is trying to decide whether to order any food from the menu and barely listening as Pat fills her in with all her news. In fact Alison is already beginning to doubt the wisdom of having agreed to meet her old friend for coffee and a chat at all. It is almost 40 years since they sat together like this. There are just so many memories on both sides to be recalled and Alison never was either as quick, or as accurate as Pat at remembering things.

Pat’s phone call had been a total surprise.

“ I’m back,” she had exclaimed, “ Back in England for good… We must meet…. Same place as always, Murray’s on the High Street… It is still there isn’t it? … Now don’t be late!”

Typically her tone had been so firm, so intolerant of refusal that even after such a long separation, Alison had felt the easiest course was just to accept. It had been that way right through grammar school and university. Pat had always been the one who proposed and decided, usually at one and the same time, and Alison had always,…. well, always found it simplest to agree.

Suddenly she forgets the menu and remembers the day, shortly after they both graduated, when she told Pat that she would not be accompanying her across the Atlantic to accept the two teaching posts they had been offered near New York. Pat had stared at her in disbelief.

“ But we always agreed that we would go together, use our qualifications to travel and see the world.”

“ No,” Alison had said, “You decided and agreed for both of us. You never actually asked me whether I wanted to go, and I’ve decided I’m happy where I am teaching here in Ashleigh.”

Initially Pat ascribed Alison’s change of heart to nerves, timidity, and an unwillingness to face the prospect of leaving her mother.

“You can’t live your whole life tied to your mothers apron strings,” she commented, “ No matter how wonderful a mother you think she is. It’s not natural.”

Pat had never pretended that her own mother was anything but a hindrance, but eventually Alison found the courage to admit the truth.

“I’m not tied to my mothers apron strings. I’ve met somebody … and I don’t want to leave him.”

“ A man?” Pat was not just astonished but shocked. Her own father had left her mother when she was in infant school; consequently men never figured in Pat’s calculations of anything. “ You want to give up your independence to stay with a man?”

“ Not just stay with him, … marry him!”

Pat had thrown a farewell party some nights before she flew to New York but she didn’t invite Alison who, in any case, had already decided she wouldn’t attend even if asked. Instead she spent he night with me…

“ Do you remember Jacinta? … Jacinta Whelan? “ Pat is asking.

Alison replaces the menu onto the table having decided not to prolong things by ordering food, and readjusts her spectacles onto the bridge of her nose. The two gestures buy her a few seconds while she decides how to respond. She remembers Jacinta very well, but frowns as if trying to recall somebody she has forgotten so Pat decides to prompt her memory.

“ She was at St. Elizabeth’s with us, and went on to University with us as well. … Her main subject was Drama. …. Well she was very good at it. She had beautiful eyes…. very expressive. … She graduated with us…. “

Alison nods and interrupts, “ And she dated Shamir for a while.”

Pat had always intended to bring me into the conversation at some point, but my arrival courtesy of Alison, prompts her to hesitate and wonder how far she dare go with her recollections. She even wonders how much I might have told Alison in the twenty odd years we were together in life but, in fact, I never told Alison anything about the night after the farewell party.

Pat arrived at my door obviously the worse for drink, and accuse me of stealing the only thing that meant anything in her life.

“ Alison isn’t a thing,” I told her, “ She’s a person with feelings and a life of her own.”

“And you’ve bloody well stolen both,” she sobbed.

I could have invited her in, given her coffee, and tried to sober her up, but Alison was out at a school function, so I decided that wasn’t the wisest course of action. Pat was already somewhat dishevelled, and using the door jam to keep herself upright. Her car, out in the roadway, was parked up onto the pavement, it’s front door wide open, it’s radio on full blast, and it’s headlights illuminating my front garden and porch like a stage set. So I offered to drive her home in my car, suggesting she collect her own the following day.

“ When you’re more fit to drive,” I explained.

She spat an obscenity at me, but let me take her keys, bring her car off the road and lock it, then almost fell headlong into the front seat of my car.

As I drove her to the pther side of Ashleigh her mood changed. She stopped crying, dropped the foul language, and even started to smile a little. When we reached her apartment block she turned to face me.

“You don’t love her Shamir do you? Not really…. It’s just the prospect of having an obedient, malleable little woman in you bed that attracts you isn’t it?”

I shook my head, told her she was wrong, and told her I didn’t want to hear her talking like that, but she began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse, tearing and pulling them open. Her speech was becoming more slurred and I wondered if she had taken drugs with whatever alcohol she had swallowed.

“ What you really want Shamir is a woman like me isn’t it? Jacinta’s told me all about what you really like…. What men like you want. You’re an Arab, and underneath this ohhhh sooo sophisticated solicitors façade you’re just like all Arab men…..”

I had to laugh.

“I’m not an Arab,” I corrected, “ I’m from Birmingham, and whatever it is that Jacinta has told you I like… it’s a lie. Jacinta Whelan lives in a fantasy world of her own, and she wouldn’t recognise the truth if it stepped up onto a stage somewhere and slapped her in the face! That’s why I stopped going out with her. Now Pat, for heaven’s sake just leave the car, go up to your falt, … and go to bed. You’re making a fool of yourself.”

She asked me why men were always attracted to Alison, but not to her, and I made the mistake of telling her it was because she obviously didn’t find men attractive. I shouldn’t have said that of course, it was cruel; but I was angry with her for coming on to me like that, imagining she could ever take me away from Alison. For a few moments she sat in silence staring at me and then, without even rebuttoning her blouse, she scrambled out of the car.

“ The trouble with you Shamir bloody Hassan,” she screamed from the footpath, “ Is that you’re a waste of space… a useless bit of arab shit…. I hope you and Alison rot in whatever hell it is you believe in!”

Well, I’m certainly not in any ‘sort of a hell,’ although, at present, I am at an unwelcome distance from Alison.

“ I was sorry to hear Shamir had died,” Pat is saying. “ Was he ill for very long?”

Alison shakes her head. She’s never been comfortable sharing her memories of me with anyone. Yet, every morning when she wakes up, she faces my photograph on her bedside table and wonders aloud how long it will be until we are together again? My pain, of course, is that I’m precluded from letting her know!

“ He was ill only a short time. Once diagnosed, lung cancer can be very quick.”

“ And you just have the one child, a daughter?”

“ Yes, Elisha. It means ‘ God is gracious.’ It was Shamirs mothers name. It is in the Bible.”

Pat is surprised. “ Shamir was a Christian? I thought…. Well I assumed…”

“That he was a Muslim?”

Pat nods. “ Well his name… his appearance… everything really!”

Alison suddenly decides to set the record straight, once and for all, irrespective of the consequences.

“ I have a grandson called Charles. You can’t get any more English and Christian than ‘Charles’ can you? …. And why did you mention Jacinta Whelan? Is it because you think I didn’t know that she and Shamir slept together before he met me?”

“ No… oh no, nothing like that, though I did think you might not know. No, it’s because I met up with her again in New York just after you and Shamir got married. In fact it was she who told me. I hadn’t seen her since my farewell party and she was a little surprised you had managed to hook him at all. She always maintained that he would jump into any skirt that was offered. In fact, at the party, she even suggested I do you a favour and put him to a little test…. Anyway she was working in a theatre out in Long Island and, eventually, we became good friends, …. and I mean ‘good friends’”

She waits for Alison to react. “ You mean….?”

“Yes, I do mean. I understand ‘partners’ is the current euphemism over here for a lesbian relationship. Well, I’m gay and I see no point in denying it. Did you never guess?”

Alison genuinely hadn’t guessed, and I never told her. I just hoped, with the passing years, that she would accept that Pat’s failure to answer any of her letters was because Pat too was making a life for herself.

“ What happened?” Alison finally asks.

“ Oh, we were together until a couple of years ago… very happy I thought… but then she moved to the west coast with a model half her age… somebody I couldn’t possible compete with.”

“ I meant what happened with the little test?”

“ I didn’t go through with it,” Pat lies.

After a few moments of awkward silence Pat suddenly blurts,

“ I‘m thinking of throwing a party on Tuesday night.” Then, recalling a conversation from years ago, adds “ Will you come?”

Alison pretends to consider the request but, in her heart, already knows what her answer must be.

“ I’m sorry but I baby sit my grandson on Tuesday nights.”

“ Friday then? I can easily arrange it for Friday night.”

“I’m sorry…. I can’t do Friday nights either. In fact, at the moment, most of my evenings are spoken for.”

Pat tries to keep the disappointment out of her voice, but can’t help remarking,

“ Still tied to the families apron strings then?”

Alison stands up suddenly and prepares to leave.

“ I’m very happy tied to them, and Ill never allow anyone to untie me. Now Pat, I’m sorry, but I simply must be going… there is somebody I have to meet…. It’s been lovely seeing you again….”

Then, because she doesn’t want the relationship to end on a sour note, she adds, “ Look, I’ll see what I can do about next Tuesday, but please don’t be annoyed with me if I can’t make it.”

Pat watches her friend move away and realises with a shock that they are no longer ‘friends.’

‘In fact,’ she thinks, ‘ I no longer have any real friends.’

She pays the bill at the till and, turning, watches Alison leave the restaurant, cross the pavement and stand at the kerb. But she does not see Alison cross the High Street because what she is seeing is no longer reality…. at least not yet.

Instead she see’s Alison pause and become distracted by a push chair on the opposite pavement containing a child who is waving to her. There is a young woman with middle eastern features standing beside the push chair. Pat see’s Alison’s face light up with recognition and watches horrified as, looking neither right nor left, Alison steps out into the busy roadway.

Pat also see’s, as if in a dream, the white truck approaching at full speed trying to beat the changing traffic lights. She tries to cry out … “ Alison, the traffic…. for God’s sake look out!….”, but the warning is pointless because it isn’t ‘now’.

She is aware of the sound of screeching tyres, the dreadful sickening thud, but she’s powerless to prevent the horror she is witnessing because.. again, it isn’t ‘now’

It is before next Tuesday…., but it isn’t ‘NOW!’

*****************************

As I said earlier, I’m precluded from revealing the future myself; but premonitions? … Oh, they’re something else entirely. They aren’t within my realm of competence to control. I’m simply not responsible for any future realities that premonitions may reveal!

THE END.

Two Players.

2011-01-31T05:57:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following piece in two parts. Two chapters as it were; separate but linked, and intended to be read sequentially.

TWO PLAYERS. PART ONE,

DAVID.

“It’s over!”

There, I’ve said it; admitted the truth. They say it’s easier when you face up to it, stop trying to kid yourself that, in the end, it will all work out, that if you want something badly enough, anything is possible.

Well they’re wrong. Nothing’s easier, and some things remain impossible no matter how badly you want them. Nothing, in my life so far, has prepared me for this pain, this feeling of emptiness,…. and admitting that ‘it’s over‘, ….only makes it harder to bear!

***************************************

I’ve always had a facility for pretence, a preference for the world of make believe. Perhaps that’s really part of my problem. Sometimes what I imagine to be the truth is more real than what is the truth. Even as a young child I was at my happiest alone, pretending to be somebody else in an imaginary drama of my own making. Play acting was as natural to me as breathing and eating. It was something I did because it made life enjoyable, made sense of the world around me.

“The lad talks to himself!” my dad protested, and my mum agreed, but made excuses for me.

“ He’s just play acting. All children do it, but David just has a more vivid imagination than other children…..these people he imagines are as real to him as you and me.”

Dad, who, I think, hoped his only son would be a soccer playing bundle of male testosterone, stared at me as if I was a creature visited on him from another planet, and snorted,

“You mean he’s a mental case!”

I remember the first time mum took me to a theatre. I was six years old and it was a Christmas pantomime. I sensed, without understanding why that, on a stage, even grown ups could play act, and not feel embarrassed if caught out doing it.

The blond Prince Charming fascinated me. Bathed in floodlights, in her principal boys costume, and singing her heart out, she was no longer the rather plain, if friendly, young assistant in Nelson’s Cake Stall on Ashleigh market; but a creature of beauty and magic, and I decided that I would love her forever! I mentally hugged every word she spoke to me whenever we bought cakes at the stall, but I never dared to reply in case she no longer sounded like ‘Prince Charming‘, and the spell would be broken.

At primary school I was too shy to push myself forward whenever parts were being cast in class or school plays, but I always knew that I would have been far better than any of those who were chosen. I was once cast as the innkeeper in the annual Nativity play but blotted my thespian copybook by displaying unchristian belligerence towards the weary Joseph and Mary seeking shelter for the night.

“We’ve no room ‘ere for ye,” I bellowed in case any deaf person might be sitting at the back of the school hall. “Ye’ll ‘ave te go inter the stable wiv the cows and sheep!”

Hardly the most auspicious start to a thespian career, but I was only nine years old and, for the few minutes I was onstage, I wasn’t just in Bethlehem, I was in heaven!

I hated secondary school, the way most shy, introverted lads do. For one thing although I liked girls, even fancied some of them, I found making friends with them difficult. I would blush, become tongue tied in their presence and end up making a real fool of myself. I was your archetypal loner, a monumental square peg in a round hole. In addition I’d very little interest in the majority of the subjects we were being taught.

The exception was English, especially the creative writing projects where I could lose myself in a world of my own creation. I also enjoyed the books and plays we studied in English Literature. Then, in my third year. we had Miss Slater for English, and I liked Miss Slater. In fact I liked her a lot, probably because I knew she liked me. Judging by the grades she gave my anything I wrote, she certainly liked my written work!

She was just out of training college, young, dark haired and, even wearing her horn rimmed spectacles, to my mind, beautiful. She was also full of enthusiasm. From the start of her time at Ashleigh Comprehensive she organised regular trips to local theatres, trips I always made a point of joining. She also took over producing, almost single handed, the annual school play. The year after she came, my fourth year, I took my courage in both hands and auditioned for the Artful Dodgers role in that years production of the musical ‘Oliver’.

I was sick with nerves beforehand, and my throat almost dried up when I opened my mouth to read the lines she had given me but, funnily enough, I found the singing bit the least stressful. I’d never sung in public before but I’d determined to pretend I was alone in the assembly hall and just let myself go. It clearly worked because Miss Slater clapped her hands when I‘d finished. She gone to the end of the hall to listen to me and walking back towards me, her high heels clacking on the wooden floor, she exclaimed,

“ David, that was really good. I can almost imagine you as a London street urchin already!”

Nonetheless she gave the part to Neil Bradshaw who was in the year ahead of me!

I was disappointed of course but appreciated that she probably had little choice; Neil’s father being one of the schools governors. As if realising how I felt she asked me to understudy Neill, while playing one of Fagin’s apprentices.

“ You’re as talented a performer as you are a writer!” she had whispered admiringly as we left the hall.

I attended every single rehearsal after that, and memorised the part even while Neil was still struggling to remember his lines, let alone his moves, Whenever he failed to turn up for rehearsal, which happened quite often, as his understudy, I filled in for him. Then, back home, and alone in my bedroom, I would act out every one of his scenes until I knew the part perfectly, and almost felt as if Neil Bradshaw no longer existed. Then, the day before the dress rehearsal, in the best theatrical tradition, my diligence was rewarded.

Neil, who was also in the schools Under 16 rugby team, dislocated his shoulder in a practise match, and Miss Slater called me out of a technical drawing class to tell me. At first she had a worried expression on her face, but then she smiled and placed her hand on my shoulder.

“I just know,” she murmured encouragingly, “That you’ll make the perfect replacement. I mean you haven’t missed a rehearsal have you?”

I thought, ‘I’ll be better than any replacement!…. I’ll be the best Artful Dodger you’ve ever seen!’

Once mum knew I’d taken over the part she bought herself tickets for every one of the productions four nights, and even managed, on the last night, to drag my father away from his Saturday night snooker game. On that night, funnily enough, I was more nervous about what he would think than anyone else, ….even Miss Slater.

As I emerged from the schools front door, at the end of that final performance, she was at my elbow walking beside me, and still on a high with the shows success. My parents were ahead of us, waiting at the school gates.

“Well Mister Lewis,” she exclaimed, “What do you think of our Artful Dodger here? Wasn’t he just absolutely wonderful?”

She suddenly gave me a fierce, almost possessive hug, and the feel of her arm around my shoulder, the sudden pressure of her body against my own both surprised and excited me. My dad though gave both of us what, at first was a startled look, then turned into a frown.

“Yeah,” he muttered, “It just goes to show what ‘e can do when ‘e puts ‘is mind to it. It’s just a pity the only thing ‘e ever put‘s ‘is mind to is this play actin’ nonsense.”

Miss Slater looked startled by his outburst and stared at him for a moment as if uncertain how to react. Finally, removing her arm from around my shoulder, she stated quite seriously,

“Actually Mister Lewis…. David has a real talent for this ‘play acting nonsense’ as you put it. Rather than rubbishing it you should encourage him to develop that talent.”

She turned and walked away without waiting for his response. If I didn’t have a crush on her before that, I certainly developed one then!

**************************************

She left at the end of that school year for a better position in a bigger school in nearby Granchester…. and also to get married. This last detail, when I learned of it, left me feeling miserable for almost a week, but. in their nature. adolescent crushes, though intense while they last, dissipate quickly once the object of the crush is removed.

Her replacement at the school, a much older woman in her 40’s, organised nothing outside school hours, and only seemed interested in our final examination results. In my case her interest from the outset was non existent. She didn’t even rate my written work all that highly and my grades dropped. Dad made it clear that because I no longer showed ability in any subject I would be removed from school, and put into ‘the real world’ as soon as regulations allowed. That was at the end of the following school year.

My first job, which he arranged for me at the furniture factory where he worked, only lasted a year. For one thing I resented the fact that he was forever claiming that I owed my employment to his good offices. The job, which involved me stacking endless parts of kitchen furniture, was monotonous, and I couldn’t relate to the interests, and coarse humour of the other men on the factory floor. Consequently I only ever did what I absolutely had to, and when a downturn in the business occurred I was let go.

“’e’ll never be any good at anythin’,” Dad complained the night I handed him my wage packet and my cards. “ A perfectly good job and ‘e’s thrown it away.”

My mum again tried to find me an excuse.

“He hasn’t thrown it away, they’ve just let him go because of the downturn,”

“ ’e’d ’ave bin kept on if ’e’d shown any initiative instead of just moonin’ about the place like someone on drugs!”

“He just needs to find something that engages his mind as well as his muscle,” she murmured.

My next job, working in a garden centre run by one of dads snooker friends should have done that. I’ve always liked flowers, admired the way they will struggle to grow and bloom no matter how unfavourable their situation, but it turned out I was allergic to something in the compost they were using. I got on quite well with the rest of the garden staff and struggled on as long as I could, but my hands, and any part of my face or arms that came into contact with the compost, blistered and peeled painfully. Clearly, either the compost, or I, had to go, and so, with expressions of genuine regret on both sides, I went. Dad, of course, still took my leaving yet another job he had arranged personally.

“ So now he’s physically handicapped, What in ‘ells name can ‘e do?”

For once mum had no answer, simply bent her head and applied the skin cream to my hands and face. I could feel my heart beating but suddenly I decided it was time I stood up for myself, rather than hide behind her skirt.

“This time,” I announced through cracked lips, “ I’ll find my own job thank you.”

He stared at me with a surprised expression on his face and, if I had only realised a hint of genuine admiration…. but still he growled,

“Well think on lad while you’re still under eighteen, and livin’ in this ‘ouse. it’d better be a proper job you get for yerself, an’ not some bloody nonsense that doesn’t even pay for yer keep !”

I remember thinking ‘Well, in another few months I’ll be eighteen, and then I wont have to live here unless I want to.’

I did find myself the next job and, this time, it was one I really liked, working in a bookshop on Ashleigh High Street.

It was one of those old fashioned book shops you see less and less of these days. It occupied a former terrace of Georgian houses now painted magnolia and brown. It had mullioned windows, and a front entrance up some steps from street level. Inside the shelving was all dark wood illuminated with recessed lighting; and the mysterious, inviting smell of unopened books permeated everything.

The owner Mister Hutchinson was, as far as I could tell, in his early sixties, with shoulder length grey hair, a line in tweed jackets and corduroy trousers that even I knew had long gone out of fashion, and. as I learned later, an obstinate refusal to computerise either his stock lists, or his cash register.

The wages were a little less than I had been earning in the two previous jobs, which made dad frown, but mum was much more positive.

“This could be right up David’s street!” she suggested thankfully.

Mr Hutchinson was unmarried and insisted from the outset that I call him Jerome.

“We don’t stand on ceremony here David,“ he informed me on the first morning, “ The only thing I insist on is that you have a love of the printed word, and that you treat not only the books on the shelves with respect, but also every person coming through that door.”

“Can I read them?” I asked gazing around the shelves stacked from floor to ceiling.

He smiled and nodded, “David…. I expect you to read them!”

The only other person working in the shop was his sister Hazel, also in her sixties, but not quite as old fashioned in her dress, manner, or attitude. In the first week she informed me ‘sotto voce’, but with some pride, that she had recently persuaded her brother to carry paperbacks in the shop.

“ I mean, “ she whispered as if disclosing a book selling secret only recently recognised by the trade, “ Not everyone can afford to buy hard back editions! I told Jerome, by not carrying paperbacks we are denying our clientele access to good literature. Mind you, Hutchinson’s will never lead people to read trashy fiction whether it’s hardback, or paperback.”

In the event what Hutchinson’s did do was lead me back to ‘play acting.’

I’d been working in the shop only a month, when Jerome displayed a playbill one of the windows. It was for a production by the local drama group being staged in Ashleigh Institute. I’d been to one of their plays with Miss Slater’s school trips, but hadn’t been to any since. Once or twice I had thought of joining the group but, with the situation at home, and my continuing painful shyness, I had never taken the ambition any further.

Seeing me watching him sellotape the poster the shops glass, Jerome asked me if I was interested in plays and the theatre? I nodded my head, but then, on an impulse, I went on to explain that I didn’t get much chance to see them any longer. He stared at me in genuine disbelief.

“Why ever not?” he asked.

“My dad thinks that sort of thing is a waste of time and money,” I replied.

What prompted me to such honesty I’ve no idea but, after a few moments of stunned silence, he looked across at his sister who was standing at the cash desk listening and said,

“Well sister, we certainly can’t allow that attitude to continue can we?”

She shook her head, and smiled knowingly.

“I mean,” Jerome continued crossing to the cash desk himself, “ We’ve noticed that you’ve read almost every book on the Theatre shelves, so we knew you must be interested…”

Reaching up onto a shelf behind the counter he lifted down one of the tickets the shop was holding for sale, and held it out to me. I shook my head.

“Dad would accuse me of wasting money,” I muttered.

“How old are you David?” His tone was almost challenging.

“Seventeen… well, almost eighteen.”

“ Well it isn’t my place to come between father and son, but don’t you think you are old enough to decide for yourself what is a waste of money?”

He was right of course but I still hesitated. Finally, he shook his head with exasperation.

“For heavens sake if it’s going to cause family discord tell your father that I consider it part of your training that you attend theatre productions,…. and I will not be charging you for the ticket.”

For some reason he then looked to his sister.

“Am I correct in this Hazel?”

She nodded her head, but addressed her explanation directly to me.

“Jerome was one of the founding members of the Ashleigh Players. He still serves on their general committee, and occasionally produces one of their plays…”

“Less of the ‘occasionally’ please sister. Next season will be our thirtieth and I’ve been asked to produce the first play of the season next autumn. I haven’t decided which play yet but …” His eyes twinkled mischievously. “I have an idea which might surprise a few people and, who knows, …..David might even consider joining us himself? All as part of his training for the job here of course. We could do with some young blood joining us, What do you think Hazel?”

She again nodded her head. “ I’m membership secretary,” she explained.

So it was that a few weeks later, I entered the foyer of the Ashleigh Institute, climbed the stairs to the first floor, and purchased a programme from a young woman selling them outside the theatre entrance.

It did occur to me that the last time I had waited on this landing it had been in a group organised by Miss Slater, and for that reason alone I should have recognised her but, until she spoke my name, I didn’t.

************************************************

“ It’s David Lewis isn’t it?”

She was no longer wearing spectacles, and her dark hair was cut shorter and curled into the nape of her neck, page boy style. She was also wearing make up, which I never recalled her using and, in a dark off the shoulder evening dress, she looked even more beautiful than I remembered.

“ Miss Slater…” I mumbled, embarrassment bringing a blush to my cheeks. Then I corrected myself. “ I mean Misses…. I’m sorry I …. I don’t know your name now…”

“Preston… as in the town,” she laughed and stepped closer.“I’m Misses Preston now.” The hand wearing the wedding ring rested onto my arm,

“But David…your so grown up! … Really, I think you can call me Rita now!”

For a moment I was unable to call her anything. Suddenly I was a love sick adolescent again. Past feelings for her rushed in on me. Part of me, prompted by my habitual shyness, wanted to mumble something incoherent and then walk away; but her hand, on my arm, restrained me.

“ Have you got a numbered ticket?” she was asking. “ A ticket with a seat number on it?”

I shook my head. “ I’m a guest of Jerome Harrison,” I explained.

Her eyes widened.

“ Really? Oh my David, he‘s almost like a god around here.”

She began to lead me towards the theatre entrance.

“I’m afraid if your ticket is unnumbered it still means you’re in the unreserved seats towards the back. I am sorry.”

“ That’s okay.” We were inside the theatre now and my voice was starting to return to normal, although my heart was still thumping. I never remembered her looking this beautiful, but I certainly recalled her being this warm and friendly.

When I spoke the words seemed to tumble out of my mouth in a frantic rush.

“ He gave me the ticket from the stock he was carrying in the shop. I’m working there… with him I mean … now. ..In the bookshop…. He has this bookshop… his bookshop, here in Ashleigh… He owns it and I … I work there…”

I was desperate to keep her beside me, but she was studying my face, as if unsure what she should do next. I realised I hadn’t paid her for the programme I was holding in my hand, and began fumbling in my overcoat pocket for some change. Anything to keep her there beside me. Suddenly it was her words that seemed to come in a rush.

“ Well at least if you’re sitting in the unreserved seats here at the back that means I can come and sit with you… during the performance I mean. …Do you mind?… It’s just that Jim, that’s my husband, is the stage manager so I’m at a bit of a loose end once the performance starts…”

Somehow I managed to sound nonchalant and cool in my response.

“I’d like that very much,” I stated, and held out some money which she took.

“ I’ll keep a seat for you” I added gallantly, and she smiled the same wonderful smile I remembered from when I presented her with a piece of written work at school.

