The following Wednesday, Anna phoned him at the Yard.
“Have you had a holiday this year, Troy?”
He hadn’t.
“I’m in a bit of a pickle. I’ve booked into hotels in North Devon. The summer’s been such a stinker, I fancied sea breezes and a dose of ozone. I had it in mind to walk some of the coast. You know, start at Ilfracombe, round past the headland and down to Baggy Point and Woolacombe, past Barnstaple and Bideford to points west, as it were.”
Churchill’s disdain for English seaside resorts flashed through his mind. He’d been pretty scathing about the pleasures of Ilfracombe himself.
“What’s the problem?”
“Angus. He’s gone walkabout on me. Just upped and buggered off and I’ve no faith in him being back by lunchtime on Friday.”
Angus did this. He was capable of disappearing for weeks at a time. It was why he lost clients; it was why he lost friends. Every so often Anna would get a call from an obscure police station—Sixpenny Handley, Wyre Piddle, Frisby-on-the-Wreake—and be asked by a deferential station sergeant to collect an errant husband who might otherwise be charged as drunk and disorderly (and few men did disorder quite as well as Angus), and, “after all, ma’am, none of us wants to throw the book at a war ’ero.”
“I’m puzzled,” said Troy. “A walking holiday with a one-legged man?”
“Oh, he was just going to drive from one watering hole to the next. I was walking alone. Angus would have been company in the evenings, otherwise I’d be dining alone. That’s sort of why I’m calling. You don’t fancy this, do you, Troy? You don’t have to do the walk. Just be there in the evenings.”
“Do you think hotels will take to a Mr. and Mrs. Smith routine?”
“I booked separate rooms. Lately, Angus’s snoring has reached danger level.”
Troy had never quite known what his relationship was with Anna. Less so since he had met her husband. He found this statement oddly reassuring. It was as though she’d said, “no hanky panky.”
“Okay,” he said, “and I will do the walks with you.”
“Thanks, Troy. It’s four days on foot. I thought we might take my car as far as Ilfracombe, park it at the Imperial, and bus back to it on the Wednesday after. I’ve saved up loads of petrol coupons and I’d rather not trust to that jalopy of yours.”
Troy’s car was past its best. They hadn’t made them since 1930, and he clung to it in part because his father had given it to him.
“I’ve a better idea,” he said. “Let’s pool our coupons and arrive in style.”
He could hear the mixture of anticipation and anxiety in her voice.
“Not . . . not that Rolls you and Rod have mothballed in the garage in Hampstead?”
“No . . . my mother’s Lagonda. You’ll like it. It’s got a V12 engine. It’ll do one-ten on the flat.”
“Gosh.”
The word almost stopped Troy midflow. So English; too English.
“We could rip down the Thames valley, have lunch at the Rose Revived . . .”
“The what?”
“Trust me . . . it’s a sweet old Elizabethan pub right on the river at Newbridge.”
“And rip, Troy? Rip?”
“Rip . . . roar . . . you don’t just motor in a Lagonda.”