by Paul Murray
‘Are we still talking about me?’ I said.
‘Yes, Charles;’ bringing her foot down thunderously.
‘What – you’re suggesting that instead of trying to protect and care for my family I should be out working in some sort of a, a job, is that it?’
‘In a nutshell,’ Bel replied.
I was confused. ‘This isn’t how the conversation started out,’ I averred.
‘Maybe not,’ Bel said. ‘But it’s high time someone told you a few home truths.’
‘Actually, I think I can feel another nauseous spell coming on,’ I said hurriedly.
She said it anyway: she was remorseless, telling me that while possibly by some tortuous logic I was misconstruing my meddling behaviour as paternal, or protective, in actual fact it was intrusive and stifling, ‘and the only reason you do it is that you don’t have anything else, because for the last two years you’ve been either sitting around here on your own or drinking with your good-for-nothing friends and basically living without the remotest concept of adulthood or maturity… Well, I’ve had enough, Charles. I don’t care any more if you don’t go back to college. I don’t care if you want to ruin your life. But I don’t see why you should get to ruin mine as well. If you’re going to be a failure, fine. But please fail on your own time.’
‘Failure?’ I yelped. ‘Someone has to preserve the family tradition, don’t they? Someone has to keep the flag flying.’
‘Father never took a day off in his life,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Flag indeed.’
‘Yes, but he didn’t work his whole life so that his children would have to – to also work,’ I parried, ‘and besides, I don’t understand what you’re getting so het up about’ – although it was pretty obvious, Bel was relentlessly introspective and probably suffering from terrible guilt over this Frank character. ‘I don’t see why a few kindly meant words of advice have you sending me out to work shelling peas, or putting tops on jam jars in some hideous mechanical barn, standing all day at a conveyor belt, the roar of machinery in my ears, not even a chair to sit on and the endless gleaming jars rolling inexorably towards my little lid-placing device –’
‘I’m talking about responsibility, Charles, about living like an actual human grown-up person –’
‘This Frank of yours, I suppose he works, does he?’
Bel halted mid-stamp and adjusted the strap of her dress. ‘He works,’ she said evasively.
‘Well? Brain surgeon, hot-air balloonist, third violin…?’
She cast down her eyes. ‘He has a van,’ she said.
‘A van!’ I exclaimed, triumphantly jabbing a finger in the air. ‘A van! And any idea as to what he puts in this “van”? Opium? Elephant tusks? Well-intentioned but misguided young girls from good families?’
‘It doesn’t matter!’ she shouted. ‘God, I knew I shouldn’t have bothered trying to reason with you.’
From outside, the querulous creak of the weathervane rose over the wind. I sighed, sat up in bed and turned back the cuffs of my pyjamas. The thing was, I wasn’t just trying to annoy her this time; I really did have the uncanny feeling that with Frank she had crossed some kind of a line. ‘Bel,’ I said earnestly, ‘I’m sorry if I’m harsh with you. You’re grown up, you’ve finished college, you can make your own decisions. But although I may not have a respectable job in a jar factory, I have seen a thing or two. And this Frank…’ I racked my brains for a more diplomatic, more palatable expression for my fears, but I couldn’t think of one. So I took a deep breath and came right out with it. ‘Are you familiar with the figure from Yiddish mythology known as the Golem?’
Bel looked puzzled but suspicious.
‘The Golem, according to legend, is a creature composed entirely of clay – or in certain cases,’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘putty, seemingly –’
‘Here we go,’ she declared heavily, cutting me off. ‘Here we go!’
‘Come back!’ I cried, stretching my arms after her. ‘Come back, for pity’s sake! I’m not joking, Bel. What I am about to tell you could be of the utmost importance to both of us!’
She paused in the doorway, then with a slight, acidic nod of the head, coolly bade me continue.