“ Thank you David, That would be wonderful. I’ll be back as soon as the curtain goes up.”

For the briefest of seconds I felt her squeeze arm, and then she was gone leaving me almost trembling with excitement, and looking for a row near the back with two vacant seats in it.

I didn’t think the play, a comedy, was up to very much. Not that, during the first act, while I waited for her to come and join me, I was able to concentrate on it very much. It certainly didn’t strike me as being very funny. Or, I wondered, was that because the cast seemed so wooden?

Inexperienced as I was I sensed that what was missing was the light touch and timing that comedy requires. Perhaps Jerome was right when he had suggested that Ashleigh Players needed an injection of new blood; and if Rita, ( how easily I slipped into thinking of her by her Christian name!), was a member, perhaps I would take him up on the implied offer?

She finally slipped onto the seat beside me at the start of the second act.

“ I’m sorry, “ she whispered, “ But I had to help Jim with a couple of things backstage during that first act.” She suddenly giggled almost girlishly, and gave my arm another squeeze. “ Did you miss me?”

I managed to shake my head, and whispered back “ No…not at all.”

She pouted playfully and suggested that a little gallantry would not go amiss. Then, more seriously she enquired if I was enjoying the play so far?

“ It’s not too bad.”

“David, that’s faint praise if ever I heard it, ….. but you’re probably right.”

Her whisper dropped so low that I had to bend my head towards her to listen and that meant I breathed in the perfume she was wearing. I was starting to blush and hoped she wouldn’t notice.

“ I’ve been talking to Jerome backstage and he tells me you might be joining us for next season?”

I told her I probably would. I wanted to add, ‘ Now I know you‘re a member,’ but instead I asked her how long she had been with the group?

“Since I married Jim. He’s been their only stage manager for years, well ten years anyway. He’s a good bit older than me. I joined them really to be a help for him. Not that I‘m much use at the hammering and nailing stuff, but I do help out with the make up and costumes when they need it.”

I wanted my blush’s to recede, but felt them growing even hotter. She was leaning so close, and I couldn’t help noticing how her dress set off her cleavage.

“Have you acted with them?” I managed to ask.

“No. Well the past few years I’ve been really busy settling into the post in Granchester. It hasn’t left me much time for anything else. Now though, …. Well, I might think about it. Especially as its such an important year for the Society, and Jerome’s agreed to take charge of the autumn production. I really would like to have a part in anything he produced. He’s just sooo brilliant, you just know that anything he does is going to be good. and who knows …”

She stopped and gazed at me intently for a moment. My burning cheeks no longer mattered. Without her spectacles her gaze seemed to envelope me, draw me into a kind of shared communion, shared between the two of us alone.

“… you might even read for a part as well? Jerome was saying he hoped you would.”

The invitation seemed obvious, and my heart leaped, but I managed to sound off hand, even nonchalant.

“ I might,” I said.

“I hope you do. I still remember the way you took on the Artful Dodger and made it so much your own. I was telling Jerome about it just now, how good you were I mean. .. He seemed very impressed.”

I wondered if she expect me to thank her? For a moment the idea irritated me. Would people never stop trying to organise my life for me?

The auditorium lights dimmed and I looked away determined to try and concentrate on the rest of the play, but it was hopeless. At least my cheeks started to cool but I couldn’t stop thinking about her sitting so close beside me. Once or twice I seemed to feel her thigh touch mine as she leaned forward, or changed her position on her seat. I wondered if the contact was deliberate on her part? I certainly hoped so. I continued to breathe in the perfume she was wearing, and ended up wishing this whole evening would last forever. I also knew that whatever else I did over the next few months, I definitely wanted to be included in any cast she was a part of.

What I didn’t know that evening, didn’t even dare to imagine over the summer months until Jerome held his auditions in the autumn, was that I would be cast opposite her!

******************************************

The play was entitled ‘ Last Summer in Rome.’ Essentially the plot was not that original. A middle aged English woman, recently widowed, rents a villa apartment outside Rome to holiday with her teenage son who has just finished public school. Coincidentally an old boyfriend of the woman has also rented an apartment in the villa, and when they meet, their romance is rekindled. Meanwhile the son, Simon, meets Sophia an Italian servant girl at the villa and, with her, starts a torrid affair which, put simply, completes those parts of his ‘education’ not covered at public school!

It had been written, but never given a stage performance, by an old friend of Jerome’s, Francis Wellman. who lived in London. Jerome had been promising for years to premier the piece with the Ashleigh Players, but his difficulty was finding somebody to play the young son. Until he encouraged me to join the group they had no teenage male players, so my reading for the part at the casting was something of a formality.

There were a couple of the female members prepared to read for the Sophia part but when Jerome gave Rita the part he justified his choice by saying that he felt she would more easily portray a girl close to Simons age. Then with the twinkle in his eye that I now knew was essentially mischievous, he added

“I also think Rita might be more comfortable playing the love scenes. I intend them to be rather more realistic than we have been accustomed to heretofore.”

“Have you read the whole play?” Rita asked me after the casting was finished. She looked a little flushed which, at first, I put down to her excitement at landing such an important part at her first reading; but then I wondered if it was because of his reference to the scenes we were to play together.

“Jerome gave it me to read in the shop.. He said it wouldn’t matter me reading it beforehand because there was nobody else could realistically read for the Simon part.”

“Oh I have to say, you read it really well David! You seemed to slip into the character even as you were reading it. Honestly… you were making the hairs stand up on the back of my neck you were so good…I just hope I can play my part as well, but….”

She stopped, and eyed me quizzically. “We do have some really big scenes together…. love scenes I mean. Are you alright with that? I mean with me having been your teacher and all that?….”

I nodded my head.

“Of course. It’s just part of the play isn’t it? It’s the parts we will be playing, And anyway… I’m not at school any more am I?”

To be honest I already suspected that, for me at least, it was going to be more than ‘just a part I was playing’. Thinking about the love scenes we were going to play together was already starting to excite me, but Rita continued to stare at me and bite her lip nervously. Then she looked away and remarked quietly, as if to herself,

“ No, you aren’t are you?”

Ashleigh Players met for castings, readings, and rehearsals not at the Institute, but in a room they hired in the Kings Arms Hotel beside the Market Square. We were standing outside the hotel’s front door.

“Jim’s away working on a contract job in Scotland on a contract job at the moment,’ Rita explained as she waitined for a lift home in another female members car. I was waiting… well I’m not sure what I was waiting for… other then wanting to wait with her!

During the casting we had not been sitting together. I had been near the front, while she had been sitting at the back with the friend she was now waiting for, but I had noticed her and let on. She was wearing a black woollen jumper, black trousers, and a white raincoat which she was now clutching around her against the cold and the rain.

“Can we wait inside David?” she asked her teeth chattering with the cold. “Angela parked in the multi storey, and it will take her a few minutes to bring the car around.”

She stepped back inside the hotel foyer and I followed her. Other members of the group were milling around us but she seemed more anxious to seek further reassurance for wh been troubling her outside.

“ Most of our scenes are together.” she stated. “ In fact almost all my scenes with you are with you alone.”

“I know,” I replied trying not to sound too pleased by the prospect.

“And you’re sure you are okay with that? I mean, they are quite strong scenes …. certainly towards the end.” Her voice dropped to a whisper; but a whisper, I could swear, that trembled with excitement.

I nodded my head and tried to look as if the prospect of playing torrid love scenes with her was no great deal. I must have pulled it off because she suddenly relaxed, gave a relieved little chuckle, and murmured,

“ Well it should be fun! I just hope I can manage the Italian accent. I’ll get some tapes out of the library and then practise it on Jim… make it sound really seductive.”

I’d already had a tendency to forget that she was married, but I found this sudden repeat of her husbands name, and the image of her sharing our love scenes with him irritating. I wanted to walk away at that point, but her friends car pulled up outside the hotels front door, and the horn blew.

“Can we give you a lift home?” she asked.

Of course I wanted to share a lift home with her but the image of arriving at my front gate with her, and possibly being met by my dad prompted me to shake my head. She frowned and stared at me.

“But David, it’s raining quite heavily. You’ll get soaked trying to catch a bus.”

I shrugged my shoulders, and pulled a woollen deer hunter with flaps onto my head.

“ I’ll not bother with the bus,” I stated. “ I feel like the walk and I don’t live that far away. In any case, a bit of rain never hurt anyone did it”

I nursed the memory, and possible implication of her disappointed expression all the way home!

******************************************

We rehearsed in the Kings Arms every Tuesday and Thursday evenings from eight until ten o’clock. The hotel sent some refreshments up to the room halfway through each evening; but Jerome was a bit of a stickler for us rehearsing without any interruptions.

“ We need to maintain our dramatic rhythm,” he asserted rather pompously, “ Constantly breaking off for tea and biscuits does nothing to help in that regard.”

I was surprised at how different his manner changed at rehearsal. In the shop I was accustomed to him being relaxed to the point of being laid back, but once he put on his producers hat he became almost dictatorial.

He quickly ‘shushed’ into silence anyone who started chatting by shaking his script in the air, and going very red in the face. The word ‘ Svengali’ was murmured more than once. At the second, or third rehearsal, ( I can’t remember which,) Rita whispered into my ear,

“I would never have imagined he could be like this. Normally he comes across as such a soft old pussy cat…” She had her arm resting across the back of the chair I was sitting on.

“ You should see him in the shop,” I whispered back, “ When lads come in, and ask him what ‘top shelf’ magazines we carry!”

Her expression was one of genuine astonishment.“ And do you carry any?”

“Of course not. They just do it to take a rise out of him.”

We had thought, sitting to one side of the room, that we would not be heard, but he turned around glared at us.

“ Please… please, …. I realise you younger ones may be new to the rituals of rehearsal, but do have some respect for the efforts of your fellow players, and remain silent until your cue!”

Rita just smiled, but after a few moments I felt her fingers begin to stroke and fondle the hairs at the back of my neck. I looked at her but there was nothing in her expression to indicate that she even knew what she was doing.

After that particular rehearsal some of the cast went down into the hotel lounge for a drink before setting off for home. As if she realised I wouldn’t have enough money to stand a full round of my own, Rita drew me to one side, and pushed a note into my hand.

“I think we need to talk, just the two of us,” she murmured urgently, “ Get me a gin and tonic, and whatever you want for yourself, and I’ll wait at a table out in the foyer.”

When I returned to the foyer with our drinks she was sitting in one of the irritation and tension he had earlier displayed dissipated .

“David, my dear boy, I was just telling Rita here how pleased and satisfied I am with your efforts this evening, and if I may say so your commitment. So early in rehearsals and you already have committed your lines to memory. That is most admirable David, I am very impressed. If only the rest of the cast were as committed!”

Rita glanced up at him as if she thought he was criticising her for still carrying her script, and I hurriedly, perhaps too hurriedly rushed to her defence by remarking that I always found it easy to recall things I had read.

He nodded. “ An admirable attribute David, and especially so in an actor.”

Rita took her drink from my hand, and said, “ I’ve just been suggesting to Jerome that since almost all our scenes are with each other perhaps we should rehearse them separately. If we came a little before the rehearsal begins, say at seven oclock that would give us an hour to work on our scenes before the others arrive.”

She half smiled up at me, and then added, I’m sure for Jerome’s benefit,

“ It would also enable me to learn my lines that more quickly!”

I was thrilled at the prospect of us being alone together for a full hour but explained that it didn’t give me much time after I finished work to go home, and have something to eat. Jerome held up his hand.

“Rubbish David. Of course you can leave the shop early on rehearsal nights, say at five oclock. That will give you ample time. I think that is an excellent idea. Your scenes with Rita are absolutely essential to the plays success. That’s why I cast you both in those parts. I shall clear it with the hotel staff immediately…. though it is only a formality. The room is booked to the Society from six every Tuesday and Thursday anyway.”

With that he left us both, and I sat down at the table with Rita.

“ You wanted to talk to me about something,” I said taking a sip from my glass of beer.

She nodded, and leaned closer. “That was it…. I think we need to work really closely together on the scenes we have together. Make them really work. Don’t you agree?”

I didn‘t dare to speak. It was the tone of her voice as much as the expression in her eyes and the way she was leaning towardsme which set my heart racing. I felt exactly as I had felt that night at the school gates when she had told my dad he should encourage rather than rubbish my acting talent. Then she had prompted in me an almighty crush… now, I suddenly realised,…. it was love!

**********************************

Tuesday and Thursday evenings became the highlights of my week, especially that first hour when Rita and I rehearsed alone. The rest of the week was like a dream from which I wanted to wake up. Even Jerome and Helen noticed it in the shop.

“His mind simply isn’t on his work,” Helen said when she thought I wasn‘t listening, “It’s as though he’s somewhere else entirely.”

“He’s living for his part” Jerome explained equally sotto voce, “You really should see the level of intensity and involvement he has brought to the play, it‘s most encouraging. Even if I say so myself, it confirms my perspicacity in casting him into the role in the first place. There were some on the committee who questioned my judgement because he has so little previous experience, but take it from me …our David there is going to surprise everyone!”

My dad, on the other hand was more direct. “ This play actin’ nonsense ‘is turnin’ ‘im into a pure dope!”

By then though I didn’t care any more what he thought.

Nothing really mattered anymore except those two evenings in every week when I lived out the fantasy that Rita and I really were lovers. Either alone for the first hour, or when we rehearsed in front of the rest of the cast; when we kissed I felt as if it was for real. Then, one night, it became as real as anything I had ever experienced before.

It was in that first hour when we were alone, We were in each others arms and, as I went to step away from her and continue with the scene, she suddenly drew me back, and kissed me even more passionately than the script required.

At first I was surprised, then stunned and exhilarated; but then I responded with equal passion, equal ferocity. It was a moment I had dreamed of sharing with her almost every moment since the casting, but never dared hope would actually happen.

“ David… I’m sorry, “ she gasped when we finally did separate. “ I shouldn’t have done that. It was wrong…. I don’t know what came over me!”

She turned away from me shaking her head as if in disbelief, but I was sure what had come over me and, taking hold of her arm, I drew her back towards me.

“ I know…and I don’t mind… really I don’t. Rita…Sophia I mean…. it‘s the play… don‘t let it worry you,”

For a moment she gazed up into my face, her eyes searching mine for some sort of meaning, some excuse that would remove her feelings of guilt; but then her eyes closed, and she allowed me to kiss her again. This time we kissed gently as if to convince ourselves that our only motivation was the good of the play.

That night as I walked home through the streets I was filled with a wild exhilaration. Now, I felt, we shared a secret, a relationship which, though it must remain secret, could find its legitimate expression in each of the scenes we rehearsed. then played together.

One Thursday night a week or so before rehearsals ended and the plays run started she told me she had been shopping for the different costumes she was going to wear onstage.

“I’ve got three changes to make,“ she explained and then, with a coy smile, added, “ For our last scene, when we come in from the beach, I’ve decided to be a little daring. Have you got your things together yet?”

I nodded. I knew there was no point expecting any sort of financial sub from home to buy the clothes I would need, so I had been scouring jumble sales, and charity shops. I reasoned that as a student just out of university my character would not have that many cloth’s anyway.

“I’ve got everything except the beach ware.” I explained. “At this time of year there isn’t much of that about!”

As usual I had walked her to the car park after the rehearsal, and we were standing beside her car. She lived in the opposite direction to me so after I had turned down the lift home on the casting night, she hadn’t repeated the offer. Now she opened her door and turned towards me as if having a sudden afterthought,

“Jim has some beach ware that might fit you, you’re about the same size as each other. I could bring it for you to try on if you like.”

I still hadn’t met her husband, and feeling the way I did about her I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to. What we shared was within the play, and between us two. I didn’t want him invading that space; not even his cloths. But then, I didn’t feel either able, or confident enough. to turn down her offer, so I nodded my head.

She sat for a moment in the driving seat staring ahead of her, and then looked up at me.

“It would be nice if you could see me in my costumes before the dress rehearsal. I’d really like to know what you think… whether I’ve gone too far with them. If you were free on Sunday afternoon, and could come out to the house, I could let you see me wearing them, and you could try Jims things on as well……. Mind you you‘re probably doing something else on Sunday …”

“No,” I exclaimed my excitement rising, “ I’m not doing anything. That would be fine, but where do you live?”

“Oh I’ll come and pick you up,” she said. “ Here, at two oclock?”

“Fine… yeah…. two oclock will be fine! That will be great.”

She was smiling as she drove away.

****************************************

Perhaps I should have had more sense; especially when she collected me in the car and told me that Jim was away again in Scotland for the weekend!

“ After we’ve tried on our costumes we can rehearse for the afternoon, and I’ll cook us something to eat,” she explained.

Alone in the house we rehearsed in the conservatory with the warm afternoon sun pouring in on us. The heat only added to the illusion that this was the reality, and our respective roles seemed to take us both over entirely. I found myself calling her Sophia, and thinking of her as the Italian servant girl bent on seducing me; no longer my former teacher now cast opposite me in work of theatrical fiction. With a coquettish, almost wicked smile she responded by calling me Simon and allowing our kisses to become both longer and more passionate than those roles demanded. It was wrong of course but I for one was beyond making such moral distinctions

She hadn’t been exaggerating either when she had said her costume for the scene following our characters skinny dip in the ocean was ‘daring.’ It was stunning, and when I changed into her husbands beach wear we almost lost control.

Almost…. but not quite!

“David… we’ll have to stop, before this goes too far…. I don’t know that I can go any further… not yet. Please try to understand….”

She turned away and walked towards the kitchen.

“I’ll get us something to eat.. We both need time to think…..”

In the event the break gave us more than time to think!

As she placed the food onto the table in front of me, and even as I wondered whether to take the chance of being totally rejected and admit out loud that it wasn’t food I really wanted, the extension telephone rang.

“Jim,” she exclaimed into the receiver, almost with relief and, rising from the table, gestured me to carry on eating while she moved into the living room to take the call. Pushing the food I didn’t want around the plate I could only catch snatches of what she was saying.

“Yes… I’m here with David… we’ve been rehearsing some of our scenes…. No, of course not…not like that at all…”

She laughed at whatever he said, and closed the intervening door between us. After that I could hardly pick up anything she said. It was almost as if she had dropped her voice so that I wouldn’t hear, was excluding me from what was none of my business anyway.

Suddenly, I felt like the outsider I really was, and when she came back into the kitchen I pushed the half emptied plate away from me and stood up to leave. The surprised expression on her face both pleased me, and make me ache.

“ I think the costumes are fine,” I stated. “ Will you thank your husband for loaning me the beach outfit. I’ll get it cleaned before I return it to him.”

“Yeees… if that’s what you want… but you don’t have to rush off now do you? I mean…I thought we could rehearse a little more.”

I managed to meet her gaze with my own. I thought I would like to see tears, but all I saw in her eyes was confusion, and perhaps a little anger.

“Yes… I think it’s best if I do. I mean they do say you can over rehearse don‘t they?”

It was lame and pathetic and she turned away. “ Well perhaps, but at least let me give you a lift home.”

I shook my head,

“ I’ll change back into my own clothes in the sitting room if I may, but then I can easily catch a bus home. It‘s a warm evening and I could do with the walk”

I’d used this excuse before of course, so I added, “ I need to clear my head.”

I desperately wanted to hear her protest, claim she hadn’t meant to confuse me like this, even pick an argument with me, and tell me I was being silly, but all I got when I looked at her was a shrug of her shoulders, and a soft murmur,

“Well if you must go, I suppose you must.”

“Thank you for the meal, “ I said as I left.

**********************************

I had no idea what Rita’s attitude might be at the next rehearsal on the Tuesday night, but on the Monday evening she came into the shop just before we closed. I was in the stockroom at the rear when Helen called me and, as I came towards the till I found Rita there with a smile on her face. My heart rose and I thought,

‘ Well at least she isn’t mad at me for walking out yesterday.”

“ David,” she said smiling even more warmly, “ I wont be able to get to the rehearsal tomorrow night until after eight o’clock so I thought I would just let you know. and not have you waiting around needlessly for the first hour or so.”

She went on to explain that Jim had got back from Scotland that afternoon and intended coming to the rehearsal on the Tuesday to discuss the stage settings with Jerome. She looked at Helen as if the explanation she had just given was as much for her benefit as for mine.

“ Well Jerome will certainly be there tomorrow night.” Helen stated. “ In fact he has been getting a bit anxious about when Jim would get to a rehearsal, and discuss the set with him.”

Now Rita concentrated her full attention on Helen.

“Yes I know he has, but it’s this contract Jim’s working on up in Scotland, its proving much bigger, and more complicated, than we originally anticipated. Honestly the poor man hardly knows whether he’s coming or going with it, and to be honest it hasn’t been easy for either of us. I mean we hardly seem to get any quality time together any longer.”

Helen nodded her head sympathetically. “ Yes I can imagine it must be very hard on you both, him being up there, and you down here. I’ll be sure to let Jerome know that James will be at the rehearsal tomorrow night.” Then she added with a grin, “ And you be sure to let that husband of yours know that he’s not to take any of my brothers ‘ I’m the producer and I want it done this way’ nonsense either!”

Rita laughed. “ I’ll tell him that.”

Then, as if recollecting that I was still standing there, she turned back to me. “So, David, I’ll see you tomorrow night then… but not at seven.”

When she left the shop Helen stared at me.

“I thought rehearsals started at eight oclock? Why did she say seven?”

Despite my best efforts I felt the blush creep up into my cheeks.

“We’ve been rehearsing before the others arrive.” I stated, then added quickly “ Jerome arranged it.”

She didn’t respond for a moment, as if thinking it through, and then murmured

“ Did he really? Sometimes I wonder whether my brother has even half the sense he was born with!”

*************************

To my surprise I found I actually liked Rita’s husband. He was a good deal older than her, in his late thirties, rather quiet and wearing the same sort of horn rimmed spectacles I remembered her wearing when I knew her at school. They arrived together a little after eight o’clock and, when Rita introduced us, he shook my hand with a firm friendly grip.

“Rita keeps telling me how much she is enjoying playing opposite you David.”

I glanced at her wondering just what she had told him, but she had turned away and was looking towards where Jerome was making a bee line across the room towards his errant stage manager.

“ Jim,“ he exclaimed. “ At last you’re here. I’d almost begun to believe we would be designing the set at the dress rehearsal!”

They both moved off together taking Rita with them but afterwards he came and sat next to me.

“This is her first really big part,” he explained indicating Rita who was now watching us both with what seemed to me a wary look in her eyes. “ She’s always been interested in theatre, and plays and so forth… well of course you know that yourself from when you were at school, but she’s never had the chance before to do anything for herself so this play is very important for her. She says that you are making it really easy for her to get into the role.”

He was looking directly at me as he made the last remark but I couldn’t see anything untoward in the look. Nonetheless I felt I needed to make some response of my own.

“ She’s making it very easy for me to get into my role as well.”

Then I realised I couldn‘t leave it like thateither, and added rather lamely,

“ She made it easy for me when we did Oliver at the school.”

He nodded. “ I’d only just started going out with her at that point, and I didn’t actually see the production. I remember she was quite annoyed with me for not getting to even one performance, but I was so busy starting up the business I just didn’t have the time.”

He made it sound as if he didn’t have the inclination either but then added, with a grin,

“ She told me the lad playing the Artful Dodger was a real star in the making.”

I was so relieved that he obviously didn’t suspect what his wife might have been doing with that self same lad that I even managed a jocular “ Well I wonder who that could have been!”

It was odd really the way I felt no sense of guilt being around him over the next few days while we were building the set onto the stage in Ashleigh Institute. I even shared tea and sandwiches with himself and Rita without any feeling of embarrassment. Once or twice I did catch Rita giving me speculative glances but I didn’t respond. I behaved as if I was just another member of the group doing what I enjoyed doing most, … putting on a play, a dramatic make believe.

It was during the remaining rehearsals, and especially during the four performances of the plays run, from the Wednesday to the Saturday night, that I became convinced that Rita and my relationship had undergone a fundamental change. Particularly during our love scenes together I had the feeling that ‘David’ was somebody I inhabited in another life. That here. on the stage, I really was Simon; but I was Simon in love with Rita who, for her part, was pretending to be ‘Sophia’ in order to respond without giving anyone, including her husband, any cause to suspect what might be going on.

Jerome had made it clear from the beginning that he wanted our scenes together to have what he termed ‘impact.’ Now, in those last rehearsals and the following performances, there was an almost electric energy between us which had not been there before; and it was significant that Jerome stopped giving us any direction at all. He just watched us with an almost mesmerised expression on his face and occasionally muttered

“ Excellent…. wonderful..,” and on the last rehearsal after our final scene together, “ They really are, both of them, everything I could have wished for!”

His sister, who was at that dress rehearsal, and sitting beside him, merely frowned, and bit her lip.

For that last scene we had a bucket of water offstage which we both used to wet our hair and clothes before making our entrance onto the stage. The implication in the plays plot was that our two characters had finally spent the night together on the beach. At the final performance on the Saturday night we were both filled with a sense of exhilaration; but an exhilaration, at least on my part, tinged with regret that the existence in which I had so recently found total happiness was about to end. Rita, for her part, was so excited that she made sure I was absolutely soaked from head to foot.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and then started a suppressed giggle that threatened to choke her.

We were standing out of everyone’s sight in semi darkness behind the rear scenery flats waiting for our cue. I was trying to wipe the water from my eyes with one hand, and felt her lean closer to me and take hold of my other hand. At first I wasn’t sure what to do so continued wiping my eyes, and staring down at the puddles spreading around my feet on the wooden floor. I hardly dared to breath, even less to hope, but impulsively squeezed her hand. Suddenly her voice, close to my ear, whispered my name, and I turned to look down at her.

“It’s almost over,” she murmured, and in the dim light her voice seemed to throb with regret.

It was then that I kissed her not as Simon kissing his Italian girl friend, but as David kissing Rita the first great love of his young life. She didn’t hold back at all. In fact she responded with equal passion pressing herself against me in the confined space, and pushing her tongue almost hungrily up into my mouth. All the emotions, all the yearning of the past few months welled up within me. I released her hand and, turning fully round, took her into my arms. We both became so excited that we almost missed our cue, and made our entrance late.

Laughing together we both stumbled onto the stage; she in her revealing beach ware, and I in my soaking wet shorts. It did occur to me that everyone in the audience must have been able to see my state of arousal, but by then I simply didn’t care.

“Simon,” she exclaimed slipping easily into the Italian accent she had learned so well,and looking around the empty set. “ We are alone you and I…”

I went through the final scene between us almost in a daze, feeling both elated by what her kisses could be implying but, realising that what she had said about it being ‘ almost over,’ could also be true. I wondered what would remain once the final curtain fell?

