Liam shook his head and walked over to the fridge and began building a mountainous sandwich. “I don’t know what to think,” he remarked. “For years, it was just the two of us. And now the house is full of men.”
“Full of Cyrils,” I said.
“It’s hardly full of men,” said Alice. “There’s just two of them.”
“Three,” said Liam. “You’re forgetting Charles.”
“Oh, yes. Sorry.”
“Four if you include yourself,” I pointed out to him. “The number just keeps growing, doesn’t it?”
“You’re not to go anywhere near my room, is that understood?” he said, glaring at me.
“I’ll try to resist the overwhelming urge,” I replied.
A couple of hours later, Cyril II arrived home and we shook hands as Alice stood between us, looking extremely flustered. He was a pleasant enough fellow, I thought, if a little dull. Within five minutes he asked me whether I had a favorite symphony and, if I did, would I like him to play it as an anthem of welcome to Dartmouth Square. I told him that I didn’t but thanked him for the thought. That was him for the night, other than to ask me whether I knew a good cure for bunions.
A week later, as I made my way upstairs to my bedroom with a mug of hot milk close to midnight, I heard crying coming from Charles’s room and I listened at the door for a few moments before tapping quietly and walking in. He was sitting up in bed with Maude’s final novel by his side, wiping his eyes.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m feeling very sad,” he said, nodding toward the book. “That’s the last one, you see. I’ve read them all now, so I think I’ll probably be gone soon. There’s nothing left. I wish I’d realized at the time how much talent she had. I wish I’d praised her more. And been a better husband to her. She was so tired of life by the end. And tired of me. I treated her poorly. You didn’t know her in the thirties, of course, but when she was a young woman, she was full of fun. Spirited is the word people used back then. The type who would jump over streams and not think anything of it. The type who carried a hip flask in her handbag and took it out for a swig if the Sunday sermon went on too long.”
I smiled. I found it hard to imagine Maude doing anything of the sort.
“You know she assaulted The Man from the Revenue after you went to prison the first time?” I said.
“Did she? Why?”
“She said that he’d worked so hard to prosecute you that her name was in all the papers and the result was that Amongst Angels had reached number four on the bestseller charts. She slapped him in the middle of the Four Courts.”
“That was a blow to her all right,” he said, nodding. “I remember her being very upset about it. She wrote me a letter afterward and it wasn’t pleasant, although it was incredibly well written. Is she upstairs, Cyril? Why not ask her to come down and I’ll try to make amends to her before I go to sleep.”
“No, Charles,” I said, shaking my head. “No, she’s not upstairs.”
“She is. She must be. Please send her down. I want to tell her that I’m sorry.”
I reached out and brushed a strand of long white hair from his forehead back across his head. The skin was cold and clammy to the touch. He lay back down and closed his eyes, and I waited with him until he was asleep before going to bed myself, lying in that single bed looking through the skylight at the stars above, the same stars that I had stared at more than forty years earlier, dreaming about Julian Woodbead and the things I wanted to do to him, and I understood at last why Charles had wanted to come back here. For the first time in my life, I started to think about my own mortality. Should I fall or have a heart attack, I could lie on the kitchen floor decomposing for weeks before anyone thought to come looking for me. I didn’t even have a cat to eat me.
Charles lasted another four days and, with impeccable timing, passed away when Alice, Liam, Cyril II and I all happened to be at home. He’d been rambling all day and it was clear that he didn’t have long left, although we didn’t think it would be just yet. Alice and I were downstairs preparing dinner when we heard Liam calling us from the floor above.
“Mum! Cyril! Come quick!”
All three of us ran upstairs and into the bedroom where Charles was lying with his eyes closed, his breathing slowing down. We could hear the effort it took for him to make every sound.
“What’s happening?” asked Liam, and it astonished me to see that my son, who had shown almost no emotion whatsoever in the time that I had known him, was close to tears, particularly since he hadn’t even met his grandfather until a few weeks earlier.
“He’s going,” I said, sitting down and taking one of his hands while Alice took the other. From the hallway outside, I heard the sound of a maudlin violin tune being played and rolled my eyes.
“Does he have to do that?” I asked.
“Shut up, Cyril,” said Alice. “He’s only trying to help.”
“Then couldn’t he at least play something more cheerful? A jig or something?”
“Tell her it wasn’t my fault,” muttered Charles, and I bent my head down closer to his mouth.
“What wasn’t your fault?” I asked, but he shook his head.
“Cyril,” he said.
“What?”
“Come closer.”
“I can’t come any closer. We’re practically kissing as it is.”
He pulled himself up a little in the bed and looked around the room with a horrified expression on his pale face before grabbing me by the back of the head and pulling my face close to him. “You were never a real Avery,” he hissed. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said.
“But Christ on a bike, you came close. You came damned close.”
And with that he released me and fell back on his pillow, said nothing more and we all watched as his breath slowed down until, finally, he was breathing no more. Somehow, I felt entirely removed from the scene at that moment, as if my own soul was ascending from my body toward the heavens. Looking down from above I could see myself, my wife and son sitting in the room over the remains of my adoptive father and I thought what a strange family I had grown up in and what a peculiar one I would leave behind one day.
Two days later we buried him in the church graveyard at Ranelagh and when we returned to Dartmouth Square Alice sat me down and said that she was happy that I’d been there toward the end and pleased that she’d been able to help but that was it, she didn’t want any misunderstandings between us, and I would have to go home now.
“But I don’t even own a cat,” I said.
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” I said. “And of course I must go. You’ve been very kind to me, you and Cyril II.”
“Don’t—”
“Sorry.”
I slept there one final night and early the following morning packed the few personal items and clothes that I had brought with me and left the house for good, while my son, my wife and her lover were still asleep, depositing my key on the small table by the front door, opposite the chair where Julian had sat as a seven-year-old boy, and making my way outside into a cold autumn morning to find that a gray fog had descended on Dartmouth Square, making the path to the main road practically invisible.
2001 The Phantom Pain