Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare Read Free Book Online

a wedding invitation.
    Rodney didn’t glance up. He leaned over his drawing board and rubbed out a pencil outline calmly, with no excitement, the way Peter had seen a fisherman on the Yorkshire coast scrape the bottom of his boat. A vicar’s son from Tansley, Rodney had escaped the Church to study art at Camberwell, but he struggled after college to live off his paintings.
    â€œSay what you like,” he said, speaking to the cherub, “I always thought of you as my son. I always will.”
    â€œYou’ll always be Daddy,” Peter said uselessly. “Always.”
    â€œYour mother never told me who he was, nor did I ask. I adored her. Still do.” He examined the edge of his eraser with a fierce look. “But I can tell you the moment when I fell for you.” At a bonfire party in Elgin Crescent, the same evening that he met Peter’s mother. “She was holding this dark-haired baby and both of you were watching the flames. You stretched out your hand to me and kept on stretching it out. That’s when I had the feeling you could be my child.”
    â€œI am your child, Dad,” and cast his eyes at what, until this afternoon, had been more fixed than any compass point. The maple-framed watercolour of a Derbyshire vicarage. The lime-washed floors. The tray of nibs that always had seemed an extension of his father.
    â€œJust remember you are exactly who you want to be at any moment of any day – you have the opportunity. Remember that.”
    â€œI will, Dad.”
    At last it was time to go to the station. His mother insisted on driving.
    Rodney tapped on the window for him to wind it down. “If you want me to, of course I’ll play in the Fathers’ Match.”
    â€œThanks, Dad.”
    â€œDarling, will you tell Rosalind we had to leave?” called his mother across his lap.
    â€œBye, Peter,” bending down, his voice infallibly gentle. Behind, the blue ropes of a motionless swing.
    â€œBye, Dad.”
    â€œSee you in 20 minutes,” said his mother.
    The car filled with her perfume as they drove towards Tisbury, filling the silence until she could bear it no more and started to lament the fact that her father had become senile. “It’s a pity you didn’t know him when he was practising.”
    Two days later, there was a note from Rosalind to say that she had waited for him. She had laid the whole game out, prepared the score sheet. “But when I came to look for you, you were gone.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    I T SHOCKED P ETER TO return to St Cross. His mother’s revelation had removed him to a ridge a continent away from his previous life. As he walked from the station past Southgate Cinema, he noticed a poster for Where Eagles Dare and caught his breath. Richard Burton in Nazi uniform.
    In Mugging Hall, the roll-call had begun. Like the Appell at Colditz.
    â€œTweed?”
    â€œ Sum .”
    â€œSibley?”
    â€œ Sum .”
    â€œRood?”
    â€œ Sum .”
    Numbly, he sat in his toyes and drew his curtain tight. He felt fragile, exposed, like a fruit cut in half and stitched back together. He wanted to jump in the Itchen. He didn’t care if he never spoke to his mother again. What had she left him with as his identity? How was he to deal with Rodney?
    â€œLiptrot?”
    â€œ Sum .”
    â€œLeadley?”
    â€œ Sum .”
    In a way, it would have surprised Peter less to discover that his mother was not his parent. Everything he was she had shattered and, all his solidity gone, he felt a complicated hostility towards her. This afternoon she had not simply lost him the father he thought he had, but she had given him one that was foreign. A German.
    â€œHithersay?”
    Until he followed her onto “Revelation Hill”, the only German Peter had given much consideration to was a charred corpse in a cockpit. Beyond the pages of The Colditz Story or the Commando “trash mags” that