2. ROWING DOWN THE RIVER

Contrasting the young man with the old...

When Chantelle looked him straight in the face after he mentioned marriage his heart went all a-flutter. It was her eyes, clear, intense, intelligent … he’d always thought that the last thing the female sex possessed was a surfeit of intelligence. He was of the old school, the one that thought that women were best served if they were allowed to become drudges in kitchens which amounted to all they really wanted, and now here was a young female, he wasn’t sure how young but she was clearly more than a child, and the light in her eyes spoke of deeply intelligent thought.

“Pardon sir?” she said in reply. And as she stood there in her pastel tee-shirt and white shorts, smart, clean, an image came back to him of another girl on another day, long, long ago when his life had been near it’s beginning rather than its ending...

What had been her name?

Chantelle? Had it been Chantelle? He rather thought it had been, an unusual name for the pre-war years when she’d been a very brief tease in his life. Yes, Chantelle something or other, he’d never remember that, though he was sure it was one of those double-barrelled names that suggested breeding and a fine home with more bedrooms than made sense.

He’d been on the river with her. They did that back then, he in his striped blazer and she in her fancy white shorts. It was a small rowing boat, and he was doing the rowing. He’d done things like that back then, rowing lazily down a river, dodging in and out of the shadows cast by passing elms and oaks and the odd dreaming willow.

And she had been smoking a cigarette that was clenched in a shiny decorative holder, and sometimes blowing the smoke towards him, and even though it annoyed him because he couldn’t smoke whilst he was rowing he had laughed with her and cracked some puerile little joke, and she had laughed back.

Then, and he did this knowing how very naughty it was likely to be, he had pulled up to a hidden bank where the edge was crumbling, and grinned at her.

“Chantelle,” he had said, “have you any idea what I’ve got on my mind?”

And she had looked back at him with the sort of expression that suggested that she knew exactly what he was thinking, but, teasingly, shook her head.

“What do you think I am? A mind reader?” she had asked, and he had guffawed as if she had just said the wittiest thing ever said, and had slapped his own thighs like a jesting person might, and had said “of course you are, my pretty Chantelle...”

And as his ancient self rested his back against the old wooden gate post and he struggled for support, he could see that Chantelle in this girl here, this bright, rosy, golden-haired girl.

And he was ninety three and could barely move a muscle let alone do anything about the thoughts that whirred in his mind, like they had back in the river-rowing days.

“Then I’ll tell you, Braxton,” that Chantelle had said. Chantelle Pembury-Smythe or something like that. “I think you’ve got a dirty little mind and want to know what I’m wearing under these shorts...”

He hadn’t got so far as wondering that, not back in those days when it took a huge amount of courage to even hold a girl by the hand. Because holding hands was called walking out, and if a boy was walking out with a girl he was just about married to her. And he’d been too young to marry anyone, hadn’t he? Not even a Chantelle like this one, though in a skittish way he did like her.

“As if I would,” he replied with just the right tone of voice to suggest she’d hit the nail on its head straight away and discovered the very kernel of his curiosity, which, he supposed, was strange because she’s planted the thought in his mind and created, out of nowhere, a brand new desire.

“Well, naughty Braxton, you’re not going to find out, though it you really, really want to know you could look in Spencer’s shop window and see exactly the same sort in there where anyone can see them and stare at them if they’re so inclined!”

Spencer’s shop was where the ladies went to buy what they called their unmentionables when they were mentioning them, and he’d looked in its window sometimes when he’d had nothing better to do, and there had been a few items of clothing on display, the modest stuff that the shopkeeper liked to think decent law-abiding people would think was all he sold, but there was sometimes a frilly this or tha. Placed casually here or there, the sort that made teenage boys think of very adult things until they got shooed off by Mr Spencer himself.

Back aching, the older Braxton whispered “that’s why he put them there, to give us lads something to look at...”

Chantelle, not the girl in the boat but the girl on the orchard path standing by a gate and curious what the old man wanted, wondered what on Earth he was on about and who the lads might be. Because he couldn’t be going on about himself, could he, not with so bent a back and so many lines on his face?

The other Chantelle, the one under the sun by the river, smirked at the boy Braxton rather suggestively.

“Though if you did want to know I could describe them,” she teased, “pure white, and silky where they touch my you-know-where...”

And it had all been too much for him, a great deal too much, but what could he do? What could he say? There was nothing decent or honourable for him to come out with that would hide his blushing confusion, but he said ot anyway.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he’d said, aloud and without actually giving the meaning of his words as much as half a thought.

And it had exploded, there and then, into something he’d always wanted to forget but never had, and ended up with him having to row that boat back to where they’d started as quickly as he could while she spent a great deal of time explaining to him exactly what a filthy little boy he was, and if he ever suggested that sort of thing again she’d make sure his father would know, and that might well end up with him getting some sort of sound thrashing, because a sound thrashing was what filthy minded little boys like him deserved.

He’d never mentioned it to her again. After all, she hadn’t been that sort of girl even though she was called Chantelle.

“She was Chantelle, he murmured so quietly that this Chantelle hardly heard a syllable other than her own name, “and I don’t think I ever saw her again. I wish I had. I heard she could be fun!”

“I’m called Chantelle,” she told him, “what was it you wanted, sir?”

But he was lost for the moment in another time and place, and could only manage to whisper “she was pretty as a picture and I should have married her. Yes, I should have married Chantelle!”

© Peter Rogerson 01.12.19