An Evening of Long Goodbyes (39 page)

‘Who knows?’ Harry improvised. ‘Possibly the thought of taking her destiny into her own hands, instead of moving her to re-evaluate her role in society, will cause her to shrink back into moral cowardice.’ He lifted a pedagogical finger. ‘In which case, Ann, it will be up to you and me to convince her –’

But no convincing was necessary, because at that moment Bel walked out on to the stage.

The audience gasped.

‘Ah, Mary,’ Harry stammered. ‘Where’s your wheelchair?’

Without replying, Bel crossed the floor to come in behind Mirela, who sat stock-still, staring at the table. Bending down, she whispered, quite audibly, in her ear: ‘Cuckoo.’

One or two of the spectators laughed nervously. Beside me, Mother murmured something I could not make out. Bel rounded the table and came upstage to where Harry was standing with his shoulders raised slightly, as if girding himself for a blow; and for a long tense moment, everything around them seemed to fade into darkness. She gazed at him with the same dissecting gaze I had been subjected to on a couple of occasions. ‘Golem,’ she said; then she turned and walked gracefully offstage, breezing right by us in the wings as if we weren’t there.

The audience rustled uncomfortably. Mirela fell back limp in her chair. For a moment the house, the world, seemed to list in utter disarray. Then Harry snapped back to life. With an opportunism one could not help but admire, he went to Mirela, drew her to her feet, and said: ‘Don’t you see what’s happened? We’ve saved her. Oh darling – we’ve saved her.’ And with that, he pulled her to him and kissed her.

‘The curtain,’ Mother gurgled in my ear. ‘The curtain, for the love of God –’

I bounced over to the panel, where the tubby stage manager stood dumbstruck, and pulled a likely looking lever. The curtain fell to absolute silence.

‘We’re ruined!’ Mother wailed. The cast and crew gathered wretchedly around, looking to one another in bewilderment. One of the actors proposed quite earnestly that we take advantage of the curtain to flee and begin a better life elsewhere; this was vociferously seconded by the others, but before I could suggest Chile as having much to recommend it, a great noise rose up from the other side. It was huge and amorphous – like an avalanche, I thought, or an entire forest falling down – and then the whoops and hurrahs began, and the curtain was winched back up for us to be confronted by a standing ovation.

A triumph, the reviews would say next day: Harry Little’s amiable melodrama lulling the audience into a false sense of security, then delivering from nowhere a knockout punch, when the growing love between her sister (a luminescent Mirela Pribicevic) and the dashing young lawyer (Little) prompts wheelchair-bound Mary (sympathetically played by Belle Hithloday) to literally find her feet and take her first faltering steps into solitary but redemptive freedom. What seems at first a slight though generous work examining the difficulties of the mobility-impaired in getting in and out of buildings, reveals itself in a shocking and conflicted resolution almost Lacanian in its prematurity – the latter half of the play is only seventeen minutes long – to be an explosive commentary on the nature of freedom and the compromised but still cathartic power of love and also the theatre in the modern world – etc, etc.

‘Ironic, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘I mean, it looks like your little
épater les bourgeois
may actually have saved the day.’

‘It hadn’t escaped me,’ she said dully, as the doctor-cum-joyrider conga’d by with a drink with a little umbrella in it. Around us the party was in full swing: Bel was watching it from between her knees, her expression with every passing second becoming more remote, like a Cinderella who has outstayed her time to see not only her carriage change back to a pumpkin, but Prince Charming’s suitcase fall open and a whole horde of glass slippers spill across the floor… I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my thighs, and massaged my bandaged scalp. ‘Damn it, Bel – what on earth were you thinking?’

‘I was angry,’ she said.

‘I know you were angry – that’s not what I mean. I mean the pictures. Mac
Gilly
cuddy. What possessed you?’

‘
I
don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘He gave me a Gold Seal Guarantee of Success.’

‘MacGillycuddy’s Gold Seal Guarantee isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,’ I snapped. ‘You know perfectly well that everything that man touches turns to disaster. How could you have been so… I mean, I just don’t understand it.’

