14. THE CLERK AND THE PLAYBOY

An exceptionally handsome young solicitor's clerk meets Charles Snootnose.

Ursula was surveying her domain, working out what small changes to make and even considering the impossible by displaying some goods where customers could help themselves and pay at her counter when they’d made their decisions, impossible because it just wasn’t done. Not anywhere. Goods were kept well out of the reach of customers until they were paid for. It was safer that way. Theft was unlikely.

And theft was equally unlikely when you had customers like those in Ursula’s corner of Swanspottle. They were all, to a man and a woman and a child, totally honest. She knew that: poor but honest. And she particularly knew that because she was one of them even though she was in the act of moving her own things into the flat above the shop and thus up a rung on the ladder of life. This was to be her home. Her permanent address. And Ma thought it was a good idea, which meant there was no chance of a tearful parting.

So she was surveying her domain, and sighed. Perfection, she was thinking, can always be improved on.

It was a deep and meaningful sigh, but it had nothing to do with the smart young man who chose that moment to walk in the shop with a sprightly ring of the doorbell.

“That was deep and meaningful,” he said with a smile.

And what a smile! One that involved a mouth that was chock full of the whitest teeth she had ever seen, that involved lips that crinkled just so and little lines that led all the way to his eyes and made them smile as well, and the whole thing set off by a haircut that was every definition of smart. And forgetting his smile for a moment, not that she could do that, but his whole appearance was clean and tidy, a suit that fit as though it had been made for him (and it had, no off the peg stuff for Greendale Blocksley, he knew the importance of appearance like few others did and fully intended to be steered in life by that knowledge). In the immediately pre world-war two years men knew the worth of a good suit but few could afford to save up for one, and when they did it had to last. They were hard times.

“Greendale Blocksley, ma’am,” he said, smiling that smile that had tripped many a young lady up. Not that his intent had been to trip anyone up: he couldn’t help the reaction in the fluttering hearts of the females of the species to his presence. No, his intention was to do well in the world. To pursue a course through life that would be a credit to himself and all his forefathers going back to the two naked charmers in the Garden of Eden. And when your intentions are so mighty there’s no place for intentionally beguiling anyone.

“Ursula Spandex,” she replied with a second sigh, this one being a direct response to the apparition before her.

What lovely trousers, she couldn’t help thinking, and if her mind wasn’t entirely on the worsted fabric from which they had been skilfully tailored but the manly legs hidden by them nobody could tell.

“I’ve been sent with papers,” he continued, “I’m from Dustcrotch, Dustcrotch and Featherington of Brumpton and I have papers for you to sign.”

“I was expecting papers,” said her fluttering heart as she made her way from behind the counter to be in front of it and consequently closer to the angel in a suit.

“I was instructed to go over them with you...”

A clerk who can follow such instructions must be a bright and noble clerk indeed, she thought. Most young men of a certain age are too bound up in other matters to be capable of guiding even a bright and knowledgeable young woman like me through legal papers…

“I trust you have a few minutes to spare,” he added, still smiling.

And that smile was beyond belief! It washed over her accompanied by a flood of Cologne that lingered in the air about her as it spread slowly from every smidgen of his highly fragranced flesh.

“I can find them,” she said, managed to be both light and serious in a single phrase.

He looked at her for a moment longer than he needed to. It was clear to him that he was in the company of a woman of extraordinary capability, and she was so young. Not much younger than himself, it was true, but young women were more notorious as flibbertigibbets and bright young things than real intellectuals. And this young Spandex woman gave off an aura of someone capable of real thought rather than the movie-going numbskulls he had hitherto been acquainted with. Not that movie-going numbskulls didn’t have their place in life, but it was never going to be a place, as he mentally put it, at the high table.

So much can a capable young man glean from a few moments with an attractive young woman!

He was about to open the envelope containing the aforementioned papers when the door to the village store opened and, with a flourish intended to make her heart flutter like it had never fluttered before, in swept Charles Snootnose, who had never yet managed to make her heart do anything spectacular.

He stood for a moment upon entering the shop and took in the smart young man and his envelope of papers, and then he took in Ursula Spandex on very much the wrong side of her counter, and then the two of them.

“I have come to talk business,” he said, adopting a superior tone of voice and accent in keeping with the public school he had attended and been expelled from a decade earlier.

“Two gentlemen with similar intents,” said Ursula lightly.

“Business?” asked the handsome Greendale Blocksley of the Brumpton solicitor’s emporium.

“It can be of no concern of yours,” snapped Charles Snootnose, resorting to his usual brusque and some might call ill-mannered attitude to strangers.

“As Miss Spandex’s legal adviser...” began Greendale, deliberately exaggerating his place in the world.

Charles looked at him suspiciously, and Ursula could almost hear the cogs revolving inside his head. Who is this twerp, he thought, making out to be in the legal profession at his age? Why, he can’t be much more than twenty…

“Miss Spandex,” if we could take a peek at these papers and if all is well, you sign them?” asked Greendale, “but maybe you should serve this customer first?”

“Of course,” she replied, smiling at him because, in truth, he was the sort of young man she couldn’t help smiling at, and not a teasing smile either but a warm one suffused with a lovely kind of burgeoning friendliness. “What is it, Charles, a tin of beans?” she asked.

“I wondered...” he spluttered, so swiftly out of his depth that it was a dreadful thing to behold, “I wondered … maybe there’s a corner … a shelf, perhaps… or a drawer…?

The cogs were still audible, and she smiled at him again. “Yes, Charles?” she repeated.

“I mean a little corner… maybe just an empty wall … to show my etchings and, maybe, offer them for sale?”

“An empty wall, Charles?”

She surveyed the shop. It was a small village store and for the life of her she couldn’t see a single area of wall that wasn’t cluttered with shop things. “What do you think, Mr Blocksley?” she asked, “do you approve of diversity?”

Where the word diversity came from she couldn’t have said, but it did, fully formed and completely appropriate as she stood there, legs teasingly apart, half-smiling at Charles Snootnose.

And without waiting for a reply he turned and almost ran out of the shop muttering “wait till I tell daddy, he’ll sort you out, yes he will, sort you out good and proper, poxy shopkeeper...”

“I guess that’s the Squire’s nuisance of a son?” asked Greendale, all teeth and cologne.

Ursula smiled and nodded.

“I loved the way he put ‘shopkeeper’ in italics when he said it,” she said

“Italics or no, he’s got a shock coming,” murmured the solicitor’s clerk, “with some of his art works. The police have been asked to take a look. Apparently he produces images of, what shall I call it, an indecent nature, and puts them on public sale… now that can’t be allowed, can it? And certainly not in your charming little shop...”

© Peter Rogerson 23.07.18