Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

I closed my fist around it and lowered it slowly down by my side.

‘Don’t be childish, Charles, just give it to me.’

‘First tell me what you meant.’

‘Nothing, I didn’t mean anything…’ She had turned an angry beetroot colour.

‘It wasn’t nothing, if it was nothing you wouldn’t have said it, and what do you want this old thing for anyway, it hasn’t even got a name on it…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, just keep it then!’ she wheeled away exasperated. Immediately I felt sorry and lunkish and I was just about to apologize and hand it over when she spun round, catching me unawares –

‘Ow — what are you doing? ’

‘Give me it, Charles —’ digging her nails in my hand to try and get me to release it. I pushed her away: she pressed her elbow into my chest for leverage, and we tussled for another minute before I twisted her arm to disempower her, but did it too hard so she was thrown back on to the drawing-room floor.

‘Oh hell…’

‘Get off me —’

‘I didn’t mean it, I was just —’

‘You were just drunk , you’re always drunk…’ She wriggled away from my outstretched hand to lean against one leg of the chaise longue.

‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘It’s not broken, is it?’ She didn’t reply, just sat folded-up by her suitcase, nursing her wrist.

‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ I said, feeling guilty. ‘It’s just, I don’t see why you always have to run things down…’

‘Oh Lord — just leave me alone, will you?’

‘You do, Bel. I mean maybe you don’t notice, but —’

She looked up with tears of pain in her eyes. ‘Why do you keep doing this to me?’

‘Doing what?’

‘Why do you keep making me have the same conversation again and again and again?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do , with your happy memories and weren’t-we-blessed, you make it seem like this the whole time I’ve been living in a totally different life to you, you have no idea how it makes me feel …’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The way you talk about us , the way all your stories are about when we were little children, like nothing ever happened after we were ten years old, and everything bad you can just paint over and forget —’

‘I’m not painting over anything.’

‘Me in the hospital, why don’t you ever talk about that? Didn’t that happen? It was you who called the ambulance, wasn’t it? Or did I imagine it?’ The embers from the fire cast a deep-red livid glow over her face: she rubbed her wrist agitatedly, brushed her nose with her sleeve.

‘It was a painful period in our lives,’ I said. ‘Just because I don’t talk about something doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten it, or painted over it…’

‘You do!’ She struggled to her feet, the injured wrist held in one hand giving her a martyred aspect. ‘Even tonight when I’m going you come home with some stray dog you found half-dead because you don’t want me to remember the first one, because you think you can just erase the memory when the whole point is we shouldn’t be trying to forget it, we should be remembering it and what a rotten thing it was for Mother to take a little puppy and —’

‘It was just a bon voyage gift,’ I protested. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be some kind of existential —’

‘It was, Charles, it always is, and then you start in on me with remember this remember that and everything you don’t want to remember either just disappears or else you twist it around to make it fit this illusion you live in, just like the rest of them with their statues and their tradition and perpetuating Father’s legacy — but it’s worse when it’s you, because you were here, you know it’s not true.’

It was late, and I should have known to leave her be. In a very short period of time she had worked herself into quite a state. But I was a little the worse the wear myself by this point, and suddenly I had had enough of her put-downs; so I told her rather harshly that I hadn’t the faintest clue what she was talking about.

She ground her hand against her cheek frustratedly. ‘ This , Charles. The whole house. All the lying and pretending and putting on masks, everybody doing whatever they can to avoid having to actually confront reality, everything paid for by conning old ladies into thinking they can be young again — it’s a total fiction, all of it. That’s all it’s ever been, it’s what the house was built on.’ She paced out to the fireplace and back, circling like some tormented moth. ‘And now it happens all over again, with Harry and Mirela, and this phone company using us to make itself look like something instead of a bunch of Scandinavian venture capital. And Mother trying to look like she cares, and more lying and pretending, and that’s Father’s legacy, Charles, that and a hundred bank accounts that we don’t even know where they are, and yet you still won’t admit it, even when you know what went on up there, Jesus Christ you know how he died , and then you think to ask me why I’m going to Yalta — God, when I think of spending another second here…’

In the window lightning snapped, transforming the room momentarily into an engraving. ‘Are you finished?’ I said quietly.

‘Yes I’m — why, wait, where are you going?’

‘I’m going to wake Mother,’ I said.

‘What?’ She scurried round and interposed herself in front of the door. ‘What?’

‘I’m going to get Mother, and then I’m going to call the doctor,’ I said, setting her aside. ‘You’re hysterical.’

‘I’m not hysterical,’ Bel said, shocked. ‘Why do you think I’m —’

‘You’re hysterical, and I’m calling the doctor. You’re not in any shape to be going anywhere.’

‘That isn’t fair , Charles, just because I tell you something you don’t want to hear doesn’t mean I’m hysterical,’ she stretched out a hand, which I dodged easily, ‘just because something happened once you can’t keep —’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said stolidly. ‘I have to do it.’

‘But it isn’t — wait!’ springing back nimbly to block my path again. ‘Wait, Charles — Charles, wait —’ She hung her head, pinched her nose with one hand, took a deep breath. ‘Wait, there’s no need to drag Mother out of bed. You’re right. I’m overwrought. It’s been such an exhausting day. I’m sorry. I just need a minute to calm down, that’s all. Why don’t we just —’ she cast about her, then caught sight of the bottle poking out of my pocket, ‘why don’t we just sit down, and pour ourselves a drink, and calm ourselves down.’

She tugged at my shirt buttons pleadingly. I wavered. Her eyes seemed chaotic and far too white: still, a drink would really hit the spot about now.

Bel fetched a glass and poured a healthy shot for herself, then one for me. We sat on the chaise longue and sipped and looked out at the storm, as placid and genteel as if we were taking tea on the lawn. Unprompted, she began to chat about this masterclass in Yalta, and how the residence had been Chekhov’s country house when ill health forced him from Moscow; how he’d lived with his actress wife Olga and written his last play, The Cherry Orchard , there; how on his birthday he’d returned to Moscow for its first performance, and had a coughing fit when the audience called him out on stage; how he’d died peacefully two months later, at the age of forty-four. And what she’d said, or almost said, a moment before, hung undispellably in the room, invisible and odourless as asbestos. And after we’d lapsed back into silence, and sat there a while longer, I said: ‘Do you remember the night of the school play, Bel?’