I HAND THE FINAL drink to Peter. He takes it out onto the patio, to join Con and Audrey. Audrey is still naked, but at this stage of the game her state of nakedness is not exactly the highest item of interest on the agenda.
I follow Peter out into the sunshine. Con is sitting on the lounger, his bulk giving him the appearance of a squatting frog. Audrey is standing by the pool, staring at the mountains. Peter lights a cheroot from the last match in a book of matches and slings the empty book into the still-billowing incinerator.
After a while Con says: “Well, there you go then.”
Nobody answers that one.
“Yes, I agree,” Con says. He raises his glass. “Cheers, Con.”
Audrey turns round from contemplating the mountains and begins to contemplate me instead.
“Well,” she says eventually, “you done it good and proper this time.”
“Oh, yes,” I tell her. “Oh, yes. That one’s all down to me, that one is. I done all those, lying in there. Personal. Only I must be slipping, as I now see I left three other characters out of it what I should not really have overlooked.”
“You done the one you was told to do in the first place then none of this lot would have happened, would it?”
I look at her and shake my head.
“ ’Course, it wouldn’t have anything at all to do with those eggs in London who at present are probably sitting behind their desks writing out their Christmas-card lists, would it?”
“Yeah, well they’ll be crossing a few names off it this year, won’t they?”
“Yeah, about that,” I say. “Nobody in the present company intending fulfilling their brief to the letter, would they?” I look at Peter and he looks back and puffs on his cheroot. “Peter?”
He shrugs.
“I done my ones,” he says, looking at Con. “Anything else is down to the other half of the act.”
“Piss off,” Con says.
“Don’t make any difference to me,” Peter says. “It’s you as got to go back and tell them what you didn’t do.”
“Piss off,” Con says again.
“Ah, well,” says Peter, and wanders inside to get himself another drink.
“Yeah,” Audrey says to me. “About going back. You still planning on doing that?”
I don’t consider that one worth an answer. Audrey folds her arms and adopts an over-the-garden-wall stance, except that with her being naked and that her tits flop over her forearms like she’s a kid holding an armful of party balloons.
“Well, in that case,” she says, “I’ll just make sure I’m not about when you get back.”
“Since when you been frightened of a bit of wind and piss?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Because that’s all there’ll be. As you well know.”
Peter appears in the window’s opening, clinking the ice in his drink.
“Apart from all these speculations about the future,” he says, “there’s one thing that has a certain immediacy about it, not to say piquancy.”
“What’s that?” Audrey says.
“Well,” Peter says, “it’s normal to have the bouquets with the funeral, but the weather being like it is out here, we’re going to have a different kind of bouquet, if you get my meaning.”
Audrey looks at me.
“Well?” she says.
“Oh, that’s down to me as well, is it?” I ask her. “Seeing of course, as how I had nothing to do with the topping of them.”
“Precisely,” she says. “Gets back to what you should have done, don’t it?”
A long silence follows, drifting over the swimming pool like the smoke from the incinerator.
Eventually Con says:
“They many more of the Blues downstairs?”
Audrey says:
“Racks of them. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Why?” I ask him.
Con shrugs.
“Just wondering. I mean pretty big, that incinerator, ain’t it? I mean, sort of family size, know what I mean?”
All of us, we all look at Con, who blandly avoids the concerted gaze and unhurriedly carries on pecking at his drink.
After a while, Audrey says:
“You know, I’ve got to say this, I really have, seeing as how it’s not often I get to experience something what turns my world upside down, so this is why I’m saying what I’m going to say. Which is that, in the way you always align yourself with whatever policy Jack takes, on the firm, I always used to think you were a bit of a wank, thinking round things, rather than through them. But on the evidence of what you just said, I take all that back. I can see now you been influenced by the wrong people, nothing more. I mean, merely a question of sociology, nothing more nor less. I would like you to know, I take it all back.”
“Bingo,” Peter says. “The lady in the flanellette draws wins the Wincyette sheets.”
“Fuck off,” Con says, and continues his glass animal routine with his drink.
For a while nothing happens.
Then Peter looks up at the sky, then down at his watch. “Getting on,” he says. “Eighty in the shade, I shouldn’t wonder, in about half an hour’s time.”
A burst of black smoke issues from the incinerator, gushing upwards into the previous mild greyness, like the cough of a smoker who’s smoked one pack too many.
Con gets up off the lounger, stretches, like he’s ready for a dip, but at the same time doesn’t care that the last one in’s a fairy.
“Well,” he says. “I don’t know what you think, but that’s what I think. Further than that I cannot go.”
“Con,” I say to him, “personally, I find that no small relief to hear that. I would hate to think, from my point of view, that there were other boundaries left to be pushed back, even farther, if you were to set your mind to it.”
Peter drains his glass and shrugs off his jacket.
“Fuck the philosophy,” he says. “Do we start now or don’t we?”