What remained was the double shock from which I have still not recovered!

***********************************************

It was usual at the end of a plays final performance for the producer to join the cast onstage and say a few words of thanks to all those who had made the production possible.

Jerome had been preparing his few ‘impromptu’ remarks for weeks in the shop but then, having made the obligatory references to the backstage staff, as well as those working front of house, he rather ostentatiously pocketed the notes he had prepared, and launched himself into a genuine off the cuff speech.

“ I had intended to curtail my words at this point,” he announced smiling in the direction of his cast lined up beside him, “ But I cannot let this moment pass without making a few additional remarks.”

We all waited with bated breath as he stepped further forward into the footlights, and addressed himself directly towards the audience.

“Firstly we are especially honoured this evening to have in the audience the author of this evenings play. I am pleased to acknowledge him not only as a very fine playwright but also an old and very dear friend of mine, Mister Francis Wellman.”

With a wave of his arm he indicated an man in his sixties with grey hair, rimless spectacles, and a tweed suite as dated as his own who was sitting in the front row. This person rose to his feet and, turning, bowed his head in response to the resulting round of applause from both the audience and the cast. Then Jerome stepped backwards, and faced us again.

“ It would not normally be appropriate for any producer to single out, as I am about to do, any members of his cast for especial mention, but I cannot fail to commend the performance of young David Lewis who has played the role of Simon with a maturity beyond his years, and an intensity which I for one have found quite astonishing. Particularly, I think, when one realises that, apart from a role some years ago in a school play, he has never acted in public before. Truly his performance in this play has been quite outstanding.”

He then led another round of applause.

Some other members of the cast looked startled by this but Rita, who was standing beside me, first of all applauded then slipped her arm under mine and gave it an enthusiastic hug, a gesture which prompted some members of the audience to whistle and cheer. With my parents sitting somewhere out in the darkness it seemed to me that life could not get better than this…. but Jerome wasn’t finished.

“I need also to mention Rita Preston who, as well as being the wife of Jim our stage manager, has been such a wonderful Sophia in the play. Sadly in her case, as well as being her first part for us, Sophia is to be her last. She and Jim will shortly be moving permanently to Scotland where Jim’s successful business is now mainly located. We are all sad to be losing two such valuable members of our society, but we do wish them both every happiness and success in the future.”

The applause this time was even louder and Rita was smiling and nodding. Then she seemed to notice the shocked expression on my face, and whispered almost apologetically,

“I think all the staff, and my form at school must be here tonight…”

Her arm dropped from below mine, her face reddened with embarrassment, and she glanced at Jerome as if pleading with him to just shut up.

No chance!

Jerome had the audiences full attention, and he just couldn’t help playing to the gallery. He was grinning like somebody about to reveal a state secret,

“…. Especially we wish them well because as those of you in the audience who are their friends probably know already… they are also expecting their very first child!”

There was a moment of stunned silence which could only mean that most people, like me, knew no such thing. Then both cast and audience erupted into enthusiastic applause, cheering and whistling. Rita seemed to wilt away from me with embarrassment, she certainly took a step away while I, for my part, felt sick with the shock. I felt a yawning hole open in the pit of my stomach and all I wanted to do was walk off the stage and hide away in the dressing room. What had been excitement and triumph one moment had become horror and despair the next, and all of it focused onto the woman now standing beside me, but apart from me!

*******************************************

“ David, let me introduce my friend Francis Wellman. Francis this is the young actor I have been telling you about.”

The three of us were in the corridor outside the dressing room from which I had just escaped feeling both wretched and betrayed. Rita, despite her apparent embarrassment onstage, still seemed unaware of the full effect her news was having on me; the torture it was putting me through. She had managed, among all the back slapping and congratulations, to get me to one side and whisper,

“David, I’ve really enjoyed playing with you.”

It seemed so insensitive that I had been stung into replying,

“Playing’ being the operative word!”

I had grabbed my coat and without even bothering to remove my make up practically ran from the dressing room, slamming the door behind me. Petulant I know, even childish, but perhaps that was what I was in her eyes… a silly adolescent to be played along with in order to ensure a good foil for her own performance. I certainly didn’t want her following me out to where my parents would be waiting so that she could tell them once again what a wonderful actor she thought I was.

‘ Stuff the acting,’ I even thought. ‘ It hurts too much.’

But in the corridor I ran into Jerome and his friend, Francis Wellman, and it was Jerome who was describing my acting as brilliant.

Francis reached for my hand with an admiring expression in his eyes.

“ And you haven’t been lying Jerome. I have been truly impressed with your acting young man. You have realised the character of Simon exactly as I imagined him.”

“As a fool?” I muttered distractedly, taking his hand.

Confusion creased his features, momentarily wiping away his smile.

“No, no David… not at all.”

I took a breath. “ I’m sorry…. I’m just a little…. Oh I don’t know… let down I suppose.”

Jerome, still on a personal high, patted me on the shoulder.

“ Only natural dear boy, “ he exclaimed. “The true thespian. Downcast by the final curtains fall, still not satisfied by his performance.”

Of course I had no idea what he was babbling about. I simply wanted him to get out of my way, take his friend with him, and let me escape from the building which, it now seemed, reeked of my pain and hurt. But Francis was still holding onto my hand determined to have his say.

“You have a genuine talent David. I know how much Jerome values you in the shop, but if you ever decide to stop wasting that talent out here in the sticks.. If you ever decide to move to London I would consider it an honour if you gave me a call. Jerome has my address, and my telephone number.”

My feelings though were so intense, yet muddled, that I barely registered what he was saying, I managed to mutter a ‘thank you’ before I got away from them both, but I carried Jerome’s parting remark with me into the following day.

“Didn’t I tell you how special he was….Who knows?… He may even take you up on the offer!”

**************************************************

Both my father and mother were surprisingly quiet on the drive home. That suited me fine. I didn’t really need them to tell me how good an actor I had been, but at the breakfast table the following morning Dad finally decided to have his say.

“Well,” he muttered across the table, “ No teacher I had at school ever treated me that way!”

“I’m not at school,” I exclaimed angrily, and he glared at me.

“ Don’t come the smart bugger with me lad. I know yer not at school any more. I’m not talkin’ about then… I’m talkin’ about last night… and you makin’ an exhibition of yerself!”

I looked towards mum hoping for the support she had always given me, but none was forthcoming this time. Instead she rose from the table and started frantically clearing the breakfast things away. Her eyes betrayed her worry and fear, but it was dad who did the talking, his voice rising accusingly.

“ D’ye think yer mother and I are blind an’ bloody stupid, or what? That wasn’t play actin’ last night at all was it? What ‘ave you and that so called teacher bin getting‘ up to?”

“Ted.. Please..” mum muttered, “ Just leave it will you.”

“ No I’ll not leave it. I wanna know what the bloody ‘ell’s bin goin’ on.”

“Nothing” I snapped angrily. “ Nothings been going on as you put it. Nothing is going on.”

“ Don’t give me that. Summat must ‘ave bin goin’ on. Everybody in the place could see it as soon as ye both walked onto the stage. The woman’s pregnant fer godssake…”

He muttered something else under his breath but I didn’t hear it properly because mum was exclaiming

“ Don’t Ted. Please don’t say that.”

I went suddenly cold inside. I had the feeling that everything was sliding away from me, that I needed to take a grip on events before I lost all control of my own future. I barely recognised the determined voice I heard as being my own.

“What did you say?”

Now he wasn’t glaring at me any more. His head dropped, and he stared at the empty tablecloth in front of him.

“ I said ‘ow do we know who’se kid she’s expectin’?”

“Oooh Ted..,” mum groaned, and he threw up his hands in a hopeless gesture as if appealing for her help, and support, in understanding me..

“Well ‘ow do we know wot ‘es bin doin’? ‘Ow ‘ave we ever known what’s goin’ on with the lad?”

It was the first time I had ever heard him speak to her in this way and it was that, as much as anything else, that prompted me to speak to him as calmly as I did.

“I’ve just told you that nothing has been going on. I wish it had, but it hasn’t. Believe me, or don’t believe me, as you like. The fact is I no longer care what you know, or don’t know about me, because at the end of it all…. It’s my life, not yours!”

His head came up, almost snapped up, and his face went crimson with fury.

“Don’t yer dare talk to me like that …. Not if yer want to carry on livin’ in this ‘ouse.”

“ Fine,” I announced, standing up and walking out of the room. “ I’ll leave!”

**************************************************

So now it’s over, and here I am, nearly a week later, on the train to London. Beyond the carraige window the rain is slanting across the glass, grey, cold and depressing. Inside me though the sense of movement is almost exhilarating, almost like a liberation. I’m wondering if I felt like this eighteen years ago when they cut the umbilical chord?

Mum cried a lot before I left, but I feel deep down she thinks it’s for the best. Dad behaved as if I no longer exist. At least now he’s spared the feeling of disappointment he always had whenever he looked at me.

Jerome was surprisingly understanding when I told him on Monday that I wanted to take Francis up on his offer. It was as if he had half expected it. He waived me having to work the full weeks notice and, after telephoning his friend to let him know I was coming, pressed an envelope full of money into my hand along with my national insurance card.

“ There’s a little something extra in there to help you over the first few weeks, until you get yourself set up with a job and so forth.”

As I was leaving the shop he took hold of my hand and said,

“ You need have no fears David. Francis is a man who lives up to his word…. and if things don’t work out for you in London there will always be a job for you here…isn’t that right sister?”

Helen, from her usual position beside the till, treated us both to one of her enigmatic smiles.

“We need have no fear that he will need to return…. brother.”

Despite the uncertain future that lies ahead, I am surprised at how few fears I have myself. In fact I feel really alive for the first time. So alive in fact that I could almost cry, and as the train speeds towards London and my future, it seems to me that the old adage is probably true,

‘When you abandon the comfort of pretence, ‘Life’ becomes so real it can make you cry!

END OF PART ONE.

TWO PLAYERS. PART TWO,

RITA.

I came across your story ‘Play Acting’ on the short story site, and have this uncanny feeling that I know you. The names in the story are different, but the incidents are exactly as I remember them happening. My surname, before I was married, was ‘Slater’ as in the story; but after I married, it changed to Prestwick, rather than ‘Preston’, and I remember your surname as being Lester rather then ‘Lewis.’ but the town, the hotel we rehearsed in, the theatre we used, even the school I taught at when I first knew you…. all those are accurate.

I could be wrong of course in thinking you are the David Lester I knew years ago, in which case forgive me for contacting you this way; but I really cannot imagine it is all pure coincidence!!

I enjoyed reading the piece even though you seem to have thought quite badly of me at the end, but whatever you thought of me at the time, I did really care for you, and have often wondered what became of you.

If I am right, and it is you David, I would love you to respond to this e-mail.

Rita.

****************************************

I sent the above e-mail on an impulse after reading David’s story on the internet. I said to myself, ‘I’ve had enough of second thoughts in my life! Second thoughts have led to me missing out on too much already. This time I’m going to follow my instinct, and see where it gets me.’

In this case I felt sure my instinct was right. When you teach English as I’ve done, assessing pupils writing on a daily basis, you come to recognise what might be termed a ‘distinctive voice,’ at least with some pupils…. and David was certainly one of those. It’s not just the words they use but the way they use them to convey their ideas, and as I read this particular story I could almost hear him talking even after all these years.

I did wonder what his attitude might be to me contacting him, but then I thought ‘Dammit, if you don’t want any response why invite readers to send one?’ and hit the ‘send’ button.

For a couple of days nothing happened, and I began to assume that either I was wrong and it wasn’t the David I knew, or, more likely, he’d decided to have nothing to do with me. On reflection, if it were the latter, I couldn’t really blame him. I really hadn’t meant to hurt him, far from it, but I had to admit I’d behaved badly. As a teacher I should have realised that encouraging an adolescent crush was wrong.

Then his reply dropped into my mail box.

************************************

Rita. I’m amazed! I don’t know what responses I expected to the piece, but I certainly never expected anything like this!

Where are you?

How are you keeping?

How’s Jim?

How many children have you?

So many questions. But then after …what is it?… nineteen years, there would be wouldn’t there?

I live in London now, and I have my own business. Surprise, surprise… selling books!! The theatre, plays and acting are still a big part of my life though. In fact I’ve just finished playing Jedd in ‘Oklahoma’ with my local society…. Great fun and, naturally, I got rave revues!!! (That’s a joke. I think playing immature and dysfunctional characters, even in musicals, is probably my forte!.)

I’ve helped set up a local writers group and even written a couple of plays myself that were put on locally, and did quite well.

Are you still involved with plays and such like yourself? In fact are you still in Scotland and teaching?

I was upset when you and Jim moved there. Not so much that you were going, more the way I found out…. and the announcement that you were expecting a baby probably didn’t help!! But, truly, I have never thought anything but good of you Rita. If what I wrote caused you to think otherwise… that I was blaming you for anything…am blaming you still, then I am truly sorry. Please forgive me and, if you don’t think the request too presumptuous, please respond. and let me know all your news…. David.

************************************

I sat staring at it for a moment, torn between a rush of eagerness to tell him all in the hope of ….., well I don’t know what I could, or should, hope for; and a sudden reticence in case, by revealing too much, I might frighten him off. Frighten him off from what though? Years ago his infatuation had been so sweet and unexpected, even exciting… but now what was it to me? I’d enjoyed playing along with it then but what could I expect from resurrecting this romantic echo now?

When Jim and I moved to Scotland I barely gave David a second thought. But since the divorce I’d found myself remembering him more often, and sometimes with a vague feeling of regret at an opportunity, perhaps even happiness, lost.

“ But then again,” I wondered out loud, “ Need it be lost at all?”

I have a photograph of Jackie beside the monitor. Jackie’s my daughter. More than that she’s my conscience, my ‘better part’, always trying to correct what she see‘s as her mothers faults. It was taken a few months ago before she went to university in Oxford, and it’s my favourite photo of her because it seems to capture her in correction mode ‘Oooh mum!…. really!! … you can’t be serious….’

“ Well yes. …actually I am.” I told her photograph out loud. “ I mean I’m in my middle forties, I’m single, …..and what on earth do I have to lose?”

Nonetheless I still waited a full week before replying…. and I turned her photograph to the wall when I did so!

***************************************

David, thank you so much for replying to my email. I felt sure it was you had written the story, and no I don’t believe you still blame me for the hurt I must have caused you, although I realise that you had every right to feel badly towards me at the time. It’s really me should ask forgiveness from you rather than you from me!

Though my feelings for you were genuine, it was my responsibility, as the older party, to exercise restraint and not indulge my own feelings without proper respect for yours… and ,in that respect, I have to acknowledge I let you down, and I am sorry.

I’m delighted to hear that you are doing so well, and especially that you are still ‘treading the boards.’ I’m sure your performance as Jedd in Oklahoma was just as memorable as your Artful Dodger was in Oliver. Living in London must provide you with so many opportunities in that line, and you sound really happy with your life.

You ask me for my news. and you’re quite right. After nineteen years there is an awful lot of it…and not all of it that good really.

I’m still living and teaching in Scotland, though Jim and I are no longer together. No ones to blame… it just didn’t work out for us, and we were finally divorced three years ago. We have one daughter Jacqueline who is really the reason we stayed married as long as we did.

I still see him sometimes, and I understand from Jackie that he’s about to marry again. Somebody he met through the business apparently. At least he’ll have more in common with her than he ever had with me!

Sorry if that sounds like sour grapes, I don’t mean it to. The truth is we never had that much in common. Our interests were always very different. He was wrapped up in the business all the time, and I lived my life in a completely different world. If we hadn’t had Jackie, we’d probably have broken up much sooner than we did. Funnily enough it was she who made us face up things.

When your adolescent daughter says something like, “ If I’m the only thing keeping you two together, forget it. I love both of you too much to want either of you this unhappy,”. it makes you think.

Anyway that’s it…. moan over!

I wasn‘t teaching for a while after we moved to Edinburgh but when Jackie was old enough for a creche, I got an English post in one of the bigger comprehensives. I really loved that place, both the school and Edinburgh. The staff were so enthusiastic and go ahead, and the head himself was really brilliant to work with, but after Jim and I separated I just felt that what I needed was a complete change of scene.

Jackie opted to stay with her father in Edinburgh so that her own schooling would not be too disturbed, and I sold the house and moved to near Falkirk. It’s a much smaller school I‘m in now, and the salary isn’t as good as it was in Edinburgh. To be honest I’m feeling a bit stifled in the job. I’ve been here more years than I care to recall and I don’t know whether I’ll stay that much longer. The house I’ve lived in since I came is only rented so moving will be easy. Jackie’s in Oxford now reading for an English degree and I’ve been thinking of moving nearer to her.

Did I ever tell you I grew up in Slough? In fact most of my family still lives around there and when I visit Jackie I always stay with my mother rather than trying to find accommodation in Oxford. It’s only an hour or so’s drive on the motorway. If I could find a teaching post down there I’d move tomorrow!

Is Slough anywhere near where you live? London is such a big place, but if I knew where in London you were I might even look you up sometime.

I haven’t done much in the way of acting or producing plays since I moved here, in fact I haven’t done anything of either; but when I was in Edinburgh I did both… I even did another production of ‘Oliver’ one year, though trying to get a Scottish Artful Dodger to sound like a Cockney wasn’t that easy.

Do you remember singing ‘Consider yerrself at ‘ome!!’ for the audition in Ashleigh Comp? Happy times eh?

David there is one thing that is bothering me. In your story you seem to imply that I was the cause of you leaving home, and landing on Francis Wellman‘s doorstep. Is this true? I would hate to think anything I had done caused a permanent rift between you and your parents.

David, I know this email is rather long but I was so grateful to get your reply, and I would like to stay in touch…. That’s if you want to of course!

Rita.

***************************************

Again I’d no sooner sent the e-mail than I began to wonder if I had gone too far, said too much, even hinted more than he would feel comfortable with; but his reply came back in a couple of days.

‘….. Of course I want to stay in touch. The shop’s in Richmond, the ’on the Thames’, Richmond, and I live just outside the town. Both situations are really beautiful and , yes, I am very happy with my life. I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you and Jim. I’ve never married myself so can only imagine the pain a divorce can cause, no matter what the faults are. or with who they lie..

Don’t feel responsible for me leaving home the way I did. What happened between us may have provided the catalyst, but it was always going to happen sooner or later anyway. Funnily enough once I struck out on my own relations with my parents improved no end, especially with my dad. They’re both still hale and hearty and I go back to Ashleigh quite often. Dad is coming up to his retirement shortly, and I’ve even been to football matches with him. He’s a big Aston Villa supporter.

You’d laugh to see us both on the terraces at Villa Park yelling and shouting with the best of them. We even dress the part; him in a thick overcoat and flat cap with his Brummy accent, and me in a Villa scarf and anorak sounding like a Sloane Ranger!

Yes I did land on Francis’s doorstep when I came to London. He has always been an enormous friend and help to me. He knows so many people and has got me into places and situations I would never have accessed for myself. He’s still alive thank God, but getting very old and frail now. It hurts me to see him so dependant on others for everything!

Did you know that Jerome Hutchinson had a heart attack and died last year? It was Helen who wrote to Francis and let him know. We didn’t attend the funeral. Well if Francis had been able for it, and really wanted to, I would have accompanied him, but he wasn’t and I don’t really do funerals. I know that sounds selfish but I prefer to remember people as they were alive, and I hadn’t seen either Jerome or Helen for ages. They’d sold the shop years ago and moved to Eastbourne to be near his son.

Yes Rita,… that’s right… his son!

I don’t think anybody around Ashleigh ever knew he had one. I’m not sure even he knew for a long time. Apparently he’d had a relationship years ago and Peter,… I think that’s the sons name, …was the result.

Anyway the story is that this Peter fellow just turned up on Jerome’s doorstep one day and announced ‘I’m your son and heir,’ and before anyone could say ‘boo,’ Jerome had sold the shop and moved to Eastbourne with Helen. That was all ten years ago but who would have thought it eh? Old Jerome with an unacknowledged love child!!

I’m thinking one day I might base a play on it… what do you think?

No, you never told me anything about where you grew up, but Slough isn’t too far from where I am in Richmond, and if you are ever down here it would be lovely to see you and catch up with old times over a coffee perhaps, or even a meal. Even if I say so myself, I’ve become a very good cook, and as I indicated in the story you read…I still owe you one home cooked meal!

Now who’se the one writing long e-mails?….’

Then he added both his home address and, just in case I called when he would be at what he called ‘ the day job,’ the name and location of his shop.

I hadn’t been in Richmond since my childhood but I felt sure I knew where the shop was. Dad used to take the whole family to Richmond to watch the boats during the annual regatta. However I wasn’t sure I wanted to face the pain going back there might cause me.

****************************************

Mum always claims I married Jim because I needed to replace my dad, and she’s probably right. It’s always been older, stronger men who seem to attract me. Is David the exception that proves the rule? I don’t know, but the similarities in our life experience are uncanny. Perhaps it’s those echoes that are prompting me to try and recapture with David what we had.

I was only eleven when my dad died.

He went into hospital for what everyone kept telling me was a routine procedure. I remember him walking out of the house, a huge man laughing and telling me to be ‘a good little princess’ until he got home.

What came home was a grey. cold thing in a coffin that wasn’t my dad at all, and for a long time, until I met Jim in my early twenties, I don’t think I ever really forgave him for leaving me like that. Suddenly… without a word of explanation. Or even a goodbye.

I really loved him, and I know he thought the world of me. I’ve three older brothers, and he loved them too, but I was his little princess, all dark curls and brown eyes, and his face used to light up every time he saw me.

My earliest memories are all of him lifting me up onto his shoulder and carrying me everywhere with him. Mum tells me he even took me into work with him one day when I could barely walk he was so proud of me. I don’t remember him doing it, but I certainly believe it was the sort of joyous, spontaneous thing he would have done.

And then he was gone…. and I had no idea why.

“People die,” mum told me, but I just thought,

‘Not my dad… not when he knows how much I need him!’

For the next couple of years mum had an awful time raising me. Not because I was ever deliberately rebellious or difficult, but because she was trying to be fair and even handed with all four of us, and I didn’t understand why I was getting only a quarter of the attention, and love, I’d had before.

When I think back now I realise I didn’t help her at all. Not the way, as her only daughter, I ought to have helped. I didn’t appreciate that if I was missing a much loved dad, she’d lost the one great love of her life, and must be feeling a hundred times worse. My three brothers were much more help to her than I was. Being lads, and that bit older, ( well a good few years older actually. Stephen the nearest to me in age was almost sixteen at the time,) they just seemed to take dad’s dying in their stride and get on with life. Me? I’d be really hyper one minute, charging around like a manic tomboy; and the next minute I’d be sitting around the house all weepy, clinging, and demanding attention.

Poor mum. She really didn’t know what to do with me. The fact that I started into puberty early didn’t help either. Eventually, when I started secondary level, she insisted on the school sending me for counselling, but that only made things worse.

“I’m not mad, and I’m not stupid,” I shouted at her, “So stop trying to make everyone think I am!”

Unlike David who, according to the story he wrote, didn’t enjoy secondary level, I really loved it.

Mum, and dad until he died, encouraged all of us to read, and I suppose they were unusual as parents at the time in that, by preference, they would take us to the theatre rather than the cinema, but it was when I got to secondary school that my interest in both really took off. And it was Jack Robinson, ’Jacko’ we nicknamed him, who was the spur.

Once I came under his influence my mood swings stopped abruptly. I became the model student even if I still wasn’t prepared to be the model daughter.

He was my English teacher from my third year right up to Sixth Form when he was also my Year Tutor. He was in his early fifties, though he never looked more than forty, quite good looking, but with a really strong personality. He was able to control even the rowdiest classes just by walking into the room. He never seemed to imagine he would ever receive anything from us but total respect, …..and so he never did.

Heaven’s but I developed such a crush on that man!

I mean I often thought myself in love with different men, but it only ever lasted until either they got fed up with me mooning around them and cut me dead, or they did something that upset me, and I ended up hating them. But not Jack Robinson.

I’m sure he realised how I felt about him especially once I got into the Sixth Form, but he never seemed to mind, and never rebuffed me. Even now I blush recalling some of the fantasies I entertained about him!

He only had to mention an author he thought worth reading, or a poet who’s verses he admired, and I was off scouring libraries and bookshops for anything they had written… and if he ever suggested a school trip to see some play put on locally, my name was always at the head of his list.

The phrase ‘Jacko’s pet’ was sometimes used in my hearing, but I never minded, In fact I took it as a confirmation that I was as special to him as he was to me.

The day I told him I’d got into teacher training at the University of my choice he squeezed my arm and murmured,

“ Rita, I never imagined you wouldn’t.”

On an impulse I added, “I owe it all to you,” and then, because we were alone in the classroom, I was able to give him a quick kiss on the cheek.

I still remember the look he gave me and the obvious sadness in his voice, “ I’ll miss having you around the place Rita, … I really will”

The extraordinary thing is the facts that never seemed to affect our relationship; that he was happily married, had two children, and, when I began my teacher training, he already had a grandson!

*************************************

I met Jim during my final teaching practice, or rather I was pushed into his company by his younger sister Geraldine who was teaching in the school I was assigned to.

Normally the relationship between student teachers and qualified members of staff is kept at a pretty formal level, but Geraldine had only qualified herself from the same University I was attending the year before, and so we hit it off from the word go.

Despite the divorce, we are still good friends. She got married after Jim and I did, but then she emigrated to Canada and still lives there. We exchange greetings cards at Christmas and birthdays, and Jackie went to visit her in Toronto last summer. In fact she was more upset over Jim and I getting divorced than we were.

“ After all,” she told Jackie, “ It was me who brought them together in the first place.”

During the teaching practice Geraldine didn’t have a car of her own and one evening Jim drove over in his own car to collect her from the school gates. Geraldine introduced him to me as her older brother.

“ My much older brother,” she emphasised, and then added rather pointedly, “Rita needs a lift back to her digs, and it isn’t very far out of our way home.”

We were standing in the car park. Jim looked across his car bonnet at me and then, somewhat reluctantly I thought, offered to take me home as well. Hardly the most romantic introduction to the man I eventually married, and I remember we barely exchanged two words during the drive. In fact I thought he was the most ignorant, ill mannered boor I had ever met! But during the following mornings break Geraldine cornered me in the staff room, and went on about the way Jim had kept on questioning her about me after I left the car.

