When conscience makes cowards of us all, what does the thinking coward—the man previously untroubled by that hysterical and unreliable organ—do?
He runs away.
“No, I can’t make Friday. I have to be at Mimram. I haven’t been there since I got back from Vienna. There’s stuff piling up.”
“Stuff?”
“Family stuff. I’m the son and heir, after all. Rod got the title, I got the house.”
“Freddie, you wouldn’t be avoiding me, would you?”
“No,” he lied.
“I don’t expect flowers and chocolates, but it’s a pig of a man who doesn’t call a girl the morning after … and don’t you dare say ‘after what?’”
He hadn’t called her. She was right. He was being a pig, but telling him so would not stop him.
“I’ll be back Sunday evening,” he said.
“Back here? At Eaton Place?”
(Pause)
“Freddie?”
“Yes … at Eaton Place.”
There was nothing piling up at Mimram except dead leaves.
He was a pig.
He got there an hour before dusk.
The first thing he saw was a pig.
A large Gloucester Old Spot, playing football on the edge of the orchard. The Fat Man was booting an old, softly deflating casey. The pig was in goal.
“He’s a marvel. Look at him,” the Fat Man said. “Never lets one through. I tell yer, old cock, if Manchester City knew about Bertrand here, they’d dump that Bert Trautmann in the wink of a pig’s eye.”
Trautmann was the most famous goalkeeper in the country, a former Luftwaffe paratrooper, he had famously played on in the cup final a couple of years back despite suffering a broken neck. He was also the only goalkeeper Troy had ever heard of.
“Bertrand? I thought you named all your pigs after Churchills?”
“There’s only so many Randolphs and Winstons you can have at one time. And as I have both still up an’ gobblin’ the new boys will be named after philosophers. Next boar I get will be called Ludwig. Or maybe Aristotle.”
He kicked the ball wildly in the rough direction of the goal. The pig snouted it back with startling accuracy. The Fat Man let the ball bounce off his shins and said, “Wot brings you ‘ere, then?”
“I live here. Surely you haven’t forgotten?”
“Have you forgotten it’s yer bruv’s weekend to meet the voters?”
Troy had forgotten. Every second Saturday, except in August, Rod held constituency surgery in the village—excising social ills, prescribing political placebos.
“Oh fuck. I really wanted to be alone.”
“Righty-ho. We shall pack our piggy bags and leave you to it.”
“No. Not you. You stay. It’s just … Rod.”
“You in trouble, cock?”
“Yes, but not the sort you might be imagining. Right now the last thing I want is the company of my family’s self-appointed moral philosopher.”
“Then don’t tell ‘im. Whoever she is, don’t tell ‘im.”
The Fat Man could do that to Troy. Catch him off guard every time. He secretly prided himself on his silence, his contrived lacunae, his well-preserved privacy … and every so often the Fat Man made him feel utterly transparent. A man whose world seemed to revolve around pigs and vegetables and beer, who probably read a book by the light of a blue moon, could read Troy as though he were a novel. In this case, though the title was undoubtedly Venetia, he hoped the author was not Miss Heyer.
“I can’t tell you, so don’t ask.”
“Wasn’t going to. So there.”