An Evening of Long Goodbyes

by Paul Murray

  I argued with him, needless to say; I threatened and cajoled him; I begged him to at least let me know who it was he was working for. He wouldn’t budge. All he would say was that it was nothing for me to be worrying about; nothing for me to be worrying about at all.

  ‘Que sera, sera,’ he said, ‘as the song goes.’

  ‘What?’ I whispered. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What will be will be, Mr H. What will be, will be.’ And he laughed: and then with a click the line went dead.

  Maybe he was right; maybe they were all right, and I was blowing things out of proportion, and there was nothing really wrong; I did try to console myself with this thought. But then there had been nothing really the matter the time of the Episodes either, that’s what the doctors had told us; it was just a phase she would grow out of, that’s what they’d said as they bandaged her up and increased her dosage; cold comfort for those who had sat at her bedside and held her hand while she convulsed, or flailed at imaginary terrors, or lay for hours staring at us without recognition from the far side of wherever it was she had gone.

  For a long time I sat with my hand over my mouth and my feet under the covers like two blocks of ice. And then – just when everything seemed at its most hopeless – Laura’s words came back to me. Why don’t you write a play? She was the second person to say it: although Bel had been being sarcastic, and Laura was Laura, so I’d more or less dismissed it straight away. But now, as I thought about it, it seemed to make a kind of sense…

  I stumbled into the living room. It was empty: Frank must have called Laura a taxi. I sat on the vacated sofa and stared interrogatively at the darkness. Of course! Write a play! How had I never thought of it before? If I was a Disadvantaged Artist they would have to let me back into the house!

  And suddenly it struck me that perhaps Bel hadn’t been being sarcastic when she’d suggested it – that maybe on some unconscious level she’d meant it, was asking me to do it, in order to return to Amaurot and set things to rights. Maybe – feverishly, I half-stood, feeling the fabric of the sofa still damp with tears beneath my hand – maybe I was destined to write this play; maybe I had been cast out of the house precisely so I would write this play. A play that would set the record straight – a play that would see off Harry’s tepid little pantomimes of bourgeois guilt – an apologia for everything I had ever thought or done, a paean to a lost way of living, a rage against the dying of the light! To speak out at last, to show the world! I snatched up a pen and a sheet of paper from the sheaf set aside for my monograph. The apartment was utterly silent: a silence taut and quivering as the surface of a lake, as if the universe herself were saying to me, Now, now is the time, we cannot wait any longer – I took up the pen and, with a daunting sense that history was being made, wrote in the upper right-hand corner: Charles.

  I sat back and surveyed my efforts. Charles. Good. I tapped the pen lid against the back of my teeth and pictured myselfback in my parlour, festooned with garlands and surrounded by worshipful ingénues eager to learn from the author of Charles. This page was very white, I noticed. Was it this particular brand, or was paper always this white? Someone else might find it disconcerting. Now! Now! Without delay! the universe pressed. Sinking the nib once more, I wrote by in front of Charles. Then, after Charles, I wrote Hythloday. After that I thought I might take a break, so I went to get a can from the refrigerator and switched on the television for a little while. Then, as the clock tolled for three, I was seized by inspiration. In one mad dash I wrote five entirely new words beside the three I had already written: the title, my title. It was a great title, a momentous title, holding within it all the joys and the sorrows, the mysteries and commonplaces of a life. I found myself brushing a tear from my eye.

  With a title like that, most of the work was already done; but I was not letting up now. My mind raged with possibilities, witty characters, wise insights into the human condition. They could all be in it: Laura as a kind of ironical Greek chorus; Frank as basically an unfettered Id running around; then there was Mother (Fickleness of Women), Mirela (Desire, Impossibility of); Bel would feature as a one big Tragic Flaw, representing a society that had lost its way… Champing my pipe, I took a fresh page, and wrote at the top in capital letters:

  PLOT

  12

  Initially, the idea had been to have the play finished and presented to Bel before Harry’s new one opened, in the hope that they might scrap his and do mine instead. However, it takes longer than you might think, writing a play – if you want to do it right, I mean; and before we knew where we were, the opening night of Ramp was upon us.

