An Evening of Long Goodbyes

1

A black wind was blowing outside the bow window. All afternoon it had been playing its tricks: scooping up handfuls of leaves and flinging them over the lawn, spinning Old Man Thompson’s weathervane this way and that, seizing rapaciously at Bel’s ruby leather coat as she battled down the driveway to her audition. Now and then, from the rear of the house, I would hear it shriek through the bones of the Folly, and I’d look up from the TV with a start. If this were Kansas — I remember thinking — it might have been the beginnings of a terrible Twister; but this wasn’t Kansas, and what the wind blew in was worse than witches or winged monkeys. For today was the day that Frank arrived at Amaurot.

It was after four but I was still in my dressing gown, recuperating on the chaise longue in front of an old black-and-white movie that starred Mary Astor in an array of hats. I’d been out the night before with Pongo McGurks and possibly overdone it a little, insofar as I’d woken up on the billiard table with a splitting headache and wearing someone else’s sarong. By now, though, I was feeling much better. In fact, I was feeling particularly at one with the world, supping at a bowl of special medicinal consommé that Mrs P had made for me, thinking that no one wore a hat quite like Mary Astor — and then I caught my first sight of him, it: a large, vaguely humanoid shape shifting about behind the glass frieze that looked on to the hallway. It didn’t fit any of the shapes that should by rights have been there — not Bel’s slender figure, nor Mrs P’s squat domestic trapezium: this shape was bulky and distended, grotesquely so, like one of those self-assembly Ikea wardrobes I’d seen advertised on TV. I raised myself up on my elbows and called out: ‘Who’s there!’

There was no reply; and suddenly the figure was gone from the glass. I put down my consommé with a little sigh. I am not so vain as to think myself, in the general run of things, any more heroic than the next fellow; still, a man’s home is his castle, and when Swedish furniture decides to have a wander through it, one must take the appropriate measures. Tying the belt of my dressing gown and picking up the poker, I stole over to the drawing-room door. The hallway was empty. I cupped a hand to my ear, but heard only the sound of the house itself, like an endless exhalation of air echoing between the high ceilings and wood floors.

I was beginning to think I must have imagined it; but I seemed to remember someone telling me about a rash of break-ins recently, so just to be certain, I continued down the hall. There were plenty of nooks in which a miscreant could hide. Holding my poker at the ready in case he tried an ambush, I checked the library and the recital room — slowly twisting the knob, then swiftly thrusting open the door — to find nothing. Nothing lurked behind the Brancusi Janus; no one loomed beneath Mother’s sprawling poinsettia. On an impulse I tried the double doors of the ballroom: they were locked, of course, as they always were.

Relieved, I was on my way to the kitchen to have a cursory look around and also to see if there was anything by way of biscuits to follow the consommé, when a noise came from behind me. I spun round just as the door of the cloakroom burst open — and there, lumbering towards me, was the hideous Shape! Without the benefit of frosted glass between us, it was even more gruesome — my nerve quite failed me, the poker freezing mid-swing–

‘Charles!’ cried my sister, ghosting up suddenly at the Thing’s shoulder.

‘Haugh,’ the Thing snarled, before I recovered my wits and caught it a good blow on the temple, sending it tumbling to the floor with a thud which rattled Mother’s china collection clear in the next room.

There was a moment of silence. Outside the house the wind snapped and howled.

‘God, Charles, what have you done?’ Bel said, hovering apprehensively over the stricken beast.

‘Don’t worry, he’s still breathing,’ I reassured her. ‘Anyway, it’s no more than he deserves. Breaking into someone else’s house like that — it’s a good thing you weren’t here on your own, Bel, he’s a vicious-looking brute.’

‘That’s frank, Charles,’ she moaned.

‘Yes, it is, and I wish you hadn’t had to see it, but the fact is that this is the world we live in, and —’

‘No, you idiot, I mean that’s Frank, he’s a — a friend of mine. We’re going out this evening.’ She knelt down to examine the creature’s forehead. ‘If he regains consciousness.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Through the door I glimpsed Mary Astor dancing a daring Charleston in a man’s trilby, and wished — not for the first or the last time — that I could step into the screen and join her.

‘Is that all you can say, “Oh”?’ Bel half-rose again the better to chastise me. ‘The poor guy takes an afternoon off work just to give me a lift back from that stupid audition, and then before I can even offer him a drink, you — you assault him.’

‘I thought he was a burglar,’ I protested.

‘A burglar,’ Bel repeated.

‘Well, there’s been that rash of break-ins,’ I said, ‘and…’ there was really no nice way to put this, ‘he does look like a burglar, Bel, you have to admit. I mean, look at him.’

We turned our attention to the figure on the floor. He wore a denim jacket, a grubby white shirt and nondescript brown shoes. He was very large and, in some unplaceable way, lumpy. His head, however, was what really fascinated me. It resembled some novice potter’s first attempt at a soup tureen, bulbous and pasty, with one beetling eyebrow, a stubbly jaw and less than the full complement of teeth; to describe his ears as asymmetrical would be to do asymmetry a disservice.

‘What do you mean, “disservice”?’ Bel exclaimed when I pointed this out to her. ‘Charles, you practically kill someone and all you can think to do is stand around criticizing his ears? What’s wrong with you?’

‘It’s not just his ears,’ I said. ‘Think about it: can you imagine what Mother would say, confronted with that?’

‘I know quite well what she’d say,’ Bel said sourly. ‘She’d say that she felt quite faint, and could someone please pour her a glass of gin.’

