An Evening of Long Goodbyes

12

Initially, the idea had been to have the play finished and presented to Bel before Harry’s new one opened, in the hope that they might scrap his and do mine instead. However, it takes longer than you might think, writing a play — if you want to do it right, I mean; and before we knew where we were, the opening night of Ramp was upon us.

They were still short of hands, so I had agreed to being temporarily unbanished in order to work as Hat-Check Girl for the evening. With some effort, I’d managed to persuade Frank to come along as moral support; Mother gave us a little table in the hallway from which to take coats and greet arriving personages. Outside, the night was cold and tingling, but here there were candles and sprays of autumnal wild flowers and warm smells enticing the guests down to the recital room, where they were received with claret, mulled wine, and music courtesy of Vuk and Zoran and some friends of theirs from the queue at the Registration Centre.

Whatever spell she had cast, no one seemed to have been able to resist Mirela’s invitation. An hour before the performance the house was bursting at the seams with heavyweights of the business world, each of whom Laura identified to Frank and me as they went by. (Laura had also volunteered to help out, even after I’d told her pointedly that it wouldn’t be necessary. Ever since Titanic she’d been around at the apartment practically every night — supposedly assisting Frank putting up bookshelves, though judging by the amount of giggling coming from his room it didn’t sound like she was being much help.)

‘There’s the French cultural attaché,’ she said, appearing in a puff of taffeta with her tray of vol-au-vents. ‘That’s Roly Guilfoyle, that chef? And there’s that guy from the beans company — oh, excuse me…’ as another personage arrived to check in her coat with the by now customary double-take, looking in alarm from my mummified face to Frank’s sadly unmummified one. ‘Thank you, madam, you’re number 105, straight through on the right…’

‘Oh my God, the head of StoneWall Friends and Mutual is here. He is like the insurance guy in Ireland. He was in VIP last month, his bathroom has this kind of Etruscan design…?’

‘Well, go and give him a vol-au-vent, why don’t you? We’re busy here — Yes, sir, number 106, thank you. Yes, sir, quite safe. Yes, sir, I’m aware that they don’t grow on trees. You’re most welcome, sir — damn it, Frank, stop louring, can’t you? You’re scaring people…’

‘I’m not louring, Charlie, this is me regular face.’

‘Guys,’ Laura tiptoed over, muttering clandestinely from the corner of her mouth, ‘you are not going to believe who’s here. Niall O’Boyle.’ She pointed to a nondescript man in a blue suit whose face appeared to have been sat on at some crucial stage of its development.

‘Who?’

‘Niall O’Boyle? He’s like CEO of Telsinor Ireland? You must remember, last year when the phone company went public and he leveraged that buyout with those Danish guys? And he owns that radio station and that magazine, he must be worth stacks — oh my God, look at his watch, he has like the biggest watch I’ve ever seen…’

‘Look,’ I rapped my stapler assertively on the table. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but Frank and I have been placed in charge of some very valuable coats, and we can’t afford to be distracted.’

‘All right, all right.’ She turned up her nose and returned to her mingling.

‘Some serious heads at this thing, isn’t there, Charlie?’

‘I’ll say, it’s like an Illuminati mixer.’ And I wondered what exactly Bel thought of that.

Various members of the Ramp cast had been in evidence earlier on, working the room, explaining to anyone who would listen the Meaning and Significance of the theatre. Bel was there too, wearing a long champagne-coloured dress and an expression of such naked hostility that only the more senescent or kamikaze of the visitors had dared approach her. Up until now, I had contrived to stay out of her way; however, after the fuss she’d made last time, I knew I’d better say something. As the first bell rang for the guests to take their seats, I decided to make a quick foray up to the dressing room and pay my respects. This way, even if I met with a frosty reception, there was at least a chance of seeing Mirela au naturel. I left Frank with strict instructions not to ruin anything or attack anybody, and going round by the scullery I climbed the back stairs to the dressing room.

