An Evening of Long Goodbyes (23 page)

‘I suppose she’ll never dance the Kirov.’

‘Still, one could hardly hear it, could one? And so pretty and exotic!’ She filled up her glass. ‘Bel’ll find herself with some competition if she has her sights set on Harry, at any rate. Quite a charming young man.’

I threw back my drink and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Didn’t seem so charming to me,’ I mumbled mutinously. ‘Didn’t seem too Disadvantaged either. None of them do.’

‘
Charles
,’ Mother said sharply, and looked over her shoulder in case anyone had heard. ‘All of that will be taken care of in good time. The important thing now is to get everything up and running. When that is done, then we can investigate the finer points of who’s Disadvantaged and who isn’t. And thus far it’s been a remarkable success. A
remark
able success.’ She twisted a ring around her finger as she looked out over the crowd. ‘Which leaves us with the question of you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, what are we going to do with you, Charles?’

I began to itch forebodingly about the nose. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about me,’ I blustered, fumbling out another dram of brandy from the bottle. ‘You know me, quite happy to just potter along, watch the odd film, drink the occasional glass of wine –’

‘Shush,’ she said. ‘There has been a sea change in the affairs of this house since you took your little leave of absence, Charles. And it is a change that was long overdue. We in this family have been living in cloud-cuckoo-land for far too long, living beyond our means, shirking our responsibilitities. You children have been let run to seed. As your mother, I must take my share of the blame.’

‘Well I think you’re being a little hard on yourself –’

‘Thankfully, with this new project Bel seems finally to be using her energies to some positive purpose. I have to acknowledge that this is largely due to Mirela, who has been a better influence on her than, perhaps, her father or myself in recent years. You, however, seem quite intractable’ She shook her head. ‘When I look at how that girl has triumphed in the face of adversity to slot into the household in a way that is a credit to her dear mother, and then I look at you –’

‘I slot into the household, Mother, don’t be callous –’

‘Lying around on the couch all day is not slotting, Charles.’

‘I’m
sick
,’ I protested. ‘Lying around is what you
do
when you’re sick.’

She silenced me with a finger. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands. Ever since you dropped out of Trinity you have been living devoid of dreams or ambition, and without so much as a pretence at concern for the future. And while lethargy is one thing, your antics lately have been quite deranged. Lord knows I’m happy to see the back of that preposterous Folly of yours, but it has come to the point where your chronic laziness is putting innocent lives at risk.’

The tingling spread up my forehead and over my scalp. ‘What are you getting at?’ I asked faintly.

‘You’ve been living off the fat of the land for too long now,’ Mother said. ‘It’s high time that you got a job.’

A job!

There it was: this was the thanks I got for trying to save a few shreds of the family dignity. My fate had been decided, even as I lay comatose in my sickbed. A job! The walls of the recital room bore down on me. A job!

I argued, of course. I highlighted the rich irony of pushing me, her own flesh and blood, out to work in some jar factory even as she invited a bunch of layabout actors to stay here for nothing; I pointed out that Bel wasn’t being made to look for a job, when she was the one who was always going on about how much she hated this place and how she longed to rub shoulders with the hoi-polloi; I closed with a stirring speech to the effect that Mother was sending me on a wild goose chase, seeing as even she had conceded that I simply didn’t have any dreams or ambitions, and so installing me in the working world was just going to be a waste of everyone’s valuable time. Mother listened to it all with a grim expression, as if this were exactly what she’d expected me to say.

‘Tough Love,’ she said. ‘That’s what we in the Cedars called this sort of thing. Helping you to help yourself. You’ll thank me for it some day.’

‘I won’t,’ I said.

‘You will. Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.’

