The Paradise Waltz

by Jessica Stirling

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

A wonderful story of love, intrigue and snobbery set in Ayrshire in the 1930s. Christine Summers is a pretty young teacher in a country school and the apple of more than one man's eye. But Christine has no intention of sacrificing her independence to marry anyone, least of all Charley Noonan, the rough-tongued young farmer who has been pursuing her for years. When she meets lonely widower Alan Kelso, however, Christine finds herself falling in love. Alan has also caught the eye of pony breeder Beatty McCall. Passionate, experienced and unscrupulous, Beatty is willing to offer him more, it seems, than Christine can ever hope to match. But sometimes all it takes to fall in love is dancing to the Paradise Waltz... Rich in tangled affections and intriguing characters, in THE PARADISE WALTZ Jessica Stirling captures all the pain and humour of life in a small, gossip-ridden village in the time between two world wars when wireless and the cinema were changing everyone's ideas about romance.

Release date: December 9, 2010

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 388

Sample

She knew without glancing at the wall clock or slipping her watch from her pocket that it was close to half past three and
that the working week was almost over. John Thomas had begun to bounce up and down in his seat and, taking their cue from
the biggest boy in class, the five- and six-year-olds scrambled to find their schoolbags and scoop up their books and pencils.


‘Still,’ said Christine evenly. ‘Sit absolutely still.’

The little ones froze obediently but the rebels in the back row muttered and, for some incomprehensible reason, kicked the
iron stanchions of their desks as if, Christine thought, they were contemplating mutiny just to avoid five more minutes of
confinement.


At the beginning of the winter term Mr McKay – Freddy – had finally persuaded the Board of Rural Education that an electrically
operated bell was essential to the welfare of the thirty-four pupils in his charge and that failure to install such a device
would seriously damage their chances of going on to university. The fact that Greenhill Primary had promoted only three pupils
into advanced education in the past ten years cut no ice with Freddy, who regarded every labourer’s son and farmer’s daughter
as a bud just waiting to flower.


‘Times are changing, Chris, my love,’ Freddy informed her. ‘Out of the peasant class will spring the leaders that this country
of ours – Scotland, I mean – so desperately needs. Observe the poor wee morsels, hungry for knowledge and parched of ambition.
What do they know of the great wide world or the changes the twentieth century will foist upon them? Believe me, before long
every ploughman and cowherd will be obliged to present a diploma in science to find any sort of employment at all.’


Christine suspected that Freddy had pitched a similar argument to members of the Board who, to shut him up, had sent two men
to fit a cable, a battery, a bell and a button and relegate the heavy brass-tongued ‘clanger’ to the cupboard. She rather
missed the old wooden-handled bell. The button for the new electrical system was hidden beneath Mr McKay’s desk in his classroom
across the hall and she, like her restless charges, was obliged to await the headmaster’s pleasure, which was not always as
prompt as it should be.


‘Miss, miss, Charley’s out there again.’

‘Charley,’ Christine said, ‘has been out there all afternoon.’

‘Aye, miss, but now he’s at the fence.’

In Christine’s opinion there was nothing remarkable about Charley Noonan who, perched on the skinny metal seat of the Wallis
tractor, peeped into the classroom and gave his juvenile admirers a friendly wave.


‘I see he’s put the studs on,’ one eight-year-old remarked.

‘Aye, no’ before time,’ said another. ‘It rained heavy last night.’

Nine years ago, when the big American-made Wallis had been new, the boys would have raced to the window and pressed their
noses to the glass, for Noonan’s tractor had been the first of its kind in the parish. Now, in 1932, several other tractors
had appeared, lighter, faster and more economical than Noonan’s old puffer with its upright exhaust and smelly paraffin engine.


The boys were no longer impressed.

The girls had no interest in Mr Noonan’s agricultural equipment. They signalled to Charley in hectic semaphore and darted
sly glances at Miss Summers as if they expected her to dissolve into jelly at the mere mention of the farmer’s name.


‘Oh, miss, he’s waitin’ for you, miss.’

‘See, miss, he’s wavin’ at you.’

For the past four days Charley had been preparing the field behind the school for potato planting. It had been a wet winter
and Charley, like most Stirlingshire farmers, was running behind. Running behind, or not, he still found time to anchor his
tractor by the fence shortly before the bell was due to ring.


