On the Saturday morning, as he lay in bed next to a sleeping Anna, Troy heard the pop-shuffle-grunt of an old BSA motorbike-sidecar combination approaching. He slid his arm from under her, hoping to slip out without her noticing. They had got through two nights without sex, a whole day without recrimination. All the same, he wasn’t about to risk the consequences of a morning quickie. He picked up his clothes from the floor and tiptoed to a bathroom on the other side of the house. Half an hour later, dressed and shaved, he sought out the Fat Man down by the pig pens.
Every so often the familiarity of the scene struck Troy as unchanging, timeless in the way visitors to the National Trust expect things to be timeless. The Fat Man would wear, as ever, his Second World War Heavy Rescue blue blouse, almost unchanging except that it got tattier with every year that passed. His Thermos and his ham sandwich would sit on the bench ready for whenever the need for elevenses hit him, which bore no relation to what the clock actually said, and the Fat Man would be found musing on some nonsense he’d found in the daily paper and occasionally reading snippets out loud to the pig. But the Fat Man was full of surprises. Today . . . Troy had had no idea the Fat Man could juggle.
As he came down the path to the edge of the orchard, the Fat Man was deftly juggling turnips, three or four at a time. Cissie the pig was sitting about fifteen feet away, her eyes spinning to keep track of the turnips, and every so often the Fat Man would bounce a turnip off his head – just like a footballer – straight at her. The pig would snatch it from the air, crunch it once and swallow it almost whole. She had the agility of a Jack Russell or, as Troy had observed when she was a piglet, a mountain goat, climbing everywhere – Troy often thought they should have named her Hillary or Tenzing. But Cissie it had been, Cissie the Gloucester Old Spot, a breed commonly known as the Orchard Pig.
The Fat Man put another handful of turnips into the air and the pig’s neck began to twist and turn as its beady eyes followed breakfast as it spun through space.
‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ Troy said.
‘I can spin plates an’ all. And what I can do with a top hat, two pigeons and a rabbit you wouldn’t believe.’
He launched all four turnips at the pig. Snap, snap, snap, snap, and they were gone.
‘How do you think she does that?’
‘Dunno, old cock. The hand may be quicker than the eye. It certainly ain’t quicker than the pig. If I was younger I’d work up a turn and go on the halls with her.’
‘If there were any music halls left,’ Troy added.
‘O’ course, cock. Goes without sayin’. Now, what gets you up bright and late on this sunny morn?’
‘Angst,’ said Troy.
‘Ants?’
‘People … are getting at me.’
The Fat Man sat down on the bench next to Troy, opened his Thermos, handed Troy a cup of sickly-sweet instant coffee, and tucked into his sandwich. The pig’s eyes followed the to and fro between them, hopefully. Troy hated instant coffee, but he’d never risk saying no to it, and much preferred the days when the Fat Man brought tea.
‘You just tell me who, and I’ll go round with an Austin 7 startin’ ‘andle and sort ‘em out.’
‘You’re kidding?’
The Fat Man spat crumbs over Troy. ‘Course I’m kidding. It’s that Stanley, isn’t it? And it’s that young woman o’ yours, and it’s that other young woman o’ yours – your doctor? And I reckon it’s your brother too.’
‘That’s about the gist of it. Not my brother, oddly enough, but everybody else you just named wants me to call it a day.’
‘Resign, you mean?’
‘Retire.’
‘But . . . you’re just a boy.’
It was well meant – although Troy found it hard to take that way – and he supposed that to the Fat Man, whose age was impossible to guess, bald for years and fat almost as long, he was not much more than a boy.
‘It’s OK. I’m not going to do it. If I give in now I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about what might have been … I’ll become a fat, sodden whinger, full of regret and self-pity like
Like who? For fuck’s sake, like who?
The pig gave up waiting for more turnips and rolled on her back squirming at an itch she could not scratch. Troy knew just how she felt.
‘. . . Like . . . like Dyadya Vanya.’
‘Daddy who?’
‘Not daddy – Dyadya. It means “uncle”. It’s Russian for “uncle”.’
‘I didn’t know you’d got an uncle Vanya. I’ve met your uncle Nikolai, but I don’t remember a Vanya.’
‘No. I haven’t got an uncle Vanya.’
‘Then why tell me you have?’
‘He’s a character in a play by Chekhov.’
‘Who’s Chekhov?’
‘Doesn’t matter. All I meant was that I’d become like Vanya – a miserable, suicidal sod incapable of blowing out his own brains or anyone else’s for that matter.’
‘You want to blow somebody’s brains out?’
‘No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’
‘It seems to me, young Fred, that about three-quarters of what you’re saying isn’t what you mean. But this much I will say. You do what you think’s best, cock. Maybe there’ll come a time to throw in the towel. Who knows? But it’s for you to say. And, if you want my twopenn’orth, when that time comes you’ll know. Believe me, old son, you’ll know. In the meantime you get back into the thick of it and kick bum!’
‘Bum?’
‘Arse.’
‘Ah, you mean … as they say in America, “kick ass”?’
‘Oh, no, cock. Never hurt an animal.’