After Rain

Timothy's Birthday

They made the usual preparations. Charlotte bought a small leg of lamb, picked purple broccoli and sprigs of mint. All were Timothy’s favourites, purchased every year for April 23rd, which this year was a Thursday Odo ensured that the gin had not gone too low: a gin and tonic, and then another one, was what Timothy liked. Odo did not object to that, did not in fact object to obtaining the gin specially, since it was not otherwise drunk in the house.

They were a couple in their sixties who had scarcely parted from each other in the forty-two years of their marriage. Odo was tall, thin as a straw, his bony features receding into a freckled dome on which little hair remained. Charlotte was small and still pretty, her grey hair drawn back and tidy, her eyes an arresting shade of blue. Timothy was their only child.

Deciding on a fire, Odo chopped up an old seed-box for kindling and filled a basket with logs and turf. The rooks were cawing and chattering in the high trees, their nests already in place — more of them this year, Odo noticed, than last. The cobbles of the yard were still damp from a shower. Grass, occasionally ragwort or a dock, greened them in patches. Later perhaps, when Timothy had gone, he’d go over them with weed-killer, as he did every year in April. The outhouses that bounded the yard required attention also, their wooden doors rotted away at the bottom, the whitewash of their stucco gone grey, brambles growing through their windows. Odo resolved that this year he would rectify matters, but knew, even as the thought occurred, that he would not.

‘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 secondhand 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 puddmg — 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 — ?

‘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?’

Charlotte had years ago accepted her son’s way of life. She had never fussed about it, and saw no reason to. Yet she sympathized with Odo, and was a little infected by the disappointment he felt. ’This is how Timothy, wishes to live,’ she used, once, gently to argue, but Odo would look away, saying he didn’t understand it, saying — to Timothy, too — that he didn’t want to know. Odo was like that; nothing was going to change him. Coolattin had defeated him, and he had always hoped, during Timothy’s childhood, that Timothy would somehow make a go of it where he himself had failed. In those days they had taken in overnight guests, but more recently too much went wrong in the house, and the upkeep was too burdensome, to allow that to continue without financial loss. Timothy, as a child, had been both imaginative and practical: Odo had seen a time in the future when there would be a family at Coolattin again, when in some clever way both house and gardens would be restored. Timothy had even talked about it, describing it, as he liked to: a flowery hotel, the kitchen filled with modern utensils and machines, the bedrooms fresh with paint, new wallpapers and fabrics. Odo could recall a time in his own childhood when visitors came and went, not paying for their sojourn, of course, but visitors who paid would at least be something.

‘You’ll have to ask him if he wants to stay to lunch,’ Charlotte said when Timothy’s friend had been shown where the downstairs lavatory was.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I’d fix that toilet for you,’ Eddie offered, explaining that the flow to the bowl was poor. Nothing complicated, corrosion in the pipe. He explained that he’d started out as a plumber once, which was why he knew a thing or two. ‘No sweat,’ he said.

When lunch was mentioned he said he wouldn’t want to trouble anyone, but they said no trouble. He picked up a knife from the drinks table and set off with his gin and tonic to the downstairs lavatory to effect the repair.

‘It’s very kind of you, Eddie.’ Timothy’s mother thanked him and he said honestly, no sweat.

When he returned to the drawing-room, having poked about in the cistern with the knife, the room was empty. Rain was beating against the windows. The fire had burnt low. He poured another dollop of gin into his glass, not bothering with the tonic since that would have meant opening the second bottle. Then the old fellow appeared out of nowhere with a basket of logs, causing Eddie to jump.

‘I done it best I could,’ Eddie said, wondering if he’d been seen with the bottle actually in his hand and thinking he probably had. ‘It’s better than it was anyway’

‘Yes,’ Timothy’s father said, putting a couple of the logs on to the fire and a piece of turf at the back. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘Shocking rain,’ Eddie said.

Yes, it was heavy now, the answer came, and nothing more was said until they moved into the dining-room. ‘You sit there, Eddie,’ Timothy’s mother directed, and he sat as she indicated, between the two of them. A plate was passed to him with slices of meat on it, then vegetable dishes with potatoes and broccoli in them.

‘It was a Thursday, too, the day Timothy was born,’ Timothy’s mother said. ‘In the newspaper they brought me it said something about a royal audience with the Pope.’