‘I just wanted to make it work,’ Bel mumbled through the cleft of her knees. ‘That’s what you do when you like somebody, isn’t it? You find out what things they like, you pretend you like the same things, you laugh at their jokes…’

‘But don’t you
see
?’ pulling at my ear in frustration. ‘Don’t you see there’s a difference, between laughing at someone’s jokes, and – and having them investigated by MacGillycuddy? I mean it’s just not
like
you…’

‘I couldn’t
help
it,’ she said. ‘I had to do something, didn’t I? You don’t know what it’s been like here, with her crowding me out all the time, trying to control everything, practically
undressing
in front of him at rehearsals, even though she didn’t even want him, it was just so, just because she
could
…’ Her brow puckered sorrowfully. ‘God, they must have rehearsed that kissing scene a hundred times…’

‘That’s no reason to try and
fabricate
an entire romance like that. I mean how did you expect it to turn out? How could anything good come of that kind of…?’

‘It worked, didn’t it,’ she said quietly.

‘That,’ I said, ‘is what they call a moot point.’

‘It
did
work,’ she insisted, as if to herself. ‘That night up on the roof, everything was perfect.’

‘Well, if it was all so perfect,’ I said sourly, ‘why did you have him trailed with a camera?’

Bel dipped her head, fiddled with the pendant that had been restored to her neck. I didn’t mean to be so harsh. I suppose I was just feeling a touch misused myself. I sighed. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I’m going,’ she said slowly, ‘to have another drink.’ She held out her empty glass.

‘All right…’ I took it from her and patted her on the knee. ‘Don’t go anywhere –’ although by the looks of her there was little danger of that.

‘She has a shock,’ Mrs P said, preparing a samovar of tea and placing it beside the glasses on a silver tray. ‘She should be drinking this, not the double brandies.’

‘Try telling her that.’

Mrs P paused and looked me in the eye. ‘What happen, Master Charles?’

‘Oh, nothing, really,’ I blustered. ‘Just the gals letting off a little steam. You know what they’re like.’

‘Mmm,’ Mrs P said equivocally, performing one of her half-shrug half-grimaces.

‘You should be happy though. Mirela’s gone down a storm.’

Mrs P frowned over at the middle ground, where her daughter and Harry stood deep in conversation with the telephone fellow. ‘I will be happier when it is over,’ she said. ‘I am old, I have seen enough fight. Excuse me, Master Charles, I must bring this man his drink.’

The party raged on. Not far away, Laura, who was already tipsy, pestered Mrs P’s sons to play her requests; Frank came in and out, carrying off entire sections of the buffet to the cloakroom, which he had kindly agreed to man while I stayed with Bel. The cast and crew, meanwhile, were full of themselves. The telephone fellow, after asking a newspaperman what
he
thought of the play, had pronounced himself delighted, and the air was alive with rumours: that he had commissioned Harry to write a new play with a vast budget; that Mirela was going to appear on a billboard for Telsinor; that everybody was getting a free phone in exchange for a phone mast being installed in the back garden at Amaurot.

Everyone acted as if the sabotaged ending had been planned all along. As for the pictures, when we went back up to the dressing room after the curtain call they had disappeared; no one mentioned them now, no one seemed to find it odd that it was Mirela, and not Bel, who cruised the room on Harry’s arm. It was as though here, too, the lines had simply been rewritten, with only the presence of Bel, sitting despondently in the wide berth the others had given her, to hint at the existence of an earlier draft.

On my way back to her I paused to eavesdrop on Niall O’Boyle and Harry, who had been buttonholed by a journalist. ‘And what do you see Telsinor getting from such an investment?’ the journalist was saying.

‘It’s not about us getting something
out
of it,’ Niall O’Boyle said. ‘What we’re talking about here is a – what did you say it was?’

‘Synergy,’ Harry said. He was still wearing his fusty costume from the play.

‘Exactly, a synergy. We’re both on the same team. This is the new Ireland, and it’s all about
communicating
. It’s about youth and young people talking to each other and turning over the old ways of doing things. And at Telsinor Ireland, we see ourselves as providing the equipment for creating that vision.’

