An Evening of Long Goodbyes Read online

  ‘Oh, Charles?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why not have one of these?’ He took something out of a drawer and held it out to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, taking it. It was a keyring. The plastic tag had the Irelandbank logo on one side, and the legend ‘We Pledge Unto You’ on the other; with a metal ring attached to it on which, presumably, I could hang the keys of the house I no longer owned.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said warmly. ‘Mind how you go.’

  I saw Mrs P as I passed the supermarket, deep in conversation with a foreign-looking woman. The woman wore an identification badge and was selling magazines. ‘Mine are in one little room,’ she was saying, ‘above a butcher’s shop, we pay and pay, and when he say, oh, police, is trouble, we pay more –’ I covered my face with my hand and slipped by them, breathing stinging, shallow breaths. What was happening? What did they mean, those irregularities? Could it really be so complicated that they couldn’t begin to sort it out? Because it seemed to me to be so obvious; it was Father, he had assets, there was plenty of money, there had to be – Gasping, I leaned against a mock-Corinthian pillar, flooded by nightmarish images: hordes of machine-stitched blue suits pouring into the house, dismantling it with their dead Golem eyes, rebuilding it as a luxury aparthotel, a leisureplex, the eighteenth hole of a cross-town golf course…

  There was nothing more I could do here, however. I detached myself from my pillar and, deciding a walk home might calm me, I headed up Ballinclea Road and through the iron gates of Killiney Hill Park. But instead of calming me, the pathways – my pathways, which I had trodden a thousand times – seemed to curl indifferently away from me; the trees bowed with the wind like elders shaking accusing heads, the birds screeching and yammering as if raising an alarm. And the mountains, and the sky, and the dark gorse and grey-blue rolling sea, they remained steeped in the clouded afternoon, withholding their beauty from me as from an undeserving passer-by.

  Soon it began to rain, and by the time I got to Amaurot I was thoroughly soaked. Ascending the driveway, I saw the house appear through a shifting veil of precipitation. Already I seemed to feel its weight on my shoulders. ‘I can’t do it!’ I whispered inwardly. ‘You’re too heavy!’ And the house, even as I got closer, retreated further back into the rain.

  It was pouring now. I went into the kitchen in search of a towel. From the window I saw Mrs P making her way in the direction of the clothes line, tucked discreetly in the lee of the Folly, with a basket of washing. Covering my head with one of Bel’s theatre monthlies, I chased out after her. ‘What are you doing?’ She froze, her shoulders leaping up around her neck. ‘Give me that basket,’ I said, taking hold of it. ‘You can’t hang clothes out in the rain.’ She handed over the basket without a word. I looked through the contents – blankets, towels, sheets, once again those fearful underpants, capacious with dread and mystery – everything already dried and pressed. ‘Go inside,’ I directed sternly. Mrs P looked as if she were about to cry. ‘Go inside and go to bed. You’re not well. I’m suspending you from your duties until we get you a doctor.’

  And then she did start to cry. I set the basket down on the ground and, taking her arm in mine, led her back to the house. She sobbed and sobbed and as we walked over the wet grass I felt for all the world as though I was leading a prisoner to the scaffold. In the kitchen I sat her down and made some tea.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ But she just waved her hands in front of her face, before giving way to a fresh stream of tears.

  I stood at the sink and looked out at the rain and the sky, the same stolid grey as the bricks of the tower. Suddenly I felt smothered in there, as I had in the bank. ‘I need to think,’ I said, going to open the back door. ‘Will you please go and get some rest?’

  Mrs P looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks, but she leapt up and dragged me back from the door. ‘Please, Master Charles, don’t go back outside!’

  ‘I have to get the basket,’ I said. ‘The clothes are getting wet.’

  But she didn’t hear. ‘It rains,’ she kept saying, ‘you catch cold.’

  ‘All right, all right…’ sitting down again at the kitchen table. ‘Happy?’

  ‘Good.’ She wiped her cheeks and pretended to be cheerful again. ‘Now, everything is good. Here we are, safe and dry. I make you hot chocolate and you watch television, yes?’