The air in the room was tense and hot and so thick with talcum powder that it was hard to breathe. Heat glared from bare bulbs over a long mirror with a counter, at which cast members sat in deckchairs. I spotted Bel at the far end, holding a cup of undrunk black coffee to her frumpy costume as Harry kneaded her shoulders. I tried to make my way down to her, but it was like swimming against the tide: after being rebuffed a number of times I gave up and retreated to a relatively quiet spot by the door to wait for an opportunity to present itself. In the meantime, I engaged myself gazing wistfully at Mirela, who was sitting near me (hélas! already dressed) with not one but three girls clustered round her, applying make-up and brushing out her shining black hair.

From somewhere in the scrum I could hear Mother piping: ‘Well, what did he say?’

‘We probably shouldn’t talk about it till afterwards,’ Harry said with a coy half-smile.

‘Oh, nonsense,’ Mother persisted.

‘Well, he’s interested,’ Harry allowed, his smile expanding as the room caught hold of this and a hubbub spread through it. ‘Apparently his wife came to see Burnin Up, so if he likes what he sees tonight…’

‘What?’ pressed the girl with barrettes, thwacking him with her script.

‘He did say that if something were to go ahead — if — it would have to be on the basis that Telsinor was sole backer of the theatre, which’d mean a total sponsorship package…’ He shrugged modestly as whoops and whistles greeted this news, then lifted his hands for calm. ‘I should remind everybody that we do have a play to put on first.’

Everybody laughed: except Bel, who was looking up at Harry with a wounded expression. ‘But I thought we didn’t want a single backer,’ she said.

‘That was because we didn’t think we’d get a single backer,’ replied Harry.

‘No, I thought we’d agreed that if all the money was coming from one place then —’

‘Oh, darling, we’ve been through all this,’ Mother cut in. ‘We can’t wait for ever while the government hems and haws. Talk about compromise, you wait till the bank comes looking for its loan back, then you’ll see what it means to be — Charles, what are you doing lurking over there?’

‘I’m not lurking, I’m standing here quite conspicuously.’

‘You’re supposed to be down minding the cloakroom. You haven’t left that poor idiot boy on his own, have you?’

‘I just wanted to come and say good luck —’

Everybody groaned in unison.

‘Oh, I mean break a leg, sorry —’

‘Charles,’ Mother grabbed me firmly by the elbow and propelled me doorwards, ‘we happen to have important visitors watching tonight. For once try and keep your dissolute antics to a minimum.’

‘Five minutes!’ called the tubby fellow, appearing behind me at the door; and everyone gasped, and started rushing around even more hurriedly than before. Through the tumult of bodies I could see Harry’s hands still absently kneading her shoulders as Bel turned to the mirror and, with a hand pressed to her bare clavicle, stared into it, as if searching its depths for something she had lost.

I ducked back down the stairs. The hallway and recital room were clear; the cloakroom had been locked. Closing the double doors behind me, I took my seat in the darkened auditorium.

‘Everythin all right, Charlie?’ Frank said.

I found myself quite out of breath: I merely coughed and pointed to the stage, as the curtain rose and a single spotlight came up, and a girl in a wheelchair trundled out.

Bel had looked awfully nervous up in the dressing room, and given her chequered on-stage history one might have been justified in fearing the worst. But in the opening scene she turned it quite cleverly to her advantage. As she shunted herself, grousing, around the suburban kitchen, the wheelchair became a kind of carapace, shielding her from her surroundings; the nerves became the restive, uncathected energy of someone who is sure she has been cheated by life. And then Mirela entered, and, as before, everything fell into place around her.

The make-up girls had done their job well. She looked at once perfectly simple and perfectly captivating; she was like a magnet, pulling you in, so that suddenly you no longer noticed the threadbare dialogue or that the model limped and the paraplegic kept tapping her foot. The lights themselves didn’t seem to want to leave her, and sparkled around her constantly like coloured butterflies.

And you couldn’t help but sympathize with her, trapped between an ailing mother and this vampiric sister. Nothing was good enough for Bel. She needled her sister incessantly; she made endless demands on her store of goodness and affection; she seemed determined to stifle Mirela’s promising modelling career purely out of spite, even when Mirela only wanted the money so that Bel could go and see this doctor everyone was talking about, the one with the revolutionary though potentially fatal new technique.

