An Evening of Long Goodbyes

3

The next couple of days were peaceful enough. Bel was out most of the time and she took her Project with her; when at home they tended to stay in her bedroom at their reading lesson. The day after was when all the trouble with the bank materialized, and things really started to cave in: though the morning began so sweetly, with Mrs P waking me just before noon with the telephone on a tray.

‘Hello?’ I said, after establishing that this was not a murderous ruse on Mrs P’s part.

‘Hello,’ an unfamiliar voice said. ‘Charles?’

Heart pounding, I scrambled out of bed to my feet. It was a sultry voice, throaty, at once refined and scandalously suggestive; it could have come from a thousand black-and-white movies — the fallen dame in the bar-room asking for a light, the heiress with the detective parked on a shadowy driveway, the trembling young widow pleading for help from the embittered ex-marine. A monochrome voice that could belong to only one person.

‘Laura,’ I said with a strange, thankful calmness, a sense that one thing had ended and a new one was beginning.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your sister called me last night, she said you had something you needed to discuss with me…?’

Damn that Bel, she would make nothing easy for me. ‘That’s right,’ I said. A moment of blissful tension elapsed.

‘So what is it?’ Laura said.

What was it? I could hardly tell her she’d caught my eye as a twelve-year-old while I was paging through my sister’s yearbook, it might give her the wrong idea, and I didn’t want to jump the gun with any talk of destiny. ‘Um…’ I said.

‘Christabel told me,’ she interjected delicately, ‘you were interested in insurance?’

‘Yes,’ I said, seizing on the words. ‘Yes I am. Very interested. Insurance, in all its, ah, forms, and, um, wonders… it, it enthrals me…’

‘She said you were interested in insuring a vase,’ Laura said slowly, as if guiding someone of limited mental ability.

‘Vases, yes, that’s it, I have a vase and I’d like to insure it. I was wondering if you’d care to come over some night and discuss it? Over dinner perhaps? Say this Saturday?’

She was doubtful at first. ‘Couldn’t you just come by the office?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘because there’s actually more than one vase, you see, in fact there’s several vases, much too many to carry to the office — and anyway I prefer to do business over dinner. That way, ah, no one gets hungry.’

‘Oh,’ she said. There was a long pause. I waited, quietly grinding my teeth and berating myself. That way no one gets hungry — what on earth was I thinking? Was I still crippled by the fallout from the Olé incident? Would I never be able to speak to a woman again?

‘All right,’ Laura broke in. ‘It’s not normally how we do things, but you are Christabel’s brother, after all.’

‘Yes,’ I said fatuously, resisting the urge to jump up and down weeping tears of gratitude. ‘So I’ll see you Saturday? Eightish?’

‘I suppose,’ the voice crackled. ‘Oh, but I’m lactose intolerant, okay? So like, I can’t eat anything with lactose.’

‘Certainly, certainly… don’t give it another thought,’ I said, and replaced the receiver. For a few seconds I remained there in the moment’s afterglow, not yet ready to yield up its immediacy; then, with a whoop, I raised my fist to the air. Victory! True, I hadn’t presented myself in the most flattering light; I may have come across as a tad eccentric, or deranged. But what mattered was that she had accepted. Once she was inside the house, where I controlled all, everything would fall into place: for she would see that here was a world waiting to be remade as she desired — mountains moved, seas emptied, lactose banished to the ends of the earth — it would all be for her, and she would understand straight away that we were meant to be.

I went into the breakfast room to deliver the good news, but found myself confronted by Frank in a state of partial undress on the far side of the table, which rather spoiled the moment. ‘All right bud,’ he greeted me, stretching back in an uninhibited, vaguely post-coital yawn that exposed his flaccid white belly. I shuddered: How could Bel endure to look at that, indeed to feel it slapping greasily against — but no. She had honoured the pact and I had got what I wanted — now the détente must be respected. Swallowing my disgust, I gave him as unhostile a nod as I could manage, and pulled out a chair at the table.

Bel was sitting slumped in front of a pile of opened letters. She looked rather agitated: her cheeks had a high colour and her hair was frazzled as though she’d been tugging at it, and when I asked her pointedly who had eaten all the marmalade she didn’t reply. I changed tack and told her about Laura. ‘Funny that she’s in insurance, though. I hardly thought she’d be the type, did you?’

‘Mmm,’ Bel said, continuing to glower into her pile.

‘Is there any more marmalade?’ Frank said.

‘I mean, bit funny, isn’t it?’

‘Not to anyone who knows her,’ she snapped. ‘Why, what did you think she did?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully, although in my imagination I’d sort of pictured her walking around a big empty house, gazing melancholically out at the rain with a cup of black coffee in her hands and slow jazz in the background, more or less on a fulltime basis.

‘Whatever. Listen, Charles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’ She turned in her seat to look directly at me. From the far side of the table I heard Frank chuckling as he ate his toast.

‘Yes?’ I said, suddenly feeling uneasy.

‘How long, exactly, have you been leaving letters in the String Drawer?’

‘Why… I don’t know.’ I was usually at home when the postman came, so it was generally me who separated the post; taking personal correspondence up to our respective bedrooms and leaving family business in the String Drawer for Bel to look at at her convenience. I didn’t see what she was driving at, nor why her face was taking on that disconcerting brick-red hue. ‘A few months, I suppose.’

‘And were you thinking of telling me at any stage?’

‘Telling you what?’ I said, confused. ‘I mean, it’s your, well it’s sort of your cubbyhole, isn’t it?’

‘What gave you the impression,’ she said, ‘that the String Drawer was my cubbyhole?’

I didn’t like her tone and was about to retort, when I realized that I had no idea what had given me that impression. We must have had some prior arrangement, I thought, racking my brains; although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I had stuck the afternoon post in there one day after some lunchtime drinks and latterly assumed that there had been a prior arrangement. Whatever had happened, the String Drawer was where family-related correspondence had been going more or less since Mother left for the Cedars. Now that I came to think of it, I had wondered recently why Bel was letting it build up so.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well what?’ I said. ‘You’ve found them now, so let’s just be happy with that, and not start blaming each other —’

‘Charles, have you seen these? Do you know what they are?’ She waved a sheaf of the envelopes with the funny red stamp on them. ‘Do you?’

‘Special delivery?’ I hazarded. Frank stifled a laugh. ‘Well how should I know? All that’s your department, that’s always been the way.’

‘One of my many departments,’ Bel said in a scornful aside to Frank. ‘Charles handles Food and Wine, and the rest is left for me.’

