October Men Read Free

trousers.
    “You don’t mean for me to go up there—?”
    “That’s just exactly what I do mean. An’ I’ll go and get Tom Yates meantime.”
    “Ah—and they’ll make mincemeat of me meantime, too, woman. Them’s young an’ I’m not.”
    “Then you just take your old gun with you. They won’t ‘ave the guts to tackle you then, not if you stand up to them.”
    Charlie had the gravest doubts about the validity of this theory of his wife’s—it was not the first time he heard her voice it, that young hooligans had no courage. But he could recall the way the rats had behaved at threshing time, in the days before the combine harvesters when there was still plenty of work to be had on the land: if you left the rats alone they soon made themselves scarce, pests though they were. But if you cornered them—they fought, rats or no, snapping at the stick as it broke their backs.
    And that, it seemed to Charlie, was what she was asking him to do to these young buggers—to corner ‘em.
    “I dunno about that,” he began doubtfully.
    “Well I do,” Mrs. Clark snapped back, through the rustle of clothes pulled hurriedly over her head. “And I knows something else too: that I promised Master David that I’d look after the house while he was away—and so I will. So if you won’t go up to it, then I shall have to. And you can go and wake up Tom Yates.”
    Charlie swore under his breath and wrenched at his trousers. Somehow he had been manoeuvred into a corner himself, a corner from which there was no escape except by doing his wife’s bidding. He never could fathom how she managed it, but it was a position with which he was all too bitterly familiar.
    He was swearing still, steadily and bitterly, as he edged his way up the lane towards the Old House five minutes later.
    Of all the nights of this rotten summer, this was the worst for such tom-fool behaviour. It was pitch black and chilly and sopping wet, without a breath of wind. The rain must have stopped an hour or more since and the heavy summer foliage had had time to drip off its surplus moisture, so that everything was quiet enough to hear a mouse stir.
    It was this stillness that made him swear now. He had tried two or three steps on the gravel drive, but the scrunch of his iron-shod boots had deafened him. His only chance of a silent approach to the house was by the rough strip of grass beside the high hedgerow on his right.
    He thought he knew both the grass and the hedge like the back of his hand; he had walked beside the one and picked blackberries and hazelnuts from the other innumerable times. But now he stumbled awkwardly, his trousers already soaked to the knee, his face lashed every now and then by unseen twigs and sodden leaves.
    And yet, perversely, this discomfort aroused in him a determination to do the job his wife had thrust upon him. When he had blundered out of the cottage he had been half decided to save himself the unpleasantness—and very possible danger—of catching the little sods in the act by warning them of his advance with a bit of well-judged noise. But now, as he moved silently from the grass verge to the springy turf of the lawn, the smouldering irritation inside him ignited into a murderous rage.
    He ’ d learn they little buggers!
    There was a lot in life that irritated Charlie Clark: big cars and noisy motorcycles, long hair and short skirts, letters from government ministries asking him questions he didn’t want to answer or telling him things he didn’t care to know about, and the high price and the low strength of beer. And most of all being bullied by anyone in the world but his wife—he didn’t like that much either, but he reckoned it was more or less covered by the promise he’d made to the vicar when they’d gone to the altar together.
    But always the enemy had been either intangible or plainly beyond his reach—always except those two times.
    It was queer that he could never remember either of those two