WENDY’S LOST SUMMER

A lifetime can bring awful changes...

Hardly a single day had passed in her later adult life when Wendy Neptune didn’t remember that summer she shared with Walter.

She’d been twentyish when her parents had both come to terrible grief in a high-speed chase in town when a police car had ploughed into them as they’d quite normally walked out of their front gate onto a narrow pavement intending to make their way, they hoped, to the shops.

And that had been that. The police car had screeched as the driver had tried to avoid what happened, but it happened anyway. The two were killed in an incident and Wendy hadn’t said goodbye. In fact, life with her parents had ended with a row, and she hated rows. But sometimes things have to be said and it’s only afterwards when they can’t be unsaid that you wish they’d never even been thought.

Then she was on her own, still too young to know quite enough about life.

To start with she was embraced by Auntie Doris until they couldn’t stand the sight of each other after a few weeks, her aunt with her churchy things and she with her wine which sometimes flowed in unreasonable abundance for a maiden aunt in the sixties to ever hope to understand That aunt who had thought a single glass of sherry at Christmas was too much!

So when she bumped into Walter Snodgrass (I know, an unfortunate name, but he couldn’t help it) she decided to take full advantage of it, especially as he was what she thought might best be described as gorgeous.

They spent a month sharing a summer break a spitting distance from the sea. It was in England, of course, Brits didn’t very often get beyond the shores of their island back then, but that didn’t matter. They even discussed personal matters like sex in whispered little conclaves between a few large rocks on the shoreline, rocks that gave them a kind of wild privacy.

“If we had a kid you’d be its father,” she told him mischievously, and that made him scowl.

“We’d best not risk anything of the sort,” he replied.

“Of course not,” she agreed.

But that didn’t matter. None of it did because the holiday, four whole weeks of it, she grieving (supposedly) and he on a break from something she didn’t understand, was heavenly. But the physical stuff was limited to smoochy kisses and the odd little movement towards her breasts, which he seemed to think was okay and wouldn’t presage anything more threatening, and she quite enjoyed.

There were favourite places that meant a lot to them. There was the stall where they bought their ice-cream and the park with flowers in multicoloured borders where they walked and talked and paused and walked again. Hand in hand, arm round shoulders, whispering or talking, the month that summer passed that way. Simply and ecstatically. And to add to her appeal short skirts had become the rage, and she loved her own reflection in the mirror whens he wore one, and beautiful long hair, and a wonderful range of cosmetics that she was certain enhanced her complexion

Then the month was over.

He vanished first, kissing her goodbye with so much enthusiasm that she just knew they’d meet again. Maybe here, next summer, on the anniversary of her month of joy. She’d make sure she was there and she was certain he would, too.

But next year he wasn’t.

Nor the next, or the one after that, and slowly her memory of the idyll that had been her twentieth summer faded until it became just another thing she rarely thought about.

Other boyfriends came along and she married one, but he wasn’t up to much even though he fathered a child for her, a son who was gorgeous, but then aren’t sons always gorgeous in the eyes of their mothers? And in those days he lasted quite a few years until she finally ditched him because she couldn’t stand the smell of him. He was one of those men who make themselves stink of Cologne by spraying it excessively all over themselves, and every time she went near him there was the smell that some scientist in some laboratory must have thought was manly and some sales executive agreed and spread it over the world in little bottles and small cans.

And that was that because years passed by as they always do. Swiftly, invisibly, until her face showed it and her hair was no longer the lustrous rich brunette it had been.

When she was fifty she had women’s troubles, as she explained it to her friends, because by then people were more open about things like that. The hushed privacy inherent in the standards of an earlier day had dissipated. Personal things could be talked about, and she had a hysterectomy operation that put things right. She was well beyond childbearing age anyway, so it didn’t impinge on her life at all. Anyway, she was a single lady with a grown up son who was himself soon to get married. She had done what her life was for and she could wile away the remainder of it as she chose without the need to worry about her fertility or lack of it.

Then she was eighty.

It happened so invisibly that it even shocked her. And eighty is a big number. For her, it meant that’s all it was, though she did carry a cane with a brass face on its end, and wear a hearing aid and resort to reading glasses. But other than that she was as sprightly as she’d ever been.

It was then that she remembered that one summer’s month, and Walter.

He’d be eighty as well because they’d been the same age: or at least she thought they had, and if they hadn’t been there can’t have been much in it.

