An Evening of Long Goodbyes

6

‘You! You! You!’ Bel pounded across the floorboards, gold bangles rattling down her forearm. ‘It was you what got me addicted to smack!

‘Me?’ Mirela said incredulously, rising from the table. ‘But how could it be me?’

‘Don’t you see?’ Bel implored. ‘My addiction was a cry for help. Heroin was replacing the love that you, and at a larger level society, weren’t giving me.’

Mirela reached for the back of the chair to support herself, her long dress brushing the floor. ‘How can you say I didn’t love you?’ she said haltingly. ‘Wasn’t it me what clothed and fed you all these years? Wasn’t it me who scraped together the few shillings so you’d always have your books for school?’

‘Ma, you still don’t understand,’ Bel said. ‘You’re just like the government, in terms of not understanding the younger generation. We need more than just methadone clinics and back-to-work schemes. We need to respect ourselves as real people, just as good as anyone else. Yes, you done all them things for me. But you never got round to telling us the three little words what are the most important thing to any child.’

Mirela seemed to wilt, right there in front of us; as she lowered herself painfully back down into the chair, you could have heard a pin drop in the old ballroom, scuppering my hopes of making a quick trip out to the bar for a revivative short.

‘It’s a vicious cycle, Ma,’ Bel went on. ‘Cos then, see, we never learned to love ourselves. That’s what pushed Dougie into joyriding — the buzz he got from robbin cars, like the temporary release of taking drugs, took the place of the self-worth that society would not give him and let him escape the monotony of long-term unemployment.’

‘If only I’d known this earlier…’ Mirela shook her head sadly, sending a cloud of talc puffing from her wig. ‘He might not have died so senselessly.’

Bel placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s not too late to save the others. If we all work together, and remember the lessons we learned tonight.’

‘I’m proud of you for coming through this,’ Mirela said, ‘and becoming a stronger woman for it. It gives me hope for the future.’

I too was given hope for the future and started reaching for my jacket; but the curtain did not fall, because Bel was saying to Mirela that speaking of the future she was pregnant. Every time you thought it was over somebody got pregnant or run over by joyriders. My head was pounding. Couldn’t they tell we were being pushed too far? I ground my teeth; I tore little strips off the programme Burnin Up a Play by the RH Workshop and rolled them into balls and threw them at Frank in the front row; I knitted my brows and willed the plot to come to a close, which only made my head hurt more and drops of sweat collect beneath my bandages.

The hospital had discharged me only that afternoon; if anyone had bothered to ask me, I might have told them that all things considered I’d prefer to spend my first night home without the company of a hundred gawping strangers. But no one had asked me, and well into the first act a few anxious faces were still turning around to check on me in the back row, perhaps surmising I was one of the endless string of long-lost joyriding half-brothers, or worrying that I might pull some kind of a Phantom of the Opera stunt and go swinging from the gantry, which I confess was by this point not a million miles from my thoughts. But there, now, the lights went down, and up, and the audience was on its feet clapping. Bel and Mirela stepped forward, beaming, to take their bows; I paused briefly to applaud then hurried out ahead of the crowd to the recital room, where Mrs P was polishing glasses behind the bar. ‘Soda, please,’ I said.

‘Is finish?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Actually, you know, maybe I’ll have some Scotch in there too.’

Mrs P reached for the bottle. I licked my lips, watching as it tipped the rim of the glass. ‘In fact, maybe forget the soda and make it a double Scotch,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from quavering.

Mrs P stopped, and looked at me suspiciously.

‘Master Charles, I think you are not allowed to drink.’

‘Eh?’ I said, feigning incomprehension; but all the bad acting must have rubbed off on me. Mrs P put the bottle back down with a reproachful look. ‘Yes, the doctor has say to you, no booze.’

‘He said no such thing, Mrs P, you must be thinking of someone else, Mother perhaps…’ This got me nowhere. ‘Look, would I lie to you?’ I squeezed her arm cajolingly. ‘For God’s sake, woman!’

‘Master Charles, you are hurting me!’

‘Special occasion, eh?’ I begged her feverishly. ‘Momentous, celebrate?’

Audience members were beginning to shuffle in from across the hall. Shaking her head, Mrs P poured the whiskey and pushed it across the bar, and I retired gratefully with it to a secluded corner. But just as I was about to send it down the old hatch, the glass was snatched from my lips — by Bel, no less, with a gaggle of her noxious actor friends in tow.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Give that back.’

‘He’s not allowed to drink while he’s on his medication,’ Bel told the actors. ‘He’s crawling up the walls. The world has lost all meaning to him.’

‘What happened to him?’ a fellow with foolish plaited hair inquired.

‘Mind your own business,’ I offered.

‘It’s a long story,’ Bel said, sipping at my drink. She was still wearing her make-up from the play; offstage it looked gaudy and incongruous, as if she’d just wandered in from a Victorian gin palace. ‘Basically he tried to blow up the Folly for the insurance and got clocked on the head by one of his own specially commissioned gargoyles. He was in a coma for six weeks.’

‘The poor thing,’ clucked a not unappealing blonde, bestowing on me a Concerned Glance.

‘Not to worry,’ I assured her, ‘life in the old dog yet, what?’

‘He’s quite all right now,’ Bel said. ‘You should have seen him the night it happened though, his head looked like a pumpkin.’

‘How awful,’ the blonde crooned, glancing at me concernedly again.

‘And you are…?’ I pressed, but again she had returned to Bel for further details, as if I were a chipped hatstand, or a beagle with a bandaged paw!

‘It was actually sort of funny,’ Bel said, ‘because for a couple of minutes after he was hit he was still running around the lawn, picking up bits of exploded silverware and putting them into Frank’s van —’

‘Into the van?’ the fellow with the hair said.

‘Yes, so I went over, you know, to try and get him to lie down until the ambulance arrived, and he holds up his hand like this —’ her face was quite pink and she took a moment for her giggles to subside, ‘— and tells me to please remain calm, that he’s not sure which way South America is, but that we can probably ask directions—’

‘Well, of course, the reason for that was —’ I began: but they were all guffawing too much to hear me. I was starting to have some inkling of what that Phantom of the Opera must have gone through. These theatrical types could be quite unfeeling. Try as I might to give my side of the story, the conversation rolled right over me like so much motorway traffic; and as there didn’t seem to be any hope of getting my drink back from Bel, I eventually gave up and stalked off.

I almost stalked straight into Mother, who was standing behind us regaling a group of dull-looking elderly people with one of her theatrical anecdotes, the one about the charity production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the children from the Polio School, when she’d first met Father. ‘I was playing Titania and he was Oberon, terribly handsome I thought, and then these children were to be the fairies, and we were quite at a loss because they were so eager to take part and yet most of them couldn’t walk, let alone dance…’

‘There’s a rum-looking fellow,’ a florid-faced gent beside her remarked.

‘That’s Charles.’ Mother’s tone altered abruptly. ‘I want a word with him, as a matter of fact — Charles! Charles!’

I was already quite aware that Mother wanted a word: that was why I had been very carefully avoiding her all afternoon, and why I now pretended not to hear and disappeared into the crowd, inasmuch as one can disappear when one’s entire head is wrapped in bandages. Eyes fell on me and slid off again like water; people made comments without even bothering to lower their voices, as though, because they couldn’t really see me, they assumed that in some way I wasn’t actually there. It was indescribably unnerving; and then to make matters worse, every so often I would catch sight of myself in the mirror, and flinch, and wish I really was invisible.

A few days previously, I had woken quite innocently from my coma to find my entire world turned upside-down — not by the bank, as had been expected, but by Bel, who had in my absence hatched a plan of her own to save Amaurot. ‘We’re going to turn it into a theatre,’ she’d told me. This was in hospital, the day I finally came to; I’d been groggy with painkillers, and the idea had seemed so conspicuously unhinged that although she explained at some length I hadn’t been quite been able to believe it. Tonight, confronted with the scheme’s first fruits — the house full of actors and wealthy patrons of the arts, the ballroom thrown open and fitted out with stage and lights and plastic seats — I still could not believe it. All I knew was that it was very, very important I find a drink.

Before I had got within twenty feet of the bar, however, Mrs P had made it clear by her expression that there was no chance of wheedling anything more out of her. I raised my hands, appealing for mercy; she merely stared, arms folded impassively. And so I had no alternative but to go about the room, lifting half-empty glasses from unsuspecting guests. I didn’t like it, needless to say. No one should ever have to steal drinks in his own house. But I did find I was rather good at it. I discovered that on some subliminal level people preferred to sacrifice their drinks than have to confront the grim reality of my appearance, and I exploited this principle ruthlessly. After a martini, two cosmopolitans and a brandy Alexander, I was feeling a little more like myself, sufficiently so to approach Mirela.

