An Evening of Long Goodbyes Read online

  Outside in the corridor a bell began to ring. Sighing, Bel picked up her jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘I’m asking you to understand that we’re not rich any more. We’re just not. Living in Amaurot, it’s like we’re struggling to maintain ourselves in a – on a little island that’s floating further and further away from what it means to actually exist –’ She sucked in her cheeks and let them out again. ‘Can’t you see, this is a good thing?’ she said, putting a hand on my arm. ‘We’ll be able to keep the house, and we’ll all be able to stay together…’

  Even in my distrait condition, I realized that this hand was the first time she’d touched me since the whole accidentally-kissing-her farrago – that she was offering me an olive branch. But I wasn’t going to be bought off so easily. Without replying, I stiffly turned my head and fixed my gaze on the shard of sky at the window, until her hand lifted and I heard the chair creak beside me as she rose to go.

  The thing was, though – the thing was that deep down I knew she was right, about the way everything was changing, about the new money taking over. You would see them at the weekends, these new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow winding roads in BMWs or hulking jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anaemic sharks. What if this really was the only way to secure the house from them? I tried to imagine Amaurot as a Residence, full of babbling strangers; I pictured myself at the breakfast table, the Disadvantaged sitting across from me. Would I be expected to make conversation? Would they want to borrow things? My razor, a tie? The notion was too painful to contemplate. A far better solution seemed to be to pretend that none of this was happening, and that my conversation with Bel had never taken place. I was getting enough painkillers to make this quite unproblematic: they made reality fat and viscous and blurred at the edges, broken only by the comings and goings of the doctors and nurses, and the mortal wheezing of the patient in the next room, like a dry wind through a petrified forest.

  That night, however – my first night back on earth after my hiatus – I wasn’t able to sleep. I lay awake for hours, gazing at the banks of screens and monitors arranged around me telling the ineffable story of my body in blips and graphs and pulses. It seemed to me that I could see things in the saw-toothed waves; all kinds of things: explosions, prophecies, impending disasters, all hastening in on top of one another until I couldn’t bear it any longer and, seized in a cold grip, I pressed the panic button and cried out ‘Help, help!’ until the night nurse’s clipping stride came down the corridor, not the attractive buxom nurse in charge of sponge baths but the thermometer-happy one with no behind.

  ‘Yes?’ she demanded. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I cleared my throat and pointed at the spikes and troughs on the monitor and said, ‘I’m a little concerned about, ahem, that is…’

  ‘Do you feel sick?’ she stamped impatiently. ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘Well, no, not as such,’ feeling all of a sudden that I could possibly have blown things out of proportion. ‘It’s just that – those sort of spikes there, don’t they look a little, you know, off?’

  ‘No,’ she said with an abrasive sigh, ‘they are perfectly normal, just like the last time, and the time before that.’

  ‘Oh. It’s just that I thought they were a bit off.’ There was a moment of silence broken only by her tapping foot; ‘Busy?’ I said, because even if she was hatchet-faced and anally fixated she was still someone to talk to –

  ‘Very,’ she snapped as if she’d been waiting for it, turned on her heel and whipped out of the room, back to her crossword puzzle or her tray of entrails or whatever it was she did in her glass box down the hall; leaving me to the silent procession of the waves, to think of home, the blossoms on the trees, the ballroom where ghosts in tails and enormous hooped dresses whirled each other round in quadrilles and cotillions, as the walls mildewed and spiders made nests in the chandeliers…

  Someone pushed open the ballroom door. ‘There you are. You didn’t wait for me.’

  ‘Oh – I didn’t think you meant actually wait…’

  ‘It’s freezing.’ Mirela rubbed her hands over her bare arms. ‘What are you doing down here? You’re missing the party.’

  ‘Oh, you know… just thought I’d take a breather.’

  ‘Your mother’s been looking for you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said bleakly.

  She sat down on the other side of the aisle. ‘Are you all right? Is your head hurting?’

