The New Inn

On Friday nights Mr Abernathy and Mr Ferrante went to the pub.

Nobody had been told this. Everybody knew it by the second week. At seven o’clock on a Friday the two of them came out of the staff house at the bottom of the drive in their coats, Mr Abernathy in the tweed cap and Mr Ferrante in a scarf so long it went round three times and still hung to his knees, and walked down the lane along the river to the village, side by side, arguing. You could hear them from the Windrush windows. You could not hear what they were arguing about, only the tune of it, Mr Abernathy low and slow and Mr Ferrante quick and high and rising at the ends, like a cello and a clarinet that had been arguing about the same piece of music for twenty years.

“What do they argue about?” said Frederick.

“History,” said Theo.

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re them,” said Theo, and went back to his chemistry.

---

On the second Friday in October Will took the Americans to the New Inn.

You were allowed. That had surprised all of them. In the Realm nobody under twenty-one went into a bar, and the bars had men on the door to make sure, and the men on the door had a way of looking at you that made you feel twelve. In England, Will said, you could go into a pub at any age with a grown-up, and at sixteen without one, and you could have anything you liked as long as it was a lemonade, and at eighteen you could have whatever you wanted and nobody would look at you at all.

“That’s mad,” said Lucía.

“It’s a pub,” said Will, as though that settled it. “It’s not a bar. It’s where you go.”

The New Inn was at the bottom of the village by the bridge, a long low building of the same grey stone as everything else, with a stone roof that had sagged in the middle over three hundred and ninety-eight years like an old horse’s back, and a painted sign swinging over the door that said THE NEW INN, and under it, in smaller letters that somebody had clearly added later for their own amusement, est. 1632. Inside it was dark and low and warm, with a stone floor worn into dips in front of the bar and a fire in a fireplace big enough to stand in, and black beams so low that Theo hit his head on the first one inside the door, and the second one three feet further on, and then walked the rest of the way across the room bent over like a man looking for a contact lens.

Every head in the pub turned when they came in.

Every head in the pub turned back again, at once, all together, with great firmness, to whatever it had been looking at before.

Frederick knew that movement. He had seen it a hundred times in the Realm, in restaurants and theatres and the concourse at Union Station: the turn and the turn back, the decision, taken in a single instant by a whole room, to be well-mannered about him. He had never seen it done so completely. In the Realm there was always one person, at the back, who kept looking. In the New Inn at Coln Saint Aldwyns on a Friday night in October there were thirty-odd people, farmers and old men and a table of women playing cards and two very young couples in the corner, and not one of them looked twice.

Except one.

Behind the bar, with a cloth over his shoulder and a pint glass in one hand halfway through being dried, in a black T-shirt with NEW INN on the front in faded white, Jack Fennell was looking at him with his mouth open.

Then the grin. All of it.

“HANOVER!” said Jack, across the whole pub, at a volume that made the card players drop their cards. “You came!”

---

The landlady of the New Inn was Jack’s mother.

She was a short, solid, fair-haired woman of about fifty with her sleeves rolled up and a pair of reading glasses pushed into her hair and a voice that could have stopped a tractor, and she came out from behind the bar while Jack was still shouting and took him by the ear, not hard, the way you would take a dog by the collar, and said, “Inside voice, Jack,” and let go, and turned to the six of them standing in the dip in the stone floor in front of the bar.

“I’m Sue,” she said. “Sue Fennell. This is my pub.” She looked at Frederick, once, up and down, quickly, like a woman checking a delivery against the invoice. “You’ll be Hanover.”

“Yes, Mrs Fennell.”

“Sue. Nobody calls me Mrs Fennell except the brewery and the vicar, and I don’t like either of them.” She looked at Theo, still bent over under the beam. “And you’ll be the one who fell over under a tree.”

“Yes,” said Theo, from under the beam.

“Mind your head, love.”

“I am minding it.”

“Mind it more.” She turned back to Frederick. “Right. I’ll say this once and then I’ll not say it again. You’re welcome here. Same as anybody. You’ll have what anybody has and you’ll pay what anybody pays and if you’re under eighteen, which you are, Michael’s told me, it’s lemonade or a Coke or a squash and nothing else, and if anybody in this pub gives you anything else I’ll have them out the door and you after them.” She looked at him very straight. “All right?”

“All right,” said Frederick.

“Good.” She turned to go back behind the bar, and stopped. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You sing?”

Frederick blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Sing. In a choir. Do you sing?” She folded her arms. “I run the choir at St John’s. Sundays. We’re down to four basses and one of them’s Mr Purvis and he’s ninety and he’s only there for the biscuits. I need a bass.” She looked at him. “Or a tenor. I’m not fussy. Can you hold a note?”

“I’ve never tried.”

