‘Cold?’ Charlotte asked him as he passed through the kitchen, and he said yes, a little chilly outside. The kitchen was never cold because of the range. A long time ago they had been going to replace it with a second-hand Aga Charlotte had heard about, but when it came to the point Odo hadn’t wanted to and anyway there hadn’t been the funds.
In the drawing-room Odo set the fire, crumpling up the pages of old account books because no newspaper was delivered to the house and one was rarely bought: they had the wireless and the television, which kept them up with things. The account books were of no use to anyone, belonging entirely to the past, to the time of Odo’s grandfather and generations earlier. Kept for the purpose in a wall-cupboard by the fireplace, their dry pages never failed to burn well. Slating: £2. 15s., Odo read as he arranged the kindling over the slanted calligraphy. He struck a match and stacked on logs and turf. Rain spattered against the long-paned windows; a sudden gust of wind tumbled something over in the garden.
Charlotte pressed rosemary into the slits she’d incised in the lamb. She worked swiftly, from long experience knowing just what she was doing. She washed the grease from her fingertips under a running tap and set aside what remained of the rosemary, even though it was unlikely that she would have a use for it: she hated throwing things away.
The oven was slow; although it was still early, the meat would have to go in within half an hour, and potatoes to roast – another Timothy favourite – at eleven. The trifle, gooey with custard and raspberry jam and jelly – a nursery pudding – Charlotte had made the night before. When Timothy came he chopped the mint for the mint sauce, one of the first of his childhood tasks. He’d been a plump little boy then.
‘I can’t go,’ Timothy said in the flat that had recently been left to him by Mr Kinnally.
Eddie didn’t respond. He turned the pages of the Irish Times, wishing it were something livelier, the Star or the Express. With little interest he noticed that schools’ entrance tests were to be abolished and that there was to be a canine clean-up, whatever that was, in Limerick.
‘I’ll drive you down,’ he offered then. His own plans were being shattered by this change of heart on the part of Timothy, but he kept the annoyance out of his voice. He had intended to gather his belongings together and leave as soon as he had the house to himself: a bus out to the N4, the long hitch-hike, then start all over again. ‘No problem to drive you down,’ he said. ‘No problem.’
The suggestion wasn’t worth a reply, Timothy considered. It wasn’t even worth acknowledgement. No longer plump at thirty-three, Timothy wore his smooth fair hair in a ponytail. When he smiled, a dimple appeared in his left cheek, a characteristic he cultivated. He was dressed, this morning, as he often was, in flannel trousers and a navy-blue blazer, with a plain blue tie in the buttoned-down collar of his plain blue shirt.
‘I’d get out before we got there,’ Eddie offered. ‘I’d go for a walk while you was inside.’
‘What I’m saying is I can’t face it.’
There was another silence then, during which Eddie sighed without making a sound. He knew about the birthday tradition because as the day approached there had been a lot of talk about it. The house called Coolattin had been described to him: four miles from the village of Baltinglass, a short avenue from which the entrance gates had been removed, a faded green hall-door, the high grass in the garden, the abandoned conservatory. And Timothy’s people – as Timothy always called them – had been as graphically presented: Charlotte’s smile and Odo’s solemnity, their fondness for one another evident in how they spoke and acted, their fondness for Coolattin. Charlotte cut what remained of Odo’s hair, and Timothy said you could tell. And you could tell, even when they were not in their own surroundings, that they weren’t well-to-do: all they wore was old. Hearing it described, Eddie had visualized in the drawing-room the bagatelle table between the windows and Odo’s ancestor in oils over the fireplace, the buttoned green sofa, the rugs that someone had once brought back from India or Egypt. Such shreds of grace and vigour from a family’s past took similar form in the dining-room that was these days used only once a year, on April 23rd, and in the hall and on the staircase wall, where further portraits hung. Except for the one occupied by Odo and Charlotte, the bedrooms were musty, with patches of grey damp on the ceilings, and plaster fallen away. Timothy’s, in which he had not slept for fifteen years, was as he’d left it, but in one corner the wallpaper had billowed out and now was curling away from the surface. The kitchen, where the television and the wireless were, where Odo and Charlotte ate all their meals except for lunch on Timothy’s birthday, was easily large enough for this general purpose: a dresser crowded with crockery and a lifetime’s odds and ends, a long scrubbed table on the flagged floor, with upright kitchen chairs around it. As well, there were the two armchairs Odo had brought in from the drawing-room, a washing-machine Timothy had given his mother, wooden draining-boards on either side of the sink, ham hooks in the panelled ceiling, and a row of bells on springs above the door to the scullery. A cheerful place, that kitchen, Eddie estimated, but Timothy said it was part and parcel, whatever he meant by that.
‘Would you go, Eddie? Would you go down and explain, say I’m feeling unwell?’
Eddie hesitated. Then he said:
‘Did Mr Kinnally ever go down there?’
‘No, of course he didn’t. It’s not the same.’
Eddie walked away when he heard that reply. Mr Kinnally had been far too grand to act as a messenger in that way. Mr Kinnally had given Timothy birthday presents: the chain he wore on his wrist, shoes and pullovers. ‘Now, I don’t want you spending your money on me,’ Timothy had said a day or two ago. Eddie, who hadn’t been intending to, didn’t even buy a card.
In the kitchen he made coffee, real coffee from Bewley’s, measured into the percolator, as Timothy had shown him. Instant gave you cancer, Timothy maintained. Eddie was a burly youth of nineteen, with curly black hair to which he daily applied gel. His eyes, set on a slant, gave him a furtive air, accurately reflecting his nature, which was a watchful one, the main chance being never far out of his sights. When he got away from the flat in Mountjoy Street he intended to go steady for a bit, maybe settle down with some decent girl, maybe have a kid. Being in the flat had suited him for the five months he’d been here, even if – privately – he didn’t much care for certain aspects of the arrangement. Once, briefly, Eddie had been apprenticed to a plumber, but he hadn’t much cared for that either.
He arranged cups and saucers on a tray and carried them to the sitting-room, with the coffee and milk, and a plate of croissants. Timothy had put a CD on, the kind of music Eddie didn’t care for but never said so, sonorous and grandiose. The hi-fi was Bang and Olufsen, the property of Mr Kinnally in his lifetime, as everything in the flat had been.
‘Why not?’ Timothy asked, using the telecommander on the arm of his chair to turn the volume down. ‘Why not, Eddie?’
‘I couldn’t do a thing like that. I’ll drive you -’