Chance Developments by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

mother.
    “You can’t stop them,” said the farm manager. “Once they take root, it’s the devil’s own job getting rid of them.”
    “Still beautiful,” she said, and turning to Harry, “Jenny? Has she written to you? Are they up yet, do you know?”
    The farm manager answered. “Arrived last week. He’s laid up with his leg, I believe.”
    Harry tried to see through the rhododendrons, to the outcrop of rock that he knew they concealed, but there was only darkness. Jenny’s father had been shot by a German—he knew that because he had heard the adults talking about it.
Did he shoot him back?
We don’t think of it like that.
But why not?
Because we just don’t. Because when there’s a war, people are told to shoot the other side. It doesn’t mean that they hate them as people. They’re just doing their job as soldiers.
If anybody shot me, I’d shoot him back. As long as I wasn’t dead, of course.
    “Your father,” he had once said to Jenny, “has got a bullet in his leg, hasn’t he?”
    She had looked at him with tolerance. He was not to know. His own father had stayed in the bank. He knew nothing about the trenches.
The trenches
…The word, it seemed, had vast power in the adult world. Her father had been in the trenches when the German shot him.
    “Of course he hasn’t got a bullet in his leg, stupid! You can’t walk if you have a bullet in your leg. In fact, you die because the bullet goes up your leg and into your heart. It goes through your veins. That happened to lots of people.”
    “Even if you got shot in the toe? Even then?”
    This required thought. “Sometimes. Sometimes people died if they got shot in the toe. It depends on which toe. If it’s just the little toe, then you may be all right. If it’s your big toe, then you may not be so lucky.”
    “Then why didn’t your father die?”
    She sighed; he knew so little of what the world was really like. “He had an operation. In something called a field hospital. They took the bullet out and put it in a jar. I’ve seen it.”
    He was impressed. To have a father who had been shot by a German was distinction enough, but to have the very bullet in a jar put one in a very special position.
    She looked at him. “My father won,” she said.
    “Won what?”
    “The War. My father won the War.”
    He looked down at the ground. His father could have won it too, had he gone to the trenches. But somebody had to stay, his mother explained, because if they didn’t stay to run the banks then there would be no money, and if there was no money then the Germans would have romped home to victory and that would have been the end of the British Empire. Which would have been like turning out the sun, she said. Just that: turning out the sun.
    And now here was Mr. Currie having trouble with his leg, reminding everybody that you may win the War but you paid a price for it.
    “All those names,” his mother said, shaking her head as she showed him the simple war memorial that had been erected beside the kirk. “Every one of them. Every single one of them a hero. All ordinary boys from right here. Local families. Every one of them.”
    But now she said, as they approached the house, “Jenny will come over, no doubt. They’ll have seen the car. People know when you arrive. They don’t in Edinburgh, do they? You could disappear into thin air and nobody would be any the wiser. But they know here.”
    3
    She came to the house virtually every day. Sometimes he imagined he was by himself, engaged in some activity of his own devising, and then he would realise that she was there, almost as if she had been there all along, watching him, waiting for an opportunity to tell him that he was doing things the wrong way, or should be doing something else altogether.
    For the most part, he was happy to follow her suggestions. “We could pretend we were Vikings,” she said. “There were lots of them settled near here, you know. I could be a Viking lady and you