  ‘No, no…’ I crossed my legs towards her, suspected it looked effeminate, crossed them back again. ‘I suppose it’s just the first time I’ve seen everything finished. Gives me an excuse to be maudlin.’

  ‘ “Maudlin”?’

  ‘Sad, you know, like when you think about the past.’

  ‘It must be strange, to come home and find everything changed like this.’

  I looked up at the raised stage, the flat planes of colour, the exposed wooden beams that had replaced the fusty wallpaper and rococo plasterwork. ‘It’s all right,’ I said nobly.

  ‘I’m glad you were able to come back today,’ she said. ‘In time for the first performance.’

  ‘It did help to have the painkillers still in my system,’ I agreed.

  She laughed. ‘Poor Charles! Didn’t you like it even a little bit?’

  I liked you, I wanted to say: even if your wig kept slipping, even though you pronounced love like laugh and made joyriders sound like something from a Transylvanian folk tale, still whenever you were onstage the dialogue momentarily stopped grating and almost began to sound a little like music. But I didn’t say it; I just mumbled something about the realistic costumes.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, looking down into her clasped hands as if she were carrying a ladybird in there, out to the garden. ‘Charles – now that you are back – there was something I wanted to say to you.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, and cleared my throat.

  ‘It’s a bit difficult.’

  ‘Well – try anyway,’ I said. Because the truth of it was that I had been wondering… I mean, what happens in films when something extraordinary happens to a fellow, like he goes on the run or he gets blown up or his sister turns his house into a community theatre, is that he then meets a beautiful woman who immediately falls in love with him and helps him along on his new path. They don’t go into why she falls in love with him. It’s just the way it works. Maybe it’s a kind of reward from the Fates for daring to disturb the universe. I was thinking that none of this might seem quite as bad with a girl like Mirela by my side.

  She exhaled preparatively, and then said, ‘I wanted to apologize for what Mama did, for her stealing from you.’

  ‘Ah, right.’ I masked my disappointment with a cough. ‘There’s no need to, really. Water under the bridge, so forth.’

  ‘You must think we’re all crazy,’ she said in a low voice. Wisps of light crept in under the door, picking out silver on her downy arms.

  ‘No, no…’ I hurried to set her at ease. ‘I’ve heard far worse stories. For instance, this one chap I know, Pongo McGurks, his family had a butler, name of Sanderson – had him for years, used to swear by him, best butler they’d ever had, etcetera. Then they came back early from a weekend away to find him in Pongo’s mother’s wedding dress, about to have the toaster marry him to the cuckoo clock.’

  ‘Oh.’ She seemed not quite to know what to make of this. ‘And this happens often?’

  ‘No, I suppose it’s pretty rare,’ I conceded. ‘I mean it’s rare that you have a butler who’s a perfect size ten.’ This wasn’t coming out right at all.

  Mirela frowned, and hooked a strand of black hair with a finger. ‘I must not be explaining it right,’ she said. ‘What I want to say is that Mama’s not really like that, you see. She’s not a thief. I told her over and over again, why do you steal from these people, they care about you, they will help us. But you must understan
d that it’s hard for her to trust people, after what has happened. At first she takes only small things you wouldn’t miss. But when she finds out about the bank, that you might lose the house, she starts to panic, she doesn’t sleep, she gets an idea she can steal enough to get us back home. As if there is anything to go back to there.’ She grimaced sardonically. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is, the reason she did these things is not because she is mad or a bad woman. She is just someone who terrible things have happened to.’ The sizzling cobalt eyes swivelled to confront me: I felt like I’d been skewered and lifted from my seat. ‘I wanted you to know that we are just a normal family that things have happened to. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Of course,’ I croaked, ‘of course.’

  ‘I knew you would,’ she said quietly. She looked down at her hands again and then suddenly said: ‘Did you notice my leg onstage tonight?’

  ‘Your…?’

