10

Timothy came-to abruptly in the dark, aware that he didn’t feel well. His nose was swollen, his eyes smarted and his ribs ached. A peculiar screeching noise had woken him, but whatever it was had faded. Beside him Roger was snoring, but it was only the low decibel on-his-side version, and from somewhere else in the room came the braying sound of Finnegan’s sleepy wheeze. Surely the monstrous dog wasn’t going to have to share their bedroom? However much Roger might dote on him, it was most unhygienic and he emitted a smell like congealed grass cuttings. He’d have a tactful word in the morning, but it wasn’t Roger’s septum or a dog’s lungs that had woken him. There it was again: a clear, baying yowl. A dog fox perhaps, or a muntjac that had strayed onto the lawn? No – something much more familiar. He threw himself out of bed in horror. Anthea!

He threw on his dressing gown, stumbled down the back stairs to the kitchen and unlocked the scullery door. The vain Persian slunk in with her belly to the floor, her thick, pearly fur lying flat-soaked and filthy, knowing she looked as plain as a feral moggie. She looked up, giving him a brief glance of sheer disgust.

‘Oh, babyboofs,’ Timothy said, whipping a warm tea towel from the Aga rail and gathering her up in his arms. The snooty cat, despite her misery and self-loathing, didn’t appreciate capture. She hissed, extended a spiteful claw to Timothy’s hand and fled to the sanctuary of the boiler room.

Timothy dabbed his wounds with the wet tea towel and crept back upstairs. As he moved to cross the galleried landing, a theatrical shaft of moonlight was shining onto his mother’s bedroom door. He tried to deny the need to enter, but already he ached for the sound of her voice, her affectionate hugs, her concern for all his problems, and the undivided attention she’d always given so freely on demand. Now, by the cruelest paradox, he wanted her to be with him, to salve the pain her death had brought on him. He found his fingers turning the heavy brass handle.

Fumbling in the dark, he switched on a bedside lamp. He’d braced himself for the sight of her shrouded body, but was shocked by its abnormally long, thin shape. He inhaled sharply and shivered with cold, but steeled himself not to run away and abandon her like a coward. In the soft muted light he recalled how this room had played such a large part in his childhood happiness. His earliest memories were of his accident nights; waking in a cold, wet bed, and stumbling in to his sleeping parents, grizzling loudly. Both of them immediately rising without complaint to give their affection and understanding, followed by warm soapy-flannelled washes, a pair of freshly ironed pyjamas and a set of clean sheets. The bliss of Sunday mornings, diving in and snuggling down between the two of them. His father making up funny, exaggerated stories about a bird called a Peckerpecker, that pecked off little boys’ willies if they told fibs, while he lay back in childish innocence, pressed against the puffed pigeons of his mother’s breasts. In later years, taking his ageing father breakfast in bed and staying for long, easy discussions of this and that, and the planning of his future life. It was to be in horticulture, they decided. A fine career, and so suited to his quiet, artistic disposition.

After the birth of Morgana, it had become a noisy place of night crying, and the night feeding demands of the lusty, red-faced infant; the infant who rapidly turned into a demanding toddler and woke them all from their slumbers, in distress from her own wet bed. It was so hard to remember that an animated, boisterous little girl really had existed. There were no photographs of her in the room, nor in fact anywhere else in the house, but he could still see, with crystal clarity, her soft, dark curly hair and pretty teeth. Then, after the tragedy, the painful, echoing silence of the room, broken only by the muffled tears of the bereaved single occupant. It was time to leave. He rose, stared with misery at the stiff, shrouded mound and turned off the lamp.

Roger’s snoring had now become the flat-on-his-back version; a shuddering, dragon-fired roar, with overtones of a pneumatic drill. The flopped broadness of his dead weight was always too much for Timothy to turn over, despite placing his foot behind a shoulder and pushing hard. The only thing he could do was to sidle quietly in beside him and pray for sleep. He lifted a corner of the duvet only to find it was weighed hard down by a firmly installed Finnegan. The determined dog dug in his anchors and refused to budge, so Timothy edged into the free six inches of the bed. Half an hour later, as a pale dawn crept into the room, Roger noisily turned over and Finnegan’s ninety pounds jumped out, using Timothy as a springboard. A cold nose immediately searched under the duvet and truffled a pair of warm buttocks to alert his new mummy that it was time for walkies.