An Evening of Long Goodbyes

by Paul Murray

  ‘Not that important,’ I assured her, as she folded the coat over her forearm and brought it away to the cloakroom. There was a creak on the stairs behind me. I looked around – and with a little kick of exhilaration saw Bel coming into view.

  ‘Charles!’ she exclaimed.

  No, wait, it wasn’t Bel, it was Mirela wearing Bel’s silver kimono: I felt my heart back up, as if it had taken a wrong turn down a one-way street –

  ‘My goodness, how are you?’

  ‘What?’ I said distractedly, trying not to look at the shapely halfmoon of flesh disclosed by the aperture of her kimono as she leaned out over the banister. ‘Oh – tolerably well, tolerably well…’

  ‘I wish I knew you were coming,’ she said, sashaying down the intervening steps. ‘You catch me looking like this. Why haven’t you come to visit before? Did you forget about us?’

  ‘Oh,’ I croaked, ‘you know…’

  ‘I suppose your new life is much more exciting. But couldn’t you have called me, at least?’

  I should explain that I had given considerable thought before coming out here as to what strategy to adopt if, as was likely, I ran into Mirela. In the end I’d decided against making any direct accusations as regarded her negligence or general heartlessness, in favour of a tone of polite but implacable froideur. However, everything already seemed to be getting confused; for she – paused just above me with her hand resting on the stair-rail like the flower of some exquisite vine – seemed adamant that it was I who had neglected her. ‘I thought we had such a good talk that night after the play,’ she said. ‘But then you were just gone. You didn’t even say goodbye.’

  I could only gape. Had I got everything back to front? Had she been pining for me all this time?

  ‘You look well, Charles,’ she said softly, coming down on to the second-to-last step.

  ‘They changed my bandages,’ I whispered.

  Who knows what might have happened had she been allowed to reach the bottom of the stairs. But without warning, our idyll was shattered – by Mrs P, who arrived back from the cloakroom and took up a stance behind me, from which she launched into a wordy and by the sounds of it highly critical speech in Bosnian.

  ‘Oh Mama, speak English, can’t you?’ Mirela shouted. This served only to increase the volume of the harangue. ‘Why can’t one of the boys do it? They’re just sitting in there playing backgammon –’

  Mrs P folded her arms and eyed her daughter squarely; and after a moment’s token resistance, Mirela buckled. ‘All right, all right, in case anyone should forget my mother is the maid.’ She turned to me entreatingly. ‘Sorry, Charles. But maybe we’ll have a chance later to catch up,’ and I felt her hand slide coolly over mine to squeeze my fingers, before she hoisted her head and marched down the hallway, her prosthesis clattering defiance on the parquet as she went.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Mrs P expostulated beside me. ‘Everybody so important!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said faintly, caressing the fingers of the lucky hand. ‘Yes…’

  Mrs P went to pick up her tray of cakes. ‘I must go and bring these to the others. Master Charles, you have eaten lunch?’

  ‘Hmm? What’s that? Lunch?’

  ‘Perhaps I make you a sandwich?’

  ‘Oh, no, Mrs P, I’m perfectly all right, I’m sure you have enough to do without –’

  ‘Or we have some cheese, if you like?’

  ‘Cheese, eh…’ It had been a long time since I’d had a decent piece of cheese. ‘Well, tell you what. Why don’t you get the cheese and I’ll deliver these for you, wherever they’re going.’

  ‘Ah, you are always so kind, Master Charles.’ She told me they were for the actors in the rehearsal room, patted my arm and waddled away into the kitchen: from which Vuk and Zoran emerged a moment later, rushing past me like scalded cats in the direction of the garden shed.

  Now that she mentioned it I was feeling rather peckish, so I ate the rest of the buns and drank the orange juice. Then I went into the recital room, where I found practically the whole menagerie had gathered to rehearse their lines. In one corner, a tubby fellow and a girl with barrettes were arguing over a hat and whether it looked legal enough; here and there along the wall, people sat in the lotus position with their eyes closed and lips moving. The majority, however, were pacing the floor, frowning at the scripts in their hands and murmuring to themselves. Some kind of sixth sense seemed to keep them from bumping into one another; the effect was rather uncanny, like being at a sleepwalkers’ convention.

