An Evening of Long Goodbyes

10

Hallowe’en in Bonetown went on well into November. With every night the destruction seemed to intensify, and scurrying back from my bus stop after work I genuinely feared for my life — although because of my outlandish appearance the revellers tended to view me as a kind of seasonal mascot, and generally received me with cheers and thumbs up.

Finally, around the middle of the month, the violence reached its peak. I remember I had double-locked the doors, and was sitting with Frank trying to watch the news. But it was nearly impossible to make anything out, what with the rioting going on outside our window. Glass was being broken like it was going out of fashion; flats were pelted with eggs, toilet rolls, homemade fertilizer bombs; theoretically unstealable things — telephone poles, skips, a suite of leatherette furniture — were duly stolen and added to the pyre that climbed and blazed ever-higher like a beacon marking the end of the world.

It was the morning after that we found the wheelchair for Bel’s play. It was just sitting there on the kerb, with no one in sight who might have been able to explain where it had come from, or who had been occupying it previous to last night — as though it had been left there especially for us. Although it was surrounded by debris, torn metal, bits of cat, the wheelchair was quite intact: pristine, in fact, in a way that seemed somehow wrong and unsettling even before we realized what was missing from the scene. The box and blankets were no longer on the doorstep. Homeless Kenny, who had remained camped outside the house through the worst of the hostilities, was gone — vanished as mysteriously as the wheelchair had appeared, as if in someone’s idea of a fair swap; with no clue as to what had happened, except that to his small defiant graffito had been added a deathly black H.

‘“Harm the Homeless,”’ Droyd read out.

‘I wonder where he went,’ I said, affecting a nonchalance I did not feel.

‘Maybe he went to the park for the night,’ Frank said.

‘Maybe he went to a hotel,’ Droyd said, ‘or he found somewhere proper to live.’

But we knew that he hadn’t: or why would we have stopped talking, and why would everything have seemed so mortally still as we hoisted the wheelchair on our shoulders and carried it up the stairs.

For days to follow it sat in the corner, gleaming at me in a way I didn’t care for. Finally I asked Frank when he was going to get rid of it. He mumbled something about how he’d been meaning to deliver it only he’d had a very busy week. This was an untruth, as for most of the week he’d been sitting around the apartment snuffling, and I told him so. He squirmed about unhappily. ‘I don’t want to go out there on me own, Charlie.’

‘Out where? Out to Amaurot? Why not?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, hanging his head. ‘I just don’t.’

‘That’s absurd,’ I told him.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed pathetically, and then, lighting up: ‘Here, you could come out with me.’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah, you could give me a hand, like.’

Now it was my turn to prevaricate. My plan for some time had been not to return to Amaurot until I had made a success of my life. I didn’t want to go back now, in my current straitened circumstances, and have Mother going I-told-you-so and those hateful actors gloating at me — and I didn’t think I could bear to witness Bel embarked on yet another ill-conceived romance, with all that oleaginous stroking and canoodling. But there really was something sinister about that wheelchair, and in the end I gave in.

Frank barely said a word the whole way out. His knuckles bulged whitely on the wheel, and I confess that I too felt a certain frisson as we left the city for the coast road. Wind ruffled in through the broad slat of the open window; buildings gave way to trees, flicking past match-pale; to our left the sea surged introspectively in and out, like a grey ghost pacing its corridor. And now here was the iron gate, and the old horse chestnut with the scar where Father had hit it late one night, from which a covey of pigeons broke as Frank took us up the bumpy driveway.

‘Looks well, the old place,’ he said woodenly, as the roof and upper floors of Amaurot began to peep over the trees.

‘Mmm…’ It seemed bigger than I remembered: I suppose because of spending so much time in Bonetown, in that cramped apartment. The closer we got, the higher the walls seemed to tower, the heavier the house’s shadow bore down on us and the rusty white van… And then, from behind us, came a cheery Parp! Parp!

‘What the blazes…?’

‘Looks like someone’s drivin round that old banger of your dad’s, Charlie.’

‘Thank you, I can see that.’ The bottle-green Mercedes was out on the lawn, white-blue smoke pouring merrily from the exhaust pipe as it trundled round in low-speed circles. ‘What does he think he’s doing?’

