Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘I’ll just wait in my room then,’ I called. ‘Come and get me when you’re finished. Down and to the right, the second door.’

A series of evacuatory noises ensued. I shrugged and walked down the dark corridor to sit on my bed and toy morbidly with my cufflinks. I remembered putting them on that evening, so full of nerves and hope. It felt like a week ago. I stretched back on the mattress, staring up at the invisible ceiling. I was beginning to feel thoroughly depressed. It wasn’t Laura’s fault she was beautiful, nor that I found her boring; it was mine. If I had got her so utterly wrong, what did that mean for the rest of my plans? Were they just as misconceived? Perhaps Bel was right — perhaps, after all, there was nothing to preserve here; perhaps Amaurot had outlived its time, and now it was better to let the world take it, pull it under the waves.

The clock ticked. I took the 8 × 10 of Gene from under the bed and held it up beside the window. There was an undeniable resemblance: the cold marble contour of her brow, the shapely swoop of her cheek, the beguiling naivety that dallied so enticingly with her beauty. And the name, Laura: its noirish elegance. Names were important, if only one could work out what they meant. I closed my eyes, replayed the famous scene in the movie — Laura , I mean — where the detective spends the night in her apartment — reading her letters and diary, smelling her perfume, going through her wardrobe, drinking her Scotch: always watched by, always circling back to, the portrait of her on the wall. She’s dead before the movie begins, of course, shot with both barrels right in the face: it’s the portrait the detective falls in love with. Tierney was equivocal about her role in the film — ‘who wants to play a painting?’ she’d say — but audiences fell in love with Laura too, and it made her a star. And despite what she said, it seemed the perfect role for her: this fabulous shadow that could lift like smoke above the intrigues and obsessions of her lovers — that existed among the rafters, so to speak, the interstices between life and death; even as offscreen her marriage and sanity crumbled. The GET girl, who’d come back from boarding school in Switzerland aged sixteen to find the family home repossessed; who’d stand on a fourteenth-storey window-ledge in New York in 1958, realize through a fog of unreason that the apartment opposite belonged to Arthur Miller and his new wife Marilyn Monroe, worry at the last minute about leaving an unpretty corpse…

At least five minutes had gone by, and of my Laura, the real-life Laura, there was still no sign. I went to the door and looked down the pitch-black corridor. I couldn’t make out a single thing. Was she still in the bathroom? Had she passed out somewhere? Or — I remembered the way she’d been hanging off Frank earlier. Had she slipped off into a corner with him? I began to panic: imagining her in the back of his rusty white van, rocking back and forth on the way to his mantelpiece –

I hurried sightlessly in the direction of the stairs — but then from a doorway a hand reached out and grabbed my wrist, and before I had a chance to tell her we were in the wrong room, she was kissing me. It wasn’t the sort of kiss one cared to interrupt; in fact, as soon as her lips met mine, everything — everything — went out of my head. It was a kiss that surrounded one, delicate and bewildering as a flurry of snowflakes; and as they fell so gaily around me, they seemed to be telling me that no matter what happened tonight, I should not despair; that there would always be old stone houses and long reverberant kisses, things that existed eternally alongside the mutable world; things in which I belonged.

‘Laura,’ I crooned the word into her cheek, ‘Laura…’

Immediately I said it, something palpably changed. At the same moment our hands stopped moving; we stood there frozen in a tense silence that seemed to go on for far too long…

‘ Charles? ’

‘Great Scott!’

‘Get off me!’ Bel cried, pushing my hand from her thigh and recoiling with such vigour that I stumbled backward and whacked my head on the door-jamb. ‘Oh my God, are you all right?’ She stretched a hand towards me before being overcome with horror and recoiling again. ‘Oh my God, oh my God…’

‘Ow…’ I picked myself up off the floor, massaging my bump, and tried to get my bearings. ‘Ow…’

‘Oh my God — Charles, this is… this is extremely bad —’

‘I think I’m having an aneurysm,’ I gasped. ‘Bel, call an ambulance —’

‘Charles, get out of here!’ She pulled her hair, stamped her foot. ‘Would you please get out , please?’ Her voice hovered on the verge of tears. ‘Don’t you get that this is really, really bad?’

‘Well, don’t blame me ,’ I said, beginning to feel somewhat offended. ‘You were the one who dragged me in here, I mean you practically manhandled me —’

‘It’s my room , Charles, I thought you were Frank, obviously.’

‘How could you possibly mistake me for Frank ?’ I tucked in my shirt tails. ‘Frank’s wrists are like fire extinguishers. And he has that sort of characteristic smell…’

‘Fire extinguishers?’ She sounded quite agitated now. ‘Charles, what’s the matter with you? Where is Frank?’

‘Well, I thought he was with you.’ Although it was obvious where he must be: downstairs swiping the family heirlooms. Laura was probably helping him, she’d drooled over them enough –

‘Don’t move for a second.’ Bel edged cautiously past me into the hallway. ‘Charles, I… I don’t want you to touch me, ever again.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said as the indistinct outline of her backed away towards the stairs, ‘but look, there’s no point blowing this out of proportion, you have to take it in the spirit in which it was meant, which is a simple crossed wire —’

‘Just don’t, don’t move,’ she warned from further away — and then took off at speed down the stairs, calling for Frank.

Without quite knowing how, I found myself in Father’s study. I staggered over to the window, raised the sash and collapsed on to the sill, grinding my fists in my eyes. Alcohol beat through my head like a tropical storm. My mind kept taunting me with sensory details: the taste of her lipstick, the gentle bump of her teeth — ugh, ugh, ugh! I breathed in the night air, vigorously shook my head, but a kind of hideous retroactive process had been set in motion, and now the events of the evening reappeared before me like a ghastly carnival: the hepatic glow of a bronze Buddha on the dresser, Bel’s disembodied arm around Frank, glutinous oysters sitting lifelessly in their shells — my fingertips sweated on the windowsill and I wondered if I was taking leave of my senses.

‘Coo-ee!’ a voice sailed up out of the night.

What now? I looked, but couldn’t see anyone.

‘Coo-ee!’ it repeated. ‘Charlie! Down here!’

I leaned out. Frank was standing in the shadows directly underneath my window.

‘All right?’ he said.

‘Ah, ha ha, yes, there you are,’ I revolved my hand weakly like an ailing monarch.

‘You look a bit rough, Charlie, were you pukin?’

‘No, no, quite all right, just a little… a little over-tired, I imagine…’ What was he doing out there? Shouldn’t he be inside, finishing his larceny?

‘I heard a noise so I came out to check it. Look who I found in the bushes!’ A satellite appeared by the moon of his upturned face: Mrs P, still looking decidedly somnambulant. I had entirely forgotten about her in the course of my doomed pursuit of Laura. ‘Oh yes,’ I said sheepishly. ‘She did, ah, wander off earlier on, now that I think of it.’