about him leaving the Exiteers.
So he cleared his throat and said, ‘I understand completely,’ and Chris nodded gratefully, as if Felix had actively supported his decision. Chris took a huge bite of his toastie, and a long string of melted cheese looped from his lower lip and draped itself down his navy tie.
Felix twitched but managed to stop himself from wiping it away. Chris was not his son.
Chris finished his sandwich without further cheese incident, and then ate his cake and drank his cappuccino.
They were encouraged to take public transport to jobs to avoid their cars being captured on CCTV, so they walked to Bristol Temple Meads station together and Chris shook his hand and said Good luck, John, and Felix said something similar back, and then Chris walked off to get his train home. Felix thought he lived somewhere near Winchester, but wasn’t sure.
He walked the two miles to the bus station and got the coach back to North Devon.
Mabel was waiting in the hallway to glare at him, and there was a puddle by the back door.
Served him right, he supposed. He looked at the clock. He’d been gone for nine hours. Next time he’d ask Miss Knott next door to have her. Miss Knott was always interrupting their walks to engage him about Mabel, as if she were a Crufts winner and not a scrubbing-brush mutt with breath that could strip paint.
He opened the door to the garden and Mabel gave him a withering look that said it was too late now, before stalking slowly outside.
He cleaned up the widdle using yesterday’s Telegraph sports section and a bottle of bleach. After washing his hands, he put his briefcase on the kitchen table and removed the thermos, then washed it out and turned it and its accompanying plastic cup upside down on the rack to dry. He unfolded the foil that had wrapped his sandwich, shook the crumbs from it and wiped off a spot of jam with the J-cloth. Then he folded it back into its square and smoothed it into the second drawer down, along with more of its kind and a collection of paper and plastic bags, elastic bands and string.
Finally he took out the silver cylinder of nitrous oxide and the clear plastic mask, and wiped them clean of . . .
anything
. . . and put them in two separate shopping bags. Tomorrow he would take the cylinder with him and drop it in a bin near the library, where he needed to renew a book about the migratory routes of seabirds. The day after that he would put the mask and tubing into somebody else’s recycling bin.
Felix always disliked getting rid of the evidence. It all felt rather grubby. What the Exiteers were doing was not illegal, of course, he had made very sure of that. So long as they didn’t actively help the clients. Didn’t encourage them. Didn’t supply the cylinder of nitrous oxide – or what Geoffrey called ‘the instrument of death’. So long as they just sat there and witnessed the end of life, then everything was fine. The client died quickly and without pain, and the family could be assured that their loved one had not died alone, without themselves being implicated in their death. Everybody got what they wanted. Sometimes insurance companies were cheated of a few premiums, but as unnecessary lingering and suffering were prerequisites of their contractual fulfilment, Felix’s conscience was crystal clear. Even so, it would have been foolish to leave anything lying around that might prompt a suspicious mind to ask awkward questions about what had at first appeared to be the wholly expected death of a terminally ill patient. And Felix Pink had never been a foolish man.
He opened the corner cupboard. His own nitrous oxide cylinders were behind the dog food. He had secured them from the same tame dental surgeon that Geoffrey had recommended, after the third or fourth Exit he’d attended. Mrs Casper – a sweet-seeming woman with motor neurone disease. By then Felix had seen enough to know how easy, how kind an end it brought to life. He bought a fresh cylinder every so often, just to be sure it was all in working order. One day he’d need it, and it would be there. Sooner rather than later, he hoped. Although not before Mabel, of course, because in these days of Bichipoos and Poodledoodles, nobody wanted to adopt a scruffy old mongrel – especially a scruffy old mongrel who enjoyed sliding her face through fox poo.
But when Mabel was gone, then his time would come . . .
Mabel had had Lamb and Vegetables last night, so he thought she should probably steer clear of red meat tonight. Tuna Surprise, perhaps, or Chicken Terrine. He held the can at arm’s length so he could read the ingredients on the Chicken Terrine and was disappointed to find that it contained only seven per cent meat products. Meat products. That left the door open for some of those seven per cent not even being chicken. Felix speculated as to what meat could be so much less than chicken that the makers would just call it ‘meat’ rather than tell it like it was and trumpet it on the label.
Mabel nudged his calf with her nose.
‘All right, all right,’ he said. He tipped the Tuna Surprise into her bowl and put it on the little plastic mat that saved the floor from spills.
By the time he’d straightened up with due deference to his hip and had glanced down again, Mabel had eaten the Tuna Surprise and was looking up at him expectantly. He ignored her and went slowly up to their bedroom to put away his navy mac. It would be the last time he wore it this year, unless there was a sudden cold snap.
He stood for a while with the doors open, surveying his wardrobe with a pragmatic eye.
Felix Pink’s days of buying clothes were over. He had bought his last three-pack of Y-fronts a year ago, and the socks he had now would see him out. It was a strange feeling – that he would be outlived by his socks.
Although it had already happened with other things, of course.
The last house.
The last car.
Felix wondered how finely he might judge it. How low he could go. The last can of shaving foam? The last jar of jam? He sometimes wondered whether his dying thought would be of a half-pint of milk going to waste in his fridge.
He had three suits – tweed, navy pinstripe and black – and five shirts: four white and one in a muted country-check. For outdoor pursuits, supposedly, although he only ever wore it in the garden. Two pairs of slacks, one grey, one brown, three ties and three pairs of shoes – to whit: brown brogues, shiny black funereals, and some misguided loafers, which he never wore because loafers of any type were anathema to him.
He hung the navy mac on the rail, next to a short beige zip-up jacket.
Felix was at peace with most of his wardrobe, but the beige zip-up jacket still bothered him. Margaret had bought it from Marks & Spencer years ago, and he’d been secretly appalled. Felix was no adventurer, but he had never dreamed that he would wear such a staid thing. Such an old man thing. He’d seen old men in that very jacket for decades. Often with matching flat cap and walking stick. He had a hazy recollection of his father in the same jacket, and quite possibly his grandfather. The fact that Margaret had apparently felt the jacket was suitable attire for him at the age of sixty-four had come as something of a blow.
The trouble was, he now wore it all the time! It was warm but not hot. It machine-washed, and dried in a jiffy, looking like new, and it went with everything else in his wardrobe, somehow making the smart look casual and the casual look smarter. On principle, Felix had spent ten years looking for something more suitable to replace it with when it finally wore out, but it never did wear out, and he was far too much a man of his generation to dream of discarding something when it was still entirely serviceable, even if he had an existential crisis every time he wore it.
