An Evening of Long Goodbyes

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.

Frank sat up quickly and said why didn’t we watch the video now; but the Rigbert’s had made me garrulous. I started telling Laura about how Bel had humiliatingly tossed Frank aside after her romantic epiphany with Harry up on the theatre roof. ‘Although it’s completely obvious he’s nothing but a conman,’ I said. ‘I mean, those plays of his are a total sham. You saw that last one. It was diabolical. You could hardly understand what those wretched people were supposed to be saying. It was like some kind of troglodyte ballet. But she’s fallen for him hook, line and sinker. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about Bel,’ Laura said. ‘She can take care of herself. Half of our school were like completely afraid of her.’

‘I’d like to believe that,’ I said dolefully. ‘Honestly, though, if you’d seen some of the goons she’s brought home over the last year — I say, no offence, Frank, old fellow,’ clapping him on the shoulder.

‘Maybe you should write a play,’ Laura said.

‘Ha ha,’ I said scowlingly.

‘No, but think about it. You want to get back into your house, okay? Well, like who lives there now? Disadvantaged Artists, right?’

‘I’m not following,’ I said.

‘Well, I mean you already look totally Disadvantaged, like with those scuzzy dungarees…’

‘That’s true,’ I mused. ‘And I do live here, with a reformed drug addict and Frank.’

Frank butted in rather pointedly to ask if we could please watch the video now.

‘Jeepers!’ Laura said. ‘I totally forgot.’

‘What video?’ I said.

‘Titanic,’ she said, taking a plastic box from her handbag. ‘Frank’s never seen it, can you believe it?’

‘I haven’t either,’ I said.

‘You haven’t?’ Laura’s jaw dropped. ‘I can’t believe it!’

‘I don’t know if it’s your type of thing, Charlie,’ Frank put in.

‘If you like films, you can’t not like Titanic,’ Laura told him.

‘I’m just not sure it’s Charlie’s type of thing,’ Frank said.

‘Well, we don’t have to watch it now. I’m having loads of fun.’

‘Maybe we could play a game,’ I proposed. ‘Like charades.’

‘Let’s watch it now,’ Frank said heavily.

I dimmed the lantern and squeezed back in beside Laura. Frank was sitting in his armchair with an inordinately put-out expression. Perhaps he was wishing we had been left alone to varnish the tallboy as had been planned originally; I suppose Laura was something of an acquired taste, although as she snuggled against me, heat seeping from her thigh, I did wonder fleetingly if perhaps I hadn’t been over-hasty in my dismissal of her before… but then I remembered Mirela’s hand on mine, and I caught a hold of myself.

At first I wasn’t sure what Frank had meant by this not being my sort of thing, as I had found myself quite moved by A Night to Remember, the 1958 depiction of the fatal voyage — a sort of floating paean to the stiff upper lip, in which passengers and crew, all apparently drawn from the British upper classes, sink very politely and with as little as possible fuss to the bottom of the ocean. Titanic’s early stages bore scant resemblance to A Night to Remember, however. There was a ship, all right; but instead of it sinking, we seemed to be spending all our time trailing around after a couple of dull teenagers: an English Rose type, played by one Kate Winslet, and a slow-witted painter she meets on board, played by a fellow who looked remarkably like one of those dogs with the squashed-up noses beloved of wealthy dowagers. They went to a ball, then capered around in steerage with a bunch of Irish people. After a while the Rigbert’s ran out so I started drinking Hobson’s from the refrigerator.

I doubted that Honor Blackman would have let anyone paint her nude only a few hours after meeting him; and she certainly wouldn’t have let him have his way with her in the back seat of a car — the back seat of a car, I ask you, on the most expensive ship in history –

‘Isn’t there supposed to be an iceberg in this?’ I said.

Laura was weeping quietly. Frank coughed uncomfortably and wouldn’t meet my eye.

The accursed ship didn’t sink for a full three hours. By the time it did, I was feeling so traumatized that even watching Dogface die offered little consolation. The dialogue, the acting, the vast emptiness of the whole endeavour! Was that what passed for cinema these days? I felt like I had been violated; violated by a team of accountants.

Laura, prostrated by grief, lay weeping on my lap. Frank stared stolidly at the credits, over which, as a coup de grâce, a cat or cats were being strangled to the effect that ‘My Heart Will Go On’, which at this moment in time was not a sentiment I could endorse.

It was several minutes before I could summon the energy to speak. ‘Frank,’ I said palely, ‘I’m going to go to bed now.’

‘Fair enough,’ Frank said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just don’t think I can bear to even have my eyes open any more tonight.’

‘That’s all right, Charlie,’ Frank said kindly. ‘I understand.’

‘What about…?’ I nodded down at the desolate figure crying into my trousers.

‘Don’t worry, Charlie, I’ll take care of her.’

‘Thanks, old man,’ wanly gripping his arm. ‘Thanks.’

Extricating myself, I went to my room and lay down in the blackness. But there was little hope of sleeping. The deathliness of the awful film had whipped my present fears into a frenzy, and reawoken old fears that had hitherto lain dormant: and now they joined forces with the phantasmagoric powers of the Rigbert’s to assail me, flapping down like bats from the spinning walls. I covered my head; I shrunk to the top of the mattress, tormented by visions of disaster and decay — of Harry fingering the shiny buttons of his waistcoat, of great crows perched on the chimneys of the house, of Bel adrift on that Golem ship, surrounded by cardboard people who recited dead words and would fall to pieces as soon as the iceberg appeared… I couldn’t bear it: I couldn’t bear to think of her there alone, alone!

