Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

It would be an understatement to say that Gene was disillusioned to find her father had feet of clay. But there was more to come: because when she demanded a new deal with the studio, so that her salary went straight to her and not to the company her father had set up, he sued her for fifty thousand dollars for breach of contract; and when she won the suit, and for the first time saw a statement of her savings at the Belle-Tier Corporation — of all the money she had earned in Hollywood and obediently sent on to her father, who had administered it with such draconian rigour — it came to zero, nought, nothing: there was nothing in the account.

She only saw him two more times. Once, she was under sedation and didn’t recognize him. The other time he came to her house and said, as he left, ‘Well, Gene, I suppose we both got what we wanted.’

Hence, surely, the succession of millionaires, the trade-off of her beauty for the security of knowing that no matter how else they betrayed her, she would never have to see them diminished like that: she would never have to see them dismiss the maid, or sell the crystal piece by piece, or carry a gun in case the worst came to the worst; no matter what else happened, there would always be security, there would always be enough to pay her hospital bills, her daughter’s hospital bills.

One would have a strong case for arguing that it was the men in her life — the lovers, the father, the directors, producers, critics — who destroyed it. And yet when you looked at the broad sweep they appeared more as agents, collectively, of a darker, wider force of ruin that pursued her. It was as if her epic beauty somehow angered the gods, and drew down a suitably Promethean punishment; and the girl behind the beauty, the nice girl from Connecticut who at the end would wonder whether, if her life had been a movie, she would have been cast to play her part — found she had wandered off the lot into a Greek tragedy.

Sitting amid the uniforms in the cavernous warehouse, I tried not to think about this. I tried to concentrate on the good things: the Oscar nomination for Leave Her to Heaven , in which out of nowhere she gives a performance of jealousy and insanity and anomie that is quite chilling; the premiere of The Razor’s Edge in New York City, the first big premiere after World War Two, when she’d walked a red carpet in a black tulle dress in front of thousands of fans…

But I couldn’t help but hear echoes of another life: in Gene’s mother Belle, in the Belle-Tier Corporation her father had sucked dry, in A Bell for Adano, Belle Starr , whose heroine’s name she’d chosen for an alias when she eloped with Cassini to Las Vegas; and I wondered if she’d ever, in the midst of those dreams and hallucinations, thought of the girl who would come fifty years later, who would also sit in a hospital ward and wonder who she was… And in the end I decided it might be kinder to forget: to let her disappear back into the twilight of late-night broadcasts, of dusty stills in the back of dusty junk shops patronized by lonely men with too much time on their hands. I put my notes in a shoebox and stowed it under the davenport in my room.

I asked Frank one time if he could remember how The Cherry Orchard had ended. After some deliberation he said that as far as he could recall, they all just leave.

‘They all just leave ?’

‘Yeah, s’far as I remember.’

‘What kind of ending is that?’

‘Dunno, Charlie. Must have been the only one he could think of.’

The Amaurot Players never reconvened. The papers had never been signed and the lavender-suited PA had taken Harry aside after the funeral and told him that Telsinor were pulling out of the deal. No one was pointing fingers or making judgements, she said; still, the company had a responsibility to listen to its shareholders, and in the shareholders’ eyes these recent events were simply not in the spirit of youth and change and communication that Telsinor represented.

Initially there was some talk of looking for funding elsewhere, but it quickly petered out. Nobody’s heart was in it any more. Soon everyone went their separate ways. Harry made some sort of a statement claiming that the theatre was an élitist art form and that the Internet was the only medium capable of expressing truly revolutionary ideas; he got a job writing copy for the Snickers website, and to my knowledge The Rusting Tractor was never produced.

Mirela seemed to have taken the crash especially hard. For weeks afterwards she barricaded herself in her room; she would not speak to Harry, and the engagement was quietly forgotten. She left the house shortly afterwards. For where I did not know: Mrs P would not speak about her. I never saw her again, at least not in the flesh.

It was only a short while after that Vuk and Zoran’s application for asylum was turned down. The former Yugoslavia, in the eyes of the Irish government, was no longer sufficiently dangerous to merit their staying on here; the next thing we knew they were heading back to Croatia with Mrs P. It all seemed very sudden. The truth of it, though, was that the citizenship issue was only an excuse. Mrs P had been pining to go back home since the day she arrived, and the ‘recent events’ had only bolstered her resolve.

‘To her it doesn’t matter there is nothing left there,’ Vuk said to me. ‘Always she is thinking only of my father, who was lost, and she does not want to live away from.’

‘What about Mirela?’ I said. ‘Is she going too?’

‘Ay, Mirela,’ he sighed. ‘Maybe she is right. Maybe it is better to stay here, to forget. But Mama is determined.’ He tapped his head and grinned. ‘We go with her, make sure she doesn’t go too crazy.’

I knew Mother must be lonely in the house on her own. I had been nagging her to get in someone new, but she didn’t listen. In fact, I was never sure how aware of my visits she was. She confined herself to one or two rooms these days, leaving the rest of the house to the great draughts that roamed through it. I would find her sitting by a cold hearth, with a glass in her hand and cinders all over the floor. We would talk, or rather I would listen as she talked: about the old days, invariably — Trinity College, the Hunt Ball, Father and her star turns in this or that production. Sometimes I would try to get her to talk about Bel, but whether real or put on, I could not pierce this cloudy nostalgia. Once only, when I asked her straight out about the night of the school play, did it seem that the cobwebs fell away. She paused, ran her finger around the rim of her sherry glass, and then said: ‘A true actress, Charles, never lets herself be seen. Every time she walks on stage, she creates herself anew, using what’s around her; and when she walks off she divests herself of it just so —’ lifting her arms and shrugging off an imaginary gown. ‘Her life is merely a peg on which to hang it. But Bel, you see, Bel…’ She paused once more, and smiled sadly. ‘Bel always insisted life skip to her tune. She never would learn the value of compromise. So like her father in that way, making things harder than they already were…’

The fingers ran around the glass: then, abruptly, she brightened. ‘But in the old days, Charles, how jolly it was. Now, of course, it’s all little people and their rules. But then… but then, when the house was full of life, when the grooms would bring round the brougham, and the maids would present in their frocks, and curtsey at the knee, and the valet and the chauffeur and the cook, and every room bustling with life…’

‘No, Mother,’ I contradicted gently. ‘That wasn’t here. We never had all those people working for us in Amaurot.’

‘I don’t mean us, Charles,’ she said irritably. ‘I mean in the old days. The last century, before we ever arrived. Now we’re starting a new century, of course,’ she added with disdain, and her eyes glazed over as she poured herself more sherry, absently tilting the bottle up and up till the drink trembled right at the rim of the glass. ‘But how jolly it must have been, how jolly…’ shaking her head and smiling fondly and not noticing as I raised the latch and let myself out into the gusty hall.