A Pocketful of Rye Read Free Page A

for it, Laurence, and we, all your good friends in Winton, will never cease to thank you.
    I read it again, slowly, shuddering slightly over ‘the dear pilgrims’, then instinctively I crushed the letter, tight and hard. What a rocket! What a blasted imposition. Coming after me ‘for old times’ sake’, thanking me in advance, handing me the good old heaven will bless you. And spoiling my Tuesday in Zürich, the one day of the week when Svenska Örnflyg were normally free of regular flights.
    Yet, how could I give Ennis the brush off. My name would stink at home. I would have to do something about it and, after all, it was only on a short-term basis. I supposed I must handle it but, as always, I would do so with calm detachment and mature consideration.

Chapter Two
    The probationer brought the tea-tray into my sitting-room, that snug little carpeted den with the easy chair before the blue and white tiled wood stove. She was a fresh country girl from the Valais, smelling pleasantly of the dairy and with well-formed milk-bars, who, as she went out, before closing the door always gave me a look over her shoulder not altogether bovine. But today I failed to respond, nor did the fragrant cheesy odour of the fresh baked ramekins break through my moodiness. Yes, the letter was a nuisance, a confounded nuisance, it had upset me, taking me back to a period in my early life that I was never unduly eager to recall.
    Personally, I cannot endure throwbacks, they interrupt the action which is dying to burst forth, but to put the picture in perspective it must be related that at the age of fifteen I had gone to live with my grandparents in Levenford. One month before, with that touch of the absurd apparent to those familiar with the beginnings of my erratic career, I had precociously won the Ellison Bursary to Winton University, an achievement somewhat dulled when it became apparent that to enter the University I must attend Levenford Academy for one year to take the Higher Leaving Certificate examination of the Scottish School Board.
    My welcome by the Bruces at their semi-detached villa in Woodside Avenue was not effusive. In running off with my Catholic father, their favourite daughter had deeply distressed them. And now, fifteen years later, fulfilling their worst forebodings, they were landed with the sole surviving evidence of that ill-fated union.
    My grandfather, Robert Bruce, was an upstanding, dignified burgher of the town, retired on a pension from his position as head of the timber department in the local shipyard of Dennison Brothers, whose staid existence was transfigured by the belief, generally regarded as fictitious, that he was the lineal descendant of the Scottish hero who, after cracking de Bohun’s skull with his battle-axe in single combat, led the Scots to victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314 – a date I was never permitted to forget.
    Do not imagine that my grandfather was either a fool or a laughing stock. He had documents, genealogical trees, extracts from meetings of the local Historical Society, and had traced his family in Levenford as far back as the fifteenth century, a record in which the name Robert was generic. Moreover, Cardross Castle where King Robert I died in 1329 stood by the river Leven on the outskirts of the town and it was from here that Sir James Douglas had set out to take the heart of Bruce to the Holy Land, only to fall, fighting the Moors in Spain. Without digressing further, it is enough to say that my grandfather’s obsession or, if you prefer it, delusion was honest, and so deeply felt, that he made every year a pilgrimage to Melrose Abbey where the casket containing the heart of King Robert was now enshrined.
    Some of this genealogy rubbed on to me and, suitably embroidered, was often socially opportune, but this apart, Bruce treated me always with decent toleration and a fine sense of justice, while my grandmother, a small, bowed wisp of a