by Paul Murray
‘There’s nothing wrong, is there? This thing with Harry hasn’t blown up in your face, has it?’
‘Oh Lord,’ she exclaimed, stamping over to the bed and retrieving her script. ‘Charles, has it ever occurred to you that I might occasionally have problems that aren’t related to men?’
‘I’m just asking,’ I said. ‘I’m just making sure that everyone’s thought everything through, and no one’s taking liberties –’
‘I mean is it so hard for you to believe that someone could actually want to be with me without having some ulterior motive, like, like wanting to steal the furniture, or having their eye on your bedroom –’
‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Although now that we’re on the subject I might as well mention that we do actually still have a pact. I mean it’s probably slipped your mind, but you did agree that when you and Frank broke up, as you tragically have, that you wouldn’t –’
‘Charles, what’s that smell?’
‘What smell?’ I said. ‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘There’s an overpowering smell of marzipan,’ she said, sniffing the air.
‘I don’t smell anything.’
‘It seems to be coming from you.’
‘Oh that,’ I said. ‘It’s Yule Log.’
‘Yule Log?’
‘It doesn’t seem to come off,’ I said sorrowfully. ‘Even in the shower.’
Abruptly her gloom was eclipsed by a peal of unladylike laughter. If I had been paying more attention, I might have found this transition too swift; I might have detected an uncomfortable treble note to her habitual Schadenfreude. But I was too busy being annoyed. Smelling of marzipan was a matter taken very seriously among the staff of Processing Zone B, several of whom had been attacked by roaming packs of hungry dogs. I told her this, but it only made her worse. She was practically doubled over with laughter.
‘It’s not funny,’ I insisted. ‘It’s all very well for you people with your plays and your ivory towers. This is the sort of thing we poor mugs down in the trenches have to put up with every day. Frankly, the roaming packs of dogs are just the tip of the iceberg.’
‘I never thought I’d see the day when you tell me I’m living in an ivory tower,’ Bel chuckled, massaging her midriff.
‘Well, it’s true,’ I said sanctimoniously, forgetting about the pact as I realized that here was a chance to take revenge for all the preachy speeches she had made to me over the years. ‘You people have it pretty easy. It’s no picnic for the working man, let me tell you. Especially when the first thing he hears when he comes in the door is Mother telling him how bracing it all is, honestly, to hear her talk you’d think the blasted world was some kind of exclusive tennis camp, where you go to learn which fork to use and work on your backhand –’
‘Maybe you should write a play,’ Bel taunted, going through her drawer of unmentionables.
‘I should take her out to Bonetown,’ I said. ‘See what she thinks of that, when the Common Man runs off with her damned handbag –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake – I’ve been in Bonetown, it’s not that bad…’ She stopped in front of me, a pair of briefs balled up in her hand. ‘Charles, why is it that every time I want to get changed I seem to find you in my room, even when you don’t live here any more?’
‘All right, all right.’ Taking her point I withdrew to a discreet spot in the corridor outside. The door closed behind me. I gazed vacantly at the boxes a moment. Then I went back to the door and reopened it a chink. ‘Anyway it is that bad. All of that stuff in Harry’s plays about the poor being jolly, or the salt of the earth, it’s a total fabrication. You’ve never seen such a crowd of malingering, dissolute layabouts. All anybody does is break things and drink and be sick on our doorstep –’
‘Well you should feel right at home then,’ came the reply, with the snick of a clasp.
‘Maybe I should write a play,’ I grumbled. ‘Shake up you people in your ivory tower a little.’ Raising my voice, I added, ‘And I’d show that charlatan a thing or two!’
