Free Portobello Notebook by Adrian Kenny

shone out like the Pole star. Again the greatthought returned: all this was his, if he wanted it. Another day, in Charing Cross, he stepped into a small bookshop, where a man in a bowler hat and dark coat was looking gravely through a tray of black and white photographs. Justin glimpsed one, of a naked girl with wire tied tightly about her breasts, and he hurried outside – where another man in a bowler hat and dark coat asked him directions, which he was able to give! He went suddenly into another shop, bought a card and posted it to Geraldine.
    He didn’t mention her to Tom. They got on well together but hardly talked. It was only when the strike had ended and they were on the train to Holyhead, that Tom said he was leaving the school, and returning to university next year to study politics. Justin realized that their ways had parted, as smoothly as the points clicked on the railway.
     
    JOY HAD a baby now, and when classes ended George went to their cottage in the grounds. Tom went to study in his room. Mr Porter, his false teeth open, his yellow tongue hanging out, slept in an armchair by the fire. When payday came, Justin was glad to escape into the town.
    ‘We haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Geraldine’s father reached through the thin brass rails and shook his hand.
    ‘I was away.’
    ‘We heard that. We heard that.’
    ‘How is Geraldine?’
    ‘You’ll have to ask her that yourself.’ Her father smiled, stamped the back of the cheque, and said, ‘Why don’t you call one evening, visit us at home?’
    He said, ‘Thank you,’ but he didn’t go. His life had been a running away from home. He had found a home here, a hiding place where he could find himself. He didn’t go to the bank again,he didn’t go to the riding school, and yet he longed to see Geraldine. He couldn’t understand it.
    ‘Still wandering?’ the rector’s wife said when she met him on the road. ‘You’re still looking for your other half.’
    He walked the back roads every evening, talking with Colonel Browne and Mike Reilly, with Bob and Rose, and Bill Galloway. Bill especially stood for all that he liked in this small place. Bill bought his newspaper in the pub, wasn’t afraid of Colonel Browne, gave Mike Reilly’s daughter work as a babysitter, and when it was raining he gave Rose a lift. In the same way, when the headmaster had finally asked his help in making a cricket pitch, Bill had agreed. By the time Justin returned from England, a field behind the farmyard had become a brilliant green.
    On Saturday evenings Bill came to level it with the long iron roller he drew across his spring wheat, washed his hands until they were as red as the school’s carbolic soap, then went home. On Sundays he went to church with his family, morning and evening. On Mondays he began work again. Everything was slow and orderly. One evening he had the schoolboys pull an old garden roller, a solid drum of limestone, up and down the wicket until it was smooth and tight. Afterwards, excited by their freedom, the boys pushed the roller so hard that it ran off the field and down a slope where it shattered against the high wall. Bill’s face clouded – the only time Justin had seen him upset – and then it was clear again.
    In a few weeks spring opened into summer. The fields disappeared behind growing walls of green; then hawthorn and elderflowers made the hedges white. When Rose walked the road, a smaller flock of birds circled overhead. As naturally, the cricket season began. Bill helped Justin to arrange a match – the school team against a county one – and as the players in their old whites stood in place about the pitch, it looked as if it had been thereforever, like the old trees standing in their pools of shade.
    Justin was playing with the boys on the school team. The headmaster agreed gladly to play on the other side – for Bill had rounded up some old county gentlemen as well as ordinary folk. His wife supervised the tea.