‘You indulge your sister too much, Ann,’ Mother said from her hospital bed, stroking Mirela’s cheek (she was pretty good, too — though only a churl would suggest that she made a far more convincing mother on stage than she ever had with Bel and me). ‘We all have. She wants to see me, she says, but don’t you understand? This is just another way of torturing you, of manipulating you. For if she were a true sister to you, and a true daughter to me, then she would know that my love goes with her everywhere. But she is blind. She doesn’t see that love, Ann, is the important thing; she doesn’t see that the ramp she must install is not on the hospital steps, but in her own heart. It is a ramp she must erect over the steps of her own selfishness and bitterness at having been run over at an early age and confined to a wheelchair.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ Mirela turning diffidently from Mother’s bed and exclaiming quietly with prayerful hands, ‘Mary is your daughter too! We can’t stop caring about her just because there is no room for the unlucky ones in our fast-paced modern world. To me, there is no greater joy than looking after her, in the hope that she will one day walk again.’

‘She’s so nice,’ Frank turned to me with tearful eyes, squeezing my hand in his. ‘Why doesn’t Bel just, just leave off?’

‘I don’t know — ow, you’re hurting me,’ tugging my hand free and nursing it in my lap. The thing is, I was inclined to agree with him and wish that Bel would leave off, and when Harry came on as the crusading lawyer, I did find myself hoping that Mirela would run away with him and leave this workhouse behind. But then from the lousy seats Mother had given us in the back corner of the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of Bel waiting in the wings for the next scene — looking so cold and crabbed in the wheelchair, so disengaged and alone, that immediately I felt sorry.

This last scene, in which Bel seduces Harry with a tray of biscuits that had actually been baked for him by Mirela, was the subject of much debate in the cloakroom during the interval.

‘I’m not saying it’s not good,’ Laura said. ‘I just don’t get why the lawyer doesn’t go for the model. Like she’s so beautiful, and he’s so dashing, they’re just so right for each other…’

‘I don’t know about dashing,’ I observed grouchily. ‘I think he’d be hard pressed to actually dash anywhere, to judge by the way he’s filling out that waistcoat these days. Anyway, what’s wrong with Bel?’

‘Hello? She’s in a wheelchair?’

‘Yeah, Charlie, and she’s always schemin and stuff.’

‘She’s not that bad,’ I said stoutly.

‘Charlie,’ Frank said solemnly, ‘you know it was Mirela what cooked them biscuits.’

‘I just find it a bit hard to swallow,’ Laura frowned: and then for no reason the two of them started giggling. It was tiresome, so I told them that they knew nothing about drama and stomped off to get a drink.

In the recital room, Vuk and Zoran had struck up ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, with a Chinese pal helping out on the erhu and a chap from Mozambique keeping time on djembe. The bar was crowded by paunchy business types. The straw-haired telephone fellow O’Boyle was ahead of me, talking to another suit about property in the Algarve. ‘Must get some nice golf out there,’ the other suit was saying.

‘Sumptuous,’ agreed Niall O’Boyle. ‘Sumptuous.’

By the time I finally ordered, the bell had rung for the resumption of the play, and I had to go and find Frank and start herding the punters back into the auditorium. I had just settled into my seat when there was a psst from somewhere below me. I looked down to see a hooded figure crouched at my ankles in the darkness. ‘Psst!’ it said again. At first I thought someone had overindulged in the claret and become confused; but then it said, ‘Charles!’ and I realized it wasn’t someone, it was Bel.

‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on stage?’

‘Quiet,’ Bel hissed. ‘I can’t let anyone see me here.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said comprehendingly. Suspension of disbelief: this was very important in a play.

‘I need you to find MacGillycuddy for me,’ Bel whispered.

Instantly my blood ran cold. ‘What? He’s here?’

‘I saw him from the stage,’ Bel said, ‘over there somewhere.’

‘But… what’s he doing here? You didn’t invite him, did you?’

‘I don’t have time to explain, Charles, just, just find him, and send him backstage.’

‘Can’t it wait till after the show?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It can’t.’

‘Wait, how am I supposed to —’ But she was gone.

I turned to Frank. ‘You didn’t let MacGillycuddy in, did you?’

‘What, Charlie?’