She was standing at the bar, wincing slightly under a frontal assault from Frank and Laura. She hadn’t taken off her greasepaint either, but it didn’t have the disorientating effect on her that it did on Bel: instead she looked enhanced, the colours of her face deeper and brighter — like a restored painting, I thought. I hadn’t realized in the Folly quite how beautiful she was; and — although it could just have been me mixing my drinks — she seemed with every second to be gaining in radiance, leaving the pale, spookish girl I had encountered that night further behind.

‘It was just so… so…’ Laura was saying, her hands making slow, squeezing motions, as if groping at the huge, spongy mass of truth that the play had communicated to her.

‘Yeah,’ Frank corroborated.

‘Like it was like EastEnders and Coronation Street and Brookside all rolled into one,’ Laura said, ‘except like in Dublin with real people in it.’

‘I could really relate to it,’ Frank said, pronouncing the words slowly as if he were trying them out for the first time.

‘Well, that’s good,’ Mirela said.

‘I cried,’ Laura said matter-of-factly.

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah. He did too.’

‘I did not!’

‘You did, you liar.’

‘No, I told you, my eyes were watering cos there was talc kept gettin in them.’

‘That’s not what you told oh my God —’

‘It’s just Charlie, relax. All right, Charlie, how’s the noggin?’

‘Well, obviously it’s been a big hit with the ladies…’ I nursed the spot where Laura’s elbow had caught me as she soared into the air.

‘Maybe we should get you a bell,’ Mirela laughed.

‘Maybe… here, try putting some tonic on it, Laura.’

‘I can do it myself,’ she muttered, snatching the napkin from my hand and dabbing at the dark stain spreading across her breast. ‘This was the last one Top Shop had in my size — bollocks, I’ll have to take it off —’

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Frank said, winking at me as he steered her, still rubbing fractiously at her blouse, towards the bathroom: though just as they reached the door I caught him floating an oddly yearning glance over at Bel, who was gabbing away merrily at the centre of her cadre. The chap with the annoying hair and the peasant jacket was doing an inordinate amount of laughing. The more I saw of him, the surer I was that our paths had crossed before, but I couldn’t place where…

‘Such a crowd,’ Mirela said to me. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

‘Mother does know a lot of people,’ I concurred feebly.

‘And all the right people, from newspapers and theatres and Arts Council and businesses they are talking about giving us money…’ Her smile was as simple and transfixing as a butterfly alighting on one’s hand.

‘Mmm.’ I noticed at that moment that as well as all the right people, MacGillycuddy was here, sitting by the trestle table with a tall glass.

‘I think this could really work out,’ she said. ‘I think this theatre could become something important — will you excuse me a moment, Charles? I have to talk to that man over there, I think he is from the Gate.’

‘Of course,’ I said, and watched a distinguished grey-haired gent light up as she buttonholed him.

I lingered there a moment to see if she’d come back; when she didn’t, I picked up the remainder of her drink and followed the bar down to the end where MacGillycuddy was perched. ‘You’ve a nerve, showing your face round here,’ I said.

He looked up at me blankly. ‘I’m sorry, have we met?’

‘Blast it, MacGillycuddy, don’t play games with me.’

He frowned, mystified, and then in an awed whisper said, ‘C? Is it really you?’

‘Oh, hell—’ I had forgotten what a serpentine experience a conversation with him could be. ‘You know perfectly well who it is.’

‘I thought you were after my drink,’ he said colourlessly, and nudged the glass in my direction. ‘Take some if you want, Charlie. We’re old friends, after all.’

‘You’re no friend of mine,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘I was invited,’ MacGillycuddy said with a wounded expression. ‘I’m a consultant.’

‘Is that so? Because I’d like to consult you about something, if you don’t mind. How much of a sucker did you play me for, is what I’d like to know.’

‘Sucker?’ MacGillycuddy said, assuming the kind of guileless expression the infant Jesus might have had in his manger.

‘I mean, when I hired you to watch Frank because I thought he was stealing my furniture.’

‘Which I did,’ MacGillycuddy said.

‘Which you did, exactly my point, because the whole time not only were you personally acquainted with him —’

‘I wouldn’t say acquainted,’ MacGillycuddy interjected. ‘I’d seen him down the pub a few times, I suppose, maybe had a couple of games of darts with him…’

‘Not only were you acquainted with him,’ I persisted, ‘but you knew about all those people in my Folly, and you went ahead and let me set up my Frank trap even though you knew that they must have been behind it.’

‘I didn’t know,’ MacGillycuddy said. ‘I had sort of a hunch, is all.’

‘Well, confound it man, didn’t you think of telling me any of this? I mean, what was the point of me paying you good money to snare Frank, if you knew all along it wasn’t Frank?’

‘Look,’ MacGillycuddy said with a hint of reproof, ‘I just did what you asked me. An All-Seeing Eye sees an awful lot of things. It’s important to ask it the right questions.’

I made a half-wheel of exasperation. ‘For an All-Seeing Eye you’re remarkably selective with your information, do you know that?’

‘Maybe you should have hired the All-Speaking Mouth,’ MacGillycuddy said expressionlessly.

‘Oh, hell,’ I said again, and turned away, propping myself against the bar with my elbows. Mirela had gathered around her a little circle by now, well-manicured theatre patrons and bluff old actors standing and grinning foolishly like moths that have found the perfect flame; in the centre, she gesticulated and argued her case and measured out her smiles democratically between them. Over in a corner, her bear-like brothers joked noisily in Bosnian, playing some game with coins laid on a tissue paper stretched over a glass of beer; Bel meanwhile was suffering from a coughing-fit which might or might not have been put on so the person with the plaits and the peasant jacket could massage her back. And then there were the others, the men and women of Society: the bank directors and their lovely wives, the noted philanthropists, the coterie artists, the entrepreneurs and government bigwigs, animated Names with foggy semblances of personalities and a permanent entourage of worshipful diarists: and as their conversation rose again, sheer and vertiginous, I felt a burning desire to grab one of them by the lapels and shout: What is happening here? Isn’t this my house? Isn’t that the Steinway in the corner on which, in happier times, I composed ‘I’m Sticking to You’ and ‘Gosh, His Galoshes’? Am I not, beneath these bandages, still Charles Hythloday?

But at that moment I spied Mother coming towards me with the alarmingly purposeful expression she’d acquired lately; and I realized that, whoever I was, it was time I made myself scarce.

I’d woken up with a start, like a commuter who’s dozed off on the train home; Bel was at my bedside poring over a book. I coughed politely.

‘Charles!’ She set the book down with a cry. ‘Oh my goodness!’ She jumped up and leaned over me, peering into my eyes. ‘Do you know who I am? How many fingers am I holding up? Can you understand what I’m saying? Blink if you understand.’

‘Of course I understand,’ I said. ‘Stop shouting, I’m all right.’

This was something of an exaggeration, as with every passing second some new part of my body seemed to awake and sing with pain. As delicately as I could I turned my head and took in my surroundings. We were in a poky room with pea-green walls and an ugly check curtain pulled over the window. Various apparatuses were arranged around me, mapping my condition with inscrutable dials and screens. A tube fed into my arm from a drip by the bed. Directly opposite me was a poster of sunlight glinting through trees, with the legend Today is the first day of the rest of your life. For some reason it gave me a chill.

‘How long have I been here?’ I asked.

‘Weeks,’ Bel said. ‘Weeks and weeks. The doctors said it’s normal when your body gets a shock like that, but we were really starting to get worried.’ She pulled her chair in closer. ‘You woke up a few times, can you remember? You were rambling on about Yeats, reciting poems at the top of your voice.’ She smiled. ‘All the really lyrical stuff. I think a couple of the nurses are in love with you.’

‘Well they’ve got a funny way of showing it,’ I said, recalling the unpleasant turn my dream had taken and gingerly adjusting my posterior. ‘Bel, why does my head feel funny? It feels sort of itchy.’

‘You got hit by a gargoyle. You’re still all bandaged up, you look like you’ve just stepped out of a pyramid.’ She hesitated, then bent down and rummaged in her bag. ‘Here —’ she opened her compact mirror.

‘Oh, lord…’

‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to be for ever.’

‘Do I still have a face under all this?’

