by Paul Murray
‘So what is it?’ Laura said.
What was it? I could hardly tell her she’d caught my eye as a twelve-year-old while I was paging through my sister’s yearbook, it might give her the wrong idea, and I didn’t want to jump the gun with any talk of destiny. ‘Um…’ I said.
‘Christabel told me,’ she interjected delicately, ‘you were interested in insurance?’
‘Yes,’ I said, seizing on the words. ‘Yes I am. Very interested. Insurance, in all its, ah, forms, and, um, wonders… it, it enthrals me…’
‘She said you were interested in insuring a vase,’ Laura said slowly, as if guiding someone of limited mental ability.
‘Vases, yes, that’s it, I have a vase and I’d like to insure it. I was wondering if you’d care to come over some night and discuss it? Over dinner perhaps? Say this Saturday?’
She was doubtful at first. ‘Couldn’t you just come by the office?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘because there’s actually more than one vase, you see, in fact there’s several vases, much too many to carry to the office – and anyway I prefer to do business over dinner. That way, ah, no one gets hungry.’
‘Oh,’ she said. There was a long pause. I waited, quietly grinding my teeth and berating myself. That way no one gets hungry – what on earth was I thinking? Was I still crippled by the fallout from the Olé incident? Would I never be able to speak to a woman again?
‘All right,’ Laura broke in. ‘It’s not normally how we do things, but you are Christabel’s brother, after all.’
‘Yes,’ I said fatuously, resisting the urge to jump up and down weeping tears of gratitude. ‘So I’ll see you Saturday? Eightish?’
‘I suppose,’ the voice crackled. ‘Oh, but I’m lactose intolerant, okay? So like, I can’t eat anything with lactose.’
‘Certainly, certainly… don’t give it another thought,’ I said, and replaced the receiver. For a few seconds I remained there in the moment’s afterglow, not yet ready to yield up its immediacy; then, with a whoop, I raised my fist to the air. Victory! True, I hadn’t presented myself in the most flattering light; I may have come across as a tad eccentric, or deranged. But what mattered was that she had accepted. Once she was inside the house, where I controlled all, everything would fall into place: for she would see that here was a world waiting to be remade as she desired – mountains moved, seas emptied, lactose banished to the ends of the earth – it would all be for her, and she would understand straight away that we were meant to be.
I went into the breakfast room to deliver the good news, but found myself confronted by Frank in a state of partial undress on the far side of the table, which rather spoiled the moment. ‘All right bud,’ he greeted me, stretching back in an uninhibited, vaguely post-coital yawn that exposed his flaccid white belly. I shuddered: How could Bel endure to look at that, indeed to feel it slapping greasily against – but no. She had honoured the pact and I had got what I wanted – now the détente must be respected. Swallowing my disgust, I gave him as unhostile a nod as I could manage, and pulled out a chair at the table.
Bel was sitting slumped in front of a pile of opened letters. She looked rather agitated: her cheeks had a high colour and her hair was frazzled as though she’d been tugging at it, and when I asked her pointedly who had eaten all the marmalade she didn’t reply. I changed tack and told her about Laura. ‘Funny that she’s in insurance, though. I hardly thought she’d be the type, did you?’
‘Mmm,’ Bel said, continuing to glower into her pile.
‘Is there any more marmalade?’ Frank said.
‘I mean, bit funny, isn’t it?’
‘Not to anyone who knows her,’ she snapped. ‘Why, what did you think she did?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully, although in my imagination I’d sort of pictured her walking around a big empty house, gazing melancholically out at the rain with a cup of black coffee in her hands and slow jazz in the background, more or less on a fulltime basis.
‘Whatever. Listen, Charles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’ She turned in her seat to look directly at me. From the far side of the table I heard Frank chuckling as he ate his toast.
‘Yes?’ I said, suddenly feeling uneasy.
‘How long, exactly, have you been leaving letters in the String Drawer?’
