An Evening of Long Goodbyes (35 page)

I compared the Mirela that Bel was presenting here with the tender, hand-squeezing,
Maybe-we-can-catch-up-later-Charles
one I had encountered on the stairs. It was painfully obvious that Bel’s version didn’t hold up. ‘That’s nonsense,’ I said.

‘It’s not,’ Bel said petulantly.

‘What does she do, then, that’s so bad? Give me one example of her being a void and getting everything her own way.’

From the corner into which she and her cloud had retreated, Bel mumbled something about borrowing her clothes without asking.

‘Borrowing your clothes!’ I repeated scornfully. I looked her up and down; she scowled and twitched and pulled compulsively at her pendant. ‘You know, you’re acting awfully strangely.’

Bel sniffed and stared at the ground.

‘There’s nothing
wrong
, is there? This thing with Harry hasn’t blown up in your face, has it?’

‘Oh
Lord
,’ she exclaimed, stamping over to the bed and retrieving her script. ‘Charles, has it ever occurred to you that I might occasionally have problems that aren’t related to men?’

‘I’m just asking,’ I said. ‘I’m just making sure that everyone’s thought everything through, and no one’s taking liberties –’

‘I mean is it so hard for you to believe that someone could actually want to be with me without having some ulterior motive, like, like wanting to steal the furniture, or having their eye on your bedroom –’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Although now that we’re on the subject I might as well mention that we do actually still have a pact. I mean it’s probably slipped your mind, but you did agree that when you and Frank broke up, as you tragically have, that you wouldn’t –’

‘Charles, what’s that smell?’

‘What smell?’ I said. ‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘There’s an overpowering smell of
marzipan
,’ she said, sniffing the air.

‘I don’t smell anything.’

‘It seems to be coming from
you
.’

‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘It’s Yule Log.’

‘
Yule
Log?’

‘It doesn’t seem to come off,’ I said sorrowfully. ‘Even in the shower.’

Abruptly her gloom was eclipsed by a peal of unladylike laughter. If I had been paying more attention, I might have found this transition too swift; I might have detected an uncomfortable treble note to her habitual
Schadenfreude
. But I was too busy being annoyed. Smelling of marzipan was a matter taken very seriously among the staff of Processing Zone B, several of whom had been attacked by roaming packs of hungry dogs. I told her this, but it only made her worse. She was practically doubled over with laughter.

‘It’s not funny,’ I insisted. ‘It’s all very well for you people with your plays and your ivory towers. This is the sort of thing we poor mugs down in the trenches have to put up with every day. Frankly, the roaming packs of dogs are just the tip of the iceberg.’

‘I never thought I’d see the day when you tell me I’m living in an ivory tower,’ Bel chuckled, massaging her midriff.

‘Well, it’s true,’ I said sanctimoniously, forgetting about the pact as I realized that here was a chance to take revenge for all the preachy speeches she had made to me over the years. ‘You people have it pretty easy. It’s no picnic for the working man, let me tell you. Especially when the first thing he hears when he comes in the door is Mother telling him how
bracing
it all is, honestly, to hear her talk you’d think the blasted world was some kind of exclusive
tennis camp
, where you go to learn which fork to use and work on your
backhand
–’

‘Maybe you should write a play,’ Bel taunted, going through her drawer of unmentionables.

‘I should take her out to Bonetown,’ I said. ‘See what she thinks of that, when the Common Man runs off with her damned handbag –’

‘Oh, for God’s sake – I’ve
been
in Bonetown, it’s not that bad…’ She stopped in front of me, a pair of briefs balled up in her hand. ‘Charles, why is it that every time I want to get changed I seem to find you in my room, even when you don’t live here any more?’

‘All right, all right.’ Taking her point I withdrew to a discreet spot in the corridor outside. The door closed behind me. I gazed vacantly at the boxes a moment. Then I went back to the door and reopened it a chink. ‘Anyway it is that bad. All of that stuff in Harry’s plays about the poor being jolly, or the salt of the earth, it’s a total fabrication. You’ve never seen such a crowd of malingering, dissolute layabouts. All anybody does is break things and drink and be sick on our doorstep –’

‘Well you should feel right at home then,’ came the reply, with the snick of a clasp.

‘Maybe I
should
write a play,’ I grumbled. ‘Shake up you people in your ivory tower a little.’ Raising my voice, I added, ‘And I’d show that charlatan a thing or two!’

