37. A LIFE OF LOVE

Concluding the story.

Wallace stood on the edge of a briar patch as the bulldozer moved in. He was holding Maureen by the hand as the earth started shaking when machinery rumbled and the first ruined walls of an old deserted cottage fell into an untidy heap of ancient bricks and the dust of ages.

“Well well,” came a familiar voice from behind him, and he turned round, a broad grin on his face.

“Innocent, by all the Saints,” he said, joyfully, “my goodness, it’s been a long time! How are you keeping these days, old friend?”

“Really well,” came the reply, “married, three kids and a mortgage. What more would a man need?”

“And a successful career, if what I see on the local telly every night is anything to go by,” chortled Wallace.

“I’m more radio than telly,” confessed Innocent, “County Radio, an up and coming local station for the stars! So what are they doing to our fallout shelter? I heard all about it from the news guys. And what about the second dead body in the cellar. That spooked me!”

“It was the last episode of a sad story,” sighed Wallace.

“Tell me more. I’m out of touch, sadly,” urged Innocent.

“Well, Penny’s father did time, you know. He didn’t kill anyone but his intervention actually caused the accident that killed the girl. Yet it was concealing the body that sent him to jail, and not reporting the incident. Freddie Barnard got away with a non-custodial sentence, probably because of his age and the fact that he only had honest lust in his heart! Anyway, Ashton’s wife left him when everything came out and when he was released he went to pieces. With no job, no wife, not even a home, he took to the booze in a big way, and the last anyone saw of him was as if he was a tramp. Then, several years ago now, he went off the radar, until, that is, we found his bones in the cellar where he must have been for five years of more, according to the pathologist. He’d even made a pile of the coal, you remember that in one corner? But he never lit it. Probably couldn’t. There were some charred scraps of paper but the coal was unburnt. The theory was he crawled there for shelter one winter, and went to sleep, never to wake up again. Sad, really, the whole tale. Penny was pretty, you know, really, really pretty, but there was that greedy streak in her...”

“So it was him you found on the same mattress where his daughter died?” asked Innocent. “some kind of justice, I suppose.”

“Anyway, it was no more than a schoolboy crush on my part, with Penny I mean,” explained Wallace, eyeing Maureen. “You know Maureen, don’t you? My infinitely better half!”

“He doesn’t know how right he is,” grinned his wife.

“Stand back, please!” bellowed a voice as the bulldozer moved closer to them. “Stuff can fly quite a distance when old beams and goodness knows what are dislodged,” explained the foreman of the demolition firm, waving them to move.

“OK. I’ve seen enough,” nodded Wallace, “it’s just good to know the old place is gone for good and there will be no more bodies on mattresses in cellars.”

“And our fall-out shelter,” grinned Innocent.

“If they know that it’s there,” suggested Wallace, “they might just knock the building down, cover up the stairs that lead down into that underground, what would you call it, mausoleum? It’s more than a cellar to my mind! Then the ages might pass and our fall-out shelter will grow ever damper until one day the Earth reclaims it and there’s a new hollow in the ground where it was.”

“Come on, fellas,” called Maureen, who had wandered on ahead, “what about fish and chips for lunch seeing as we walk past the best fish and chip shop in the county on our way home? You coming too, Innocent?”

He shook his head. “I would,” he murmured sadly, “but I’m doing the two o’clock weather bulletin and need to check my facts and be certain in my mind what I’m talking about in time.”

There was a crashing sound behind them, and a mushroom cloud of dust rose in the air where the bulk of the old cottage collapsed into a heap that seemed to slither away as they watched.

“I’d say that was our nuclear shelter done and dusted and filled with rubble,” grinned Innocent, “and about time too! I wonder how good it would have been at protecting us from fall-out?”

.“We thought it would, and I guess that’s really all that matters,” sighed Wallace. “Anyway, we’re still safe and sound and unpolluted by the stuff of bombs.”

“The stuff of nightmares you mean,” whispered Maureen, and she shuddered.

“Well, here’s my jalopy,” said Innocent regretfully, arriving at his four-by-four, “I’ll tell you what: I’ll pop round and see you one evening, and I’ll bring the wife. We’ll catch up on old times, because there were some good ones, well worth catching up on.”

“Did I know her?” asked Wallace, “I guess she wasn’t one of our crowd. Probably some well-educated young woman with a University degree and odd vowels and much too posh for us!”

“Not at all,” grinned Innocent, “I’m a traditionalist and married my first love. Do you remember Sarah McGivven?”

“The policeman’s daughter? The copper who had it in for you?” asked Wallace.

“The very same,” grinned Innocent, “and every time I see him he has to swallow his words. He may be a racist pig, but I love his daughter more than I love life itself, so I’m the winner.”

Then Innocent drove slowly off, and Wallace took Maureen by the hand once more. “It’s like a chapter has finally ended,” he said thoughtfully as a distant crash told him the last remnants of the old witch’s cottage were falling to the ground.

“What chapter might that be?” asked his wife, guessing the answer,

“My boyhood. My childhood. The olden days,” he replied, “when we were scared to death that the bomb might wipe us all out. When our fear drove us to an old cellar under a ruined cottage. When a friend was truly a friend. When for the first time in our lives we found a sort of love. Not the grown-up sort with all its problems but an innocent love, two lads together held in friendship by a mutual fear.”

“You had me back then too, Wallace,” she said quietly, “waiting in the wings.”

“And I loved you, but it was different. You were a girl, and that made you … special.”

She smiled at him. “And you were a boy, Wally, and that made you rather silly,” she said, “and I always loved you back then, and I always will.”

“A life of love,” he mused, “that’s what it’s been and always must be: a life of love.”

“Wait until Eloise brings home her first boyfriend before you make too many forecasts,” suggested Maureen, “he might be a nightmare!”

“Not with you as her mother, sweetheart. She knows. She’s already on the right path to share our life of love. Yes, she’s there alright. I can tell.”

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 15.07.19