Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

She sat down next to me on the chaise longue. ‘Don’t you see, though, that’s why I get angry with you, because you pretend not to know, because you act like you think everything in the world’s just a digression from the grand noble lives Father had mapped out for us, and that if you ever did anything or became part of anything, you’d be betraying him. But there is no map, Charles. There are no values. All Amaurot ever was was somewhere to fill up with his delusions and walk around with his head in the clouds, pretending the world outside didn’t exist. I’m not judging him for it. But none of this means anything at all. Except maybe money.’

The balls of my fingers were sweating, and the glass kept wanting to slip away from them. The mad skirl of the storm came rushing down the chimney. It felt rather as if we had arrived at the end of the world; and all that was left now was this drawing room, this chaise longue, her body beside mine. Summoning all my energies I heaved myself forward, like some old dinosaur struggling out of the swamp, so that my forearms leaned on my thighs; then, clearing the dust from my throat, I said in a slurred voice: ‘Poppycock.’

I might have gone on. I might have told her that I’d never in my life heard such vile trash; I might have gone through her points and refuted them one by one. But I found that the effort of sitting up had exhausted me; so I set my glass down by the suitcase and sat staring sourly at the floor, ignoring her gaze on my cheek.

‘Geoffrey’s been arraigned,’ Bel said: her voice had regained its parsed, melodious distance. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard. One of Father’s companies turned up in this offshore thing the government’s investigating. They haven’t traced it as far as us yet. But it’ll hardly take them long. It’s pretty obvious once you start looking at the books. Front companies, holding companies, dummy accounts, leading here, there, into the ether. Donations to these mysterious charities, trust funds — you must have wondered what happened to your trust, Charles, you must have realized even you couldn’t have drunk it all.’

I said nothing; eventually she sighed and got up and went to the curtain again, as she had been when I came in.

‘I mean it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The place’ll go on regardless, and get stronger and stronger. They’ll create synergies and put up statues. How could you ever stop something as big as that?’ She looked round at me over her shoulder. ‘So you can wake Mother now, if you want. Tell her I’ve gone crazy again.’

I still did not reply; I was thinking of something else now.

‘But Charles, promise me one thing. When I’m gone, promise you won’t come back here. Even if Mother offers you a room. There isn’t going to be any more face-painting, do you understand that?’ She crossed the floor, frowning to herself. I suppressed a giggle. She hadn’t noticed, but there were two of her now, pacing along side by side. The room was beginning to wheel slowly, in a cosy, rockabying sort of a way. ‘And you have to stop falling in love with beautiful girls you don’t know anything about…’ A chorus-line of Bels lifted their hands and pushed the bangs out of their eyes. ‘Because what you have to remember, if there’s one thing, it’s that everybody’s human, that’s the first thing they are, whether they’re beautiful or not, or rich or poor, or actresses from the 1940s or Frank… they’re all humans, the first thing they are is human, do you see? Do you see, Charles?’

I was only dimly aware of the kaleidoscope-Bel that shimmered up and waited expectantly at my foot. I was thinking of that time when she was seven, when she’d watched the documentary about the famine in Ethiopia and decided she was going to make a cake to send over to them: ‘Do you remember, Bel? Everyone was out and the kitchen went on fire, and Father said, when the firemen had gone, Father said —’ hooting with laughter now, ‘he had a good mind to ask the blasted Ethiopians to send some of their food to us , seeing as we’d have to eat takeaways for the next month…’

The shimmer paused, then said quietly that she remembered. The clock struck something-or-other, and she said she really did have some things to do.

‘Yes,’ I said, rising unsteadily and sinking again. ‘I might just need a — a small hand, however…’

She took my wrist and hauled me up. When I had found my feet, she draped my right arm over her shoulders and linked her own arms tightly around my waist, and in this fashion we made our way down the hall, with her slight frame braced against mine, adjusting itself forwards, backwards to counter my errant centre of gravity. It seemed, as we began our ascent of the stairs, that I could hear the sound of chopping wood somewhere; but Bel was already huffing under my weight, so I didn’t mention it. Probably just some left-behind spook, I thought, as she hefted me onward; probably just some Golem, dragging its sad, sleepless feet of clay through the darkened grounds.

The next thing I knew, we were standing outside Father’s study door. ‘Well,’ I said to the place where I thought she was standing.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Give my regards to old Chekhov.’

‘Of course.’

There was an awkward lacuna: suddenly I was aware of something having been brought up that had been left unresolved — or was it something left unsaid that should have been said? I couldn’t remember, so hazarding a guess I said, ‘You know, that business we were talking about before. You and I finding a place to live, so forth. We should have a talk about it when you get back, thrash out something definite.’

‘Of course,’ she said again: no more than a smudge now, a thumbprint on the photograph of the night. She planted a kiss on my cheek. ‘Goodbye, Charles.’

‘Goodbye,’ I said. But she had already vanished down the stairs.

I tripped into the study and took my share of the blankets back from Frank and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep; as Bel returned downstairs, went out to the garage, climbed into Father’s Mercedes, and drove it at full speed into the garden wall.

‘Why should people be trapped with just one face?’ Father liked to say. ‘Or stuck in just one life?’

The mask, he’d say, was something that you wore but was opposite to you; because it was not wholly real, it could withstand pain that you could not; because it was not wholly human, its beauty was not diminished by age or feeling. Father’s hands never smelled of the same thing twice; and fragrances hung in the house like sweet invaders, like opulent chains of memories that no longer belonged to anyone.

We’d encounter his models on their way up or down the stairs, in the ordinary prettiness of their unmade-up daytime faces; it was always a shock to find them in the magazines a few months later, and see what Father had made from them. Louche, tomboy, prissy, gauche; Cleopatran, Regency, Berlin decadent; flappers and hippies and Arabian princesses — he mined their faces for stories and myths and desires old as history, or older, like seams of rare ore that lay buried in the earth of their youth.

In the magazines, the faces of these transient girls had a power, a power that my father could summon and balance, like those old music-hall acts that spun plates on sticks. They could call into being any age or emotion or state of mind; and everything around them would be transformed too, turned from diffuse, unwieldy life into a story, something with direction and significance. Looking out from the glossy pages, their faces seemed to promise everything; they promised that you could become anything; they promised that they would take you with them, that you could leave yourself behind.