  They were still short of hands, so I had agreed to being temporarily unbanished in order to work as Hat-Check Girl for the evening. With some effort, I’d managed to persuade Frank to come along as moral support; Mother gave us a little table in the hallway from which to take coats and greet arriving personages. Outside, the night was cold and tingling, but here there were candles and sprays of autumnal wild flowers and warm smells enticing the guests down to the recital room, where they were received with claret, mulled wine, and music courtesy of Vuk and Zoran and some friends of theirs from the queue at the Registration Centre.

  Whatever spell she had cast, no one seemed to have been able to resist Mirela’s invitation. An hour before the performance the house was bursting at the seams with heavyweights of the business world, each of whom Laura identified to Frank and me as they went by. (Laura had also volunteered to help out, even after I’d told her pointedly that it wouldn’t be necessary. Ever since Titanic she’d been around at the apartment practically every night – supposedly assisting Frank putting up bookshelves, though judging by the amount of giggling coming from his room it didn’t sound like she was being much help.)

  ‘There’s the French cultural attaché,’ she said, appearing in a puff of taffeta with her tray of vol-au-vents. ‘That’s Roly Guilfoyle, that chef? And there’s that guy from the beans company – oh, excuse me…’ as another personage arrived to check in her coat with the by now customary double-take, looking in alarm from my mummified face to Frank’s sadly unmummified one. ‘Thank you, madam, you’re number 105, straight through on the right…’

  ‘Oh my God, the head of StoneWall Friends and Mutual is here. He is like the insurance guy in Ireland. He was in VIP last month, his bathroom has this kind of Etruscan design…?’

  ‘Well, go and give him a vol-au-vent, why don’t you? We’re busy here – Yes, sir, number 106, thank you. Yes, sir, quite safe. Yes, sir, I’m aware that they don’t grow on trees. You’re most welcome, sir – damn it, Frank, stop louring, can’t you? You’re scaring people…’

  ‘I’m not louring, Charlie, this is me regular face.’

  ‘Guys,’ Laura tiptoed over, muttering clandestinely from the corner of her mouth, ‘you are not going to believe who’s here. Niall O’Boyle.’ She pointed to a nondescript man in a blue suit whose face appeared to have been sat on at some crucial stage of its development.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Niall O’Boyle? He’s like CEO of Telsinor Ireland? You must remember, last year when the phone company went public and he leveraged that buyout with those Danish guys? And he owns that radio station and that magazine, he must be worth stacks – oh my God, look at his watch, he has like the biggest watch I’ve ever seen…’

  ‘Look,’ I rapped my stapler assertively on the table. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but Frank and I have been placed in charge of some very valuable coats, and we can’t afford to be distracted.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ She turned up her nose and returned to her mingling.

  ‘Some serious heads at this thing, isn’t there, Charlie?’

  ‘I’ll say, it’s like an Illuminati mixer.’ And I wondered what exactly Bel thought of that.

  Various members of the Ramp cast had been in evidence earlier on, working the room, explaining to anyone who would listen the Meaning and Significance of the theatre. Bel was there too, wearin
g a long champagne-coloured dress and an expression of such naked hostility that only the more senescent or kamikaze of the visitors had dared approach her. Up until now, I had contrived to stay out of her way; however, after the fuss she’d made last time, I knew I’d better say something. As the first bell rang for the guests to take their seats, I decided to make a quick foray up to the dressing room and pay my respects. This way, even if I met with a frosty reception, there was at least a chance of seeing Mirela au naturel. I left Frank with strict instructions not to ruin anything or attack anybody, and going round by the scullery I climbed the back stairs to the dressing room.

  The air in the room was tense and hot and so thick with talcum powder that it was hard to breathe. Heat glared from bare bulbs over a long mirror with a counter, at which cast members sat in deckchairs. I spotted Bel at the far end, holding a cup of undrunk black coffee to her frumpy costume as Harry kneaded her shoulders. I tried to make my way down to her, but it was like swimming against the tide: after being rebuffed a number of times I gave up and retreated to a relatively quiet spot by the door to wait for an opportunity to present itself. In the meantime, I engaged myself gazing wistfully at Mirela, who was sitting near me (hélas! already dressed) with not one but three girls clustered round her, applying make-up and brushing out her shining black hair.