  ‘Darling!’ Mother’s voice came from behind me. ‘Oh, how good of you to come and see me! But how pale you look, my dear. Please, sit and tell me what’s the matter –’

  ‘Oh, hello Mother, nothing really, just a little over-tired I suspect…’

  ‘What?’ She looked up distractedly from the pages in her hand. ‘Oh, hello Charles, what are you doing here?’

  ‘What?’ I blinked. ‘Oh… I just came over with the wheelchair.’

  ‘The wheelchair, bravo! We must tell Bel, it’s for her part – Charles, why are you carrying around a tray of dirty dishes?’

  ‘Mrs P gave them to me,’ I said.

  ‘Tsk, tsk,’ Mother said, shaking her head. ‘Is there no end to that woman’s corner-cutting? Well, put them down, dear, we’re rather busy but you might as well have a glass of something while you’re here.’

  I left the tray on the sideboard and followed her into the hallway. ‘You look well, Charles,’ she declared, nodding at various passing Residents. ‘There’s a bit of colour in your cheeks.’

  ‘They changed my bandages, if that’s what you –’

  ‘A fortitude, that’s what it is. I knew it would do you good, getting out there into the rough and tumble of the real world.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ trailing after her into the dining room.

  ‘There’s something bracing about an honest day’s work,’ she reflected, pouring a glass of sherry for me, then one for herself, ‘doing one’s bit, getting one’s due, going home on the tram with the satisfaction of knowing that the part one plays, small as it may be, is indispensable to the whole. One can’t put a price on that kind of satisfaction, can one, dear?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘although in terms of actual pay, they’ve managed to put a –’

  ‘Good, because that’s what keeps the whole world turning, Charles, isn’t it? What are you doing, exactly? Wasn’t it something about the Civil Service? Is it terribly bracing?’

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s moderately br—’

  ‘You know that we’re all terribly proud of you…’ glass in hand she clipped back out. ‘Though as I say we’re very busy here ourselves, Harry’s new play is going up in three weeks and we’re all working like blacks. Not that any of us is making any money from it – perhaps we could enlist you as one of our patrons, Charles?’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I rejoined dully, shying away from the Pandora’s box of Oedipal and economic problems inherent in that particular idea.

  ‘A remarkable piece of work, remarkable. That boy has such a touch for the stories of everyday life, the stories of the Common Man, you might say. Because it’s all very well for us in our ivory towers and our cosy Civil Service positions, Charles, but what about the less fortunate? It’s no picnic for them, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine –’

  ‘Which is why they are so lucky to have a writer like young Harry to give them a voice. Although I can’t claim to be entirely impartial, seeing as I myself have a small part, as the ailing mother.’ She laughed, and tossed back her sherry. I took advantage of the interval to ask Bel’s whereabouts so I could tell her I’d brought the wheelchair.

  ‘Oh, heaven knows,’ Mother said. ‘Wafting about somewhere upstairs, I think. Do tread softly with her, she’s been a perfect Antichrist lately.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘She sounded all right when I spoke to her.’

  ‘Well take my word for it,’ Mother said grimly. ‘And it is not
very helpful, Charles, when one is trying to rehearse a play, and one needs everyone rowing in together.’ She sighed one of her martyr’s sighs. ‘I just hope she’s not slipping into her old ways, just when at long last she was seeming halfway socialized…’

  I recoiled. ‘Well, don’t say that,’ I said. ‘She’s probably just over-excited, you know how she gets…’

  ‘Mmm,’ Mother said sceptically, fingering her sherry glass. I excused myself and, with a touch of trepidation, mounted the stairs.

  Bel was in her dressing gown at the end of the corridor outside her bedroom, shuffling up and down with her head bowed over her script, making odd thrusting gestures down her side with her free hand.

