17 THE TWO BLACK DRESSES

Two women preparing for an evening out

Sophia was cross with herself. She’d persuaded her visitor, a Priest, of all people, to go out for a drink (or two) with her that evening and now she knew with absolute certainty that she’d be unable to say anything during the vast lulls between sips of whatever was his poison, and end up having a glass too many herself as a consequence.

And what should she wear?

It was years since she’d even gone out with a man on her own, and back in her student days when she had been persuaded to drop her reserve alone with this or that lad she’d still managed to keep it above eye level. So what should she wear? Something that wouldn’t intimidate him, for sure, and something that wouldn’t give him ideas either, if he was prone to getting such things. After all, even priests were men, weren’t they?

A dress? Her black one ... would that be too … revealing? She’d bought it two or three years earlier when Mildred had suggested she tried to play the field if she wanted the sort of personal experiences that she could trawl through in order to add colour to her already successful books. It was a little short for a woman of her years, she thought, though in truth she was far from being old. But her knees were well in evidence when she wore it, and she wasn’t proud of them.

She had a nice trouser suit, in beige. That might do. It was smart and neutral. No, not so much neutral as boring. He would look at her as they sat in the pub (not the Crab and Lobster, for goodness’s sake, but somewhere decent), and see bland.

Did she mind being bland?

None of the heroes in her romantic novels were bland. She often described them, down to the last details, largely drawn from life. Not her life, of course, but men she saw during her excursions to the supermarket or library. She would sit in a chair in the reading section of the library and spend a great deal of time people watching, and some of those people would, unbeknown to them, appear in one or more of her books. She’d even found Germaine Paltry in the library, for goodness’ sake, and Germaine had been the heroine of her three more successful novels, until she’d finally been married off in When the Cuckoo Calls and married in a service conducted by Father Bream, with whom she’d had a mild flirtation until his celibacy got in the way.

How she would have loved to be Germaine, even though the character had suffered several disappointments on her way to living happily ever after.

But none of this self-indulgent thinking took her any closer to deciding what to wear. Would jeans do? Jeans went with just about anything, and she had just the one pair because she didn’t really like wearing trousers of any sort, which also ruled out the beige suit, she supposed.

Then her mind flittered to imagining what he might be like.

He was a Priest. That much was obvious from his collar. But beneath that uniform accessory he was what she knew was good looking in a rakish sort of way. He clearly had a sense of humour, she could tell from the way his mouth had created lines that indicated a great deal of smiling. And he had a full head of light brown hair even though he was no longer in the comfortably young bracket of manhood. He was handsome, she decided, in the sort of way that a lot of men weren’t. And he probably smelled gorgeous, too. He had when he’d given her a lift to the Presbytery, anyway.

What would he be interested in? He’d probably not be the sort to talk God all night long, but if it turned out that he was then the night, she decided, would be remarkably short because she had no personal religious belief whatsoever and although she accepted that others did, she hardly wanted to waste her life discussing the issue.

What else might they talk about? Music? Films? Sport? She rather hoped not the latter because she’d never been particularly fond of sport of any sort, probably because years ago, before University, her father had taken her to a small league football match which had bored her almost to tears.

I think I’ll wear the black dress, she decided when the subject of conversation had proved fruitless.

So black dress it was going to be.

She dressed and applied a modest amount of make-up, then sat waiting for her beau to call.

Oo0oo

Pamela Smythe was quite looking forwards to her evening out.

She arrived back at her flat from a long day in the company of Detective Inspector Craddock, a man she had to almost admire because his results were above average, but who she found detestable. It wasn’t that he tried anything on with her even though she knew she was a great deal better looking than anyone else in the station, and that wasn’t her ego talking, she was by quite a margin the most attractive woman in the place. But he didn’t try anything on with her, not even offering her the odd saucy glance, and that pleased her. After all, it was work, where she earned her living, he was a married man, and looks and casual relationships didn’t come into it.

She wasn’t the partying sort. There were some girls, she knew, who lived for parties and too much drink and a great deal too much sex. She wasn’t one of those. She liked to take things more quietly and was waiting, she told the curious, for the right man to come along.

So she asked the question, had he? This man tonight?

Of course not!

She was going out with a grieving widower, an angry man when it came to his attitude to the D.I. Everything in her mind told her that what she was doing was wrong. Stupid, even. But she had craftily engineered his inviting her out, ostensibly to discuss what he should do about darned Brian Craddock.

If they spent more than five minutes in a pub having a drink it was never going to be just about Craddock, largely because there was damn-all she could say about the man other than he was a successful copper who jumped to conclusions too often, which upset the innocent and embarrassed her. Full stop. That was it.

So what should she wear? She didn’t have long to make her mind up, so she concentrated on the matter as she took a swift shower during which she washed away what she imagined was the stench of the police station.

She knew that he was in mourning still, so she didn’t want to give the impression of a woman on the pull. No, she was to be friendly, open, but the evening mustn’t have any of the overtones of suppressed sexuality that she usually quite enjoyed. She must be a person willing and able to offer the grieving man her sympathy, her understanding, and if need be a shoulder to cry on. And that must be it. No more than that. And in order to be that woman she would, she decided, wear her little black dress. That was the right colour to set a decent, moral and understanding tone.

It wasn’t little but not too little, yet it was short enough not to look frumpy. It didn’t look common but it did look smart and she’d always thought she looked modestly attractive in it. And modestly attractive was as far as she wanted to go, because Jonathan O’Donnelly was a handsome enough sporty school teacher who needed no more than a few words of helpful advice from a woman who knew the ropes, and she would add, maybe, a soupçon of feminine understanding to the mix.

That was it. The black dress, a tidy appearance, not too much make-up, she didn’t want to give the wrong impression, and let’s get the evening over quickly. But no indecent haste and no lingering after closing time.

And she would be driving. That way he’d understand when she had just the one glass of wine followed by fruit juice until they left. She wouldn’t get tiddly and he wouldn’t become the carnivorous beast that all men can be when they’ve got a drink inside them.

So she dressed swiftly, and waited for the time to come when she had leave her flat to pick him up, still wondering why it was she was going out with him, and knowing at the back of her mind that there might have been something more than just sympathy that had spurred her on.

© Peter Rogerson 23.01.19