An Evening of Long Goodbyes

2

Perhaps it might seem that Bel had a point, about me not having a job, I mean. To the casual observer it may have looked like I was living a life of indolence, compared to the noisy industry with which the city to the north was ripping itself to pieces. It was true that, after a brief but regrettable entanglement with Higher Learning, I had fairly much confined my activities to the house and its environs. The simple fact of it was that I was happy there; and as I didn’t have any skills to speak of, or gifts to impart, I didn’t see why I ought to burden the world with my presence. It was not true, however, to say that I did nothing. I had several projects of my own to keep busy with, such as composing, and supervising the construction of the Folly. I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times, they had called it sprezzatura: the idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat. I had explained it several times to Bel, but she didn’t seem to get it.

Our house was called Amaurot. It was situated in Killiney, some ten miles outside of Dublin, a shady province of overhanging branches, narrow winding roads and sea air. Most of the houses had been built in the nineteenth century by magistrates, viceroys, military and navy men; in recent years, however, the area had become something of a tax haven for foreign racing-car drivers and soi-disant musicians. But it still possessed a sequestered elegance, an arboreal hush: I would not have lived anywhere else. On bright mornings I might take a walk up to Killiney Hill, climbing mossy steps under canopies of ash and sycamore; at the top stood the Obelisk, a monument to the kindness of the landed gentry to the local peasants during the famine year of 1741, from where you could look out over the half-hidden rooftops to the blue mountains and the golden sickle of the beach. Beside it was a little ziggurat, and the legend was that if you ran around each level of it seven times your wish would come true. But neither Bel nor I had ever managed to make it to the top; and even if we had, we would have been too dizzy to wish.

Amaurot was big and hundreds of years old, and it seemed to me while Bel and I were growing up that as long as we were there nothing bad could ever happen to us; the world outside could go up in flames and we would continue to play, safe in the shadow of the high stone walls. As far as we were concerned, Amaurot was the world — and it belonged to us, like the waves belonged to the sea, or certain shades of blue to the sky.

The house was set on a promontory, bordered on two sides, at the bottom of steep hills, by the sea. At every hour of the day you could hear it whispering or roaring, slipping from jade to amethyst to grey to deepest black; I loved it as the companion to my thoughts and the ear to which I disclosed my desires. A long avenue swept proudly over the lawns back to the road; ancient trees rubbed shoulders with saplings and wild flowers along the perimeter. To the rear of the house were the vegetable garden, which had gone to seed rather in recent years, the apple trees and cherry trees and a small rivulet that bore frogs down to the sea. This was where Bel and I had spent most of our childhood, in the long grass and pine needles.

Bel had been a recalcitrant playmate. She went through long periods of not talking to anyone; instead she’d read, for days on end, her bare legs dangling from the windowsill. But she had a gift for invention, and on days when she jumped down from the ledge to join me in my stick fort, all of the fabulous ideas that she nursed over her books came bubbling out as complex adventures which I had to struggle to keep up with.

She liked to read about Russia, and Amaurot often doubled as the Winter Palace. Sometimes we would be orphaned children of the Tsar, fleeing the clutches of the evil Revolution, crossing invisible wastes on phantom troikas; sometimes she would be the diffident, entrancing princess and I the dashing suitor trying, with difficulty, to win her over. I would be called Karl and Bel Tanya, after the heroine of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which she had fallen in love with at the age of eight. (In fact, even when the toys had been put away for ever and the games forgotten, she hung on to this name: to her friends at school, she was Tanya until well into her teens. ‘Christabel’ had been Father’s idea, after a Coleridge poem — a murky and rather depressing thing about nymphs and vampires, which breaks off abruptly at a point of confused identities and general malaise. She couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s not just the fact that nobody can spell it,’ she would fulminate periodically, ‘but he never even got around to writing the happy ending. I mean, couldn’t they have named me after a poem that someone had actually finished, would that have been too much?’ Eventually, ‘Bel’ was arrived at as a sort of compromise, and Father became the only person to call her by her full name.)

Mother thought she might be a genius; I overheard her talking to Father about it sometimes. ‘The way she reads!’ she’d say. ‘The library is looking positively bare, she’s smuggled off so many books.’

‘I was thinking perhaps we should get a billiard table for it,’ Father said.

‘And such an imagination!’ she went on. ‘The things she comes out with, really —’

‘Hmm… you don’t think she might be a bit over-imaginative, do you? She does seem to spend an awful lot of time in this dreamworld of hers.’

‘That’s a sign of intelligence, Ralph. That girl will go places, believe me.’

‘Hey, Your Highness,’ I’d say to Bel, listening in on the windowsill, ‘escaping from these sorfs is making me hungry, I think there are apples in yonder wood, yonder…’

‘You can’t say “Hey” to a princess, Charles,’ jumping down, ‘and it’s serfs, not sorfs…’ and we’d steal through the gap in the hedge to Old Man Thompson’s garden and throw sticks up into the branches, until apples began to thud around us and, inevitably, Olivier, his sinister German manservant, appeared on the verandah: ‘Herr Zompson! Zey are scrumpfing our apfeln!’

