A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

9. THREE FRAGRANT TRIBUTES

Ursula may not have been quite sure that it was her sixteenth birthday before her mother, standing by the small front room window of their Swanspottle cottage, exclaimed:

“What on Earth’s a car like that doing down our little road?”

And Ursula looked out of that same window and sighed.

The car belonged to the Squire from Snooty Manor who had recently returned to be with his sophisticated and disgruntled lady wife, Patience Snootnose. Any hope of him sorting out his domestic problems was made a tad more difficult when Lady Patience discovered that he had decided to employ a lady chauffeur, one Angela Tightbottom who was just about all the things that a middle-aged squire might want in a chauffeur.

And here she was, majestically drawing the Squire’s limousine to a standstill not ten feet from the Spandex window, and there was Squire Snootnose sitting next to her. Yes, on the front seat next to her and not on the rear seat where he properly belonged, him being a squire and she being his underling.

“It’s the Squire,” sighed Ursula.

She’d had a few lucky escapes from the squire since the time she’d met him in the rain whilst trying to disentangle herself from Lady Patience’s amorous chauffeur. She’d learned to keep a wary eye open for him and his inquisitive hands.

“What’s he carrying some flowers for, then?” asked Mrs Spandex of her daughter, who hadn’t the slightest clue why either.

And then,

“Why’s he knocking on our door, then?” demanded Mrs Spandex, though she was perfectly sure that Ursula didn’t know the answer to that question either.

“You’d better open it, mum,” said Ursula, knowing what her mother’s response would be.

“It’s your birthday, so you go,” urged Mrs Spandex. “What will your father say of this when he comes home caked in mud? He’ll be right thrilled that we’ve got gentlemen callers, and when I say gentlemen I mean gentlemen!”

“There’s only one, and he’s no gentleman,” sighed Ursula, and she opened the front door which, as was common in time of yore, opened directly onto the front room where Mrs Spandex stood still with her eyes glued to the window.

“Hello, young lady,” smiled the Squire, and Ursula couldn’t help wondering why he gave the impression of being nervous to the point of almost shaking when he was standing on so lowly a doorstep.

“Sir,” replied Ursula, and she attempted a curtsy, which was something she was never any good at, largely because she thought it absurd that a man like this should be worthy of her ever bending her knees.

She knew too much about the Squire to hold him in anything but mild contempt.

The squire looked back at his limousine. He could see, quite plainly, that his chauffeur was doing her best not to scowl at him, but not succeeding.

“I like to honour our villagers when they have a special day,” he said, almost booming.

I’ve not heard of him doing that sort of thing before, thought Ursula, but “yes, sir,” she said with enough obsequious deference to make her feel like vomiting.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” he continued, “after all, where would any of us be if it weren’t for shop girls…”

He said that as if I, working in a shop, was a mile beneath him… thought Ursula, but, “we’d probably starve,” was what she said, adding “sir” as if it pained her to pronounce the monosyllable.

“So I bought you these flowers,” he said, holding the bunch towards her, “as my way of wishing you a happy birthday, my dear…”

Ursula started wondering how on Earth she should reply to that tribute when a loud squawk from her mother made them both jump.

“Why, there’s another!” she shrieked.

Because there was.

Lady Patience Snootnose’s limousine was pulling up just behind Lord Snootnose’s, and when it had stopped its chauffeur leapt out, removed his cap, produced a much larger bunch of flowers than that proffered by the Squire, and covered the few feet to where the Squire stood in three nimble strides.

“Morning, sir,” he said to Squire Snootnose, “nice day for it…” and then he smiled broadly at Ursula and thrust his huge bunch of flowers into her hands.

“I thought it might be the right thing to do, seeing as it’s your sixteenth,” he said, and winked.

Ursula had no idea what that wink meant. She couldn’t remember ever having been winked at before, but it did cross her mind that there might be something adult about it, something that was meant as an acknowledgement of her new age.

And Mrs Spandex removed any awkwardness from the situation by squawking again.

“Heaven help us, it’s a charming man on horseback, with flowers…” she screeched.

Because it was.

Like a dashing hero from one of those Hollywood films that were all the rage, Charles Snootnose jumped off his grey horse and pulled the bunch of flowers that Ursula’s mother had noticed from where they stuck out of a saddle bag.

“What will your father say…” dithered Mrs Spandex, “Oh father, what has the world come to, with limousines and horses at our door?”

“Happy birthday, Ursula,” said a nervous Charles, removing his riding hat in tribute to the confused girl.

“Who’s Ursula?” asked the Squire, feeling quite put out that he wasn’t the only gentleman bearing flowers, not that he looked on his wife’s chauffeur as any kind of gentleman, but she swore she wouldn’t get rid of the young man whilst the Squire had Angela Tightbottom driving him around the county. And the Squire rather thought he might be in love with Angela, though it had crossed his mind that a reserve filly might be no bad idea, and the shop girl’s chest had attracted his attention more than once recently.

“I’m Ursula,” she told him, very nearly scornfully, “do you often give flowers to girls before you learn their names?”

Which would have put many a man in his place, but not the likes of the Squire.

“I don’t bother with names,” he said, “not unless it’s someone important.”

“You’re important, and I know your name,” put in Tony Nonesuch to Ursula, who may have been perky and full of life but was certainly out of his depth when it came to competing with the aristocracy for the attention of a pretty girl.

Then Mrs Spandex gave another squawk.“Why, it’s her Ladyship!” she screeched.

And it was. Striding along with a hat made of half a summer garden perched on her head and striking the low brick wall bordering the small gardens of the houses on the street with a silver-handled walking cane she strode like majesty itself.

Then Patience Snootnose tapped her chauffeur on the bottom with her walking cane’s business end.

“I need the car!” she snapped, “come along before I fire you!”

“Yes dear,” mumbled the Squire, who’d got completely the wrong end of the stick, and he slung his bunch of flowers (which Ursula hadn’t yet taken) at the girl, muttered “happy birthday, young lady,” and turned to face his wife.

“You!” hissed Lady Patience at Tony Nonesuch, for it was he she wanted, “I want the car, and I want its driver and I want them both right now! We’re off to London to see the King!”

And within mere moments the two limousines pulled away, leaving just Charles and his horse and three bunches of flowers by the Spandex front door.

“Ursula, I think I love you,” he said, “what about being etched?”

© Peter Rogerson 18.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

8. THREE ROMEOS

Ursula knew two things: firstly that she’d done nothing to cause any offence to anyone and secondly that she was not in the same class as the Snootnoses and therefore stood a good chance of being blamed for anything and everything that displeased them.

She stared at the older man, trying to work out on Earth might be going on and really grateful that the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started.

And for some reason she couldn’t imagine the Squire had returned to Swanspottle where he still fuming wife had settled in as queen of her castle, and somehow his limousine was on the same cul-de-sac as the one Tony Nonesuch had driven into, with, as far as she was concerned, evil intent. If the Squire had found his way by error to where he was then she was sure he’d find some way of blaming her. It was the way the ruling class had always lived.

“You girl!” barked the Squire a second time, “what’s going on here? Why are you parked in my way?”

He doesn’t realise this is the car used by his wife, thought Ursula, jumping logically to that conclusion. If he had, she reasoned, his attitude would be far more conciliatory and he’d not be in the mood to start gossip amongst his servants.

Tony Nonesuch had been equally quick when it came to thinking the situation out. He knew that for the moment at least he had the upper hand if something devious was going on. He leapt from his driving seat and smiled obsequiously at the Squire, who was still glowering at them.

“Sorry sir,” he said, “but I took a wrong turning and I was asking this young lady to guide me back…”

So you can lie as well as grope, thought Ursula. And quickly, as if you were used to it…

“Aren’t you the chauffeur of my wife?” asked the Squire.

