A LIFE OF LOVE (37)

37. A LIFE OF LOVE

Wallace stood on the edge of a briar patch as the bulldozer moved in. He was holding Maureen by the hand as the earth started shaking when machinery rumbled and the first ruined walls of an old deserted cottage fell into an untidy heap of ancient bricks and the dust of ages.

“Well well,” came a familiar voice from behind him, and he turned round, a broad grin on his face.

“Innocent, by all the Saints,” he said, joyfully, “my goodness, it’s been a long time! How are you keeping these days, old friend?”

“Really well,” came the reply, “married, three kids and a mortgage. What more would a man need?”

“And a successful career, if what I see on the local telly every night is anything to go by,” chortled Wallace.

“I’m more radio than telly,” confessed Innocent, “County Radio, an up and coming local station for the stars! So what are they doing to our fallout shelter? I heard all about it from the news guys. And what about the second dead body in the cellar? That spooked me!”

“It was the last episode of a sad story,” sighed Wallace.

“Tell me more. I’m out of touch, sadly,” urged Innocent.

“Well, Penny’s father did time, you know. He didn’t kill anyone but his intervention actually caused the accident that killed the girl. Yet it was concealing the body that sent him to jail, and not reporting the incident. Freddie Barnard got away with a non-custodial sentence, probably because of his age and the fact that he only had honest lust in his heart! Anyway, Ashton’s wife left him when everything came out and when he was released he went to pieces. With no job, no wife, not even a home, he took to the booze in a big way, and the last anyone saw of him was as if he was a tramp. Then, several years ago now, he went off the radar, until, that is, we found his bones in the cellar where he must have been for five years of more, according to the pathologist. He’d even made a pile of the coal, you remember that in one corner? But he never lit it. Probably couldn’t. There were some charred scraps of paper but the coal was unburnt. The theory was he crawled there for shelter one winter, and went to sleep, never to wake up again. Sad, really, the whole tale. Penny was pretty, you know, really, really pretty, but there was that greedy streak in her…”

“So it was him you found on the same mattress where his daughter died?” asked Innocent. “some kind of justice, I suppose.”

“Anyway, it was no more than a schoolboy crush on my part, with Penny I mean,” explained Wallace, eyeing Maureen. “You know Maureen, don’t you? My infinitely better half!”

“He doesn’t know how right he is,” grinned his wife.

“Stand back, please!” bellowed a voice as the bulldozer moved closer to them. “Stuff can fly quite a distance when old beams and goodness knows what are dislodged,” explained the foreman of the demolition firm, waving them to move.

“OK. I’ve seen enough,” nodded Wallace, “it’s just good to know the old place is gone for good and there will be no more bodies on mattresses in cellars.”

“And our fall-out shelter,” grinned Innocent.

“If they know that it’s there,” suggested Wallace, “they might just knock the building down, cover up the stairs that lead down into that underground, what would you call it, mausoleum? It’s more than a cellar to my mind! Then the ages might pass and our fall-out shelter will grow ever damper until one day the Earth reclaims it and there’s a new hollow in the ground where it was.”

“Come on, fellas,” called Maureen, who had wandered on ahead, “what about fish and chips for lunch seeing as we walk past the best fish and chip shop in the county on our way home? You coming too, Innocent?”

He shook his head. “I would,” he murmured sadly, “but I’m doing the two o’clock weather bulletin and need to check my facts and be certain in my mind what I’m talking about in time.”

There was a crashing sound behind them, and a mushroom cloud of dust rose in the air where the bulk of the old cottage collapsed into a heap that seemed to slither away as they watched.

“I’d say that was our nuclear shelter done and dusted and filled with rubble,” grinned Innocent, “and about time too! I wonder how good it would have been at protecting us from fall-out?”

.“We thought it would, and I guess that’s really all that matters,” sighed Wallace. “Anyway, we’re still safe and sound and unpolluted by the stuff of bombs.”

“The stuff of nightmares you mean,” whispered Maureen, and she shuddered.

“Well, here’s my jalopy,” said Innocent regretfully, arriving at his four-by-four, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll pop round and see you one evening, and I’ll bring the wife. We’ll catch up on old times, because there were some good ones, well worth catching up on.”

“Did I know her?” asked Wallace, “I guess she wasn’t one of our crowd. Probably some well-educated young woman with a University degree and odd vowels and much too posh for us!”

“Not at all,” grinned Innocent, “I’m a traditionalist and married my first love. Do you remember Sarah McGivven?”

“The policeman’s daughter? The copper who had it in for you?” asked Wallace.

“The very same,” grinned Innocent, “and every time I see him he has to swallow his words. He may be a racist pig, but I love his daughter more than I love life itself, so I’m the winner.”

Then Innocent drove slowly off, and Wallace took Maureen by the hand once more. “It’s like a chapter has finally ended,” he said thoughtfully as a distant crash told him the last remnants of the old witch’s cottage were falling to the ground.

“What chapter might that be?” asked his wife, guessing the answer,

“My boyhood. My childhood. The olden days,” he replied, “when we were scared to death that the bomb might wipe us all out. When our fear drove us to an old cellar under a ruined cottage. When a friend was truly a friend. When for the first time in our lives we found a sort of love. Not the grown-up sort with all its problems but an innocent love, two lads together held in friendship by a mutual fear.”

“You had me back then too, Wallace,” she said quietly, “waiting in the wings.”

“And I loved you, but it was different. You were a girl, and that made you … special.”

She smiled at him. “And you were a boy, Wally, and that made you rather silly,” she said, “and I always loved you back then, and I always will.”

“A life of love,” he mused, “that’s what it’s been so far, and always must be: a life of love.”

“Wait until Eloise brings home her first boyfriend before you make too many forecasts,” suggested Maureen, “he might be a nightmare, or worse!”

“Not with you as her mother, sweetheart. She knows. She’s already on the right path to share our life of love. Yes, she’s there alright. I can tell.”

THE END

©Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (36)

36. BLACKBERRY WINE AND OLD BONES

Years can pass as though they were sprayed with fairy dust that makes them vanish in an instant. A child can learn its first few tricks (which will it say first, mama or dada?), then it will crawl, hands and knees, towards its first few upright steps and then run like the wind through the years.

And that was exactly how the years passed.

Eloise did that. Eloise was bright as a shiny button on a uniform jacket, and the years passed as if they were racing to an ending somewhere and somewhen, and all Wallace wanted to do was cry out halt, stop, woah there, but time had its own way and would do no such thing.

So Wallace had to help it.

“When I was a nipper,” he said to Eloise, “a long, long time ago…”

It was 1976 and everything before she was born was a long time ago to Eloise. She would be leaving school soon, or not if she wanted further education and a place at university, which she hummed and hawed about because there was this boy she thought she just might love and then thought she might not even like in a sort of rota of love and hate.

“Here we go again,” grinned Eloise, “back to the good old days!”

“They weren’t all that good,” put in Maureen, “what with the bomb…”

“It never fell,” said Eloise, “you’re always on about it, but it never fell and now, look at the sunshine, like how gorgeous the weather is…”

“There never was such a summer,” agreed Wallace, “they say it’s the hottest since the year dot, and I think we should do something special.”

