...and no prizes for guessing the 'inspiration'!
Celia was also aware that Gareth Pritchard, (Sociology lecturer and voluntary youth worker) had his interest in Ursula triggered by her victimisation by those awful anti-English idiots but thoughts of Ursula could still reduce Celia to alternative hot flushes of shame and the cold sweat of fear that anyone should know of her appalling betrayal of a woman who had seen her only as a friend.
Ursula and William had trusted them and Gareth and Celia had actually had sex in the church hall! If it had been just the once it would be easier to dismiss as an aberration but it was more than that – Why, they’d even considered running away together although thankfully Celia was often to recall, she’d pulled them back from that brink of madness. The sex was good but that wasn’t it…
Perhaps it came back to the princess thing… It was obvious that William loved her but Gareth had had the knack of making her feel like a princess.
She would not have admitted it to anyone but the ‘rescue’ of Sally in all her finery in the Sealed Knot re-enactment had stirred something romantic and sexual in Celia. As a child she would often imagine herself as a princess on horseback and as she got older the idea of being rescued by a prince became more appealing… Of course she wasn’t jealous of the younger Sally’s looks and romantic ‘rescue’ but she could imagine it happening with her as the damsel thrown from her horse… Celia saw no connection between this repressed fantasy and her ‘falling’ for the man who was so central to ‘rescuing’ her as the distraught mother of an unhappy teenager. Celia was never very hot on insight – at least not about herself. Now the motivations of family, friends and of course her big sister – no problem! When it came to more personal insight Celia could be just a touch myopic.