“Yes sir,” replied a suddenly humble and very servile chauffeur who clearly knew his place in the scheme of things. Gone was the bravado … and by then he’d just about rebuttoned his trousers

“Jolly good,” murmured the Squire, frowning because there was something that was making him feel uncomfortable.

Then Ursula noticed that something. It was something that in that day was most unusual, and she found herself almost giggling when the implication his home.

The old devil, she thought, now I’ve seen everything…

“If you’ll get your car to reverse out, then I’ll help guide this poor young man out of his predicament,” she said stoutly, and added “sir,”

“I say, you won’t say anything you two, will you?” almost gabbled the middle-aged Squire. “My wife can be very hasty when it comes to jumping to conclusions, and the only reason I was sitting in the back seat is that my chauffeur happens to be a young lady, and it is so easy for a wife to think that something might be going on when nothing is. I mean, it wouldn’t, would it? That’s right, isn’t it Angela – er, Miss Tightbottom?”

A head appeared leaning out of the window of the Squire’s car, and it was all lipstick, blusher, eye-liner and mascara topped by a bouffant hair style that was all the fashion amongst the young set in London that year.

Now that’s quite something, thought Ursula.

“Quite right, sir,” the bouffant head replied in a voice that was half way between being a gasp and a sigh and had more to do with the latest Hollywood pronunciation of the English language than it did with even the more elite of London ladies.

“My chauffeur,” muttered the Squire, though the young Angela looked less like a chauffeur and more like a dreamy imitation of a screen goddess. She seemed to be wearing some kind of uniform, but there was no way a chauffeur’s hat would ever sit comfortably on that frizzy head

“I drive,” she said with a tinkling little laugh, “Little girl, big car,” she added almost childishly, and that bouffant hair bobbed as if she’d just cracked the mightiest joke since Adam asked Eve what the two bumps on her chest were, and why she didn’t have a willy.

“Ladies are taking to the wheel these days,” explained the Squire airily, “and I’m all for it. Yes, I think it should be encouraged. Do you drive, my dear?” she asked Ursula, who was so stuck for words at the sudden direction the conversation was taking that she merely shook her head, dumbly.

“You should,” said the older man, “if you like I’ll show you how. There are pedlas for the feet, and a big wheel to turn. You’d look good turning a big wheel, my dear. It’s quite easy.”

If it’s that easy why do you need a chauffeur, she asked herself in the silence of her head, but said nothing.

“Now then Porky, don’t let’s forget little me,” squeaked Angela.

Porky…? What a name for the most important man round here, thought Ursula, confused, who would ever dream of calling the Squire Porky?

“Now Sweetie…” almost remonstrated the Squire, clearly blushing and probably annoyed, though any annoyance would be softened, thought Ursula, by thoughts of what he and Sweetie sometimes got up to.

But Sweetie?

And Sweetie giggled the slightly harsh tinkling laugh of the woman on the take, and the bouffant disappeared back into the car.

The squire took the few steps that separated him from Ursula and smiled artificially in as warm a way his deceit could muster.

“There’s no need to say anything,” he murmured, and did the impossible which would surely have an opposite to his desired effect.

“Let me,” he said quietly yet deliberately, and without so much as explaining or asking or even suggesting that he might do it, he reached one hand to her and very gently and certainly not accidentally touched one of her breasts as if to dislodge a feather or a speck of dust.

“There, that’s better,” he breathed and without apparently giving anything a moment’s thought he returned to his own vehicle. Ursula heard him order his dolled-up chauffeur to reverse and her tinkling reply which involved the word Porky, which she did with practised ease. The larger of the two limousines was soon back on the road and moving sedately off.

“At least she can drive,” muttered Tony Nonesuch from his seat behind the wheel of lady Snootnose’s car, “better watch out or she’ll be after my job. Angela Sweetie! It makes you sick!”

“Oh! So his lady wife can have a male chauffeur and he can’t have a female one?” demanded Ursula, “I’ve never heard so much chauvinistic talk in my life!”

“Chauvin-what?” asked a confused Tony Nonesuch.

“You heard!” snapped Ursula, “I’m fed up! You tried to grope me and so did the Squire! And if I’m going to be groped I’ll choose the groper if I may! My bosom’s my own!”

And at that she stormed off, down the lane to where it narrowed to the point where no car could go, and for a few moments she felt safe.

But only a few moments.

“Well then, who’ve we got here again? A pretty young lady wanting to undress for handsome Charles and have an etching made of her tits?” said a familiar voice.

“Good Heavens!” she snapped and without giving it a moment’s thought she ran like the wind out onto the field where her father had returned, now that the rain had stopped, to fiddle with the fencing.

“That’s my gal that’s my gal!” chortled Charles Snootnose as he swiftly packed his easel away.

© Peter Rogerson 16.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

7. THE LUSTING CHAUFFEUR

“Why are we stopping here?” asked Ursula, somewhat tentatively.

The chauffeur Tony Nonesuch had slowly driven down a shaded lane that was almost protected from the squalling rain by a dense canopy of chestnut leaves. Ahead it petered out to little more than an animal track and Ursula was aware that it was unlikely that they would be overlooked by anyone in so hidden a place.

“I thought we might have a little chat,” he said quietly. “About Charley-boy perhaps? The wretch and his etching?”

“I don’t know him,” replied Ursula, “only to recognise, I mean,” she added, “like when he comes into the village shop where I work to buy tins of beans.”

“So you’re a shop wench, eh?” almost leered Tony Nonesuch.

“I work there, yes,” replied Ursula with a great deal of dignity. “Why do you want to talk about the Squire’s son?”

“I detest the nincompoop,” said Tony flatly, clearly assuming, or trying to assume, the sort of accent that might provide a kind of equality with the squire’s flesh and blood. “Look at me: I drive this car for his mother, and keep it clean and polished, oiled and fuelled and so on, and get paid peanuts and an ill-fitting uniform for my time. And I have to spy on him, on her own son, or lose my job! And he prances about, a pretend-artist with his easel and etchings, doing naughties with any girl that takes his fancy, and there are quite a few, I can tell you, when he gets away from home…”

“He’s not tried anything like that on me,” protested Ursula, defending Charles Snootnose whilst protecting her own honour.

“But I saw you at Snooty Manor,” almost sneered the chauffeur, “I gave you a lift home: remember? What were you there for if it wasn’t to give young Charleyboy something to you-know-what to? You wouldn’t have been there for the good of your health, not the state he’d got the place into…”

“I was there for a drink and only a drink, lemonade if you must know, and I never got one because he couldn’t lay his hands on a clean glass or cup or anything to drink out of, and then his mother came home unexpectedly and made horrible suggestions about me. The same kind of suggestions that you’re implying now, in actual fact.”

“I know tarts,” grinned Tony, “I know what they’re after, all of them, a little something tasty from inside a man’s trousers, that’s what they’re after, though they never say it in words: they’re too clever for that!”

“I beg your pardon!”

“You know, duckie, you know what you want! Or there’s summat wrong with you! You want some fun, that’s what you want…” And Tony Nonesuch licked his lips and loosened his tie.

“Then you must have met some pretty rough girls if you think we’re all like that,” snapped Ursula, suddenly realising exactly why the chauffeur had pulled onto the shaded lane where they were parked. “Anyway, I’m only fifteen and too young for that kind of thing!”

“You could be taken for twenty,” leered Tony Nonesuch, “I’ve had lasses of twenty who look younger than you when they scrape the rouge off their faces. Nah, I’m going to pretend you’re twenty and you’re going to like it!”

“Well I ought to know how old I am, and I’m fifteen,” insisted Ursula, “not that my age should have anything to do with it,” she added.

“It don’t matter, lass. You’re a bitch and I’m a dog on heat and that’s all that matters.”