“Do what, darling?” asked Maureen, still as lovely as ever and despite being a bit older still looking younger than him.

“My mum, Helen that is, used to take us into the country, picking blackberries. They grow wild round here, in the fields along the Swanspottle road,” he said slowly, “we’d pick loads of blackberries and eat some of them instead of putting them in a basket. Innocent came one year and made himself sick!”

The local weather man on the telly. That was what Innocent had become and Wallace almost felt a smidgen of his fame reflected on him over the years when he remembered his friendship with the handsome, dusky boy with African blood in his veins.

“Probably sick of all this hot weather,” suggested Maureen.

“My mum used to make blackberry and apple jam,” recalled Wallace, “several jars of it with circular bits of cloth tied round the top with elastic bands… and it was delicious!”

“Is that what you want to do, dad? Go out and pick dirty old blackberries and make jam?” asked Eloise, screwing up her face.

“No. Not jam, but wine,” said Wallace. “I know how to make blackberry wine. I’ve read it in a book and I really fancy having a go.”

“So you want us to all go out in the boiling heat so that you can get drunk at Christmas?” asked Maureen.

“I wouldn’t mind … we all need interests, and making my own plonk sounds like a money-saving exercise as well as an interest,” explained Wallace. “I’m not trying to say we actually need to save money now that I’m in charge of housing, but it never hurt anyone to have a few more pennies in their pockets.”

And that was that. Wallace got his own way and the three of them went out, walking rather than driving towards Swanspottle, a village tucked round a bend and out of sight until they were almost on it. (There were still only three of them, and try as they might Wallace and Maureen couldn’t produce a sibling for Eloise, and sometimes it seemed they tried so hard they’d wear themselves out. Still, they both agreed, it was fun trying and disappointment was only a kind of postponement of what might yet happen possibly, somewhen.)

They took baskets with them, wicker baskets lined with greaseproof paper, and soon they were happily picking large, juicy blackberries ripened to sweetness by a long, hot summer.

“These should make really tasty country wine,” said Wallace, “they’re full of natural sugar. You can taste it. Delicious.”

After an hour or maybe longer they had filled the baskets and were about to turn round and go back home when they came upon the almost forgotten lane that led to the woods that encircled Swanspottle, and Wallace had a far-away look on his face when he gazed down it.

“I wonder if it’s still there?” he asked himself.

“If what’s still there, dad?” asked Eloise who was beginning to feel that they’d done enough blackberry picking for a lifetime.

“Our fallout shelter,” sighed Wallace, remembering how he and Innocent had been convinced that there would be a nuclear war any day then, and that the only place on the planet they’d be safe was in their underground shelter. “Come on, it’s not so far, come along, I’ll show you.” And he started walking purposefully down what was little more than an animal track,

“Just a minute,” called Maureen, “isn’t that where your old girlfriend was murdered?”

“It was an accident, and I’d fallen out with her ages before,” frowned Wallace, “nobody was done for it though Helen’s dad did time for not reporting it. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now. I’ll bet the place isn’t still there, and if it is the old wreck of a cottage will have fallen in on it.”

They had to follow him. Of course they did! This was all part of his story and they’d heard about his bomb shelter on and off over the years from him when he mentioned his best friend Innocent.

He led the way and to his surprise the ruined cottage was still there, unchanged it seemed, as tumble-down as it had been way back when as boys he and Innocent had declared their own determination to remain safe in the certainty of war.

He led the way past brambles and briars, fighting them determinedly and being scratched in return, towards the door which led into a kitchen which was now more a greenhouse for wild plants than anything remotely to do with human habitation.

He stood by the cellar door, open a crack, but hiding what looked like a staircase to hell.

“It was down here,” he said, “in the darkness of an old cellar. We used our bicycle lights to see.”

“So we’d best not go down to that nasty dark cellar?” suggested Maureen, who had no intention of visiting an ancient murder site.

“It so happens I’ve brought this,” grinned Wallace, and from the sandwich bag they’d brought with them he produced a small torch. “You don’t have to come,” he added, “I know it’s scary. But I’ve just got to take a peep, remind myself of the old days.”

“I’ll come too, dad,” said Eloise, and he’d never been so glad to hear those words as he was then.

“Just follow slowly then,” he whispered, and she shadowed him as he slowly crept down the old brick staircase.

It was just as he remembered it when he shone his torch round the dank place. There was still a dusty pile of coal against one wall, and even the camp bed that Penny had taken down there when she’d hoped to make her fortune lying on her back.

She was gone, of course.

But there was someone lying on that bed, someone dry as old dust, all bones really, bones and a hollow-eyed skull and rags for clothes.

Eloise screamed when she saw it, loud enough to bring the cottage tumbling down, thought Wallace, grateful that it didn’t.

But he was only too happy to push his daughter back up the stairs, away from what looked like very old death lying in a black slumber on a rotting bed.

© Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (35)

35. A GRANDMOTHER’S TALE

Edina Hawkesbury had already occupied a complicated place in Wallace’s life, starting off as an English teacher who first pointed out to him the fact that he rather liked one particular girl to his discovering that she was, in actual fact, the woman who had born him for nine months and then given birth to him before handing him over to her late husband’s brother and his wife for them to bring up.

Few children are actually told who their parents are but grow up, from squalling babyhood to teenage strength and beyond, knowing it. Mum is mum and dad is dad. Until they’re not. And it was all very confusing for Wallace Pratchett when he discovered that his actual parents weren’t who he thought they were.

Eventually he’d accepted the situation, largely because he hadn’t much choice over a matter of provable fact, and here was that birth mother once again in his life. Edina Hawkesbury was holding baby Eloise as if it was her right to coo at her. And, he thought, practical as ever, he supposed it was.

“The hardest thing I ever did, Wallace, was give you up,” she said quietly. “I never cuddled you, never told your I loved you, though I knew in my heart I’d never loved anyone more, I simply, when I was at my weakest and war was raging all around us, handed you over to the woman who should have been my sister-in-law because I knew you’d get a better life with her.”

“It must have been a terrible choice for you to make,” murmured Maureen, taking her week-old daughter back from Edina because she’d started crying.

“I never even heard you cry after you were born,” whispered Edina, “not then, a sleeping new-born, and not ever, because you were taken away and I was left in my own, my milk flowing and no babe to suckle it.” And Wallace could see the tears forming in her eyes and for the first time ever he understood something of what she’d been going through over the years. Even that last year or so with the boy she knew was her son in her English class twice a week. That can’t have been easy.

“I’m so sorry,” he mumbled, then added, “mum.”

“I want to tell you all about it, Wallace,” she said quietly, “about me, and what I did.”

“You don’t have to, mum.” This time the mum wasn’t an afterthought.

“But I feel I need to, so here goes. As soon as the war was over and after I’d stopped praying to be bombed out of existence myself, because I did that, you know. I prayed to be killed so that I could rejoin the sweet man I was due to marry… I had to believe in Heaven, the afterlife, that sort of thing back then because it was my only hope, the only point I could see in being alive when he was dead. Anyway, as soon as the war was over I tried to pull myself together.

