History Lesson 1

 

Time passes, but the routine goes on. Been away from my diary for a few months but I’ll report events back to eventually over the next month or so.

However you may well be wondering how  did I first meet my delectable Mr Robson?

Time for a little history lesson perhaps.

It was over twenty years ago and I was a free-spirited twenty-something girl about town. I’d graduated from Art School and was running my own little interior design business and it was doing very well too. I had enough commissions to keep me busy five sometimes six days a week and although I wasn’t making a fortune, there was enough cash coming to not just keep the wolf at the door, but firmly down the path and outside the garden gate.

I had independence and a great deal of sexual freedom. I had plenty of fun and boyfriends but never anybody serious and although that sounds great, personally, I still had a bit of an emptiness in me and a great deal of uncertainty about what I actually wanted out of life and, specifically, a relationship. At the time I met the Reverend Alistair Preston I was in a semi-serious relationship with a guy called Rick, a fellow Art School graduate who was working as a photographer for some fledgling start-up business based on a nondescript industrial estate way out on the edge of town. I say semi-serious in that Jonah was serious about us, but although he was a nice enough bloke, I wasn’t. You get the picture.

And so entirely oblivious to how my life was about to drastically change I made my way towards St. Delilah’s vicarage in one of the city’s ordinary western suburbs.

I remember driving out the increasingly quieter streets to this day; to some inane music on Radio One, wondering whether to see my friend Karen in the local wine bar for a bit of a tipple that night and do some man-watching, the usual, normal musings of cloudy autumn afternoon.

The vicarage wasn’t the archetypical sort that I was expecting- you know, imposing Victorian villa covered in wisteria with a huge imposing front door and an Adam’s Family style bell on a chain to summons the housekeeper- but a pretty ordinary looking thirties detached town house with a bay windows, a yellow front door, a gravel drive and roses around a well-manicured lawn out front. In fact if there hadn’t of been a small notice board with a church newsletter pinned in it next to the a small brass plaque saying ‘St. Delilah’s Vicarage’ I really wouldn’t have thought I was in the right place and our dippy half-day secretary back at the office had fed me the wrong address.

Whatever I parked the car in the drive and folded my long legs out of the motor. I was wearing one of my typical work-combat outfits: short light brown suede skirt, thick, mustard coloured hold up stockings that were more like very long socks when combined with such a short skirt than stockings to tell the truth, mocha high heeled pixie boots, a nice tight melon coloured tee-shirt and by favourite, battered leather jacket. My hair was a wild perm of blond waves and backcombing- remember this was still a hangover time from the eighties- and my make-up was bold and assertive. I looked fantastic, and I knew it.

After crunching up the driveway I rang the very ordinary door bell and I heard a distant buzz within the house. To my surprise a housekeeper didn’t open the door-I thought all vicars and priests had housekeepers- but the vicar himself! And to my further surprise [and I have to admit, sudden spark of delight] he wasn’t some doddery old bloke clutching some huge to me he’d been engrossed in, a youngish thirty something bloke who was good-looking in a bookish way, well built without being over-developed, chiselled without being cartoonish and for some reason, he suited his dog-collar down to a tee. And I even got a sudden, unexpected tingle in my cunt-where the hell had that come from?- which returned as he looked me up and down. Now I was more than used to being scoped by men and being mentally undressed by them, I loved it in fact, but something about the way he drank me in, the way he seemed to scan me, was entirely different. Disturbing, spooky and -I have to admit- arousing, all at the same time.

‘Good,’ he eventually said with a slight smile before I had managed to say anything.

‘Barbara Smiles.’ I said holding out my hand. To my intense relief he didn’t come out with the now deadly boring predictable retort ‘oh I see you do!’ or one of the many other various tedious variations. So he immediately went up in my estimation by merely taking my hand, briefly squeezing it then letting go.

‘Come in,’ he said holding the door wider and I did so still smiling, walking past him into a large hallway, unashamedly wiggling my bum [old habits die hard].

I stood in the hallway looking around me, hitching my bag further upon my shoulder. To the right a wide staircase went up to the next floor, all dark wood blood red carpet. The floor of the hall though was parquet wood and I looked down at my heels.

‘Ooops sorry,’ I said, ’do you mind heels on this floor? They can leave marks…’

Firmly closing the front door he walked towards me and said enigmatically:

‘Whenever you come here, I expect you to wear nothing but heels.’

Now this took me aback a little. On so many levels as a thing to say it was just…weird. Particularly for a vicar.

But it gave me the chance to look at him in more detail. He wasn’t a conventionally good looking man- he also had a very off-putting sense of aloofness- but there was something about him, some strange allure that really confused me. His face was craggy but not weather-beaten; his black hair was thick but swept back in a neat cut. The fact that his bright, penetrating blue eyes seemed so deep - a maelstrom of analysis and suppressed passion were my first impression- yet at the same time so empty was, I must say, disturbing.

But…definitely fascinating. And what more can I say; for a vicar, he had an unusually sinister air and as he stood close to me, I had what I can only describe as a sense of dark nastiness within him. I felt my lips quiver a little; it all added up to a lot of sexiness to my mind and to my shame I dampened a little. Looking back, I do believe it was at that point, he knew I was his.

‘Let me take your jacket,’ he said with a half-smile. I snapped out of my reverie and smiled back, dropping my bag to the parquet floor.

‘Yes, of course,’ I replied slipping the leather jacket off my shoulders. He reached behind me and helped to slide it off my arms. I instinctively pushed my tits out and smiled-oh yes, tits and teeth, my speciality- as he took the jacket from me then walked across to door to our left opposite the staircase. It was a small coats cupboard and has he hung my jacket up, I had the chance to look around the hall and through a nearby open door into what I took to be the sitting room a little bit more. I picked up my bag again and pulled out my notebook and pen. The house on the whole from what I could see looked okay; certainly a little tired, it looked like very little had been done in terms of interior decoration since the fifties, but otherwise I suspected it was a pretty solid canvas to work too.

‘It’s a very grand hallway,’ I say brightly. ‘I like this space. It’s a good start!’

The Rev. Robson returns from hanging up my jacket.

‘Yes it is, and I too enjoy this space. It makes for a good introduction to the vicarage, does it not’ he says but with a sudden air of distraction, looking past me through the door into the nearby room at the foot of the staircase. I suddenly feel an intense stab of irritation at no longer being the centre of his attention. As you will have gathered already though, that is of course me all over.

‘Well,’ I say moving towards him determined to wrest his attention back to as he stared off into the other room, ‘if you can give me a bit of tour, then we can talk about what you want me to do for you.’

‘Yes,’ he says his attention immediately returned to but it is not so much what I want you to do, but what I want to do.’

‘Oh, of course,’ I say smiling. ‘It is all about what you as the client wants done, at the end of the day, I will only be doing as you say.’

‘More like as I command,’ he says and before I can become indignant at this- I am after all a professional, here to advise not be dictated to like a decorator skivvy- I am immediately disarmed by his first genuine smile since we first met. I then irritate myself by going suddenly coy.

‘Well I would like to think I am able to interpret your basic ideas and wishes and perhaps even enhance them,’ I pout.

‘No doubt,’ he says simply, still smiling. Let’s go into the Drawing Room.’ He holds out his hand in front of me to the open doorway. I followed it and walked ahead of him into the room, feeling his eyes burning into my legs, arse, hair. It suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t just want this vicar to eventually fuck me, I needed him to. That thought both disturbed and excited me in equal measure.