1. The Visitor

Stella has a visitor in the middle of a summer storm...

STELLA’S AUTUMN

1. The Visitor

In the middle of a wretched night with all sorts going on �" a storm crashing across the heavens over the hill and round the valley, a dying cat calling for its feline deity to take it on a special journey where the kids from down the road can’t get at it any more, the young couple next door raging at each other, either that or frantically loving each other the way youngsters can when enthusiasm becomes part of their rituals. Stella had been like that once, a life time ago, and she didn’t like being reminded how good it had felt. But ll that had been, what, sixty or even more years ago.

In the middle of that night Stella really tried to go to sleep, but couldn’t. It was as if her brain was one of those old fashioned radios that slipped off the station every so often, and wouldn‘t go back, not even to find a friendly dream and relive it.

She didn’t normally have trouble sleeping. She wasn’t one of those people who find themselves lying awake for helpless hours, half asleep and wanting the conscious half to yield to sleep and join the sensible subconscious half. But there was too much going on in her corner of the world, and that just had to be that.

Until Percival called out if the blue, that is.

She’d known Percival years ago, more years ago than she cared to remember, and half of her mind had occasionally found itself wondering whether he was still alive. People did die when they might be considered merely old rather than ancient, like she was, aged 82. Not a horrible and feeble 82 but one quite capable of putting things right if that’s what things neede, and no matter who with. Their member of parliament was testame nt to that: he had born the wrath of several of her acidic enquiries.

She just about recognised his voice on the phone, and knew it was him when she heard him chuckle and then say “so you’re in then, babe?”

That’s what he’d always called her. Babe. But always had been well above half a century ago and anything could have happened to him in the intervening decades. She’d regretted their parting back then, but it had happened. He was off to University and she wasn’t.

There was a pause on the telephone, and then she said “That’s you then is it, Percy?”

“Yes it is. I thought I‘d look you up Babe, if that’s all right…”

“At this time of night after so many years?” she asked.

“It’s this weather. Cats and dogs coming down, it is, and there’s a cat somewhere, squawking like it wants to die… I couldn’t get my head down, and then you popped into my mind.”

“It’s the same here, thought probably not the same cat! Where are you these days?”

“Parked outside your front door and waiting to be invited in!”

Yes, that was Percival all right. He’d always had the cheek of the devil, which is probably why she’d fallen for him way back when she’d been young enough to do that kind of falling. Their last parting had been an occasion for floods of tears, at least it had from her.

The answer fell from her mouth before she could be bothered to bite it back: “better come in then, Percy,” she replied. “I must have been expecting you because the doors on the latch, though I warn you: I’m in bed trying to sleep and you’re not helping.”

“I won’t disturb you then, babe. Mind if I sit down in your parlour?”

Parlour: that’s what they’d called the living room back in the day. She found herself smiling to herself. Somehow an unexpected phone call had flipped a switch and put youthful thoughts and exciting memories into her old head. How was that possible?

She heard the door, her front door, being opened. She hardly ever locked it though her son Peter had told her it was dangerous not to, and she had pooh-poohed him and asked who was likely to want to risk life and limb breaking into her house in order to rob her of her less than nothing?

“The parlour’s on your left,” she called down, shocked at how firm her own voice suddenly sounded.

“Cheers, babe. I’d come up there and remind you of a thing or two that we used to get up to together, but my legs have fallen out with stairs.”

It happened again, words falling out before her brain had been properly engaged. “Then I’d best come down,” she said. Well, thought her mind I wasn’t asleep and I’m not likely to drop off now, am I?

And that’s what she started to do, though she made herself decent because the storm ripping round the valley was the result of a sultry and very hot spell off the weather and she wasn’t wearing very much in bed. In fact, she had stripped everything off in her efforts of coming to terms with the gods of the weather.

“You’re a devil,” she said when she was half way down the stairs and having to pause because, well, she and stairs weren’t the best of friends either.

“You always did say if I was the Necromancer then you’d settle for an eternity in Hell,” he said as she stepped off the bottom step and paused again.

“That was before I lost my religion,” she replied.

“All of it?” he asked from the front room.

“When my better half Robert passed away in the middle of reciting the Lords Prayer I knew that believing in it was so much codswallop,” she said “now hold on tight, make sure you’re decent, I’m coming in!”

She pushed the door open and stared at the elderly man sitting on her best chair.

It was Percival all right. She’d know that cheeky grin anywhere, but it was hard to reconcile the youth she had known way back when life had been an adventure with the elderly vicar or priest or whoever he was smiling back at her.

“Well what the devil?” she gasped.

© Peter Rogerson 20.06.23

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