‘Mother’s nerves are no laughing matter,’ I reproved her, but she was already heading for the kitchen, reappearing a moment later with a tea-towel full of ice cubes just as her creature was coming to its senses.

‘Janey,’ it said. ‘Fuck.’

‘Are you all right?’ Bel asked, after hauling it with both hands up to a sitting position.

‘I dunno what happened,’ the creature said. ‘I was lookin for the kitchen and I must have got lost cos then I was in this room with all these coats and then it was like somethin hit me…’

‘You had an accident,’ Bel told it, glaring icily in my direction.

‘Well, all in the past now,’ I said. ‘You could probably do with a drink, though. A cognac, maybe? Or actually, I was just going to make myself a gimlet, if I can tempt you…’

‘A cup of tea’d be lovely,’ the interloper said, dragging itself up off the parquet and, leaning on Bel’s shoulder, limping into the drawing room to sink down in my place on the chaise longue.

‘Tea. Certainly,’ I said graciously, as he picked up the remote control and Mary Astor’s smiling eyes were replaced by a straggly trail of dogs running about.

There was no response when I rang the service bell and I was staring hopelessly at the range of kitchen cupboards when Bel came in. ‘Where does Mrs P keep the tea?’ I said. She opened a door rather abruptly, nearly clipping my nose, to reveal a cabinet of glazed pots. ‘Do you think he wants Earl Grey? Is it a bit early?’

Bel sighed heavily, took a box of Band-Aids from a drawer and left again.

Maybe he’d be better with Lapsang Souchong, I pondered; but then I decided I had been right the first time, and carried in the tray with a plate of Mrs P’s amuse-bouches left over from the other night. Our guest was delighted with these and shoved them in fistfuls into his cavernous mouth. The tea, however, was less to his satisfaction.

‘Isn’t there any milk?’ he asked.

I rolled my eyes at Bel, who flounced out of the room again with yet more sotto voce imprecations. Now the two of us were alone. I could feel him looking at me and I knew the poker was within his reach. I kept my eyes fixed firmly on the television screen. The key was to show no fear. After a long, strained silence he addressed me. ‘Follow the football at all?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘So… do youse live here all alone?’ He had a thick Dublin brogue that made everything he said sound vaguely menacing.

‘Hmm?’ I said. Menace or not, I was becoming hypnotized by the dogs on TV. They were racing around their track at full pelt, despite appearing not to have been fed for several days; a small electric rabbit was leading them a merry dance. Frank repeated his question.

‘Oh, yes, it’s just the two of us at the moment, and Mrs P, of course. Father passed on a couple of years ago,’ gesturing at the photograph on the wall, Father with that Westwood woman at a fashion thing in London, ‘and Mother has been unwell lately — nerves, you know. Quite a trouper, though, never complains.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Frank. He ruminated over this, then his mouth contorted itself into a sinister leer. ‘I’d say you’ve a bit of crack in the gaff though, without the oul pair knockin about?’

I didn’t understand quite what this meant, but it sounded like he was insinuating something unwholesome. ‘What?’ I said.

‘Parties, like, you must have a good few parties and stuff.’

‘Oh, oh yes,’ I relaxed. ‘We do. That is, I do. Bel usually prefers to mope about with her drama friends. It’s been pretty quiet lately, now that I come to think of it. But we’ve had some high times, all right. Back in April, for instance, a close friend of mine — Patsy Olé, maybe you know her? Everybody knows Patsy —’

He looked at me blankly.

‘She’s gone now, anyway,’ I continued — annoyed to hear a quaver in my voice as I said it — ‘India, Grand Tour sort of a thing, you know. Where was I? Oh yes, that night, absolute mayhem. This one chap, Pongo McGurks,’ I leaned forward conspiratorially, ‘arrives at the stroke of midnight with an entire deer, bagged it over at the Guinness place in the mountains, and we…’ I stopped, judging from his uncomprehending gaze that there was no point continuing this anecdote. We returned our attention to the greyhounds’ pursuit of their small indigestible prey.

‘So who’s this Mrs P, then,’ he asked suddenly, ‘your auntie or something?’

‘Mrs P? Oh no. She’s the help. Bosnian, you know. Or is it Serbian? An absolute treasure, anyway. As I always say to Bel, if there’s one good thing to come out of all this fuss in the Balkans, it’s the availability of quality staff…’ The words died away on my lips: once again I found myself trailing off in the stare of those unblinking eyes. This fellow was like some kind of after-dinner black hole. My anxiety began to mount again. Where was Bel anyway? What was she doing leaving me at the mercy of this primate? Did she want me rent limb from limb and stuffed up the chimney?

‘Excuse me a moment,’ I said, getting to my feet and tracking her down to her bedroom, where she stood contemplating her shoe-rack.

‘Charles, for God’s sake, no one’s going to stuff you up any chimneys,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to change here, do you mind? I’ll be back down in a minute.’

‘Well I do mind,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact I mind very much. I thought you’d just gone for milk.’

‘Charles,’ Bel turned, waving her hairbrush impatiently, ‘can’t you just not be weird for five minutes, and just talk to him until —’

‘I’ve tried talking to him,’ I said, drawing aside the curtain to see the wind still careering over the long grass. ‘Everything I say just gets sort of… absorbed. It’s very off-putting. And then I worry that he’ll get hungry, and mistake me for a brisket.’

‘Well if you’d simply allow me to get dressed, then I — come to think of it, are you planning to put on clothes at all today? Or have we reached a new stage in your seemingly interminable decline?’

