An Evening of Long Goodbyes (22 page)

‘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 –’

‘Charles, you’ve got pâté all over your bandages,’ Bel said.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes. No, don’t rub it, you’re just making it worse… Oh, now it’s really disgusting.’

The assembled faces groaned and assumed attitudes of repulsion. Bel lowered her eyebrows truculently at me, like a bull about to charge.

‘I’ll go and wash it off,’ I said apologetically, and withdrew to the bathroom, past the florid gent who was now slumped weeping over the closed piano lid. I did not rejoin the actors when I came back; instead I took up a position by the wall, shielded from Mother by a potted plant, and sucked dejectedly on an ice cube. It was turning into a singularly depressing evening. Wasn’t there anyone who wanted to talk to me?

As if in answer, a large malformed shadow at that moment fell across me. ‘All right?’ it said.

I confined myself to a soundless expletive.

‘What’s the story with the oul head, anyway?’ he said. ‘Have you still got one under there, or what?’

‘I am reliably informed I still have a head,’ I said.

‘Cos I was thinking, right,’ Frank said, ‘you wouldn’t want to turn out like your man in
Batman
, would you, like when he takes the bandages off and he’s turned into this freakish Joker.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘No, I’m hoping that’s not going to happen.’

He nudged me conspiratorially. ‘I’d say there was some bangin nurses there in hospital, was there?’

‘Mmm,’ I said, wishing this conversation had some kind of ejector seat. What was he bothering me for, anyway? Shouldn’t he be off groping Bel?

‘Ah yeah – as me oul man used to say, there’s only two things in life you can be sure about – death, and nurses.’ He followed this wisdom with a long sigh: a curious expression passed over his face, and I had an unsettling intimation of some deep chord of melancholy ringing through his monolithic interior. I was wondering whether I ought to get out of the way when, scratching his stomach, he asked offhandedly if Bel had said anything about him to me.

‘About you?’ I said. ‘To me?’

‘It’s not important,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just that I haven’t seen much of her these last few weeks, that’s all.’

Casting my mind back, I seemed to recall her saying something along the lines of
Frank, ugh
that time she came to visit me in the hospital; but apart from that she hadn’t even mentioned him, or their apartment-hunting, for that matter. I looked over at her now where she stood with the theatre types, and then back at Frank. It struck me that I
hadn’t
seen him groping her or trying to look down her shirt all evening.

‘I was just wonderin,’ Frank said morosely. ‘Every time I call out here she’s busy putting in wires, or doin her lines or havin meetins. Half the time she won’t even talk to me on the phone.’ There was a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead and the most forlorn look in his eyes. I had the strongest urge to toss him a Bonio.

‘Well… she’s busy,’ I said. ‘That’s all. She’s tied up with this wretched theatre. I’m sure she’ll be back to normal before long.’

‘Charlie,’ he whispered, ‘what are they doin puttin a fuckin theatre in your house anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said tersely. ‘I was away in hospital. The house was full of women. Anything could’ve happened, in that kind of a situation.’ I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He was making me uneasy: even as I spoke I was thinking that there had been a certain coolness between Bel and me tonight too. To the uninformed observer it might appear that Frank’s situation and my own had distinct parallels. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a word with her, all right? I’ll find out what’s going on. But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. This theatre shouldn’t last long. You know Bel, she gets bored with everything after a few weeks –’

It was only when I had said it that I realized the statement’s full implications. Frank gaped at me in horror. ‘That is –’ I began in a strangulated voice, but it was no good, I couldn’t bear to stay there one second longer. With a gurgle of apology, I turned and fled. I saw that Mrs P had left the bar unattended; I slipped behind it and, without quite knowing why, began to fill my pockets with canapés.

As it turned out, I never did get to have that word with Bel. All those unguarded bottles distracted me: I was administering myself a double Hennessy, just to get my nerves back on an even keel, when I felt an icy draught whip over my shoulders and a voice said, ‘Ah, Charles, there you are.’

I downed my drink in one and slowly turned around.

‘You know, for a man with such an uncluttered schedule you can be awfully hard to track down.’

‘Ha ha,’ I laughed feebly, casting about for an escape route. There was none. ‘Well, here I am.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mother, smiling a steely smile.

I should explain that, whatever they had done to her in the Cedars, Mother had changed. She’d visited me in hospital and it was obvious from the minute she came through the door: storming in like a Valkyrie late for Rotary Club, marching over and without so much as a polite inquiry after my numerous injuries, launching into a wide-ranging sermon about responsibility and holistic dieting and twelve imaginary steps our souls had to go up in order to reach the top of something else. She’d made me quite nervous and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the reason I had woken up after weeks of unconsciousness surrounded by fruit-baskets but no chocolates.

At the root of this transformation was an entity hitherto unfamiliar to me, known as Higher Power. Apparently this Higher Power was quite a big wheel over at the Cedars, in terms of persuading wealthy neurotics to give up their vices and take on their share of life’s various burdens; and while the giving-up-drinking end of things seemed to have passed Mother by, she was extremely taken with this notion of duty and doing one’s bit. Even then I had known that this did not augur at all well for me and my bid to revive the modus vivendi of the country gentleman.

Perhaps it seems foolhardy to think, as I had on arriving home that day, that I would be able to avoid Mother indefinitely. With the old Mother, however, the Mother who stayed in bed till two or three in the afternoon and then confined herself to an armchair in the drawing room with a bottle of gin, this would have been quite unproblematic. With the new Mother it was almost impossible. I had only been back since lunchtime and it had taken all my wits to steer clear of her. She appeared to have new and boundless reserves of energy. She was ubiquitous; she was immanent. Wherever one went she seemed to be there first, with a can of furniture polish or a book of carpet swatches or the sinister red ring-binder she’d taken to carrying around, labelled ‘Projects’. By teatime I was quite exhausted. And now she had me in her grasp.

‘It’s been quite an evening, hasn’t it?’ she said, reaching behind me for the sherry. ‘I’m
terribly
proud of the girls. Aren’t you
terribly
proud?’

‘It was nice to see Bel onstage again,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t acted in a while.’

‘Oh
yes
, surrounded by all those
awful, awful
hoodlums, I was quite on the edge of my seat – it was like a voyage to the Underworld, in a way, wasn’t it?’

‘Mmm,’ I agreed morosely.

‘And Mirela – what a find, Charles! Such presence! She’ll go places, that girl. At least…’ her reason catching up with her, ‘if she can do something about that awful – she does move so terribly slowly…’