Male Order Part 1
… a seasonal tale
Ella and Ted would fail to survive his early retirement. He was a dull but robustly handsome maths lecturer at the University, she a warm and worldly student counsellor. They had met in the campus carpark over a terminally floppy squirrel that he had inadvertently run over, and that she had tearfully failed to resuscitate. He just happened to have a spade in the boot, and as a gesture of remorse had scraped a shallow grave, whilst she snuffily snatched up a ceremonial fistful of buttercups. He suggested a moratorium over coffee, and within days they had blundered into a shallow but steamy summertime affair.
It might well have spluttered to a close, but by the start of the new academic year, Ella was overwhelmed by the nausea that heralded twin sons: a situation that would fuel the ongoing blunder into a marriage that held scant promise. Not that it was a particularly bad marriage, but once the passion had dwindled, it just lacked depth, intimacy, and nonsense. They muddled along amiably enough on the common causeway of family life, and had even survived his frequent undergraduate infatuations. However, within days of Ted’s retirement, his sneaky dalliance with young Maeve, the raven-haired potter in the barn conversion across the valley, exploded into inescapable reality, when he just bloody moved in with her.
This was harsh for Ella, not least because Maeve's place was directly visible from the landing window. Ted now parked his red Fiat ostentatiously in her yard, hitherto having hidden it . For some weeks, Ella took the bend on the stairs with her eyes screwed shut as she loudly cursed their brazen and humiliating disregard. She was glad that their sons, having left for university, were spared this outrage. She would have to tell them after Christmas.
But, in early December came the solemn visit from the police, to gently inform her that Ted had failed to survive a head-on collision with a local tractor. At least she would no longer have to see the red car. The wails of Maeve echoed across the valley, but Ella felt no pain whatsoever - just a joyous surge of freedom and cosy singularity. She was going to enjoy being a widow, and Ted's pension would enable her also to retire early from a rewarding but draining career. Best of all, she could finally express her inner Bohemian into their tired old home and she could both lose and find herself in the sweet sanctuary of the long neglected riverside garden.
A few years later, Ella’s life was well and truly hers and hers alone. A few complicated brief encounters established her preference for uncompromised singledom. She enjoyed her own company, reinforced by a few old friends and four cats. She now less frequently attended the local poets’ group, as their ramblings became increasingly moribund, and she no longer went on the painting holidays that had taught her how to see, if not how to paint. For awhile, she made her home a social hub, but fewer people came calling now - old friends moved on either mortally or geographically, the track was in poor repair, and she was deeper in a world of her own.
Her sons, now nearing thirty, continued to explore their lives ever further from home; Laurie had finally despaired of the brutality of inner-city teaching and with his modest savings and a wispy Dutch girlfriend, now aspired to be an eco-peasant in Bulgaria. Jake, a gifted mathematician like his father, was currently a burlesque dancer in Melbourne. They both seem to have fallen much further from the family tree than Ella could either have hoped or expected. They stayed connected through bubbly intermittent internet, and on her birthdays they always sent far too many flowers.
Soon, all the days began to feel much like another, having lost their distinction. Likewise, the clock no longer imposed its disciplines. Ella and the cats all rose from and sank back into her wide and cosy bed to the rhythm of the sun. Sometimes she would stir in her sleep to acknowledge the calls of the owl or the whistles of the otters. Dressing for comfort before style, being still tall and lean with a wild shock of black and silver hair, she cut a bright dash as she pottered along the banks of the river. As she was doing on the chilly November afternoon when she heard a deep shout from up by the house and went to investigate. A disarmingly broad and familiar grin broke through the generous beard of a tall figure, a large package under his arm. She felt warmly appraised as she tried to clump elegantly up the path in her overlarge wellies, escorted by two weaving cats.
The man wanted her to sign for the parcel intended for the new couple further down the track. He ducked to step into the kitchen to deposit the box, and they exchanged easy banter whilst she washed the sticky compost from her hands, before drying them down the front of the Hereford cow onesie that she had scrambled into at sunrise. Glimpsing her dishevelled self in the dresser mirror she felt suddenly shy and vulnerable, and as she turned towards him, felt the rise of a girlish blush accompanied by a burst of gibberish smalltalk as he proffered a stylus for her to sign the delivery console. In those few seconds of electronic closeness she yearned to tuck herself into the safe crook of his tall shoulder. She saw herself add a childish kiss after her signature, at which he laughed aloud - a deep rolling Disney laugh. “I don’t get enough of those,” he quipped softly, as he dipped back out of the door and out of her life.
An absurd sense of impending loss made her follow him outside and round to the yellow delivery van, as she fished through her mind for prolonged conversation. It defaulted to the forecast of impending bad weather, as she wondered how far he had yet to travel. “Back over the mountains to Newtown, and home before dark, I hope.“ Pushing her hair back from her face, she abandoned all attempts to extend the exchange, and threw him her best smile. “Bye for now,” she squeaked. “I really like your style, my lady. Take care.” He blew a kiss through the murky windscreen, and rumbled off.
Back in the now profound emptiness of the kitchen she savoured the clutch of the pulse that had risen in her throat. Her heart clamoured to make itself felt and a rare chill of loneliness crept through her. She brusquely slipped into the Pavlovian routine of filling the kettle and found herself reaching for the dusty old Cinderella mug at the back of the cupboard. Sinking into the old rocker, she basked in the musky embrace of Earl Grey. Only then did she spot the large glove on the floor. On snatching it up, she shocked herself when she raised it straight to her cheek.
Being an experienced counsellor, Ella spent a couple of days diagnosing and defusing her absurd infatuation as some glitch of displaced abandonment. Unlike bloody Cinderella, she would be fifty-something in a few weeks, when she would probably fall for the Interflora delivery man too, when he’d arrive to swamp her with the twins’ annual avalanche of guilt. What she chose not to observe, however, were her growing number of subversive activities.
Her heart and brain had teamed up on Google for one thing, to casually explore the realms of internet shopping, where they were soon trawling for urgent items that wouldn’t quite fit through the cat flap. Meanwhile, her bedroom mirror was conspiring to tweak up her appearance. A quick trim and an upsweep of the madness of her hair, the re-discovery of the earrings that reflected her blue-grey eyes, and the re-instatement of a lick of mascara and a blush of the cheeks. Soon those funky grey dungarees re-discovered themselves, along with an assortment of shapely and interesting garments that had slunk to the back of the wardrobe.
And so it was, that just a week later, the yellow van came rumbling back up the track to deliver a rather nice new garden bench. By the time it had pulled up, Ella was sitting pretty in the kitchen deeply immersed in a seed catalogue. But when the bell rang, her heart twerked as she chirped “Come in!” …..
….. to be continued