The Woman at Stable Cottages

“Can you believe it, Aden, I was very attractive in those days…”

I protested, “Kym, you are lovely now…”

“Do shut up, Aden. He asked me to marry him. He was in his mid-forties, and I knew he had been married five times before, but it would be different with me. How we delude ourselves! I would find the best in him. I would make him happy. Together we would conquer the world.”

“I won’t bore you with a long story. He was a pig. He might, as the media has told us, have had a horrendous childhood, but he was a pig. He didn’t care who he hurt, who he destroyed, so long as he came out on top.”

Kym had spoken strongly to this point, but now she seemed to wilt.

“Aden, oh Aden, you don’t know the things he made me do. He was a man of power, but in bed, he wanted to be abased…to be humiliated…I can’t…I won’t tell you, Aden… Can you understand? Please say you understand.”

I was not to pity her, but what do you call it when the heart bleeds for someone?

“I understand.”

“When I became pregnant, do you know what he said, Aden? Oh, Aden, try to understand, please…”

“Just tell me, Kym.”

She slipped from her chair onto the rug before the fire and knelt there as if praying. I wanted to go to her, hold her, but did not have the nerve.

“He said, ‘Get rid of the little bastard.’ We didn’t know it was twins then. He called it, ‘An accident’. I didn’t know, Aden, I didn’t know what to do. I still thought I could show him what love could do, could be, but I…”

I hated myself. Here was someone in anguish, and I hadn’t the guts to comfort her.

“Aden, when I was in hospital, just after having the babies, he was interviewed on television. I was watching him on the screen over my bed. They asked him about his many marriages. Do you know what he said?”

I did know, for I had seen that interview, but I let her get it out.

“He said, ‘I marry them, then after a couple of years, when I’ve had enough of ‘em, I give ‘em a couple of million dollars and piss ’em off’.”

“I was so humiliated. I felt like a slut. I was something to be used, then thrown aside. Aden, don’t hate me.”

“When I came home with the babies, I tried to tax him with what he said on television. He laughed. ‘Piss of now, if you like, I’ve had all I want from you. You can have your money now, that’s what you want, isn’t it? I’ve got your replacement lined up.’”

“Do you understand, Aden?”

“I understand.”

“I got very sick with depression. They called it ‘post natal depression’. It wasn’t that, it was the humiliation of his rejection, and my foolishness in ever being tied up with him.”

“Mummy and daddy did their best. I got my ‘pay out’ from him, and bought the cottages, but I wasn’t supposed to move in until all the work was done.”

“You know, I thought I had made many friends when I was with him. When he told me I could go, most of them didn’t want to know me. They all wanted to hold on to his coat tails - to get what they could out of him - he thought he could buy love, but all he got was obsequious followers.”

“When you met me off the airplane, I was trying to run away…run way from the memory of his world and all his pathetic, money grubbing ‘friends’. It doesn’t work Aden. You have to face things as they are. I suppose that’s what I’m doing now.”

She ceased speaking, her head bent as she stared at the rug. It had been a cathartic unbosoming. I felt somehow a responsibility as the recipient of her confession.

Kym remained kneeling on the rug before the fire, weeping as if her heart would break. She was a woman who had been used, a toy to be thrown aside. One of the plastic people of our time who, when their “use value” runs out, are sent like discarded plastic wrapping to a social rubbish dump.

At last, I found the courage, or whatever it was, to comfort her. I knelt in front of her and she looked up, her eyes still filled, her face ravaged by tears.

“Well, Aden?”

“I understand, Kym.”

She crumpled against me, pressing in against my chest as if she would hide in me. I put my arms round her. I felt as if I wanted to protect her, to shelter her and her babies. She began to speak again in a voice muffled by my shirt.

“I tried to be fair to him, Aden. I had heard all about his terrible life as a child. I would even have forgiven the hurts he had inflicted on me, but there was one thing that I could not forgive.”

“What?”

“After I left him and went to live with mummy and daddy, I contacted him about access to the twins. Do you know what he said?”

The sobs began again.

“He said…he said…’They’re you’re little shits, you keep ‘em’, and he rang off. He doesn’t want to see them, Aden.”

I knew how this man looked and sounded from his appearance on television. He came across as disdainful and brutal, and he made no attempt to hide it. I don’t like to admit it, but I think he appealed to something both basic and base in people, including me. He touched the worst, in us, almost making it seem the best. He displayed a, “Greed is good” mentality and made one think it a virtue. Yet even then it was hard to accept that he would reject his own children so crudely.

“That’s the story, Aden. What do you think of me now? ‘A slut’? ‘A money grubbing whore’? That’s what he called the women he had been married to. Is that what I am Aden?”

“No.”

“What then? Tell me what I am to you.”

This I suppose is what people call, “The crunch point.” What I said now would have ongoing consequences for our relationship. It might deepen it or end it, depending what I said. Kym came to my rescue.

“I shouldn’t have asked you that, Aden, not right now. Hearing what I had to say your response at this moment might be different from that which you might make after it has milled around in your head for a while. Come and see me in a week’s time, and tell me then, if you wish.”

Kym had gained some composure, and it seemed that I was to leave. She rose and I stood up.

“Thank you for listening to my miseries so patiently,” she said, then rising on her toes she put her arms round my neck and kissed me for the first time on my lips. It was not an erotic kiss, but tender and warm. She pressed her still wet face to mine for a moment and said again, “Thank you, Aden.”

She walked to the car with me holding my arm; I opened the car door and said, “Goodnight, Kym.”

“Goodnight, Aden.”

