grumpy about, Dora?’ and ‘Feeling your age, are you, Poll?’ His gilts, the breeding sows, all had names. The pigs he was growing for the table he did not name, but called them all Piglet. When he chose a new gilt, it was his practice to give her a name starting with the same letter of the alphabet as her mother; it made it easy to trace the breeding line.
He came to Martha in the last sty. She was in pig, would deliver in four days’ time. He filled her trough with grain and her sink with water. She lifted herself from her straw bed and waddled heavily towards the trough at the gate, where she did not immediately eat or drink, but rested her chin on the horizontal bar of the fence and scratched. Armstrong rubbed the top of her head between the ears and she snorted contentedly.
‘Alice,’ he said thoughtfully. The letter had not left his mind the entire time. ‘What do you make of it, Martha?’
The sow looked at him with eyes full of thought.
‘I don’t know what to think, myself,’ he admitted. ‘A first grandchild – is that it? And Robin … What is going on with Robin?’ He sighed heavily.
Martha pondered his boots in the mud for a moment, and when she gazed back up at him it was with a rather pointed look.
He nodded. ‘Quite right. Maud would know. But Maud’s not here, is she?’
Martha’s mother, Maud, had been the best sow he had ever known. She had produced numerous litters of many piglets, never lost one by accident or neglect, but more than that, she had listened to him as no other sow had ever listened. Patient and gentle, she had let him speak his mind; when he shared his joys about the children her eyes lit up with pleasure, and when he told her of his worries – Robin, it was nearly always Robin – her eyes were full of wisdom and sympathy, and he never came away without feeling somehow better about things. Her quiet and kindly listening had made it possible to speak his thoughts aloud, and sometimes it was only when he spoke his thoughts that he knew he had them. It was surprising how a man’s mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidante appeared, and Maud had been that confidante. Without her, he might never have known certain things about himself, about his son. On this spot, some years ago, he had shared the disagreement between himself and his wife about Robin and the theft from the bureau. As he retold the sorry tale to Maud, he saw it anew and noticed what he had registered but not paid attention to at the time. I saw a man, Robin had said. I saw his boot disappearing out of the window. It was instinctive in Armstrong to see the best in people, and his faith in the boy was spontaneous. But then, prompted by Maud’s quizzical gaze, he’d remembered the watchful wait that followed the boy’s story, known then in his heart what it meant: that Robin was watching to see whether he’d got away with it. It hurt Armstrong to accept it, but on this occasion Bess was right.
When they had married, Robin was already on the way, put into her womb by another man. Robert had chosen to put this fact aside. This was not difficult, for he loved the boy with all his heart. He had determined to build a family with Bess, not fragmented and splintered, but whole and entire, and he would permit no member of it to be left on the outside. There was love enough for all. Love would hold them together. But when he realized the thief who had left the bureau splintered and its contents ransacked was his own Robin, he wept. Maud had eyed him quizzically. What now? And he had found the answer. Loving the boy even more would put things right. From that day on he had defended Robin even more vigorously than before.
Maud had looked at him again. Oh, really? she’d seemed to say.
The thought of Maud brought tears suddenly to his eyes. One of them fell on to Martha’s thick neck, clung momentarily to the ginger hair that sprouted from it, then rolled into the mud.
Armstrong brought his cuff to his face and wiped the wetness away. ‘This is foolishness,’ he chided himself.
Martha looked steadily at him from between her ginger lashes.