I know that.”
William turned back to the coffee. Did he love Eddie dearly? Would it be possible for anybody to love Eddie dearly? William’s late wife had done so, but that was because she was his mother. Every mother loves her son dearly—or should. Even after the son has done something egregiously terrible—tried to shoot the Pope, or something equally awful—the mother would still love him. There had been that man, of course, who had shot the Pope; what must his mother have thought? Perhaps it would depend on whether the mother was Catholic or not, thought William. A Catholic mother might find her maternal affection stretched if her son did something like that. But then again, she would have remained his mother and might have argued, “Well, dear, you must have had your reasons …”
The thought occurred to him that Marcia had found a flat for Eddie. That would be all very well, but the problem lay not so much in the finding of flats—there were plenty of those—but in getting Eddie to move into one of them.
“You’ve found somewhere suitable for him?” he asked. “He’s difficult, you know. He’s very fussy when it comes to flats. Corduroy Mansions seems to suit him rather too well.”
Marcia shook her head. “No, I haven’t found him a flat. But I’ve found a way of encouraging him to move out. It’s something you and I have already discussed.”
William poured two shots of espresso into a cup and brought it over to Marcia.
“There,” he said. “Strong.”
She looked at him appreciatively. “Remember you said you’d had the idea of getting a dog. You said that Eddie can’t stand dogs and that if you got one, then he would probably be inclined to move out. Remember?”
William laughed. “Yes, I do. I had planned that but the problem, you see, is that I can’t envisage keeping a dog for ever. What would happen once Eddie had taken the hint? You can’t take dogs back to the”—he waved a hand in the air—“to the dog place.”
“But—”
William was emphatic. “No, you can’t.”
“I know that,” said Marcia, rather crossly. “But the point is that you could have a temporary dog.” She paused, taking a sip of her espresso. William made such delicious coffee, and yet there he was single; such a waste … “Let me explain. I was catering for a dinner party in Highgate the other night. Quite a do, and some fairly well-known faces there. The host is a newspaper columnist. Not that I read him. But somebody must, I suppose. Always preaching to people, telling them what to do; holier than thou. Anyway, when I took things round before the guests arrived I got talking to him. They have this dog, you see. Odd sort of creature. A mongrel, I’d say, but he said it was a Pimlico terrier. Now there’s a coincidence—you living in Pimlico. Have you ever heard of Pimlico terriers? No? Neither have I.”
She took another sip of her coffee. “Anyway, he said that they liked this dog but they wished they had some sort of dog-sharing arrangement. He said that they had friends who had a set-up like that—the dog was shared by two households. If one set of people had to go away, the dog went to the other. It divided its time.”
William nodded. “A useful arrangement. People sometimes have that sort of thing for their elderly relatives.”
“Exactly. So it occurred to me: Why don’t you talk to them about sharing this Pimlico terrier with them? You need a dog, but not a full-time dog. They have a full-time dog that they would like to convert into a part-time dog. If job-sharing is all the rage, then why not dog-sharing?”
10. Oedipus Snark, MP
JENNY WAS ON HER WAY to Dolphin Square, where she was to meet Oedipus Snark for what he described as dictée. She had asked him why he called it that, and he had replied, “Dictation, my dear Jennifer, is such an authoritarian word. If I were to give you dictation, I would feel so like a … like a Conservative. Dictators, no doubt, give dictation. Whereas dictée is what we used to have at the Lycée in South Kensington. Our dear teacher, Madame Hilliard, would dictate a complicated passage to us—Proust perhaps, with its dreadfully long sentences—and we poor élèves would write it all down in our little cahiers. So sweet. That’s why I call this taking of letters on your part dictée rather than dictation. See?”
Oedipus Snark had