An Evening of Long Goodbyes

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Take me with you,’ she said.

I looked at her.

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

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

‘Anywhere,’ Mirela said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ I said.

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

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

‘I suppose not.’

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

‘What?’

‘The gloves.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s perfectly all right.’

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

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was ours.’

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

‘Told me what?’

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

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

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

‘Was it?’ I said cautiously, it having been my occasional habit to watch television in the drawing room without the encumbrance of trousers.

‘You were watching an old film, I could tell by the light on the walls. And it reminded me of when I was a little girl, and they would put on old films late at night, and Mama would let me stay up because I told her it was to help me learn English. But really I liked them because everything looked so beautiful in black and white.’ She smiled bashfully. ‘I even used to get angry when Dorothy went to Oz, because I didn’t like the world being coloured in, and I just wanted her to go home to Kansas.’

I said nothing to this, but inside my heart was clapping its hands, exclaiming, ‘Me too! Me too!’

‘Anyway, there I was in the flowerbed looking at you, and it was — it was like I could tell exactly what was happening just by looking at your face. Like when you frowned, I knew the murderer was comforting the widow, and when you put your hands over your face I knew the pistol had been kicked across the floor, and when you smiled I knew the hero had kissed the girl —’ She laughed again, and drew breath. ‘Or that’s what it looked like to me. After that I used to check through the TV guide and mark out all the movies you might watch, and at night when I would steal out of the Folly I would always go to the window, just for a few minutes, and imagine I was in there beside you, and it was my home, with the fire in the fireplace and a glass of red wine.’ She rocked herself still and pulled in a little closer to the table. ‘What do you think, Charles?’ she said softly. ‘Do you think that’s de trop?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

She stood up and came around to my side of the table. She brushed her hair back with one hand and looked at me seriously; and the universe seemed to pull up, like a horse at a high fence. ‘What would it take for you to kiss me, Charles?’ she said.

I gave it some thought. I thought about everything that had happened tonight. By rights I oughtn’t even to be in the same room as her: and yet, although it made little sense, it felt as if the girl in front of me now had nothing to do with those other things. It was as if somehow she predated the awful events of this evening — as if she were a different Mirela, an essential Mirela: the girl I had found that night in the Folly, and unreeled in my mind’s eye every night since.

‘I think you would have to put down your drink,’ I said.

In one smooth unhurried motion she set down her glass and snuffed out the lantern; then taking my hand, she led me away into the darkness.

Imagine a fade-out here, if you please, or one of those discreet rows of asterisks, to indicate the passage of time — not very much time, admittedly, as one of us was out of practice and perhaps a little over-excited — anyway, we return to the scene with the two participants lying back on their pillows, bedsheets now chastely drawn up to their chins, watched silently through the doorway by a stuffed otter and the head of a china basset hound, half-hidden under a frayed gingham tablecloth. Everything was perfectly still; it felt like no one in the whole wide world was awake but us — like we had stolen a march on time, and although our problems waited for us on the other side, these moments were ours to let float by as we pleased. How sweet it was, after so much turbulence, not even to have to talk, or think.

In between long drifts of nothingness I was wondering idly what I could give her for breakfast next morning — I had brought home a cheesecake the day before yesterday and I thought there was some left in the fridge — when her bare arm stretched over me to retrieve the brassiere adorning the lampshade. ‘What are you doing?’ I murmured, through a mouthful of sleep.

‘I have to go,’ she whispered.

‘You have to go?’ I sat up, blinking. Sure enough she was hooking herself up. ‘But it’s the middle of the night.’

‘Exactly. Harry’s going to be wondering what’s happened to me.’

Even hearing his name was like a taking a shiv between the ribs: I gasped slightly and clutched at my chest. But this was no time for theatrics. Suddenly she was all brisk efficiency, arranging her hair, searching the bedclothes for a stocking, making it impossible even to remonstrate properly.

‘But how will you possibly get home, there’s no —’

‘Sorry, Charles, could you just pass me that —’

‘I mean, there’s no way you’ll get a taxi round here, and anyway you can’t go out dressed like that —’

‘I’m resourceful — zip me up, will you?’

