19 THE TWO PUBS

Matters of faith and love

Had Father Samuel Tinder not been dead and lying like the cold meat that he was in the town mortuary he might well have been upset at the sight of two couples in the Cap and Gown public house. After all, his ideas of the world had ancient roots, roots that probably were seeded before the Bronze Age of Earth dawned, ideas formulated by simple men needing to do two things. Firstly, because they were human they needed to understand the why and wherefore of the world about them, its origins, their own origins, everything sparked into being by their curiosity. And secondly, because they were men in love with their rough and ready women who constantly proved to be unable to curtail their female tongues, they needed to find a means of controlling them. The concept of original sin went a long way to doing that! And a man-loving misogynist of a God.

Men, they thought, should be uppermost. And men, the late Father Samuel Tinder had thought, should be the very pinnacle of creation. He had been a stone age man living in the twenty-first century, but he was dead. So there was nobody frowning when recently widowered Jonathan O’Donnelly took the pretty young police constable by one elbow and guided her towards the alcove where Sophia and the new priest were sitting.

“Imagine meeting you two here,” he said, smiling broadly despite the weight of widowerhood that still hung heavily on his heart. ”It was the officer who noticed you first!”

“Pamela, please,” interjected the officer. “I’m not on duty now.”

Father Potter stood up politely. “Would you care to join us?” he said.

“We wouldn’t like to interrupt anything,” muttered Jonathan.

“I’m only trying to find out what I can about my predecessor,” the priest told him, “and it seemed more sociable to ask the lady what she knew about the fellow over a drink.”

“Then it should be me you’re asking. I don’t think Sophia knows much about the man he was.”

“That’s what I said,” confessed Sophia.

“Whereas I teach religious studies at the Comprehensive and got to know him,” said Jonathan, “and I thought he was he was a b*****d before the funeral debacle!”

“Jonathan!” chastised Sophia, “Peter’s too much of a gentleman to know what you mean by saying such a thing!”

“Me a gentleman? I’m no such thing and know exactly what you mean, and b*****d seems to be the right word for him when I think of the way he treated you at your lovely wife’s funeral,” said the priest quietly.

“Respect to you!” said Pamela Smythe to him. “I’m so used to hearing my colleagues call a spade a spade that it comes as a bit of a surprise when I hear the same words coming from a priest!”

“I dared so there are some who might suggest that I’m no normal priest,” sighed Peter, “because there’s a lot of gobbledegook in religion that’s precisely what the word implies: superstition inherited from an age when it was used by both church and state to control the people. But don’t get me on to that subject or I’ll end up convincing you that I’m a raving atheist, and the truth is I do have a little bit of atheist in my brain.”

“This is getting interesting,” grinned Jonathan, “I’ve heard rumours that the Bishop might share some of those ideas.”

“I may well be putting a priest at the heart of my next book,” put in Sophia, “not an atheist one, but a real man who gets urges that men say they get and knows that he’s going against the dictates of the church if he succumbs to them.”

“Ah, the gnarly problem of celibacy,” suggested Peter.

“Yes, what does Padre Peter Potter of the Presbytery do about that?” asked Jonathan. “As a mere mortal I can’t understand how a man can live in a world where there are many beautiful women, and at the same time not give in to inevitable urges of an, er, physical nature.”

“Padre Peter Potter of the Presbytery might not be exactly celibate,” came the thoughtful reply, “Padre Peter Potter is a man, and he’s darned grateful for that! The celibacy thing was something invented long after the time of Christ by men of Rome for purposes of their own, including the old dogmatic belief that women bring men down from a state of holiness. But in my opinion it’s all a load of rubbish. Though there are some priests who stick to it, my predecessor being one of them. I, if you’re interested, am not.”

“You mean you…, you know, are prepared…?” asked Jonathan awkwardly.

“I believe in love,” stated the priest, “and love of a woman is about the most perfect love that there is unless you get beguiled by affection for a possibly non-existent spirit in the skies. Look, let’s change the subject. I feel as if I'm under attack here!”

oo0oo

Constance Bingley was feeling a little depressed as she walked home from work. She had left the library rather late, it being what they used to call early closing day and the library still sticking to an out-dated opening regime which had given her time to do some paperwork without the interruptions customers always brought. As usual, her paperwork had run into overtime. Unpaid overtime at that.

Now the day was turning to night and she felt she ought to have something better to do than sit at home watching the television when there was nothing that appealed to her on any of the dozens of channels available to her. It was lovely weather, and she ought to have something to do that was more productive than nothing.

She could, she told herself, read a book, but spending a glorious evening reading was akin to her taking a busman’s holiday. She spent the entire day and evening with books and would have liked something different for a her free time.

“Miss Bingley,” came a voice, “you are Miss Bingley, aren’t you? I hardly recognise you outside the library!”

It was the elderly gentleman, Bernard, the one she had introduced to Sophia Stone’s books and who had declared undying affection for them, even though he acknowledged they were, in the parlance of the day, ‘chick lit’.

“Why, it’s Bernard,” she said, wishing she had reached home and closed the door behind her before he spotted her.

“That woman writer,” he puffed, breathlessly, “that Sophia Stone that you know. Where can I get hold of her? There’s a few things I want to ask her, like was she looking through my keyhole when my misses was alive, ‘cause she’s got the things we said and did spot on!”

“Really, Bernard?” she asked.

He grinned at her. “Sort of,” he said, “it’s just that I want to ask her if she got any closer to my bedroom door than the front door! ‘Cause if she did I don’t want to read any more just in case what she saw wasn’t good enough!”

“Oh, you’re safe enough there, Bernard. None of her books peep into bedrooms. She leaves that up to your imagination, which is what makes her books so fascinating.”

“Thank goodness for that! I say, lass, we’ve well nigh reached the Crab and Lobster … how about me buying you a drink. Reward for all the kindness you show an old man.”

“I don’t know about that, Bernard….” she murmured, doubtfully.

“It’s just, I’m at a loose end… and it’s a fair time since I supped a glass or two with a lovely lady like yourself.”

It’s a fair time since I supped a glass or two with anyone… what can be the harm?

“All right,” she said, “for a few minutes, but I’m paying.”

“Then I’d best have a whole pint,” he grinned, “take advantage!”

“You’re an old rogue,” she said, “wait till I tell Sophia about you! She might even slip you into her next book! Then how would you feel?”

“Me with one of them lovely lasses whose hearts she breaks, then mends, then breaks again… I’d be out of my depth, and that’s no word of a lie!”

“I don’t believe a word of it. Come on. You want a pint of something wet… but what’ll I have?”

“Anything you like,” he suggested, winking, “what with you paying.”

“A white wine. That’s what I’ll have. A white wine,” she decided.

“What would that Sophia Stone have to sup, then?” he asked, “just in case I bump into her one day and there’s a bar waiting to serve us.”

“You know,” she said, glancing back, “I don’t actually know what her poison is. But I’ll tell you what … why don’t you ask her … she’s coming into the pub right behind us, and she’s got a man in tow!”

© Peter Rogerson 25.01.19