CONSTANCE AND A COFFEE

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

The day after feeling ill Constance returns to work

“I suppose that Frank’s a nice man,” said Constance to her very part-time assistant Janet Goody. “He stayed with me for half an hour when we got back yesterday and told me the story of his life! He works for the Brumpton Courier.”

It was the day after Constance had collapsed at work and Janet had been asked by someone at the council to work an extra day because there was nobody else if the librarian was still ill.

“Your Frank seemed all right,” nodded Janet, “do you fancy him? It’s about time you got a bit of love in your life.”

“I’m perfectly all right as I am, and he’d not my Frank,” replied Constance, but without conviction. Maybe the nightmare of a couple of nights ago had got to her, when in the dream she had been scorned as useless as she lay, dead, in her coffin, useless because she was alone and childless.

“Everyone needs someone,” comforted Janet.

“My mother didn’t have anyone,” Constance reminded her.

“She must have had somebody or you wouldn’t be around,” pointed out Janet. “I’m afraid that’s the main fact of life!”

“She was very religious,” sighed Constance, “and always said that her faith was enough for her and she would never need another man.”

“Faith’s not very satisfactory when you’re alone at night and need the comfort of another person, maybe even in bed with you...” Janet was a happily married woman, had three children and a husband who adored her. She knew what she was talking about because her own life was the kind that most men and women aspire to have. Constance was aware of this and might have been jealous, but she’d read loads of romances and knew the road to paradise was never straight or smooth but usually got there in the end, and even with nobody on her horizon that thought comforted her.

“My mum, for as long as I can remember, was a single mother, and happy being it.” Constance told her, but that wasn’t quite true, was it?

“Well, you know what’s best for you,” sniffed Janet.

“I’m just off to sort out the romance section,” said Constance. “There are quite a few books in quite the wrong place.”

“Okay.” Janet felt like making a comment about Constance’s fondness for the fictitious romances of a host of imagined women but decided against it.

Constance tried to look purposeful as she strode to the shelves where dozens of female hearts were broken and repaired, where handsome men with pure hearts eventually cuddled the sweetest of ladies in loving embraces, and sighed when she got there. And all in print. All without a human thought.

There was Rodney once, she thought, the funeral director’s lad who came to see me after mum died… the way he spoke to me, the way he looked at me… I told him the kind of funeral my mum had always said she wanted… I could talk to him, and he listened sympathetically. Maybe I should have got to know him a little bit, sort of personally, or, and this is most likely, he was only doing his job and trained to sound sympathetic. But I did like him. I know mum said it’s best to leave men completely alone, to have nothing to do with them because they’re a waste of space, but he might have really been quite nice…

She picked up a paperback about a hospital teeming with romances and rejections and a final happy ending, and sighed again. She’d read that book twice in the past year, and the second time wasn’t accidental. She’d read it for the happy ending. She’d read it because it assured her that whatever the route that life might guide you along there might always be an arrival at a better place.

She needed that better place.

Her mother’d had it rough.

And that roughness soured her, made her hate men. Made her even hate me! Yes, she did her best to be a good mother … and she was. But underneath it all, buried so that only she might see it, was the knowledge that I was part of my father. I had his genes, his eyes, the things I inherited from him, those that would always make her distrust me. Those that made a bit of her hate me.

She told me she’d tried to dig me out of her when I was no more than a foetus. She’d have done anything to rid her body of the intruder growing in her womb, but it hadn’t worked. Maybe she’d gone about it half-heartedly because she really know it was wrong. Maybe she was afraid that an abortion like that might rebound on her and kill her. Who knows? Not even me…

Janet’s voice came softly to her, “Coffee, Constance?”

“That’d be nice.” The reply was automatic, but coffee would be nice.

I remember thinking that a man like Rodney, and he was quite young I think, would have saved me from … from what? Am I lonely? Would he have saved me from years of loneliness? No: I haven’t felt lonely! I’ve got my own life! My thoughts! My hobbies and interests, my caravan…

Yes, my caravan. For two weeks holiday a year! And always on my own! But I meet people, don’t I, holiday friends...

If I was a character in one of the books that I’m tidying in between feeling sorry for myself, I’d be with an impossibly good-looking bloke, we’d go off in that caravan, towards the setting or the rising sun, and park it in a field, and he’d smother me with kisses and we’d move ever closer together until our hearts beat as one…

“It’s ready,” called Janet.

“What?”

“Your coffee, silly! Come and get it while it’s hot and before the rush begins.”

There wouldn’t be a rush. There never was. Libraries weren’t for rushes. They were for quiet research, quieter reading, wonderful young women falling head over heels in love with ever-so handsome young men.

They’re always young … and I’m thirty three… that’s not so young...”

“Coming,” she called, and put the last book in its place.

The Sultan’s Garden… I read that … it wasn’t so good as most. I didn’t really like it. It didn’t have a happy ending. Well, it did if death is a happy ending, and a garden made of flowers planted as a memorial is a happy ending…

Janet looked at her thoughtfully. “You don’t look right yet,” she said.

“I was remembering someone. A man, a youngish man, from the undertaker’s when my mum died.”

“Did you fancy him?”

Constance frowned. “My mum had just passed away. I know we didn’t get on as well as we could have, but she was still my mum and I was upset. He was just being sympathetic and nice, that’s all.”

“Of course.” Janet looked at her quite seriously. “And Frank?” she asked.

“He drove me home,” sighed Constance, “I was feeling lousy so I was glad that he did. I made him some coffee.”

“So you do fancy him?”

Constance stared at her. “I never said that!” she exclaimed.

“But you were feeling sick as a pig and still went to the trouble of making him coffee? You fancy him all right!”

Constance looked down, examined the floor, bent down and picked up a scrap of waste paper.

I suppose I like him. A little bit, she thought, maybe just a bit but I didn’t and still don’t really know him....

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© 2018 Peter Rogerson

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Reviews

barleygirl

What a delightful ditty! I love the way you pick up on so many of the romantic notions in life & pack them into your story with gentle honesty. This reminds me of the way people will often assume everyone wants what they want in life & therefore, anyone without it must be miserable or at least incomplete. As a person who's never been married in 61 years, I always hated when others read this as something different than what it was, according to what they believed about romantic necessity. Excellent dialogue & dreamy asides thru-out (((HUGS))) Fondly, Margie