‘What decline?’ I said. She stomped barefoot past me to the chest of drawers. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I mean,’ she said as she pulled out a series of frilly items, held them up for scrutiny, and dropped them on the floor, ‘that you’ve been cooped up in this house for I don’t know how long and you’re beginning to —’

‘Beginning to what? Beginning to what, exactly?’

‘It just seems like more and more often these days I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’ She tossed a slip and a pair of slate-blue moccasins on to the bed. ‘I seem to recall you making a lot more sense than you do at the moment.’

‘Well that’s absolute poppycock,’ I retorted, ‘because for a start I was out last night. Pongo McGurks is going off to London to work for his old man and we went to the Sorrento for valedictory gimlets —’

‘I see, that would explain the strange dream I had of the pair of you dancing around on the lawn at four in the morning… were you wearing grass skirts? Please tell me you weren’t wearing grass skirts.’ She opened her wardrobe. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter, my point is could you please try and act like a normal human being and just… be polite.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘But if the circus comes looking for him, I’m not going to be answerable.’

She took a dress from the wardrobe, turned to the mirror and shook out her hair aggressively. ‘Haven’t you anything better to do than stand around annoying me?’ she said.

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I was watching a film with Mary Astor and hats —’

‘We’re going in a minute,’ she scowled. I was about to make another witty remark, to the effect that if I didn’t leave the house much it was probably because everywhere else was full of people like Frank; but catching sight of her eyes in the mirror I decided to hold my peace. Bel put up quite a show, but she wasn’t nearly so tough as she liked to make out. I knew how long she took to apply her mascara, and if she started to cry the pair of them would be here all night. The audition mustn’t have gone well.

‘I never asked how you got on today,’ I said casually. ‘Did you get the part?’

‘No,’ she mumbled, tilting the cheval glass and holding the dress up against her. ‘It was awful, it was for an ad for some company selling doors over the Internet. I’d never read anything so asinine in my whole life. The idea was that me and this guy who’s supposed to be my boyfriend are in an apartment having this huge fight — I mean he’s shouting at me and insulting me and just being a bastard for about two minutes, until I storm off and slam the door behind me. And then the slogan is, “Doors. It’s good to leave.” Isn’t that poisonous?’

‘Still, that was your first one in a while, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Something better’s bound to come along.’

‘Mmm.’ She flushed. ‘Charles, I really do have to change now, do you mind?’

‘I mean something that you actually want to — you’re not wearing moccasins with that dress, are you?’

‘Charles, I’m changing, would you please get out?’

I retreated without further comment and went downstairs to fidget in the kitchen until I heard her descend the staircase and rejoin Frank.

‘Don’t wait up,’ she called from the hallway.

‘Ha!’ I returned, but they had already gone.

It might seem that I was being a little hard on my sister, but with Mother away at the Cedars I felt it was my responsibility to look after her. Bel was twenty-one, three years younger than me, a strikingly pretty girl with Father’s pale-blue eyes and Mother’s autumn-leaf hair and a streak of recklessness, a dismissive impatience with her own life, that she’d inherited from no one. In June she’d finished at Trinity, where she’d taken a rather indulgent degree in Drama — ‘Bel study Drama,’ Father had sighed as he signed the cheque, ‘there’s coals to Newcastle for you’ — which wasn’t entirely fair, because while she did have a tendency for melodrama and a keen sense of any injustice that pertained to herself, she wasn’t really the flamboyant type. Although acting was her passion, in college productions she’d always preferred to work behind the scenes, designing sets or editing scripts, and any time she got on to the stage her roles were swallowed up by her own shyness.

Ever since her finals she’d been at a loose end; the void bothered her, I could tell. Over the last months, she’d gone through a series of male companions of diminishing quality, even by her haphazard standards; the rest of the time she’d spent closeted away in her room, listening to Bob Dylan records and smoking joints out the window into the evening air.

‘It’s time off,’ I’d counsel her. ‘Just enjoy it. Slow yourself down a little, like I do.’

‘It’s not time off,’ she’d say. ‘It feels like Purgatory. Stuck out here on my own in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everyone I know, just waiting I don’t even know what for, and I have no money, and I’m nothing, I feel like a zero —’

‘You’ve only been finished a month. It’s a transition period, that’s all. I don’t see what you’re so worried about.’

‘I’m worried that I’ll turn into you,’ she’d wail, and return despairingly to the endless pages of computer-programming jobs in the appointments section of the newspaper. Which was a pity, because that summer we enjoyed beautiful stretches of sunshine, and the grounds had rarely looked so fetching. With Mother away, I was free to stroll around at my leisure, admiring the verdant tint of the oak leaves, the fleecy flowers of the horse-chestnut, the tall amaryllis and columbine; it was a peaceful time, and, in spite of what Bel had said, I felt unusually contented, although naturally from time to time I thought it would have been nice to have a companion for my rovings — a wolfhound, perhaps, or a setter, to wag along beside me as I tramped over the grass, and curl up at my feet as I sat under a tree with my Improving Book.

After Bel and Frank departed, I spent a good half-hour massaging the chaise longue to remove the dent Frank had left in it. I was feeling dinnerish but there was still no sign of Mrs P; I was standing at the window waiting for her when I saw the postman rolling drunkenly up the path. One of the disadvantages of living where we did — the house was on the coast, two miles of devious road from Dalkey village — was that the postal services found it hard to bring themselves to deliver; on rainy days, or days when it looked like it might rain, or days before or after days when it had rained, you could forget about it. But it had been relatively clement lately, and the postman, a white-haired geezer of untrustworthy aspect, had evidently decided to take a chance. I opened the front door just as he was bending to the letterbox with a sheaf of correspondence.

