Mr. Flood's Last Resort(78)
A record player is set up at the end of the table.
He pulls out a chair. “Would you care to take a seat, Maud?”
*
THE SKY gets darker. It’s a mild night for the time of year but there’s a blanket on the back of my chair if I want it. We sit alongside each other. A few cats populate the empty seats ranged around the table.
“Why’ve you got so many chairs?”
Cathal smiles grimly. “The agency gobdaw, I told him I was having a birthday dinner and he set all of this.”
“They’re for your imaginary friends.”
He laughs. “The best kind.”
“Who would you invite?”
Cathal grins. “To start with: Picasso and Mata Hari.”
I join in. “Jimmy Stewart and Genghis Khan.”
“There’d be Brendan Behan; he’d be hopping.”
I nudge him. “And Greta Garbo on the piano.”
He’s delighted. “Is it music you want?”
And he’s up and fumbling at the record player, cursing the failing light and then with a quick slip and scratch of the needle a few bars of— “Are you dancing, Maud?”
“Are you asking?”
We take a turn around the table to Frank Sinatra, watched only by the cats skulking in the lamplight or licking crumbs from the tablecloth.
With my hand in his big paw I look up at him. “Is there anyone else you would want here?”
He stops shifting in his slippers and looks down at me. “Don’t say it, Maud. Please, not tonight.”
*
WE EAT casserole from paper plates and then turn to the cake Lillian has made: a sponge with a lemon filling and the top iced in a brown ellipse with little dabs of food coloring.
“It’s an artist’s palette,” I say after a while.
Cathal nods respectfully, perhaps touched by the effort someone has gone to for a stranger.
“You’ve told your friends about me.” He smiles. “That I’m an artist and worse, a bollix, no doubt?”
Much, much worse, Cathal Flood.
I keep my head down, rummaging in the shopping trolley for his birthday gift.
Happy birthday, Bluebeard!
Perhaps, after all, the idea of Cathal is very different from the real thing. The Cathal of our fiction, mine and Renata’s, is not the same at all as the raggedy old giant with the still-dark brows and the shock of white hair who looks up at me with eyes lit with humor.
He opens his present, making pleased noises, and carefully folds the wrapping paper and puts it in his pocket.
I tie the cravat for him.
“Well now, Maud, how do I look?”
“A fine figure of a man.”
He smiles up at me, gratified, in the dead man’s cravat. On a whim I reach over to one of the vases and break off a blousy yellow tea rose. To his amusement I thread it through his buttonhole.
“Now you’re perfect, Cathal.”
He grins and holds out his hand.
We take to the floor with Louis Armstrong.
*
EVEN THE cats feel it: the sense of something ending, the slow sinking of the ship. Meanwhile, the music plays on and the lights twinkle. A cold inky blackness waits offstage, lapping at the edges of our scene, starting to trickle in. We will be swept away. But not in this moment, not right now.
All of the felines have turned out for the occasion. I see Beckett, a pale blur snaking under the table. The others prowl on the outskirts or lie along the table. There is a pattering of claws on metal and I look up to see the snout of a young fox peer over the roof of the caravan.
“What will you do with them?”
Cathal looks around him. “They’ll find their own ways. The rest is in Gabriel’s hands now.”
“But your house?”
“We weren’t going to talk about this.”
“I know.”
He smiles. “It’s only a house. All things come to an end, Maud. The trick is to go with the flow.”
I shake my head. “Is there nothing we can do?”
“Do? No. Unless it’s to have a wee bit of that cake.”
I set the candles on the cake without counting, figuring that if there’s enough years you lose count anyway. I pour him a drink in a plastic glass and we have a toast.
“To you on your birthday, Cathal Flood.” I smile.
“To you on my birthday, Maud Drennan.” He smiles.
“Now make a wish,” I say.
As seriously as a child he closes his eyes, then he nods. He’s ready. I hold the cake near him and he blows out the candles.
“Will you come and see this creation you’ve inspired now?”
“The painting, is it finished?”
“It is. You’re a fine muse, Maud.”
“Am I not a little on the square-jawed side for a muse?”
“I made do.” Cathal stands up. “It’s inside the house. You’ll come in?”
I’m halfway down the garden path before I remember the pepper spray but I don’t even think about going back.
*
THE HOUSE has a different quality at night. The fittings cast a flat tungsten light that is far less mysterious than I thought it would be. There are dark corners, but they are dark in an unswept kind of way. The smell is heightened, as if the rubbish, slumbering, is freely giving off its noxious fumes.