Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘What’s wrong ?’ I demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ But she just waved her hands in front of her face, before giving way to a fresh stream of tears.

I stood at the sink and looked out at the rain and the sky, the same stolid grey as the bricks of the tower. Suddenly I felt smothered in there, as I had in the bank. ‘I need to think,’ I said, going to open the back door. ‘Will you please go and get some rest?’

Mrs P looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks, but she leapt up and dragged me back from the door. ‘Please, Master Charles, don’t go back outside!’

‘I have to get the basket,’ I said. ‘The clothes are getting wet.’

But she didn’t hear. ‘It rains,’ she kept saying, ‘you catch cold.’

‘All right, all right…’ sitting down again at the kitchen table. ‘Happy?’

‘Good.’ She wiped her cheeks and pretended to be cheerful again. ‘Now, everything is good. Here we are, safe and dry. I make you hot chocolate and you watch television, yes?’

Try as I might, I couldn’t persuade her to lie down until she had installed me on the chaise longue, with a cup of cocoa resting on the floor where the table had been. As luck would have it, there was a movie on: The Killers , aka A Man Alone , handsome old Burt Lancaster murdered in flashbacked increments by faithless Ava Gardner. I eased my head back and tried to immerse myself in that world, the bare dark apartment where Lancaster sat and smoked, waiting for the assassins to come. But I couldn’t do it. I was thinking of the impossible mortgage, the exhausting interview with the bank official. It seemed to me that it all came back to Frank somehow: that after all these years, all Father’s fortifications, one little cancerous cell of reality had at last slipped through; and now, inexorably, it was metastasizing.

Bel and Frank entered with a great commotion an hour later. Frank was holding his jaw, across which a big purple bruise was spreading. Bel fussed about him, bringing him iodine and cotton wool from the bathroom.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Uh ugh,’ Frank mumbled, ‘or ucksh ake.’

‘It was the cunt,’ my sister translated. ‘Do you remember, Charles, the cunt from the pub?’

Remember? The cunt’s knobbly white face had been etched into several of my many nightmares in recent times. Bel explained that he and his mates had followed Frank home from work and ambushed him on his way to meet her; indeed, had not the postman been making a tardier round than usual it might have gone worse for Frank. As it was, Bel had had to take him to Outpatients to get his ribs taped up.

‘I gugga figh ag ugh,’ Frank expostulated now, making to rise from his chair, ‘ah ick izh ughing ead ih.’

Bel pushed him back. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she told him. ‘It can wait. You’re in no condition to kick anyone’s head in.’

His eye rolled whitely, like a fallen horse’s: and for a split second, before the Golem dead calm reasserted itself and he sat back, it was disconcertingly like looking into a mirror. I recognized the same besieged humanity that shrieked banshee-like through my own heart; and for that split second I felt a sympathy for the poor beast, and wondered if it might not be better if we were all of us Golems: obedient, unquestioning, impervious to pain.

I left them and went to the breakfast room, where the various threats and notices still lay on a corner of the table. I seated myself and read them through with masochistic glee. The principal players were numerical: account numbers, rates of interest, amounts outstanding, dates from long ago. These were the figures whose tale was spun over the headed pages; we were mentioned in passing, in the third person, given only bit-part, transient-sounding roles as ‘occupants’.

I read the last one, and as I laid it face-down on the table I experienced a sensation of utter dislocation, as if all this were happening light-years away, in a parallel, contradictory universe. But it was succeeded by a kind of a supercharged hereness , a phantasmagorical awareness of my familiar surroundings: the heavy drapes hanging drowsily, the quietly babbling patterns of the wallpaper, the grandfather clock and the tea-chest resting innocent in their shadows like sleeping children about to be orphaned. I thought of Amaurot and all the other great houses, those great hearts that strained now to keep beating with the thin blood of modernity, built for a simpler time when men wore hats and ladies wore gloves, silver was polished for guests, fires roared in hearths…

In the hallway, Frank was gibbering incoherently into the phone, like a chimpanzee general declaring a state of emergency. Through the door, Bel was sitting off to one side with her chin resting on her hand. I looked at her, and looked back out at Frank and all of those who had come before him, and suddenly had an inkling of her desperation to find a place for herself in this world.

‘Mother’s being discharged next weekend,’ she said wanly, waving a letter from the Cedars.

‘Just in time for the auction,’ taking a seat beside her. ‘Seems appropriate.’

‘No luck with the bank, then?’

‘Well, you know, we hammered a few things out. They seemed quite adamant about getting their money back, though.’ The television was on with the sound down: rockets fired mutely across a shaky desert. ‘They did say that if we could speak to our accountant he might be able to untangle this a little.’

‘I’ve tried to find our accountant. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth. And Father’s files are impossible . They’re like code. You never come across the same name twice. I don’t even know if they are the right files.’

‘Mother would know, I suppose.’

‘Oh God ,’ Bel covered her face with her hands, ‘the horror of bringing Mother into this…’

‘Well, something ’ll turn up.’ I tugged gently at her hair. ‘Maybe we have a rich uncle we don’t know about.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much of a plan,’ she said dismally, picking at a patch on her cords. ‘This is horrible , Charles. Ever since this morning I’ve been feeling like a trespasser, I feel like I’m sleeping in someone else’s bed, and eating with someone else’s cutlery. Every time I close a door it seems to echo almost for ever. And now Mother’s going to come back and make it look like it’s all our fault, and go on about how we’ve let Father down and we’ve thrown away our birthright and all that —’

‘Oh, you always take her too seriously…’

‘She will, that’s what she thinks , Charles, no one’s good enough to live here, we’re all just flailing about since Father died.’ She worked loose a thread and left it and sipped her brandy. ‘I wish it would all just, just end . I’m so sick of living my life at the behest of this stupid house , it sucks the soul out of you, makes you its slave, that’s how it stays alive…’

‘Well, of course it’ll end, Bel, we’ll find a way out, you’ll see.’

‘I don’t mean this mortgage stuff. I mean, everything .’ She kicked her feet out in front of her. ‘I can’t keep living here, Charles. I can’t keep living like this. It’s too weird. It’s not life , can’t you see that?’

‘Life,’ I said bitterly.

‘Because even if we’d sold some of our antiques — that ridiculous car, for instance, all it does is gather dust, I find myself feeling sorry for it locked up out there — I mean if we’d gone about it correctly, I’m sure we could have paid them off. But… but the way everything’s turned out, don’t you think that maybe this is supposed to happen? Because places like Amaurot aren’t supposed to exist any more —’ She paused suddenly, bowing her head to gaze down into the brandy glass swirling in her left hand, as though daunted in spite of herself by the magnitude of what she’d just said; then with an impetuous sweep of her hand she went on: ‘It’s like some story that’s gone wrong and refuses to end, and it’s been like this for so long — it’s so long since things made sense and all we do is try and pretend it’s the same as when we were little children. That’s not the way life should feel, Charles, not when you’re young. Father dies, Mother goes loolah, now this — it’s like the world is trying to tell us something. Do something, it’s saying, get out of there while you still can…’ Her gaze lifted, wandered, alit on the glass frieze of Actaeon, beyond which Frank paraded up and down the hallway. ‘And it’s right. Maybe you can live in this dreamworld, Charles, without anything in it, but I can’t, not any more.’