There was a pregnant sort of a silence; and then the sound of bare feet stamping across the floor, and Bel appeared at the door. ‘Charles, I shouldn’t even bother, but for your information the reason why Harry is twice the man you are is because he has opened his eyes, he’s lived in places and worked all kinds of jobs and actually tried to like people, instead of covering his ears and clicking his ruby slippers and wishing he was back in Amaurot –’
‘Well, you wouldn’t know it to look at him today,’ I said, shielding my eyes from the sight of her bare legs, ‘hurtling about in Father’s Mercedes, gotten up like a country squire as if he owned the place –’
‘That’s his costume, you fool, we have a scene later on – and for another thing, I told him he could drive that wretched car if he wanted to. I mean no one else has so much as looked at it in two years –’ She broke off and for a moment sagged limp against the door-jamb, rubbing her eye with the heel of a hand. ‘This is absurd. Charles, I’m not going to get in an argument with you over who’s more alienated, you or Harry –’
‘No, because I would win,’ I said.
With a gurgle of rage she stormed back inside, slamming the door. Seconds later it reopened. ‘You know what your problem is?’ she said, having thrust herself into a pair of jeans and fastening the button. ‘You expect life to be like some kind of continuous Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, with, with wine and amuse-gueules and women lounging around with no clothes on, and then when it’s not –’
‘Are you referring to Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe?’
‘Yes, Manet’s, obviously Manet’s – but then when it’s not like that you just throw your hands in the air and you think that’s good enough –’
‘Well, I mean to say,’ I said mildly – actually I was rather taken with the idea of a continuous Déjeuner sur l’Herbe – ‘it has to be something, doesn’t it? I mean I’m the one who has to live in the damned thing.’
‘That’s just it, Charles,’ she said, furiously waving her sandal, ‘you think you live in there all on your own, you tell me I’m in an ivory tower when you carry the ivory tower, you carry around this fucking house, inside yourself, and you never let anyone in, and you have no inkling what life is like for the people outside – like you complain about having to work, but at least you can work, do you ever think of what it’s like for Vuk and Zoran, who aren’t even allowed to? Do you ever think what it’s like for them, sitting around here day in, day out, what that does for their dignity?’
‘Of course I…’ I began, then stopped, sidetracked by the memory of my own happy days sitting or indeed lying around the house, and how dignity had never seemed to enter into it.
‘And all those people in Bonetown, what about them, all those people who came to this country to try and make their lives better, because this for them is hope? This for them is over the rainbow?’
‘I’d say they need to have a word with their travel agent,’ I said. ‘I say, wait!’ as with a gasp she pushed free of me and headed down the stairs. ‘Wait! I was only joking –’
I caught up with her mid-sweep and grabbed her elbow; she turned unwillingly around, and to my astonishment I saw that her eyes had filled up with tears.
‘I was only joking,’ I repeated.
‘It isn’t funny,’ she said, her voice slipping down into a whisper. ‘You can’t do this any more, Charles. You can’t come over here and run everything down. You’re just like Father, all you want to do is lock yourself away in your study with your lovely fantasies. That’s no use to me any more, don’t you see? Because… because, God Charles, something has to be good, doesn’t it? Something has to be worth doing? You’re my brother, can’t you just support me? Can’t you just tell me I’m not a fool for trying? Even if you didn’t believe it, couldn’t you just say?’
Her eyes gazed, over-bright and condemning, into mine; the mysterious pendant ran glittering through her fingers as if it were trying to
tell me something, and I realized that this wasn’t just one of her regular harangues, that there was more at issue here than my laziness, or Harry’s plays. I recalled what Mother had said earlier on. Was something really amiss? Was she asking me now to do something about it?
‘Master Charles!’
But these questions would have to wait, for here was Mrs P at the foot of the stairs, bearing a plate of delicious-looking nibbles.
‘Ah, bravo, Mrs P!’
‘Oh, for God’s sake –’ Bel followed me down.
‘What have we got here?’ I examined the platter. ‘Brie… Gorgonzola… Edam… a real international selection.’
‘Mrs P, you’re not supposed to be waiting on him,’ Bel remonstrated.
‘Oho, what’s this?’
‘I find a little Roquefort too, Master Charles,’ Mrs P said, chortling bashfully.
‘Yes, indeed!’ I held up a tender little morceau like a prospector with a nugget of gold.
‘Mrs P!’ Bel stamped her foot authoritatively. ‘He doesn’t live here any more, do you understand?’
