An Evening of Long Goodbyes Read online

  ‘I think this could really work out,’ she said. ‘I think this theatre could become something important – will you excuse me a moment, Charles? I have to talk to that man over there, I think he is from the Gate.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and watched a distinguished grey-haired gent light up as she buttonholed him.

  I lingered there a moment to see if she’d come back; when she didn’t, I picked up the remainder of her drink and followed the bar down to the end where MacGillycuddy was perched. ‘You’ve a nerve, showing your face round here,’ I said.

  He looked up at me blankly. ‘I’m sorry, have we met?’

  ‘Blast it, MacGillycuddy, don’t play games with me.’

  He frowned, mystified, and then in an awed whisper said, ‘C? Is it really you?’

  ‘Oh, hell–’ I had forgotten what a serpentine experience a conversation with him could be. ‘You know perfectly well who it is.’

  ‘I thought you were after my drink,’ he said colourlessly, and nudged the glass in my direction. ‘Take some if you want, Charlie. We’re old friends, after all.’

  ‘You’re no friend of mine,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

  ‘I was invited,’ MacGillycuddy said with a wounded expression. ‘I’m a consultant.’

  ‘Is that so? Because I’d like to consult you about something, if you don’t mind. How much of a sucker did you play me for, is what I’d like to know.’

  ‘Sucker?’ MacGillycuddy said, assuming the kind of guileless expression the infant Jesus might have had in his manger.

  ‘I mean, when I hired you to watch Frank because I thought he was stealing my furniture.’

  ‘Which I did,’ MacGillycuddy said.

  ‘Which you did, exactly my point, because the whole time not only were you personally acquainted with him –’

  ‘I wouldn’t say acquainted,’ MacGillycuddy interjected. ‘I’d seen him down the pub a few times, I suppose, maybe had a couple of games of darts with him…’

  ‘Not only were you acquainted with him,’ I persisted, ‘but you knew about all those people in my Folly, and you went ahead and let me set up my Frank trap even though you knew that they must have been behind it.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ MacGillycuddy said. ‘I had sort of a hunch, is all.’

  ‘Well, confound it man, didn’t you think of telling me any of this? I mean, what was the point of me paying you good money to snare Frank, if you knew all along it wasn’t Frank?’

  ‘Look,’ MacGillycuddy said with a hint of reproof, ‘I just did what you asked me. An All-Seeing Eye sees an awful lot of things. It’s important to ask it the right questions.’

  I made a half-wheel of exasperation. ‘For an All-Seeing Eye you’re remarkably selective with your information, do you know that?’

  ‘Maybe you should have hired the All-Speaking Mouth,’ MacGillycuddy said expressionlessly.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ I said again, and turned away, propping myself against the bar with my elbows. Mirela had gathered around her a little circle by now, well-manicured theatre patrons and bluff old actors standing and grinning foolishly like moths that have found the perfect flame; in the centre, she gesticulated and argued her case and measured out her smiles democratically between them. Over in a corner, her bear-like brothers joked noisily in Bosnian, playing some game with coins laid on a tissue paper stretched over a glass of beer; Bel meanwhile was suffering from a coughing-fit which might or might not have been put on so the person with the plaits and the peasant jacket could massage her back. And then there were the others, the men and women of Society: the bank directors and their lovely wives, the noted philanthropists, the coterie artists, the entrepreneurs and government bigwigs, animated Names with foggy semblances of personalities and a permanent entourage of worshipful diarists: and as their conversation rose again, sheer and vertiginous, I felt a burning desire to grab one of them by the lapels and shout: What is happening here? Isn’t this my house? Isn’t that the Steinway in the corner on which, in happier times, I composed ‘I’m Sticking to You’ and ‘Gosh, His Galoshes’? Am I not, beneath these bandages, still Charles Hythloday?

  But at that moment I spied Mother coming towards me with the alarmingly purposeful expression she’d acquired lately; and I realized that, whoever I was, it was time I made myself scarce.

  I’d woken up with a start, like a commuter who’s dozed off on the train home; Bel was at my bedside poring over a book. I coughed politely.