“With no contact of any kind with my own little boy I had to focus on doing something big, something worthwhile, of creating a life for myself in which I could have a chance of, not forgetting exactly, but blocking out my memories of what might have been, and so after a lot of thought I went to college. I’d already done quite well at school, and I qualified as a teacher because that would put me into a world where there were children, probably subconsciously because I’d lost the only child I was likely to have of my own. I was Miss Hawkesbury and I planned on staying a Miss and never finding a soul-mate who would change me into a Mrs.”

“Maybe you should have looked for a handsome young man?” Suggested Maureen, “I mean, isn’t the world meant for men and women to be together? I don’t know where I’d be and how I’d cope if I didn’t have Wally.”

“I didn’t want to.” Edina was almost defiant as she said those words, “but don’t get me wrong: I’ve never been one of those women who doesn’t want a man around and seeks comfort with another woman. It wasn’t that at all. No, I’d already lost too much and as I saw it if I found another dose of happiness I would be lining myself up for another spate of losses and heartbreak. I’d lost one man, and I loved him dearly, so dearly that I let him, not just let, I encouraged him, to go so far one night that I ended up pregnant. I can still remember the exact moment, it was so perfect in every sense, and we knew that he would be joining his comrades soon enough. It was his leave, you see, he had a few days’ leave, and we couldn’t control ourselves. But he never rejoined his comrades. He was on his way to the train station when the damned bomb dropped, almost a direct hit, it couldn’t have been more direct if the pilot had tried… and he was gone for ever.”

“It must have been awful,” murmured Maureen.

“The baby continued to grow inside me,” sighed Edina, “you, Wallace, and you were all that was left of my lovely man, his seed, his hopes for a better future, he was an eternal optimist! And common sense, misguided maybe, but times were very different back then, hopes were being dashed on a daily basis, the news was never good, we all expected that sooner or later we would have to learn to speak German so that we could understand and obey our new masters… and even if the impossible happened and we won the bloody war, sorry for using that word but it was bloody, there would be the social consequences of me being a single mother with a child born out of wedlock. So I chose, what was it? An easy way out? And gave you to Helen and Jack.”

“It must have been a terrible time,” whispered Maureen, “I was tiny back then, only just at school myself when my Wally was born, but I can still remember the dreadful sirens, the air raid warnings and the all-clear. And the sound of guns. I remember them, too, spitting lead into the skies.”

“Well, the world seems a better place now,” smiled Edina, needing to lighten the mood now that she’d told the bulk of her story, “there’s talk of Europe uniting into one big trading block, and if that happens, as it seems to be then there might be no more big wars like the two that ruined so many lives. It was the nineteen fifties soon enough, I had become a qualified teacher and I found myself teaching my own son without realising it! I should have asked myself if the nice boy sitting next to the pretty girl was my Wallace, and maybe the thought did try to surface in my mind, but something made me push it out until I bumped into Helen in the park one day.”

“And learned all about me,” sighed Wallace.

“Exactly. Now let me hold your little girl one last time before I go. I never got to hold my son, but I’m blowed if I’m going to miss out when it comes to holding my granddaughter!”

Maureen very carefully passed the week old Eloise Pratchett to his grandmother, and the baby opened her eyes … and was that a smile? It might have been.

Edina was sure that it was.

© Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (34)

34. RUSHING HOME

Poor Wallace and Maureen! Their honeymoon was cut short when she became aware of sudden pains in her stomach early on the morning of the third day and thought her baby may have started clamouring to get out weeks before it should. They had a choice: seek local help or catch the next train home and see her own midwife. She was sure she could manage the journey so that was the option they decided on, possibly rather too hastily.

“I know her,” she confided in Wallace, “and she knows me. If I am going to have the baby it won’t be straight away. I’ve friends that said they were in labour for days, and anyway I don’t think it’s due yet, if I’ve got my dates anything like right.”

Wallace didn’t know anything about dates or the mysterious world of childbirth and chose to keep his ignorance to himself. “We’d best get home as quickly as we can then,” he said, “and I think there’s a train at ten.”

“Hurry up and pack then,” urged Maureen, holding her stomach, and Wallace did the packing in record breaking time. There wasn’t a great deal, and some was already in their one and only suitcase. After all, the year was nineteen sixty one and most people had smaller wardrobes than they might be expected to have have half a century later.

It fell to Wallace to tell Tom Berkely, so he ran to the office and was overjoyed to find it open so early in the day because he felt that leaving without settling up would seem too much like them doing a moonlight flit, and he was too honest to want to be seen in that light.

“She’s afraid the baby might be coming,” he told Tom, “and we’d better go home as soon as we can.”

“Is she sure?” asked the other, “there are facilities here, in Skegness,” he added.

“Well, she’s never been pregnant before and doesn’t exactly know what it’s like, but she’s got these pains…” began Wallace, ”and she wants to see her own midwife.”

“Better safe than sorry then, lad,” agreed Tom, “and the good news is I’ve seen the dragon at that hotel and she was overjoyed to refund your deposit after I mentioned a few things to her. And when I saw how much she was going to keep, and you getting nothing in return, I was shocked! Now you’ve only been here for, let me see, three days, so I’ve got a bit left over for you after I’ve taken my charges out. Here you are, lad, here’s your change, and you get to see to that pretty lady of yours, make sure she’s all right.”

And that was very much that. A taxi took them to the station in Skegness and as luck would have it there was already a fast train in the station that would drop them off in Brumpton. So not much more than two hours later they were making their way the short distance from the Railway Station in Brumpton to home.

Home was still the large council house where Wallace had been brought up after his father had died. He had applied for continued tenancy to the council, explaining that his wife (though she hadn’t exactly been his wife when he’d made the application but the Register Office had been booked) was expecting their first child, and his tenancy had been agreed with the proviso that as he was under the age of twenty-one Maureen would have to sign all the documents and agreements.

When they finally settled in Maureen rushed to the bathroom, one hand over her mouth as though she was going to burst if she took it away.

“I feel sick,” she moaned, and slammed the door behind her before he could get to her in order to help her.

Ten minutes later she announced that she was feeling very much better, having suddenly emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet.

“That’s what it was,” she said, grimly, “I was just feeling sick.”

Wallace was relieved, to say the least, but the down side was he soon found himself developing stomach cramps the like of which he’d not had before.

“Have you eaten anything odd lately?” asked the doctor when they called him, and Wallace, almost without thinking, shook his head.

“There were those cockles,” put in Maureen, “we stopped at a sea-front bar and had some cockles,” she added. “I wondered at the time about the taste, but the vinegar disguised anything odd about it.”

“Oh dear,” the doctor shook his head, “it is possible… but you’ve got a mild dose of food poisoning. I’ll give you some medicine that should sort things out, but remember, when you’re eating sea food make sure that it’s fresh. I’m not saying it was the cockles, but it might have been.”

Then he took a good look at Maureen. “You’re coming on nicely,” he said, smiling, “I always like to see young ladies in your condition. They always look blooming with health.”

“I wasn’t feeling so healthy first thing,” Maureen told him.

“You had some of the seafood too, then?” he asked, and she nodded. “That about confirms it then,” he concluded, and left them as he dashed away to look after other patients with other problems.

By next morning they were both feeling very much better and looked back regretfully on their shortened honeymoon.

