20. The Lodger

THE POETESS Part 20

“Blast this pandemic! It’s obliging me to live in the past rather than venture forth into the future,, and that past’s a pretty bleak place too.” muttered the elderly Rosie as she stood by the side window that looked out on Strong Lane as it meandered towards her house.

If Roy were to came back, she thought, if dreams of a lifetime could come true and I’d see him again, taste that kiss before the world fades and I pass away for good… but it’s no good me getting maudlin! I’m not on my last legs yet!

She made her way back to her armchair and sighed as she lowered herself back into it.

The memory of that expression on the map-man Mike’s face as Roy’s briefest possible return to her life ended in his marching off having seen what he possibly thought was an intimate moment. After all, the man was in his undies already!

The silly fool! What did he expect? He went off and married another woman, and Violet was pretty enough, there’s no doubt about that, but she was so naive, allowing an older man do what he did to her and wondering why she became pregnant! But at the exact moment when he might have sailed joyfully back into my life and welcomed with open arms I was about to be kissed by another man. Michael bloody Micklecott.

“Who was that?” asked Mike as she stared after Roy.

“The love of my life,” whispered Rosie, “the boy I kissed the one time, and have yearned for ever since. The boy whose kiss stayed with me as I bought this cottage, as I had it done up and brought back to life, the boy who will be with me until the day I die…”

“The man, you mean,” muttered Michael, probably more cruelly than he intended.

“Man then!” snapped Rosie, “and did you see what he was wearing? Eh? On a sunny scalding day like this he was wearing shorts! Yet you come to see me on this identical day in thick jeans and smelling of sweat!”

That was mean of me too, but then it was true and his boxer shorts were comical and all cartoony and not the sort of thing to make a woman squirm inside whilst wondering what they concealed… Did I have such thoughts back then? I was into my thirties I suppose, and still almost as innocent as the sixteen year-old who had found her way here almost accidentally after school one day and changed her attitude to life with a single kiss…

“Were you going to?” she asked.

“Was I going to what?”

“Kiss me? Like Roy did all those years ago? Wrap that tongue of yours round mine until all I want to do is squeal and demand even more? And you in your underpants too, unbuttoned and raring to go.”

“I never button them up.”

That scared him, all right, the mention of his boxers! Maybe he was feeling a hint of an urge under the sun, maybe his maleness was starting to drive him closer to me… he wasn’t so bad a man, there wasn’t anything remotely wrong or evil or nasty about him, he was an ordinary youngish man whose heart had been broken and who hoped that one day it would heal in the hands of a nurse or a witch, and he wasn’t probably particularly bothered which would do it, maybe I’d do, nurse or witch…

“I’m sorry for being catty,” murmured Rosie, and she did genuinely feel sorry.

“I’ll be going,” he said, “I’m sorry … I shouldn’t have come. You seem to haver some issues…”

“Like you?” she said, “I think we’ve both got some issues and I suppose I can be catty. I tell you what. I’ve got some cans of beer in the fridge, nice and cool for a day like this. Would you care for one? It’s thirsty work is this sun-bathing, and we can sit in my kitchen and talk our woes away.”

“My woes are too old to deserve to be re-awoken,” he said, “but a beer would be lovely this weather.”

“I think so too.”

It was better in the kitchen. Cooler, not just as a result of the room shading them from the sun but because sitting at a table was more formal and less suggestive. After all, he was in his undies and I had not been so unsexed by a rather sterile life not to be interested. Nature does it to we humans and if it didn’t there are few women who’d have a second baby after the pains of having a first. At least, that’s what people tell me. I’m well stricken with age and am childless so sadly or happily have no personal experience.

“That’s a very pretty dress you’re wearing,” he ventured. “It sort of, well, damn it, you’re pretty enough yourself, but it adds to your looks!”

“I bought it for this weather,” she replied, “it covers most of me up for the sake of decency but also allows a large part of my skin to breathe.”

“And you live here all on your own?” he asked.

She nodded. “I like my own company,” she conceded.

“And you wouldn’t want, say, a lodger?” he asked, suddenly nervous, as if that question represented the real reason nor him turning up on her doorstep.

Rosie eyes him, suddenly suspiciously. “Why do you ask” she asked.

“No reason.” There didn’t seem to be much truth in that simple reply.

“Are you looking for new lodgings?” she asked, “is that why you’re here in your sweaty jeans and drinking one of my cans of best bitter?”

He blushed. Then: “I’m in lodgings at the moments, but I can’t stand my landlady, and her husband’s not much better.”

“How?” asked Rosie, frowning.

“Well, all she wants to do all day is smoke endless cigarettes, which makes the house stink, and drink even more endless mugs of coffee endlessly gossiping with the woman next door, which means she doesn’t do half of what she said she’d do, like bung my clothes in the washing machine once every so often! When you asked me why I was wearing jeans on a day like this, that’s why. My other stuff is waiting to be washed.

“You could always visit a launderette,” she said lightly, “and do your own washing.”

“I could. But she charges extra for it,” grumbled Mike, “and it sticks in my craw having to pay for something twice. And her husband. He works on the buses, but I doubt he’s ever sober! It’s just a good job he isn't a driver, that’s all I can say.”

“And when you were wondering what to do today you thought you’d go down Strong Lane and see if that kind lady in the old Miller’s Cottage is willing to become your slave and scrub your smalls for tuppence a week?” she smiled.

Because she was. I was. Suddenly there was a window that might let another human being into part of my life. And a man at that. Who could tell, I wondered, if I let a man get as close as the spare room next to mine? I was already becoming a frustrated old maid whose only love affair was with a small plastic battery-operated intimate vibrating device….

“You can move in tomorrow,” said Rosie, fetching two more cans from the fridge, “if you promise to be a good boy,,,

© Peter Rogerson, 26.03.21

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