Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘I say, you’re spitting, old man…’

‘I don’t care!’ Hoyland cried, pounding the table. ‘You’ll spit too, when you see what it’s like! Spending all day long typing blasted VOID and PowerPoint, going home to your shoebox of an apartment block with electric fences to keep out the locals, never seeing a soul from one day to the next — that’s no way for a man to live! I’ve lived before, I know that that’s not living!’

The office types at the table next to ours had fallen silent and were shooting us wary glances.

Hoyland took a deep breath. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He fiddled out a cigarette from the pack in front of him and lit it. I studied his tortured brow wonderingly. I felt a bit like Dante, chancing upon one of his old acquaintances in the nth circle of hell.

‘So this is the boom, eh?’ I said. ‘Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?’

‘I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ he said glumly. ‘It’s like being in Caligula’s Rome, and everyone around you’s having an orgy, and you’re the mug stuck looking after the horse.’ He pulled heavily on his cigarette. ‘The whole thing’ll come crashing down,’ he said bleakly, ‘and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.’

Rain had begun to fall outside. Beside us the office types were jawing noisily about some takeover or other. Hoyland smoked the rest of his cigarette in silence.

‘Seen any of the old crowd?’ he said eventually. ‘Pongo, that lot?’

‘From time to time,’ I replied. ‘Pongo’s in London now.’

‘Lucky blighter,’ he said. He stared a moment into the middle distance, then in a casual voice said, ‘I hear Patsy’s back.’

I made a little horseman of the salt cellar and marched him along the table. ‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes, someone met her working in a café.’

‘Oh,’ I said colourlessly.

‘Christ, Hythloday,’ Hoyland said flatly, ‘we’ve been dopes, do you know that?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘You know what I mean. Not patching things up. Letting the whole gang drift apart for the sake of a girl.’

I puffed up my cheeks and blew.

‘Well, damn it, what do you think?’

‘Oh hell,’ I said irritably, ‘I don’t know. It didn’t come out of nowhere, did it? Maybe it was meant to happen. Maybe that whole gang was past its sell-by date, and that was just the, you know, the catalyst. I mean, good God, if Patsy Olé was the only thing holding us together, Patsy Olé who has all the loyalty of the ball in a roulette wheel —’

‘So what?’ Hoyland said bitterly. ‘So now for the rest of our lives we just dwindle off into our own little private solitary worlds, is that it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, can we? How should I know?’

We fell into a fractious silence.

‘Sure, the public got burned in the buyout,’ one of the business types declaimed energetically next to us. ‘But that’s what happens in a revolution. You’ve got to understand that this is a whole new paradigm of management .’

Hoyland fumbled out another cigarette but didn’t light it; then, catching sight of his watch, he swore and started to his feet. ‘I have to get back,’ he said. ‘My masters don’t look kindly on tardiness. But look here, Hythers — I’m glad we met. We should go for a brandy some time. I’m free most evenings.’

I nodded mechanically. Suddenly everyone was leaving: massing round the door, unfurling their umbrellas. Hoyland reached into his wallet and handed me a card. ‘Do call,’ he said. ‘Silly to let everything just go to the wall.’ He hovered there a moment, blankly watching the exiting hordes, the unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. ‘I still think about her, you know,’ he said abstractedly; then he turned up his collar and passed with the others back on to the boulevard. In a few minutes, the café was almost empty.

Damn it, I had forgotten how a fellow couldn’t go twenty yards in this city without running into someone he used to know, wanting to dig up the past. Maybe that was why they were knocking the whole place down. As the waitress moved from table to table with her tray, piling up the dishes, the old faces appeared in front of me out of the rain, like the cast of a play taking its curtain call…

We had all been wild about Patsy, of course; though none of us would ever have claimed he truly knew her, or understood her. She was like the moon moving through the houses of the Zodiac — favouring each of us in turn, yet remaining always remote: her love a mysterious influence you couldn’t quite put your finger on but didn’t dare disbelieve. In retrospect it’s obvious she was quite happy in this orbit of her own, from which she could enjoy the chaotic effect she had, the squalls and storms and other aberrant weather patterns caused by her peculiar magnetism. But each of us had hoped that he would be the one who finally brought her to earth.

My chance had come that spring. She appeared by my side one day, more or less literally, amid a pageant of bluebells and forget-me-nots. I didn’t know how she had got there, exactly, but I didn’t ask questions. I fell instantly under her spell, just like everybody did.

I don’t remember exactly what we did together, or what we said to each other. It’s possible we didn’t do or say anything at all. It was the time itself that seemed enchanted: becoming a single evening that didn’t begin or end, through which we drifted along hand-in-hand as if plunged into a wonderful dream. And if she never quite yielded, if some part of her always seemed to be elsewhere, still I — spending my solitary hours frantically learning off Yeats, searching for the insight, the single line that would deliver her to me — still I assumed that this would only be a matter of time.

The problem was that the part of her that I felt was always somehow elsewhere was usually, more specifically, with Hoyland Maffey Indeed, Hoyland was frequently there with us, helping us to witness the spectacular spring. It seemed to me rather unorthodox for two people who were falling in love to have a third party present for so much of the falling. At last I put this to Patsy.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘I mean, usually it’s just the two people on their own.’

‘But Hoyland’s our friend, Charles. Our bosom friend. It’s not fair leaving him out just because we’re so terribly, terribly in love.’

The way she said bosom would probably have been enough; but when she went on, completely unprompted, to deny that there had ever been anything between her and Hoyland, any doubts I had left were extinguished. At that moment I knew that she was telling Hoyland exactly the same story about me; I knew she knew I knew, and I knew that Hoyland knew it too.

The enchanted spring was quickly poisoned. Every moment was shadowed by mistrust and deception. Time and time again Patsy and I would be alone together in the library — a candle burned low on the ledge as we approached, seemingly inexorably, a moment of ecstatic union — when the doorbell would ring and Patsy would spring up from the billiard table saying, ‘Oh good, that’ll be Hoyland,’ as casually as if we’d just been playing an uninspired round of Scrabble; and there he would be, his mirthless grimace and darting eyes the mirror image of my own: ‘Hello, Hythers, just thought I’d stop by…’

‘Ha ha, always a pleasure, old man, get you a glass of something?’

Before long my love for Patsy had been totally superseded by my hatred for Hoyland. Every hour apart from her I spent in torment, imagining the two of them together. When I was with her I oscillated between desperate bids to impress her and equally desperate attempts to find out her true feelings. Every dainty sniff, every equivocal cough, every half-raised eyebrow, I would pore over for hours seeking to decode. Patsy, of course, had no true feelings; or if she did they had nothing to do with us. But even if I had known this it would have made little difference. What mattered now above all was that I thwart my former friend.