‘No,’ I said. This at least had the effect of stalling her temporarily. She turned and looked at me.

‘Stay,’ I pleaded. ‘I mean it’s practically tomorrow anyway. Why don’t you stay?’

‘I can’t, Charles,’ she said, with just a trace of exasperation. ‘We’re meeting the Telsinor people at nine to start working out our strategy. It’s a big day and I need to be ready.’ She cocked her head, scrutinizing me almost playfully. Then she sat down at the end of the bed and placed a hand on my forearm. Frostily I shook it away. She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I thought we’d been through all this,’ she said. ‘I thought we understood each other.’

I pursed my lips. ‘Well maybe I didn’t,’ I said. I felt horribly like a hoodwinked schoolgirl. ‘Understand, I mean.’

Mirela sighed and stroked her hand and looked down at the cold shaft of the prosthesis. ‘We had a nice time, didn’t we? But now we have to go back to our lives. You know that.’

I got up and began storming about the room. ‘But you don’t —’ I said agitatedly, ‘I mean to say you don’t love him —’

She could not have turned cooler if I had poured iced water over her; I could feel the temperature in the room drop. ‘I never said it had anything to do with love,’ she said impersonally, like a piano teacher correcting a child who keeps fudging his scales. ‘Who or what I love is my business. I said I needed him. Charles, sit down for a minute.’

‘Needed him, there’s a word for that sort of thing, you know…’ as now outside, as if to complement our little scene, as if to make it so that everything was finally and perfectly hellish, a drunken battering set up at the front door, Droyd must have forgotten his keys again…

Mirela reached behind her and pulled up the zip of her dress, then got up and drew me over on to the mattress beside her. ‘I thought I explained it to you,’ she said. ‘I had a life before. But it’s gone. My memories are of things that don’t exist any more. The world stood by and let it happen and now all that I have left of home is this — look, Charles —’ lifting her dress over the rough splint of metal and bitten, singed wood. I gazed at it dumbly, and then back up at her. Outwardly at least she appeared quite composed. ‘Don’t you understand, Charles?’ she said softly. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you? None of this matters to me. Not you, not your sister, not the house you grew up in. I’ll act in the theatre. I’ll go on the billboards if they want me to. I’ll try hard to be a success. But none of it means anything to me. I look at the people around me and all I see are the little cardboard counters in a board game.’

She patted my hand; I stared paralytically into the mild gaze of those alien blue eyes. Somewhere far, far away, the pounding recommenced. ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ she said.

I rose numbly, threw on a dressing gown and went out to the living room, where the door juddered on its hinges. ‘All right, all right, for God’s sake…’ Cursing, I pulled it open. ‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Can I come in?’ Bel said.

‘Hmm,’ I said with a finger to my lip, ‘you know now might not actually be the best time…’

But she had already tottered past me, pulling a suitcase behind her. ‘It’s pitch dark in here,’ she declared. ‘I mean how are you supposed to see anything?’

Surely this couldn’t be happening — I swallowed and wiped my hands on the dressing gown. ‘Yes, that’s because do you know what time it is?’ rushing in to redirect her as she veered dangerously towards a promontory of junk, then with trembling fingers taking a match to the lantern — ‘what are you doing here anyway — good God…’

She looked an absolute state. Her make-up had run all over the place, giving her smudgy black rings around the eyes and a luridly Cubist appearance. Beneath her red coat, the lovely champagne-coloured dress hung bedraggled around her, like the wings of an affluent moth that had been caught out in the rain: except that it wasn’t raining. She swayed beneath me in the glow of the lamp, emanating not so much a smell as an aura of alcohol so toxic it made my eyes water just standing next to her.

‘You’re all pink,’ she said, squinting at me. ‘What’ve you been doing?’

‘Doing?’ I squeaked, glancing back reflexively at the sliver of darkness at my bedroom door. ‘Nothing at all. Probably just that it’s warm tonight, haven’t you found it unseasonably warm?’ But she had already forgotten her question and continued on her dizzy tour to the couch, where she deposited her suitcase. ‘Now, Bel,’ I skipped past her, hurriedly removing the lipsticked wineglass and secreting it in the pocket of my dressing gown. ‘Now, Bel, I —’

‘There’s a nice smell, I don’t remember there being a nice smell…’

‘Oh yes,’ opening the window and vigorously shooing in fresh air, ‘yes, Laura came by with about half a ton of pot pourri. Now, Bel —’

‘Do you have anything to drink?’