‘Why… I don’t know.’ I was usually at home when the postman came, so it was generally me who separated the post; taking personal correspondence up to our respective bedrooms and leaving family business in the String Drawer for Bel to look at at her convenience. I didn’t see what she was driving at, nor why her face was taking on that disconcerting brick-red hue. ‘A few months, I suppose.’
‘And were you thinking of telling me at any stage?’
‘Telling you what?’ I said, confused. ‘I mean, it’s your, well it’s sort of your cubbyhole, isn’t it?’
‘What gave you the impression,’ she said, ‘that the String Drawer was my cubbyhole?’
I didn’t like her tone and was about to retort, when I realized that I had no idea what had given me that impression. We must have had some prior arrangement, I thought, racking my brains; although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I had stuck the afternoon post in there one day after some lunchtime drinks and latterly assumed that there had been a prior arrangement. Whatever had happened, the String Drawer was where family-related correspondence had been going more or less since Mother left for the Cedars. Now that I came to think of it, I had wondered recently why Bel was letting it build up so.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well what?’ I said. ‘You’ve found them now, so let’s just be happy with that, and not start blaming each other –’
‘Charles, have you seen these? Do you know what they are?’ She waved a sheaf of the envelopes with the funny red stamp on them. ‘Do you?’
‘Special delivery?’ I hazarded. Frank stifled a laugh. ‘Well how should I know? All that’s your department, that’s always been the way.’
‘One of my many departments,’ Bel said in a scornful aside to Frank. ‘Charles handles Food and Wine, and the rest is left for me.’
‘As long as you keep handlin me,’ Frank leered. She lapsed into a shy smile and I glimpsed her stockinged toe nudging his white sock under the table; I experienced a sensation of utter displacement, as though the earth had shifted on its axis and everything had toppled over. This must have been how Louis XVI felt, I reflected, when he was taken from his prison cell and led to the scaffold, and understood for the first time that this noisy, shouty bunch of nobodies were actually serious about their Revolution business.
‘Well, what are they so?’ I half-shouted, in case she had forgotten I was there.
‘They’re from the bank, Charles!’ Bel shouted back, banging the palms of her hands on the table. ‘From the bank, from the building society, from our solicitors, from other people’s solicitors. But mainly from the bank.’
A cold shiver went down my spine. ‘I wonder what they want?’ I said.
‘What do they ever want,’ Frank mused dolorously. ‘You won’t catch them wastin stamps askin you how you are.’
‘Money. They want money. There’s bills in here going back for months, from the phone company, the electricity, the television people.’ She flung the pages about desperately. ‘But they’re the least of our worries. The big one is the bank. Our mortgage repayments are in arrears, serious arrears. They’re talking about foreclosing.’
This took a moment to register with me. Mortgage, foreclose – these were words with which I was not wholly familiar, rarely being encountered in polite society, except in murmured stories told in the midnight hours, in the same tone one might use for cancer or abortion; horrible things that, outside the confines of one’s demesne, were happening to luckless strangers. ‘I didn’t know we had a mortgage,’ I said.
‘Charles,’ Bel pulled at her hair frustratedly, ‘this Hythloday empire you’re always going on abo
ut didn’t come from nowhere. It’s built on credit. None of it’s ours, not really. It looks like Father borrowed an absolute fortune, the sums they’re talking about here are just, just astronomical –’ She sat back in her chair, making slits of her eyes. ‘I knew something like this would happen, Mother’s just let everything go to hell since he died, I don’t think she’s even seen the accountant since the funeral…’
‘But…’ we had company, so one didn’t want to be vulgar, ‘but, I mean – we’re still rich, aren’t we? Can’t we just pay them what they want and they’ll leave us alone?’
Bel got up and started throwing her hands around. ‘What goes on in that fucking head of yours? When you’re not drunk, what’s happening in there?’
‘Well don’t swear,’ I pleaded, not feeling very well.
‘Father was a chemist, Charles, a scientist, not an emperor, not fucking Charlemagne. Even very good scientists don’t get paid enough to afford a place like this, haven’t you ever thought of that?’