“Then you’ll start Sunday,” said Sue Fennell. “Half nine. Bring a pencil.” And went back behind the bar, and picked up a pint glass, and looked at Jack, who was still grinning, and said, “Glasses, Jack.”

Jack went on drying glasses, and grinning, and looking at Frederick over the top of the glass.

---

Jack’s mates were at the end of the bar.

There were two of them, and they had clearly been sitting on those two stools since they were legally allowed to, and possibly before. One was very tall and very thin with ginger hair and a face like a sad horse, and his name was Gaz. The other was very short and very wide with no neck at all, and his name was Little Rob, though there was no other Rob that anybody could identify, large or small. They both played cricket for the village. They had both known Jack since they were four. They both looked at Frederick, as he came to the bar to buy six lemonades, with the frank, appraising, merciless interest of two men looking at a horse they had been told was very expensive.

“So you’re him,” said Gaz.

“I’m Frederick.”

“Hanover,” said Little Rob, correcting him, with satisfaction. “He’s Hanover. Jack said.”

“Jack talks about you,” said Gaz.

“Jack does not,” said Jack, from behind the bar, very loudly, going red.

“Jack talks about you a lot,” said Gaz, in exactly the same tone, the tone of a man reading out the weather. “Jack’s been talking about you since September. Hanover this. Hanover that. Hanover doesn’t know what an over is. Hanover’s going to be rubbish.” He drank some of his pint. “We’ve heard more about you than we’ve heard about the Gloucestershire bowling attack.”

“Gaz,” said Jack.

“I’m just saying. He’s going to be rubbish. You said.” Gaz looked at Frederick, sadly, like a horse. “Are you going to be rubbish?”

“Probably,” said Frederick.

“He’s honest,” said Little Rob to Gaz, approvingly.

“He’s honest,” said Gaz to Little Rob, with the air of a man revising a prior estimate. “I’ll give him that.” He looked at Jack. “You never said he was honest.”

Jack put down the glass he was drying, very carefully, on the bar, and leaned across it toward his two oldest friends, and said, in a low and dangerous voice that Frederick had not heard him use before, “If you two don’t shut up I will tell Hanover about the goat.”

Gaz and Little Rob went quiet at once.

“What goat?” said Frederick.

“There was no goat,” said Gaz.

“There was never any goat,” said Little Rob.

“There was a goat,” said Jack to Frederick, picking up the glass again, with great contentment, “and I’ll tell you about it another time.”

---

At a table by the fire Mr Abernathy and Mr Ferrante were sitting with two pints, side by side on a settle with their backs to the wall, still arguing.

Frederick went past them on the way back from the bar with three lemonades and heard, for the first time, what it was about.

“Seventeen eighty-three,” Mr Ferrante was saying, with his finger on the table. “It’s always seventeen eighty-three. The Charter, the Charter, the Charter. As though nothing happened before it. As though they all woke up one morning at Philadelphia in a new country.”

“They did,” said Mr Abernathy.

“They did not. That’s my point. They woke up in the same country with a new piece of paper. The same fields. The same walls.” Mr Ferrante waved his hand at the room, at the black beams and the fire and the stone floor worn into dips. “This was here. This was here a hundred and fifty years before the Charter and it’s still here and the man who built it thought he was building a new inn. That’s history, Martin. Not the paper. This.”

Mr Abernathy drank some of his pint.

“You only say that,” he said, “because you’ve got a map.”

“I’ve got a map because I’m right.”

They looked up and saw Frederick standing there with three lemonades.

Mr Abernathy looked at him for a moment, with his face doing nothing, the way it did nothing at a quarter past eight every morning when he read the roll. Then he raised his pint, about an inch, the way Frederick’s father had raised his stick at the barrier at Paddington.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Sir.”

“Lemonade?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good,” said Mr Abernathy, and turned back to Mr Ferrante, and said, “Paper,” in a tone of great finality, and Mr Ferrante threw up both hands.

---

On Saturday it rained, and Windrush played Coln at rugby.

It was the first house match of the year. It was, Will said, traditionally violent. Frederick had been put in the team on Wednesday by the master in charge of Windrush rugby, a former Welsh international called Mr Pryce with a nose that had been broken in so many places it looked like a map of the coast of Norway, who had watched him in practice for twenty minutes and said, you’re fast and you don’t know anything, which is ideal, I’ll put you on the wing.

He did not know what the wing was.

He found out. The wing was the place at the edge of the field where you stood in the rain for long periods of time with nothing to do, getting colder, while thirty boys in the middle of the field fought each other in the mud over a ball you could not see, and then, without warning, the ball came out of the mud and was thrown along the line from hand to hand toward you, and you caught it, and ran, and every boy in the house of Coln ran at you at once.

Kimura could not watch.

