A TALE OF TWO WEDDINGS

Arnold was a bully but he soon met his match...

For what seemed ages before Leslie Finch married the love of his life people smirked and said it would never last. How could it? He was such an idiot and she was a beauty queen. She was Annabelle Crumpet and had just about everything going for her, particularly her brain combined with a curvaceous body that earned many a wolf whistle wherever she went.

But cynics will be cynics and things like what in the name of goodness does she see in him and if I were her I’d run a mile every time he takes her anywhere near a church were to be heard in odd corners of any bar whenever his name cropped up.

The trouble with Leslie Finch was basically that he was an ordinary guy, a bit on the clever side (which a few people didn’t like), had a good job but carried with him the burden of his own childhood.

His first problem was his father. Or at least, the decomposing mass of dead flesh that had been his father. And it wasn’t that his father’s decomposing flesh was doing anything like decomposing in public. No, he had been tucked neatly into a pine coffin with polished handles and lowered tidily into a spot in the town cemetery twenty-odd years ago, when Leslie had been only four years old.

That should only have brought sympathy and understanding his way, but there was one boy in his class at school, when they were five or six years old, who had decided that the sins of fathers should be visited on aS many generations in the future as possible, and Leslie’s father had sinned in that he had died. That boy was Arnold Plumtree and he was plain unpleasant to everyone, but particularly to Leslie

Where Arnold had got the idea that if his father had sinned so had Leslie from is anyone’s guess, though it probably came from an enthusiastic Sunday School teacher who loved the morality implied in such a lesson and had rammed it home until everyone except for Leslie’s new enemy Arnold was heartily sick of it. And that one boy became the touch paper that ignited a fire of bullying.

If Leslie Finch’s father had sinned at all it was a sin of too much kindness. He was famous for always having a few sweets in a bag in his pocket. Everyone said what a lovely man he was when he ruffled the tousled hair of boys with newly grazed knees when they’d tripped on the gravelly pathways near their home. And when he offered a lift home to Sadie Frost on wet evenings as she struggled home from the shops with heavy bags of groceries she was enthusiastic in her gratitude.

If anything was a sin in Mr Finch’s life it was Sadie Frost. He went out of his way to help her. His motive was honourable because Sadie was a widow with two sets of twins and had nobody else to help her, and our Mr Finch had developed a soft spot for her. Not that he did anything about that soft spot except on one occasion allowed her to casually and fleetingly kiss him good night when she was coming down with flu, and surprise surprise, he caught that flu from her and suffered badly, and people have been known to die from flu, which is something he did, leaving Mrs Finch a widow with a Leslie in her care.

Leslie had no sooner lost his father to flu than Arnold Plumtree started his campaign. At first he suggested that somehow the deceased father had died in order to escape from an evil son, and then he started finding ways in which Leslie had brought about his own father’s demise. Nothing to do with a fleeting kiss with Sadie Frost which Arnold, of course, knew nothing about, he intimated there might be something toxic about the way Leslie farted, proved it by introducing a matchbox on which he’d loosely attached a dial that moved, allegedly, according the stink in the air and which he called a gasometer, and in order to provoke outbursts of wind for measuring he took to punching Leslie in the stomach and darting away before the assaulted boy could respond in kind. Not all the time, though, but often enough to give the impression there might be something wrong with Leslie Finch and his farts that needed thumping out of him.

That was the beginning, and it just continued from there. As Leslie Finch grew slowly older, into his teens and then beyond, he was barely accepted by his peers. Arnold Plumtree had, indeed, set a mighty ball rolling.

Then Leslie met and fell head over heels for Annabelle Crumpet.

Annabelle was a popular girl. Even Arnold Plumtree tried to edge into her awareness. Besides being highly intelligent and quite capable of administering a sharp yet bright riposte to anyone who upset her, she had the sort of shape that many a young woman would have paid a fortune for. And she knew it, and dressed accordingly. Her legs were long and delightful, so the brief shorts and frocks she chose to wear matched them perfectly. Her hair, on the slightly dark side of blonde, fell from her head in waving cascades of well-fragranced beauty. And her unblemished skin always seemed to shine with a cleanliness that gave the impression she must have spent an age cleansing it.

And she fell for Leslie in much the same way as he fell for her.

That set the tongues wagging in cafe’s and bars and wherever his tribe of critics met.

“Have you seen who Finch is going out with?”

“What in the name of everything does she see in him?”

“I’ll bet it doesn’t last long, when she finds out about that todger of his…”

“What about it?”

“Well, those who saw him changing after swimming at the baths said it’s so small she’d need a magnifying glass to see it!”

And so on. Mostly ignorant and mostly pure fiction, and it’s probably just as well he heard very little of it.

It was just a couple of weeks before the wedding that she entered the Brumpton Beauty Competition (that’s what it was called) and won. She came first, second and third in the various categories, but overall she was easily first out of two dozen attractive young women. Her answer to the interviewer’s question about animals was remarkable.

“I love all of God’s creatures, but have special affection for moles,” she said, “it’s their intelligence, you know…”

So she won outright. Of course she did, loving moles.

“It’ll be all over for daft old Finch,” was the popular opinion. “She won’t want him now that she’s a beauty queen!”

But she and Leslie did get married for the simple reason they were both deeply in love. And the wedding was quite an affair. The press was there, both local and national, and the local television station with a camera and the weatherman in front of it, I said it would be sunny today, and you can see the sun shining from the happy pair as our belle of the ball, Annabelle marries the man of her dreams…

But there’s always a down side to life, and this was the celebrity hostess who, despite a few sniffles and a bit of a cough, laughed along with the crowd and dropped a kiss on Leslie’s lips.

Talk about the sins of the father…

She shouldn’t have been there, what with the reigning pandemic in every corner of the land, but the pay was too good for her to ignore. However, she carried a highly toxic family of virus germs with her, and passed a dose of covid on to Leslie.

It was one fleeting kiss that did it even though he was young, one momentary touching of lips, but three weeks later Annabelle was bidding farewell to the love of her life. No cameras, no crowd, not even a weatherman. Leslie was laid to rest a spitting distance from his father.

And the point of this story?

Well, after a decent time for mourning Annabelle met and married the plague of Leslie’s life. She knew all about Arnold Plumtree and the way he’d tormented Leslie before he died, so she set about sorting him out once and for all. She wasn’t a widow for long before she became Mrs Plumtree and once the banners were taken away and the cake eaten, Arnold became the most miserable man on planet Earth. Even during the honeymoon on Ibiza. She saw to that. It was the least she could do.

© Peter Rogerson 11.04.22

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