  ‘Charles!’ She set the book down with a cry. ‘Oh my goodness!’ She jumped up and leaned over me, peering into my eyes. ‘Do you know who I am? How many fingers am I holding up? Can you understand what I’m saying? Blink if you understand.’

  ‘Of course I understand,’ I said. ‘Stop shouting, I’m all right.’

  This was something of an exaggeration, as with every passing second some new part of my body seemed to awake and sing with pain. As delicately as I could I turned my head and took in my surroundings. We were in a poky room with pea-green walls and an ugly check curtain pulled over the window. Various apparatuses were arranged around me, mapping my condition with inscrutable dials and screens. A tube fed into my arm from a drip by the bed. Directly opposite me was a poster of sunlight glinting through trees, with the legend Today is the first day of the rest of your life. For some reason it gave me a chill.

  ‘How long have I been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Weeks,’ Bel said. ‘Weeks and weeks. The doctors said it’s normal when your body gets a shock like that, but we were really starting to get worried.’ She pulled her chair in closer. ‘You woke up a few times, can you remember? You were rambling on about Yeats, reciting poems at the top of your voice.’ She smiled. ‘All the really lyrical stuff. I think a couple of the nurses are in love with you.’

  ‘Well they’ve got a funny way of showing it,’ I said, recalling the unpleasant turn my dream had taken and gingerly adjusting my posterior. ‘Bel, why does my head feel funny? It feels sort of itchy.’

  ‘You got hit by a gargoyle. You’re still all bandaged up, you look like you’ve just stepped out of a pyramid.’ She hesitated, then bent down and rummaged in her bag. ‘Here –’ she opened her compact mirror.

  ‘Oh, lord…’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to be for ever.’

  ‘Do I still have a face under all this?’

  ‘Of course. It just needs time to heal. Nothing’s broken, it’s just badly bruised. You were very lucky. The doctor’s explained it all to us. I’m sure he’ll come in and see you now that you’re awake.’ She caught my eye then looked away, toying with her hair. Suddenly it seemed to me that she was acting rather strangely.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘What’s what?’ she said innocently.

  ‘You’re sitting there positively about to explode, is what.’

  ‘I’m just glad to see you, that’s all.’

  ‘I wish I could believe that,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’ A terrible thought occurred to me. ‘Oh hell, you haven’t got married to Frank or something, have you?’

  ‘Ugh, no,’ she said, flicking her hand disdainfully, then recomposing herself. ‘Let’s talk about you, though. How are you? How do you feel?’

  I squinted at her suspiciously. She puckered her brow in a passable imitation of attentiveness. ‘I feel all right,’ I began, ‘although –’

  ‘Oh Charles, I’ve so much to tell you, so much has happened since you’ve been in here, I hardly know where to begin –’

  I knew it. ‘Well, begin somewhere,’ I said, propping myself up on my lumpy pillow and starting to feel somewhat uneasy.

  She took a deep breath. ‘It’s the house,’ she said. ‘We’re turning it into a theatre.’

  ‘A what?’ I said. ‘A theatre?’

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Her eyes were lit up like Roman candles. ‘We’re going to do The Cherry Orchard, and –’

  ‘Wait – a theatre? Wha
t do you mean, a theatre? Like when Mother and Father were in that Amateur Dramatics thing? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘No, no, I mean like a proper theatre company, we’re going to build a little stage and – Charles I don’t like the noise that machine is making, maybe this ought to wait until you’re feeling better…’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, through a miasma of little sparkling lights. ‘This is all very interesting.’

  She went to the window and lifted the sash. ‘Well, I should probably start at the start,’ she said. ‘What happened after you – after the Folly…’ She turned her back to the glass. ‘Charles, what were you thinking? Were you really going to disappear off to South America?’

  I sat myself up again. ‘Look,’ I said, pressing my fingers to the outline of my nose. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t really care to discuss it. All I want to say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. And furthermore, it would have worked, if it hadn’t been for Mrs P and her wretched offspring –’ I stopped, remembering my brief encounter with Mrs P’s youngest. ‘How are they?’ I asked impetuously. ‘I mean – she wasn’t hurt, was she? The girl?’