“You know, darling,” murmured Maureen before they got up that morning, “I’m rather glad that we’re here, in our own home, and not in that caravan, even though it was lovely.”

“It was very good of Mr Berkely to rescue us,” reminded Wallace.

“And lucky that he was passing by at exactly the right moment, too,” agreed Maureen, and she snuggled up as close to her husband as possible.

“I can feel something moving in your tummy,” exclaimed Wallace suddenly, “have you got wind or something? Are you going to be sick or have diarrhoea?

“No, silly,” laughed Maureen, “you really are a wally, aren’t you!”

“There! I felt it again!”

“It’s the baby kicking,” she laughed, “it does it a lot. If it’s a boy I bet it’ll be a footballer!”

“Is it really? Here, let me feel it.”

He gently put his hand under her nightie and rested it on the bump of her stomach, and right on cue the unborn child flexed its muscles.

“I felt that!” he almost shouted.

“Shh! Not so loud! The neighbours will hear!”

“Let them” We’re going to have a baby and it’s alive and kicking right now! Oh, Maureen, you are such a clever lady! And I can’t wait, now, until it’s born and we know what sex it is and everything! I want it to be a boy, don’t you?”

“Or a girl,” she said to him, “a boy or a girl, whatever it wants to be, as long as it’s all right.

“Yes,” he agreed, “as long as it’s all right. And I hope it is. It’s stopped kicking! It has, it’s stopped! There isn’t anything wrong, is there?”

She laughed at him. “Of course not, silly! Even baby needs to get forty winks some times!”

He smiled, and kissed her fully on the mouth/ “Of course,” he whispered, “but I don’t want forty winks, do you?”

“What are you suggesting?”

He smirked at her. “Just that I don’t half love you,” he purred, “it will be all right, won’t it? It can’t hurt your baby if we…?”

“Wallace Pratchett! You really are a naughty boy! But it’ll be fine as long as you take it easy.”

“I will. Oh, I will!” he replied.

© Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (33)

33. WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE

“I see you’re in difficulties,” said the voice from the darkness of a midnight Skegness street, “maybe I can help?”

Wallace squeezed Miranda’s fingers gently as a figure loomed towards them out of the shadows.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” said the voice as it emerged into the dim light from a street lamp. “My name is Tom, Tom Berkely, and I live locally. I heard that little exchange just now, and I’m not surprised. That lady has very fixed views about a great number of things and she and I have crossed swords many times over them. But I know a thing or two, and she’s nowhere near as perfect as she likes us to think she is! But tell me, will you allow me to advise you and offer a helping hand? You seem to need one.”

It was a man in grey holding a large umbrella firmly over his head and swaying it to cover Maureen. He appeared to be in that bracket Wallace mentally reserved for those approaching middle age. He had never been very good at estimating the age of others, and broad estimates seemed to serve him better than wrong guesses ever could.

“We were expecting to begin our honeymoon,” he said, sorrowfully, “and the lady won’t let us in even though we’ve paid quite a lot of money as a deposit.”

“She’s a stickler for what I call old fashioned values,” muttered Mr Berkely, shaking his head. “She has her beliefs and I’m afraid she’s never been very flexible. It’s a wonder she keeps any customers, but she does. People who share her views, I suppose, and come back year after year. But back to your problem. It’s gone midnight, it’s raining, you’re getting wet and I’ve got a car round the corner. Here’s my proposal. I run a caravan park just outside town and as it’s early in the season there are three or four unoccupied. You can spend the night, and as many nights as you planned to stay at SunnySea Hotel if you like, in one of those and I’ll get your deposit back from the old trout as part payment. It might even turn out to be full payment! We can’t have newly-weds stranded on the streets, can we?”

“Oh, you are so kind sir,” said Maureen with a great deal of enthusiasm in her voice, which was trembling as the rain pattered into puddles all round them.

“Not at all! It might end up that I’m doing myself a good turn if you end up as customers in the future,” laughed Tom Berkely, “now come on, before we all drown!”

He led them to a large motor car parked not a dozen yards away, just round a corner, and they climbed in.

“I’ll take you straight there and we can sort details out tomorrow,” he said, “the lighting and cooking are all done with gas, and there’s a cylinder of the stuff by the front of the van. You’ll need sheets, of course, for the bed… I don’t suppose you have those?”

“I’m sorry…” muttered Wallace, “we didn’t know…”

“Don’t worry! There’s nothing new under the sun, and your problem isn’t anything like new! You’d be surprised how unprepared some people can be! We have spare bedding, laundered and clean, but we charge a rental for it. We prefer people to bring their own…”

It took less than five minutes for the car to pull up by the entrance to a park on which caravans were arranged in tidy rows. Some still had lights glowing in windows, making them look cosy and homely whilst others were in darkness.

Tom indicated one of them. “This one isn’t booked out for at least a fortnight,” he said, “so you are welcome to it! I’ll see the old bat at SunnySea tomorrow and she won’t dared hang on to your deposit. I know stuff about her she’d prefer not to be common knowledge, if you see what I mean, so I can usually convince her to do the right thing. Now just you wait here, and I’ll fetch the key.”

It didn’t take him long to return with a bundle of bedding and a key. He opened the door for them, showed them how to light the gas mantles and lit the gas fire.

“Just let it warm up for a few minutes,” he said, “chase the damp away! There are bunks for four people, but you’re just the two, and this table…” he indicated the table that occupied the front area of the caravan, “lets down, the seats become mattresses when you push them together and you’ve got a double bed, which is just the job for a young married couple like you! There’s a small tank with water in it and a pump that you squeeze with your foot, and you’ll find a kettle for heating the water up. I’ll be in my office in the morning, and there’s a shop next to it where you can buy essentials like bread and milk. The gas won’t run out, but just in case it does you tell me in the office and I change it. That’s about all until tomorrow!”

And he said goodnight, and left them alone in a tidy and clean-smelling caravan.

“I’m sorry, Maureen,” muttered Wallace, “I wanted everything to be right and it’s all gone wrong.”

“This isn’t wrong, silly,” smiled Maureen, “it couldn’t be more right! Who wants a grotty seaside hotel run by a dragon when you can have a nice clean caravan like this with nobody rushing to make a judgement about your morals?”

“Mr Berkely seemed nice,” suggested Wallace.

“He’d have seemed nice even if he’d been a one-eyed ogre with bad breath!” laughed Maureen, “but tell me, Wally, how did you find out about that awful hotel?”

He sank onto the bench seat which ran one side of the table that they had been told would become their bed. “The telephone book,” he said, “I looked at hotels on the East Coast in the telephone book, SunnySea sounded like a really nice name so I rang them, the woman sounded just as nice when she answered and I agreed to pay a deposit for a week’s holiday, and sent off a postal order. I told her it was our honeymoon and I thought everything would be good. Maybe I should have done some research.”

“Well, it’s all water under the bridge now,” grinned Maureen, “and this is a lovely little caravan. Now, you be a man and see if you can turn this table into our first double bed together, and I’ll see what’s what. And talking of water being under the bridge, I need a wash and he mentioned water.”