“ I think he really likes you,” she confided in a whisper.

“ But he barely spoke to me, or even looked at me. I thought he was annoyed at having to give me a lift at all!”

“ No, no, don’t let that put you off. He’s always like that with any girl the first time he meets her. We reckon that’s why he never gets to date anyone, We’ve almost given up hope of him ever getting to know any girl well enough to marry her, and it’s a pity really. He’s really nice when you get to know him, and he’s just started up in his own business. He has his own flat, and did you see the car he’s driving around in? He’ll make a real catch for some girl…”

I was about to observe that the girl wouldn’t be me, but Geraldine was rattling on enthusiastically.

“ He just kept on asking questions about you. He even asked if you were engaged, or going steady with anyone….”

She stopped and gave me a horrified stare.

“Oh god, you aren’t are you? Going with anyone I mean? I told him if he felt that interested in you he should just cut to the chase and go for it!”

“ No I’m not, “ I muttered. “ But I’m not sure I relish you telling him to ‘go for it’ as though I’m a prize in a raffle. Sorry Geraldine, I know he’s your brother, and he is very good looking, but he’s also a lot older than me.”

She waved her hand airily. “ Oh pooh pooh to that. You’ll love him when you get to know him!!”

And I did…. or at least I thought I did.

The following summer I qualified and applied for the job at Ashleigh Comprehensive because that was near to where Jim had his flat, and the business.

****************************************

It was half term when I was visiting Slough and staying with my mother that I decided to take the next step and visit Richmond; but first of all I spent a couple of days with Jackie in Oxford. She was settling in well and already had a circle of friends she had made.

“Lads? “ I asked, and she smiled.

“ Lots of them but none I’m likely to get really serious about. Stop trying to marry me off mum, it’s far too early.“

It was a lovely warm Saturday afternoon and we were sitting at an outside table on Broad Street having an afternoon coffee. and watching the weekend shoppers hurry by.

“I’m not trying to marry you off…. For heavens sake I know only too well where that sort of interference can lead. I’m just interested in how well you are settling away from home for the first time; away from everything you’ve been used to.”

“ I’m loving every minute of it, honestly I am. Oxford feels a lot like Edinburgh.”

She’d emphasised her accent on the ‘burgh,’ and grinned.

“ When I speak really Scottish like that the poor sassenachs start fantasising about Flora McDonald, and offer to buy me supper!”

I pointed towards the dome at the end of Broad Street.

“ Isn’t that the Sheldonian Theatre?” I asked.

She nodded.

“ I can get us a couple of tickets for tonight if you want, “ she offered. “ It’s a new experimental play about the way our past actions can affect our present, and have an influence, sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse, on our futures!”

She must have seen the look of surprise on my face.

“Are you alright mum? You look as if I just walked over your grave or something!”

“ No… no… it’s just that. .. Oh well you might as well know. I’ve been in touch with someone I used to know years ago, just by e mail so far but… well I’m going to meet him again.”

Her eyebrows raised perceptibly. “ A man you mean?”

I nodded. “ People described as ‘he’ usually are men.”

“ And you knew him before you knew dad?”

I could have lied of course, but I didn’t. There was no point. I think she has second sight where I’m concerned. She always seems able to look straight into my soul.

“ No. Your dad and I were already married, but it was in the first few years… and before you were born.”

It seemed important for me to emphasise the last point but we then sat there for a long time in a silence that seemed to weigh heavily between us. Jackie finally decided what her own response would be.

“ When will you see him?” she asked.

“ Before I go back to Scotland.”

“ Mum , it’s your own life now, just promise me you’ll be careful… and if it ever happens that I need to know something you’ll be the one to tell me.”

I nodded.

“ Promise,” she persisted. “ I need you to promise me. I don’t want any more of the nonsense I had with Louise and dad.”

“ I promise,” I muttered.

I knew what the problem was for her. I’d asked her earlier whether she had heard from Jim since she came back from staying with her aunt in Canada? She’d looked away from me knowing what I was really asking.

“He and Louise intend to marry early in the new year. Dad didn’t tell me himself. I learned because I telephoned Louise and asked her outright what their plans were. Honestly. I felt like a concerned parent in a Victorian melodrama chasing after one of my daughters suitors, and demanding to know what their intentions were? Whether they were honourable?”

She had sounded bitter, and I have to admit to the pleasure her pain afforded me!

**************************************

I went to Richmond the following Tuesday. Mum assumed I was driving up to Oxford again and I didn’t correct her in this. To be honest I thought I might well get halfway to Richmond and then bottle out, turn around. and do exactly that. Motor in the opposite direction, and perhaps meet up with Jackie again. But the nearer I got to Richmond the more excited I began to feel.

‘I haven’t felt like this in months’ I thought.

As I entered the town centre and began to look for somewhere to park I felt like a school girl again, someone sneaking back into school in the hope of seeing ‘Jacko’ Robinson and perhaps having a talk with him alone.

“ Act your age Rita’ I thought but knew I was enjoying myself too much to do anything of the sort.

I’d decided that rather than meeting David in the privacy of his home address, the relative anonymity of his shop was probably the better option for both of us. Driving in on the Kew road I was aware that this was how my father had always brought us, but my increasing sense of excited anticipation removed any of the pain I had been expecting to feel. The shop was in the centre, in a paved courtyard surrounded by other small specialty shops, all painted a uniform white, with mullioned windows and ‘olde worlde’ signage attached to their facias.

When I stepped inside the door I was hit by the overwhelming smell of books and old leather, and the inviting untidiness of the place. Floor to ceiling shelving ran off into the interior from a blue carpeted entrance area, and various posters and notices seemed to fill every available bit of wall space.

I instantly recalled Jerome Hutchinson’s book shop in Ashleigh on the one occasion I had visited it to tell David…. Oh, what was it I had gone to tell him?… I’d forgotten…but it was after that Sunday afternoon when we almost…. Well it was all there in the story he had written, the story that had prompted me to make this wild impulsive trip to…to what?… What was I expecting?

“ Can I help you?” he asked looking up from the computer beside his till.

****************************************

My first thought was, ‘ My god David, you’ve really not aged that well!”

He blinked at me from behind horn rimmed glasses, had a slightly flushed complexion, and his hair, already thinning, was going grey at the temples. He was wearing a fawn coloured jacket with old style leather patches at the elbows, a V neck brown sweater, and an open neck check shirt that looked frayed at the collar. For all the world he resembled an eternal college student gone early to seed.

At first his gaze was one of expectant curiosity because he simply thought of me as a prospective customer, but when I removed the sunglasses I was wearing it changed to one of dawning recognition. I broke the silence by laughing, and holding out my hand.

“Have I changed that much David?” I asked.

For a moment his expression seemed frozen, and then he exclaimed,

“Rita, is it really you?”

“ In the flesh,” I answered more loudly than I intended. I was feeling suddenly nervous and acutely aware of myself; of how I looked. He took my outstretched hand into his.

“ Rita, “ he murmured admiringly, “ You look absolutely fabulous. You haven’t changed at all… in fact if anything you look even better than I remember you looking.”

“ Thank you David, “ I murmured, “ You always knew how to flatter a woman!”

I knew I was blushing and didn’t want to. I looked at the young girl standing beside him. She was about the same age as Jackie with long dark hair. Quite pretty if a little innocent looking, and she was looking at each of us in turn and smiling as if uncertain how to react herself. I thought she must be a student supplementing her grant with some part time work.

“We’re friends, “ I explained, “ Very old friends really, but we haven’t seen each other in years.”

“Nineteen in fact,” David added.

“Before my time then” the girl stated, and I couldn’t help feeling she made the age point deliberately.

He began to laugh nervously and, I thought, was about to say something about it being too many years; but instead he put down the sheets of paper he was holding onto the counter and knocked over the Starbucks coffee cup. A pool of dark brown liquid spread everywhere, staining a pile of notices, and making him jump back involuntarily.

“ Damn,” he exclaimed as some of the coffee spilled over the counters edge, and stained the grey slacks he was wearing.

“ Perhaps,” I murmured, “ I’d better go out and come back later when you’re less busy.”

“ Oh no Rita… no, no not at all. I’m not busy at all. … Well we are actually but… oh hell what am I saying, or doing? You must think I’m a complete fool.. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting you so soon… I mean really… I… why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”

His tone seemed to imply that I was responsible for him upsetting the coffee. I felt myself bridling.

“ I thought it might be a nice surprise for you, but obviously I was wrong. I’ll be in touch…”

I turned to leave, and had reached the door by the time he found his voice again.

“ Wait, …Rita please wait. I’m sorry… It’s just that you caught me by surprise, and I’m not that good at surprises. Please don’t go off like that.”

I paused holding the door handle, and he went on,

“ Let me just clear up all this mess and I’ll be right with you. Really…. I mean it.”

“I’ll look around for a moment then, “ I said and moved towards the nearest set of book shelves. The young assistants face was wreathed in what looked suspiciously like a knowing smirk, and I was almost on the point of saying something when David turned on her himself.

“ Kay,” he snapped, “Just get this lot cleaned up, and bring me a towel.”

The girls expression changed to one of shock, (obviously David was not in the habit of criticising his staff,) and she lifted a kitchen roll from beneath the counter. She began frantically mopping up the brown liquid, then tried to wipe the front of his trousers.

“No, “ I heard him whisper angrily, “ Not me, the counter… before all these invoices are ruined!”

Finally he came and stood beside me with an apologetic expression on his face. I suddenly remembered the young lad who nineteen years ago had kissed me so suddenly and so passionately when we were rehearsing together.

“ Shall we start again?” he asked with a lopsided grin.

“That would be nice.”

I turned towards him hoping my expression, as I looked into his eyes, might reveal what I was feeling. Having him stand this close to me was resurrecting feelings I had not experienced in a long time. I didn’t want the feelings to stop.

“It really is lovely to see you again Rita, “ he was murmuring, “ I meant what I said. You haven’t changed at all, still as beautiful as ever.”

“ David, I’m a good few years older than I was then…” I whispered back and he whispered back,

“So am I, but in my case I’m starting to show it.”

“You look…” I wanted to say something complimentary but finally settled for an uninspired, “ … more distinguished than I expected.”

“ You refer of course to the grey hairs and the glasses? The first are the result of worrying about how the recession is going to affect the book trade, while the second comes from spending too much time reading the books.”

“ You mean you’ve read all these.” I indicated the shelves with a wave of my hand. I remembered him telling me how much he loved reading, but this struck me as both amazing… and a little sad!

“ Good heavens no… but I do read all the publishers blurb and between you and me, that’s usually enough to put me off reading most of them. It does mean I can give the customers the impression I’ve read whatever I’m recommending though! In most cases I haven’t even read one page. Now, let me get a change of trousers from the back room, and then I’ll take you out for lunch.”

His smile widened and he added, “ I owe you that at least!”

******************************

We sat at a table overlooking the river. He ordered a smoked salmon baguette while I ordered a fish salad with cheese and croutons. He suggested a white Chablis and I nodded in agreement. I couldn’t help reflecting that the last time I had seen him he had been a young, eager, but rather gouche youth; now what was sitting across the table from me was a mature middle aged man at ease in a restaurant ordering wine and food.

It was now even warmer than it had been earlier in the morning and I needed to wear my sun glasses in order to see his face properly. Slightly fatter. but still good looking I thought.

“ Is the recession hitting your business hard then?” I asked. He looked up and shook his head.

“ No not really. The business has a long standing relationship supplying schools in the local area, and we provide not just their set books but quite a lot of their educational materials besides. Since taking it over I’ve tried to develop that by providing art and stationery material as well. When Francis owned the business it was simply books that we supplied.”

“ Francis?,” I asked. “ You mean Francis Wellman?”

He nodded again. “ He started the business many years ago. When I moved here he took me on in the shop, and I’ve worked here ever since. Then, when he retired some years ago, I bought it from him…. Well I was able to buy it with a bank loan he acted as guarantor for. That’s how I could afford it.”

“ But I thought… I mean people said you left home to take up a stage career.”

He laughed, offered me more wine which I shook my head at, ( I did have to drive home to Slough,) and pushed his plate away with the baguette only half eaten.

“ That was my idea but I’m afraid economic necessity intervened and I sensibly took up the offer of a job with Francis. Oh I did take time out occasionally to do theatre work, and even a bit of television work, but even that was down to Francis using his influence on my behalf. Finally I realised that acting was a none starter as a full time profession. I like my tummy filled at least once every twenty four hours, and Francis could guarantee me that.”

“ He’s been really good to you then?”

For a moment he hesitated eyeing me as if unsure how to answer, but then nodded, offered me the sweet menu, and murmured,

“ Yes Rita he has. I owe him a lot, ….. and not just financially either.”

I chose lemon meringue with glace cherries while he chose the trifle.

“ Does Francis live locally?” I asked, and was again surprised by the wary look he gave me.

“ Yes…. In fact we live together. He owns the house, but it’s a very big one and nowadays he only uses the ground floor rooms so I’ve moved into the upstairs part.”

Without thinking I remarked that he had certainly landed on his feet there. Suddenly he frowned at me, and responded quickly, in something approaching the severe tone he had used earlier when speaking to his assistant.

“ Francis is quite frail and I look after him. It’s an arrangement that suits us both.”

“ I’m sorry,” I murmured, “ I didn’t mean to imply you were being selfish or anything like that.”

There was a few moments of awkward silence and then he said, “ I’d like to take you out there to see it… the house I mean… and Francis of course, That’s if you have the time?”

“ I‘d like that David… I really would. I don‘t have to be back in Slough until this evening.”

“ We’ll finish our meal, have a coffee. then I’ll just let Kay know where I am. She’s well able to look after the shop for a couple of hours on her own. We can drive out to the house in my car. .”

It was while we were waiting for our sweet order to arrive that he raised the subject he must have been itching to raise ever since I walked into the shop.

“If you find it difficult to talk about the divorce I will understand, but I am told by friends that I’m a very good listener when the need arises… if you want to tell me anything.”

“ There isn’t anything really to tell,” I murmured thankful that I was wearing the sunglasses. “ Put simply, Jim and I just grew apart.”

But, as I went on to try and explain, like everything in my life, nothing ever is that simple!

*****************************************

I mean the simplest thing would have been to claim that Jim was entirely responsible for our marriage breaking up, but that wouldn’t have been fair.or honest would it? I mean I too have to take some of the responsibility. I didn’t have to play away from home did I? But then, if Jim had been a little more understanding, a little less insensitive and distant when I needed him most after Jackie was born, perhaps I wouldn’t have sought comfort elsewhere. But then again, …as Geraldine, his sister, asserted at the time,

“My brother doesn’t do understanding, least of all where women are concerned; and quite definitely not where post natal depression is involved! You have to understand. Jim’s a man who thinks weeping, crying, and losing the run of yourself because you’ve just had his child is something, feminine, irrational, and best left to cure itself; preferably without any male intervention.”

When we moved to Scotland he seemed to think it would help me cope with being pregnant if I didn’t immediately go looking for a job.

“ Just concentrate on getting the house sorted and getting ready for the baby,” he said.

Then he went off to work each day leaving me trying to sort out furnishings, curtains, and a whole lot of domestic stuff that I’ve never had that much interest in; at the same time trying to cope with having this new person growing inside me. I mean I became pregnant by accident. I never imagined myself as having a child. Silly I know, and I knew I ought to feel as happy about becoming a mother as everyone around me seemed to be….. but I didn’t.

Then, when Jackie was finally born and I held her in my arms for the first time, instead of feeling any rush of mother love, my emotions were all over the place. Poor little mite lay there all red, her face all screwed up, and everyone around me cooing and telling me how beautiful she was, and all I could think was,

‘ I really do resent the restrictions you are placing on me!’

Jim standing there accepting everyone’s congratulations as if he had done all the work didn‘t help much either!.

When she cried the nurses kept telling me to feed her, and I didn’t want to. I just wanted them to take the problem away from me.

“Does that confirm that I’m a bad mother?” I asked David out loud.

He hesitated for a moment, before asking,

“ How do you feel about her now?”

“ God, I love her to bits, I really do, but that all came later.”

“ Then that’s what matters. I’m not a woman so I don’t understand the emotional chaos some women go through giving birth, but I don’t believe you could ever be anything other than a perfect mother Rita!”

The affection in his eyes was so real I couldn’t help reaching across the table and resting my hand onto his arm.

“ Thank you David,” I murmured, “ I haven’t talked like this to anyone, least of all a man, in such a long time. I really appreciate you understanding.”

At that moment the waiter arrived with our sweet course, and for a few moments the intimacy was broken. But then I went on,

“ It was after Jackie was born that the real depression set in. God I was such a mess. Crying without reason, couldn’t settle to doing anything, forgetting things, and I looked an absolute sight. I think Jim thought I was going crazy, but he dealt with it in his usual fashion. He left me well alone. The house we were living in was on a new estate where everyone went off to work all day; everyone, that is, except me!”

“ I did manage to get Jim to come to a session with my GP, but she was a woman so that only made matters worse, confirmed in his mind that the whole thing was a put up job by neurotic females. When she suggested he might take some of the load off me at home do you know what his response was?”

David didn’t answer. He put down the spoon he was holding and rested his own hand over mine. I almost felt like crying with the relief of having somebody I could share the memories with, finally let it all out. The pain poured out of me like a flood held back for too long, and David… sweet, adorable David, now grown up, just sat there and listened…. And didn’t even bother to eat the rest of his trifle

***************************

“‘What load?’ Jim asked, ‘She’s at home all day with nothing to do except take care of the baby? I’m the one going out to work every day!’

When we came out of the surgery he glared at me and asked if I had ‘understood what all that was about?’

‘ Of course I understood it,’ I told him, ’ I’m bloody living it aren’t I?’”

“After that he basically did what he always did, ignored the problem. He did offer to make some of the meals at weekend if it didn’t interfere with his trips to the golf club with his male friends, but he made such a fuss about doing it I ended up shooing him out of the house, and feeling even more inadequate as both a wife and a mother.”

“I rang my mum once and blubbered down the phone to her for ages. Eventually she said all men were the same, and that the feelings would pass. She assured me I would make a wonderful mother, and I told her I didn’t want to be a wonderful mother. I wanted to be a wonderful wife.”

“ It did pass of course, and when Jackie was two years old, I placed her in a creche and started looking around for a teaching job. Jim was none too pleased of course. He made it very plain that he didn’t like the idea of me going out to work. I remember he said to me,

“‘We’re not short of money or anything like that. We’re not missing out on anything are we?’ I told him I was missing out on life. There are only so many times in a week, I told him, that a person can sensibly clean any house from top to bottom. I even got to the point of rationing my trips to the shops so that I would have some reason to get up each day. Jim had never had that much interest in anything I did as a teacher, but once I started back teaching near Edinburgh his interest was nil”

I stopped talking. and watched David closely for a moment. During the drive over from Slough I had wondered how much I could dare to tell him. But now I wanted to tell him everything. Hold nothing back. I realised that if we were to have any chance of rekindling our relationship onto a meaningful footing there could be no secrets. I took a deep breath, finished my sweet, and blurted out the next bit.

“ I suppose that’s why he never realised what was going on between Andrew and myself. By the time he did things had got so bad between us I don’t think he even cared. He certainly didn’t care enough to make any attempt to win me back.”

I waited. David’s gaze was fixed on my face, but I couldn’t tell from his eyes what he was thinking. Finally, he surprised me by asking,

“ Had he found somebody else?” I

I shook me head. “ No I don’t think he had… certainly not at that point. Later on he did. I mean, by then we had stopped fighting over anything. It was as if nothing was worth the effort of a fight. Does that sound sad? I don’t mean it to. It’s just that by the time my relationship with Andrew could have become an issue between us we neither of us had the energy to fight over it…. and then Jackie made her remark about us not staying married just for her sake, and we agreed to end it. The divorce was quite amicable. I see him occasionally, Jackie’s birthday and so forth, and we’re always very civil towards each other but…” I let my voice trail off into nothing and at that moment the coffee arrived.

It was almost as if the waiter was performing to a set of cue’s laid down in a script somewhere. I looked up at him and saw the smile on his lips.

‘ Gawd,’ I thought, ‘ Has he been able to hear me?’

We drank the coffee in silence, and then David went to pay the bill. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking and had almost decided to tell him I would drive straight back to Slough when he returned to the table, pocketing his mobile as he did so.

“I’ve just telephoned Kay, and told her I wont be back in the shop until later this afternoon,” he said, “ That I’m taking you out to meet Francis.”

We were in his car driving towards the outskirts of the town when he said,

“ I need you to tell me the truth about Andrew. Were you in love with him?”

“ For a while I believed I was. …. No that’s not quite the truth… Yes, I was in love with him. I even believed he was in love with me.”

“ Was he a teacher too?”

I nodded. “ At the same school. He was the Deputy Principal.”

“ Married?”

That made me laugh. “ Of course not. I’m not into stealing other women’s husbands. In any case he always maintained that he was married to the job, and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to steal him away from that. He was such a brilliant teacher.”

“ But you were in love with him?”

His repetition of the question made me realise how much he needed a fuller, and more honest answer, than I was giving him. I also realised that the half truths and pretences I had fed him nineteen years ago were no longer good enough…. not even for me. I took a deep breath.

“ I was absolutely crazy about him. If he had ever asked me to leave Jim and marry him, even just move in with him, I would have done it without a second thought. I would even have risked losing Jackie to be with him. That’s how I am once my hearts engaged… my own worst enemy. Silly, and selfish without any thought for who I might be hurting, not even if it is the person who has engaged my heart.”

I stopped and looked across at him in the driving seat. I wondered if he realised I wasn’t just talking about Andrew, or Jim for that matter; that I was also referring to a young lad I hurt deeply all those years ago?

The only sign of understanding he was displaying were the whitened knuckles gripping the steering wheel, but that was enough.

“ Anyway, he never asked me to do either and, after the divorce well…. he just lost interest in taking the relationship any further. I was hurt of course, and for quite a while absolutely miserable, but then I told myself that for all his good points, and he had many, commitment wasn’t one of them. In other words I blamed him not just for the relationship starting but also for ending it. I convinced myself that what had attracted him to me was the idea of stealing another mans wife. Once I was no longer the wife. he was no longer interested in me. …..”

“There you go again, “ David suddenly exclaimed with a frown, making my heart lurch even as he steered the car off the main road, and into a tree lined avenue.

“ There I go what?” I asked.

“Selling your own part short. Relationships that aren’t a two way affair, both for good and bad, aren’t full relationships at all. Even if you were silly and selfish looking to him for the affection you weren’t getting from Jim, wasn’t he being equally selfish taking advantage of your vulnerability? Don’t kid yourself either that the fact of you being a married woman was the only thing that attracted him. You were, and you still are, a very beautiful woman Rita; certainly beautiful enough to attract any man I know!”

Suddenly he was blushing the way he had that afternoon in my living room in Ashleigh when we almost…

“I attracted you once.” I murmured, and reached out for his hand.

“ And it wasn’t because you were married either,” he asserted; then, turning the car left into a gateway, he added, “We’re here.”

He sounded almost relieved!

***********************************

On reflection, I think it would have been better if David had warned me what I was about to meet inside the house. Yes, he had told me that Francis Wellman was very old and frail, but not that he was so completely detached from reality.

The house was a typical semi detached built in the Tudor style between the wars. It had a front garden, a side garden and as far as I could see a long rear garden. There was a detached brick garage at the side, and David parked the car on the driveway before it. He got out quickly, went around to open the passenger door, and helped me out.

As he took my arm he seemed to lean in close to me, and I hoped he might even be about to kiss me, but instead he led me towards the front door.

“Hello Francis,” he called out as we entered the dark hallway and walked through into the even darker sitting room. He sounded as if he was speaking to a very deaf and rather stupid infant. “ I’ve brought somebody to see you.”

Francis was sitting in an armchair beside an electric fire surrounded by cushions and blankets heaped over his lap. His face was thin and his skin stretched like old parchment over his head. A few untidy strands of long grey hair hung untidily over his ears, and looked, for all the world, as if the slightest movement of the rooms hot and suffocating atmosphere would blow them away.

He tuned his head to look in our direction, but his pale blue eyes revealed no immediate signs of recognition Fronds of spittle, like spiders webs, hung from the corners of his mouth, and I almost gagged with the odour of stale urine which filled the room. Not just urine either, something else, even more nauseating, hung heavy in the air.

David’s expression immediately changed to one of concern and anxiety, and he looked frantically about the room.

“Where’s Elaine?” he demanded.

Francis’s voice, when he spoke, sounded thin and hard.

“Gone.”

“ Gone where?”

“ Gone home… I sent her home.”

David walked quickly across the room to a door which obviously led into some sort of kitchen or scullery.

“ You might have sent her,” he was muttering, “ But she wont have gone.”

I had the feeling he was talking as much for my benefit as for Francis’s. He went out of the room and I heard him talking in a low urgent whisper to somebody. He seemed to be reprimanding whoever it was over something. For the most part his words were indistinct but I did catch, “ never to be left alone like that!”

For my part I remained standing just inside the sitting room door unable to decide what I should do. Finally I smiled at the old man in the armchair who was still looking in my direction, but still with an unseeing gaze which only added to my discomfort. I’ve never been comfortable around sick people, particularly when their sickness is mental, and evidence of human mortality. All I wanted to do was get out of the room, and get out fast.

“ Chocolate,” Francis’s voice suddenly cracked across the space between us. “ You promised me chocolate!”

I shook my head thinking, ‘David please come back…. I’m frightened.”

“ I’ve only just come” I managed to reply but he looked away, and stared at the fire beside him.

“ Pissin’ chocolate you promised…. Nobody brings me the bloody chocolate…. Not nobody…” and he began to sob quietly, rocking backwards and forwards and clutching at the cushions in his lap as if he had a stomach ache.

David re-entered the room with a middle aged woman following behind him. She registered my presence in the doorway and seemed to derive some satisfaction from it.

“ For heavens sake Elaine,” David was saying, still in an angry tone, “ What are we paying you for? Get him cleaned up, and put him back into his bed.” He indicated a divan bed in the window alcove. The woman was clutching a sandwich in one hand, and her complexion reddened.

“I’m very sorry Mister Lester, really I am but I assure you he was fast asleep when I left him, and I am entitled to eat my lunch in peace. You were supposed to be back here over an hour ago.”

She again looked across at me.

“ Clearly you were busy with …. other things, but I assure you, Mister Wellman was perfectly alright when I left him.”

David nodded his head, but glared at her. “Well he isn’t alright now is he? Just take a deep breath woman!”

