Against this tide the Sinclairs came from London to the empty parsonage in Ardcarne, where Colonel Sinclair had grown up, where Mrs Sinclair, as a young army wife and mother, had spent happy summers with her gentle parents-in-law, the old canon and his second wife. After the war, the Colonel had settled uneasily into the life of a commuter between their house in Wimbledon and the ministry. Their son had been killed in the war and their daughter was married to a lecturer in sociology at Durham University, with two children of her own. They both wanted to live in the country, and when they discovered that the church commissioners would be only too glad to give the decaying parsonage for a nominal sum to a son of the manse, they sold the house in Wimbledon, and the Colonel took early retirement.
They stayed in the Royal Hotel while the parsonage was being restored, and as they employed local tradesmen, it was not resented. Once they moved in, the grounds, the garden and orchard, even the white paddock railings, they brought back with their own hands. They loved the house. Each year just after Christmas they went to England for two months, and every summer their daughter and her children came from Durham. Each Thursday they did a big shopping in the town, and when it was done went to the Royal Hotel for a drink. It was the one time in the week they drank at the Royal, but every evening except on Sunday, at exactly nine o’clock, their black Jaguar would cross the bridge and roll to a stop outside Charlie’s Bar. It was so punctual that people began to check their watches as it passed, the way they did with the mail van and the church bells and the distant rattle of the diesel trains across the Plains. Mrs Sinclair never left the Jaguar, but each night had three gin and tonics sitting in the car, the radio tuned to the BBC World Service, the engine running in the cold weather. It was the Colonel who brought out the drinks, handing them through the car window, but his own three large Black Bushmills he drank at the big oval table in Charlie’s front room or parlour. ‘Wouldn’t Mrs Sinclair be more comfortable in at the fire on a night the like of that?’ Charlie himself had suggested one bad night of rain and a rocking wind not long after they had started to come regularly. ‘No, Charlie. She’d not like that. Women of her generation were brought up never to set foot in bars,’ and the matter ended there; and though it caused a veritable hedgerow of talk for a few weeks, it provoked no laughter.
‘They’re strange. They’re different. They’re not brought up the like of us. Those hot climates they get sent to does things to people.’
At first, the late night drinkers entering Charlie’s used to hurry past the car and woman, but later some could be seen to pause a moment before pushing open the door as if in reflection on the mystery of the woman sitting alone drinking gin in the darkness, the car radio on and the engine running wastefully, the way they might pause coming on the otter’s feeding place along the riverbank, its little private lawn and scattering of blue crayfish shells.
When they left for England after Christmas, the car was missed like any familiar absence, and when suddenly it reappeared in March, ‘They’re back,’ would be announced with relief as well as genuine gladness.
‘How long have we been here now? How long is it since we’ve left Wimbledon?’ the Sinclairs would sometimes ask one another as the years gathered above them. Now they found they had to count; it must be three, no four, five my God, using birthdays and the deaths of friends like tracks across the sky.
‘They’re flying now.’
‘Still, it must mean we’ve been happy.’
Company they seemed not to need. Occasionally, they ran into their own class, on Thursday in the Royal, after their shopping was done, the town full of the excitement of the market, bundles of cabbage plants knotted with straw on offer all along the Shambles; but as they never had more than the one drink, and evaded exploratory invitations to tea or bridge, they became in time just a matter of hostile curiosity. ‘How did you get through the winter?’ ‘Dreadful. Up to our hocks in mud, my dear.’ ‘But the Bishop is coming for Easter.’ Mostly, the Colonel was as alone in Charlie’s parlour as Mrs Sinclair was outside in the closed car, though sometimes Charlie joined him with a glass of whiskey if the bar wasn’t busy and Mrs Charlie wasn’t on the prowl. They’d sit at the table and talk of fruit trees and vegetables and whiskey until the bell rang or Mrs Charlie was heard surfacing. Sometimes the Colonel had the doubtful benefit of a local priest or doctor or vet or solicitor out on the razzle, but if they were very drunken he just finished his drink and left politely. ‘I never discuss religion because its base is faith — not reason.’ What brought them most into contact with people was the giving away of fruit and vegetables. They grew more than they could use. To some they gave in return for small favours, more usually by proximity and chance.
It was because of help the Sergeant had given with the renewal of a gun licence that they came with the large basket of apples to the barracks. The day had been eventful at the barracks, but only in the sense that anything at all had happened. An old donkey found abandoned on the roads had been brought in that morning. Every rib showed, the hooves hadn’t been pared in years, the knees were broken and twisted and cut, clusters of blue-black flies about the sores. He was too weak even to pluck at the clover on the lawn, and just lay between the two circles of flowerbeds while they waited for the Burnhouse lorry, an old shaky green lorry with a heavy metal box like the lorries that draw stones, too wide to get through the barrack gates.
‘It’d be better if we could get him alive on the lorry. That way it’d save having to winch him up,’ the driver said.
They had to lift the donkey from the lawn and push, shove, and carry the unresisting animal over the gravel and up a makeshift ramp on to the lorry.
‘Whatever you do keep a good hault of his tail.’
‘I have his head. He can’t fall.’
‘Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass.’
‘He’d not ride far on this one.’
They expected the donkey to fall once they let go of him on the lorry, but he stayed on his feet without stirring while the driver got the humane killer out of the cab. When the back of the metal horn was tapped with the small hammer close to the skull, he crumpled more silently after the shot rang than a page thrust into flame. The tailboard was lifted up, the bar dropped in place. A docket had to be signed.
The Sergeant and two of the policemen signed themselves out on delayed patrol after the lorry had rattled across the bridge with its load. Guard Casey remained behind as barrack orderly and with him the Sergeant’s sixteen-year-old son, Johnny. As soon as the policemen had split out in different directions on their bicycles at the bridge, Casey turned to the boy. ‘What about a game?’
They were friends, and often played together on the gravel, dribbling the ball around one another, using the open gates as goal. The old policeman was the more skilled of the two. Before he’d joined the Force he’d been given a trial by Glasgow Celtic, but he would leave off the game at once if any stranger came to the barracks. What annoyed the boy most during the games was that he’d always try to detain people past the call of their business. He had an insatiable hunger for news.