There was a pregnant sort of a silence; and then the sound of bare feet stamping across the floor, and Bel appeared at the door. ‘Charles, I shouldn’t even bother, but for your information the reason why Harry is twice the man you are is because he
has
opened his eyes, he’s lived in places and worked all kinds of jobs and actually tried to
like
people, instead of covering his ears and clicking his ruby slippers and wishing he was back in Amaurot –’

‘Well, you wouldn’t know it to look at him today,’ I said, shielding my eyes from the sight of her bare legs, ‘hurtling about in Father’s Mercedes, gotten up like a country squire as if he owned the place –’

‘That’s his
costume
, you fool, we have a scene later on – and for another thing, I
told
him he could drive that wretched car if he wanted to. I mean no one else has so much as looked at it in two years –’ She broke off and for a moment sagged limp against the door-jamb, rubbing her eye with the heel of a hand. ‘This is absurd. Charles, I’m
not
going to get in an argument with you over who’s more alienated, you or Harry –’

‘No, because I would win,’ I said.

With a gurgle of rage she stormed back inside, slamming the door. Seconds later it reopened. ‘You know what your problem is?’ she said, having thrust herself into a pair of jeans and fastening the button. ‘You expect life to be like some kind of continuous
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
, with, with wine and
amuse-gueules
and women lounging around with no clothes on, and then when it’s not –’

‘Are you referring to Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
?’

‘Yes, Manet’s,
obviously
Manet’s – but then when it’s not like that you just throw your hands in the air and you think that’s good enough –’

‘Well, I mean to say,’ I said mildly – actually I was rather taken with the idea of a continuous
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe
– ‘it has to be something, doesn’t it? I mean I’m the one who has to live in the damned thing.’

‘That’s just it, Charles,’ she said, furiously waving her sandal, ‘you think you live in there all on your own, you tell me I’m in an ivory tower when you carry the ivory tower, you carry around this fucking
house
, inside yourself, and you never let anyone in, and you have no inkling what life is like for the people outside – like you complain about having to work, but at least you
can
work, do you ever think of what it’s like for Vuk and Zoran, who aren’t even
allowed
to? Do you ever think what it’s like for them, sitting around here day in, day out, what that does for their dignity?’

‘Of course I…’ I began, then stopped, sidetracked by the memory of my own happy days sitting or indeed lying around the house, and how dignity had never seemed to enter into it.

‘And all those people in Bonetown, what about them, all those people who came to this country to try and make their lives better, because this for them is
hope
? This for them is over the rainbow?’

‘I’d say they need to have a word with their travel agent,’ I said. ‘I say, wait!’ as with a gasp she pushed free of me and headed down the stairs. ‘Wait! I was only joking –’

I caught up with her mid-sweep and grabbed her elbow; she turned unwillingly around, and to my astonishment I saw that her eyes had filled up with tears.

‘I was only joking,’ I repeated.

‘It isn’t funny,’ she said, her voice slipping down into a whisper. ‘You can’t do this any more, Charles. You can’t come over here and run everything down. You’re just like Father, all you want to do is lock yourself away in your study with your lovely fantasies. That’s no
use
to me any more, don’t you see? Because… because, God Charles, something has to be good, doesn’t it? Something has to be worth doing? You’re my brother, can’t you just support me? Can’t you just tell me I’m not a fool for trying? Even if you didn’t believe it, couldn’t you just
say
?’

Her eyes gazed, over-bright and condemning, into mine; the mysterious pendant ran glittering through her fingers as if it were trying to tell me something, and I realized that this wasn’t just one of her regular harangues, that there was more at issue here than my laziness, or Harry’s plays. I recalled what Mother had said earlier on. Was something really amiss? Was she asking me now to do something about it?

‘Master Charles!’

But these questions would have to wait, for here was Mrs P at the foot of the stairs, bearing a plate of delicious-looking nibbles.

‘Ah, bravo, Mrs P!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake –’ Bel followed me down.

‘What have we got here?’ I examined the platter. ‘Brie… Gorgonzola… Edam… a real international selection.’

‘Mrs P, you’re not supposed to be waiting on
him
,’ Bel remonstrated.

‘Oho, what’s this?’

‘I find a little Roquefort too, Master Charles,’ Mrs P said, chortling bashfully.

‘Yes, indeed!’ I held up a tender little
morceau
like a prospector with a nugget of gold.

‘Mrs P!’ Bel stamped her foot authoritatively. ‘He doesn’t
live
here any more, do you understand?’