‘Morning,’ he said, the brazen untruth of which knocked the wind out of my sails and with it the lecture I had been preparing for several days to give him; instead I just snatched the mail from his hand and slammed the door, and he sauntered off whistling across the lawn, which is not meant to be walked on except by the peacocks.

I glanced cursorily through the letters. Nothing for me, a few official-looking things for my sister, several others addressed to Mother with a similar red stamp, special delivery or something. I put these aside for Bel, who was in charge of family correspondence while Mother was indisposed, and turned my thoughts back to the whereabouts of Mrs P. I hadn’t seen her since lunchtime and by now was getting weak with hunger. What I’d said to Frank had been no exaggeration: her bonhomie and excellent cuisine had carried the household through some difficult times. Yet recently she hadn’t seemed quite as devoted as usual. She’d been keeping rather erratic hours, and she seemed preoccupied, as if her mind was elsewhere. I hadn’t said anything to Bel yet, but the truth was that I was getting a little worried. I wondered if she hadn’t something troubling her — or worse, if she had simply come to the end of her useful days and was ready to be put out to pasture.

On the upside, by this time my hangover had dissipated so I went down to the cellar to pick out a bottle for dinner. I liked the cellar: the air down there was cool and rarefied, and clung to one damply in a comforting way, like a blanket over the shoulders; and all around the dim light glinted crimson, mauve and burgundy on the bottles, rainbows within rainbows, one of the few unalloyed joys of my father’s life. Of late, it had to be said, the ranks were looking somewhat depleted. It had been a rather frenetic few months — all the old crowd together again, those fabulous, foolish parties merging into one another like the giddy breathless space between night and day. In retrospect I suppose it had all the hallmarks of a Last Hurrah. I wondered if everyone had known it except me.

Not that it mattered; none of it had come to anything, not the flings nor the booze nor the girls with peacock feathers in their hair. Patsy Olé had been the one I was after: Patsy Olé, who was suave and pretty and didn’t give a damn, and who, like all girls that are suave and pretty and don’t give a damn, always had a string of fellows grovelling at her heel. She was one of those girls, furthermore, who enjoyed the strife and hatred she engendered among her suitors at least as much as the relationships themselves, and as such was quite amenable to conducting two or more romances at the same time. And yet, on certain nights, she and I had seemed on the verge of something quite…

I roused myself. She was in India now; we were all probably better off. I selected a bottle and returned to the kitchen. It was easy to get caught in the cellar; if I wasn’t careful I could end up mooning about down there for hours, getting myself covered in cobwebs.

My stomach was really beginning to hurt now and Mrs P remained AWOL. This was ridiculous. I couldn’t be expected to hang about all night. There was a Gene Tierney double-bill on television later that I’d been looking forward to for ages. I decided I would teach Mrs P a lesson by cooking my own meal.

The larder presented some difficulties initially. The fish needed gutting, the meat cutting, the vegetables peeling, slicing, sautéing. But then I chanced on some beans in a jar, and thinking that one could not go wrong with beans, put them in a pot with a cupful of rice. I waited until some steam began to brew over the water, then drained it and put it on a plate and took my meal into the dining room. It was quite edible if you ate it quickly enough between swallows of wine, and I was rather proud of myself. I dined alone, watched over by the sombrely ticking clock and a moth that fluttered atmospherically against the shade of the lamp by the long mahogany table. Afterwards I made myself a gimlet and returned to the drawing room and the by-now-restored chaise longue.

The first half of the double-bill was the negligible Heaven Can Wait, in which Tierney has only a small part as Don Ameche’s saintly wife; but it was followed by Otto Preminger’s magnificent Whirlpool, in which her curious combination of magnetism and vacuity, so suited to Hollywood’s purposes that she might have been constructed in some Burbank lot, was exploited to its fullest: drawing in the viewer as at the same time she retreated from the plot, fading and fading until, Siren-like, she had pulled you right into the picture just at the moment that she disappeared from it; so you found yourself alone in the space where she should have been, in the shadows and spiderweb of Preminger’s cruel machine.

I watched a lot of old movies, and from the first time I saw her, Gene Tierney was my favourite star of that era of true stars. Although she’s largely forgotten now, in her time she was regarded as the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen. But her beauty took the form of a smouldering, purely feminine darkness, without the reassuring masculinity of a Bacall or the frivolity of a Hayworth, and it seemed to terrify the movie-makers; they would cast her resolutely against type, as a dullard housewife or a good-natured ninny or a cartoonish Arabian princess, roles devised to restrict and minimize the awesome power of her face, emphasizing instead her natural and deep-rooted uncertainty. Critics and industry, even as they fell in love with her, insisted unanimously that she couldn’t act. (Of Whirlpool, for instance, in which she plays a kleptomaniac taken advantage of by an unscrupulous psychoanalyst, one reviewer said: ‘it is sometimes difficult to tell from Miss Tierney’s playing whether she is or is not under hypnosis’.) Preminger was the only director who seemed to understand her and what she meant to those who saw her; in his and her best film, Laura, she spends most of her time dead, appearing on screen in the form of a painting and in the flashback testimony of the suspects for her murder.