‘Of course. It just needs time to heal. Nothing’s broken, it’s just badly bruised. You were very lucky. The doctor’s explained it all to us. I’m sure he’ll come in and see you now that you’re awake.’ She caught my eye then looked away, toying with her hair. Suddenly it seemed to me that she was acting rather strangely.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘What’s what?’ she said innocently.

‘You’re sitting there positively about to explode, is what.’

‘I’m just glad to see you, that’s all.’

‘I wish I could believe that,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’ A terrible thought occurred to me. ‘Oh hell, you haven’t got married to Frank or something, have you?’

‘Ugh, no,’ she said, flicking her hand disdainfully, then recomposing herself. ‘Let’s talk about you, though. How are you? How do you feel?’

I squinted at her suspiciously. She puckered her brow in a passable imitation of attentiveness. ‘I feel all right,’ I began, ‘although —’

‘Oh Charles, I’ve so much to tell you, so much has happened since you’ve been in here, I hardly know where to begin —’

I knew it. ‘Well, begin somewhere,’ I said, propping myself up on my lumpy pillow and starting to feel somewhat uneasy.

She took a deep breath. ‘It’s the house,’ she said. ‘We’re turning it into a theatre.’

‘A what?’ I said. ‘A theatre?’

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Her eyes were lit up like Roman candles. ‘We’re going to do The Cherry Orchard, and —’

‘Wait — a theatre? What do you mean, a theatre? Like when Mother and Father were in that Amateur Dramatics thing? Is that what you mean?’

‘No, no, I mean like a proper theatre company, we’re going to build a little stage and — Charles I don’t like the noise that machine is making, maybe this ought to wait until you’re feeling better…’

‘Not at all,’ I said, through a miasma of little sparkling lights. ‘This is all very interesting.’

She went to the window and lifted the sash. ‘Well, I should probably start at the start,’ she said. ‘What happened after you — after the Folly…’ She turned her back to the glass. ‘Charles, what were you thinking? Were you really going to disappear off to South America?’

I sat myself up again. ‘Look,’ I said, pressing my fingers to the outline of my nose. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t really care to discuss it. All I want to say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. And furthermore, it would have worked, if it hadn’t been for Mrs P and her wretched offspring —’ I stopped, remembering my brief encounter with Mrs P’s youngest. ‘How are they?’ I asked impetuously. ‘I mean — she wasn’t hurt, was she? The girl?’

‘Mirela,’ Bel said. ‘She’s fine, apparently you acted as a sort of human shield for everybody else.’

‘And what’s going to happen to them? Are they still there? Is the house still there? What happened with the bank?’

‘This is what I’m trying to tell you. It turns out that the girl, Mirela — she’s so sweet, Charles, I feel so sorry for her with that dreadful artificial — anyway, she’s an actress, so that’s… well, that bit comes later. First of all, that morning — I mean only a couple of hours after the explosion — Mother arrived back from the Cedars. They’d let her out early. The place was still in absolute chaos. None of us had slept, the lawn was covered with jewellery and ornaments and this smouldering stump of Folly and of course the piano upside-down in the middle of it — it had barely a scratch on it, isn’t that weird? Meanwhile, the house was full of detectives and policemen asking these humiliating questions about our financial situation and the insurance on one hand, and trying to get someone to press charges against Mrs P on the other — well, I expected her to take one look and then turn on her heel and get back in the cab. But she was fantastic, she just brushed right past everybody and made herself this enormous gin and tonic —’

‘I thought she wasn’t supposed to be drinking,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of her going to the Cedars?’

‘I did ask her about that,’ Bel said. ‘She just muttered something about them being very progressive.’

‘Oh.’

‘But anyway, it was complete pandemonium, all these people tugging at her, and then Mrs P went into shock and they had to take her to hospital, and then bloody Laura thought she’d lost her car keys and cried and cried for about four hours straight. But Mother just calmly went and made a couple of phone calls, and a few minutes later all the policemen and so on just sort of vanished. Really, Charles, we’re lucky she knows who she does. I mean strictly speaking you should be under arrest.’

‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with a theatre,’ I said. ‘Unless you’re hoping to pay off the bank by putting on shows in the old barn, like in some Mickey Rooney film.’

‘The bank is paid,’ Bel said.

I felt my stomach turn over. ‘What?’

‘The debt’s paid off. It’s gone. The auction, all that — it never happened.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘How can it be gone? The mortgage was… I mean, you saw the figures.’

‘I know, I know. But Mother tracked down the accountant — Geoffrey, you remember him. He was away working on some island I’d never heard of. Anyway, he came back and they went to meet the director of the bank — the director, Charles, it turns out Mother and he go back years and years. Between the three of them they uncovered some annuity of Father’s that no one had known about. They had the whole thing sorted out by lunchtime. I felt a little foolish, I can tell you.’

‘But…’ My head was spinning. ‘You went through the accounts. There wasn’t any money there. There simply wasn’t. How can they suddenly produce this —’

‘I know, I don’t quite understand it either. But we should just count our blessings that they —’

‘And what about the irregularities, what about those? That time I went to see the bank chap in the shopping centre, he told me the structure of the repayments was all wrong, he was going to have it investigated…’

‘I don’t know, Charles.’ Bel shifted her weight impatiently from foot to foot. ‘Father’s accounts were so complicated. Maybe your manager just wasn’t used to it. Surely the main thing is that we’re out of the woods, for now at least. We do still owe people, of course, but nobody’s trying to take the house away.’

I tried to return her smile. This was good news, wasn’t it? Why did it feel so wrong?

‘Still, you probably picked a good time to be unconscious. Even with everything sorted out, the atmosphere has been pretty apocalyptic. Mother’s… well, you’ll see yourself. But she was talking seriously about selling Amaurot.’

‘Selling?’ I raised myself up on my forearms. ‘Mother wouldn’t sell! What have you been saying to her? Have you been putting ideas into her head?’

‘I haven’t been putting anything into her head, Charles, you know she hasn’t been happy there since Dad died, you know how miserable it must be for her, floating around this vast empty mansion… And meanwhile, there’s all these computer people buying up everywhere around us, every week practically someone arrives at the door and makes an offer — crazy offers, enough to pay off all our debts once and for all and get a little house down the country that Mother could retire to —’

She sat back down at the foot of the bed, picked up her book and began riffling back and forth through the pages. ‘But then one night I was talking to Mirela, and she was telling me about this theatre group she was part of at home in Yugoslavia, before all the, you know, the war and everything. They did all kinds of things, workshops, street theatre, political stuff. The founder had just started it from his house with a few friends, and it had taken it off from there. And I thought, why couldn’t we do the same thing at Amaurot? I mean there’s all this space where you could have rehearsals and classes and so on, and then there’re all those spare bedrooms we haven’t used in years — it’s like the more you think about it, the more perfect you realise it is. And when I told Mother she was just as excited as me…’

So the very next morning, she said, she had contacted some of her former classmates from the drama course to help her come up with a design for a theatre: they had given this design to Mrs P’s son Vuk, who it turned out had been an architect before taking up residence in my erstwhile Folly — Vuk, Zoran and the beguiling Mirela, I should add, had, in the climate of anarchy that seemed to be prevailing at Amaurot, been moved into guest bedrooms until their asylum claims had been looked at, while Mrs P was still in situ as housekeeper without Mother so much as docking her pay. As she went on, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was not just one of the regular Bel pipe dreams that she would obsess about for a week and then forget — that without my steadying influence, Mother and she had formed some sort of unholy alliance, and were already putting their demented scheme into motion.

‘We’re going to open up the old ballroom and put the stage in there. All we’re waiting for is the builders to come back from Tibet. Charles, isn’t it wonderful? No more trudging round to auditions, we can put on anything we want —’ She waltzed from her chair with her hands clasped to her breast, looking for all the world as if she were about to burst into song, and began to reel off a list of plays and playwrights, plans and strategies, with words like artists and residence, space and community ominously juxtaposed; while I sat there my head stewing inside the bandages like an enormous pudding, Today is the first day of the rest of your life glinting mockingly at me from the far wall –

‘But this is absurd!’

Bel halted mid-waltz and looked at me. Over my left shoulder, one of the monitors bleeped shrilly. ‘It’s absurd,’ I repeated. ‘The whole idea. Amaurot’s already a residence. I reside there. I’m sorry you’ve made all these plans for nothing. But it’s a house, that people live in. You can’t just come in and turn it into something else.’

‘But we’ve been through all this,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t keep it going the way it is, you know that. We have to adapt, or else we lose it.’

