His sister Sasha had telephoned. ‘We’ll come and get you,’ she’d said. We. Somehow Troy had expected Rod. Rod driving Troy’s Bentley. He was late.
Troy sat in the open windows of the conservatory, case packed, coat on, like a soldier awaiting demob, watching the empty drive, the dancing butterflies of August, half-hearing the meaningless mutterings of General Catesby behind him, the low murmur of the Home Service on the wireless. Then the slow crescendo of a very familiar noise, that mixture of roar, putter and purr, preceded first sight of his carriage home. Not a brother, not a Bentley. It was a motorbike. A motorbike with sidecar. A motorbike without snowplough. A motorbike with sidecar and without snowplough driven by an extremely fat man in a leather helmet and an old Second World War London County Council Heavy Rescue Squad navy-blue leather-elbowed battledress, unbuttoned to the summer breeze, its belt tail flapping and its pockets billowing.
The Fat Man scrunched to a halt in the gravel, pushed up his goggles and said, as he always did, ‘Wotcher cock.’
‘Do you expect me to ride in that?’ said Troy.‘I’ll catch my death of cold.’
‘Nah. You’ll be fine. That good-lookin’ young woman as is your quack told me you needed fresh air, lots of it.’
‘Fresh air! It’ll be like riding in a hurricane!’
‘Trust me, old cock. I got the ’orse blanket to wrap you in—’
‘I’m not wearing anything previously worn by a horse!’
‘Just a figure o’ speech. Keep yer ’air on. ’Orse blanket.’
The Fat Man reached into the sidecar and held up a grubby old blanket.
‘Thermos flask.’
The Fat Man pointed to a flask mounted on the nose of the sidecar’s fuselage, with a little leather strap, where the snowplough used to be.
‘’Ipflask. With a nice dropof Armagnac, as I knows yer partial to it.’
The Fat Man pointed to a half-bottle of brandy mounted after the same fashion.
It was like the obligatory armourer’s scene in a James Bond film. Where the exploding talcum powder? Where the 9 millimetre Walther automatic? And the fifty quid in old sovereigns?
‘And at the back ’ere. Yer Fortnum’s ’amper. Plus all the Sunday papers. We s’ll ’ave a nice little picnic, and be ’ome to the family before dinner. They’ll all be there. They can’t wait to see yer. The pig’s been pining.’
Troy was not at all certain that pigs pined. But he believed the rest of the Fat Man’s tale. They would most certainly be waiting. He could do without that. Without they.
They cut a path across the northern corner of Essex, via back lanes and villages. Every so often the Fat Man would bring the bike to a halt on some picturesque village green, pink-painted cottages, black mansard barns, windmills for the tilting, some corner on the English quilt, and say, ‘Do you a fancy a bite to eat?’ and Troy would say, ‘No.’
Two hours and more later they were within fifteen miles of home, the hamper still unopened. They pulled onto the green in Datchworth and Troy heard him say, ‘Sod yer, I’m not wasting it.’
The Fat Man got off, unstrapped the hamper and began to lay out the picnic.
‘We’re only twenty-five minutes from home,’ Troy protested.
‘I don’t care if we’re two furlongs from the back door. A picnic I brought and a picnic we shall ’ave. You be as miserable as you like, I’m going to tuck in.’
Troy said nothing, accepted defeat, and climbed out of the sidecar.
‘There you are,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Baguliar caviar.’
‘Beluga.’
‘Same to you.’
‘No – I mean it’s pronounced Beluga.’
‘Beluga, begorrah – I don’t care – so long as it’s the best.’
‘It is,’ said Troy. ‘And it’s kind of you, but I really can’t stand caviar. Sorry. It’s like a cross between tapioca and fishpaste to me.’
‘No apology necessary, old cock. It’s yer brother you should thank. He slipped me a pony, said I was to go down Fortnum’s and fill a namper o’ the best. Besides I’m very partial to a spot o’ caviar. Go down a treat that will. Or did you think I was a fish an’ chips man?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I thought you were a ham-sandwich man. If I’ve seen you eat one of a Saturday morning, I’ve seen you eat a hundred.’
‘True enough. But after bein’ a nam guzzler, I’m most definitely a caviar guzzler. But on top of yer Baguliar, we got quails’ eggs, smoked salmon, and a jar of that dill sauce, a quarter moon of ripe camembert, half a duck, a jar of pears in port . . .’
Troy felt sick just listening to him.
‘Smoked salmon,’ he said, clutching at something that sounded safe.