  Try as I might, I couldn’t persuade her to lie down until she had installed me on the chaise longue, with a cup of cocoa resting on the floor where the table had been. As luck would have it, there was a movie on: The Killers, aka A Man Alone, handsome old Burt Lancaster murdered in flashbacked increments by faithless Ava Gardner. I eased my head back and tried to immerse myself in that world, the bare dark apartment where Lancaster sat and smoked, waiting for the assassins to come. But I couldn’t do it. I was thinking of the impossible mortgage, the exhausting interview with the bank official. It seemed to me that it all came back to Frank somehow: that after all these years, all Father’s fortifications, one little cancerous cell of reality had at last slipped through; and now, inexorably, it was metastasizing.

  Bel and Frank entered with a great commotion an hour later. Frank was holding his jaw, across which a big purple bruise was spreading. Bel fussed about him, bringing him iodine and cotton wool from the bathroom.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Uh ugh,’ Frank mumbled, ‘or ucksh ake.’

  ‘It was the cunt,’ my sister translated. ‘Do you remember, Charles, the cunt from the pub?’

  Remember? The cunt’s knobbly white face had been etched into several of my many nightmares in recent times. Bel explained that he and his mates had followed Frank home from work and ambushed him on his way to meet her; indeed, had not the postman been making a tardier round than usual it might have gone worse for Frank. As it was, Bel had had to take him to Outpatients to get his ribs taped up.

  ‘I gugga figh ag ugh,’ Frank expostulated now, making to rise from his chair, ‘ah ick izh ughing ead ih.’

  Bel pushed him back. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she told him. ‘It can wait. You’re in no condition to kick anyone’s head in.’

  His eye rolled whitely, like a fallen horse’s: and for a split second, before the Golem dead calm reasserted itself and he sat back, it was disconcertingly like looking into a mirror. I recognized the same besieged humanity that shrieked banshee-like through my own heart; and for that split second I felt a sympathy for the poor beast, and wondered if it might not be better if we were all of us Golems: obedient, unquestioning, impervious to pain.

  I left them and went to the breakfast room, where the various threats and notices still lay on a corner of the table. I seated myself and read them through with masochistic glee. The principal players were numerical: account numbers, rates of interest, amounts outstanding, dates from long ago. These were the figures whose tale was spun over the headed pages; we were mentioned in passing, in the third person, given only bit-part, transient-sounding roles as ‘occupants’.

  I read the last one, and as I laid it face-down on the table I experienced a sensation of utter dislocation, as if all this were happening light-years away, in a parallel, contradictory universe. But it was succeeded by a kind of a supercharged hereness, a phantasmagorical awareness of my familiar surroundings: the heavy drapes hanging drowsily, the quietly babbling patterns of the wallpaper, the grandfather clock and the tea-chest resting innocent in their shadows like sleeping children about to be orphaned. I thought of Amaurot and all the other great houses, those great hearts that strained now to keep beating with the thin blood of modernity, built for a simpler time when men wore hats and ladies wore gloves, silver was polished for guests, fires roared in hearths…

  In the hallway, Frank was gibbering incoherently into the phone, like a chimpanzee general declaring a state of emergency. Through the door, Bel was sitting off to one side with her chin resting on her hand. I looked at her, an
d looked back out at Frank and all of those who had come before him, and suddenly had an inkling of her desperation to find a place for herself in this world.

  ‘Mother’s being discharged next weekend,’ she said wanly, waving a letter from the Cedars.

  ‘Just in time for the auction,’ taking a seat beside her. ‘Seems appropriate.’

  ‘No luck with the bank, then?’

  ‘Well, you know, we hammered a few things out. They seemed quite adamant about getting their money back, though.’ The television was on with the sound down: rockets fired mutely across a shaky desert. ‘They did say that if we could speak to our accountant he might be able to untangle this a little.’

  ‘I’ve tried to find our accountant. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth. And Father’s files are impossible. They’re like code. You never come across the same name twice. I don’t even know if they are the right files.’

