An Evening of Long Goodbyes (36 page)

11

It wasn’t the haranguing that worried me; one didn’t live with Bel for twenty-odd years without getting used to being harangued every once in a while. As for being banished from Amaurot, I was getting used to that too.

‘But she asked me for support. Bel never asks me for support. In all the years I’ve known her she’s never once asked me for support or advice or so much as a hand assembling her Sindy’s Dream Kitchen…’ I swirled my glass and frowned into the vortex. ‘Something’s up, I can tell. And it’s something to do with that blighter Harry.’

‘He’s a balloon, right enough,’ Frank commented from the sofa.

‘It’s not just that he’s a balloon,’ I said. ‘He’s an
actor
. They’re bad news. Personally I wouldn’t trust an actor as far as I could throw one. Because look at the facts. The facts are that she’s known him for four years without a hint of romance, and then the moment this theatre idea manifests itself he reappears with a script in his hand and suddenly everything’s Doris Day and pylons singing in the wind, with Mother eating out of his hand and the run of the whole house.’ I paced over to the kitchen door. ‘I mean, talk about your tailor-made parts.’

‘Some day,’ Frank said, staring at the ceiling, ‘he’s going to get what’s coming to him.’

‘If only she weren’t so infernally
naïve,’
I said vexedly. ‘The fundamental problem with Bel is that she’s so naïve that she’s under the impression she’s
streetwise
. She shouldn’t be let within a thousand miles of a blackguard like Harry – blast it, what was I
thinking
, leaving her there on her own? How could I just let her fall into the hands of that snake in the grass?’

‘Snakes don’t have hands, Charlie.’

‘Be quiet, Frank, there’s a good fellow.’ I crossed back over to the tallboy. Frank had found it in a skip; dilapidated as it was, I’d taken rather a shine to it, and persuaded him not to sell it. Things never seemed quite as grim with a tallboy in the house.

I refilled my glass, drumming my fingers on the wood. It
had
to be Harry; what other reason could there possibly be for that bizarre performance? She had her wretched theatre, she had her leading role, she had filled the house with Marxists; the only conceivable explanation was that this latest dalliance had somehow gone awry.

This, if it were the case, would not be without precedent. She had always played her romances out this way – back to front, I mean: chancing upon these chumps and falling in love with them purely because they fit whatever impracticable ideal she was labouring under at the time, diving in head-first without a moment’s thought, and when it went wrong, as it inevitably did, blaming it on me and my interfering. The fact was, though, that Bel
needed
somebody to interfere. She might get away with that kind of recklessness with a character like Frank, who couldn’t think two things at the same time without having to sit down. This Harry was another kettle of fish entirely. He was a schemer, a dissembler; one of these sneaky types that spend their evenings in a basement, cobbling together new personalities for themselves. But what could I do about it, stuck miles away in my slum? How could I help her from here?

A few days after the visit Mother called to tell me that Old Man Thompson was dead. Apparently Olivier had accidentally left him on the verandah while he went out for groceries; he came home to find the old man stiff in his bath chair, ‘frozen like a fish-stick,’ as Mother picturesquely put it. Olivier was hysterical. It had taken three paramedics to prise him away from the old man’s body; they wouldn’t allow him to ride in the ambulance, and Mother said he’d stayed out on the lawn for hours after they’d left, bawling and running around and practically howling at the moon.

The real reason she called was to ask me if I was available to help out at the premiere of
Ramp
in two weeks’ time. They were going ahead with Mirela’s idea and staging a special one-off performance in the house, to which potential investors would be invited. It seemed to me rather paradoxical to have a fundraiser in such lavish surroundings; but Mother explained it was common knowledge that the best way to get money out of the better-off was to look like you didn’t need it. There would be complimentary tickets, she said, for everyone who lent a hand.

I told her that enticing as that offer was, given the direction our last meeting had taken, it might be better if I stayed out of Bel’s way for a while. ‘She seems a little highly strung,’ I said.

Mother would not hear of this. ‘There is nothing remotely the matter with that girl,’ she said, ‘other than resentment because she is no longer the centre of attention.’

‘You don’t think she might be…?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ Mother said firmly.

