THE SLEUTH

Teresa reveals her interest in Oliver

“Mummy” (or Marlene, to give her proper Christian name) was an older version of Teresa and equally beautiful, a beauty that seemed to have been enhanced if anything by the years of life and experience that lay between mother and daughter. Cyril was smiling broadly as the two parents walked towards Oliver until he noticed exactly who it was that he was walking towards, sitting with his daughter, and then he stopped abruptly and shook his head as if trying to dislodge something particularly unpleasant from somewhere inside his brain.

“You!” he exclaimed, and his eyes travelled towards his smiling daughter. “What’s he doing here?” he asked, and added “and what’s he doing sitting with you?”

“It’s a free country, daddy,” said Teresa coyly, “and why shouldn’t I be sitting with the man I’m most likely going to marry?”

“You … you … you marry? Over my dead body!” almost exploded Cyril Hunt, and Oliver realised the man wasn’t so unemotional as he sometimes seemed to be. This explosion, after all, threatened to be in the megaton range and the man’s face was already approaching the fiery colour of a newborn sun just before it gets to shine properly.

But he felt more than awkward as he watch the apoplexy rage on his former boss’s face. He stood up.

“I can see I’m not welcome...” he began.

“Just you sit down, Oliver,” ordered Teresa, and the tiny fragment of his mind that wasn’t anxious to be anywhere but where he was suggested that this girl might be a great deal more than she seemed to be on the surface, and even wondered if this was a warning about what might control a possible future. But he obeyed her and sat down. He had to.

“Now daddy, nip to the bar and fetch some drinks,” she said, reverting in Oliver’s eyes to the girl she had been moments earlier. “I want a sangria, and so does Oliver, and you must get mummy what she wants while I tell her what’s happening...”

“Sangria?” muttered Cyril, as if he had suddenly been stricken by alien tongues and was speaking an unfamiliar language.

“Exactly, daddy,” smiled his daughter with the kind of expression in her blue eyes that Oliver thought might be capable of levelling mountains or outshining the sun, and then she said “Oliver, he might need help carrying...”

“Of course,” stammered Oliver wondering if that stammer would ever go away. He stood up and followed Teresa’s obedient father to the bar.

“What’s this about you marrying that boy?” asked Marlene Hunt when the two men had gone into the pub and to the bar. “And isn’t that dress you’re wearing a bit too short?” she added as if the length of a girl’s summer frock was in any way important when the subject of an unsuspected marriage out of the blue together with her husband’s obvious annoyance at he presence of the lad had combined to make a heady mix that could spoil any summer’s day.

“He didn’t know either,” smiled Teresa. “I think he might have guessed, though, from the way I look at him.”

“You mean the boy … what’s his name … didn’t know he was in your wedding plans?” asked Marlene, more confused than ever.

“Boys are never sure about these things, mummy,” Teresa told her, as if she had the wealth of experience and the older woman didn’t.

“I don’t know what your father’s going to think!”

“We’ll find out soon enough, but it won’t make any difference. By the way, Oliver’s staying.”

“What do you mean, staying?” Marlene was used to being out of her depth when it came to her daughter and her plans, and managed to make the question sound almost trivial, but maybe it was just that when compared to marriage plans.

“He’s got a tent and I said he could pitch it on our back,” explained Teresa, “they’ve thoughtfully turned the place he was going to camp into a caravan park. Tents are much nicer than caravans don’t you think, mummy? I like the idea of a manly lad stretched out naked and unashamed in his sleeping bag in a tent, don’t you?”

“They’re uncomfortable and full of creepy-crawlies!” replied Marlene, deliberately ignoring the naked bit, “and nowhere near as cosy as a nice caravan!”

Meanwhile, Cyril returned, carrying two glasses whilst Oliver, nervously and almost as white as a sheet, carried the other two.

“I must go, Teresa,” he mumbled, “I really must...”

“Not before daddy shows you where you can put your tent and mummy tries to work out where we can find you a nice cosy caravan for the week,” almost laughed Teresa, then she turned to her father, her blue eyes flashing like a warning.

“Now daddy,” she said, “here’s what’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. I know you think Oliver’s a bit of a crook, but he really isn’t and he’s not had the nicest of lives, you know. If you’d had to put up with half of what he’s had to put up with in his short life … that’s short compared to yours, I don’t mean to call him childish … then you wouldn’t be the man you are.”

Oliver wondered what the girl knew about his life. He hadn’t told her anything other than his mother’s problems, and yet there was a confidence in her voice when she spoke of what she almost certainly knew nothing about.

“It’s all right Oliver,” she said, smiling that heart-aching smile at him. “I’m afraid I know a great deal more about you than you think I know, and it’s all good, so there’s nothing for you to worry about. I don’t want you to think that I’m a meddler, though I suppose I am in a way, but when you worked at the mill I quite took a fancy to you, me and my dowdy workaday look and dusty overall, and so set about finding things out. It wasn’t hard. You’ve left a trail in your life that a blind man could follow! Murders by the score, mayhem every which-way and a terrible coma, together with that horrible football incident. I got auntie Elly to help there because she had access to his notes even though it was all years before you started work at the paper mill...”

“Auntie Elly?” asked Marlene, “my niece? What did she have to do with the boy?”

“She nursed him when he was in hospital after the rotten football teacher nearly killed him,” said Teresa, seriously. “She was a lot of help to me, was Nurse Elly Saunders and her own little network in the hospital! And from what she told me I reckon she liked him more than a nurse usually likes her patients. It’s a good thing she married that doctor or I might have had a fight on my hands!”

“What’s all this got to do with the here and now?” asked her father, more to fill in a space in the conversation and establish his own importance in his daughter’s life than because it was a question he couldn’t easily answer himself.

“A girl needs to know who she’s going to marry, and I’m going to marry Oliver,” said Teresa brightly, and she stood up to go to the girls’ room, her little white dress hypnotising Oliver as it swirled and flashed in the odd summer breeze.

Her parents fixed him with their combined eyes.

“What have you got to do with this?” asked Cyril Hunt.

Oliver was finally out of his depth, and knew it.

“Nothing,” he sighed, “absolutely and totally nothing.

Teresa’s father shook his head, apparently relieved. “So it’s all nonsense?” he asked, “you don’t want to marry my lass?”

“Do you think I’m a fool?” asked Oliver, “because I’m not. Of course I’ll marry her! Yesterday, if that’s soon enough!”

© Peter Rogerson 19.01.17