The Soulmate Agency

by Ivan B

  “No contest,” said Riona immediately. “My family is a total embarrassment.”

  Cameron stroked his chin and remarked, quietly, “Mine’s not a total embarrassment, but I rather fear that they are a little insular.”

  Riona frowned, “Meaning?”

  He managed a half smile, “Meaning my mother’s always on at me to marry a nice quite Highland lass and my brother’s wives are what you might best describe as solidly serious. As for my only brother-in-law I don’t believe I’ve heard him volunteer any information or initiate a single conversation.”

  Riona put her hands on her hips, “I might tell you I can wear a kilt with the best of them!”

  He laughed, “You probably can, and now you can wear a MacLeod kilt with pride, but quiet, you?”

  Riona tucked her arm under his, “If you asked I’d be as quiet as a mouse.”

  He stared at her for about fifteen seconds before they both burst out laughing.

  “Children,” Said Gwen. “Would you want children and if so when; or do believe children are not for you.”

  Derek took on an anguished expression. “To be honest. I haven’t thought about it, I mean without a wife why should I think about it?”

  She turned the wooden tile over in her fingers, “Suppose you did have a wife, then what?”

  “Then I’d think about it.”

  She sighed, “But what would you think?”

  He shrugged, “I don’t know, I’d think about it.”

  Gwen went to open her mouth for another question when Derek held up his hands. “What about you?”

  She shuffled her feet in the dust – they were sitting on a low brick wall behind the gym – and looked at her feet. She mumbled something. Derek leant forward, “I didn’t catch that, was it a yes or a no?”

  She looked at him, “It was a yes but. Yes I’d love children, but I’d be scared to have them.”

  Derek realised that this was most unlike Gwen; normally she knew her mind and felt free to speak it. He put his arm around her, “Can you unpack that?”

  She replied in a low tremulous voice, more like a hesitant distraught child than a grown woman. “I’d be worried that they’d be as ugly as me, and suffer for it, and that I may end up a single parent. I don’t think I could face being a single parent.”

  She turned to look at him and he realised she was crying. “I know what they’d say ‘Good for sex, but nothing else.”

  Something clicked in Derek’s brain. He subconsciously rubbed her shoulder as he tenderly asked, “Your childhood, wasn’t all happy was it?”

  She shook her head, “It was at home, mum made sure of that, and my brother David. He’s only a year older than me so he made sure that when he was around no-one made remarks about me. Otherwise I was always the child that was never chosen. You know everybody has to choose a partner for various activities; often there was an odd number and I was always left. Even when there was an even number of us two boys would argue over the same girl, any girl, rather than choose me.”

  He handed her a handkerchief as he could see drips falling from her chin. “In my last year in the sixth form we had an end of year prom. Our form-teacher came up with the idea of the boys all pulling a girls name out of a hat rather than individually choosing. It was a nice thought and I’m convinced he did it to save me embarrassment. Unbeknown to him all the boys chipped in a pound for whichever boy got me as long as they gave me a kiss. Michael Evans got my name and he paid the money back to his classmates as soon as he knew; he said some things were just not worth the money.” She blew her nose, “My dad used to tell me the story of the ugly duckling and tell me, when I was young, that I’d grow into a beautiful swan. When I was eight he said he was wrong and that I was turning into a chimera.” She sniffed miserably, “I had to ask my teacher what a chimera was; she said that it was a hideous fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.”

  He pulled her close to him, “And you’d be worried that your children would have to go through the same thing.”

  She nodded and then shuddered, “I almost had plastic surgery when I was twenty-two. I was on a placement in a hospital and this surgeon said he’d do me for free, I rather think he fancied the challenge. His idea was to break my cheek bones and upper jaw and just pull my face out using bits of jaw-bone he’d cut off while shaping my lower jaw as spacers. He also said that he’d give me a nose-job while he was at it.”

  She turned her eyes onto Derek, “I chickened out. He had this patient see, with the strep bacteria. She’d had plastic surgery after a train crash and somehow the strep had got between the skin and bone of her face. It was just eating her flesh away and she had to have radical attention and came out looking like a…”

  She tailed off and blew her nose again, “I just couldn’t take the risk.”

  He held her for a few minutes and then said softly, “I was economical with the truth as well. Dad didn’t only send me to drama school because of my accent, I was also years behind in schooling. I knew nothing of history, geography, European art, just basic arithmetic and English. The local school said I was too backward for them, it was fortunate for him and me that the drama school had a wider acceptance policy.”

  He suddenly changed his grip on her shoulders by putting his hand under her armpit, scooped her up and around so that she ended up sitting on his legs and facing him. He then kissed her. With eyes wide open he kissed her. Then he held her close and whispered in her ear, “I pity your Michael Evans, he doesn’t know what he missed.”

  This time she kissed him.