‘Hello there! Hi there! Hythloday!’ We were being saluted by a figure in a tweed cap and old-fashioned leather motoring goggles.

‘It’s that ponce Harry,’ Frank said darkly.

‘Just ignore him,’ I said. ‘That oik — no one’s taken that car out in twenty years. If it explodes under him, it’ll be too good for him.’ Balefully I sat back in my seat. ‘Taking liberties like that. And who does he think he is in those ridiculous goggles, Toad of Toad Hall?’

Lapsing into a bad-tempered silence, we drove on and pulled up outside the portico, where we got out, took the wheelchair from the back of the van and set it down by the steps. I had lost my house-keys some weeks ago down the back of Frank’s sofa, which was the Bermuda Triangle of the apartment; however, if memory served, Mrs P kept a spare set down here under the laburnum… I was casting about on my hands and knees when I heard the engine restart behind me. ‘What are you doing?’ I said. Frank had climbed back behind the wheel of the van. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

‘Ah no, Charlie,’ bobbing his head evasively, ‘no, better get back to the old work —’

‘But it’s Sunday,’ I protested. ‘Don’t you want a cup of tea, even?’

‘No, I just remembered this thing I have to do…’

‘Well, can’t it wait a minute? We can’t just leave the damned wheelchair sitting there, help me carry it inside.’ He gunned the motor, drowning me out, and with a fugitive expression began to reverse the van and turn back down the driveway. ‘For heaven’s sake, she’s not going to bite you!’ I called after him, to no avail. ‘How am I supposed to get home?’ Too late: the indicator blinked and the van nosed out on to the road. For a moment I wished that I had gone back with him

Cursing him, I went back to my search for the keys. I was still searching when the elderly Mercedes came chugging up a moment later.

‘Hey there, Charles,’ Harry said, dismounting. ‘Long time no see.’

‘There’s a reason for that, you oik,’ I muttered under my breath.

‘What’s that?’

I straightened up and shot him a cold, reproving look. His hair was more annoying than ever, but he seemed to have traded in his revolutionary attire: instead of combat trousers he was wearing pantaloons of a robust tweed, and the tedious peasant jacket had been replaced by a waistcoat with an appalling Aztec motif. ‘What do you think you’re doing, driving that car around?’ I said.

‘Just thought I’d take it for a spin,’ he said mildly. ‘Seems a shame to keep a beautiful machine like that cooped up in a stuffy old garage.’

‘That car is a museum piece,’ I said. ‘It is not meant to be driven.’

‘Oh, come on!’ he laughed. ‘Of course it is. That’s what cars are for, not sitting around under a tarpaulin.’ He ran a gloved hand affectionately over the bottle-green flank. ‘It still runs like a dream. All it needed was a little tinkering.’

‘Be that as it may,’ I said in a tight voice. ‘I’m telling you now that that car is a priceless antique, and I would prefer if it were left alone.’

‘Suit yourself,’ he shrugged.

I turned my back on him and resumed my search beneath the flowerpot.

‘You know, if you’re looking for the keys, we don’t keep them there any more,’ he said.

Slowly, I rose again to my feet, clenching my teeth.

‘Don’t worry, though, I can let you in. But hey — you haven’t met the new inmates, have you?’

‘What, more Disadvantaged?’ I said witheringly.

‘Stay there a second.’ He jogged over to the undergrowth by the garage, and started making a clucking noise.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I’m in rather a hurry —’ That is, I began to say it; but then, out of the bushes, strutted the peacocks, and my jaw dropped.

They were barely recognizable as the vermin-infested creatures I had left behind: in fact, I don’t think they had ever looked so handsome. Every vein of their nacreous feathers shone, every eye on their fanned tails glistered; and running about and cheeping in front of them were what appeared to be small, very mobile balls of dust.

‘What,’ I said incredulously, ‘you got new ones?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘Rosa had them last week — we call the taller one Rosa, after Rosa Luxemburg?’

‘She never did that before,’ I said, scrutinizing the peacock in question.

‘Well, I thought when I got here they looked a bit down, so I changed their diet a little, fixed up their coop — I used to work with birds when I lived in Guatemala. I guess I must have put them in the mood for love, because next thing you know Rosa has these two little bundles of joy, little Che and Chavez.’