While Maureen splashed some cold water onto her face Wallace discovered that making the bed up was much easier than it sounded, and within minutes he had done it. Blankets were found in a cupboard, the sheets that Tom Berkely had brought with him were spread out, and the two newly-weds started their second day as a married couple by passing swiftly into a much-needed sleep after Wallace turned out the gas light.

“You called me Wally,” he said, sleepily, when they were in bed and close together, like lovers should be.

“I know,” she said, equally sleepily, “because you really are a Wally, and I love you.”

“Like I love you,” he whispered, “like I really, really love you.”

© Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (32)

32. A HONEYMOON HORROR

If ever there was a good wedding this was it. The wedding, that is: the start to their honeymoon was to be less spectacularly enjoyable.

But to begin with the wedding itself.

True, the Registrar was a surly individual who gave every impression that he’d have liked to be anywhere but where he was and the office in which he conducted what seemed like quite a reduced ceremony was badly in need of brighter décor. A few flowers might have helped, or maybe the odd official smile. But the wedding was, in essence, made by the people who were there, and they, as a one, wished the bride and groom nothing but well. And that universal wish, if it could have been bottled, would have been worth all the tea in China. It calmed roughened nerves, added a lustre to the dimness of the surroundings and even seemed to jollify the corners of the registrar’s mouth.

His voice was well oiled. It had clearly been the one quality that officialdom had deemed essential in their Registrar if he was to conduct himself with due dignity was an oily voice.

Afterwards the small party (the only non-family persons there were Innocent Umbago, smartly dressed in a light coloured suit that contrasted pleasingly with his dark skin, and Amy’s second husband, Jess Templeman, who bordered on being family) gathered for a reception at Amy’s home, where a lavish buffet had been set out and covered with sheets of grease-proof paper in order to keep insects away from tempting morsels of food. Edina Hawkesbury was there, of course, in the correct role of Wallace’s birth mother, and in his eyes she was now most certainly in the category of family. Much to Wallace’s amusement she spent a great deal of the time in conversation with Innocent, who seemed to enjoy exchanging a wide variety of views with her.

Records were played on Amy’s record player and furniture was cleared out of the way so that there could be dancing, and there was dancing. It was the year 1961 and consequently a year or two before the explosion of exciting Liverpool music (headed by the Beatles, of course). But dancing was vigorous anyway, and records by both Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard dominated the evening. Afterwards, it was mooted that such dancing had never been seen before, especially that of Edina Hawkesbury (attempting a jive) with Innocent Umbago cavorting in a unique and very expressive leaping sort of dance of his own invention.

Maureen was a beautiful bride even though her being in what was called the family way was more than evident, no matter how she chose to dress. But her gown was white, had sparkly bits on it and had been her mother’s before the second world war. As for Wallace, he had hired a suit for the occasion (and hang the expense) and looked very much the suave young bridegroom he wanted to be seen to be.

At the end, around ten, it was time for the happy couple to change into more comfortable outfits and to bid farewell to family and friends as they were escorted to the railway station by a car trailing a string of old cans behind it. Innocent (tee-total then as ever) drove them in his own car, an elderly Ford Popular) as far as the near-deserted station, together with one suitcase containing all they would need for a few days’ honeymoon.

It was only the beginning of the nineteen sixties and there were still remnants of post-war prudence in the way Wallace and Maureen spent their money, even on such an important event as a honeymoon. So they were booked into a small hotel in Skegness, a seaside town on the English East Coast where the winds from the North Sea could chill holidaymakers to the bone even in mid summer if conditions were right for bone-chilling.

It was midnight by the time they arrived at their destination and the hotel was locked, and all its windows were in darkness.

“I’m sure this is the right place,” mumbled Wallace as he knocked on a door that rattled but showed no signs of being attended to.

“You did tell them what time we’d get here?” asked Maureen, struggling against an aching back and the weariness brought on by a great deal of excitement and very little recent sleep.

“I telephoned them,” confirmed Wallace, “they know it’s our wedding day and that we’re honeymooning here. I made sure of that.”

“What time did you tell them to expect us?” asked Maureen.

“I don’t think she asked me so maybe I didn’t say,” mumbled Wallace as it dawned on him that must be the essence of their problem, and in order to deafen his brain to self-blame he hammered on the door again, as hard as he dared.

And a dim light illuminated the dusty quarter lights above the door, and that door did eventually open.

There have been caricatures of small-town bed-and-breakfast landladies in many a comic sketch since then, but to the two standing on a door-step by a somewhat flaking hotel door the harridan facing them once the door was opened was quite a novelty.

“What time do you call this?” it barked, a grotesquely hooked nose dribbling onto a protruding chin. The woman (if woman it was, gender was hard to determine but the voice had a hawkish female quality to it) glared at them through bottle-bottom lenses set into tortoise-shell spectacles.

“What do you want at his hour?” she demanded.

“We’re booked in,” Wallace told her, keeping his voice as polite as he could whilst he could detect Maureen suppressing a giggle next to him. He picked up their suitcase as though to push his way in.

“Arrivals between four and six pm.” The voice squawked as if that was the most reasonable thing in the world for newly weds to do.

“We were getting married,” Wallace told her, “and then we were being received by friends at our reception. Now we’re here for our honeymoon. I did explain on the phone.”

The nose in front of him moved from left to right and settled back on him again. The eyes behind the lenses seemed to swell, though even enlarged were pale and lifeless to his inexperienced mind.

“Arrivals between four and six,” the harridan repeated, “and if you insist in trying to knock my door down I’ll call a policeman! And looking at you, even if you’d come at the correct hour you wouldn’t have gained admittance, what with your young lady being in that condition and not married for even a day yet! We have morals here, young man, good Christian morals.”

“I telephoned. I explained that we were honeymooning!” said Wallace, a little more sharply.

“Well, you can explain all you like, young man, you’re not bringing that hussy into my establishment, and deposits are not refundable!”

And the door was slammed into their faces. Just like that. A dim light that had illuminated the quarter-lights above it was extinguished and two weary travellers complete with one suitcase were left standing on the doorstep.

And it started to rain.

“Maybe I can help,” suggested a stranger’s voice from the darkness of a 1961 street.

©Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (31)

31. WEDDING PLANS

The Reverend John Simpson was most insistent.

“There’s no way you can look anything like the innocent virgin that a bride is supposed to be,” he said to Maureen when she and her husband-to-be, Wallace Pratchett, were at a meeting with him to discuss their forthcoming wedding

“What do you mean?” asked Maureen, “it’s obvious that I’m not still without experience of life, so to speak, you’ve only got to look at my figure to see that, but as for the innocent bit, I think I’m pretty innocent of just about everything you might call a sin.”

“A bride should be untouched,” he said suavely, “and without carnal knowledge. That’s what marriage is for, and you are most obviously very much and very obviously with carnal knowledge. I can’t allow it.”

“Can’t allow what?” asked Wallace, knowing what the cleric meant but wanting to hear him say it

“It’s all the rock and roll and promiscuous dancing,” intoned the Reverend, “it makes people go too far, much too far, and look at what it’s done to you. And now you’re asking me to conduct a wedding of convenience in my church, and create a marriage that will no doubt lead to a divorce court in due course, and I won’t do it. Marriage is a holy state in which two loving people are joined together for life, not just because it’s convenient!”