Old Man Thompson would come hobbling out waving his cane, yelling, ‘After ’em, Olivier! After ’em!’ and we’d shriek and run away as Olivier gave chase — a spindly black spider in his tight PVC suit — and burst back through the gap just in time, Old Man Thompson howling from the other side, ‘Bloody children, I’m going to call your father up, you bloody…’

I don’t know if he ever did call Father up; I don’t know that it would have done him much good anyway. Father could be a difficult man to get through to. He was full of unfulfilled romanticism and wilful, unspoken delusions; he spent long hours at the office or in his study, and only the husk of him was brought home to us at the end of the day. Through the evening he’d maintain a weary, benevolent silence, and only address us to deliver abstract lectures, or ask disinterested questions about school. But sometimes he would take walks out through the trees to the hillside, to look down at the flying vapour of the sea, and bring Bel and me along with him; we would fidget restlessly while he gazed into the darkness, and then, just as we were wondering what the point of all this was, and how long we would have to stand there doing nothing while valuable television-watching time was being eaten up, he would turn to us and without introduction launch into a poem from memory, spooky verses about lonely lovers and capricious fairies, tricking spectres and murmuring seas. And as our faces turned pale with not-understanding, and we tingled with the haunting, equivocal magic that crackled around the poems, he would chuckle out, ‘Yeats, children. Yeats would have liked to be up here with you and me, on a night like this.’ And before we could express our indifference as to the presence or otherwise of Yeats, he would be marching off again, back to the house.

Father had been a master cosmetician. In the skin of the human face he divined what a Renaissance master might have seen on a blank canvas: the possibility of a transcendent beauty. Though the Renaissance master painted to testify to God’s greatness, while my father, one of those agnostics who spends his life doing battle with the God he doesn’t believe in, worked more out of defiance, as if to say, Where you have failed, I succeed; I can lift people up out of your squalid Creation. He had worked with all the greats — Lancôme, Yves St Laurent, Givenchy, Chanel — inventing unguents, balms and lotions to retard the ravages of the sun, to preserve the black sparkle of mascara from rain and tears, to maintain the bloody red kiss of the mouth through a thousand bloody red kisses; to soothe, to rejuvenate, to enhance and restore, in short an act of such great love for the human race that, through his cosmetics, the years could be rolled back and the tale of anyone’s life — written always in lines, scars, desiccation, no matter what they say about the beauty of wisdom and life’s rich tapestry — could be untold.

His death was more than two years ago now: it followed a long, wasting illness which had caused him great suffering. In his last days he had faltered badly. His mind had slipped, and he misused his art. He tried to disguise the desecration the disease had left, and thus, by his thinking, counteract it. ‘There’s no escaping it,’ he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, ‘the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.’ And so the make-up was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half-darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge. For a time the house teetered on the verge of becoming some kind of hospice Cage Aux Folles, everyone flapping about in hysterics and occasionally French accents. It was a mercy when he died and we could restore him in our memories to what he had been before all this mortal vaudeville. I can still hear his last words to me, with a crumbling, crooked finger beckoning me out of the shadows to kneel at his side: ‘Son… the world is cruel…’ he’d whispered. ‘Always… moisturize…’

Although before his death Father’s was the mood that generally prevailed in the house — a sort of brittle otherworldliness, an ethereally edged detachment, as though saying to the world, ‘We will indulge you for the moment, but bear in mind, please, that as soon as Father’s work is done, we will leave you’ — Mother had always been the steelier of the pair, strict about correct behaviour and what she called ‘breeding’. She knew just about everyone there was to know, and was forever flying about to lunches and gallery openings and book launches and dinner parties, with or without Father in tow. In later years especially she became more and more independent of him, and ran the show in the house as he receded from it.

Shortly after his death, however, she too began to disintegrate. It happened gradually but unmistakably, a slow, irresistible shutting-down, until eventually she wouldn’t go out at all, or even take telephone calls. At the same time she exhibited a sunniness that was quite out of character. Bel and I constantly found ourselves cornered in silly, chatty, endless conversations with her. She’d rabbit away to us with gossip about the neighbours or vague plans to take a holiday or work that needed doing round the house — whatever came into her head, like a kind of domestic Reuters, tickering constantly in her armchair in the drawing room. It was a side of her that we hadn’t known existed, that (we presumed) used to be bounced off Father and now came babbling through to us. We didn’t know quite how to respond, and it wasn’t even clear that she was listening when we did, because she was drinking all the time, martinis for breakfast and whiskey sours to see in the evenings, drinking and talking, talking and drinking. Finally, one night, the situation came to a head.

Over the years, she and Bel had developed quite a fiery relationship, which could be ignited by the most trivial things. I didn’t know what lay at the heart of it, but I had my suspicions. Before we were born, Mother and Father had been quite the stars in Dublin dramatic circles — never professionally, of course, but they were certainly well known — and now some kind of showbiz rivalry seemed to have arisen between Mother and Bel. It was funny, because for the first years, when Bel was still in school, Mother had been very encouraging about her acting ambitions. Then, suddenly, she changed. Suddenly — almost overnight — she seemed to resent them; suddenly she was full of needling opinions and advice, far more than Bel was happy with. ‘Every great actress has an inner core, on which all her performances are hung,’ she’d say: most of her pronouncements were along these metaphysical lines. ‘Your trouble, Bel, is that you have still to find your inner core.’

That, I conjectured, was the source of the bad feeling; that was how it was even before Father got sick. In the months that followed his death, it deteriorated to the point where they could create a fight out of almost anything. Mother would accuse Bel of forgetting things, or neglecting things, of selfishness, narcissism, disloyalty, deceit. At first, Bel was so surprised that she simply took it; but after a while, when everything she did incurred a criticism from above, she began to retaliate. Bel’s practice, when she was hurt, was to shout and scream abuse of every kind until whoever it was went away; the fights got ugly very quickly. One night about six months ago, I arrived home to find Bel standing in the hallway with a face quite drained of colour. Her hands were shaking; Mother was nowhere in sight. She refused to tell me what had happened. All she would say was that, after a protracted discussion, Mother had agreed that she wasn’t herself, and that perhaps she needed some time on her own to think. The black car that had passed me in the driveway belonged to the nice people from the Cedars, taking her away for an indefinite stay.