  Treasa had an early morning swim, took her time over a light breakfast she had delivered to her room and strolled across the grounds. She ended up sitting on a small grass mound reading the daily sheet that Angela had been poking under her door. It told her what was happening day-by-day with the idea that she wouldn’t feel left out of the conversation at the evening meals. She sighed, knowledge was one thing, being sat at the end of a table with four pairs of people ogling at one another was something else. She looked up as a shadow fell across her and squinted into the sunlight. “Hello,” he said, dropping down to sit beside her. “Young woman in a wheelchair said you’d walked over here.”

  “That’s Sylvia, I had a swim with her this morning.”

  She watched his face. “Didn’t think I’d see you again.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “What you reading?” He asked in a blatant attempt to change the subject.

  She waved the paper, “It’s a list of discussion questions the people who come to the agency are supposed to work through. It’s meant to hone their minds on what they expect of a relationship.”

  He wiggled his bottom to get comfortable. “Are they difficult?”

  She shrugged, “Depends on who you are and what you think I suppose. Want to try one?”

  “Fire ahead.”

  She put on a schoolmarm voice, “Physical relationship: Do you think it’s important and do you find it easy?”

  “Oh shit,” he said and fell into silence.

  She waited. Five minutes passed and he just stared down the immaculate lawns towards the far distance. Without warning he cleared his throat. “Before I came this morning,” he said, “I did two things. I regretted that last night I didn’t try to say goodnight properly and I turned on the Golden Satellite channel. You were on, I guess it must be a recorded programme. But there you were in tiny pigtails singing and dancing and getting children to believe that you were a shepherdess chasing a bunch of imaginary sheep around an imaginary hillside, even jumping over an imaginary rock. I found it hard to believe that I spent yesterday with you. Somehow that seemed the imaginary thing, not the sheep.”

  Treasa waited as he again fell into silence. She didn’t have to wait so long this time, once again he cleared his throat. “I’ve always been a traffic cop ever since my probationary years were over. I know that promotion opportunities are higher in other branches, but I’m c
ontent in what I do. Call it lack of ambition if you like. One of the downsides is that sometimes we get compulsorily seconded into other operation; the rationale being that you can let the drivers speed for a few days if there are more important crimes to be solved.”

  He swallowed as if tasting bile. “Six months ago I helped review a lot of pornographic material that had come in from the Far East. It was all based around young girls. They were all made to dress up far beyond their age and…”

  He fell into silence, but she had got the message, she’d heard it before. “So you find my size difficult to cope with?”

  He flapped his arms like a drowning penguin, “You are an immensely attractive woman, but how do I even touch you without thinking that I am somehow violating you?”

  “And do you want to touch me?”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Lie down and close your eyes,” she ordered.

  He lay back on the grass and closed his eyes. She bent over and kissed him on the lips, “How about like this,” she murmured. “How about like this?”

  Once Henry had escaped to get dressed Willow had a shower, as usual in hotels she had to bend to fit under the shower-head. She carefully chose a long denim skirt with embroidery around the hem and a pale blue blouse with embossed cuffs. She thought about wearing her larger padded bra, but decided against it on the grounds that she felt so much more relaxed without it and anyway Henry had seen the naked truth. She’d just slipped on a pair of high-heels when Henry returned wearing what he termed his casual gear, on anybody else it would have been a tailor’s dummy outfit. He looked uncharacteristically nervous. He came into her sitting room and didn’t sit down, instead he shuffled from foot to foot. Willow wondered if this was where she got the brush off. She could almost hear the words, ‘Just not compatible m’dear’ ringing in her mind when he took a deep breath and gave her an award winning smile. “I don’t know how to put this. I guess there should be violins playing on the lawn and birds singing. I haven’t even got a ring.”

  He took a tremulous breath, “Would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”

  Her heart jumped, however it had jumped before. She sought to keep control of her feelings, knowing that her emotions could easily run away with her. “You don’t have to marry me just because we’ve slept together.”

  He raised an eyebrow, “I’m not sure the Pope would agree with that statement and it’s not just because we’ve slept together. Last night I realised that I’ve started comparing other women to you; you’ve become my benchmark.”

  “Suppose you find a better one?”

  Henry noted the hint of Willow sarcasm in her voice and wondered if he was losing the opportunity of a lifetime. He folded up onto one knee and grabbed her hand while peering up into her eyes. “There isn’t a better one out there, not for me. Marry me Willow or I’ll just implode in misery. I know that we can be good together. We’re a ying and yang, a gin and tonic, a pair of perfectly meshing gearwheels, a match made in heaven, a…”

  He ran out of hyperbole and kissed her hand. She knelt in front of him and said softly, “And is two days enough?”

  He took both her hands in his, “When you find a priceless gem you don’t ask how long have I known it, you just want to have it.”

  She leant forward and kissed his nose, “After that how can I say no?”

  She now became uncertain. “But before you accept you’d better know one thing.”

  She trembled slightly and he felt it through her hands. “I know that you are devout Catholic and I’d be happy to go to church with you, but I probably would never become a Catholic, I’d rather stay CofE, can you live with that? It’s not your religion that frightens me, it’s…”

  She had a quick intake of breath, “It’s just that we can’t get married in church.”