‘Never mind…’

On stage, the action had restarted. Harry was in a courtroom, remonstrating with a fellow in a wig. ‘You’re out of order, sir!’ the wig was saying. ‘Never have I seen such insubordination!’

‘M?’ I called softly, making my way down the dark aisle. ‘M?’

‘Shut up,’ audience members hissed; someone tried to punch me in the leg as I went by.

This was absurd. It was far too dim to see anybody’s face. Bel must have imagined it. Just to be sure, though, I went back to the recital room to ask Mrs P if she’d seen anything unusual — and there, on a stool I was sure had been unoccupied when I left a few minutes earlier, he was: propped at the bar, drinking a glass of milk.

‘You,’ I said.

‘Ah, it’s yourself,’ he said, and he flashed me a disingenuous grin, no doubt in the hope of distracting me from whatever it was he was slipping back into that long brown envelope, which in turn went under his pullover.

‘Bel wants to see you,’ I said curtly.

‘Thought she might,’ MacGillycuddy said with a sigh. ‘Thought she might.’ He speared an olive from the dish at his elbow, and heaved himself to his feet. I shot out a hand to grab his arm. ‘Not so fast,’ I said.

MacGillycuddy looked at me with a faint air of amusement.

‘I want to know what’s happening to my sister,’ I said. He smiled gently, and then, one by one, began to prise away the fingers fastened around his wrist.

‘Tell me, damn it!’ I gasped, wincing with pain. ‘And don’t give me any of that hooey about confidentiality, MacGillycuddy, you wouldn’t know confidentiality if it sidled up to you and whispered confidentially in your ear —’

‘You know, I never could understand the appeal of all this theatre stuff,’ MacGillycuddy mused, delicately bending back my index finger, my middle finger. ‘Everybody pretending they’re somebody else, mixing things up till you can’t even remember who they started out as. Give me a nice documentary any day. A nice history programme. The facts, ma’am. Jes’ the facts.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I said through clenched teeth and eyes full of tears.

‘Ah yeah,’ he stepped away, absently rubbing his freed hand. ‘Must be a lot of history in an old place like this.’ Turning his back, he dawdled over the burnished floorboards out to the hallway. ‘You know what history does, don’t you, C?’ pausing to examine the portrait of Father. ‘It repeats itself’

‘What do you mean?’ distractedly coming away from the bar. ‘What’s happening?’

But, sucking his teeth, MacGillycuddy had passed out of sight. From the doorway Father’s painted face looked down, thin lips buckled inscrutably shut, as though reserving judgement to himself for all eternity. Somnambulantly I wheeled round and stumbled back into the theatre.

‘Where were you, Charlie?’ Frank leaned over to me when I returned. ‘You missed a deadly bit, the judge didn’t want to put in the ramp cos he said that the hospital was this like special historic building you can’t put new bits on, and Harry went on this big speech about how if someone wasn’t able to walk up the steps of the law, then the law had to come down and carry them…’

‘Oh,’ I said, looking at the figures on the stage with a gnawing in the pit of my stomach.

‘By Jove, sir!’ the judge was pounding his gavel for all he was worth. ‘You can’t just waltz in here and turn two centuries of the law upside-down! We have procedures for dealing with cases like this, formal channels —’

‘My client doesn’t give two pins about your formal channels!’ Jack Reynolds QC exclaimed, rolling up his shirtsleeves. ‘You know why? Because it’s the same bunk she’s been hearing her whole life!’ A buzz ran around the courtroom set. ‘That’s right, bunk!’ he repeated. ‘Her whole life, she’s been pushed down the “formal channels” other people have chosen for her. And she should be happy to go where she’s pushed, that’s what you’re thinking! She should be glad to have someone to push her! She’s in a wheelchair, isn’t she? She’s a cripple, isn’t she?’

This time the ripple of noise ran right out into the audience and for a moment drowned out even the judge, who thrashed his gavel, roaring, ‘Order! Order! By God, sir, if I don’t see some respect for this court, I’m going to come down and teach it to you myself!’

