Free Watching the Climbers on the Mountain by Alex Miller Page B

for lack of enthusiasm. It was Alistair’s turn and they were waiting for him. All was quiet; the alcohol, the heat and the rich meal had weighed them down into a state of contentment, each of them induced to private thoughts despite the social nature of the game. Alistair’s remark cut through the mood and caught them unawares. Looking at the stockman, he said, ‘Are you going to fight tomorrow Gil?’
    For maybe two or three seconds everyone accepted the question as having something to do with the performance of his charade; then what he had said dawned on them and, with the exception of Gil Sturgiss, they all looked at Crofts. The stockman blushed and looked down, scraping at an imaginary remnant of plum pudding in his dessert bowl. Gil Sturgiss reached across the table and picked up the station owner’s brass lighter, flicking it with his thumb. The Rankins were all waiting, their attention on the stockman and Gil; and in Alistair Rankin’s eyes there was a peculiarly intense light.
    â€˜We’ll bring home the golden eagles,’ Gil Sturgiss announced confidently, touching the flame to one of the thin Ritmeester cigars that Alistair had given him for Christmas. He leant back and blew out a huge cloud of smoke, aiming it up at the glass balls dangling above his head and making them twist and dance on their threads.
    â€˜Robert’s not fighting,’ Alistair pronounced abruptly, and they all looked at the stockman again.
    â€˜Well what’s this charade you’re going to do for us?’ Gil Sturgiss asked, puffing a spurt of smoke into the young boy’s face.
    â€˜Ask him yourself!’ Alistair persisted.
    â€˜That’ll do now,’ Ida Rankin admonished gently, and there was an uncertain pause.
    â€˜Robert’ll have a go,’ her brother said then, backing up his new friend and making his trust in the stockman clear to all of them in order to silence their doubts.
    Ward Rankin recognised the stockman’s fear the moment Crofts blushed and started fiddling with his spoon. The sight gave him a sharp and unexpected pleasure; it was another precise connection between them. He knew the stockman’s fear well; he had grown up with such a fear and had carried it with him into adulthood until the incursions of middle age had finally eroded it. This was the same fear from which his English master had offered him a refuge at school: the very private fear of the boy who has never had a fight with another boy and who dreads the inevitable day when he will be left with no way out and will be forced to fight, or—if he has managed to elude the business for so long—to prove himself at last against another man. This was Crofts’ unenviable situation now. Rankin recognised the isolating dread which afflicts the lives of all boys—unless they belong to that minority who not only overcome the fear but who discover in themselves a sadistic pleasure in fighting and who seek out opportunities for it.
    Ward Rankin heard his son cross-examining the stockman now, and he misunderstood the boy, thinking him to be simply pinning Crofts down because of his own nervousness about this business. ‘You don’t have to go in for the tournament, Robert,’ he interrupted. ‘No one has to fight if they don’t want to.’ But even as he was saying the words he realised that they sounded foolish and that to the others it must seem as though he were really asserting the opposite. How could it seem otherwise? Old age is the only secure refuge from manhood. So he attempted to amend his words and explain himself to Crofts, but succeeded only in further alienating the stockman. In that eternity when he had believed he was about to die, just before his hand closed over the pig’s hard foot, when the heat of his hatred for Crofts was compressed into a brief fierce flame, he had understood the limits of his own fear and had passed beyond them. The intensity