Which is how the house came to be under my care, and whatever Bel said, I had to work hard to keep its inscrutable momentum, to tie the disparate elements together in some semblance of order — Mrs P’s wandering mind, Bel’s pathological insistence on controlling every aspect of her life, the eccentricities or criminal tendencies of whoever she was seeing at the time, and the house itself, the centuries of stonework and timber, that had its own whims and bad moods to be coaxed through. It was I who kept it all ticking over, who stayed in all day just to centre things a little, give them a bit of focus; it was a tough job and no one thanked me for it. I couldn’t be expected to get things right all the time, either; that is, what happened afterwards wasn’t entirely my fault, whatever they tell you.

I rose early the next morning, in spite of all the excitement the night before. The vet was coming to look at the peacocks, which had developed an infestation of some kind, and I had to let him into the garage. The peacocks were my responsibility. Father had looked after them when he was alive — he was the only one who actually liked them and they had been somewhat neglected since. I had had a peacock-flap built into the door of the garage where they lived, so they could come and go as they pleased, and other than embarrassing visits from the vet we didn’t have much to do with each other most of the time. I felt a little guilty about this, but really it was their own fault: they were the most unrewarding creatures, bone-stupid and filthy, with little sense of loyalty or gratitude, and they got infestations at the drop of a hat if they weren’t paid constant attention.

The vet examined each bird and doused them with some sort of powder; then as usual he started getting cross about their living conditions and exhorting me to change their sawdust more frequently to avoid future infections, etc. ‘And feed them, Mr Hythloday, they’re animals, they need to eat every day, not just when you remember —’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said; it was a little early for exhortations and frankly I think we were all secretly hoping that they would die off quickly and we would be rid of them; I can’t think of any other reason that I should have been left: in charge of them, apart from the practical one that the garage was the only area of the house to which Mrs P did not have a key. Even Mother found the peacocks a little over the top, and Bel reserved a special loathing for them — all her Drama friends had turned Marxist in their Sophister year at Trinity and they gave her a fearful time about them.

The reason Mrs P didn’t have a key was that the peacocks shared the garage with what was probably the most beloved of Father’s objets: a 1930 Mercedes, a pristine, bottle-green Grand Prix racer. It had been a gift from the German ambassador, who lived nearby; Father had developed a special hypoallergenic balm for his daughter, who suffered terrible eczema. He’d never driven the car — in fact, none of us was quite sure whether it could actually be driven — but he’d cleaned it obsessively every Sunday afternoon, buffing vigorously with chamois and beeswax for hours on end. When he was finished, he would stand arms folded at the garage door, watching the light spill over the metal as behind him the sun sank below the trees; and these liminal moments, reflecting on the stationary Mercedes, were among the few times when you could say with any degree of certainty that my father looked genuinely happy.

After the vet had gone I wandered into the kitchen, where Mrs P was scooping scrambled eggs on to two plates of soda bread and smoked salmon.

‘He’s still here, then,’ I said.

‘Yes, Master Charles, you must hide from your sister, she is very very busy.’

‘Busy, what’s she busy about?’

‘I don’t know, she get up early too, say where is my scrambled eggs please, I must prepare —’

‘Prepare for what?’

‘I don’t know, Master Charles, but she is very — how you say — stress?’

‘Just a second, Mrs P — who owns those pants?’

‘Pants, Master Charles? I see no pants.’

‘There, poking out of that basket.’ How could she not see them? They were the most enormous underpants I had ever seen.

‘Oh, yes, I see, those pants.’

‘They’re not Frank’s, are they?’ I didn’t like the idea of Frank’s delicates mixing it with mine.

Mrs P rubbed her chin slowly. ‘No, Master Charles, they are a… a present.’

‘A present?’

‘Yes, Master Charles,’ she nodded, ‘a present for you, I buy.’

Surely this wasn’t more penance for last night! Couldn’t she just let it go? This was the sort of thing I meant earlier, about her seeming distracted; these pants, furthermore, could quite comfortably have fitted three or four Charleses in them. ‘That’s a very touching gesture, Mrs P, but really, I don’t expect you to buy me presents. Anyhow, I already have plenty of underpants.’

‘Oh yes, Master Charles, but it’s in shop, is special offer, I think only, ah, is bargain for Master Charles, but then I see, is too big —’

‘Yes, well, not to worry, you can bring ’em back later, or something.’

‘Later, Master Charles, I bring them back to the shop.’

‘That sounds like the best plan, all right.’ I found myself speaking to thin air as she bustled away with the tray. ‘I mean, thanks anyway.’

Whatever they were doing, Bel and Frank kept a low profile for much of the morning, and in keeping with the terms of the pact I refrained from investigating. Passing by her door at one point, however, I couldn’t help but overhear Frank talking about a countess. I wondered what Frank was doing knocking about with countesses, and whether it was anyone I knew, and without meaning to eavesdrop, I lingered there momentarily. But the conversation soon turned to appearing in court, which seemed more in his line, so I continued on my way.

As a matter of fact, I was feeling unusually purposeful after my early start. I passed a fruitful hour at the piano working on the bridge for a song I was composing, entitled ‘I’m Sticking to You’.

You may say that we’re all through: I’ll tell you that I understand;You can cry, and say goodbye,But as you leave I’ll take your hand — For I know that you need to be free,But I can’t let go so easily,A girl like you’s a damn hard thing to leave,So…I’m sticking to youLike gum on your shoe,Like a cheap tattoo, like the Chinese flu,Or a nasty coughYou just can’t shake off — Oh darling, I’m sticking to you.

That was merely a warm-up, however. The double-bill I had fallen asleep during last night had reawoken an idea for a project. I returned to my room and searched amid the clutter under the davenport until I located an old shoebox. Inside, beneath a wasting elastic band, were pages and pages of biography, reviews, snatches of Hollywood gossip, photographs and stills — all of them relating to Gene Tierney, her life and work. I had been assembling these odds and ends for the longest time, without ever quite knowing why. There was something about her that set her apart, that seemed to speak to me. More than any of her contemporaries, her life seemed entwined with the actual, intangible stuff of cinema; every detail had the quality of a fairy tale, or its opposite. The more films I saw, the more cuttings I assembled, the more I felt this vague nagging desire to do something for her — to write something or make something or at least to sort these fragments into some kind of sense.

