4. THE FOURTH KISS

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (4)

PROLOGUE

Blowing, it was, on the wind that day, blowing with the smoke and the stink of fire heavy in it, but pure like the rest wasn’t. That’s how Mary Ingott saw it as she watched the most special man in the world digging a great hole in the soil of his back yard, and bury his parmesan. And the wonder that was blowing in the wind was the kiss she secretly blew his way, because you always kiss the one you love. Her mum had taught her that, before the plague got her a year back.

But it wasn’t the cheese that fascinated Mary but the man digging to bury it. The Master. The centre of her dreams. And not only her dreams. She knew he had an eye for pretty young things, and as she believed herself to possibly be the prettiest and because he’d told her she was, she didn’t really care.

That cheese was a precious thing too, probably more precious than the papers and trinkets he buried with it to save his treasures from the flames that had spread out from Pudding Lane that September day and was whisked to fury by a wind that seemed to come from nowhere.

The master was afraid or he wouldn’t be digging that hole, and who knows what mischief the fire had in its flaming heart? It might even come this way, might even smother the entire world until everything was ashes. Ashes and scorched cheese. But not the Master! She had been tempted by him, had even slept in his bed when the mistress was out, slept when absolutely no sleeping was done! And she had found every moment of their writhing ecstasy a joy above all others. He was a man, was the Master, a true man yet with the kindest of hearts that knew the worth of a woman’s love.

She was so preoccupied with the man of her dreams and recalling a bout of lust with him only a week or so since that she slipped on the floor that had been soaked lest the fire come that way, for everyone knows that water douses flames, and she fell like a great weight down the steps leading to the cellar, and smashed her brains until they’d never think again, not even to blow another kiss.

And Mary Ingott, in passion and love, lay dead to this life.

THE TALE

With autumn coming on and Cyril banging about in his room upstairs I felt irritable, but not for any good reason because an old man moving furniture isn’t really a good reason, and every year has its autumn, doesn’t it? There’s no good reason there either!

I suppose the worst thing was the book I was ploughing through. I didn’t like it but thought I really ought to know a little bit more about seventeenth century society if only to scorn its pretensions and weaknesses. And it was then that someone knocked my door, and it can’t have been Cyril. Not this time, because he was still banging above my head.

The horrible truth is I’ve got to thinking about Cyril lately, not in a romantic way, you understand, I don’t do romance of any sort. I don’t even read romantic books and haven’t got the least idea of what makes men physically different from women though I suspect it may have something to do with the trousers. But then, you see, I’m a virgin aged seventy three, and proud of it. No, my thoughts about Cyril are questions, like is he a lonely old man and should I call on him out of the blue so that he’s no longer totally isolated from the mass of humanity? It would be a kindly thing to do, surely, and not really matter that he was a man who might have improper thoughts when he saw me.

I won’t, of course.

Then the door was knocked a second time and I muttered something irritably under my breath and went to open it.

The girl who stood there can’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen and she reeked of smoke. Wood smoke, the sort you can’t help impregnating your clothes with on Bonfire night, though this was only September and there was no reason for anyone to light a fire in the morning, not yet anyway.

“Yes?” I asked. I’m getting good at that word, the number of weird people who’ve been at my door this year.

“It’s the master,” she said. Was that a Cornish accent? I’m not so good on accents though they do sometimes fascinate me. Like how can accents and even vocabulary become so different over relatively small distances as two adjacent counties? Even between two nearby villages, I’ve been told. It’s always struck me as odd.

“Yes?” I repeated, shockingly imperiously, but it was this child who had knocked my door and not the other way round. Is there another way round? Maybe not, but I know what I mean.

Then I noticed something.

Looking at the child’s careworn face I saw something. Something familiar, like I’d seen it before.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Mary, miss, Mary Ingott,” she said, and I knew what it was. It was that looking glass she/I had looked in. Way back, before… oh before time, I suppose. And that thought and those words caused something to happen all around me that scared me stiff. At the very sound of her name and the way she pronounced it the world dissolved and became, in a couple of instants, something else and I was standing on the roughly tiled and very wet floor of an outhouse with my eyes glued on a man working away with a shovel. And he was wielding that shovel as if the world depended on him battering it into shape.

“Samuel,” I whispered, and the very beauty of his name was like the tinkle of diamonds. But he ignored me and he dug with his shovel until he was apparently satisfied with the product of his labour, whereupon he slowly and carefully lowered a few precious things into his newly dug hole. You could tell they were precious from the care he took, the expression on his face as he turned some of them over in his hand, looking at them, and smiling before lowering them into the hole

One of the treasures was a huge cheese, the hard sort they make in Italy and what I know he is extremely fond of, along with the wine he keeps in crates down the cellar for when friends call.

Down the cellar…

Which is just behind me, and I find my feet slipping on the newly drenched floor. I couldn’t help it, but I was out of control as I flailed helplessly, and when I knew my time was up and because I loved him more than any lass ever loved a man I blew him a huge and passionate kiss.

Then the world changed back to its proper self like the past had never been.

Cyril was coming down the stairs from his flat, and he frowned at me.

“Was that you falling down, my dear?” he asked, and I thought, what a cheek! Calling me his dear!

“Not as loud as all the banging from upstairs!” I retorted, and he smiled the sort of smile I’ll never forget and murmured “Touché” and carried on his way.

I’d best go down and apologise, I thought to myself, I might have been kinder in the way I spoke to the poor man... But when I got to the main door to our block of flats he was nowhere in sight, though the bus to PARMA VALLEY was Just moving off, and i thought he must have caught it, because Parma Valley is where the library is, where I once worked.

© Peter Rogerson, 13.03.20