Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Look,’ I rapped my stapler assertively on the table. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but Frank and I have been placed in charge of some very valuable coats, and we can’t afford to be distracted.’

‘All right, all right.’ She turned up her nose and returned to her mingling.

‘Some serious heads at this thing, isn’t there, Charlie?’

‘I’ll say, it’s like an Illuminati mixer.’ And I wondered what exactly Bel thought of that.

Various members of the Ramp cast had been in evidence earlier on, working the room, explaining to anyone who would listen the Meaning and Significance of the theatre. Bel was there too, wearing a long champagne-coloured dress and an expression of such naked hostility that only the more senescent or kamikaze of the visitors had dared approach her. Up until now, I had contrived to stay out of her way; however, after the fuss she’d made last time, I knew I’d better say something. As the first bell rang for the guests to take their seats, I decided to make a quick foray up to the dressing room and pay my respects. This way, even if I met with a frosty reception, there was at least a chance of seeing Mirela au naturel . I left Frank with strict instructions not to ruin anything or attack anybody, and going round by the scullery I climbed the back stairs to the dressing room.

The air in the room was tense and hot and so thick with talcum powder that it was hard to breathe. Heat glared from bare bulbs over a long mirror with a counter, at which cast members sat in deckchairs. I spotted Bel at the far end, holding a cup of undrunk black coffee to her frumpy costume as Harry kneaded her shoulders. I tried to make my way down to her, but it was like swimming against the tide: after being rebuffed a number of times I gave up and retreated to a relatively quiet spot by the door to wait for an opportunity to present itself. In the meantime, I engaged myself gazing wistfully at Mirela, who was sitting near me ( hélas ! already dressed) with not one but three girls clustered round her, applying make-up and brushing out her shining black hair.

From somewhere in the scrum I could hear Mother piping: ‘Well, what did he say ?’

‘We probably shouldn’t talk about it till afterwards,’ Harry said with a coy half-smile.

‘Oh, nonsense,’ Mother persisted.

‘Well, he’s interested,’ Harry allowed, his smile expanding as the room caught hold of this and a hubbub spread through it. ‘Apparently his wife came to see Burnin Up , so if he likes what he sees tonight…’

‘ What ?’ pressed the girl with barrettes, thwacking him with her script.

‘He did say that if something were to go ahead — if — it would have to be on the basis that Telsinor was sole backer of the theatre, which’d mean a total sponsorship package…’ He shrugged modestly as whoops and whistles greeted this news, then lifted his hands for calm. ‘I should remind everybody that we do have a play to put on first.’

Everybody laughed: except Bel, who was looking up at Harry with a wounded expression. ‘But I thought we didn’t want a single backer,’ she said.

‘That was because we didn’t think we’d get a single backer,’ replied Harry.

‘No, I thought we’d agreed that if all the money was coming from one place then —’

‘Oh, darling, we’ve been through all this,’ Mother cut in. ‘We can’t wait for ever while the government hems and haws. Talk about compromise, you wait till the bank comes looking for its loan back, then you’ll see what it means to be — Charles, what are you doing lurking over there?’

‘I’m not lurking, I’m standing here quite conspicuously.’

‘You’re supposed to be down minding the cloakroom. You haven’t left that poor idiot boy on his own, have you?’

‘I just wanted to come and say good luck —’

Everybody groaned in unison.

‘Oh, I mean break a leg, sorry —’

‘Charles,’ Mother grabbed me firmly by the elbow and propelled me doorwards, ‘we happen to have important visitors watching tonight. For once try and keep your dissolute antics to a minimum.’

‘Five minutes!’ called the tubby fellow, appearing behind me at the door; and everyone gasped, and started rushing around even more hurriedly than before. Through the tumult of bodies I could see Harry’s hands still absently kneading her shoulders as Bel turned to the mirror and, with a hand pressed to her bare clavicle, stared into it, as if searching its depths for something she had lost.

I ducked back down the stairs. The hallway and recital room were clear; the cloakroom had been locked. Closing the double doors behind me, I took my seat in the darkened auditorium.

‘Everythin all right, Charlie?’ Frank said.

I found myself quite out of breath: I merely coughed and pointed to the stage, as the curtain rose and a single spotlight came up, and a girl in a wheelchair trundled out.

Bel had looked awfully nervous up in the dressing room, and given her chequered on-stage history one might have been justified in fearing the worst. But in the opening scene she turned it quite cleverly to her advantage. As she shunted herself, grousing, around the suburban kitchen, the wheelchair became a kind of carapace, shielding her from her surroundings; the nerves became the restive, uncathected energy of someone who is sure she has been cheated by life. And then Mirela entered, and, as before, everything fell into place around her.

The make-up girls had done their job well. She looked at once perfectly simple and perfectly captivating; she was like a magnet, pulling you in, so that suddenly you no longer noticed the threadbare dialogue or that the model limped and the paraplegic kept tapping her foot. The lights themselves didn’t seem to want to leave her, and sparkled around her constantly like coloured butterflies.

And you couldn’t help but sympathize with her, trapped between an ailing mother and this vampiric sister. Nothing was good enough for Bel. She needled her sister incessantly; she made endless demands on her store of goodness and affection; she seemed determined to stifle Mirela’s promising modelling career purely out of spite, even when Mirela only wanted the money so that Bel could go and see this doctor everyone was talking about, the one with the revolutionary though potentially fatal new technique.

‘You indulge your sister too much, Ann,’ Mother said from her hospital bed, stroking Mirela’s cheek (she was pretty good, too — though only a churl would suggest that she made a far more convincing mother on stage than she ever had with Bel and me). ‘We all have. She wants to see me, she says, but don’t you understand? This is just another way of torturing you, of manipulating you. For if she were a true sister to you, and a true daughter to me, then she would know that my love goes with her everywhere. But she is blind. She doesn’t see that love, Ann, is the important thing; she doesn’t see that the ramp she must install is not on the hospital steps, but in her own heart. It is a ramp she must erect over the steps of her own selfishness and bitterness at having been run over at an early age and confined to a wheelchair.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ Mirela turning diffidently from Mother’s bed and exclaiming quietly with prayerful hands, ‘Mary is your daughter too! We can’t stop caring about her just because there is no room for the unlucky ones in our fast-paced modern world. To me, there is no greater joy than looking after her, in the hope that she will one day walk again.’

‘She’s so nice,’ Frank turned to me with tearful eyes, squeezing my hand in his. ‘Why doesn’t Bel just, just leave off?’

‘I don’t know — ow, you’re hurting me,’ tugging my hand free and nursing it in my lap. The thing is, I was inclined to agree with him and wish that Bel would leave off, and when Harry came on as the crusading lawyer, I did find myself hoping that Mirela would run away with him and leave this workhouse behind. But then from the lousy seats Mother had given us in the back corner of the auditorium, I caught a glimpse of Bel waiting in the wings for the next scene — looking so cold and crabbed in the wheelchair, so disengaged and alone, that immediately I felt sorry.