Gordon Williams Read Free Page B

he’d been in court for various offences, some of violence and some purely larcenous.
    When closing time came it was generally Norman Scutt who wanted to go on drinking and while, like any other landlord of an out-of-the-way pub, Harry Ware was willing to stretch the law by half an hour or so to keep the goodwill of his regulars, he always had a slight fear of Norman turning nasty.
    “I don’t get twelve in my wages, do I?” said Phillip Riddaway, who took his time about entering conversations.
    “That’s because you’m thick, Phil,” said Norman. “Them yanks aint thick, they’m richer’n you nor I’ll ever be. You see his wife, then? Cor, Phil, she’d give you a good time, you dirty big booger.”
    Phil grinned. Norman was always telling him about women. Phil had never done anything to a woman. Norman was always saying he’d have to try it before he reached forty or it would be too late. Phil liked hearing Norman talk about women. Norman had done it with lots of women.
    “Aye, it’s all right for them yanks, bein’ rich like,” said Tom Hedden. “Us got to scratch for the price of a pint’r two.”
    Harry Ware wondered if Norman, who had not been out of Exeter gaol for two months, might be thinking of doing a bit of burglary up at Trencher’s. The others always said in Norman’s favour that he’d never stolen from anybody in Dando, but a Yank wasn’t local...
    When he went downstairs it was George Magruder’s routine to pick up the morning’s post from behind the front door and then to rake out and fill the two fires. In the sitting-room there was an Esse, a glass-fronted slow burner which heated water for six radiators throughout the house. Every morning when he raked out the night’s ash he told himself how lucky they’d been to find an English house with central heating.
    Having made a parcel of the Esse ash, using The Times Business Section as a wrapper, he then went through the sitting-room and the dining-room to the kitchen, having to duck his head to avoid the low oak beam above the dining-room door. In the kitchen he cleaned out the Aga, which the estate agents had called the Rolls-Royce of cookers. On its two hot plates, normally capped by massive stainless steel lids on hinges, Louise did all their cooking, and the slowburning fire also provided hot water for the kitchen and bathroom. Although he knew the Aga was of modern and scientific design he liked to think it was the kind of stove women cooked on when men were out ploughing virgin prairies or branding longhorn calves. It was the first time in his life he had seen anything seriously cooked by other means than electricity. It gave life a kind of barbecue flavour.
    He went out of the kitchen door into the porch, carrying the Aga rakings in its ash-shovel; he put down both lots of ash to pull on his rubber boots. These had tractor type soles and had been left behind in the coal-shed by a previous tenant. He had bought special felt sole-linings but even with those he still thought there was something unhygienic about wearing another person’s castoffs. If it had not been for certain ridicule by Louise – who tended to laugh at his awareness of germs – he would have burned them and bought himself a new pair. He felt this sort of detail might possibly help towards creating the right mental attitude for writing the Branksheer book. Squire and scholar and diarist as he was, Branksheer had lived in what could only be described as squalor. George Magruder just could not tune in on the wavelength of a man who was at home in Latin and Greek and corresponded with Europe’s leading classicists, and at the same time took head-lice for granted and the pox as almost inevitable. He and Louise oftenargued whether it was sophisticated to desire clinical sterility. She took the view that the truly mature man would not have a complex about dirt.
    He opened the porch door and walked through a foot of snow towards the corner of the house, passing the