“It’s bitches that get on heat, not dogs,” Ursula spat at him, “and there’s no lass colder than me at the moment.”

Not, she thought, that it was true. Fear of the unknown had warmed her blood, and proximity to a lad she had hitherto thought of as relatively decent and honourable but who now turned out to be just another deviant after what he could get, and to hell with those who he got it from and how they felt about it.

“No matter,” he grunted. “take a look at what I’ve got down here…”

And he started to undo the fly buttons of his uniform trousers, struggling because he was seated, but undoing them slowly, one at the time!

She looked at his face. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and the gleam in his eyes spoke of an intense appetite that would probably never be satisfied. So this is what drives them, she thought, this is the animal inside the male of the species!

She was suddenly like a traveller lost in a foreign land, not knowing the geography and unsure of the language. She looked around her at the giant trees and the globules of rain finding their way between sodden branches and over saturated leaves, at a sudden desolation where not so long ago there had been sunshine and summer. And there was only one thing she could think of doing: getting away as quickly as she could and running like the wind to the bosom of her family where she would be able to weep and give vent to her anger in peace.

He reached one hand for her as he struggled with his buttons, and the fingers of that hand brushed against her blouse. And she felt it. The anxious greed for a forbidden contact, the lust for something that would never be his because he was a man.

“No!” she squealed, and she reached wildly for the door handle of the car and yanked it open.

The limousine was big and she was small, but with very little difficulty she propelled herself out of it, her haste fuelled by both fear and anger. She was having nothing of this: besides her youth she needed to nurture her pride, and keep that intact.

“There’s no need for that!” protested the young chauffeur as she stood there proudly and with huge dignity on the wet lane and stared back at him, “I weren’t going to do nowt, honest, I just had summat to show you. You’d like it, all the gals like it.”

The pseudo-sophisticated accent that had been his up to that moment was dropped as he sat there, unable to follow her because of his state of near indecent exposure.

“You’re worse than that creep Charles,” she snapped at him, “at least he pretends there’s a motive for what he wants a lass to do, with his etchings and stuff, but you … you’re just an animal with animal desires and nothing else and you’d rape me if you got half a chance.”

“It’s only natural…” he muttered, “it’s what us men do. Ask the Squire if you see him. He does it all the time. It’s why the ever-so-posh lady Snootnose has left him, if you must know!”

“That’s got nothing to do with me and my life,” retorted Ursula, and she would have carried on to say how the high and mighty try to lord it over ordinary folks like her, but he was a mere servant and wasn’t one of those and hadn’t got the right to lord it over anyone, but she was interrupted before she started by the sound of a car horn just behind them.

A second limousine had silently, like a ghost, appeared from nowhere.

“Now then, what’s going on here?” enquired the suave and sophisticated yet oily tones of a newcomer.

It was Squire Snootnose, and he climbed out of the back seat of the car he was in and stood on the road, glowering at her.

© Peter Rogerson 15.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

6. THE FRYING PAN AND THE FIRE

The weather had changed. The sun had, much to the relief of those beginning to become over-tanned by it, decided to seek refuge behind an increasingly dark and glowering cloud.

Charles Snootnose was rambling despite the threat of rain, but as insurance against what might come plummeting from the skies he was carrying an umbrella as well as an artist’s easel and an assortment of clean paper in a folder.

He wanted to do some more etching but lacked inspiration. He thought, probably quite correctly, that if he sketched a few of the more rural scenes in the neighbourhood of Swanspottle he might, on a wet day, be able to convert them into tasteful etchings and thus keep his mother quiet.

She had started to suggest that he might be a wastrel. That he might be squandering his life away, doing nothing and contributing nothing to the good family name which, she reminded him several times a day, went back to ancient times.

She wasn’t sure what ancient times she meant because even though her own background was closely related to the Snootnoses, she wasn’t actually one herself. Born Patience St Clement, she was merely a second cousin of the Snootnose she had married and to whom she had presented three offspring, all of whom bore heavily the stain of their inheritance on their faces, particularly on their chins.

But Charles, for we are following him, was out on a cloudy day. As was Ursula Spandex, still a few days short of her sixteenth birthday and still as gloriously beautiful as Charles thought that she was.

But he was looking for a more rural beauty, probably in the form of a cowshed that was falling down on one of Farmer Bismuth’s fields. Ursula was making for that same field because her father was fiddling with the fencing, making sure it was secure, and as he knew a bit about the weather and hated the idea of getting a good unexpected soaking he was fiddling as quickly as he could and had arranged with her to bring sandwiches at lunch time.

It was some approximation of lunch time, and the sandwiches were duly delivered and after a joke with her father she started to make her way back to her home in the hope of beating the glowering cloud that was edging towards Swanspottle with the determination of all good storm clouds.

And Charles was perched on a tussock of earth that had probably started off as a molehill and got to be grown over several times since the mole had first worked it. His easel was in front of him and he was gazing with rapt adoration at the partly demolished cowshed and marvelling at the acute angle a cracked old door could maintain without actually falling down.

“Why, hello there,” he called, out of the blue, when he noticed her before she noticed him.

“Oh. Hello, sir,” she replied, picking up her pace in order to look as if she was in a hurry.

“Would you like to be in my picture?” he asked, indicating his easel. “I’m going to do an etching of that shed over there. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“But it’s falling down!” she protested, “Farmer Bismuth wants it gone but it’s too much for my dad, what with his arthritis. Sir.”

“That’s sad,” he said, grinning in such a way that his receding chin looked as if it might have melted into his bottom lip.

“He wants to build a new one,” pointed out Ursula, “because the cows don’t feel comfortable in that one any more.”

“Well, would you?” he persisted when it looked as if she was going to continue on her way without giving him time to exercise his somewhat limited vocabulary.

“Would I what, sir?”

“Like to be in my picture. You can keep your clothes on if you like…”

“I do like!” she flashed back at him.

“I always think that girls look better if you can see them properly,” he sighed, “I mean, they always have done. Look at Adam and Eve.”

“You mean, the two characters who never actually lived?” she asked, her voice suddenly dribbling with sarcasm.

“Of course they did! What do they teach you in those ordinary schools, for goodness’ sake? They were the first man and the first woman, and they were, how shall I put it, naked… Heavenly, don’t you think?”

“I know the story, silly! But that’s what it was, a story, and only daft people believe it,” she told him, and deliberately omitted the sir. There was no way she wanted to show deference to him any more, not since the absent lemonade debacle and now this fresh reference to nakedness.

“But they preach it in churches everywhere, so it must be true,” he persisted, and she sighed and started walking away.

“You could take your clothes off anyway,” he called, as if to tempt her. “I bet you look corking in the flesh!”

“Never in a million years!” she retorted, and strode off, ignoring his last call of or you can keep them on before she was out of earshot.

“That was a close call!” came another voice from beyond a thicket which was mostly brambles and nettles that bordered the lane she was now on.

“Mr Nonesuch,” she sighed, “I think that’s who the voice belongs to!”

“Tony. You can call me Tony,” he replied. “I was just taking a leak, begging your pardon, where no-one could see me and I heard that tête-à-tête with Charlie boy,” he replied, and she heard the rustling as he fought his way back to the lane. Then he appeared, struggling to button his trousers before she could see him, and almost succeeding.

“He’s a cheeky bugger, if you don ‘t mind the Welsh,” he said, grinning. “Fancying you in a mucky old cowshed…”

“It was just for a picture…” she told him, “he’s got paper and some pencils and he’s trying to draw the cowshed.”

“I know what he’s got all right,” confirmed the chauffeur, “you see, I was following him.”

“Why one Earth would you want to do that?” asked Ursula, frowning.

“I’m acting on orders,” admitted Tony, “the mistress, she don’t trust that lad of hers. She reckons he might be up to no good, going out on his own like he does. She reckons he’s got a dairy maid or someone and he’s likely to put her in the family way and she don’t want that to happen. So she sent me to spy on him.”