‘You’re talking like a Stalinist!’ I cried. ‘People don’t get jobs to
achieve
things and learn
values
! They do it because they
have
to, and then they use whatever’s left over to buy themselves things that make them feel less bad about having jobs! Can’t you see, it’s just a terrible vicious circle!’ I broke off to claw at my bandages. The itch had seized control of my entire head; it was getting worse and worse and scratching didn’t do any good. Mother coolly turned her attention back to the room, where the florid-faced drunk had been ousted from his residency on the piano lid and someone had humorously struck up a funeral march. ‘Damn it,’ I declared in anguish, ‘damn it, you wouldn’t think it was such a barrel of laughs if you’d worked a single day in your life –’ halting abruptly as Mother turned stiff and white as alabaster. ‘Your charity work, of course,’ I said quickly, and then, seeing a lifeline, ‘I say, maybe
I
could do charity work.’ It didn’t look too hard: gala luncheons, wine-tastings, celebrity auctions, none of these would be beyond me – The glass in Mother’s hand began to tremble. ‘Or – how about a vineyard? I could start making my own wine, in the, you know, in the garden, and then sell it –’

‘I’m glad we had this discussion, Charles,’ Mother said glacially. ‘I only wish we’d had it sooner. Your allowance will be discontinued as of next week. That seems to be the best way of going about this. I shall speak to Geoffrey tomorrow.’

‘Fine then!’ I threw my hands in the air. ‘I mean it seems to me that
I’m
the only one who cares about this place. It seems to me that I’m the one who’s been keeping it going all the time you were away, I’m the one who’s been telling Mrs P what to do, and feeding the peacocks, and burying them when they die. But if all anyone thinks is that I’m some sort of a
moocher
…’

‘There’s no need to raise your voice, Charles.’

‘I’m not raising my voice!’ I shouted. The architecture of the room was contorting itself into the strangest shapes. Over Mother’s shoulder I caught sight of Harry, the light falling in such a way as to appear to be emanating from him – a plaited, peasant-jacketed sun, with Bel and Mirela on either side of him like pretty, laughing moons. What did that make me, I wondered feverishly? A splinter? An asteroid, left to languish alone in the cold dark outer reaches of space? Then over Mother’s other shoulder my eyes fell on Frank, who saluted me with his can of beer – ‘Damn it, if that’s all anyone thinks, why not go the whole hog and fling me out on my ear while you’re at it! In fact, why don’t I save you the trouble, and fling
myself
out on my ear! Because, because I didn’t come here to be insulted!’

‘No one’s insulting you, Charles. If you’re not even capable of having a calm, rational discussion –’

‘I’m perfectly calm! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ like to calmly go upstairs and, and rationally pack my suitcases –’

Mother stepped wordlessly out of my way. Heart pounding madly, I marched for the door. In the hallway the staircase loomed up, crowned with spires and shadows like something from a German Expressionist film. ‘A moocher!’ I whispered as I climbed the steps. ‘A moocher!’ It was simply too monstrous. After everything I had done for the house, to be charged with lethargy, with ‘chronic laziness’ – with
not caring
, when all I did was care!

I had been wounded terribly; it appeared furthermore that all those drinks had finally caught up with the painkillers and mounted some sort of campaign on my brain. Yet even as I packed my suitcase, even as I made my way back down the stairs, even as I removed my coat from the closet and spent more minutes than were strictly necessary standing there brushing imaginary dust from the lapels, if one person had come after me to remonstrate – to say,
Charles, can’t we talk about this?
or
Don’t be a duffer, old chap, come and have a drink
– I’m sure I would have thrown down my bag and laughed the whole thing off. I even went back into the recital room, just in case someone had meant to come but had been delayed. I stood by the door and I watched them, talking and laughing and swirling about the room like coloured smoke, and no one came.

Once, many years ago – I must have been about ten or so – I gatecrashed one of my parents’ parties. Putting me to bed, Mother had hinted, as she always did, at the dreadful things that would befall me if I strayed from my room. But I couldn’t bear any longer not to know what went on down there; so, shortly after eleven, I stole back down the stairs. As luck would have it I walked straight into Father. I thought he would be angry; but he was in a jovial mood, and he said that if I was that curious I could stay up for a very short while, provided I sat quietly in the corner and didn’t let Mother see me.