I wished I could be so sure. After what had happened at the house, I wondered if Thompson’s death might not be some sort of portent. I began to feel, in the days that followed, a nameless darkness pressing down on me; and now at night it seemed I could hear Olivier’s banshee cry, borne in on the wind.

Even the news of that time seemed to take on an antic slant: the bodies waiting under the clay in the Balkans; the steady stream of grey-suited politicians declaring their corruption to the tribunals; once, during a live report from some kind of fracas at an accountants’ convention in Seattle, I could have sworn I saw one of the builders, hurtling around with what looked like a large yellow plastic W taped to his head, mooing noisily as four policemen in gas masks chased him with their batons.

The solution came to me one evening from a quite unexpected source: though really, like the best solutions, it had been right under my nose all along. Frank was in the kitchen throwing pots about; Droyd had gone off to sign in with his parole officer; I was sitting there in the armchair as I always did after work, smoking a pipe that Frank had brought home in one of his boxes and thinking what bad luck it was that of all the rotters in the world Bel had hitched her wagon to Harry. In short, it was an evening like any other, except that someone must have rearranged the rubbish, or else Frank had found a more credulous than usual buyer in the last day or two, because there was an unusual air of spaciousness in the room, and several areas of carpet I was sure I hadn’t seen before. Fresh flowers, furthermore, had materialized in a vase on the table; the television had been switched off and the apartment lit instead by an old-fashioned storm lantern, hung from the fixture in the ceiling. And now Frank came in and began skirting the room, picking things up and glancing meaninglessly at the bottoms of them. After a while he started making me nervous, so I asked him what he was doing.

‘Not going out tonight, Charlie?’ he said.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Your tie’s a little crooked there, old man.’ He was wearing one of those clip-on ties that I think had come free with something.

‘Oh right,’ he said, turning a deep puce colour. ‘No, I just thought you might be goin out, like with them Latvian lads or somethin.’

There had been some talk in Processing Zone B earlier in the week of possibly going over to Bobo’s to play cards; but in the end I had decided I was too depressed and would prefer to have a night in. I told this to Frank, adding that I was thinking of varnishing the tallboy later on if that interested him at all.

‘Oh right,’ he said again. He lingered purposelessly a moment longer, then lumbered back to the kitchen. I thought nothing more of it, and began to flick through the listings of insipid TV movies:

He Got Goyim
(1992): true story of an uptight New York rabbi whose life is turned upside-down when he is transferred from his synagogue to coaching an inner-city basketball team.

At that moment the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I called out to Frank, but there was no answer. I imagined he was occupied with whatever was producing that noxious burning smell in the kitchen. Grumbling, I got up and opened the door, to be greeted by a familiar ear-piercing scream.

‘Laura!’ I said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

‘Sorry, Charles,’ she gasped. ‘I just keep forgetting you have all that…’ waving her hands illustratively in front of her face.

‘That’s perfectly all right.’ I helped her to her feet and held her bag while she sucked on her asthma inhaler. ‘As a matter of fact, Frank and I were about to have some tuck, perhaps you’d like to…’

She wheezed gratefully and ducked under my arm into the many-cornered apartment. ‘Wow, it’s really…’

‘Kafkaesque?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, like in a Laura Ashley type way?’

I took her coat and asked what she was doing out in this neck of the woods.

‘Oh, it’s funny,’ she said, with a silvery laugh. ‘Like, just the other day I was coming over to have a look at – well, Frank, why don’t you tell him?’

Frank had appeared in the doorway, adorned with a fixed smile of uncertain meaning. His apron was gone, and so was his blush: in its stead was an ashen grey colour possibly induced by smoke inhalation, as the kitchen was, by the looks of it, very close to impassable. After it became clear that for the present Frank would be confining himself to that perplexing smile, Laura giggled and explained that she had run into Frank a couple of days ago when she was over here to look at her new apartment, and he’d said to drop by. ‘So here I am!’ she squealed, shaking out her hair.

‘Here you are,’ I said. Smiling, Frank turned and was swallowed up by the billowing smoke. ‘Sorry, he’s not really much of a host. You will have a drink, won’t you?’