  ‘Mirela,’ Bel said. ‘She’s fine, apparently you acted as a sort of human shield for everybody else.’

  ‘And what’s going to happen to them? Are they still there? Is the house still there? What happened with the bank?’

  ‘This is what I’m trying to tell you. It turns out that the girl, Mirela – she’s so sweet, Charles, I feel so sorry for her with that dreadful artificial – anyway, she’s an actress, so that’s… well, that bit comes later. First of all, that morning – I mean only a couple of hours after the explosion – Mother arrived back from the Cedars. They’d let her out early. The place was still in absolute chaos. None of us had slept, the lawn was covered with jewellery and ornaments and this smouldering stump of Folly and of course the piano upside-down in the middle of it – it had barely a scratch on it, isn’t that weird? Meanwhile, the house was full of detectives and policemen asking these humiliating questions about our financial situation and the insurance on one hand, and trying to get someone to press charges against Mrs P on the other – well, I expected her to take one look and then turn on her heel and get back in the cab. But she was fantastic, she just brushed right past everybody and made herself this enormous gin and tonic –’

  ‘I thought she wasn’t supposed to be drinking,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of her going to the Cedars?’

  ‘I did ask her about that,’ Bel said. ‘She just muttered something about them being very progressive.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But anyway, it was complete pandemonium, all these people tugging at her, and then Mrs P went into shock and they had to take her to hospital, and then bloody Laura thought she’d lost her car keys and cried and cried for about four hours straight. But Mother just calmly went and made a couple of phone calls, and a few minutes later all the policemen and so on just sort of vanished. Really, Charles, we’re lucky she knows who she does. I mean strictly speaking you should be under arrest.’

  ‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with a theatre,’ I said. ‘Unless you’re hoping to pay off the bank by putting on shows in the old barn, like in some Mickey Rooney film.’

  ‘The bank is paid,’ Bel said.

  I felt my stomach turn over. ‘What?’

  ‘The debt’s paid off. It’s gone. The auction, all that – it never happened.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘How can it be gone? The mortgage was… I mean, you saw the figures.’

  ‘I know, I know. But Mother tracked down the accountant – Geoffrey, you remember him. He was away working on some island I’d never heard of. Anyway, he came back and they went to meet the director of the bank – the director, Charles, it turns out Mother and he go back years and years. Between the three of them they uncovered some annuity of Father’s that no one had known about. They had the whole thing sorted out by lunchtime. I felt a little foolish, I can tell you.’

  ‘But…’ My head was spinning. ‘You went through the accounts. There wasn’t any money there. There simply wasn’t. How can they suddenly produce this –’

  ‘I know, I don’t quite understand it either. But we should just count our blessings that they –’

  ‘And what about the irregularities, what about those? That time I went to see the bank chap in the shopping centre, he told me the structure of the repayments was all wrong, he was going to have it investigated…’

  ‘I don’t know, Charles.’ Bel shifted her weight impatiently from foot to foot. ‘Father’s accounts were so complicated. Maybe your manager just wasn’t used to it. Surely the main thing is that we’re out of the woods, for now at least. We do still owe people, of course, but nobody’s trying to take the house away.’

  I tried to return her smile. This was good news, wasn’t it? Why did it feel so wrong?

  ‘Still, you probably picked a good time to be unconscious. Even with everything sorted out, the atmosphere has been pretty apocalyptic. Mother’s… well, you’ll see yourself. But she was talking seriously about selling Amaurot.’

  ‘Selling?’ I raised myself up on my forearms. ‘Mother wouldn’t sell! What have you been saying to her? Have you been putting ideas into her head?’

