tin of pills, which he snapped open. He stared at its contents for several seconds.
9: Gin and tears
"Glug glug glug," whispered Giles to himself, swirling the lime juice in its prefrosted beaker and holding it up to the light. "Glug glug glug glug glug."
Seen from outside his window Giles Coldstream might have been mistaken for a crazy scientist were it not for the amiable blandness of his face. The desk over which he was hunched was a fizzing, gargling laboratory of martini shakers, electric stirrers, corkscrews, siphons, ice buckets, glass coolers, lemon peelers, spoons.
Without taking his eyes from the misted beaker Giles reached out gropingly with his right hand until it settled on the lumpy green bottle of Gordon's gin, which he then unscrewed, upturned, and frowned at. "Ah. Empty," he said.
Giles sauntered the length of the room, opened the double doors of his vast teak drinks cupboard, selected a bottle of gin from the off-license-sized rank on the top shelf, and returned to his desk. Giles filled the tall beaker almost to the brim, adding, by way of an afterthought, scolding himself for his forgetfulness, a squirt of tonic. He sipped quizzically. "Delicious." Giles sipped again, more candidly this time, and ambled back to the bed. A creased Penguin of Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, the tale of a sixty-year-old man's romance with a twenty-year-old girl, lay open on his pillow. He read a few more pages before disappointment at Miss Murdoch's continual shirking of the question of the protagonists' difference in teeth caused him to toss the book scathingly under his bed. "You can't 'suspend disbelief forever," he remarked. From the pile of hardbacks which The Black Prince joined— Teeth, Oral Hygiene: The Facts, The History of the Denture, A Dentist's Day, The Tooth —our good Giles selected one at random and sank with foreboding into the deep pillows.
Twenty pages later there was a firm rap on his bedroom door. "Giles?"
He peered woefully over his book. "Yes?" "Telephone." "Who is it, actually?" "Some old woman." "No. I meant outside the door. Who are you?”
: "Celia."
"Ah. Now Celia—couldn't you just sort of—"
"What? Look—" Celia fought with the handle. "—I can't—"
"Hang on." Giles swung his body off the bed and toddled over to the door, whose three bolts he threw back and which he opened a few millimeters.
When Giles saw Celia he screamed.
"Gosh, sorry about that," he said afterward. "I didn't really recognize you." Celia had a lardlike cream pack on her face and had brushed her hair out tangentially from her big square head. She looked like an anemic golliwog. "Look, um, uh . . ." Giles snapped his fingers weakly.
"Celia."
"Celia. Look—Celia—it may be my mother. In fact, it is. Do you think you could very kindly tell her I'm ill?"
"No, I'm afraid I couldn't. I've already told her you're well."
"I see. Am I right in thinking you've got a telephone in your room? May I take it in there?"
Celia swiveled and after a moment's hesitation Giles followed her across the landing.
"What's happened to your telephone?"
"I cut the wire," said Giles, not without pride.
Celia preceded him into the room and pointed to the telephone on the windowseat. "Whatever for?" she asked.
"The sudden ringing gives me such a fright sometimes. I thought I might fall over one of these days and knock out . . ."
Giles was going to say "some teeth," but he fell silent, blank and becalmed in the doorway.
"Well, you'd better answer it now you're here."
"Oh! Thank you . . . Celia."
Celia repaired to her dressing table. She took up the hairbrush with a roll of her eyes. "You stink of gin, you know."
"Do I?" asked Giles, faintly intrigued. "No, I didn't know that." Giles then gave Celia one of his smiles, which is to say he compressed and elongated his lips. "Hello? Mother? Oh, hello. This is Giles here. I'm very well, indeed, thank you
—awfully well. Ah, no, now, today isn't a good day, actually.
Oh, I've got lots of things I must