7. THE LUSTING CHAUFFEUR

A wet overgrown lane and a frustrated chauffeur

“Why are we stopping here?” asked Ursula, somewhat tentatively.

The chauffeur Tony Nonesuch had slowly driven down a shaded lane that was almost protected from the squalling rain by a dense canopy of chestnut leaves. Ahead it petered out to little more than an animal track and Ursula was aware that it was unlikely that they would be overlooked by anyone in so hidden a place.

“I thought we might have a little chat,” he said quietly. “About Charley-boy perhaps? The wretch and his etching?”

“I don’t know him,” replied Ursula, “only to recognise, I mean,” she added, “like when he comes into the village shop where I work to buy tins of beans.”

“So you’re a shop wench, eh?” almost leered Tony Nonesuch.

“I work there, yes,” replied Ursula with a great deal of dignity. “Why do you want to talk about the Squire’s son?”

“I detest the nincompoop,” said Tony flatly, clearly assuming, or trying to assume, the sort of accent that might provide a kind of equality with the squire’s flesh and blood. “Look at me: I drive this car for his mother, and keep it clean and polished, oiled and fuelled and so on, and get paid peanuts and an ill-fitting uniform for my time. And I have to spy on him, on her own son, or lose my job! And he prances about, a pretend-artist with his easel and etchings, doing naughties with any girl that takes his fancy, and there are quite a few, I can tell you, when he gets away from home...”

“He’s not tried anything like that on me,” protested Ursula, defending Charles Snootnose whilst protecting her own honour.

“But I saw you at Snooty Manor,” almost sneered the chauffeur, “I gave you a lift home: remember? What were you there for if it wasn’t to give young Charleyboy something to you-know-what to? You wouldn’t have been there for the good of your health, not the state he’d got the place into...”

“I was there for a drink and only a drink, lemonade if you must know, and I never got one because he couldn’t lay his hands on a clean glass or cup or anything to drink out of, and then his mother came home unexpectedly and made horrible suggestions about me. The same kind of suggestions that you’re implying now, in actual fact.”

“I know tarts,” grinned Tony, “I know what they’re after, all of them, a little something tasty from inside a man’s trousers, that’s what they’re after, though they never say it in words: they’re too clever for that!”

“I beg your pardon!”

“You know, duckie, you know what you want! Or there’s summat wrong with you! You want some fun, that’s what you want...” And Tony Nonesuch licked his lips and loosened his tie.

“Then you must have met some pretty rough girls if you think we’re all like that,” snapped Ursula, suddenly realising exactly why the chauffeur had pulled onto the shaded lane where they were parked. “Anyway, I’m only fifteen and too young for that kind of thing!”

“You could be taken for twenty,” leered Tony Nonesuch, “I’ve had lasses of twenty who look younger than you when they scrape the rouge off their faces. Nah, I’m going to pretend you’re twenty and you’re going to like it!”

“Well I ought to know how old I am, and I’m fifteen,” insisted Ursula, “not that my age should have anything to do with it,” she added.

“It don’t matter, lass. You’re a b***h and I’m a dog on heat and that’s all that matters.”

“It’s b*****s that get on heat, not dogs,” Ursula spat at him, “and there’s no lass colder than me at the moment.”

Not, she thought, that it was true. Fear of the unknown had warmed her blood, and proximity to a lad she had hitherto thought of as relatively decent and honourable but who now turned out to be just another deviant after what he could get, and to hell with those who he got it from and how they felt about it.

“No matter,” he grunted. “take a look at what I’ve got down here...”

And he started to undo the fly buttons of his uniform trousers, struggling because he was seated, but undoing them slowly, one at the time!

She looked at his face. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, and the gleam in his eyes spoke of an intense appetite that would probably never be satisfied. So this is what drives them, she thought, this is the animal inside the male of the species!

She was suddenly like a traveller lost in a foreign land, not knowing the geography and unsure of the language. She looked around her at the giant trees and the globules of rain finding their way between sodden branches and over saturated leaves, at a sudden desolation where not so long ago there had been sunshine and summer. And there was only one thing she could think of doing: getting away as quickly as she could and running like the wind to the bosom of her family where she would be able to weep and give vent to her anger in peace.

He reached one hand for her as he struggled with his buttons, and the fingers of that hand brushed against her blouse. And she felt it. The anxious greed for a forbidden contact, the lust for something that would never be his because he was a man.

“No!” she squealed, and she reached wildly for the door handle of the car and yanked it open.

The limousine was big and she was small, but with very little difficulty she propelled herself out of it, her haste fuelled by both fear and anger. She was having nothing of this: besides her youth she needed to nurture her pride, and keep that intact.

“There’s no need for that!” protested the young chauffeur as she stood there proudly and with huge dignity on the wet lane and stared back at him, “I weren’t going to do nowt, honest, I just had summat to show you. You’d like it, all the gals like it.”

The pseudo-sophisticated accent that had been his up to that moment was dropped as he sat there, unable to follow her because of his state of near indecent exposure.

“You’re worse than that creep Charles,” she snapped at him, “at least he pretends there’s a motive for what he wants a lass to do, with his etchings and stuff, but you … you’re just an animal with animal desires and nothing else and you’d rape me if you got half a chance.”

“It’s only natural...” he muttered, “it’s what us men do. Ask the Squire if you see him. He does it all the time. It’s why the ever-so-posh lady Snootnose has left him, if you must know!”

“That’s got nothing to do with me and my life,” retorted Ursula, and she would have carried on to say how the high and mighty try to lord it over ordinary folks like her, but he was a mere servant and wasn’t one of those and hadn’t got the right to lord it over anyone, but she was interrupted before she started by the sound of a car horn just behind them.

A second limousine had silently, like a ghost, appeared from nowhere.

“Now then, what’s going on here?” enquired the suave and sophisticated yet oily tones of a newcomer.

It was Squire Snootnose, and he climbed out of the back seat of the car he was in and stood on the road, glowering at her.

© Peter Rogerson 15.07.18