“That’s awful!” said Ursula, shocked.

“I reckon it’s a bad job too, but what can I do? Lose me job if I don’t do as I’m told? And Charlie boy’s no angel, I can tell you…”

“He isn’t?”

“You know Daisy at the King’s Bullocks? You know, the old pub on Goosedown Road?”

Ursula wasn’t sure. “I might,” she conceded.

“Well, if pop into the Bullocks any time and ask for Daisy, she’ll tell you. She’d be pushing a pram around if Old Ma Pumpkin hadn’t held her out of a problem she was having…”

“I know Old Ma Pumpkin and what she does,” said Ursula.

“Have you … you know, called on her for business?” asked Tony.

“What? Me?” Ursula shook her head determinedly. “I’ve never been taken that way because I’ve kept myself to myself, if you get my meaning,” she said.

The conversation might have carried on with Old Ma Pumpkin’s skills and morals being discussed at greater length, but at first one, then a second and sudden cascade of many more raindrops splattered onto them with an awe-inspiring suddenness.

“Quick! This way! It’s only a few yards!” shouted Tony, and he dragged Ursula by one hand into a disused farm entrance where he had parked the Snootnose limousine.

“Just in time!” he grinned at her when they had climbed in and the door was shut. “Oops, here comes the squire’s laddy! We haven’t noticed him, right?”

Ursula smiled, and nodded.

And with the push of a button the engine roared into life and Tony roared off, leaving a suddenly bedraggled young Snootnose yelling at them for all of his might.

“If they ask we never saw him here,” grinned Tony, “serve the young twonk right for what he did to Daisy! And other lasses, I’ll be bound. Look, shall I take you back home, or do you want to find a quiet place to have a chat before it’s time for tea?”

© Peter Rogerson 14.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

5. THE FANCY LIMOUSINE

“Where have you come from, mummy?” almost squawked Charles. “I thought you were in Londers with daddy!”

“Oh, that philanderer! That pourer of gemstones into call-girls brassieres? No, I thought I’d come back home and see that my precious little son is well and breathing the good country air like he should be. But Charles, dearest, introduce me to your little peasant friend?”

Peasant? That was enough for Ursula, but she had some sense and didn’t respond to the insult.

Instead, “My Lord Charles thought I might require a glass of lemonade before he strips me and does an etching of me, but it seems he’s neglected the washing-up this past few weeks and we don’t have a clean glass … so I’ll be leaving you and return to my counter at Harrods!” she said in one breath.

“Where’s your scullery maid?” asked Lady Patience Snootnose, turning to her son. Is this young lady her? Is it she who has neglected to care for your kitchen appliances to the standard you’ve been brought up to expect?”

Then Charles screwed himself up to almost breaking point and decided to be honest.

“No, mummy, what the young lady says is perfectly true, except for the reference to Harrods. She is employed in a far superior store! But I did promise her lemonade, and if she felt so inclined I did offer to create an etching, in the nude if she preferred…”

He said nothing about preferred, thought Ursula, but remained quiet.

“…But what was that you were saying about daddy?” he asked as an afterthought.

“The beast! I only caught him in flagrente with a tart!” she replied, “he was down to his particularly swollen underwear and she was all smiles and suspenders!”

“Mummy! Are you sure …but daddy … surely there’s an innocent explanation!” Charles sounded genuinely shocked by his father’s alleged antics.

“If there is you’d better tell him, because he hasn’t come out with it yet!” snapped Lady Snootnose. “I mean, darling, it’s all right for you to dally with this shop girl, but daddy, after all, is a married man! And to make matters worse it’s me he’s married to, and if he needs to play games what’s wrong with him playing them with me? No, I’ve left him in Londers, I’ve come back home and I’ll have this place spick and span when I get my hands on a few peasant maids! You have let it go a weeny bit, haven’t you?”

“Daddy said he couldn’t afford for me to have any servants…” began Charles glumly.

“But your allowance!” replied his mother, somewhat sharply, “I know how much that is, and you could easily buy the service of half a dozen young wenches with that much, and have enough left over to pamper yourself!”

Ursula had heard enough. In a way she felt sorry for the almost penitent Charles but it crossed her mind that if he’d stood up to this woman when he’d been a boy and not waited until he was in his twenties then he might be a stronger person now.

“I see I’m not getting any lemonade, so I’ll bid you goodbye,” she said sharply. ”I’ll see you next time you call in at the village shop for your tin of beans and loaf of bread, sir.” The emphasis she put on that last syllable was sarcasm in sound.

She turned to leave, not looking forward to the thirsty walk home under a baking sun, but the atmosphere after the arrival of Charles’s mother had become unbearable. It was as if she had the skill to turn off lights of happiness wherever they may be and replace them with high class gloom.

“You ungrateful child!” spat Lady Snootnose at her as she reached the door.

As she half-walked, half-ran though the turgid air of the passage that led to the entrance door of the south wing she could hear the shrill yet cultured sound of Lady Patience Snootnose.

“How have you let things get to this state?” she squawked, “I mean, darling, there’s actual filth everywhere…”

And the muffled reply involving the use of the two words sorry and mummy and not much else.

The twerp, she thought, and to think I had dreams about him…

She marched out of the house and was tempted to slam the door behind her, but thought better of it. I’ll show them who’s got manners because it’s clear they haven’t a clue, she raged to herself as she pulled the door to gently until it was almost shut.

Lady Snootnose had a car waiting outside. There could be no doubt that it was a Snootnose car because, emblazoned in gold leaf on the doors was the Snootnose coat of arms, which consisted of a swan’s head peering over the rim of a tankard, and the ornate script CS. Charles, it seemed, was a family name.

“’Scuse me, miss,” came a voice from inside the car. She paused, startled, and looked to see who might be lurking within earshot, and there was a young man in the uniform of a chauffeur sitting in the Snootnose family limousine.

“You want me?” she asked.

“Are you in service, miss?” he asked, taking his peaked hat off and scratching behind one ear.

“Me? No, not likely,” she replied, “I was offered a cool drink because of all the heat, and then the lady came in and took over and I left before she could think of any more lowly names to call me.”

He looked around him, making sure he wasn’t being overheard, and he beckoned her to move closer to where he was sitting.

“That’s her all round,” he said quietly, “taking over like that. She does it all the time. How far are you going?”

“Back to Swanspottle,” she replied, wiping her own brow.

“Then you wait there, miss, and I’ll slip inside and tell her highness that we need petrol and I’d better go now or the garage will be shut, it being Sunday and all that. I’ll take you back to your place, you see if I don’t.”

He pushed the car door open and stepped out. “Won’t be a tick,” he grinned, and walked into the house. The door opened at a touch, and he vanished inside.

Moments later he reappeared, grinning. “That’s arranged,” he chortled, holding a pound note in the air. “This’ll fill her, and the change will buy us a cold drink each. Come on, step inside before her highness changes her mind and joins us.”

It was the heat that won the argument, if argument there was, and Ursula rushed round the other side and climbed into the passenger seat.

“You’d best tell me where you live,” grinned the chauffeur, “I’m Tony, by the way, and you’re pretty as a picture!”

“I’m Ursula. Mr Charles wanted to make a picture of me,” she smiled.

“He still does those etchings of his? They’d be nice if he was any good, but he ain’t.”

“He wanted me to take my clothes off,” sighed Ursula, “and I’m not that sort of girl.”

“But would you have? If he were a great artist and wanted a beautiful model? You are beautiful, you know. ‘Specially dressed like that, for the sun.”

“Thank you kind sir,” she replied.

“I’d offer to paint a picture of you in the altogether if I could, but tell the truth, miss, I don’t know one end of a paint brush from the other so I won’t!” he grinned, “Look, down this here road is the garage and when I’ve filled her up we’ll get you home.”

