An Evening of Long Goodbyes (18 page)

‘Ah, there you are,’ the girl said.

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling somewhat trumped.

‘Come in, won’t you?’ she said politely, laying her book to one side.

‘Thank you.’ Without moving, she watched me haul myself through the hatch. ‘I knew you’d come sooner or later,’ she said. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, bit of a dispute over at the house. Your, ah, your brothers were kind enough to step in…’

Even in the uncertain light I could appreciate that she was a striking girl, with the same fine black hair as her brothers and bold, imposing features. Her eyes were an intense, electrical blue, and didn’t so much meet as violently earth themselves in one’s own. It was something of a relief when she blinked.

‘It’s probably for the best,’ she pronounced lightly, in the same moderate, ambiguous tone; and then nodded, as if agreeing with herself. Her accent was softer than her mother’s and gave her voice a velvety, hypnotic quality. I suddenly felt in no hurry to leave. In her sleeping bag she began to hum to herself, winding a tress around her finger; then she stopped abruptly, as if something had occurred to her. ‘Do you want a drink? We seem to have acquired a large selection of wine all of a sudden.’

‘No,’ I said reluctantly, scuffing one shoe against the other. ‘Look – this isn’t entirely a social call. I came to tell you that the building’s about to explode.’

‘
Plus ça change
,’ she said, with a little smile.

‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You have to get out of here.’

‘How long do we have?’

‘I don’t know. Not long.’

She looked about the room as if seeing everything for the first time. ‘Such a shame,’ she said, with a kind of dispassionate regret. ‘Turn around, will you? I’ll have to put on some clothes.’

‘Certainly.’ I gallantly took myself off to the far side of the room and, ignoring a curious tapping noise from behind, looked through Mrs P’s purloined treasure trove. A plastic miniature of the Eiffel Tower had found its way in there: a memento from a childhood trip to France, mostly spent in hotel rooms waiting for Father to return from interminable conferences. He and Mother had fought like cat and dog. I wondered who had kept it. ‘I must say, I admire your sang-froid…’ I called over my shoulder.

‘I guess a girl picks things up on the road,’ she returned. ‘It’s all right, you can look now.’ I turned in time to see a bare arm plunge itself into a burgundy sleeve. She re-emerged and gave me a Lauren Bacall wink. Her skirt was pale and narrow and reached nearly to the floor. ‘Well? Am I presentable?’

‘Eminently.’

‘What about…?’ She gestured generally, taking in the Folly and its contents.

I hesitated. There wasn’t much hope for my plan now. Even if I could still carry off the death-faking part, which was looking increasingly unlikely, there was little chance of getting the insurance to cough up for all these obliterated valuables. Any gains made from my death would therefore be totally cancelled out; I would be exiled to Chile for nothing. My next thought was that the best thing to do at this stage would be to abandon the plan and limit the damage by grabbing what I could of the valuables and bringing them outside to safety. But then I realized that anything I saved would only be put up for auction. None of this was mine any more. It wasn’t
anybody
’s: at least not anybody with a face and a name, who might have come up here with a martini and a half-bag of truffles of an evening to look out at the people walking their dogs on the strand. Perhaps it was something to do with this girl and the strange spell she cast, but it seemed to me suddenly that I would almost rather have our fortune blown up than see the bank sell it off to the highest bidder. If we were going to be destitute, we might as well do it in style. ‘Forget it,’ I shrugged. ‘We’ll always have Paris.’

She laughed, and took a step towards the hatch. Impulsively I took her arm. ‘This is absurd, I know,’ I said, ‘but in a few minutes this place’ll go up and after that I don’t know that I’ll ever see you again. So if you don’t mind – won’t you tell me why I feel we’ve met before?’

‘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 side; 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 world, 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.

‘I don’t see why you’re always defending her,’ I said, swiping irritably at a moth that fluttered around the lantern. ‘It’s all very well talking about masks and the triumph of failure and so forth, but the fact is that she led you on while it suited her, and then dropped you when it didn’t. You have to watch out for girls like that, Yeats. Especially when they’re actresses, I mean really you’re asking for trouble there.’