‘As long as you keep handlin me,’ Frank leered. She lapsed into a shy smile and I glimpsed her stockinged toe nudging his white sock under the table; I experienced a sensation of utter displacement, as though the earth had shifted on its axis and everything had toppled over. This must have been how Louis XVI felt, I reflected, when he was taken from his prison cell and led to the scaffold, and understood for the first time that this noisy, shouty bunch of nobodies were actually serious about their Revolution business.

‘Well, what are they so?’ I half-shouted, in case she had forgotten I was there.

‘They’re from the bank, Charles!’ Bel shouted back, banging the palms of her hands on the table. ‘From the bank, from the building society, from our solicitors, from other people’s solicitors. But mainly from the bank.’

A cold shiver went down my spine. ‘I wonder what they want?’ I said.

‘What do they ever want,’ Frank mused dolorously. ‘You won’t catch them wastin stamps askin you how you are.’

‘Money. They want money. There’s bills in here going back for months, from the phone company, the electricity, the television people.’ She flung the pages about desperately. ‘But they’re the least of our worries. The big one is the bank. Our mortgage repayments are in arrears, serious arrears. They’re talking about foreclosing.’

This took a moment to register with me. Mortgage, foreclose — these were words with which I was not wholly familiar, rarely being encountered in polite society, except in murmured stories told in the midnight hours, in the same tone one might use for cancer or abortion; horrible things that, outside the confines of one’s demesne, were happening to luckless strangers. ‘I didn’t know we had a mortgage,’ I said.

‘Charles,’ Bel pulled at her hair frustratedly, ‘this Hythloday empire you’re always going on about didn’t come from nowhere. It’s built on credit. None of it’s ours, not really. It looks like Father borrowed an absolute fortune, the sums they’re talking about here are just, just astronomical —’ She sat back in her chair, making slits of her eyes. ‘I knew something like this would happen, Mother’s just let everything go to hell since he died, I don’t think she’s even seen the accountant since the funeral…’

‘But…’ we had company, so one didn’t want to be vulgar, ‘but, I mean — we’re still rich, aren’t we? Can’t we just pay them what they want and they’ll leave us alone?’

Bel got up and started throwing her hands around. ‘What goes on in that fucking head of yours? When you’re not drunk, what’s happening in there?’

‘Well don’t swear,’ I pleaded, not feeling very well.

‘Father was a chemist, Charles, a scientist, not an emperor, not fucking Charlemagne. Even very good scientists don’t get paid enough to afford a place like this, haven’t you ever thought of that?’

‘He had his investments,’ for some reason I felt the need to defend Father here, ‘his assets, that sort of thing —’

‘Well, where are they? Where are they, Charles? I mean I just don’t know what he was thinking. Even if he hadn’t died I don’t know how he was intending to repay it all. And since then we’ve had no income proper and this colossal inheritance tax and all these new demands on the finances, Mother’s clinic and your alcoholism and that ridiculous Folly and we seem to be spending a ton on groceries at the moment for some reason —’

I bit my lip. ‘What are you saying, exactly?’

‘There isn’t enough, Charles. There simply isn’t enough to pay them back.’ She rested her head on the back of her chair, as if overcome by fatigue; sunlight streamed through the Chantilly curtains and picked out golden strands in her hair. At that moment my conversation with Laura seemed to be terribly far away. ‘Right now the only thing I can think of to do is sell off some of our shares. I mean that’ll get us some time, at least.’

‘Ah, yes, the shares,’ I said neutrally.

‘Mine’re still all bound up in trust, so we’ll have to use yours,’ she blinked at me with red eyes. ‘We can split the difference later.’

‘Right. Good.’ I decided that now was not the best time to tell her about my run of bad luck at the baccarat table a few months ago. Instead I put on a false smile and told her not to worry. ‘They’re reasonable people, bankers,’ I said. ‘And we’ve given them loads of money over the years. They must have forgotten it’s us, that’s all. I mean I’m sure no one ever lost a house because they’d put the letters in the wrong cubbyhole; that’s absurd. I can go and talk to them today. It’s a storm in a teacup, you’ll see.’

‘Ha,’ remarked Frank, who had been occupying himself with an extensive excavation of his aural cavities.

‘What, “Ha”? What do you mean, “Ha”?’ I rounded on him; the whole thing was his fault, sort of.

‘Me ma was plagued by them fucken banks her whole life,’ he said into his teacup. ‘Never had a penny to her name but they’d be sniffin after it — she used to have this joke, what’s the difference between banks and the Devil?’

Bel and I looked at him.

‘In Hell they won’t cut off your heatin,’ he said.

‘Is that a joke?’ I screeched at last.

He shrugged. ‘It’s about as funny as banks get,’ he said.

‘Well I’ll go and talk to them,’ I said, and left them to their sock-rubbing, which might calm Bel down at least. I didn’t like her to get upset. She might not have looked it, but she was a ferocious worrier: she could tie herself into knots over the most inconsequential matters. She had always been like this, even as a small girl. When other children were busy believing in Santa Claus and Tooth Fairies, she became obsessed with the idea that every time Father and Mother left the house they would never come back. She never said anything to them; but as soon as she saw the car pull out of the driveway, she’d go to her room, sit very still and think Positive Thoughts about them until they had safely returned. That was just one instance of what was even then a broad spectrum of worrying. She also worried about losing things. She worried about things breaking or running out. She worried about robbers and dangerous drivers. She worried about what would happen to her dolls when she died. She had a whole host of worries on behalf of the animal kingdom — what would they eat in the winter, where would they sleep if people kept putting buildings everywhere, whether they would be all right crossing roads by themselves. All these were as nothing, however, compared to the Herculean bout of worrying provoked by the arrival of our one and only household pet, not counting the peacocks, which I didn’t: a springer spaniel, a loving if excitable fellow who in the end wasn’t around long enough even to be given a name.