I went into the kitchen and told Frank I’d invited Laura to stay for dinner if he didn’t mind, and that she could have some of my food if there wasn’t enough. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me, as fires had started in several of the saucepans and he was busily trying to put them out. I decided I’d better leave him to it.

There didn’t seem to be any wine, but as luck would have it an unopened bottle of Rigbert’s had materialized as if from nowhere on the counter. I took it and a couple of glasses and told Frank to pop out and say hello when he had a chance.

‘Oh my God,’ Laura laughed when she saw the bottle. ‘I totally shouldn’t drink that stuff, the last time I had a total
blackout
…’

‘Nonsense, just a light aperitif,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear you say you were getting an apartment in Bonetown, did I?’

‘They’re very competitively priced,’ she said. ‘And they’re going to be gorgeous, I’ve seen the plans.’

‘“Going to be”?’

‘Well, they’re not built yet, they still have to knock down those horrible old tower blocks. Like at the moment there’s nothing to see except lots of people waving placards about.’

‘Oh yes, I wondered what that was about.’

‘There are some very rude people living round here, Charles,’ she said. ‘Some of them threw stones at my estate agent, even.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I said.

‘You’d think they’d be glad. I mean, they’re going to be moved off to somewhere way nicer, like out near the country? Like it’s not like they’re just going to be left at the side of the road.’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Well, here’s to somewhere nicer – chin-chin.’

I hadn’t seen Laura since that disastrous dinner party when I kissed Bel instead of her, and to tell the truth I hadn’t been in any great hurry to see her again. However, we ended up having rather a jolly time. It was quite a novelty having a woman in the apartment, particularly a woman of Laura’s spectacular beauty. She had a litany of bawdy jokes that she had received by electronic mail at work; each was more outrageous than the last, and I was positively gasping for breath by the time Frank finally emerged in a flurry of smoke, bearing three smouldering plates.

‘Bravo!’ I called, clapping and whistling. ‘Author! Author!’

‘That looks gorgeous,’ Laura said.

‘Eh, Charlie, do you want to sit in the armchair?’

‘No, no, old fellow, that’s quite all right.’ I was tucked up cosily on the couch next to Laura, who was sitting in a sideways position so that her legs arched over my lap and her toes – she had kicked off her shoes two drinks earlier – wiggled over the armrest.

Frank muttered something and lowered himself into the armchair. Laura and I attempted to compose ourselves and concentrate on the old burnt offering. There was a lull as we chewed silently on the unidentified meal, then Frank struck up thoughtfully: ‘You know, sometimes it’s nice, isn’t it, when it’s just you an’ your mates, and there’s not all noise and stuff –’

‘“Put it in my Volvo!”’ I exploded, interrupting him. ‘Sorry old man – just thinking of that poor, that poor valet!’

Laura hooted and kicked her legs in the air. Frank – who seemed somewhat out of sorts this evening – looked at me with a questioning, almost a disapproving mien.

‘But I mean, like,’ he reattempted, ‘how in life, sometimes you think what you want are these real big things –’

‘“I said, ‘Put it in my
Volvo
!”’ Oh my word! No tip for him, I shouldn’t think!’

Laura squealed and stood up and declared that if she didn’t go to the bathroom this minute she was going to
burst
. I brushed a tear from my eye and slapped Frank on the knee. ‘Very tasty, I must say. Compliments to the fire brigade. I say, what about dessert?’

Frank stared petulantly at his feet and did not reply.

‘Cheer up, old chap. You look like a wet weekend.’

He looked up at me with an expression of such scruffy downheartedness that I immediately felt like a heel. ‘Oh hell,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry –’

‘What’s wrong with Frank?’ Laura said, returning. ‘You’re out of Rigbert’s, Frank – Charles, give him some Rigbert’s.’

‘Oh, he’s been like this since Bel gave him the old heave-ho,’ I said.

‘
Has
he?’ Laura said. ‘Oh, the poor thing.’

Frank coughed and started saying something about not keeping a good man down.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘He’s been positively maudlin. Weeping all the time, that sort of carry-on. Driving out to look at the sea.’

‘The
sea
?’ Laura repeated, pityingly.