‘He had his investments,’ for some reason I felt the need to defend Father here, ‘his assets, that sort of thing –’
‘Well, where are they? Where are they, Charles? I mean I just don’t know what he was thinking. Even if he hadn’t died I don’t know how he was intending to repay it all. And since then we’ve had no income proper and this colossal inheritance tax and all these new demands on the finances, Mother’s clinic and your alcoholism and that ridiculous Folly and we seem to be spending a ton on groceries at the moment for some reason –’
I bit my lip. ‘What are you saying, exactly?’
‘There isn’t enough, Charles. There simply isn’t enough to pay them back.’ She rested her head on the back of her chair, as if overcome by fatigue; sunlight streamed through the Chantilly curtains and picked out golden strands in her hair. At that moment my conversation with Laura seemed to be terribly far away. ‘Right now the only thing I can think of to do is sell off some of our shares. I mean that’ll get us some time, at least.’
‘Ah, yes, the shares,’ I said neutrally.
‘Mine’re still all bound up in trust, so we’ll have to use yours,’ she blinked at me with red eyes. ‘We can split the difference later.’
‘Right. Good.’ I decided that now was not the best time to tell her about my run of bad luck at the baccarat table a few months ago. Instead I put on a false smile and told her not to worry. ‘They’re reasonable people, bankers,’ I said. ‘And we’ve given them loads of money over the years. They must have forgotten it’s us, that’s all. I mean I’m sure no one ever lost a house because they’d put the letters in the wrong cubbyhole; that’s absurd. I can go and talk to them today. It’s a storm in a teacup, you’ll see.’
‘Ha,’ remarked Frank, who had been occupying himself with an extensive excavation of his aural cavities.
‘What, “Ha”? What do you mean, “Ha”?’ I rounded on him; the whole thing was his fault, sort of.
‘Me ma was plagued by them fucken banks her whole life,’ he said into his teacup. ‘Never had a penny to her name but they’d be sniffin after it – she used to have this joke, what’s the difference between banks and the Devil?’
Bel and I looked at him.
‘In Hell they won’t cut off your heatin,’ he said.
‘Is that a joke?’ I screeched at last.
He shrugged. ‘It’s about as funny as banks get,’ he said.
‘Well I’ll go and talk to them,’ I said, and left them to their sock-rubbing, which might calm Bel down at least. I didn’t like her to get upset. She might not have looked it, but she was a ferocious worrier: she could tie herself into knots over the most inconsequential matters. She had always been like this, even as a small girl. When other children were busy believing in Santa Claus and Tooth Fairies, she became obsessed with the idea that every time Father and Mother left the house they would never come back. She never said anything to them; but as soon as she saw the car pull out of the driveway, she’d go to her room, sit very still and think Positive Thoughts about them until they had safely returned. That was just one instance of what was even then a broad spectrum of worrying. She also worried about losing things. She worried about things breaking or running out. She worried about robbers and dangerous drivers. She worried about what would happen to her dolls when she died. She had a whole host of worries on behalf of the animal kingdom – what would they eat in the winter, where would they sleep if people kept putting buildings everywhere, whether they would be all right crossing roads by themselves. All these were as nothing, however, compared to the Herculean bout of worrying provoked by the arrival of our one and only household pet, not counting the peacocks, which I didn’t: a springer spaniel, a loving if excitable fellow who in the end wasn’t around long enough even to be given a name.
Almost as soon as it was in the door, Bel diagnosed the anonymous dog, unsuspectingly brought home as a gift for us by Father, as suffering from a dizzying array of existential terrors. It was, in retrospect, a clear case of transference: as if the appearance of the dog had allowed her to open the floodgates, so that all the dread that had accumulated inexplicably within her small soul could come pouring out. For the two weeks it lasted in Amaurot, she devoted herself to acting as mouthpiece for the anguished dog. She stayed up night after night, not sleeping, pacing around the house with the dog trotting amiably at her heel, relating its woes to anyone who would listen. She worried that it was lonely. She worried that it was hungry. She worried that it was being over-exercised, or not exercised enough. She worried that its collar itched. She worried that it might start thinking it was a human but feel bad because it had fur instead of skin. She worried that it was unfulfilled. She worried that it felt naked, missed its parents, was afraid of the dark, fretted about only being able to speak in barks, was ashamed of its fleas, didn’t understand why it had to sleep in the pantry. At school, she continued to voice her fears, which separation from the dog only made worse. Before long, the other children in the class were so upset that the teacher was spending the whole day just trying to reassure them as to the welfare of our pet. Finally, one afternoon, the school principal rang Mother up and suggested in a weary voice that something really ought to be done; before Mother could reply the phone had been passed over to a tearful Bel who asked Mother to put her on to the dog, please – and that’s when Mother snapped. When we came home that day the dog was gone. Mother wouldn’t say where; only that it had been ‘relocated’. She refused to discuss the matter any further.