‘The medium is the message,’ Harry put in.

‘And what about you?’ The journalist turned to him. ‘How do you feel about getting into bed with big business?’

‘Well,’ Harry said slowly, ‘I don’t think we’d say we were quote-unquote “getting into bed” with anybody…’

‘Exactly,’ Niall O’Boyle came in. ‘That’s a very old-fashioned way of looking at it. Because art, so-called big business, at the end of the day what they’re both about is
people
. For example, take Marla here,’ reaching over to take Mirela by the arm and presenting her to the journalist. ‘Someone like Marla is exactly what this centre, the Ralph Hythloday Centre, and Telsinor Ireland are about. It’s about creating a space for people where they can be who they want to be and say what they want to say. It’s about inclusivity and diversity. It’s east meets west, coming together in peace and harmony, young people forgetting about the past, turning their backs on war and politics and saying, It’s our turn now, and we just want to have a good time. For me, that’s really what the play was saying tonight.’

‘Was that what it was all about?’ the journalist said to Harry.

‘Well yes, in a way,’ said Harry, ‘because to communicate…’

I returned to Bel, still slumped dejectedly in her chair. ‘I don’t know what you ever saw in that charlatan,’ I said. ‘By golly, I’ve a good mind to go over there and clean his clock for him.’

The tea seemed to rouse her a little; she lifted her head and watched the ceiling flash white as the newspaper photographer went around the room taking pictures of cast members and guests.

‘It isn’t his fault,’ she said, after a long time.

‘I see,’ I said tartly. ‘I suppose Mirela put a gun to his head and made him do it. Or maybe it wasn’t her idea either, maybe they just tripped and fell into bed together –’

‘It’s the house,’ Bel said.

I turned around. ‘What?’

‘The house,’ she repeated. She was staring straight ahead of her, frowning slightly, as if trying to work out a complicated maths problem in her head: her voice was soporific, faraway-seeming. ‘It’s like it’s changing them,’ she said. ‘Like it’s making them do what it wants, so it can keep itself alive.’

I sat up with a jerk and pulled her head round so I could peer into her eyes. ‘Are you all right? Do you want me to get someone?’ Mrs P had just come in with a fresh tray of canapés: I waved my arm at her, but she didn’t see me.

‘Just look,’ Bel said simply, twisting the pendant in her fingers.

I looked, not knowing what I was supposed to be seeing. To the right there was a flash and a laugh and a group of people broke apart in front of the camera. ‘Why not get one of just you and the kids,’ I heard Niall O’Boyle say. ‘Take one of Georgie and the kids, why don’t you? Theatrical family, sort of thing.’

Bodies shuffled around: Harry linked his arm with Mother’s, Mirela doing the same on the opposite side, all three of them with their backs to us. ‘Ready?’ the photographer said.

‘Shouldn’t we have Bel in it too?’ someone – Mirela – asked; I heard Mother explain cursorily how Bel, for reasons of her own, preferred not to have her picture taken.

‘Perfect,’ the photographer said. ‘one more –’

‘Don’t you get it?’ Bel said. ‘They’re us.’

‘What?’

‘Everybody smile…’

‘They’re
us
,’ she said: and at that moment the flash went off and, though I was sure I was going to say something, the light caught me right in the eye, so that whatever it was I forgot it; instead I reeled back blinking and waving my hands – ‘Though in that case,’ she murmured invisibly beside me, ‘who are we?’

I took a deep breath and placed my hands over my eyes, waiting for my vision to compose itself before I told Bel that what she was saying didn’t make one iota of sense and perhaps it was time to get Mrs P and go for a lie down somewhere quiet. But then her voice broke in my ear, ‘I’m going to get a drink,’ and I looked up through a glaze to see her move away across the floor, the long dress, the still-settling light, the roomful of strangers combining to give her the appearance of floating…

13

She didn’t come back. I knew she wouldn’t; still I waited an hour or so, there on the outskirts of the party, drinking gimlets and drifting along the peripheries of other people’s conversations: the men in suits discussing offshore investment, property, golf; their wives discussing property, holidays, surgery, good causes.