He seemed to remember that I was still there, and came towards me.

“I’m sorry about all this Rita. I hadn’t expected to come home and find him like this. Let me show you upstairs to where my apartment is, and then I’ll be with you shortly …. after I’ve made sure he is settled and comfortable.”

The figure in the chair became suddenly agitated. He started throwing the blankets and cushions off his lap, and trying to reach the cushions behind his back, as if intending to throw them off as well.

“ Where’s the paper?… I have to go for mi paper…. Where’s mi fuckin‘ paper?”

David took hold of my arm and guided me into the hallway outside the sitting room door.

“Just wait here for me Rita” he whispered. “ I’ll be with you shortly.”

Away from the distressing scene in the sitting room I found my voice,

“ I’ll wait upstairs David,” I said and turned towards the stairs behind me. “ I can go up to your apartment, and wait there.”

*********************************************

A door, at the top of the stairs, led into David’s apartment and, using the key he had pressed into my hand, I went in there and waited. It took him a good while to settle Francis down, and, while I waited, I looked around. What struck me was how beautifully decorated all the rooms in this part of the house were; unlike the rooms on the ground floor which had seemed so dark and depressing.

What surprised me most was the emphasis on pastel shades which I would not have expected to find in a mans apartment. With the soft furnishings, which were there in abundance, they gave the whole place a distinctly homely feel. David, I realised, had a real ‘eye’ for design.

He had called after me, as I climbed the stairs, to make myself at home, even suggesting that I put some coffee on in the kitchen. I went in there and located the percolator, and the other things I needed, all neatly stored in the cupboards. Then, while I waited for David to rejoin me, I sat down at the kitchen table.

There was a newspaper cutting pinned to a notice board beside my head showing the cast of what I realised was his latest production, not the ‘Oklahoma’ he had told me about in the e-mail, but Terence Rattigan’s ‘Separate Tables.’ It’s run in the local theatre had ended the previous Saturday night, but the cutting indicated that David had played the ’double’ male leads Mister Malcolm and Major Pollack. The write up was full of praise for his performance and I even experienced a puissance of pride that not only did I know such a ‘star’, but I had given him his first part in a school production twenty three years earlier. Not that the article mentioned that important detail of course!

He came into the flat even as I was reading the cutting, and I pointed to it.

“ So you can play other roles apart from dysfunctional characters,“ I said, and the half smile he gave me was so reminiscent of the 18 year old I knew in Ashleigh, part man and part boy, that I had to look away quickly; otherwise I would have certainly reached out for him; reached out for him as I had nineteen years earlier.

“ It’s the one release I can allow myself at the moment,” he muttered crossing to the worktop, and starting to pour out the two coffees. “It’s a brilliant play but does rely heavily on dialogue rather than action to deliver it’s point. Do you know it?“

“ Only by reputation,” I replied.

“You don’t mind the coffee in mugs do you?” he asked. His back was to me, and I realised we were both talking about things we didn’t really want to talk about.

“David, I know it’s none of my business” I said, “I’ve only just seen Francis after nearly twenty years but I’m sure you can realise it for yourself,…. I mean he is very ill.”

His answer, when it came, was in a barely audible whisper.

“ I know…. Oh God Rita I do know… but I just can’t bring myself to put him into somewhere where he wont know anyone, or anything. He was so good to me … has been so good to me… really I owe him almost everything. If I put him into residential care he will just fall apart completely…. At least here…in his own place he has something familiar to cling onto… recognise when he has lucid moments…. Doesn’t he?”

The question sounded so desperate. I got up from the table and crossed to stand beside him. I shouldn’t have done that of course. I should have remained seated, and maintained some physical distance between us, but I could feel his pain as if it were my own. I desperately wanted to comfort him, make amends for the pain. Not just the pain I had caused him in the past but the pain life was inflicting on him now.

“He’s probably in a place now where nothing is familiar to him” I whispered, “Nothing remains in his memory….”

David’s head shook quite violently.

“ But sometimes he has periods when he remembers everything really well… when he’s quite lucid and even knows me…”

“ Recently? “ I asked, and waited.

His painful silence answered the question for both of us. He turned to face me, and tears welled up in his eyes. I reached out quite deliberately, and rested my hand on his arm. I can’t pretend I didn’t know what I was doing, or where it might lead.

“ Oh Rita.” He was groaning like somebody struggling to awaken from a terrible nightmare, “ It’s so awful to watch him… feel him disappearing from me… I can‘t just let him make his exit like this… It‘s too awful… It‘s a tragedy, and there’s nobody who’ll close the bloody curtain!…”

I let him take me into his arms, and I let him hug me as the sobs shook him against me, and I felt his tears on my cheek.

Oh yes, I know I shouldn’t have let him hold me like that, not then when he was hurting so much, but I did. I shouldn’t have let his lips find mine either, still less let him kiss me as he did… but I turned my mouth to find his, and held him until the sobbing ceased, and he stepped away from me with that look of hunger in his eyes that I remembered so well…. but I did!

Later when he drove me back into Richmond to collect my car I even had a premonition what he was going to say before he said it.

“This time Rita, when you go to Scotland, promise me you’ll stay in touch. Don’t leave me another nineteen years without seeing you.”

“I promise,” I whispered, and kissed him again.

**************************************

I sent him the following e-mail a couple of weeks later.

“Just a short e-mail this time David, to thank you for the meal, and the wonderful time we spent together in Richmond. I think you must realise how special that afternoon was for me. If you’ll forgive me using a theatrical analogy we can only play the part life, or God, I’m not sure which, casts us in. I do feel that we two have been handed a second chance at the roles we were originally given. I don’t want, this time, to ‘fluff’ any of my lines, but I’ve decided to move back to Slough with my mum. In the short term I can always get a supply teaching job. Mum is delighted with the idea. I’ve still got most of the money I got from the sale of the house in Edinburgh so I don’t need to worry too much about the money side of things. It means I’ll be near Jackie, at least until she graduates and, of course, it also means I will be not too far away from you, and able to visit you more easily… always assuming, of course, that you can bear me as your leading lady? Let me know what you think. Love Rita. XXX”

David’s reply, when it dropped into my ‘inbox’ filled me with the same exhilaration I experienced at the final performance of ‘Last summer in Rome.’

“Rita do you really need to ask what I think? You were always my ideal leading lady!! All my love, David. XXXX”

THE END.

Because.

2011-01-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

I started wondering about why we exist at all and came up with the following verse. The 'You' of course refers to God, or whatever name you give the cause of 'existence.,

BECAUSE.

We are because You have always been.
And because, before time was, You are,
We too are, before time is;
Eternally begotten; but existing in the ‘now.’

Mirrored Reflections.

2010-12-01T06:36:00.000-08:00

Another subject from my writers group, this time on the subject of 'Mirrors. Enjoy.

Mirrored Reflection.

I once caught a reflection in the heart of my God
And realised with surprise that it was my own.
From start to end and everything between,
Including those features I’d wish never were seen.
I wondered aloud if this mirror could talk
Then heard in my heart a tone like my own,
“Look again my child, catch the reflection I see
When I gaze on your soul from eternity.”

I again saw the mirror in the heart of my God
But the image it revealed had subtly reversed.
Now left was to left, while the right was to right
And those features I’d hidden were now fit to be seen.
I wondered aloud what had caused things to change,
Then remembered a truth my heart had long known,
That the image God see’s is what creation can be
When uniquely reflected in the mirror called ‘Love.

The Door.

2010-11-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

The following two pieces resulted from an exercise we were given in the writers group I've just joined. Again one is a piece of prose, the other is in the form of verse. Enjoy!

OUTSIDE THE DOOR.

It was one of those silly arguments really. Even now, years later, I’m not exactly sure how it started, though I am sure how it ended! I think it was probably when he said,

“When we get home we’ll get changed quickly. We’re invited to a party tonight.”

“ Oh no… not tonight! I’m really tired,” I said and pointed to the bags full of exercise books on the back seat of the car. “ And I’ve got all this marking to finish before tomorrow.”

We both work at the same school. I teach English so marking of exercises takes up quite a lot of my time; while he, on the other hand, is Head of P.E. and so ‘marking’ hardly figures at all.

“ I’ve already accepted,” he stated and that did irritate me.

“But I don’t want to go,” I muttered out loud, as much to myself as to him.

We drove on in silence for a while, him ramming in and out of gear, and me getting more and more furious, and staring out of the passenger window. Lately he had taken to agreeing to things without even bothering to check with me first whether I wanted to do them or not. Finally he said,

“Well I’ll go on my own then.” And I snapped back,

“ Oh do whatever you like…. You usually do.”

When we turned onto our driveway he got out without a word, slammed the car door shut behind him, and went straight through the front door and upstairs to change. He didn’t even offer to help me carry the piles of exercise books into the lounge. It was when I dumped them onto the carpet beside the sofa that the obvious question occurred to me. So I went to the foot of the stairs and called up to him,

“ Where exactly is this party anyway?”

“ At Janine’s place,” he replied from the bedroom…. And it was then that I really lost it. Janine!

Now, with hindsight, I have to admit that I’ve really no right to be holding anything against her. She was his assistant in the P.E. department, just out of training college, and full of eagerness and enthusiasm for everything he suggested. About five or six years younger than us, she was also the same age at which we got married. Blond and really nice looking but with a very ‘touchy feely’ manner.

My mum, shortly before she died, had warned me, ‘ Beware of the touchy feely ones! They can get away with almost anything by claiming it’s just the way they are, and it doesn’t really mean anything!’

“Well,” I shouted back up at him. “ If it’s at Janine’s place you certainly don’t want me with you do you? …..cramping you style?”

I marched off into the kitchen, nearly stumbling over Brandy our new Labrador puppy, banged open the freezer door, pulled out a ready meal for one, slammed the door shut and started throwing plates and cutlery onto the formica top table. I certainly intended him to hear how angry I was. I’m not sure I’d any clear idea what I expected, or wanted him to do about it. ‘Backing down’ has never been something Keith finds easy to do.

Finally he appeared in the kitchen door and stood looking at me with what seemed suspiciously like a superior expression on his face. He was wearing the new sweater and trousers that I had bought him for our anniversary the previous week and Brandy, who had been our present to each other, rolled onto her back and began to wag her tail with pleasure.

“That was a very childish remark you just made,” he stated.

“Well that’s probably because I thought I was speaking to a child,” I replied.

What on earth was I saying? I didn’t want this thing that had reared up between us to go on like this! It was as if somebody else had taken over my voice and, regardless of what I wanted, that somebody was still talking…. No… not just talking either…. Shouting!

“It’s always the same with that Janine,” the voice yelled. “She flash’s you one of her looks, crooks her finger, and your like Brandy over there. On your back with your legs up in the air and begging to have your tummy rubbed. It’s pathetic…. No…. you’re pathetic…. Selfish and bloody pathetic…”

I have to admit, he did look stunned by the outburst.

“You don’t mean that…” he began as if trying to reason with an hysterical child, which of course, only made me feel even worse.

“But that’s the point… I do mean it. I’m so sick of watching the two of you together.” I tried to mimic Janine’s eager tones. “ ‘Oooh Keith that is such a good idea… I’ll get onto it straight away’. … She’s just as silly as you are!”

I stared at him, angry tears of frustration in my eyes, wishing he would not only realise what was the matter, but understand what he needed to do in order to put it right. What he said was,

“Well I’d better go then,” and I flung the plate I was holding onto the table smashing it in the process and sending Brandy skittering across the tiled floor, past his legs, and out into the hallway

“ Go then,” I screamed, “ Go to your precious Janine and then don’t bother coming back. Stay with her if she’ll have you…. because I’m fed up with the sight of both of you!”

He turned and went. and I suddenly thought,

‘If he slams the front door the way he slammed the car door I’ll know it really is over between us!’

The bang seemed to rattle and shake not just the house but me as well, and I stood there gasping for breath, listening to the car start up, leave the driveway and roar off down the road. My thoughts and emotions whirled in my head like a runaway carousel and I didn’t know how to stop them. I didn’t know either how to prevent the world I knew and loved from collapsing into nothing around me. I think I sobbed something like ‘ Mummy…oh mummy please help me,’ and then I went out into the darkened hallway.

The door wasn’t shut. He’d slammed it so hard it had recoiled into the latch and now it had swung open again. As suddenly as the tide of fury had overwhelmed me it now ebbed away, and I knew what I needed to do.

I took a moment in the lounge to reassure a trembling Brandy that I wasn’t actually angry with her, cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, had a quick sandwich, and then went up to the bathroom. I showered, washed and dried my hair; then I put on the new nightdress he had bought me for our anniversary, and climbed into bed.

Really I took an awful risk when I think about it because I didn’t close the front door but just sat in bed waiting and hugging his pillow in my arms. Somehow I knew I wouldn’t have too much longer to wait… and I didn’t.

I heard the car turn back onto the drive and listened as he re-entered the house, closed the front door, looked for me in the lounge, and then climbed the stairs to our bedroom door. He watched me with a slightly wary, even sheepish, expression in his eyes and then he said,

“ I’m sorry… I didn’t think or even understand…. Your mum and everything…”

I interrupted him. “ I’m sorry too.. For saying the things I did.”

Then I asked him if those at the party had liked his new sweater and trousers, and he looked down as if he had forgotten he was wearing them.

“ I didn’t go into the party,” he mumbled, “ Just sat outside for a while and then went for a drive around… to clear my head I mean…”

I made a show of replacing the pillow onto his side of the bed and then quite pointedly lowered the duvet. As he came around the end of the bed he did ask me about the marking.

“I’ve a couple of free periods in the morning. I’ll do it then.,” I murmured.

He started to explain, “ I can tell Janine tomorrow that you were very tired and…” but I interrupted him again.

“Keith,… just for tonight… let’s leave Janine outside the door!”

The end.

THAT DOOR.

Do you see ahead of you that door?

It’s a door unlike any you have seen before,

For it’s neither closed nor open,

At present impassable, but accessible in time.

From beyond it, if you care to listen,

Come the sound of voices long remembered

But now almost never heard. Well, only ‘almost’.

Sometimes those voices,

Like muffled phrases from a foreign song,

Can catch you off guard, bypass you ears,

Yet resonate loudly into your yearning heart.

Then, in tears you long to hear again

Those precious remembered tones

As if that door were flung open wide.

But still it will remain the singular door,

Through which you hesitate to pass.

What lies beyond is a place

By the human mind unknowable,

But which, by the heart, is recognised as ‘home;’

As where those we have loved and left,

Now rest awhile, and await our return.

5 senses.

2010-11-08T11:45:00.000-08:00

Another exercise with the writing group. I was asked to compose s short piece involving all five senses. I actually ended up composing two pieces, one prose the other in verse. In deference to the subject title I wanted to restrict the verse to five lines, but it didn't quite work out like that.... oh well... even Shakespeare was known to nod on one of his off days.

Lost, then found.

This is what we used to call a ‘pea souper!’ A fog so thick I can taste it, sooty and unpleasant, clinging to the roof of my mouth, making me want to cough and spit both at the same time. But I’m afraid to open my mouth in case the dank odorous vapour gets into my throat and drowns me.

Ahead, a street light illuminates the grey mass with a diffused yellow glow from which a dark shape assumes a human form. Large, … oh much larger than myself, leaning forwards as if searching for its injured prey and advancing towards me.

“Is that you Thomas?”

Now I can discern it’s female form, but it’s the trembling tone of anxiety and relief in equal measure that I respond to.

“Yes,” I exclaim and rush quickly forwards to be enveloped into the warmth and security of her arms wrapped around my shoulders. I feel her pulling me close, hugging my face tightly into her warm soft belly. Her perfume. Eau de cologne or Chanel number 5, I’m too young to discern which, slowly disperses the foggy smell from my nostrils, and I begin to sob with relief.

“There… there… don‘t cry,” my mothers voice murmurs from above my head, from beyond the shelter of my rediscovered womb. “ I’ve found you haven’t I? …You weren’t really lost at all were you?…. You’re safe now!… ”

Tropic Nigella.

Watching your practised fingers,
Crumbling sugary shortbread biscuits
Into bowls of swirling, delicious chocolate;
Listening to your voice softly suggesting
Your kitchens various seductive aromas;
Can cooking, Nigella, taste this erotic?

One Day soon.

2010-10-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

The first sentence of this story was again given as a project in the writing group I've joined. Hope you like it.

One Day Soon.

Emma threw the knife down onto the table and went out of the kitchen. Whenever she became angry her usual limp became more pronounced, almost a grotesque hobble. Now her fury was so intense as she lurched out into the darkness that she almost fell down the wooden steps that led onto the terrace around Rialto’s big house.

Away to the west the slopes of the Allegheny mountains lay like a dark grey undulating blanket beneath a sky already flooded by the setting sun with red, gold, yellow and, above her head, purple blue. Beneath her feet the stones released upwards the days burning heat the way her stove in the kitchen would slowly cool during the night.

She stood still waiting for the boiling heat within her to subside as well. She knew it would. It always did.

From beyond the terrace wall where Rialto’s land dropped away into the darkening shadows of the Shenandoah Valley, where the field hands huts lay, came the sound of singing. Spirituals that seemed to her as old as time. Soft and soothing their sound drifted into her, borne on the cooling breeze that blew each evening from the river itself.

Those fields and huts, those people with their suffering dignity expressed in their music, even the river itself that never rushed anywhere headlong, but always flowed steadily from wherever it began towards wherever it would end; all those things had been hers through the first six summers of her life.

She barely remembered how the man her mother taught her to call ‘father’ had actually looked. All she remembered was his enormous size, and massive strength as he held her in his arms, gently rocked her from side to side, and hummed into her ear those same negro songs.

Though her skin was much lighter than either his or her mothers, not even once in those first six years could she remember being called a nigger, or even worse ‘a mullato slave.’

When the man she had been taught to call her father died he was buried among the other slaves near where the river sometimes overran its banks and rendered the land unusable. It was then that the master moved both her mother and herself into the big house. When she asked her mother why they could no longer live with their own people, her mother made no mention of her skin colour but replied simply.

“Why child… for our protection. We must live apart for our own safety!”

So her mother had become the masters house slave, cooking his meals, serving his table, and, when the need or desire arose, serving him as a woman serves her man.

Even when the master put on his light grey uniform, mounted his horse, and led his motley ill equipped army of volunteers away from Rialto to fight with men in dark blue uniforms from the north, his influence continued to protect them…. And when, after the surrender, he had returned still wounded from a place called the Appomattox she had cared for him and continued to serve him as a woman might serve her invalid man.

The master had done as the men in blue had ordered him to do. He had brought all the slaves from the fields and their ramshackle huts below the terrace up to the big house itself, and told them they were all now free men and could leave Rialto if they wished. He assured them he would not have them hunted down, or punished as runaways. Some did leave, but most remained. Emma asked her mother why they remained?

“Where else will we go child,” her mother replied. “ Rialto is all we have ever known!”

Then she too had died four summers ago and been buried not down by the river with the man Emma had been taught to always call her father, but up here beside the house in the apple orchard in the plot reserved for the family. And now Emma cooked for the master and served his meals at the table.

She continued to listen to the sounds of singing. They sang, her people, like this every evening when their work was done, but now the soothing sound was broken. From behind her, through the open veranda window came the sounds of loud chatter and raucous laughter. Well at least the master and his guests, the fine gentlemen and ladies from Winchester had apparently recovered their good humour, though she wondered whether they were still talking about her, still laughing at her discomfort.

The accident had not been Emma’s fault. Much of Rialto’s former splendour had been stripped and taken away by the men in blue who came from the north so that now even the carpets were worn, threadbare and, in places, torn and rucked.

Turning from the table she had stumbled and spilled a little wine onto the dress of the finest lady.

“Lawd bless me Ethan,” the lady had exclaimed in her anger “ Why you keep this mulatto nigger at your table I cannot understand.”

Then she had struck Emma across the face causing her to spin sideways and fall to the floor. Emma had remained there for a moment, her cheek hot and stinging, but fully expecting that the master would in some way at least protect her. But all he said with a laugh was,

“ Why Miss Arabella I keep her here because it amuses me to do so, and in my condition there is very little in this broken world that provides me with any amusement at all.”

Sometimes, when the master ate alone and she served his table, he would ask Emma to stay with him while he ate. Emma was old enough now to know that if she remained still she had both the looks and body to capture and hold the attention of any man… whether he was black or white. So she would stand motionless beside his chair and wait for the moment when his groping hand, gnarled and twisted with years would reach out, take hold of and caress her own.

She had not, so far, served him as a woman serves her man, but she would look down into his pale grey eyes and see there the terrible longing and frustrated yearning that old age can bring. Then she would know, and even feel exulted with the knowledge that she was now the mistress and he had become the slave.

**********************************************

Feeling calmer now Emma turned and limped slowly back into the kitchen. The knife was still where she had thrown it onto the kitchen table, it’s blade shining and inviting in the candlelight. She lifted it into her hand and rested its cold blade against her still throbbing cheek, but taking care not to press its edge too close.

The master liked his knives sharp, their blades honed so fine they could slice even the toughest meat like over ripe apples. From somewhere an old spiritual tune of her mothers came to her and, as she used the knife to carve her own portion from the dinner joint - cooked exactly as the master liked it, hard black crust on the outside, blood red and running on the inside,- she began to sing.

But the words--- oh the words were entirely her own.

Whether she hummed it softly beneath her breath, or whether she sang it out loud,- later she would be unable to recall.

One day soon O lord, one day soon.

Gonna cut these chains O Lord, one day soon.

One day soon O Lord, one day soon

I’ll cut these chains O Lord, one day soon.

The End.

Memories Walk

2010-10-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

The first two lines were handed me as a writing task in a writers group I've just joined. They seemed rhythm of their own so I developed them as a poem. Like all the verse I write at the moment they were directed towards Alicia.

Memories Walk.

I walk along the sandy beach

Barefoot, and treading slowly.

Where time and tides swirl round my feet,

Where sinking sands would pull me down.

First ankles, calves, then knees and thighs,

To drown in memories darkest pools,

Echoing my hearts still painful sighs.

Yet overhead a soft breeze rises,

And fills my sails like wings of hope;

To rise beyond this desolate strand

To where your light directs me home.

And Lucifer said....

2010-10-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure where in my imagination the following piece originated other than the recollection that I was once told the Devil had been given unfettered access to the last century. ' Lucifer' is another name for the Devil.

One day Lucifer went up to the gates of Heaven and when St. Peter asked him what he wanted he stated,

“Well, I certainly don’t want to waste my time talking to the doorkeeper. I want to talk to God.”

At first Peter wasn’t too keen, but finally he decided that only God could deal effectively with this particular Devil so he went inside and brought God to the gate.

“ Now God,” Lucifer said. “ You believe that because your Son became a human being and did all that preaching about how much you love the human race, and went around working all those miracles and things, not to mention letting them crucify Him and then rising from the dead and letting them see that he wasn’t some sort of ghost… You believe the human race will always prefer you to me, and will live their lives the way you want them too?”

God nodded his head in agreement.

“Now I, on the other hand,” Lucifer continued, “ I believe that because my way seems a lot more fun and satisfying, they prefer to do things my way. So what I suggest is that we have a little contest, a sort of test to see who is right… You or me!”

God asked Lucifer what sort of test he had in mind.

“Oh a very simple one really. You agree to give me unhindered access for 100 years, during which I will try to convince them that through science, technology, and human ingenuity there isn’t anything they can’t do for themselves… In other words they can achieve perfect happiness without any help from you.”

God thought about this for a moment but He really believed that after all His Son had done on earth the human race would always prefer His way to that of the Devil. So he nodded His head in agreement and asked,

“Which hundred years do you want?”

“The 20th. Century,” Lucifer replied. “ From 1900 until 1999. It’ll probably take me most of that time to convince them that my way will make them really happy. After all you have had nearly 1900 years to convince them otherwise!”

For some reason God began to feel a little less certain and asked if that was all the Devil wanted.

“Not quite,” Lucifer replied. “ Just two little things more. I want you to let me try to convince them that two realities no longer exist. First of all let’s see if I can convince them that ‘sin’ no longer exists.”

God frowned, and began to wonder if….? But then He had already agreed to the contest so he asked what was the second reality the Devil would try to fool humanity into believing no longer existed?

“ Is it me?” He asked.

Lucifer laughed. “No, no… no problem there. Let them continue to think you exist if they want to. No….let me convince them I no longer exist. Then we’ll see what will happen.”

God realised that He couldn’t go back on the agreement He had already made so He again nodded His head, and Lucifer went off gleefully rubbing his hands together, and hissing,

“ Now we‘ll see who‘se the greatest!”

God meanwhile, now really worried, went back into Heaven and sent for Jesus.

“Son,” He said, “ I’ve just made a deal with the Devil at the gate, and I’ve realised it’s not such a good deal on our part.”

He went on to explain what He had agreed to, and Jesus also looked worried.

“What can we do?” he asked.

“ Well we can’t back out of the contest now, “ God replied, “ And I know how much you did on earth all those years ago to prove we love humankind. All those miracles, preaching, being crucified, then rising and letting people see you risen. You did a really fantastic job…. We have to let the Devil try to prove himself during the 20th. Century, ….but….” and He hesitated for a moment.

“…But I think Son, when the 21st. Century starts…. You’ll have to go back and do it all again!”

The end.

Light in Shade.

2010-07-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

I'm still writing poems with Alicia in mind. It helps.

Light in Shade.

For years you walked behind,
Your gentle shadow touching mine.
Now life has turned that table,
Your lights ahead of mine.

When I stumble along in shadows
Your spirits a light in my hand.
Illuminating the darkness
Revealing our ‘Promised Land.’

Where youthful dreams are realised,
Where strength and beauty endure.
Where we are what exists in the now,
What we were, or could be, is no more.

On Our Tomorrows

2010-06-13T15:04:00.000-07:00

When my wife Alicia became ill in 2009 I started writing her little poems. She sadly died on 31st. May 2010. I'm posting a few of them as an expression of my love for her.

On our tomorrows.

Were I one of God’s angels

And knew what lies ahead,

I’d hold your heart in my heart;

And walk you through golden meadows,

Aglow with hope-filled sunlight.

No shadows cast by doubting fear

To slow your steps;

But in dappled shades of memory,

Those lost, and now remembered,

Would rush to welcome you home.

But I am no angel,

And can only discern

The now and saddened present;

So I hold your trembling hand in mine.

And under fearful darkened clouds

Stumble on with uncertain steps.

