Old Flames (15 page)

Troy leaned over the side of the sty. The large Gloucester Old Spot sow was scarcely visible in the shade of the tree, well camouflaged by the natural black and white of her markings and the odd
splash of mud. She grunted a greeting. Troy could just make her out, sitting on her haunches, rolling her head at the sky in anticipation of the coming sunshine.

‘I’s’ll ’ave ’er put to the boar next month,’ the Fat Man said. ‘We should get a good litter this year. She’s in the pink of condition.’

Troy sat next to him on the planks and declined the offer of sickly sweet, milky tea.

Troy had sought him out to get his advice on building the pens and breeding pigs. One hot summer day in 1953 he had roared up the drive on his motorcycle combination, still in his blue jacket,
wearing goggles and a leather helmet. In the sidecar sat a patient, self-possessed pig, a large specimen of the Middle White. It, too, wore a leather flying helmet.

Troy had stood in the porch with Sasha watching the bike approach. It ground to a halt in a spurt of gravel. The Fat Man pushed up the goggles and beamed at Troy.

‘Wotcher, cock,’ he said as though they had last met only yesterday.

Sasha drifted over to the bike, walked slowly round it, delicately, barefoot on the gravel, feigning appraisal.
At last she said, ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Randolph,’ the Fat Man said.

‘Randolph?’

‘Randolph. On account of his father was called Winston.’

Sasha corpsed. A fit of girlish giggles. The Fat Man did not, clearly, see the naming of pigs as a source of mirth. He looked stonily at her doubled up with laughter. The pig, for its part,
continued to roll a pebble round in its mouth, it eyes narrowed to slits, staring straight ahead, oblivious to her hysterics, listening to the sound the pebble made on its teeth. For all Troy knew,
what sounded like utter monotony to him might well have been music to the pig.

‘Ere,’ the Fat Man said to Troy, ‘is she taking the mick?’

‘Most of the time she does little else,’ said Troy.

‘Right, Randolph. Time to show ’er your stuff!’

He plucked the leather flying helmet from the pig’s head, and the porker leapt from the sidecar and put his nose to the ground. He sniffed a second or two and was off.

‘What’s happening?’ Sasha cried.

The pig had the acceleration of an MG. He had almost reached a gallop and was approaching the corner of the house with the Fat Man in hot pursuit.

‘Come on,’ he yelled over his shoulder to Troy. ‘Shake a leg! Or we’ll lose the bugger!’

Troy looked from the Fat Man to Sasha. She was clutching the hem of her skirt and hopping madly from one foot to the other.

‘I’ve nothing on my feet!’ she squealed, desperate at the thought that she would be left out of anything.

‘My wellies are behind the door,’ Troy said.

He took off after the pig and the Fat Man, already vanishing around the corner. The pig had a head start on them, but Troy soon drew level with the Fat Man.

‘What are we doing?’ he gasped.

The Fat Man wheezed and creaked and spoke in rapid snorts.

‘We’re finding the pig spot.’

‘What’s a pig spot?’

‘The best place to build a pig pen, old cock.’

‘How do we know it when we find it?’

‘Simple. The pig stops. We stop. When yer pig finds his spot he’ll stop. Either he finds something worth eating or he knackers himself. Either way he stops. And that’s where we
builds ’is little piggy ’ouse.’

Randolph was out of sight, darting between the greenhouses and the cold frames. From behind them came a shrill ‘View halloo’. Troy turned his head to his sister galloping after them
in outsize wellington boots, skirts tucked into her knickers to keep them free of the mud.

‘Mind you,’ said the Fat Man, ‘a good pig in his prime can run you ragged. I’ve known Randolph give you a right round the ’ouses when ’e’s a mind to. I
’ope that mad woman as appears to live with you ’as got the energy to keep up. He’ll do for me in a couple of rounds. If he starts circling the ’ouse I’s’ll sit
it out and nab ’im on another lap.’

Sasha’s cries were getting closer. Windows were going up in the house. He saw Rod lean out, heard him yell, ‘What the bloody hell is going on?’

‘A pig! A pig!’ cried Sasha, as though this alone would suffice as explanation.