What was he doing to my house?

‘Yes, well, you must be very proud,’ I said. ‘Look, if you wouldn’t mind letting me in now —’

‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. He bounded up the steps and turned his key in the lock, then bounded down again to help me carry in the wheelchair. We set it down inside the door. I looked at him. He smiled at me gormlessly.

‘I can manage from here,’ I told him.

‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘See you later, then.’

He ambled back down to the lawn; for a moment I stood there in the threshold, contemplating the hallway. Everything appeared to be just as I had left it: there was the poinsettia, there was the Brancusi, there the glass frieze of Actaeon threw its queer curlicues of light on to the floor. And yet in some unaccountable way it felt different — unconvincing, almost, that curious sense of dissonance one gets when one finally visits a place seen many times in photographs. Then, as though specifically to allay these misgivings, Mrs P bustled out of the kitchen with a tray of butterfly cakes and a carafe of orange juice.

‘Master Charles!’ she cried. ‘Is it really you? Please, you will take a butterfly cake?’

‘Thanks,’ I said. This was a bit more like it.

‘How long you have waited to come to see me?’ she scolded. ‘Why have you waited so long?’

‘Oh, you know how it is,’ I said carelessly. ‘How’s things? How is the old place?’

‘Ay, Master Charles, we miss you very much,’ she sighed, moving behind me to take my coat. ‘Now everyone is working, everything is rush rush, nobody has time to sit, enjoy a nice meal… But you too, Master Charles, you are important too, eh? Now that you work, make money…’

‘Not that important,’ I assured her, as she folded the coat over her forearm and brought it away to the cloakroom. There was a creak on the stairs behind me. I looked around — and with a little kick of exhilaration saw Bel coming into view.

‘Charles!’ she exclaimed.

No, wait, it wasn’t Bel, it was Mirela wearing Bel’s silver kimono: I felt my heart back up, as if it had taken a wrong turn down a one-way street –

‘My goodness, how are you?’

‘What?’ I said distractedly, trying not to look at the shapely halfmoon of flesh disclosed by the aperture of her kimono as she leaned out over the banister. ‘Oh — tolerably well, tolerably well…’

‘I wish I knew you were coming,’ she said, sashaying down the intervening steps. ‘You catch me looking like this. Why haven’t you come to visit before? Did you forget about us?’

‘Oh,’ I croaked, ‘you know…’

‘I suppose your new life is much more exciting. But couldn’t you have called me, at least?’

I should explain that I had given considerable thought before coming out here as to what strategy to adopt if, as was likely, I ran into Mirela. In the end I’d decided against making any direct accusations as regarded her negligence or general heartlessness, in favour of a tone of polite but implacable froideur. However, everything already seemed to be getting confused; for she — paused just above me with her hand resting on the stair-rail like the flower of some exquisite vine — seemed adamant that it was I who had neglected her. ‘I thought we had such a good talk that night after the play,’ she said. ‘But then you were just gone. You didn’t even say goodbye.’

I could only gape. Had I got everything back to front? Had she been pining for me all this time?

‘You look well, Charles,’ she said softly, coming down on to the second-to-last step.

‘They changed my bandages,’ I whispered.

Who knows what might have happened had she been allowed to reach the bottom of the stairs. But without warning, our idyll was shattered — by Mrs P, who arrived back from the cloakroom and took up a stance behind me, from which she launched into a wordy and by the sounds of it highly critical speech in Bosnian.

‘Oh Mama, speak English, can’t you?’ Mirela shouted. This served only to increase the volume of the harangue. ‘Why can’t one of the boys do it? They’re just sitting in there playing backgammon —’

Mrs P folded her arms and eyed her daughter squarely; and after a moment’s token resistance, Mirela buckled. ‘All right, all right, in case anyone should forget my mother is the maid.’ She turned to me entreatingly. ‘Sorry, Charles. But maybe we’ll have a chance later to catch up,’ and I felt her hand slide coolly over mine to squeeze my fingers, before she hoisted her head and marched down the hallway, her prosthesis clattering defiance on the parquet as she went.