“We are a loving couple,” said Wallace quietly, though the beginnings of a sense of anger was forming somewhere inside his brain when he heard the dismissal of the man who’d replaced his adoptive father as the clergyman in this very church.

“No, my boy, no,” droned the Reverend Simpson, “you are too young to know what you are, but if you were a loving couple you would have waited to consummate your love and not have barged head-first into the nearest bed and done it there and then. For that was sin, and there is no way a sinful relationship can be a loving one, not in the eyes of the Lord and not in my church…”

“Come on, Maureen,” Wallace said, grabbing the already obviously pregnant Maureen by one hand, “this man knows nothing about us, about you and me! There’s got to be a better way for the two of us!”

The cleric shook his head sadly. “I know enough about you, Wallace Pratchett,” he began, “to judge that you came from a sinful union yourself, for wasn’t it true that your own father was mercifully sent to the hereafter by a bomb during the war, and therefore must have lain with your mother prior to his death, your real mother, that is, and not the woman who took you on? It’s in your blood, obviously. The sins of the fathers are passed down the generations, my son, don’t you forget that.”

Wallace was incensed, but rather than engage in a full scale argument that he knew he would never win no matter how long he bellowed at the priest, he pulled Maureen along and out of the vestibule of the church, and into the early summer air.

“All we want is to get married,” groaned Maureen, “and now that! The man’s no idea what it’s like to be a real person! He cloaks himself in a white surplice and passes judgements as if he was the Lord himself!”

“Let’s see what your mum’s got to say,” suggested Wallace.

“She won’t be happy,” Maureen told him, “she never did like churchy things. Even when your mum married a vicar she thought she could do better for herself, or so she’s told me since. The trouble with men who get obsessed like daft old Reverend Simpson is obsessed, they can’t see that there’s more than one way of looking at things. Think of what it would be like when I was working at the baths. I see a column of bubbles rising to the surface and because, say, I’m obsessed by the way kids find it funny breaking wind under water, it never crosses my mind that someone might be drowning!”

“What about the Register Office?” asked Wallace, deliberately changing the subject. “We could get married there, all legal and they say it’s quite nice there, and no church involved. No criticism from men who have no idea what it feels like to be us. Just a registrar, a few friends who know us, your mum, and it’s done in a twinkling!”

“We’d better decide quickly, though,” pointed out Maureen, “or our little lump of pride and joy might put in an appearance before we’re married, and I would be happier if it didn’t.”

“I tell you what: let’s go to the office this very minute and book our wedding for as soon as they can do it. Then we’ll tell everyone,” decided Wallace, and Maureen said, with the broadest of smiles on her face, “if you still want to marry me, Wallace.”

“Of course I do!” Wallace looked hurt as though the very idea of her thinking he might have changed his mind was pernicious to him. “You know how I feel about you, darling,” he continued as they walked along, arm in arm, close together like lovers ought to be, “I will always love you like this,” he said, “you’ve got to believe me.”

“But I’m so much older than you,” she smirked, “so how will you be when I’m an old woman with warts and a gammy leg with elastic wrapped around it?”

“I’ll be an old man with varicose veins and a stoop,” he told her, “and if an old man like that can’t love an old woman with warts I don’t know what’s becoming of the world!”

“Are we going to have a reception afterwards?” she asked suddenly, “a party with things on sticks and jelly? And a cake, a dirty great big wedding cake with icing all over it and little icing models of the bride and groom on top?”

“Of course we will! And music and dancing!”

“A band? What about getting Cliff Richard and the Shadows?”

“Or Tommy Steele? But I’ve a feeling we would never be able to afford big names like that!”

“But we would if they were on records and we played them on my Dansette,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s really quite loud, you know. We could play records, proper dance records too, if we know someone who’s got some…”

“My Mum number Two has,” said Wallace, “I remember her saying, once in an English lesson when I was still at school, that she had quite a decent collection of dance records! And she’ll come to our wedding, won’t she?”

“She better had,” grinned Maureen, “if only to give you a hundred lines for needing a shave!”

“I’m going to grow a beard,” he said, mischievously.

“That might be quite interesting. I’ve never kissed a man with a beard.”

“And you plan to kiss me even after we’re married?”

“Just you wait and see! I’ll gobble you all up, beard and face and all!”

“Urgh!” he smiled, “and I’m trying to think what part of your quivering flesh I might want to gobble up first.”

“I think I can guess,” she said, “but look: we’re nearly at the Register office. Let’s pray that everything works out all right.”

“I’m not praying to anyone after that rotten Reverend,” he replied, and he squeezed her fingers gently, “come on!”

© Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (30)

30. IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO

Because of her relative youth and the odd circumstances of her death, there was a post mortem examination of Helen’s body, carried out by a surgeon who specialised in determining cause and effect in cadavers. Usually it had to do with finding out what was involved, drink or drugs being among the possibilities. But this one was different.

His report, when it was delivered to the police, showed there were no suspicious circumstances in the death of the poor woman, though he did draw their attention to a particular peculiarity which he elaborated in his written report.

There was little doubt that her death was by suicide and that she had thought it would be better for her to die than suffer imagined prejudice in the future. Maybe her opinion had been influenced by the opinions of Wallace’s birth mother almost twenty years earlier, but she had a deep psychological fear of being an unmarried mother.

But not everything is what it seems to be.

“It’s the first time I’ve experienced this,” he told the officers when he delivered his report, “and I hope it’s the last,” he added, “read my notes carefully. They might be educational.”

That ought to have been all that the mourners at Helen’s house had to put up with, but there was more: a great deal more in the form of the moralising ego she had called a boyfriend, for it was he more than anyone who had driven her to fear the future. He would obviously play no part in the family he had helped to create. She would be alone, painfully and very alone, with Wallace moving away to start a life of his own with Maureen and their baby.

But that same moralising ego had one more card to play.

Richie Donne called round to the sombre house where Helen was in her coffin, waiting to be laid to rest.

Nobody could begin to understand why Helen had both spent a moment of her life with the man, and even slept with him on more than one occasion. But she had, and it had been her undoing because he reflected the very worst elements of a pseudo-moral attitude to the misfortunes of others but not, apparently, relating them to to his own appetites.

“She brought it on herself,” was his opening comment as he pushed past Wallace into the house, a sneer on his face. Wallace thought there and then it might be best to grab him by his collar and yank him out of the house before he said anything else that might be hurtful because Amy and Maureen were there and the air was heavy with their emotional sadness.

“What do you mean?” asked Amy, beginning to bristle.

“The way she lived, the things she did. With men.” There was spite in his last two words.

“What do you mean, with men?” demanded Amy, “dear Helen’s life was like an open book and easy to ready, and the only mistake she made was finding time to spend with a man like you, of all the wretched creatures on this Earth!”

“But pregnant!” he spat, “it goes against everything I believe in! A woman should be chaste outside of marriage, and she obviously wasn’t!”

“Before I grab you by your shirt tails there are two things you should know,” hissed Wallace, fury replacing the sorrow that had lain heavy on his heart since Helen’s suicide.

“I know more than two things,” scoffed Richie meanly, “Anyway, I’ve come to see if she left me anything. You know, in her will. She ought to have done, the money I spent on her, and I can’t forget that she killed my child when she killed herself, and that’s downright criminal!”