The pig doubled back on Troy, caught him in the narrow corridor between two greenhouses, pigdozed him aside and headed back to the house. One circuit of the house and the Fat Man, true to his
word, decided to sit it out, pulled forth a large white handkerchief and sat on the edge of the verandah, mopping his brow. Two, and Troy joined him, leaving only Sasha to keep up the chase. She
and the pig orbited the house, she squawking and hooting, the pig threatening at any moment to lap her and pursue the pursuer.

‘Has she been barmy long, then?’ the Fat Man asked.

‘Don’t ask,’ Troy replied. ‘By the way, I have very bad news for you. There’s two of them.’

‘Eh?’

‘Twins,’ said Troy.

Troy pushed the Fat Man to one side as Randolph came hurtling across the verandah and shot between them.

‘Right,’ said the Fat Man, lumbering to his feet. ‘This looks like it.’

The pig disappeared southwards.

Down by the oaks, a couple of hundred yards from the house, Troy found Randolph snuffling among layers of dead oak leaves and digging vigorously with his front feet. Was this the pig spot?

Sasha came bounding up, well ahead of the Fat Man, speechless with giggles, capable only of hooting, ‘A pig! A pig!’ She drew a deep breath and at her third attempt managed a short,
full sentence.

‘Has the pig come to stay?’

‘No. He’s a breeding boar. To be honest, I don’t know why he’s come.’

A wheezing Fat Man came slowly down the slope. ‘I might’ve known,’ he said. ‘Haycorns.’

‘Wrong time of year,’ said Troy.

‘Nah, ’e’s diggin’ for last year’s, buried under all that leafmould.’

He gazed up at the spreading branches of the great oak tree.

‘So this is it, eh? This is where you wants yer piggy ’ouse, is it?’

The pig snuffled and dug and ignored him.

‘Is an oak tree the best spot?’ Troy asked.

‘It’ll do. Shady, doesn’t have to walk far, food just drops off the tree to him. On the other hand, if you doesn’t want a pig livin’ right under yer tree, you just
picks a bit o’ waste land, like them brambles over there, and you tosses in an ’andful of haycorns, and yer average porker’ll turn it over for you better than two horses and a
plough.’

So saying he took a few acorns from his jacket pocket and tossed them among the mass of nettle and blackberry. The pig gave up his dig and tore into the brambles with his trotters, slashing away
with a demonic ferocity.

‘And when ’e’s through, all you ’as ter do is put up a sty and bob’s yer uncle.’

‘That’s it?’ said Troy. ‘That’s how you find a pig spot? It all seems a bit arbitrary to me. You could just start off by throwing the acorns into the brambles and
not bother chasing the damn pig all around the garden.’

The Fat Man looked hurt, suddenly deadly serious. A sharp intake of breath, a shake of the head, as though Troy were defying ancient pig lore that might be almost sacred to him. He stared at the
ground a while and then looked up at Troy.

‘But then you’d miss all the fun,’ he said.

That had been three years ago. The Fat Man still regarded Sasha with great suspicion, and never referred to her by any other name but ‘the mad woman’. Masha—when he was certain
it was her—he was scrupulously polite to. But then she hardly ever went near the pig pens anyway. He acknowledged the fact of twins with a degree of doubt, much of it due to Troy’s
too-often repeated assertion that they were one dreadful woman with two bodies. Today he and Troy sat on the plank bench and followed the pig’s example in looking at the sun.

‘Are you goin’ to say anythin’? Or shall I drink up me tea and go home?’

‘Sorry,’ Troy said. ‘Things on my mind.’

‘What you should have on yer mind is muckin’ out. A mornin’ shovellin’ pigs’ doins should take yer mind off whatever it is.’

He was right. And in the afternoon, following lunch outdoors, they walked down through the village, cut a five-mile circle through the leafing woods and came back to the house from the north in
a bobbing sea of bluebells and an unearthly tangle of uncurling spleenwort. They chatted about nothing much; the Fat Man was a committed cockney and Troy doubted that he could tell Love-in-a-Mist
from Hole-in-the-Head, but he added to Troy’s knowledge of pig lore, and Troy thought the old man made most of it up and minded not one bit—and he told Troy what he thought of
Arsenal’s performance this season, a subject of which Troy knew no more than he did of cricket. And at the end of it Troy returned home feeling pleasantly sane, delightfully buffeted by the
inanities of a normal conversation. It was an art so difficult in his own household, so far were the Troys from normal. Their father’s legacy; his character, split up so oddly among them, and
none of them easy, normal people. Rod, inheritor of the old man’s political earnestness, his journalistic nose. The Sisters, heirs to the mercurial, whimsical, self-indulgent side of his
nature—a man who could crack jokes in five languages, who could be reduced to hysterics often by the slightest thing—oddly crossed with their mother’s stern humourlessness,
evident on the days when nothing would make them see the joke. And Troy—what had he inherited? Troy knew full well. The tendency to secrecy. The habit of playing his cards close to his chest.
Put together with the nosiness of a journalist, it was what made him a copper, but it was also the source of the very problem from which pig and pigman had so pleasurably distracted him.

