‘I’m not going down.’
Timothy reduced the volume further. As he took the cup of coffee Eddie offered him, his two long eye-teeth glistened the way they sometimes did, and the dimple formed in his cheek.
‘All I’m asking you to do is pass a message on. I’d take it as a favour.’
‘The phone -’
‘There’s no phone in that place. Just say I couldn’t make it due to not feeling much today.’
Timothy broke in half a croissant that had specks of bacon in it, the kind he liked, that Eddie bought in Fitz’s. A special favour, he softly repeated, and Eddie sensed more pressure in the words. Timothy paid, Timothy called the tune. Well, two can play at that game, Eddie said to himself, and calculated his gains over the past five months.
The faded green hall-door, green also on the inside, was sealed up because of draughts. You entered the house at the back, crossing the cobbled yard to the door that led to the scullery.
‘He’s here,’ Charlotte called out when there was the sound of a car, and a few minutes later, as Odo arrived in the kitchen from the hall, there were footsteps in the scullery passage and then a hesitant knock on the kitchen door. Since Timothy never knocked, both thought this odd, and odder still when a youth they did not know appeared.
‘Oh,’ Charlotte said.
‘He’s off colour,’ the youth said. ‘A bit naff today. He asked me would I come down and tell you.’ The youth paused, and added then: ‘On account you don’t have no phone.’
Colour crept into Charlotte’s face, her cheeks becoming pink. Illness worried her.
‘Thank you for letting us know,’ Odo said stiffly, the dismissive note in his tone willing this youth to go away again.
‘It’s nothing much, is it?’ Charlotte asked, and the youth said seedy, all morning in the toilet, the kind of thing you wouldn’t trust yourself with on a car journey. His name was Eddie, he explained, a friend of Timothy’s. Or more, he added, a servant really, depending how you looked at it.
Odo tried not to think about this youth. He didn’t want Charlotte to think about him, just as for so long he hadn’t wanted her to think about Mr Kinnally. ‘Mr Kinnally died,’ Timothy said on this day last year, standing not far from where the youth was standing now, his second gin and tonic on the go. ‘He left me everything, the flat, the Rover, the lot.’ Odo had experienced relief that this elderly man was no longer alive, but had been unable to prevent himself from considering the inheritance ill-gotten. The flat in Mountjoy Street, well placed in Dublin, had had its Georgian plasterwork meticulously restored, for Mr Kinnally had been that kind of person. They’d heard about the flat, its contents too, just as Eddie had heard about Coolattin. Timothy enjoyed describing things.
‘His tummy played up a bit once,’ Charlotte was saying with a mother’s recall. ‘We had a scare. We thought appendicitis. But it wasn’t in the end.’
‘He’ll rest himself, he’ll be all right.’ The youth was mumbling, not meeting the eye of either of them. Shifty, Odo considered, and dirty-looking. The shoes he wore, once white, the kind of sports shoes you saw about these days, were filthy now. His black trousers hung shapelessly; his neck was bare, no sign of a shirt beneath the red sweater that had some kind of animal depicted on it.
‘Thank you,’ Odo said again.
‘A drink?’ Charlotte offered. ‘Cup of coffee? Tea?’
Odo had known that would come. No matter what the circumstances, Charlotte could never help being hospitable. She hated being thought otherwise.
‘Well . . .’ the youth began, and Charlotte said:
‘Sit down for a minute.’ Then she changed her mind and suggested the drawing-room because it was a pity to waste the fire.
Odo didn’t feel angry. He rarely did with Charlotte. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t any beer,’ he said as they passed through the hall, both coffee and tea having been rejected on the grounds that they would be troublesome to provide, although Charlotte had denied that. In the drawing-room what there was was the sherry that stood near the bagatelle, never touched by either of them, and Timothy’s Cork gin, and two bottles of tonic.
‘I’d fancy a drop of Cork,’ the youth said. ‘If that’s OK.’
Would Timothy come down another day? Charlotte wanted to know. Had he said anything about that? It was the first time his birthday had been missed. It was the one occasion they spent together, she explained.
‘Cheers!’ the youth exclaimed, not answering the questions, appearing to Odo to be simulating denseness. ‘Great,’ he complimented when he’d sipped the gin.
‘Poor Timothy!’ Charlotte settled into the chair she always occupied in the drawing-room, to the left of the fire. The light from the long-paned windows fell on her neat grey hair and the side of her face. One of them would die first, Odo had thought again in the night, as he often did now. He wanted it to be her; he wanted to be the one to suffer the loneliness and the distress. It would be the same for either of them, and he wanted it to be him who had to bear the painful burden.
Sitting forward, on the edge of the sofa, Eddie felt better when the gin began to glow.
‘Refreshing,’ he said. ‘A drop of Cork.’
The day Mr Kinnally died there were a number of them in the flat. Timothy put the word out and they came that night, with Mr Kinnally still stretched out on his bed. In those days Eddie used to come in the mornings to do the washing-up, after Mr Kinnally had taken a fancy to him in O’Connell Street. An hour or so in the mornings, last night’s dishes, paid by the hour; nothing of the other, he didn’t even know about it then. On the day of the death Timothy shaved the dead face himself and got Mr Kinnally into his tweeds. He sprayed a little Krizia Uomo, and changed the slippers for lace-ups. He made him as he had been, except of course for the closed eyes, you couldn’t do anything about that. ‘Come back in the evening, could you?’ he had requested Eddie, the first time there’d been such a summons. ‘There’ll be a few here.’ There were more than a few, paying their respects in the bedroom, and afterwards in the sitting-room Timothy put on the music and they just sat there. From the scraps of conversation that were exchanged Eddie learned that Timothy had inherited, that Timothy was in the dead man’s shoes, the new Mr Kinnally. ‘You’d never think of moving in, Eddie?’ Timothy suggested a while later, and afterwards Eddie guessed that that was how Timothy himself had been invited to Mountjoy Street, when he was working in the newsagent’s in Ballsbridge, on his uppers as he used to say.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Eddie said in the drawing-room, ‘I never touch a beer.’
Timothy’s father – so thin and bony in Eddie’s view that when he sat down you’d imagine it would cause him pain – gave a nod that was hardly a nod at all. And the mother said she couldn’t drink beer in any shape or form. Neither of them was drinking now.
‘Nothing in the gassy line suits me,’ Eddie confided. It wasn’t easy to know what to say. Timothy had said they’d ask him to stop for a bite of grub when they realized he’d come down specially; before he knew where he was they’d have turned him into the birthday boy. Odo his father’s name was, Timothy had passed on, extraordinary really.
‘Nice home you got here,’ Eddie said. ‘Nice place.’
A kind of curiosity had brought him to the house. Once Timothy had handed him the keys of the Rover, he could as easily have driven straight to Galway, which was the city he had decided to make for, having heard a few times that it was lively. But instead he’d driven as directed, to Baltinglass, and then by minor roads to Coolattin. He’d head for Galway later: the N80 to Portlaoise was what the map in the car indicated, then on to Mountmellick and Tullamore, then Athlone. Eddie didn’t know any of those towns. Dublin was his place.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, addressing Timothy’s father, lowering his voice. ‘D’you have a toilet?’