She stood at the edge of the field under a large black umbrella beside Castellanos, who watched everything with no expression whatever, and every time the ball came out along the line toward the wing she turned round, completely, and looked at the trees.

“Has he got it?” she said, to the trees.

“He’s got it,” said Castellanos.

“Is he running?”

“He’s running.”

“Is anybody.”

There was a noise like a door being slammed on a mattress.

“Yes,” said Castellanos.

Kimura turned back round. The King of fourteen countries was lying on his back on the wing in a puddle under two boys from Coln with the ball held against his chest, and the rain was coming down on his face, and he was laughing.

Kimura turned back to the trees.

“Three,” she said, to the trees. “Three out of ten. For my nerves.”

---

They lost, thirty-one to five. The five was Frederick’s.

He had not meant to score. He had not known, until it happened, that he was in a position to score. The ball had come out along the line in the forty-eighth minute, and he had caught it, and there had been nobody in front of him, because the entire house of Coln had been at the other side of the field disputing something with the referee, and he had run, and run, along the wing in the rain, with Will shouting something behind him that might have been go or might have been no, and crossed a white line, and somebody had shouted put it down, you idiot, put it DOWN, and he had put it down, on the grass, with both hands, because that seemed to be what was wanted, and the whole of Windrush had made a noise like a train.

“That’s a try,” said Will, arriving, and falling on him. “That’s a try! You scored a try!”

“Is that good?”

“Is that good,” said Will, to the sky, and hit him on the back of the head, affectionately, with the flat of his hand.

At the edge of the field, under the umbrella, Kimura had turned round in time to see the end of it. She stood very still for a moment.

“Nine,” she said, to Castellanos.

“For the try?”

“For not looking at me,” said Kimura, “while he did it.”

---

After the match, in the mud by the touchline, Hugo Lomax sat on the grass with blood coming out of a cut above his eye.

Hugo Lomax was the Coln prop forward. He was about six foot and about six foot across, with a neck like a gatepost and small, mild, short-sighted eyes, and he had been in the front row of every scrum and at the bottom of every pile for eighty minutes, and in the last of them somebody’s knee had opened his eyebrow, and he was sitting on the touchline holding the cut together with two fingers, very calmly, while the blood came out between them, as though it were happening to somebody else.

Theo was already there.

Frederick had not seen him go. Theo had been on the bench, as a reserve, all match, in a tracksuit, because Mr Pryce had looked at him in practice and said you’re very tall and very kind and you’ll be no use whatsoever, and now he was on his knees on the wet grass in front of Hugo Lomax with a green bag open beside him that Frederick had last seen in New Westminster in July, and a pair of blue gloves on, and he was looking at the eyebrow with great concentration, the way he looked at a chemistry paper.

“Take your fingers away,” said Theo.

Hugo Lomax took his fingers away. More blood came out.

“Right,” said Theo, entirely calmly. “It’s not deep. It’s long, but it’s not deep. It doesn’t need stitches. It needs strips.” He had a packet of something open already. “Look at the sky.”

Hugo Lomax looked at the sky. Theo cleaned the cut, and dried it, and put five thin white strips across it, one after another, very neatly, pulling each one tight, and then a square of gauze over the top, and taped it, and sat back on his heels and looked at it, and nodded.

“There,” said Theo. “Don’t get it wet.”

Hugo Lomax looked at him.

“It’s raining,” said Hugo Lomax.

“Then don’t get it wetter.” Theo took off the gloves. “If it starts bleeding again, or you get a headache, or you feel sick, or you see two of anything, tell someone. Tell me. I’m in Windrush.”

“I know where you are,” said a voice behind him. “Everybody knows where you are. You’re the one who fell over under a tree.”

Theo turned round on his knees.

Standing on the touchline behind him in a long navy coat with the collar up and a woolly hat pulled down to her eyebrows and her arms folded, looking down at him with an expression of considerable scepticism, was a tall dark girl with very straight eyebrows and a very straight back, whom Frederick had seen at the head of the Evenlode table at every meal for six weeks.

“That’s my brother,” said the girl, nodding at Hugo.

“Oh,” said Theo.

“You’ve put him back together.”

“Only his eyebrow.”

“Yes, well, his eyebrow is the only bit of him that’s ever come apart.” The girl looked at the gauze on her brother’s forehead, critically, with her head on one side. “You’ve done it quite well.”

“Thank you.”

“For a lamp post.”

“I’m a paramedic,” said Theo, standing up, which took some time. “Well. I’ve done the cadet course. I’ve got a certificate. It’s in my bag.” He looked down at her, from a height, with great dignity, and mud on both knees. “Who are you?”