Rod, too, seemed to have recovered his form. He entertained them all over dinner with his account of events in Westminster—a wicked caricature of Macmillan announcing a thing he called a
Premium Bond, a lottery by any other name. The very way Rod said ‘orf’ reduced the twins to giggling heaps. They cackled like demented hags when he screwed up his face and imparted to
his eyes the sad slant of an old bloodhound.

Troy looked at the one in-law present—Lucinda, Lady Troy. Laughing quietly, a delightful, shy smile, the bright blue eyes in the pale face. Neither Hugh nor Lawrence, Masha’s
husband, had come for the weekend. So often these days Lucinda was the only outsider present. If nothing else it ensured that they spoke English. Russian evenings bored Troy with the sense of their
exclusivity, the retreat into a private language. Rod had married Lucinda in 1936, the year of the three kings. She was about the same age as the girls. Troy thought he had a good relationship with
her—she had none of the girls’ tendency to bully, and none of that preordained idea that he was inevitably ‘younger’ and hence disqualified from judgement for the rest of
his life. He had often envied Rod the choice, the step towards normality he had made. The choice of an indisputably English woman.

Suddenly, as they were finishing the last course, Sasha was on her feet announcing she must dash, trying to be home before the pumpkin got her. And the meal, and with it the evening, dissolved
around her. Rod had papers he must read before bedtime, Masha’s favourite programme was on the goggle-box in the yellow room. There was half a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé ’52 left in
the ice bucket.

‘Shall we finish it?’ he said to Lucinda.

‘I’d love to, Freddie,’ said the indisputably English woman, ‘but I’m worn out. I didn’t know Sasha was going to cut and run, but now that she has I’d
rather like an early night.’ She yawned. ‘I seem to have spent so many nights sitting up listening to Rod get his speech right, or waiting up for him to come in after a division.
Sorry.’

Troy took the bottle out of the bucket, grabbed his coat from the hall stand and walked through his father’s old study to the south verandah. It was still not yet May. The day had lost its
warmth. He slipped on the coat, sat on a creaking wicker chair and finished the bottle in natural silence—the mechanical clatter of a pheasant, the distant bark of a dog-fox, the wind,
gently, in the willows. The willows divided the garden from the river and were overhanging badly. He had put off pollarding them last year, and as they vanished from sight into the encroaching
night, he knew he could not put it off again. He loved the sweeping shape of wild willow—a pollarded willow was always a squat thing, with too regular an array of branches, but if left they
would split down the middle and die.

In the deepening gloom a pair of bats began to criss-cross the lawn at first-floor height, cutting the night into invisible squares, in search of prey Troy could not even see. As one cut in from
the north, the second would come in from the west, missing each other with unerring accuracy, with scarcely a flutter of the skinny wing, weaving the warp and weft of their nightly pattern.

He sat until the darkness was complete and his hands turned numb with cold. Looking back, he would come to think of it as the last peace he would ever know. In the morning the warp and weft of
one life began to tear themselves apart and thread themselves into the matted conspiracy of another.

He was taking coffee alone in his father’s study, scanning the Sunday papers for any admissions by Her Majesty’s Government that bore out what Rod had told him. He
sat in his father’s chair, facing the window. For a while after the old man had died he had sat on the other side of the partner’s desk, facing into the room—his father’s
pen and blotter exactly as he had left them—giving in to some fearful sense that it was a form of sacrilege to occupy his place. Then, one day, he had thought, sod it, the view’s
better, moved around to the other side, and gave the matter no more thought. Today, for no reason that was immediately apparent, Masha appeared, perched on the edge of the desk, put her feet on his
father’s chair, helped herself from the cafetière and smiled her sweethag’s smile.

Troy said nothing. They sipped coffee in silence. He waited to see if the visit had any purpose.