‘See what I mean?’ Mrs P expostulated beside me. ‘Everybody so important!’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly, caressing the fingers of the lucky hand. ‘Yes…’

Mrs P went to pick up her tray of cakes. ‘I must go and bring these to the others. Master Charles, you have eaten lunch?’

‘Hmm? What’s that? Lunch?’

‘Perhaps I make you a sandwich?’

‘Oh, no, Mrs P, I’m perfectly all right, I’m sure you have enough to do without —’

‘Or we have some cheese, if you like?’

‘Cheese, eh…’ It had been a long time since I’d had a decent piece of cheese. ‘Well, tell you what. Why don’t you get the cheese and I’ll deliver these for you, wherever they’re going.’

‘Ah, you are always so kind, Master Charles.’ She told me they were for the actors in the rehearsal room, patted my arm and waddled away into the kitchen: from which Vuk and Zoran emerged a moment later, rushing past me like scalded cats in the direction of the garden shed.

Now that she mentioned it I was feeling rather peckish, so I ate the rest of the buns and drank the orange juice. Then I went into the recital room, where I found practically the whole menagerie had gathered to rehearse their lines. In one corner, a tubby fellow and a girl with barrettes were arguing over a hat and whether it looked legal enough; here and there along the wall, people sat in the lotus position with their eyes closed and lips moving. The majority, however, were pacing the floor, frowning at the scripts in their hands and murmuring to themselves. Some kind of sixth sense seemed to keep them from bumping into one another; the effect was rather uncanny, like being at a sleepwalkers’ convention.

‘Darling!’ Mother’s voice came from behind me. ‘Oh, how good of you to come and see me! But how pale you look, my dear. Please, sit and tell me what’s the matter —’

‘Oh, hello Mother, nothing really, just a little over-tired I suspect…’

‘What?’ She looked up distractedly from the pages in her hand. ‘Oh, hello Charles, what are you doing here?’

‘What?’ I blinked. ‘Oh… I just came over with the wheelchair.’

‘The wheelchair, bravo! We must tell Bel, it’s for her part — Charles, why are you carrying around a tray of dirty dishes?’

‘Mrs P gave them to me,’ I said.

‘Tsk, tsk,’ Mother said, shaking her head. ‘Is there no end to that woman’s corner-cutting? Well, put them down, dear, we’re rather busy but you might as well have a glass of something while you’re here.’

I left the tray on the sideboard and followed her into the hallway. ‘You look well, Charles,’ she declared, nodding at various passing Residents. ‘There’s a bit of colour in your cheeks.’

‘They changed my bandages, if that’s what you —’

‘A fortitude, that’s what it is. I knew it would do you good, getting out there into the rough and tumble of the real world.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ trailing after her into the dining room.

‘There’s something bracing about an honest day’s work,’ she reflected, pouring a glass of sherry for me, then one for herself, ‘doing one’s bit, getting one’s due, going home on the tram with the satisfaction of knowing that the part one plays, small as it may be, is indispensable to the whole. One can’t put a price on that kind of satisfaction, can one, dear?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘although in terms of actual pay, they’ve managed to put a —’

‘Good, because that’s what keeps the whole world turning, Charles, isn’t it? What are you doing, exactly? Wasn’t it something about the Civil Service? Is it terribly bracing?’

‘Well, I suppose it’s moderately br—’

‘You know that we’re all terribly proud of you…’ glass in hand she clipped back out. ‘Though as I say we’re very busy here ourselves, Harry’s new play is going up in three weeks and we’re all working like blacks. Not that any of us is making any money from it — perhaps we could enlist you as one of our patrons, Charles?’

‘Ha ha,’ I rejoined dully, shying away from the Pandora’s box of Oedipal and economic problems inherent in that particular idea.

‘A remarkable piece of work, remarkable. That boy has such a touch for the stories of everyday life, the stories of the Common Man, you might say. Because it’s all very well for us in our ivory towers and our cosy Civil Service positions, Charles, but what about the less fortunate? It’s no picnic for them, you know.’

‘Yes, I can imagine —’

‘Which is why they are so lucky to have a writer like young Harry to give them a voice. Although I can’t claim to be entirely impartial, seeing as I myself have a small part, as the ailing mother.’ She laughed, and tossed back her sherry. I took advantage of the interval to ask Bel’s whereabouts so I could tell her I’d brought the wheelchair.

