by Paul Murray
‘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 hear
d. ‘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.