On my way out I encountered an argument in progress at the cloakroom. ‘I’m not sure you understand the severity of the situation,’ a lady was telling Frank in a chandelier-shattering falsetto. ‘It’s not just a question of expense. That fox fur is irreplaceable. It is a piece of history, can you comprehend that?’

‘Well, it’s not there,’ Frank said with an air of finality.

‘But where else could it be?’ The woman’s voice rose another couple of octaves. ‘Where else could it be?’

‘Maybe it ran off,’ Frank suggested. ‘Maybe it didn’t want to live in a house any more.’

‘It’s
dead
!’ the woman wailed, bringing a jewel-laden hand down on the table; then, as though horrified at what she had just said, she staggered backwards with the same hand clutched to her throat. I got the impression that this discussion had been in train for some time; I felt a little sorry for her, but I turned my collar up and kept my eyes on the front door.

Outside the night was clear and cold and bit at my lips and nostrils. One of the company’s underlings was standing at the top of the driveway in an old-fashioned bellhop’s uniform (discovered among the seemingly endless store of antiquities Harry was having excavated from the attic), directing cars out with blue fingers and a stoical expression. As they left their swinging lights created crazy shadows, conjuring knotty, elfish faces from the boles and branches of the sleeping trees. Through the hedge another light could be made out, burning in Old Man Thompson’s den. Mother had sent Olivier an invitation to the play, though I don’t think she’d really expected him to come. No one had seen him since the old man’s funeral; he wouldn’t even answer the door. There were all kinds of stories flying around: that the will, which left everything to Olivier, was being contested by an obscure nephew living in Australia; that this nephew was planning to knock the old place down and build new houses to sell on; that Olivier, out of whatever perversity, was refusing to speak to Thompson’s solicitors, or for that matter anyone else.

I descended the steps, making for the line of taxis waiting at the gate, in the hope that one of them could be persuaded to take me back to Bonetown. But as I passed the laburnum, a figure stepped out in front of me. I rocked back on my heels. For a moment neither of us moved; we stood there, eyeing each other up.

‘I thought you’d gone to bed,’ I said eventually.

‘No,’ she said, shaking out her wrists. Her entire body was trembling; I wondered how long she’d been waiting, out here in the trees.

‘Well –’ Having exchanged our pleasantries, I made to move on, but she anticipated me and blocked my way again.

‘Take me with you,’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘I need,’ she said falteringly, ‘I need to get out of here for a little while.’

I paused and then said, without warmth, ‘Where is it you want to go?’

‘Anywhere,’ Mirela said.

I should have walked right past her, I suppose. What could we possibly have left to say to each other, after tonight? But there was something in her disorientation – the panicked eyes, the gestures that had come unmoored from their meaning – that was hypnotic, in the same way that a car crash is hypnotic; it struck a chord in me, in spite of everything, or because of it. And life isn’t like the movies: there’s no ominous swell to the soundtrack, no fatalistic overhead shot, nothing to tell you that this moment is the one your life will turn on; instead it’s like a train silently switching tracks, sheering off mid-journey into a whole other part of the night. She looked at me again with that strange uncloaked expression. ‘Please, Charles,’ she said; and I remembered her hand moving to cover mine on the banister that time, her eyes falling on me with the weightless insistence of a petal on water.

The taxi ride took the best part of an hour and we spent it in silence. She sat at the far window with her head resting against the glass and the dark city passing through her reflection. When we came closer to Bonetown, however, she seemed to rouse: she sat up and looked around her, taking in her environs with a little nod, as if the dismal towers, the crumbling roads were the answer to some unframed question in her mind.

I directed the taxi to stop outside Frank’s building. Without a word to me she got out and waited shivering in her ballgown on the kerb while I paid the cabbie. At the end of the street a shopping trolley rattled and was silent, like an animal bolting for the undergrowth.

Frank hadn’t come home yet and there was no sign of Droyd. The room was full of smoke and a chemical odour. I took a match to the lantern and, not knowing what else to do with her, offered Mirela a drink. I came out of the kitchen with the glasses and a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet to find her making her way slowly about the back of the room, gazing at the galleries of salvage, which in the ungiving light looked more forlorn than ever. ‘What is all this stuff?’