‘Yes, but Miss Bel, if Master Charles is hungry…’

‘Yes Bel, if Master Charles is hungry…’

Bel clenched her teeth. ‘And another thing, I thought we’d agreed we weren’t going to have any more of this Master Charles, Miss Bel business.’

‘Comrade Bel,’ I chuckled through a mouthful of Roquefort.

Bel exhaled sharply. ‘That’s it – Charles, I think you should go now.’

I looked up. ‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Get out, Charles. Go.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I’m quite serious,’ she said. She was. Just as in the bedroom earlier, her mood had changed quickly as a cloud passing over the sun; the tremulous, solicitous Bel of a moment before had given way to a steely, unflinching Bel, who with a thunderous countenance pointed to the door. ‘If you’re just going to come round and try to ruin everything we’ve done, then I think you should just
leave
.’

‘Can’t I at least finish my cheese?’ I said.

‘
No
,’ she said, snatching the platter out of my hand. ‘Just go.’

I looked to Mrs P for a measure of sanity or reason, but her eyes were set discreetly on the ground. ‘Very well, then,’ I said, drawing myself up to my full height. ‘Mrs P, my coat, please.’

Mrs P went to fetch my coat. Bel continued to glower blackly at me like something out of
Der Ring des Nibelungen
. I knew better than to argue. Instead, I waited for the coat to return, and then – without fuss, without so much as a backward glance – I proceeded in a dignified manner down the hall, past the malevolently winking wheelchair and out of the front door.

But there I stopped; and closing the door behind me, stood for a time at the top of the steps. The sea shushed invisibly to the east, the fog whirled up over the grass; I stood there, sucking my cheeks and staring into nothingness.

After her daughter Daria was put away, Gene went into a long, long tailspin. Her marriage to Cassini had now completely foundered; she was wooed and conquered by a series of notable men. John F. Kennedy visited her on the set of
Dragonwyck
. He had just returned from the South Pacific, still thin from the Navy hospitals after PT109. He was about to run for Congress; Gene promptly fell in love with him. They were both part Irish, and their first date was on St Patrick’s Day, when he took her for lunch in New York. JFK was wearing a new hat, which later that night he left in a bar; he never wore one again, no matter how the nation’s hatters pleaded with him, and thus began the slow disappearance of the hat from American life.

She saw him on and off for nearly a year before he told her – casually, waiting for friends to join them for lunch – that he could never marry her. She should have seen it coming: he had his political career to think of, and his mother would never approve of him marrying a divorcée – an actress, and Episcopalian to boot! But she hadn’t seen it coming. She rebounded into a long-drawn-out, absurd affair with Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan, whom she met in Argentina while shooting
Way of a Gaucho
. He was just divorced from Rita Hayworth: with him, her life entered the tawdry whirlwind of the jet-set – polo matches, ocean cruises, meetings on the Riviera with Picasso, a life of leisure conducted in the full glare of the media spotlight and the gossip columns.

It was hard to say exactly when Gene’s crack-up began. The day she arrived in Hollywood she had got stomach cramps and they didn’t go away until she left for good, fourteen years later. On her fourth picture,
Belle Starr
, she had come down with an eye complaint that no one was able to explain: her eyes would swell up and itch, and shooting would have to be suspended for days on end. (Cassini used to visit her in the trailer and kiss her hideously inflamed eyelids and assure her she was still beautiful to him; she would say that that was when she first knew he really loved her.) But people who knew her well saw that this was different – that the relationship with Aly Khan was a symptom of a spiralling mental state.

She began to have difficulty remembering her lines. This had never happened before. She was under no illusions as to her gifts as an actress, but she had always been able to memorize her parts; in fact she used to say that she felt best when she was playing someone else, and that it was when she was herself that her troubles began. Now she became aggressive and bossy on set. Her moods fluctuated wildly from stretches of total lethargy to flashes of hyperreal awareness when she said she could see God in a light bulb.

The last picture before her breakdown was
The Left Hand of God
, with Humphrey Bogart. Bogey’s sister had been mentally ill; he knew the signs. He went to the studios and told them that Gene needed help. They assured him that Gene Tierney was a trouper and wouldn’t let them down, not on a movie as expensive as this one.

It was Bogey’s kindness that carried her through the picture; he was dying of cancer then, though nobody knew it. Afterwards, she remembered the time of the shoot as being itself like a silent movie. There were no sounds or words – but she told her doctors she could see herself the whole time, as if she were floating outside her own body, watching herself from afar.