Is he still alive? That thought found its way into her head and wouldn’t go away. He could be, couldn’t he? Not everyone dies before their eightieth birthday, do they? After all, she hadn’t, and some people even live to be the better part of a hundred, don’t they?

And the thought wriggled around in her head until she booked a holiday at that same resort and went along on a coach to see if she remembered the place.

Their ice-cream stall had gone, but the park was as lovely as ever. The sea crashed on the beach in the same way, and glory of glories, their little private enclave made of large battered rocks was still where it had been. That magical corner of the world where only they had existed and where they’d planned impossible furures that never happened, it was precious in her memory and she shed a tear when she saw it again.

She sat on one of the smaller boulders and sighed. Yes, it was all coming back to her, the things she and Walter had said, the half-meant promises they’d made, the whispered secrets…

“So you remember?” came a cultured voice from somewhere behind her, lost in the shadows in her mind.

She looked up.

Who was this, talking to her? What was he? A priest with a clerical collar marking his faith? Bald, a shaved head even, a grey moustache, and a cultured voice.

Not Walter, then. He’d not been what a woman could call cultured, just a plain ordinary loveable guy with long wavy hair and eyes to die for, and certainly no dog-collar round his neck.

“I’ve thought of you a lot since then. It is Wendy, isn’t it?”

I’ve only ever been here with Walter … tbis can’t be… but who is it then?

“Walter?” she asked.

He smiled a yellow-toothed smile. “I prayed for you to be here, and here you are,” he said, continuing the smile, and the lines reaching up to his eyes joined in.

“It is you, isnt it?” she asked.

“I knew we’d meet again, Wendy,” he said, “all my life I’ve known it! We can continue where we left off. That would be the best of all things that could happen, we could be the lovers we were, but with the wisdom of age to guide us…”

“But lovers?” she stammered, “we weren’t exactly that if you are Walter, my Walter, and not some other man masquerading as him…”

“You’re Wendy and I’m the Walter who’s saved himself this past sixty years for you,” he said, his voice almost breaking, and she knew that it was.

“What do you mean, continue where we left off?” she asked, thinking the light in his eyes might be too bright and that expression on his face too crazed.

“We once said, here in our secret place, that it would be good for us to have a son, a light on the world that would guide it in the bad times, and there are bad times, very bad times.” His cultured pronunciation had become a croak.

“I don’t know what you mean, Walter.”

“You can be the mother of a new tribe! We can walk with our sons into the world, you and me, patriarch and matriarch. We can be God’s angels in the fight against evil!”

“What do you mean, sons?” Her own voice was quavering. Had some wretched madness stolen the mind of a lad who’d been truly gorgeous? And where was all that lovely hair?

“I know what we’re supposed to do, the mechanics of love-making… I’ve studied it, know every detail of it, learned from old tomes; let’s do it now, I’m ready…” and a bulge in his clerical trousers told its own story.

“Don’t be so silly!” she snapped, “at our age!”

“But we can. I know we can! Your seed and mine will join together, and the future will be glorious,” he gabbled, “the old world will fade away and a new glorious one will emerge.”

“But, you silly man, I have no seeds left! And even if I had I’ve had a hysterectomy! Thirty odd years ago I allowed myself to surrender to a surgeons knife!”

His face turned a strange grey and his eyes half-closed. “You can’t be telling me... you can’t, I won’t let you, I’ve dreamed of this moment so many times in prayer, I’ve gone over it again and again until I know its every detail! We will do it! You will produce sons! I chose you in our young days, but had to wait until we were mature and sensible enough to do it right.”

She was beginning to feel alarmed. If this was really Walter then something had happened, something had turned his mind and his sanity had escaped. Had he prayed himself to madness?

“No, Walter,” she said firmly, “that is totally impossible. Surely you know the facts of life?”

Then he stood up, his legs as uncertain as hers when she was standing, and grabbed her walking cane with its shiny brass head and waved it around.

“You must!” he threatened, waving that stick at her, “I demand my right to join with my chosen angel!”

“”You’re crackers,” she said, “as mad as a hatter! Don’t you know that the seeds in women fail, often before they’re fifty years old! And anyway, my hysterectomy, the operation that gave me renewed life, that took any that were left away and that’s that!”

“I need my son!” he almost roared, and it seemed that he, an old man with uncertain legs, was dancing on the spot, “I need my son!”

And just there in an enclave that had nurtured their first love he brought the weighted cane down on her white hair, and stole what may have been her last love…

© Peter Rogerson 26.08.22

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