‘Oh, heaven knows,’ Mother said. ‘Wafting about somewhere upstairs, I think. Do tread softly with her, she’s been a perfect Antichrist lately.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘She sounded all right when I spoke to her.’

‘Well take my word for it,’ Mother said grimly. ‘And it is not very helpful, Charles, when one is trying to rehearse a play, and one needs everyone rowing in together.’ She sighed one of her martyr’s sighs. ‘I just hope she’s not slipping into her old ways, just when at long last she was seeming halfway socialized…’

I recoiled. ‘Well, don’t say that,’ I said. ‘She’s probably just over-excited, you know how she gets…’

‘Mmm,’ Mother said sceptically, fingering her sherry glass. I excused myself and, with a touch of trepidation, mounted the stairs.

Bel was in her dressing gown at the end of the corridor outside her bedroom, shuffling up and down with her head bowed over her script, making odd thrusting gestures down her side with her free hand.

‘I don’t want your charity, Ann,’ she was saying. ‘In fact I’m sick of your whole saintly act. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a bitter and self-involved person. But I could have been just as good a model as you — better even, if it hadn’t been for that car that knocked me down at an early age.’ She paused here, as if allowing for a reply, then, angrily: ‘Help me? How can you help me? Are you going to wave a magic wand and make the fashion industry sit up and take notice of the disabled community? Are you going to make it so when society looks at me, they won’t see only this chair, and push me into this narrow stereotype of an oh my God —’ as I tapped her on the shoulder and she spun round with the script clutched to her breast — ‘What are you doing, sneaking around like that?’

‘Hello, Charles. Delighted to see you, Charles. Charles, how kind of you to come over here in your spare time and bring out our stupid wheelchair for our tiresome play —’

‘You brought the wheelchair?’ she said, sitting down on one of several dusty cardboard boxes that cluttered the landing. ‘Where is it?’

‘In the hall,’ I said. ‘Mother said you’d want to know. What are you doing up here all on your own? Why are there boxes everywhere?’

‘They’re from the attic. We’re going through them to see if there’s anything we can use. I had come up here in the hope of getting a minute’s peace to go over my lines. But obviously I was deluding myself.’

‘Was that Harry’s thing you were reading there? The new thing?’

‘See for yourself,’ she said, thrusting the script at me and repairing to her room.

RAMP, said the first page, with Harry’s name in big letters under the title. On the next was DRAMATIS PERSONAE: MARY — an embittered young woman in a wheelchair; ANN — her loving and beautiful younger sister, a model; MOTHER — their mother; JACK REYNOLDS QC — a dashing socially concerned young lawyer.

‘What’s it about?’ I asked, following her into the bedroom.

‘It’s about,’ Bel recited, taking some pins from her hair and putting them down on the dressing table, ‘a girl in a wheelchair, which is me, and my mother’s dying of cancer in hospital, but I can’t get in to see her because I can’t get up the steps, so I go to court to try and get this ramp installed and it turns into a huge legal battle and a cause célèbre.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘I mean it’s all allegorical, obviously.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said; although inside, my mind was shouting things like Good grief! and How does he keep getting away with this? I sat down on the bed and leafed through the pages. ‘So this is the part he wrote for you? This is your tailor-made part?’

Bel nodded, taking a brush from a drawer and beginning to work the tangles out of her hair.

‘Seems to do a lot of shouting, to judge by all these italics,’ I commented, though I supposed this wasn’t too far off the mark.

‘It happens to be a very good part,’ she said to the mirror, brushing vigorously. ‘She’s complicated. You don’t often get to play women who are complicated.’ She reached up to undo a snarl. ‘Most of the time you’re just there to look pretty and weep occasionally.’

‘And who’s the beautiful sister? Mirela?’

‘Mmm,’ Bel said unenthusiastically. ‘And Harry’s the lawyer and Mother, in spite of all my pleading with her, is the ailing mother.’

‘Sort of funny that you’re the girl in the wheelchair, and Mirela’s playing the model,’ I joked. ‘I mean, when you think that she’s the one that only has one leg.’

Bel did not reply, but her brushing increased in intensity and there was the crackling sound of hairs snapping.

