The Line Between Us Read Online Free Page A

Rocket, about the elegance of Latin grammar – a system devised for creating order out of chaos if ever there was one, and I badly needed a sense of order. Without my time at West Monmouth Grammar, photosynthesis would have remained a mystery to me, ditto the circulation of the blood and the four moons of Jupiter named by Galileo after the lovers of Zeus. They say that knowledge is power, but to me it was insulation.
    I should have realised I was a poor boy feasting at a rich man’s table, but I was dazzled by all that learning, the irresistible poetry of information laid out before me. When the boys at school started discussing the merits of Oxford over Cambridge, going to university also seemed like a proper ambition for a person to have, for a short time, at least.
    I was doing my homework up in my room, safe behind a barricade of textbooks, struggling to translate Appian’s account of the second Punic war, longing for Hannibal to appear with his elephants, when Ma loomed over the crenulations waving a copy of the Monmouth Guardian . I hadn’t seen her look so happy since the end of the war.
    “See what I’ve found!” she cried, pressing the paper against the skirt of her apron as she thumbed through the pages. “Not there … not there … where the goodness was it? Oh, just look at that, will you,” she tutted at the newsprint coming off on her fingers, always clean and tidy, my Ma. “Here we are! What do you think?” She creased the page flat as though it were an ironed sheet ready for folding.
    I stared at the list of classified advertisements without so much as an inkling of what was coming. “What is it, Ma?”
    She read the advert aloud for me: “Wanted: Gardener’s Lad. Eight to Sixteen Pounds a Year Depending on Age and Ability. Apply with References, Nanagalan.”
    “But –”
    “A job at the big house!”
    “But I –”
    “Just like your father. Gardener’s Lad at Nanagalan. That’s how he started and he ended up as Head Gardener, so there’s no limit – really. Think what you could do with a job like that, Ifor.”
    I was fingering my pencil, tracing the letters embossed into the blue paint: HB. The Royal Sovereign Pencil Company Ltd. It’s a wonderful thing, a pencil with a sharpened point: a remembrancer. I let mine rest against my upper lip for the faint smell of the cedar wood. “There’s my studies …” I began, my gaze travelling along the line I’d been translating.
    “You spend a lot of time with your nose in a book for a boy your age,” Ma said with some asperity. There was a note in her voice, a tension, and I was conscious of the freight she brought with her: the expectation of what a son might do, crushed into dust on that July morning five years ago. Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy ...
    “And there’s my examinations …”
    She sat down on my bed. “Examinations won’t butter anybody’s parsnips, will they?” she said quietly.
    There was a silence between us. I sat staring at my pile of textbooks, my blotter, my pencil case, my exercise book, all the apparatus of the written word. Each one had a place and a meaning of its own for me.
    “And besides, it would be so close to home …” she said.
    I glanced round at her. I could see the first salting of age in her face; all the scouring of the last few years. Something in the curve of her shoulders, the leaning of her elbows on her knees with her hands hanging loosely down, made her seem resilient and diminished at the same time. I suppose she was both of those things. Stoic, and forlorn. For a moment I wondered what the merits of Oxford over Cambridge really were. I thought about what my Dad said. It was the echo of an obligation, and here was my flesh and blood Ma who I loved until my heart hurt.
    I laid my pencil on the table. “Do you think it would improve my chances,” I said, “if I mentioned Dad in my application letter?”
    She stood up and rested her hand on my shoulder and the two of us