8. THE WOMAN AT THE DOOR

Braxton's memories take him back to an affair with Colette...

Braxton Spendthrift stood absolutely still with the piece iof paper in one hand and a walking stick handle in the other whilst he stared at the message.

He’s got to be a slow reader, thought Chantelle, he’s never make it out of the remove class in my school reading that slowly…

Then he spoke. Or rather, mumbled… “But I haven’t got a son!”

He knew that much was true. For more years than he cared to remember he had wanted a son. Ever since his father had passed away with his wretchedly failing heart he’d known there ought to be someone to inherit the huge fortune stashed away in the vaults of more banks than you could count if you had a millipede’s legs to help you. He certainly wouldn’t spend a tenth of it even if he tried really hard.

He sighed and sat down on an upright and very uncomfortable chair by the back door proper.

Sons … they’re so important, so loathsomely impossibly important, he thought

Way back he’d been particularly keen on Colette producing a son for him.

My god, he thought as he crinkled the sheet of paper with its two-word message in his hand and let his mind rove over the past long lifetime. There had been this girl, this fabulous, beautiful girl. I didn’t half love Colette…he couldn’t help thinking.

He’d been approaching forty, it was the mid sixties and the Beatles were all the rage. Them and the Rolling Stones. He’d preferred the implied anarchy in the Stones, but none of that mattered now. He’d even let his hair grow indecently long and actually produced, for a few weeks, a wispy sort of beard before he’d acknowledged that beards weren’t his thing and shaved it off.

Colette was the girl (and she’d been younger than him by two decades, which didn’t matter one jot if she was going to hand a son to him on a silver platter. She was a girl of almost twenty, fabulous, vibrant, and she introduced him to legs. To her own legs, in actual fact, and a display that proved that women had legs that existed above the knees.

It was Colette, in actual fact, who wore the first miniskirt he’d seen on a lass. And the moment he saw those wonderful legs he knew that he loved her. Of course he did! Who wouldn’t? And he found himself wondering all sorts of things about what she might possibly wearing on her bottom, what brief little garment might be covering her decency, and he was hooked like never before.

Colette, though, was the proof if proof were ever needed, that a young woman didn’t have to be any kind of s**t to wear short skirts and dresses. She wore them because, firstly, she knew they suited her, made her attractive in a girly kind of way, pretty and almost childlike, and secondly because it was the height of fashion.

And he had decided to court the lass. Oh, he was old enough to be her father, he knew that much, he wished he’d met her years ago but it hadn’t happened, so he took her for a drink at his club and the number of eyes that swivelled almost on stalks when they walked in alarmed even him.

He knew what they were looking at. And so did she. He liked what he saw as envy in geriatric eyes slumped on easy chairs round coffee tables littered with brandy glasses and ashtrays, she hated the fact that she was there at all. In her eyes the old men were sleazy. They’d have her pretty dress off her no sooner than look at her if they could summon up the energy, which she doubted, and that wasn’t why she wore it.

“Let’s get out of here,” she whispered before they found a seat.

“But it’s my club!” he insisted.

“What do you think they’re all looking at?” she asked.

“You, I suppose,” he insisted, “because you’re beautiful.”

“It’s not my face they’re looking at,” she hissed.

He knew that, of course. Why should any man look at her face when she had legs like hers?

But he’d taken them to a pub a few doors away, and they’d sat in a corner, she’d had a Babycham, just the one, and he’d had the only drink he understood, brandy.

They’d sat and talked about all sorts of things and it had come as some surprise to him when he discovered that she had a brain. She was able to discuss politics with him, the fact that she really believed, with evidence to back her ideas up, that the ruling classes’ day was over and there was a bright new age in front of them, an age in which all men were deemed equal.

It opened his eyes, that much was true, even though he had a fistful of shallow and very selfish arguments against it. But the really scary thing was he didn’t really believe himself when he suggested there would always be those who gave the orders and those who obeyed them.

It was whilst sitting in that public house that he made the suggestion.

“You’d make a darned good mother,” he said, almost devoutly.

She smiled at him. “I’m not planning to be one of those yet awhile,” she said, “I want a career, something to do that I believe in, not the drudgery of washing nappies and endlessly cooking steak and chips for my fat husband!”

“But you’re not married,” he said,

“I know, but if I were I’m absolutely sure he’d grow to fat and want a skivvy,” she murmured, “once the lovey-dovey bit is over and done with, that is.”

He looked at her sadly. Such cynicism, he thought, surely her life will be better than that!

“It doesn’t have to be like that!” he assured her, “you’re obviously super-intelligent and will find a super-intelligent man!”

“Like you, you mean?” she asked, coyly.

And that fertilised the seed that her mini-skirt had planted in his already excited loins.

“Could be,” he whispered, “could very well be...”

Half a lifetime later he looked up at Chantelle where she was standing next to the open treasure chest in his porch and saw the same intelligence that he’d fallen for when he’d looked at Colette.

“So many women,” he whispered, “and all so perfect...”

Chantelle frowned. “Nobody’s perfect,” she told him.

“I wonder who took the treasure?” he asked himself, “I never had a son and I wanted one so badly...”

The porch door was open and suddenly a figure appeared in it, blotting out the slanting sun for a moment or two.

“Excuse me,” it said, “but are you Braxton Spendthrift?”

They both looked at the newcomer. A woman, fiftyish, pretty, almost, thought Chantelle, too pretty.

Braxton nodded, not vigorously. “At your service,” he mumbled.

She smiled at him. “Then hello dad,” she said, “it’s been an awfully long time...”

© Peter Rogerson 07.17.19