1959, Eddie calculated, fourteen years before he saw the light of day himself. He thought of mentioning that, but decided they wouldn’t want to know. The drop of Cork had settled in nicely, the only pity was they hadn’t brought the bottle in to the table.

‘Nice bit of meat,’ he said instead, and she said it was Timothy’s favourite, always had been. The old fellow was silent again. The old fellow hadn’t believed him when he’d said Timothy was off colour. The old fellow knew exactly what was going on, you could tell that straight away.

‘Pardon me a sec.’ Eddie rose, prompted by the fact that he knew where both of them were. In the drawing-room he poured himself more gin, and grimaced as he swallowed it. He poured a smaller measure and didn’t, this time, gulp it. In the hall he picked up a little ornament that might be silver: two entwined fish he had noticed earlier. In the lavatory he didn’t close the door in the hope that they would hear the flush and assume he’d been there all the time.

‘Great,’ he said in the dining-room as he sat down again.

The mother asked about his family. He mentioned Tallaght, no reason not to since it was what she was after. He referred to the tinker encampment, and said it was a bloody disgrace, tinkers allowed like that. ‘Pardon my French,’ he apologized when the swearword slipped out.

‘More, Eddie?’ she was saying, glancing at the old fellow since it was he who was in charge of cutting the meat.

‘Yeah, great.’ He took his knife and fork off his plate, and after it was handed back to him there was a bit of a silence so he added:

‘A new valve would be your only answer in the toilet department. No problem with your pressure.’

‘We must get it done,’ she said.

It was then — when another silence gathered and continued for a couple of minutes — that Eddie knew the mother had guessed also: suddenly it came into her face that Timothy was as fit as a fiddle. Eddie saw her glance once across the table, but the old fellow was intent on his food. On other birthday occasions Timothy would have talked about Mr. Kinnally, about his ‘circle’, which was how the friends who came to the flat were always described. Blearily, through a fog of Cork gin, Eddie knew all that, even heard the echo of Timothy’s rather high-pitched voice at this same table. But talk about Mr. Kinnally had never been enough.

‘Course it could go on the way it is for years,’ Eddie said, the silence having now become dense. ‘As long as there’s a drop coming through at all you’re in business with a toilet cistern.’

He continued about the faulty valve, stumbling over some of the words, his speech thickened by the gin. From time to time the old man nodded, but no sign came from the mother. Her features were bleak now, quite unlike they’d been a moment ago, when she’d kept the conversation going. The two had met when she walked up the avenue of Coolattin one day, looking for petrol for her car: Timothy had reported that too. The car was broken down a mile away; she came to the first house there was, which happened to be Coolattin. They walked back to the car together and they fell in love. A Morris 8, Timothy said; 1950 it was. ‘A lifetime’s celebration of love,’ he’d said that morning, in the toneless voice he sometimes adopted. ‘That’s what you’ll find down there.’

It wouldn’t have been enough, either, to have had Kinnally here in person. Kinnally they could have taken; Kinnally would have oozed about the place, remarking on the furniture and the pictures on the walls. Judicious, as he would have said himself, a favourite word. Kinnally could be judicious. Rough trade was different.

‘There’s trifle,’ Eddie heard the old woman say before she rose to get it.

The rain came in, heavier now, from the west. A signpost indicated Athlone ahead, and Eddie remembered being informed in a classroom that this town was more or less the centre of Ireland. He drove slowly. If for any reason a police car signalled him to stop he would be found to have more than the permitted quantity of alcohol in his bloodstream; if for any reason his clothing was searched he would be found to be in possession of stolen property; if he was questioned about the car he was driving he would not be believed when he said it had been earlier lent to him for a purpose.

The Rover’s windscreen wipers softly swayed, the glass of the windscreen perfectly clear in their wake. Then a lorry went by, and threw up surface water from the road. On the radio Chris de Burgh sang.

The sooner he disposed of the bit of silver the better, Athlone maybe. In Galway he would dump the car in a car park somewhere. The single effect remaining after his intake of gin was the thirst he experienced, as dry as paper his mouth was.

