Assessment One: 'Indulgence'

The assessed part of my course is three 500 word stories. This is the first; a 'character summary.'

Mr Studer was a pale, imposing man of fifty six. He was as broad as a telephone box and nearly as tall. He stood in his gloomy study admiring a picture of his second wife. Behind him the shutters kept out the streaming Puertabanus light and the room retained some semblance of cool in the middle of the day. People said that he must be north facing, because he never caught the sun.

Maria, his old maid of eighteen years knocked at the door and brought him in a tea set that clinked on the tray as she moved. She laid it on the desk next to a hard backed volume on oenology.

“Thank you” he said without smiling.

He looked back at the photo ‘She was the best looking’ he thought ‘of all of them’. Mr Studer was obsessed with women and their fine elegant features, their necks and fingers; a constant obsession that skipped from one woman to the next so much so that he was found to be most inconstant by both his previous wives. Like the women, the divorces had been very different; the first had been happy to get the money, but the second he had hurt very badly. He gripped the top of his padded chair; its leather was stiff and cracked, ‘but by and large they did not impact upon me too much’.

Still with Anna, the delightful third, he had been faithful. She reminded him of the second; blonde, sylph-like, thirty four and so full of newness and joy that he could almost cry when he saw her. It felt different this time; there was something about her, and there was also something starting to be different in him.

He poured himself a cup of tea. The liquid was dark and its smell bitter. He wrinkled his nose; it was stewed. Maria never got the tea right, and he always tipped it away so as she wouldn’t know that he hadn’t liked it.

Behind him was a large framed picture of a horse situated in a Gainsborough country scene. It had an unusual amount of relief even for an oil painting. He had loved horse racing and sponsored many events a long time ago. He adored the thrill of the day, the beautiful animals and the girls in all their finery. The horse in the picture was ‘Promised Land’; the very first indulgence he had bought for himself when he sold the company. He loved that horse; back then for a time he had wanted to set up with a colleague and start a stables. But when ‘Land’ fell and had to be put down he had lost interest in the idea for good.

Most of the time he looked at the painting without experiencing any of the sadness he once bore, and today was no different, he looked at the glossy flanks and remembered that moment of painted perfection, and nothing else.