I’d seen both films before, though, and drained by the exertion of making dinner I dozed off. As I did so I experienced the curious sensation, not for the first time in recent months, that in some inexplicable way the film was watching me; I slept tormented by bad dreams, in which vampiric images of women enticed me, withholding focus and changing at the last minute into hideous monsters that grinned toothlessly and made meaningful gestures at a vast chimney lined with empty bottles. I woke to the sound of voices at the door and a new, more crippling pain in my stomach. The voices belonged to my sister and the Thing and had distinctly romantic undertones, but I found myself unable to get up and intervene. ‘Cease,’ I cried weakly, but my voice cracked and my head swam and I lay there powerless in a pool of sweat. In the corner the muted television showed pictures of people in some kind of makeshift campsite — thousands and thousands of people, weeping and lamenting. Then, in one of those moments of extreme clarity that nausea brings, I perceived that my cocktail glass had been removed from the table. Mrs P was back! With the last of my strength, I pulled on the bell-rope and its clang echoed distantly around me as I passed out of consciousness.

When I came to again — parched, pain rampaging through my intestines — I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs P’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was effectively through her negligence that I had been forced to poison myself), and one gormless and oblivious, face, which belonged to Frank. Biting her lip and putting a hand on my shoulder, Bel asked if I were all right.

‘Beans!’ I gasped.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I think he has eaten many kidney beans,’ Mrs P shuddered. ‘Many kidney beans not cooked.’

‘Beans!’ I cried again deliriously.

‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ Bel said. ‘Charles, listen carefully, did you soak the beans before you cooked them?’

‘Of course I didn’t soak them,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘What do you think?’ Bel said to Mrs P. Mrs P threw her hands in the air and turned away, speaking agitatedly in Bosnian, or whatever it was.

‘They did seem rather crunchy,’ I recalled.

Frank gave me a wink. ‘On the batter, eh? Hair of the dog’s what you want.’

‘What?’ I said, then ‘Oh,’ as he produced a hip flask. The thought of putting my lips where his had been repulsed me but I would have done anything to rid myself of this mortal agony, so I steeled myself and swallowed a mouthful of very cheap whiskey — and it worked, in that soon I was copiously throwing up into a silver champagne bucket. After that I felt a little better, better enough to request a moment in private with Bel.

‘Charles,’ she said, sitting beside me and stroking my brow, ‘when are you going to learn to stop being such an idiot?’

‘Never mind that for the moment,’ I snapped. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on.’

‘Well, we came home and found you rolling around the floor, so we —’

‘Not that, damn it, Bel — that Frank, what is he doing back here?’

Bel drew back. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘I mean, I’ve never laid eyes on him before today, and already he’s spending the night? Just because Mother isn’t here doesn’t mean the house can be turned into a, a bordello, you know.’

She flushed a deep scarlet. ‘How dare you,’ she said coldly.

‘I’m only thinking of you,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to stop you doing something you might regret. One of us has to keep a level head, after all.’

‘My head is perfectly level, I assure you.’

‘Well, is it, though,’ I said.

Bel stood up. ‘What do you mean, “is it, though?”’

‘I mean, you’re not in good form. You said it yourself, Bel. You’re feeling bereaved. You’re ticked off because you’re not with your pals in college any more. You’ve been like this all summer. It’s perfectly understandable. But there comes a point where someone has to step in and take charge. Because the fact is that bereaved or extremely sad people often reach out for support to the wrong places. Their heads are clouded, you see, so they make these ferociously bad decisions —’

Bel’s teeth ground audibly. ‘Charles, how dare you say what you just said and then presume to think you know how I feel. God, if anything’s pushing me to make bad decisions and do something I’ll regret, it’s —’

‘I’m simply thinking of your welfare. Can’t you just sit down and listen for a moment?’ I winced and pressed my hand to my side as a flame of pain shot up from my gut. ‘I mean, who is this Frank? That’s what we have to ask ourselves. What does he want with us?’

‘I know who he is, I’m what he wants with us.’

‘Ah, but do you? I mean he could be anyone, he could be a — a serial killer, or a very well-disguised master criminal after the family fortune —’

‘Why do we keep having this conversation?’ She directed her question to the ceiling. ‘Why are you like this every time I bring someone home? You snipe and you complain till I can’t face it any more. It’s insupportable.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s because you have such uneducated tastes —’ adding hurriedly as she looked about set to hit me, invalided or not, ‘Because you’re such an exquisite creature, Bel, you deserve so much better.’

‘Charles, two minutes ago you basically called me a prostitute.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘You did, you said I was turning the house into a bordello.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said. ‘I only meant, you know, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on imbeciles. I know how hard it is to find the right person, but that’s no reason to exhaustively work your way through all the wrong people. You seem to be living your romantic life by some kind of process of elimination. It’s like matching a Louis Quatorze armchair with one of those plastic patio tables. It simply doesn’t work.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Bel said. ‘I’m an armchair, is that it?’

‘A Louis Quatorze armchair,’ I qualified.

‘And my boyfriends are patio tables.’

‘Actually,’ I remembered, ‘this one’s more like one of those self-assembly Swedish wardrobes.’

‘I worry about you,’ Bel said, getting up and pirouetting angrily in the pool of light thrown by the lamp. ‘I seriously do. I think you have real demons to struggle with, Charles. Every single relationship I have you do your best to destroy. You make every boy I bring home feel uncomfortable and you make me look like I come from some sort of uppity zoo. No one is good enough for you. Kevin was too badly dressed —’

‘The sandals? The socks?’

