15. The Light in his Darkness

` A WIDOW WOMAN Part 15

Tony Dimbleby stared out of his window, making sure he was shielded by the curtain, and watched as the Reverend Jonah Pike made his way, almost furtively, from the house across the road.

He might be getting on in life, he was well into his seventies, but he was becoming aware of something he’d forgotten about since his time in hospital after his return from South Africa years and years earlier. A light in his darkness suddenly burst into being and he was becoming aware that he was a man and that the woman across the road, the one with two mischievous children, was everything he liked in a woman: she was pretty, intelligent and friendly. What else could a man like in a woman? April had been like that way back before the first big war, but his own injuries had been made worse than they actually were by her refusal to look at them.

The scars were already fading when he’d suggested she examined his leg, offered to roll his trouser leg up and show her where the bullet had torn him. but he was too much of a gentleman to ask her to look beyond at that even though evidence of the damage was already difficult to detect until you counted the objects inside his scrotum. It hadn’t mattered to her that they insisted that he could still be a father. She believed what her granny had said, that it meant he was impotent. Granny read it in the tea leaves, so it must be true.

The lovely April had firmly gone away, told him there was someone else, another man who was intact, and he’d had to put up with that.

He may have rejoiced when he learned that the other man had met his maker at the Somme and she with what was euphemistically called a bun in the oven, but he didn’t. He merely felt saddened for April.

Now he spent an indecent amount of time looking out of his front room window on Jane. He knew the whole idea was silly, he being old as he was and she having two children, but he couldn’t help himself.

He’d noted the comings and goings of the vicar as well. And then he’d seen the kiss through the lady’s window and interpreted her moving away as rejection, and something had risen out of the chaos of loneliness inside him.

If anyone was going to kiss her it was going to be him!

Ignoring the remnants of pain from half a century ago injuries he scurried along after the Reverend gentleman. He didn’t like priests or men of God because he knew them for what they were. Charlatans, the lot of them, was his opinion based on Father O’Neill who had been the padre in Africa, who had prayed over the dying, had actually prayed over him, but he had stayed alive, and not because of the prayers but because he wanted to prove that Father O’Neill was wrong,

He’d fought the grim reaper, and won. And as he’d slowly regained his strength O’Neill had paused by his bed and told him all sorts of things. He’d mentioned that the Lord had rejected him or he would be in paradise by then, with the angels, which was where he ought to be, embracing lovely scrumptious angels. He’d even held his cross in front of him as if he was warding off the devil, for in that twisted priest’s mind it was the devil that had prevented Tony Dimbleby from rising to the spheres of Heaven, minus a testicle, because what angel would want to embrace a man so deformed?

And now there was another creature in a clerical collar haunting the woman across the road. The woman something inside him told him that he loved. Or liked. Maybe that was enough, to like her and talk to her, tell her tales from his life, if he could conjure any up.

The Reverend Jonah Pyke was dawdling, lost in self-sorrow and self-pity, which is the only reason how Tony could catch him up.

“Hey you! Priest!” he called, his old voice almost breaking as a backlog of emotion tried to tear it to pieces.

The Reverend Jonah Pyke paused and looked behind him. Who was this old man and why was he calling him? He didn’t recognise him from his congregation, but then his church was almost full most Sundays and he wouldn’t be able recognise everyone.

“You called?” he asked, switching on his pulpit voice with embarrassing ease.

“You’re a damned swine!” snapped Tony, “the way you treat ladies! Kiss them and leave them to weep, that’s you, isn’t it? Or do you do more, eh? Take them away from the men who truly love them? With your fancy talk of angels and paradise? Is that what you do? Beguile them with that sort of nonsense?”

Jonah was lost for words. His carefully crafted sermons were no help here. The old man had called his fall-back rhetoric nonsense, and he’d always known at the back of his mind, in the deepest recesses where he daren’t tread, that it was nonsense.

At that moment and on no road to anywhere like Damascus he saw, in a flash of reality, what he’d always known. Hold his beliefs up to inspection, shine the light of logic through them, and ask a man who’d really lived to gaze upon them, and they were like verbal dust that might blow away in any wind without so much as a moment’s warning. That’s why he had to work so hard writing his Sunday message. He had to fold pretence and fiction into the words, and call them belief.

But there was this old man standing there, accusing him.

“I won’t be coming this way again,” he said, “nor go anywhere that another man might tread.”

With that simple statement of intent he turned away, a half-formed plan in his head as it crossed his mind just how empty his life had been. And how that emptiness was okay, he could live with it, as long as he didn’t burst a bubble of belief, because once that bubble was burst there was precious little left.

“You’re right,” he called back at the old man, “and I’m off to find my father and tell him exactly who I am… Look for me in Heaven when your time’s up and you won’t find me there. Not at all. I’ll be mouldering in a casket six feet down, where all men go…”

And with more confidence he walked back to his vicarage leaving the old man confused, and back at Number 9 Empire Road, Jane Simpson sat at her kitchen table and sighed as a single tear splashed from her cheek onto its scrubbed surface.

© Peter Rogerson 27.06.21

...