Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

I was reaching the point where I didn’t think I could physically stand any more; and evidently someone else in the room felt the same way, because suddenly a loud, exasperated voice called out, ‘Oh, balls!’

Everyone went quiet. Harry adjusted his bow tie, and said ‘Excuse me?’ as if to offer the perpetrator a chance to exculpate himself. But this protester was not to be silenced. ‘Balls!’ the voice cried again, even louder than before. I tittered to myself; and I was so enjoying seeing Harry squirm that it took a moment to realize that I was standing up, and that furthermore the entire table was staring at me.

Bother.

‘Charles, leave the table, please,’ Mother said.

‘No,’ Harry interjected. ‘If you don’t mind — let’s hear what Charles has to say.’

I wiped my palms on my trousers, unexpectedly finding myself addressing the room at large. ‘Well, I mean to say,’ I stuttered. ‘I mean… well, a house is a house isn’t it? It’s a place people live in. I don’t see what the twenty-first century’s got to do with it. I don’t see why, just because you’ve put up some new wallpaper, you should be allowed to claim the place in the name of the future , like some sort of… you know… time-travelling… pirate.’

‘That’s Harry for you,’ chuckled Niall O’Boyle. ‘I like a man who’s got his eye on the future. Because that’s where it’s all going to happen, mark my words. The past is one thing, but the future, that’s where the money is.’

‘I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes,’ Harry said. ‘I’m just saying you have to move with the times. It’s in everybody’s interests. You have to admit this place was falling to pieces before we came.’

I thought back to that golden age when it was just Bel and me and the drinks cabinet. ‘It wasn’t,’ I said.

‘It was,’ he reiterated. ‘The paint was peeling, the floors were rotten — your mother told us that while she was in hospital the bank was practically calling in the sheriffs to repossess the place…’

‘That was all a misunderstanding,’ I claimed.

‘But you blew up the Folly for the insurance,’ Harry pursued, fingering the buttons of his lawyer’s waistcoat. ‘I mean — you tried to fake your own death . How can you say the house was better off then?’

I blinked stuporously, and cast about me for support. Bel continued to gaze dreamily into space like a patient under ether in the dentist’s chair. Frank was lying inert on the table like a giant rag-doll, as he had been for the last five minutes. All the others waited for my response, their eyes holding me pinned like so many skewers. ‘We knew what we were doing,’ I mumbled.

There was a momentary delay; then, as one, the guests around the table burst into laughter. It was warm and full; everyone joined in, even people I had never met before, like Niall O’Boyle’s PA; even Mother, her anger dissipating in the general gaiety.

Harry threw his hands up humorously as if to say, I rest my case; I slunk down in my seat and thought that maybe I was just a dope — in all likelihood I was, I wasn’t debating the matter: but still it didn’t seem right that a man should be made to feel like this, not in the dining room of his own childhood home.

And then, abruptly, mechanically, Frank lifted his head from his plate. With a glazed yet curiously purposeful expression, like a man acting with orders from on high, he rose and tucked in his chair; then he crossed the floor and began strangling Harry.

For a couple of seconds we sat watching dumbly as plates flew, glasses smashed, chairs tumbled. Then the girls began to scream. At the same time, the bit-part actors at the end of the table hurrahed and stood on their seats to get a better view; the dog barked; Mirela turned grey; the businessmen puffed themselves up and waved their hands about –

‘Do something, Charles!’ Mother shrieked. ‘Do something!’

‘Right,’ I responded, getting to my feet. ‘Who’s for brandy? And I believe we have some cigars…’

‘Charlie?’

‘Yes, Frank?’

‘You awake?’

‘Yes, Frank, I’m awake.’

‘Where are we, Charlie?’

‘We’re in Father’s study. You had a sort of a funny turn.’

‘Oh right. I gave your man a box.’ There was a pause: the darkness recomposed itself over the shelves, the vials and periodicals and thick portfolios of photographs. ‘I’d say he wasn’t expectin that.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he was.’