The small garage with its single fuel pump was off a narrow lane that would one day become part of a major road, but not for decades. As it was, the place was basic to say the least, but it was open briefly on Sunday afternoons and chauffeur Tony was able to fill up.

“Just the job,” he grinned, smelling faintly of petrol, “now let’s take the pretty lass home, shall we?”

“That would be most kind, good sir,” she said.

“That’s me … kind all over! Might I see a bit of you if you don’t think I’m being too forward? That’s if Madam Snootnose decides to stay on until her old man is forgiven!”

“That would be nice, and, no, it’s not too forward,” laughed Ursula as they pulled up outside the modest house she called home and climbed out of the passenger seat of the most expensive car that had ventured down her road in living memory.

© Peter Rogerson 07.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

4. A RATHER GRUBBY YOUNG MAN

The sun is so hot, thought Urusula, and she smiled at Charles Snootnose.

“I am rather thirsty,” she said quietly, using what she thought was a really posh accent so that he didn’t look down on her from too great a height. “I’d love some lemonade.”

Charles dribbled, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist, his heart suddenly racing.

“It’s down here,” he muttered, indicating the drive to Snooty Manor, leading to the right off the lane they were on.

He’d lived there alone for a good year by then, and the drive was getting to be overgrown. Where the gardener, employed when the family lived there, had weeded the gaps in its cracked surface, he’d done nothing. And it looked weedy in an untidy, uncared for, unkempt sort of way.

The house at the other end of the drive also looked tired.

“My father left me in charge,” he grumbled as he surveyed his own fiefdom, “but it’s not me, really. I’m a troubadour and an artist and a great romantic, not a painter and a weeder, but father only allows me enough in the way of funds to live on, not enough to employ an army of artisans to tidy the old place up.”

“You poor soul,” murmured Ursula.

He glanced quickly at her. Was that sympathy in her voice, or something he didn’t like? Might it be criticism of his good fortune when compared to her own? But she was only a girl, a child really, and he must try to realise that, especially when she pushed her chest towards him like she had that time in the village shop. What did she know about the cost of upkeep when the upkeep is of a mansion the size and splendour of Snooty Manor?

“I am,” he almost purred, “would you like me to show you my etchings?”

“Etchings?” What are those, sir?” she asked, in genuine ignorance.

They didn’t teach her much at that dreadful school she went to, thought Charles, always dismissive of the misfortunes of others, I’ll bet she didn’t even get thrashed for her ignorance like a good schoolmaster would…

“I make them,” he said, “they’re pictures etched by acid onto a metal plate and then the image transferred to paper. I love doing it. Maybe I could do one of you? After all, you are moderately good looking.”

“With acid?” she asked, nervously, ignoring the moderately word.

“I wouldn’t put any acid near you,” he assured her, “but I have copper plates, quite small because big ones are expensive and father is mean with his money, and I coat them in wax before scratching away with a sharp point until I have my picture. Then I soak the plate in acid, and the places where the wax has been scratched through are eaten away by the acid… it’s really quite skilful, as you might imagine…”

“And that would make a picture of me, sir?” she asked.

“Naked, if you like,” he almost purred, “I’ll bet you look very much the artist’s model when you’re naked … you seem to have the right shape.”

“I’d have to get undressed?” she asked, “You’d have to see my … body?

“How else would the artist know what to etch?” he replied, grandly despite his almost withered chin.

“But do I have some lemonade anyway?” she murmured nervously, “sir?” she added.

He shook his head almost as if he could see the fly escaping his parlour-web

“Of course you can,” he breathed onto her neck when they reached the side door, the one that led into the smallish south wing, which was the limit of his empire. “Come on in. It’s delicious. Father sends it from Harrods.”

“What’s Harrods, sir?” she asked.

Where has the child been all her life? Not knowing the meaning of Harrods and living in England? He looked at her and shook his head. “It’s a big shop,” he replied, “where the King goes shopping,” he added, to give it some extra kudos even though that kudos was wasted on her because Ursula wasn’t all that bothered where royalty went shopping. As far as she was concerned the king and his family were a different species, as far above her as she was above a flea.

“Oh,” she said, and dutifully added, “sir.”

The inside of the south wing was generally untidy and here and there she was sure there were little pools of dried vomit on the floor. It smelt that way too, having the sort of smell that turned the stomach. But Charles ignored it and said, crisply, “follow!”

So she followed.

“I could do with a woman, but father won’t pay for one,” he said as if it was enough explanation for the assault on Ursula’s senses. She wanted to ask why he didn’t do a few obvious things for himself but thought it might sound ungrateful, what with the promise of a glass of lemonade and maybe even an etching.

The kitchen wasn’t so bad. It hadn’t always been the main kitchen, just a small affair used by servants to boil their kettles and toast their bread. There were burnt things in there, pans and the like, scorched to the point of being holed so that there was hardly a saucepan that would hold liquids again, and piles of unwashed crockery, but the smell was less offensive than it had been in the vomit-strewn passage.

“I get my laundry done by the co-op,” he said, “but nobody washes my plates.”

This time she couldn’t hold back. This time the question had to be asked or something inside her would shrivel up if it wasn’t.

“Can’t you wash them yourself, sir?” she asked.

“I sometimes have to,” he agreed as if the offence was magnified by his sentence.

“Most people do,” she said quietly, and omitted the sir.

He looked at her, his double squint disguising his inner feelings.

“I’m a gentleman,” he said, “and you’re a child. I ask you, does a gentleman wash plates and cups and saucers? Does a gentleman, with good honest ancient blood flowing in his veins, have to do such tawdry tasks?”

“Maybe, if nobody else will,” she replied, again without the deferential sir.

He stared at her, though the double squint disguised the direction of his stare.

Then he sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, “so now for the lemonade.”

“If you’ll let me clean the receptacles first,” she said, “I don’t like drinking from dirty glasses.”

He had no shame, that much was obvious.

“If you will,” he said, “and while you’re doing that I’ll go and change into some clean clothes. I don’t know what happens to my underwear, but it always has a smell about it…”

“Don’t you bathe?” she asked the obvious question.

“What? With nobody to fill the bath and test the temperature?” he asked, “how could I? It’s unreasonable to expect…”

“So you don’t take a bath? So you’re dirty?” she asked.

“I suppose so. Father will put it right when he finds out. He’ll provide me with a manservant. Do you want to see my etchings now, and have lemonade later?”

“I’ll see your etchings, but not until after you’ve cleaned this place and taken at least two baths,” she said, bravely, determined to state her intent. “I’ll come back some time,” she added, “but meanwhile, you have shown me just how disgusting life can be when you’re a gentleman!”

He stamped one foot in a sudden burst of temper. “You cheeky harlot!” he snapped, “I’ll tell mummy, and that will be that!”

“What will?” came a well-modulated voice from just beyond the greasy kitchen door.

“Mummy!” he shouted, “Mummy, mummy, mummy, where did you come from?”

It was Lady Patience Snootnose, and Ursula could tell by the wrinkled angle of her nose that she was most displeased.

“What’s this harlot doing here with my little boy?” she asked, flicking a casual wrist towards Ursula, “why isn’t she cleaning things, why isn’t she being good?”

© Peter Rogerson 06.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

3. SEDUCTION UNDER THE SUN

Ursula decided there never had been such a heat wave. She was a teenager in the mid-thirties and enjoying a Sunday, a day when she wasn’t expected to work in the village store, which Old Aunty Emmett closed for the day.

There was church in the morning, of course, always on a Sunday with the Joneses and the Smiths, the Taylors and the Pumpkins all neatly hatted and dressed in what they called their Sunday best and smelling of moth-balls. Then, after church, there was Sunday lunch at home, which involved she and her parents sitting round the table with roast something and cabbage. Always cabbage! Then there was the afternoon, and that was hers. Her free time of all the time that goes to make up a week: Sunday afternoon.

