Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Oh, heaven knows,’ Mother said. ‘Wafting about somewhere upstairs, I think. Do tread softly with her, she’s been a perfect Antichrist lately.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘She sounded all right when I spoke to her.’

‘Well take my word for it,’ Mother said grimly. ‘And it is not very helpful, Charles, when one is trying to rehearse a play, and one needs everyone rowing in together.’ She sighed one of her martyr’s sighs. ‘I just hope she’s not slipping into her old ways, just when at long last she was seeming halfway socialized…’

I recoiled. ‘Well, don’t say that ,’ I said. ‘She’s probably just over-excited, you know how she gets…’

‘Mmm,’ Mother said sceptically, fingering her sherry glass. I excused myself and, with a touch of trepidation, mounted the stairs.

Bel was in her dressing gown at the end of the corridor outside her bedroom, shuffling up and down with her head bowed over her script, making odd thrusting gestures down her side with her free hand.

‘I don’t want your charity, Ann,’ she was saying. ‘In fact I’m sick of your whole saintly act. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a bitter and self-involved person. But I could have been just as good a model as you — better even, if it hadn’t been for that car that knocked me down at an early age.’ She paused here, as if allowing for a reply, then, angrily: ‘Help me? How can you help me? Are you going to wave a magic wand and make the fashion industry sit up and take notice of the disabled community? Are you going to make it so when society looks at me, they won’t see only this chair, and push me into this narrow stereotype of an oh my God —’ as I tapped her on the shoulder and she spun round with the script clutched to her breast — ‘What are you doing , sneaking around like that?’

‘Hello, Charles. Delighted to see you, Charles. Charles, how kind of you to come over here in your spare time and bring out our stupid wheelchair for our tiresome play —’

‘You brought the wheelchair?’ she said, sitting down on one of several dusty cardboard boxes that cluttered the landing. ‘Where is it?’

‘In the hall,’ I said. ‘Mother said you’d want to know. What are you doing up here all on your own? Why are there boxes everywhere?’

‘They’re from the attic. We’re going through them to see if there’s anything we can use. I had come up here in the hope of getting a minute’s peace to go over my lines. But obviously I was deluding myself.’

‘Was that Harry’s thing you were reading there? The new thing?’

‘See for yourself,’ she said, thrusting the script at me and repairing to her room.

RAMP, said the first page, with Harry’s name in big letters under the title. On the next was DRAMATIS PERSONAE: MARY — an embittered young woman in a wheelchair ; ANN — her loving and beautiful younger sister, a model ; MOTHER — their mother ; JACK REYNOLDS QC — a dashing socially concerned young lawyer .

‘What’s it about?’ I asked, following her into the bedroom.

‘It’s about,’ Bel recited, taking some pins from her hair and putting them down on the dressing table, ‘a girl in a wheelchair, which is me, and my mother’s dying of cancer in hospital, but I can’t get in to see her because I can’t get up the steps, so I go to court to try and get this ramp installed and it turns into a huge legal battle and a cause célèbre.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘I mean it’s all allegorical, obviously.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said; although inside, my mind was shouting things like Good grief ! and How does he keep getting away with this ? I sat down on the bed and leafed through the pages. ‘So this is the part he wrote for you? This is your tailor-made part?’

Bel nodded, taking a brush from a drawer and beginning to work the tangles out of her hair.

‘Seems to do a lot of shouting, to judge by all these italics,’ I commented, though I supposed this wasn’t too far off the mark.

‘It happens to be a very good part,’ she said to the mirror, brushing vigorously. ‘She’s complicated. You don’t often get to play women who are complicated.’ She reached up to undo a snarl. ‘Most of the time you’re just there to look pretty and weep occasionally.’

‘And who’s the beautiful sister? Mirela?’

‘Mmm,’ Bel said unenthusiastically. ‘And Harry’s the lawyer and Mother, in spite of all my pleading with her, is the ailing mother.’

‘Sort of funny that you’re the girl in the wheelchair, and Mirela’s playing the model,’ I joked. ‘I mean, when you think that she’s the one that only has one leg.’

Bel did not reply, but her brushing increased in intensity and there was the crackling sound of hairs snapping.

‘I mean when you think about it, it’s sort of funny,’ I repeated, in case she hadn’t got it.

‘Charles, I’m actually quite busy,’ she declared to the mirror.

‘That’s all right,’ I said genially. ‘You carry on doing what you’re doing. Don’t mind me.’

She rolled her eyes and began to dab at her face with a swab of cotton wool.

I stood up and went to the window. The heat in the room was stifling; I wondered that she didn’t notice it. ‘I say, you don’t mind if I open this, do you? Getting a bit of a prickly neck…’ She shrugged. I raised the sash and looked out.

It was winter: you could see it better out here where there were things that lived and died, and not just a cramped square of sky to be filled with clouds or fireworks. In the garden, trees clasped the last of their leaves to them, blushing deeply like thin girls caught skinny-dipping. Old Man Thompson, looking every one of his million or so years, was braving the cold out on his verandah. A silvery fog had started to roll in from the sea, like miles and miles of cobwebs floating over the waves.

‘Frank sends his regards,’ I said, tickling the lily on the windowsill. ‘Wanted to come in but he had to rush off somewhere. Man about a dog or something.’

‘Good,’ muttered Bel, more categorically than was strictly necessary. I turned and from the corner of my eye watched her frown at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look at all as she had sounded that time on the phone, so full of energy. Mother was right: there was a dark cloud in her brow that didn’t mean any good. Around her neck she was wearing a sort of a pendant — a blank metal disc on a cord, that for some reason seemed faintly familiar.

‘So how are you?’ I asked innocently. ‘Everything going all right?’

She dropped the cotton wool into the wastebasket. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she mumbled, unscrewing the lid from a jar of aromatic cream, one of a small army of bath oils, cleansers and face-balms amassed on the dressing table.

‘Just you look a bit, ah, under the weather…’

‘Everything’s fine ,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a bit tired, that’s all. It’s a lot of work getting a play up.’

‘It is?’

‘You have no idea.’ Leaning into the mirror she made two quick Red-Indian dabs under her eyes and smeared them into her cheeks. ‘Everything’s so much work that sometimes I could swear the damn house was resisting me, as if it didn’t want us to have a theatre. I mean I know it sounds ridiculous…’ She caught up with herself and stopped; then, after a moment of deliberation she turned around and said, ‘But I don’t mind the work, like the rehearsals, and staying up all night programming the lights, and trying to get the posters designed and doing twenty different things at once, I don’t mind that. It’s the money , that’s what gets me. The endless harping on about money, you’d think there was nothing else in the world…’