He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, spread it out on his lap, carefully folded it again and returned it to his pocket. ‘Perhaps every woman is an actress when love is the stage,’ he mused; and before I could puzzle out what he meant, he went on, ‘But what about that actress you’re so obsessed with? The girl with the man’s name?’

Did he mean Gene? Because that was totally different: because what captured me about Gene was that – although she may have dated princes, danced with Picasso, attended lavish parties in the Hollywood of the 1940s – she only seemed to truly
exist
when she was up there on the screen; where she appeared, no matter what role they cast her in, only as herself, shimmering through every scene like a double-exposure, like some panicky spirit-creature they had trapped between lights and glass –

‘Aha!’ Yeats leaned back in his chair beaming delightedly, like the teacher whose recalcitrant pupil has blundered into iterating a truth. ‘So it’s her
bad
acting you love her for! And your sister, she’s not a
real
actor either, I take it?’

I didn’t quite see what he was getting at, and I felt my cheeks crimsoning. ‘Well, she isn’t,’ I said defensively. ‘I know she
thinks
she is. But it seems to me that Bel’s far too preoccupied with her own life to actually
do
it. I mean she’s always too busy fighting with Mother or haranguing me or swanning about with some oaf. That’s her true calling, if you ask me. Though obviously I’d be far too frightened of her to actually say it.’

‘Do you know, Charles, I think all this time we’ve secretly been in agreement…’ and with a dry chuckle he rose to trim the wick.

On some evenings, after we’d been talking, he’d fall into deep silences, and I’d know that he was brooding over Maud and thinking of what might have been. At times like these I would remind him of his Nobel Prize, which was usually enough to cheer him up; or else we’d go to the dog-track and watch the greyhounds.

The races were nothing like the one I’d seen with Frank: the track was marked out in complicated chalk divisions, with flags at certain points around it, and the dogs had unearthly sounding, occultish names like Hecate and Isis. The sun could still be quite hot and Yeats insisted on wearing his absurd sombrero with the enormous brim that obscured most of his face. This wasn’t to say that he didn’t take the whole business very seriously. He always brought along a sort of almanac, into which he scrawled feverishly for the duration of the race. He was very mysterious about it, guarding it jealously with his arm. I presumed it was some kind of racing form; but on the couple of occasions I managed to peek over his shoulder, all I could see were strange runes and astrological diagrams. He refused to explain what they meant; nor would he disclose why he seemed far more interested in the patterns made by the various dogs during the race than who actually won it. Instead he limited himself to arcane remarks about connectedness.

‘What does connectedness have to do with anything? It’s a race, isn’t it? I mean, the only question is will this Shiva win and we can buy that fancy samovar you liked, or won’t she, in which case we’ll have to stick with the regular teapot –’

‘The shape of things, Charles,’ he replied, a hermetic smile flashing beneath the brim of the sombrero. ‘Isn’t that rather the more interesting question? How can we know the dancer from the dance?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Look, there’s one of those snack vendors. Run over and buy us some hot dogs, why don’t you.’ When he returned, as I chewed down the warm spicy meat, I wondered what extra information he could be searching for, when we had everything anyone could possibly want right here in front of us. Tan-skinned natives cheered around me, raising their hands as the dogs approached the finish-line; I looked away to the sun setting over the ocean, and wished for an instant that Father could be here to see it. He would have liked it here, up on this little corral east of the mountains with Yeats and me: old hunters, talking with gods.

Then one day, quite out of the blue, Yeats asked me to turn on my side as he had to administer something anally, and when I looked around to make sure I’d heard him correctly he had changed into a hatchet-faced nurse and Chile into a dimly lit room with green paint on the walls and perforated ceiling tiles. There was a strange tight clinging about my skull and shadowy figures standing around me. I resisted as best I could; I shut my eyes, I begged them to leave me in peace. But it was like being underwater: no matter how I wriggled, every second impelled me closer to the surface; and already Chile, our little house, the lime trees, were far, far away…