‘I think you’ve probably had enough,’ I said, then, reluctantly, added: ‘I’ll make you some tea, if you want.’

‘You’re prob’ly right,’ she said, crashing on to the sofa. ‘I had to stop the taxi three times on the way over because I thought I was going to be…’ She pored over her purse as though it might contain the key to the whole business, then turned it upside-down and shook it, to no avail. ‘I think he overcharged me,’ she concluded mournfully.

I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle, then stood over the sink racking my brains. What was she doing here? How was I going to get her out? Of all the nights she could possibly have chosen to visit me…

The kettle clicked off. At least Mirela had had the good sense to stay in the bedroom, that was something. And it was just possible that Bel was too drunk to notice anything amiss.

‘Oh my God… What’s this?’

Heart pounding, I sprinted out into the living room to see her gazing at a sheaf of dog-eared pages.

‘Put that down,’ I ordered her.

‘“There’s Bosnians In My Attic! A Tragedy in Three Acts by Charles Hythloday —”’

‘Give that to me, please.’ I held out my hand. She dodged it and turned over the page.

‘“Plot”.’ She flipped it over, then back, then through the other pages. ‘Is that all you’ve written?’

‘It takes time,’ I said haughtily. ‘If one is going about it properly.’

‘There’s Bosnians In My Attic.’ She rolled over on to her stomach. ‘Please tell me you’re not writing your autobiography.’

‘There are autobiographical elements, yes,’ I informed her. ‘Though as you can see I changed the Folly to an attic. I thought people might be able to relate to it better.’

‘Relate to it…’ She rolled back, groaning, and folded the pages over her face. ‘Wealthy mother’s boy moons about house, twiddles thumbs, conducts imaginary conversations with his late father… God, Charles, only you could possibly find our stupid lives in any way interesting or, or edifying…’

‘Just because a fellow’s life isn’t set in a kitchen sink doesn’t mean it’s not interesting,’ I said stiffly. ‘That’s a prejudice that belongs to you alone. Anyway, sounds a bit like Hamlet, when you put it like that.’

Bel mumbled something about a tale told by an idiot and didn’t offer any resistance as I bent down and gathered the pages scattered over her face, drifting off instead into dark babblings half-lost to the couch about how some day she’d tell me a thing or two about Father and we’d see how instructive it was. She was fond of making ominous pronouncements at times like this: I didn’t pursue it. I crossed over to my bedroom and, without looking in, thrust the pages through the door. I brought it to and, hearing the snick of the latch, felt my heart begin to slow its pounding. I returned to the kitchen and poured the tea. ‘May I ask to what we owe this very great pleasure?’

She didn’t reply: she was lying with her hands folded limply over her midriff, staring at the ceiling as if picking out constellations. I set a cup down in front of her. ‘Bel, what are you doing here?’

There was a pause, and then she said slowly, ‘I’ve left Amaurot.’

I felt my heart sink again. ‘You’ve left?’

‘I couldn’t stay there another second,’ she said. She held her head still a moment, then pronounced, ‘Not another second.’

‘But you’d gone to bed,’ I beseeched her, clasping my hands. ‘When I left you’d gone to bed. I mean what happened, did someone spike your hot-water bottle?’

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘They were making such a racket, singing songs and… So I came downstairs for a nightcap. And it made me feel better, so I stayed there. I was drinking White Russians but then I used up all the cream so I thought the logical thing to do would be to move on to Black Russians and I was looking in the kitchen for the Coke when he came in.’

‘When who came in? Harry?’