  ‘I haven’t been putting anything into her head, Charles, you know she hasn’t been happy there since Dad died, you know how miserable it must be for her, floating around this vast empty mansion… And meanwhile, there’s all these computer people buying up everywhere around us, every week practically someone arrives at the door and makes an offer – crazy offers, enough to pay off all our debts once and for all and get a little house down the country that Mother could retire to –’

  She sat back down at the foot of the bed, picked up her book and began riffling back and forth through the pages. ‘But then one night I was talking to Mirela, and she was telling me about this theatre group she was part of at home in Yugoslavia, before all the, you know, the war and everything. They did all kinds of things, workshops, street theatre, political stuff. The founder had just started it from his house with a few friends, and it had taken it off from there. And I thought, why couldn’t we do the same thing at Amaurot? I mean there’s all this space where you could have rehearsals and classes and so on, and then there’re all those spare bedrooms we haven’t used in years – it’s like the more you think about it, the more perfect you realise it is. And when I told Mother she was just as excited as me…’

  So the very next morning, she said, she had contacted some of her former classmates from the drama course to help her come up with a design for a theatre: they had given this design to Mrs P’s son Vuk, who it turned out had been an architect before taking up residence in my erstwhile Folly – Vuk, Zoran and the beguiling Mirela, I should add, had, in the climate of anarchy that seemed to be prevailing at Amaurot, been moved into guest bedrooms until their asylum claims had been looked at, while Mrs P was still in situ as housekeeper without Mother so much as docking her pay. As she went on, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was not just one of the regular Bel pipe dreams that she would obsess about for a week and then forget – that without my steadying influence, Mother and she had formed some sort of unholy alliance, and were already putting their demented scheme into motion.

  ‘We’re going to open up the old ballroom and put the stage in there. All we’re waiting for is the builders to come back from Tibet. Charles, isn’t it wonderful? No more trudging round to auditions, we can put on anything we want –’ She waltzed from her chair with her hands clasped to her breast, looking for all the world as if she were about to burst into song, and began to reel off a list of plays and playwrights, plans and strategies, with words like artists and residence, space and community ominously juxtaposed; while I sat there my head stewing inside the bandages like an enormous pudding, Today is the first day of the rest of your life glinting mockingly at me from the far
wall –

  ‘But this is absurd!’

  Bel halted mid-waltz and looked at me. Over my left shoulder, one of the monitors bleeped shrilly. ‘It’s absurd,’ I repeated. ‘The whole idea. Amaurot’s already a residence. I reside there. I’m sorry you’ve made all these plans for nothing. But it’s a house, that people live in. You can’t just come in and turn it into something else.’

  ‘But we’ve been through all this,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t keep it going the way it is, you know that. We have to adapt, or else we lose it.’

  ‘I don’t see how you building a theatre is going to help anyone.’

  She hesitated a moment, then circled back carefully towards the bed. ‘Well you see it won’t be an ordinary theatre,’ she said. ‘We want it to be a place where people who normally wouldn’t get anywhere near a stage can come and learn to express themselves, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds can come and stay and –’

  My head thumped back on to the pillow. ‘Are you out of your mind? Don’t you have any idea how society works?’

  ‘I know it sounds strange,’ she reached her arm out imploringly, ‘but if you’ll only listen, there’s a reason for it. I’ve talked to Geoffrey. He says that if we presented ourselves right we’d be eligible for all kinds of government grants. You know, if we’re helping people, and then there’s the cultural diversity element too, with Mirela being from the Balkans. If the theatre was successful we might even be able to have Amaurot registered as a charity. Then think of it, Charles, we could stay there as long as we wanted, and never have to worry any more about banks, or creditors, or how we’re going to keep it running…’ She sat back and hunched her shoulders earnestly. ‘And aside from the money, it’s a chance to put Amaurot on the map again, for it to mean something. Isn’t that what you want? We’d finally be using it for something good. And the possibilities are endless, once you start thinking about it. We can give classes – you know, drama classes, for inner-city kids, they can come out for the day and –’

  ‘Why stop there?’ I said. ‘Why not throw the doors open altogether? We could give guided tours: “This is Charles’s bedroom, visitors are asked kindly not to extinguish their cigarettes on his, on his childhood stamp collection –”’