Checkmate by John Barclay

CHECKMATE

‘I hate you, Tom Small,’ Tabitha said glaring across the kitchen table on a Friday night in late January.  Tom had just moved his Knight back and across which, together with his Bishop, had trapped her Queen.  Hence the outburst.  She gave him the look and they went up to bed as another week drew to a close.

Tabitha, rosy-cheeked and inclined to plumpness, was neither gorgeous nor feline, as her name suggested, whilst Tom’s countenance was thin-lipped and wan to accompany his spindly features.  Rhythm and routine was their mantra and served as a substitute for romance. ‘My old man’s a dustman’ had been Tom’s favourite song – ‘He wears Cor Blimey trousers’ his favourite lyric. Tabitha confined her dancing to Helen Shapiro ‘Whoopah, oh yeah yeah’.That was about as far as it went on the romantic front. 

So it was choir practice on Wednesdays after which Tom cooked supper, fly-tying on Thursdays, chess on Fridays and Scrabble on Sundays.  Sex had never been much part of the scheme of things, although it must have happened once or twice or there would have been no Ernest nor Verity.  Ernest, as in Hemingway – never Ernie as in Benny Hill’s milkman – lived up to his name and threw himself into the Civil Service (Agriculture and Fisheries) as Tom had done years earlier (Building Regulations).  Verity never lived up to her name and went to live in a commune in New Zealand.   

On weekdays Tom and Tabitha would walk to the station in Chingford from where he travelled to Whitehall and she to the Houndsditch Warehouse to sell fashion accessories, nik-naks and clothing too.  When they met up again in the evening, they found more to talk about than you might think.

The tempo suited them.  Church on Sundays – neither believed in God – but the singing and Victorian architecture were comforts.  Tom would catch the number 42 bus and go for walks, bird-watching mostly, in Epping Forest or across Mesopotamia between the rivers Lea and Roding where he fished.  On Saturdays he stood on the terraces at Upton Park where Moore, Peters and Hurst were his heroes.  

Tabitha did none of these things and rarely left the house but for work and church.  After her hip operation the doctor recommended light exercise, so she took a train to Liverpool Street, bought a platform ticket and walked gently up and down for an hour with a crutch before returning home.

Tom and Tabitha Small neither talked nor listened to each other as often as they might, believing that contentment came from being as you were and behaving as nature intended.  Marriage for these two was not all fluffy marshmallows and baby angels, even though they did share the orange Smarties.  

But they sometimes wondered whether this happy, if mundane union was the overture to something more fruitful or merely preparation for the final curtain.