Rose and Myrtle

  • 16 Nov - 22 Nov, 2019
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Fiction


He loved Rose, he married Myrtle. The seeds of the latter event were sown in that period towards the end of his final year at university when the accumulated disappointment he had suffered at the hands of Rose had made him particularly vulnerable. Myrtle filled the vacuum which we are told nature abhors and, a few months after graduation, the small occluded diamond that perched on Myrtle’s finger in its slim shank was complemented by a thin band of gold.

Thanks to a late cancellation, they had managed to get the university chapel. The reception took place at one of the smaller of the Victorian hotels lining the narrow road that ran along the cliff. Like arrows from a bow whose string had gradually been drawn to full tension during the four years of their studies, his friends, such as they were, had lost no time in launching themselves upon the world, some in travel to all the usual exotic places, others already embarking upon all the usual types of profession. When the day came, few were able to attend, though it is true that the emails expressing on the one hand the senders’ congratulations to the happy couple and on the other what they presumably considered to be witty apologies for their own absences were not entirely unamusing. And his second-choice best man, no doubt emboldened by the dearth of familiar faces in the audience, managed to exceed the admittedly low expectations they had held out for him. All in all, those who attended agreed that the whole thing might have been far worse.

For the record, Rose had been invited but did not attend. Nor did she send an email expressing congratulations on the one hand and an apology for her absence, witty or otherwise, on the other. Perhaps the event had simply failed to register in her consciousness.

Wedding safely out of the way, he settled down to the serious business of forging a career for himself amidst the groves of academe. Wisely choosing for his doctoral thesis a topic neither too broad nor too complex, he passed with no corrections and took the greatest pleasure in ordering a replacement debit and credit card. He felt that the new honorific somehow ennobled the rather nondescript name that had been his from birth.

His luck did not end there. He was offered, and immediately accepted, a junior position on the staff of his old department at the university. The road to a professorship winked into existence, tantalising him with the prospect of power. Nor was he entirely oblivious to the promise of financial security that such a position would afford him. As he walked back home, imagining how Myrtle’s face would look when he told her the good news, the glass of his bifocals caught the afternoon sun and flashed as if in triumph.

To celebrate his newfound status as a published academic, he had taken Myrtle out to dinner at a renowned seafood restaurant in one of the small fishing ports that dotted the coast in a chain of limewash and red pantiles. They went the whole hog, or rather, its piscatorial equivalent: he had the lobster and she ordered crab. They shared a dozen oysters for starters. The bill came to a quarter of his monthly junior lecturer’s salary. Brushing off the expense in a devil-may-care fashion, he pulled out his credit card with a flourish, smiling to himself as the silver letters of his new honorific gleamed in the candlelight. He fancied that the waitress had given him a cool look of appraisal when her eyes fell on his title (and how could they fail to? Those two raised silver letters had a way of arresting the attention of all manner of employees: supermarket cashiers, for example, railway officials, even the lady in the off-licence on the corner by the Chinese takeaway who was to customer service what Attila the Hun had been to international relations). Emboldened – and perhaps the notorious aphrodisiac qualities of the oyster had also played a role.

He remembered that night now as he stared into the mirror. The face that looked quietly back at him wore the intervening years for all to see. It was like one of those wooden shutters designed to protect window panes from the ravages of wind and salt air that are still sometimes seen in those eighteenth-century fisherman’s cottages that line the streets nearest to the port throughout the East Neuk. Much of the hair was gone, and what remained seemed as likely to hold as the walls of a sandcastle to stand firm against the incoming tide. He had long since accepted the inevitable encroachment of age and would just stare at the mirror in a sort of detached amazement as he noticed its latest depredations.

He came to and looked around the small bathroom in distaste. With little interest, he registered that the front door had just banged shut. He knew that it would be Myrtle, doubtless headed out to one of her committees. She had embraced this aspect of university life from the first, volunteering at every occasion, explaining to him that it would help further his own career. When they had given up trying for children, she had redoubled her efforts in this direction. So successful had she become in this role of arch-organiser that no function, garden party, ceremony or other event took place in the social and institutional life of the university without her administerial input. Having lost themselves in such monotony, they thought, they had found everything the world leads you to believe? Had they though? Has anyone?

RELATED POST

COMMENTS