“Freya Lomax,” said the girl. “Head of girls in Evenlode. I’m going to read medicine at Edinburgh, if they’ll have me, and they will.” She looked up at him, a long way up, without any apparent effort. “I’ll be a better doctor than you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually,” said Freya Lomax, and turned round, and said to her brother, “Up, Hugo,” and Hugo got up, and they walked away along the touchline together, the enormous mild boy with the gauze on his head and the tall straight girl with her arms folded, and at the corner flag she looked back, once, over her shoulder, not at her brother.

Theo stood on the touchline in the rain with his green bag in his hand and mud on both knees.

“Freddie,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I think,” said Theo, slowly, “I’ve just been told off.”

“I think you have.”

Theo looked at the corner flag, where they had gone.

“I didn’t mind,” he said, in a voice of considerable surprise.

---

On Sunday morning at half past nine Frederick sang in the choir of St John the Baptist, Coln Saint Aldwyns, in a white surplice two sizes too big for him, between Mr Purvis, who was ninety and had once fired a shotgun at a hot-air balloon and was there for the biscuits, and a retired schoolmaster called Mr Treadgold, who sang the bass line of every hymn half a beat ahead of everybody else as though he were trying to get to the end first.

He could hold a note. That was Sue Fennell’s verdict, delivered afterwards in the vestry, with her arms folded: he can hold a note, he can’t read music, he’s got no idea what he’s doing, and he’s the best bass I’ve had since 2009.

Mrs Haverfield, in the front pew, in her coat and headscarf, with Ernest asleep under the pew, sat through the whole service with her chin up and her eyes on the choir, and at the end of it, when the choir went out past her in procession down the aisle, she looked at Frederick in his surplice two sizes too big as he passed, and her pale clear eyes went to the door at the back of the church, where Jack Fennell was leaning against the frame with his hands in his pockets, in a clean shirt, which nobody had ever seen him in, having very obviously come to church for the first time in about eleven years, and then her eyes came back to Frederick.

She did not say anything. She did not need to.

---

On Sunday afternoon, at the village cricket ground behind the church, in the outdoor nets, which were a long cage of green netting on poles along one side of the field, Jack taught him to bowl.

“It’s October,” said Frederick.

“I know it’s October.”

“You said November. You said nets, November.”

“I said indoor nets in November. In Cirencester. These are the outdoor ones. They come down next week.” Jack threw him a ball. It was red and hard and had a raised seam round the middle of it, like a scar. “I couldn’t wait.”

Mr Ellis was there. He was the captain of the village side, it turned out, and had been for nineteen years, and he stood at the far end of the net behind the stumps in a white sweater, with pads on, and a bat, and he was not anxious at all. He was the least anxious Frederick had ever seen him. He stood at the crease with the bat raised behind him, quite still, like a heron, and looked down the net at Frederick with an expression of mild, terrible, absolute calm.

“Right,” said Jack. “Arm straight. Straight. You can’t bend it. Run up. Bring the arm over the top. Let go at the top. Don’t throw it. Bowl it.”

Frederick ran up. He brought his arm over the top. He let go.

The ball went straight up into the air, very high, higher than the net, and came down on the other side of it, in the outfield, and rolled away toward the church.

There was a silence in the nets.

“Again,” said Jack.

He did it again. The ball went into the netting at the side and hung there.

He did it again. The ball bounced twice and rolled gently down the net to Mr Ellis’s feet, and Mr Ellis looked down at it, and then up at Frederick, and leaned on his bat.

“You’re throwing it, lad,” said Mr Ellis, quite kindly.

“I’m trying not to.”

“I know you are.” Mr Ellis picked up the ball and threw it back, underarm, with great gentleness. “You’re from a throwing country. It’s in the elbow. It’ll take a year to get it out.” He took his guard again, like a heron. “Go on. Again.”

He bowled for an hour. He bowled perhaps sixty balls. Four of them reached Mr Ellis in a form that Mr Ellis could have hit, and Mr Ellis hit all four of them, without apparent effort, into the far corner of the field by the church, where Gaz and Little Rob, who had come along to watch and had brought a flask of something, went and got them back, with tremendous slowness, commenting.

At the end of the hour Jack took the ball off him and held it up, and looked at it, and looked at Frederick, sweating, red in the face, with his sleeves pushed up and grass on his knees.

“You’re rubbish,” said Jack.

“I know.”

“You’re properly rubbish.” Jack turned the ball over in his hand, looking at the seam, and then looked up, and the grin came, slowly, from the bottom up. “Same time next week?”

From the corner by the church, where he had gone to get the last ball, Gaz shouted, “They come DOWN next week, Jack!”

“Then INDOOR!” shouted Jack. “In NOVEMBER!”

“You SAID that!”

“I’m saying it AGAIN!”

In the blue notebook that night Frederick wrote:

Lost 31-5. The 5 was me. Sang bass. Mr Ellis is a heron. Theo was told off by Freya Lomax and didn’t mind. I am properly rubbish. Same time next week.