That was enough for Wallace, and he had grown to be a strong enough man to find the objectionable Mr Donne any problem.

“Then before I break your neck I’ll tell you,” he hissed, “she wasn’t actually pregnant you’ll no doubt be happy to learn, so there’s no case of anyone’s unborn child in any way hurt by anything she did, and secondly, I never managed to work out how come the first man she spends some time with after the death of her husband all those years ago has to be a creature like you, who cares for nobody but himself. Now get out before you get damaged!”

“What do you mean, she wasn’t pregnant?” demanded the offensive Donne, not moving towards the door, “I saw her belly and I know a pregnant stomach when I see one! It’s that what made her into a whore in my book, and a whore she’ll stay, forever in Purgatory, begging for holy forgiveness but never receiving it!”

It was Amy’s turn to defend her sister, and she fought against an overwhelming desire to hiss and scratch at the man she was addressing.

“There was a post mortem examination that showed that she had something called a pseudocyesis,” she said, beginning to sob again at the memory of what the pathologist had reported, “and it was most likely your fault,” she added, sounding stouter than she felt.

“Pseudo-whatsit? What you doing, trying to whitewash her before she’s in the ground with fancy words?” sneered Donne, “I saw her belly and I know what I saw. You must think I was born yesterday.”

“Then you’re a more stupid man that I thought you were,” grated Wallace, taking over from Amy who was clearly too upset to argue any more with a boor like Richie Donne. “Pseudocyesis is what doctors call a phantom pregnancy, and that’s what she had. No baby in there, but her body mimicked what it would be like if there was one. And so she believed that she was expecting. Apparently a phantom pregnancy can be caused by the psychological fear of being pregnant, maybe a deep and abiding fear that the creature who did it to her might father something as repellent as himself!”

“That doesn’t stop her from being a whore…” said the other defensively, “being pregnant out of wedlock…”

“And who would have put her in that condition if it had been real?” asked Amy, “a woman can’t impregnate herself, you know. There’s an old saying that it takes two to tango, don’t you know? But enough of this talk. You know the facts now, so go, and don’t darken this doorway again or I’ll call the police!”

“And her will?” asked Donne, “am I remembered?”

Wallace didn’t reply. He couldn’t. He was too busy man-handling Richie Donne and finally pushing him through the door with enough violence for him to fall flat on his face.

“Well, let’s hope that that is that,” he said grimly.

Maureen, who had been quiet during the row with Richie Donne, spoke up.

“Is what he said about unmarried mothers true?” she asked, holding her own stomach, which was beginning to swell.

“Not these days,” her mother assured her, “and anyway, you won’t be an unmarried mother, will she Wallace?”

Wallace nodded his head violently. “No way,” he said, “You, my lovely, will be married to me!”

©Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (29)

29. THE SCENT OF DEATH

Most mornings began in exactly the same way, with Helen getting up first and bustling in the kitchen, preparing breakfast for two. But not this particular day, and Wallace was puzzled. He liked things to follow a familiar pattern, and today wasn’t.

Then the letter said it all.

He knew the handwriting, it was the tidy and very feminine script that he’d known all his life and it told him everything he needed to know. Mother had written it and left it for him to find, on the bed next to where she lay.

My darling boy, it read, and she still called him a boy even though he was approaching the end of his teens and considered himself to be a man, I’ve decided to end it all. It’s my choice and nobody has influenced me. As you are fully aware I am pregnant with a horrible man’s child growing inside me, and at my age I’ll become an unmarried mother who, to all intents and purposes, will be looked on as a dreadful whore by just about everyone, and you know that I’m not like that at all. But you also know how cruel people can be. It is, after all, why Edina gave you up to me all those years ago. The cruelty of bigots has really generated the strange pattern of your life..

But it’s not totally fear of rejection but the pain I have suffered of late. I never knew that having a baby could involve so much discomfort! The pains have driven me to distraction and I would have sought the help of Dr. Niven but for my own fear of the look in his eyes when he sees my condition. Because he, too, will see a whore when he looks at me.

But I see that’s what I’ve become, courtesy of a man who in his usually calm and quiet way is as despicable as he wants the world to think I am. I’m sorry, Wallace, I truly am, but you are in the fortunate position of having two mothers, not by any choice of your own but because that’s the way things turned out, and I know that the woman who carried you in her womb for nine months and who offered you to me for your own good will be there for you if you ever need support or guidance. Say goodbye to Maureen and my sister Amy for me and know that I wish her well. It won’t be long before you’re a father yourself and will feel the great weight of responsibility that joy brings with it.

That is all. Remember that I love you, always have, for you have been an exceptional son. I am going in a few moments to join my late and very much loved husband where I will finally find the understanding, I hope, that I need. I’m sorry that I’ll miss your wedding, but I would only have cast a black shadow on it. It’s better this way.

And that was it. That and the still white form of the woman lying on her bed, posed as if there had been a party of angels and she was the last preparing to go back to Heaven.

Except for the faint aroma in the room, of course, the tiniest scent of death.

Wallace couldn’t believe it. The woman who had been as much of a mother as any woman could without actually giving birth to him was motionless on her bed and clearly very dead.

“Oh, you silly woman,” he mumbled, and wept.

He’d never been the sort of boy to cry if he hurt himself or was made distraught by any of the few misfortunes life had thrown at him, but he wept now. His mind, like a streak of lightning, raced through moments of the woman she had been, the things she had done, the words she had spoken, in happy times and sad ones. The comfort she had been to others when dark shadows had touched their lives.

And here she was, white as the winter world outside, and dead.

Eventually, in a state of numbness he went to their neighbour’s house and asked to use the phone (though getting a telephone installed was on his mother’s list of things to do as soon as, well, as soon as it could be afforded). He didn’t explain anything because his face and the dried tears on his cheeks told a story that nobody wanted to hear, and he dialled the emergency number.

He rang for an ambulance.

“Are you sure she’s dead?” asked the operator’s voice.

He was and he wasn’t. He’d touched her and she was cold like ice, but the faint smile on her face was seraphic and almost alive. But the empty bottle of prescription tablets that she was still holding in one frozen hand had been enough to convince him.

“She’s dead,” was his response.

“The police will be informed,” said the voice, “it’s the law, I’m afraid.”

“Okay.”

He hung the phone on its cradle and made to go back home.

“Is there anything we can do?” asked the neighbour, Mrs Wilson, a kindly lady with too many children of her own not to be harassed for most of the time even though her husband did more than most men to ease her load. She certainly wouldn’t have time to be anything but sympathetic, thought Wallace.

“Can I make another call?” he asked before he reached the door, “I’ll pay, of course,” he added, digging in his pockets for some change.

“Don’t be silly,” smiled Mrs Wilson, “go on, ring who you like.”

So he telephoned Maureen at the baths where she worked, though she wouldn’t be there for much longer, not with the baby due in March.

“Mum’s dead,” he said, his voice breaking, “I found her when she wouldn’t come down for breakfast. She must have done it last night…”

“Done what?” asked an alarmed Maureen, because Helen had been an aunt she had always been fond of.