Almost as soon as it was in the door, Bel diagnosed the anonymous dog, unsuspectingly brought home as a gift for us by Father, as suffering from a dizzying array of existential terrors. It was, in retrospect, a clear case of transference: as if the appearance of the dog had allowed her to open the floodgates, so that all the dread that had accumulated inexplicably within her small soul could come pouring out. For the two weeks it lasted in Amaurot, she devoted herself to acting as mouthpiece for the anguished dog. She stayed up night after night, not sleeping, pacing around the house with the dog trotting amiably at her heel, relating its woes to anyone who would listen. She worried that it was lonely. She worried that it was hungry. She worried that it was being over-exercised, or not exercised enough. She worried that its collar itched. She worried that it might start thinking it was a human but feel bad because it had fur instead of skin. She worried that it was unfulfilled. She worried that it felt naked, missed its parents, was afraid of the dark, fretted about only being able to speak in barks, was ashamed of its fleas, didn’t understand why it had to sleep in the pantry. At school, she continued to voice her fears, which separation from the dog only made worse. Before long, the other children in the class were so upset that the teacher was spending the whole day just trying to reassure them as to the welfare of our pet. Finally, one afternoon, the school principal rang Mother up and suggested in a weary voice that something really ought to be done; before Mother could reply the phone had been passed over to a tearful Bel who asked Mother to put her on to the dog, please — and that’s when Mother snapped. When we came home that day the dog was gone. Mother wouldn’t say where; only that it had been ‘relocated’. She refused to discuss the matter any further.

Strangely enough, Bel received this news quite calmly, and soon she seemed to forget about the dog entirely. Maybe it had served its purpose. Her anxiety had miraculously disappeared; she started attending Speech and Drama classes after school, and immediately that was all she could talk about; she grew, romantic turbulences aside, into a happy teenager. I suppose that for all of us that was a sort of Golden Age. The family prospered, everything seemed secure; I shocked Father by gaining captaincy of the school cricket team, and thanks to the unpopularity of that sport in Ireland we even won a few matches.

Bel was in her late teens when she started acting up again, just as I began my short career in university. The doctor called them Hysterical Episodes. For a period of about seven months she suffered these Episodes almost every other week. They were quite terrifying to witness: shaking and tears and vomiting and voices; she would lie on the bed sobbing and begging us to help her without being able to tell us how, what was the matter, what these forces were that were attacking her. The doctor hadn’t been overly concerned; by now he was more interested in Father, whom he had sent into the hospital for tests. Bel’s kind of instability was quite common in girls of her age, he told us. It was little more than a rather extreme manifestation of adolescent confusion — a natural side-effect of growing up, complicated by her propensity to doubt and over-analyse, by her volatile relationship with Mother, and Father’s waning health. The best way to look at it was as a period of adjustment; some people adjust to the real world more easily than others. He tried her on different dosages and different medications, he gave her time off school. Eventually she was back to normal, and everyone was pretending it had never happened. Father’s condition had spiralled downwards, the house was full of white coats and strange machinery — there simply wasn’t space to keep worrying about Bel too.

But I couldn’t forget. Sometimes, if we were having a fight, or if something had upset her, I would think I saw it — the hysteria, the terror — shivering, eclipse-like, at the edges of her, waiting for its moment. It seemed to me that wherever it came from, it was too fundamental a part of her now ever to truly go away. That was why I badgered her about her boyfriends, that was why the unsettled, mercurial mood she’d been in lately bothered me, like that curious gathering of electricity an epileptic feels before an attack. She might have put it all behind her — I knew she hated being thought of as delicate, or precarious — but to me the memory was still fresh. The fear, that was what I remembered primarily: those horrible mornings of convulsions and terrorized, unfocused weeping, and in her eyes the fear so huge and formless that it robbed us both of speech.

The bank was situated about a mile and a half away, in the middle of a shopping centre. I set out to see the manager that very afternoon. I was sure Bel was making more out of this business than she needed to, but I knew I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until it was sorted out; also, it provided a useful cover for another matter I needed to take care of. Pact or no pact, furniture was still disappearing; I wanted to see if I could find some background information on our Golem friend.

I rarely ventured that far from home. Bel took this as another instance of my ‘feudal outlook’. ‘You see yourself as Lord of the Manor,’ she’d say, ‘and these people are your vassals, and you don’t want to rub shoulders with them in case you catch something.’ But that wasn’t it at all. Watching from the back seat of the cab as lofty sea-roads and shady avenues gave way to the encircling suburbs, I was gripped — as I always was — by a sense of claustrophobia and threat. The shopping centre frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent’s whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression: seeming to be skipping whole rungs of the evolutionary ladder, so that pleases and thank-yous had gone south long ago, and I expected to go in some day soon and find them gnawing bones and worshipping fire. As vassals I doubt they’d have been much good to me.

The newsagent’s, however, was where I was headed now: debouching from the cab on to newly laid faux cobblestone and gingerly edging my way through a Walpurgisnacht of middle-aged women with bleached hair, mock-leather jackets and yodelling children. Across the road, a huge billboard dominated the skyline. ‘IRELANDBANK: WE PLEDGE UNTO YOU,’ it said. ‘100 WAYS IN WHICH WE ARE MAKING LIFE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS BETTER AND BETTER.’ Which seemed to augur well for me and my predicament, but then beneath the letters was a picture of the amassed Irelandbank staff, waving mirthlessly up at the camera. There were thousands of them, a silent army clad in uniform blue jackets, the appalling tailoring of which made them all the more menacing.

The window of the newsagent’s was cluttered with dayglo flashcards; I scanned down through advertisements for nannies, lawnmowing, kittens, maths grinds, until I found what I was looking for.

The All-Seeing Eye.

Marital Infidelity? Extortion?

Conspiracies against you in the Office?

The All-Seeing Eye Sees All.

Have your suspicions confirmed

and your mind set at ease.

Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.

I took down the number and went in search of an unvandalized callbox.

‘Hello?’ a cautious voice answered, low and mumbly as if unwilling to divulge the slightest hint of identity.

‘Is that the All-Seeing Eye?’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ the voice said.

‘My name is Charl—’

‘No names!’ the voice interrupted urgently.

‘Fine then, my name is… is C, and I need your help.’

‘Marital infidelity? Extortion? Conspi—’

‘No, no, none of those. There’s a chap in my house stealing my furniture.’

‘Oh,’ the All-Seeing Eye said. ‘Are you sure it’s not marital infidelity?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s my sister’s boyfriend.’

‘Ah,’ it said salaciously. ‘Want a few pictures, do you?’

‘No, look here, Eye, are you going to help me or not?’

‘Come to my office,’ the Eye said. ‘118, The Savannah. Come alone. The All-Seeing Eye takes cash and all major credit cards.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Photo development is extra, though, and the All-Seeing Eye reserves the right to hang on to negatives it likes…’

He gave me directions to his office, which was in fact more of a small semi-detached house in an estate of identical semi-detached houses not far away. I rang the doorbell, and after a series of unlocking noises, the door was opened by a familiar figure: none other than our dilatory postman, the one who smelled of gin and only delivered post when he felt like it.

