Wait until Viola was old, he thought (“older,” Bertie said), and it was her children’s turn to clear out their mother’s “crap”—the dream-catchers and light-up Madonnas (“ironic”), the decapitated dolls’ heads (also “ironic”), the witch balls that “prevent evil from entering the house.”
Sunny appeared to have fallen asleep, as if exhausted, as if he had been involved in hard labour rather than moving a few boxes around. The removal men had done all the brute work while Sunny merely riffled through papers and files, saying to Teddy every five minutes, “Do you want to keep this? Do you want to keep this? Do you want to keep this?” like a linguistically challenged parrot, until Teddy had to say, “Just leave it to me, Sunny, I’ll go through it all myself. But thank you.”
Teddy put a plate of biscuits and two mugs of tea on a tray. Plate, mugs and tray were all destined later for Oxfam. “You have four trays! Four!” Viola said, as if Teddy was personally responsible for a capitalist glut of tea-trays. “No one needs four trays. You can only take one with you.” He chose the oldest tray, a scratched and worn tin thing that he’d had since the year dot. It had belonged to the anonymous old lady who had lived and died in the cottage he had lived in when he was first married. “The old biddy” they used to call her, as if she were a friendly ghost.
“That old thing?” Viola said, regarding the tray with horror. “What about that nice bamboo one I bought for you?”
“Sentimental value,” Teddy said resolutely.
He took the tea outside to where the removal men were on a break. They were sitting on the tailgate, smoking and enjoying a bit of sunshine, and welcomed the tea.
Sunny opened his eyes slowly like a cat returning from sleep and said, “Didn’t you make me anything? I could murder a drink of something.” Teddy supposed Sunny got his self-absorption from his parents. Both Viola and Dominic had always put themselves first. Even the way Dominic had died had been selfish. Sunny needed to be coaxed into standing on his own feet, taking his place in the wider world, and understand that it was full of other people, not just him.
“The kettle’s in the kitchen,” Teddy said to him.
“I know that,” Sunny said sarcastically.
“Don’t use that tone,” Viola said (her own tone, Teddy noted). She had her arms folded in a combative way, glaring out of the window at the removal men. “Look at them, what a pair of layabouts, being paid to drink tea.” As long as Teddy could remember, even before they lost Nancy, Viola had resented other people’s pleasure, as if it subtracted something from the world rather than adding to it.
“You used to be on the side of the workers, I seem to remember,” Teddy said mildly. “And anyway, it’s me that’s paying them. They’re nice chaps, I’m happy to pay them to drink tea for ten minutes.”
“Well, I’m getting back to the endless task of sorting out all this stuff. Do you know how many glasses you’ve got? I’ve counted eight brandy glasses alone so far. When have you ever needed eight brandy glasses?” Viola led a sloppy kind of life. She had lurched from one disaster to the next. Perhaps having authority over tea-trays and brandy glasses gave her the illusion of control. Teddy suspected he was entering into the unsafe territory of cod psychology.
“And you certainly won’t need them where you’re going,” she pressed on. It sounded as if she were referring to the afterlife, rather than his move to sheltered housing, although he supposed that was a kind of afterlife. “The odds against eight people being in your new flat and all wanting brandy at the same time are astronomical,” Viola said. Perhaps, Teddy thought, he could organize some kind of brandy-tasting soirée after he moved, for eight people, obviously. Take photographs as evidence to show Viola.
“At least you don’t have a dog to get rid of,” she said.
“ ‘Get rid of’?”
“Well, they don’t allow pets where you’re going. You would have to give it away.”
“Or you could take it in.”
“Oh, I couldn’t manage, not with the cats.”
Why on earth were they talking about an imaginary, non-existent dog, Teddy wondered?
“Just as well that Tinker’s dead,” she said. How harsh she could be.
Teddy hadn’t considered it before, but now he realized that Tinker had been the last dog he would have. He supposed he had presumed there would be another one—not a puppy, he didn’t have the energy for a puppy, but an older, unwanted dog perhaps, from the dogs’ home. They could have lived out their last days together. It was three years since Tinker had died. Cancer. The vet had come to the house to put him down before it grew painful. He was a good dog, perhaps his best one. A foxhound, very sensible in his outlook. Teddy had cradled him in his arms while the vet injected him, looked steadfastly into the dog’s eyes until the life had gone from them. He had done the same for a man once. His friend.
“I liked Tinker, Grandpa Ted,” Sunny interjected unexpectedly, suddenly six years old again. “I miss him.”