He turned Chris de Burgh off, not trying another channel. It was one thing to scarper off, as Timothy had from that house: he’d scarpered himself from Tallaght. To turn the knife was different. Fifteen years later to make your point with rough trade and transparent lies, to lash out venomously: how had they cocked him up, how had they hurt him, to deserve it? All the time when there had been that silence they had gone on eating, as if leaving the food on their plates would be too dramatic a gesture. The old man nodded once or twice about the valve, but she had given no sign that she even heard. Very slightly, as he drove, Eddie’s head began to ache.

‘Pot of tea,’ he ordered in Athlone, and said no, nothing else when the woman waited. The birthday presents had remained on the sideboard, not given to him to deliver, as Timothy had said they probably would be. The two figures stood, hardly moving, at the back door while he hurried across the puddles in the cobbled yard to the car. When he looked back they were no longer there.

‘Great,’ Eddie said when the woman brought the tea, in a metal pot, cup and saucer and a teaspoon. Milk and sugar were already on the pink patterned oilcloth that covered the table top. ‘Thanks,’ Eddie said, and when he had finished and had paid he walked through the rain, his headache clearing in the chilly air. In the first jeweller’s shop the man said he didn’t buy stuff. In the second Eddie was questioned so he said he came from Fardrum, a village he’d driven through. His mother had given him the thing to sell, he explained, the reason being she was sick in bed and needed a dose of medicine. But the jeweller frowned, and the trinket was handed back to him without a further exchange. In a shop that had ornaments and old books in the window Eddie was offered a pound and said he thought the entwined fish were worth more. ‘One fifty,’ came the offer then, and he accepted it.

It didn’t cease to rain. As he drove on through it, Eddie felt better because he’d sold the fish. He felt like stopping in Ballina-sloe for another pot of tea but changed his mind. In Galway he dropped the car off in the first car park he came to.

Together they cleared away the dishes. Odo found that the gin in the drawing-room had been mostly drunk. Charlotte washed up at the sink. Then Odo discovered that the little ornament was gone from the hall and slowly went to break this news, the first communication between them since their visitor had left.

‘These things happen,’ Charlotte said, after another silence.

The rain was easing when Eddie emerged from a public house in Galway, having been slaking his thirst with 7-Up and watching Glenroe. As he walked into the city, it dribbled away to nothing. Watery sunshine slipped through the unsettled clouds, brightening the façades in Eyre Square. He sat on a damp seat there, wondering about picking up a girl, but none passed by so he moved away. He didn’t want to think. He wasn’t meant to understand, being only what he was. Being able to read Timothy like a book was just a way of putting it, talking big when nobody could hear.

Yet the day still nagged, its images stumbling about, persisting in Eddie’s bewilderment. Timothy smiled when he said all he was asking was that a message should be passed on. Eddie’s own hand closed over the silver fish. In the dining-room the life drained out of her eyes. Rain splashed the puddles in the cobbled yard and they stood, not moving, in the doorway.

On the quays the breeze from the Atlantic dried the pale stone of the houses and cooled the skin of Eddie’s face, freshening it also. People had come out to stroll, an old man with a smooth-haired terrier, a couple speaking a foreign language. Seagulls screeched, swooping and bickering in the air. It had been the natural thing to lift the ornament in the hall since it was there and no one was around: in fairness you could call it payment for scraping the rust off the ballcock valve, easily ten quid that would have cost them. ‘A lifetime’s celebration,’ Timothy said again.

‘It has actually cleared up,’ Odo said at the window, and Charlotte rose from the armchair by the fire and stood there with him, looking out at the drenched garden. They walked in it together when the last drops had fallen.

‘Fairly battered the delphiniums,’ Odo said.

‘Hasn’t it just.’

She smiled a little. You had to accept what there was; no point in brooding. They had been hurt, as was intended, punished because one of them continued to be disappointed and repelled. There never is fairness when vengeance is evoked: that had occurred to Charlotte when she was washing up the lunchtime dishes, and to Odo when he tidied the dining-room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he had said, returning to the kitchen with forks and spoons that had not been used. Not turning round, Charlotte had shaken her head.

They were not bewildered, as their birthday visitor was: they easily understood. Their own way of life was so much debris all around them, but since they were no longer in their prime that hardly mattered. Once it would have, Odo reflected now; Charlotte had known that years ago. Their love of each other had survived the vicissitudes and the struggle there had been; not even the bleakness of the day that had passed could affect it.

They didn’t mention their son as they made their rounds of the garden that was now too much for them and was derelict in places. They didn’t mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was.