O his soul more like it! The priest that is.

Great guy though!

Always said buongiorno with a winning smile

Thought we were going to be good friends .

But listen to this advice. Never make friends with a priest.

It gets complicated.

Look! I’m not Catholic and only say I’m Church of England on those official forms you have to fill in from time to time. It’s always easier to take the easy route in matters of bureaucracy I have found.

My pretended agnosticism is the reason he chose to confess to me. Truth was though I couldn’t have cared a damn about his problems. The bishop breathing down his neck. The threats of a posting to some far away tropic. A suitably chosen Dante hell with cannibals and worse, mosquitoes!

My involvement was situational. There I was condemned for a while through unfortunate circumstances, and of these more later, to live in a tiny village in Tuscany populated by people of even tinier minds. What made matters more difficult was that the house I rented was right at the far end of the village and that getting out by car, by horse, on foot meant passing four grocer stores, the electrician, two bars, the church , the cloisters and the petrol pump. This meant pretending I was always in a hurry and couldn’t be stopped at any cost. If I dropped my guard at any moment to look at an interesting dog or plant, if I were to pause and simply look out of my head, there would be one or other of the town gossips on to me in a flash.

And the gossip?

The Scandal

In my own defense, I can truly say that I was the first to warn her to back off. Rosie is the sort of woman who hasn’t been without a man since the age of fifteen for more than a week or so. Gets desperate when it happens and equally desperate in her search for the immediate replacement. In fact sinks into a black hole of non-existence searching for identity during this brief time ignoring pleas to tough it out for a month or so. Better still a year. Most women I have known find this difficult if not impossible.

In such a tween-men period the young and some say dashing priest of the village asked her to translate a letter for him from English to Italian. This done, the request was then for firstly weekly, then twice weekly, then (you can guess) nightly English lessons.

I was used as a sort of dupe. I would be around at dinner times and be fed Scot free for acting as cover for the soon to be lovers. On winter evenings he would arrive through mist and frost bearing hams and bottles of wine, cakes and biscuits hidden beneath a sort of Dracula cloak. Only later did I realise that these were gifts given to him daily by the adoring female elders of the village.

The Priest would leave very early in the morning and hug the shadows of the passing night to make his way back to his apartment next to the church. For a while I thought well, why not?! They seemed to be happy, he was even talking about giving up the church for Rosie and becoming a teacher and she was dreaming of having children with him.

They think themselves invincible.

My friend Cynthia was the first to spot him. She was up early to take in her crystals off the window sill after their full moon bath - it sharpened them she said. Cynthia was Italian, had lived for twenty years in London, kept herself to herself and only lived in Italy because of her rheumatism and the fact that we were only 8 miles from the nearest Osho Centre, the nearest equivalent she could find to witchcraft, her hobby. I called out ‘Hi Priest!’ she said to me later, ‘and it made him jump. What’s he up to I wonder’? She winked at me. She was the first to know.

From that moment on, it began to get out of hand. Layers of history were peeled away before my eyes in a play of events stretching over the summer. I saw my considerable enlightened attitudes to life challenged in an uncomfortable way. I became the focal point for opinions and grievances, prejudices and finally downright hostility and danger.

Ed and Frances have shifted to a spot deeper inside the brown hinge. It’s warm enough now in late April to turn the bathroom heating off. This might have something to do with their move. Maybe they are spring-cleaning. Something similar is happening to my mind. I think a process of dream-cleaning is going on . It’s got nothing to do with the deal as far as I can make out but there is a connection between my late night shower, dream-cleaning and these memories flooding back stripped of illusion .

You ask me if spiders sing? A year ago I would have laughed at such a question. Last night the hunting dogs were baying for their master who‘d gone off to Rumania at midnight for his twice yearly sojourn with prostitutes in Bucharest. Just as I’d decided to get out of bed and shout the usual ‘be quiet or die’ threats they stopped and the celestial singing began and lulled me back to sleep.

Ed and Frances, the celestial duet.