  ‘I don’t want your charity, Ann,’ she was saying. ‘In fact I’m sick of your whole saintly act. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a bitter and self-involved person. But I could have been just as good a model as you – better even, if it hadn’t been for that car that knocked me down at an early age.’ She paused here, as if allowing for a reply, then, angrily: ‘Help me? How can you help me? Are you going to wave a magic wand and make the fashion industry sit up and take notice of the disabled community? Are you going to make it so when society looks at me, they won’t see only this chair, and push me into this narrow stereotype of an oh my God –’ as I tapped her on the shoulder and she spun round with the script clutched to her breast – ‘What are you doing, sneaking around like that?’

  ‘Hello, Charles. Delighted to see you, Charles. Charles, how kind of you to come over here in your spare time and bring out our stupid wheelchair for our tiresome play –’

  ‘You brought the wheelchair?’ she said, sitting down on one of several dusty cardboard boxes that cluttered the landing. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the hall,’ I said. ‘Mother said you’d want to know. What are you doing up here all on your own? Why are there boxes everywhere?’

  ‘They’re from the attic. We’re going through them to see if there’s anything we can use. I had come up here in the hope of getting a minute’s peace to go over my lines. But obviously I was deluding myself.’

  ‘Was that Harry’s thing you were reading there? The new thing?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ she said, thrusting the script at me and repairing to her room.

  RAMP, said the first page, with Harry’s name in big letters under the title. On the next was DRAMATIS PERSONAE: MARY – an embittered young woman in a wheelchair; ANN – her loving and beautiful younger sister, a model; MOTHER – their mother; JACK REYNOLDS QC – a dashing socially concerned young lawyer.

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked, following her into the bedroom.

  ‘It’s about,’ Bel recited, taking some pins from her hair and putting them down on the dressing table, ‘a girl in a wheelchair, which is me, and my mother’s dying of cancer in hospital, but I can’t get in to see her because I can’t get up the steps, so I go to court to try and get this ramp installed and it turns into a huge legal battle and a cause célèbre.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I mean it’s all allegorical, obviously.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said; although inside, my mind was shouting things like Good grief! and How does he keep getting away with this? I sat down on the bed and leafed through the pages. ‘So this is the part he wrote for you? This is your tailor-made part?’

  Bel nodded, taking a brush from a drawer and beginning to work the tangles out of her hair.

  ‘Seems to do a lot of shouting, to judge by all these italics,’ I commented, though I supposed this wasn’t too far off the mark.

  ‘It happens to be a very good part,’ she said to the mirror, brushing vigorously. ‘She’s complicated. You don’t often get to play women who are complicated.’ She reached up to undo a snarl. ‘Most of the time you’re just there to look pretty and weep occasionally.’

  ‘And who’s the beautiful sister? Mirela?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Bel said unenthusiastically. ‘And Harry’s the lawyer and Mother, in spite of all my pleading with her, is the ailing mother.’

  ‘Sort of funny that you’re the girl in the wheelchair, and Mirela’s playing the model,’ I joked. ‘I mean, when you think that she’s the one that only has one leg.’

  Bel did not reply, but her brushing increased in intensity and there was the crackling sound of hairs snapping.

  ‘I mean when you think about it, it’s sort of funny,’ I repeated, in case she hadn’t got it.

  ‘Charles, I’m actually quite busy,’ she declared to the mirror.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said genially. ‘You carry on doing what you’re doing. Don’t mind me.’

  She rolled her eyes and began to dab at her face with a swab of cotton wool.

  I stood up and went to the window. The heat in the room was stifling; I wondered that she didn’t notice it. ‘I say, you don’t mind if I open this, do you? Getting a bit of a prickly neck…’ She shrugged. I raised the sash and looked out.

  It was winter: you could see it better out here where there were things that lived and died, and not just a cramped square of sky to be filled with clouds or fireworks. In the garden, trees clasped the last of their leaves to them, blushing deeply like thin girls caught skinny-dipping. Old Man Thompson, looking every one of his million or so years, was braving the cold out on his verandah. A silvery fog had started to roll in from the sea, like miles and miles of cobwebs floating over the waves.

