An Evening of Long Goodbyes Read online

  Our house was called Amaurot. It was situated in Killiney, some ten miles outside of Dublin, a shady province of overhanging branches, narrow winding roads and sea air. Most of the houses had been built in the nineteenth century by magistrates, viceroys, military and navy men; in recent years, however, the area had become something of a tax haven for foreign racing-car drivers and soi-disant musicians. But it still possessed a sequestered elegance, an arboreal hush: I would not have lived anywhere else. On bright mornings I might take a walk up to Killiney Hill, climbing mossy steps under canopies of ash and sycamore; at the top stood the Obelisk, a monument to the kindness of the landed gentry to the local peasants during the famine year of 1741, from where you could look out over the half-hidden rooftops to the blue mountains and the golden sickle of the beach. Beside it was a little ziggurat, and the legend was that if you ran around each level of it seven times your wish would come true. But neither Bel nor I had ever managed to make it to the top; and even if we had, we would have been too dizzy to wish.

  Amaurot was big and hundreds of years old, and it seemed to me while Bel and I were growing up that as long as we were there nothing bad could ever happen to us; the world outside could go up in flames and we would continue to play, safe in the shadow of the high stone walls. As far as we were concerned, Amaurot was the world – and it belonged to us, like the waves belonged to the sea, or certain shades of blue to the sky.

  The house was set on a promontory, bordered on two sides, at the bottom of steep hills, by the sea. At every hour of the day you could hear it whispering or roaring, slipping from jade to amethyst to grey to deepest black; I loved it as the companion to my thoughts and the ear to which I disclosed my desires. A long avenue swept proudly over the lawns back to the road; ancient trees rubbed shoulders with saplings and wild flowers along the perimeter. To the rear of the house were the vegetable garden, which had gone to seed rather in recent years, the apple trees and cherry trees and a small rivulet that bore frogs down to the sea. This was where Bel and I had spent most of our childhood, in the long grass and pine needles.

  Bel had been a recalcitrant playmate. She went through long periods of not talking to anyone; instead she’d read, for days on end, her bare legs dangling from the windowsill. But she had a gift for invention, and on days when she jumped down from the ledge to join me in my stick fort, all of the fabulous ideas that she nursed over her books came bubbling out as complex adventures which I had to struggle to keep up with.

  She liked to read about Russia, and Amaurot often doubled as the Winter Palace. Sometimes we would be orphaned children of the Tsar, fleeing the clutches of the evil Revolution, crossing invisible wastes on phantom troikas; sometimes she would be the diffident, entrancing princess and I the dashing suitor trying, with difficulty, to win her over. I would be called Karl and Bel Tanya, after the heroine of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which she had fallen in love with at the age of eight. (In fact, even when the toys had been put away for ever and the games forgotten, she hung on to this name: to her friends at school, she was Tanya until well into her teens. ‘Christabel’ had been Father’s idea, after a Coleridge poem – a murky and rather depressing thing about nymphs and vampires, which breaks off abruptly at a point of confused identities and general malaise. She couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s not just the fact that nobody can spell it,’ she would fulminate periodically, ‘but he never even got around to writing the happy ending. I mean, couldn’t they have named me after a poem that someone had actually finished, would that have been too much?’ Eventually, ‘Bel’ was arrived at as a sort of compromise, and Father became the only person to call her by her full name.)

  Mother thought she might be a genius; I overheard her talking to Father about it sometimes. ‘The way she reads!’ she’d say. ‘The library is looking positively bare, she’s smuggled off so many books.’

  ‘I was thinking perhaps we should get a billiard table for it,’ Father said.

  ‘And such an imagination!’ she went on. ‘The things she comes out with, really –’

  ‘Hmm… you don’t think she might be a bit over-imaginative, do you? She does seem to spend an awful lot of time in this dreamworld of hers.’

  ‘That’s a sign of intelligence, Ralph. That girl will go places, believe me.’

  ‘Hey, Your Highness,’ I’d say to Bel, listening in on the windowsill, ‘escaping from these sorfs is making me hungry, I think there are apples in yonder wood, yonder…’

  ‘You can’t say “Hey” to a princess, Charles,’ jumping down, ‘and it’s serfs, not sorfs…’ and we’d steal through the gap in the hedge to Old Man Thompson’s garden and throw sticks up into the branches, until apples began to thud around us and, inevitably, Olivier, his sinister German manservant, appeared on the verandah: ‘Herr Zompson! Zey are scrumpfing our apfeln!’

