25. The Boudoir

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Barney wants to leave the Retreat

“Come, Reverend Pickle, with me, and you dear lady, and i will give you a tour of our Retreat,” smiled Father Teatrader when both the Reverend Barney Pickle and Emma Dresden were properly dressed.

Barney nodded almost absently whilst Emma smiled and smoothed her hair with one hand, getting prepared to follow the leader of the commune.

“It’s a wonderful building judging from the bit I’ve seen,” she said.

“It goes back to the fourteenth century and part of it is actually that old,” smiled Teatrader, “though most of the parts are more recent additions, like your rooms which were built in the nineteenth century and refurbished in the twentieth. But I want you to come with me to the library, our pride and joy and the oldest existing part of the building, and still perfectly weatherproof so it can be used perfectly safely as a library, and never a drop of ink runs down soggy paper.”

“Er… yes,” muttered Barney as Emma took him by one arm and followed their guide down the corridor, past the door to her own room, and round a couple of bends. It was then that it became obvious that the surface that they were walking on was less smooth with time-worn paving stones under their fee, and the walls had an appearance that must have been due to age, with extremely small windows set at irregular intervals.

“You can almost smell the years that this place has stood just here,” murmured the Father proudly, “and wonder at what was going through the minds of out ancestors.” He paused by a door, one that was clearly made of ancient wood, and pushed it open.

“This is where monks in days of yore entertained the nuns from an adjacent convent, but sadly that has been closed for some time,” he said, rather sadly, thought Barney, surprised that what he had perceived as a very masculine Retreat should evoke emotions in one of its older inmates to the very extent that they drew females ito their lives.

“It was, of course, never spoken of,” he continued, “for from an early time the church, and we are affiliated to that institution, has followed the ideals forged in Rome, that original sin involved the first woman and has gone down the female line ever since then. But once in a blue moon a man needs release from inner tensions, and he comes here if he is in our order, and makes whatever use he needs to in order to refresh himself. Take a peek.”’

And he did the impossible. He pushed the door open, and it creaked alarmingly as it swung inwards until they could see the interior of what was little more than the space a cupboard might occupy, but squashed into it was a bed, barely large enough for one person. Yet on that bed in full view was a naked brown haired woman with an almost naked monk lying on her, not moving but breathing whispered words into her ears as if each syllable contained the essence of worship itself in it.

”You see,” grinned Father Teatrader, “here we have Brother Hairdresser enjoying the company of young Daisy Gump, the angel who provides us with our food when she’s in the kitchen, and who, if she has the time, flicks a duster here and there lest we become overburdened with the detritus of the ages.”

“Shut the door then!” called the woman on the bed as the man, apparently Brother Hairdresser, planted a huge kiss on her cheek.

Father Teatrader pulled the door closed as if obeying the young woman’s instruction, and grinned broadly.

“But isn’t that evil and sinful, and aren’t they both condemned to an eternity in hell by what foul deeds they do to each other?” ask Barney, clearly appalled by the brief sight he had of two people obviously embracing in a physical passion that ought, in his view, be totally forbidden rather than apparently encouraged.

“You are speaking from a lost age,” sighed the Father.

“It is just two people being natural together, Barney,” explained Emma with a smile dancing round the corners of her mouth.

“But they can see each other…!” He left the sentence unfinished because to him at least it was quite clear that what he could see was deeply wrong, writ as sin in the book of his brain over a long time.

“It’s not wrong, Barney,” whispered Emma hoarsely, “it is the most beautiful and natural thing two people can do together.”

But the Reverend Barney Pickle had seen and heard enough.

“I know what is right and equally I know what is wrong,” he declared, “and that, in that room, is evil! I want to go home now, to my parsonage, where I can tend to my human sheep if they’re in need of my help, and where I can be free from evil!”

And he turned round and stomped off the way he had come, leaving Father Teatrader and Emma behind him, confused.

“Does he prefer to form relationships with men?” asked the Father, confused.

Emma shook her head. “No, she murmured sadly, “he was brainwashed as a child, had every piece of common sense beaten from him by a father he heard only yesterday has passed away. It may be sadness at the man’s passing that has affected him like this so soon afterwords.”

But Father Teatrader shook his head. “whatever it is that has made a decent man so convinced that right is wrong, that is the evil that has happened in his life,” he said quietly, “for there is not a mortal man, not now and not ever, even back to the very start of human life on Earth, who benefits our species by withdrawing to s cold and sterile mental place where nothing of worth or beauty ever happens. And to my mind, that is sadder than it is evil. Yes: it is both.”

“I’ll catch him up,” Emma told the Father, and she hurried after the already quite distant figure of Barney Pickle.

She could move a lot faster than him and it didn’t take her long to catch him up.

“Stop, Barney!” she asked him, “you are making a bit of a fool of yourself.”

“I know evil when I look upon it, and I have just witnessed it!” he told her, pausing and looking at her. He took in her face, her glorious hair, her beautiful eyes, the beseeching expression written all over it.

“You know you are wrong, Barney,” she said quietly, “and you can leave this place if you need to, I’ve got my purse with he and we can take a taxi if you haven’t got any loose change. But get it out of your mind that two people together, be they clothed or naked, are doing the wrong thing. After all, why do we wear clothes? Why did our distant forefather take to covering themselves up?”

“For decency!” he almost shouted.

She shook her head. “No, love, it was a great deal simpler than that. The weather was getting cold and they could fee the chill all around them, and they wore the skins of dead animals for protection against it. They were the first clothes and they wanted to be warm and not freeze to death: that’s the sum of it.”

“Tell me about it,” he whimpered, ”because I want that to be true. Yet inside my head is the absolute certainty that my beliefs are right.

“Your wicked father must have hammered them in hard,” she said, “come on: I’ll take you home if that’s what you want, to your parsonage, and it can be either your own sweet and holy home or your prison, whichever you choose. As long as I can share it with you.”