‘What!’ I said.

‘C?’ he said.

‘But you’re the —’

‘No names,’ he said, and after a furtive look around motioned me inside. The hallway was filled with great billows of steam, into which he quickly disappeared. I followed as best I could and arrived in an even steamier room, where after stumbling around blindly for a moment I bumped into something. It emerged presently as a table, with a postbag of mail sitting on it. On either side of the bag was a pile: one of opened envelopes, the other presumably their former contents — hundreds of sheets of handwritten and printed correspondence.

Gradually, through breaks in the vapour clouds, I was able to piece together the rest of my surroundings. We were in a kitchen. The windows were fogged with condensation: on the cooker and counter, several kettles and saucepans were on the go at once, with sealed envelopes resting over each on makeshift tripods of Blu-Tak and cocktail sticks.

‘Tea?’ he said from somewhere.

‘What’s going on here? Is this people’s post?’

‘I’ll put on a kettle,’ the postman said, abruptly appearing and disappearing again into the fog. I sat down at the table and looked through the damp pages. How is Uncle Harold’s new leg?… We regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful… These girls are beautiful and discreet… Dear Bazzer, Mother died today…

‘I mean, what are you doing?’ I asked in disbelief.

‘Well, I suppose it started as a hobby,’ the postman said over his shoulder, ‘and then it grew into something more. I like finding solutions to problems. Answers. Life is full of questions. Only the privileged few have access to the answers.’

‘But you can’t —’

‘It’s really amazing what people will say in their letters,’ he mused.

‘And this… this heinous intrusion into people’s privacy is what you call detection, is it?’

‘You may not like it,’ he replied, setting a cup in front of me and sitting down, ‘but it means that I can give you a Gold-Seal Guarantee of Success.’

‘Hmm,’ I said.

‘Let’s talk business,’ he said. ‘Actually, when I saw you at the door there I thought you must have come about your mortgage difficulties.’

‘Did you,’ I said.

‘Yes, thought you might have been wanting to fake your own death or something. Not unusual, people in your position.’

‘Not that it’s any of your concern,’ I told him haughtily, ‘but the mortgage is a minor matter, a simple crossed wire. As a matter of fact, I’m just on my way to see my bank manager and sort it out.’

He smiled at me indulgently. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Of course you are. I suppose the repo men won’t be needing this, then.’ He plucked from the pile a single sheet headed with the Irelandbank logo, a sort of euro-sign-meets-swastika affair, and passed it to me. It was addressed to a debt-collection agency, stating that the bank now had legal authorization to take ‘the next step’ and that the collectors could begin shortly with their ‘recovery’.

‘Quite so,’ I swallowed. ‘A trifle.’

‘So you’ve come about your sister,’ he said, grinning.

‘Yes — listen here, Eye, kindly remove that lascivious expression when discussing my sister, if you please.’

‘All right,’ he said amiably. ‘Fine-looking girl, though. Shame that company didn’t take her on. I’d have thought she was a shoo-in.’ He exhaled ruminatively, crossed an ankle over his thigh, fiddled about with the hem of his trouser-leg. ‘Takes the wind out of your sails, a knockback like that,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ His omniscience was starting to irk me; it was like meeting the Wizard of Oz or something. ‘And I don’t want to know. I’m not especially pleased about taking this course of action, and I’d appreciate it, Eye, if we could keep to the matter at hand and you would at least pretend not to know all there is to know about my family.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And another thing, don’t you have a name? I can’t keep calling you “Eye”, it’s confusing.’

‘Okay.’ His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his jaw. ‘Call me… MacGillycuddy.’

‘All right then.’ Carving a niche of air for myself from the steam, I told MacGillycuddy the whole story of Frank’s sudden and mysterious appearance in my house: his murky past and equally murky present, his baffling success with Bel, the disappearance of various household items, the sinister rusty white van.

‘I don’t quite get why the van bothers you so much,’ MacGillycuddy said.

‘Because no one knows what’s in it, that’s why.’ I told him about the time Frank was driving us to the greyhound race, when I had surreptitiously managed to peek into the back and seen dimly, through the smeared grille, what looked like mounds and mounds of garbage.

‘That’s unusual, right enough,’ MacGillycuddy admitted.

‘It’s more than unusual. The man’s a sociopath. I mean I don’t know if you’re familiar with Yiddish folklore at all, but — well, perhaps we shouldn’t get into that now. The sad fact is that my sister has a thing for sociopaths and if I don’t keep an eye on him he’ll run off with the whole house and her to boot.’

‘So you want me to…’

I told him that I wanted him to find out everything he could about Frank: who he was, what he did, what had happened to my chair. ‘Basically, anything incriminating,’ I said.

‘No bother,’ MacGillycuddy said. ‘Child’s play. Give me twenty-four hours.’ Having scribbled out my number and a cheque for his retainer, I rose to leave.

‘Say hello to your mother for me,’ he winked. ‘Good to have her back.’

I was tempted to pursue this, but the sight of his eagerly rubbing hands was enough to warn me away from opening any more Pandora’s boxes. I wished him good day, and opened the door.

‘And the repo men!’ he called after me.

I made my way back to the shopping centre sunk in thought. So they’d already called in the repossessors: that seemed rather unsporting of them. This interview might not be the formality I’d expected. I took a deep breath, and stepped through the doors of the bank.

It was a long, windowless chamber, with a rather elegant fan depending lifelessly from the low ceiling. A painted wooden counter ran down the left-hand side, bearing pens on chains, transaction dockets, leaflets about car loans, tracker bonds, inscrutable investment schemes. To the right, beside a small row of uncomfortable chairs, a louvred door led off to another room to which one went for cash, lodgements and so on. Two pictures hung side by side on a prominent area of the wall. One was an anaemic landscape of a soothing sun glinting through trees. ‘RELIABILITY,’ it said underneath in big, sincere letters. The other was somewhat more fanciful, depicting a tropical island with dolphins frolicking soothingly just offshore. ‘QUALITY SERVICE,’ this one said.

At the back of the room, a man in a badly-tailored blue jacket was smiling at me from behind a desk. His arms were folded and he was sitting at the exact midpoint between his computer and a fake-looking potted plant. He looked rather as if he had been sitting like that all day, smiling placidly; a sign saying ‘Information’ hung above him, with an arrow pointing down at his head.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said pleasantly, when he saw I had finished my examination of the dolphin picture.

