TWO SIDES, ONE STORY

A sort of love story

Dennis Quail was at the end of his tether.

For almost eighty years he’d had his eye on the pretty young Angela from down the street and he couldn’t any more because the pretty young Angela had gone through several stages starting with young and ending with dead. And through all those stages he had honestly loved her, but always mostly from afar.

It had to be like that because he knew exactly how ugly he was. There had been the accident with a boiling kettle when he’d been three years old and that had scarred him for good, and three year-old Angela was obviously too nice for him, too pretty, too special. Even so young he had known that much.

Then at school, first the infants where Miss Catchpole had actually made Angela sit next to him because they scored the same as each other in some sort of test, then the Juniors where Alex Ogilvy from the posh house was known to really love Angela and she was supposed to really love him, though they were too young to properly understand that their love was little more than a battle of wills and neither of them saw much very special about the other.

After that there had been the comprehensive school, where things started heating up because for no reason he could understand the lovely Angela turned him on. And he couldn’t help it, and he did his best to conceal his mounting excitement whenever he saw her.

And it wasn’t until they were well into their teens that they actually had what might be called a conversation with each other. It was quite a simple one.

“How did you get those marks on your face?” asked Angela.

“I was scalded when I was little,” he told her, shy because even though being in your teens is getting to be old he felt desperately uncomfortable exposing his biggest weakness to the prettiest girl on the planet (his personal description of her).

“That’s very sad,” she purred, and went on her way to talk to Pete Smithson who rumour said loved her.

He left school at sixteen and went to work at Benson’s, the sweet shop and tobacconist shop that was on the brink of bankruptcy, and true to the nature of commerce it went under before he was eighteen even though he had accepted a couple of pay cuts designed by Mr Benson to turn things round. But nothing would work because smoking, the back-bone of Benson’s business, was becoming unpopular on account of serious health reports linking the habit to lung and heart diseases, and when Mr Benson himself fell ill with what he called the big C the writing was more than on the wall.

Meanwhile, the lovely Angela was still at school and from there moved on the college to learn how to be a teacher. He hardly saw her during those years but he knew deep inside his heart that he would always love her, and her only.

So when he married Denise in his early twenties it came as quite a shock to him, but he did. She was in tears because she was in what she called the family way and told him it was his fault though he hardly knew her. And, being a decent, well brought up young fellow he believed her and got to imagine he must have gone out sleepwalking one June warm night and had actually got up to the kind of thing he often dreamed about, but this time in reality, and even though he found Denise to be, at best, irritating, he did what he believed to be the right thing, and married her.

The baby was born and clearly had almost nothing to do with him because it was a very beautiful and bright eyed little fellow, and it was black whilst neither he nor Denise were anything but pale skinned.

It was Denise who decided to divorce him largely because she was getting fed up with being called Angela if they ever got to be physically close.

Into his thirties he found himself wondering what Angela was up to, and the shocking thing was when he next saw her he didn’t recognise her.

She was on the same street as him in town and walking towards him, and she pulled up dead.

“Why, it’s Dennis, isn’t it?” she trilled.

“”Er.. yes,” he replied.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, smiling broadly, and no, he hadn’t but when he saw those teeth, pearly and even and perfect, he did.

“Angela?” he stammered.

“So you do know me! Look, we must catch up some time, exchange .memories, that sort of thing,” she cooed, “but I’m off to school to meet the twins before they get lost and get up to some mischief…”

And she almost trotted up before he could find out who on Earth she meant by the twins

But it had been Angela and all his best phantasies homed in on him as he watched her disappear round a corner. But why had it been she who had recognised him first, and not the other way round? Why had he almost walked past the one woman who haunted many of his nights when he was so utterly in love with her?

He discovered, by asking his own mother with whom he lived now that has dad was in the cemetery, that the twins she had referred to were her sons and that she had been married to a wretched small time villain who was currently resident within the walls of Brumpton Prison.

“And to think I had hopes that you might end up with Angela,” muttered his mother, “but I dared say she’s not your sort.”

He tried to forget that brief encounter with the beautiful Angela, but nothing worked.

He found work in the nearby city and moved to a small one bedroom flat, which got him out from under his mother’s feet, as she put it. And for five years he slaved away for Mr Jackson of Jackson and Plummer, house repairs and conservatory erectors, until Mr Jackson concluded he wasn’t really cut out for that type of work, and dismissed him weeks before the business collapsed from under his feet.

And more years passed. He entered his forties and approached his fifties before he saw Angela again.

It was like this.

He formed a loose sort of friendship with Albert Princeton who lived across the road. They shared a few interests, gardening being one of them, and Albert had three children. He was a widower and his late wife had left him as a consequence of carelessly walking in front of a motor vehicle whilst staggering home late one night, and poor old Albert was left to demonstrate how a man can be almost as good as a woman when it comes to rearing the next generation.

And it was as a consequence of that friendship that he accompanied Albert to the comprehensive school to cheer the youngest Princeton on when he played a piano sonata in a concert at the end of the summer term.

And it was a shock to Dennis when he applauded the Headmistress’s opening comments because, as he did so, he realised that the headmistress was his Angela. And didn’t she look the part! She was clearly a bit older, but the added years were barely noticeable when she smiled.

So Angela had completed her college course and become a teacher and than a Headmistress! And despite having a dodgy marriage to a felon together with twins, she had overcome goodness knows how many obstacles to get this far!

That meant he loved her even more.

Gaining employment with a private coach company he discovered that he had real talent when it comes to paint-brushes, spray-guns and the like, he found work to be both lucrative and fascinating, and a side benefit came to when he had to accompany parties of usually schoolchildren on coach journeys.

It was one day when he was to accompany a school party to the theatre that he met Angela for the last time, but only from a distance. She was standing outside the coach scowling at the children as if to warn each and every one of them about behaviour, and then she turned, without even glancing his way, and made her way back into the school. But she was Angela and still the queen of his heart.

“And that,” he miserably told himself several times later, as the years and his retirement rolled along, “is the sum total of my love life.”

And then came a magical day when a girl in school uniform knocked on his door and handed him a letter.

It was from Angela!

“My granny asked me to give you this when she passed away,” the girl said, and when he opened it he wept because it told his own story but from Angela’s perspective, and she was no longer alive.

“Dennis,” he read, “I’ve held a candle for you for just about all of my life and wish we’d had a chance to get to know each other, but if you’re reading this it’s because I’ve passed away and left my thoughts for you while you still live. But there was a time when I was just a little girl and you were a little boy and we sat next t to each other in school. I liked you then and in a sill spooky way I’ve liked you ever since. I wanted you to know, my love, because that’s what you’ve been to me over my mixed-up years. You’ve been my love.”

“And you’ve been mine,” he sighed, and he popped across the road to tell Albert all about it.

© Peter Rogerson 09.11.24

xxx