Chapter 193: The Earth on Top I

Jodie closed the book over both cards and put her hand flat on the cover.

"You told him you’d do your own asking," she said. "So ask. You’ve got the phone in your pocket and I’m stood here, and I’m on the list, so I get to watch."

He took the phone out and typed with her reading over his arm.

How does the host ask for something?

[ That is not a question the Concierge is able to answer. ]

"Same as always," Danny said. "It answers what it’s allowed to answer. Times and doors. It’s a rota. Whoever knows how asking works isn’t on the end of this phone."

"Then they’re on the end of something else." Jodie picked the book up off the sill and held it against her chest. "Ida asked for you. Pemberton asked 4 or 5 times. Pemberton never had a gold phone in 1958, and Ida asked for you at a table in a hall. They did it some other way, and somebody showed them. Pemberton says he was taught. Ida had 61 years of it."

"And Ida’s dying."

"So ask her before Thursday afternoon," Jodie said. "Not the phone. Her."

He rang St Columba’s at 9 the next morning and the woman on the desk said Mrs Marsh had slept all night and wasn’t to be woken, doctor’s orders, and that her niece had said no visitors till further notice. He asked her to write down that Danny Flynn had rung, and the time. She said she would.

At 10 Pemberton opened the door of 17 in a white shirt with his braces down round his hips, and his good black shoes on a sheet of newspaper on the hall floor, half polished.

"I have a black tie," he said. "I bought it in 1994 and have not worn it since. I am deciding whether it is still black or has gone grey. Robin would have said that was vanity."

He sat Danny down by the gas fire and didn’t offer tea.

"I have a favour to ask you, Mr Flynn, and I am going to ask it plainly. The funeral directors have asked who will speak. There is no vicar. Robin did not hold with vicars. They will give somebody 5 minutes in the chapel. I would like it to be you."

"Me? I knew him 4 hours, Mr Pemberton. And a Wednesday 11 years ago with a pen."

The old man looked at the fire. "If I stand up in that chapel I shall either say nothing or say everything, and both would be wrong. I will pick the wrong 5 minutes out of 90 years. You saw the beginning of you and the end of him. That is enough. Say what you saw."

Danny sat with his elbows on his knees.

What did I see? A man behind a desk who let a lad with a school bag have a flat. A man in a bed who put his fingers on my wrist while he drank.

"I’ll do it," he said. "On one condition. The card that went blank last night. I want to bring it Thursday. It was yours, and it’s his doing as much as yours. I don’t think it should sit in a library book."

Pemberton turned his head and looked at him.

"Then put it in your inside pocket on Thursday morning, Mr Flynn, and I shall know what to do with it at the grave."

They stayed at 40 on the Wednesday night to be near the lobby in the morning. Jodie had brought her black dress over on the bus in a dry-cleaner’s bag, unfinished at the hem, and she sat on the floor of the big empty living room with her back against the sofa and the hem across her knees, sewing it up by hand with tiny stitches, while Danny sat at the kitchen island with a pad and Pemberton’s pen.

He wrote a line and crossed it out. He wrote another one.

"Read me what you’ve got," Jodie said, without looking up from her needle.

"Robin Hollis was a good man."

"Cross it out. Everybody says that at funerals. Say what he did."

He crossed it out.

"He signed my tenancy," Danny said. "On a Wednesday. I was 17 and I told him 18, with a school bag on my back. I’d got 2 months’ courier money in an envelope and I counted it out on his desk twice, to be sure. He never asked for a guarantor. Every other office on that street asked me for one, and I hadn’t got one."

"That’s it. That’s the first bit. What else?"

"He had an East London voice that his brother hasn’t got. He went to Romford dogs on a Saturday. He sold cars." Danny turned the pen over. "And on the morning he died he told me why he gave me the flat. I asked him. He said, You counted it twice. That’s all. That’s the whole reason."

Jodie had stopped sewing.

"And then?"

"Then he had 3 sips of water, and he put his fingers on my wrist while he drank, and left them there. At the end I took his hand off my wrist and held it properly. He died at 24 minutes past 9 holding my hand. He was 94. I’ve told you the time before. I’ve not told anybody it was 3 sips."

"Say it Thursday," she said. "Say exactly that. Don’t dress it up."

She bit the thread off and stood up and held the dress against herself in the window, black wool, long sleeves, a high round neck at the front and nothing at all at the back from the shoulder blades to the base of her spine.

"Is that a funeral dress, Jodie? With the back out of it like that?"

"I’ll have my coat on in the chapel." She turned round to show him the back, over her shoulder, with the river lights behind her. "And it’s for after. For you. He’s not going to mind, Robin. From what you’ve told me he’d have whistled."

At 5 to 10 on Thursday Pemberton came out of the lift into the Sterling lobby in his grey suit, black tie, good coat and grey hat, with the borrowed walking stick and a single white rose in a cellophane sleeve held against his coat. Kieran stood up behind the desk without being asked.

"Mr Pemberton," Kieran said. "I’m sorry for your loss, sir."

"Thank you, Kieran. You have been very kind this fortnight."

The car was outside at 10 exactly, black and long, with the driver in a peaked cap holding the back door open in the rain. Pemberton got in first. Jodie went in after him in her coat with the collar up and her black stockings and black heels, and Danny last, in the navy suit and a white shirt and John Mulvey’s black silk tie, knotted twice before he got it right in the mirror at 40.

The blank card was in an envelope in his inside pocket, next to Pemberton’s pen and the folded page of the pad.

They drove east through the City in the rain and out along the Mile End Road and the Romford Road, and nobody talked much. Pemberton held the rose on his knee. Once, at the lights at Stratford, he spoke.

"He bought his first car on this road. A Ford Anglia, in 1956, for 40 pounds."

Then he didn’t say anything else till the gates.