She went out. Fat Charlie did not resume breathing.
“Who,” said Rosie’s mother, perfectly calmly. “Was. That.”
“My sis—cousin. My cousin,” said Fat Charlie. “I just think of her as my sister. We were very close, growing up. She just decided to crash here last night. She’s a bit of a wild child. Well. Yes. You’ll see her at the wedding.”
“I’ll put her down for Table H,” said Rosie’s mother. “She’ll be more comfortable there.” She said it in the same way most people would say things like, “Do you wish to die quickly, or shall I let Mongo have his fun first?”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie. “Well,” he said. “Lovely to see you. Well,” he said, “you must have lots of things to be getting on with. And,” he said, “I need to be getting to work.”
“I thought you had the day off.”
“Morning. I’ve got the morning off. And it’s nearly over. And I should be getting off to work now so good-bye.”
She clutched her handbag to her, and she stood up. Fat Charlie followed her out into the hall.
“Lovely seeing you,” he said.
She blinked, as a nictitating python might blink before striking. “Good-bye Daisy,” she called. “I’ll see you at the wedding.”
Daisy, now wearing panties and a bra, and in the process of pulling on a T-shirt, leaned out into the hall. “Take care,” she said, and went back into Fat Charlie’s bedroom.
Rosie’s mother said nothing else as Fat Charlie led her down the stairs. He opened the door for her, and as she went past him, he saw on her face something terrible, something that made his stomach knot more than it was knotting already: the thing that Rosie’s mother was doing with her mouth. It was pulled up at the corners in a ghastly rictus. Like a skull with lips, Rosie’s mother was smiling.
He closed the door behind her and he stood and shivered in the downstairs hall. Then, like a man going to the electric chair, he went back up the hall steps.
“Who was that?” asked Daisy, who was now almost dressed.
“My fiancée’s mother.”
“She’s a real bundle of joy, isn’t she?” She dressed in the same clothes she had worn the previous night.
“You going to work like that?”
“Oh, bless. No, I’ll go home and change. This isn’t how I look at work, anyway. Can you ring a taxi?”
“Where are you headed?”
“Hendon.”
He called a local taxi service. Then he sat on the floor in the hallway and contemplated various future scenarios, all of them uncontemplatable.
Someone was standing next to him. “I’ve got some B vitamins in my bag,” she said. “Or you could try sucking on a spoonful of honey. It’s never done anything for me, but my flatmate swears by it for hangovers.”
“It’s not that,” said Fat Charlie. “I told her you were my cousin. So she wouldn’t think you were my, that we, you know, a strange girl in the apartment, all that.”
“Cousin, is it? Well, not to worry. She’ll probably forget all about me, and if she doesn’t, tell her I left the country mysteriously. You’ll never see me again.”
“Really? Promise?”
“You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.”
A car horn sounded in the street outside. “That’ll be my taxi. Stand up and say good-bye.”
He stood up.
“Not to worry,” she said. She hugged him.
“I think my life is over,” he said.
“No. It’s not.”
“I’m doomed.”
“Thanks,” she said. And she leaned up, and she kissed him on the lips, longer and harder than could possibly fit within the bounds of recent introduction. Then she smiled, and walked jauntily down the stairs and let herself out.
“This,” said Fat Charlie out loud when the door closed, “probably isn’t really happening.”
He could still taste her on his lips, all orange juice and raspberries. That was a kiss. That was a serious kiss. There was an oomph behind the kiss that he had never in his whole life had before, not even from—
“Rosie,” he said.
He flipped open his phone, and speed-dialed her.
“This is Rosie’s phone,” said Rosie’s voice. “I’m busy, or I’ve lost the phone again. And you’re in voice mail. Try me at home or leave me a message.”
Fat Charlie closed the phone. Then he put on his coat over his tracksuit and, wincing just a little at the terrible unblinking daylight, he went out into the street.
ROSIE NOAH WAS WORRIED, WHICH IN ITSELF WORRIED HER. It was, as so many things in Rosie’s world were, whether she would admit it to herself or not, Rosie’s mother’s fault.
Rosie had become quite used to a world in which her mother hated the idea of her marrying Fat Charlie Nancy. She took her mother’s opposition to the marriage as a sign from the heavens that she was probably doing something right, even when she was not entirely sure in her own mind that this was actually the case.
And she loved him, of course. He was solid, reassuring, sane….
Her mother’s about-turn on the matter of Fat Charlie had Rosie worried, and her mother’s sudden enthusiasm for wedding organization troubled her deeply.
She had phoned Fat Charlie the previous night to discuss the matter, but he was not answering his phones. Rosie thought perhaps he had had an early night.
It was why she was giving up her lunchtime to talk to him.
The Grahame Coats Agency occupied the top floor of a gray Victorian building in the Aldwych, and was at the top of five flights of stairs. There was a lift, though, an antique elevator which had been installed a hundred years before by theatrical agent Rupert “Binky” Butterworth. It was an extremely small, slow, juddery lift whose design and function peculiarities only became comprehensible when you discovered that Binky Butter-worth had possessed the size, shape, and ability to squeeze into small spaces of a portly young hippopotamus, and had designed the lift to fit, at a squeeze, Binky Butterworth and one other, much slimmer, person: a chorus girl, for example, or a chorus boy—Binky was not picky. All it took to make Binky happy was someone seeking theatrical representation squeezed into the lift with him, and a very slow and juddery journey up all six stories to the top. It was often the case that by the time he reached the top floor, Binky would be so overcome by the pressures of the journey that he would need to go and have a little lie-down, leaving the chorus girl or chorus boy to cool his or her heels in the waiting room, concerned that the red-faced panting and uncontrolled gasping for breath that Binky had been suffering from as they reached the final floors meant that he had been having some kind of early Edwardian embolism.
People would go into the lift with Binky Butterworth once, but after that they used the stairs.
Grahame Coats, who had purchased the remains of the Butterworth Agency from Binky’s granddaughter more than twenty years before, maintained the lift was part of history.
Rosie slammed the inner accordion door, closed the outer door, and went into reception, where she told the receptionist she wanted to see Charles Nancy. She sat down beneath the photographs of Grahame Coats with people he had represented—she recognized Morris Livingstone, the comedian, some once famous boy-bands, and a clutch of sports stars who had, in their later years, become “personalities”—the kind who got as much fun out of life as they could until a new liver became available.