PANDEMIC REVELATIONS

A happy couple Mark and Laura

Well-loved for their benevolence
Their frequent visits to friends and relatives
To encourage them on Life’s Journey

In their charming old-world cottage

Everything refined
Rational cosy and tasteful
No children to disrupt the harmony
And the cats are dead

A gentle ménage-a-deux
Retired from running a local business
Lord and Lady Bountiful
Pillars of the community

But mine is a family of high achievers

Who all have garnered fistfuls of diplomas
Attaining success and high positions
Seemingly by accident

I’m ashamed to admit that I too have diplomas

One sister has founded an Orchestra and two Theatre Groups
One is an Editor for Oxford University Press
And a friend with an OBE addressed the United Nations

We are not proud of these distinctions

But as these are my closest relatives
I emailed them when I was in dire straits
Disabled at 84, flooded out by an explosion
In a Brittany forest alone at midnight
To the email I added a couple of old friends
One of them was Laura
With whom I had shared the intimate details
Of our middle-aged middle-class life
Since the 1970’s.

Getting on with the cleaning up

Came an email from Laura in return
Asking to be removed from the “list of strangers”
People she did not know who could contact her
To her confusion and distress

This was surprising as my family

Rarely sent emails
Never to people they did not know
And had never met Laura

But of course I replied at once

I would strike her off my “list”
Assuring her not to worry
She would not hear from me again

This did not go down well

For Laura replied she did not mean me to
Strike her off my LIST
Only the list of people I emailed

As it happened I didn’t have a list

But I contacted the members of my family
To ask why they had been harassing Laura
To which they replied “Who is Laura?”

I left it at that
Sorry to have lost an old friend
In mid Pandemic when friends are so important
But no there was more to come
For Laura sent an old photograph
Of me in a hat at their wedding
Superscribed with the words “Mrs Danvers”

Mrs who? . . and then I remembered

In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca
Mrs Danvers the nastiest woman in fiction

So that is what Laura thought of me

(I later discovered a generous fun-loving friend
(Had sent her a cartoon of Prince Charles
(Assuming a friend of mine was a friend of hers)

How wrong can you be?

It takes a Pandemic to bring out the truth it seems.

(copyright e.j.ward 2020)