The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [123]
"Ah, you won't know yet, Gerald," said a helpful local. It was an extension perhaps of the bogus camaraderie of election time, the blind forging of friendships, that constituents felt free to call their MP by his Christian name, and in Gerald's face a momentary coldness was covered by a kind of bashfulness, bogus or not, at being a public property, the people's friend.
"Mr Trevor," murmured Penny at his elbow. "Septic tank."
"Hullo, Trevor," said Gerald, which made him sound like the gardener.
"Five o'clock," Mr Trevor said. "That's when we'll know: one that's thrown the farthest wins the pig." And he pointed to a small pen, previously hidden by the crowd, in which a Gloucester Old Spot was nosing through a pile of cabbage stalks.
"Goodness . . ." said Gerald, laughing uneasily, as if he'd been shown a python in a tank.
"Breakfast, dinner and tea for a month!" said Mr Trevor.
"Yes, indeed . . . Though we don't actually eat pork," Gerald said, and he was turning to move on when he saw the man in gold-rimmed glasses approaching the oche and weighing the gumboot knowingly in his hand.
"Ah, Cecil'll show you a thing or two!" shouted out the woman in curlers, who maybe wasn't Gerald's friend after all—you never knew with these people. Cecil was slight, but wiry and determined, and everything he did he did with a thin smile. Gerald waited to see what happened, and Nick and Penny closed in and tried to talk to him about something else. "I bet he knows some trick," said Gerald, "what . . . ?"
Cecil's trick was to take a short run-up, and then with a complete revolution of the arm to send the welly flying as if to a waiting batsman—it was a dropper, the boot descending steeply to a spot a yard beyond Gerald's final mark; the boy ran out and pressed in a red golf tee. Then Cecil had another trick, which was to throw it underarm, lofting it not too high, and bringing it down short of the first shot, but still beyond the blue tee. He had a grasp of the weight and direction of the thing, the trajectory, no mid-air wavering or tumbling. He refined and varied these methods, and with his last go went a good three yards over his own record. Then, wiping his hands, his smile twitchily controlled, he walked over and stood not next to but near Gerald. "Ah, shame, but there you are," said Mr Trevor. "Still, if you've no use for the animal —"
Gerald said breezily, "Oh, damn the animal," and looked from Penny to Nick, and then to the bristlingly insouciant figure of Cecil. He began to remove his jacket, with tiny quick head-shakings, his colour rising, making a joke of his own temperament, frowning and smirking at once. "I feel that can't be allowed to pass without a firm rejoinder," he said, in his humorous but meaningful debating tone. There were cheers, and also a few whistles, as his jacket came off and blue braces, dark sweat-blooms, were revealed: a sense, depending on how you looked at it, that Gerald was being a terrific sport or that he was making a fool of himself, as Cecil had said. Penny, always vigilant, took his jacket with an eyebrow-flicker of caution, but enough of a smile to be publicly supportive. Then she had to search in her bag for another pound coin.
"So you've won a pig!" Nick's