  ‘My leg, Charles. You must have, everyone must have. I don’t want you to be diplomatic about it. Just tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said. ‘Honestly. Maybe a little at first. But I soon forgot.’

  ‘That was something else Mama wanted to do with the money,’ she reflected. ‘They can do amazing things these days, everyone says.’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘I mean I think it rather suits you.’

  Possibly this wasn’t the right thing to say; I wasn’t sure of the etiquette on missing limbs. But she started to laugh. ‘It’s good to finally have someone I can talk to about being blown up!’ she said.

  ‘It’s no joke,’ I averred.

  ‘The world never looks the same afterwards, does it?’ She stopped laughing. ‘When you realize that things can just happen like that.’ She bowed her head: I let my gaze settle on her face again, tried to figure out what it was about it that mesmerized me so.

  ‘I really am grateful to you for taking us in, Charles,’ she said. ‘Most people don’t even know what happened over there. They think we just come here to beg.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ I said. Sfumato, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux.

  ‘I knew you would understand,’ she repeated. A moment of silence drifted by. It was quite plain what she was getting at. The time had come to make my move. ‘That reminds me,’ I said, ‘there was something I wanted to say too. About the play, that is.’

  ‘Oh?’ She looked up.

  ‘Yes’ I said, thrusting my wrists out of my cuffs. ‘I meant to say that one thing that I found interesting – I found heartening about it – was what it said about love.’

  ‘Love?’ she repeated uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, the way it showed love could triumph over all the, ah, poverty and car-theft and so on.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Mirela said. ‘Yes, though it’s not really a love story, I don’t think.’

  ‘But the love between Bel’s character, for instance, and the, the chap with the moustache – what it said to me was, you know, that even when terrible things happen to you, and your life is uprooted, there’s still hope, because that’s just when you’ll meet that special someone who’ll sort of help you along with it all. That’s what I really took from it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mirela nodded vaguely while inspecting a left-behind programme on the seat beside her. ‘That’s very interesting, Charles, because it wasn’t something that we were trying specifically to bring out as a theme…’

  She wasn’t following me. ‘That’s the thing about love, though, isn’t it?’ I persevered. ‘You know, that it sort of turns up in unexpected places, even when it’s not strictly speaking a, a theme…’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said: then turned and added volubly, ‘Yes, you’re right, of course, and also friendship, you know, loving friendship, that’s very important in the play too. The kind that Bel had with her half-brother.’

  ‘Which one,’ I said.

  ‘The one that worked in the chip shop,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s friendship all right,’ I agreed. ‘But there was love as well, such as when the heroin-addict chap and that girl who kept shoplifting from Marks and Spencer’s –’

  ‘Yes, but mostly friendship, Charles,’ she blurted, and then she paused and then there was an awkward silence. She was obviously too preoccupied by her big night to perceive the true meaning behind my commentary. Confound it, it was impossible to handle these delicate moments without the benefit of a face!

  The silence persisted a while longer and then she said, quite out of the blue, ‘Have you met Harry?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Harry, he’s the boy who wrote the play. Didn’t you meet him earlier today?’

  ‘I didn’t meet anyone,’ I said dolefully. ‘Bel told me to stay out of the way. I think she’d have locked me in the cellar if she could.’

  ‘Oh. Well, then, you have to come and meet him now,’ she said. ‘He’s so funny and clever and kind. I just know you’ll like him.’

  Perhaps I was wrong to go immediately on the defensive; but a fellow doesn’t go ten rounds with Patsy Olé without learning a thing or two about the darker workings of the female mind. Suddenly she seemed far too animated. Could it be that her Balkan upbringing had not stretched as far as the protocol of torrid love affairs? Could it be that this Harry and his wretched play had so dazzled her that our tender moment together in the Folly had flown right out of her head?

  ‘I won’t,’ I volunteered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I won’t like him,’ I said. ‘This Harry person.’