Strangely enough, Bel received this news quite calmly, and soon she seemed to forget about the dog entirely. Maybe it had served its purpose. Her anxiety had miraculously disappeared; she started attending Speech and Drama classes after school, and immediately that was all she could talk about; she grew, romantic turbulences aside, into a happy teenager. I suppose that for all of us that was a sort of Golden Age. The family prospered, everything seemed secure; I shocked Father by gaining captaincy of the school cricket team, and thanks to the unpopularity of that sport in Ireland we even won a few matches.
Bel was in her late teens when she started acting up again, just as I began my short career in university. The doctor called them Hysterical Episodes. For a period of about seven months she suffered these Episodes almost every other week. They were quite terrifying to witness: shaking and tears and vomiting and voices; she would lie on the bed sobbing and begging us to help her without being able to tell us how, what was the matter, what these forces were that were attacking her. The doctor hadn’t been overly concerned; by now he was more interested in Father, whom he had sent into the hospital for tests. Bel’s kind of instability was quite common in girls of her age, he told us. It was little more than a rather extreme manifestation of adolescent confusion – a natural side-effect of growing up, complicated by her propensity to doubt and over-analyse, by her volatile relationship with Mother, and Father’s waning health. The best way to look at it was as a period of adjustment; some people a
djust to the real world more easily than others. He tried her on different dosages and different medications, he gave her time off school. Eventually she was back to normal, and everyone was pretending it had never happened. Father’s condition had spiralled downwards, the house was full of white coats and strange machinery – there simply wasn’t space to keep worrying about Bel too.
But I couldn’t forget. Sometimes, if we were having a fight, or if something had upset her, I would think I saw it – the hysteria, the terror – shivering, eclipse-like, at the edges of her, waiting for its moment. It seemed to me that wherever it came from, it was too fundamental a part of her now ever to truly go away. That was why I badgered her about her boyfriends, that was why the unsettled, mercurial mood she’d been in lately bothered me, like that curious gathering of electricity an epileptic feels before an attack. She might have put it all behind her – I knew she hated being thought of as delicate, or precarious – but to me the memory was still fresh. The fear, that was what I remembered primarily: those horrible mornings of convulsions and terrorized, unfocused weeping, and in her eyes the fear so huge and formless that it robbed us both of speech.
The bank was situated about a mile and a half away, in the middle of a shopping centre. I set out to see the manager that very afternoon. I was sure Bel was making more out of this business than she needed to, but I knew I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until it was sorted out; also, it provided a useful cover for another matter I needed to take care of. Pact or no pact, furniture was still disappearing; I wanted to see if I could find some background information on our Golem friend.
I rarely ventured that far from home. Bel took this as another instance of my ‘feudal outlook’. ‘You see yourself as Lord of the Manor,’ she’d say, ‘and these people are your vassals, and you don’t want to rub shoulders with them in case you catch something.’ But that wasn’t it at all. Watching from the back seat of the cab as lofty sea-roads and shady avenues gave way to the encircling suburbs, I was gripped – as I always was – by a sense of claustrophobia and threat. The shopping centre frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent’s whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression: seeming to be skipping whole rungs of the evolutionary ladder, so that pleases and thank-yous had gone south long ago, and I expected to go in some day soon and find them gnawing bones and worshipping fire. As vassals I doubt they’d have been much good to me.