‘Don’t even say it.’ She turned over on her side. ‘I don’t even want to hear his name. He came in and instead of just leaving me alone he started talking to me. He just started going on and on. Apologizing for not saying anything earlier but there were all these people round and he didn’t want to make a scene, and then about how if we cared we shouldn’t want to possess each other, and then about how the theatre was bigger than both of us. And I was standing there listening to this, when all I wanted was the Coke, and I started thinking, this is unreal, this has got to be some kind of sign, this is like the universe saying once and for all would you please get out of there —’

My shoulders slumped. ‘You’re not going to start all that business about the house again, are you?’ I said wanly. ‘Because I have enough on my plate without being told I don’t even exist any more.’

‘No, but — well, yes,’ pulling herself upright and gazing at me earnestly through her mask of streaked colours. ‘I mean it made me realize that nothing there is ever going to change. Harry is one thing. I mean, you were totally right about him. But he’s probably better off with her, if you think about it. They probably deserve each other. But the truth is it doesn’t matter whether there’s a theatre there or not. That’s what I realized while he was making his speech. All the reasons I’ve ever wanted to leave — they’re still there. They’ll always be there. They’re like a part of the house. And suddenly it was like this fog had been lifted and I could see that everything I’d been doing was basically wrong, that it’s no good just waiting around for things to change. So I listened politely and then as soon as he was finished I went upstairs and packed my suitcase and called a cab. I should have done it years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. I was afraid, I suppose.’

Bel and her signs! Everything had to be a sign, nothing could simply be the result of lack of foresight or bad planning — ‘You can’t just leave, though,’ I said weakly. ‘I mean, where would you go?’

Her eyes widened, as if in surprise that I hadn’t guessed. ‘Well, I thought I’d stay here with you.’

‘Here?’ I repeated. ‘With me? Now?’

‘With you and Frank,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that? I thought it might be sort of fun.’

I passed around behind the sofa and paced about, distractedly wringing my hands and glancing back at the shut door. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather awkward? What with your and Frank’s, shall we say, history?’

‘It’s not a history,’ Bel said. ‘And he wouldn’t mind, I’m sure of it.’

‘Yes, but — well, where would you sleep, for a start?’

‘I thought I could sleep on the couch, please don’t get all moral guardianish…’

‘It’s not that, it’s just a little awkward, you see Droyd normally sleeps on the couch —’

‘Well, the armchair then, or the floor, I don’t care — Charles, why won’t you sit down? Why do you keep skulking around like that?’

‘I’m not skulking.’

‘You are, you’re making me nervous,’ she said.

I sat down in the armchair opposite her as unfurtively as I could manage.

‘Is it that you don’t want me to stay? Because if it is, just say.’

‘No, no,’ leaning forward to reassure her, ‘it’s not that at all. I’m just worried that you’re being over-hasty.’

‘I’m not being over-hasty,’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve been talking about it for years.’

‘Yes, but —’ unconsciously bounding up from my chair and returning to my pacing, ‘do you see, it’s just that in this situation the danger would be — I mean quite often the best thing to do in these matters is to — to go home and sleep on it, and then in the morning when you wake up and you can consider it in the cold light of day —’

‘I’ve had all the time I need to consider it. I’m totally sure about this, Charles. That’s why I had to leave the house right away, before it caught me up in it again and everything got confused. Because maybe I’m not meant to be an actress, even. Maybe I’m supposed to be something else and I don’t even know what it is yet.’ She rubbed her eye excitedly, spreading a streak of kohl out to her hairline. ‘So what I was thinking was that I could stay here with you until I’ve worked out what I should do with my life, and then maybe we could look for a place together —’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘Together?’

‘I don’t have much money, so you’d have to tide me over for a little while. But I could get a job, and then in a few months I’ll have my trust —’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Together?’

‘It’s easier to find a place for two,’ she said. ‘And you want to get out of here, don’t you?’

I flopped into the armchair, running a hand over my jaw. ‘Are you being serious?’ I said. ‘This isn’t some sort of White-Russian-pink-elephantish whim?’

‘I can’t go back there, Charles,’ she said quietly. ‘I can’t go back there, to him, and her, and Mother, and that awful phone company with their marketing strategy. It feels like — it feels like Vichy France. And just the thought of getting up there and reciting those lines, his lines, it makes me feel physically sick.’

‘But what about — what about old Chekhov? What about that play you wanted to put on, what about that?’

