Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam

Author:Candia McWilliam
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-06-28T22:00:00+00:00

SEVEN MAGPIES

The train was passing between still, high fields of standing corn. The light over the fields had a talcy glow that lightened and ceased to shimmer a yard or so into the sky. From time to time a small area of field flicked under a switch of wind, the specific unanimated flick of a creature’s pelt. Rangy wild oats over the wide crop and flimsy poppies at its edges were the only intimations of natural disorder. Nothing much was moving but the train through this thinly chivalric part of England.

‘Girls are like people, I realised it late on,’ said the younger man to the older, who resembled him too much not to be linked to him by blood.

‘It will have been my fault you did not see that before. Though I can’t see the good it will do you to know it now.’

‘Why do you say now?’

‘You’ve already done your harm and it is late to begin any undoing.’

‘You know more than most that there is no undoing. At least I need do no more harm now.’ The young man spoke as though harm were something simple, like hammering.

The older man stood to open a window, with such urgency that he seemed in want of new air. The air that entered the train brought nothing new with it but dust more rural than the dust within.

‘You dramatise yourself, Findlay, a pointless thing to do in your profession and very tiring in hot weather.’ Sitting down, the older man pinched his trousers and flung his right leg over his left as though this gave depth to his paternal but unfatherly dictum.

‘Gum?’ rejoined his son, loosening a white tooth of chewing gum from its packet with his thumb and offering it gingerly to his father. It might have been the elegant old man in his cream linen who had been uncouth. But the reprimand was lost on Robert Meldrum who sat now looking at his son over his own, just touching, fingertips.

Knowing that his father was waiting for him to offend, Findlay shot five bits of gum into his own mouth and began to champ until his throat was flooded with minty saliva and his jaw was aching. Would it be the professional or the private life that was coming into the old man’s sights, he wondered, with the same dishonourable curiosity that led him to encourage people to repeat themselves indefinitely and to tell him stories he already knew.

‘I followed a trade all my life and I fear you are too good for that.’ The word ‘good’ carried none of its customary decent replete weight. Nor did it imply its opposite, merely something lightweight, skittering, inconsiderable.

‘Father, your life is not over,’ said Findlay, hoping to divert attention from his own life, still, he felt, hardly begun. He almost forgot himself and began to flatter the hard old man, as he might have someone he loved less and trusted more, enticing him into discussion of the past with some welcome slipway down into memory, ‘And what a life it has been, eh .

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