After Rain by William Trevor Page A

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