The beautiful Downshire village of Clerembeax St Giles was situated to
the west of Abbeyvale located between Grace Hill and Bushy Down and on the
outskirts was the Clerembeax Palace Hotel and Spa which had become very
important to the lives of those living in the village community with St Giles’
Church at its hub.
It was a busy village with all the usual amenities you would expect,
in addition to St Giles’ Church there was a village Hall, and primary school of
the same name.
There was also the Trinity Methodists Church, Stephenson’s General
store, which included an off-license, newsagents and Post Office, and two pubs,
Étienne of Normandy and the Saracen, and it was at the Saracen where James Timms and Constantina Mironica worked.
Twenty-three-year-old Constantina
worked there full time in order to support herself and her lazy good for
nothing older brother Emilios, who everyone referred to as Moronica.
James Timms on the other
hand was a full-time gardener up at the Palace but worked as many shifts as he could
get at the pub because he was in love with her.
He had asked Tina out many
times but between the hours she worked at the pub and fetching and carrying for
her brother she never had time for a date.
Emilios had made it
perfect plain to James that he didn’t like him and that his sister was “off
limits” not that James cared what he said or thought, and it didn’t make any
difference to the way he behaved around her.
He addressed her as Tina,
which he knew Emilios hated, and she called him JimTim, which he also disliked,
but he had to tolerate it as he needed the money she contributed to the house.
James had been in love her
for almost the whole two years he had worked at the Saracen and it looked like
nothing would alter the status quo, until one weekend when Emilios had been to
the Beer Festival in the village of Mornington-by-Mere and crashed his car on
his way home while he was more than two and a half times over the legal limit.
As a result of his
injuries in the accident he was in a coma for more than three months at the St
Bernadette’s Covent Hospital in Abbeyvale and Constantina was constantly at his
bedside and James saw little of her, and when he did there was an awkwardness
between them that had never been there before, and he later found out that was
because she felt guilty, but he didn’t know why.
Because of his
catastrophic spinal injuries Emilios was destined to be a quadriplegic, but he
never regained consciousness and died four months to the day after the
accident.
Yet still she could not
confide in James or feel at ease with him and he was confused, he wanted to be
there for her to support and comfort her, but she pushed him away.
Undeterred he kept a
watching brief on her and was ready to step in when she needed him to.
She kept her distance from
him right up until the day of the funeral when her resistance withered, and she
allowed him to hug her.
He was there to comfort Tina
on the loss of her brother, in truth she didn’t really like her brother, he was
older than she was and he was never a pleasant man once drink and drugs got
their hooks into him and as he got older he got worse, she loved him because he
was her brother, and she cried for him when he died, but her tears were for the
boy he once was rather than the man he became.
But when James put his
arms around her, it didn’t matter to her that she didn’t like Emilios, because
she wasn’t about to turn down the opportunity for a hug from a good-looking man
that she loved.
And her estrangement
towards him following the accident were not borne out of dislike or distrust,
she loved him, and she wanted him.
The reason her being
distant towards him were as a result of her terrible guilt, a guilt brought on
by the knowledge of her actions, because she had prayed on her knees countless
times at St Giles’ church for God to grant her wish to spend her life with
James, and then came the accident which she believed her prayers brought about.
But as she stood there in
the arms of the man she loved she knew that the power of prayer didn’t cause
the accident that ultimately killed her brother, she knew that the loving God
she worshipped would not answer such a prayer or act in that way.
Her brother died because
of his own irresponsible actions, and she was sad for the loss of the boy he
once was, but she was content because the future that lay ahead was a bright
one.
