Troy took his first bath, before the unnaturally early bedtime. The sky had scarcely darkened, the moon peeped between the hurrying clouds, and the room was a vast echoing chamber, almost as high as it was long, and his knees stuck up like white-bone mountains in the lagoon of cooling bathwater. He climbed out and stood dripping onto an inch-thick cork mat. Stood clutching the towel, facing a full-length mirror bolted to the wall. Then it hit him. Everything he had not seen or had refused to see came home to him. He saw himself with Anna’s eyes. And he did not recognise himself. He was not tall – under height in fact for the job of copper, and only enlisted by a waiving of the rules – but even so, eight stones in weight made him look little short of Belsen-like, half-starved and half-dead. He let the towel fall. He could count every rib in his chest. His stomach was not just flat, it was concave. His thighs looked like sticks, his cock, exaggerated by the contrast, made him seem almost priapic – the Errol Flynn of the Eastern Counties. Why did one not lose weight in proportion; why did one not lose it everywhere; why not a thin cock; why not thin toes? He looked at his toes – they were thin. He stepped on the scales. Seven stone nine pounds.
He revised the image. Swapped Germany for Russia. Tuberculosis – the Victorian word had been consumption, the preferred disease of so many novelists. Who was it in what Dostoevsky novel who died slowly of consumption, and made such a song and dance about it? The Idiot, it was some . . . dammit . . . some idiot in The Idiot. Troy would not make a song and dance. But he would waste away just the same.