‘I don’t see how you building a theatre is going to help anyone.’

She hesitated a moment, then circled back carefully towards the bed. ‘Well you see it won’t be an ordinary theatre,’ she said. ‘We want it to be a place where people who normally wouldn’t get anywhere near a stage can come and learn to express themselves, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds can come and stay and —’

My head thumped back on to the pillow. ‘Are you out of your mind? Don’t you have any idea how society works?’

‘I know it sounds strange,’ she reached her arm out imploringly, ‘but if you’ll only listen, there’s a reason for it. I’ve talked to Geoffrey. He says that if we presented ourselves right we’d be eligible for all kinds of government grants. You know, if we’re helping people, and then there’s the cultural diversity element too, with Mirela being from the Balkans. If the theatre was successful we might even be able to have Amaurot registered as a charity. Then think of it, Charles, we could stay there as long as we wanted, and never have to worry any more about banks, or creditors, or how we’re going to keep it running…’ She sat back and hunched her shoulders earnestly. ‘And aside from the money, it’s a chance to put Amaurot on the map again, for it to mean something. Isn’t that what you want? We’d finally be using it for something good. And the possibilities are endless, once you start thinking about it. We can give classes — you know, drama classes, for inner-city kids, they can come out for the day and —’

‘Why stop there?’ I said. ‘Why not throw the doors open altogether? We could give guided tours: “This is Charles’s bedroom, visitors are asked kindly not to extinguish their cigarettes on his, on his childhood stamp collection —”’

Outside in the corridor a bell began to ring. Sighing, Bel picked up her jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘I’m asking you to understand that we’re not rich any more. We’re just not. Living in Amaurot, it’s like we’re struggling to maintain ourselves in a — on a little island that’s floating further and further away from what it means to actually exist —’ She sucked in her cheeks and let them out again. ‘Can’t you see, this is a good thing?’ she said, putting a hand on my arm. ‘We’ll be able to keep the house, and we’ll all be able to stay together…’

Even in my distrait condition, I realized that this hand was the first time she’d touched me since the whole accidentally-kissing-her farrago — that she was offering me an olive branch. But I wasn’t going to be bought off so easily. Without replying, I stiffly turned my head and fixed my gaze on the shard of sky at the window, until her hand lifted and I heard the chair creak beside me as she rose to go.

The thing was, though — the thing was that deep down I knew she was right, about the way everything was changing, about the new money taking over. You would see them at the weekends, these new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow winding roads in BMWs or hulking jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anaemic sharks. What if this really was the only way to secure the house from them? I tried to imagine Amaurot as a Residence, full of babbling strangers; I pictured myself at the breakfast table, the Disadvantaged sitting across from me. Would I be expected to make conversation? Would they want to borrow things? My razor, a tie? The notion was too painful to contemplate. A far better solution seemed to be to pretend that none of this was happening, and that my conversation with Bel had never taken place. I was getting enough painkillers to make this quite unproblematic: they made reality fat and viscous and blurred at the edges, broken only by the comings and goings of the doctors and nurses, and the mortal wheezing of the patient in the next room, like a dry wind through a petrified forest.

That night, however — my first night back on earth after my hiatus — I wasn’t able to sleep. I lay awake for hours, gazing at the banks of screens and monitors arranged around me telling the ineffable story of my body in blips and graphs and pulses. It seemed to me that I could see things in the saw-toothed waves; all kinds of things: explosions, prophecies, impending disasters, all hastening in on top of one another until I couldn’t bear it any longer and, seized in a cold grip, I pressed the panic button and cried out ‘Help, help!’ until the night nurse’s clipping stride came down the corridor, not the attractive buxom nurse in charge of sponge baths but the thermometer-happy one with no behind.

‘Yes?’ she demanded. ‘What’s wrong?’

I cleared my throat and pointed at the spikes and troughs on the monitor and said, ‘I’m a little concerned about, ahem, that is…’

‘Do you feel sick?’ she stamped impatiently. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘Well, no, not as such,’ feeling all of a sudden that I could possibly have blown things out of proportion. ‘It’s just that — those sort of spikes there, don’t they look a little, you know, off?’

‘No,’ she said with an abrasive sigh, ‘they are perfectly normal, just like the last time, and the time before that.’

‘Oh. It’s just that I thought they were a bit off.’ There was a moment of silence broken only by her tapping foot; ‘Busy?’ I said, because even if she was hatchet-faced and anally fixated she was still someone to talk to –

‘Very,’ she snapped as if she’d been waiting for it, turned on her heel and whipped out of the room, back to her crossword puzzle or her tray of entrails or whatever it was she did in her glass box down the hall; leaving me to the silent procession of the waves, to think of home, the blossoms on the trees, the ballroom where ghosts in tails and enormous hooped dresses whirled each other round in quadrilles and cotillions, as the walls mildewed and spiders made nests in the chandeliers…

Someone pushed open the ballroom door. ‘There you are. You didn’t wait for me.’

‘Oh — I didn’t think you meant actually wait…’

‘It’s freezing.’ Mirela rubbed her hands over her bare arms. ‘What are you doing down here? You’re missing the party.’

‘Oh, you know… just thought I’d take a breather.’

‘Your mother’s been looking for you.’

‘I know,’ I said bleakly.

She sat down on the other side of the aisle. ‘Are you all right? Is your head hurting?’

‘No, no…’ I crossed my legs towards her, suspected it looked effeminate, crossed them back again. ‘I suppose it’s just the first time I’ve seen everything finished. Gives me an excuse to be maudlin.’

‘ “Maudlin”?’

‘Sad, you know, like when you think about the past.’

‘It must be strange, to come home and find everything changed like this.’

I looked up at the raised stage, the flat planes of colour, the exposed wooden beams that had replaced the fusty wallpaper and rococo plasterwork. ‘It’s all right,’ I said nobly.

‘I’m glad you were able to come back today,’ she said. ‘In time for the first performance.’

‘It did help to have the painkillers still in my system,’ I agreed.

She laughed. ‘Poor Charles! Didn’t you like it even a little bit?’

I liked you, I wanted to say: even if your wig kept slipping, even though you pronounced love like laugh and made joyriders sound like something from a Transylvanian folk tale, still whenever you were onstage the dialogue momentarily stopped grating and almost began to sound a little like music. But I didn’t say it; I just mumbled something about the realistic costumes.

‘Mmm,’ she said, looking down into her clasped hands as if she were carrying a ladybird in there, out to the garden. ‘Charles — now that you are back — there was something I wanted to say to you.’

‘Oh?’ I said, and cleared my throat.

‘It’s a bit difficult.’

‘Well — try anyway,’ I said. Because the truth of it was that I had been wondering… I mean, what happens in films when something extraordinary happens to a fellow, like he goes on the run or he gets blown up or his sister turns his house into a community theatre, is that he then meets a beautiful woman who immediately falls in love with him and helps him along on his new path. They don’t go into why she falls in love with him. It’s just the way it works. Maybe it’s a kind of reward from the Fates for daring to disturb the universe. I was thinking that none of this might seem quite as bad with a girl like Mirela by my side.

She exhaled preparatively, and then said, ‘I wanted to apologize for what Mama did, for her stealing from you.’

‘Ah, right.’ I masked my disappointment with a cough. ‘There’s no need to, really. Water under the bridge, so forth.’

‘You must think we’re all crazy,’ she said in a low voice. Wisps of light crept in under the door, picking out silver on her downy arms.

‘No, no…’ I hurried to set her at ease. ‘I’ve heard far worse stories. For instance, this one chap I know, Pongo McGurks, his family had a butler, name of Sanderson — had him for years, used to swear by him, best butler they’d ever had, etcetera. Then they came back early from a weekend away to find him in Pongo’s mother’s wedding dress, about to have the toaster marry him to the cuckoo clock.’

‘Oh.’ She seemed not quite to know what to make of this. ‘And this happens often?’

‘No, I suppose it’s pretty rare,’ I conceded. ‘I mean it’s rare that you have a butler who’s a perfect size ten.’ This wasn’t coming out right at all.

Mirela frowned, and hooked a strand of black hair with a finger. ‘I must not be explaining it right,’ she said. ‘What I want to say is that Mama’s not really like that, you see. She’s not a thief. I told her over and over again, why do you steal from these people, they care about you, they will help us. But you must understand that it’s hard for her to trust people, after what has happened. At first she takes only small things you wouldn’t miss. But when she finds out about the bank, that you might lose the house, she starts to panic, she doesn’t sleep, she gets an idea she can steal enough to get us back home. As if there is anything to go back to there.’ She grimaced sardonically. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is, the reason she did these things is not because she is mad or a bad woman. She is just someone who terrible things have happened to.’ The sizzling cobalt eyes swivelled to confront me: I felt like I’d been skewered and lifted from my seat. ‘I wanted you to know that we are just a normal family that things have happened to. Do you understand me?’