‘Yes, but Miss Bel, if Master Charles is hungry…’
‘Yes Bel, if Master Charles is hungry…’
Bel clenched her teeth. ‘And another thing, I thought we’d agreed we weren’t going to have any more of this Master Charles, Miss Bel business.’
‘Comrade Bel,’ I chuckled through a mouthful of Roquefort.
Bel exhaled sharply. ‘That’s it – Charles, I think you should go now.’
I looked up. ‘Eh?’ I said.
‘Get out, Charles. Go.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m quite serious,’ she said. She was. Just as in the bedroom earlier, her mood had changed quickly as a cloud passing over the sun; the tremulous, solicitous Bel of a moment before had given way to a steely, unflinching Bel, who with a thunderous countenance pointed to the door. ‘If you’re just going to come round and try to ruin everything we’ve done, then I think you should just leave.’
‘Can’t I at least finish my cheese?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said, snatching the platter out of my hand. ‘Just go.’
I looked to Mrs P for a measure of sanity or reason, but her eyes were set discreetly on the ground. ‘Very well, then,’ I said, drawing myself up to my full height. ‘Mrs P, my coat, please.’
Mrs P went to fetch my coat. Bel continued to glower blackly at me like something out of Der Ring des Nibelungen. I knew better than to argue. Instead, I waited for the coat to return, and then – without fuss, without so much as a backward glance – I proceeded in a dignified manner down the hall, past the malevolently winking wheelchair and out of the front door.
But there I stopped; and closing the door behind me, stood for a time at the top of the steps. The sea shushed invisibly to the east, the fog whirled up over the grass; I stood there, sucking my cheeks and staring into nothingness.
After her daughter Daria was put away, Gene went into a long, long tailspin. Her marriage to Cassini had now completely foundered; she was wooed and conquered by a series of notable men. John F. Kennedy visited her on the set of Dragonwyck. He had just returned from the South Pacific, still thin from the Navy hospitals after PT109. He was about to run for Congress; Gene promptly fell in love with him. They were both part Irish, and their first date was on St Patrick’s Day, when he took her for lunch in New York. JFK was wearing a new hat, which later that night he left in a bar; he never wore one again, no matter how the nation’s hatters pleaded with him, and thus began the slow disappearance of the hat from American life.
She saw him on and off for nearly a year before he told her – casually, waiting for friends to join them for lunch – that he could never marry her. She should have seen it coming: he had his political career to think of, and his mother would never approve of him marrying a divorcée – an actress, and Episcopalian to boot! But she hadn’t seen it coming. She rebounded into a long-drawn-out, absurd affair with Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan, whom she met in Argentina while shooting Way of a Gaucho. He was just divorced from Rita Hayworth: with him, her life entered the tawdry whirlwind of the jet-set – polo matches, ocean cruises, meetings on the Riviera with Picasso, a life of leisure conducted in the full glare of the media spotlight and the gossip columns.
It was hard to say exactly when Gene’s crack-up began. The day she arrived in Hollywood she had got stomach cramps and they didn’t go away until she left for good, fourteen years later. On her fourth picture, Belle Starr, she had come down with an eye complaint that no one was able to explain: her eyes would swell up and itch, and shooting would have to be suspended for days on end. (Cassini used to visit her in the trailer and kiss her hideously inflamed eyelids and assure her she was still beautiful to him; she would say that that was when she first knew he really loved her.) But people who knew her well saw that this was different – that the relationship with Aly Khan was a symptom of a spiralling mental state.
She began to have difficulty remembering her lines. This had never happened before. She was under no illusions as to her gifts as an actress, but she had always been able to memorize her parts; in fact she used to say that she felt best when she was playing someone else, and that it was when she was herself that her troubles began. Now she became aggressive and bossy on set. Her moods fluctuated wildly from stretches of total lethargy to flashes of hyperreal awareness when she said she could see God in a light bulb.
The last picture before her breakdown was The Left Hand of God, with Humphrey Bogart. Bogey’s sister had been mentally ill; he knew the signs. He went to the studios and told them that Gene needed help. They assured him that Gene Tierney was a trouper and wouldn’t let them down, not on a movie as expensive as this one.
