An Evening of Long Goodbyes Read online

  ‘We have to hurry,’ she began automatically, and then stopped. ‘If you climb up on the bookcase,’ she gestured back towards the sleeping bags, ‘you can unfasten the tarp and lean yourself out from the top of the Folly. It’s a bit like flying, especially on a windy night.’

  ‘Why… you’re the angel!’ I exclaimed. ‘You used to wave to me!’

  ‘You thought I was an angel?’

  ‘Well… I mean I was never quite sure…’

  ‘I think you were usually drunk.’

  ‘Well, yes…’

  ‘You always looked so confused,’ she laughed again, and then it was her turn to take my arm. ‘Charles, what will happen to us? Will your mother give us over to the police?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said earnestly. ‘She wouldn’t dream of it. We’ll talk to her, don’t worry. We’ll work something out.’

  She seemed satisfied with this; she nodded and withdrew her hand. She looked me in the eye, and said gently, ‘Charles, what have you got in your trousers?’

  I had forgotten all about Father’s portrait, and I confess that I was somewhat thrown by this remark; our momentum might have been fatally compromised had a reddened, anxious face not at that instant popped up through the trapdoor.

  ‘Well, well,’ I snapped back to life, ‘if it isn’t the rat come back for one last look at the sinking ship.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ MacGillycuddy shrieked. ‘There’s a bomb! What are you doing standing around talking?’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He disappeared again and I ushered the girl ahead of me – and there it was again, that tapping sound –

  ‘Do you have mice up here? Very large mice?’

  She paused at the edge of the hatch, as if debating a point with herself. ‘It’s not mice,’ she said.

  ‘What is it then?’

  She half-turned towards me, the cobalt eyes burying themselves in mine, and hitched up her skirt. I thought at first she was going to curtsey; then I saw that while her right leg was bronzed and strong, the left ended just below the knee: strapped around the stump were rough steel bands that attached it to a clumsy looking wooden prosthesis.

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘Something else I picked up on the road,’ she said. ‘A bomb. Or a mine. I don’t remember. I woke up and this was there instead.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said weakly – but she was already hastening down the steps. I hurried after her, clambering over the piano, for some reason passing Frank at the door –

  ‘All right?’ Frank said.

  ‘Over here! Come on!’ MacGillycuddy waved at us from behind a brake of shrubs and saplings. All the fear and urgency that until now had been dormant sprang up in us both: we dashed across the lawn, the girl clinging to my arm for balance. Above us the sky had darkened and the wind risen: it threw her hair about and grabbed at my cheeks like some huge, amorphous infant. We crashed down beside MacGillycuddy.

  ‘You think we’ll be safe here?’ Her breast rose and fell steeply as she caught her breath.

  ‘Don’t worry, running away is one thing that MacGillycuddy really does well, don’t you, MacGillycuddy?’

  He pretended not to hear me, addressing himself instead to the girl. ‘Hope I didn’t alarm you, shouting like that,’ he said in an obsequious voice. ‘I was a bit surprised to find you still there. I thought you’d be long gone.’

  ‘Wait,’ her eyes flashed, ‘how long did you know about this bomb?’

  ‘Well, I planted it, you see – didn’t you get my note?’

  ‘It was you? You planted a bomb in the Folly?’ Her voice grew shrill and she rounded on him with quite frightening ferocity. ‘Weren’t you going to tell me?’

  ‘I did tell you,’ MacGillycuddy protested, shrinking back as she loomed up over him. ‘I left Post-its everywhere, they were quite specific, “Get out, bomb,” they said, “Flee, explosion at 2 a.m.” I don’t see how you could have missed them –’

  ‘Post-its?’ The blazing eyes looked to me.

  ‘They’re a sort of self-adhesive notepaper,’ I began – ‘but look here, MacGillycuddy, you know this girl?’

  ‘Not intimately,’ MacGillycuddy blustered.

  ‘But, I mean to say, you knew that Mrs P had her children in the Folly?’

