Free Fellow Passenger by Geoffrey Household Page B

drying after rain and white geese wandering from common to pond like a solemn party of selectors on their way to the bar. The home eleven was true to village form. Six of them were local gentry in ancient, yellowing flannels; four were dressed as they pleased; and one wasn’t there at all. The captain was a tall, fair fellow, who seemed altogether too diffident and indecisive. A type too common in our countryside. The squire without land; the parson without a congregation; the former colonial servant with nothing to serve. It matters so little what they do that they cannot help showing they are aware of it.
     
    ‘Lovely day, sir, ’I said as he passed me.
     
    His eye fell on me with alarm and disapproval. However, I was evidently settling down to be an interested spectator, so he could hardly be impolite. He continued with me the anxious debate which he was carrying on with himself.
     
    ‘But I daren’t put ‘em in if we win the toss,’ he objected in answer to nothing. ‘We might never get them out.’
     
    ‘They’re all that good?’ I asked.
     
    ‘County second eleven, most of them.’
     
    ‘All the same, on that drying wicket—’
     
    ‘I know, I know,’ he said desperately. ‘I know.’
     
    ‘Let me bowl,’ I suggested. ‘You’re a man short, aren’t you?’
     
    He was more alarmed than ever. I might be respectable, but I was dirty.
     
    ‘O’Reilly had a bald head, too,’ I encouraged him.
     
    That made him smile.
     
    ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
     
    I had not really decided on a name, and he took me by surprise.
     
    ‘Michael Bassoon,’ I answered. ‘I’m a painter.’
     
    I was hopelessly out of practice, but I thought I could probably bother the reserves of a second-class county after a wild over or two. My medium-paced off-break had always been phenomenal, though more impressive to a spectator than a steady bat. I could never keep a length, and it was not much use to make the ball jump sideways like a startled hare when it pitched as a long hop.
     
    The game was short and brutal. I took six wickets for nine, and we had our opponents all out for something under fifty. But it was too soon. The pitch was as treacherous for us as for them. We scored thirty-nine. I nearly decapitated a goose with a six into the pond, and was clean bowled trying to do it again.
     
    After the game we retired to the village pub. When the diffident captain had supplied me with a pint, he frightened me into hiccups by remarking:
     
    ‘I’ve never seen an off-break like yours since Howard-Wolferstan’s.’
     
    ‘Good Lord, you mean the spy!’ I exclaimed.
     
    I cursed myself for my intemperate longing to play cricket again. My reply must have sounded wildly unnatural, but the tone, I suppose, passed as surprise and interest.
     
    The name caught the attention of three or four other members of the team who were standing at the bar alongside. That was what the captain intended. He could at last claim some serious attention.
     
    ‘That’s the man! But I don’t think he was a spy.’
     
    ‘Did you know him?’I asked.
     
    ‘Oh, I knew him very well at Oxford. No more sense than a monkey! I can imagine him robbing a bank, but he never cared enough about anything to be a real communist.’
     
    A libellous character! Still, I must admit that at the age of twenty I had not reached the responsibility of later years. He did not know me. He had merely heard of me, and very inaccurately. We may have had friends in common. But he had evidently watched me often enough playing cricket, and, talking to a stranger, it was a forgivable social lie to claim my acquaintanceship.
     
    ‘He admitted that he was a communist,’ I said.
     
    ‘My own speciality at that age was black magic,’ he answered surprisingly. ‘One would look back on those things with shame if they weren’t so absurd.’
     
    ‘But then what was he doing at Moreton Intrinseca?’
     
    ‘After women, of course. That was