He sank towards a bottomless silence. Days passed in a waking dream of idleness and exhaustion. He got to know the others, even as he ceased to know himself.
He knew the Alfies of this world. For that matter he knew the Geoffs too, pompous men – little men, his sisters would have said, dripping scorn – born to be local councillors, aldermen, justices of the peace, and to run, as Geoff did in Brentwood – a briar patch of which he seemed inordinately proud – a car showroom. Not for him the tat of the second-hand trade, but plate-glass windows and shiny new Wolseleys and Rileys and a turntable on which to revolve them. Geoff was a bore and best avoided. Alfie was a bore too, but a bore of the type that at least held professional interest for Troy. Alfie was the sort of young man – twenty-five or six years old – who had gone from job to job for the last ten years, ever since getting out of secondary modern school, working his little fiddles. Man on the make, but with so little imagination of just how much one could make. He wasn’t a villain – and Troy doubted very much whether the application of the term would strike him as anything but insult – but he was a rogue. The sort of rogue who could do no job without ‘somefink on the side, knowotahmean?’ And it ran, as a rule, to nothing bolder or smarter than one hand in the till. The ever-cheerful, ever-chattering, smirking cockney wide boy. Troy knew Alfie. He’d seen Alfie all his working life.
He took to the conservatory on the southern side of the house. It was warm in the mornings, and since he could not sleep, it suited him well enough to sit there before breakfast and through the morning that crawled towards noon. If it overheated, he could simply throw open the doors, with a view across the rhododendrons – Himalayan weeds his mother had always called them, and would not have them in her garden at Mimram – out over the meadow and its leisurely herd of milk cows. He could watch the dazzling play of dragonflies across the pond in the late westerly sun. And when the sun had set a small army of grumbling toads would emerge from the shrubbery, toad-strutting like miniature bulldogs, to share the pond and debate the night with their elegant, long-legged, vociferous cousins, the frogs. All the while a short-eared owl would watch from the lower branches of a birch, wondering which was which and which was edible.
Few others seemed to care for the place. Catesby would occasionally come in and chat, or if Troy was particularly uncommunicative he would read, unbidden and aloud, from the national newspapers, as though Troy were in some way part of his duty. Alfie would pass through, but like the best of bores would always move on in minutes in search of new audiences, and the nurses soon tired of asking Troy how he was. He did not answer. He had fallen down a glass well.