of wintry sunlight that flickered through the low grey cloud and lit the
fields not far from the River Thames with that incredible vivid shade of
Engis green.
Samantha and Nicholas stood in a thin line of miserably cold parents and
watched the pile of struggling boys across the field in their coloured
jerseys; the light blue and black of Eton, the black and white of St
Paul's, were so muddied as to be barely distinguishable.
What are they doing? Samantha demanded, holding the collar of her coat
around her ears.
It's called a scrum Nick told her. That's how they decide which team
gets the ball. Wow. There must be an easier way. There was a flurry
of sudden movement and the slippery egg-shaped ball flew back in a lazy
curve that was snapped up by a boy in the Etonian colours. He started
to run.
It's Peter, isn't it? cried Samantha.
Go it, Peter boy! Nick -roared, and the child ran with the ball
clutched to his chest and his head thrown back.
He ran strongly with the reaching coordinated stride of an older boy,
swerving round a knot of his opponents, leaving them floundering in the
churned mud, and angling across the lush thick grass towards the
white-painted goal line, trying to reach the corner before a taller more
powerfully built lad who was pounding across the field to intercept him.
Samantha began to leap up and down on the same spot, shrieking wildly,
completely uncertain of what was happening, but wild with excitement
that infected Nicholas.
The two runners converged at an angle which would bring them to the
white line at the same moment, at a point directly in front of where
Nick and Samantha stood.
Nick saw the contortion of his son's face, and realized that this was a
total effort. He felt a physical constriction of his own chest as he
watched the boy drive himself to his utmost limits, the sinews standing
out in his throat, his lips drawn back in a frozen rictus of endeavour
that exposed the teeth clenched in his jaw.
From infancy, Peter Berg had brought to any task that faced him the same
complete focus of all his capabilities.
Like his grandfather, old Arthur Christy, and his own father, he would
be one of life's winners. Nick knew this instinctively, as he watched
him run. He had inherited the intelligence, the comeliness and the
charisma, but he bolstered all that with this unquenchable desire to
succeed in all he did. The single-minded determination to focus all his
talents on the immediate project. Nick felt the pressure in his chest
swell. The boy was all right, more than all right, and pride threatened
to choke him.
Sheer force of will had driven Peter Berg a pace ahead of his bigger,
longer-legged adversary, and now he leaned forward with the ball held in
both hands, arms fully extended, reaching for the line to make the
touch-down.
He was ten feet from where Nick stood, a mere instant from success, but
he was unbalanced, and the St Paul's boy dived at him, crashing into the