Yet I carry you in my heart;

And hope-- no, rather believe and pray,

That welcoming cries, and recollected smiles,

In eternal sunlight lie ahead!

The name of Love.

When I was young I chose to rest

In a beautiful garden.

And the gardener’s name was God.

“Rest here,” He said,

“One day you will understand.”

So I rested then beneath shading trees,

Amongst fragrant flowers and shrubs,

Far more than I could count.

Then, close beside me, a flower appeared,

More beautiful than all the rest.

“What flower is this?” I asked

The gardener whose name was God.

“I call it Love,” He made reply,

“But you may call it what you wish

When you have learned to know.”

So I have stayed; the flower has bloomed,

Its fragrance fills my soul.

I’ve learned to love, to understand

And come to know that flower

By name….. Alicia!

On not knowing.

Shall we envy those who know what is to come?

Who know what their tomorrows will bring?

What they’ll do next week,

Or month, or year?

No; for what we have is now.

Our past has brought us here,

Our future’s yet to be.

Now is where we are,

And now is all we have.

Love is now, eternal without end,

Begun in time, but lived today;

Love is. That’s all we need to say!

Let others know what the future will bring,

I’m content in the loving, and in loving today.

I also came up with a sort of 'God prayer' which she really fell in love with and kept handing out to all the other patients in her ward. It's based on the Old Testament principle that a persons name not only defined who they were, but more importantly what sort of a person they were.

Before Time was.

Before Time was, I knew you by name.
It was I who called you forth
from nowhere.
And I carry you now in my arms,
Like a mother close to my breast,
I carry you through it all.
For you are my child, my Beloved,
Both now and forever. Amen.

Maxines Letter

2010-01-24T04:21:00.000-08:00

The inspiration for this story was a couple I once observed in a staff canteen!........

It was a letter Maxine had no wish to open. It dropped through the letter box while she was having her breakfast, and when she sat down to her lunch at midday it was on the sitting room mantelpiece leaning against one of her mothers silver plated flower vases, still unopened.

“There’s a letter for you,” her mother stated placing a plate of beans on toast onto the kitchen dining table.

“Yes, I know,” Maxine replied.

Elsie Prentiss sniffed loudly as if trying to clear an unwelcome smell from her nostrils. “ I’d say it’s from that Derek fellow,” she observed.

Maxine made no reply, and lowered her head to avoid meeting her mothers eye. Instead she shook both salt and pepper onto her dinner; shook far more than she had intended of either.

From her position beside the kitchen sink, Elsie finally asked, “ Well, are you going to open it, or not?”

Maxine pulled a face at the taste in her mouth, stood up and, crossing to the sink, filled a glass with water from the cold tap. She took a large mouthful and swallowed it staring out of the window into the back garden.

“Probably, but not now…. later.”

At teatime her mother switched off the six o clock news on the radio and said, “ If that letter’s still unopened when we go to bed I’m chucking it onto the fire. I’m not having it staring at me from the mantelpiece all tomorrow, and you wandering about the house pretending to ignore it.”

“If it’s bothering you,” Maxine muttered, “ Open it yourself.”

“ I’ll do no such thing,” Elsie exclaimed. “ It’s addressed to you, and it’s for you to open it.”

“ Oh for heavens sake it’s just a bloody letter, that’s all it is!”

“There’s no need for you to start swearing. It’s not my fault he’s dumped you is it? I‘ve never even met the fellow.”

Maxine marched off into the sitting room and stood by the mantelpiece. It was such an awful word she thought, ‘dumped.’ Like you were a piece of life’s furniture, once useful and treasured, but now neither needed nor wanted. The coal fire burning in the grate started to scorch her legs.

She took down the white envelope with Derek’s distinctive scrawl across the front, and stared at it. She didn’t really want to open it, didn’t want to read what he had written, or run the risk of empathising with whatever pain it had caused him to write it. She had already endured enough of that to last her a lifetime; last both of them in fact. Perhaps straight into the fire was the best place for it.

But then, she reflected, surely her pain entitled her to some explanation, no matter how inadequate or pathetic? She wondered if, in not opening it, she was not simply ‘dumping’ him in return?

“This wont do,” she snorted, and tore open the envelope.

**********************************************

It was on Maxines first day working at Shaws Department Store that she and Derek met. She was adjusting a mannequins underwear when his opening remark, “ I need to get your number,” brought a smile to her face, and a blush to his.

“ Well, it’s not the most original line I’ve heard, but I suppose, in the absence of anything else, it will have to do.”

His blush deepened making him seem to Maxine even more attractive. He was, as far as she could judge, in his middle to late thirties. Tall with dark hair beginning to grey at the temples, and with the clearest blue eyes she had ever seen in a man.

Maxine believed that you could judge a lot about a man from the colour of his eyes, and most especially by the way his eyes engaged with yours. Blue, she believed , usually signified integrity and a straightforward character. If his eyes only locked momentarily with yours before swivelling away to the side, that indicated that he couldn’t be trusted. On both counts Derek passed, and when, despite his embarrassment, he smiled with his eyes, Maxine knew she was going to like him.

“ I meant I need your National Insurance number. I’m from Wages and Salaries.”

She stepped off the stand she was working on and found she came up to his shoulder. Tall, at five feet nine inches, there weren’t that many men she felt comfortable standing next to. Standing quite close to either, without any sense of her space being invaded.

“ I’m Derek,” he said and waited, his initial blush beginning to fade.

“And I’m Maxine, but then you already know that don’t you?”

His smile widened even further and she thought, ‘You really are bloody gorgeous!’

“ I know quite a lot actually from the application form you filled up when you started with us yesterday, but I still need to make sure we have all your details correct before we can pay you. Especially I need to get your Insurance number which you didn’t have with you yesterday. It’s that rather than your telephone number that I need.”

“ Pity,” she said and suddenly felt as if he was looking into her soul. Why on earth had she said that? She wasn’t usually this forward.

“It needn’t be for long,” he said, and it was her turn to blush.

She found out later that he was already married, but without any children.

“Wifes a bit of a mystery though.” Beryl one of her new colleagues in Ladies Hosiery and Underwear informed her. “ He never mentions her, never brings her to staff do’s or anything like that. We think it’s probably not a happy union. They go on holidays each year, but they never seem to go out that much in the evenings, or at weekends… and he seems to do all the shopping. He’s probably really hen pecked and under her thumb at home. Sad really!”

‘Intriguing more like,’ Maxine thought and decided, subsequently, to discount the fact that the steadiness of his gaze had little to do with his character. In fact, without his glasses, he was quite short sighted!

****************************************

The first day in any staff canteen can be awkward. Everyone else already has their circle of fellow diners, friends and colleagues. Where do you, the newcomer, fit in? Is it wise to just sit yourself down anywhere uninvited? You might be sitting in somebody’s long established seat and become a source of annoyance and irritation on your very first day.

In the absence of any invitation from her fellow assistants in Ladies Hosiery and Underwear to sit with them, Maxine chose to sit alone at a vacant table for two near the door, but she didn’t remain alone for very long. Derek was suddenly standing beside the table smiling down at her. Now he was wearing dark horn rimmed glasses. He looked like one of her old teachers from school, or a wages clerk… which was, of course, what he was.

“Would you mind if I joined you?” he asked, and she indicated the empty chair facing her.

“ Not at all… feel free,… I’d like that…” Then in case she sounded too enthusiastic on such a short acquaintance, she added “ I’m going to be going out in a few minutes anyway. Things I need to get around town that I forgot to get this morning.”

In fact she was still sitting there talking to him when their dinner break finished. He was so easy to talk to, and so engaging that she talked as if they had known each other for years, and were just catching up after a long separation. She only realised later on in the afternoon that she had revealed her whole life history, even told him about the recent loss of her father to cancer. How that loss had impacted on her mother and herself.

“ Me being the only child probably hasn’t helped,“ she had mused. “If I’d had a brother or sister to help take the load perhaps things would now be different…. But then again… maybe not.“

In return he had told her very little about himself other than the fact that he had worked at Shaws ever since leaving school. She admitted almost flippantly that this was her fifth job in as many years.

His blue eyes twinkled behind his glasses.” I noticed that on your C.V. and it made me wonder which are you then, a sprinter, or a butterfly?”

She laughed. “ A butterfly I guess. It’s not that I lack staying power, in fact I can be quite determined sometimes, but I’m always on the lookout for the next opportunity. I like trying new things and I like the feeling of moving on to the next thing. I’m still too young to feel the need to settle for the status quo. In fact my mum always claims that I don’t do domestic!”

She would wonder afterwards if that was when he decided she was available.

The following day, when she walked into the canteen, he was already at the same table, and smiled up at her. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, once she had collected her lunch from the counter, to occupy the seat facing him. And every day after that they sat together. Lunch breaks became the highlight of her day, They were the period when she felt most alive in the job. Only later did it occur to her that other staff members must have noticed, might even have commented on their growing and obvious friendship. Had the change from friendship to intimacy been obvious to everyone else?

Afterwards Beryl made a remark that sealed Maxines subsequent course of action. “ We did notice, and we did think about saying something…. Warning you, but you always gave the impression of being so confident, so able to take care of yourself…. a bit aloof really. We just assumed you knew what you were doing.”

If only she had!

Eventually she asked him, “ What’s your wife’s name? I’ve noticed you aren’t wearing a ring, but I do know that you’re married.”

He stared at her for almost a minute, his eyes suddenly pained and wary, as if her question had brought them to a crossroads from which there might be no going back

“ Sylvia… Her name is Sylvia.” He was leaning forward, and speaking quietly as if he didn’t want anyone else overhearing what he was saying. “She’s my wife… but in many important ways no longer my wife …. if you can understand what I mean.”

His gaze had never wavered, but the hurt in his voice made Maxines heart lurch and, because she wanted Derek to realise she could understand, even when she didn’t, she nodded, reached across the table, and rested her hand over his.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, “ I wont ask anything more.”

The first time they ‘went out’ together it was simply for a coffee and a sandwich after work. He seemed not to want to leave her and return to whatever sort of homelife he shared with Sylvia, a world that he inhabited, but had clearly indicated he did not want to burden Maxine with. When they parted on the High Street she gave him a hug, and a kiss on the cheek.

Partings on following evenings were marked by embraces and kisses more intimate and intense. The following Sunday she agreed they could meet and spend the whole afternoon together. She sensed that their relationship was racing forwards, but its very speed exhilarated her.

It was a warm summers afternoon and, at his suggestion, they left the city centre and spent it walking in one of the suburban parks. They found a tea room where he insisted on buying her the most expensive cream tea on the menu, and then holding hands as they joined other couples and families beside the boating lake. It was there, watching young people in rowing boats, that she admitted first to herself, and then out loud to him, that she was in love.

He didn’t turn away as he might have done. He could have ended it there but instead he took both her hands into his and again looked her straight in the eye.

“ Then I’m blessed,” he murmured. “ At long last I feel that my life is blessed, but…”

She thought she knew what was coming, what he was going to say and quickly released her hand from his grasp and placed it over his lips.

“ No Derek, don’t say it please. Don’t ruin this moment for me. I want nothing from you except that you know how I feel, what is in my heart. What’s the old cliché they use in books?… No strings? …Let’s just leave it at that.”

And after a moments silence, a silence he should have broken, he simply nodded his head in agreement. Damn him!

*************************************

Derek insisted that the first time they had sex together would have to be special. She had told him that she was still a virgin. Odd fumblings and heavy petting in the past, but never with anyone who really mattered. Never with anyone like Derek, ... and never full intercourse. This idea seemed to please him.

He promised to be gentle, promised not to rush her into anything, but he asserted that her being a virgin meant that their first time must be something special, something she would never forget and, more importantly, never regret. She was, he told her, the most precious thing in his life. Her happiness was the only thing he cared about.

She had thought of Sylvia as he said this but quickly dismissed thoughts of his wife from her mind. After all hadn’t he already told her that whatever sort of wife Sylvia been to him in the past she wasn’t anymore?

Maxine did tell her mother. At least she told her she had met somebody special at work, and admitted that yes. this might be the ‘real thing’.

They were sitting together in the sitting room watching one of her fathers favourite detective series on the television. Continuing to watch it together somehow made them both feel that Tom Prentiss, by dying, had not left them completely. Her mother had remarked on how distracted Maxine had become of late.

“ You look happy enough but it’s almost as if you’re not really with us.. with me anymore.”

The word ‘me’ was emphasised as if to remind her that since her fathers passing, she, Maxine, had become her mothers only remaining focus in life. Those few months less than a year earlier when they had nursed Tom Prentiss through the final stages of his cancer had forged a bond between them that went deeper than the usual mother/daughter relationship. Sometimes, lately, Maxine had thought it went too deep.

Now Elsie looked at her with an expression at once curious and fearful. “What’s his name then… this special person?”

Maxine had been bursting for almost a week, ever since her afternoon in the park with Derek, to tell somebody about her feelings, but her mothers harsh tone made her stomach sink. She suddenly regretted admitting as much as she had. Why, she wondered, did becoming a widow rob you of the ability to take pleasure in anybody else’s happiness?

“ Derek,” she murmured staring at the television, “ His name is Derek.” She repeated his name because simply saying it out loud made her feel warm, even cherished, but Elsie had turned on the sofa to face her with an accusing expression on her face.

“ And does he have a second name? This Derek person who has you walking around the place with your head so much up in the clouds that you’ve barely spoken a sensible word to me all week?”

“ Of course he does…. But if you’re going to be awkward about me having a male friend then his first name will suffice for the present.”

Elsie, who was holding the remote control, switched off the television.

“I’m not being awkward, “ she insisted, “ But I am your mother and I’m obviously interested to know what you are doing. We didn’t used to have secrets like this before.”

Maxine tried to keep the rising sense of irritation out of her voice. “ And we haven’t any secrets now,” she asserted, "Really we haven’t.”

But then she thought, ‘Apart from the fact that Derek is a married man of course, with a wife he goes home to every evening.’ She almost added out loud, ‘But at almost twenty years of age surely I‘ve a right to live my life as I want to! Perhaps even have a few secrets of my own?’

Instead she muttered “What I’m trying to do at the moment is watch this television programme. Daddy never liked being interrupted while he was watching it and I want to know how it all ends. Now please, switch it back on before we miss something important.”

Her mother fumbled with the remote control, twice hitting the wrong channel button before finding the right programme. They watched it together in silence until the end but, in neither case, with any great attention. As they were turning off the lights, before going upstairs to their bedrooms, Elsie murmured softly,

“What’s important to me Maxine is that you are happy.”

“And I am mummy… for the first time in ages I am really happy, and I want you to be happy for me…. Can’t you at least manage that much?”

Realising that Elsie was crying Maxine enclosed the smaller woman in her arms. Since Tom’s passing her mother had even seemed to shrink physically as if all she wanted to do was disappear. The tiny thin shoulders shook for a moment and then stopped.

“ I’ll try too, “ Elsie muttered. “ But if this Derek person ever does anything to hurt you be sure and let me know… and I’ll hit him such a clatter he’ll wish you‘d never met!”

*****************************************

Later. when regret might have been considered only right and proper, Maxine had to admit that Derek had kept his word about making their first time really special.

Unlike sales staff at Shaws, those employed in Wages and Salaries did not have to work shifts that included weekend work. When he explained that Sylvia would be visiting friends over one weekend, Maxine swapped her Thursday afternoon off with Beryl’s Saturday afternoon off so they could spend almost the entire weekend together.

“ I’ll have to be back by Sunday evening when Sylvia gets home” Derek explained, “ But I’m telling her I’m attending an accountants seminar in Scarborough. She wont question that, or try to contact me at home. She‘ll be too busy sharing all the gossip with her friends.”

Maxine’s heart lifted. “ And where will we be?” she asked.

Whenever she had imagined them being together for a weekend she had assumed it would probably mean them being at his house, but instead he tapped the end of his nose.

“ That would be telling“ he whispered, “ But trust me, it wont be anywhere near Scarborough. It wont be anywhere that will have you thinking about Sylvia every time you turn around either. It will be somewhere which will be ours alone… our special place.” Then, almost as an afterthought he asked, “ What will you tell your mother?”

“ Oh I’ll tell her I’m spending the weekend with a friend from work. That way I wont have to answer any of her questions with any lies.”

Derek frowned. “ I wish I didn’t have to lie either, but its better Sylvia doesn’t know the truth …for the moment at least.”

Maxine’s heart leaped for a second time. Was he hinting that one day he might….?

‘No,’ she thought, ‘ I mustn’t think that far ahead.’

Actually what Elsie did ask, rather pointedly, was “ Do I need to enquire whether you and this friend from work will be sharing the same bedroom?”

“ No,” Maxine replied and left it at that. Her mother could apply that denial to whichever part of her question she liked, but ‘At least,’ Maxine thought, ‘ I’ve avoided lying.’.

He collected her from work at midday on the Saturday and they drove out of the city following the signs for Birmingham. Maxine closed her eyes and sank into the warmth and intimacy of being in his car, sharing his space, feeling his warmth.

“ Scarborough is to the north,” she murmured dreamily, “ But I trust you implicitly!”

Returning home on the Sunday afternoon nothing would have convinced her that her trust was misplaced. The whole weekend had been so wonderful, so perfect.

The hotel was set in acres of parkland and had pepper pot roofed towers, warm grey walls covered with wisteria, and a view over fields and hedgerows towards a misty lake and blue hills fading into the distance. It was like something out of a romantic novel. Their bedroom had a balcony and old style antique furniture and a four poster bed. They had dined by candlelight on their first evening at a window table that overlooked a terrace decked with fairy lights. Derek had even arranged for them to have breakfast in their room the following morning.

He had been gentleness and patience personified as they had sex for the first time in the four poster bed surrounded by white lace curtains. He had shushed her fears that she might have disappointed him by being so tense and inexperienced. When she awoke in the early morning and looked across at him lying beside her he had already been awake. He had taken her then a second time, and on this occasion she had achieved a climax simultaneous with his. They had remained in bed until it was time to vacate the room and after lunch in the restaurant they had begun a leisurely drive home. When he dropped her off in the town she had thanked him knowing that, of necessity, future trysts could not be as romantic as this their first..

******************************

As spring became summer and the fine weather typically gave way to rain and humidity Maxine told him that her mother knew she was seeing somebody, and wanted to meet him. She was startled to see how worried he looked.

“ You mean she knows about us?”

“ She knows I’m seeing somebody from work, she even knows your name,… well your first name anyway, but I haven’t told her anything about your situation because, to be frank, I don’t know that much about it myself”

“For heavens sake Maxine,” he protested, “ We have to be careful. I’ve kept my life with Sylvia separate from all this, and I thought you were doing the same. I can‘t possibly meet your mother!”

“Well I’m sorry but I can’t compartmentalise my life to that extent. I’ve never had to keep secrets from her before and I’m finding it difficult. I’m not an accountant like y ou. I can’t divide my life into separate little boxes the way you seem able to, and I haven’t been able to relegate our relationship to the level of ‘all this!’”

“ I didn’t mean it like that, but really I can’t just shake hands with your mother and then pretend that I’m not married, that I don’t have a wife somewhere.”

She was angry now, but angry for reasons she couldn’t immediately identify. “ You seem well able to pretend she doesn’t exist when we’re in bed together!”

The sudden pained look in his eyes hit her hard.

“Ohhh shit Derek, I’m sorry. That was unforgivable.. I should never have said that to you…..”

“ That’s alright… really… I deserve it.”

“ No you don’t. You’ve never tried to pretend anything with me and you don’t deserve to have me accuse you of deceit like that. Please tell me you forgive me..”

He looked away. “ There’s nothing to forgive, “ he muttered but she knew there was. Like a sour flavour in a favourite sweet you can’t quite identify, the tastelessness of her outburst lingered on afterwards. It even began to linger in those few private times together they managed to steal.

Later she realised that even thinking of their moments of passion as something ‘stolen’ was probably an indication that common sense and reality were beginning to reassert themselves. For the moment though she decided that her increased feelings of vulnerability sprang from the prospect of them being separated for three weeks in the summer holidays.

Her service at Shaw’s only entitled her to a weeks vacation. but Derek would be on holiday for three weeks. What made it worse was that he would be away from home for all of those three weeks. Away with Sylvia.

“ We always go away together for the three weeks,” he explained then added with an ironic shrug, . “ It’s about the only normal married thing we do.”

Did he mean they would….? ‘ Oh God no, don’t go there!’ she thought.

Out loud she cried “ But I wont see you for a whole three weeks!. I wont even see you at work, What will I do? It isn‘t fair. It‘s….it’s cruel!”

She couldn‘t help it but, for Maxine at least, Sylvia had suddenly become an issue. an unwelcome ogre occupying a corner at her own special party. It was silly of course. Maxine didn’t even know what the woman looked like. Was she blond, brunette? Tall, small; fat, thin? Did she wear glass’s?

Maxine thought she probably did. Strong dominant women always wore glass’s. They had their hair fastened up into a tight bun to emphasise their masculinity, and Maxine assumed that Sylvia was the dominant partner in that particular marriage. How else could she have so effectively emasculated Derek’s independence?

What Beryl had suggested must be true. He seemed totally under Sylvia’s thumb, almost pathologically afraid of doing anything that might upset her. Maxine knew that she couldn’t ask Derek any of the questions that were now keeping her awake at night, but she also knew that if their relationship was to have any future, she had to get the answers.

“Where are you going for this holiday” she asked him. “ At least tell me that much so that I can imagine you while you’re away.”

He seemed reluctant even to tell her that much but finally admitted that they were going to Eastbourne. “We always go there, to the same hotel. Sylvia likes it there. Now stop torturing yourself. It’ll be over before you know it and then everything will be as it was before.”

Maxine couldn’t imagine how switching her feelings off could ever mean things would be as they were before but, for the first week, she tried.

She avoided the staff canteen, going out to a nearby café for lunch each day, and in the evenings at home she redecorated her bedroom. She even helped her mother cut back the lawns and tidy up the flower beds which had become overgrown and weed infested during her fathers illness, but, by the second week, she was running out of distractions, and prowling the house like a caged animal.

“Oh for heavens sake Maxine, “ Elsie exclaimed, “ If you know where he’s gone on his holiday why don’t you just go and see if you can find him!”

The idea had occurred to her before but once her mother had tacitly given it her approval she made her decision.

“ Sunday,” she announced, “ I‘ll get the train on Sunday.”

But to where? Eastbourne yes, but where in Eastbourne? Which hotel would he be in? She spent an entire lunch break raiding travel agents for lists of hotels in Eastbourne, and almost two full evenings on the telephone ringing receptions, and asking in a subdued tone, so that her mother would not overhear, if she could be connected to Derek and Sylvia Fraser’s room. On the Friday evening she struck lucky.

“ But I’m afraid Mr and Mrs Fraser are out for the evening,” the voice at the other end of the line informed her. A male voice, very cultured and refined, almost public school. She could imagine him standing there consulting his registers, perhaps playing with his pen the way Derek did sometimes when he was thinking, or adding up columns of figures. “ Can I give them a message when they return? Tell them who is calling?”

“No, “ Maxine exclaimed loudly feeling as if the telephone in her hand had suddenly become red hot. “ No, no there’s no need… It’s not at all important.” And she dropped the telephone back onto the rest hoping it would sound as if she had been suddenly cut off. It bounced off the rest and down onto the floor with a clatter.

“Anything the matter?” her mother called through from the sitting room.

“ No.. no.. nothing at all,” Maxine gasped fumbling to replace it onto the hall table. “Everything’s fine.”

‘What am I saying?’ she thought. “ Of course something’s the matter. Nothing’s fine. The man I love is out on the town with his bloody wife and I don’t know what she’s going to make him do when they get back …. And I‘ve just told some ponce of a receptionist that it‘s not important!”

Of course it was important. Important for her to learn what sort of a woman she was up against in this fight for Derek’s attention. Because, in her mind, that was what it had become; a fight. If necessary a fight to the bloody finish. But equally important was retaining Derek’s trust. He mustn’t ever know that she had been checking up on him and was about to follow him.

She arrived in Eastbourne just after lunch and went immediately to the hotel which stood in Edwardian splendour on the promenade facing out towards the sea. For a while she sat in a shelter on the promenade staring across at the white marble entrance porch with two pillars on either side. She half hoped that Derek and 'she' might appear. ( Sylvia, she had decided, would henceforth only ever be thought of as ‘her,’ or ‘ she,’ never as a person with an actual name!)

It started raining, quite heavily and she decided that if they were indoors they were unlikely to emerge. On an impulse she decided to take one further chance. No point, having got this far, just turning around and going home.

She put up her umbrella, crossed the promenade and went down the nearest side street. She quickly located a newsagents, went inside and bought herself a broadsheet newspaper, one large enough to hide behind if she needed to. Then she returned to the hotel entrance. By now it was raining heavily and. with her heart beating so fast she thought she might actually faint. she went through the revolving door into the reception area.

She lowered the umbrella, gave it a shake on the tiled area just inside the door and then looked up. She noticed the young receptionist at the desk dealing with one of the guests, and turning to her left noticed the entrance into the hotel bar. She would wait in there before deciding what else to do.... what else she could do!

The reason she hadn’t immediately recognised Derek standing at the desk with his back to her, and talking to the receptionist, was because of the woman accompanying him.

For a moment Maxine had been rooted to the floor, her mind numb, staring at the woman. She, for Maxine continued to think of Derek’s wife as a ‘she’, looked back at her, and for a moment their eyes had locked. Then ‘she’ had smiled.

Maxine lurched sideways, turned, and without raising the newspaper at all walked in a daze into the bar. Sunday afternoon and the place was full. Well it was raining outside… of course it was full.!! Why wouldn't it be full? Her mind in a whirl she managed to find a stool by the wall and drop onto it. She wanted to be sick. Scream.

‘Please God,’ she thought, ‘Don’t let me faint. Not yet. Not till I can get out of here!’

She dropped her umbrella onto the floor, fumbled to pick it up and then lean it against the flock wallpaper beside her. Surely everyone in the bar was staring at her, realising what a fool she was making of herself Then, fearful that ‘they’ might come into the bar, she opened the paper and held it up in front of her face. Used it to hide the tears that were already stinging her eyes and starting to streak down her cheeks.

It wasn’t that ‘she’ was especially beautiful, although she wasn’t ugly either. Blond hair, short and wavy, blue eyes and no glasses. Nor was it the way ‘she’ had been holding onto Derek’s hand as he leaned across the desk to study something the receptionist was showing him. It wasn’t even the warm, open smile so indicative of a friendly trusting disposition.

