It is chilly. He is seizing up from the cold and from standing for so long. The dog is lying on her belly again, on the porch’s stone tiles. Sydney, slowly, stiffly, joins her down there, lowering his thin backside to the ground. The dog gazes at him with her big, brown eyes. It looks like love but she barely knows him. He only recently picked her up from his friend, the friend with whom he had left his dog before going away. Technically, this is not his dog. Really, this offspring of his dog belongs to his friend, but this friend, having taken receipt of a dog, felt that a dog — rather than an empty dog collar, an empty dog bowl, an empty dog bed — is what needed to be returned to Sydney in due course. This friend knows Barry Bolton too and has perhaps learnt to avoid having debts. Sydney wonders if the dog is missing the friend who was, until this morning, her owner, or whether all she really wants is to know where her next meal is coming from.
When Sydney hears the door opening behind him, a part of him anticipates his mother coming to scold him, as she did when he was a boy and dared to sit on hard kerbs and cold walls; he half expects to hear her yelling, ‘Do you want piles?’
He turns to see a man of his own age standing in the doorway, staring down at him.
‘I’m here about the room,’ says Sydney.
‘I didn’t hear you knock,’ says the man. He looks at Sydney’s dog. ‘No dogs,’ he says.
Sydney’s knees crack as he gets to his feet, and the dog sighs.
The man leads Sydney down the hallway. Coming to a stop before the stairs, he says, ‘You’ll have your breakfast in the dining room.’ He opens the nearest door and Sydney sees a chintzy dining table set for breakfast even though it is not breakfast time, as if, like Miss Havisham, the man just keeps it that way all the time.
‘What do you like for breakfast?’ asks the man. ‘I can offer you Sugar Puffs, Coco Pops, Chocolatey Cheerios, Golden Nuggets, Golden Puffs and Honey Wows.’
‘All I really want is a fag,’ says Sydney, ‘first thing.’
‘Oh,’ says the man, closing the door of the breakfast room.
They climb the stairs, and when they get to the top, the man opens a door and shows Sydney into a front bedroom. Sydney thinks at first that he has been shown the wrong room because this is a child’s bedroom, a young teen’s bedroom, with an astronaut on the single duvet, but the man says, ‘Everything’s clean. The drawers and the wardrobe have been emptied for now, so there’ll be space for your things, but I don’t want to change too much in here in case Martin comes back. If he came back and wanted his room, I’d need to ask you to leave. You’d get your deposit back.’
Sydney nods and goes to the window, looking out at the village green, at Barry who is still on the bench.
‘It’s cold out,’ says the man, ‘but that radiator’s on.’
Sydney, standing warming his legs, asks the man about the rent. He keeps him talking about the bills and the cost of living, but still Barry does not move away, and in the end Sydney has to say to the man, ‘Is there a back garden?’ The man looks delighted.
He takes Sydney out through the back door, next to which, on the patio, there is a rabbit hutch with a young rabbit inside. The hutch looks brand new. ‘Martin’s always wanted a pet,’ says the man.
He indicates an empty flower bed at the near end of the garden. ‘Sweet peas,’ he says. ‘They’re his favourite.’
‘It’s not the right time of year for planting sweet peas,’ says Sydney.
‘I put them in last spring.’
‘Well, if they’ve not come through yet,’ says Sydney, ‘I don’t think they’re going to.’
The man gazes down at the cold soil as if watching it. ‘We’ll see,’ he says.
They make their way down an increasingly muddy path to the vegetable patch in which the man has planted rhubarb. ‘Martin loves rhubarb,’ he says, surveying this plot in which, by March, he should have six square feet of the stuff.
‘If you don’t mind,’ says Sydney, ‘I’ll leave through your back gate.’
‘Oh,’ says the man. ‘Of course.’ He walks with Sydney to the gate, where he jots down his phone number and hands it over. ‘Call me,’ he says to Sydney, who will not.
The gate brings Sydney into an alley. He walks down to the far end, coming out well away from the house and the village green, and then he remembers his dog, which is still waiting outside the man’s front door. He can’t walk up the street to the front of the house because Barry will see him. He turns around and goes back down the alley, retracing his steps. When he arrives at the man’s gate, he peers over it, scanning the garden, the patio, the rear of the house. The man is not there. Sydney leans over and lifts the catch, letting himself into the garden. He walks up the muddy path, in between the well-tended plots, watching the back windows. The man is not in sight. Only the rabbit in the hutch is watching him. He could knock, but it would be a whole lot easier to just get in and out without having to explain himself, without being noticed. He can see — through the patterned glass in the back door — that the kitchen is empty. He tries the handle. Finding the door unlocked, he goes inside, back into the warm house. The man’s boots, muddy from the garden, are on the doormat. The kettle is boiling beside a clean cup, inside which a dry teabag, a shiny teaspoon and the tiny white dot of a sweetener are ready, waiting for the hot water. Sydney stands still for a moment and listens but hears no sounds from inside the house. He steps into the hallway, making his way past the closed dining room door and down to the far end where he quietly opens the front door. The dog looks up, wags her tail and gets to her feet. Sydney brings her into the house and closes the door again, but the closing is louder than the opening. He can hear the man moving around upstairs now, in the front bedroom. He hears the man call out, ‘Hello?’ and after a pause, ‘Martin, is that you?’
Sydney leads his dog back down the hallway, through the kitchen and out of the back door, which he closes behind him, leaving a trail of mud from his boots all along the hallway carpet for the man to find and puzzle over.
2. He does not want soup
‘YOU DON’T WANT anything, do you, Dad?’ says Ruth, on her way out of the living room. Lewis opens his mouth to reply, but he can’t decide whether he does or not, he can’t say what he might want, so he doesn’t say anything.
Ruth takes their teacups through to the kitchen, puts them heavily into the sink and turns on the tap.
It is still close enough to winter to be dark outside at getting-up time. Ruth complains about having to drag herself out of her warm bed at what feels like four o’clock in the morning, but Lewis rather likes how it feels to wash his face in the bathroom sink before it is light. It makes him feel like a man with a job to do, like a farmer rising before dawn, like a jet-setter with an early flight to catch.
It is dark, still, when Ruth drops her boy off at his new nursery. She has said to Lewis that it must seem to the boy as if she is leaving him with strangers in the middle of the night. ‘Yes,’ said Lewis, ‘it probably does.’
By the time she gets to Lewis’s house, though, it is almost light.
Sitting in his armchair in front of the television, Lewis can see her standing looking out of the kitchen window while she waits for the water to run warm, her fingertips in the cold drizzle. The snowdrops are still out and the daffodils should soon be through. She raises her voice to say to him, ‘Your lawn’s looking a bit dead.’ He once pointed out an azalea that had turned bright red — not just its flowers but its leaves as well were all scarlet, glorious, and Ruth told him it was dying. You got a final show, she said, this burst of beauty before it expired. He’d had an oleander, too, of which he was rather fond, but she took one look and said it was poisonous and that it had to go. She would not let the boy play in Lewis’s garden until the plant had gone, and even now she will not let the boy go in there, because if some toxic part of it is still lying around he will put it in his mouth.