  Old Man Thompson would come hobbling out waving his cane, yelling, ‘After ’em, Olivier! After ’em!’ and we’d shriek and run away as Olivier gave chase – a spindly black spider in his tight PVC suit – and burst back through the gap just in time, Old Man Thompson howling from the other side, ‘Bloody children, I’m going to call your father up, you bloody…’

  I don’t know if he ever did call Father up; I don’t know that it would have done him much good anyway. Father could be a difficult man to get through to. He was full of unfulfilled romanticism and wilful, unspoken delusions; he spent long hours at the office or in his study, and only the husk of him was brought home to us at the end of the day. Through the evening he’d maintain a weary, benevolent silence, and only address us to deliver abstract lectures, or ask disinterested questions about school. But sometimes he would take walks out through the trees to the hillside, to look down at the flying vapour of the sea, and bring Bel and me along with him; we would fidget restlessly while he gazed into the darkness, and then, just as we were wondering what the point of all this was, and how long we would have to stand there doing nothing while valuable television-watching time was being eaten up, he would turn to us and without introduction launch into a poem from memory, spooky verses about lonely lovers and capricious fairies, tricking spectres and murmuring seas. And as our faces turned pale with not-understanding, and we tingled with the haunting, equivocal magic that crackled around the poems, he would chuckle out, ‘Yeats, children. Yeats would have liked to be up here with you and me, on a night like this.’ And before we could express our indifference as to the presence or otherwise of Yeats, he would be marching off again, back to the house.

  Father had been a master cosmetician. In the skin of the human face he divined what a Renaissance master might have seen on a blank canvas: the possibility of a transcendent beauty. Though the Renaissance master painted to testify to God’s greatness, while my father, one of those agnostics who spends his life doing battle with the God he doesn’t believe in, worked more out of defiance, as if to say, Where you have failed, I succeed; I can lift people up out of your squalid Creation. He had worked with all the greats – Lancôme, Yves St Laurent, Givenchy, Chanel – inventing unguents, balms and lotions to retard the ravages of the sun, to preserve the black sparkle of mascara from rain and tears, to maintain the bloody red kiss of the mouth through a thousand bloody red kisses; to soothe, to rejuvenate, to enhance and restore, in short an act of such great love for the human race that, through his cosmetics, the years could be rolled back and the tale of anyone’s life – written always in lines, scars, desiccation, no matter what they say about the beauty of wisdom and life’s rich tapestry – could be untold.

  His death was more than two years ago now: it followed a long, wasting illness which had caused him great suffering. In his last days he had faltered badly. His mind had slipped, and he misused his art. He tried to disguise the desecration the disease had left, and thus, by his thinking, counteract it. ‘There’s no escaping it,’ he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, ‘the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone els
e in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.’ And so the make-up was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half-darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge. For a time the house teetered on the verge of becoming some kind of hospice Cage Aux Folles, everyone flapping about in hysterics and occasionally French accents. It was a mercy when he died and we could restore him in our memories to what he had been before all this mortal vaudeville. I can still hear his last words to me, with a crumbling, crooked finger beckoning me out of the shadows to kneel at his side: ‘Son… the world is cruel…’ he’d whispered. ‘Always… moisturize…’

  Although before his death Father’s was the mood that generally prevailed in the house – a sort of brittle otherworldliness, an ethereally edged detachment, as though saying to the world, ‘We will indulge you for the moment, but bear in mind, please, that as soon as Father’s work is done, we will leave you’ – Mother had always been the steelier of the pair, strict about correct behaviour and what she called ‘breeding’. She knew just about everyone there was to know, and was forever flying about to lunches and gallery openings and book launches and dinner parties, with or without Father in tow. In later years especially she became more and more independent of him, and ran the show in the house as he receded from it.

  Shortly after his death, however, she too began to disintegrate. It happened gradually but unmistakably, a slow, irresistible shutting-down, until eventually she wouldn’t go out at all, or even take telephone calls. At the same time she exhibited a sunniness that was quite out of character. Bel and I constantly found ourselves cornered in silly, chatty, endless conversations with her. She’d rabbit away to us with gossip about the neighbours or vague plans to take a holiday or work that needed doing round the house – whatever came into her head, like a kind of domestic Reuters, tickering constantly in her armchair in the drawing room. It was a side of her that we hadn’t known existed, that (we presumed) used to be bounced off Father and now came babbling through to us. We didn’t know quite how to respond, and it wasn’t even clear that she was listening when we did, because she was drinking all the time, martinis for breakfast and whiskey sours to see in the evenings, drinking and talking, talking and drinking. Finally, one night, the situation came to a head.

  Over the years, she and Bel had developed quite a fiery relationship, which could be ignited by the most trivial things. I didn’t know what lay at the heart of it, but I had my suspicions. Before we were born, Mother and Father had been quite the stars in Dublin dramatic circles – never professionally, of course, but they were certainly well known – and now some kind of showbiz rivalry seemed to have arisen between Mother and Bel. It was funny, because for the first years, when Bel was still in school, Mother had been very encouraging about her acting ambitions. Then, suddenly, she changed. Suddenly – almost overnight – she seemed to resent them; suddenly she was full of needling opinions and advice, far more than Bel was happy with. ‘Every great actress has an inner core, on which all her performances are hung,’ she’d say: most of her pronouncements were along these metaphysical lines. ‘Your trouble, Bel, is that you have still to find your inner core.’