“ She’s a cripple,” Maxine heard herself gasping aloud, almost choking on the words. “ She’s in a bloody wheelchair for Chrissake!”

********************************************

‘My Darling Maxine.’ the letter began ‘ I assume I am still allowed to call you my darling…’

She thought, ‘You assume too much Derek. I’m no longer your darling, or anything anywhere near it.’

She moved away from the fireplace to sit down on the sofa and read the rest of it, two sides of a single sheet of paper.

‘ You really know how to hurt a soul don’t you?’ the letter continued. ‘Not a word of explanation, not even a note saying goodbye. Surely Maxine after all we have meant to each other, all those times you assured me you would love me… always love me…. surely I’m entitled to something more than this unfeeling silence?’

‘ And what about my feelings?’ she wondered.

‘ I asked Beryl did she know why you had left Shaw’s so suddenly, barely even working a full weeks notice, and she told me that you had arrived in to work on the Monday really distressed but unwilling to explain anything. All you had said was that you had to leave quickly. As she put it, ‘ Get away from this place and all its associations.’ I have to assume, in the absence of any word from you, that the association you were referring to is me.

She did say something about you collecting brochures about Eastbourne, and I think I know what has happened. I’ve checked with reception at the hotel and they tell me that someone telephoned to check whether we were there or not, and Sylvia told me about a young woman behaving very strangely in the hotel lobby. The woman she described to me sounded like you. She’s used to people giving her second glances because of her situation, but not the look of horror she was treated to on this occasion. If it was you Maxine following me, and then glaring at poor Sylvia in that terrible way, then I am truly shocked. How could you be so cruel after I have made such efforts to protect you from the truth?’

Maxine got up from the sofa suddenly, her heart racing, her anger rising like an irresistible tide.

“ Me cruel?” she demanded out loud. “ For pity’s sake Derek get real! You’re the one who’se been cheating on poor Sylvia. But then, of course, you don’t do ‘real’ do you?”

She turned the letter over in her hand.

‘ If it was you Maxine,’ it continued, ‘ Then you know now why I am unable to let my feelings for you override my responsibilities for Sylvia. But you must also know that my feelings… no darling Maxine, my LOVE for you is the one real thing in my life.’

“ No, you miserable creep,” Maxine muttered, “ What’s real in all this is the fact that poor crippled Sylvia clearly loves you, and it’s not because being in a wheelchair means she has to rely on you either. Not like the way Daddy had to rely on me sometimes. I saw the way she was looking up at you, the way she was holding your hand and I remembered the way Daddy looked at me when I had to clean him up. The poor woman adores you the way I thought I adored you. And that means she‘s just as deluded about you as I was.”

‘ I considered telephoning you,’ the letter ended, ‘ But I shall restrict my efforts at reconciliation to this one letter. I shall not invade your privacy in the way you attempted to invade mine., but I do beg you to reconsider what we have shared and might still share in the future if you wish it so. You can always contact me at work, but if I don’t hear from you then I shall accept that the hurt you have caused me is intended to be terminal for our relationship.’

He signed himself simply ‘ Your friend, Derek.’ No crosses, no mention, in the end, of love.

Maxine stared at the scrawled signature and felt its cold finality. Felt it with a rising tide of relief.

“Everything okay?” Elsie asked.

Maxine nodded. She hadn’t realised that her mother had come into the sitting room and was standing beside her.

“ I heard you talking out loud, and you seemed upset.”

“ No mum, I’m alright,”

She let the single sheet of notepaper slip from her fingers and flutter down into the flames licking upwards in the grate. It darkened, then curled at the edges as Derek’s handwriting slowly faded into burnt ashes.

“It was from that Derek person then?” Elsie murmured, and rested a sympathetic hand on her daughters arm.

Maxine nodded. “ Derek nobody,” she muttered, and, turning back to the sofa, switched on the television.

THE END.

Dancers in Life.

2009-03-11T03:01:00.000-07:00

A chance encounter on a ‘Park n Ride,’ led to this story.

DANCERS IN LIFE.
They intrigued me from the moment they boarded the ‘ Park’n’Ride’ bus. It was late afternoon and the evening rush hour was just starting. The bus was crowded with shoppers leaving the city for the out of town car park.. With all the shopping bags there was very little room between the seats and the two woman smiled apologetically at me as they took their seats facing me. The bags they were carrying indicated that they had been shopping at the better end of town.
The eldest, whose name I later overheard as being Gwen, appeared to be in her middle thirties with short cropped auburn hair, brown eyes, and a good complexion with very little make up. Her companion was much younger, in her early twenties with straight black hair cut and waved in at the neck, and hazel eyes emphasised and enlarged by the dark horn rimmed spectacles she was wearing. By listening carefully to their conversation, ( well what else was I, as a single traveller without any reading matter, to do?) I learned that her name was Clare. She was by far the most vivacious of the two, laughing readily and , for the most part, taking the lead in their conversation.
Gwen was more reflective and, in keeping with her age, more adult in her attitude. While Clare talked almost continually as if trying to cram a weeks conversation into a thirty minute bus ride, Gwen seemed given to moments of introspection during which she would simply stare out of the window beside her at the darkening streets and buildings as they flashed past us. It had begun to rain and I sensed that in some way this suited her current mood.
I wondered what their true relationship was? Their age difference, only a decade or so at the most, ruled out them being mother and daughter. They could have been sisters but somehow I didn’t think so. At one point Clare, without even breaking the flow of her chatter, took off her glasses to give them a polish with a white handkerchief, and I realised there were no sisterly similarities in their features. I therefore assumed that they were simply friends sharing an afternoons shopping trip into town.
Nonetheless there was something intriguing in their relationship, a closeness and warmth that seemed to go beyond simple friendship. It was evident in the way they looked at each other, (when Gwen wasn’t staring forlornly out of the window,) and in the way they seemed to need only the slightest hint, odd word, or half sentence to understand each others meaning entirely. In that way, I realised, they were very similar to Sandra and myself.
I too glanced often out of the window, and studied my hands and shoes far more closely than I have ever done before in order to disguise the fact that, as the journey went on, I was listening ever more closely to what they were saying.
They had recently been to the theatre together. A rather controversial play it appeared which Clare had enjoyed, but Gwen had found a little obtuse and difficult to understand. I formed the opinion that she didn’t really want to understand it!
“But the whole point is,” Clare emphasised, “ That people do live their lives in separate compartments don’t they? Most of us don’t make any real contact with each others lives at all do we?. We experience other peoples lives as if they’re images on a television screen, or even actors on a stage. I felt that was what the writer was saying.”
“I didn’t get the feeling he was talking to me at all,” Gwen protested quietly. It was at this point that Clare began polishing her glasses.
“I don’t mean you and me, but most other people. Society is breaking down into smaller and smaller units. At one time people had all manner of relatives and friends they could relate to, but now people live in little units that never connect. Look how many people die alone and sometimes its days before even their closest neighbours know that they’ve gone. It’s very sad really and that was the point of the play…well at least I think that‘s what I thought was the point.”
She suddenly laughed. “ I suppose it was really a little confusing. The character made up to look like a vampire who kept prancing about in the auditorium didn’t really help did he?”
Gwen nodded and also smiled at the recollection. “No he didn’t, well not for me anyway. I suppose it was what they call ‘experimental theatre’, but at least you enjoyed it didn‘t you?”
“ Yes I did really. I mean sometimes it pays to look at things in a different way. It’s like, …well it’s like when you move a picture from one room into another, or even onto a different wall so that the light strikes it in a different way. You see things in it you hadn’t noticed before. See it with different eyes really.”
Gwen murmured “ I suppose you do…. if you are able to move it into a new room that is. John doesn‘t like me moving anything without asking him first! Mind you he never asks me why I want to move it. Just expects me to ask his permission first.”
Her words seemed to strike a different chord between them, perhaps even a painful one. Clare’s smile, which I found an attractive one, disappeared. She replaced her glasses and, reaching across her bags, took hold of her friends hand.
“You’ll probably enjoy the weekend once you get there,” she said, but Gwen glanced out of the window, and shook her head. The traffic in this part of town was so heavy the bus was moving almost at a crawl.
“ I don’t think so. It will be all John’s friends from work, and for the most part I never really understand anything they’re talking about. It’s not that I’m stupid or anything, ….I’m just not interested.”
“Will none of their wives be there that you can talk to?”
“ A few but I’ve nothing in common with any of them either. For the most part they talk about their children, and I’ve none I can talk about. Usually I just let the whole weekend wash over me, read a book, and think about something else.”
Clare’s response was barely more than a whisper. “Think about me then.”
If I hadn’t been watching them at that point I would have missed what happened next, and then who knows what direction my own life might have taken!
Clare suddenly giggled, leaned across the space between them, and rested her head onto her friends shoulder. Gwen turned towards her and brushed a kiss onto her forehead. Not a passionate kiss, but the briefest display of something more than friendship; and I realised with a shock the true nature of their relationship.
And I felt again the soft pressure of Sandra’s lips on mine.
*********************************************
We had been friends since we were at school together. Perhaps an unusual friendship in some ways because we were so dissimilar in character. Sandra was always the go ahead one, whereas I tended to hold back and take the second place. I often thought that any friends I had were only my friends because that gave them access to her. I couldn’t blame them of course because she was very attractive. People, especially men, just liked being around her., although sometimes she treated them with appalling indifference. From our childhood she had been the one who excelled at sports, and anything on the practical side of things, whereas I was always happier with a book, or something academic.
At university our paths did diverge slightly, although we still remained close friends. She took Business Studies while I took English, and afterwards, when she started to climb the corporate ladder, I went into teaching. We had this rather silly undeclared race between us; would she make it into a boardroom before I made it into a headship?
It was silly because there was never going to be any other winner but her!
“Don’t you want to reach the top?” she had asked me only a few months earlier when I told her I had no intention of even applying for a vacant head of department position.
“No.” I replied quite simply and quite happily. She had shaken her head and looked at me as if I was beyond any normal persons reasoning or understanding.
“Is it that you don’t think you’re qualified enough? Because, if so, that’s absolute poppycock. I don’t know anyone better qualified than you to run an English department, or any other department, or school, for that matter. You’ve twice as many letters after your name as I have, and I’ve seen you with the kids. They almost kiss the ground you walk on; even the most difficult ones. You say yourself you’re able to relate to them when nobody else can reach them. What is the matter with you? Do you always want to be second best?”
“Well thank you for that. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings will you?” I tried to continue smiling but it had actually hurt. Realising this she softened her approach and tried another tack.
“Is it the responsibility you’re afraid of? Is that it?”
It had been my turn to shake my head. “It’s none of those things, and I’m certainly not afraid of responsibility either.”
“Well what is it then? I don’t understand.”
“It’s that I’m perfectly happy as I am. I’m not like you always looking for the next mountain to climb, the next great prize to be won and put into my trophy cabinet. I’m perfectly happy paddling along the river bed picking up a few shells here and there.”
“ May I remind you,” she had stated in her best ’I’m saying this for your own good’ voice, “ That you’ve just got yourself engaged. When you’re married that means you have responsibilities for somebody else’s happiness besides your own and you’ll need more than a few shells from the river bed to meet those and make the marriage work!”
Her reference to my recent engagement brought the conversation to an abrupt end. It was typical of Sandra to be so forthright, but I was left wondering whether the responsibility for making a marriage work really was frightening me?.
********************************************
Gwen began rooting into one of the shopping bags on her lap. It’s label indicated one of the most expensive fancy good shops in town. Clare was watching her with an expectant expression on her face.
“Have you lost something?” she asked.
“ No… well I hope not anyway! It’s something I meant to give you when I got back from this weekend buried away with John, and his appalling business friends, in deepest Gloucestershire.”
“You don’t have to buy me a present,” Clare protested, “ You’ll only be away for the weekend. Just try to enjoy it and come back to me afterwards.”
“ I know I don’t have to buy you anything but in this case I wanted too. I know it’s only a few days until I will see you again but I don’t expect I’ll be allowed any opportunity to go off by myself and buy you anything over the weekend and… Aha, here it is..”
She looked up. “ I want to give it you now and know that you are enjoying it while I’m away.”
She passed Clare a small bundle wrapped in fine white tissue paper. For a moment Clare stared at it nonplussed, and then her eyes slowly filled with tears.
She whispered, “ It isn’t what I think it is…is it?”
I couldn’t look away at that moment, but Gwen seemed to notice, for the first time, that I was watching them. She eyed me warily as if questioning my right to intrude, but when I smiled, she turned her head away to look out of the bus again.
“ Oh Gwen, you shouldn’t have.” Clare was exclaiming.
By now the tissue packaging had been removed to reveal a small porcelain figurine, white, and no more than three or four inches tall on a flat delicately thin base. It depicted two young female dancers, one of them kneeling on the floor as though weary and exhausted, the other bending over in a caring, solicitous pose. The features, even on so small a piece, were so beautifully defined that you immediately felt an empathy for both of them.
I couldn’t help but smile even more, and Gwen glancing back at me again, took my reaction as a sign of approval. She immediately dismissed me from her mind, and returned her attention to Clare.
“I saw you looking at it when we first went into the shop” she explained. “ I realised how much you like it…”
“It’s absolutely beautiful… I just love it. But when did you buy it?”
“ When you went in next door looking for a toilet. I nipped back in and bought it. I was dreading you would come looking for me before I could have it wrapped and get it into my bag.”
“There was a queue a mile long for the ladies… but Gwen.. the price!”
“You’re worth it, every penny of it, and you did like it didn’t you?”
“Oh God yes, of course I did. I do… even more now. Thank you so much” And without embarrassment she leaned across and pressed a kiss of her own onto Gwen’s cheek. And I recalled how Sandra’s supportive kiss onto my cheek had suddenly turned into a passionate kiss onto my lips!
*****************************************
“I’ve broken off the engagement,” I had said. “ I’ve realised it isn’t the right thing for me, for us, and I can’t go through with it.”
Sandra, because she had no husband to call on, had asked me along to make up the numbers at a dinner party she had arranged at her house for some important clients. Afterwards we were cleaning up in the kitchen and she asked me whether something was wrong.
“You’ve been really quiet all evening” she observed, “Even quiet by your standards.”
So I told her about breaking off the engagement. She was silent for a long minute, her head bowed, and concentrating on some point among the pots and pans in the sink as if they were a management problem that had suddenly landed on her desk with a memo from above telling her to solve it.
“Well say something for heavens sake,” I muttered.
“I’m wondering if you breaking it off has anything to do with me, with what I said to you the other week about marriage bringing its own responsibilities?”
I tried to laugh but it came out all wrong, like a pained cough. “ Is that what you were trying to say? I thought you were trying to make me feel inadequate.”
She looked across at me her eyes challenging me.
“Don‘t duck the issue… was it what I said?”
“No it wasn’t what you said. Well not completely anyway. Perhaps a little… Oh for heavens sake I don’t know do I? I never know how much what you say affects what I do. Sometimes I just wish you wouldn’t say anything at all. Just keep your mouth shut, let me decide for myself ….and get on with it.”
I picked up the nearest tea towel and started drying the pots. That had always been my function in our friendship. Sandra washed and polished, and I trailed along behind her drying up!
After another awkward silence she said, “ Well for what it’s worth I think you were right to break it off. From the beginning I never thought it would work, and I didn’t want to be around and watch you suffering when it all went pear shaped.”
I tried to lighten the mood a little. “So at least I…we, have your approval then?” And it worked because she laughed, and nodded.
“What was it like, breaking it off I mean?” she asked.
I told her as much as I felt I could tell her, but then thought I had probably told her more than she had any right to know. That was another long standing feature of our friendship.
“ Finally we both agreed it was for the best” I ended. Pots and pans were cleaned, dried, and stored into their rightful cupboards. Everything was neat and tidy, and in it’s proper place. So why the hell, I wondered later, couldn’t it have stayed that way?
At first I assumed it was because she recognised that the tone of regret in my voice indicated my uncertainty and unhappiness. She came to me, put her hands onto my shoulders and, looked me straight in the eye.
“ The idea that marriage is first of all a social responsibility, went out at the end of the nineteenth century. This is the twenty first century. Our first responsibility now is to ourselves, and if it was the wrong thing for you to go and get married, then you were right to break it off before either you, and in this case somebody else, got hurt.”
“So why,” I asked, “Is it hurting me so much now?”
Her arms went around my shoulders and she gave me a hug and then kissed me on the cheek. It wasn’t the first time we had physically expressed our affection for each other, but this time it was different. Perhaps she sensed how much I needed something more than mere words, but suddenly her lips had moved and she was kissing my lips.
The kiss was a passionate one, no longer the sort of kiss friends would exchange. I was stunned; for a long time unable to move, respond even, step back, or do anything. Least of all break it off. Finally it was she who took the step backwards staring at me with an expression I had never seen in her eyes before. Confused, angry perhaps, but most of all, uncharacteristically for the friend I thought I knew so well, afraid.
“Oh gawd,” she gasped turning away as if she could no longer trust herself to look at me. “ Now I’ve done it haven’t I? I’ve let you know how I feel haven‘t I, what I really want? Gawd but I never meant it to happen like that. Not when you’re on a rebound!”
“Sandra,” I asked, trying to take in what had just happened, “Why?”
“ What do you mean, …why? Why the hell do you think? Why not for gods sake… Oh no, no…please forget I said that. In fact… just forget it happened at all.”
She opened the fridge door, not because she needed anything from the fridge but because she needed to do something. Anything as long as it involved physical activity. In a corner Sandra always needed to act, do something, whereas I….
“I can’t just forget it” I gasped then, feeling totally at sea and challenged beyond my resources, I turned and went into the living room.
Her voice followed me as she slammed the fridge door shut. “Don’t just walk away from me like that.” But the act of moving away from her impelled me to keep moving. Perhaps, just once in my life, movement might lead to a solution of some sort.
“I can’t handle this,” I managed to mutter and, collecting my coat from the hallway, I left the house by the front door and walked to my car on her driveway. Getting into it I looked back.
She was standing at the open door looking alone and frightened. Vulnerability was not an aspect of her character I had ever seen before. As I got into the driving seat her voice, low and desperate, still followed after me.
“Rachel, please! Don’t go off like this… stay and talk to me.”
*******************************
“ Where will you put it?” Gwen asked. “ In your living room among all your other ornaments?” Her tone seemed to indicate some desperation as if she needed her friends reassurance. Clare was still holding up the figurine studying it, and turning it around so that the light within the bus met it at different angles.
“Oh heavens no, it’s too beautiful to be put with anything ordinary. Just look at the way it changes when you turn it around. From the front the taller figure seems to have appeared from nowhere, almost by chance, to help the one kneeling on the floor; but then, when you look at it from the back, the initiative is clearly the other way around. It’s the one kneeling who is holding on to her companions hand, as if stopping her from leaving. It‘s just so very, very sad, but in such a beautiful way.”
“So where will you put it then?” Gwen persisted.
“Beside my bed of course, then every morning when I wake up, you will be the first person I think about.”
She began to carefully rewrap it into the tissue paper and place it into one of the bags on her lap. “ I just wish I could buy you something as beautiful that you could place beside your bed so it would remind you of me.”
Gwen smiled ruefully, “It’s probably as well you can’t. I’m not a very convincing liar, and how would I explain to John where it came from? We so still share the same bed you know.”
They sat in silence for a while, holding hands and, to my eyes, sharing their own private thoughts. When they broke the silence, they seemed to confirm this. It was as if they had simultaneously decided to change the subject.
“ When are you?…” Clare began, while Gwen, for her part began
“ We’ll have …..”
Clare laughed and Gwen continued as if them both thinking the same thought was something she took for granted.
“ … to leave early tomorrow morning. John hates having to rush, and always wants to arrive long before the first working session begins. I can’t see the point myself. We can’t access the rooms until after ten o’clock, and the first session doesn’t even start until eleven.”
She pulled a face. “ It’s what they call the ’brain storming module.’”
Clare pulled a face but laughed again. “ Sounds almost painful.”
Gwen’s frown became almost rueful. “ Not half so painful as sitting in my room watching Saturday morning television, and waiting for lunch at one o’clock!”
“ Oh my poor Gwen. Look, I’ll be at home all tomorrow. I’ll phone you on your mobile between eleven and one, and we can have a good chat.”
Gwen’s features brightened up at that point. “ Oh yes, that would be lovely. I’ll probably be in need of some decent human contact by then!”
I’d considered telephoning Sandra any number of times since that night of the dinner party. Sooner or later I knew I would have to. A lifetimes friendship could not be allowed to end like that. Once or twice I’d even got myself to the point of starting to dial her mobile number, but at the last second I’d ducked the issue, and switched off. The problem was that, like Gwen, I was a useless liar. Especially if the person I was lying to was myself. Furthermore I knew that in making the call I would have to face the truth, and Sandra was right. I was afraid.
Clare continued trying to cheer Gwen up. “ And then, next Tuesday afternoon we have the Mozart recital to attend. I’m really looking forward to that.”
“ Yes,” Gwen agreed, “It should be wonderful, but would you mind if I came over to your place in the morning and we could have some lunch together before we go to the recital. John still intends going off on this promotion trip to Brussels. He’ll expect me to be at home that evening to take his call, but if I thought we would spend the whole day together it would make this weekend a little more bearable.”
I thought both Clare’s look and response were unambiguous. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t”
Gwen however had again noticed me listening to their conversation. To forestall any suggestion that I should mind my own business, I leaned towards Clare, and explained that I couldn’t help but notice and admire the figurine she had been holding.
She smiled, accepting the compliment at its face value. If she did realise I had been listening in she, equally, was unconcerned.
“ I could never have afforded to buy it for myself“ she explained.. “It’s a present from a friend.”
At that point the bus turned into the shelter beside the car park, and everyone prepared to leave.
“Well it’s very beautiful” I said.
Without embarrassment she looked at Gwen and said, “ But nowhere near as beautiful as the friend who gave it to me.”
With that they began to gather their bags, and move off the bus. I remained where I was for a moment stunned by the feeling and honesty in her words, and by the warmth in her voice. No wonder Gwen almost glowed as she too stood up, and struggled off the bus with her own bags and parcels.
‘Go for it,’ I thought, ‘ Happiness doesn’t knock twice.’
But as I followed them off the bus, and into the car park, that nagging voice that assails us all sometimes whispered, ‘ physician heal thyself!’
By the time I got into my car I was already trying to extract my mobile from my handbag. I wondered why we women can never immediately locate, in our handbags, what we are looking for?
By the time I had retrieved my mobile from underneath the other detritus, Gwen and Clare had reached their cars, parked only a few bays apart, and had each stowed their shopping bags into their respective boots.
I dialled the number automatically, then waited anxiously while it connected.
Gwen crossed over to Clare’s car to say goodbye. I could see and almost feel the tension between them now the moment of parting had arrived. Or was it my nerves waiting for the ringing tone to stop?
They were illuminated by one of the car parks halogen lamps. Like two dancers in a spotlight they came together in a single synchronised movement.
I thought, ‘If it switches to the message minder, I’ll simply hang up and hope she returns my call.”
Without any apparent embarrassment, and ignoring the rain that was still falling, Gwen and Clare embraced and kissed. Envy of their happiness overwhelmed me and I thought how lucky they were to share such a bond, such a level of understanding, and such a commitment. Then I realised it had nothing to do with luck; it was their choice in life!
The ringing tone stopped.
“Oh Rachel,” Sandra’s voice exclaimed into my ear, “ Oh thank god you’ve rung. Hold on a minute, I’m in a meeting but…”
I heard the sound of a chair being moved, heard her apologise to somebody for moving away, and then the sound of a door being closed. When she spoke again her voice was soft and close into my ear as if she was whispering into the phone.
“ I’ve been so worried about you, about us…”
“ I’m sorry I haven’t rung you earlier,” I said.
“ No, no Rachel it isn’t for you to be sorry, not after what happened. It was for me to ring you and apologise, but… I couldn’t think what I might say that would make it up to you.”
She laughed,” Now that’s a first; me unable to think of what to say! ….. I’m sorry Rachel… for shocking you like that…I really am.”
“ I wasn’t shocked, “ I murmured. “ Surprised, yes, but I wasn’t shocked.”
“ You weren’t?”
“No.”
It was time for absolute honesty. I took a deep breath.
“ I’ve had time to think and what shocks me is … that I was surprised at all…”
Gwen remained standing where she was until Clare got into her car, reversed backwards, and then drove away. The tiny wave of her hand, as well as her posture, betrayed the loneliness she was already feeling. As Clare’s tail lights disappeared between the lines of cars she turned and went back to her own car. It was a 4X4 and she climbed into the drivers seat, and then sat there for a while before starting up her engine, reversing and following Clare’ little Fiat out of the car park.
“Rachel, are you still there?” Sandra’s voice echoed into my head, and recalled me to the matter of my own loneliness.
“ Yes, I’m still here. I need to see you Sandra. Will you be at home tonight?”
Please God don’t let this be the night she has a meeting that lasts forever! But her words when she answered came in a rush,
“ In an hour. This meeting is nearly finished and I can go straight home,… or come to you wherever you are. Whichever you wish. Rachel, ….you decide.”
“ No Sandra, please… I want it to be at your place!”
I tried to make it clear in my tone what I really wanted and, for a long moment the silence was at her end. I closed my eyes and could almost hear her breathing. I could certainly feel my heart thumping. In my minds eye I could see her standing there wearing her dark business suit looking strong, certain, and in charge…. Yet not at all certain, or in charge. I bit my lip so hard it hurt almost as much as the yearning, and I thought
‘ If she asks me am I sure, I’ll scream at her!’
What she actually said was “I’ve very little food in for both of us,” and my heart rose.
They say at such moments, moments of deep happiness, people sometimes hear music, and feel like dancing; but all I heard was the hope in her voice, and all I felt was the sudden rush of love.
“Well if I’ve an hour to wait,” I said, starting up my engine, “ I’ve time to fetch enough for both of us.”
THE END.

Scents Recall.

2009-03-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

There is a biographical aspect to the following story. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the recollection!

SCENTS RECALL.

