An Evening of Long Goodbyes (50 page)

‘You’re coming back, aren’t you?’ I said, beginning to feel a little browned off. ‘I just thought it would be nice to have a dog about the place again. I remembered how you used to dote on that spaniel…’ This I felt sure would elicit a response, but her face remained blank as the silver tag nestled in my pocket. I thought about producing the tag as evidence of her obsession, thereby proving that the dog was a good present, Aeroflot’s luggage policy notwithstanding; but I checked myself. I had done my best to make amends. If she was going to be infantile, that was her business. She returned to her reverie. I fell into a grumpy silence of my own. From the other side of the table, Frank resumed his muttering, mingling it with superstitious glances at Bel of the kind that a savage might throw at a bicycle. Oh yes, we made quite a party.

‘You know,’ Niall O’Boyle was telling Mother, tilting his chair back from the table, ‘I’ve always fancied one of these big houses. A man could get some thinking done in a place like this.’

‘Oh, these old piles are far more trouble than they’re worth,’ Mother laughed. ‘Don’t be fooled. So much work just to keep them going, and it’s only on nights like this that they truly come into their own.’ But even as she said it, her eyes roved over the lavish appointments, and sparkled with approval.

‘It’s those Slavic cheekbones,’ the lavender-jacketed PA said, stroking her wine glass and gazing at Mirela. ‘They photograph so beautifully…’

‘I’m calling it
The Rusting Tractor
,’ Harry said to Geoffrey. ‘It’s about a young woman moving from the city to an isolated village in Connemara, one of those places that’s totally stuck in the past, you know, no Internet access, two TV channels – anyway, she gets in a fight with the locals because she wants to put a mobile-phone mast up on her land, because I don’t know if you’ve been to the west but the coverage is really appalling out there, but to them this is a kind of sacrilege, because, you know, the “land”, capital L –’

‘Charlie!’ a hoarse voice called from across the table. ‘What’s he talkin about?’

‘I think he’s talking about mobile phones,’ I said.

‘… so what develops is a conflict between the quote-unquote “new” Ireland, the Ireland of technology and communication and gender equality, and the “old” Ireland of repression and superstition and resistance to change, which is represented by the rusting tractor…’

‘Why does he keep doin that thing with his fingers?’

‘Oh, it’s a sort of inverted commas,’ I whispered. ‘Just ignore him. It’s patent nonsense anyway. Mobile phones, the very idea is absurd. People don’t want to be bothered with phones when they’re out and about, that’s the whole reason they leave their houses.’

‘It’s like a strobe light goin off in me brain,’ Frank said through clenched teeth, holding his head with his hands.

‘What?’ I looked over at him. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and his eyes were doing this alarming trick of rolling back in his head. He was definitely behaving more sociopathically than usual. That blow earlier must have dislodged something. ‘Look at all these bastards,’ he said, gazing saturninely up and down the table.

‘Eat your truffles,’ I said hurriedly, pointing to his plate. ‘And maybe you shouldn’t drink any more.’ I poured his glass into mine.

I haven’t mentioned it up to now for fear of sounding immodest, but ever since I sat down Mirela had been staring at me. At first it had been in the form of plaintive,
mea culpa
-type looks whenever Harry’s head was turned, which I had politely ignored. Yet she persisted: and as the night wore on, they had increased in urgency – flickering constantly from the other side of the table as if she had some message she was attempting to send via a Morse code of blinks and flashes, until they came to resemble the entreaties of one of those silent-movie heroines who has been tied to a train track. But now, as the clock struck for midnight, she seemed suddenly to resign herself. She slumped down in her seat; at the same moment, a wine glass pinged, and Harry got to his feet.

‘Friends… friends.’ He held up his hand for quiet. ‘You’ll forgive me if I detain you with a few brief words of my own.’ His doltish hair looked even more snaky and annoying than usual. An Evening of Long Goodbyes began to growl. ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Bad dog. Be quiet,’ slipping him a truffle when Mother had stopped looking.

‘We’ve heard a lot tonight about “new visions”, “rebirths” and “new beginnings” –’

‘Gnnnhhhh,’ Frank ground his fists into his temples.