  She laughed a sparkling laugh. ‘Don’t be silly! I’m positive you will. Anyway, you can’t hide away in here all night.’ She grabbed my wrist and, without looking me in the eye, pulled me to my feet. With a mounting sense of doom I found myself being tugged down the hallway, like an old dog being dragged off to the vet.

  Father’s portrait had been reinstated just outside the recital room, with a plaque underneath it that read Ralph Hythloday Centre for the Arts, as if it had all been his idea. He looked trapped: our eyes met briefly, helplessly, as Mirela led me back to the party.

  Inside the company had thinned out a little. Mother was holding court to a brace of journalists with her back to us just inside the door. The red-faced gent had gotten even redder; he stood with his cohorts in a ragged semi-circle around the piano, belting out some awful show-tune. Behind them, MacGillyguddy was peering into the old dumb waiter.

  ‘What’s he doing hanging around here anyway?’ I said. ‘What sort of theatre has MacGillycuddy as a consultant?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, he’s…’ She stopped and frowned. ‘Well I don’t know, exactly. He just seems to appear. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked – oh look, Charles, there’s Harry!’ Gaily she waved her hand at a group of dramatic types in the corner: and my heart sank as I realized that, just as I had feared, ‘Harry’ and the annoying fellow with the avant-garde hairstyle were one and the same person.

  Bel had her arm linked to his right, and now Mirela insinuated herself into his left.

  ‘I don’t consider Burnin Up to be a play as such,’ he was saying. ‘It’s more of a call to arms. It’s a kind of an insurgency. It’s about exploding the whole –’

  ‘Harry, this is Charles that I wanted you to meet.’

  He glanced around uninterestedly and gave me a vacuous smile.

  ‘Charles, this is Harry that I was –’ Mirela turned back to me.

  ‘We’ve met,’ I said grimly.

  ‘We have?’ Harry said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. For the penny had finally dropped. I knew where I’d seen him before: and the mechanics of this whole sinister enterprise were now clear to me. The supposedly Disadvantaged Actors clogging up the recital room were none other than the food-scrounging Marxists who had plagued my afternoons during Bel’s college days; and this fellow, though he’d had pink hair then, and gone under the name
of Boris, had been their ringleader. How many times had I overheard him harping on about dreams or freedom or revolutions to some starry-eyed girl as he lay with his feet up on the chaise longue, or agitating Mrs P to rise up against her oppressors, viz. Mother and me, even as he stuffed himself with truffles or devoured the pecan plait that one had specially set aside for oneself. ‘Oh yes,’ I said again, to let him know that I was on to his game and would be keeping a very close eye on him. However, the conversation had already moved on, which is to say that the girls, gushing like twelve-year-olds who had eaten too much sherbet, were pulling his sleeve and asking him to tell them more about the insurgency, so I took a couple of canapés from a passing tray and contented myself with chewing on them in a vaguely threatening way.

  ‘Well, the way I think of it is as a kind of “guerrilla warfare”,’ Harry said. Close up, his plaits looked like a gaggle of snakes that had been poisoned while crawling over his head. He was one of those people who makes imaginary quotation marks with their fingers, which seemed another good reason to despise him. ‘Taking an elitist art-form and using it essentially as a Trojan horse from which we can then spring out and confront bourgeois audiences with their own hypocrisy. So the play itself has to have the kind of explosive power that can so to speak “shatter” the edifices it’s being staged in, like a bomb –’

  ‘Just a minute,’ I cut in here. ‘You’re not talking about shattering Amaurot, I hope.’

  ‘It’s a metaphor, you dope,’ Bel said crossly.

  ‘We’re hoping we won’t have to use any actual explosives,’ Harry said to me.

  ‘I should hope not,’ I said, returning to my canapé. ‘You can’t fool around when it comes to blowing up edifices. I speak from experience.’

  ‘Because I suppose the legacy of postmodernism,’ Harry went on, ‘has been to deny art the power to make any kind of meaningful statement – about this, about us. So it seems to me that what we have to do is get back to the theatre of Berkoff, of Artaud –’