‘Liam was too Scottish —’

‘Oh, but so Scottish, Bel! Come on, the bagpipes? The interminable quotations from Braveheart? Anyone who’s proud of coming from Scotland obviously has issues —’

‘David?’

‘Duck-walk.’

‘Roy?’

‘Repressed homosexual.’

‘Anthony?’

I scratched my head. ‘Picayune,’ I said.

‘Thomas, what about him? How did he offend you?’

Why do birds sing? Why is the sky blue? Thomas, the alleged body-artist, who looked like he’d fallen face-first into a bag of nails: I refrained from comment, contenting myself with a supercilious chortle.

‘But haven’t you ever considered,’ Bel went on in an ironic tone, ‘whether the problem might not be with you? Have you ever thought to yourself, why am I so obsessed with my sister’s love-life, isn’t that a bit unhealthy, especially when the rest of the time I do nothing except wander around the house drinking Father’s wine and watching television and romping around with singularly stupid girls who haven’t a hint of brain in their pretty little heads like that awful whatshername who sounded like a bullfight, even as I criticize my unfortunate sister for her attempts at a normal, real relationship and a real actual life — am I,’ she heated up and started stamping about, ‘am I going to spend the rest of my life hanging around Amaurot doing nothing but spy into other people’s affairs as if I owned them when in fact it is none of my business?’ Trembling with fury, she turned to look at me, as if expecting a response.

‘Are we still talking about me?’ I said.

‘Yes, Charles;’ bringing her foot down thunderously.

‘What — you’re suggesting that instead of trying to protect and care for my family I should be out working in some sort of a, a job, is that it?’

‘In a nutshell,’ Bel replied.

I was confused. ‘This isn’t how the conversation started out,’ I averred.

‘Maybe not,’ Bel said. ‘But it’s high time someone told you a few home truths.’

‘Actually, I think I can feel another nauseous spell coming on,’ I said hurriedly.

She said it anyway: she was remorseless, telling me that while possibly by some tortuous logic I was misconstruing my meddling behaviour as paternal, or protective, in actual fact it was intrusive and stifling, ‘and the only reason you do it is that you don’t have anything else, because for the last two years you’ve been either sitting around here on your own or drinking with your good-for-nothing friends and basically living without the remotest concept of adulthood or maturity… Well, I’ve had enough, Charles. I don’t care any more if you don’t go back to college. I don’t care if you want to ruin your life. But I don’t see why you should get to ruin mine as well. If you’re going to be a failure, fine. But please fail on your own time.’

‘Failure?’ I yelped. ‘Someone has to preserve the family tradition, don’t they? Someone has to keep the flag flying.’

‘Father never took a day off in his life,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Flag indeed.’

‘Yes, but he didn’t work his whole life so that his children would have to — to also work,’ I parried, ‘and besides, I don’t understand what you’re getting so het up about’ — although it was pretty obvious, Bel was relentlessly introspective and probably suffering from terrible guilt over this Frank character. ‘I don’t see why a few kindly meant words of advice have you sending me out to work shelling peas, or putting tops on jam jars in some hideous mechanical barn, standing all day at a conveyor belt, the roar of machinery in my ears, not even a chair to sit on and the endless gleaming jars rolling inexorably towards my little lid-placing device —’

‘I’m talking about responsibility, Charles, about living like an actual human grown-up person —’

‘This Frank of yours, I suppose he works, does he?’

Bel halted mid-stamp and adjusted the strap of her dress. ‘He works,’ she said evasively.

‘Well? Brain surgeon, hot-air balloonist, third violin…?’

She cast down her eyes. ‘He has a van,’ she said.

‘A van!’ I exclaimed, triumphantly jabbing a finger in the air. ‘A van! And any idea as to what he puts in this “van”? Opium? Elephant tusks? Well-intentioned but misguided young girls from good families?’

‘It doesn’t matter!’ she shouted. ‘God, I knew I shouldn’t have bothered trying to reason with you.’

From outside, the querulous creak of the weathervane rose over the wind. I sighed, sat up in bed and turned back the cuffs of my pyjamas. The thing was, I wasn’t just trying to annoy her this time; I really did have the uncanny feeling that with Frank she had crossed some kind of a line. ‘Bel,’ I said earnestly, ‘I’m sorry if I’m harsh with you. You’re grown up, you’ve finished college, you can make your own decisions. But although I may not have a respectable job in a jar factory, I have seen a thing or two. And this Frank…’ I racked my brains for a more diplomatic, more palatable expression for my fears, but I couldn’t think of one. So I took a deep breath and came right out with it. ‘Are you familiar with the figure from Yiddish mythology known as the Golem?’

Bel looked puzzled but suspicious.

‘The Golem, according to legend, is a creature composed entirely of clay — or in certain cases,’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘putty, seemingly —’

‘Here we go,’ she declared heavily, cutting me off. ‘Here we go!’

‘Come back!’ I cried, stretching my arms after her. ‘Come back, for pity’s sake! I’m not joking, Bel. What I am about to tell you could be of the utmost importance to both of us!’

She paused in the doorway, then with a slight, acidic nod of the head, coolly bade me continue.

I am not by nature a superstitious man, and the next day I wondered if the kidney beans were to blame for the wild thoughts riding roughshod through my mind that night. Looking back on it now, though, I can see that I was part right, at least: that the coming of Frank did mark the beginning of our downfall — although each of us had many, many contributions of our own to make. ‘The Golem does not think for itself,’ I told Bel. ‘It is an automaton, animated by mystical powers — usually malevolent, it has to be said.’