‘If you’re goin’ t’marry Mr Noonan,’ one six-year-old piped up, ‘can I be a flower girl, miss?’

‘Can I be a flower girl, too, Miss Summers?’

‘Me too, miss. Me too.’

‘If ever I do decide to get married you can all be flower girls,’ Christine said, ‘but right now I’m not engaged to Mr Noonan
– or to anyone else.’


‘Is he not your sweetheart then?’

In her day, not so long ago, whether you were five or fourteen, talking out of turn inevitably brought a taste of the tawse,
that thin black snake of a strap that lay coiled in every teacher’s pocket ready to be drawn across a small, trembling palm
at the first sign of familiarity. It was still much used, she supposed, in city schools or rural institutions that didn’t
have an ‘enlightened’ head like Frederick McKay who believed that freedom of expression was a keystone of learning.


‘No, Joyce, Mr Noonan is definitely not my sweetheart.’

‘Why not, but?’

‘Because he—’ Christine began.

Then the bell buzzed, like a bee in a bottle.

And the class exploded.

*

Greenhill Primary lay on the high road between Ottershaw and Kennart. Although traffic was rarely heavy at that hour of the
afternoon, there were perils enough in the countryside to threaten small children. Infants were released a half-hour before
Juniors, an inconvenient arrangement that obliged Christine to hang about to ensure that every child under seven had a brother,
sister or trusted friend from the Junior class to accompany them to the road-end or farm gate where, in an ideal world, mother
would be waiting to greet them.


Johnny Thomas and his little sister made for the village where their father, a blacksmith, had his forge. The two mechanically
minded experts, still arguing about fly-wheels, magnetos and studs, set off for the row of workers’ cottages on the Balnesmoor
Estate. Christine ushered six little stragglers into the playground. They ran at once to the fence, drawn by the brown paper
bag of wine gums that Charley had fished from his pocket.


There was nothing sinister in Charley Noonan’s liking for children. Whatever his faults – and they were many – he had an impeccable
reputation as a Sunday school superintendent and an officer in the Boys’ Brigade. He had enough respect for convention to
wait for Christine’s nod before he began lobbing sweets over the fence, like a zoo-keeper feeding fish to seals.


Chris hung back until every child had a wine gum stuck in his or her cheek then, with a sigh, she wandered over to confront
the burly young farmer.


‘You really shouldn’t do that, Charley.’

‘Do what, darlin’? It’s only a few sweeties.’

‘Stop at the window, I mean, wave to them.’

‘I wasn’t wavin’ to them. I was wavin’ to you,’ Charley said. ‘Any roads, what harm does it do?’

‘It gives the children the wrong idea.’

‘Aye, aye,’ said Charley. ‘You mean they think I’m your sweetheart.’

‘Which you’re not.’

‘It’s not for want o’ tryin’, is it?’ Charley laughed.

Four little girls had formed a half circle behind the teacher and, sucking noisily on their sweets, were listening raptly
to Mr Noonan’s attempt to woo her.


‘Don’t be so nosy,’ Chris told them sharply. ‘Go over there and play,’ and, to her relief, saw them scamper off.

‘Fancy a wine gum?’ Charley said. ‘Plenty left.’

‘No,’ Christine said. ‘Thank you all the same.’

‘Cigarette then?’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Chris reminded him, ‘on school property.’

‘Aye,’ Charley said, ‘you’re a model o’ propriety, right enough.’

She ignored the back-handed compliment. ‘When will you finish here?’

‘If the rain stays away we’ll be finished by Wednesday, like as not.’

‘Good.’

‘Can’t wait to get rid o’ me, eh?’

‘I don’t like you bothering me in front of the children.’

‘Is it such a bother to snatch a bit o’ conversation?’

‘It’s not the conversation,’ Christine said, ‘it’s where the conversation leads that bothers me.’

Charley leaned on the steering wheel. ‘An’ where might that be?’

‘I’ll tell you where it’s not,’ Christine answered. ‘It’s not to the Young Farmers’ dance tomorrow night.’

‘What have you got against farmers?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Christine.

‘What have you got against me then?’

She shook her head. ‘I like you, Charley, I just don’t want to…’

‘To what?’

‘Encourage you.’

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ he said. ‘I’ve been courtin’ you for years, in case you haven’t noticed?’

