Charlie Bird may have been surprised. I wasn't.
Charlie Haughey always made an early entrance. People would be making their final preparations and suddenly, there he'd be, moving slowly, inexorably, impassive in the face of the consternation his arrival caused.
It was as his Minister of State that I first noticed this pattern. And I learned to cope with it by being there an hour before the time appointed for any meeting.
The effect on others of his early arrival was invariably the same. Embarrassed, they would babble some kind of apology. When he listened to them attentively, the small pale hands steepled, they felt flattered and grateful.
Haughey's early arrivals were part of a planned performance. Time and thought went into it. Time, thought - and a deadly understanding of the inadequacies of those around him.
He knew that the need to join, to be included, to be appreciated was paramount. His antennae homed in on the left out, the frustrated, the unappreciated, the resentful, and he set out (starting in the post-Arms Trial years on the rubber chicken circuit) to own them.
They brought him information. He paid them in time, attention, and a sense that it was him - and them - against The Others. What Mr Haughey created was a largely anonymous force of high-energy individuals bonded to him (not necessarily to each other) in a conspiratorial collegiality.
They saw both his high-flown public style and the unbuttoned profane side of him, when a grunt or a glance dismissed the pretensions of someone who had just left the group.
There were degrees of closeness to him. There were the people who had never been to Kinsealy. The people who'd been there once (I belonged to that - a half-hour visit). The people who'd spent evenings at the bar in Kinsealy. The last group were the real insiders.
They were the ones who must have been conscious of the distance between income and spend. The rest of the party had little sense of the scale of the art collection, the good wines in the cellar or any other evidence of great wealth.
In the last week, lots of people have asked me questions about the former Taoiseach, often preceded by the comment, 'You must have known him really well . . .' Every time, my attempts to dismiss this suggestion would provoke the reaction, `Ah you're trying to distance yourself from him now.'
Never mind other people's reactions. I find myself, this last week, doing a version of the old game played with daisy petals - I knew him, I knew him not.
I knew him as a colleague and as a boss. I knew him not as a friend to socialise with. I knew him as a superb chairman. I knew him as his Minister of State - and I knew him less well when I was a Minister.
A correspondent to this paper this week rightly pointed out that the parliamentary party could have selected any one of its members as leader yet chose him, knowing `that his lavish lifestyle and known income did not add up.'
It's a good point. On the other hand, almost half the Parliamentary Party didn't choose him. Many of us who served as Ministers or Junior Ministers in his first administration were among the 38 votes for George Colley, as opposed to the 44 for Charles Haughey. He had unequalled strengths. No Taoiseach has had anything like his capacity to gather non-political brains around him. They brought him their ideas and were honoured when he brought them to fruition.
No other Taoiseach has shown his ability to translate generalised goodwill into simple, memorable legislative gestures, like the Succession Act, like the free TV licences and free travel for older citizens, and the tax concessions to artists.
No other Taoiseach came near his volcanic impatience. If he wasn't happy that a Cabinet Minister was responding quickly enough to a request from him, he went directly to the Department Secretary.
There was real fear at the root of most people's respect for him. When Des O'Malley was an outcast from Fianna Fail, I remained on friendly terms with him. During Dail divisions I'd talk with him - and, very soon afterwards, would be told that my `behaviour' was not good for me.
The meeker ones virtually planned their lives around the need to avoid any possibility of provoking Mr Haughey. I have watched senior Ministers trembling after he had erupted at them - and see them later rush to be near him, much as a beaten dog returns to its master.
The photograph that best sums up the frenetic fervour he created, and its need for an enemy to punish, is best summed up by that picture of Charlie McCreevy being protected by Leinster House staff and gardai as he leaves a Fianna Fail meeting in October 1982 after proposing a vote of no confidence in the leader.
It's all there. The jostling, threatening rage all around that would have terrified most men. But a dark-haired, much younger McCreevy looks dogged rather than scared. And, of course, it was McCreevy who always said one of the reasons why the plain people of Ireland loved Charlie Haughey was that he always had the smell of sulphur about him. But the smell of sulphur means that someone's being burned. When I thought the burning away of erstwhile friends had gone far enough, in the autumn of 1990, I went to Mr Haughey and told him it was time for him to retire as leader. After I'd finished talking, his mouth smiled - not his eyes. I'll keep his verbal response for my memoirs.
Not long afterwards I was told he wanted me to do the warm-up to his '91 ardfheis speech. I refused. Back came the response.
'She did it in the good times, she can . . . do it now.'
Fair point. I would have to do it. But I wasn't prepared to lie. On the other hand, I could not be rude to the party leader at the party's annual gathering.
It was among the briefest speeches I've ever made - and it took longest to write. When I did the warm-up, the people at the ardfheis heard and warmed to the praise. Only one journalist - RTE's Gerald Barry - spotted the truth in each point.
My description of him seems, if anything, more pointed now than it did six years ago. I described him as:
'A man who could never be predicted with certainty - who always saw another option, another possibility.
A man who would sacrifice - and ask sacrifices of others.
A man motivated to survive any challenge - and capable of motivating any other individual in the party to do likewise.
A man who could take pain - and demand that others take pain, too, in the interests of something he believed in.'
Some of the 'others' - his former colleagues, are still taking that pain. And they continue to stand for something he believed in.