Ronald walked anxiously down Montague Place towards Russell Square. Taking care to avoid the cracks between the paving slabs, he approached the pedestrian crossing from the usual side but stopped short of the curb. He looked down at the bright yellow rectangle, incongruously embedded in the gray of the sidewalk like a giant piece of discarded Lego. Ronald did not care to stand on the yellow slab. He understood its purpose. He also appreciated how it might be useful if you were blind, or visually impaired, as people might say these days. But Ronald disliked the feel of the nobbles of its surface, even through the thick leather of his soles. So instead he waited for the lights to change and, when they did, took a lunging step over the fluorescent shape and onto the road, causing a cyclist to swerve and an unpleasant-looking young girl to snigger.

Passing the British Library on his right, he took the long way through the pleasant gardens that faced the Imperial Hotel and then a shortcut onto Cosmo Place before turning right, this time down a one-way street whose sidewalk was broader and littered with red leaves of the yew trees that had been battered by the first autumn storm.

Ronald headed straight for the small, canopied entry of the restaurant and pushed open the door. The noise of the street gave way to the low murmur of contented diners, punctuated by the intermittent clink of silverware on china. The atmosphere felt warm and rich to Ronald after the thinned-out air of the street.

“Ah, Monsieur Miller. How nice to see you again. It’s been a long time, non? Maybe one week, even longer perhaps?” The younger man took Ronald’s coat and hat. “Such a long time. We were getting worried,” the waiter said, with playful concern. “We thought maybe you had been unfaithful to us.”

Ronald hoped by smiling he could cut the conversation short. “Is my table available?” he grimaced uncomfortably, not sure what else to say.

“Of course, of course, Monsieur Miller,” said an older man in a black tuxedo hurrying up behind them and dismissing the young waiter with a click of his fingers. He guided Ronald gently away by the arm. “Ignore my young friend ‘ere with his talk of nonsense. He ‘as the brains of a pigeon and the vocabulary of a parrot, but that does not stop him from chattering,” the man said, demonstrating the point by shaping his thumb and fingers into a beak which rapidly opened and closed in mute caricature. “So come right this way. If you please, take your place and I will bring you one glass of Kir and one bowl of soup. Oh, and the menu,” he paused, turning to smile at Ronald, “just in case you want to try something new.”

Ronald followed in the not insubstantial wake of Marcel, the head waiter at the Fleur de Lis, as he wove like an ice skater between chairback and chairback to a corner table at the rear, beside the fireplace.

Marcel motioned to Ronald to sit and then eased the chair gently towards the table as he did so. Within minutes, Ronald had the first elements of his early evening meal at hand.

Ronald let his eyelids drop, as if in silent prayer, and savoured the moment. The best of anything, he thought, is just before you begin. Opening his eyes once more, he looked down at his plate. A shallow, wide, white fine china bowl which had been generously filled with Ronald’s favorite soup, oxtail, and placed by Marcel onto the cushioned, virgin white tablecloth that spread out before him.

Ronald stared, not at the bowl, nor at the soup, not even at the silver spoon and white damask napkin that lay unused beside him.

No, Ronald’s attention was drawn instead to the small pink pig that stood half submerged in the brown oxtail pool looking, for all the world, it seemed to Ronald, like a hippopotamus in a mudbath.

The little pig, roughly the size of a dinner roll and the color of a brown chicken egg, shifted slightly from side to side, adjusting its weight from left to right before dipping its hindquarters into the soup with an almost imperceptible quiver of its rump. Wallowing, observed Ronald, you, my little pink friend, are most definitely wallowing.

A small wave of oxtail soup lapped over the shallow lip of the bowl and splashed onto the tablecloth.

Ronald looked up at his fellow diners to see if they had noticed the middle-aged man in the tweed jacket with the Financial Times folded neatly by his side and the half moon glasses and the pig in his soup. But there had been no pause in conversation, no sharp intakes of breath. For now, at least, Ronald seemed to be the pig’s only observer.

Closing his eyes and reminding himself that this had happened before with the giraffe in his cornflakes, Ronald breathed deeply in through his nose and out through his mouth, as his doctor had instructed, before returning his gaze to the plate. The pig had, in the meantime, turned around in the bowl to face Ronald.

