Driving home from Mort's, I stopped in the town to collect a radio I'd been having repaired, and again to fill up with petrol, and again at Bananas' pub to pick up some beer.
Bananas was in the kitchen prodding some marinating veal. Opening time still lay an hour ahead. Everything in the place was gleaming and fresh and the plants grew damply in their pots.
'There was a fellow looking for you,' Bananas said.
'What sort of fellow?'
'Big man. Didn't know him. I told him where your cottage was.'
He scowled at Betty, who was obliviously peeling grapes. 'I told him you were out.'
'Did he say what he wanted?'
'Nope.'
He shed an apron and took his bulk into the bar. 'Too early for you?' he said, easing behind the counter.
'Sort of.'
He nodded and methodically assembled his usual breakfast; a third of a tumbler of brandy topped up with two scoops of vanilla-walnut ice cream.
'Cassie went off to work,' he said, reaching for a spoon.
'You don't miss much.'
He shrugged. 'You can see that yellow car a mile off, and I was out front cleaning the windows.' He stirred the ice cream into the brandy and with gourmand enjoyment shovelled the first instalment into his mouth. 'That's better,' he said.
'It's no wonder you're fat.'
He merely nodded. He didn't care. He told me once that his size made his fat customers feel better and spend more, and that his fat customers in search of a miracle outnumbered the thin.
He was a natural eccentric, himself seeing nothing unusual in anything he did. In various late-night sessions, he'd unbuttoned a little of his inner self, and under the surface geniality I'd had glimpses of a deep pessimism, a moroseness which looked with despair at the inability of the human race to live harmoniously on the beautiful earth. He had no politics, no god, no urge to agitate. People, he said, were known to starve on rich fertile tropical earth; people stole their neighbours' lands; people murdered people from racial hate; people tortured and murdered in the name of freedom. It sickened him, he said. It had been going on from pre-history, and it would go on until the vindictive ape was wiped out.
'But you yourself seem happy enough,' I'd once said.
He looked at me darkly. 'You're a bird. Always on the wing. You'd be a sparrowhawk if you hadn't such long legs.'
'And you?'
'The only option is suicide,' he said. 'But right now it's not necessary.' He'd deftly poured himself another brandy, and lifted the glass in a sort of salute. 'Here's to civilisation, damn it.'
His real fore-names, written over the pub doorway, were John James, but his nickname was a pudding. 'Bananas Frisby', a hot fluffy confection of eggs, rum, bananas and orange, was an item nearly always on his menu, and 'Bananas' he himself had become. It suited his outer persona well, but his inner, not at all.
'You know what?' he said.
'What?'
'I'm growing a beard.'
I looked at the faint shadow on the dark jaw. 'It needs compost,' I said.
'Very funny. The days of the big fat slob are over. What you see is the start of the big fat distinguished innkeeper.' He took a large spoonful of ice cream and drank some of the liquid as a chaser, wiping the resulting white moustache off on the back of his hand.
He wore his usual working clothes: open-necked shirt, creaseless grey flannels, old tennis shoes. Thinning dark hair scattered his scalp haphazardly, with one straight lock falling over an ear, and as Frisby in the evenings wasn't all that different from Frisby in the mornings I couldn't see a beard transforming the image. Particularly not, I thought interestedly, while it grew.
'Can you spare a tomato or two?' I said. Those Italian ones?'
'For your lunch?'
'Yeah.'
'Cassie doesn't feed you.'
'It's not her job.'
He shook his head over the waywardness of our domestic arrangements, but if he had had a wife I wondered which one of them would have cooked. I paid for the beer and the tomatoes, promised to bring Cassie to admire the whiskers, and drove home.
Life for me was good, as I'd told Cassie. Life at that moment was a long way from Bananas' world of horrors.
I parked in front of the cottage and walked up the path juggling radio, beer and tomatoes in one hand and fishing for keys with the other.
One doesn't expect people to leap out of nowhere waving baseball bats. I had merely a swift glimpse of him, turning my head towards the noise of his approach, seeing the solid figure, the savagery, the raised arm. I hadn't even the time to think incredulously that he was going to hit me before he did it.
The crashing blow on my moving head sent me dazed and headlong, shedding radio, beer cans, tomatoes on the way. I fell half on the path and half on a bed of pansies and lay in a pulsating semi-consciousness in which I could smell the earth but couldn't think.
Rough fingers twined themselves into my hair and pulled my head up from its face-down position. As if from a great distance away from my closed eyes a harsh deep voice spoke nonsensical words.
'You're not-' he said. 'Fuck it.'
He dropped my head suddenly and the second small knock finished the job. I wasn't aware of it. In my conscious mind, things simply stopped happening.
The next thing that impinged was that someone was trying to lift me up, and that I was trying to stop him.
'All right, lie there,' said a voice. 'If that's how you feel.'
How I felt was like a shapeless form spinning in a lot of outer space. He tried again to pick me up and things inside the skull suddenly shook back into order.
'Bananas,' I said weakly, recognising him.
'Who else? What happened?'
I tried to stand up and staggered a bit, trampling a few more long-suffering pansies.
'Here,' Bananas said, catching me by the arm, 'come into the house.' He semi-supported me, and found the door was locked.
'Keys,' I mumbled.
'Where are they?'
I waved a vague arm, and he let go of me to look for them. I leant against the doorpost and throbbed. Bananas found the keys and came towards me and said in anxiety. 'You're covered in blood.'
I looked down at my red-stained shirt. Fingered the cloth. 'That blood's got pips in.' I said.
Bananas peered at my chest. 'Your lunch.' He sounded relieved. 'Come on.'
We went into the cottage where I collapsed into a chair and began to sympathise with migraine sufferers. Bananas searched in random cupboards and asked plaintively for the brandy.
'Can't you wait until you get home?' I said without criticism.
'It's for you.'
'None left.'
He didn't press it. He may have remembered that it had been he, a week ago, who'd emptied the bottle.
'Can you make tea?' I said.
He said resignedly, 'I suppose so,' and did.
While I drank the resulting nectar, he told me that he'd seen a car driving away from the direction of the cottage at about eighty miles an hour down the country road. It was the car, he said, of the man who'd asked for me earlier. He had been at first puzzled and then disquieted, and had finally decided to amble down to see if