‘Your ma was awful angry, wasn’t she? Like sayin she was goin to get us arrested and stuff.’

‘Oh, Mother says these things, you know…’

‘Sorry, Charlie. I dunno what happened. It was like I wasn’t in control of me own mind.’

I charitably let this pass.

‘He kept goin on and on with all that shite. It was drivin me mad. And I couldn’t just let him make a laugh of you.’

I coughed. ‘Well, I don’t know that he was making a laugh of me —’

‘Like I wasn’t just goin to let him make you look like some geebag that didn’t know his arse from his elbow.’

‘Well… well, thanks, old man.’

Silence.

‘Charlie?’

‘Go to sleep .’

‘Fuckin cold in here, isn’t it?’

‘…’

‘Charlie… d’you ever see a ghost here? I bet there’d be loads of ghosts in an old gaff like this… fuck —’ the camp bed creaked painfully, ‘just like that bit in Bel’s play, like all these faces like starin at you from the fuckin trees and shit —’

‘Look, there aren’t any ghosts, all right?’ I said irritably. ‘If there were, Harry would have roped them into serving dinner, or helping in his wretched play. Lord knows if I was a ghost I’d have fled the minute he walked in the door.’

‘Ah yeah, I s’pose…’ He laid himself gingerly back down. I turned back to the window. I was at my old vantage point behind Father’s desk, where I’d used to look out at the Folly and occasionally see an angel, or an actress. There weren’t any angels tonight; we had used up our quota, probably, or else they had hitched a ride with the ghosts.

We had ruined the dinner party so thoroughly, so unequivocally, that even after the furore had died down and the paramedics had gone, the wisest course of action had still seemed to be one of ignominious retreat. I wasn’t at all sure that Mother had been joking about pressing charges, so with Mrs P’s help I had smuggled Frank up here, and here the two of us had stayed. Only now, as I sat at the windowsill, did it occur to me that this was the end: that our parts were, at last, played out. Tomorrow was already today. Bel would leave for Yalta and Amaurot would be reborn as the Telsinor Hythloday Centre for the Arts. Our contributions had made, when it came to it, not the slightest bit of difference.

I had been utterly defeated on every front; I should, at that moment of all moments, have been steeped in despair. And yet, as I sat at the window, I did not find myself despairing. For out of the gloom, the hopelessness, the humiliation of the day, certain images kept defiantly floating up: Frank with Droyd in his arms, lurching out of the stinking basement; Frank thumping the Plexiglas, cheering on the dogs; the glorious moment of Frank, tongue tucked between his teeth, crisply punching Harry on the nose. I didn’t ask for them; they didn’t appear to change anything; yet there they were, floating up out of the darkness before my eyes, over and over again, and with them now something Yeats had said once: ‘Friendship is all the house I have.’

I frowned out through my ghostly reflection at the swaying trees, the rain. Friendship is all the house I have . It wasn’t a line I’d given much thought to before. Still, you could see what he meant, given all the problems one encountered with actual houses — heating bills and mortgages and wayward domestics, rack-renting landlords, actors moving in, all that. What kind of house would my friendship make? The day’s events paraded palely by again, like the tapestry of a long-ago battle. On the evidence it seemed that, for all my aspirations to the courtly life, I hadn’t provided much protection from the elements. Bel, Amaurot, Droyd and the Latvians… the closer you looked the more it appeared that, in terms of houses, it was your Charles Hythlodays who were the seedy overpriced flats with wobbling walls and dubious plumbing; while it was the Franks of this world — even if they thought a French press was some sort of ungentlemanly wrestling move, even if they were under the impression that Stockhausen was a Swedish furniture shop, even if one had heard them with one’s own ears telling Droyd when he asked that Donatella Versace was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle — it was the Franks who were the grand old mansions overlooking the sea. And it struck me that the last time we all of us had been happy — really happy, even if we hadn’t been aware of it — was when Frank and Bel were still together.