  That, I conjectured, was the source of the bad feeling; that was how it was even before Father got sick. In the months that followed his death, it deteriorated to the point where they could create a fight out of almost anything. Mother would accuse Bel of forgetting things, or neglecting things, of selfishness, narcissism, disloyalty, deceit. At first, Bel was so surprised that she simply took it; but after a while, when everything she did incurred a criticism from above, she began to retaliate. Bel’s practice, when she was hurt, was to shout and scream abuse of every kind until whoever it was went away; the fights got ugly very quickly. One night about six months ago, I arrived home to find Bel standing in the hallway with a face quite drained of colour. Her hands were shaking; Mother was nowhere in sight. She refused to tell me what had happened. All she would say was that, after a protracted discussion, Mother had agreed that she wasn’t herself, and that perhaps she needed some time on her own to think. The black car that had passed me in the driveway belonged to the nice people from the Cedars, taking her away for an indefinite stay.

  Which is how the house came to be under my care, and whatever Bel said, I had to work hard to keep its inscrutable momentum, to tie the disparate elements together in some semblance of order – Mrs P’s wandering mind, Bel’s pathological insistence on controlling every aspect of her life, the eccentricities or criminal tendencies of whoever she was seeing at the time, and the house itself, the centuries of stonework and timber, that had its own whims and bad moods to be coaxed through. It was I who kept it all ticking over, who stayed in all day just to centre things a little, give them a bit of focus; it was a tough job and no one thanked me for it. I couldn’t be expected to get things right all the time, either; that is, what happened afterwards wasn’t entirely my fault, whatever they tell you.

  I rose early the next morning, in spite of all the excitement the night before. The vet was coming to look at the peacocks, which had developed an infestation of some kind, and I had to let him into the garage. The peacocks were my responsibility. Father had looked after them when he was alive – he was the only one who actually liked them and they had been somewhat neglected since. I had had a peacock-flap built into the door of the garage where they lived, so they could come and go as they pleased, and other than embarrassing visits from the vet we didn’t have much to do with each other most of the time. I felt a little guilty about this, but really it was their own fault: they were the most unrewarding creatures, bone-stupid and filthy, with little sense of loyalty or gratitude, and they got infestations at the drop of a hat if they weren’t paid constant attention.

  The vet examined each bird and doused them with some sort of powder; then as usual he started getting cross about their living conditions and exhorting me to change their sawdust more frequently to avoid future infections, etc. ‘And feed them, Mr Hythloday, they’re animals, they need to eat every day, not just when you remember –’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said; it was a little early for exhortations and frankly I think we were all secretly hoping that they would die off quickly and we would be rid of them; I can’t think of any other reason that I should have been left: in charge of them, apart from the practical one that the garage was the only area of the house to which Mrs P did not have a key. Even Mother found the peacocks a little over the top, and Bel reserved a special loathing for them – all her Drama friends had turned Marxist in their Sophister year at Trinity and they gave her a fearful time about them.

  The reason Mrs P didn’t have a key was that the peacocks shared the garage with what was probably the most beloved of Father’s objets: a 1930 Mercedes, a pristine, bottle-green Grand Prix racer. It had been a gift from the German ambassador, who lived nearby; Father had developed a special hypoallergenic balm for his daughter, who suffered terrible eczema. He’d never driven the car – in fact, none of us was quite sure whether it could actually be driven – but he’d cleaned it obsessively every Sunday afternoon, buffing vigorously with chamois and beeswax for hours on end. When he was finished, he would stand arms folded at the garage door, watching the light spill over the metal as behind him the sun sank below the trees; and these liminal moments, reflecting on the stationary Mercedes, were among the few times when you could say with any degree of certainty that my father looked genuinely happy.

  After the vet had gone I wandered into the kitchen, where Mrs P was scooping scrambled eggs on to two plates of soda bread and smoked salmon.

  ‘He’s still here, then,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Master Charles, you must hide from your sister, she is very very busy.’

  ‘Busy, what’s she busy about?’

  ‘I don’t know, she get up early too, say where is my scrambled eggs please,
I must prepare –’

  ‘Prepare for what?’

  ‘I don’t know, Master Charles, but she is very – how you say – stress?’

  ‘Just a second, Mrs P – who owns those pants?’

  ‘Pants, Master Charles? I see no pants.’

  ‘There, poking out of that basket.’ How could she not see them? They were the most enormous underpants I had ever seen.

  ‘Oh, yes, I see, those pants.’

  ‘They’re not Frank’s, are they?’ I didn’t like the idea of Frank’s delicates mixing it with mine.

  Mrs P rubbed her chin slowly. ‘No, Master Charles, they are a… a present.’

  ‘A present?’

  ‘Yes, Master Charles,’ she nodded, ‘a present for you, I buy.’

  Surely this wasn’t more penance for last night! Couldn’t she just let it go? This was the sort of thing I meant earlier, about her seeming distracted; these pants, furthermore, could quite comfortably have fitted three or four Charleses in them. ‘That’s a very touching gesture, Mrs P, but really, I don’t expect you to buy me presents. Anyhow, I already have plenty of underpants.’

  ‘Oh yes, Master Charles, but it’s in shop, is special offer, I think only, ah, is bargain for Master Charles, but then I see, is too big –’