She was seventeen when she was discovered — backstage on a Warner Bros. set, like a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. She was on a guided tour of the studio with her mother, brother and sister: one stop on a grand cross-country vacation they made that summer, driving eight thousand miles from their home in Fairfield, Connecticut to California and back again (the girls brought so many clothes they had to hitch a trailer to their car). Here, on the set of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, starring Errol Flynn and Bette Davis, the director stopped shooting to come over to tell Gene she ought to be in pictures. It wasn’t just a line: he sent her for a screen test right away, and the following day Warners offered her a contract.

Her father, when he heard the news, was not enthused. He had stayed in New York that summer to work. Howard Tierney was a powerful insurance agent, though, like everybody’s, his fortunes had dipped in recent years. He didn’t think much of Hollywood, and he thought even less of Warners’ $150-a-week contract. In those days, young ladies of breeding — the Tierneys were society — were expected to finish school, marry a Yale boy and live in Connecticut; any actorly tendencies were to be confined to the ball and the country club. But Gene was his favourite, and he told her that if after making her debut she still wanted to act, he would do everything in his power to help her find a job on the Broadway stage.

He was as good as his word. Every Wednesday, instead of going into the office, he and Gene caught the 8.15 train into the city to meet agents and producers. After bit parts here and there, she finally landed a part in a hit play, and Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox, flew out to see her. He signed her up immediately. Her father brokered a deal with Fox worth five times what Warners had offered. He formed a company, the Belle-Tier Corporation (Gene’s mother was called Belle), to represent and promote his daughter and to administer her future earnings.

Gene flew to Hollywood in 1939 on the maiden transcontinental flight: somebody gave her a plaque when she got off the plane. She was handed over to the Fox publicity people to be given the starlet build-up: to be photographed at nightclubs, by the pool, on the beach, to be interviewed and profiled while they thought about changing her name and decided what ‘type’ she was — a Penny Singleton, a Deanna Durbin, it was important to look like somebody else. She began work on The Return of Frank James, with Henry Fonda; she spent night after night alone in the projection room after the shoot, watching films, trying to teach herself how to act.

I spent the next few hours going through my discontinuous notes, trying to put them in chronological order. Reading over them made me sad; perhaps everyone’s life is sad when you know what will happen next. It seemed to me that in every atom of information — in every snippet of biography, in every publicity still — you could descry the whole trajectory of her life and the forces that would destroy her. Even when you went right back to the beginning, to when everything was full of promise and hope, they were there, like traps waiting to be sprung.

By twelve o’clock I was feeling quite fatigued. I put the notes back in the shoebox, pledging to return to them sooner rather than later, and went to see if Mrs P felt like rustling up some crumpets. On my way I passed Bel’s door again, and happened to pause there, to get my bearings, so to speak — only to find them talking about exactly the same thing as earlier on. Frank was on about his countess again, saying that she was very wealthy, and then stopping and coughing for a while, and then saying that she was easy-going morally and had married a man who wasn’t of noble birth, which seemed a bit rich coming from him. He appeared to have developed a speech impediment overnight; he stumbled over every second word and spoke in a maddening, leaden monotone. Bel got upset and started fretting about how she couldn’t sleep. She kept calling Frank ‘Uncle’, which I took to be some kind of odious pet name. She sounded odd, as if her voice were a borrowed dress that didn’t quite fit right.

‘Yes,’ Frank said. ‘Yes. You are quite right. It is dreadful. My God.’

‘Could you go a bit faster?’ she said.

‘Yes yes you’re quite right it’s —’

‘Stop, Frank, maybe we should go back a bit — how about my dear little child —’

‘All right… you’re not just a niece to me, you’re an angel, you’re — Bel, I can’t understand a word this bollocks is sayin, is he tryin to ride her or what? Cos like if he’s the uncle you wouldn’t think he should be tryin to, like, give her lengths.’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said despairingly.

‘Unless,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘he was one of them uncles that’s just like married to her auntie, I s’pose then it’d be fair enough…’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter Frank, you just have to read it — oh, this is hopeless, I’m never going to get this right.’

She was teaching him to read, that was what it was!

‘Bel?’

‘What?’

The poor thing sounded quite exhausted and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Perhaps she was realizing that she’d bitten off more than she could chew.

‘I reckon if you were my niece, I’d want to give you lengths.’

There was a moment of outraged silence; I blushed at the door on her behalf.

‘… Give you a ride on the oul train, like…’

Oh, for shame! I was on the point of bursting in and rewarding his discourtesy with the back of my hand when — to my horror — I heard Bel burst into laughter: ‘Oh, you,’ she said, and there was a creaking of bedsprings. Suddenly I felt queasy; I beat a hasty retreat before things took a turn for the tactile.

*

‘What do we know about Mrs P?’ I said next afternoon, laying my book down.

Across the table, Bel was crimping her eyelashes with some sort of metal contraption. ‘Hmm?’ she said.

‘I mean, she’s been here with us for — what, two years? Three? And yet we don’t truly know what makes her tick.’

‘You’re not going off on one of your paranoid delusions,’ she said, inserting the top lashes of one eye between two steel prongs.

‘No,’ I said impatiently. ‘I just think it odd that someone should live in one’s house for so long and remain a veritable stranger, albeit a cherished and well-paid stranger. Do we — are we giving her enough attention? Should we be, you know, talking to her, and so forth?’

‘What’s brought this on?’ Bel said curiously.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But everybody needs love, though.’

