Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Well, this is all fascinating,’ I managed to croak, ‘but we should probably get started on the, ah, vases…’

‘You’re right,’ she said, backing her chair away from the table and taking a personal organizer from her jacket pocket. ‘That was lovely, by the way. It’s actually a really good idea, having dinner first and getting to know each other, I must say it to my department manager.’ She stepped over to the dresser and on tiptoes scrutinized the top shelf. ‘Obviously these’ll have to be valued, so I’m just going to do an inventory and give you a rough estimate, okay?’

‘Fine,’ I said, and filling my glass once more watched as she picked things up and put them down, affixing mental price-tags to each and making diligent notes in her electronic pad. Even her face looked somehow wrong . Close-up she bore only a passing resemblance to the girl in Bel’s school annuals, and adjust the lights as I might I could not get her to look any more like her. How had this come to pass? Did the Laura I had fallen in love with exist only in the yearbooks? An image imprisoned in seven grainy pages, just as I was trapped in the corporeal world?

I glanced over at the clock. My God, could it only be half past nine? Laura chattered on as she went about her vivisection; I ground my nails into my palms. My last night in Amaurot wasted, my grand love story in tatters, and nothing to show for it but some over-insured vases! Then — like a ray of hope — I perceived the sound of the key in the front door. ‘Pardon me one moment.’ I sprang to my feet and dashed out to the hall, catching the newcomers just as they were sneaking off upstairs. ‘Bel! Thank God! And is that Frank with you? My dear fellow, what a pleasant surprise!’

‘All right?’

‘Charles, we’re actually quite tired, I thought we might go straight to —’

‘Yes, yes, you’ll stop by the dining room just for a minute, though, won’t you? I know Laura is dying to see you… please , Bel…’

‘Ow, Charles, let go… all right, but just for a minute.’

‘I’m just going to run into the jacks first and have a slash,’ said Frank.

‘Yes, capital, you do that.’ He lumbered off and Bel, with the sigh of a surgeon called back into the emergency room just as she is about to leave for home, took off her gloves and preceded me into the dining room.

‘ Laura ,’ she said, laying her handbag on a chair, ‘how wonderful to see you!’

‘Oh my God, Bel!’ Laura turned from her inventory with a exclamation of delight. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Charles is keeping you entertained, I see?’

‘Oh yes, we’ve had such a laugh — do you know, I was just talking about you to Bunty the other day, no one’s even seen you in I don’t know how long…’

‘Oh, you Smorfett girls have such busy social lives,’ Bel countered with a smile, pouring a glass of wine. ‘I suppose I just sort of fell by the wayside.’

‘Well, you still look gorgeous , you look so artistic , did you get those second-hand?’

‘Thanks, so do you — where did you get that lovely suit? It makes you look so mature —’

‘Oh, I just grabbed it off the rail, I don’t really have time to shop these days, I’m so busy at work —’

‘Laura’s been promoted,’ I informed Bel.

‘But what about you, Bel, are you still acting, or…?’

‘Oh, you know, finding my feet,’ Bel said. ‘It takes time.’

‘Mmm,’ Laura nodded, returning her attention to the Chinese jade. ‘You know, I had no idea your family had so much —’ she stopped herself, blushing. ‘Sorry — it must help, though, knowing you have all this to fall back on…’

Blood might well have been spilled if at that moment Frank had not wandered in with a bag of chicken balls — his favourite dish, until I met him I hadn’t been aware that chicken came in balls. ‘All right?’ he inquired of the room in general, and then, his eyes falling on Laura, ‘Holy fuck .’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Laura brought a hand to her chest.

‘How the fuck are you?’ he bellowed, opening his arms wide.

She jumped into them with a happy scream. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said again, somewhat muffled by Frank’s embrace.

‘What don’t you believe?’ Bel asked her when finally she re-emerged.

Face flushed with serendipity, she launched into an interminable explanation. I sat down heavily and started drinking her glass of wine. It seemed that Frank had been one of the licentious holiday-makers in Greece: indeed, he was one of Laura’s beloved T-shirt-snatchers.

‘I’ll never forget that night,’ she laughed, repeatedly.

‘I won’t either,’ Frank leered, eyeing her handsome chest.

‘Remember that rep… what was his name… he looked like a takeaway…’

‘Onion Bhaji!’ Frank roared with delight. ‘Onion Bhaji, what a bollocks!’

‘Remember when my friend Liz wanted to shag him and he was in her room shagging her flatmate and she burst in and said, “You’d better not use all your sperm up on her” —’

‘And remember when we went on that hike and he drank all the sangria and we threw him off that cliff —’

They threw back their heads and guffawed.

‘Did she say sperm …?’ I whispered to Bel.

Bel was watching the pair of them with a faint smile.

‘Ahem, Bel —’

‘Charles,’ she said without looking at me, ‘we ought to have more wine. We may be here for some time.’

It was a relief to go down to the cellar, to close the warped door on their debauched reminiscence and the non-events of their subsequent lives, and breathe in the mossy, deliquescent air. There was something about it — the bare slats, the stained concrete of the walls, the spare creak of floorboards underfoot — that always renewed me. Descending the rickety steps, I thought how glad I was that Bel had come home, and how really the dinner hadn’t been all that bad; I may even have chuckled once or twice, thinking of Laura’s agonizing conversation. And then I saw the racks. They were almost entirely empty.

In disbelief I glanced from one bare slat to the next. Redundant rack-labels peeked sadly back at me like tiny white tombstones. At first, idiotically, I thought that the bottles might have been misplaced. I looked behind the great oak casks, under the brambles of electrical cable, among the crates of empties by the stairs. Then I simply stood there, agape. All that remained was a shelf of dubious liqueurs, gifts to the family over the years that no one, until now, had resorted to opening. Everything else had been taken. My hands trembled. First Laura, now the cellar, the inviolable cellar — it was as if the world were taunting me, bearing down with all its imbecilic might: Your efforts are in vain , it was saying. We have already won .

For some minutes I was completely at sea. Then I took a deep breath. The night wasn’t over yet. I still had a chance to put an end to Frank’s reign of terror. Clenching my teeth, I gathered up an armful of the uncontemplatable liqueurs and stormed back up the stairs.

Frank was recapitulating his triumphant revenge on the cunt from the pub earlier that day; Laura gazed at him adoringly, hanging on every gruesome word. Bel had moved her chair to curl a proprietary arm around him.

‘ — so after we let the air out we broke the windows and got the radio, and then we set it on fire, see, and then we went up to his house where he lives with his Granny, and there were all these fuckin like gnomes in the garden, so we started pickin them up and throwin them at his house and shoutin, y’know, Come out, you cunt, until he came out. He had a crowbar and his brother this bollocks called Rory had one of them metal bicycle pumps, and we had a two-by-four length of plywood and —’