‘It’s Frank’s. It’s his work. Things he gets out of houses. He sells it on to dealers, decorators, so forth.’

‘Mmm-hmm…’ She picked up a moth-eaten cloth head that must once have belonged to a child’s hobbyhorse and turned it over in her hands.

‘That particular lot he picked up at an auction. Belonged to a recluse. Junk, mostly. Went in for stuffed animals in a big way. They don’t really sell, Frank says, not these days.’

She nodded absently, replacing the horse. Heavy swathes of smoke were still descending from the ceiling, slipping like so many diaphanous stoles over her bare shoulders. ‘We used to see this kind of thing in some of the towns we came through,’ she said, running her fingers over the bricolage. ‘When the people had run away, and the soldiers would go in and take whatever they had left behind. Washing machines, video recorders, picture frames, rugs, heaters, you would see it all sitting out on the street, waiting to be put in lorries and driven away and sold. When the houses were empty they burned them.’

I had never heard her speak about what had happened over there; I waited, not moving, in case she might say more. But instead she turned away with her drink and took a chair opposite where I sat on the windowsill. She smiled artificially and drew her hands into her lap. ‘So this is where you live now,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Hard to imagine, you in the middle of all the pots and pans.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said defensively.

‘I suppose not.’

I tapped my foot. What did she want from me? Did she really expect me to sit here and make small talk while she took in the derelict ambience? I looked her over biliously willing her to leave; then following her line of vision down to her clasped hands I said suddenly, ‘Aren’t those Bel’s?’

‘What?’

‘The gloves.’

‘These?’ Somewhat bewildered, she held them in the air in a hands-up position, as if I had pulled a gun on her. ‘Yes, they are. She gave them to me.’

They had been another gift of Father’s, I remembered; he was always buying her expensive things she never wore. Bel didn’t like new clothes – she preferred her clothes to have lives, she’d say, that was the whole idea of clothes, wasn’t it?

‘It was a while ago,’ Mirela said. ‘When you were in hospital, probably. I didn’t have any clothes of my own.’ She splayed her fingers and wiggled them experimentally. ‘We were getting on better then.’ She gave me a rueful smile, which I did not return. She sighed, and with her right hand began bending back the fingers of her left, one by one. ‘I didn’t want this to happen, Charles. I never intended to hurt anybody. These are just the things you have to do when you’re a girl. This is what you have to do. For your sister it’s the same. She would have done exactly the same thing, even though she won’t admit it.’

‘If you’re referring to what happened with Harry –’ I began.

‘Oh, let’s not talk about Harry!’ she cried, hair flying across her face. ‘I don’t want to talk about him, you can understand that, can’t you?’

I withdrew back into the window-frame. She took a hasty gulp from her glass and looked down at her lap. ‘I’m saying that this is what’s it’s like, when every man you kiss thinks he’s unearthed you, and everyone has a role for you to play, the brave little refugee, the obedient daughter, the foreign girl with loose morals…’ Her hand made a quick mechanical gesture. ‘You do what you can with that. You can’t stop life from happening, can you? You don’t get to choose what parts you get. So you take your opportunities. You use the means available to you. Your life becomes something that takes you further and further away from yourself. It sounds cynical, I know. It is cynical.’

She got up and went back over to the array of salvage, standing at it with her head bowed, touching its surface. ‘But what you have to remember is,’ she continued, keeping her back to me, her voice dipping and fragmenting as if unwilling to go on, ‘I’ve done all this before. I’ve had a whole life that no one here even knows. I had friends. I had someone I loved. How come no one ever asks me about that, Charles? How come if everybody’s so concerned about me they never ask about that? Because I loved him and he loved me, we took walks by the river and put daisies in our hair and all the things that people do when they’re in love, except that we were in a war, except that meanwhile everyone else was trying to kill each other for things that happened before any of them were even born… Still, what did any of that have to do with us? We didn’t want to kill anybody. We thought they’d leave us alone. We thought being in love made us different. We told each other how we’d run away from it and start everything again.’ The fingers of her left hand passed again one by one through those of her right.