‘Well, it’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’ Harry bellowed back. ‘It’s what you’re all thinking, so why don’t you say it! A cripple!’ He swung his finger round to Bel, sitting pallidly in her corner looking over to the cavernous darkness of the wings, where MacGillycuddy would be waiting with that long brown envelope… ‘Because that’s what you do with people, put them in neat little boxes with neat little labels, so you don’t have to think about them any more! That’s your system! That’s your “procedure”! Well by golly, those wheels are going to turn, whether you like it or not, the wheels of Justice, the wheels of Destiny —’

‘You’ve got to give him respect, Charlie,’ Frank whispered. ‘He may be a ponce, but he’s a deadly lawyer, that Harry. Like you can see why your one Mirela fancies him.’

I didn’t reply: I was struggling with these coloured dots that were floating before my eyes, and this horrible sensation that the words the actors were speaking on stage no longer belonged to the play, but to a darker something beneath it, that stretched to take in not only us but the walls and ceilings and foundations…

And now Harry and Mirela were alone, back in Harry’s chambers. ‘No, no, no!’ she was crying. ‘We can’t tell her, we can never tell her! Last night was a mistake — a wonderful, an exhilarating mistake, but one we cannot allow to happen again!’

‘Oh, Ann,’ Harry said desperately, ‘don’t you see? It wasn’t Mary that I loved, but her court case. The chance to strike a blow for our differently-abled friends, the opportunity to further the cause of freedom — that’s what I fell in love with. But my love for you is for you alone — not just for your beauty, and your promising career as a model, but because you’re real — because of your soul and heart, the soul and heart that Mary still has to find within herself —’

‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’ Frank whispered. ‘Do you need to go to the jacks?’

‘But she loves you,’ Mirela said tearfully, gripping on to his lapels.

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Mary never learned to love, curled up in the shell of that wheelchair. But these last few weeks, the court case, have changed her. We have led her up the ramp of self-knowledge; perhaps this will be what pushes her over the brink, into redemption.’ He reached out a hand and ran it down her hair; she laid her teary cheek against his cravat. I leapt from my seat and hurtled out the door.

MacGillycuddy sat at the base of the maids’ stairs, shaping his toothpick into some sort of animal; I was past him before he had a chance to speak.

The dressing room was empty and the floor covered from end to end with photographs: glossy black-and-white shots, blown up to about the size of a sheet of typing paper; quite professional looking. I picked one up. It was my room — you could see the old poster that Harry had left up, Jimmy Stewart kissing Donna Reed in It’s A Wonderful Life; the wee hours of the morning, according to the digitized numbers in the bottom right-hand corner. Blurred by motion and the scant light, the lustrous black hair caught mid-swing, the body on the bed appeared no more substantial than smoke: a genie billowing from the lamp, curling up to the lucky chump that freed her… I let it slip back down to join the others. There must have been thirty or forty of them. Strewn across the floor like that, they resembled a kind of mosaic, the limbs interlocking anonymously towards some larger, indeterminate meaning; with here and there a motif from the waistcoat, hung on a chair in the background, or the prosthesis, gleaming dully like a bad joke. Little was left to the imagination: they’d put on quite a show, between themselves and MacGillycuddy.

Sounds of distress emanated from the little water closet in the corner. I picked my way over and knocked on the door. ‘Bel?’

There was a retching noise, quickly covered by the flush of the toilet. ‘Go away,’ the small voice came back.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m not all right,’ the voice said.

‘Well — are you coming out?’

She took a moment to consider this. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m never coming out.’

More choking noises ensued. I went back to the long counter, the bare bulbs blazing for no one, and stared into the mirror at my own unreadable visage. Then I turned one of the deckchairs round and sat down on it. A few moments later, Mother appeared at the door in her hospital shift. ‘Where’s your sister?’ she demanded.

I gestured lethargically at the locked door. Mother marched over to it without appearing to notice the photographs under her feet. She rapped once and, in a voice that could have cut metal, ordered Bel to come out. There was only a short delay; then the key turned in the lock and Bel emerged, shamefaced and grubby with tears.

‘What were you thinking?’ Mother grabbed her by the arm and tugged her towards the door. ‘You’re on in the next scene, come on!’

But she resisted, pulling her arm free and shying back to the corner.

‘What,’ Mother said very quietly.

Bel tried to speak, but it just came out as nonsense: she turned crimson and hung her head.