She cackled unflatteringly. ‘Maybe you should have a bed-in?’

‘Well, haven’t you found her a little… unbalanced lately? Take the business with the kidney beans. She keeps making these bizarre gestures of atonement. Yesterday she bought me pants.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything unbalanced about her wanting to make it up to you, Charles, except that it was entirely your fault, of course —’

‘Yes, well, you didn’t see the pants. Anyway, it’s hardly appropriate, is it, buying underwear for one’s employer — unless…’ A terrible thought struck me. ‘Good God, Bel, you don’t think she’s developed some sort of obsession with me? I mean, she’s not trying to seduce me, is she?’

‘I’d say she probably knows all it takes is a half-bottle of Jameson and a Wonderbra…’

‘I’m being serious. There’s other things. The other night — at a quite ungodly hour — I caught her making me breakfast. I can’t fault her dedication, obviously, but she was preparing what looked like a full pheasant. Isn’t that a little strange?’

She raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. ‘Not really. Not for you. Not when you remember your lobster-breakfast phase, and your foie-gras phase, and that atrocious Moroccan concoction —’

‘Yes, yes… But lately I’ve been quite frugal. I take just a croissant and the cricket pages.’

‘Yes, but only because lately you’ve been hungover every morning — do wish you’d curb your drinking, Charles, have you seen the wine cellar? Of course you have, silly question. But it looks like it’s catering for a whole shedful of rakes, not just you.’

‘Well, better a rake than a hoe, as I always say. That’s quite enough, anyway. Kindly return to your maquillage.’

She made a face and began to dab her nose with a powder-puff. Bel always took great care with her appearance: most of her clothes came from charity shops, but her look — penniless Parisienne student circa 1968 — was artfully constructed. I wondered how Frank prepared for a night out. One suspected that once he had hidden the bolts in his neck he was satisfied.

‘I was talking about Mrs P. I simply feel we ought to make more of an effort. She’s getting on and she needs our support. Polite inquiries, suchlike. I daresay she’s got a few rum stories from that place she’s from, what is it, Bosnia?’

‘I daresay.’

‘What’s it like, Bosnia? Do you know anything about it?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Charles, it was only on the news for about three solid years —’

‘Well, which one is it? Is it the one with the chaps with those funny hats?’

‘I can’t believe you. Don’t you know anything about current affairs?’

‘Hardly my cup of tea.’

‘Oh, genocide isn’t your cup of tea, is it?’ she said sarcastically, pulling a miniature pencil over her eyebrows. ‘One wonders whose cup of tea it is.’

‘Well, I don’t recall you doing much about it,’ I retorted. ‘I don’t recall you… collecting bottle-tops, or, or writing stern letters to the UN.’

‘Collecting bottle-tops,’ she said, reaching for an emery board. ‘The great humanitarian. That’s priceless.’

‘Well, it seems to me,’ I objected, ‘that the only reason you know about these things is to lord it over me. In fact, it seems to me that that’s the only reason anyone knows about these things, so they can act superior and have heated discussions in pubs and make everyone else feel guilty for not watching more television.’

‘You go and talk to Mrs P then,’ Bel scowled, ‘and I’m sure she’ll be delighted to share in your informed opinions. Maybe you can swap traditional recipes, you can give her kidney beans à la Charles —’

‘So where’s Frank bringing you tonight, then?’ I said, as the gloves appeared to be off. ‘Badger-baiting? Mud-wrestling? Are you going to drink cans in a field?’

‘The pact!’ she cried, outraged. ‘The pact!’

‘Habeas corpus,’ I countered. ‘The pact isn’t sealed till you fulfil your half.’

‘I called her,’ she protested. ‘She gave me her work number and said she would be delighted to hear from you any time.’

‘Well, that’s no use!’ thumping my hands on the table. ‘You know I hate using the phone.’ In fact, I abhorred all modern gadgetry — gadgets, even the word had an ignoble ring to it. ‘Couldn’t you call her back and tell her to come over here?’

‘What are you, an invalid? I’m not your lackey.’

Maybe Mrs P would call her — but no! The pact had not been honoured, and I was going to make a stand. ‘The pact has not been honoured,’ I told her, ‘and until it is, we remain in a state of war.’

‘War?’

‘So I must insist on joining you tonight as chaperone.’

‘Charles,’ she warned, glaring at me through her black-frosted eyelashes.

‘I insist.’

‘Every day you plumb new depths, do you know that?’

‘Be that as it may,’ I replied peaceably. ‘So where are we going?’

*

‘Go on, Ask Me Hole, you useless fucker!’ Frank was shouting abuse at the top of his voice, between dips into a bag of coagulated chips. ‘Go on, you shit-bag, run, for fuck’s sake!’

I chuckled to myself. My hound, Jasper, had turned out to be a superb brute, and had left Ask Me Hole and the pack trailing in his wake. Bel’s choice, meanwhile, the insipidly named Piece of Lightning, seemed to have given up the ghost entirely.

Ascot it wasn’t, but the proprietors of the dog-track had made a brave effort to lift it above its inherent squalor. There was a well-lit bar with a long glass window from which one could look down on the action; mixed in with the luckless reprobates gambling away their welfare were several groups of normal people. Frank, however, had eschewed the bar as for ‘ponces’, and dragged us out to shiver in the stands with red-eyed, desperate types as whippet-thin as the dogs to whom they had entrusted their fortunes. None of them was quite as terrifying as Frank himself, though, and I was oddly comforted by his presence. They all seemed to know him, anyway: throughout the races a litany of Mickers, Antos and Farrellers approached to pay their respects — ‘All right, Francy, how’s your wobbly bits?’ they would say, or ‘Howya Frankie, get up the yard ya bollocks.’