She could stay in and read a book, even listen to the wireless if there was something on that might interest her, but now there never had been such a heatwave and she was fifteen and too wide awake to loll around listening to violins and harps or old men reading from old books, or even reading from books herself.

She needed to be out in the sun!

After cleaning away the Sunday lunch things, and drying the pots while mum washed up and dad snoozed in his chair, she announced she was going out.

“Watch yourself,” advised Mrs Spandex, not saying what might be a threat that needed watching.

“And remember it’s the Lord’s day,” muttered Mr Spandex from the middle of a dream.

She hadn’t always been allowed out on her own on Sundays. The Spandexes were a very religious family and it was their firmly held belief that their god wouldn’t like youngsters making free with Sundays. Life was work during the week and cow-tow to a deity nobody could see on the Sabbath in the hope that some time after death there might be a reward. That Sabbath, Ursula had got to believe, was a punishment, though she wasn’t quite sure what humanity was being punished for. Maybe the war, which was a fading memory, or too much dancing. Not that she danced very often. Swanspottle was small and didn’t have a dance hall.

So this Sunday afternoon, out she went, down the lane, and walking towards Snooty Manor because, well she was shy even to herself when she thought this, but there was something about the boy. The Snootnose one.

It was a cheek thinking of him as a boy because he must have been the best part of ten years older than, her, which made him a man. But he didn’t look like a man, not any man she’d known anyway, and he behaved in a boyish way, riding his horse through the village on Sundays when everyone knew that horses needed a Sabbath too. And he was single. Some said he always would be, what with those eyes and that chin, but she thought maybe wait and see…

Swanspottle was too small a village to be raided by even a single horse rider. Even a bachelor one. Everyone said that.

She wasn’t going all the way to Snooty Manor, just down the lane until she could see its iron gate, painted black but starting to rust because only one person lived there and he couldn’t be bothered to do things like paint gates. He didn’t know how. Servants were meant to do that, and as far as she was aware he didn’t have any servants, which was mighty odd.

Who, she wondered, helped him dress in the mornings?

That thought made her blush and hope there were no mind-readers anywhere near.

There were tales about his laundry, though. Plenty of them. It was done for him by the co-op laundry and some of the things said about his intimate wear made the tellers of those tales blush beetroot red as they told them.

“They say there are stains,” muttered Gwyneth Jones who worked at the co-op laundry, “and we all know what that means.”

“Not enough roughage in his diet,” agreed Lizzie Smith.

“Or evil,” breathed Gwyneth, “touching himself. Evil.”

“May the Lord strike him dead,” nodded Lizzie, not really meaning it, but it just had to be said.

So Ursula, on a torrid sunny Sunday, was sauntering down the lane that lead towards Snooty Manor, well aware of the dreaded rumours but for some reason liking the boy. Or man. Maybe she should have thought of him as a man.

The beans and bread purchase had been made several times since that first time last year and she began to wonder if that very limited diet might explain some of the laundry rumours. But the lad was shy. Maybe a diet of baked beans on bread made a man shy.

And here she was walking towards his big house. There was still discolouration where smoke had billowed out from the fire that had driven all but Charles Snootnose away. It had darkened the brickwork as if an airborne deity had poured a pot of charcoal paint over the place.

“Is that you?” came a nervous voice from behind a hedge.

She knew the voice straight away because it was usually heard asking for a tin of beans.

“Mr Snootnose? Sir?” she responded, knowing her place. That was something that had been impressed on her since birth, her place and the importance of knowing it. Young ladies, her mother had insisted, who don’t know their place end up getting taken advantage of by young gentlemen with too many urges in their loins… it’s the way young gentlemen are…”

She remembered that, and knew her place.

“Are you…?” The question was incomplete but it didn’t seem that he was going to add to it. He just stared at her squintily from just behind a hedge with just the top half of his head with a riding hat atop it showing.

“Am I, sir?” she asked gently.

“Er … yes, sorry,” he stammered. She wasn’t to know it but he felt worse about this chance meeting than she did because as far as she was concerned it had been something she had dared to hope for, but to his mind the sort of thing best avoided until it had been planned in the most minute detail by Charles himself. And here he was behind a hedge where he’d been doing … better not even think that, it might show in his squints and give his dirty secret away.

And, being behind that hedge and going about what he had been going about with his trousers round his knees was behaviour that was clearly totally divorced from planning in any kind of detail.

He emerged into the light of day, the sun shone onto his face turning it from being ordinary to being, in her eyes, beautiful, and he was pulling the braces that held his trouser up until those trousers were actually up.

“You’re the g-girl from the sh-sh-shop?” he mumbled, stammering over the first noun and almost obliterating the second.

“Beans and bread,” she smiled, nodding, and adding “sir,”

“By golly, you’re a corker!” he gabbled.

Five words, just five rather senseless, meaningless words that together didn’t add up to very much at all, and something deep in side Ursula started melting in much the same way as, on a day like it was, strawberry sundae might melt into goo.

“You’re … nice,” was all she could say in reply, before adding “sir.”

“Do you … would you … I mean, I’ll be the spider and you be the fly, would you like to come into my parlour,” he gabbled, and added “please”.

“What for, sir?” she asked innocently, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it said.

“Lemonade,” he replied, “freshly squeezed…”

“Lovely,” she sighed.

And what was never meant to be a trap was set and the victim, who was never meant to be a victim, was walking straight into it.

And Charles’ trousers were having the time of their life.

© Peter Rogerson 05.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

2. THE BOY FROM THE BIG HOUSE

When Ursula reached the dizzy age of 14 she was expected to leave school. After all, she was a girl and hardly anyone could see much point in educating girls beyond infancy, and fourteen was a long way beyond that. As long as she could add tuppence for this to threepence for that together and subtract the total from a shilling she was educated enough.

She was just about to take herself off and tap humbly at the back door of Snooty Manor in search of domestic employment when a bombshell was dropped by the ringing of a fire bell and via the gift of powerful gossip. Not a literal bombshell, but one that forced her to put all her more devious plans on hold.

There was a fire at Snooty Manor. Spookily, that fire occurred in early November, but it was more related to the combustible nightdress worn by Lady Patience Snootnose when she was feeling the cold in her gnarled old bones and huddling as close as she could get to a blazing fire whilst shivering quite violently in the withdrawing room than it was in celebration of a failed seventeenth century attempt at killing a king.

Fortunately, she escaped with most of her life (her hair, she was assured, would grow back and be more luxuriant than ever) because she hastily removed the blazing garment as she ran for her life.

The blazing garment, though, had been discarded onto the luxurious sofa, a special uncomfortable piece of fancy furniture that had been in the family since the year dot, and that was before there were any flame-proofing regulations in place, so nobody had thought of flame-proofing it. Consequently, it burst into a cascade of brilliant sheets of sparking fire and spread rapidly, via an Turkish carpet, to the curtains, which were tinder dry and waiting for it.

The Brumpton Fire Brigade turned up in time to rescue most of the house, but Squire Snootnose declared that the building would never be the same again and moved out to his London quarters, taking most of his family and servants with him.

Most, that is, except Charles, his youngest son.

He was to remain in Snooty Manor, in the undamaged South Wing which was nowhere near as grand as it sounded, but his father was quite adamant on one thing.

“You won’t be having any servants,” he threatened him, “you’ll have to do the skivvying yourself. I wouldn’t trust your trousers near any fragrant skivvy.”

“But why?” whined Charles, who had a private scheme involving a harem of skivvies.

“Because you’re damned devious!” replied his father, and that had to be that. “I’ve heard the rumours. I know what you get up to, but then you’re only a lad with overactive loins, a bit like your father…”

“Yes, father,” he replied pointedly, and started modifying his plans.

