The Mysteries of Brambly Hollow

Cal, Meli glanced down the list. It was a very strange experience, but she actually felt hungry too. Much to everyones amazement, she forewent her usual Light Bite Scampi and Chips, and chose a large sirloin steak, with an extra portion of mushrooms. The men queued at the bar to place their orders.
    “Who were the couple in the doorway?” Meli enquired as she took a sip of her drink. Her nose wrinkled slightly, it was at least a double. Still, it was her birthday. She took another mouthful.
    “ Which couple?” Barbara stretched up her short neck to its full extent, and glanced across the room to check. The pair in question had gone now.
    “ The woman in the wheelchair.”
    “ Oh,” Barbara’s neck retracted as she nodded. Grabbing her own glass by the stem, she catapulted it to her lips and took a swig at her gin and tonic. “That would be Countess Wilhelmina Van Gelda, or Vilma, as we call her.
    “ Wow,” gasped Meli in suitable reverence. “Sounds very grand. And the man?”
    “ Oh, that was Bill.” She flapped a hand dismissively, startling her bangles into a momentary frenzy of activity.
    The bog-basic, no frills name fell like a rubber mallet on her ears after ringing with the impressive title. Meli instantly ruled out the possibility of them being in a relationship, other than that of an employer and paid employee, a gardener or maybe a handyman or something like that. He couldn’t possibly be a Count. Count Bill? No, definitely didn’t have any ring to it.
    Meli wanted to ask more about them, but decided to restrain herself. With Barbara’s untactful tones, she didn’t want everyone to know that she was being nosy. When Meli didn’t press the subject, Barbara looked a little down in the mouth. She liked nothing more than participating in gossip-mongering, especially when she was the one in the know.
    The evening passed pleasantly enough, although the noise carried from the other room, where cries of ‘one hundred and eighty’ and ‘bullseye’, amid clamorous cheers and high pitched whistles as each final double was landed, nearly sent the more nervous patrons through the ceiling, but it didn’t stop Meli clearing her plate, much to Cal’s delight.
    Their friends left just after ten, a late night for the pair who were usually tucked in by nine, ready to mobilize, the first warming-up chirps of the dawn chorus their bugle, calling them to take up pots and pans and cereal packets to begin the mammoth task of cooking breakfasts for their ten guests at Blue Bells. Meli and Cal stayed on a bit longer, to have a nightcap. By the time they left; after who knew how many birthday vodkas, her share from two bottles of wine, all topped off by a large brandy, Meli was feeling more than a little tipsy as her legs swaggered and buckled like bendy reeds beneath her.
    Cal, who had fared far better than her, laughingly supported her, firmly wrapping a strong arm around her waist. When she tripped and almost fell to her knees on the unlit stretch of lane, he was forced to grapple with her torso to keep her upright, and his hand unintentionally closed around a breast. Meli felt a shower of sparks explode in her groin like an extravaganza of rockets bursting in the darkened sky over London on November fifth. To Cal’s total amazement, he suddenly found himself hauled behind a geranium bush in Mrs. Gratham’s garden and attacked by a nymphomaniac wife, her lips locked over his preventing any screams of protest as her long and oh so soft fingers violated his crotch in a way that made his eyes roll upwards in their sockets, while sending shivers of unbridled sexual delight shimmying through his body.
    Cal was not one to turn down such a brazen offer from his wife, especially when they had been so rare this last year. In less than a millisecond he was reciprocating, his hand inside her bra caressing her, his lips working down her hastily exposed cleavage as he groaned and panted, his manhood springing to attention, pink and shiny as a polished button and ready for parade. They would have had sex there and then; squashed between a wheelie bin and the quivering fronds of the geranium if they had not been given away by the furious yowling of some territorial and obviously jealous tomcat.
    “Shoo, get out of there, you filthy beasts,” came the hollering from the downstairs window of the cottage as Mrs. Gratham, alerted by the tom, flung it wide and saw the shaking bush. Stifling their giggles, almost helpless