Chapter 192: Robin II

At 6 o’clock it was dark on Mare Street and St Columba’s had its lights on behind the glass. There was a woman on the front desk instead of Clive, younger, with a lanyard and a cardigan, who looked up from a screen and said Mrs Marsh’s niece was already in.

"She said you’d be coming at 6, with a young lady. She said to send you both straight through."

Jodie looked at Danny.

"She said both of us. We only sorted that out this morning."

"I chose the name last night on the bus," Danny said. "And you told me this morning you were coming, so you’re coming. She’s had both since before we did."

They went down the corridor past the boat paintings to the end, where the door stood ajar. The room was warm and dim, with only the lamp on by the bed and the French windows black, the bird table a shape on the lawn. Ida Marsh was propped up on 3 pillows in a pink bed jacket, with her lipstick freshly on and very slightly over the line, and her eyes went straight past Danny to Jodie.

"Oh, there she is," Ida said. "Come here where I can see you, love. I sat looking at you through that hedge for 4 hours yesterday and I couldn’t see your face for the railings.

"Oh, you’re lovely. Isn’t she lovely? And that coat, did you make that? You did, I can tell, nobody sells a coat with a collar set like that any more. I had a coat like that in 1959, bottle green, and Stanley Marsh followed me 3 streets in it to ask me to a dance. He said he’d followed the coat. Cheek. I went, mind."

The secretary sat where she’d sat the day before, in the corner armchair, in the grey silk blouse and the black skirt, with her stockinged legs crossed and the folder on her knee. She inclined her head to Jodie very slightly.

"Miss Carter," she said. "Good evening."

Jodie went to the bed. Ida took her hand in both of hers and held it, and looked her up and down without any shame, and patted it.

"He’s chosen, then," Ida said. "I can see it on you. You’ve been crying today and it was the good kind."

"Last night, on the bus," Jodie said. "He wrote it on his arm and didn’t let me see it till this morning."

"Then let’s have it." Ida turned her pale eyes on Danny. "Say it to her, love, not me."

Danny stood at the foot of the bed with his coat still on. He looked at the secretary, and she looked back at him, waiting.

Say all of it, so nobody in this room can mistake who you meant.

"I want Mr Pemberton’s record closed," he said. "Mr Pemberton of flat 17, the Sterling Riverwalk. The man who’s sat in that hall since 1958. Not Miss Carter’s. I’m closing his with Mrs Marsh’s one."

The secretary opened her folder. She didn’t write anything. She looked at a page, and then she closed the folder again and rested both hands on it.

"Mr Pemberton’s record is closed," she said.

Danny’s phone buzzed in his coat. He took it out. Jodie came and stood at his shoulder, and he held it so she could see, on purpose, at an angle where Ida could see it too.

[ A record has been closed. ] [ This was not done by the Concierge. ]

Jodie read it, and put her hand flat on his back between the shoulder blades and left it there.

"20 past 6," she said, looking at the time on the screen. "Write that down somewhere."

"Good boy," said Ida Marsh, and lay back on her pillows with her eyes shut. "That’s done properly. 61 years, and that’s the first door I’ve seen shut with my own eyes."

Danny pushed his cuff back. He held his wrist out to the bed.

"I wrote it down on the bus last night, so I’d not change my mind on the way here."

Ida opened her eyes and looked at the word on his arm.

"And who’s Robin, love?" she said.

"His brother. Half-brother. He died holding my wrist 2 weeks ago this Thursday, at 24 past 9 in the morning. The funeral’s Thursday at 11. Mr Pemberton wants to go in the ground next to him with nobody keeping a list of it, whenever his turn comes."

Ida looked at the word with her glasses on. Then she reached out and touched it with one dry fingertip.

"That’s nice, that you wrote the brother," she said. "I’ll see if I can’t hang on till Thursday afternoon, then. I’ll not go the same morning his brother’s going in. He should have his morning to himself."

The secretary stood up, smoothing her skirt.

"Mr Flynn," she said. "Mrs Marsh will need to sleep now."

"Can I ask you something first? Just 1 thing."

"You may ask."

"After Thursday. When she’s gone, and you’re sent somewhere else. Will it be you on that door in Kensington when they send me there next? Or somebody I’ve never seen?"

The secretary put the folder under her arm. For the first time since Danny had known her, something moved in her face, very slightly, at the corner of the red mouth.

"That is not a question I am able to answer, Mr Flynn," she said. "I will remember that you asked it."