  ‘Mother would know, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Bel covered her face with her hands, ‘the horror of bringing Mother into this…’

  ‘Well, something’ll turn up.’ I tugged gently at her hair. ‘Maybe we have a rich uncle we don’t know about.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like much of a plan,’ she said dismally, picking at a patch on her cords. ‘This is horrible, Charles. Ever since this morning I’ve been feeling like a trespasser, I feel like I’m sleeping in someone else’s bed, and eating with someone else’s cutlery. Every time I close a door it seems to echo almost for ever. And now Mother’s going to come back and make it look like it’s all our fault, and go on about how we’ve let Father down and we’ve thrown away our birthright and all that –’

  ‘Oh, you always take her too seriously…’

  ‘She will, that’s what she thinks, Charles, no one’s good enough to live here, we’re all just flailing about since Father died.’ She worked loose a thread and left it and sipped her brandy. ‘I wish it would all just, just end. I’m so sick of living my life at the behest of this stupid house, it sucks the soul out of you, makes you its slave, that’s how it stays alive…’

  ‘Well, of course it’ll end, Bel, we’ll find a way out, you’ll see.’

  ‘I don’t mean this mortgage stuff. I mean, everything.’ She kicked her feet out in front of her. ‘I can’t keep living here, Charles. I can’t keep living like this. It’s too weird. It’s not life, can’t you see that?’

  ‘Life,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Because even if we’d sold some of our antiques – that ridiculous car, for instance, all it does is gather dust, I find myself feeling sorry for it locked up out there – I mean if we’d gone about it correctly, I’m sure we could have paid them off. But… but the way everything’s turned out, don’t you think that maybe this is supposed to happen? Because places like Amaurot aren’t supposed to exist any more –’ She paused suddenly, bowing her head to gaze down into the brandy glass swirling in her left hand, as though daunted in spite of herself by the magnitude of what she’d just said; then with an impetuous sweep of her hand she went on: ‘It’s like some story that’s gone wrong and refuses to end, and it’s been like this for so long – it’s so long since things made sense and all we do is try and pretend it’s the same as when we were little children. That’s not the way life should feel, Charles, not when you’re young. Father dies, Mother goes loolah, now this – it’s like the world is trying to tell us something. Do something, it’s saying, get out of there while you still can…’ Her gaze lifted, wandered, alit on the glass frieze of Actaeon, beyond which Frank paraded up and down the hallway. ‘And it’s right. Maybe you can live in this dreamworld, Charles, without anything in it, but I can’t, not any more.’

  For a long, desolate moment I could think of nothing to say to her. Outside Frank bayed and ululated his battle-plans; she sat bunched at the end of the divan, staring disconsolately into the cold fireplace.

  ‘Must have taken the wind out of your sails,’ I ventured gently, ‘the company turning you down like that…’

  She wheeled round sharply. ‘How do you know about that?’ she demanded.

  I shrugged; I wasn’t about to divulge how I came to be talking to MacGillycuddy, or that this was all he had told me. ‘I found out. You can tell me what happened, if you like.’

  She crossed her arms on her knees and leaned forward, frowning slightly; I knew she wanted to tell someone, though she wasn’t entirely happy that it was me. ‘Well, I had an audition and they really liked me,’ she said, drawing her arms high up around her as if she were cold, ‘and I got a callback. It was only a couple of days ago – the day we went greyhound racing, that morning. I thought I’d got it, I really did. I thought this would be my big break. Not that it was much of a part or anything, but just to start, finally – and it was Chekhov, Charles, I knew that play inside-out. But then today I got this letter…’ She broke off; she’d turned her head, but I could see a tear shimmer and tremble against the orb of her eye. ‘They were quite frank, it was very helpful of them, really…’

  ‘So what did they say?’

  ‘They said that while they thought that technically my reading was very good, they were concerned –’ she took a deep, shivery breath, ‘that it wasn’t sufficiently alive to contemporary social realities. They said I didn’t have enough of a grasp on… on the world. You mightn’t think that’d be important for an actress, Charles, but you have to, they want to bring out all the elements in the play that are like life today, you see, and they didn’t think I could do it. I mean, they were right, there’s only so many parts for fake princesses –’ twisting up these last words bitterly as the tear detached at last to course exuberantly down her cheek; leaving me to sit and watch her, wishing that I weren’t so useless and that the few inches of divan separating us didn’t feel like a thousand miles, so that maybe I could say something to comfort her instead of getting up and going over to the mantelpiece to examine the dried flowers: other people’s dreams always embarrassed me, especially when they didn’t come true.

