by Paul Murray
‘They all have stupid names, Charles.’
A barrage of noise from the loudspeaker signalled that the race would be commencing shortly. The dogs were locked into their traps.
‘Yes, but names are important, you have to pay attention to them.’ I said this with a curious certainty: for here at the dog-track, I was finding my senses awakening to the resonances of seemingly superficial things, the intricate spectral machinery of Luck…
‘Here youse, the race is startin,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll put a fiver on him anyway, all right?’
‘I don’t think it is a stupid name,’ Bel said, ignoring him. ‘I think it’s romantic.’
‘It’s a dog, that’s why it’s stupid. I mean, if it was a song or a book or something, that’d be different, but who on earth names their dog An Evening of Long Goodbyes?’
‘Ponces,’ Frank chipped in. ‘You get some posh benders down here fancyin themselves as trainers, as a hobby, like, prob’ly cos they can’t afford a horse. Their dogs are always crap.’
‘Exactly. There’s a time and a place, Bel. Not everything can be theatre –’
‘Why not?’ she said, colouring. ‘Anyway, there’s more to it than winning.’
‘Depends who’s paying for it,’ I returned.
Frank sighed and shrugged and went off to the plate-glass hatch to place the bets – perhaps with a forlorn glance over to the far side of the stand, where his down-at-heel pals merrily drank their cans – leaving us to stare furiously into the thickening sheets of rain, starting as the gun went off and the electric rabbit began another lonely circuit…
After Meet the Wife’s storming victory, Frank took us to a local inn to celebrate. Bel’s mood improved once we had left the track. None of us mentioned An Evening of Long Goodbyes, whose race had been so catastrophic that, by the end, neither Frank nor I could summon the will to gloat. He had begun badly, getting his head stuck in the gate and having to be extricated by the stewards, and continued with a series of humiliating and distinctly uncanine trips and stumbles; disgracing himself beyond redemption in the third lap, when his muzzle came off and, to the boos of the crowd, he abandoned the race to leap over the hoardings and snatch a hot-dog from the hand of a small boy.
The pub was seedy and glum and my white wine arrived in a diminutive bottle with a screw-off lid. My sister joined Frank in a conciliatory Guinness, and as they clinked glasses I looked about at my fellow drinkers. Was I the only one in evening wear? These chaps were a uniformly rough-looking lot, and many of them, I realized, were directing unfriendly stares at me.
‘Quite an ambience, this place,’ I laughed nervously.
‘We come here a good bit,’ Frank told me, ‘don’t we, Bel?’
‘That’s right,’ Bel looking me straight in the eye. ‘It’s our favourite pub.’
I sighed inwardly; I came up against this kind of attitude quite often in my dealings with girls in general, and Bel in particular. They love to flirt with transgression: give them a lout who breaks the odd window and they will pull each other’s hair out for him – without ever diluting or moderating their own careful delicacy, needless to say. Sometimes Bel reminded me of an E M Forster heroine, traipsing about the jungle in a ballgown, with a full set of china and embroidering work for the evenings. What was she looking for, I wondered, in her lonely dallyings outside her own realm; while keeping that same realm locked tightly up inside her.
‘Well, I like it here too,’ I said to annoy her. ‘We should do this more often. I like the company of the working man. Good, honest folk, enjoying their time for reflection after a hard week in the jar factory.’
‘You always get a deadly scrap in here,’ Frank said. ‘Last week me and me mate, right, saw these two scumbags we know, and we go up to them, straight in with the dujj, and bop! I loaf one of them and then I see his mate’s got me mate on the ground and he’s stampin on his head, so I grab this bottle, and smash, right between the fuckin eyes. The both of them fuckin legged it.’
I absorbed this silently.
‘I was just laughin,’ Frank added.
‘Aha,’ I said.
‘That’s one of the cunts there,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘See that cunt sittin at the bar? The poxy little fuck? That’s one of the cunts we done.’
The cunt in question was a short man with a crew-cut and a long fresh scar down his jaw. As Frank spoke he turned his head slowly in our direction. An interchange of baleful stares ensued. Caught in the middle, I rubbed my nose and coughed and was beginning to hyperventilate when, mercifully, the cunt bowed his head. Frank snorted victoriously. Bel let out a worried coo.