‘I mean when you think about it, it’s sort of funny,’ I repeated, in case she hadn’t got it.

‘Charles, I’m actually quite busy,’ she declared to the mirror.

‘That’s all right,’ I said genially. ‘You carry on doing what you’re doing. Don’t mind me.’

She rolled her eyes and began to dab at her face with a swab of cotton wool.

I stood up and went to the window. The heat in the room was stifling; I wondered that she didn’t notice it. ‘I say, you don’t mind if I open this, do you? Getting a bit of a prickly neck…’ She shrugged. I raised the sash and looked out.

It was winter: you could see it better out here where there were things that lived and died, and not just a cramped square of sky to be filled with clouds or fireworks. In the garden, trees clasped the last of their leaves to them, blushing deeply like thin girls caught skinny-dipping. Old Man Thompson, looking every one of his million or so years, was braving the cold out on his verandah. A silvery fog had started to roll in from the sea, like miles and miles of cobwebs floating over the waves.

‘Frank sends his regards,’ I said, tickling the lily on the windowsill. ‘Wanted to come in but he had to rush off somewhere. Man about a dog or something.’

‘Good,’ muttered Bel, more categorically than was strictly necessary. I turned and from the corner of my eye watched her frown at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look at all as she had sounded that time on the phone, so full of energy. Mother was right: there was a dark cloud in her brow that didn’t mean any good. Around her neck she was wearing a sort of a pendant — a blank metal disc on a cord, that for some reason seemed faintly familiar.

‘So how are you?’ I asked innocently. ‘Everything going all right?’

She dropped the cotton wool into the wastebasket. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she mumbled, unscrewing the lid from a jar of aromatic cream, one of a small army of bath oils, cleansers and face-balms amassed on the dressing table.

‘Just you look a bit, ah, under the weather…’

‘Everything’s fine,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a bit tired, that’s all. It’s a lot of work getting a play up.’

‘It is?’

‘You have no idea.’ Leaning into the mirror she made two quick Red-Indian dabs under her eyes and smeared them into her cheeks. ‘Everything’s so much work that sometimes I could swear the damn house was resisting me, as if it didn’t want us to have a theatre. I mean I know it sounds ridiculous…’ She caught up with herself and stopped; then, after a moment of deliberation she turned around and said, ‘But I don’t mind the work, like the rehearsals, and staying up all night programming the lights, and trying to get the posters designed and doing twenty different things at once, I don’t mind that. It’s the money, that’s what gets me. The endless harping on about money, you’d think there was nothing else in the world…’

‘Money?’ I said.

‘We don’t have any,’ she said. ‘I mean we should, we should have enough to keep afloat, at least. But any time I ask Mother about it she’s busy and when I look at the house’s accounts they’re like a labyrinth, or, or modern art or something. And without it we can’t do anything, we can’t afford publicity, so we can’t get audiences, so we can’t get a grant, it’s like a vicious circle.’ It struck me that the only way they could have got better audiences for Burnin Up would have been to go down to the docks and shanghai drunken sailors, but I kept this to myself. ‘So the drama classes and the outreach programme, all that’s been put on hold while we have these endless meetings, and meetings about meetings, and meetings about meetings about meetings, and everybody just talks and nobody ever does anything…’ The cloud in her brow darkened ominously. ‘Mirela wants to have a fundraiser for the next one. Put on an invitation-only event where we can woo corporate sponsors.’

‘Well, I suppose Mirela knows what she’s talking about,’ I put in. Apparently it was the wrong thing to say, because Bel immediately went pink and started lecturing me about how banks and e-businesses and phone companies and the rest of them were exactly what the theatre was supposed to be working against, and how she’d rather the whole thing failed than sell out like that, and so on and so forth.

‘I only meant that, you know, hasn’t she done this sort of thing before, with her group in Slovenia or wherever it was?’ I said. ‘So she probably knows how the whole thing works, that’s all.’

‘She likes to give that impression,’ Bel said icily.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Bel opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again, and said in a rush: ‘It means that she comes on like this great actress who’s seen it all before, but all she is really is a big void with no emotions of her own, I mean all she does is go around telling people what they want to hear so she can get her own way, and if you ask me the whole routine is getting pretty tired…’

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.