I drove away with the feeling that I was leaving part of myself with her.

I flung myself into work the following week, but her story still buzzed around in my head. My confusion over her had not been dissipated by her revelation, it had redoubled it. I suppose I could not equate the woman I knew with the image of a rebellious girl who married a coarse thug.

Then I took a mental walk up and down in my own past behaviour. The girls I had used, and even my present comfort lady. True, we both understood what the contract was but I now began to feel I was using her as a “thing” and not a person.

I went to see my comfort lady that week and ended our arrangement.

“Thought it would come to this,” she said with a sigh. “Well, no regrets, Aden. I’ve had some lovely times with you. Just you make sure that girl has some lovely times with you as well.”

We kissed and I left her. I felt a pang of regret. She was some fifteen years older than I was, and a very motherly type. Sex with her was rather like fulfilling the fantasy of many boys, of making love with their mother.

I had, as it were, burnt my sexual bridges behind me, yet I had not clearly defined why I had done that. My legal brain was tormented by this lack of a definition. Was it so I could come to Kym with “clean hands”, or more accurately, “A clean sex organ”? But there was no guarantee that I would ever have sex with Kym. The arrangement was that next time we met, and if I so chose, I could tell her what I thought about her.

There was no compulsion for me to tell her. She had said so her self, but three little words she had used kept gnawing away at me; “I love you.” They had been said almost in passing and were the reason she had told me her story. They had not been said again, but the power they exerted was disproportionate to the number of times they were uttered. They are words, often used casually by people, but in the context of my meeting with Kym, they carried the overtones of commitment.

Assuming for a moment that marriage or becoming lovers, was the matter to be decided, how did I feel about it?

Construed in the worst possible way, did I want that man’s cast-off? Did I want an association with his children? Kym her self had questioned whether or not she was a “slut,” “a money grubbing whore.” Did I now see her like that?

I had confessed nothing to her, but the question arose in my mind, “Do I want her to see me in the light of what I have been, the things I have done? Or do I want her to accept me as I am now?

Yes, that is what I expected of her in relation to me.

What hypocrites we humans can be. As someone said about two thousand years ago, “You judge others by rules that you don’t apply to yourselves.”

Kym had suggested a week to pass before we met again. It was now less than a week, but I had reached the point where could not hold out any longer.

I telephoned asking that I see her that evening. She made no fuss about this, and a time was set for my arrival. I think we both understood that this would be the crisis and defining moment in our relationship.

Kym was there to greet me at the door, but there was no kiss this time. We were both very tense.

Once more it was the kitchen and the chairs on either side of the wood stove, although, being a warm evening, there was no fire.

We sat in silence for some time, me not knowing how to begin, she anticipating that I had something to say to her.

Finally, Kym broke the silence.

“Aden, you asked to come and see me. Am I to take that literally – that you just want to sit here looking at me - or was there something more?”

“Something more,” I muttered.

Another long pause.

“Well, what is it Aden?”
“I love you, Kym.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Ah!”

“Is that it, then, Aden?”

“No there’s more.”

“What more?”

“You’ve told me about you, but I haven’t told you about me.”

“You don’t need to, Aden. I accept you as you are now.”

“But that not fair…”

“Aden, you’re not arguing a case in the magistrates court now, it’s me you’re talking to. Remember me, Kym?”

We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Remember you? You awful woman! I can’t get you out of my mind.”

“Oh?”

“Can we get married, or something?”

“Now that, Aden, is a really romantic proposal. My immediate answer to your delicately put suggestion is, I’d rather pass on the ‘or something’, and since you are so legal, I shall say that I’m prepared to negotiate on the ‘get married’ aspect.”

“There are two aspects to this case, M’lud. First, my client, the proposee is not yet divorced, and secondly, M’lud, will the proposer also marry the proposee’s offspring?”

Picking up her mimicking caricature of the court room, I continued; “M’Lud, my client, the proposer, wishes it to be known that he is willing to await the final dissolution of the proposee’s previous marital bonds, and undertakes to provide due care and sustenance for her two female offspring.”

We both nearly fell out of our chairs laughing.

“M’lud,” Kym, barely able to get the words out through her laughter, went on, “My client the proposee accepts the proposer’s offer, and is prepared to negotiate a date for the commencement of the nuptial ceremony.”

We came into each other’s arms still laughing and tried to kiss. It took a while for this to be really successful.

Some comments by people during the weeks following our decision to marry are, I think, worth recording.

Arnold by telephone: “Damn glad old chap, damn glad. Wife and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Phineas: “Come to your senses have you? The day you get married, you become a full partner. My wedding present to you, old son.

Emily: “Well, if she wants you, she wants you, that’s all I can say.”

Comfort Lady: “You be good to her or you’ll have me to reckon with.”

There were many other comments, but one thing I noticed there was a marked absence of the coarser remarks that often go with these occasions, even within the pub fraternity. I think this was due, not to anything about me, but a respect for “The woman at stable cottages” who had been a bit of a mystery for the town.

On the day of the wedding, the whole town seemed to turn out. The church was packed, and the street outside crowded with people who had come to see.

I had arranged with the parson an extra and special vow of which I had said nothing to Kym. It was to the effect that I would protect and accept as my own children her twins.

Kym broke down and cried, and sobs arose from the females in the congregation, and I am sure there were tears in the eyes of some of the men present.

All that was two years ago at the time of my writing this. Six months ago Kym announced she was pregnant. It seems as if she’s programmed to have twins, because the doctor has informed us that are what is on the way.

Perhaps it will be boys this time. But no matter, either sex will do. We’ll welcome either gender.