For me expensive perfume always brings to mind Christmas in summer, coffin ships, and emigration. It’s not that I have ever sailed in a coffin ship, nor even, apart from a move some years ago from England to Ireland, that I have any great personal experience of what it means to be an emigrant; but Miss Shanahan wore expensive perfume and she broke my young heart when she emigrated to the land of ‘Christmas’s in summer.’
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning, when I was eight years old and went into her class at St. Francis Primary school in Ashleigh. It was a mixed class of boys and girls and although the girls were delighted to have a woman teacher, especially one as young and darkly glamorous as Miss Shanahan, we boys were getting to an age when we wanted a man teaching us. After all we reasoned what could any woman know about football?
But that was an initial judgement on our part. In fact Miss Shanahan had abilities and talents which more than made up for her lack of sporting knowledge. Not only was she beautiful and elegantly dressed, and constantly surrounded by a cloud of expensive perfume, but she had a love of, and facility with words which fired our imaginations. In her soft Irish brogue she could paint word pictures so vivid and real that even the most cynical among us were irresistibly drawn into an imaginary world redolent with colour and excitement, and far beyond anything we could hope to experience in the reality of our whitewashed classroom, or the rows of terraced houses beyond its high windows She was unlike anything we had experienced before and in no time at all every boy in the class was totally smitten with Miss Shanahan… including me.
She told us that she grew up in Cork, a city in southern Ireland, and described the many Atlantic liners that passed her bedroom window when she was a girl, and breasted their way through the green waters of the great ocean that lay beyond. We could almost smell the salty air, and taste the spray on our faces. Then, with tears in her eyes she would relate stories of the dreadful ‘coffin ships’ that so many years earlier had borne their cargoes of human misery and despair away from the familiar comforts of their homeland, epitomised by what she called ‘ the sound of Shandons bells’ to a new, and more challenging life in a distant land called America.
“Some of them died on the voyage” she whispered sadly and then, tugging at the silk scarf she always wore around her neck, she added with pride throbbing in her voice “ But many more of them survived to build themselves a new life in that great and wonderful land.”
Then she would tell us stories about how they lived and worked in the great city of New York, a melting pot for so many races; how they built the Brooklyn Bridge, and how they became policemen and firemen to fight the gangsters and the fires.
“Did they meet Red Indians?” we asked excitedly.
Like all eight year olds in the 40’s brought up on a diet of Saturday matinees we fondly believed that Indians resplendent in feathered headdresses, war paint, and mounted on piebald horses surrounded even Ellis Island itself and would, given half a chance, scalp some immigrants before they even properly landed in America!
Miss Shanahan simply nodded and accepted our idiosyncratic sense of North American geography without correction. “ Later…. Well yes later some of them did meet Red Indians.” She told us how they moved west onto the Great Plains, their struggles to settle the land and build the towns and cities which are still there today, and added “ We know there were Irishmen with General Custer at the Little Big Horn.”
Thus released from formal limitations, and nourished by her extraordinary visual imagery, our own imaginations were let free to fly unfettered wherever they would.
In my case it was Miss Shanahan who, in those first few weeks, inspired me to write my first great novel! It filled all of sixteen pages of a penny copy book and it depicted in lurid detail the destruction of a north country Atlantis buried not deep beneath the sea, but under the barren Yorkshire Moors. She had asked us to write a story in a setting we had actually visited and, although I had never been to the ocean I had, on one occasion, visited an aunt of mine who lived in North Yorkshire.
I presented Miss Shanahan with my completed, and rather crumpled manuscript, at the end of school one Friday afternoon, and could hardly believe my ears when she announced that she would take it home with her and read it over the weekend. I felt it would be a bond between us, a bridge spanning the miles that would separate us for the next two days.
On the following Monday morning she called me to her desk and enveloped me in a cloud of her perfume. “That story you wrote was absolutely excellent” she informed me. “You have a very special gift. You must make sure you always use it. Now, if you don’t mind I would like to hold on to it for a while, keep it here in my desk so that I can read it again and again. May I do that? Will you let me hold onto it for a while.”
Would I let he? In that moment I would have agreed to anything she asked. I was so smitten all I could do was gulp, nod my head, and blush with pleasure.
Of course I was not the only one in live with Miss Shanahan. Everybody knew that Mr. Thomas the head teacher was in love with her also. You only had to watch the amount of time her spent in our classroom as opposed to any other in the school to realise that. And judging by the amount of additional colour in her cheeks, and the glow in her eyes whenever he was there, it was clear that she was not indifferent towards him either.
Each evening they walked together to Ashleigh Bus station and caught the same bus home. The girls in our class would sometimes giggle and speculate whether Miss Shanahan and Mr. Thomas had ever actually kissed one another, and when they would marry. Listening to such talk invariably made me feel a little uncomfortable and rather angry.
Then towards the end of the summer term Mr. Thomas did get married…. but not to Miss Shanahan, to someone else! Although Miss Shanahan continued to dress elegantly, and wear expensive perfume, it seemed to everyone that some of the colour and sparkle disappeared.
The girls, of course, who claimed to know more about these things than boys did suggested that she was suffering from a broken hear and would, in all probability, waste away and die of it like some tragic film heroine. Along with the other boys I could only wait for this inevitable end with silent dread.
One afternoon I went back into the classroom to collect a library book from my desk and found her sitting at her own desk staring into space with tears in her eys. At frist she seemed startled by my sudden appearance but then, as if recalling herself from sad reflections to practical realities she reached down into the drawer beside her and held out the still crumpled exercise book.
“I’m clearing out some of my things,” she said. “ Perhaps you had better take this back now.”
I stood there as mute and stunned as I had been when she first asked if she could hold onto it for a while. I wondered if I had done something wrong, offended her in some way but, reading my thoughts, she explained, “You see I’m leaving St. Francis’s at the end of this term. I’m going to teach in another country.”
“Are you going to America?” some of us asked when she told then rest of the class later, but she shook her head and sighed as deeply and sadly as she had when telling us about the coffin ships.
“ No…..no. I’m going much further than that. In fact I’m going to a country we call Australia. It’s a place we haven’t talked about very much but it is on the other side of the world.”
Somehow we sensed that this was one of its great attractions for her. Then, as if wishing to emphasise how different she wanted her life to become, she added, “ It’s a land where they celebrate Christmas in the middle of summer!”

THE END.

The Letter.

2009-02-25T11:53:00.000-08:00

Another story set in my imaginary location 'Ashleigh.' Mind you, in this case I'm not sure who is making an 'april fool' of who!

The Letter.

16 Canal View,
Ashleigh .

To. Mr. Herbert Prendergast,
20 Canal View,
Ashleigh.
1st. April.

My dear Herbert,
I am in receipt of your letter and proposal of marriage received this morning, and I have decided to reply immediately lest any delay on my part should be misconstrued on your part as a sign of encouragement. However I have decided to respond in the same manner in which you chose to submit your proposal to me…. that is by letter.
Now Herbert I realise that neither of us is in what might be termed the ‘first flush of our youth’; you being already five years in the receipt of your old age pension while I am… well we need not dwell indelicately on how close I am to receiving mine. I would not therefore expect a proposal of marriage from you, or anyone else of your age, to be accompanied by ‘moonlight and roses.’ Though, on reflection, I cannot help but feel that, even during this Lenten season, a nice box of chocolates would not have gone amiss! Nor would I expect you to go down onto your knees with such a proposal.
Especially I would not expect such a romantic gesture in your case when I consider your not inconsiderable weight problem, nor the war wound to which you make frequent, nay interminable, references. Indeed considering your aforementioned girth I am not at all sure that, having descended onto your knees in order to effect your offer of matrimony you would then, irrespective of my response, be able to regain an upright posture without considerable outside assistance which I, as a now single woman, would be hard pressed to provide.
But what my dear Herbert am I to make of a proposal of marriage which is submitted to me on British Legion notepaper? Am I assume that were I to accept your offer I would also be marrying an entire regiment of the Lancashire Fusiliers? Or, at the very least, those members of that august company who are still alive all these years after hostilities have ceased?
To say that your proposal, and the manner of it, has left me speechless would be to grossly understate the effect your eloquence has had upon me.
For the life of me Herbert Prendergast I cannot understand how you can ever have imagined that I might entertain feelings for you reciprocal to those you insist you feel for me. I have thought long and hard about our past meetings and I can recall no words or deeds on my part which could have led you to form such a profound delusion.
For one thing, other than a few pleasantries we exchanged during last years old folks day trip to New Brighton, I cannot recall ever having had a proper conversation with you.
Yes, dear Herbert, I do recall the incident you mention in your letter when I grabbed hold of your arm on the deck of the Royal Iris ferry, but I should also remind you that a force nine gale was blowing at the time and, if I hadn’t grabbed hold of something, I would assuredly have ended the day floating face downwards in the River Mersey.
And while I am in the business of correcting your romantic if erroneous recollections, I should also point out that our pairing in the Silver Threads dancing competition last Christmas, which you recall with such emotion in your letter, was hardly the runaway success you describe. I must be the only woman in history to have been eliminated from a slow waltz competition because her partner experienced a shrapnel movement in his right leg seconds before they took the floor!
In truth Herbert I am forced to observe that, other than the fact that we both share the same view through our respective front windows, we thankfully have nothing else in common and, frankly, the idea of awakening one morning to, as you put it in your letter, ‘ find our two sets of dentures sharing the same jam jar on the dressing table’ is a prospect too nauseating for words!
Finally Herbert Prendergast I have to tell you that it will certainly not be in order for you to call upon me either now, or in the foreseeable future to, as you put it, ‘ press your suit.’ Indeed since receiving your letter, and its unwelcome proposal of marriage I have been prompted to accept a long standing invitation from my daughter in Bury St. Edmunds to stay with her, and my grandchildren, for an extended holiday.
I can only hope, and pray, that my absence from Canal View for an indefinite period will, at the very least, serve to cool your inordinate ardour, and bring to a halt those nauseating fantasies which you describe to me in such graphic and nauseating detail!
Your neighbour,
Nora Scatterthwaite. ( widow!!)
The End.

AM I GOOD ENOUGH?

2009-02-15T13:48:00.000-08:00

Some years ago I created an imaginary town called Ashleigh in which to set my stories, This was one of the first I set there. Hope you enjoy it.

AM I GOOD ENOUGH?

It struck Dennis Hill as curious that the question only presented itself to him when, in a sense, it no longer mattered if he was good enough. Not so much a question of ‘am I good enough?’ but ’ was I ever good enough?”
For the thirty years he had been a teacher, most of them at Gratton Lane Comprehensive, it had never occurred to him to question his effectiveness in the job. Now on the very day he was due to retire, he found himself not only uncomfortably challenged on the issue, but also wondering whether his failure to ask the question earlier was not, itself, an indication of his unworthiness. Was it evidence of a level of arrogance on his part that probably disqualified him from ever being a really effective teacher?
In the end it was not the retirement day he had expected. That, he had always imagined, would be a day suffused with a warm glow of personal satisfaction in a lifetimes work completed, with many fine speeches and expressions of appreciation from both pupils and fellow members of staff. He would have the opportunity he imagined to make a speech, not too long, but with a few wry observations on the current state of education. Then, as a few tears were shed he would take his final leave of the Gratton Lane assembly hall, and walk off through the school gates with head held high ….. and catch the bus home! (Living only a few miles from the school he had never seen the necessity of buying a car, or even learning to drive.)
It was perhaps ironical, because he was probably the only member of staff never to have had a problem with her, that it was Trish Henry, the scourge of the 4th. year who brought his fantasy crashing down. So much so that when, later on that final school day, when he was told by the Henry Leighton, the head, that the planned formal presentation would need to be postponed until after the summer vacation., he was quite relieved. The reason given was that only a few members of staff were able to remain behind that evening. Clearly a weak excuse but nonetheless welcome because it allowed him to slip out of the building without any fuss and escape almost unnoticed into retirement..
**********************************
He had come to teaching in his early twenties shortly after he and Shirley got married, and after he had tried his hand at a number of jobs without any great success in any of them. It was Shirley who, prompted by his natural empathy with children suggested he consider becoming a teacher. It was also she who supported him through training college; even enduring her parents disapproval of a situation where their daughter supported a husband who, in their view, ‘whiled away his time sitting in a library reading books!’
“It’s something we both believe he has to do,” Shirley had explained but there was no doubting that it had been a real struggle and his teaching certificate was only achieved at a cost.
For one thing it had meant Shirley working long hours of overtime at the supermarket, hours which often left her too exhausted at weekends to keep up with his socialising. Consequently they slipped into a married routine which resulted in them having few shared experiences. When he finally did qualify, and they could have started the family they both wanted Shirley’s health had broken down and having children of their own had become impossible. He had often wondered if over the years the pupils he taught had not become substitutes for the children Shirley could not give him?
He took to classroom work like the proverbial fish into water and his enthusiasm for his two subjects, English and Drama had, in the early years, been infectious and made him popular with both pupils and staff. But his late nights and weekends spent at school, especially when exams or a production were in the offing meant that Shirley saw even less of him than before.
Mind you, she never complained. Not even during her increasingly frequent periods of illness when she could have done with his help around the house and garden they had bought. He had insisted on a large house, and garden, as being commensurate with his position. Insisted on holding regular dinner parties, (’networking’ he called it,) with other members of staff, fellow teachers, and friends held over from his student days. Long evenings of ’ teacher talk’ around the dining room table which she found difficult to follow, or contribute too. Eventually she learned to just slip away to the bedroom when the meal was over, and listen to the radio, or read a book until it was time for the guests to leave. If her absence was commented upon at all Dennis usually laughed it off as one of ‘Shirley’s headaches!”
“You have your job to do,” she always commented if he enquired whether she minded being left out of things so much. Now, as he thought back over those years, he wondered why she had never added “… and you’re good at it!” Was it really because she saw no reason to state the obvious, or was it because to tell a lie would devalue what little relationship they still had?
Trish Henry had collided with him that morning just inside the entrance to the school. Running inside the building was strictly forbidden, but Trish was not the sort of girl to let a rule prevent her from doing what she wished; in this case, catch up with a boy from the sixth year who had just thrown her lunch bag into the boys toilet, and then himself run off towards the stairwell.
Dennis, preoccupied with his own thoughts on this his ‘ special day’, had not seen her coming. The collision not only scattered the books and papers he was carrying all over the tiled floor, but knocked the breath out of his body as well.
“Shit,” Trish exclaimed, took a step backwards, and then, concluding that attack represented the most effective defence, blurted out angrily, “Why don’t yer watch where yer goin’?”
In his younger days Dennis’s response would have been to laugh, make a jocular reply, and defuse the girls insolence with humour. He often found Trish quite amusing and succinct in her observations and when she was not trying to justify her reputation as ‘the pupil from hell’, she revealed real intelligence. But ‘the day that was in it,’ and the sudden thump as a heavily built fifteen year old crashed into his chest distracted him. He was no longer a young man, and with the passage of time almost all his former fire and enthusiasm for the job had dissipated.
Staff ‘do’s’ in pubs and clubs that went on until the early hours had ceased long ago, and lately even the dinner parties had become few and far between. Almost unnoticed, he now realised, his dignity as a teacher had become what defined him rather than his effectiveness. It had been a milestone in his life when, checking the list of first years one September he had recognised the name of a former pupils child. Now when younger members of staff deferred to him for advice he suspected they did it more to establish what would be out of date and to be avoided than to find out what they should do.
Certainly they did not expect to receive words of encouragement. The last time he complimented one of the younger teachers she had reacted as if she thought he might be ill!
Of course Shirley’s death had affected him badly, making him more introverted and insecure. He could not help blaming himself to a certain extent for not reacting more positively to her increasingly frequent periods of illness and lethargy.
“You have a lie in today,” had been his response on that last morning he left her for school. “I can get something to eat on the way in, and the few extra hours in bed will do you the world of good.”
She had nodded wearily, rested her head back onto the pillow, but said nothing. Her eyes were closed as he left her.
Of course it was not his fault that a parents meeting had kept him late at school that evening and when he got home and found no lights on in the house he had looked into the bedroom where Shirley still lay in the bed. He still shuddered when he recalled how still and quiet she had looked under the duvet. Why on earth hadn’t he gone over to the bed and touched her?
Instead deciding it was better to let her sleep he had sighed, closed the bedroom door and slept in the guest room that night.
The doctor later confirmed that she must have died sometime during the morning. “In her sleep I imagine,” he had suggested as if he thought this might help Dennis cope with his loss. “Her heart just gave up the struggle.”
What struggle? It had bothered Dennis ever since that he had no idea what she might have been struggling against. “ Surely I would have known,” he often mused, “… wouldn’t I?”
“You were running,” he managed to gasp at Trish Henry when his breathing stabilised sufficiently for him to speak. She, aware that her classmates were standing nearby watching the confrontation develop went straight into her ‘ leader of the pack’ mode. She rested one hand on her hip, and brought her head up defiantly.
“So what?” she demanded.
He took another deep breath to steady himself. Shirley’s death had been six years ago but had been one of the factors that prompted him to seek early retirement. His lump sum and pension would be reduced but would still provide him with enough to live on. The house was paid for and now he would have the time to write the novel he had always believed he had in him. He was looking forward to retirement. But first he had to get through this last day…. And cope with Trish Henry!
“So it’s against the rules to run, “ he explained. He would try to be as patient and forbearing as the circumstances allowed… but he really could not let the incident pass. Not even today. “ I’ll have to put you on discipline report for this evening.”
She snorted dismissively. “We finish for the summer tonight… and in case you’ve forgotten Mister Hill you’re finishin’ fer good. So what’ll yer do if I don’t turn up?”
Her classmates were beginning to giggle and, emboldened, she decided to pree home her attack. “Send a note ‘ome te mi mum and dad? What d’yer think they’re goin’ ter do wiv it? Neither o’ them can bloody read or write. They’ll probably wipe their arses wiv it!”
Her friends guffawed with laughter and Dennis’s shoulders sagged wearily. He really was too tired to continue with his attempted correction. He pointed towards the papers scattered all over the floor.
“ Help me pick them up,” he muttered.
“ You dropped ‘em, you pick ‘em up”
She turned and started to walk towards the boys lavatory intending to retrieve her lunch box, but when she reached the door she turned back towards him. She seemed to recall something she had read, or heard, somewhere, and a pitying look crept into her eyes.
“ Tell me sir,” she asked in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone, and challenging enough to be still ringing in his ears that evening as he rode home on the bus. “ Were you always this useless and pathetic, or is it summat you ‘ad te be trained for?”
THE END.

Thoughts in Flanders Field

2008-12-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

I wrote this poem after watching the Remembrance Day programmes commemorating the 90th, anniversary of the Armistice in 1918.

A terrible peace filled with
Grey stone slabs
Like serried ranks of nameless dead.
Who are these sentries who guard our peace,
Won at such cost?
We know no names,
But,owing them all,
Fail to pay their price.

The Plank of Wood.

2008-11-21T12:09:00.000-08:00

The bane of every writer is what is called a 'writers block,' the sudden inability to compose anything. One cure suggested is that you write down the first sentence that comes into your head. No critical assesment, no attempt to work out where it might lead. Just bang it down and then keep on going until the block disintegrates. The following piece was an attempt to break a block I was experiencing.

THE PLANK OF WOOD.

“ You can’t bring that plank on here” the bus conductor announced. “It’s too long, and it won’t fit.”
The man standing at the bus stop holding the plank of wood looked aghast. Though not very wide, ( it was only a few inches,) it was a very long plank of wood; though not, at least in his view, too long to fit into the bus. He stepped up into the bus and pointed towards the narrow passageway between the seats on the lower deck.
“It will fit in there,” he suggested, “ And I don’t mind if people stand on it, or walk on it. I just want to get it home.”
The bus conductor was not impressed with this suggestion. A long serving employee of the Corporation Transport Division his public duty, as he saw it, was clear. He was, therefore, adamant. “You’re not bringing that plank onto my bus!”
The man with the plank of wood did not, at first sight, appear to be the type of person who relished public argument or controversy. He was rather small with thin features, horn rimmed spectacles, and the sort of diffident manner one normally associates with ineffective insurance agents, or low ranking civil servants. But something in the bus conductors overbearing manner, and belligerent tone prompted within him a sudden surge of public righteousness, and egalitarian principle.
“It isn’t your bus,” he stated angrily, “ It’s a Corporation bus and as such it belongs to all of us.”
“Nonetheless, you’re not bringing that plank on here.”
In any other circumstances the matter might well have rested there but the conductor then made two mistakes.
A much bigger man than his would be passenger, he drew himself to his full height and by taking a step towards the edge of the platform forced the little man to step backwards into the gutter and into a deep puddle of rainwater. He had only intended to emphasise his authority as a bus conductor but his apparent aggression did nothing to endear him to those passengers who were already seated on the bus.
Almost without exception they formed the instant opinion that this particular conductor was a bully, almost certainly a man with fascist tendencies, and possibly even a member of the National Front. Emotionally they began to line up behind the little man who now stood beside the bus stop staring down at his sodden trouser bottoms, and rain soaked shoes. He, for his part, confirmed them in their sympathies by adopting a tone of appeal.
“ But what can I do?” they hear him ask. “ I can’t walk home from here. I live miles away…. and it’s pouring with rain!”
The conductors second mistake was to, then, indulge in sarcasm. “Cut it in half,” he suggested, and, in so doing, alienated any residual sympathies his passengers may have had for his stand.
Someone muttered ‘ insensitive bastard,’ while the little man shook his head. “ I can’t do that,” he explained rain dripping from his peaked cap. “ It’ll be wasted if I cut it any shorter….I…. I need it this length at home…” He sounded near to tears.
“Oh for heavens sake let him bring it on,” a lady passenger sitting near the door exclaimed. “ None of us mind… and it is an awful day.”
The conductor, who was not a man to take questioning of his authority lightly, then turned his annoyance on her.
“ I’m only doing my job, “ he informed her in a loud voice so that all might hear and digest his reasoning. “ Bringing a plank of wood that long onto a Corporation bus would be against company policy. It would be a health hazard, a very serious health hazard. This bus is for transporting passengers… not their various goods and chattels.”
“Absolute rot,” another passenger exclaimed. “ There’s probably nothing in the Company’s regulations about what passengers can bring onto a bus, or not bring onto it. It’s all down to your discretion… or lack of it! You’ve no right to be using the Company’s regulations to justify your own prejudices!”
The lady sitting near the door had begun to rise from her seat and gather her own numerous parcels and packages together. Erect she was almost as tall, and a good deal stouter than the conductor. “ In that case” she announced in a tone reminiscent of Boedicea ordering her Iceni warriors into battle, “We should all leave this bus immediately since we’ve all got goods and chattels.”
For the first time the conductor displayed uncertainty. He imagined numerous letters of complaint landing on the Transport Managers desk and besmirching his so far exemplary record. He turned uncomfortably towards the bus driver who had, thoughout the preceding exchanges, sat silently in his cab beside the bus platform.
“Better drive off now,” he said and the driver looked at him quizzically.
“Are you sure?”
The conductor nodded. “ I’m sure,” and immediately a chorus of noisy disapproval filled the bus.
“You’re not leaving him there are you? In the pouring rain?”
“Ooooh… that’s awful. He wants reporting.”
“I fought a bloody war to get rid of his sort!”
This last remark came from an elderly pensioner with a military bearing and steel rimmed spectacles who looked as if he could still fight a war if the need arose.
The conductor, now thoroughly dispirited by all the animosity being directed at him was about to suggest that ‘ If anyone doesn’t like the way I’m conducting this bus they can always leave,’ when the driver, also somewhat distracted, engaged the gears and sent the bus lurching away from the kerb straight into the side of a laundry van which was trying to overtake on the outside.
The awful crunching sound as metal ground into metal was followed by an equally awful moment of silence before one of the passengers shouted “ He never even indicated… They‘re as bad as each other!”
“ I think I’ve injured my neck,” an old lady sitting at the rear of the bus announced and was immediately assured by her companion, and everyone else sitting around her that she would certainly have grounds for claiming substantial damages for pain and suffering from the bus company.
Moments later the irate driver of the laundry van appeared on the bus platform.
“What the ‘ell did yer think yer were bloody doin’? ” he roared at the bus driver. “ Yer never even bloody signalled.”
He too was assured by almost everyone on the lower deck that he could count on them as witnesses if he brought a case against the driver for driving a public service vehicle without due care and attention.
“ Reckless endangerment I call it” someone remarked.
“ ‘as ‘e even passed a bloody drivin’ test?” someone else enquired.
The driver for his part sat in his cab his normally ruddy complexion suddenly ashen and his hands locked around the steering wheel with shock. He was in his middle twenties, and had only been married for a few years. He had a baby daughter, and his young wife was now expecting their second child. In fact he had only recently obtained his P.S.V. licence, and had just bought a new house on the strength of his increased status and income. All of these lovely reflections flashed before his young mind before an almost hysterical fury welled within him and he too turned on the conductor.
“This is all your bloody fault!” he snarled.
“I don’t care whose fault it is,” the van driver announced starting to collect the names and addresses of potential witnesses. “ That’s a brand new van you’ve wrecked there. Someones goin’ to ‘ave to pay for its replacement.”
The companion of the old lady who had complained about injuring her neck now approached the conductor with a worried expression on her face.
“Do you think, “ she enquired in a tone which indicated an unwillingness to accept any refusal or procrastination on his part, “ That you might call for an ambulance. My friend has just fainted and she does have a very serious heart condition!”
Surveying his bus load of, by now, thoroughly hostile passengers the conductor suddenly went weak at the knees. He couldn’t help it. With horror he realised that events had taken upon themselves an awful inevitability all of their own. It was like watching a slow motion rehearsal of his own demise. Involuntary tears seeped from his eyes and he began to shake uncontrollably. He felt an almost desperate need to lie down or, at the very least… find a public toilet!
As he began to wriggle uncomfortably, and fiddle frantically with the front of his blue serge trousers, the military type passenger appeared before him ferocious of aspect, bristling with indignation, and with eyes glaring.
“ What sort of disgusting pervert are you?” he demanded. “ You’re not fit to conduct this bus or anything else for that matter.”
Meanwhile the would be passenger with the plank of wood continued to stand quietly on the pavement in the pouring rain. He surveyed the chaotic scene before him through rain soaked spectacles. Then suddenly like a man waking from a terrible dream to find the sun is, after all, still shining, and the world is bathed in a beautiful light… he smiled.
He had no need to say anything. Anyone looking at his face knew instantly what he was thinking,
‘ If only you had let me on the bus….!’

THE END.

Before I begin

2008-11-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be posting onto this blog examples of my literary output for the delectation and delight of all you eager readers, but first I should explain that I've been writing ever since I was a child. In fact I wrote my first full length story, all 360 words of it, when I was 7 years old. I wrote it for my mum and she informed everyone willing to listen that it was the best thing she had ever read. I'm now in my later 60's so there's a hell of a lot of writing I can put up here. ... Don't say you haven't been warned!!!