‘They’ve decided they’re not doing Chekhov,’ she said.

‘They’re not? Why not?’

‘There aren’t any phones in it,’ she said darkly, then shrugged at me through the dimness. ‘So you see, you’re the only person I have left, Charles. Sad as it sounds, you seem to be the one person left in my life that I can actually trust.’ She put down her cup and knocked her knees together. ‘But what do you think? Wouldn’t it be amazing, a totally fresh start?’

I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t able to think. Everything suddenly seemed terribly unreal. Could we really just start again? Forget about the house, abandon it to those unbearable people, when all of our lives, everything we were was bound up in it? When even here, exiled in Frank’s rat-trap, I had always assumed I would some day be going back, that Amaurot’s fortunes and my own would go forever hand-in-hand… But maybe she was right: maybe the house really did have interests of its own to protect. Maybe it really had found replacements, and forged them into the son and daughter we had never quite managed to be, and it was this new pair that would map out its strategies from hereon in, would fill its halls with gaiety and laughter and the best brocade, and live the lives of the scions of the great…

Well, if it had: we had done our best for it, hadn’t we? Wasn’t this the best course now? The two of us united at last, on a Grand Digression through the world… As the idea took wing in my mind, and the city unfolded in front of me with all the places we could go, a gust of wind came blowing through the window: billowing through the dusty crannies, through the gingham tablecloth, the stringless tennis racket and the yellowed Chantilly lace, through all the dingy evidence of a hundred used-up lives. I felt a foolish, astonished smile spreading over my face; and for an instant, superimposed over the benighted Bonetown skyline, I had a vision of sunlight glinting through branches, and the words Today is the first day of the rest of your life…

‘Charles, don’t move.’ Bel’s dilated pupils were fixed on a point just above my right shoulder.

‘Eh?’

‘There’s an enormous spider sitting on the back of your chair.’

‘Ugh!’

‘Don’t move,’ she said again, squinting through the shadows. ‘God, it’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen…’

‘Help, quick, kill it!’ I moaned.

‘It’s bad luck to kill a spider,’ Bel recollected.

‘Well, do something — ugh, I can feel it eyeing me…’

‘All right, hold still…’ I clenched my teeth, sitting there entirely immobilized as she reached her hand slowly for the TV guide, rolled it up and then — with an agility quite unexpected, considering all those White Russians — leapt over and dealt a lightning blow to the back of the armchair, and then another and another — until with a soft thud the unfortunate spider hit the ground. I sank back in a pool of sweat while Bel lurched behind the chair to examine the remains.

‘Is it dead?’ I said, patting my brow.

She didn’t reply.

‘I say,’ I said.

But the curious silence continued. And then I heard her say, ‘Wait a second. That’s not a spider.’

As soon as she said it, I realized what had happened, and in an instant was out of my seat. But it was too late. Bel was already getting to her feet, holding in her hand a long black glove.

She recognized it, naturally: not to labour the point, but it fitted her like a glove. There was no way I was going to be able to lie my way out of this. I back-pedalled to the threshold of the kitchen, watching her stare in bafflement at the glove, struggling to comprehend its appearance in my apartment. As the blood drained from her face, I knew she had figured it out; as she sank back down on to the sofa, gazing into space, I knew she was recalling everything she had just said about trust, and fresh starts, but especially trust. The glinting sunlight, the trees, retreated into the ether.

‘I can explain,’ I said, but only as a matter of course.

‘Is she here?’ she said, swallowing. ‘Has she been here the whole time?’

‘Don’t ask me that,’ I pleaded. ‘I mean it’s not what it looks like.’

‘That’s just what Harry said,’ she remarked desolately, behind her smudge of colours. ‘That’s exactly what he said.’

‘Yes, but,’ I strained. ‘Yes, but, that is to say…’

‘Oh, Charles,’ she murmured, shaking her head.