‘Charles, it’s late. Have you a point to this, other than pretending that the reason you don’t like Frank isn’t that you’re a snob and a sociopath, but because he’s some kind of a mystical being sent to corrupt me?’

‘I know it sounds outlandish,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how else to explain this sense of foreboding. None of your boyfriends ever made my skin actually crawl before.’ I shuddered, imagining the dark slab of Frank driving his van down crepuscular suburban streets, eyes gleaming emptily as he awaited the call from his master…

Bel’s shoulders slumped. ‘Then it appears we are at an impasse.’

‘Almost literally,’ I said, picturing Frank moonlighting as a roadblock or a small dam.

Bel sighed, and sank wearily on to the foot of the bed. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘it’s quite obvious that in Mother’s absence the power has gone to your head. I don’t know what’s going to come of it, or if there’s anything I can do about it. But I know that I can’t go on like this. We have to sort something out if we’re going to keep living here with any semblance of normality. So though I do this with a bad conscience, I propose we make a pact.’

‘A pact?’

‘A pact.’ She rubbed her eyes with the edge of her hand. ‘If you let this relationship take its course, without any more complaining or allusions to Jewish mythology, I hereby promise that if — if — Frank and I then break up, I’ll — I’ll stay in for three months before seeing anyone else. How’s that?’

‘That sounds very cynical, Bel,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, I just want you to be happy.’

‘Charles, just tell me what it will take to get you to leave me alone.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. Cynical it might have been, but I was rather taken with the novelty of this arrangement. Usually my arguments with Bel ended in her hurling something breakable at me. The sad truth was that she was going to see this fellow whether I liked it or not. At least this way I would be offered some kind of recompense — something, for instance, that under normal circumstances she would never be persuaded to do…

‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘Three months, and…’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘And?’

‘And you also have to introduce me to that friend of yours. That Laura Treston.’

‘Laura Treston?’ Bel repeated disgustedly. ‘She’s not my friend, I haven’t spoken to her in — wait a minute, what made you suddenly think of her, anyway?’ I made an indistinct coughing noise and smoothed some bumps out of the eiderdown. Bel groaned and tugged her hair. ‘Oh Charles, you haven’t been going through my old yearbooks again, have you?’

‘I had to check something,’ I mumbled.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, it’s creepy and morbid, those photographs are from four years ago at least, those girls are practically still children…’

‘Be that as it may,’ I said gruffly.

‘I mean, none of them looks the same now. A couple are dead, even.’

‘Coming back to the matter at hand,’ I said.

Bel groaned again. ‘Don’t make me call her, Charles. She’s so boring. The last time I talked to her I practically had to be drip-fed espresso for the rest of the week.’

‘Those are my terms,’ I said. ‘Take them or leave them.’

She surrendered. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. I’ll call her tomorrow, and you’ll promise to leave Frank and me alone. Promise?’

‘Where is he now?’ I sat up. ‘I hope he’s in the spare room, Bel.’

‘Starting now.’

‘All right, all right, I promise.’ I outstretched my hand; she shook it, and the pact was sealed. She went off yawning to her room, and I laid down my head, thoughts awhirl like galaxies.

Bel’s yearbooks had been a secret vice of mine since my girl-less schooldays, when I’d spirit them away from the pile under her bed and bring them in to show my classmates and be hailed as a hero for the day. We would gather behind the cricket pavilion and huddle round in the glow of the pages: boggling at the sheer number of faces and names and possibilities, rating every single girl out of ten, speculating on their sexual proclivities, imagining lights-out in the dorms and the pillow fights that, if we knew anything about girls, must surely ensue… and before long a silence would fall, as each of us drifted off into his own private reverie — lost in the photograph, this seeming Elysium where our feminine counterparts dwelled beaming or scowling in black-and-white rows, distant and unknown to us as stars.

And that was where I first encountered her — one summer’s day when, with nothing to do, I had stolen into Bel’s bedroom on an ongoing and fruitless quest for her diary, and instead found the new yearbook, and sitting on the bed cast my eye over the rank-and-file of twelve-year-olds, until suddenly I stopped and caught my breath; and my lust gave way to something purer, translucent and doomed as a wish. Those eyes, that mouth, the thrilling glimpse of throat through the school blouse; that array of tresses — hazel or blonde, it was hard to tell — that hung so magnificently still… With a strange sense of destiny I’d traced through the block of names at the bottom of the page — Audrey Courtenay, Bunty Chopin, Dubois Shaughnessy — until I arrived at hers: Laura; Laura Treston.

Ever since then, although the fates had conspired to keep us from meeting, I had followed her progress in the yearbooks, each one bringing a new metamorphosis; in the pillow fights of my dreams, it was the throw-cushions of her breasts more than any others that shook and resounded with the light thump of feathers. Even now, years after school had ended and she had gone I knew not where, she lived on in my heart like a hologram. The Patsy Olés of this world could come and go; this, I felt sure, was to be my grand love story.

Bel herself never appeared in the class photographs, nor in any other photographs for that matter. She’d always been sensitive about her looks; whenever photos came back from the chemist after a family occasion she would invariably grab them first, and look through them compulsively, and put them down disappointed two minutes later, saying sadly, ‘I look like that? Why didn’t someone tell me…’ I never understood what she got in such a fuss about, because even then you could tell she would be pretty — but the girl in the pictures evidently didn’t match up to the girl she was in her imagination, and she began to dread them, these moments that didn’t die away but would come back to haunt her in all their objective, inescapable truth. So, at the age of twelve, she’d decided she would simply no longer allow herself to be photographed. In school she’d engineered ways to get out of it, coming down with ever more extravagant ailments on Photograph Day (the nuns who taught her were old and doddery and always fell for her painted-on measles, lesions, yellow fever). In family portraits, she’d feature as a blank space, a decentring, inexplicable inch of room furnishings beside Mother, Father and me. To this day, the moment a camera appeared, Bel seemed to vanish into thin air.

