John Berger - G.

The gun room was small and square with a high ceiling. High on one wall hung a pair of mounted antlers, dusty and grey. An oil lamp was reflected in the black curtainless window. Jocelyn stood at a bench-like table on which his gun lay in three parts. The boy sprawled in a sagging arm-chair in front of the fireplace in which there was no fire.

Why, asked the boy looking towards the black window rather than towards Jocelyn, do you disapprove of Aunt Beatrice’s marriage?

It is not a subject we should discuss.

The boy took in the crowded room: boots, mackintoshes, fishing rods, baskets, piles of old copies of The Sportsman , two foxes’ masks, a pipe-rack, a ladder — and on everything pointing upwards an old hat or cap hung. He remembered the room as he had been aware of it as a child. He had never been allowed in. But he had noticed through a half-open door men in their shirt-sleeves, a fire burning and an unusual smell. After a pause, he re-started the same conversation.

Everything has changed since she went, he said.

Jocelyn was screwing together the brass joins of two lengths of a cleaning rod. The table smelt of gun oil. The smell reminded Jocelyn of his father. It was associated in his mind with the smell of cordite and metal — the smell of sport. It suggested to him the smell of food being prepared for company. This last was associated with returning home with friends after a shoot, but is perhaps inherent in the smell itself. The smell of gun oil, for all its graphite, has something about it of the smell of butter in shortbread or pastry when they are still very hot in an iron oven. It is the antithesis of the smell of lilac. In the chill fireless room, Jocelyn shivered and heard himself saying: There was no stopping her.

Did he sweep her off her feet, then? asked the boy.

He fawned at her feet like a dog.

Is she happy with him?

She couldn’t be happy with him, Jocelyn said and then, with the gesture of a romantic ’cello-player, drove the cleaning-rod through the barrel. The action always pleased him. He ran his hand along the bluish polished metal of the underside of the barrels. Again he was speaking before he had decided to do so. She has the highest standards, he was saying, that is how she is made.

He was handsome, said the boy in a tense intended to provoke.

He is a cad, said Jocelyn, his hand beginning to tremble.

Did you have it out with him?

I could not.

A cad you think?

Jocelyn put the barrels down and steadied himself with both hands on the table.

This is not a subject we should pursue, he said.

He was not thinking of the boy’s age. He wished to talk to nobody about this subject.

The boy, however, was determined to force Jocelyn to say more: not out of personal animosity but in order to claim his own right — and his ability — to know, to touch on no matter what subject. It seemed to him that nothing familiar now remained in his life: hence his right to pursue every question.

I doubt, said the boy, whether there are any marriages which the families of both parties are really happy about. There used to be.

One side always makes a sacrifice. Usually the side with the least money.

Surprised by the odd sense and wording of those remarks, Jocelyn turned to look at the boy who was leaning deep back in the arm-chair, his face in shadow. He could discover no insolence in his expression. When their eyes met, the boy said:

You didn’t approve of my mother and father did you?

That was a very different case.

You mean because they were never married?

Who told you that?

A boy at school called Charles Hay.

Jocelyn turned to the window. The whole of the boy’s upbringing, he considered, had been compromised by half-measures and his mother’s sudden whims.

The boy was still speaking: You can tell by looking at them that they’ve never been married. They don’t treat each other like husband and wife. They don’t possess anything in common — except me.

That is no way to speak of your mother and father.

Is lying better?

I find it regrettable that you should come across such stories at school.

They call me Garibaldi because they say my mother might have been his mistress too.

It is terrible.

I laugh.

Laugh?

Do you expect me to defend my mother’s honour?

Jocelyn wanted to tell the boy that he had argued many times with Laura that it was necessary to tell him the truth. Yet he felt that anything he said would now be incomprehensible because it belonged to a past which existed only in his own memory.

He turned back to the table and began wiping the stock of his gun.

Why is Captain Bierce a cad? asked the boy in a gentle, almost tender voice.

He’s a bullying Irish braggart — a mutton-fisted loud-mouthed pack-horse captain!

That’s no way to talk about your brother-in-law!

Having said this, the boy laughed. And Jocelyn laughed too. They laughed at the collapse of the formalities which had surrounded them. In face of this collapse they were for a moment equal. The boy got up from the chair and went over to the table. The man sat down and leant back in the arm-chair. He was trembling.

The boy, picking up the stock, noticed that the firing-pins had not been released. Pressing the front of the stock against the table top, he squeezed each trigger. The two sharp taps of the pins against the wood broke the silence. The surface of the table there was already scarred with thousands of tiny pock marks caused during the years by this method of releasing firing-pins so that their springs should not be weakened.

Jocelyn began to speak from the depths of the chair, staring at the fire grate, and softly as though almost to himself:

He tore her out of her own place. I know what she is like. She is as fine as china. She’s like that figure there with flowers around her waist. She needs to be protected and free.

The boy could not see the man for he was hidden by the back of the chair. Above the chair he could see the mantelpiece: on it were a dusty packet of envelopes, a ball of twine, a leather strap and a porcelain figure of a shepherdess, about eight inches high.

He tore her out of her own place. She was part of this place. She knew it. There were no secrets from her. She was the spirit of this place and this house. She was why I lived here.

The boy stared at the porcelain figure, its pink, almost white glaze shining in the lamplight.

I begin to be glad I’ve lived half my life. A fair part of it has been good. But from now on everything will get worse. Everybody is becoming ignorant and mutton-fisted and too busy judging everybody else. We’re going to have sermons and commerce. I hate this damned farm now. No one knows how to wait any more, because they haven’t anything worth waiting for. I don’t know how to wait myself. I used to wait for her.

The man stopped talking.

I’ll go and change, he said later, it’s cold here.

The boy approached the mantelpiece still staring at the porcelain figure of the shepherdess.

How did it happen that on 2 May 1902, Beatrice was in her bedroom, her hair loose, wearing only a nightdress and wrap, in the middle of the afternoon?

The previous day, walking through the walled vegetable garden, she had noticed that several boughs of lilac had come out on the tree in the north-east corner. She wanted to pick some to take into the house. But to get to the tree she had to cross a bed of wet earth and rotting brussel sprout plants. She took off her shoes and stockings and left them on the path. Her feet sank into the mud up to her ankles. When she reached the tree, she discovered she was not tall enough. A little way along the wall was a black, rotten ladder. (During her absence in South Africa the house and farm had deteriorated dramatically.) She tested the first three rungs and they seemed strong enough. She moved the ladder to the lilac tree and climbed up. A wasp, caught between her skirts and the wall, stung her on the instep of her foot. She cried out (a small cry like a child’s or a gull’s), took little notice, cut the lilac and went barefoot into the house to wash her feet. By evening, her foot was inflamed and during the night she slept badly.