But he still had the south wing of his nice big house, and there are, he told himself, several ways of skinning a rabbit – not that he’d ever skinned one or had intimate knowledge of even one of the ways such a cruelty might be achieved.

He had, though, noticed the Spandex girl and learned via the gift of devious enquiry in the village that she was fourteen and ripe for the plucking, not that he was quite sure what plucking was and even if it was the right word. He had particularly noticed that she had several unmistakable qualities, all of which affected him in the trouser region. And he wasn’t the only person to be aware of those qualities.

Farmer Bismuth had.

Farmer Bismuth had been a widower for above half a century, every since his wife Murial had passed away giving birth to a still born son, which had struck him as the height of carelessness on her part. By now he was getting on in years and had started wondering where on Earth the better part of his life had gone to, and even been seen shedding the odd tear on the subject when he was in a more or less morose mood. And one day when his labourer was called on in the potato field by his lass Ursula, he took one look at the girl and knew exactly what his life might have been and the kind of person it could have been with. It might have been, he fantasised, in a cosy cuddle with Ursula. But he did nothing about it because there was no way he could chase the girl, not with her being nimble and him needing the use of a zimmer frame.

But let us return to Ursula. There was no chance of a job in service at Snooty Manor. So she found herself alternative employment in the village shop run by Old Aunty Emmett. It was honest work, the hours were long, and that last fact kept her out of mischief. Until, that is, Charles Snootnose learned where she worked.

Any lonely youth in search of a lass in his life will confirm that meeting one who happens to work in the village shop is easy peasy. One only has to go in and buy something.

Anything.

“A tin a beans please,” he asked as gazed into her eyes for that first time.

She looked at him and something melted. Something inside her. It felt like strawberry ripple. Or a small rodent doing handstands against her innards.

This was the young man she’d seen out and about on his horse when she was equally out and about, but gathering things like blackberries and dandelion flowers for mum Spandex to make wine out of, and who she’d taken a worrying fancy to because, in truth, most girls considered him to be as ugly as a pot dog, what with his binocular squint and receding chin and a few other imperfections donated to him by a selfishly restricting gene pool. The Snootnoses, for generations, had only bred with variations on the Snootnose theme and thus, by pure breeding, had produced this nincompoop in trousers. But what is a nincompoop to some is an angel to others, or something like that.

Anyway, Ursula, despite her high intelligence and excellent breasts, quite fancied the young man, and suddenly, as if she’d rubbed Aladdin’s lamp, here he was buying beans.

“Anything else?” she asked, placing a tin of beans in front of him.

He didn’t need anything else, but, “a loaf of bread please,” he mumbled.

“White?” she asked.

He thought all bread was white if he thought of its colour at all.

“Of course,” he said. “Yum yum,” he added, without knowing why.

“Anything else?” she asked, emphasising what she knew was a spectacularly tidy bosom by encouraging it towards him.

But that was too much.

“Whaaa…” he screamed when his imagination revealed the magnificence of that bosom, and without beans or bread he found himself running out of the shop. That imagination, though, had been educated by a cheapish book he’d acquired secretly, a publication in which young ladies were posed naked, and printed in black and white. Fortunately someone during the manufacturing process had airbrushed vital body parts out or the law might have had something to say about the kind of person to own such works of deviant art. But, in truth, it left his education incomplete.

I mean, he sometimes thought, I’ve got little nipples, so why haven’t ladies got any at all?

Such was his innocence. And it was that innocence that, on the very verge of him discovering reality, sent him racing into the street instead. And where he was knocked down by a passing cyclist and left lying for dead in the gutter. Or if not for dead, for very slightly bruised.

“That lad’s a moron,” growled Farmer Bismuth who’d popped in for his half ounce of strong shag.

But the poor lad’s quite lovely, thought Ursula to herself as she reached for the tobacco jar and smiled like the innocent she was.

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 04.07.18

A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT TASTE

1. THE EARLY YEARS.

Ursula Spandex hadn’t lived to a grand old age (she was in her nineties and still contemplated the possibility of running the odd Marathon once her hip replacement had settled in) without asking herself why that should be. After all, there were old ladies who had been in the same class at school as Primrose, her one and only daughter, and they’d died of old age and infirmity already. So had Primrose, which had saddened her.

She put her vigour down to a good sex life. Not just in the past but as often as she could find someone willing to exchange bodily fluids with her, and bearing in mind her age that was more frequently than you’d think possible. But enough of that talk. Ursula would call it smut, and that’s what it probably is.

Ursula, in fact, was remarkably unworldly when it came to matters of intimacy. She knew what she enjoyed and when it became available enjoyed it, but she never went out in search of excesses, though occasionally she got near doing that if chatting up young men seventy years her junior might be considered getting near to doing it.

She lived, as do so man eccentric old ladies, in the village of Swanspottle in the district of Middleworth not so far from the county town of Brumpton. But she was no sharp-tongued harridan, no pseudo witch, no echo of the old creature who lived at the other end of the village, the dreaded Griselda Entwhistle and her broomsticks. No, Ursula was level-headed, smart in appearance, only swore on Thursdays and considered that watching commercial television was tantamount to being a sin.

Spandex hadn’t always been the family name. Once, ages ago, even before Ursula was born, it had been very different and generally unpronounceable with far too many consonants to make any sense at all. So her parents, with the enthusiasm of youth, had decided to get rid of most of those wretched consonants and ended with Spandex. It had, they thought, got a ring to it.

Then they had settled down in Swanspottle, her father had tilled the land for Farmer Bismuth, and in the fullness of time and after a great deal of sexual congress between the newly renamed Spandexes, she had been conceived and then born.

It had been a happy day, the one in which she had breathed the first of many, many breaths, and she had been loved. Everyone said how cute she was, and bearing in mind that the first world war hadn’t been over for long, that was praise indeed.

You see, during the war there had been doubts in Middleworth when it leaked out that a suspicious number of consonants had been struck from their surname. To the Joneses and Smiths and Taylors and Pumpkins it seemed that anyone with Spandex as their name must be foreign, and with the healthy dislike of foreigners common to many in the land they were called names. Nasty names. Names that implied that somewhere in their genealogy one might find Satan if one poked around hard enough.

But Ursula put the end to that kind of suspicion because of her extreme cuteness.

“What a little dearie,” crooned Mrs Jones.

“And a cutie too,” agreed Mrs Smith.

“With such a pretty smile,” acknowledged Mrs Taylor,

“And the sweetest of dimples,” crooned Mrs Pumpkin.

That was during the early years of the twentieth century when being cute and cuddly was all a girl had to be in order to achieve her main objective in life, which was having babies, babies and yet more babies, preferably sons what with the war having stolen so many young male lives. And everyone knew that no lad worth his salt would want to impregnate an ugly lass if he had a choice, so cuteness and prettiness was a necessary pre-requisite to a successful life. Leave the politics and money matters up to the menfolk, the Joneses said, and we women are much too useful to be bothered with honest toil when there are nappies to be washed and doorsteps to be scrubbed, agreed the Smiths. And others, the Taylors and Pumpkins among them, said very much the same sort of thing, proudly, as if all life was about was honest if unpleasant toil..

“She’ll be going into service, then,” decided Mr Spandex when Ursula, still cute, was eleven.

“She’s not just cute,” pointed out Mrs Spandex with a frown, “she’s becoming a spectacularly attractive young women with big whatsits.”

“She’s not twelve yet, so we’ll have less of that kind of talk,” growled the father, who fortunately hadn’t noticed that his daughter was out of nappies. But then, he did work hard on the farm, making Farmer Bismuth obscenely wealthy and giving himself an aching back.

“I’m almost a woman, father,” sighed Ursula, and he snorted and went about his potato picking with a vengeance.