‘Of course,’ I croaked, ‘of course.’

‘I knew you would,’ she said quietly. She looked down at her hands again and then suddenly said: ‘Did you notice my leg onstage tonight?’

‘Your…?’

‘My leg, Charles. You must have, everyone must have. I don’t want you to be diplomatic about it. Just tell me.’

‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said. ‘Honestly. Maybe a little at first. But I soon forgot.’

‘That was something else Mama wanted to do with the money,’ she reflected. ‘They can do amazing things these days, everyone says.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘I mean I think it rather suits you.’

Possibly this wasn’t the right thing to say; I wasn’t sure of the etiquette on missing limbs. But she started to laugh. ‘It’s good to finally have someone I can talk to about being blown up!’ she said.

‘It’s no joke,’ I averred.

‘The world never looks the same afterwards, does it?’ She stopped laughing. ‘When you realize that things can just happen like that.’ She bowed her head: I let my gaze settle on her face again, tried to figure out what it was about it that mesmerized me so.

‘I really am grateful to you for taking us in, Charles,’ she said. ‘Most people don’t even know what happened over there. They think we just come here to beg.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ I said. Sfumato, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux.

‘I knew you would understand,’ she repeated. A moment of silence drifted by. It was quite plain what she was getting at. The time had come to make my move. ‘That reminds me,’ I said, ‘there was something I wanted to say too. About the play, that is.’

‘Oh?’ She looked up.

‘Yes’ I said, thrusting my wrists out of my cuffs. ‘I meant to say that one thing that I found interesting — I found heartening about it — was what it said about love.’

‘Love?’ she repeated uncertainly.

‘Yes, the way it showed love could triumph over all the, ah, poverty and car-theft and so on.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Mirela said. ‘Yes, though it’s not really a love story, I don’t think.’

‘But the love between Bel’s character, for instance, and the, the chap with the moustache — what it said to me was, you know, that even when terrible things happen to you, and your life is uprooted, there’s still hope, because that’s just when you’ll meet that special someone who’ll sort of help you along with it all. That’s what I really took from it.’

‘Yes,’ Mirela nodded vaguely while inspecting a left-behind programme on the seat beside her. ‘That’s very interesting, Charles, because it wasn’t something that we were trying specifically to bring out as a theme…’

She wasn’t following me. ‘That’s the thing about love, though, isn’t it?’ I persevered. ‘You know, that it sort of turns up in unexpected places, even when it’s not strictly speaking a, a theme…’

‘Mmm,’ she said: then turned and added volubly, ‘Yes, you’re right, of course, and also friendship, you know, loving friendship, that’s very important in the play too. The kind that Bel had with her half-brother.’

‘Which one,’ I said.

‘The one that worked in the chip shop,’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s friendship all right,’ I agreed. ‘But there was love as well, such as when the heroin-addict chap and that girl who kept shoplifting from Marks and Spencer’s —’

‘Yes, but mostly friendship, Charles,’ she blurted, and then she paused and then there was an awkward silence. She was obviously too preoccupied by her big night to perceive the true meaning behind my commentary. Confound it, it was impossible to handle these delicate moments without the benefit of a face!

The silence persisted a while longer and then she said, quite out of the blue, ‘Have you met Harry?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Harry, he’s the boy who wrote the play. Didn’t you meet him earlier today?’

‘I didn’t meet anyone,’ I said dolefully. ‘Bel told me to stay out of the way. I think she’d have locked me in the cellar if she could.’

‘Oh. Well, then, you have to come and meet him now,’ she said. ‘He’s so funny and clever and kind. I just know you’ll like him.’

Perhaps I was wrong to go immediately on the defensive; but a fellow doesn’t go ten rounds with Patsy Olé without learning a thing or two about the darker workings of the female mind. Suddenly she seemed far too animated. Could it be that her Balkan upbringing had not stretched as far as the protocol of torrid love affairs? Could it be that this Harry and his wretched play had so dazzled her that our tender moment together in the Folly had flown right out of her head?

‘I won’t,’ I volunteered.

‘What?’

‘I won’t like him,’ I said. ‘This Harry person.’

She laughed a sparkling laugh. ‘Don’t be silly! I’m positive you will. Anyway, you can’t hide away in here all night.’ She grabbed my wrist and, without looking me in the eye, pulled me to my feet. With a mounting sense of doom I found myself being tugged down the hallway, like an old dog being dragged off to the vet.

Father’s portrait had been reinstated just outside the recital room, with a plaque underneath it that read Ralph Hythloday Centre for the Arts, as if it had all been his idea. He looked trapped: our eyes met briefly, helplessly, as Mirela led me back to the party.

Inside the company had thinned out a little. Mother was holding court to a brace of journalists with her back to us just inside the door. The red-faced gent had gotten even redder; he stood with his cohorts in a ragged semi-circle around the piano, belting out some awful show-tune. Behind them, MacGillyguddy was peering into the old dumb waiter.

‘What’s he doing hanging around here anyway?’ I said. ‘What sort of theatre has MacGillycuddy as a consultant?’

‘Hmm? Oh, he’s…’ She stopped and frowned. ‘Well I don’t know, exactly. He just seems to appear. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked — oh look, Charles, there’s Harry!’ Gaily she waved her hand at a group of dramatic types in the corner: and my heart sank as I realized that, just as I had feared, ‘Harry’ and the annoying fellow with the avant-garde hairstyle were one and the same person.

Bel had her arm linked to his right, and now Mirela insinuated herself into his left.

‘I don’t consider Burnin Up to be a play as such,’ he was saying. ‘It’s more of a call to arms. It’s a kind of an insurgency. It’s about exploding the whole —’

‘Harry, this is Charles that I wanted you to meet.’

He glanced around uninterestedly and gave me a vacuous smile.

‘Charles, this is Harry that I was —’ Mirela turned back to me.

‘We’ve met,’ I said grimly.

‘We have?’ Harry said.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. For the penny had finally dropped. I knew where I’d seen him before: and the mechanics of this whole sinister enterprise were now clear to me. The supposedly Disadvantaged Actors clogging up the recital room were none other than the food-scrounging Marxists who had plagued my afternoons during Bel’s college days; and this fellow, though he’d had pink hair then, and gone under the name of Boris, had been their ringleader. How many times had I overheard him harping on about dreams or freedom or revolutions to some starry-eyed girl as he lay with his feet up on the chaise longue, or agitating Mrs P to rise up against her oppressors, viz. Mother and me, even as he stuffed himself with truffles or devoured the pecan plait that one had specially set aside for oneself. ‘Oh yes,’ I said again, to let him know that I was on to his game and would be keeping a very close eye on him. However, the conversation had already moved on, which is to say that the girls, gushing like twelve-year-olds who had eaten too much sherbet, were pulling his sleeve and asking him to tell them more about the insurgency, so I took a couple of canapés from a passing tray and contented myself with chewing on them in a vaguely threatening way.

‘Well, the way I think of it is as a kind of “guerrilla warfare”,’ Harry said. Close up, his plaits looked like a gaggle of snakes that had been poisoned while crawling over his head. He was one of those people who makes imaginary quotation marks with their fingers, which seemed another good reason to despise him. ‘Taking an elitist art-form and using it essentially as a Trojan horse from which we can then spring out and confront bourgeois audiences with their own hypocrisy. So the play itself has to have the kind of explosive power that can so to speak “shatter” the edifices it’s being staged in, like a bomb —’

‘Just a minute,’ I cut in here. ‘You’re not talking about shattering Amaurot, I hope.’

‘It’s a metaphor, you dope,’ Bel said crossly.

‘We’re hoping we won’t have to use any actual explosives,’ Harry said to me.

‘I should hope not,’ I said, returning to my canapé. ‘You can’t fool around when it comes to blowing up edifices. I speak from experience.’

‘Because I suppose the legacy of postmodernism,’ Harry went on, ‘has been to deny art the power to make any kind of meaningful statement — about this, about us. So it seems to me that what we have to do is get back to the theatre of Berkoff, of Artaud —’

‘Charles, you’ve got pâté all over your bandages,’ Bel said.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes. No, don’t rub it, you’re just making it worse… Oh, now it’s really disgusting.’