‘Ah, don’t mind him,’ Frank assured her. ‘Sure he’s only a cunt. Anyway if there was any bother you’d have Charlie and me to protect you, wouldn’t you?’
‘Ha ha,’ I said, but this was my cue to go. ‘Look, I forgot, I have to, um…’
‘See a man about a dog?’ Frank chortled, the meaning of which escaped me; Bel smirked triumphantly as I put on my topcoat and hastened outside in a cold sweat to hail a cab.
It was a long ride back, and at the door I bade farewell to a sizeable portion of my winnings. But I didn’t care, it was such a relief to be home: I closed the door and leaned back against it thankfully. The rich aroma of cooking floated up to me, and I went into the kitchen, where Mrs P was just that minute taking a tray of cinnamon buns out of the oven, piping hot with the sugar frosting still sizzling on their golden tops. My entrance took her by surprise – in fact she practically jumped out of her skin, only this time the tray acted as ballast.
‘Buns,’ I said, ignoring this. ‘I’ll just pinch one, if I may –’
‘Hmm yes,’ she recovered in time to swerve nimbly away, moving the tray just out of my reach, ‘but Master Charles, they are for your dear mother in hospital.’
‘She won’t mind,’ I said, deftly stepping around to her tray side.
She reversed. ‘Now Charles, please to think of your poor mother.’
‘Look, give me a bun,’ I said bluntly.
Pursing her lips, she proffered the tray. Tearing off a mouthful of delicious steaming sponge, I remembered my plan to save Mrs P’s failing mental health through love. ‘So,’ I said, chewing and swallowing, ‘what’s it like in that place, anyway?’
‘What?’ she said.
‘You know, where you’re from,’ I said, taking another bun. They really were very good. She hadn’t made cinnamon buns in ages.
‘Well…’ she frowned. ‘It was very nice, yes. When I was a little girl. Now, of course, there are many troubles.’
‘But it was nice when you were little, eh?’ I said.
She put the buns on the counter behind her and folded her arms meditatively. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, and her expression quite changed, making her look twenty years younger, her amber eyes taking on a happy, nostalgic glaze not unlike two frosted cinnamon buns. ‘When I was little, we lived in the country. My father was a painter and the house is filled always with the loveliest colours. Each day my sister and I bring wild flowers home for him to paint –’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, as this line of questioning didn’t show much promise. ‘But it’s in a bad way now, is it? Lots of explosions, houses burning down, sort of thing? Like on the news?’
‘Now,’ frowning down at the ground, ‘everything is changed. Like you cannot even think. The explosion may stop, the burning, but… like this plate,’ she picked up one of Mother’s Wedgwood dinner-set from the dresser and traced her finger around the intricate design on the rim, ‘if I drop, is gone. Smash up into little pieces. You can glue it together, but the pattern, that leads into itself at every place, is still broken, disappears for ever. Houses and families, friends who talk at the market, children who sing and shout in the street, men who build, eat sandwiches in sunshine, look at pretty girls – all pattern lost and disappear like –’
‘Well don’t break the plate,’ I said hurriedly, snatching it from her upheld hand. Midnight bre
akfasts were one thing, but wilful plate-breaking was another matter entirely. Really the woman seemed quite disturbed. Possibly I ought to call the chap at the Cedars to come and have a look at her. ‘What about your family?’ I said, attempting to lead her on to more peaceful topics that might be less of a threat to the crockery. ‘What about them?’
She was about to reply, but halted and regarded me curiously. ‘Why do you ask me this?’
‘No reason. Just, you know, I don’t know much about you. Seems odd, doesn’t it? I mean you live here –’
‘Many, many questions,’ she said.
‘Well, global village, you know, hands across the sea, what –’
She didn’t understand. ‘Many questions,’ she mused to herself, then looking back at me said in an unfamiliar, bitter tone, ‘in Yugoslavia, men come with questions. Is not good, when they come.’