  From somewhere in the scrum I could hear Mother piping: ‘Well, what did he say?’

  ‘We probably shouldn’t talk about it till afterwards,’ Harry said with a coy half-smile.

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ Mother persisted.

  ‘Well, he’s interested,’ Harry allowed, his smile expanding as the room caught hold of this and a hubbub spread through it. ‘Apparently his wife came to see Burnin Up, so if he likes what he sees tonight…’

  ‘What?’ pressed the girl with barrettes, thwacking him with her script.

  ‘He did say that if something were to go ahead – if – it would have to be on the basis that Telsinor was sole backer of the theatre, which’d mean a total sponsorship package…’ He shrugged modestly as whoops and whistles greeted this news, then lifted his hands for calm. ‘I should remind everybody that we do have a play to put on first.’

  Everybody laughed: except Bel, who was looking up at Harry with a wounded expression. ‘But I thought we didn’t want a single backer,’ she said.

  ‘That was because we didn’t think we’d get a single backer,’ replied Harry.

  ‘No, I thought we’d agreed that if all the money was coming from one place then –’

  ‘Oh, darling, we’ve been through all this,’ Mother cut in. ‘We can’t wait for ever while the government hems and haws. Talk about compromise, you wait till the bank comes looking for its loan back, then you’ll see what it means to be – Charles, what are you doing lurking over there?’

  ‘I’m not lurking, I’m standing here quite conspicuously.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be down minding the cloakroom. You haven’t left that poor idiot boy on his own, have you?’

  ‘I just wanted to come and say good luck –’

  Everybody groaned in unison.

  ‘Oh, I mean break a leg, sorry –’

  ‘Charles,’ Mother grabbed me firmly by the elbow and propelled me doorwards, ‘we happen to have important visitors watching tonight. For once try and keep your dissolute antics to a minimum.’

  ‘Five minutes!’ called the tubby fellow, appearing behind me at the door; and everyone gasped, and started rushing around even more hurriedly than before. Through the tumult of bodies I could see Harry’s hands still absently kneading her shoulders as Bel turned to the mirror and, with a hand pressed to her bare clavicle, stared into it, as if searching its depths for something she had lost.

  I ducked back down the stairs. The hallway and recital room were clear; the cloakroom had been locked. Closing the double doors behind me, I took my seat in the darkened auditorium.

  ‘Everythin all right, Charlie?’ Frank said.

  I found myself quite out of breath: I merely coughed and pointed to the stage, as the curtain rose and a single spotlight came up, and a girl in a wheelchair trundled out.

  Bel had looked awfully nervous up in the dressing room, and given her chequered on-stage history one might have been justified in fearing the worst. But in the opening scene she turned it quite cleverly to her advantage. As she shunted herself, grousing, around the suburban kitchen, the wheelchair became a kind of carapace, shielding her from her surroundings; the nerves became the restive, uncathected energy of someone who is sure she has been cheated by life. And then Mirela entered, and, as before, everything fell into place around her.

  The make-up girls had done their job well. She looked at once perfectly simple and perfectly captivating; she was like a magnet, pulling you in, so that suddenly you no longer noticed the threadbare dialogue or that the model limped and the paraplegic kept tapping her foot. The lights themselves didn’t seem to want to leave her, and sparkled around her constantly like coloured butterflies.

  And you couldn’t help but sympathize with her, trapped between an ailing mother and this vampiric sister. Nothing was good enough for Bel. She needled her sister incessantly; she made endless demands on her store of goodness and affection; she seemed determined to stifle Mirela’s promising modelling career purely out of spite, even when Mirela only wanted the money so that Bel could go and see this doctor everyone was talking about, the one with the revolutionary though potentially fatal new technique.