I am not by nature a superstitious man, and the next day I wondered if the kidney beans were to blame for the wild thoughts riding roughshod through my mind that night. Looking back on it now, though, I can see that I was part right, at least: that the coming of Frank did mark the beginning of our downfall – although each of us had many, many contributions of our own to make. ‘The Golem does not think for itself,’ I told Bel. ‘It is an automaton, animated by mystical powers – usually malevolent, it has to be said.’
‘Charles, it’s late. Have you a point to this, other than pretending that the reason you don’t like Frank isn’t that you’re a snob and a sociopath, but because he’s some kind of a mystical being sent to corrupt me?’
‘I know it sounds outlandish,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how else to explain this sense of foreboding. None of your boyfriends ever made my skin actually crawl before.’ I shuddered, imagining the dark slab of Frank driving his van down crepuscular suburban streets, eyes gleaming emptily as he awaited the call from his master…
Bel’s shoulders slumped. ‘Then it appears we are at an impasse.’
‘Almost literally,’ I said, picturing Frank moonlighting as a roadblock or a small dam.
Bel sighed, and sank wearily on to the foot of the bed. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘it’s quite obvious that in Mother’s absence the power has gone to your head. I don’t know what’s going to come of it, or if there’s anything I can do about it. But I know that I can’t go on like this. We have to sort something out if we’re going to keep living here with any semblance of normality. So though I do this with a bad conscience, I propose we make a pact.’
‘A pact?’
‘A pact.’ She rubbed her eyes with the edge of her hand. ‘If you let this relationship take its course, without any more complaining or allusions to Jewish mythology, I hereby promise that if – if – Frank and I then break up, I’ll – I’ll stay in for three months before seeing anyone else. How’s that?’
‘That sounds very cynical, Bel,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, I just want you to be happy.’
‘Charles, just tell me what it will take to get you to leave me alone.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. Cynical it might have been, but I was rather taken with the novelty of this arrangement. Usually my arguments with Bel ended in her hurling something breakable at me. The sad truth was that she was going to see this fellow whether I liked it or not. At least this way I would be offered some kind of recompense – something, for instance, that under normal circumstances she would never be persuaded to do…
‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘Three months, and…’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘And?’
‘And you also have to introduce me to that friend of yours. That Laura Treston.’
‘Laura Treston?’ Bel repeated disgustedly. ‘She’s not my friend, I haven’t spoken to her in – wait a minute, what made you suddenly think of her, anyway?’ I made an indistinct coughing noise and smoothed some bumps out of the eiderdown. Bel groaned and tugged her hair. ‘Oh Charles, you haven’t been going through my old yearbooks again, have you?’
‘I had to check something,’ I mumbled.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, it’s creepy and morbid, those photographs are from four years ago at least, those girls are practically still children…’
‘Be that as it may,’ I said gruffly.
‘I mean, none of them looks the same now. A couple are dead, even.’
‘Coming back to the matter at hand,’ I said.
Bel groaned again. ‘Don’t make me call her, Charles. She’s so boring. The last time I talked to her I practically had to be drip-fed espresso for the rest of the week.’
‘Those are my terms,’ I said. ‘Take them or leave them.’
S
he surrendered. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. I’ll call her tomorrow, and you’ll promise to leave Frank and me alone. Promise?’
‘Where is he now?’ I sat up. ‘I hope he’s in the spare room, Bel.’
‘Starting now.’
‘All right, all right, I promise.’ I outstretched my hand; she shook it, and the pact was sealed. She went off yawning to her room, and I laid down my head, thoughts awhirl like galaxies.
Bel’s yearbooks had been a secret vice of mine since my girl-less schooldays, when I’d spirit them away from the pile under her bed and bring them in to show my classmates and be hailed as a hero for the day. We would gather behind the cricket pavilion and huddle round in the glow of the pages: boggling at the sheer number of faces and names and possibilities, rating every single girl out of ten, speculating on their sexual proclivities, imagining lights-out in the dorms and the pillow fights that, if we knew anything about girls, must surely ensue… and before long a silence would fall, as each of us drifted off into his own private reverie – lost in the photograph, this seeming Elysium where our feminine counterparts dwelled beaming or scowling in black-and-white rows, distant and unknown to us as stars.