It was Bogey’s kindness that carried her through the picture; he was dying of cancer then, though nobody knew it. Afterwards, she remembered the time of the shoot as being itself like a silent movie. There were no sounds or words – but she told her doctors she could see herself the whole time, as if she were floating outside her own body, watching herself from afar.
11
It wasn’t the haranguing that worried me; one didn’t live with Bel for twenty-odd years without getting used to being harangued every once in a while. As for being banished from Amaurot, I was getting used to that too.
‘But she asked me for support. Bel never asks me for support. In all the years I’ve known her she’s never once asked me for support or advice or so much as a hand assembling her Sindy’s Dream Kitchen…’ I swirled my glass and frowned into the vortex. ‘Something’s up, I can tell. And it’s something to do with that blighter Harry.’
‘He’s a balloon, right enough,’ Frank commented from the sofa.
‘It’s not just that he’s a balloon,’ I said. ‘He’s an actor. They’re bad news. Personally I wouldn’t trust an actor as far as I could throw one. Because look at the facts. The facts are that she’s known him for four years without a hint of romance, and then the moment this theatre idea manifests itself he reappears with a script in his hand and suddenly everything’s Doris Day and pylons singing in the wind, with Mother eating out of his hand and the run of the whole house.’ I paced over to the kitchen door. ‘I mean, talk about your tailor-made parts.’
‘Some day,’ Frank said, staring at the ceiling, ‘he’s going to get what’s coming to him.’
‘If only she weren’t so infernally naïve,’ I said vexedly. ‘The fundamental problem with Bel is that she’s so naïve that she’s under the impression she’s streetwise. She shouldn’t be let within a thousand miles of a blackguard like Harry – blast it, what was I thinking, leaving her there on her own? How could I just let her fall into the hands of that snake in the grass?’
‘Snakes don’t have hands, Charlie.’
‘Be quiet, Frank, there’s a good fellow.’ I crossed back over to the tallboy. Frank had found it in a skip; dilapidated as it was, I’d taken rather a shine to it, and persua
ded him not to sell it. Things never seemed quite as grim with a tallboy in the house.
I refilled my glass, drumming my fingers on the wood. It had to be Harry; what other reason could there possibly be for that bizarre performance? She had her wretched theatre, she had her leading role, she had filled the house with Marxists; the only conceivable explanation was that this latest dalliance had somehow gone awry.
This, if it were the case, would not be without precedent. She had always played her romances out this way – back to front, I mean: chancing upon these chumps and falling in love with them purely because they fit whatever impracticable ideal she was labouring under at the time, diving in head-first without a moment’s thought, and when it went wrong, as it inevitably did, blaming it on me and my interfering. The fact was, though, that Bel needed somebody to interfere. She might get away with that kind of recklessness with a character like Frank, who couldn’t think two things at the same time without having to sit down. This Harry was another kettle of fish entirely. He was a schemer, a dissembler; one of these sneaky types that spend their evenings in a basement, cobbling together new personalities for themselves. But what could I do about it, stuck miles away in my slum? How could I help her from here?
A few days after the visit Mother called to tell me that Old Man Thompson was dead. Apparently Olivier had accidentally left him on the verandah while he went out for groceries; he came home to find the old man stiff in his bath chair, ‘frozen like a fish-stick,’ as Mother picturesquely put it. Olivier was hysterical. It had taken three paramedics to prise him away from the old man’s body; they wouldn’t allow him to ride in the ambulance, and Mother said he’d stayed out on the lawn for hours after they’d left, bawling and running around and practically howling at the moon.
The real reason she called was to ask me if I was available to help out at the premiere of Ramp in two weeks’ time. They were going ahead with Mirela’s idea and staging a special one-off performance in the house, to which potential investors would be invited. It seemed to me rather paradoxical to have a fundraiser in such lavish surroundings; but Mother explained it was common knowledge that the best way to get money out of the better-off was to look like you didn’t need it. There would be complimentary tickets, she said, for everyone who lent a hand.