‘Oh, I’ve noticed,’ Christine said. ‘How could I not notice? Why won’t you take no for an answer?’

‘’Cause I’m just as stubborn as you are,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Now, what do you say? Stick on your glad-rags, powder your
nose, I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock tomorrow an’ we’ll dance the night away.’


‘In Kennart church hall,’ Christine said, ‘with a midnight curfew?’

‘Half past eleven,’ Charley corrected her. ‘It’s always the same wi’ Saturday dances, in case you’ve forgotten.’

It had been eight years since she had last been to a dance in Kennart or, for that matter, in any of the villages in the neighbourhood.
It was not that she did not like dancing, even the obstreperous jumping about that passed for dancing among young farmers.
She could not bring herself to tell Charley Noonan that he was the reason she no longer went anywhere. Ever since she had
arrived in Kennart and had passed three terms seated in front of him in what had then been the old parish schoolhouse he had
been making up to her with a determination that most young women would have found flattering.


Charley had never been cruel, had never bullied her, had never tugged her pigtails, dripped ink on her jotter or slipped grasshoppers
down the neck of her dress. Indeed, he had protected her when other boys and girls had tormented her because of her unfamiliar
accent and the fact that she lived with the Brigadier at Preaching Friar, which rendered her, in their eyes, ‘posh’.


There was no reason for her not to like Charley, in spite of his bitten fingernails and coarse brown hair. Perhaps it was
the shape of him, as broad as he was tall, that put her off, or the barely contained vitality that made him the life and soul
of every party. But now, approaching thirty, she was almost ready to admit that she was well and truly ‘on the shelf’ and
that if she did not marry soon she would not marry at all. A new generation was springing up and Christine suspected that
if she showed her face at the dance in Kennart she would be surrounded by fertile young things of eighteen, nineteen or twenty
who would dismiss her as far too old to be considered a rival for any man’s attention, even Charley’s.


She nursed a gloomy feeling that being plain, with no figure to speak of and no other suitor on the horizon, she might eventually
be daft enough to marry Charley Noonan, who, with all that energy spilling out of him, would drag her off to Ottershaw and
fill her up with one baby after another until, in ten or fifteen years, she would be a worn-out hag. Besides, she was not
cut out to be a farmer’s wife, but that did not seem to matter to Charley.


‘If I promise to keep my hands to myself an’ deliver you back to your mammy by midnight, will you consider it?’ Charley said.
‘Anyhow, it’s hardly the weather for lyin’ about in the heather, is it?’


He was trying to make a joke of it but Christine remained wary. He had kissed her once, long ago, had held her so close that
she could hardly breathe and although she had thrust him violently away, she had not forgotten the brief, lurid loss of control
that his kiss had occasioned.


As if he had read her thoughts, Charley went on, ‘I was too young to know better, Christine. It was a bloody long time ago,
anyway.’


‘It’s not that, Charley,’ she told him.

‘What is it then?’

‘I just don’t want to give you any false hopes.’

‘Hopes?’

‘I’m not the marrying kind, Charley.’

‘Why? Don’t you like men?’

‘I like men well enough.’

‘But not this man, eh, not me?’ There was, it seemed, a limit to his patience. He adjusted his broad hips to the metal seat
and reached for the starter switch. ‘Damn it, it’s only a dance, Chris, only another dance.’


‘Charley, I’m sorry.’

‘Not as sorry as I am,’ he said and, when the engine sputtered into life, fisted the wheel, steered the tractor round in a
half circle and drove away up the side of the field without looking back.


It had been a good day, a very good day. He had thought of Marion hardly at all. He had called for an early surgery and had
been at the table by eight with a varied slate to keep him occupied.


First he had removed six large grey polyps from the nose of a five-year-old, a brave wee lad, who had shed not a single tear
even when his nose was being cocainised. He would have preferred to put a patient of that age under but Josie Carmichael,
his anaesthetist, was reluctant to use gas for what was, on the surface, a minor operation. He had let her have her way.


Fifteen minutes with the cold wire snare and broad-bladed forceps had done the trick. The child had been so well-behaved that
he had even taken time to pick off the tags and ensure that there were no other nasal deformities. It had all been perfectly
simple, an easy tune-up for the more complicated operations that lay ahead. Perfectly easy save for the fact that the little
boy had kept his eyes open all the time, big, brown eyes without a trace of fear in them, only a dog-like trust that he, the
surgeon, would do him no harm.