He seemed to have grown even larger in the open air; beside him Bel looked small and pinched, her eyes glowing sparely like cold blue moons. I don’t know if she was still sulking because I’d insisted on coming along, although Frank didn’t seem to mind, or if she was ashamed of me seeing him in his natural milieu, or if it was something else entirely, but she’d hardly spoken two words all night: she kept her face buried deep in her muffler, and her eyes locked on the track. After asking her twice if she was all right, and offering her a chip, Frank had left her to her silence. We’d discovered I had a hitherto untapped gift for picking winners, and I had risen several notches in his estimation.

‘Who’d you fancy for the next one?’ he said respectfully, ‘Up the Duff or Gordon’s Couscous?’

‘Neither,’ I replied. ‘Look at them there in their pens. These are dogs whose spirits have been snuffed out. They might be fast, but neither of them has the self-belief to actually win. Take a look at Meet the Wife, on the other hand. Note the calm gait, the proud, lofty bearing. A regal dog. That’s where I’d put my money. If you ask me, he’s already won it.’

‘Right — here, Bel, you’ll have a flutter, won’t you?’

‘I don’t have any money,’ came the icy response.

‘I’ll spot you, come on.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said flatly, not looking up.

‘Ah, go on, look, I’ll put a bet on for you. Meet the Wife is Charlie’s tip, I’ll put a fiver on him —’

‘No!’ she exclaimed, suddenly animated. ‘I don’t want Charles’s tip.’ She unfolded her track sheet and studied it, white-fingered in the frosty light of the floods. ‘I want to bet on this one. Number Four.’

‘An Evening of Long Goodbyes,’ Frank read over her shoulder. ‘I dunno, what d’you think, Charlie?’

‘Well,’ I said even-handedly, ‘they’re nice odds if he’s any good at all — Number Four, where is he anyway?’

We scanned the track. The trainers had brought the dogs out and were leading them up and down the grassy area in the middle; sleek coats gleamed, pink tongues quivered athletically as they went through their paces. ‘I don’t see Number Four though — oh.’

Number Four, wearing an unflattering chartreuse jacket, was sitting alone on the chewed-up grass, despondently licking his testicles. ‘Hmm, I don’t know, Bel…’

‘That’s the one I’m betting on,’ Bel said adamantly.

‘Would you not listen to Charlie, Bel, he always wins.’

‘You’re here with me, not Charles, and anyway I thought you were going to spot me, why are you so concerned who I bet on?’ Her jaw thrust out palely against the first flecks of rain blowing down and backward from the roof of the stand.

‘It’s just it has such a stupid name…’

‘They all have stupid names, Charles.’

A barrage of noise from the loudspeaker signalled that the race would be commencing shortly. The dogs were locked into their traps.

‘Yes, but names are important, you have to pay attention to them.’ I said this with a curious certainty: for here at the dog-track, I was finding my senses awakening to the resonances of seemingly superficial things, the intricate spectral machinery of Luck…

‘Here youse, the race is startin,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll put a fiver on him anyway, all right?’

‘I don’t think it is a stupid name,’ Bel said, ignoring him. ‘I think it’s romantic.’

‘It’s a dog, that’s why it’s stupid. I mean, if it was a song or a book or something, that’d be different, but who on earth names their dog An Evening of Long Goodbyes?’

‘Ponces,’ Frank chipped in. ‘You get some posh benders down here fancyin themselves as trainers, as a hobby, like, prob’ly cos they can’t afford a horse. Their dogs are always crap.’

‘Exactly. There’s a time and a place, Bel. Not everything can be theatre —’

‘Why not?’ she said, colouring. ‘Anyway, there’s more to it than winning.’

‘Depends who’s paying for it,’ I returned.

Frank sighed and shrugged and went off to the plate-glass hatch to place the bets — perhaps with a forlorn glance over to the far side of the stand, where his down-at-heel pals merrily drank their cans — leaving us to stare furiously into the thickening sheets of rain, starting as the gun went off and the electric rabbit began another lonely circuit…

After Meet the Wife’s storming victory, Frank took us to a local inn to celebrate. Bel’s mood improved once we had left the track. None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly uncanine trips and stumbles; disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap, when his muzzle came off and, to the boos of the crowd, he abandoned the race to leap over the hoardings and snatch a hot-dog from the hand of a small boy.

The pub was seedy and glum and my white wine arrived in a diminutive bottle with a screw-off lid. My sister joined Frank in a conciliatory Guinness, and as they clinked glasses I looked about at my fellow drinkers. Was I the only one in evening wear? These chaps were a uniformly rough-looking lot, and many of them, I realized, were directing unfriendly stares at me.

‘Quite an ambience, this place,’ I laughed nervously.

‘We come here a good bit,’ Frank told me, ‘don’t we, Bel?’

‘That’s right,’ Bel looking me straight in the eye. ‘It’s our favourite pub.’

I sighed inwardly; I came up against this kind of attitude quite often in my dealings with girls in general, and Bel in particular. They love to flirt with transgression: give them a lout who breaks the odd window and they will pull each other’s hair out for him — without ever diluting or moderating their own careful delicacy, needless to say. Sometimes Bel reminded me of an E M Forster heroine, traipsing about the jungle in a ballgown, with a full set of china and embroidering work for the evenings. What was she looking for, I wondered, in her lonely dallyings outside her own realm; while keeping that same realm locked tightly up inside her.

‘Well, I like it here too,’ I said to annoy her. ‘We should do this more often. I like the company of the working man. Good, honest folk, enjoying their time for reflection after a hard week in the jar factory.’

‘You always get a deadly scrap in here,’ Frank said. ‘Last week me and me mate, right, saw these two scumbags we know, and we go up to them, straight in with the dujj, and bop! I loaf one of them and then I see his mate’s got me mate on the ground and he’s stampin on his head, so I grab this bottle, and smash, right between the fuckin eyes. The both of them fuckin legged it.’

