13. Something for the Weekend...

A WIDOW WOMAN part 13

The Reverend Jonah Pyke dared himself.

He went to a barber’s shop for a haircut, short back and sides was all te fashion, but he had something else on his mind.

A worm of a thought, unworthy of him but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist, had been eating at his mind. He had tried to pray it away, but that particular prayer went unanswered. Maybe it was his Lord’s will...

He had an unchristian (to him) desire to talk the widow Jane Simpson into bed. Her bed, because his own in the vicarage belonged to Christ, with an image of his father’s son, not his flesh father but his spiritual father, gazing down from the wall opposite his pillow. Or if not talk her into bed, onto any softly yielding surface that would suffice.

And his ignorance might have been only partial because he was aware that his desire could result in the conception and birth of a child and he had no intention of bringing that kind of shame onto the poor woman. He knew the biology of conception. He even knew that he was capable of producing the required seminal fluid. Once or twice, years ago in his youth, he had found himself moist with it when he woke up in the morning, and had even listened to boys at school discussing it and had experimented actually on himself, with a marked degree of truly enjoyable success.

His faith had put an end to that kind of thing. Almost, that is. His shame was it wasn’t a quite complete end. He was a weak mortal, and that was that.

And all this had built up, over virtually sterile years, into an almost uncontrollable urge to join his flesh with that of Jane Simpson. Every time he looked at her, pretty as a picture, he felt it and fought it off.

At first he wondered whether it was something to do with looking on her as a mother substitute. After all, she was that much older than him. She had two children and knew what it (he always mentally referred to his sexuality as it) was about and how to do it. She was probably old enough to just about be in his own mother’s generation and maybe he subconsciously wanted to learn to love her for her matriarchal self.

Or maybe he wanted to experience at least once in his life what love was all about. He watched movies from time to time, went to the cinema to enjoy the fantasy of lives that weren’t real, heard actors tell the actresses in their lives I love you, wanted to taste it for himself.

So he went to the barber’s shop for a haircut, and waited for the rather effeminate genius of the scissors to ask him the time old question,

“Is there anything else sir? For the weekend?”

And he swallowed, and shook his head. He just couldn’t.

“For the weekend?” he asked, assuming ignorance. He couldn’t let his dog collar down by displaying too much knowledge.

“You are a married clergyman, I presume? Something to take the risk out of life…” replied the barber almost teasingly, and he shuddered and left the shop without saying a word, shaking his head and hoping his silence didn’t convince the barber that, yes, he did want something for the weekend but didn’t want anyone to know.

“Maybe next time,” sniggered the man with the scissors to the back of his head.

Instead of returning to the vicarage where he had work to do, a sermon to write if nothing else, he made his way straight from the barber’s shop to Empire Road, his mind a torment of confusion as he wondered what had come over him.

He’d had it all planned. When asked the inevitable question he had intended to waffle on about a parishioner who was house-bound but who wanted to have a normal relationship with his wife but was in no position to support a family of demanding children. And then, on behalf of that fictitious parishioner he would buy a packet of three contraceptives with a smile and a knowing wink, and the barber and any other customers in his shop would never think they were for him. What a fine man of God, they would think, going that extra mile for one who can’t...

He was an unmarried clergyman and therefore had absolutely no need for prophylactics of any sort in any quantity. That’s what his faith demanded. That fiction must be kept intact and preserved for all eternity, or at least until he found himself a wife, which seemed unlikely because, and he admitted this shamefully to himself, he was enamoured of Jane Simpson, a widow.

“I’ve made an idiot of myself,” he confessed to Jane when he sat at her kitchen table nursing a cup of tea. “I was tempted … when the barber asked … something for the weekend … an image of you crossed my mind!”

She knew exactly what he meant, and it shocked her. Not so much that he had thought of her whilst having his hair cut, and that he was confessing that she herself was behind the whole notion of providing himself with condoms, but that he’d actually come out and said it to her.

“What do you mean, Jonah?” she asked.

“I scarpered. That’s what happened. I ran off like a scaredy-cat! So I didn’t shame myself by buying his something for the weekend. But I must admit in all honesty I did think of it for a tiny second.”

“You said you thought of me!”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Why?”

“For thinking of you like that, as if you were some floozy who would, you know, take anyone.”

“So how do you see me? You come round often enough, and you are welcome, but how do you see me?”

“You’re a friend.”

“And that’s it? Just a friend who happens to be a woman, but my gender doesn’t matter? Maybe you think I’m too old for you…?”

“I do not!”

“Then what is it?”

“You’re … you’re you.”

“And because of that you can’t see me as anything but a harassed widow with two kids? Untouchable?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why don’t you touch me, Jonah, if I’m not untouchable?”

He might have wept when he thought of the reality that was parading itself through his mind, that same reality that had made him almost buy something for the weekend from the barber, that had sent him in to have his hair cut in the first place.

“What would God make of me if I were to even think of you like that?” he asked, knowing that the question had, buried in it, a dreadful lie. Because that’s exactly how he was thinking of her`, and at that moment.

“Come upstairs,” ordered Jane.

“What?”

“Come on. Upstairs.”

And she led the way to her bedroom. The bed was there, a double one left over from the halcyon years before George had died.

She stood by it and looked at him, then she smiled. “Trousers off!” she said in the sort of voice that meant do it.

“I can’t,” he mumbled miserably, “I mustn't.”

“Come along. If you went to the barber’s shop to buy you know what, then you thought that you might need them.”

“But I didn’t … didn’t buy them!” It sounded more like a canine yelp than human speech.

“But you wouldn’t need them,” she smiled, “I’m not capable of becoming pregnant, not even if you’re firing the most powerful tadpoles ever spawned! I’m too old. Menopausal, I think they call it.”

She slowly, enticingly, undid her skirt and let it slither to the rug next to her bed. “Come on, Jonah,” she said quietly, “I know you want to do it, and I want to do it too, so let’s do it together.”

“But we’re not married…”

“No,” she whispered, sliding her pristine white panties an inch down her cheeks, “no, we’re not…”

© Peter Rogerson 25.06.21

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