Notwithstanding by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online Page A

became ‘you know, the man who caught the Girt Pike at the Glebe House when he was a boy, the one who had a rook’. In his house on Cherryhurst there would always be an overexposed photograph on the wall of the self-conscious and proud little fellow trying to hold up a pike that was too long and heavy for him. There would always be a photograph of the catch, laid out on the lawn beside a yardstick.
    Robert’s mother hung the fish up in the larder with its mouth full of salt, and next day it was eaten with great ceremony by the extended family and some of the neighbours. Robert did not think that it tasted very good because to him it savoured of guilt, but everyone else seemed to think it very fine. He received many a toast, many a pat on the head and many a congratulatory slap between the shoulder blades, none of which quite succeeded in drawing off his perturbing feelings of shame. He was haunted by how beautiful the pike had been when it was freshly out of the water, and how its beauty had already diminished when it had been out for only an hour. He knew instinctively that beauty should last for ever, and that this world would never be perfected until beauty was perpetual. Whenever he dreamed of his battle with the Girt Pike, what he remembered more than anything was the terror and panic of it, so that in retrospect his triumph took on more the aspect of a nightmare.
    There was no doubt about the effect of the episode on Robert’s self-confidence. He suddenly started to do unnaturally well at school, and passed the eleven-plus unexpectedly, so that his parents had to decide whether or not they could bear the expense and inconvenience of sending him to the grammar school in Guildford.
    He had also been touched in another way. When the cancer took Mrs Rendall off a year later, he was heartbroken, and he wrote her a letter:
    Dear Mrs Rendall,
    I am so sorry that you have died, because you were so pretty and so nice, and you let me catch the Girt Pike, which was the best thing ever, and you made me tea and peanut butter sandwiches, and you bought me the Intrepid Prince Regent reel to thank me for catching the Girt Pike and saving the ducklings, and it’s the best reel ever and just what I always wanted.
    With love from Robert.
    Robert folded up the letter very small and put it into one of his grandfather’s discarded tobacco tins. He borrowed his mother’s trowel and cycled up to the churchyard, where he buried his message in the upturned clay of the new grave, before crawling into the abandoned lime kiln nearby, where he could crouch in the wet darkness and bury his eyes in his forearm without being seen.
    Robert used the Intrepid Prince Regent reel for the rest of his life, even though he never went pike fishing again. Content with perch and roach, he used the reel long after its manufacturer was bought out by a predator and asset-stripped, and he used it when he was middle-aged and everyone else was using superbly engineered reels made of lightweight graphite, which ran on roller bearings. Whenever he got it out of its bag and mounted it on his rod, he remembered the Girt Pike, the Glebe House pond, and pretty, vivacious Mrs Rendall. Every time he went to the churchyard he would pause in front of her grave, where the headstone was tilting and covered with yellow lichen, and, wondering if his tobacco tin and message had rotted away, would feel all over again his long-standing sorrow.

THE AUSPICIOUS MEETING OF THE FIRST TWO MEMBERS OF THE FAMOUS NOTWITHSTANDING WIND QUARTET
    IT WAS A day in middle March, of the kind that for early risers begins sunny and uplifting, but which for late risers has already degenerated into the nondescript gloom that causes England to be deprecated by foreigners. The rooks were breaking off the ends of willow twigs and building their nests with raucous incompetence, most of the twigs ending up on the ground below, whence the birds could never be bothered to retrieve them. The box hedges were