Compassion had not translated into self-pity, though, and for the rest of the morning he had been so absorbed in his work
that Marion might never have existed, let alone have died.


‘Popping off early, old man?’ said a voice behind him.

He balanced his coffee cup on the brass-topped table of the railway refreshment bar and looked round.

McEwan was chief dispensary physician at the South Side Infirmary. He leaned on the bar, nursing a whisky and puffing on a
shiny black cheroot. His overcoat was thrown open, scarf trailing, his hat, a squashed fedora, pushed back from his brow.
He had been in the running for the Martindale Chair of Clinical Medicine at one time but rumours concerning his fondness for
drink and fondling young nurses, though never confirmed, had put paid to his chances.


Alan let out a muffled groan as McEwan eased over to his table.

‘Heard about the old lady, Kelso. Sorry.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Not sudden, though?’

‘No, not sudden.’

‘Best part of a year, was it?’

‘I’d hardly call it the best part,’ Alan Kelso said.

‘No, of course not.’

McEwan pulled out a chair and, without invitation, plonked himself down at the table. He drew on the cheroot. ‘Cancer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Colon.’

‘Nasty,’ McEwan said. ‘Very nasty.’ He shrugged as if, duty done, it was time to step off the eggshells. ‘So where are you
off to for the weekend? Somewhere exciting, I trust.’


‘Home,’ Alan told him.

‘Stirling, is it?’

‘Ottershaw.’

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ McEwan said. ‘I believe I did hear you’d become a lord of the manor. How long have you been out there?’

‘Five years.’

‘Really! I had no idea. Not awfully convenient for the factory, is it?’

‘Not awfully,’ Alan agreed.

‘How do you cope with early surgery, let alone ward rounds?’

‘I put up at the Caledonian overnight.’

‘Ah, yes, the jolly old Caledonian. I was blackballed out of the Caledonian, you know, back in the twenties.’

‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘Anyway, ’nuff said about that. What are you drinking?’

‘Coffee.’

‘Coffee – on a Friday afternoon? Let me stand you a stiff one.’

‘No, thanks,’ Alan said. ‘I’ll have to be off in a minute or two.’

The hand on the sleeve, that confiding tone again: ‘Big house, is it?’

‘Big enough.’

‘Big empty house these days, I’ll bet.’


‘Yes.’

‘Housekeeper?’

‘I’ve a woman—’

‘Thought as much – though I didn’t like to pry.’

‘… a woman who comes in every day.’

‘And every night? Sorry, sorry. Tactless thing to say.’ McEwan’s apology lacked conviction. ‘It’s just that if it were me,
if I was your age – what age are you, Kelso, about forty?’


‘Forty-six.’

‘Well, if I was your age and, heaven forbid, my Doris gave up the ghost I’d be far too miserable to live on my own for long.
I mean, how do you manage without a lady to look after you on the – shall we say – the domestic front?’


‘I keep busy,’ said Alan thinly.

‘Work, the great healer, yes. Still, all work and no play…’

Alan got to his feet. ‘My train leaves in five minutes.’

McEwan rose too. He glanced at the clock that dominated the concourse. ‘God! Is that the hour?’ He swallowed the remains of
his whisky and dropped the butt of the cheroot, still burning, to the floor. He punched Alan softly on the upper arm. ‘Talking
of ladies, I’m off to Aberdeen to fish the Don with a rather attractive peeress of a certain age. No names, no pack drill.’


‘And Doris?’

‘Gone south to visit the grandchildren.’ McEwan chuckled. ‘What the missus doesn’t know won’t kill her, will it?’

‘No,’ Alan Kelso said, ‘I don’t suppose it will.’

Then, hefting up his briefcase, he wished McEwan a brusque goodnight, and headed for the faraway platform and the shabby two-coach
train that would carry him home to Ottershaw.


Bruce began barking as soon as she entered the house. She could hear the Scottie scratching frantically at the door of the
sitting-room and, a moment later, the Brigadier calling out, ‘Christine, if that’s you, will you do something about this blasted
dog, please, before I wring his neck.’