On the way out, the younger volunteer on the desk looked up from her screen.

"Was she all right?" she said. "She’s been ever so bright today. She made me do her lipstick twice."

At half 7 Pemberton had the door of 17 open before Danny had finished knocking, and stood in it in his shirtsleeves and cardigan, with the new key hanging off his wrist on its string. His face looked different. Danny couldn’t have said what had changed in it.

"I know," he said. "Come in, both of you."

The gas fire was on and the radio was off. There was a glass of water on the little table by his chair, and the evening paper folded at the crossword with the biro across it, and only 3 clues filled in.

"How?" Danny said. "Nobody’s rung you. I came straight here from Mare Street."

Pemberton sat down slowly in his armchair, and put his hands on his knees.

"I was doing the crossword," he said. "At about 20 past 6. 9 across, a word for a harbour, 5 letters. I had the pen on the paper. And the flat went quiet."

He looked at the fire.

"I do not mean the radio. The radio was off. I mean a kind of quiet I have not heard since before I first went up those steps in Kensington, in 1958. As if somebody who had been standing behind my chair all that time had put their coat on and gone out, and shut the door behind them very carefully, so as not to disturb me."

Nobody said anything. Jodie sat on the arm of the settee with her hands between her knees.

"I sat here for a quarter of an hour," Pemberton said. "I did not finish 9 across. Then I filled a glass of water and drank it. The nurse from Cork would ask."

"That’s when I said it," Danny said. "Your record’s closed, Mr Pemberton. I said your name to her with Mrs Marsh watching, and the phone said it was done, and it wasn’t the Concierge that did it."

"And Miss Carter?"

"Stays on," Jodie said. "My choice. He just said it out loud."

Pemberton looked at her over the half-moon glasses. Then he looked at Danny.

"Thank you," he said.

"I have not said that word to anybody in that way since I said it to Robin, over a matter of our mother’s, in about 1990," he said. "I would like you to know that I mean all of it. When I go in beside him, I shall go in the same as he did. Nobody in a white house will stand in a hall and say my name and the year I first came."

He took his glasses off.

"And I cannot ask for you now, Mr Flynn. Not ever. Whatever comes to you, at whatever door, I can do nothing about it but make you tea. You understood that when you said my name?"

"I understood it at 4 o’clock yesterday, sat by this fire, when you told me," Danny said. "Then I’ll do my own asking. I’m the host. I’ll find out how."

"Mm," said Pemberton.

He put his glasses back on, and picked up the paper and the biro, and looked at 9 across, and wrote in 5 letters in small careful capitals.

"Haven," he said, to nobody. "It was haven. I had it at 20 past 6 and lost it."

Flat 40 was dark when they let themselves in. Danny didn’t put the big light on. The river was black and full of moving lights below the windows, and the copy of The Cruel Sea was on the windowsill where he’d put it back on Thursday night, after he’d carried it into the house in Kensington and out again. It had its library sticker on the spine and the 2 cream cards inside, keeping flat, by Priya’s orders.

"Get it out, Danny," Jodie said. "I want to see if anything’s different."

"It’s 2 bits of card in a library book, Jodie."

"Because one of them’s yours and one of them’s his. The new one’s about where the host lives. The old one’s 11 years old, and it was posted under his door, to him, about you. It’s on his record. If his record’s shut, I want to see what that looks like on paper."

She’s right. It was his card. He only let me keep it.

He switched on the lamp by the window and opened the book on the sill under it.

The Pembury card lay on the left-hand page, flat, cream, in the same close typewriter type as before.

The host is recorded at Pembury House. Top flat, end.

On the right-hand page lay the old card, the one Pemberton had taken out of the second drawer of his bureau last Wednesday and laid on this same book beside the new one, and told Danny to keep. It had gone the colour of weak tea at the edges from 11 years in an envelope.

It was blank.

The words were gone. A boy will come into the Mare Street office this week had gone, and Take him had gone, and so had See that the roof does not fall on him. There was no ghost of a letter left and no dent where the typewriter keys had struck. The brown edges were still there, and the cream in the middle was as clean as the day it was cut.

Jodie put her finger out and didn’t quite touch it.

"The roof card’s gone," she said.

Danny looked at the blank card on the right-hand page, and at the typed one on the left that still knew where he lived. Then he picked the blank one up by its edges and turned it over to the back, blank as it had always been, and laid it down again flat where it had been, next to the one that hadn’t changed.