RestaurantMeetsNET -- Part 8 -- Chapel Tea Rooms
Revelation
Dad and I bid our last guest mourners farewell, and returned to the Function Room. Caroline had gone back to Mum and Dad's ... Dad's now ... to prepare us an evening meal.
Although Caroline and I are now divorced, we have remained friends; as our marriage, although not a 'sham', exactly, was more a 'marriage of convenience' -- I had my 'Cougars' (especially Mum and Marion); and she had her Silver Foxes (especially Reginald). After Reginald's wife died from complications from her dementia, he proposed to Caroline, and she jumped at her chance to be with him; he always having been her favourite.
Being only 3pm, and with the Room hired until 5pm, we were in no hurry to get away. But the staff could continue clearing and resetting the tables as they wished.
Dad and I took a soft chair each in a sofa/chair nest in the corner furthest from the tables. Dad nursed his half of sweet cider, and I had yet another coffee. Neither of us are drinkers, really; though I do enjoy some wines with a meal, and I do have a weakness for the occasional good single malt scotch.
We sat quietly for a while; but then, from his breathing and movements, I knew he was going to speak. What he then said surprised me.
"Your mother really loved you, you know?"
"Yeah. She was a good Mum."
"No, Freddie, I mean
Loved
you." and he stressed the 'Loved' part.
I looked at him quizzically, wondering exactly what he was getting at.
"Yeah?"
He nodded, solemnly, "Yeah!"
"OK."
"You still don't get it, do you?"
"Er ... what?"
"Loved ... you! The way a woman loves a man. But not as a son. And she has, ever since you fucked the stuffing out of her twenty-odd years ago, when that Meetings organisation you both belonged to tricked you into that Date."
I had frozen and was looking at him in wide mouthed, wide eyed horror.
I started to gabble, "Look, sorry, Dad I know it was bad, and illegal, but ... but I did love her so much. I'm sorry if we ... I ... hurt you!"
He flicked his hand as if waving away a fly, "Don't worry about it. Water under the bridge. But we, she and I, I mean; had some fucking hot sex over these intervening years -- that we ... I ... wouldn't have had without you."
"Beg pardon?"
"You heard! She'd come home from every one of your weekends together, so hot that she had usually taken her knickers off so that I could plug her as soon as she walked in the door.
"God! She was wonderful during the week following one of your trysts.
"Thank you! And I mean that from the heart!"
Explanation
We sat and pondered for a while. Me -- in uncertain, stunned silence.
"Er, Dad? How did you find out?"
He took a deep breath as he pondered getting the right words into the right order. And this is the tale he told: -
"When she got in, after your first weekend, she was stiff, and sore and achy, so she moved hesitantly. I demanded to know what was going-on. I was scared that she had been raped, or at least assaulted, and was trying to hide it from me.
"So, I pushed her. Not physically, you understand, just to get her to loosen up, and explain her condition to me.
"I was sitting on the corner unit of that old 'L' shaped sofa we had at the time, remember it?" I nodded. "She was sitting at the end of the long section. She broke-down into sobs, and through her snotty gasps and gulps I heard that it was because you two had been together.