Under their feet the ground rumbled, a District Line train slowing for Earls Court Station. He took a sip. “And slip Timothy a quick fuck when you can.”
“And you! With that Dutch bitch!”
“Hardly, in darkest Beirut.”
“You'll find somebody there. You always do.”
He tossed back the whisky and put the glass in the sink. “There's no point, Bev. We can't keep this up.”
She came close, took his elbow. “For all the years we've had, Neill, let's not take it out tonight on the kids? Let's have a quiet evening and then in the morning you can go and we'll see what happens when you get back? Please?”
“You know they damn well don't care whether I go or stay.”
“Yes, they do. They'd rather you go.”
“Thanks.”
“The way you've been, can you blame them?”
“I blame you.” The phone was ringing. “Imagine, some day we could've been buried side by side.”
“We have been!” she snapped.
“Mum!” Edgar called. “Phone!”
Neill opened a bottle of wine and took it into the dining room. “Yes,” Beverly was saying in the living room, into the phone. “Yes, yes.”
“You didn't put out wine glasses,” he said to Edgar.
“Sorry.” Edgar bent to the buffet, took out a glass.
“Two,” Neill said. “Since when doesn't your mother drink?”
“Sometimes.” Edgar put a second glass on the table. “Mostly with you.”
He smiled at Katerina. “See how he is, your brother?”
She glanced back at him. “No wonder.”
“That's it, don't you see? No wonder at this magic life of ours!”
The children looked at him. Beverly sat and began serving the peas, the noodles. “This case...”
“That's why I'll never be a lawyer,” Katerina said. “You see what she has to go through?”
Neill sat back. “You mean me, or her job?”
Beverly's hand undulated through the plates and glasses, caught his. “We made a deal...”
“I made no damn deal. I never made a damn deal that I couldn't say what I think.” He took a forkful of meat, chewing gristle, turned on Edgar, this son, he thought, I love who hates me. I didn't always drink, my son, I didn't always hate your mother. “What do you think?”
“It's not worth saying,” Edgar said, “what I think.”
“Even with me?”
Katerina stopped chewing. “Especially with you.”
He smiled at her. “Et tu, Brute?”
“Now, don't pick on your father,” Beverly said. “He'll be gone three whole weeks, and if the news desk takes all his articles maybe when he gets back we can go up to the Lake District, unwind together.”
“That, Mother,” Katerina answered, “is impossible.”
“Promise to study?” he said to Edgar.
“You were the one,” Edgar said, “who told me school was like what that caste does in India – maiming their children young so they'll always be able to earn a living. As crippled beggars.”
“That's true.” Neill rubbed his head, imagined the gray hairs growing silently, ruthlessly. “I said that.”
“You say lots of things.” Katerina tossed him her best smile, one she practiced in the cloakroom mirror before going out to that nauseous little creep with the curly Afro and the earring. Trying to slip his puny prick into my daughter. Go ahead, he told her silently, with his eyes. Go ahead and see what you get.
The phone rang and in a single fluid motion Beverly was up and after it.
“It's just a circus,” Neill said. “We play the clown, the tightrope walker, you name it. In the end the audience goes home.”
“What is?” Edgar said.
Beverly returned. “Just Timothy.”
“Just Timothy.”
“Same case, different argument.”
Château Lascaze, the bottle said, 1981. He emptied it and scanned the buffet for another. “In October, 1981 where were we? Does anybody remember? When these grapes were plucked from the sun –”
“School,” Edgar said.
Katerina nodded. “School.”
“I must've been bent over my desk at The Times, pounding out my daily thousand pointless words, beside Quilliver and his bloody cigarettes and graveyard cough – you know, they've found passive smoke's more cancerous?”
“Because it isn't filtered,” Edgar said.
He smiled at Beverly. “That was long before Timothy. What in heavens, my dear, had you to do back then?”
She made a show of thinking. “October’81. That wretched accident case. Woman lived but her husband didn't. Nine months of plastic surgery. Sued the drunken driver in the other car and lost.”
“Long, sure hand of the law. Rewarding the guilty. Justifiably flailing the innocent.”
“She said the strangest things. They reanimated her in hospital, dead but they brought her back. Said she'd risen up out of her body and traveled down a tunnel toward the light, but decided to return. Do you suppose –”
“Journalists aren’t supposed to suppose.” He went to the kitchen and brought back another bottle.
“Neill,” she whispered.
“Even if you did care I wouldn't –”
“Don't have so much, Neill.”
From his pockets Neill extracted a Swiss Army knife, opened it and uncorked the bottle. “Long swift arm of the law. Furious fist of timorous Timothy.”
“You're never serious. Except when you're talking about yourself. Your deep problems of love and death.”
Across the table Katerina yawned. Edgar rose like a butler who'd momentarily forgotten himself and sat at table with his masters. “The dishes call.”
Neill poured a full glass, raised it to the light. “Don't answer.”
“Afterwards can I go and play music?” Edgar said. “Just till midnight?”
“Be on the last Tube,” Beverly said.
“And you?” Neill turned to Katerina.
“Going to Max's. We have a calculus assignment.”
And fiddle his liverish prick, he said for her. See the Crusader departing for the Holy Land, shunned by his own kind. “Whatever happened to the time-honored idea of figuring things out for yourself?”
“She does better over there,” Beverly said.
“With his own place,” Katerina added, “why would he want to come here?”
“Nothing left,” Neill smiled at Beverly, “but for you and me to have our quiet evening at home.”
“I've got to work on that case.”
They carried the dirty plates into the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and turned it on. It started