Dumping her satchel on the chest beneath the window, Chris crossed the hall to the sitting-room and mischievously rattled
the ornate knob for a moment or two before she opened the door and, kneeling, let the stumpy little terrier leap into her
arms.


Bruce was four years old and had not yet acquired the dour character common to all Scotch terriers. He spent most of the day
lying on the Brigadier’s lap in one room or another or, if the Brigadier was busy with letters or trying to read a newspaper,
snoozing at his master’s feet. But the instant Christine arrived home, he changed from a passive, if annoying, lap dog into
a noisy, tail-wagging bundle of energy. Officially, Bruce was the Brigadier’s pet but it was Christine who fed him, Christine
who took him walking and, the Brigadier grumbled, it was obvious to whom the deceitful little devil, like all pot-lickers,
gave his true allegiance.


The only member of the Brigadier’s household who Bruce did not take to, and who did not take to him, was Christine’s mother,
Maude, but although she might grouse at the Scottie and now and then give him a nudge with the side of her foot, she knew
better than to abuse him.


The Brigadier twisted round in his high-backed armchair. ‘There,’ he said, ‘she’s home at last. Are you happy now, you rascal?’

Puffing a little, for Bruce was no light weight, Christine carried the dog into the sitting-room where a coal fire burned
in the grate and a standard lamp in the corner had already been lighted. ‘I’ll take him out, shall I?’


‘Have tea first,’ the Brigadier suggested.

He tweaked the threadbare tassel that some long-dead tyrant, probably his grandfather, had installed to keep the servants
on their toes. Maude Summers arrived with the tea tray before the echo died away.


Tipping the dog on to the carpet, Christine brought a little kidney-shaped table from the corner and placed it by the old
man’s chair. Her mother set the tray upon it, removed the muslin cover from a plate of toasted teacakes and poured two cups
of tea.


‘Aren’t you joining us, Maude?’ the Brigadier asked.

‘I’m in the middle of making dinner.’

The old man reached for a teacake. Maude slid a plate on to his lap and Christine tucked a napkin into the neck of his cardigan.

The Brigadier frowned but did not complain. In the past few months, he had become reconciled to the debilitating infirmities
of old age and no longer chided the women for ‘babying’ him.


Bruce put his paws on the arm of the chair and cocked his head.

‘Now what could you possibly want?’ the Brigadier said as he tore off a piece of teacake with his crooked fingers and fed
it to the dog.


‘I do wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Maude Summers said. ‘It’s small wonder the creature has no manners.’

‘Manners?’ the Brigadier said. ‘He’s a dog, for heaven’s sake.’

‘And should be treated as such.’

‘Madam,’ the Brigadier said, ‘don’t you have something to do in the kitchen?’

‘Yes,’ Maude Summers said. ‘I do.’

‘Then scamper off and do it,’ the Brigadier told her, not at all sternly, while Bruce, having gobbled down the titbit, squatted
at Christine’s feet and placed a pathetic paw on her knee.


‘Mum does have a point, you know,’ she said. ‘Bruce is getting rather fat.’

‘A good run about will pare him down,’ the old man said. ‘It’ll soon be time for you to dig out the bicycle and race the little
blighter from here to Ottershaw. If I were ten years younger, I’d do it myself.’ He bit into the teacake, chewed and swallowed.
‘I used to run the legs off poor old Bracken when she was alive.’


‘You used to run the legs off me, too.’

‘Oh, you were more than up to it in those days.’

‘I still am,’ Christine reminded him.

‘Of course, of course you are.’ He lifted his teacup and, holding it close to his chest, sipped. ‘Why, when I was your age,
I was…’ He paused. ‘Where was I?’


‘In the Transvaal,’ Christine told him.

‘So I was, so, indeed, I was.’ He looked up. ‘By gum, child, you know my history better than I know it myself. You’ve heard
it rather too often, I suppose. Well, I’ll not bore you with more of the same – at least not today.’


Christine had been brought to Preaching Friar in 1915, a few months after her father had been killed in the March offensive
at Neuve Chapelle. The Brigadier had been wounded in the same battle and, much to his disgust, put out to pasture. He had
retreated to Preaching Friar, the big, old ancestral house in which he had spent no more than a handful of months in the course
of a long military career.