  ‘You indulge your sister too much, Ann,’ Mother said from her hospital bed, stroking Mirela’s cheek (she was pretty good, too – though only a churl would suggest that she made a far more convincing mother on stage than she ever had with Bel and me). ‘We all have. She wants to see me, she says, but don’t you understand? This is just another way of torturing you, of manipulating you. For if she were a true sister to you, and a true daughter to me, then she would know that my love goes with her everywhere. But she is blind. She doesn’t see that love, Ann, is the important thing; she doesn’t see that the ramp she must install is not on the hospital steps, but in her own heart. It is a ramp she must erect over the steps of her own selfishness and bitterness at having been run over at an early age and confined to a wheelchair.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ Mirela turning diffidently from Mother’s bed and exclaiming quietly with prayerful hands, ‘Mary is your daughter too! We can’t stop caring about her just because there is no room for the unlucky ones in our fast-paced modern world. To me, there is no greater joy than looking after her, in the hope that she will one day walk again.’

  ‘She’s so nice,’ Frank turned to me with tearful eyes, squeezing my hand in his. ‘Why doesn’t Bel just, just leave off?’

  ‘I don’t know – ow, you’re hurting me,’ tugging my hand free and nursing it in my lap. The thing is, I was inclined to agree with him and wish that Bel would leave off, and when Harry came on as the crusading lawyer, I did find myself hoping that Mirela would run away with him and leave this workhouse behind. But then from the lousy seats Mother had given us in the back corner of the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of Bel waiting in the wings for the next scene – looking so cold and crabbed in the wheelchair, so disengaged and alone, that immediately I felt sorry.

  This last scene, in which Bel seduces Harry with a tray of biscuits that had actually been baked for him by Mirela, was the subject of much debate in the cloakroom during the interval.

  ‘I’m not saying it’s not good,’ Laura said. ‘I just don’t get why the lawyer doesn’t go for the model. Like she’s so beautiful, and he’s so dashing, they’re just so right for each other…’

  ‘I don’t know about dashing,’ I observed grouchily. ‘I think he’d be hard pressed to actually dash anywhere, to judge by the way he’s filling out that waistcoat these days. Anyway, what’s wrong with Bel?’

  ‘Hello? She’s in a wheelchair?’

  ‘Yeah, Charlie, and she’s always schemin and stuff.’

&
nbsp; ‘She’s not that bad,’ I said stoutly.

  ‘Charlie,’ Frank said solemnly, ‘you know it was Mirela what cooked them biscuits.’

  ‘I just find it a bit hard to swallow,’ Laura frowned: and then for no reason the two of them started giggling. It was tiresome, so I told them that they knew nothing about drama and stomped off to get a drink.

  In the recital room, Vuk and Zoran had struck up ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, with a Chinese pal helping out on the erhu and a chap from Mozambique keeping time on djembe. The bar was crowded by paunchy business types. The straw-haired telephone fellow O’Boyle was ahead of me, talking to another suit about property in the Algarve. ‘Must get some nice golf out there,’ the other suit was saying.

  ‘Sumptuous,’ agreed Niall O’Boyle. ‘Sumptuous.’

  By the time I finally ordered, the bell had rung for the resumption of the play, and I had to go and find Frank and start herding the punters back into the auditorium. I had just settled into my seat when there was a psst from somewhere below me. I looked down to see a hooded figure crouched at my ankles in the darkness. ‘Psst!’ it said again. At first I thought someone had overindulged in the claret and become confused; but then it said, ‘Charles!’ and I realized it wasn’t someone, it was Bel.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on stage?’

  ‘Quiet,’ Bel hissed. ‘I can’t let anyone see me here.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said comprehendingly. Suspension of disbelief: this was very important in a play.

  ‘I need you to find MacGillycuddy for me,’ Bel whispered.

  Instantly my blood ran cold. ‘What? He’s here?’

  ‘I saw him from the stage,’ Bel said, ‘over there somewhere.’

  ‘But… what’s he doing here? You didn’t invite him, did you?’

  ‘I don’t have time to explain, Charles, just, just find him, and send him backstage.’