‘So in keeping with the general theme of the evening,’ Harry continued, ‘and with no further ado, it is my pleasure to inform you that at half past eight this evening, Miss Mirela Pribicevic agreed to give me her hand in marriage –’

Before he had finished the sentence, the female contingent of the table erupted and rushed over to swamp Mirela in squeals and embraces. ‘How wonderful!’ Mother clasped her hands to her cheeks as her eyes welled up with tears. ‘Oh, how wonderful!’

My first thoughts were for Bel, and I swung round with my arms half-outstretched, I suppose in case she might be about to swoon. But she was looking on placidly as if this were happening far, far away, to a group of people she had never met; and I was forced back to face my own emotions.

It was funny: if someone had put this situation to me hypothetically five minutes earlier, I’d probably have replied, quite honestly, that I didn’t think it would bother me in the slightest. Yet as I watched Mirela now, I felt as cold and sick and hollow as if I had been dealt a mortal blow. As I watched her emerge from the scrum of well-wishers, pink and fresh-faced and laughing and looking very much like a girl in love, everything she had said to me in our few contradictory exchanges ran through my mind; and in that moment, I realized with a terrible sense of finality that I had no idea, and I never would have any idea, how this world worked or what went on in the hearts of its inhabitants; that it was and always would be utterly opaque and mysterious to me, and that whatever happened from now on would not make any difference, because it would never come any closer.

‘Charlie,’ Frank confided sweatily, ‘I’m not feelin meself.’

‘Me neither, old chum,’ I said. ‘Me neither.’

Harry, meanwhile, had lied about a few brief words. Instead he was using his announcement as a springboard for more speechifying. ‘On the occasion of this double union,’ he raised his voice over the hubbub, ‘I would like to say a word of thanks. You hear a lot these days about how the notion of “the family” is one that can’t exist any more in our fast-paced modern world. But from the first day I came here, after Bel asked me to join the theatre group she was just starting, a family is exactly what it’s been. And it’s made me realize what a family
can
be. Coming from a typical middle-class, “petit-bourgeois” background, I suppose I had a fairly low opinion…’

From his position face-down on the empty plate, Frank informed me that he couldn’t take much more of this.

‘… realize that the family can be something
political, radically
political, can be a force which can be posited
against
the controlling groups of our time, a “free space” where differing opinions can come together and new unions can be made – like the one I am so fortunate to have made tonight.’

I gulped back a fresh glass of Rioja and felt a cold sweat break over me like a kind of necrosis.
You can’t stop life from happening
, that’s what Mirela said, that night in Frank’s apartment. It would carry you further and further away from yourself; it would make its way into your past and transform that too…

‘… learn that the market, like a gun, isn’t anything
intrinsically
good or bad, that we can use it for good, we can join forces with it. And just as we have grown, so Amaurot has grown with us…’

And meanwhile all anyone did was make speeches! It felt like he was dancing up and down on our grave, he and market forces, he and the asset strippers, he and the Golems of progress, and yet no one
did
anything, no one gainsaid or challenged him or said, It isn’t right, these things you’re saying
aren’t right
…

‘… a house weighed down by, or rather trapped in, its own history, to recontextualize it, realign it with modernity, and basically haul the place into the twenty-first century –’

I was reaching the point where I didn’t think I could physically stand any more; and evidently someone else in the room felt the same way, because suddenly a loud, exasperated voice called out, ‘Oh, balls!’

Everyone went quiet. Harry adjusted his bow tie, and said ‘Excuse me?’ as if to offer the perpetrator a chance to exculpate himself. But this protester was not to be silenced. ‘Balls!’ the voice cried again, even louder than before. I tittered to myself; and I was so enjoying seeing Harry squirm that it took a moment to realize that I was standing up, and that furthermore the entire table was staring at me.

Bother.

‘Charles, leave the table, please,’ Mother said.

‘No,’ Harry interjected. ‘If you don’t mind – let’s hear what Charles has to say.’

I wiped my palms on my trousers, unexpectedly finding myself addressing the room at large. ‘Well, I mean to say,’ I stuttered. ‘I mean… well, a house is a house isn’t it? It’s a place people live in. I don’t see what the twenty-first century’s got to do with it. I don’t see why, just because you’ve put up some new wallpaper, you should be allowed to claim the place in the name of the
future
, like some sort of… you know… time-travelling… pirate.’

