Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

This last scene, in which Bel seduces Harry with a tray of biscuits that had actually been baked for him by Mirela, was the subject of much debate in the cloakroom during the interval.

‘I’m not saying it’s not good ,’ Laura said. ‘I just don’t get why the lawyer doesn’t go for the model. Like she’s so beautiful, and he’s so dashing, they’re just so right for each other…’

‘I don’t know about dashing,’ I observed grouchily. ‘I think he’d be hard pressed to actually dash anywhere, to judge by the way he’s filling out that waistcoat these days. Anyway, what’s wrong with Bel?’

‘Hello? She’s in a wheelchair?’

‘Yeah, Charlie, and she’s always schemin and stuff.’

‘She’s not that bad,’ I said stoutly.

‘Charlie,’ Frank said solemnly, ‘you know it was Mirela what cooked them biscuits.’

‘I just find it a bit hard to swallow,’ Laura frowned: and then for no reason the two of them started giggling. It was tiresome, so I told them that they knew nothing about drama and stomped off to get a drink.

In the recital room, Vuk and Zoran had struck up ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, with a Chinese pal helping out on the erhu and a chap from Mozambique keeping time on djembe. The bar was crowded by paunchy business types. The straw-haired telephone fellow O’Boyle was ahead of me, talking to another suit about property in the Algarve. ‘Must get some nice golf out there,’ the other suit was saying.

‘Sumptuous,’ agreed Niall O’Boyle. ‘Sumptuous.’

By the time I finally ordered, the bell had rung for the resumption of the play, and I had to go and find Frank and start herding the punters back into the auditorium. I had just settled into my seat when there was a psst from somewhere below me. I looked down to see a hooded figure crouched at my ankles in the darkness. ‘ Psst !’ it said again. At first I thought someone had overindulged in the claret and become confused; but then it said, ‘Charles!’ and I realized it wasn’t someone, it was Bel.

‘What are you doing?’ I whispered. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on stage?’

‘Quiet,’ Bel hissed. ‘I can’t let anyone see me here.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said comprehendingly. Suspension of disbelief: this was very important in a play.

‘I need you to find MacGillycuddy for me,’ Bel whispered.

Instantly my blood ran cold. ‘What? He’s here?’

‘I saw him from the stage,’ Bel said, ‘over there somewhere.’

‘But… what’s he doing here? You didn’t invite him, did you?’

‘I don’t have time to explain, Charles, just, just find him, and send him backstage.’

‘Can’t it wait till after the show?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It can’t.’

‘Wait, how am I supposed to —’ But she was gone.

I turned to Frank. ‘You didn’t let MacGillycuddy in, did you?’

‘What, Charlie?’

‘Never mind…’

On stage, the action had restarted. Harry was in a courtroom, remonstrating with a fellow in a wig. ‘You’re out of order, sir!’ the wig was saying. ‘Never have I seen such insubordination!’

‘M?’ I called softly, making my way down the dark aisle. ‘M?’

‘Shut up ,’ audience members hissed; someone tried to punch me in the leg as I went by.

This was absurd. It was far too dim to see anybody’s face. Bel must have imagined it. Just to be sure, though, I went back to the recital room to ask Mrs P if she’d seen anything unusual — and there, on a stool I was sure had been unoccupied when I left a few minutes earlier, he was: propped at the bar, drinking a glass of milk.

‘You,’ I said.

‘Ah, it’s yourself,’ he said, and he flashed me a disingenuous grin, no doubt in the hope of distracting me from whatever it was he was slipping back into that long brown envelope, which in turn went under his pullover.

‘Bel wants to see you,’ I said curtly.

‘Thought she might,’ MacGillycuddy said with a sigh. ‘Thought she might.’ He speared an olive from the dish at his elbow, and heaved himself to his feet. I shot out a hand to grab his arm. ‘Not so fast,’ I said.

MacGillycuddy looked at me with a faint air of amusement.

‘I want to know what’s happening to my sister,’ I said. He smiled gently, and then, one by one, began to prise away the fingers fastened around his wrist.

‘Tell me, damn it!’ I gasped, wincing with pain. ‘And don’t give me any of that hooey about confidentiality, MacGillycuddy, you wouldn’t know confidentiality if it sidled up to you and whispered confidentially in your ear —’

‘You know, I never could understand the appeal of all this theatre stuff,’ MacGillycuddy mused, delicately bending back my index finger, my middle finger. ‘Everybody pretending they’re somebody else, mixing things up till you can’t even remember who they started out as. Give me a nice documentary any day. A nice history programme. The facts, ma’am. Jes’ the facts.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I said through clenched teeth and eyes full of tears.

‘Ah yeah,’ he stepped away, absently rubbing his freed hand. ‘Must be a lot of history in an old place like this.’ Turning his back, he dawdled over the burnished floorboards out to the hallway. ‘You know what history does, don’t you, C?’ pausing to examine the portrait of Father. ‘It repeats itself’

‘What do you mean ?’ distractedly coming away from the bar. ‘What’s happening?’

But, sucking his teeth, MacGillycuddy had passed out of sight. From the doorway Father’s painted face looked down, thin lips buckled inscrutably shut, as though reserving judgement to himself for all eternity. Somnambulantly I wheeled round and stumbled back into the theatre.

‘Where were you, Charlie?’ Frank leaned over to me when I returned. ‘You missed a deadly bit, the judge didn’t want to put in the ramp cos he said that the hospital was this like special historic building you can’t put new bits on, and Harry went on this big speech about how if someone wasn’t able to walk up the steps of the law, then the law had to come down and carry them…’

‘Oh,’ I said, looking at the figures on the stage with a gnawing in the pit of my stomach.

‘By Jove, sir!’ the judge was pounding his gavel for all he was worth. ‘You can’t just waltz in here and turn two centuries of the law upside-down! We have procedures for dealing with cases like this, formal channels —’

‘My client doesn’t give two pins about your formal channels!’ Jack Reynolds QC exclaimed, rolling up his shirtsleeves. ‘You know why? Because it’s the same bunk she’s been hearing her whole life!’ A buzz ran around the courtroom set. ‘That’s right, bunk!’ he repeated. ‘Her whole life, she’s been pushed down the “formal channels” other people have chosen for her. And she should be happy to go where she’s pushed, that’s what you’re thinking! She should be glad to have someone to push her! She’s in a wheelchair, isn’t she? She’s a cripple , isn’t she?’

This time the ripple of noise ran right out into the audience and for a moment drowned out even the judge, who thrashed his gavel, roaring, ‘Order! Order! By God, sir, if I don’t see some respect for this court, I’m going to come down and teach it to you myself!’

‘Well, it’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’ Harry bellowed back. ‘It’s what you’re all thinking, so why don’t you say it! A cripple!’ He swung his finger round to Bel, sitting pallidly in her corner looking over to the cavernous darkness of the wings, where MacGillycuddy would be waiting with that long brown envelope… ‘Because that’s what you do with people, put them in neat little boxes with neat little labels, so you don’t have to think about them any more! That’s your system! That’s your “procedure”! Well by golly, those wheels are going to turn, whether you like it or not, the wheels of Justice, the wheels of Destiny —’