And that was where I first encountered her – one summer’s day when, with nothing to do, I had stolen into Bel’s bedroom on an ongoing and fruitless quest for her diary, and instead found the new yearbook, and sitting on the bed cast my eye over the rank-and-file of twelve-year-olds, until suddenly I stopped and caught my breath; and my lust gave way to something purer, translucent and doomed as a wish. Those eyes, that mouth, the thrilling glimpse of throat through the school blouse; that array of tresses – hazel or blonde, it was hard to tell – that hung so magnificently still… With a strange sense of destiny I’d traced through the block of names at the bottom of the page – Audrey Courtenay, Bunty Chopin, Dubois Shaughnessy – until I arrived at hers: Laura; Laura Treston.
Ever since then, although the fates had conspired to keep us from meeting, I had followed her progress in the yearbooks, each one bringing a new metamorphosis; in the pillow fights of my dreams, it was the throw-cushions of her breasts more than any others that shook and resounded with the light thump of feathers. Even now, years after school had ended and she had gone I knew not where, she lived on in my heart like a hologram. The Patsy Olés of this world could come and go; this, I felt sure, was to be my grand love story.
Bel herself never appeared in the class photographs, nor in any other photographs for that matter. She’d always been sensitive about her looks; whenever photos came back from the chemist after a family occasion she would invariably grab them first, and look through them compulsively, and put them down disappointed two minutes later, saying sadly, ‘I look like that? Why didn’t someone tell me…’ I never understood what she got in such a fuss about, because even then you could tell she would be pretty – but the girl in the pictures evidently didn’t match up to the girl she was in her imagination, and she began to dread them, these moments that didn’t die away but would come back to haunt her in all their objective, inescapable truth. So, at the age of twelve, she’d decided she would simply no longer allow herself to be photographed. In school she’d engineered ways to get out of it, coming down with ever more extravagant ailments on Photograph Day (the nuns who taught her were old and doddery and always fell for her painted-on measles, lesions, yellow fever). In family portraits, she’d feature as a blank space, a decentring, inexplicable inch of room furnishings beside Mother, Father and me. To this day, the moment a camera appeared, Bel seemed to vanish into thin air.
I was too excited to get back to sleep and for an hour I lay there happily considering my new life with Laura. But as the night wore on the excitement curdled, and I began to be tormented by doubts. That everything should fall into place this way: suddenly it seemed too neat, too easy. Should I have turned down the pact? Had I sold Bel down the river? And then I thought I heard noises, and I couldn’t reassure myself that it wasn’t him, stalking deadly through the halls and corridors, making sure all was quiet before beginning his maleficent enterprise.
Chiding myself, I put on my slippers and went out to the landing. But all was silent, save the distant clanks and rumblings the house made in its sleep, and somewhere a clock ticking to itself. There was no one in the bathroom, although there was an unfamiliar stench. I drew the curtains in Mother’s bedroom, then went to the door of Father’s study. And there I paused: seized, as I turned the handle, by memories, as if they had been waiting there coiled inside the metal. They were from when I was very small, before he started locking the door, and I would come to see him with a glass of milk or a snail or my homework (norway has alot of fjords, nobody does much there), and find him brooding in the recesses of his enormous chair; how the room had seemed enchanted, with its vertiginous walls of arcane books and ledgers, the murky carpet that he wouldn’t let Mother change, the obsequious plaster head waiting hopefully on its plinth – the room like an alchemist’s lair, that both was and wasn’t part of the house, where Father both was and wasn’t with us…
‘What’s this about Dad, bones?’
‘Cheekbones, Charles, see some people don’t really have ’em, and these colours –’
‘And what’s this?’
