Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Oh,’ she said. There was a long pause. I waited, quietly grinding my teeth and berating myself. That way no one gets hungry — what on earth was I thinking? Was I still crippled by the fallout from the Olé incident? Would I never be able to speak to a woman again?

‘All right,’ Laura broke in. ‘It’s not normally how we do things, but you are Christabel’s brother, after all.’

‘Yes,’ I said fatuously, resisting the urge to jump up and down weeping tears of gratitude. ‘So I’ll see you Saturday? Eightish?’

‘I suppose,’ the voice crackled. ‘Oh, but I’m lactose intolerant, okay? So like, I can’t eat anything with lactose.’

‘Certainly, certainly… don’t give it another thought,’ I said, and replaced the receiver. For a few seconds I remained there in the moment’s afterglow, not yet ready to yield up its immediacy; then, with a whoop, I raised my fist to the air. Victory! True, I hadn’t presented myself in the most flattering light; I may have come across as a tad eccentric, or deranged. But what mattered was that she had accepted. Once she was inside the house, where I controlled all, everything would fall into place: for she would see that here was a world waiting to be remade as she desired — mountains moved, seas emptied, lactose banished to the ends of the earth — it would all be for her, and she would understand straight away that we were meant to be.

I went into the breakfast room to deliver the good news, but found myself confronted by Frank in a state of partial undress on the far side of the table, which rather spoiled the moment. ‘All right bud,’ he greeted me, stretching back in an uninhibited, vaguely post-coital yawn that exposed his flaccid white belly. I shuddered: How could Bel endure to look at that , indeed to feel it slapping greasily against — but no. She had honoured the pact and I had got what I wanted — now the détente must be respected. Swallowing my disgust, I gave him as unhostile a nod as I could manage, and pulled out a chair at the table.

Bel was sitting slumped in front of a pile of opened letters. She looked rather agitated: her cheeks had a high colour and her hair was frazzled as though she’d been tugging at it, and when I asked her pointedly who had eaten all the marmalade she didn’t reply. I changed tack and told her about Laura. ‘Funny that she’s in insurance, though. I hardly thought she’d be the type, did you?’

‘Mmm,’ Bel said, continuing to glower into her pile.

‘Is there any more marmalade?’ Frank said.

‘I mean, bit funny, isn’t it?’

‘Not to anyone who knows her,’ she snapped. ‘Why, what did you think she did?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully, although in my imagination I’d sort of pictured her walking around a big empty house, gazing melancholically out at the rain with a cup of black coffee in her hands and slow jazz in the background, more or less on a fulltime basis.

‘Whatever. Listen, Charles, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’ She turned in her seat to look directly at me. From the far side of the table I heard Frank chuckling as he ate his toast.

‘Yes?’ I said, suddenly feeling uneasy.

‘How long, exactly, have you been leaving letters in the String Drawer?’

‘Why… I don’t know.’ I was usually at home when the postman came, so it was generally me who separated the post; taking personal correspondence up to our respective bedrooms and leaving family business in the String Drawer for Bel to look at at her convenience. I didn’t see what she was driving at, nor why her face was taking on that disconcerting brick-red hue. ‘A few months, I suppose.’

‘And were you thinking of telling me at any stage?’

‘Telling you what?’ I said, confused. ‘I mean, it’s your, well it’s sort of your cubbyhole, isn’t it?’

‘What gave you the impression,’ she said, ‘that the String Drawer was my cubbyhole?’

I didn’t like her tone and was about to retort, when I realized that I had no idea what had given me that impression. We must have had some prior arrangement, I thought, racking my brains; although it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I had stuck the afternoon post in there one day after some lunchtime drinks and latterly assumed that there had been a prior arrangement. Whatever had happened, the String Drawer was where family-related correspondence had been going more or less since Mother left for the Cedars. Now that I came to think of it, I had wondered recently why Bel was letting it build up so.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well what?’ I said. ‘You’ve found them now, so let’s just be happy with that, and not start blaming each other —’

‘Charles, have you seen these? Do you know what they are?’ She waved a sheaf of the envelopes with the funny red stamp on them. ‘Do you?’

‘Special delivery?’ I hazarded. Frank stifled a laugh. ‘Well how should I know? All that’s your department, that’s always been the way.’

‘One of my many departments,’ Bel said in a scornful aside to Frank. ‘Charles handles Food and Wine, and the rest is left for me.’

‘As long as you keep handlin me,’ Frank leered. She lapsed into a shy smile and I glimpsed her stockinged toe nudging his white sock under the table; I experienced a sensation of utter displacement, as though the earth had shifted on its axis and everything had toppled over. This must have been how Louis XVI felt, I reflected, when he was taken from his prison cell and led to the scaffold, and understood for the first time that this noisy, shouty bunch of nobodies were actually serious about their Revolution business.

‘Well, what are they so?’ I half-shouted, in case she had forgotten I was there.

‘They’re from the bank , Charles!’ Bel shouted back, banging the palms of her hands on the table. ‘From the bank, from the building society, from our solicitors, from other people’s solicitors. But mainly from the bank.’

A cold shiver went down my spine. ‘I wonder what they want?’ I said.

‘What do they ever want,’ Frank mused dolorously. ‘You won’t catch them wastin stamps askin you how you are.’

‘Money. They want money. There’s bills in here going back for months, from the phone company, the electricity, the television people.’ She flung the pages about desperately. ‘But they’re the least of our worries. The big one is the bank. Our mortgage repayments are in arrears, serious arrears. They’re talking about foreclosing.’

This took a moment to register with me. Mortgage, foreclose — these were words with which I was not wholly familiar, rarely being encountered in polite society, except in murmured stories told in the midnight hours, in the same tone one might use for cancer or abortion; horrible things that, outside the confines of one’s demesne, were happening to luckless strangers. ‘I didn’t know we had a mortgage,’ I said.

‘Charles,’ Bel pulled at her hair frustratedly, ‘this Hythloday empire you’re always going on about didn’t come from nowhere. It’s built on credit . None of it’s ours , not really. It looks like Father borrowed an absolute fortune, the sums they’re talking about here are just, just astronomical —’ She sat back in her chair, making slits of her eyes. ‘I knew something like this would happen, Mother’s just let everything go to hell since he died, I don’t think she’s even seen the accountant since the funeral…’

‘But…’ we had company, so one didn’t want to be vulgar, ‘but, I mean — we’re still rich , aren’t we? Can’t we just pay them what they want and they’ll leave us alone?’