He claimed not to have known Christine’s father, a lowly private, and his reason for contacting Maude out of the blue had
never been made clear. He had written to Mrs Summers to offer her a position as his housekeeper, the child being, it seemed,
no impediment. With nothing but a scrap of pension to support her, Maude Summers had jumped at the offer.


The Brigadier sat up. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘what time is it?’

‘Just after five,’ Christine answered.

‘Switch it on then, girl, switch it on.’

Carefully wiping her fingers on a napkin, Christine crossed to the breast-high walnut cabinet that housed the radiogram. She
switched on the set and thumbed the Bakelite knob until a faint whine changed to a fierce crackle through which the strains
of a dance band emerged.


‘Who is it tonight?’ she asked.

‘Jack Payne,’ the Brigadier told her.

Five o’clock marked the beginning of the BBC’s evening programme of light entertainment and brought Brigadier Sandy Crockett’s
dreary afternoon to an end. Newspapers excepted, he had no stomach for reading nowadays but revelled in the sweet, swinging
music that the wireless provided. He knew all the orchestras and band-leaders by name and, to Christine’s amusement, would
croon the sentimental love songs without so much as a blush.


During the long winter evenings they sat, all three, by the fire in the sitting-room and listened to one programme after another
or, if the broadcast turned pompous, played records on the gramophone. Before his legs became too weak to support him the
Brigadier would dance, sedately, with her mother. Even now, half crippled, he would hoist himself from the armchair and sway
in time to the music as if the rhythms remained, youthful and clamouring, in the marrow of his bones.


The band-leader’s signature tune emerged loud and clear from the cavernous cloth-covered speaker.

The Brigadier let out a sigh and, closing his eyes, sank back in his chair.

‘Happy now?’ Christine asked.

‘Quite happy, thank you,’ the Brigadier answered and hardly seemed to notice when she cleared the tea things and, with the
Scottie trotting at her heels, carried the tray out into the hall.


If there was one thing Alan hated it was riding home in the dark and the long, stumbling walk following the beam of his pocket
torch up the country road from Ottershaw Halt to Moss House. He gazed, thoughtfully, from the window as the train rattled
through the small, smoky towns on the outskirts of Glasgow and jogged at length on to the line that skirted the hills.


‘Rain before morning, I fear.’

‘Yes,’ Alan agreed, ‘another wet weekend in store by the look of it.’

Weather was the sole topic of conversation between the two men who shared the first class compartment. Alan did not even know
the chap’s name, only that he smoked scented tobacco in a blackened briar pipe, wore pale grey spats and pored over the Scotsman with grim concentration.


He did not get off at Ottershaw but rode on, with nothing more than a nod by way of farewell; rode on to where, Alan wondered:
to Kennart or Harlwood or all the way out to the junction and beyond?


One word to Marion and she would have unearthed everything there was to know about the fellow but he had never mentioned his
mysterious travelling companion to Marion, and it was too late now.


He watched the hills slide away as the track looped along the plain.

The river, the Kennart, trailed the embankment for a mile or two. He caught the glint of fading daylight on the water before
the river vanished into the trees above the salmon pool. Marion and her friend Mrs Waddell had often toddled down there in
the autumn months and had come back full of tales of spate and spray and the courage of the spawning fish. Marion had revelled
in the wonders of the natural world, wonders that he had long ago put behind him.


He spotted a tractor, big and square like a water tank, rolling along the highway in the gathering dusk, and on the back road
that climbed from the river a dung-cart drawn by a Clydesdale and, a little further on, a girl and a dog.


He craned forward to watch her wave her scarf at the passing train, as a child might do. For a moment he was tempted to wave
back but before he could obey the impulse the curve of the track blocked her from view.


The gentleman lowered his newspaper an inch or two and regarded him with the trace of a smile.

‘Sandy Crockett’s girl,’ he said.

‘Sandy Crockett?’ Alan said.

‘The Brigadier.’

‘His daughter?’

‘His housekeeper’s daughter.’

‘I didn’t know we had a Brigadier in these parts. What regiment?’

‘Gordon Highlanders. Retired,’ the gentleman said, and retreated behind his newspaper once more.

‘For God’s sake, Charley,’ Beatty McCall said, ‘if you’re going to hang about like a soul in torment, the least you can do
is make yourself useful.’


‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Give me a hand with this tree branch for one thing.’

‘What are you burnin’ that for, Beatty? It’s good f. . .