4. A Dry Mouth

We get an insight ito two illegitimate births

STELLA‘S AUTUMN

4. A Dry Mouth

“So you were enjoying all sorts of mysterious things, like drink and drugs and a woman you don’t feel like saying much about… what did you all her? Jane? And not giving a single thought about what was happening to me here?” asked Stella. “not caring whether you had a son or a daughter or just a romantic memory that came to nothing due to impotence on your side?”

“I guessed you be ok,” said Percival, meaninglessly. “I mean, you had your landlord here. Back then it was only digs in the house of your boss from work. What was his name? I forget. And if you had any real problems your own parents are not so many miles away, are they?”

“Robert. His name was Robert, Percival, and he did the best thing he could think of doing. He married me because, if you think back, unmarried mothers were not always looked on in a kindly way.! That’s what you should have done seeing as you’d planted your seed in me, and not gallivanted off in a cloud of exotic smoke and a sea of strong drink! And as for my parents, my dad was already dying and mum dithery. I maybe should have returned to them but I had my baby son Peter and a good and considerate husband as well as a job near by. As you know (if you’ve not forgotten) I only moved in with Robert in the first place because my family home was too far from Woolworths where I worked and the buses weren’t so reliable.”

“And he was uncle Bob to me. I had nobody to call dad.” added Peter, “by the time I was old enough to understand the world my granddad was coughing his last and my grandma was on some other planet somewhere when we went to see her. I’d have liked a real dad.”

“I’m sorry. I truly am,” sighed Percival, “but let me finish my story and help you understand the man I’ve become.”

“Ok. Dad,” grunted Peter, underlining the dad as he spoke.

Percival looked him between the eyes, and sighed. This middle-aged man was calling him dad and he’d missed the many important years of fatherhood, all because of what was little more than a misunderstanding.

“Let me explain,” he muttered, ashamed of what he was about to say, “I was sent to a sort of monastery where I was supposed to get dried out, but there was very little drying to be done. I wasn’t any more than a social drinker, like I was back in the day when I loved you, Stella, more than I loved anything. And that spliff I’d been given… I barely took half a dozen puffs at it before we were interrupted. And I hated it. But there I was, carted off in a minibus to Saint Cardew’s where I was to spend the best part of the next two years, totally against my will. And to make matters worse, it was an all-male place, and wouldn’t you like to know what some of them got up to when there were no normal people around? But less said about that because I don’t actually know, but there were enough clues to help me to guess.”

“So if it was so bad, why did you stay?” demanded Stella, “you and I had a cosy relationship and I actually believed that I loved you! You could have come home to me.”

“I wanted to, but where was I? I didn’t know, geographically speaking. I could have been anywhere within a half hour minibus drive of college, and that was a good way from home. I was truly lost, and anyway I was told that some pretty unpleasant things might happen to me if I escaped. I was actually told that with the word escaped in the sentence!”

“So you were a prisoner?” asked Stella, beginning to enjoy his discomfort.

“As good as,” he nodded. “Then the Principal of my university turned up one wet and miserable afternoon. He was all smiles with the monks or whatever some of them were, and he brought Jane with him. There she was, an eighteen year old nymphet in an all-male enclave, and it didn’t take her long to get away from her father and find me in the room I called my cell!”

“And you were probably over the moon to see her!” grinned Stella.

“I was not! It was all down to her that I was incarcerated in Saint Cardew’s. But she became all sweet and sugary, and produced a small silver hip flask and offered me a sip of something forbidden in that place, and before you could say Jack Robinson she was taking my trousers off after muttering all sorts of sorrowful apologies in my ears. Now look, I was a young male with all my instincts intact, and there was only one thing that could happen. I’m sorry, Stella, but it’s true. I did try to resist, but what man could? After all, Jane was quite a looker, as we used to say. And besides her being devious there was something genuinely innocent about the way she was.”

“So you had it all laid on then, dad?” grunted Peter, beginning to think he could see through a story he had barely been able to believe.

“She only came that once,” sighed Percival, “but that was enough. Word went round a couple of months later that the Principal’s daughter had been really naughty and got her self in the family way! But she wasn’t going to be sent away even though she was a student, like I was. A second male student arrived at Saint Cardew’s, a meek young fellow called Denis, and he was given the blame. I liked him and we soon became friends. He told me that Jane had implied that she’d only had sex with one lad, but hadn’t said who he might be. If that was true then I knew who it was because it had been me that time her father brought her to what I saw as my jail. And it was then that my perception changed. It was then that I started to look upon Saint Cardew’s as a genuine refuge from the real world, one I could learn from. I started reading religious texts. And I started not only believing in God with a certainty you’d never believe if I told you a thousand times. but became absolutely sure that there was some special task for me. And when I returned to college after I was apparently cured of my excesses I started work on a degree which would give me entrance into the church.”

“You soft sod,” grunted Peter “and to think I always hoped that my father, whoever he might be, was an out and out atheist!”

“Now, darling, that’s no way to talk to your newly found father,” Stella told him, “he can’t help it!”

“Put the kettle on again, babe,” said the clergyman, “I’ve got too much to think about, and thinking always makes my mouth go dry.”

© Peter Rogerson 04.07.23

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