“I guess it’ll be service for you,” sighed mother, who wanted Ursula to be something special and not a skivvy.

“Most girls go into service,” whispered Ursula, with a secret thought in her head.

She often had secret thoughts in her head, but this one was more secret than any that had preceded it because it coincided with the little feelings lasses have when they start noticing there’s a second gender in the world.

And unbeknown to anyone else, she had cast her eyes, from behind an elder tree in full bloom, at Charles Snootnose, the youngest son of the toff, Squire Snootnose, who lived in Snooty Manor well enough outside Swanspottle for no-one who lived there to think of it unless they were sending their daughters there to be in service until the day they died. Charles Snootnose had been riding his horse, had actually dismounted it and tied it to a gate leading onto the field where Ursula was lurking pleasantly behind her tree, and she spotted him stooping behind a hawthorn hedge with his breeches round his knees and doing something vigorous to himself just out of sight of her curiosity.

But she was smitten anyway, no matter what he was doing. Charles Snootnose wasn’t handsome in any obvious way, what with that receding chin of his, and the slight squint in both of his eyes. But he had a bearing that had been provided to him by breeding and a mighty long chain of genes, mostly of the inbred and consequently pure variety. His family was proud of them. It meant he was as thoroughbred as the horse they liked to see him riding. And they turned a blind eye to some of the vigorous things he did behind hedges.

“It’s only natural in a boy that age,” grunted Squire Snootnose.

“It’s good to see,” purred his mother, who rather thought it was.

“I did it once,” nodded the squire in a confessional mood.

“So did I,” smiled his good lady, Patience Snootnose.

The villagers, particularly the Joneses, Smiths, Taylors and Pumpkins, had a different idea.

“He’ll get to be blind,” they grunted, “just you mark my words, the lad’ll end up blind as a bat with all the whatsit he gets up to.”

But Ursula had seen something about the lad that they hadn’t, and because of that she really fancied to go on low-paid service in Snooty Manor, despite the long hours and promised drudgery. Things, she thought, might get to be interesting.

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 03.07.18

THE SPARKLERS’ REUNION

12. THE REUNION CONCERT

We arrived back at the old ruined castle in pitch black night. There was a kind of hazy blotch in the sky where the moon might be, though in all honesty it could have been anything, even an alien spaceship.

“You’d best sleep with Jed,” Scabby said to me as he pulled Joanie closer to him.

How in the name of goodness have they kept it going for so long? I found myself wondering. But: “In his van?” I mumbled, knowing the answer. Where else would I be able to sleep? It was far too dark for erecting tents, even little ones like the one Scab had brought with him. Why, I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

“But Crin was in there, leaking his juices…” I protested.

“There are two bunks,” pointed out the logical Joanie. “You have the other one.”

“And Jed would allow that!” I snapped. “He’s done nothing but kick me since we arrived anyway … and at his age too, behaving like a petulant child!”

“Poor Josh,” grinned Scabby. “Take the tent, then.”

So, despite the pitch of night, I did.

In almost total darkness I managed to create something that would keep the rain off me if the weather turned wet again. It didn’t look much like a tent when I surveyed it critically next morning, but it sort of worked.

But I mustn’t get in front of myself. Next morning I was the first to emerge from a night of near-sleep, and I cursed in a way I didn’t very often and wriggled out of what may have been the tent’s entrance, yawning and half-blinded by sunlight.

And I crept out to a round of applause. Polite applause at that.

My immediate reaction was that the others had decided to applaud me for my tent-building, but they weren’t there. Instead there was a small crowd of elderly tourists. Japanese tourists with cameras dangling round their necks and big affectionate grins on their faces.

“What the…?” I stammered, and then I realised why they were applauding.

I was starkers. I usually sleep naked, even, it seems, when I’m in a half-constructed tent, and I was starkers now.

“Get some knickers on!” hissed Scabby as he peered out of the camper-van door to see what all the commotion was about.

“The man’s an exhibitionist,” I heard Joanie murmur loud enough to be heard, “though I don’t see anything special in most men to be an exhibitionist about.”

It took me almost less than no time to pull a pair of boxers on, something I usually struggle with on account of stiff knees and arthritic joints. But the pressure was on and I yanked them up virtually as fast as lightning.

“I don’t know,” I heard Scabby tell Joanie, “I’ve never heard you complain.”

“I said most men, and anyway the good Lord never did make diamonds as big as bricks,” she replied, and even though I couldn’t see her I was well aware of the twinkle in her eyes.

One of the Japanese tourists separated himself from the group and edged towards me, rather nervously I thought.

“’Scuse,” he said, so polite I could have kissed him, “we came once before, 1969, maybe… came back to see. Memories, so sweet. Sparklers sang. Lovely English singing. Just to remind us.”

“Bootiful song,” echoed another, a nervous Japanese woman with the most gorgeous of eyes. “About green and sleeping world.”

Then the most ridiculous thing happened. The first of the tourists produced one of those small tape recorders that sold cheaply back in the sixties before cassettes became all the rage. Reel-to-reel, they were, and hardly ever quite managed to play at the right speed even when the batteries were new.

And he switched it on and pressed a button.

Over the decades it came to us, Joanie’s voice like that of an angel, me with the rhythm and Scabby adding the odd twiddly guitar solo in between verses. There was Crin, too, tapping away on his drums, gently, hardly louder that Joanie’s tambourine, and finally Jed’s recorder adding tears to the lilting melody. Scabby had composed the music and the words were mine. At least, most of them were though I recall I had always been open to suggestions when it came to letting the music flow without lyrics getting in the way.

But the song was all Joanie. She was the angel, and just as the last chorus began on the tinny tape recorder she stepped out of their van in the flesh and half a century older, and sang it again, walking flowingly in her short white nightdress towards her audience. And the words were the same, the voice as wonderful despite the years, and the Japanese crowd stood motionless before bursting out with an explosion of applause that sounded as if it might go on for ever.

“You … Sparklers?” asked the original tourist.

I nodded. “We were going to hold a private reunion and play some of the old stuff while we still can,” I explained, “but our drummer passed away.”

“Sad, so sad,” grunted the Japanese man. “But … can you … will you … play for us? We go soon, but right now we here.”

“Come on then lads,” shouted Scabby as he climbed out of his van, Jed, get your arse out here! We’re in for a ball!”

It didn’t take long. Instruments were just about already tuned, or rather, as tuned as they’d ever been, and we lined up just as we had way back when our beards had been shorter, and Scabby said, “after three…”

“For Crin,” I added under my breath, and Joanie smiled my way.

Then Scabby began, and on cue, Joan with the voice of an angel gave life to the words. Words I’d written years ago, before life had daubed its filth on me.

It was the night we slept, the night we wept,

The night our tears did flow,

The night of hope, the slippery slope

When the southern winds did blow…

And our green and sleeping world,

Yes the green and sleeping world,

It’s fingers forged from golden truth

And the diamond flavour of our youth

On this green and sleeping world…

And in the night, the sleeping night

Dream eagles hoping soar…

Like lovers dreams of crystal streams

Making love for ever more.…

And our green and sleeping world,

Yes the green and sleeping world,

It’s fingers forged from golden truth

And the diamond flavour of our youth

On this green and sleeping world…

And when our fluids like the Druid’s

Mingle with the stars

We close our eyes, soar through the skies,

As far as ruby Mars…

And our green and sleeping world,

Yes the green and sleeping world,

It’s fingers forged from golden truth

And the diamond flavour of our youth

On this green and sleeping world…

On this green and sleeping world.

   And, you know, the applause, when we stopped and it started, meant more than anything else had ever meant, both to me and to my friends. It was applause for all of us, for our lives, for the years, our loves and losses, for the very essence of living and being…

     And for Crin.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 28.06.18