Gordon Williams Read Free

mutual suspicion and one night he’d walked down to the Inn hoping to strike up some kind of thing with these fearsome villagers. The bar was smaller than their sitting-room. It contained seven or eight men and youths who seemed to do little drinking but a lot of dart-playing. He’d felt like a complete stranger who had walked uninvited into someone’s family home. The men stared at him and then turned their eyes away when he stared back and said good evening.
    At the bar, a small counter hardly longer than his desk, he asked for a small beer. The landlord seemed pleasant enough, although it did strike George Magruder that the man showed very little curiosity. After all, how many Americans did they get in a joint like this? While most of the men looked like farm-workers or automechanics, the landlord had a faint air of having come down in the world. He wore a shirt and tie and the jacket of a blue suit.
    He tried casual conversation about the weather and the beer, but the landlord made only non-committal replies, the kind that leave no conversational bridges. If he’d been in a similar situation at home (unlikely, he thought) he might have asked the man to give everyone a drink on him, but Louise had warned him against such typically unwelcome American habits. She said these kind of country folk would only respect you if you were as close with money as they were themselves. What the hell, he wasn’t interested in respect, only in getting somebody to talk to, but the customers ignored him for their interminable darts and the landlord offered not one word that could be construed as conversation.
    “What was it like, darling?” Louise asked when he got home.
    “I was hardly overwhelmed by traditional English hospitality, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Going by tonight we’ll have to learn to make our own conversation.”
    Louise had been slightly worried all the time he’d been gone. She knew more about the kind of people who lived in a place like this than George could ever hope to. To them a Londoner was a foreigner – an American might as well be from outer space. Yet she’d often been surprised by George’s American ability to crash into situations which she found delicate – and to come out on top. It was one of the things she had admired him for.
    After that night George Magruder began to wonder constantly if a man could exist purely within the society of his own family. Much as he loved Louise they had been married for nine years and the time for mutual exploration by conversation (or anything else) was past. And there was a limit to the satisfaction one could obtain from the company of an eight-year-old girl.
    It seemed likely that for at least six months Trencher’s Farm wouldbe his only world. Well, countless men had lived like this in the frontier days. A man and his wife alone in a brutal, unknown world, living on their own resources. A man who’d come to a virgin valley and carved out a piece of land and fought off Indians and survived drought and ploughed and reaped and lived through hunger and blizzards and... it was the kind of childish thought, Louise said, that prevented him from turning completely into a stuffy old academic with his nose buried in the late eighteenth century.
    That same evening, after he’d left the bar, the men had talked about him. They, of course, knew who he was, the rich yank who’d rented Trencher’s, some kind of professor. The ones who had been in the army didn’t like Americans for they knew that Americans were loudmouths with fat bellies and a yellow streak down their backs a yard wide. This view had come to be accepted by those who hadn’t been in the army.
    Tom Hedden, a Dando farmer, had been throwing for double sixteen to win the game when George Magruder left. Normally he could throw three darts into the treble bed ten times out of ten, but his concentration had been broken.
    “They’m yanks be takin’ over the whole world,” he said, pulling