  ‘He brought my mother letters,’ the girl looked ready to rend him limb from limb, ‘from us, in secret. Then when we came here he arranged false papers for my brothers, for a price –’

  ‘So yes, in answer to your question –’

  ‘Well – blast it –’ the realization of his duplicity was building like steam between my ears, ‘I mean – when I came to you, and told you someone was stealing my furniture –’

  MacGillycuddy had a decidedly besieged look about him. ‘I wonder how Frank’s getting on,’ he said hurriedly, standing up and peering into the darkness.

  ‘Don’t change the subject – though what is Frank doing there, exactly?’

  ‘He thinks he might be able to defuse it,’ he said. ‘I had to tell them about it, Charlie. I didn’t know what’d happened to you.’

  ‘That’s because you were upstairs hiding under the bed,’ I said. ‘Anyway, why aren’t you defusing it, seeing as it was your idea to ruin my plan, and it was your blasted bomb in the first place –’

  MacGillycuddy waggled a little finger in his ear. ‘It’s one thing to make ’em,’ he said, scrutinizing the results, ‘and another thing entirely to switch ’em off.’ He cupped his hand to his mouth and bellowed: ‘Isn’t that so, Francy?’

  Frank, a dim smudge at the base of the Folly, stopped what he was doing. ‘What?’ he called back.

  ‘I say, how’s that bomb going?’

  Frank looked down between his knees. ‘Ah, there’s a good two minutes left,’ he shouted, ‘though you might want to keep clear of the windows.’

  ‘He’s going to be killed!’ The girl dragged slender white fingers down over her face.

  ‘Not at all. Sure he was in the UN. He’s done this loads of times.’ He put his hand to his mouth again: ‘Am I right, Francy?’

  ‘What?’ Frank stopped again and turned his head in our direction.

  ‘I was just telling Charles, you’ve done this loads of times.’

  ‘Just defuse the bomb!’ I cried.

  ‘I’d say it’s like riding a bike, is it? Once you learn, you never forget.’

  Frank paused to consider this with what looked like a piece of wiring in his teeth.

  ‘Actually,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it’s more like takin off a bra – like, you know how it works, and you’ve done it millions of times before, but still when you’ve got the girl there in front of you in the back of your van –’

  ‘For – would you stop distracting him!’

  ‘Get down, Charles!’ The girl grabbed my leg and pulled me down beside her.

  MacGillycuddy looked at his watch. ‘Should be about eight seconds left,’ he said. ‘Five… four…’

  We threw ourselves into the dirt.

  A cloud drifted over the moon.

  ‘There,’ said Frank.

  ‘See?’ said MacGillycuddy.

  Slowly we got to our feet.

  The Folly was intact.

  The girl and I looked at each other and laughed a foolish, happy laugh. Frank was laughing too, getting up and walking over to meet us. Without a sound, the power came on in the house behind us, and the windows streamed light onto the grass, making everything, after the hours of gloom, ecstatic and Disney-bright; the four of us gathered on the lawn, laughing and clapping Frank on the shoulder. ‘You did it!’ MacGillycuddy said.

  ‘You owe me a pint,’ Frank replied, his crooked teeth showing as he smiled; and though there seemed to be something not quite right about this exchange, I put it to the back of my mind and joined in the congratulations as, like troops returned victorious from a long and bloody war, we headed back for the house. Through the drawing-room window I saw Bel gazing out, sleepless and pale, by Mrs P’s s
ide; I caught her eye, but she looked away before I could give her the thumbs-up. Never mind, I told myself; because even though not a single thing had gone according to plan tonight, it seemed nevertheless to have worked out for the best. The Folly was still standing, in spite of everything; surely this meant that we too would prevail, not only over the forces ranged against us, but over our own misguided desires, our own best intentions. Whether she liked it or not, Bel was part of the family: wherever life took us, I couldn’t lose her for long.