  An audition: that was what MacGillycuddy meant, that explained what she’d been doing locked up with Frank every morning when I thought she was giving him reading lessons. It probably explained Frank himself, in fact; things didn’t get much more real than him, and Bel wasn’t one to do things by halves. She wanted so much from the world, there was so much she wanted to make it see: if she had to, she would turn away from her own life to do it – she would explode her past, she would take a bed with a criminal, lie back and think of realism…

  And this Chekhov she had always been crazy about, ever since school when they had put on one of his plays. For weeks beforehand she had wandered around the house in her silver kimono with the enormous cerise flowers, incessantly mumbling her lines like some sort of itinerant monk (with the end result that on the night she had gone totally blank). Even now, if you made the mistake of asking her what was so great about him, she would go on long harangues about how not only had he written the defining plays of the twentieth century, but he had also been a doctor and treated thousands of peasants for tuberculosis, and he had founded a theatre, and he had supported his horrendous drunken family, and he had loved his wife even though she’d had an affair, and actually managed in spite of everything to like people and listen to their stories and try to be true to them…

  ‘It’s this house,’ she said now in a slow monotone, like Mother on one of her bad days. ‘It makes me feel like I’m already obsolete, like as long as I’m here I’ll never be able to belong anywhere else…’ She looked up at me suddenly with a streaked face and an expression that was a mixture of accusation and appeal. ‘Don’t you see, Charles? Maybe it’s better for both of us if things don’t work out with the bank. Maybe then we can get free of this place.’

  I looked at her dumbly. Get free of this place? Didn’t she understand that Amaurot was special, that what we had here was special? Didn’t she know that outside everything was less, that it was smaller, meaner, indifferent?
But she was serious: and she was still waiting for a reply, pinning me to the wall with that funny look, as if evaluating the very essence of what I was. Then, mercifully, Frank lumbered in, and I seized the opportunity to break away. I went to the drinks cabinet and made myself a Scotch and soda, which I drank with a deliberating air, pretending to turn what she’d said over in my mind. After a moment I was feeling more composed. I lowered the glass from my lips and began to tell her sagely, even-handedly, that although this audition was a disappointment all right, she shouldn’t let it cloud her judgement – that instead of rushing into anything, we should try and sort out the bank first and see how we felt after that. But she had turned around in her seat to devote her whole attention to Frank, who, through a combination of grunts and hand-flapping, was giving her details of his revenge plans. I didn’t care to interrupt, and I didn’t need her to translate either. Frank’s bestial jabberings were curiously eloquent: I could see all too clearly the breaking windows, the hurtling knuckles, the burning. In my already shaken state, I found the atmosphere was getting a little too apocalyptic; I topped up my drink and told Bel I would talk to her later. I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me.

  Ascending the staircase, I pondered again over what she’d said. I told myself she was upset; I tried to convince myself that this was just an awkward phase – Bel’s life, after all, was a more or less continuous series of awkward phases. But I knew that in her eyes this audition business was more than just a temporary setback. She dreamed on a vast scale, and she placed her whole self within those dreams; minor things, setbacks, became great waves that spilled over her, threatening to swamp her. If by some elliptical process of reasoning she had arrived at the conclusion that it was the house that had come between her and the part – between her and the bright future she envisioned for herself – then it would be next to impossible to persuade her to stay.

  My task was clear. I had to find some way to save Amaurot. I had to show Bel that it worked; that unlike the shifting, unstable world outside, Amaurot would always be a haven, where we could live completely, where the years moved forward or backward or stood still as we pleased. I told myself I was doing it for her, but in my heart I knew that if she left, the jig was up for me too. What would Amaurot be without her? Nothing more than an abandoned film-set, and I the thin shade of an actor, left behind after the director and soundmen and cameras were gone, reciting his lines to no one… Lying on my bed with the whiskey glass rested on my belly, I drew up strategy after strategy on the ceiling. But each idea that came to me had some insuperable flaw; until finally I was left with only one, the horror of which made me tremble so the ice cubes jingled in the glass…