“Taken too many pills,” replied Wallace, and he sobbed again, “I’ll see you later, shall I?”

“But Wallace…?”

“I know,” he said, he who, for the moment, didn’t know anything, “I’ll be at home,” he added.

Helen was taken away soon after he made that phone call, and he was left in the house on his own. A policeman came, a sergeant with three savage stripes and a ruddy face. He nodded a few times, took a few notes, nodded again when he mentioned the empty bottle, then said “you didn’t help her did you, sonny?”

“Help her?” he almost shouted, “I’d have moved Heaven and Earth to stop her if I’d known!”

“It’s all right, sonny, just a question I have to ask, you know the way things are, being methodical, getting everything down in its right order so that the bosses back at the station don’t have to come back to see you when you don’t want them anywhere near you and be asked even more questions on a day when all you want is answers.”

And he was gone leaving Wallace alone again. But not for long. Maureen and Amy came up to the house in a taxi, two women who never took taxis anywhere because of the cost.

“You poor dear,” cried the two together.

And Wallace wept again.

© Peter Rogerson, 2019

A LIFE OF LOVE (28)

28. THE FRUITS OF LOVE

“Wallace,” said Maureen quietly, “I’ve got something to tell you, something you ought to know…”

They were at the swimming baths. Wallace had almost conquered a life-long fear of drowning and managed to swim a width and a bit, had dried off and dressed in jeans and a sweater, it being late autumn and the cold of winter already putting in an appearance.

He looked at her, nodded and guessed what she was about to tell him. Back in the spring he and she had ventured into the carnal world of adult love, and since then it had happened several times as, to him, the two of them seemed to grow closer, their friendship becoming an overpowering thing that amounted to an obsession.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, “and I wish I wasn’t.”

“I thought you were going to say that,” he replied seriously, “and although it might seem a bad thing, it isn’t really.”

“My step-dad will throw me out. I know he will,” she shivered, “he’s that kind of man, very sure of his own righteousness.”

“That’s a bit old-fashioned,” suggested Wallace.

“You’ve met him, darling. You know what kind of man he is. He has beliefs that are so inflexible it’s a wonder he can make sense of life. Remember the summer, when it was so hot the pavements were melting? When most men thought a loose shirt was too much to wear? Well, when we went to the seaside he wore his suit, jacket and tie and all, and if he’d had a waistcoat he’d have worn that as well. And he did that because he thought it quite improper for a man to appear in public where there are women present if he’s not properly dressed. Well, a man with that kind of attitude isn’t going to take lightly to an unmarried pregnant step-daughter!”

“I see,” he murmured quietly, “then there’s only one solution that I can see: we’ll have to get married!”

“Can we?” Her eyes were wide open as the implication of his words sunk in. For all his life, since that very first day when Helen had held him, she had told herself that she loved him, as a babe in arms, as a toddler, as a schoolboy and more recently as someone she had been separated from too often by work and the passing of too many weeks away from him. True, she’d had boyfriends in that period, only one serious one, but they’d all petered out because not one of them had got anywhere near her feelings for Wallace.

“Of course we can. I’ve always thought we would, one day,” he told her.

“But can we?” she asked, “aren’t we cousins?”

“Cousins can marry, I think,” replied Wallace, frowning, “come on, let’s go home, to my home that is, and I’ll explain how we’re not even cousins so it doesn’t enter into the equation anyway. You do remember that my mum, Helen, might be your mum’s sister, but she’s not my real mum, don’t you?”

“I’ll never forget it!” said Maureen, “it came as a shock to me though I should have wondered on your very first day of being alive why the mum holding the baby wasn’t the woman lying in bed! But I was only five back then.”

“If the lady I call mum number one was my real mother, then we’d be cousins because she’s your mum’s sister, but she isn’t, and my real dad was the brother of my adoptive dad, so that doesn’t enter into it at all. So we’re not related at all, which makes what I’m going to do with you later on perfectly all right from the relations point of view, though there are quite a lot of people who believe it should never be done by normal unmarried couples. But we’re not normal at all, are we?”

“Of course we’re not,” laughed Maureen, “but what about me being pregnant? We did it together, Wallace, you and me, when nobody was looking and so far as I’m concerned whenever we could! I’ve never even been tempted to do it with anyone else. And as you took me I knew there was a chance…”

“So did I,” Wallace told her, “remember that time you told me the facts of life? How ignorant I was but how I picked it up in no time at all? I’ve known what happens if you do the things that we’ve done as often as we can, and, you know, darling, I’ve never cared. You’ll be all right, I’ll see to that, we’ll find somewhere to call home and you’ll have our baby there. Nothing will go wrong, nothing at all, and the future, if the bomb doesn’t fall on us, will be an exciting book filled with love and hopes and dreams… I love you, Maureen.”

“And we’re going to get married? Really married, like loving people do?”

“Yes we are, and not just because you’re having my … I mean our … baby but because when a man feels like I do about a woman, and that woman feels the same about him, then it’s the only right thing to do.”

“And we’ll find a home?”

“Yes we will, and somewhere better than the witch’s cottage in Swanspottle Woods!”

“Where people get accidentally murdered? I’d hope it would be a lot better than that!”

When they arrived at the home Wallace had lived in since his adoptive father had died and they’d had to vacate the vicarage, it was to discover that the expected peace and calm and harmony was nothing of the sort.

Helen had a friend, a boyfriend called Richie, who had always seemed to be a quiet and inoffensive man, was cursing and swearing and using the kind of language best suited to the gutter, and Helen was in tears, real tears.

“Call her mother!” Richie stormed at Wallace when he saw him, “she’s not fit to be anyone’s mother, the whore, the slag, the tart! You, kid, you know what your fancy mother’s gone and done, eh? Ask her, then, just you ask her, and she’ll tell you! She’s going to have a baby, that’s what she’s going to do, and she told me she couldn’t! “

“I didn’t know,” wept Helen, “I thought, I believed…”

“And you know what belief does!” raged Richie.

“I was sure I’d reached the change,” sobbed Helen, “My curse dried up, it never came, and I felt sick and uncomfortable. I was sure it was safe to do … you know what … and that’s what I told to this man here because I believed he loved me, and he took advantage of me… but if he thought anything of me at all he wouldn’t call me the names he has, would he?”

“No, mum, he wouldn’t,” said Wallace firmly, and to everyone’s astonishment he grabbed hold of the still cursing Richie and marched him out of the house.

“And don’t come back,” he hissed, “unless it is to beg a good woman’s forgiveness on your knees!”

When he returned into the house it was to find Maureen with her arms round Helen, comforting her.

“Well,” said Wallace, trying to sound light, “that’s sorted him out, and I hope for good. So, mum, you’re going to give me a brother or sister, are you?”

Helen nodded. “I thought we’d be all right, Wallace,” she sobbed, “I didn’t know it could happen like that…”

“I wonder who’ll have their baby first, mum?” he asked, “will it you, or will it be Maureen and me?”

She looked at him. Her eyes, still moist from tears, suddenly opened wide.

“You mean?” she asked, “you really mean … you’re not having me on?”

“Would we be so cruel, auntie Helen?” asked Maureen. “No, it’s the truth, I’m pregnant.”

© Peter Rogerson, 2019