And so — even though I knew I would regret it in the morning — I found myself reaching for what, in my desperation, seemed the only lifeline left to me. I went to the telephone, and dialled MacGillycuddy’s number.

It was well after midnight, and the voice on the other end, when it finally picked up, was far from happy at being disturbed. ‘Who is this? C, is that you?’

‘Damn it, MacGillycuddy, I’m not in the mood for your games. I have a job for you, if you have a gap in your snaky portfolio.’

‘Have you been drinking?’ MacGillycuddy asked reproachfully.

‘Yes I have. Now do you want to hear about this or don’t you?’

He yawned. ‘It’s not Frank again, is it?’

‘Of course it’s not Frank. If it were Frank, I — look, it’s different to last time, it’s this fellow Harry —’

‘Banging your sister, is he?’ MacGillycuddy chuckled. ‘Stealing your furniture too?’

I swore silently and wrapped the phone flex tight around my hand. ‘It’s different to last time,’ I said again, struggling to keep the rage from my voice. ‘Bel’s — I’m worried Bel’s not well. I think this Harry might have something to do with it. I want you to keep an eye on her. On him too. Find out who he is, what he wants. No fiddling around this time. Keep an eye on both of them and make sure no one’s… taking advantage.’

From the receiver came the sound of MacGillycuddy sucking his teeth. Finally he spoke. ‘Can’t do it,’ he said.

‘Can’t do it? What do you mean? Why can’t you do it?’

‘Confidential,’ MacGillycuddy said.

I reeled back. I had expected contrariness; I had expected some gloating, even; but I hadn’t foreseen a flat refusal. Confidential: who would have thought the word could strike such dread into a heart? Confidential: it meant that whatever dark game was unfolding at Amaurot, MacGillycuddy was already in it up to his neck — MacGillycuddy, whose appearance in the recent history of the house was an omen more ill-starred than any black cat or screeching peacock or cracked mirror…

I argued with him, needless to say; I threatened and cajoled him; I begged him to at least let me know who it was he was working for. He wouldn’t budge. All he would say was that it was nothing for me to be worrying about; nothing for me to be worrying about at all.

‘Que sera, sera,’ he said, ‘as the song goes.’

‘What?’ I whispered. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What will be will be, Mr H. What will be, will be.’ And he laughed: and then with a click the line went dead.

Maybe he was right; maybe they were all right, and I was blowing things out of proportion, and there was nothing really wrong; I did try to console myself with this thought. But then there had been nothing really the matter the time of the Episodes either, that’s what the doctors had told us; it was just a phase she would grow out of, that’s what they’d said as they bandaged her up and increased her dosage; cold comfort for those who had sat at her bedside and held her hand while she convulsed, or flailed at imaginary terrors, or lay for hours staring at us without recognition from the far side of wherever it was she had gone.

For a long time I sat with my hand over my mouth and my feet under the covers like two blocks of ice. And then — just when everything seemed at its most hopeless — Laura’s words came back to me. Why don’t you write a play? She was the second person to say it: although Bel had been being sarcastic, and Laura was Laura, so I’d more or less dismissed it straight away. But now, as I thought about it, it seemed to make a kind of sense…

I stumbled into the living room. It was empty: Frank must have called Laura a taxi. I sat on the vacated sofa and stared interrogatively at the darkness. Of course! Write a play! How had I never thought of it before? If I was a Disadvantaged Artist they would have to let me back into the house!

And suddenly it struck me that perhaps Bel hadn’t been being sarcastic when she’d suggested it — that maybe on some unconscious level she’d meant it, was asking me to do it, in order to return to Amaurot and set things to rights. Maybe — feverishly, I half-stood, feeling the fabric of the sofa still damp with tears beneath my hand — maybe I was destined to write this play; maybe I had been cast out of the house precisely so I would write this play. A play that would set the record straight — a play that would see off Harry’s tepid little pantomimes of bourgeois guilt — an apologia for everything I had ever thought or done, a paean to a lost way of living, a rage against the dying of the light! To speak out at last, to show the world! I snatched up a pen and a sheet of paper from the sheaf set aside for my monograph. The apartment was utterly silent: a silence taut and quivering as the surface of a lake, as if the universe herself were saying to me, Now, now is the time, we cannot wait any longer — I took up the pen and, with a daunting sense that history was being made, wrote in the upper right-hand corner: Charles.

I sat back and surveyed my efforts. Charles. Good. I tapped the pen lid against the back of my teeth and pictured myselfback in my parlour, festooned with garlands and surrounded by worshipful ingénues eager to learn from the author of Charles. This page was very white, I noticed. Was it this particular brand, or was paper always this white? Someone else might find it disconcerting. Now! Now! Without delay! the universe pressed. Sinking the nib once more, I wrote by in front of Charles. Then, after Charles, I wrote Hythloday. After that I thought I might take a break, so I went to get a can from the refrigerator and switched on the television for a little while. Then, as the clock tolled for three, I was seized by inspiration. In one mad dash I wrote five entirely new words beside the three I had already written: the title, my title. It was a great title, a momentous title, holding within it all the joys and the sorrows, the mysteries and commonplaces of a life. I found myself brushing a tear from my eye.

With a title like that, most of the work was already done; but I was not letting up now. My mind raged with possibilities, witty characters, wise insights into the human condition. They could all be in it: Laura as a kind of ironical Greek chorus; Frank as basically an unfettered Id running around; then there was Mother (Fickleness of Women), Mirela (Desire, Impossibility of); Bel would feature as a one big Tragic Flaw, representing a society that had lost its way… Champing my pipe, I took a fresh page, and wrote at the top in capital letters: PLOT