“Not if you get one for me too.”
He grinned and jumped up, and a minute later we were sitting next to each other, watching as grown men in capes leaped from building to building looking manly and utterly furious with the world.
“Do you like this kind of thing?” I asked, confused by the sweeping action that was taking place before me.
“It’s a whole universe,” he said. “You have to watch all the films to understand them.”
“Seems like a lot of work to me.”
“It’s worth it,” he replied, and we continued to watch silently until the credits rolled and he muted the television and turned to me in delight. “Told you,” he said. “Wasn’t it great?”
“No, it was terrible.”
“I’ll give you a box set. If you watch them all, you’ll appreciate them. Trust me.”
I nodded. I’d take it if he gave it to me. And I’d probably watch them, just so I could tell him that I had.
“So,” he said. “Are you excited about tomorrow?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I’m more nervous than anything else. I just want everything to go well, that’s all.”
“No reason why it shouldn’t. Do you know that this will be the first wedding I’ve ever been to?”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“Yeah. I suppose you’ve been to lots.”
“Actually, no. Not as many as you might think. My own wedding day to your grandmother rather put me off them.”
He sniggered. “I wish I’d been there,” he said, because of course he’d heard the story many times. Alice liked to wheel it out whenever she felt like annoying me. “It sounds like it was hilarious.”
“It really wasn’t,” I said, smiling despite myself.
“Oh come on. You must be able to see the funny side of it now, though, right? It was more than forty years ago.”
“Don’t say that in front of your grandmother,” I warned him. “Or she’ll beat you with a stick.”
“I think even she thinks that it’s funny.”
“I’m not so sure that she does. Even if she pretends to.”
He thought about this and shrugged. “You know I have a new suit?” he said.
“I heard.”
“It’s my first one. I look the business in it.”
I smiled. Of all my grandchildren, George was the one with whom I connected best. I’d never been particularly good with children in general—I’d never really known any—but somehow we seemed to amuse each other and I enjoyed his company. How thin he was, I thought, looking at him now, his long pale legs so skinny as they stretched out before him. And how fat I had grown. When had that happened? The body going to flab. My mother had been hounding me about it for years, encouraging me to go to a gym, but there was something comforting to me about it. I was an elderly man, after all, with the kind of girth one expected from an elderly man. It was strange, though, since I wasn’t much of an eater, wasn’t much of a drinker and yet was still going to seed. Not that it mattered now anyway. What would be the point of losing weight when I had only a few months left to live?
Dragging myself from the bed now, I put my dressing gown on and went downstairs to find Liam, Laura and the three children busying themselves with breakfast.
“How did you sleep?” asked Liam, looking across at me.
“Fine,” I said. “Do you know, I haven’t slept in this house since the night my father was buried.”
“Your adoptive father,” he replied.
“I suppose. When was that anyway? Twenty-one years ago? Doesn’t feel that long.”
Laura came over and put a mug of coffee in my hands. “How’s the speech coming along?” she asked.
“It’s getting there.”
“You haven’t finished it yet?”
“I have. Almost. It was too short at first. And then it was too long. But I think I have it now. I’ll give it another run-through before we leave.”
“Do you want me to have a read of it?” asked Julian, looking up from his book. “I could put in some dirty jokes.”
“Good of you,” I said. “But, no. I’ll wait and surprise you with it.”
“Now, showers,” said Laura, all business. “There’s six of us, so five minutes for everyone or the tank will run cold, OK?”
“I need more time than that to wash my hair,” said Grace, my youngest grandchild, twelve years old and already obsessed with her appearance.
“I’m going first,” said George, charging from the room and up the stairs with a speed that nearly knocked me off my feet.
“I’ll go back to my room,” I said, taking my tea with me. “I’ll have one when George is finished.”
It was difficult at times to believe that this was the same house in which I had grown up. After Alice and Cyril II moved into their own apartment and Liam and Laura took it over, they did so much remodeling that it was like a different place. The ground floor had been gutted entirely so the living area and kitchen blended into one enormous living space. The first floor, which had once belonged to Charles, held the master bedroom and George’s room. The second floor, where Maude’s office had once been and where she had written her nine novels, contained two bedrooms, one each for Julian and Grace, while the study itself was long gone. The top floor was the guest room, my room, and this had remained largely unaltered. It both felt like home and didn’t feel like home. If I looked around, the house was alien to me, but if I closed my eyes and walked up the stairs, inhaling the scent of the place and feeling the presence of the ghosts of the past, then I might have been a child again, longing for Julian to come over and ring the doorbell.
Half an hour later, when I returned downstairs, I was taken aback to see a boy in the hallway, looking at some of the family photographs that decorated the wall. He was standing in the exact spot that had once held the chair where Julian had been sitting when I first laid eyes on him sixty-three years earlier. As he turned to look at me, the way the light was coming through the glass above the door recalled him to me instantly, with his messy blond hair, good looks and clear complexion. It was a deeply unsettling moment, and I had to reach out to the bannister for a moment to prevent myself from falling over.
“Julian?” I said.
“Hello, Cyril.”
“It is you, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is. Who else would it be?”
“But you’re dead.”
“Yes, I know.”
I shook my head. This wasn’t the first time I had seen him recently. He’d been coming to see me more and more over recent months and always at the most unexpected moments.
“Of course, you’re not really here,” I said.
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
“Because I’m ill. Because I’m dying.”
“You have a few months yet.”
“Do I?”
“Yes,” he said. “You die three nights after Halloween.”
“Oh. Is it painful?”
“No, don’t worry. You go in your sleep.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose. What’s it like anyway, being dead?”
He frowned and thought about it for a few moments. “It’s hard to say,” he said eventually. “I’m getting even more action than I ever did before, so that’s something.”