The assembled faces groaned and assumed attitudes of repulsion. Bel lowered her eyebrows truculently at me, like a bull about to charge.

‘I’ll go and wash it off,’ I said apologetically, and withdrew to the bathroom, past the florid gent who was now slumped weeping over the closed piano lid. I did not rejoin the actors when I came back; instead I took up a position by the wall, shielded from Mother by a potted plant, and sucked dejectedly on an ice cube. It was turning into a singularly depressing evening. Wasn’t there anyone who wanted to talk to me?

As if in answer, a large malformed shadow at that moment fell across me. ‘All right?’ it said.

I confined myself to a soundless expletive.

‘What’s the story with the oul head, anyway?’ he said. ‘Have you still got one under there, or what?’

‘I am reliably informed I still have a head,’ I said.

‘Cos I was thinking, right,’ Frank said, ‘you wouldn’t want to turn out like your man in Batman, would you, like when he takes the bandages off and he’s turned into this freakish Joker.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘No, I’m hoping that’s not going to happen.’

He nudged me conspiratorially. ‘I’d say there was some bangin nurses there in hospital, was there?’

‘Mmm,’ I said, wishing this conversation had some kind of ejector seat. What was he bothering me for, anyway? Shouldn’t he be off groping Bel?

‘Ah yeah — as me oul man used to say, there’s only two things in life you can be sure about — death, and nurses.’ He followed this wisdom with a long sigh: a curious expression passed over his face, and I had an unsettling intimation of some deep chord of melancholy ringing through his monolithic interior. I was wondering whether I ought to get out of the way when, scratching his stomach, he asked offhandedly if Bel had said anything about him to me.

‘About you?’ I said. ‘To me?’

‘It’s not important,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just that I haven’t seen much of her these last few weeks, that’s all.’

Casting my mind back, I seemed to recall her saying something along the lines of Frank, ugh that time she came to visit me in the hospital; but apart from that she hadn’t even mentioned him, or their apartment-hunting, for that matter. I looked over at her now where she stood with the theatre types, and then back at Frank. It struck me that I hadn’t seen him groping her or trying to look down her shirt all evening.

‘I was just wonderin,’ Frank said morosely. ‘Every time I call out here she’s busy putting in wires, or doin her lines or havin meetins. Half the time she won’t even talk to me on the phone.’ There was a faint sheen of perspiration on his forehead and the most forlorn look in his eyes. I had the strongest urge to toss him a Bonio.

‘Well… she’s busy,’ I said. ‘That’s all. She’s tied up with this wretched theatre. I’m sure she’ll be back to normal before long.’

‘Charlie,’ he whispered, ‘what are they doin puttin a fuckin theatre in your house anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said tersely. ‘I was away in hospital. The house was full of women. Anything could’ve happened, in that kind of a situation.’ I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He was making me uneasy: even as I spoke I was thinking that there had been a certain coolness between Bel and me tonight too. To the uninformed observer it might appear that Frank’s situation and my own had distinct parallels. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a word with her, all right? I’ll find out what’s going on. But I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. This theatre shouldn’t last long. You know Bel, she gets bored with everything after a few weeks —’

It was only when I had said it that I realized the statement’s full implications. Frank gaped at me in horror. ‘That is —’ I began in a strangulated voice, but it was no good, I couldn’t bear to stay there one second longer. With a gurgle of apology, I turned and fled. I saw that Mrs P had left the bar unattended; I slipped behind it and, without quite knowing why, began to fill my pockets with canapés.

As it turned out, I never did get to have that word with Bel. All those unguarded bottles distracted me: I was administering myself a double Hennessy, just to get my nerves back on an even keel, when I felt an icy draught whip over my shoulders and a voice said, ‘Ah, Charles, there you are.’

I downed my drink in one and slowly turned around.

‘You know, for a man with such an uncluttered schedule you can be awfully hard to track down.’

‘Ha ha,’ I laughed feebly, casting about for an escape route. There was none. ‘Well, here I am.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mother, smiling a steely smile.

I should explain that, whatever they had done to her in the Cedars, Mother had changed. She’d visited me in hospital and it was obvious from the minute she came through the door: storming in like a Valkyrie late for Rotary Club, marching over and without so much as a polite inquiry after my numerous injuries, launching into a wide-ranging sermon about responsibility and holistic dieting and twelve imaginary steps our souls had to go up in order to reach the top of something else. She’d made me quite nervous and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the reason I had woken up after weeks of unconsciousness surrounded by fruit-baskets but no chocolates.

At the root of this transformation was an entity hitherto unfamiliar to me, known as Higher Power. Apparently this Higher Power was quite a big wheel over at the Cedars, in terms of persuading wealthy neurotics to give up their vices and take on their share of life’s various burdens; and while the giving-up-drinking end of things seemed to have passed Mother by, she was extremely taken with this notion of duty and doing one’s bit. Even then I had known that this did not augur at all well for me and my bid to revive the modus vivendi of the country gentleman.

Perhaps it seems foolhardy to think, as I had on arriving home that day, that I would be able to avoid Mother indefinitely. With the old Mother, however, the Mother who stayed in bed till two or three in the afternoon and then confined herself to an armchair in the drawing room with a bottle of gin, this would have been quite unproblematic. With the new Mother it was almost impossible. I had only been back since lunchtime and it had taken all my wits to steer clear of her. She appeared to have new and boundless reserves of energy. She was ubiquitous; she was immanent. Wherever one went she seemed to be there first, with a can of furniture polish or a book of carpet swatches or the sinister red ring-binder she’d taken to carrying around, labelled ‘Projects’. By teatime I was quite exhausted. And now she had me in her grasp.

‘It’s been quite an evening, hasn’t it?’ she said, reaching behind me for the sherry. ‘I’m terribly proud of the girls. Aren’t you terribly proud?’

‘It was nice to see Bel onstage again,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t acted in a while.’

‘Oh yes, surrounded by all those awful, awful hoodlums, I was quite on the edge of my seat — it was like a voyage to the Underworld, in a way, wasn’t it?’

‘Mmm,’ I agreed morosely.

‘And Mirela — what a find, Charles! Such presence! She’ll go places, that girl. At least…’ her reason catching up with her, ‘if she can do something about that awful — she does move so terribly slowly…’

‘I suppose she’ll never dance the Kirov.’

‘Still, one could hardly hear it, could one? And so pretty and exotic!’ She filled up her glass. ‘Bel’ll find herself with some competition if she has her sights set on Harry, at any rate. Quite a charming young man.’

I threw back my drink and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Didn’t seem so charming to me,’ I mumbled mutinously. ‘Didn’t seem too Disadvantaged either. None of them do.’

‘Charles,’ Mother said sharply, and looked over her shoulder in case anyone had heard. ‘All of that will be taken care of in good time. The important thing now is to get everything up and running. When that is done, then we can investigate the finer points of who’s Disadvantaged and who isn’t. And thus far it’s been a remarkable success. A remarkable success.’ She twisted a ring around her finger as she looked out over the crowd. ‘Which leaves us with the question of you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, what are we going to do with you, Charles?’

I began to itch forebodingly about the nose. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about me,’ I blustered, fumbling out another dram of brandy from the bottle. ‘You know me, quite happy to just potter along, watch the odd film, drink the occasional glass of wine —’

‘Shush,’ she said. ‘There has been a sea change in the affairs of this house since you took your little leave of absence, Charles. And it is a change that was long overdue. We in this family have been living in cloud-cuckoo-land for far too long, living beyond our means, shirking our responsibilitities. You children have been let run to seed. As your mother, I must take my share of the blame.’

‘Well I think you’re being a little hard on yourself —’

‘Thankfully, with this new project Bel seems finally to be using her energies to some positive purpose. I have to acknowledge that this is largely due to Mirela, who has been a better influence on her than, perhaps, her father or myself in recent years. You, however, seem quite intractable’ She shook her head. ‘When I look at how that girl has triumphed in the face of adversity to slot into the household in a way that is a credit to her dear mother, and then I look at you —’

‘I slot into the household, Mother, don’t be callous —’

‘Lying around on the couch all day is not slotting, Charles.’

‘I’m sick,’ I protested. ‘Lying around is what you do when you’re sick.’

She silenced me with a finger. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands. Ever since you dropped out of Trinity you have been living devoid of dreams or ambition, and without so much as a pretence at concern for the future. And while lethargy is one thing, your antics lately have been quite deranged. Lord knows I’m happy to see the back of that preposterous Folly of yours, but it has come to the point where your chronic laziness is putting innocent lives at risk.’

