“Come on now!” the little man with the mustache was urging, as game practice commenced with a drill in which members of two sides circled around a ball trapped in their center. “Push it out now! That’s it! And again! … And again!”
“Know the game at all, Blaine?” John Neville was asking, suddenly by his side.
“Bits and pieces.”
“A game made for children, this is. They can take the rough-and-tumble. Take a hard hit and bounce right back. The older one gets, the—”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“The small talk to help me relax. It isn’t necessary.”
Neville simply nodded and let his own thoughts stray briefly. “Playing on the right across the field. Striped shirt muddied in the front.”
And with his heart crashing against his ribs, Blaine found the boy just as a teammate gave him a perfect pass on the run and Matthew Ericson streaked down the far sideline like a champion thoroughbred. A deft stutter step stranded one opponent in his tracks, and a fake pass to the side left him with a clear path to the goal line.
The boy ran with graceful, loping strides, propelled by a high leg kick that tossed mud behind him off his soggy cleats. With token pursuit closing at the last, he slid to touch the ball to the ground in the end zone to insure the points. Then he rose to the shoulder slaps and praise of his teammates and mustachioed coach. He walked back toward the center line just as gracefully as he had sped in for the score, front thigh muscles rippling with definition. His hair was straight and longish, curled at the ends now from the dampness. His eyes were brown and radiant and he carried himself with a smoothness and confidence that seemed entirely natural.
“Want me to call him over?” Neville offered.
“No, please. Let him be.”
“Him or you?”
“What?”
Neville smiled. “After practice then?”
“Yes. Much better.”
“With you to be introduced as …”
“A friend of his mother’s. A good friend.”
“And tomorrow’s holiday?”
“We’ll do something. If he wants.”
“You’re underestimating him, Blaine. Not only will he want to, it won’t take him long to figure out what’s going on. You’d be wise to prepare for that.”
“I’ll try.”
“I was a friend of your mother,” he told the boy before John Neville had a chance to as they shook hands after practice. “A good friend.”
The boy’s grip was sweaty but firm. Blaine was surprised when he smiled. “Really? Did you know her from America?”
“Accent give me away?”
Another smile. “Would she have mentioned you, sir?”
“Call me Blaine, please. No, I don’t think she would have.”
In the next instant neither knew what to say, and John Neville stepped in.
“Matt, Mr. McCrack — er, Blaine — is going to be in the country for a bit and would like very much to spend some time with you. I suggested tomorrow’s school holiday as a possibility.”
“If you don’t have any plans,” Blaine added, wanting the boy to have a way out, or maybe himself.
“I’d like that very much, sir.”
“Blaine.”
“He was thinking an outing to London might be smart,” Neville proposed.
“Oh yes! Smashing!” The boy beamed. “It’s been ages since I’ve been there.”
“Done, then,” Neville concluded.
But it isn’t done, Blaine reckoned, not by a longshot. Do I tell him, and if so when? Damn you, Henri, for dropping all this in my lap….
Later, thrashing his thoughts about, Blaine drove from the school through Henley on Thames to the small Norman village of Hambleden where Lauren Ericson had lived and been buried. The village was quiet to the point of seeming deserted, and Blaine found himself easing the car door shut to avoid an echo. The moist air had the same sweaty feel as it had back in Reading. Here, though, it was laced with the warm scent of wood smoke coming from chimneys on houses that might have been fashioned out of the same light reddish brick. It was difficult to date the structures since even the newer ones had been built to blend in with and maintain the village’s rustic appeal. There were graves in the churchyard dating back to the eleventh century but only a few dug in the last few years, and their tombstones hadn’t been aged as the buildings had.
Lauren’s was a simple affair wedged in a small family plot her ancestors had obtained four centuries before. Dying, Blaine supposed, should be like coming home, and perhaps this was as close to that ideal as possible. He knelt by the grave wanting to feel something other than the confusion and uncertainty racing through him.
In recent weeks he had for some reason been reminiscing about his own parents, and all this served to only intensify his confused feelings. How unglamorous the story was. His parents had married late and had him, their only child, later. His father was an insurance salesman who made his living on the road and died in a Milwaukee hotel room of a heart attack at the age of sixty when Blaine was in high school. His mother had held up through it bravely and built a decent life for herself that ended after a painful struggle with cancer while Blaine was in Vietnam following an aborted attempt at college. She’d been dead for six months before he learned of it, due to the incommunicado status of men who were assigned to clandestine duty such as his. In those same six months and the six that came before he had not been allowed to send a single letter. Strange how when word came about her death he wondered more than anything what he might have said if he had been permitted.
Even with everything else considered, that was the only time he really hated the war, for not allowing him the dignity of rushing to his mother’s deathbed or at least attending her funeral. And though he tried, he was unable to remember what mission he’d been on at the moment of her passing.
Blaine supposed the advanced ages of his parents had helped make him independent almost from the cradle. He had always gone his own way, never with the crowd, and spent many of his early years resenting his parents for being so much older than those of his friends. In later years he loved them even more for it. At the very least they were there. At the most, they had somehow helped mold him into the man he had become.
He thought of all the high school sporting events his father had been unable to attend and how guilty he felt for preferring this to having the old man standing out among the other parents, looking more like grandfather than father. He thought of Matthew streaking down the sidelines to bring Reading School the rugby championship … with no parent to cheer him on, no face to pick out amidst the crowd. And if it wasn’t McCracken’s face, then whose would it be? Besides Henri Dejourner there was no one. Blaine had never turned his back on an obligation before, and this was no time to start. The boy was strong and brave and beautiful, but time might work as his enemy under the circumstances. He hadn’t gone through a Christmas alone yet, or a birthday. Blaine knew all about that and it was never easy.
“I wish I could cry for you, Lauren,” he said over the grave. “I’m sorry we shared so little time. But I won’t abandon what we produced. You have my word on that.”
Chapter 4
“You met my mother in England, then?” Matt asked as they took the fast train toward London from Reading the next morning.
McCracken nodded. “I was over here for an extended time, almost a year.”
“On business?”
“Sort of.”
The boy hesitated before speaking again. “Did it have anything to do with you being a soldier?”