5. A Life Alone

Stella has time to review her own life

STELLA‘S AUTUMN

5. A Life Alone

It was afternoon by the time that thr Reverend Percival made his lonely way out of her home and to wherever it was he lived. Peter was still there, and when his father was gone he eyed her suspiciously.

“What were you doing having it off with a vicar?” he asked, “Are you sure he’s my father?”

“Of course I am! It’s a bit offensive of you to ask that, Peter,” she had said, sadly, “what kind of woman do you think I was fifty years ago?”

“The best mum in the world,” he had replied, and she knew he had meant it.

Now she was left on her own. But before he had gone Percival had continued his story, going on at great length to describe the time he spent convincing himself that he was being called to do what he called “good” work by an invisible deity on high. It had sickened Stella because her memories of him as a young man were contrary to a great deal that he claimed to believe of himself. During the two years they had spent together, sometimes in each other’s arms though most of the time not overtly physical, he had been far from spiritual. He had spent a lot of time fantasizing about an Earthly life on terra firma, travelling through Europe, maybe, with the lovely Stella.

“We can see the world,” he had said, “can savour other cultures and get to know strangers in their own lands.”

He had been a decent young man back then. And when they had made love, though they’d done it only the once, it had been a joint affair, she as involved in it as he had been. At least, that’s how she remembered it.

Then he had gone away before she had suspected that she might be pregnant.

She sighed at the recollection because then he had gone away to University (she had known that he would), but until his unexpected appearance late last night that was the last time she had seen him.

But the clerical collar! That had surprised her. She had lost her faith ages ago when her father had coughed himself to death. For years he had claimed the cigarettes he was so fond of were actually good for his health, and when evidence that they did actual and visible harm to a smoker’s lungs he muttered ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they? Call themselves doctors! I should coco! It’s all one excuse for not healing the sick! Blaming the f**s. So darned easy!’

And then he had known he was dying and, what was worse for him, why. But back then she had stopped living at home because she had a good job at Woolworth’s department store but couldn’t get there without being late because of an erratic bus service. Robert Dingley had come to her rescue. She could hear his voice now.

“I’ve got a spare room and all you’ll have to pay is a pittance, just enough to cover the cost of services and anything you might eat,” he’d said, “because, Stella, I’d enjoy the company…”

And he had enjoyed her company, not in a physical way though when it was obvious that she was pregnant and he had shocked her by insisting that she stayed on and, would it help, married him? Not because he lusted after her, he assured her that he wasn’t that sort, didn’t really have much time for women, but it made her look decent in the eyes of hos neighbours who were bound to wonder what she was doing on their street, a single woman with a bairn, the twittering classes would have a field day.

So they had got married on the quiet with a minimum of fuss, then she had produced Peter and the twittering classes had cooed at him and called him a sweet little man, and nobody seemed to have made calculations and come to the conclusion that he must have been conceived before she became Mrs Dingley.

“It’s for the best,” Robert had said, and he meant it was for the best for him as well. He knew what the aforementioned twittering classes had begun to think about him, and twitter barely out of his hearing. A single man in his forties, parents dead or elsewhere, and never a woman to brighten his doorstep. So Stella had silenced that brand of twittering, and all had been good.

Until he died, that is.

Out of the blue. One day he had been alive and then he was dead. Just like that, and not yet fifty.

It as mooted that it had been his heart and the worry of having a wee child in a house where children had never trod. Maybe it had been cursed? Some thought so. A previous owner had been carted off to jail for the things he did to children. Cruel, spiteful things which he claimed were done out of love

But Robert had left the house to her in his will. No surprise there, they were man and wife, but it was comforting to her, and she was in need of comfort. He’d even left her quite a nice sum of money in his bank account, so she cut out work at Woolworth’s and occasionally visited her mother with toddling Peter, and her mother didn’t even know who she was. It was heart-breaking, and she didn’t call very often because if her mother didn’t even know her, what was the point? She was Mrs Dingley, she had a handsome son, and the memories of dreams.

Dreams of travelling the world with her first and only proper love, the father of her son and a man who seemed to have vanished off the face of the Earth.

Then her mother had died. It wasn’t that she was actually ill in a coughs and sneezes way, but apparently she had gone to sleep one night and never woken up. There had been a district nurse calling on her once a week or so, and she had found her dead in bed.

“And smiling that I’ve never seen her smile when she were alive,” she had said to Stella.

“She never knew happiness, not since dad died,” muttered Stella, and it seemed to be the truth.

And as far as Stella was concerned that summarised her life. The rest, with Peter doing well at school and going off to college himself and emerging from its halls as a full blown doctor, then joining a practice only a couple of miles from here she still lived, the home that Robert had left her and where Peter had grown up.

Peter had married Miriam and they had produced two children, her grandchildren who she saw as often as she could. Mack and Bella they were, and they, too were on their way to being grown up. But all that was his and their story. She was just on the periphery of it.

She was eighty two and all the past, the long years that had somehow dragged along, put together both happily and sadly, was somehow only memories.

There could be no future. Or could there somehow be?

© Peter Rogerson 05.07.23

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