John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘Just digging out the few potatoes,’ he said to the Colonel, who got out of the car. ‘A real sign that the old year is almost done.’

‘Very good ones they seem to be too,’ the Colonel responded, and at once began his proposition.

At first, the Sergeant listened smiling. Obscurely, he had always felt that some benefit would flow from the association with the Sinclairs. Soon it grew clear that what was being proposed was no benefit at all. He was not a man to look for any abstraction in the sparrow’s fall. If that small disturbance of the air was to earn a moment’s attention, he would want to know at once what effect it would have on him or that larger version of himself that he was fond of referring to as ‘my family’. By the time the Colonel had finished he was speechless with rage.

‘It’d mean he’d come out of all that as a British army officer?’

‘Precisely. That is, of course, if he is accepted, and proves satisfactory.’

‘He couldn’t.’ He was so choked with emotion that he was barely able to get out the words.

‘He seemed to have no objection to the idea.’

‘He can’t. That’s the end and the be-all.’

‘Very well, then. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Goodbye, Sergeant.’

The Sergeant didn’t know what to do with his rage as he watched the black car back out the avenue, turn and snake round by the bridge to Charlie’s. He did not move till the post office shut the car from sight, and then, mouthing curses, started to beat the sides of ridges with the spade, only stopping when he felt the handle crack, realizing that he could be seen by someone passing the road. There was no one passing, but even if there were he could always pretend that it was a rat he had been pursuing among the furrows.

The Sergeant waited until the barrack orderly came back on duty and the dayroom door shut again before he went in search of the boy.

‘I hear we’re about to have a young Sassenach on our hands, an officer and gentleman to boot, not just the usual fool of an Irishman who rushes to the railway station at the first news of a war,’ he opened.

‘It was Colonel Sinclair who brought it up. I told him he’d have to ask you.’

‘And I’m told you’re favourably inclined to the idea.’

‘I said you’d have to be asked first.’

‘Well, then. I have news for you. You’re going to no Sandhurst whether they’d have you or not, and I even doubt if the Empire is that hard up. And you’re not going to the Sinclairs’ this Saturday or any other Saturday, for that matter. I was a fool to countenance the idea in the first place. Well, what do you have to say for yourself?’

‘I say that I’m not going,’ the boy said, barely able to speak with disappointment and anger.

‘And you can say it again if you want,’ and the father left him, well satisfied with the damaging restraint of his performance, his self-esteem completely restored.

The following Saturday the Sinclairs lingered a long time over breakfast but at ten-thirty the Colonel rose. ‘He’s not coming. He was always punctual. He’s been stopped.’

‘There’s a chance he may be ill,’ Mrs Sinclair said.

‘That would be too much of a coincidence.’

They prepared as usual for the garden, but neither had heart for their separate tasks. They found themselves straying into one another’s company, until Mrs Sinclair smiled sadly and said what they had been avoiding. ‘It’s a hurt.’

‘Yes. It is.’

‘That’s the trouble. We can’t help but get attached,’ she added quietly. It was the end of no world, they had been through too much for that, but these small hurts seemed to gather with the hurts that had gone before to form a weight that was dispiriting; and, with the perfect tact that is a kind of mind-reading, she said, ‘Why don’t we forget the garden? I know we have a rule against drinking during the day, but I think we can make an exception today. I promise to try to make an especially nice lunch.’

‘What kind of wine?’ he asked.

‘Red wine,’ she said at once.

‘I suppose the lesson is that we should have let well enough alone,’ he said.

‘I had my doubts all along but, I suppose, I was hoping they weren’t true. I don’t really think we’d have managed to get him into Sandhurst in the first place; but if we had, his trouble would have just begun — his whole background, his accent most of all. It’s hopeless to even contemplate. Let’s make lunch.’

The boy hung about the gravel outside the barracks that morning. Casey was the barrack orderly again. All the others were out on patrol. After he had finished the Independent , Casey came out to join the boy on the gravel.

‘This must be the first Saturday in a long time you aren’t away helping the Colonel,’ Guard Casey probed gently.

‘I was stopped,’ he replied with open bitterness.

‘I suppose it’ll be the end of the free fruit and vegetables. I hear they were threatening to make a British officer out of you.’

‘I wouldn’t have minded. Many go from here to England to work.’

‘Your father would never have been able to live with that. You really have to be born into that class of people. You don’t ever find robins feeding with the sparrows.’

‘Will the Sergeant be out on evening patrol?’

‘I’ll have a look.’

Johnny followed Casey over the hollow, scrubbed boards of the dayroom, where the policeman looked in the big ledger.

‘He is. From six to nine. In the Crossna direction.’

It was in the opposite direction to the Colonel’s. During those hours he would go to the parsonage to explain why he had not come to them, how it had ended.

Just after six, as soon as the Sergeant was out of sight, the boy crossed the bridge with a hazel fishing rod. Though it was too late for the small fish, perch or roach, he could say he was throwing a line out as a sort of experiment, for fun; but as soon as he was across the bridge he hid it behind a wall and took to the fields. Running, walking, running, scrambling across the stone walls, keeping well away from the farmhouses, he was soon close to the parsonage, which he circled, coming up through the orchard at the back. He was so mindless with the fear of not getting to the house in secret that he could hardly remember why he had set out, when he found himself at the kitchen window looking in at the Colonel and Mrs Sinclair seated at the big table with wine glasses in their hands. They were so absorbed in their conversation that he had to tap the window before they noticed. They both rose to let him in.

‘It wasn’t my fault, I would have come today as usual if he’d let me.’ Hard as he tried, he wasn’t able to beat down a sudden attack of sobbing. They allowed him to quiet and Mrs Sinclair got him a large glass of raspberry cordial.

‘Of course it wasn’t your fault. That’s the very last thing anybody could imagine.’ Mrs Sinclair put the glass in his hand, gently touching his hair.

‘In fact, it was all our fault. Our proposal upset everything,’ Colonel Sinclair said. ‘We didn’t think it through.’ He didn’t know what to give the boy, knew he wouldn’t accept money and, in a fit of weary inspiration, he went upstairs to fetch a book on natural history that had been their son’s favourite book when young. He first checked with his wife, and when she nodded he gave it to the boy. ‘It’s something we want you to have. We intended to give it to you for Christmas.’

In spite of the gift, he knew that it was all closing down. With kindness but with firmness, the Sinclairs were now more separate than the evening the Colonel had come to the barracks with the basket of apples. A world had opened that evening; it was closing now like curtains being silently drawn, and all the more finally because there was not even a shadow of violence.