I absorbed this silently.

‘I was just laughin,’ Frank added.

‘Aha,’ I said.

‘That’s one of the cunts there,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘See that cunt sittin at the bar? The poxy little fuck? That’s one of the cunts we done.’

The cunt in question was a short man with a crew-cut and a long fresh scar down his jaw. As Frank spoke he turned his head slowly in our direction. An interchange of baleful stares ensued. Caught in the middle, I rubbed my nose and coughed and was beginning to hyperventilate when, mercifully, the cunt bowed his head. Frank snorted victoriously. Bel let out a worried coo.

‘Ah, don’t mind him,’ Frank assured her. ‘Sure he’s only a cunt. Anyway if there was any bother you’d have Charlie and me to protect you, wouldn’t you?’

‘Ha ha,’ I said, but this was my cue to go. ‘Look, I forgot, I have to, um…’

‘See a man about a dog?’ Frank chortled, the meaning of which escaped me; Bel smirked triumphantly as I put on my topcoat and hastened outside in a cold sweat to hail a cab.

It was a long ride back, and at the door I bade farewell to a sizeable portion of my winnings. But I didn’t care, it was such a relief to be home: I closed the door and leaned back against it thankfully. The rich aroma of cooking floated up to me, and I went into the kitchen, where Mrs P was just that minute taking a tray of cinnamon buns out of the oven, piping hot with the sugar frosting still sizzling on their golden tops. My entrance took her by surprise — in fact she practically jumped out of her skin, only this time the tray acted as ballast.

‘Buns,’ I said, ignoring this. ‘I’ll just pinch one, if I may —’

‘Hmm yes,’ she recovered in time to swerve nimbly away, moving the tray just out of my reach, ‘but Master Charles, they are for your dear mother in hospital.’

‘She won’t mind,’ I said, deftly stepping around to her tray side.

She reversed. ‘Now Charles, please to think of your poor mother.’

‘Look, give me a bun,’ I said bluntly.

Pursing her lips, she proffered the tray. Tearing off a mouthful of delicious steaming sponge, I remembered my plan to save Mrs P’s failing mental health through love. ‘So,’ I said, chewing and swallowing, ‘what’s it like in that place, anyway?’

‘What?’ she said.

‘You know, where you’re from,’ I said, taking another bun. They really were very good. She hadn’t made cinnamon buns in ages.

‘Well…’ she frowned. ‘It was very nice, yes. When I was a little girl. Now, of course, there are many troubles.’

‘But it was nice when you were little, eh?’ I said.

She put the buns on the counter behind her and folded her arms meditatively. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, and her expression quite changed, making her look twenty years younger, her amber eyes taking on a happy, nostalgic glaze not unlike two frosted cinnamon buns. ‘When I was little, we lived in the country. My father was a painter and the house is filled always with the loveliest colours. Each day my sister and I bring wild flowers home for him to paint —’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, as this line of questioning didn’t show much promise. ‘But it’s in a bad way now, is it? Lots of explosions, houses burning down, sort of thing? Like on the news?’

‘Now,’ frowning down at the ground, ‘everything is changed. Like you cannot even think. The explosion may stop, the burning, but… like this plate,’ she picked up one of Mother’s Wedgwood dinner-set from the dresser and traced her finger around the intricate design on the rim, ‘if I drop, is gone. Smash up into little pieces. You can glue it together, but the pattern, that leads into itself at every place, is still broken, disappears for ever. Houses and families, friends who talk at the market, children who sing and shout in the street, men who build, eat sandwiches in sunshine, look at pretty girls — all pattern lost and disappear like —’

‘Well don’t break the plate,’ I said hurriedly, snatching it from her upheld hand. Midnight breakfasts were one thing, but wilful plate-breaking was another matter entirely. Really the woman seemed quite disturbed. Possibly I ought to call the chap at the Cedars to come and have a look at her. ‘What about your family?’ I said, attempting to lead her on to more peaceful topics that might be less of a threat to the crockery. ‘What about them?’

She was about to reply, but halted and regarded me curiously. ‘Why do you ask me this?’

‘No reason. Just, you know, I don’t know much about you. Seems odd, doesn’t it? I mean you live here —’

‘Many, many questions,’ she said.

‘Well, global village, you know, hands across the sea, what —’

She didn’t understand. ‘Many questions,’ she mused to herself, then looking back at me said in an unfamiliar, bitter tone, ‘in Yugoslavia, men come with questions. Is not good, when they come.’

So I was the secret police now, was I? ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you can just answer the question, or not. Tell me about your wretched family or don’t. I don’t care. I’m just trying to be nice. I know all about it already. I watch the news.’

‘You want to know about my family?’ she shouted angrily. ‘Fine. Five years ago, my husband is architect, I give the legal aid, we have two sons in university and a girl who wants to be famous actress. Now there is nothing. House gone, money, we hide and we run —’ She covered her face with her apron. Little cotton ducklings danced up and down where her nose had been.

I hadn’t even known she had children. ‘Where are they?’ I asked, as gently as I could.

‘ — and now I cook you buns!’ Mrs P sobbed, and ran out of the room.

What could I do? I couldn’t follow her; she was the help, after all; her personal life wasn’t really any of my business. Possibly paying attention to Mrs P hadn’t been such a good idea after all. We truly didn’t know the first thing about her — she’d just turned up one day, responding to an advertisement that had, we discovered subsequently, mysteriously appeared in the window of the local newsagent. As it happened, though, Mother had been thinking of getting a new maid, the last one, a fetching little French au pair, having left some months before following a misunderstanding with Pongo McGurks at our Christmas party — perfectly innocent, of course, but you know au pairs. And so Mrs P had joined the household. By then Father was already very sick, and no one had ever got around to asking her about her past. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that she might have preferred it that way.

