Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

As it turned out, I never did get to have that word with Bel. All those unguarded bottles distracted me: I was administering myself a double Hennessy, just to get my nerves back on an even keel, when I felt an icy draught whip over my shoulders and a voice said, ‘Ah, Charles, there you are.’

I downed my drink in one and slowly turned around.

‘You know, for a man with such an uncluttered schedule you can be awfully hard to track down.’

‘Ha ha,’ I laughed feebly, casting about for an escape route. There was none. ‘Well, here I am.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mother, smiling a steely smile.

I should explain that, whatever they had done to her in the Cedars, Mother had changed. She’d visited me in hospital and it was obvious from the minute she came through the door: storming in like a Valkyrie late for Rotary Club, marching over and without so much as a polite inquiry after my numerous injuries, launching into a wide-ranging sermon about responsibility and holistic dieting and twelve imaginary steps our souls had to go up in order to reach the top of something else. She’d made me quite nervous and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the reason I had woken up after weeks of unconsciousness surrounded by fruit-baskets but no chocolates.

At the root of this transformation was an entity hitherto unfamiliar to me, known as Higher Power. Apparently this Higher Power was quite a big wheel over at the Cedars, in terms of persuading wealthy neurotics to give up their vices and take on their share of life’s various burdens; and while the giving-up-drinking end of things seemed to have passed Mother by, she was extremely taken with this notion of duty and doing one’s bit. Even then I had known that this did not augur at all well for me and my bid to revive the modus vivendi of the country gentleman.

Perhaps it seems foolhardy to think, as I had on arriving home that day, that I would be able to avoid Mother indefinitely. With the old Mother, however, the Mother who stayed in bed till two or three in the afternoon and then confined herself to an armchair in the drawing room with a bottle of gin, this would have been quite unproblematic. With the new Mother it was almost impossible. I had only been back since lunchtime and it had taken all my wits to steer clear of her. She appeared to have new and boundless reserves of energy. She was ubiquitous; she was immanent. Wherever one went she seemed to be there first, with a can of furniture polish or a book of carpet swatches or the sinister red ring-binder she’d taken to carrying around, labelled ‘Projects’. By teatime I was quite exhausted. And now she had me in her grasp.

‘It’s been quite an evening, hasn’t it?’ she said, reaching behind me for the sherry. ‘I’m terribly proud of the girls. Aren’t you terribly proud?’

‘It was nice to see Bel onstage again,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t acted in a while.’

‘Oh yes , surrounded by all those awful, awful hoodlums, I was quite on the edge of my seat — it was like a voyage to the Underworld, in a way, wasn’t it?’

‘Mmm,’ I agreed morosely.

‘And Mirela — what a find, Charles! Such presence! She’ll go places, that girl. At least…’ her reason catching up with her, ‘if she can do something about that awful — she does move so terribly slowly…’

‘I suppose she’ll never dance the Kirov.’

‘Still, one could hardly hear it, could one? And so pretty and exotic!’ She filled up her glass. ‘Bel’ll find herself with some competition if she has her sights set on Harry, at any rate. Quite a charming young man.’

I threw back my drink and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. ‘Didn’t seem so charming to me,’ I mumbled mutinously. ‘Didn’t seem too Disadvantaged either. None of them do.’

‘ Charles ,’ Mother said sharply, and looked over her shoulder in case anyone had heard. ‘All of that will be taken care of in good time. The important thing now is to get everything up and running. When that is done, then we can investigate the finer points of who’s Disadvantaged and who isn’t. And thus far it’s been a remarkable success. A remark able success.’ She twisted a ring around her finger as she looked out over the crowd. ‘Which leaves us with the question of you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, what are we going to do with you, Charles?’

I began to itch forebodingly about the nose. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about me,’ I blustered, fumbling out another dram of brandy from the bottle. ‘You know me, quite happy to just potter along, watch the odd film, drink the occasional glass of wine —’

‘Shush,’ she said. ‘There has been a sea change in the affairs of this house since you took your little leave of absence, Charles. And it is a change that was long overdue. We in this family have been living in cloud-cuckoo-land for far too long, living beyond our means, shirking our responsibilitities. You children have been let run to seed. As your mother, I must take my share of the blame.’

‘Well I think you’re being a little hard on yourself —’

‘Thankfully, with this new project Bel seems finally to be using her energies to some positive purpose. I have to acknowledge that this is largely due to Mirela, who has been a better influence on her than, perhaps, her father or myself in recent years. You, however, seem quite intractable’ She shook her head. ‘When I look at how that girl has triumphed in the face of adversity to slot into the household in a way that is a credit to her dear mother, and then I look at you —’

‘I slot into the household, Mother, don’t be callous —’

‘Lying around on the couch all day is not slotting, Charles.’

‘I’m sick ,’ I protested. ‘Lying around is what you do when you’re sick.’

She silenced me with a finger. ‘The devil makes work for idle hands. Ever since you dropped out of Trinity you have been living devoid of dreams or ambition, and without so much as a pretence at concern for the future. And while lethargy is one thing, your antics lately have been quite deranged. Lord knows I’m happy to see the back of that preposterous Folly of yours, but it has come to the point where your chronic laziness is putting innocent lives at risk.’

The tingling spread up my forehead and over my scalp. ‘What are you getting at?’ I asked faintly.

‘You’ve been living off the fat of the land for too long now,’ Mother said. ‘It’s high time that you got a job.’

A job!

There it was: this was the thanks I got for trying to save a few shreds of the family dignity. My fate had been decided, even as I lay comatose in my sickbed. A job! The walls of the recital room bore down on me. A job!

I argued, of course. I highlighted the rich irony of pushing me, her own flesh and blood, out to work in some jar factory even as she invited a bunch of layabout actors to stay here for nothing; I pointed out that Bel wasn’t being made to look for a job, when she was the one who was always going on about how much she hated this place and how she longed to rub shoulders with the hoi-polloi; I closed with a stirring speech to the effect that Mother was sending me on a wild goose chase, seeing as even she had conceded that I simply didn’t have any dreams or ambitions, and so installing me in the working world was just going to be a waste of everyone’s valuable time. Mother listened to it all with a grim expression, as if this were exactly what she’d expected me to say.

‘Tough Love,’ she said. ‘That’s what we in the Cedars called this sort of thing. Helping you to help yourself. You’ll thank me for it some day.’

‘I won’t,’ I said.

‘You will. Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.’