  ‘Frank sends his regards,’ I said, tickling the lily on the windowsill. ‘Wanted to come in but he had to rush off somewhere. Man about a dog or something.’

  ‘Good,’ muttered Bel, more categorically than was strictly necessary. I turned and from the corner of my eye watched her frown at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look at all as she had sounded that time on the phone, so full of energy. Mother was right: there was a dark cloud in her brow that didn’t mean any good. Around her neck she was wearing a sort of a pendant – a blank metal disc on a cord, that for some reason seemed faintly familiar.

  ‘So how are you?’ I asked innocently. ‘Everything going all right?’

  She dropped the cotton wool into the wastebasket. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she mumbled, unscrewing the lid from a jar of aromatic cream, one of a small army of bath oils, cleansers and face-balms amassed on the dressing table.

  ‘Just you look a bit, ah, under the weather…’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a bit tired, that’s all. It’s a lot of work getting a play up.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘You have no idea.’ Leaning into the mirror she made two quick Red-Indian dabs under her eyes and smeared them into her cheeks. ‘Everything’s so much work that sometimes I could swear the damn house was resisting me, as if it didn’t want us to have a theatre. I mean I know it sounds ridiculous…’ She caught up with herself and stopped; then, after a moment of deliberation she turned around and said, ‘But I don’t mind the work, like the rehearsals, and staying up all night programming the lights, and trying to get the posters designed and doing twenty different things at once, I don’t mind that. It’s the money, that’s what gets me. The endless harping on about money, you’d think there was nothing else in the world…’

  ‘Money?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have any,’ she said. ‘I mean we should, we should have enough to keep afloat, at least. But any time I ask Mother about it she’s busy and when I look at the house’s accounts they’re like a labyrinth, or, or modern art or something. And without it we can’t do anything, we can’t afford publicity, so we can’t get audiences, so we can’t get a grant, it’s like a vicious circle.’ It struck me that the only way they could have got better audiences for Burnin Up would have been to go down to the docks and shanghai drunken sailors, but I kept this to myself. ‘So the drama classes and the outreach programme, all that’s been put on hold while we have these endless meetings, and meetings about meetings, and meetings about meetings about meetings, and everybody just talks and n
obody ever does anything…’ The cloud in her brow darkened ominously. ‘Mirela wants to have a fundraiser for the next one. Put on an invitation-only event where we can woo corporate sponsors.’

  ‘Well, I suppose Mirela knows what she’s talking about,’ I put in. Apparently it was the wrong thing to say, because Bel immediately went pink and started lecturing me about how banks and e-businesses and phone companies and the rest of them were exactly what the theatre was supposed to be working against, and how she’d rather the whole thing failed than sell out like that, and so on and so forth.

  ‘I only meant that, you know, hasn’t she done this sort of thing before, with her group in Slovenia or wherever it was?’ I said. ‘So she probably knows how the whole thing works, that’s all.’

  ‘She likes to give that impression,’ Bel said icily.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Bel opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again, and said in a rush: ‘It means that she comes on like this great actress who’s seen it all before, but all she is really is a big void with no emotions of her own, I mean all she does is go around telling people what they want to hear so she can get her own way, and if you ask me the whole routine is getting pretty tired…’

  I compared the Mirela that Bel was presenting here with the tender, hand-squeezing, Maybe-we-can-catch-up-later-Charles one I had encountered on the stairs. It was painfully obvious that Bel’s version didn’t hold up. ‘That’s nonsense,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not,’ Bel said petulantly.

  ‘What does she do, then, that’s so bad? Give me one example of her being a void and getting everything her own way.’

  From the corner into which she and her cloud had retreated, Bel mumbled something about borrowing her clothes without asking.

  ‘Borrowing your clothes!’ I repeated scornfully. I looked her up and down; she scowled and twitched and pulled compulsively at her pendant. ‘You know, you’re acting awfully strangely.’

  Bel sniffed and stared at the ground.