the puritanical shikepoke, was watching me closely… so Maureen resigned herself to
four, five, possibly six months in a nunnery.
Father often spent a couple of hours in the evening at a pool hall he called his
`chess club’. On a rainy night at the end of February he surprised me by bringing a
stranger home with him.
He thereby subjected me to the greatest emotional shock of my life.
I found myself offering my hand and greeting a young man who matched in every way
(even to his body odour, which I caught quite clearly – clean mate, in fresh rut) –
a man who was my father as my earliest memory recalled him.
While I smiled and made small talk, I said to myself, `Don’t faint. Maureen, you
must not faint.’
For I had immediately gone into high readiness to receive a male. This male. This
male who looked like my father, thirty years younger. I forced myself not to
tremble, to keep my voice low, to treat him exactly like any other welcome guest
brought to my house by husband or father or child.
Father introduced him as Mr Theodore Bronson. I heard Father say that he had
promised Mr Bronson a cup of coffee, which gave me the respire I needed. I smiled
and said, `Yes indeed! For a cold and rainy night. Gentlemen, do be seated’ – and
fled into the kitchen.
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The time I spent in the kitchen, slicing pound cake, dishing up mints, setting out
coffee service, cream and sugar, transferring coffee from the kitchen-range
coffee-pot into a silver `company’ serving-pot – this busy-ness gave me time to pull
myself together, not expose my own rut and (I hoped) cover some of my body odour
simply by the odours of food and the fact that female clothing in those days was
all-encompassing. I hoped that Father would not notice what I had been sure of, that
Mr Bronson felt the same way about me.
I carried in the tray; Mr Bronson jumped up and helped me with it. We had coffee and
cake and small talk. I need not have worried about Father; he was busy with an idea
of his own. He too had seen the family resemblance… and had formed a theory: Mr
Bronson was a by-blow of his brother Edward, killed in a train wreck not long after
I was born: Father had us stand up, side by side, then look in the mirror over the
mantelpiece together.
Father trotted out this possible theory of Mr Bronson’s ‘orphan’ origin. It was many
months before he admitted to me that he suspected that Mr Bronson was not my cousin
through my rakehell Uncle Edward, but my half-brother through Father himself.
The talk that night let me, with all propriety and right under my father’s nose,
tell Mr Bronson that I looked forward to seeing him at church on Sunday and that my
husband expected to be home for my birthday and we would expect him for dinner…
since it was Mr Bronson’s birthday, too!
He left soon after that. I bade Father goodnight and went up to my lonely room.
First I took a bath. I had bathed before supper but I needed another one – I reeked
of rut. I masturbated in the tub and my breasts stopped hurting. I dried down and
put on a nightgown and went to bed.
And got up and locked my bedroom door and took off my gown and got naked back into
bed, and masturbated again, violently, thinking about Mr Bronson, how he looked, the
way he smelled, the timbre of his voice.
I did it again and again, until I could sleep.
Chapter 12 – `Hang the Kaiser!’
I’m wondering whether Pixel will come back at all, so disastrous was his last visit.
I tried an experiment today. I called out, `Telephone!’ just as I had heard Dr
Ridpath do. Sure enough, a hologram face appeared… of a police matron.
‘Why are you asking for a telephone?’
`Why not?’
‘You don’t have telephone privileges.’
`Who says so? If that is true, shouldn’t someone have told me? Look, I’ll bet you