McAuslan in the Rough by George MacDonald Fraser

Author:George MacDonald Fraser [Fraser, George MacDonald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007477043
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1974-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fly Men

I had the Padre trapped and undone, helpless in my grasp; the rocks were about to fall and crush him. In fact, he was snookered, with the white jammed in behind the black on the bottom cushion, and pink masking the blue at the top end of the table. Also, he was twenty-five points behind.

Reluctant to admit defeat, as the Church of Scotland always is, he played for time. He stood there sweating and humming Crimond, a sure sign of his deep disturbance, fiddled with his cue, dropped the chalk, ran a finger behind his dog-collar, wondered irritably when the Mess Sergeant was going to announce dinner, and finally appealed for help to the M.O., who had been offering him gratuitous advice throughout the game but now, in the moment of crisis, had retired to the bar and was tying salmon-lures. (The M.O. did this habitually, carrying the tackle in his enormous pockets, and fiddling with bits of thread and feather at the slightest excuse.)

“Now Israel may say that truly, we’re stymied,” said the Padre. “Lachlan, will you look at this situation. What’s to be done?”

“Put up a prayer,” said the M.O. irreverently, with his mouth full of red worsted. He glanced at the table. “Left-hand side, a bit of deep screw, and come off three cushions.” And then, just as the Padre has resigned himself and was preparing to attempt his own patent version of the mass$eA shot, which in the past had necessitated heavy stitching in three different parts of the cloth, the M.O. added artlessly:

“Here, did you know that Karl Marx was related on his mother’s side to the Duke of Argyll?”

“Is that so?” said the Padre, feigning interest and glad of any respite. “I never—”

“Lay off,” I said firmly. I had been here before. When it came to gamesmanship the M.O. and Padre could make Stephen Potter look like a girl guide. I knew that the M.O.’s irrelevant interruption at a crucial stage of the game had been perfectly timed so that the Padre could delay his shot until dinner intervened, or I forgot the score, or a new war broke out, and I wasn’t having it. I had been pursuing the Padre across the snooker table for weeks, and now I had him gaffed at last.

“Take your shot, you fugitive from the Iona Community,” I said. “Play ball.” And as he sighed and stooped over the table, remarking that there was no balm in Gilead, I added some gamesmanship of my own. “You’re twenty-five behind, bishop, and dead, dead, dead.”

“The poor soul, have some respect for his cloth,” said the M.O., and it was at that moment, with the Padre poised on the lip of destruction, that the Adjutant came in to announce that we had smallpox in the battalion.

“Smallpox?”

The M.O. ran a hook into his thumb in his startled reaction, and swore luridly, the Padre’s cue rattled on the floor, and I suspect I just stood and gaped. And then the Adjutant, who was normally a slightly flustered, feckless young man, given to babbling, took things in hand.

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