‘Ah, hello,’ I replied with a whimsical brightness, as if I were just passing a few idle minutes on my way somewhere else.

‘How can I help you today?’ he inquired. He was a nondescript-looking fellow, with a kindly, roundish face and a little hyphen of a mouth.

‘Oh, just a small thing,’ I said breezily, waving a couple of red-stamped envelopes at him. ‘Just a few final-notice things we seem to have got by mistake.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Mind if I have a quick look at them?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’

‘Why not take a seat,’ he said, ‘Mr…?’

‘Hythloday — Charles,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

He scanned through the pages expressionlessly while I whistled something in keeping with the relaxed but respectful mood we had established, and tried to imagine what he might look like away from his desk — cheering on a boat race, or frowning thoughtfully over a jar of pickles in the supermarket. He slid his chair over to the computer and began to tap at it. He tapped for a good three minutes. ‘Oh,’ he said at one point, briefly pulling back from the screen. I leaned casually over to one side but I couldn’t make out what was on it. I continued uneasily with my whistling.

‘Well, Charles,’ he said eventually, ‘it says here that we haven’t received any mortgage payments from you in over six months.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said in a businesslike manner that might make this sound like an explanation.

‘It looks like we’ve been trying to contact you about it for some time,’ he continued, still gazing into the computer screen. ‘Didn’t you get our letters about legal action?’

He was trying to keep up his friendly tone but I could tell that he was hurt, as though I had deliberately misled him. I explained that the letters had been misfiled in the String Drawer but this didn’t cut much ice.

‘The String Drawer,’ he repeated to himself, labouring to understand.

‘It’s not just string,’ I expanded, ‘there’s other stuff in there as well: thumb-tacks, Sellotape, that sort of thing.’

‘Yes,’ he said, placing his hands on the top of his head and leaning back his chair. I felt like a heel. ‘Well, Charles, that could happen to anyone. But unfortunately that doesn’t change the fact that we have a bit of a problem here.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes — unless, of course, you’re going to tell me that you have in your wallet the sum of —’ He named the sum with a jocular laugh — ‘in cash, ha ha’ — but his eyes implored me to give him something, not to let a dreary, mundane old debt scuttle the friendship that was budding so beautifully between us. My heart sank a little more. Coincidentally, the figure he’d named bore some resemblance to the amount I’d lost playing baccarat that spring, on somebody’s yacht one day with Pongo and Patsy and Hoyland Maffey. How insubstantial it had seemed then, in the simmering below-deck; after too many Kahluas and with Patsy pressed against my arm, when she wasn’t outside playing some juvenile hide-and-seek game with Hoyland, that is — it hadn’t seemed to matter whether I won or lost; she’d clutched my elbow and laughed and cheered me on, little pearl earrings shining out of her ebony bob; and the cards all looked the same anyway, smiling in the light that washed in through the picture-window, as the croupier swept up another pile of chips…

‘There must be something we can do,’ I said.

The bank official chewed his ballpoint pen pessimistically. ‘Charles, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘The family has assets, though — I mean it’s not as if we’re down to our last few pennies. This is just a temporary thing. Couldn’t we sort out a… a loan, or a moratorium or something? At least until I can talk to Father’s accountant, and he can… he can divert funds from our dividends…’

The bank official looked up at me with a weary little smile; he knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘that would be all well and good. I would love to do that for you, Charles, and if it were personally up to me, you’re right, arrange a moratorium, that’s exactly what I’d do. But you see, I have to look after the bank’s interests too.’ His eyes looked earnestly into mine, hoping that I would understand. ‘It’s so far behind, and the sum is so large, and — though I personally believe you do — on paper I can’t see that you have the collateral to pay this off. I want to take care of this for you, Charles, but I have to make sure that the bank gets a square deal.’

I swallowed, looking helplessly back at him. Didn’t he think he could trust me? Did he think we were some crowd of snaky conmen, trying to take advantage of the bank’s good-heartedness? In a fatuous slip of mirror beside the fake-looking potted plant I caught a glimpse of my hands wringing, and wondered curiously whose, what they were.

‘The thing is, Charles — you see, the mortgage as it stands seems somewhat irregular. That’s what really bothers me.’ The pen went back in his mouth.

‘Oh yes?’ distractedly mopping my brow.

‘Yes. You see, normally, Charles, how a mortgage works is that when the first party passes away — Mr Ralph Hythloday, that’s — that was your father, I assume?’

I nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ the bank official said quietly.

‘Thank you,’ I said. For a moment we reflected in silence.

‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘what usually happens is that, on the occasion of the borrower’s death, the life insurance is put towards outstanding debts. For some reason, that hasn’t happened in your father’s case.’

‘No?’ The atmosphere in the room was unbearably close; I glanced hopefully up at the fan.

‘No… and then when I go back further, I find that the original structure of the loan was… well, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The payments are totally irregular. And they come in from somewhere new practically every time. Look,’ turning the screen round to me, ‘this is just in the last four years. Instead of us simply debiting your father’s account, the money’s paid in by this company on this date, and a different company here, and then there’s nothing for months, and then this lump sum from this bank which I have to say I’m not familiar with — do you know who any of these people are?’

‘Assets?’ I croaked weakly. My head was spinning and I could make no sense of the numbers dancing up and down on the screen. Why wouldn’t he let me go?

‘I don’t know who set this up,’ he was saying, ‘but it’s most irregular, most irregular.’

‘So what should I do?’ I said feverishly, simply to bring this to an end. ‘You can’t give me a loan, you say, and you can’t give me any more time.’

He looked at me with a sorrowful, stoical expression. ‘Charles, my hands are tied,’ he said. ‘If you can find your family’s accountant, and if he can make head or tail of this — well, then, maybe we can work something out. But as it stands… the debt will have to be called in.’

‘Meaning the house will be repossessed?’

‘That’s the standard operating procedure, yes.’ He brooded behind a steeple of fingers.

‘I see.’ That was the bottom line. I reached behind me for my jacket and got to my feet. ‘Well,’ I said, reverting to the breezy style I had begun with, as if none of this were really important anyway.

‘Yes,’ the bank official followed suit, ‘thanks for dropping by.’ He stretched over the desk to shake my hand.

‘Thank you,’ I said without quite knowing why, and made my way to the door.

‘Oh, Charles?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why not have one of these?’ He took something out of a drawer and held it out to me.

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking it. It was a keyring. The plastic tag had the Irelandbank logo on one side, and the legend ‘We Pledge Unto You’ on the other; with a metal ring attached to it on which, presumably, I could hang the keys of the house I no longer owned.