So I was the secret police now, was I? ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you can just answer the question, or not. Tell me about your wretched family or don’t. I don’t care. I’m just trying to be nice. I know all about it already. I watch the news.’
‘You want to know about my family?’ she shouted angrily. ‘Fine. Five years ago, my husband is architect, I give the legal aid, we have two sons in university and a girl who wants to be famous actress. Now there is nothing. House gone, money, we hide and we run –’ She covered her face with her apron. Little cotton ducklings danced up and down where her nose had been.
I hadn’t even known she had children. ‘Where are they?’ I asked, as gently as I could.
‘ – and now I cook you buns!’ Mrs P sobbed, and ran out of the room.
What could I do? I couldn’t follow her; she was the help, after all; her personal life wasn’t really any of my business. Possibly paying attention to Mrs P hadn’t been such a good idea after all. We truly didn’t know the first thing about her – she’d just turned up one day, responding to an advertisement that had, we discovered subsequently, mysteriously appeared in the window of the local newsagent. As it happened, though, Mother had been thinking of getting a new maid, the last one, a fetching little French au pair, having left some months before following a misunderstanding with Pongo McGurks at our Christmas party – perfectly innocent, of course, but you know au pairs. And so Mrs P had joined the household. By then Father was already very sick, and no one had ever got around to asking her about her past. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that she might have preferred it that way.
Pensively I ate another bun, then took the tray up to Father’s study. I ate tentatively; one could no longer be sure of the cooking’s soundness, that was the thing. They tasted fine, but who knew what madness might throw into the mixing bowl? And if not now, what of breakfast tomorrow? Elevenses? Lunch? Tea? Dinner? Supper? And the day after that, the deadly game of Russian roulette would continue, with each spoonful another spin of the chamber…
Deciding a glass or two of wine might steady my nerves, I went back downstairs to the cellar. Hmm. I could see what Bel meant. The stocks really had taken a beating recently. Was it possible that I could have put away this amount on my own? Or could it be that I was getting help from another quarter? I clenched my fists and swore. Frank! I could just see him, laughing soundlessly in the back of his rusty white van, rocking back and forth as he swigged from the neck of a bottle of Marsanne. Or at the dog-track, the green rim poking from the collar of his windcheater as he frittered away the proceeds from our ottoman. Or – a new thought struck me, maybe it wasn’t Frank at all! Maybe Mrs P had drunk the wine! Maybe she was a Secret Drinker, like that laundrywoman of Boyd Snooks’s he’d found asleep in the dog basket! Wouldn’t that explain why she was acting so strangely? Unless of course it was only a symptom of her collapse… Great Scott, we were living in a time bomb!
I grabbed a soothing premier cru, and returned to the study. There was only the ghost of a moon outside, but I left the light off. I sat at the desk, poured a glass and raised it to Father’s portrait – just in case there might be some vestige of his spirit still hanging around among the toxic oils and leads that could give me a sign, point the way out of my quandary. But the glass was filled and emptied until there was nothing left, and I remained in the dark.
I turned to the window and looked out at the Folly, half-hidden by night. The Folly was my idea: it had occurred to me on one of my strolls around the grounds that we hadn’t got one, and as no one else seemed to be doing anything about it, I had called in the builders. That was almost a year ago, but the tower, to be the glory of our estate, was still nowhere near finished. The builders hadn’t been in all week; possibly they were on strike, they were always on strike for one reason or another. Unlike most builders one hears of, these ones were very moral. They would go on strike at the drop of a hat, in support of the nurses or the bricklayers or some other branch of labourer, or often on more general humanitarian grounds. ‘We can’t work,’ the head builder would tell me in the kitchen of a lunchtime, ‘until the UN does something about Indonesia, it’s getting ridiculous’ (‘It is,’ I’d agree, as they went off to picket the Nike shop in town); or they’d down tools on a Tuesday morning, telling me ‘It’s the whole Kurdish thing, Mr Hythloday, it’s unconscionable, and the US is just making things worse’ (‘I know,’ I’d say with a sigh as they gathered up their placards and set off for the Turkish Embassy); and every week the Palestine question took a new turn to prompt a day off.
