CONSTANCE AND A FISH WIFE

Sometimes it's easy to misinterpret things and make a dreadful mistake...

Constance was in a kind of euphoric second Heaven. Besides providing literacy for the good folks of Brumpton she had a pupil. A student. A window-cleaner who had never learned to read during his childhood but wanted to now.

It wasn’t his fault. He’d grown up as a remarkably sickly child with a condition that had caused a great deal of head-scratching amongst the medical classes until, in his teens, he had recovered without needing the chemist’s potions or the surgeon’s knife. But the downside had been his failure to attend school at the vital stage of life when learning to read is a doddle and had his education generously in the hands of an illiterate father.

And so it was that Constance, librarian and all-round good egg of Brumpton Borough Library, had undertaken to remedy the shortcoming one evening a week at her own home.

Maybe she should have enquired, but she hadn’t.

The window-cleaner, Bert by name, wasn’t alone in life. He had a wife who was perfectly contented that her husband lacked literary skills of even the most basic kind because that ignorance on his part provided her with one skill he didn’t have and therefore a kind of superiority when it came to filling in forms or applying for loans or any of the literacy-based requisites of the modern world. And that good lady was someone who Constance had no idea existed. In fact, she believed the window cleaner to be a single man alone in the world and, given a nudge here and there, ripe for the plucking.

The window-cleaner wife, Mildred by name and fierce by nature, went to Karate classes once a week, and it was that once a week when Bert chose to become educated at Constance’s home. And this sowed the very first seed of suspicion in Mildred’s mind, and Mildred’s mind was fertile soil in which suspicion could take root and grow.

“Where are you off to?” she would ask as she gathered her karate stuff ready to leave for her class, and he would simply reply rather too vaguely for comfort, “Oh, here and there, maybe the library...”

“You can’t read books!” she would snap and he would point out that “there are computers there these days...”

Not that it made much difference because computers are just as greedy of a literate mind as books. Maybe more so because a computer has access to an infinite number of words, all of which need reading if they’re to make any sense at all.

So she decided that if he was going to the library in the evening he either had another woman or had found his way to one of those internet sites that display naked ladies in all manner of outrageous poses for men to ogle at. And she didn’t fancy her man being involved in either of those activities.

The thing is, he really shouldn’t have lied if the lie involved books or the library (where he wasn’t going). It would have been a great deal better had he merely said something about going to the pub or calling at my mate’s.

The time came for Mildred to follow Bert. She just had to because she didn’t believe all the references to the library and as far as she was concerned his interest in dubious Internet sites would certainly have waned by now. He must have another woman and she was going to find the b***h and sort her out, just see if she wasn’t!

They each had a car. His was easily recognised because he had ladders strapped to the roof-rack and was developing an unpleasant cough on account of it being elderly and needing a service. Hers had been new last year so it still glided along as smooth as a smoothing iron on white cotton sheets. So following her errant man was no problem.

And Bert, of course, led her straight to Constance Bingley’s semi-detached home just outside Brumpton, on the Swanspottle road.

So this is what the swine’s up to, she brewed up inside her rather sour mind, the b*****d! Thinking he can get one over on me by actually having another woman!

It must, in her mind, be true. There could be no other explanation, especially when you looked at the house and the tidy garden with a caravan parked in front of the windows and really pretty and very feminine curtains adorning the upstairs windows.

A woman of loose morals! The thought raced through her head until she hated the very memory of Bert and his ways. He’s paying for sex, was the next thought and she remembered how he had recently complained that there was never enough money for the few expenses required by the careful window-cleaner.

She watched him as he parked outside the offending house and, carrying a small bag in which he probably had a few playthings enjoyed by dirty people who actually liked doing perverse things to each other, he hurried up to the front door and rang a bell.

“The cunning swine,” she raged in a brain ravaged by jealousy, “wait till I get my hands on him!”

The door was opened and Constance, a woman she had never seen before, smiled at her husband, said something that was probably totally filthy, and he trotted into her home as the door shut behind him.

So that’s what a woman of that sort looks like, she raged inside, and I might have known, the filthy w***e! But I’ll wait a few minutes before I challenge them! Oh yes, I’ll wait until they’ve got themselves all naked, and then we’ll see who ends up victorious!

That’s what she did. She waited for five minutes, and that was quite enough for her. With a slam of the car door and a flicker from the indicator lights as she fired her key at it, she stormed like a venomous dervish towards the front door.

There was a bell-push there, but she knocked a brass knocker for volume and effect.

The same woman, the creature who had opened the door for Bert, after a very brief pause … she’d been expecting a longer one as the two immoral perverts got dressed hurriedly … opened the door with a tempting and rather beguiling smile on her bewitching face. At least, that’s how Mildred saw it.

“Where is he?” she bellowed as she barged past the offensive Constance Bingley and, using her considerable weight and karate-fuelled muscles, stomped into what she took to be the living room.

It was, and Bert was there, sitting on a settee with a book open on his lap and another next to him, on the arm. But, and this was the shocker, he was fully dressed. His jeans were clearly as body-hugging and fastened as they’d been when he’d left their house not half an hour earlier. And Mildred had expected evidence of perverse immorality, items of underwear strewed here, there and everywhere and the fragrance of intoxicating perfumes in the air.

But no. Here was Bert and he had a book on his knees.

But Mildred’s mind was still following a trail, and even though it was obviously wrong she couldn’t shake it from her head.

“So this is what you get up to when I go to my classes!” she stormed, “cavorting with a w***e when my back’s turned! I’ll get you home, Bert Simpson, and I’ll let you know what I think of the sort of man who behaves like this when his wife’s back is turned! Aren’t my knickers good enough for you that you need someone else’s?”

Constance was no push-over. She was used to dealing with unruly teenagers who sought refuge in the library from wet weather, and she was having no wild woman like this stranger shouting about underwear in her house.

“Excuse me,” she said, her voice a practised cold verging on icy, “but I would oblige you to be more moderate in my house!”

“So who do you think you are?” raged Mildred, completely incapable of casting aside her imagined scene and substituting it for an unexpected reality, “whoring with my man the moment my back’s turned? Earning your filthy crust by robbing a man who can barely afford a new rubber blade for his windows when he needs one? You and your kind are disgusting!”

“Mildred,” said Bert, standing up and placing the book onto the settee next to him. His face was normally placid but now it was furious. “I’ve had enough of you! Who do you think you are barging into this lady’s house when all she’s doing is teaching me to read so that I don’t have to depend on you for every form I have to fill in! And using such language! You should be ashamed of yourself!”

“Teaching...” stammered Mildred as the backdrop of unreality melted away from her mind and she saw the scene for what it was. “Teaching….” she repeated, then unable to do or say anything, though an apology would probably have been appropriate, she fled from the room and from the house, slamming the front door behind her and cursing as she went.

“That’s the wife,” explained Bert unnecessarily, “and when her temper’s up she’s nowt but a fish-wife and I hate her!”

“I’m sorry...” began Constance.

“Now I should think my lessons are over,” almost wept Bert, “and I was doing so well.”

“You can still come,” smiled Constance, “because you are doing well and, to tell the truth, I quite like you.”

© Peter Rogerson 13.01.18