By the Lake Read Free Page A

no answer.
    Ruttledge accompanied him to the gate where he had left the two buckets in the hedge of fuchsia bushes.
    “See if there’s anybody watching in the lane,” he demanded.
    Ruttledge walked out into the lane and looked casually up and down. Between its high banks the narrow lane was like a lighted tunnel under the tangled roof of green branches. “There’s not a soul in sight.”
    “There’s no one watching above at the gate?”
    “Nobody. You were very hard on poor Jamesie,” Ruttledge said.
    “That’s the only way to give it to him,” he grinned in triumph. “He’s too newsy.” He lifted the two buckets out of the fuchsias and, gripping the blackthorn against one of the handles, headed towards the lake.
    His kind was now almost as extinct as the corncrake. He had fled to his present house from the farm he first worked on. When he was fourteen years old he had been sent out from the religious institutions to that first farm. Nobody knew now, least of all Bill Evans, how long ago that was.
    One cold day, several years earlier, they had gone away, locking him outside, warning him to watch the place and not to wander. They were an unusually long time away. Towards evening he could stand the hunger no longer and came to Ruttledge. “Get me something to eat. I’m starving.”
    “What’s happened?”
    “They went away,” he admitted reluctantly.
    There was little food in the house. Kate had gone to London and Ruttledge was housekeeping alone. “You’re welcome to anything in the house but there isn’t even bread. I was waiting till tonight to go to the village.”
    “Haven’t you spuds?”
    “Plenty.” He hadn’t thought of them as an offering.
    “Quick, Joe. Put them on.”
    A pot of water was set to boil. The potatoes were washed. “How many?”
    “More. More.”
    His eyes glittered on the pot as he waited, willing them to a boil. Fourteen potatoes were put into the pot. He ate all of them, even the skins, with salt and butter, and emptied the large jug of milk. “God, I feel all roly-poly now,” he said with deep contentment as he moved back to the ease of the white rocking chair. “Do you have any fags?”
    The small ration was taken from the shelf. A cigarette was lit. He smoked, inhaling deeply, holding the smoke until the lungs could no longer bear the strain, and then released the breath with such slow reluctance that the smoke issued first from the nostrils before gushing out on a weak, spent breath. So deep was his pleasure that watching was also a dismaying pleasure. For once he was in no anxiety or rush to leave, and Ruttledge began to ask him about his life, though he knew any enquiry was unlikely to be welcomed. Already he knew the outlines of such a life.
    He would have known neither father nor mother. As a baby he would have been given into the care of nuns. When these boys reached seven, the age of reason, they were transferred to places run by priests or Brothers. When he reached fourteen, Bill Evans was sent out, like many others, to his first farmer.
    They were also sent as skivvies to the colleges; they scrubbed and polished floors, emptied garbage and waited at tables in the college Ruttledge attended. He recalled how small the boys were in their white jackets, the grey stripes of their trousers, their crew-cut heads, the pale faces tense and blank. No words were allowed to pass between them and the students. They brought huge trays of fish or meat, bowls of soup and vegetables, baskets of bread, and on Sundays glass siphons of red lemonade with silver tops. The place was so bleak that the glass siphons were likeflowers on the table for the one festive day of the week. What went on in the kitchens behind the heavy oak partition was a hubbub of distant sound from which the occasional crash or cry or shout emerged. In his long black soutane and red burning eyes under a grey crew-cut, the dean of students was a sinister figure, never more so than when he smiled weakly.