After Rain by William Trevor

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