Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘The pair of you smell like a distillery.’

‘Let’s just get him some food… is there any food left?’

‘There are truffles,’ Bel thought. ‘And maybe some bisque?’

‘What’s bisque?’ Frank said, opening his eyes.

We guided him to a chair. Bel went out and returned with an ice pack and a plate of leftovers that Mrs P had scraped together, which seemed to pacify him. I sat down opposite. I was feeling a trifle light-headed myself. I hadn’t eaten anything since that crêpe Frank had thrown in the dustbin and I was beginning to wish I’d taken his advice and we’d stopped at the takeaway for Chicken Balls on the way back from the dog-track. But it was too late now, so I made do with a bottle of smoky Rioja which was floating around, lit my briar and took in the table. Mother was seated at the top, with the guest of honour, Niall O’Boyle, on one side and Harry on the other in that repellent country-squire waistcoat. Mirela was next to Harry; I did not allow my gaze to linger. Beside Niall O’Boyle was a woman in a rather unfortunate lavender jacket — his personal assistant, I discovered — and then, Geoffrey, the woolly-headed old family accountant. I hadn’t seen him in the house since he’d executed Father’s will; he looked uncomfortable, as if something were caught in his throat. Our place in the new order was plain; we had been given unglamorous seats in the middle, just at the watermark past which the company descended into hooting actors and stage managers.

‘Must’ve thought we weren’t coming tonight,’ I said to Bel jauntily.

‘What is that thing?’ She reseated herself next to me with a choking cough. ‘Since when do you smoke a pipe?’

‘I have a lot of time on my hands,’ I explained. ‘As I was saying, though, we almost didn’t make it. It’s been a perfect nightmare of a day. But I said to Frank, this is Bel’s going away, and come hell or high water I’m going to be there.’

‘It smells repulsive,’ she murmured.

I was glad she was talking to me, even if she wasn’t exactly turning cartwheels; but she seemed removed from things, and everything she said had a rhetorical ring, such that I began to feel foolish replying to her. Try as I might, I could not breach this porcelain reserve: not only was I unable to get on to the subject of forgiveness, and the manifold speeches I had prepared on that topic, but — once I had passed on Jessica Kiddon’s message about the taxi and made a little smalltalk about the décor — I quickly ran out of anything to say to her at all; and frankly it came as something of a relief when Mother stood up and pinged a glass and I realized that, although we might have missed the food, Frank and I had arrived just in time for the dull speeches.

‘Tonight,’ Mother pronounced, ‘is a night of hellos and goodbyes. In one way, it is a sad occasion, because we will be taking leave, if only for a short while, of our dear Bel, who is travelling to Russia in the morning. But in the main it is a joyful one, for tonight we mark the beginning of a new epoch — a new passage in the history of this marvellous old house.’

We applauded dutifully.

‘It is also an opportunity for us to say thank you — to Telsinor Ireland, and more particularly to Mr Niall O’Boyle, whose personal vision and sense of social commitment, so rare in today’s business world, have played such a part in creating this unique partnership.’ As Niall O’Boyle basked like a basilisk on a rock, Mother asked us to reflect for a moment on the meaning the partnership — cemented tomorrow morning when the papers were signed — would have for the house. She outlined the plans to renovate the old west wing, expand the theatre, begin the long-promised instruction of children from underprivileged parts of the city; she explained how, on a more personal level, the signing of the papers would at last secure the house financially, something that her late husband, for all his years of work, was never conclusively able to do –

‘Charles, stop twitching .’

‘It’s Geoffrey, he keeps staring at me. He looks like he’s suppressing the urge to bless himself.’

‘It’s your face, Charles,’ Bel whispered back. ‘Haven’t you seen it? You look exactly like — oh —’

Mother had moved on to the goodbyes part of the speech and was calling on Bel to stand up and take a bow. ‘Our loss is Russia’s gain,’ Mother was saying. ‘Bel’s devotion to the theatre has never been in question. I can’t think of any other girl who would come to her own going-away party dressed like Hamlet…’

Everyone laughed obligingly and clapped again. Frank leaned over to Mirela, who had left most of her food uneaten, and asked if she was planning to finish it. Niall O’Boyle rose and thanked Mother and began to read from flashcards handed him by his PA to the effect that Amaurot was more than just a house, it was a symbol, the symbol of an ideal, and how inspiring he personally found it to see this ideal being perpetuated by modern technology in the form of the Telsinor Hythloday Centre for the Arts, and so on and so forth; I drifted away. There was a fresh sally of rain against the window. To my left Bel fidgeted with a doily. The tubby stage manager was rubbing his foot up and down the girl with barrettes’ ankle and trying to make her laugh.

‘… a central part of our project of renewal, who really embodied these values we’ve been talking about, and more importantly used them and shared those qualities with others in order to make the world a better place, a permanent monument to him.’

Noisy applause here. ‘What did he say?’ I whispered to Bel.

‘They want to put up a statue of Father,’ Bel said, absently twisting her doily into a garrotte.

With this announcement, the speeches came to a close, and the table fragmented into a happy babel of conversation. But Bel retreated further into herself, watching the proceedings as if they were occurring on the other end of a microscope. It didn’t matter what I asked her about — Yalta, Ramp , Olivier’s legal travails — she would answer politely in as few words as were humanly possible, and then withdraw into silence. It was like being seated next to a vacant lot.

I decided it was time to bring out the big guns. When Mrs P came in to ask about coffee (Frank was right, she did look rather out of sorts), I had a word in her ear. A few minutes later, An Evening of Long Goodbyes nosed into the room, bandaged up and looking much improved.

‘Well!’ I said. ‘Look who it is!’

‘Who is it?’ Bel barely lifted an eyebrow.

‘Don’t you recognize him?’ I said, seeking to disengage the dog’s head from its reproductive organs momentarily so she could see him properly. ‘It’s that dog you bet on at the races that time, remember? An Evening of Long Goodbyes. You thought it was romantic.’

‘What’s it doing here?’ Bel said.

I stifled my exasperation. ‘Well, it’s for you, obviously. I mean it’s a bon voyage gift.’

‘We robbed it from the car park,’ Frank chipped in unhelpfully.

‘We didn’t rob it,’ I said. I explained about the race and the dog’s heroics earlier that evening. Bel still didn’t seem to understand how this related to her; she nodded neutrally, patting the smooth area between the dog’s ears, and made some remark about not knowing if Aeroflot allowed dogs on as hand luggage.

‘You’re coming back, aren’t you?’ I said, beginning to feel a little browned off. ‘I just thought it would be nice to have a dog about the place again. I remembered how you used to dote on that spaniel…’ This I felt sure would elicit a response, but her face remained blank as the silver tag nestled in my pocket. I thought about producing the tag as evidence of her obsession, thereby proving that the dog was a good present, Aeroflot’s luggage policy notwithstanding; but I checked myself. I had done my best to make amends. If she was going to be infantile, that was her business. She returned to her reverie. I fell into a grumpy silence of my own. From the other side of the table, Frank resumed his muttering, mingling it with superstitious glances at Bel of the kind that a savage might throw at a bicycle. Oh yes, we made quite a party.