‘Ah, well that’s a chemical formula, is what that’s called, this fellow here’s a stearate radical and – no, don’t touch that, Charles –’
‘Oops, sorry…’
‘Doesn’t matter. Look, there’s Mother out in the garden, I wonder if she needs a hand,’ steering me gently but firmly out the door…
Nothing in the room had been touched since his death. Everything was as he had left it, as if he’d just stepped out and would be returning momentarily: the vials of dyes and tinctures, the colour charts and cross-sections; the desk overflowing with magazine-cuttings of tempestuous models in hair and dresses already passed out of fashion, like spirits that had been called into being for that moment alone, sprung like flames from shadows before disappearing back to that essential realm where it was forever 1996. The only addition was the portrait that Mother had installed – opposite the window, so that he could continue to enjoy the grounds and gardens, this empire he had built from nothing. Or not quite nothing: our family traced its lineage back to the first Norman conquerors, although some regrettable dalliances with the local peasantry over the centuries had somewhat thinned the bloodline, perhaps accounting for an occasional lassitude in judgement such as exhibited by my sister. Standing in the moonlight, leaning back with my arms rigid against the desk, I studied the aquiline nose, the thinly smiling lips, the ruddy cheeks. It had been painted posthumously, from photographs, but the picture really captured the spirit of my father, a man devoted to life in his own inspiring if inexplicable way.
I’d almost forgotten why I came in at all, when by chance I spotted something unusual. Two red dents in a velvet square: two pieces of Father’s coin collection mysteriously absent. Frank! So that was his game – start slow, no one will notice, until the whole house was cleaned out! I pictured him at one of those vile suburban pubs, sitting at a faux-marble table top, drinking a fizzing lager with his fence, satellite television blaring above them as they laughed and clinked glasses in their pork-pie hats. Now from downstairs came the sound of a cupboard opening. In a fury I rolled up my pyjama sleeves. Just let me catch him in a fresh act of thievery, I would settle his hash for him, Golem or no!
I padded softly down the stairs. I took the poker from the drawing room, then saw a faint glisten of light along the wooden floorboards of the hall: I whirled about in the eye of the sweeping staircase, glancing from one shut door to the other, and then a noise! I pounced, poker high, through the scullery door – and checked myself just in time, so that Mrs P was dealt only a glancing blow, although unfortunately enough to bring the silver tray she was carrying crashing to the floor. ‘Young Master Charles!’ she cried. ‘You are giving me the heart failure!’
‘Oh, yes, sorry Mrs P, did
n’t think you’d be about this late –’
‘Yes,’ she faltered, ‘I am – I am making the breakfast…’
I picked up a tender sliver of pheasant from the floor. Morsels of roast potato clung to it alluringly. Making breakfast at three in the morning? And no ordinary breakfast either – on top of the pheasant, or rather beside it on the floor, was a heavenly looking soufflé and a bottle of rather fine Armagnac. It looked like someone was in the running for a first-class breakfast in bed. And there could be little doubt as to who that someone would be – the poor thing was still upset about the kidney-bean debacle; indeed, now that I looked at her properly, I could see the rings that worry and tiredness had left on her simple rustic face.
She protested, but I would not hear of her making another breakfast at this hour; I told her to forget about the kidney beans and go directly to bed as soon as she had cleaned up the floor. She bowed gratefully, and I left the room, marvelling at her diligence even if increasingly concerned about her mental stability – I mean to say, pheasant for breakfast? In all the excitement, the Frank conundrum went clean out of my head; and it wasn’t until some time later that I noticed the disappearance of the ottoman, and the ornamental teapot.
2
Perhaps it might seem that Bel had a point, about me not having a job, I mean. To the casual observer it may have looked like I was living a life of indolence, compared to the noisy industry with which the city to the north was ripping itself to pieces. It was true that, after a brief but regrettable entanglement with Higher Learning, I had fairly much confined my activities to the house and its environs. The simple fact of it was that I was happy there; and as I didn’t have any skills to speak of, or gifts to impart, I didn’t see why I ought to burden the world with my presence. It was not true, however, to say that I did nothing. I had several projects of my own to keep busy with, such as composing, and supervising the construction of the Folly. I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times, they had called it sprezzatura: the idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat. I had explained it several times to Bel, but she didn’t seem to get it.