‘Basically, it would be wrong of us to work while this sort of thing is going on,’ they would argue, and they had a good point; however, the world didn’t seem to be improving and consequently the Folly was going very slowly. I still wasn’t allowed to enter it, and they weren’t sure exactly when it would be safe enough to do so. Yet in a way, I almost preferred that they did it like this; as I looked out at its skeletal form, I could perceive already its proud upsurge, its noble future. ‘Liberty!’ it seemed to cry. And tonight, just as I was about to look away, I saw something: an angelic face peeping out from one of the narrow windows. It was a very beautiful face, painted in the choicest greys and silvers of the clouded moonlight; it saw me, smiled and waved. I waved back, whereupon it disappeared.
I should explain at this point that this sort of thing wasn’t entirely new to me. In recent months I had had quite a few supernatural experiences. My theory was that without Mother here to distract me with her nagging, I was more receptive to communications from the spirit world. I’ve mentioned the eerie feelings I had had watching late-night films – i.e., the unshakeable sense that the films were watching me. Often the Visions were of a more hostile variety. Leaning from the window after a long night, attempting to assuage my spinning brain, I had on more than one occasion seen huge, goblin-like figures, not dissimilar to Frank, lurching about in the shadow of the Folly, or lumbering with silent menace across the lawn. Whether these manifestations had always been resident in Amaurot, or whether they had only arrived recently in some sort of premonitory capacity, I didn’t know. But whichever line you took, this particular Vision seemed propitious. I mean an angel was a definite step up from a goblin, for one thing; symbolically speaking, it surely meant that the Folly (representing me, Charles, and also the family line in general) would continue to rise and transcend the intrusions of the brutish world (symbolized by Frank, if you want).
I tipped an imaginary hat to Father, by way of thank you for the good omen, and returned to my room in a much more optimistic frame of mind, and it wasn’t until I tried to sit down on it that I realized the chair to my writing-desk wasn’t there. ‘What now?’ I said to the ceiling, which had risen to prominence in my new horizontal position.
Picking myself up, I scoured the room for it, and then the landing, but it was nowhere to be seen. This was exasperating. It wasn’t a costly chair, it wasn’t even an attractive chair; it had come down from the attic after its predecessor succumbed to woodworm. Its theft revealed a hitherto unsuspected degree of stupidity in the malefactor. There were lots of nicer things in the
house to steal, and it was most bothersome that he should settle on this worthless item just as I intended to sit on it. At that very minute I heard them come in and, sniggering to each other, climb the stairs to Bel’s room. I had half a mind to go and confront him there and then: indeed I had put on my slippers and was halfway to the door when the horrible image of interrupting him and Bel in the middle of something appeared in my mind, and my legs quite failed me. The room began to list, like a ship in a storm; knees buckling, I staggered into the armoire, then back the way I had come as the room tilted to the other side. I lay down on the bed and covered my eyes. This had to end. We couldn’t go on like this; my stomach, for one, couldn’t bear it. Action had to be taken: definitive action.
3
The next couple of days were peaceful enough. Bel was out most of the time and she took her Project with her; when at home they tended to stay in her bedroom at their reading lesson. The day after was when all the trouble with the bank materialized, and things really started to cave in: though the morning began so sweetly, with Mrs P waking me just before noon with the telephone on a tray.
‘Hello?’ I said, after establishing that this was not a murderous ruse on Mrs P’s part.
‘Hello,’ an unfamiliar voice said. ‘Charles?’
Heart pounding, I scrambled out of bed to my feet. It was a sultry voice, throaty, at once refined and scandalously suggestive; it could have come from a thousand black-and-white movies – the fallen dame in the bar-room asking for a light, the heiress with the detective parked on a shadowy driveway, the trembling young widow pleading for help from the embittered ex-marine. A monochrome voice that could belong to only one person.
‘Laura,’ I said with a strange, thankful calmness, a sense that one thing had ended and a new one was beginning.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your sister called me last night, she said you had something you needed to discuss with me…?’
Damn that Bel, she would make nothing easy for me. ‘That’s right,’ I said. A moment of blissful tension elapsed.