Three
“Sorry I can’t offer you tea or biccies, it’s all a tad spartan around here. But do take a pew anywhere you can find one,” said Jeremy, gesturing vaguely at the pewless barn. “Or possibly a hay bale. Jolly comfortable things, hay bales.”
Sir Magnus Montague and Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von Strumpf swapped meaningful glances while Jeremy pulled on the suit trousers he’d been wearing on and off for the last two weeks, then tucked Sophie’s diaphanous taupe nightie into their waistband before cinching the ensemble with a Gucci belt. An unusual outfit, even Jeremy had to concede, but it would have to do.
Sir Magnus and Frau Professor Doktor Gisela exchanged even more meaningful glances, but, casting around for something authoritative to sit on and finding nothing suitable, went for the hay bales. Which were neither authoritative nor comfortable, but it was either that or standing. And, in the face of a loony needing life-changing therapy, standing/looming would have been threatening and counterproductive, soo…
“And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Sir Magnus, on this fine morning?” asked Jeremy. “Although I could hazard a guess.”
“Oink,” agreed Pete, who’d lumbered over to check out these unexpected and unwelcome visitors. Snuffling at their trouser cuffs—Frau Professor Doktor Gisela was also wearing trousers, black shiny ones—and showing no evidence he approved of either of them. This he evinced by farting fulsomely, then sitting on Frau Professor Doktor Gisela’s right, also black-shiny, shoe causing her to squirm, blink, blanch, and only just manage to prevent herself from screaming. But how could Pete have known that back in Swäbisch Gmünd as an adolescent, Gisela had developed a horror of the pigs on her father’s farm and had herself needed long-term therapy to cope with it, hence her first introduction to psychiatric treatments, “face your fears” and all that. Which was now her professional, professorial mantra along with heavy doses of Meister Freud and anxiolytics, if push came to shove.
“Could you possibly persuade the pig to lever his bottom off the lady’s shoe, Jezza?” Sir Magnus asked as politely as he was able.
“Pete?”
“You have a name for him?”
“Yes,” said Jeremy, beginning to enjoy himself. “‘Pete.’ Also, who is the woman on whose shoe Pete is sitting? I don’t believe we have been introduced. Does she have a name too?”
Sir Magnus took to grinding his molars. This wasn’t going anything like the way he’d planned it. By now, Frau Professor Doktor Gisela’s fabulous Freudianism and prescription mind changers should already have been at the very least mentioned as a means of healing Jeremy’s clearly deranged mind. Persuading him to be normal and worship money again. Persuading him to get back to work and make shedloads of it for the bank—and his family, of course. It wasn’t as if Harley Street Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von fucking Strumpf had come cheap either. Four thousand big ones he’d had to shell out just for her to agree to turn up. And all that now jeopardised by her evident hang-up over some pig called Pete farting, then sitting on her foot. In his long and distinguished career, Sir Magnus had faced all manner of crises—political, financial, fiduciary, all sorts. But this one took the biscuit.
“Yes, of course she does,” he said, peering critically at von Strumpf who was attempting to overcome her Schweineangst by kicking Pete in the bottom with her free black-shiny shoe—the left one—which Pete wasn’t appreciating.
“Oink, oink!!” he said, huffily. Shifting his prodigious weight such that his bottom immobilised both Gisela’s feet, which caused her to shriek: “Scheisse. Ach, meine liebe Götter and collapse face forward over Pete’s pink, bulbous, and prickly back.
Pete took that as the sign of the sorts of friendship and acquiescence which would allow him to forgive the lady, grunt, turn his head, and nuzzle her ash-blonde wig, thereby causing it to fall off and reveal a grizzled-going-on-white crew cut. Still Pete enjoyed chewing on the hairpiece. Made a nice change from hay and corn meal.
Jeremy chuckled. “And what is it… her name?” he asked Sir Magnus, whose face had turned puce, even more puce than normal. Sir Magnus’s face was always puce-ish, given his proclivity for regular nips of five-star Courvoisier between high-protein luncheons and dinners mainly featuring boeuf bourguignon with frites and peas and two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to go with them. But this was a new and rare kind of puce bordering on vermilion.
“Frau Professor Doctor Gisela von Strumpf,” he spluttered.
“Long name. And she is here why?”
“To help you out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself, you dumb prick.”
Jeremy frowned.
“‘Prick’?”
“Yes, ‘prick.’ Off you potter to live in a pigsty while your poor wife and parents are left bereft of cash? While the bank’s funds are dwindling in your absence. For God’s sake, man, get a grip of yourself.”
“And you brought along this Frau Professor Doktor person to help me out with that?” said Jeremy, gripping himself in the crotch while waggling a pinkie.
“Yes.”
“And she is a Frau Professor Doktor of what?”
“Psychiatry. You’ve gone bonkers, so you need a shrink, old chap. Simple.”
“Simple, pimple. Tell you what, why don’t you bugger off and take the lady with you? Looks to me like she needs a whole lot more help than I do,” said Jeremy, raising both eyebrows in the direction of von Strumpf, who looked to be suffocating under the pressure of Pete’s attentions, seeing as he was clearly beginning to think of her as his new best friend.
“Grrrurg, bleeerg, Donner und Blitzen,” she said, having taken to weeping and gurgling once Pete began chewing at her grizzled crew cut after he’d swallowed her wig. But however hard she swatted at his muzzle, it made no difference, seeing as Pete reckoned she liked him and this was some form of foreplay. Watching on, Sir Magnus had little option but to agree with Jeremy on the buggering-off issue.
“Just call your pig off,” he said.
So Jeremy did. “Pete. Enough,” he commanded.
And, surprisingly, Pete obeyed. Stopped trying to eat Frau Professor Doktor Gisela von Strumpf’s hair, climbed off her shiny shoes, and shambled back off to his hay corner.
“Okay. Thanks,” said Sir Magnus, taking the distraught Freudian by a limp hand and dragging her to the barn’s door.
“But I’ll be back,” he shouted over his shoulder as he and von Strumpf made their inglorious exit. “With reinforcements.”
“Bring it on,” Jeremy called back.
“Nice one, Pete,” he then told Pete, but sapped by more human intercourse than a pig could be expected to tolerate on an otherwise perfectly normal day, Pete was already asleep.
“Mmm,” Jeremy muttered to himself, pacing up and down the barn once Sir Magnus and the pig-challenged female had bowed out. “Gonna have to make a plan here.”
His feisty performance with Pete’s helpful intervention was all well and good at seeing off Sir Magnus and the peculiar Frau Doktor von Strumpet on this their first foray onto his territory, but would Jeremy be able to repeat the act? What if the next time Sir Magnus did come with reinforcements? Of shrinks all pre-tested and guaranteed porcine-phobia-free? Jeremy’s playground bravado was one thing, but there was no good pretending it could frighten off a whole phalanx of Freudians armed to the teeth with not only gloomy ideas about sex and death but probably also hypodermics stuffed with benzodiazepine cocktails sufficient to fell a rabid rhino. There was little either Jeremy or Pete would be able to do to fend off that kind of attack, the very kind “Monty”—as Sir Magnus liked to be called whenever prating about his supposed role in government financial support for the Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan—which could include not only heavily armed mind benders but also heavily armed soldiers.