Pensively I ate another bun, then took the tray up to Father’s study. I ate tentatively; one could no longer be sure of the cooking’s soundness, that was the thing. They tasted fine, but who knew what madness might throw into the mixing bowl? And if not now, what of breakfast tomorrow? Elevenses? Lunch? Tea? Dinner? Supper? And the day after that, the deadly game of Russian roulette would continue, with each spoonful another spin of the chamber…

Deciding a glass or two of wine might steady my nerves, I went back downstairs to the cellar. Hmm. I could see what Bel meant. The stocks really had taken a beating recently. Was it possible that I could have put away this amount on my own? Or could it be that I was getting help from another quarter? I clenched my fists and swore. Frank! I could just see him, laughing soundlessly in the back of his rusty white van, rocking back and forth as he swigged from the neck of a bottle of Marsanne. Or at the dog-track, the green rim poking from the collar of his windcheater as he frittered away the proceeds from our ottoman. Or — a new thought struck me, maybe it wasn’t Frank at all! Maybe Mrs P had drunk the wine! Maybe she was a Secret Drinker, like that laundrywoman of Boyd Snooks’s he’d found asleep in the dog basket! Wouldn’t that explain why she was acting so strangely? Unless of course it was only a symptom of her collapse… Great Scott, we were living in a time bomb!

I grabbed a soothing premier cru, and returned to the study. There was only the ghost of a moon outside, but I left the light off. I sat at the desk, poured a glass and raised it to Father’s portrait — just in case there might be some vestige of his spirit still hanging around among the toxic oils and leads that could give me a sign, point the way out of my quandary. But the glass was filled and emptied until there was nothing left, and I remained in the dark.

I turned to the window and looked out at the Folly, half-hidden by night. The Folly was my idea: it had occurred to me on one of my strolls around the grounds that we hadn’t got one, and as no one else seemed to be doing anything about it, I had called in the builders. That was almost a year ago, but the tower, to be the glory of our estate, was still nowhere near finished. The builders hadn’t been in all week; possibly they were on strike, they were always on strike for one reason or another. Unlike most builders one hears of, these ones were very moral. They would go on strike at the drop of a hat, in support of the nurses or the bricklayers or some other branch of labourer, or often on more general humanitarian grounds. ‘We can’t work,’ the head builder would tell me in the kitchen of a lunchtime, ‘until the UN does something about Indonesia, it’s getting ridiculous’ (‘It is,’ I’d agree, as they went off to picket the Nike shop in town); or they’d down tools on a Tuesday morning, telling me ‘It’s the whole Kurdish thing, Mr Hythloday, it’s unconscionable, and the US is just making things worse’ (‘I know,’ I’d say with a sigh as they gathered up their placards and set off for the Turkish Embassy); and every week the Palestine question took a new turn to prompt a day off.

‘Basically, it would be wrong of us to work while this sort of thing is going on,’ they would argue, and they had a good point; however, the world didn’t seem to be improving and consequently the Folly was going very slowly. I still wasn’t allowed to enter it, and they weren’t sure exactly when it would be safe enough to do so. Yet in a way, I almost preferred that they did it like this; as I looked out at its skeletal form, I could perceive already its proud upsurge, its noble future. ‘Liberty!’ it seemed to cry. And tonight, just as I was about to look away, I saw something: an angelic face peeping out from one of the narrow windows. It was a very beautiful face, painted in the choicest greys and silvers of the clouded moonlight; it saw me, smiled and waved. I waved back, whereupon it disappeared.

I should explain at this point that this sort of thing wasn’t entirely new to me. In recent months I had had quite a few supernatural experiences. My theory was that without Mother here to distract me with her nagging, I was more receptive to communications from the spirit world. I’ve mentioned the eerie feelings I had had watching late-night films — i.e., the unshakeable sense that the films were watching me. Often the Visions were of a more hostile variety. Leaning from the window after a long night, attempting to assuage my spinning brain, I had on more than one occasion seen huge, goblin-like figures, not dissimilar to Frank, lurching about in the shadow of the Folly, or lumbering with silent menace across the lawn. Whether these manifestations had always been resident in Amaurot, or whether they had only arrived recently in some sort of premonitory capacity, I didn’t know. But whichever line you took, this particular Vision seemed propitious. I mean an angel was a definite step up from a goblin, for one thing; symbolically speaking, it surely meant that the Folly (representing me, Charles, and also the family line in general) would continue to rise and transcend the intrusions of the brutish world (symbolized by Frank, if you want).

I tipped an imaginary hat to Father, by way of thank you for the good omen, and returned to my room in a much more optimistic frame of mind, and it wasn’t until I tried to sit down on it that I realized the chair to my writing-desk wasn’t there. ‘What now?’ I said to the ceiling, which had risen to prominence in my new horizontal position.

Picking myself up, I scoured the room for it, and then the landing, but it was nowhere to be seen. This was exasperating. It wasn’t a costly chair, it wasn’t even an attractive chair; it had come down from the attic after its predecessor succumbed to woodworm. Its theft revealed a hitherto unsuspected degree of stupidity in the malefactor. There were lots of nicer things in the house to steal, and it was most bothersome that he should settle on this worthless item just as I intended to sit on it. At that very minute I heard them come in and, sniggering to each other, climb the stairs to Bel’s room. I had half a mind to go and confront him there and then: indeed I had put on my slippers and was halfway to the door when the horrible image of interrupting him and Bel in the middle of something appeared in my mind, and my legs quite failed me. The room began to list, like a ship in a storm; knees buckling, I staggered into the armoire, then back the way I had come as the room tilted to the other side. I lay down on the bed and covered my eyes. This had to end. We couldn’t go on like this; my stomach, for one, couldn’t bear it. Action had to be taken: definitive action.