‘You’re welcome,’ he said warmly. ‘Mind how you go.’

I saw Mrs P as I passed the supermarket, deep in conversation with a foreign-looking woman. The woman wore an identification badge and was selling magazines. ‘Mine are in one little room,’ she was saying, ‘above a butcher’s shop, we pay and pay, and when he say, oh, police, is trouble, we pay more —’ I covered my face with my hand and slipped by them, breathing stinging, shallow breaths. What was happening? What did they mean, those irregularities? Could it really be so complicated that they couldn’t begin to sort it out? Because it seemed to me to be so obvious; it was Father, he had assets, there was plenty of money, there had to be — Gasping, I leaned against a mock-Corinthian pillar, flooded by nightmarish images: hordes of machine-stitched blue suits pouring into the house, dismantling it with their dead Golem eyes, rebuilding it as a luxury aparthotel, a leisureplex, the eighteenth hole of a cross-town golf course…

There was nothing more I could do here, however. I detached myself from my pillar and, deciding a walk home might calm me, I headed up Ballinclea Road and through the iron gates of Killiney Hill Park. But instead of calming me, the pathways — my pathways, which I had trodden a thousand times — seemed to curl indifferently away from me; the trees bowed with the wind like elders shaking accusing heads, the birds screeching and yammering as if raising an alarm. And the mountains, and the sky, and the dark gorse and grey-blue rolling sea, they remained steeped in the clouded afternoon, withholding their beauty from me as from an undeserving passer-by.

Soon it began to rain, and by the time I got to Amaurot I was thoroughly soaked. Ascending the driveway, I saw the house appear through a shifting veil of precipitation. Already I seemed to feel its weight on my shoulders. ‘I can’t do it!’ I whispered inwardly. ‘You’re too heavy!’ And the house, even as I got closer, retreated further back into the rain.

It was pouring now. I went into the kitchen in search of a towel. From the window I saw Mrs P making her way in the direction of the clothes line, tucked discreetly in the lee of the Folly, with a basket of washing. Covering my head with one of Bel’s theatre monthlies, I chased out after her. ‘What are you doing?’ She froze, her shoulders leaping up around her neck. ‘Give me that basket,’ I said, taking hold of it. ‘You can’t hang clothes out in the rain.’ She handed over the basket without a word. I looked through the contents — blankets, towels, sheets, once again those fearful underpants, capacious with dread and mystery — everything already dried and pressed. ‘Go inside,’ I directed sternly. Mrs P looked as if she were about to cry. ‘Go inside and go to bed. You’re not well. I’m suspending you from your duties until we get you a doctor.’

And then she did start to cry. I set the basket down on the ground and, taking her arm in mine, led her back to the house. She sobbed and sobbed and as we walked over the wet grass I felt for all the world as though I was leading a prisoner to the scaffold. In the kitchen I sat her down and made some tea.

‘What’s wrong?’ I demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ But she just waved her hands in front of her face, before giving way to a fresh stream of tears.

I stood at the sink and looked out at the rain and the sky, the same stolid grey as the bricks of the tower. Suddenly I felt smothered in there, as I had in the bank. ‘I need to think,’ I said, going to open the back door. ‘Will you please go and get some rest?’

Mrs P looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks, but she leapt up and dragged me back from the door. ‘Please, Master Charles, don’t go back outside!’

‘I have to get the basket,’ I said. ‘The clothes are getting wet.’

But she didn’t hear. ‘It rains,’ she kept saying, ‘you catch cold.’

‘All right, all right…’ sitting down again at the kitchen table. ‘Happy?’

‘Good.’ She wiped her cheeks and pretended to be cheerful again. ‘Now, everything is good. Here we are, safe and dry. I make you hot chocolate and you watch television, yes?’

Try as I might, I couldn’t persuade her to lie down until she had installed me on the chaise longue, with a cup of cocoa resting on the floor where the table had been. As luck would have it, there was a movie on: The Killers, aka A Man Alone, handsome old Burt Lancaster murdered in flashbacked increments by faithless Ava Gardner. I eased my head back and tried to immerse myself in that world, the bare dark apartment where Lancaster sat and smoked, waiting for the assassins to come. But I couldn’t do it. I was thinking of the impossible mortgage, the exhausting interview with the bank official. It seemed to me that it all came back to Frank somehow: that after all these years, all Father’s fortifications, one little cancerous cell of reality had at last slipped through; and now, inexorably, it was metastasizing.

Bel and Frank entered with a great commotion an hour later. Frank was holding his jaw, across which a big purple bruise was spreading. Bel fussed about him, bringing him iodine and cotton wool from the bathroom.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Uh ugh,’ Frank mumbled, ‘or ucksh ake.’

‘It was the cunt,’ my sister translated. ‘Do you remember, Charles, the cunt from the pub?’

Remember? The cunt’s knobbly white face had been etched into several of my many nightmares in recent times. Bel explained that he and his mates had followed Frank home from work and ambushed him on his way to meet her; indeed, had not the postman been making a tardier round than usual it might have gone worse for Frank. As it was, Bel had had to take him to Outpatients to get his ribs taped up.

‘I gugga figh ag ugh,’ Frank expostulated now, making to rise from his chair, ‘ah ick izh ughing ead ih.’

Bel pushed him back. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she told him. ‘It can wait. You’re in no condition to kick anyone’s head in.’

His eye rolled whitely, like a fallen horse’s: and for a split second, before the Golem dead calm reasserted itself and he sat back, it was disconcertingly like looking into a mirror. I recognized the same besieged humanity that shrieked banshee-like through my own heart; and for that split second I felt a sympathy for the poor beast, and wondered if it might not be better if we were all of us Golems: obedient, unquestioning, impervious to pain.

I left them and went to the breakfast room, where the various threats and notices still lay on a corner of the table. I seated myself and read them through with masochistic glee. The principal players were numerical: account numbers, rates of interest, amounts outstanding, dates from long ago. These were the figures whose tale was spun over the headed pages; we were mentioned in passing, in the third person, given only bit-part, transient-sounding roles as ‘occupants’.