The tingling spread up my forehead and over my scalp. ‘What are you getting at?’ I asked faintly.

‘You’ve been living off the fat of the land for too long now,’ Mother said. ‘It’s high time that you got a job.’

A job!

There it was: this was the thanks I got for trying to save a few shreds of the family dignity. My fate had been decided, even as I lay comatose in my sickbed. A job! The walls of the recital room bore down on me. A job!

I argued, of course. I highlighted the rich irony of pushing me, her own flesh and blood, out to work in some jar factory even as she invited a bunch of layabout actors to stay here for nothing; I pointed out that Bel wasn’t being made to look for a job, when she was the one who was always going on about how much she hated this place and how she longed to rub shoulders with the hoi-polloi; I closed with a stirring speech to the effect that Mother was sending me on a wild goose chase, seeing as even she had conceded that I simply didn’t have any dreams or ambitions, and so installing me in the working world was just going to be a waste of everyone’s valuable time. Mother listened to it all with a grim expression, as if this were exactly what she’d expected me to say.

‘Tough Love,’ she said. ‘That’s what we in the Cedars called this sort of thing. Helping you to help yourself. You’ll thank me for it some day.’

‘I won’t,’ I said.

‘You will. Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.’

‘You’re talking like a Stalinist!’ I cried. ‘People don’t get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then they use whatever’s left over to buy themselves things that make them feel less bad about having jobs! Can’t you see, it’s just a terrible vicious circle!’ I broke off to claw at my bandages. The itch had seized control of my entire head; it was getting worse and worse and scratching didn’t do any good. Mother coolly turned her attention back to the room, where the florid-faced drunk had been ousted from his residency on the piano lid and someone had humorously struck up a funeral march. ‘Damn it,’ I declared in anguish, ‘damn it, you wouldn’t think it was such a barrel of laughs if you’d worked a single day in your life —’ halting abruptly as Mother turned stiff and white as alabaster. ‘Your charity work, of course,’ I said quickly, and then, seeing a lifeline, ‘I say, maybe I could do charity work.’ It didn’t look too hard: gala luncheons, wine-tastings, celebrity auctions, none of these would be beyond me — The glass in Mother’s hand began to tremble. ‘Or — how about a vineyard? I could start making my own wine, in the, you know, in the garden, and then sell it —’

‘I’m glad we had this discussion, Charles,’ Mother said glacially. ‘I only wish we’d had it sooner. Your allowance will be discontinued as of next week. That seems to be the best way of going about this. I shall speak to Geoffrey tomorrow.’

‘Fine then!’ I threw my hands in the air. ‘I mean it seems to me that I’m the only one who cares about this place. It seems to me that I’m the one who’s been keeping it going all the time you were away, I’m the one who’s been telling Mrs P what to do, and feeding the peacocks, and burying them when they die. But if all anyone thinks is that I’m some sort of a moocher…’

‘There’s no need to raise your voice, Charles.’

‘I’m not raising my voice!’ I shouted. The architecture of the room was contorting itself into the strangest shapes. Over Mother’s shoulder I caught sight of Harry, the light falling in such a way as to appear to be emanating from him — a plaited, peasant-jacketed sun, with Bel and Mirela on either side of him like pretty, laughing moons. What did that make me, I wondered feverishly? A splinter? An asteroid, left to languish alone in the cold dark outer reaches of space? Then over Mother’s other shoulder my eyes fell on Frank, who saluted me with his can of beer — ‘Damn it, if that’s all anyone thinks, why not go the whole hog and fling me out on my ear while you’re at it! In fact, why don’t I save you the trouble, and fling myself out on my ear! Because, because I didn’t come here to be insulted!’

‘No one’s insulting you, Charles. If you’re not even capable of having a calm, rational discussion —’

‘I’m perfectly calm! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ like to calmly go upstairs and, and rationally pack my suitcases —’

Mother stepped wordlessly out of my way. Heart pounding madly, I marched for the door. In the hallway the staircase loomed up, crowned with spires and shadows like something from a German Expressionist film. ‘A moocher!’ I whispered as I climbed the steps. ‘A moocher!’ It was simply too monstrous. After everything I had done for the house, to be charged with lethargy, with ‘chronic laziness’ — with not caring, when all I did was care!

I had been wounded terribly; it appeared furthermore that all those drinks had finally caught up with the painkillers and mounted some sort of campaign on my brain. Yet even as I packed my suitcase, even as I made my way back down the stairs, even as I removed my coat from the closet and spent more minutes than were strictly necessary standing there brushing imaginary dust from the lapels, if one person had come after me to remonstrate — to say, Charles, can’t we talk about this? or Don’t be a duffer, old chap, come and have a drink — I’m sure I would have thrown down my bag and laughed the whole thing off. I even went back into the recital room, just in case someone had meant to come but had been delayed. I stood by the door and I watched them, talking and laughing and swirling about the room like coloured smoke, and no one came.

Once, many years ago — I must have been about ten or so — I gatecrashed one of my parents’ parties. Putting me to bed, Mother had hinted, as she always did, at the dreadful things that would befall me if I strayed from my room. But I couldn’t bear any longer not to know what went on down there; so, shortly after eleven, I stole back down the stairs. As luck would have it I walked straight into Father. I thought he would be angry; but he was in a jovial mood, and he said that if I was that curious I could stay up for a very short while, provided I sat quietly in the corner and didn’t let Mother see me.

At first it was so exciting I was quite overcome. The ballroom was a jungle of expensive fabrics, heavy with the steam of a dozen mingled perfumes that promised all sorts of things I didn’t understand. Though it was dark, there was light everywhere you looked: catching on the platters of mysterious foodstuffs, refracting through dancing glasses of Shiraz and Sauvignon, glinting off chokers, rings, tiaras — so that if you half-closed your eyes it seemed like the air was alive with fireflies. And the noise! Who would have thought that a roomful of grown-ups talking about nothing could produce such a roar?

But most remarkable of all were the thin girls who stood dotted here and there among the circling guests. They rose above the heads of the others like statues in a garden; they looked very bored and they never spoke. These were Father’s models, here to showcase whatever new suite of cosmetics was being launched; they weren’t supposed to talk, in case it lessened the effect. Father called them his canvases: the idea was that guests could pause and study them as they moved on to the next conversation.

When I would see them in the days leading up to these parties, skipping down the staircase from Father’s study, these girls didn’t look so much older than me. Some of them were nice; they were from all kinds of places, though they mostly lived in Paris, where they’d been working with the lab. But tonight they had been changed into something not quite human. There was an apocalyptic quality about them that was almost frightening, as if they were outside of time, or as if they were the same all the way through, without blood or guts. Their eyes looked at you and passed right through you. They stood with their limbs bent in motionless arabesques, blazing silently like priceless, preternaturally beautiful anglepoise lamps.

Now and then people found themselves in my corner by mistake — gaunt couturiers with shaven heads, or creepy sensuous-looking men with crushed-velvet suits and brilliantined hair, who smoked spicy cigarettes and who may, in retrospect, have been women. ‘Oh,’ they’d say, confronted by my ten-year-old stare, ‘hello’; then tugging at their ivory cigarette-holders or making anxious goldfish-mouths they’d hurry back the way they came.

But where were they going, I began to wonder, what were they making their way to? When, in short, was the thing going to start? It took a long time before it dawned on me that this walking around talking was the whole point of the evening. I was bitterly disappointed. Now when the jewel-strewn old ladies came over to pat my head I no longer bothered to give them my best cub-scout smile, because I knew that none of them was going to say, ‘Charles, now it is time for the trampoline, and we would like you to have the first bounce,’ or ‘Charles, we have set up this boring party to try and trap a spy, now we need someone inconspicuous, for example a small boy, to discover him, or her.’

And the things I overheard people talking about weren’t even interesting. The men went on about percentiles, or how so-and-so wouldn’t do, or about rugby games they had seen recently. The women meanwhile were all of a flutter about Yves St Laurent’s new concealer pen, a miraculous trompe l’oeil affair that reflected light away from wrinkles, or something. ‘Your father’s a genius,’ they told me. ‘How is Yves anyway?’ they asked Father.

‘Usual. Moping,’ Father said with a little sigh; and then from the French windows at the far end a voice cried, ‘The Beaujolais’s arrived!’ and everyone bubbled forwards, leaving Father and me standing there watching their backs.

‘Well?’ he said to me. ‘Learned your lesson?’

‘What?’ I said. ‘I mean, pardon?’