  This was what I was thinking when, just in front of me, Frank stopped and pointed up into the sky. ‘Look at that funny bird,’ he said absently.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, squinting at it as it soared by us; but before I could tell him that on second thoughts it didn’t look like a bird so much as a piece of rock or something, we were enveloped in a deafening roar; and I just had time to turn and see that for some reason the Folly wasn’t where we’d left it –

  5

  The first thing that struck me – the first thing after that fast-moving piece of masonry – was that my plan had come off; because for some time after the Folly went up I was under the impression that I was residing in Chile, in a charming period hacienda, with the poet and Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats. It sounds unlikely when I set it down like that, I know; but that’s dreams for you, you can’t tell they’re dreams when you’re in them; and anyway, Yeats and I were quite happy there and I didn’t feel like rocking the boat. We were living in the lee of the Andes, on a slope of the Casablanca Valley. Santiago lay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west; I could see it from the verandah, a faint blue line beyond the vineyards.

  It was coming into summer, so the days were long, and everything in the valley was vibrant with colour and life. Sometimes it got so hot that I felt I was being smothered: the air was like a thick blanket held over my face, and my muscles ached as if I had been pulverized. But these periods of suffering never seemed to last for long, and when the heat had lifted, I would go out to the garden behind the house and wander happily amid the bees and blooming hibiscus. Lime trees grew in an odiferous corner; Yeats would pluck the fruit to make gimlets that were like nothing I had ever tasted before, so fresh and sharp and cold that they made me gasp, like jumping into a frosty sea.

  The days slipped by peacefully, with little variation. I had begun work, at long last, on my Gene Tierney monograph, and that’s how I spent most of my time. Generally I would rise mid-morning and, after a light breakfast and a cup of mountain coffee, go to my desk. While Yeats did his chores, I would write, filling page after page without pause – fancying I could feel her come to life before me as I did so, I could sense her gratitude and relief at being restored after decades of ghosthood.

  Towards the end of the day I’d send Yeats down to the bodega for some of the local wine, and amuse myself with a crossword puzzle until I saw him, a spindly figure with a shock of white hair, returning up the dust-road. I’d help him prepare dinner and then, after we’d eaten, we’d sit out on the verandah together, talking and watching night fall. Out here the sunsets were like Italian operas, torrid, emotional affairs that went on for three hours or more, hanging in the sky like burning castles. Yeats could be curmudgeonly at times – it was the 1930s, and he was getting on – but he was an excellent cook and a conscientious housekeeper and we had quite a lot in common. We’d both had Follies, for one thing. Yeats’s was called Thoor Ballylee, a stone keep in County Galway that had been built by the Normans originally but had fallen into disrepair; like me, he’d had considerable trouble with the builders who were supposed to be restoring it.

  ‘Did they have social consciences?’ I asked. ‘Were they always going on strike?’

  ‘I don’t know about social consciences,’ he said, ‘but they were local men and they all had tiny, ailing farms, and any time they felt like a break they’d tell me they had to go and resuscitate them. Saving the harvest, that was the favourite excuse. In January, mind, or the middle of June. They must have thought I was a terrible fool. Mice as well, they all claimed to be terribly afraid of mice. The lead fellow, what was his name, Raftery, forever writing these interminable letters to my wife, “Dear Mrs Yates, Oi know Oi said last time the plastering would be done by autumn, but it is going terrible slow because of the mice, there is such a dreadful scurrying and squeaking every night that my men can’t get a wink of sleep, I hope Mr Yates has sent the mousetraps and that they will arrive soon, the roofing is also going fierce slow…”’ He sighed. ‘Still, I suppose it was worth it. A man needs a Folly, after all.’

  ‘You’re so right,’ I said, with a nostalgic pang.

  He had little time for the modern world, its vapid protocols and blandishments. He didn’t believe in jobs, or in material success. He said that he had always hated work; he was proud never to have been gainfully employed, and claimed the whole idea of working for a living had been made up by the Bolsheviks.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the way I look at it, living itself is a kind of work, isn’t it? I mean to say, if you have to go through the effort and trouble of being alive, you might as well take the time to do the thing right, live with some manner of style –’

  ‘Sprezzatura,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  I explained how instead of getting a job I’d tried to reintroduce the spirit of sprezzatura into the day-to-day running of Amaurot. Yeats wasn’t surprised when it came to the part about the bank. Actually, he hated modernity even more than I did. ‘Men live such petty lives these days,’ he complained. ‘So small and scrabbling. In the days of the aristocracy a man had the chance to develop, to mould himself into something of permanence.’ He shook his head gloomily, and sank his chin into his hand. ‘When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light, and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he would go on like this all night if you let him, ‘here, written any poems lately?’