‘Pâté de fois gras, a tin o’ snails in jelly, truffles . . . a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’53 . . .’
‘Any bread?’
‘Yes, cock – one o’ them there French sticks.’
‘Just a little bread and salmon then.’
‘Comin’ up.’
Troy nibbled. The Fat Man started on the caviar with a dessert spoon and in two gulps it was gone. Then he tore into the duck like Henry VIII just coming off an enforced diet. He ate the quails’ eggs, shells and all, and managed to find room for half a loaf and a quarter pound of fois gras. The camembert seemed not to appeal, or perhaps he was saving it for later. Troy felt like an invalid.
A young woman of thirty or so came into view, wheeling a large black pram, and took the bench next to them. Troy looked at her face, wonderful blue-grey eyes. The Fat Man looked at the infant set down from the pram to crawl its infant crawl upon the grass. It was a small child, Troy thought, six or seven months at most.
‘Oochie coochie coo,’ said the Fat Man to the child, and began to prattle meaninglessly, and Troy wondered whether the man was any better with children than he was himself. They were aliens. Creatures from some other universe. He looked again at the woman, beaming with evident pride and pleasure in her offspring, and the thought occurred to him that this was everything he had missed in life, everything he had avoided, rejected – wife, child, family – locked away in the attic of the mind. But he did have a wife, somewhere – a brown-eyed, short-arsed American – somewhere. She smiled at him. He knew he wasn’t smiling. Wrapped up in the horse blanket like a forgotten parcel. And he knew her smile said ‘poor sod’ and he hated her for it.
Time to go.
‘What’s ’is name?’ the Fat Man was saying to the blue-eyed blonde.
‘Samantha,’ she replied.
‘Wot? Like the Kenny Ball song?’
The Fat Man hummed a few bars of some inane hit of couple of years ago. The thankfully short-lived ‘Trad’ Jazz boom. It was the sort of music that drove Troy demented and brought him to the brink of smashing wireless sets.
The woman’s expression showed she had taken umbrage at this suggestion of topicality in the naming of children. And it dawned on Troy that the Fat Man had probably expected a boy, and had addressed the child thinking it was a boy. He could not see the Fat Man as a ladies’ fat man. He had utterly failed to charm this local beauty. Nor could he see himself as a ladies’ man. The last thing he wanted was women. And the house would be full of them.
‘Can we go?’ he said. ‘I’m suddenly very tired.’
The Fat Man chugged slowly up the third of a mile from the gate to the house, letting Troy take it all in. It had scarcely been spring when he had seen it last and now it was the dry end of summer, August winding down into September – a month that in the British Isles could be summer or autumn depending on the fickleness of the weather. Troy did not know the place. As often happened, it rose up before him as though he had seen it only in some distant dream.
They stood on the steps, waiting to meet him. His twin sisters Sasha and Masha, his sister-in-law Lucinda, Rod, their son Alex, their daughters – the second set of twins – Eugénie and Nastasia, his brother-in-law Lawrence, his Uncle Nikolai and so ad infinitum. Troy stumbled from the sidecar, shed the horse blanket, and nobody moved. For a moment he felt like Haig inspecting the troops. Then they fell upon him – wolves upon the fold. An enveloping curtain of women, a solid wall of clashing scents, a buffeting bolster of soft arms and smothering breasts. He would gladly have murdered the lot of them. It was like being eight years old again, the youngest again, and the last thing he could say was what he had said when he was eight – a brutally simple ‘Get off !’
By the time he had extricated himself he became aware that Rod and the Fat Man had bunked off. The women bundled him onto the porch steps and he heard Masha saying, ‘Half a mo’. We’ve got a surprise for you.’ They were not words he much wished to hear.
Then they turned him around like the victim of blind man’s buff and the surprise surprised him.
There, standing between Rod and the Fat Man, was his prize Old Spot sow, Cissie. Cissie, wearing a lead, and upon the lead her runner-up’s rosette from last year’s Hertfordshire show.
‘Schnuck,’ said the pig – in Troy’s experience pigs said little else.
‘’Ere,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Look who’s come to see yer.’
He was delighted to see the pig again. Clearly the pig did not know him. But then one of the things Troy had always liked about pigs was their wilful contempt for humanity. They were like tortoises, and he’d kept plenty of those when he was a boy. They moved through your world, took what you had to offer, but didn’t want a great deal to do with you. Their evolution oddly followed mankind’s: they were closer companions than even the trusty dog; they had emerged from the forests when we had; they ate what we ate – anything and everything – but as far as they were concerned we were all yahoos, and ours was the yahoo life.