She didn’t say it damningly or vindictively; I might not have felt so bad if she’d said it like that. Instead it was more that tone of tired, unjudging sadness one hears in people’s voices after something terrible has happened on the news, when humanity has let itself down in some significant way; it was a tone Bel had reserved since childhood for my more spectacular blunders. And standing there in the gloom, I found myself transported back to an afternoon many years ago: the afternoon when, having spirited it away from the drawer in his study, I had successfully sold Father’s fob watch via a newspaper classified to a private buyer, in order to raise money to buy a digital alarm clock for his birthday. I didn’t often come up with plans — that was more Bel’s forte — and this one I had kept secret even from her until I’d come back from Dun Laoghaire with the alarm clock carefully hidden in my lunchbox, and could present it to her as a fait accompli. But she didn’t take it with the level of unbounded admiration I felt a plan of this order deserved. Quite the opposite: she’d opened her eyes very wide and shaken her head very slowly and said ‘Oh, Charles,’ in this awestruck way, as if like a character in those Tales from the Greek Myths she was always reading I had broken something big, very big, and beyond anybody’s power to fix, such as the World –

That time, however, I had been sure I was in the right. ‘I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up,’ I’d said. ‘Of course he’s not going to be angry. Why would he be angry?’

‘Don’t you know anything?’ she’d said, taking her finger out of her mouth. ‘That watch was grandfather’s.’

‘Well, so what? It was old. I don’t think it worked, even. This one is new. It has a radio and you can see the numbers in the dark. He needs an alarm clock. He always stays in bed too late, that’s why Mother shouts at him all the time. Come on, it can be from you as well. I don’t mind.’ But instead of leaping to accept this kind and unselfish offer, Bel covered her face with her hands, as if hoping to make the situation disappear.

‘Maybe we could get another watch, just to be on the safe side,’ I mused. ‘One exactly the same as the old one. Or maybe he won’t notice it’s gone. Or maybe he will, but he just won’t be angry.’

But Bel just stood there, shaking her head, swaying to and fro, repeating ‘Oh, Charles,’ in a way that after a while got under your skin and then really started to nag at you –

‘Well, what are we going to do, then?’ I shouted at last. ‘You’ll have to run away,’ Bel said automatically, and a trifle glibly for my liking. ‘Fine,’ I retorted, ‘so will you, then.’ ‘Why will I have to?’ she said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said irritably. ‘Because they’ll punish you too.’ ‘Why would they punish me? I didn’t do anything.’ ‘They just will, that’s all, you know what they’re like — well, so long, I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again —’ ‘Charles, wait!’ running after me out of her bedroom and down the stairs and out the door to begin our new life in the gazebo, which continued happily enough until nightfall, when Bel — who was at that time deeply afraid of the dark, indeed unhappy about the entire concept of darkness, having developed grave doubts as to the likelihood of the sun, once it had been allowed to set, ever rising again, even when one told her that in one’s own experience, which remember was eight years compared to her five, it had always risen in the past: ‘But what if it doesn’t?’ she’d say, whispering in case it might hear, ‘what do we do then?’ — when Bel began to cry, and continued to cry, and would not be comforted even when I switched on the radio part of the radio alarm clock, till at last, worried that she was going to stop breathing, I took her hand again and led her back across the lawn, the house rising forbiddingly out of the twilight, ice-bolts of terror plunging through me, but still fair was fair, she’d been a good sport about the whole running-away business in the first place, she was good about that sort of thing, Bel was, even if she was a girl, if only she wouldn’t cry so much, and we went round to the back door to knock to be let in by whatever maid was there at the time, to troop in to Father in the drawing room and take our punishment…

Only this time, of course, there was no gazebo to run to, no higher power to arbitrate or condemn; there were only the facts, lying there inert as the glove on the table. Neither of us was sure of the protocol; so we merely stood, wilted slightly, as though the room were short on oxygen. It must have looked rather comical, the two of us with our hands in our pockets, staring at nothing, searching for the words to resolve or express or at least reanimate the scene, to carry it out of this awful moment. Then Bel got up and walked out. I tried to follow her, but I got my foot caught in the stringless Dunlop tennis racket, and by the time I’d pulled it free and gone down to the street she was nowhere in sight. And so, like a man in a hall of mirrors, or in an endless Chinese box of dreams, I stumbled back upstairs, and thrust open my bedroom door — only to find the room empty: emptier than a magician’s cabinet, emptier than anything ought possibly to be.