“The very picture of health.”
“Not a little puffy?” Neville fingered his middle regions.
“Not at all.”
“No hint of stoutness there? You can be frank with me, I have no fear of criticism.”
Omally shook his head and looked towards Jim. “You look fine,” said Pooley. “Are you feeling a bit poorly, then?”
“No, no.” Neville shook his head with vigour. “It’s just that, well…” he considered the two drinkers who surveyed him with dubious expressions. “Oh, nothing at all. I look all right you think? No higher, say, than usual?” Two heads swung to and fro upon their respective necks. “Best to forget it then, a small matter, do not let it spoil your ale.”
“Have no fear of that,” said John Omally.
The Swan’s door opened to admit the entry of an elderly gentleman and his dog. “Morning, John, Jim,” said Old Pete, sidling up to the bar. “Large dark rum please, Neville.” Neville took himself off to the optic.
“Morning, Pete,” said Pooley, “good day, Chips.” The ancient’s furry companion woofed non-committally. “Are you fit?”
“As well as can be expected. And how goes the sport for you? That Big One still lurking up beyond your frayed cuff?”
Pooley made a “so-so” gesture. “Inches, but…”
Old Pete accepted his drink from Neville and held up the glass to evaluate the exact volume of his measure before grudgingly pushing the correct change across the bar top. “So,” he continued, addressing himself to Omally, “and how fare the crops?”
“Blooming,” said Omally. “I expect a bumper harvest this year. Come the Festival. I expect several firsts and as many seconds in the Show.”
“King Teddies again then, is it?” Revered as the personification of all agricultural knowledge within a radius of an ’nth number of miles, Old Pete had little truck with potato growers.
“Nature’s finest food,” said John. “Was it not the spud which sustained the Joyces, the Wildes, the Behans and the Traynors? Show me a great man and I will show you a spud to his rear.”
“I have little regard for footballers,” said Old Pete. “If you were any kind of a farmer you would diversify your crops a little. I myself have fostered no fewer than five new varieties of sprout.”
Omally crossed himself and made a disgusted face. “Don’t even speak the word,” said he. “I cannot be having with that most despicable of all vegetables.”
“The sprout is your man,” intoned the old one. “Full of iron. A man could live alone upon a desert island all his life if he had nothing more than a few sprout seeds and bit of common sense.”
“A pox on all sprouts,” said John, crouching low over his pint. “May the black fly take the lot of them.”
Pooley was consulting his racing paper. Possibly there was a horse running whose name was an anagram of “sprout”. Such factors were not to be taken lightly when one was seeking that all elusive cosmic connection. The effort was quite considerable and very shortly Jim, like Dickens’s now legendary fat boy, was once more asleep. Neville made to take up the half-finished glass for the washer. With a sudden transformation from Dickens to Edgar Alien Poe, the sleeper awoke. “Not done here,” said Jim. “It’s Omally’s round.” Omally got them in.
“Let us speak no more of horticulture,” said John to Old Pete. “Your knowledge of the subject is legend hereabouts and I am not up to matching wits with you. Tell me something, do you sleep well of a night?”
“The sleep of the just, nothing else.”
“Then you must indeed have a cosy nest to take your slumbers in.”
“No, nothing much, a mattress upon a rough wooden pallet. It serves as it has since my childhood.”
Omally shook his head in dismay, “Longevity, as I understand it to be, is very much the part and parcel of good sleeping. Man spends one third of his life in bed. Myself a good deal more. The comfort of the sleeper greatly reflects upon his health and well being.”
“Is that a fact?” said Old Pete. “I have no complaints.”
“Because you have never experienced greater comfort. Take myself. You would take me for a man of thirty.”
“Never. Forty.”
Omally laughed. “Always the wag. But truthfully, I attribute my good health to the comfort afforded by my bed. There is a science in these things, and believe me, I have studied this particular science.”
“Never given the matter much thought,” said Old Pete.
“So much I suspected,” said John. “You, as an elderly gentleman, and by that I mean no offence, must first look after your health. Lying upon an uncomfortable bed can take years off your life.”
“As it happens, my old bed is a bit knackered.”
“Then there you have it.” Omally smacked his hands together. “You are throwing away your life for a few pennies wisely invested in your own interest.”
“I am a fool to myself,” said Old Pete, who definitely wasn’t. “What are you selling, John?”
Omally tapped at his nose, “Something very, very special. The proper palatial pit. The very acme of sleeping paraphernalia. Into my possession has come of late a bed which would stagger the senses of the gods. Now had I the accommodation I would truly claim such a prize for my own. But my apartments are small and I know that yours could easily house such a find. What do you say?”
“I’ll want to have a look at the bugger first, five-thirty p.m. tonight, here.”
Omally spat upon his palm and smacked it down into the wrinkled appendage of the elder. “Done,” said he.
“I’d better not be,” said Old Pete.
Omally drew his partner away to a side-table, “Now that is what you call business,” he told Jim. “The old bed is not even dug out, yet it is already sold.”
Pooley groaned; he could already feel the blisters upon his palms. “You are on to a wrong’n there,” he said. “This venture has to me the smell of doom about it. That is a bomb site you will be digging on. There will probably be a corpse asleep in that bed. Should bed it in fact be and not simply a shaft or two of nothing.”
Omally crossed himself at the mention of a corpse. “Stop with such remarks,” said he. “There is a day’s pay in this and as the digger you deserve half of anything I get.”
“And what about Norman’s wheel and the many millions to be made from that?”
“Well, we have no absolute proof that the wheel spins without cessation. This would be a matter for serious scientific investigation. Such things take time.”
“We have no lack of that, surely?”
“I will tell you what,” Omally finished his pint and studied the bottom of his glass. “I will chance your wheel if you will chance my bedframe.”
Pooley looked doubtful.
“Now be fair,” said John. “There are degrees of doubt to be weighed up on either side. Firstly, of course you cannot approach Norman, he knows that you are on to him. A third party must act here. Someone with a subtlety of approach. Someone gifted in such matters.”