I was too excited to get back to sleep and for an hour I lay there happily considering my new life with Laura. But as the night wore on the excitement curdled, and I began to be tormented by doubts. That everything should fall into place this way: suddenly it seemed too neat, too easy. Should I have turned down the pact? Had I sold Bel down the river? And then I thought I heard noises, and I couldn’t reassure myself that it wasn’t him, stalking deadly through the halls and corridors, making sure all was quiet before beginning his maleficent enterprise.

Chiding myself, I put on my slippers and went out to the landing. But all was silent, save the distant clanks and rumblings the house made in its sleep, and somewhere a clock ticking to itself. There was no one in the bathroom, although there was an unfamiliar stench. I drew the curtains in Mother’s bedroom, then went to the door of Father’s study. And there I paused: seized, as I turned the handle, by memories, as if they had been waiting there coiled inside the metal. They were from when I was very small, before he started locking the door, and I would come to see him with a glass of milk or a snail or my homework (norway has alot of fjords, nobody does much there), and find him brooding in the recesses of his enormous chair; how the room had seemed enchanted, with its vertiginous walls of arcane books and ledgers, the murky carpet that he wouldn’t let Mother change, the obsequious plaster head waiting hopefully on its plinth — the room like an alchemist’s lair, that both was and wasn’t part of the house, where Father both was and wasn’t with us…

‘What’s this about Dad, bones?’

‘Cheekbones, Charles, see some people don’t really have ’em, and these colours —’

‘And what’s this?’

‘Ah, well that’s a chemical formula, is what that’s called, this fellow here’s a stearate radical and — no, don’t touch that, Charles —’

‘Oops, sorry…’

‘Doesn’t matter. Look, there’s Mother out in the garden, I wonder if she needs a hand,’ steering me gently but firmly out the door…

Nothing in the room had been touched since his death. Everything was as he had left it, as if he’d just stepped out and would be returning momentarily: the vials of dyes and tinctures, the colour charts and cross-sections; the desk overflowing with magazine-cuttings of tempestuous models in hair and dresses already passed out of fashion, like spirits that had been called into being for that moment alone, sprung like flames from shadows before disappearing back to that essential realm where it was forever 1996. The only addition was the portrait that Mother had installed — opposite the window, so that he could continue to enjoy the grounds and gardens, this empire he had built from nothing. Or not quite nothing: our family traced its lineage back to the first Norman conquerors, although some regrettable dalliances with the local peasantry over the centuries had somewhat thinned the bloodline, perhaps accounting for an occasional lassitude in judgement such as exhibited by my sister. Standing in the moonlight, leaning back with my arms rigid against the desk, I studied the aquiline nose, the thinly smiling lips, the ruddy cheeks. It had been painted posthumously, from photographs, but the picture really captured the spirit of my father, a man devoted to life in his own inspiring if inexplicable way.

I’d almost forgotten why I came in at all, when by chance I spotted something unusual. Two red dents in a velvet square: two pieces of Father’s coin collection mysteriously absent. Frank! So that was his game — start slow, no one will notice, until the whole house was cleaned out! I pictured him at one of those vile suburban pubs, sitting at a faux-marble table top, drinking a fizzing lager with his fence, satellite television blaring above them as they laughed and clinked glasses in their pork-pie hats. Now from downstairs came the sound of a cupboard opening. In a fury I rolled up my pyjama sleeves. Just let me catch him in a fresh act of thievery, I would settle his hash for him, Golem or no!

I padded softly down the stairs. I took the poker from the drawing room, then saw a faint glisten of light along the wooden floorboards of the hall: I whirled about in the eye of the sweeping staircase, glancing from one shut door to the other, and then a noise! I pounced, poker high, through the scullery door — and checked myself just in time, so that Mrs P was dealt only a glancing blow, although unfortunately enough to bring the silver tray she was carrying crashing to the floor. ‘Young Master Charles!’ she cried. ‘You are giving me the heart failure!’

‘Oh, yes, sorry Mrs P, didn’t think you’d be about this late —’

‘Yes,’ she faltered, ‘I am — I am making the breakfast…’

I picked up a tender sliver of pheasant from the floor. Morsels of roast potato clung to it alluringly. Making breakfast at three in the morning? And no ordinary breakfast either — on top of the pheasant, or rather beside it on the floor, was a heavenly looking soufflé and a bottle of rather fine Armagnac. It looked like someone was in the running for a first-class breakfast in bed. And there could be little doubt as to who that someone would be — the poor thing was still upset about the kidney-bean debacle; indeed, now that I looked at her properly, I could see the rings that worry and tiredness had left on her simple rustic face.

She protested, but I would not hear of her making another breakfast at this hour; I told her to forget about the kidney beans and go directly to bed as soon as she had cleaned up the floor. She bowed gratefully, and I left the room, marvelling at her diligence even if increasingly concerned about her mental stability — I mean to say, pheasant for breakfast? In all the excitement, the Frank conundrum went clean out of my head; and it wasn’t until some time later that I noticed the disappearance of the ottoman, and the ornamental teapot.