‘How can a person, how can
your
person, just disappear, Charles? How can someone go for food one night and just never come back? It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense. But everyone had stopped caring about making sense. And then it was time to run away again, and when I tried to go back to look for him I found out about the mines – they put mines down in our street in case we tried to come back. Where is he now? A grave somewhere in Krajina? The same one as my father? Nobody knows. How can nobody know? I don’t understand it. But that’s what our love amounted to. That’s what my love could do for him.’ A faint wobble ran through her chin; the hobbyhorse head looked at me mournfully from the mausoleum darkness at the back of the room.

‘And so I come here, where no one knows or cares what happened over there, no one’s even sure what language I speak, and I forget. I forget my father, who went back to the village because his friends had left their dog in the basement. I forget that my mother came here hidden in trucks full of meat and computer parts. I forget the brothers I grew up with so it doesn’t hurt to see the boredom on their faces. I pretend I don’t see the news when it shows the same thing happening all over again. I forget, like everyone wants me to forget. I make myself think only of my new life – the plays, the boys, the opportunities. Every night when she says good night to me Mama asks when we will go back. She doesn’t understand that everything is gone now. All the people we knew are gone. Different people live in our houses, strangers. I explain it to her every night and then the next night she comes in again and looks the way she thinks is east and asks the same question. She doesn’t understand. But I understand. And I’m never going back, whatever I have to do.’

There was a long, subdued silence. I frowned at my glass, which needed a top-up. Mirela wrapped an arm around her waist and gently swayed her dark cowl of hair. ‘I don’t expect you to forgive me,’ she said more quietly. ‘I just don’t want you to think of me as a thief, who came in and stole your life away without even thinking. I didn’t want it to be like this. I would have made it different, if I could. I would have made us friends. You with your face and me with my leg. Maybe if they added us together we might make a whole person.’

She laughed: in the penitent atmosphere the sound was startling, like the report of a gun. Perhaps because I started, I laughed too. The tension dissipated somewhat and she turned away from the wall; and as she did I caught her perfume for the first time, and I was put in mind suddenly of home: the smells on Father’s hands when he came back from the lab, the fragrances the models trailed after them as they skipped down the staircase that would stay behind long after they had gone, haunting the house like warm sweet ghosts: slinking up to you unexpectedly in a corridor, or springing out
Boo!
from the corner of a hardly used room, then with a wink disappearing as if they had never been there at all…

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d be making any more speeches tonight.’

‘That’s perfectly all right.’

She had come back towards the centre of the room, but under the lantern she stopped, and her smile receded into something more pensive; reaching up, she made a
tink
with her fingernail against the glass. ‘We had one of these in the Folly,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was ours.’

‘It seems like so long ago,’ she said. The lantern canted away from her fingertips, sending light swirling in the hollows of her collarbone like the dregs of some opalescent drink. ‘You know I never told you…’

‘Told me what?’

‘Nothing.’ She lowered her head, coming back up to the table and leaning her hip on its edge. ‘Just something stupid I used to do.’

I moved out to the table and filled up our glasses. ‘Tell me,’ I said, glad to be on to a less morbid line of conversation.

‘Well… it was when we were hiding in the Folly, my brothers and me. Every day they used to go into the city, trying to register. But I wasn’t allowed outside. They said it was too dangerous, because of my leg. I can’t move very quickly on it, obviously. And anyway I was ashamed of it. When I got to Ireland, and I saw all these people who weren’t running away from anybody, who were living normal lives, I felt ashamed. I felt – what’s the word? – absurd. So every day and every night I stayed up there in that tiny little room. Eventually of course I started going crazy. I had to get out. I didn’t care who saw me. So at night when the boys were asleep I started sneaking out. Not going anywhere, just around the garden, just to taste the air.’ Absently she peeled off her gloves and laid them neatly on the back of the armchair. ‘Then one night I saw a light in the drawing-room window, and that night I must have been particularly bored and particularly lonely because I went up and peeped through the crack in the curtains. And it was you.’