“You’re not going to eat me, are you?” said the pig, his white eyes twinkling nervously out of his oxtail darkened face. “You shouldn’t, you know. That would be cruel.” Knowing better than to enter into conversation with talking pigs, or indeed any other animals, Ronald paused to consider his options. He could spoon the pig out of the bowl like an unwanted piece of gristle and leave him on the napkin to dry off. But Ronald worried about the tramlines of little trotter marks that an escaping pig might leave across the white cloth. Not to mention the long drop to the floor. He thought of native American Indians driving buffalo over cliffs. He decided to eat around the pig instead.

By making a decision not to fight the appearance of the pig in his soup, Ronald felt that he had regained an element of control over his situation. With the measured movements of one preparing for surgery, he unrolled the napkin and spread it evenly over his lap, conscious that jerky movements might draw attention to his situation or, worse still, alarm the pig into flight. He picked up his soup spoon and, resisting the temptation to say excuse me, gently lowered it to the soup’s surface to let the warm dark broth flow into the silver depression.

The pig shivered. “I’m actually a little chilly,” he said, drumming his trotters gently on the base of the bowl in an effort to keep warm. Ronald, in the way that he had been taught as a child, drew the spoon away from him in an even sweep, curving slightly to avoid the pig’s flank.

“I said, I’m actually a little…”

“Wheesht! I heard you,” shushed Ronald, his eyes darting around the room. “Pipe down. Someone will hear you.”

“I don’t mind that,” said the pig, trying to be helpful.

“Well, I do. You’ll make me look bad.”

“Well, do you think you could, if it’s not too much trouble, I mean, would it be too much to ask, for you, perhaps, to spoon a little soup over my back? Just to warm me up. While we wait?”

Ronald looked down at the plaintive eyes of the little pig, his little pink pig all alone in a world of beefy soup, and felt an unexpected rush of compassion for the chilly little porker. Scooping up a generous ladle of soup, he poured a little over the pig’s back. The pig let out a squeal of such unbridled joy that Ronald unexpectedly felt his heart swell and his eyes grow moist. Slowly Ronald let the remaining contents of his spoon wash over the pig’s head, then his shoulders and flow all the way down his back to his curly tail. Ronald was certain he saw the little tail wag with glee.

“Remarkable. Quite remarkable,” thought Ronald, before realising he had said the words out loud.

“Eez good, huh?” he heard the young waiter say at his side.

“I’m sorry, I…what is?” Ronald mumbled.

“Ze soup, of course. It’s special. Today there is something special in the soup. A little something that Chef has added that he won’t tell me.”

The two men continued to look at each other expectantly as the uncomfortable silence grew longer. Ronald was not sure why the waiter had not yet left.

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About the secret ingredient, of course. You ‘ave this soup every time you come. You are a soup expert. You would know what he has changed. Maybe he added some sherry?”

Ronald looked at the bowl. The pig, of course, being both modest and clever, had submerged itself almost completely leaving only a tip of snout as a snorkel sticking out of the surface, looking to the untrained eye like a simple crouton. Albeit a crouton that was steering itself in small figures of eight around the plate. Ronald was relieved at the pig’s reserve. Somehow, being discovered with a whole pig in a bowl of soup that one had not sent back to the kitchen suddenly struck Ronald as a reason to doubt a person’s good taste, if not his sanity.

“Maybe Chef added bacon?” the waiter suggested.

Ronald was sure he heard an agitated grunt bubble up from the surface of the soup.

“Well, that’s possible,” Ronald conceded. Another snort. “I really am no expert,” Ronald continued, “but I suspect that the thing that is special about a secret ingredient is that you don’t know what it is. I have a feeling that is exactly what Chef intended. If we knew what it was, it might not taste as good.”

The waiter looked at Ronald and then at the soup for just long enough to make Ronald concerned that he had seen a crouton circumnavigate the bowl. Then he shrugged, filled Ronald’s water glass, and moved on to the next table.

When Ronald turned his attention back to the bowl, the pig had disappeared from view completely. He gently dipped the edge of his spoon into the soup to make certain, but after a number of increasingly deliberate taps of silver spoon against porcelain plate, Ronald resigned himself to the reality of the situation. The pig had gone. Ronald knew the pig would return and so also knew that he shouldn’t feel terribly sad. Like old friends, they would pick up again where they had left off when he next saw the pig, maybe snuggled in a bowl of pasta or cushioned by a bed of lettuce. But for now he was on his own.

Ronald picked up the Financial Times, opened up the pink broadsheet pages at the usual place, and started reading. Suddenly he had an idea and flicked through to the back of the paper, past the business updates to the stock market listings. His eyes tracked down the list from currencies to capital markets and stopped at commodities. A small smile crossed his lips. Good, he thought, pork bellies are up.