SLUMBERING DESIRES

What exactly is love and how do we know if we've found it?

It was Thursday last week when Timmy made love to me, and to be honest I’d never been with anyone better, even at my age.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m some sort of tart, because I’m not. My name is Sandra Byewater and I’m the Reverend Paul Byewater’s wife and I swear that I love my husband and hold our marriage as sacred in the highest sense. So when I say that Timmy made love to me and that he was the best I’ve known when it comes to the intimacies I’ve referred to you must understand that Timmy doesn’t actually exist.

Am I confusing you? I hope not, but anyway let me explain.

Timmy was my best friend at school, and that was years ago. Let’s face it, well over half a life time has passed since the halcyon days when we played together in the playground. We were both ten, and on the verge of leaving to go to our separate schools, me to the girls’ grammar and he to the boys’.

It was not unusual back then for the sexes to be educated quite separately. We girls were educated for office work, the clatter of typewriters the dominant sound in my memories, and he reckoned he was going to do woodwork, and maybe a science if he was good enough.

Timmy knew that he was no academic! But that didn’t matter because he was the best friend I ever had, and that’s true of us since our junior school days as well. There was Rachel in the first year of grammar school, and we were ffriends until she spent a great deal too much time (in my opinion) with Trish. But then, Trish was more like a boy than a girl and she was proud of it. She even wore trousers at school whilst the rst of us wore the pleated school skirt. She said there was a medical reason why she couldn’t wear a skirt, but I didn’t believe her then and I’ve never believed her since. The simple matter was she wanted to be a boy, and her parents, a pair of hippies, supported her and argued her case to the headmistress till she gave in.

When I saw Timmy, and it was rare now that our educational paths never crossed, he said we were still friends, but that he was rather keen on Hayley Stone, a girl I barely knew because, quite simply, she wasn’t my sort. Oh, there was nothing wrong with her, I knew that, but I couldn’t do with all that titillating she did, using forbidden make-up carefully in such minute quantities that it didn’t really look as if she was wearing any because if the teachers had detected it she would have been ordered to wash it offAt . But she didn’t go to the boys’ grammar and neither did I, so why couldn’t he have been just as keen on me?

After my “A” levels I went on to go to college where I met Paul, and I fell for him almost straight away. We were at Western Hall College of Education learning to be teachers (though it seemed to us that the lecturers there were more intent on our personal education than what we’d turn out like as teachers. I mean, I intended to teach young kids and my subject at college was English, but I didn’t learn one thing about how kids learn to read when they’re five but a hell of a lot about the Greeks and then the Romans, and their various philosophers and obscure (to me) poets.

Paul, though, did Religious Education and that involved an awful lot of praying, but when he wasn’t praying he developed a fascination with my bosom, which was all right by me.

After college we got teaching jobs in different schools, he in a secondary modern where the kids were generally known to be unruly and me in an infants school where the kids were sweet but sometimes a bit smelly.

It was then that our relationship became a love affair in the most wonderful sense of the term, but much to my disappointment he left the job of teaching kids that didn’t want to be taught and went to a different college in order to learn how to preach. But after he graduated toi my delight and his pleasure he became the curate and then the vicar in a fairly local church

And that just about brings us up to date. We married (obviously) and even though we’ve been married for half a century during which time I retired and Paul carried on worrying about sin it’s like nothing has changed.. But that’s been fifty years of life, of him writing sermons and me composing a series of readers for slow five year olds, followed by him getting a part time additional job at Brumpton Prison responsible for the souls of thieves and murderers, but still retaining his parish and his work to convince his parishioners about a deity I’ve never thought existed. Not that I discussed it with Paul

And his courses. He ran lecture courses about praying and how criminals can be saved by prayer, and that left me on my own for reasonably long periods because he went all over the country doing it, and left the church in the hands of his curate, an eccentric young man by the name of the Reverend Caspian Sykes who didn’t believe in God or his angels, had no time for Satan and the fall of man but believed fully in an important place in society for the church because something like the stability that gives can only be good and help those who are lost in the complexity of modern life and need a crutch to hang on to.

Paul didn’t like him at all, which didn’t surprise me at all because Paul was convinced that his own life had always been controlled by a figure in the skies, and hated the suggestion that maybe he was wrong, but I did like him Caspian. He was refreshing and I could see his point about those who fell by the wayside in life.

Which is where Timmy comes back into my life

Paul was off on one of his interminable courses, leaving me and Caspian (I called him Caspy, which sounds less pompous) living close together in the vicarage. He had a boxroom, and he said he loved being up at the top of the house because that’s where the servants would have suffered in those days when the vicar had servants. Casp hated the idea of servants having to waste their lives scrubbing and cooking when the sky is often blue, the fields green and life is for living.

I must admit now that I liked him. He was refreshing because I’ve never had much in the way of a religious faith, and slowly, duting several of Paul’s many absences on this or that course, Casp morphed into the first love of my life, into Timmy. And, you know, none of the childish affection I’d felt as a junior schoolgirl had gone away. I found myself liking and then loving Caspian, and as a consequence I discovered that I was increasingly annoyed by Paul and his sermons.

One day, quite recently if you must know when, I broached the subject to Casp. “Why,” I asked, “am I so drawn to you when I’m married to a very good man who loves me in return for my love?”

“And you do love him? In every sense of the word?” he asked, frowning at me, a seventy three year old woman who was increasingly suspecting that she knew nothing about what love really means at all.

“I think so,” I replied, and then I called him subconsciously “Timmy.”

“Why did you call me that?” he asked.

So I had to explain about my schoolgirl crush on a boy in grey short pants called Timmy, and how the vagaries of the educational system had separated us. And how nobody in my adult life has equalled the feelings I’d had for him. I even told him that once when Timmy had been punished by being beaten with a slipper (they did it back then) and it was me who did the weeping.

And he smiled at me. “Timmy really is my middle name,” he said.

We left it at that, but after I’d gone to my lonely bed with Paul goodness-knows where doing his converting and praying, a gentle knock on my door alerted me.

I knew who it was: there were only the two of us in the house and it wasn’t me, and when the door opened it was Casp in grey shorts and a smile.

“I love you even though you’re a bit on the old side,” he said cheekily, and slipped next to me into bed.

That was Thursday last week, and then Friday, then Saturday…. You see where I’m going.

And Timmy knew exactly how to wake up the slumbering passions of an old woman, and without seeming to try he showed me that I’d actually lived a lonely life.

When Paul returned he commented that I seemed a changed woman and assumed it was a change in the weather. Little did he know!

© Peter Rogerson 19.04.23

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Reviews

[DIVYA]

This story has such a universal appeal to it. The husband of the protagonist was a vicar in this story but one finds such loneliness in a marriage so often, everywhere and it was the same in every age. I was pleasantly surprised she found a lover at such an age but I think anything is possible in love and war and I felt quite happy for her. It's a true journey of self-discovery and throws up so many vital questions. Thank you for the simply and entertainingly narrated story. I was drawn in and stayed in till the last.