12. LUST

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (12)

FOREWORD

Prostitution.

THE TALE

He knew, when he surfaced in a moment of sanity and could see the Afterlife for what it might or couldn’t have been, but probably was, that maybe he was Sir Toby Bumblegum as was. And Sir Toby had pockets filled with hard cash, notes and coins, from his trade. He loved his notes and hard cash and so did the dragon of a wife he kept at his country seat.

Penny dreadfuls were his stock in trade, cheap and cheerful and occasionally nasty little works of words in which moneyed men, like Sir Toby was a moneyed man, took huge pleasure in maidens whose only function in life was to provide that pleasure. He knew there were nasty little rooms with the prettiest wenches installed for the pleasures of his sort. He knew that because he owned one. He’d heard the pretty wenches gasp and demand more than even he could give, and that demanding would be printed in a day or so and make his fortune ever bigger, because didn’t the working man like nothing more than being titillated by words without flesh to them? Literacy was a great thing and plenty of men were literate these days. Pen the glorious wenches in their cheap frocks and their pennies and he was enriched by his smut.

“And fat men dying in their ecstasy?” asked the swirling fogs, and out of them emerged a dream called Edith.

“What was that” asked Cyril Boniface, or was it Sir Toby Bumblegum or could it have been both?

“That time, sir, when you called on me in the little attic room you gave to me?” said Edith. Oh wasn’t she a delight to look upon, even though he or they didn’t have eyes as such with which to see her. But it was in her voice, not its sound because it was silent, but its intent.

“I called on you,” agreed Sir Toby or Cyril or both, “and you beckoned me to your clean crisp sheets and bade me lie on them with you, and from that moment on I was in thrall to you. I had to more than just love you...”

“You mean lust?” asked the lass, “for love is more than simply thrusting and the like. It is more than simply dying in the act so that a girl, this girl, has to seek help to shift the flesh of a fat man and explain how, in his haste to see her he’d raced up the stairs to her garret room and fallen flat on his face, and she’d made him decent, tucked his shirt in and thanked the Lord he’d kept his pants on, and when the constable came had told him with innocent eyes that her dad was dead just there. No, that was lust, dad, lust and nothing like love.”

“But you still call me dad,” he smiled. Or his voice smiled, its tone, its vulgar nuances, the smut that had brought his fat old heart to a standstill, all there.

“I always called you dad because you bade me to,” she agreed, “I hoped that it was because you looked on me as the daughter you never had, but I rather suspect the truth: a father visiting his daughter in a tiny garret attic is a kindly thing whilst that same father, but being a mere man, visiting his mistress up a narrow flight of dusty stairs, might set tongues wagging. And when tongues in those days wagged the parson might get to hear of it and the very next Sunday vent forth a sermon on the evils of the flesh.”

“But you were like a daughter to me,” he complained.

Cyril, the other half, didn’t understand that one little bit. Fathers and daughters… he’d always been childless because of a problem with his earthly physical flesh, his inability to generate the essence needed for new life, but if he’d had a daughter he would have loved her like fathers do love daughters, and there would have been no flesh involved. The whole idea of a fat father lying with his own daughter was anathema to him.

“That’s wrong,” he said, flatly, or at least something in his non-existent head generated the thoughts/words. “Fathers and daughters aren’t ever like that.”

“But I wanted her!” protested Sir Toby, “I was away from home and the spittle-tongued spouse I might have loved in my green days was a day or two away in the town with my gold to spend.”

“Tittle,” laughed the girl, the one who may have been Edith or may have been Gwennie but who was almost certainly both. “You were as many men are and greedy for what your prim and proper church-going wife withheld from you because that’s what the parson said. Happy is the man who has many arrows in his quiver, he told you, meaning babes in their cots or schoolboys laughing their ways to school, satchels on backs and wit in their mouths as they laugh together, and then he told her, told your wife in his congregation, that begetting was good but pleasure was bad. The stupid man!”

“So you blame the parson?” asked Sir Toby, welcoming a substitute for his guilt.

“No more than I blame myself for taking the charity of a rich man and rewarding him with a little pleasure until he dies of excess of it,” laughed Edith, “but I don’t blame you either, whose prim and churchy wife drove you to it. No. I blame the whole conglomeration that was our society in life for working out such abstruse rules and regulations. And for believing that those restrictions were some particular god’s words. Then your comely wife would have drained you in her bed herself, and there would have been no long flights of garret stairs for you to struggle up!”

“And you?” asked Sir Toby, “what would have been of you?”

“I’d still be here somehow,” she laughed, “for they were cruel times and there would have been a dirty hole for me to live in.”

“And Gwennie?” asked Cyril, “What of her? Where do I find her?”

“At the end of this eternal pasture she’ll be waiting for you, but she won’t be alone,” murmured Edith, “there have been other shadows with the same dreams as she and I.”

“She is bookish,” he told them, “not churchy.”

“Just as well,” giggled or sighed or laughed or wept Edith, “for without churches there would be no brothels or solitary garrets. It is true, you know, that churches once raised taxes from brothels and thus it was in the interest of Bishops to keep them busy. Why, it is said that they even frequented them when nobody was looking, and took their pleasures for free, themselves! Think of it: the sermon preacher being the same man as the sermon hearer!”

Cyril had a headache, or would have had he got a head, which he didn’t, and that was probably a good thing.

“I must move on and see who comes next in the parade of Gwennies,” he said, understanding what was going on.

“Before you go,” whispered Edith, “you must know one thing.”

“I must?”

“Yes. Of course. That despite it all I loved you.”

And she was gone from his consciousness like a breath of sea air stirring a mist in the morning. In life, that is, not in death.

© Peter Rogerson, 21.03.20