‘Bel,’ Mother said, ‘whatever issues you may have, they can wait till afterwards. I will not allow you to ruin this night. I will not allow it, do you understand?’

‘But didn’t you see?’ Bel managed now, pointing to the floor. ‘Didn’t you see?’

‘What I see,’ Mother said, raising her voice, ‘is a vain, troubled girl letting a temper tantrum jeopardize everything we have all worked so hard to achieve —’

‘A temper tantrum?’ Two high pink spots appeared in Bel’s cheeks.

‘That’s exactly what it is,’ Mother sailed on. ‘It may offend your principles, but what we have been offered here tonight is a lifeline — not only for the company, but for this house, this family, to pick itself up and dust itself off, to make Amaurot known and important again, as your father would have wanted —’

‘This family,’ Bel broke in, ‘What family? Why do you go on even pretending to care about these things, when everybody knows all you want is to get back on the society pages, so people will invite you to gally openings again —’

‘Christabel,’ Mother said in a measured, sibilant voice, ‘I understand that you are having problems. But there are ways we can address them. There are doctors —’

‘ — and you’ll turn a blind eye to everything that’s going on as long as you get it, and that’s what Father would have wanted, isn’t it?’

Mother slapped her across the face in a single, precise motion.

‘I say!’ I cried, springing out of the deckchair.

Mother’s livid countenance was enough to stop me in my tracks; she looked like something that had just floated up out of a tomb. ‘The play,’ I pleaded, back-pedalling slightly. ‘We have to finish the play, don’t we?’

This seemed to bring her to her senses. She cleared her throat and smoothed down her shift. She turned once more to Bel — who was staring into space with an expression not so much of shock as of revelation — and said in a tone cool and rational as water: ‘Charles is right. We can continue this discussion later. Are we agreed?’

Bel, whose cheek still bore the crimson imprint of her hand, nodded mutely.

‘Good,’ Mother said, straightening up. ‘Now, you are on in the next scene. Charles, you will follow us, please.’

She led Bel by the elbow over the sea of glossy black-and-white flesh and out the door. MacGillycuddy was still sitting where we had left him, at the foot of the maids’ stairs: the two women passed him without a word and went on in the direction of the wings. But I stopped and looked at him. Before I had a chance to say anything, however, he launched into a long self-exculpatory speech to the effect that he was merely a tool of the client, and that he just did what they told him to, and that all he offered was a little peace of mind –

‘Peace of mind? You call selling pornographic photos to a wretched, addled girl peace of mind?’

‘This is the way she wanted to do it,’ MacGillycuddy said querulously. ‘This was her idea, not mine. She asks me to do a little job for her, ring up a few of that muppet’s old girlfriends, find out what makes him tick — I do it. Everybody’s happy. She comes back to me two weeks later, she’s not sure, she thinks he’s banging the refugee, she’s distraught, she can’t sleep — what am I supposed to do? I’m in a position to deliver the facts. You’re saying I should have turned her away?’

Suddenly I was too exhausted even to be properly angry at him. I closed my eyes and held my head. ‘Get out of here, MacGillycuddy.’

‘It’s not my fault if she’s like you,’ he said, raising his hands defensively, ‘with a head like fuckin cement. I just gave her the facts. There’s no right or wrong about a fact. I can’t be held responsible if —’

I feinted at him: he sprang sideways, like a cat from a hurled stone, and then slunk away towards the back door. ‘And don’t come back!’ I called after him; then joined the others crowded anxiously around the wings.

The lawyer and the beautiful model were back in the kitchen. They had decided to come clean about their affair; now they were waiting for Bel to return from visiting Mother and the new ramp so that they could tell her. In the script this leads Bel to an epiphany, wherein she realizes what a horrible person she’s been and in a spirit of setting things to rights decides to undergo the revolutionary but potentially fatal new procedure — which goes tragically awry, killing her and leaving Harry and Mirela free to get married. But of Bel there was no sign: Mirela had given her cue three times now, and the two of them were beginning to look a little edgy.

‘I hope nothing’s happened to her,’ she said from the table, looking to the crevasse on the far side of the stage.

‘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. MacGillycuddy. 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…