Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘This is what I’m trying to tell you. It turns out that the girl, Mirela — she’s so sweet, Charles, I feel so sorry for her with that dreadful artificial — anyway, she’s an actress, so that’s… well, that bit comes later. First of all, that morning — I mean only a couple of hours after the explosion — Mother arrived back from the Cedars. They’d let her out early. The place was still in absolute chaos. None of us had slept, the lawn was covered with jewellery and ornaments and this smouldering stump of Folly and of course the piano upside-down in the middle of it — it had barely a scratch on it, isn’t that weird? Meanwhile, the house was full of detectives and policemen asking these humiliating questions about our financial situation and the insurance on one hand, and trying to get someone to press charges against Mrs P on the other — well, I expected her to take one look and then turn on her heel and get back in the cab. But she was fantastic, she just brushed right past everybody and made herself this enormous gin and tonic —’

‘I thought she wasn’t supposed to be drinking,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of her going to the Cedars?’

‘I did ask her about that,’ Bel said. ‘She just muttered something about them being very progressive.’

‘Oh.’

‘But anyway, it was complete pandemonium, all these people tugging at her, and then Mrs P went into shock and they had to take her to hospital, and then bloody Laura thought she’d lost her car keys and cried and cried for about four hours straight. But Mother just calmly went and made a couple of phone calls, and a few minutes later all the policemen and so on just sort of vanished. Really, Charles, we’re lucky she knows who she does. I mean strictly speaking you should be under arrest.’

‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with a theatre,’ I said. ‘Unless you’re hoping to pay off the bank by putting on shows in the old barn, like in some Mickey Rooney film.’

‘The bank is paid,’ Bel said.

I felt my stomach turn over. ‘What?’

‘The debt’s paid off. It’s gone. The auction, all that — it never happened.’

‘That’s impossible,’ I said. ‘How can it be gone? The mortgage was… I mean, you saw the figures.’

‘I know, I know. But Mother tracked down the accountant — Geoffrey, you remember him. He was away working on some island I’d never heard of. Anyway, he came back and they went to meet the director of the bank — the di rec tor, Charles, it turns out Mother and he go back years and years. Between the three of them they uncovered some annuity of Father’s that no one had known about. They had the whole thing sorted out by lunchtime. I felt a little foolish, I can tell you.’

‘But…’ My head was spinning. ‘You went through the accounts. There wasn’t any money there. There simply wasn’t. How can they suddenly produce this —’

‘I know, I don’t quite understand it either. But we should just count our blessings that they —’

‘And what about the irregularities, what about those? That time I went to see the bank chap in the shopping centre, he told me the structure of the repayments was all wrong, he was going to have it investigated…’

‘I don’t know , Charles.’ Bel shifted her weight impatiently from foot to foot. ‘Father’s accounts were so complicated. Maybe your manager just wasn’t used to it. Surely the main thing is that we’re out of the woods, for now at least. We do still owe people, of course, but nobody’s trying to take the house away.’

I tried to return her smile. This was good news, wasn’t it? Why did it feel so wrong ?

‘Still, you probably picked a good time to be unconscious. Even with everything sorted out, the atmosphere has been pretty apocalyptic. Mother’s… well, you’ll see yourself. But she was talking seriously about selling Amaurot.’

‘ Selling ?’ I raised myself up on my forearms. ‘Mother wouldn’t sell! What have you been saying to her? Have you been putting ideas into her head?’

‘I haven’t been putting anything into her head, Charles, you know she hasn’t been happy there since Dad died, you know how miserable it must be for her, floating around this vast empty mansion… And meanwhile, there’s all these computer people buying up everywhere around us, every week practically someone arrives at the door and makes an offer — crazy offers, enough to pay off all our debts once and for all and get a little house down the country that Mother could retire to —’

She sat back down at the foot of the bed, picked up her book and began riffling back and forth through the pages. ‘But then one night I was talking to Mirela, and she was telling me about this theatre group she was part of at home in Yugoslavia, before all the, you know, the war and everything. They did all kinds of things, workshops, street theatre, political stuff. The founder had just started it from his house with a few friends, and it had taken it off from there. And I thought, why couldn’t we do the same thing at Amaurot? I mean there’s all this space where you could have rehearsals and classes and so on, and then there’re all those spare bedrooms we haven’t used in years — it’s like the more you think about it, the more perfect you realise it is. And when I told Mother she was just as excited as me…’

So the very next morning, she said, she had contacted some of her former classmates from the drama course to help her come up with a design for a theatre: they had given this design to Mrs P’s son Vuk, who it turned out had been an architect before taking up residence in my erstwhile Folly — Vuk, Zoran and the beguiling Mirela, I should add, had, in the climate of anarchy that seemed to be prevailing at Amaurot, been moved into guest bedrooms until their asylum claims had been looked at, while Mrs P was still in situ as housekeeper without Mother so much as docking her pay. As she went on, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was not just one of the regular Bel pipe dreams that she would obsess about for a week and then forget — that without my steadying influence, Mother and she had formed some sort of unholy alliance, and were already putting their demented scheme into motion.

‘We’re going to open up the old ballroom and put the stage in there. All we’re waiting for is the builders to come back from Tibet. Charles, isn’t it wonderful? No more trudging round to auditions, we can put on anything we want —’ She waltzed from her chair with her hands clasped to her breast, looking for all the world as if she were about to burst into song, and began to reel off a list of plays and playwrights, plans and strategies, with words like artists and residence, space and community ominously juxtaposed; while I sat there my head stewing inside the bandages like an enormous pudding, Today is the first day of the rest of your life glinting mockingly at me from the far wall –

‘But this is absurd!’

Bel halted mid-waltz and looked at me. Over my left shoulder, one of the monitors bleeped shrilly. ‘It’s absurd,’ I repeated. ‘The whole idea. Amaurot’s already a residence. I reside there. I’m sorry you’ve made all these plans for nothing. But it’s a house, that people live in. You can’t just come in and turn it into something else.’

‘But we’ve been through all this,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t keep it going the way it is, you know that. We have to adapt, or else we lose it.’

‘I don’t see how you building a theatre is going to help anyone.’

She hesitated a moment, then circled back carefully towards the bed. ‘Well you see it won’t be an ordinary theatre,’ she said. ‘We want it to be a place where people who normally wouldn’t get anywhere near a stage can come and learn to express themselves, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds can come and stay and —’