I read the last one, and as I laid it face-down on the table I experienced a sensation of utter dislocation, as if all this were happening light-years away, in a parallel, contradictory universe. But it was succeeded by a kind of a supercharged hereness, a phantasmagorical awareness of my familiar surroundings: the heavy drapes hanging drowsily, the quietly babbling patterns of the wallpaper, the grandfather clock and the tea-chest resting innocent in their shadows like sleeping children about to be orphaned. I thought of Amaurot and all the other great houses, those great hearts that strained now to keep beating with the thin blood of modernity, built for a simpler time when men wore hats and ladies wore gloves, silver was polished for guests, fires roared in hearths…

In the hallway, Frank was gibbering incoherently into the phone, like a chimpanzee general declaring a state of emergency. Through the door, Bel was sitting off to one side with her chin resting on her hand. I looked at her, and looked back out at Frank and all of those who had come before him, and suddenly had an inkling of her desperation to find a place for herself in this world.

‘Mother’s being discharged next weekend,’ she said wanly, waving a letter from the Cedars.

‘Just in time for the auction,’ taking a seat beside her. ‘Seems appropriate.’

‘No luck with the bank, then?’

‘Well, you know, we hammered a few things out. They seemed quite adamant about getting their money back, though.’ The television was on with the sound down: rockets fired mutely across a shaky desert. ‘They did say that if we could speak to our accountant he might be able to untangle this a little.’

‘I’ve tried to find our accountant. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth. And Father’s files are impossible. They’re like code. You never come across the same name twice. I don’t even know if they are the right files.’

‘Mother would know, I suppose.’

‘Oh God,’ Bel covered her face with her hands, ‘the horror of bringing Mother into this…’

‘Well, something’ll turn up.’ I tugged gently at her hair. ‘Maybe we have a rich uncle we don’t know about.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much of a plan,’ she said dismally, picking at a patch on her cords. ‘This is horrible, Charles. Ever since this morning I’ve been feeling like a trespasser, I feel like I’m sleeping in someone else’s bed, and eating with someone else’s cutlery. Every time I close a door it seems to echo almost for ever. And now Mother’s going to come back and make it look like it’s all our fault, and go on about how we’ve let Father down and we’ve thrown away our birthright and all that —’

‘Oh, you always take her too seriously…’

‘She will, that’s what she thinks, Charles, no one’s good enough to live here, we’re all just flailing about since Father died.’ She worked loose a thread and left it and sipped her brandy. ‘I wish it would all just, just end. I’m so sick of living my life at the behest of this stupid house, it sucks the soul out of you, makes you its slave, that’s how it stays alive…’

‘Well, of course it’ll end, Bel, we’ll find a way out, you’ll see.’

‘I don’t mean this mortgage stuff. I mean, everything.’ She kicked her feet out in front of her. ‘I can’t keep living here, Charles. I can’t keep living like this. It’s too weird. It’s not life, can’t you see that?’

‘Life,’ I said bitterly.

‘Because even if we’d sold some of our antiques — that ridiculous car, for instance, all it does is gather dust, I find myself feeling sorry for it locked up out there — I mean if we’d gone about it correctly, I’m sure we could have paid them off. But… but the way everything’s turned out, don’t you think that maybe this is supposed to happen? Because places like Amaurot aren’t supposed to exist any more —’ She paused suddenly, bowing her head to gaze down into the brandy glass swirling in her left hand, as though daunted in spite of herself by the magnitude of what she’d just said; then with an impetuous sweep of her hand she went on: ‘It’s like some story that’s gone wrong and refuses to end, and it’s been like this for so long — it’s so long since things made sense and all we do is try and pretend it’s the same as when we were little children. That’s not the way life should feel, Charles, not when you’re young. Father dies, Mother goes loolah, now this — it’s like the world is trying to tell us something. Do something, it’s saying, get out of there while you still can…’ Her gaze lifted, wandered, alit on the glass frieze of Actaeon, beyond which Frank paraded up and down the hallway. ‘And it’s right. Maybe you can live in this dreamworld, Charles, without anything in it, but I can’t, not any more.’

For a long, desolate moment I could think of nothing to say to her. Outside Frank bayed and ululated his battle-plans; she sat bunched at the end of the divan, staring disconsolately into the cold fireplace.

‘Must have taken the wind out of your sails,’ I ventured gently, ‘the company turning you down like that…’

She wheeled round sharply. ‘How do you know about that?’ she demanded.

I shrugged; I wasn’t about to divulge how I came to be talking to MacGillycuddy, or that this was all he had told me. ‘I found out. You can tell me what happened, if you like.’

She crossed her arms on her knees and leaned forward, frowning slightly; I knew she wanted to tell someone, though she wasn’t entirely happy that it was me. ‘Well, I had an audition and they really liked me,’ she said, drawing her arms high up around her as if she were cold, ‘and I got a callback. It was only a couple of days ago — the day we went greyhound racing, that morning. I thought I’d got it, I really did. I thought this would be my big break. Not that it was much of a part or anything, but just to start, finally — and it was Chekhov, Charles, I knew that play inside-out. But then today I got this letter…’ She broke off; she’d turned her head, but I could see a tear shimmer and tremble against the orb of her eye. ‘They were quite frank, it was very helpful of them, really…’

‘So what did they say?’

‘They said that while they thought that technically my reading was very good, they were concerned —’ she took a deep, shivery breath, ‘that it wasn’t sufficiently alive to contemporary social realities. They said I didn’t have enough of a grasp on… on the world. You mightn’t think that’d be important for an actress, Charles, but you have to, they want to bring out all the elements in the play that are like life today, you see, and they didn’t think I could do it. I mean, they were right, there’s only so many parts for fake princesses —’ twisting up these last words bitterly as the tear detached at last to course exuberantly down her cheek; leaving me to sit and watch her, wishing that I weren’t so useless and that the few inches of divan separating us didn’t feel like a thousand miles, so that maybe I could say something to comfort her instead of getting up and going over to the mantelpiece to examine the dried flowers: other people’s dreams always embarrassed me, especially when they didn’t come true.

An audition: that was what MacGillycuddy meant, that explained what she’d been doing locked up with Frank every morning when I thought she was giving him reading lessons. It probably explained Frank himself, in fact; things didn’t get much more real than him, and Bel wasn’t one to do things by halves. She wanted so much from the world, there was so much she wanted to make it see: if she had to, she would turn away from her own life to do it — she would explode her past, she would take a bed with a criminal, lie back and think of realism…

And this Chekhov she had always been crazy about, ever since school when they had put on one of his plays. For weeks beforehand she had wandered around the house in her silver kimono with the enormous cerise flowers, incessantly mumbling her lines like some sort of itinerant monk (with the end result that on the night she had gone totally blank). Even now, if you made the mistake of asking her what was so great about him, she would go on long harangues about how not only had he written the defining plays of the twentieth century, but he had also been a doctor and treated thousands of peasants for tuberculosis, and he had founded a theatre, and he had supported his horrendous drunken family, and he had loved his wife even though she’d had an affair, and actually managed in spite of everything to like people and listen to their stories and try to be true to them…

‘It’s this house,’ she said now in a slow monotone, like Mother on one of her bad days. ‘It makes me feel like I’m already obsolete, like as long as I’m here I’ll never be able to belong anywhere else…’ She looked up at me suddenly with a streaked face and an expression that was a mixture of accusation and appeal. ‘Don’t you see, Charles? Maybe it’s better for both of us if things don’t work out with the bank. Maybe then we can get free of this place.’