At first it was so exciting I was quite overcome. The ballroom was a jungle of expensive fabrics, heavy with the steam of a dozen mingled perfumes that promised all sorts of things I didn’t understand. Though it was dark, there was light everywhere you looked: catching on the platters of mysterious foodstuffs, refracting through dancing glasses of Shiraz and Sauvignon, glinting off chokers, rings, tiaras – so that if you half-closed your eyes it seemed like the air was alive with fireflies. And the noise! Who would have thought that a roomful of grown-ups talking about nothing could produce such a roar?

But most remarkable of all were the thin girls who stood dotted here and there among the circling guests. They rose above the heads of the others like statues in a garden; they looked very bored and they never spoke. These were Father’s models, here to showcase whatever new suite of cosmetics was being launched; they weren’t supposed to talk, in case it lessened the effect. Father called them his canvases: the idea was that guests could pause and study them as they moved on to the next conversation.

When I would see them in the days leading up to these parties, skipping down the staircase from Father’s study, these girls didn’t look so much older than me. Some of them were nice; they were from all kinds of places, though they mostly lived in Paris, where they’d been working with the lab. But tonight they had been changed into something not quite human. There was an apocalyptic quality about them that was almost frightening, as if they were outside of time, or as if they were the same all the way through, without blood or guts. Their eyes looked at you and passed right through you. They stood with their limbs bent in motionless arabesques, blazing silently like priceless, preternaturally beautiful anglepoise lamps.

Now and then people found themselves in my corner by mistake – gaunt couturiers with shaven heads, or creepy sensuous-looking men with crushed-velvet suits and brilliantined hair, who smoked spicy cigarettes and who may, in retrospect, have been women. ‘Oh,’ they’d say, confronted by my ten-year-old stare, ‘hello’; then tugging at their ivory cigarette-holders or making anxious goldfish-mouths they’d hurry back the way they came.

But where were they going, I began to wonder, what were they making their way to? When, in short, was the thing going to
start
? It took a long time before it dawned on me that this walking around talking was the whole point of the evening. I was bitterly disappointed. Now when the jewel-strewn old ladies came over to pat my head I no longer bothered to give them my best cub-scout smile, because I knew that none of them was going to say, ‘Charles, now it is time for the trampoline, and we would like you to have the first bounce,’ or ‘Charles, we have set up this boring party to try and trap a spy, now we need someone inconspicuous, for example a small boy, to discover him, or her.’

And the things I overheard people talking about weren’t even interesting. The men went on about percentiles, or how so-and-so wouldn’t do, or about rugby games they had seen recently. The women meanwhile were all of a flutter about Yves St Laurent’s new concealer pen, a miraculous
trompe l’oeil
affair that reflected light away from wrinkles, or something. ‘Your father’s a genius,’ they told me. ‘How is Yves anyway?’ they asked Father.

‘Usual. Moping,’ Father said with a little sigh; and then from the French windows at the far end a voice cried, ‘The Beaujolais’s arrived!’ and everyone bubbled forwards, leaving Father and me standing there watching their backs.

‘Well?’ he said to me. ‘Learned your lesson?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘I mean, pardon?’

‘You don’t look like you’re having much fun.’

‘Well,’ I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I tried to pick my words, ‘it doesn’t seem like a very good party.’

‘It doesn’t, does it?’

‘There’s no cake,’ I observed. ‘There’s no
chairs
, even.
And
no one brought presents.’

‘Better off in bed, if you ask me.’

‘Dad… what do they all
want
?’

Father laughed his big braying laugh that Mother was always complaining about. ‘That’s a good question, old chap. Very good question. What
do
they want?’ He took a swig of his wine. ‘What you have here, see, is a room full of very important people. And what very important people like more than anything else in the world is being made to feel important. So what they do is, they come to parties like this one where they can meet other important people and have important conversations about important things and they can all feel important together, see? Are they having fun? I don’t know. I don’t think
they
know any more, either. They get a bit like those peacocks out on the lawn, do you think they’re having fun?’

‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled.

‘Course they aren’t, parading around, showing each other their feathers, what kind of fun is that?’ Father tilted his head back and drained his glass; then stood and frowned, collecting his thoughts. ‘See, the thing is, Charles, the thing is, old sport, that although they tell you in school – and it’s very important to pay attention in school, and apply yourself, and learn as much as you can, do you hear me?’