  He’d always hesitate at first; but then after a moment he’d cough and mutter that he had been tinkering with a couple of things; and take a stand by the fire with the pages in one hand and the other holding his spectacles to his eyes, reading in that dreary droning voice of his: ‘Ahem. I have heard that hysterical women say, They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow –’

  ‘Hold on –’

  ‘Yes?’ looking up –

  ‘This isn’t going to be one of your difficult ones, is it, one of those slouches-towards-Bethlehem-gong-tormented-sea things, that no one can understand?’

  Yeats would pause with a chilly, quizzical smile.

  ‘I mean, they’re good, don’t get me wrong,’ I hastened to clarify, ‘but how come you don’t do any of the old-type ones? Like that fairy one, Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild, that sort of thing.’ For these were the ones that Father would recite to Bel and me, standing on the clifftop.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Yeats would say with a grimace of politesse, ‘that these are the thoughts that afflict old men.’

  ‘Yes, but, these new ones, they’re not the sort of thing that anyone’s going to read and think, well, that bucked me up, you know, I’d love to meet that Yeats and maybe have a drink with him –’

  ‘That,’ he’d say, ‘is not the goal of poetry.’ And he’d wheel round and go into the kitchen, and start noisily rattling the dishes round the sink.

  Most of the time, however, we steered clear of the divisive subject of poetry, and our conversations went on for hours, stretching far into the night. Yeats especially liked to hear about Father’s work, how from rows of polymers on a whiteboard he knew how to transform a single ordinary face into a hundred different ones that when you looked at them seemed to ring out like steel hitting stone. Sometimes he would get excited and lean forward to me with his elbows on his knees and start gabbing away about masks and anti-selves and how, to live fully in the w
orld, you needed to construct a new personality for yourself that was the exact opposite of your real one. Father used to say things like this too; I never pretended to understand what he meant either.

  We spoke often of love, though it seemed that neither of us had any particular flair for it. I told him about Laura, and that whole rigmarole with Patsy and Hoyland, and the beautiful girl in the Folly I’d met minutes before leaving the country for ever. Yeats, for his part, had contrived to fall for the one woman in the world who was immune to his poems. Her name was Maud Gonne; she was a famous actress of the time, and a celebrated beauty. She had dangled him on a string for literally years on end before marrying a policeman named MacBride, a drunkard whom Yeats had always abhorred.

  ‘I never understood why you didn’t just give up. I mean, when she was obviously a lost cause.’

  ‘It wasn’t that simple,’ Yeats said, looking abstractedly into the roof beams. It was very late; we were sitting on hard wooden chairs by the kitchen stove.

  ‘It was perfectly simple, the woman had a heart of pure Bakelite that you couldn’t have melted with a blowtorch. And all this celebrated-beauty business. I’ve seen photographs. She wasn’t so great.’

  ‘Oh, photographs,’ he scoffed, ‘what do they tell you…’ But his voice faltered: he had never quite got over her. Really she reminded me quite strongly of Patsy. ‘All that we learn,’ he said, ‘we learn from failure. We come back to the business of the masks, Charles. The poet finds his true self in disappointment, in defeat. That’s how he learns to face the world. Maud Gonne was my quest, the transcendent ideal I failed to achieve.’

  ‘The mountain you failed to mount,’ I quipped, which didn’t go down particularly well.

  ‘She was a remarkable woman,’ he said softly, studying the fob of his watch. Perhaps he was thinking of their glory days together, when they’d founded the National Theatre that would lead eventually to the Easter Rising; or the time he and she had pushed a coffin through Dublin and thrown it into the Liffey to protest about the King’s visit.