‘That’s Harry for you,’ chuckled Niall O’Boyle. ‘I like a man who’s got his eye on the future. Because that’s where it’s all going to happen, mark my words. The past is one thing, but the future, that’s where the money is.’

‘I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes,’ Harry said. ‘I’m just saying you have to move with the times. It’s in everybody’s interests. You have to admit this place was falling to pieces before we came.’

I thought back to that golden age when it was just Bel and me and the drinks cabinet. ‘It wasn’t,’ I said.

‘It was,’ he reiterated. ‘The paint was peeling, the floors were rotten–your mother told us that while she was in hospital the bank was practically calling in the sheriffs to repossess the place…’

‘That was all a misunderstanding,’ I claimed.

‘But you blew up the Folly for the insurance,’ Harry pursued, fingering the buttons of his lawyer’s waistcoat. ‘I mean – you tried to
fake your own death
. How can you say the house was better off then?’

I blinked stuporously, and cast about me for support. Bel continued to gaze dreamily into space like a patient under ether in the dentist’s chair. Frank was lying inert on the table like a giant rag-doll, as he had been for the last five minutes. All the others waited for my response, their eyes holding me pinned like so many skewers. ‘We knew what we were doing,’ I mumbled.

There was a momentary delay; then, as one, the guests around the table burst into laughter. It was warm and full; everyone joined in, even people I had never met before, like Niall O’Boyle’s PA; even Mother, her anger dissipating in the general gaiety.

Harry threw his hands up humorously as if to say, I rest my case; I slunk down in my seat and thought that maybe I
was
just a dope – in all likelihood I was, I wasn’t debating the matter: but still it didn’t seem right that a man should be made to feel like this, not in the dining room of his own childhood home.

And then, abruptly, mechanically, Frank lifted his head from his plate. With a glazed yet curiously purposeful expression, like a man acting with orders from on high, he rose and tucked in his chair; then he crossed the floor and began strangling Harry.

For a couple of seconds we sat watching dumbly as plates flew, glasses smashed, chairs tumbled. Then the girls began to scream. At the same time, the bit-part actors at the end of the table hurrahed and stood on their seats to get a better view; the dog barked; Mirela turned grey; the businessmen puffed themselves up and waved their hands about –

‘Do something, Charles!’ Mother shrieked. ‘Do something!’

‘Right,’ I responded, getting to my feet. ‘Who’s for brandy? And I believe we have some cigars…’

‘Charlie?’

‘Yes, Frank?’

‘You awake?’

‘Yes, Frank, I’m awake.’

‘Where are we, Charlie?’

‘We’re in Father’s study. You had a sort of a funny turn.’

‘Oh right. I gave your man a box.’ There was a pause: the darkness recomposed itself over the shelves, the vials and periodicals and thick portfolios of photographs. ‘I’d say he wasn’t expectin that.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he was.’

‘Your ma was awful angry, wasn’t she? Like sayin she was goin to get us arrested and stuff.’

‘Oh, Mother says these things, you know…’

‘Sorry, Charlie. I dunno what happened. It was like I wasn’t in control of me own mind.’

I charitably let this pass.

‘He kept goin on and on with all that shite. It was drivin me mad. And I couldn’t just let him make a laugh of you.’

I coughed. ‘Well, I don’t know that he was making a
laugh
of me –’

‘Like I wasn’t just goin to let him make you look like some geebag that didn’t know his arse from his elbow.’

‘Well… well, thanks, old man.’

Silence.

‘Charlie?’

‘Go to
sleep
.’

‘Fuckin cold in here, isn’t it?’

‘…’

‘Charlie… d’you ever see a ghost here? I bet there’d be loads of ghosts in an old gaff like this… fuck –’ the camp bed creaked painfully, ‘just like that bit in Bel’s play, like all these faces like
starin
at you from the fuckin trees and shit –’

‘Look, there aren’t any ghosts, all right?’ I said irritably. ‘If there were, Harry would have roped them into serving dinner, or helping in his wretched play. Lord knows if I was a ghost I’d have fled the minute he walked in the door.’

‘Ah yeah, I s’pose…’ He laid himself gingerly back down. I turned back to the window. I was at my old vantage point behind Father’s desk, where I’d used to look out at the Folly and occasionally see an angel, or an actress. There weren’t any angels tonight; we had used up our quota, probably, or else they had hitched a ride with the ghosts.