I looked at her dumbly. Get free of this place? Didn’t she understand that Amaurot was special, that what we had here was special? Didn’t she know that outside everything was less, that it was smaller, meaner, indifferent? But she was serious: and she was still waiting for a reply, pinning me to the wall with that funny look, as if evaluating the very essence of what I was. Then, mercifully, Frank lumbered in, and I seized the opportunity to break away. I went to the drinks cabinet and made myself a Scotch and soda, which I drank with a deliberating air, pretending to turn what she’d said over in my mind. After a moment I was feeling more composed. I lowered the glass from my lips and began to tell her sagely, even-handedly, that although this audition was a disappointment all right, she shouldn’t let it cloud her judgement — that instead of rushing into anything, we should try and sort out the bank first and see how we felt after that. But she had turned around in her seat to devote her whole attention to Frank, who, through a combination of grunts and hand-flapping, was giving her details of his revenge plans. I didn’t care to interrupt, and I didn’t need her to translate either. Frank’s bestial jabberings were curiously eloquent: I could see all too clearly the breaking windows, the hurtling knuckles, the burning. In my already shaken state, I found the atmosphere was getting a little too apocalyptic; I topped up my drink and told Bel I would talk to her later. I couldn’t tell if she’d heard me.

Ascending the staircase, I pondered again over what she’d said. I told myself she was upset; I tried to convince myself that this was just an awkward phase — Bel’s life, after all, was a more or less continuous series of awkward phases. But I knew that in her eyes this audition business was more than just a temporary setback. She dreamed on a vast scale, and she placed her whole self within those dreams; minor things, setbacks, became great waves that spilled over her, threatening to swamp her. If by some elliptical process of reasoning she had arrived at the conclusion that it was the house that had come between her and the part — between her and the bright future she envisioned for herself — then it would be next to impossible to persuade her to stay.

My task was clear. I had to find some way to save Amaurot. I had to show Bel that it worked; that unlike the shifting, unstable world outside, Amaurot would always be a haven, where we could live completely, where the years moved forward or backward or stood still as we pleased. I told myself I was doing it for her, but in my heart I knew that if she left, the jig was up for me too. What would Amaurot be without her? Nothing more than an abandoned film-set, and I the thin shade of an actor, left behind after the director and soundmen and cameras were gone, reciting his lines to no one… Lying on my bed with the whiskey glass rested on my belly, I drew up strategy after strategy on the ceiling. But each idea that came to me had some insuperable flaw; until finally I was left with only one, the horror of which made me tremble so the ice cubes jingled in the glass…

‘Charles!’

I opened my eyes. Outside it had gotten dark. How long had I been up here?

‘Charles!’ Bel called again from the hallway. ‘Phone!’

I hurried down the stairs. ‘It’s the All-Seeing Something,’ Bel said, handing me the telephone.

‘Oh yes,’ I said nonchalantly, ‘we’re playing tennis tomorrow morning.’ Carrying it to the recital room, I whispered, ‘M?’

‘C?’

‘The situation has changed. We have to move fast. Let’s get down to business.’

The All-Seeing Eye’s Gold-Seal Guarantee was no lie; in the few hours since I’d left him he had gathered all manner of information on my foe. Frank, as I had conjectured, came from a bad area, had gone to a terrible school that got burned down at least once a year, left with a pass grade in shadowy circumstances, had never been married although was suspected of fathering one or more children in said area, had attended a technical college where he studied Panel Beating (one year) and Advanced Panel Beating (one year), before a stint abroad with the UN Peacekeeping Force. ‘After the Peacekeepers,’ MacGillycuddy told me, ‘he started work in a scrap dealership in Dublin, and then got into architectural salvage. Last year he went into business for himself. He does quite well out of it.’

‘Architectural salvage? What’s that?’ I had an absurd image of Frank scuba-diving to the bottom of the sea and pulling up old libraries and Palladian casinos.

‘Essentially it’s about digging up old junk, cleaning it off and selling it on at an enormous profit,’ MacGillycuddy explained.

‘Like antiques?’

‘No…’ MacGillycuddy seemed reluctant to expand. ‘More like… put it this way, antiques are to architectural salvage what museums are to, em, grave-robbing.’

I blanched.

The hunting-ground of the architectural salveur, he went on, was the dilapidated mansion, the bankrupted family grocer’s, the outdated factory or hospital or train station: anywhere fallen on hard times, that the changing economy had rendered unviable and marked for death. To these the salveurs would flock like crows: to the auctions, the derelict rooms, the still-smouldering embers, where they would pick up for a song or for nothing at all the skeleton and innards of these institutions, anything that could conceivably be polished up and resold as an antiquity, a charming foible of the past, for installation in modern apartments, pubs and hotels. Mercilessly MacGillycuddy described how they uprooted floor tiles, pulled out banisters and columns, removed lamp fittings, doorknobs, shop signs, lanterns, tea kettles, sawed off piano legs and marble table tops, dismembered cornices and plasterwork, rifled through boxes for old picture-frames, photographs, advertisements, concert programmes, wardrobes for hats and wedding dresses and old-fashioned shoe-racks –

‘Stop!’ I cried. ‘No more!’

This was far, far worse than anything I had imagined. Good God, could such people really exist? And was he doing a salvage job on us? Could it be that we were nothing more than carrion to him, that he had caught the smell of death on us before we even guessed, picked out Bel as his personal treasure… Fury boiled in my veins. But at the same time, a tremulous voice inside me was whimpering: who is there to steal me away? Where is the mantelpiece out there for me?

‘Is everything all right?’ MacGillycuddy inquired.

What could I say? Everything was crashing down around me; suddenly, our destruction seemed not only inexorable, but perfectly logical. There was only one option remaining.

‘What were you saying earlier about faking your own death?’ I said.