Free Portobello Notebook by Adrian Kenny Page A

There was almost a crowd standing about the boundary. Colonel Browne and his wife sat on school chairs. Bob stood alone in his long brown tweed overcoat. Even Mike Reilly was there, looking uneasily about. His daughter and another girl left their bikes in the ditch outside the school gates and walked tiptoe up the avenue, as if into another land. The headmaster was in his element, talking to an old man with an Oxford accent and huge purple hands. He wore his old Trinity blazer, even as he went out to bat. A silence came over the field, and the match began.
    Justin opened the bowling, and by a terrible fluke hit the stumps with his first ball. The silence remained for a moment, like a shot bird before it falls. Then the boys cheered suddenly, savagely, and – with a hurt, puzzled look at Justin – the headmaster walked away. The rest of the innings was a blur. It wasn’t until teatime that he saw Geraldine and her mother were there.
    He went cold with fright and hot with excitement as he approached them. Bill’s wife introduced them as friends from the music society. Geraldine’s mother said that they had met already, and Bill’s wife left them alone.
    ‘I was away.’ He blushed. ‘Did you get my postcard?’
    ‘I did.’ She smiled and looked at his face, and then her mother moved away.
    It was wonderful to find her in that small place. He told her about his job in London, and described the Park Lane Hotel. She laughed as he told her how he had gone there for tea one afternoon, and what the manager had said when he found out. He told her of going to a fish and chip shop in Piccadilly one night, wherean elegant man called, ‘Barrow in Furnace, Nineteen-Forty-Five?’ and a small man frying the chips looked up at him, then winked and said, ‘That’s right!’
    Bill came by and said to her, ‘Don’t listen to that fella!’ His wife called them up to tea.
    ‘Would you like to join me?’ Geraldine smiled and looked at his face again.
    He went on talking as they stood at the long trestle table. He could hear himself, as if he had a finger in one ear. It was as if all the energy of the past three years was being released. He told her how Mr Porter had been sacked. He described his many aunts. She began to talk of the local music society. He interrupted, asking if she still played the violin.
    She smiled and said, ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Didn’t you learn it at school? In a glass box!’ He laughed, and talked again.
    She smiled again, but not so much, and when more people came up for tea she stepped back quietly from the table. Her face changed and she said, ‘Thank you.’
    ‘You’ve had enough?’ he said.
    She walked away. He hurried after her. ‘What did I say?’
    ‘Nothing.’ Her blushing embarrassment gave her voice a power that turned him cold.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘Nothing. I asked you to have tea with me.’ She said, ‘Thank you,’ again, then crossed the field and stood talking with her mother.
    He stood, trying to remember what he had said, but all he could remember was her trembling ‘Nothing.’ It meant that his talk had held her at arm’s length, that he was afraid of being caught, that he didn’t take this place to heart, that it had been a place torest in, and that he was better now. But he couldn’t grasp that. When he looked again she had gone. The players went back onto the field and stood in the lengthening shadows of the trees. This was where his three years in the country had led him. He knew then he would leave.
     
    THERE WAS a shout from the wicket – one of the stumps was down. Bill was fielding on the boundary, bent forward, hands on thighs. He straightened slowly when the umpire raised his finger. Justin went over to the rope.
    ‘Bill?’
    ‘I was thinking it was you.’ The same slow Westmeath accent. ‘I saw you there and I said to myself, that’s Justin Kelly.’
    ‘How are you?’ He looked at the thin grey hair, the glasses so unlikely on his out-of-doors