  The words tumbled out. “My first husband was a Catholic, I did try to get the marriage annulled, but in the end I had to go for a divorce so your church probably regards me as still married. Besides I’ve been married since then and even my own church would probably draw the line at four.”

  She gazed into his eyes, “If we had children,” she said softly, “I wouldn’t mind them being brought up as Catholics. I’d rather that than no church at all.”

  She frowned, “I didn’t mean it like that I…”

  He put a finger to her lips before giving her another award winning smile, “I don’t care,” he said tenderly, “if we have to get married in a town hall or a city jail and any children would be bought up as Christians not Catholics or Protestants.”

  He kissed her hands again and said softly, “Will you marry me?”

  She knew that she’d been here before, three times before. She knew the dangers of running into marriage and knew them all too well, but that didn’t change her answer. She leant forward and kissed him passionately before giving the simplest of replies, a plain tender, “Yes.”

  Chapter 24

  Not Quite as Intended

  Riona checked the coffee pot. The other four had been and gone leaving only her, Cameron and the hostess trolley. She waved the pot at Cameron, he shook his head. She placed it back on the trolley and sat down, taking a last ginger cookie with her on the way. She picked the felt bag up, took out another tile and tossed it to Cameron. He glanced at it, “Let’s put this back and choose another.”

  She was intrigued. “What is it?”

  “Not worth discussing.”

  There was a peculiar note to his voice, she thought, was he avoiding something she should know? “Shouldn’t that be a joint decision?”

  He almost slumped into the corner of the settee. “Friends,” he read, “Would you expect to keep the same circle of friends in the same way?”

  She stood up and walked to the window and stared at the view. Eventually, after what seemed an age she stated, as if drowning in remorse, “Only one real friend, Harriet Holmes, met her at my last boarding school. We usually holiday together once a year and have the odd weekend.”

  Cameron wondered why his usually exuberant wife had suddenly gone into a shell. “You don’t mean the Harriet Holmes, the electronic harpist who took the blues world by storm with her album Harping on?”

  “One and the same, she also plays a mean piano. She’s married now, but still uses her maiden name for her work.”

  Riona turned and flopped back down beside him, “So there it is, all these years and one friend, only one friend.”

  Cameron sat still and murmured, “That’s one more than me. I did have a good friend, but he committed suicide after his girlfriend got mown down in a hit and run accident.”

  He gazed at his feet, “I should have been there for him, that’s what friends do isn’t it? I should have been there for him, but I thought he was OK.”

  “How long,” asked Riona, “How long after did he…?”

  “Two years to the day. He became depressed and I really thought he was pulling out of it. He’d started working again and had even been to football. That was her passion, the football, he was a cricket man.”

  She could hear the despair in his voice. “He went to football, cheered her favourite team; went to their favourite restaurant and had a meal; went to the cinema and sat in their favourite seats and then drove a hired open top car into a concrete bridge at well over a hundred miles an hour without wearing his seat-belt.”

  He took a sharp intake of breath and then burst into tears. Riona, after a moments hesitation put her arm around him and her immediately put his head on her chest sobbing loudly. She cradled him in her arms and held him to her bosom after all he needed her; after all these years somebody needed her.

  Gwen peered at the wooden tile and turned it as if by doing so it would make the question change. “Money,” she intoned, “Is it to be shared between you as a mutual resource or should each of your keep their own and use it to support the other.”

  Derek shrugged, he was getting fed up with this exercise. The only bonus had been when they had kiss
ed one another. He wondered if he could find a way or repeating the experience. She picked a daisy off of the grass bank where they were sitting. She gazed at it intently. “I’d like to think,” she said, “that couples kept a joint account and shared the money while each having their own account so that they could at least have some independence. You know to buy the odd thing or surprise the other.”

  Derek half listened and added, “No idea what my parent’s did, think they had a joint account.”

  He frowned, “Yes they must have, when mum died dad didn’t have to worry about paying her bills because he had access to her money. Took him a few months to sort out her business accounts though.”

  Gwen gazed at the grass looking into her past. “I know what my parent’s did,” she replied flatly. “He earned the money and then he drank it in the pub leaving mum to buy the food from her wages as a shop assistant.”

  Derek nodded absently, still plotting how to manoeuvre another kiss. He lay back onto the grass, “So money’s not an issue then.”

  She realised he wasn’t listening. Her voice rose a notch, “It was a bloody big issue in my family, dad and mum argued about it every Friday.”

  Fortunately Derek picked up her voice’s change in cadence and sat up. He engaged his whole brain on the subject lest he annoy Gwen, annoyed women probably didn’t kiss. “I meant it’s not an issue with me. In the marriage service you say you’re going to share everything; I’ve heard it often enough, been best man four times. If you say it you should mean it; so it’s a joint account from the start, though I like your idea of a little on the side.”

  “A little on the side?” She echoed.

  “Each having a separate account as well.” He frowned, she was getting annoyed and he didn’t know why.

  “So belt and braces is it?” She asked loudly.

  He tried to back off. “It was your idea, I just said I thought it was a good idea.”