“I wouldn’t say no to a jar, Mrs. T,” Keith replied, at his most affably Australian.
Sylvie seemed to have assembled a cast list of characters for a banal farce. It was the kind of bourgeois society that she had little time for usually and Teddy couldn’t work out why she had chosen to broaden her social circle with the great and the good of the parish. It was only when she started making a performance out of pointing out his medal ribbons and boasting about his “brave deeds”—even though he had told her virtually nothing about his “deeds,” brave or otherwise—that he began to suspect that she was showing him off to this collection of worthies. He found he had absolutely nothing to say when they urged him to recount some of his “feats of derring-do” and it was left to Keith to entertain them with humorous accounts of their exploits, so that the war began to sound like a series of madcap escapades, rather like one of Augustus’s adventures.
“But still,” the bachelor said, in search of something more barbaric, “it’s not all fun and games. You’ve certainly been bombing the daylights out of Jerry.”
“Yes, well done,” the local councillor said pompously. “A good show. Hamburg has been a great success for the RAF, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, well done, lads,” the bishop said, making a slight toasting gesture with his sherry glass. “Now let’s get the rest of them.”
All of them, Teddy wondered?
I should warn you,” Ursula had written to Teddy, “that the pig has been killed.” Teddy had met Sylvie’s pig on several occasions since its arrival as a rotund pink piglet. He had rather admired the pig. It had no pretensions to grandeur, snuffling and truffling around in its knocked-together pen, grateful for any scraps that came its way. And now, apparently, the poor creature was being packaged up as bacon and sausages and ham and all the other products that a pig was destined to be in its afterward. To be hawked around for money by spivvy Sylvie, presumably.
They were to eat roast leg of pork with vegetables from the garden and apple sauce bottled from last autumn’s apples, and a Queen of Puddings provided mostly by the overworked chickens. Teddy couldn’t help but think of the pig when it was alive, still in possession of four sturdy legs.
“Everything from Fox Corner,” Sylvie said proudly, “from the pig on the table to the jam and eggs in the pudding.” Perhaps she was advertising her household economy to the bachelor. Or the bishop. Teddy couldn’t imagine his mother remarrying. She had settled into a rather stout, self-satisfied middle age and enjoyed having her own way.
“That’s a smell to raise a man’s spirits,” the bishop said, raising his refined episcopal nose to sniff the roasting pig.
“You’re very ingenious to be so self-sufficient, my dear,” the solicitor said to Sylvie, draining his sherry from the tiny glass and looking round hopefully for a decanter.
“There should be medals for women on the home front,” the councillor’s wife grumbled, “for our ingenuity, if not for everything we have to suffer,” a remark that provoked more grousing from the elderly widow. (“Suffering! Tell me about it.”)
Teddy felt himself growing hot and restless. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, putting his glass of beer down. “All right, mate?” Keith said as he pushed past him. “Just need a bit of air,” Teddy said.
“Off to have a smoke,” he heard Keith say, making an excuse for him.
Teddy whistled for the dog, which he found outside, intent on studying the chickens safely interned behind the wire in their run. Lucky, obedient to the last, followed Teddy into the lane.
The dog slipped beneath the gate into the dairy herd’s field and then stopped in bewilderment at the sight of the cows. “Cows,” Teddy said. “They won’t hurt you,” he added, but the dog began barking wildly. It was both nervous and defiant, a mixture that was unsettling to the normally easy-going cows, and Teddy retrieved the dog before it could cause any trouble.