‘You don’t look like you’re having much fun.’

‘Well,’ I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I tried to pick my words, ‘it doesn’t seem like a very good party.’

‘It doesn’t, does it?’

‘There’s no cake,’ I observed. ‘There’s no chairs, even. And no one brought presents.’

‘Better off in bed, if you ask me.’

‘Dad… what do they all want?’

Father laughed his big braying laugh that Mother was always complaining about. ‘That’s a good question, old chap. Very good question. What do they want?’ He took a swig of his wine. ‘What you have here, see, is a room full of very important people. And what very important people like more than anything else in the world is being made to feel important. So what they do is, they come to parties like this one where they can meet other important people and have important conversations about important things and they can all feel important together, see? Are they having fun? I don’t know. I don’t think they know any more, either. They get a bit like those peacocks out on the lawn, do you think they’re having fun?’

‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled.

‘Course they aren’t, parading around, showing each other their feathers, what kind of fun is that?’ Father tilted his head back and drained his glass; then stood and frowned, collecting his thoughts. ‘See, the thing is, Charles, the thing is, old sport, that although they tell you in school — and it’s very important to pay attention in school, and apply yourself, and learn as much as you can, do you hear me?’

‘Yes, Dad. Except it’s the holidays now.’

‘Well of course, yes, good fellow… where was I? Oh yes — the thing is that the world isn’t like a swimming pool, you know, where everybody’s splashing around in the same water, you know, in their togs. It might look that way, but in fact — in fact,’ he brought up his finger for emphasis, the abruptness of the motion almost unbalancing him, ‘there’s another swimming pool, a tiny little one, and the people in it are the ones who make the…’ He blinked deliberately. ‘It’s like — what’s the name of that fellow in Flash Gordon, the baddie?’

‘Ming the Merciless?’

‘Yes, him. Well, take the folks in this room. They mightn’t look like much more than a bunch of old fogies, but if you add them together, they run the show just like Ming does in… whatever his place is called.’

‘Mongo.’

‘Right, Mongo. So as I say, although this might look like a party, where you might have a bit of fun, it’s actually more like work, because this is where all the people from the small swimming pool make their deals and decisions. So it’s very important that we’re nice to them, nice and polite, and we let them eat all our food. Second nature to a woman like your mother, of course. Grew up in a place like this, all the great and good, all splashing around…’

I had never heard Father speak this way before. It was a bit like when the babysitter lets you stay up and watch a horror film — too strange and scary to actually enjoy, but at the same time unquestionably a unique opportunity, so you stay quiet and don’t draw attention to yourself. His voice was loud and puffing, but his speech was somehow becoming dimmer now, and his face was starting to sag. ‘Splashing around… pluck ideas from a dreamland of Beaujolais and that revolting cheese and dump it on the unsuspecting… Wives at me for free cosmetics, should call the next line bloody Lazarus, ha ha…’

‘Dad?’ pulling on his hand.

He looked down, the white collar of his shirt too tight beneath his surprised red face.

‘How’s that brioche?’ he said.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, quickly chewing off a piece because I was discovering at that very moment that I wanted to cry.

‘Caterers ought to be shot.’ He laughed again, and his brow unfurrowed. ‘See the tennis today? That Lendl? He’s something, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, but Boris Becker’s going to beat him.’

‘Boris Becker, listen, my boy, the day a red-haired German — a red-haired German, that’s all wrong for a start — the day a red-haired German teenager wins Wimbledon, I will personally eat my hat. Germans can’t play grass-court. They’re too analytical. For grass you need an artist. Pancho Gonzales, ever see him play? Now there was a man. Beautiful to watch. That’s what it’s all about. Or take cricket. Who’s the greatest bowler of all time?’

‘I don’t know. Underwood?’

‘To the untrained eye, perhaps, but if you want a true craftsman you need to go right back to Rhodes. Took over four thousand wickets, he had this funny sort of a spin, he — well, I’ll show you, come on.’ Taking me by the hand, he led me out of the room and down the hall. ‘“The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told”, know who said that?’

‘Yeats?’

‘Goodlad.’ He was impressed. Opening the front door, ‘Bugger, it’s raining — well, we’ll just go out for a minute, you’re wearing shoes aren’t you?’

I followed him, disorientated, down the steps to the front lawn and stood shivering in a late-night drizzle while he ran about assembling a wicket from two wine bottles and a frisbee. Then he bounded back into the house to fetch the bat and ball. ‘Here’s the line, all right?’ He dug his heel into the grass and scraped out a muddy mark. ‘You bat first. Now here’s how they say old Rhodes used to do it —’

He hung his jacket on somebody’s wing mirror, and began a long, lolloping run. His shirtsleeve shuttled up his wrist as his arm came round in an arc and the ball flew from his hand; I shook the tiredness and the strangeness of it from my eyes and drew the bat protectively to my shins as the ball materialized before me –

‘Bravo!’ Father clapped, jogging up to me. ‘Not bad at all. Now you have a turn.’

I’d rescued the ball from the undergrowth and was just about to start my run-up when a silhouette appeared in the doorway and inquired as to what, exactly, we thought we were doing.

‘We’re having a very important philosophical debate,’ Father said, touching his bat off the ground. ‘We’re righting wrongs.’

‘Would it be too much to ask for you to do it inside?’ Mother said icily.

‘In a minute.’

Mother’s arm dropped from the lintel to fold tightly across her chest. ‘People are wondering where you are,’ she said, and then, ‘your guest will be getting lonely.’

‘Come on, Charles, let’s see what you have.’ He motioned me to deliver the ball; obediently I started to run.

‘We wouldn’t want her to start frowning, and jeopardize her lucrative career,’ Mother said from the doorway in a wicked singsong voice. ‘What would your insurance think of that?’

‘Christ!’ he turned and roared, his bow tie askew, ‘I said in a minute, didn’t I, can’t you see I’m with the bloody boy —’

Mother brought her right foot down on to the next step and screamed, ‘You can’t even get that right, can you? You don’t speak to him for weeks on end and then you keep him up half the night because you suddenly feel paternal —’ She flinched back as he hurled the bat in her direction. It clattered on to the gravel and slid under a car. Mother span on her heel and stamped back inside, slamming the door behind her. I retrieved the bat and waited. Father was standing under a tree, rubbing his temples.

‘Dad, do you want me to bowl?’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘Are you ready, or —?’

‘Tell you what, let’s call it a night, old chap. Your mother’s right, it’s time you were in bed.’ He sighed as he trudged over towards me. He patted my head and turned to look out over the bay. He jingled the keys in his pocket and cleared his throat, and after we had looked at the bay some more he said, ‘The thing is, Charles, that life is a lot like cricket. The wicket is… no, well, listen, anyway, it’s… life’s a nasty business, can be a nasty business…’ His breath nearly knocked me down. ‘What I want is for you and your sister, for you and Christabel… I don’t want you to have to claw through the, the shit, do you understand?’

He never swore in front of us; my heart pounded with alarm. ‘Yes, Dad.’

‘“Unshapely things”, remember that. World’s full of unshapely things. Some of ’em’ll look shapely enough, though. Some’ll be quite alluring. So you can’t listen to anybody. And what you’ve got to do, is… what you’ve got to do…’ He stopped, seeming to lose his thread; turned away from me and shambled back towards the house, pulling at his jaw, lost in his own thoughts. So I never found out what it was I had to do; I could only take my best guess. And closing the door of the recital room gently behind me twenty-odd years later, I had to admit to myself that it was quite conceivable I had got it wrong.

One of Bel’s actor-friends had taken the piano and was tinkling out a melancholy ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ as, with my suitcase in my hand, I proceeded down the hall. Voices fell in for the parts they knew: ‘There’s a land that I dreamed of…’ I walked by the glass frieze of Actaeon down to the door and surveyed my lost kingdom through a fine, sifting rain: the forlorn trees the birds had deserted, the twisted iron lattice where the Folly had been.

Would the Twister that had seized our lives never set us down in Kansas again, in good old black and white? Or couldn’t you ever go back? Was that only for fairy tales, was the real world everybody got so excitable about precisely this gaudy Techni-colour, this relentless, senseless propulsion?

‘Birds fly over the rainbow,’ the voices filtered out from inside, ‘why then, oh why can’t I?’

Numbly I descended from the porch. I passed Frank’s van there among the Saabs and Jaguars, and wondered briefly if I’d ever see him again. Then, retrieving a squashed canapé from my pocket, I took the first dark, rain-laden steps of my life away from Amaurot.