Ursula Urquhart
URSULA URQUHART

First published 'Inkshed' 1989



Mrs Urquhart was a woman who thought she knew everything about everything. But she knew nothing about imagination. Either things were or things weren’t.

But, eventually, she was to discover that between either “either” and the “or” was a space large enough to hold a whole ocean of things that neither were nor weren’t.

Mrs Urquhart, let’s he honest, was not a strikingly pretty woman, though it is not too far beyond the bounds of belief that she was once passably attractive when she finally left the school that had been the whole of her life up to the age of 14. Her headmaster - and only the memories of some of those ex-pupils who attended that school (none of whom I have been able to track down) would he able to remember his name - patted her on the head and said: “Ursula, one day. I have no doubt...” (but he did have some doubt, as all have who say “no doubt”) “…you will get married and have a clutch of bonny babes...” (his turn of phrase had much to be desired. for a headmaster) “…but always remember your old headmaster’s advice, beware of easy virtue, there is many an evil man who would do anything to catch a sight of your unclothed bosom - spurn them, I say, give them no truck. And, if they only want to feel them through your clothes, I have no doubt that you will give them the edge of your tongue and the look of your old-fashioned eves...” (and at this point, the headmaster would always stare up at the ceiling) “…and may Our Saviour Lord Who looks ever upon His flock and about Whom We have spent all our time here teaching you - may He cast plagues upon those who accost you in such an unseemly manner...”

Ursula Maybury (as she was then known) did not reply. But as she ironed her aprons. come her fifty-first year, she unaccountably recalled that interview, so strange in retrospect. She also recalled many other things that queued up for recalling…

Her craft of life had often hit reefs since leaving school and had been sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where other half-putrid fish-heads such as she was fast becoming would drift and dangle where the tides took them in and out of the darkest sea-caves of’ desolation and dissolution.

She rubbed hard with the edge of the iron to remove a particularly stubborn crease, but her mind was elsewhere. If she actually thought about what she was doing, she would no doubt not do it at all: probably true of all women who end up ironing aprons only so that they can wear them.

The men in her life had been many and various. One had led her into parts of the city she previously didn’t know existed, where fire escapes were bent and twisted into painful sculptures around living ghosts of those that once had failed to climb down them in time. Another took her from those parts to a town by the sea - and on the pier she played bingo and, come winter, when it was all boarded up. she took herself along the prom, seeking out those men of whom her headmaster had once warned her.

Each lover (if that word is not too kind to describe those to whom I refer) had a way about him that distinguished him from the others. One with eyes like dark pools caught heron his hook, line and sinker and showed her what else lurked along the sea-bed of his soul. The next had no soul at all, but what he had instead was nothing of which Our Saviour Lord could have knowledge, she thought, for it had sucking sides and utter emptiness...

And many others, each different from the next, but each with the similarity of hating her as much as they loved her.

Then. one day (exactly when I’m not certain), there came Urquhart. whose soul was even emptier than the one with sucking sides.

But, first, let me put us in the picture: she left the seaside town because she could no longer stand the stench of the fish. She bid farewell to the men she’d known, one by one, and it goes without saying there were a few words of recrimination and a thousand if onlys...

She played her last game of bingo, which turned out to be her first win: a cuddly teddy hear - which she immediately named aftter her late headmaster - was passed over to her with a few souvenir beer bottletops (that were used to cover the numbers called). Thrusting it into her bosom, she fled with ne’er a backward glance.

She tramped to the edge of town where she hitched a lift back to the city ... and he who picked her up on that fateful night was none other than Urquhart.

He was not going to the city but, to cut what is a long story short, he took her the whole way. wrote a farewell letter to whom he called his girl friend somewhere on the south coast and set up home with the future Mrs Urquhart.

But Urquhart had a secret: a secret of which even now his wife is unaware and, I suspect, he himself does not fully comprehend it. He does not exist. He never existed. And he never will. She did not guess for he acted quite normally, bringing in a goodly wage by selling policies to the dying, but filling her bed with fishy farts, teasing her up with his timely foreplay, widening out her defences (which were still spinsterish despite her many seaside lovers), entering her mouth with his searching tongue, splicing the mainbrace of her innards, dreaming of her, making her dream of him, and all manner of such devices to make her believe that he was as real as the next man.

Either she was a fool or she cared not at all whether he existed or she cared even less whether she herself existed ... or tickling her teddy bear into fits of telling laughter or seeing her headmaster in bed with her tut-tutting between her breasts or Urquhart becoming, if nothing else, a vision of Her Saviour Lord...

But more than one “or” after an “either” makes no sense at all. She was indeed a fool to believe that either things were or things weren’t. And now even she had no doubt gone, leaving nothing but an empty apron crumpled on the kitchen floor.