Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

She stood up and came around to my side of the table. She brushed her hair back with one hand and looked at me seriously; and the universe seemed to pull up, like a horse at a high fence. ‘What would it take for you to kiss me, Charles?’ she said.

I gave it some thought. I thought about everything that had happened tonight. By rights I oughtn’t even to be in the same room as her: and yet, although it made little sense, it felt as if the girl in front of me now had nothing to do with those other things. It was as if somehow she predated the awful events of this evening — as if she were a different Mirela, an essential Mirela: the girl I had found that night in the Folly, and unreeled in my mind’s eye every night since.

‘I think you would have to put down your drink,’ I said.

In one smooth unhurried motion she set down her glass and snuffed out the lantern; then taking my hand, she led me away into the darkness.

Imagine a fade-out here, if you please, or one of those discreet rows of asterisks, to indicate the passage of time — not very much time, admittedly, as one of us was out of practice and perhaps a little over-excited — anyway, we return to the scene with the two participants lying back on their pillows, bedsheets now chastely drawn up to their chins, watched silently through the doorway by a stuffed otter and the head of a china basset hound, half-hidden under a frayed gingham tablecloth. Everything was perfectly still; it felt like no one in the whole wide world was awake but us — like we had stolen a march on time, and although our problems waited for us on the other side, these moments were ours to let float by as we pleased. How sweet it was, after so much turbulence, not even to have to talk, or think.

In between long drifts of nothingness I was wondering idly what I could give her for breakfast next morning — I had brought home a cheesecake the day before yesterday and I thought there was some left in the fridge — when her bare arm stretched over me to retrieve the brassiere adorning the lampshade. ‘What are you doing?’ I murmured, through a mouthful of sleep.

‘I have to go,’ she whispered.

‘You have to go ?’ I sat up, blinking. Sure enough she was hooking herself up. ‘But it’s the middle of the night.’

‘Exactly. Harry’s going to be wondering what’s happened to me.’

Even hearing his name was like a taking a shiv between the ribs: I gasped slightly and clutched at my chest. But this was no time for theatrics. Suddenly she was all brisk efficiency, arranging her hair, searching the bedclothes for a stocking, making it impossible even to remonstrate properly.

‘But how will you possibly get home, there’s no —’

‘Sorry, Charles, could you just pass me that —’

‘I mean, there’s no way you’ll get a taxi round here, and anyway you can’t go out dressed like that —’

‘I’m resourceful — zip me up, will you?’

‘No,’ I said. This at least had the effect of stalling her temporarily. She turned and looked at me.

‘Stay,’ I pleaded. ‘I mean it’s practically tomorrow anyway. Why don’t you stay?’

‘I can’t, Charles,’ she said, with just a trace of exasperation. ‘We’re meeting the Telsinor people at nine to start working out our strategy. It’s a big day and I need to be ready.’ She cocked her head, scrutinizing me almost playfully. Then she sat down at the end of the bed and placed a hand on my forearm. Frostily I shook it away. She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I thought we’d been through all this,’ she said. ‘I thought we understood each other.’

I pursed my lips. ‘Well maybe I didn’t,’ I said. I felt horribly like a hoodwinked schoolgirl. ‘Understand, I mean.’

Mirela sighed and stroked her hand and looked down at the cold shaft of the prosthesis. ‘We had a nice time, didn’t we? But now we have to go back to our lives. You know that.’

I got up and began storming about the room. ‘But you don’t —’ I said agitatedly, ‘I mean to say you don’t love him —’

She could not have turned cooler if I had poured iced water over her; I could feel the temperature in the room drop. ‘I never said it had anything to do with love,’ she said impersonally, like a piano teacher correcting a child who keeps fudging his scales. ‘Who or what I love is my business. I said I needed him. Charles, sit down for a minute.’

‘ Needed him, there’s a word for that sort of thing, you know…’ as now outside, as if to complement our little scene, as if to make it so that everything was finally and perfectly hellish, a drunken battering set up at the front door, Droyd must have forgotten his keys again…

Mirela reached behind her and pulled up the zip of her dress, then got up and drew me over on to the mattress beside her. ‘I thought I explained it to you,’ she said. ‘I had a life before. But it’s gone. My memories are of things that don’t exist any more. The world stood by and let it happen and now all that I have left of home is this — look, Charles —’ lifting her dress over the rough splint of metal and bitten, singed wood. I gazed at it dumbly, and then back up at her. Outwardly at least she appeared quite composed. ‘Don’t you understand, Charles?’ she said softly. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you? None of this matters to me. Not you, not your sister, not the house you grew up in. I’ll act in the theatre. I’ll go on the billboards if they want me to. I’ll try hard to be a success. But none of it means anything to me. I look at the people around me and all I see are the little cardboard counters in a board game.’

She patted my hand; I stared paralytically into the mild gaze of those alien blue eyes. Somewhere far, far away, the pounding recommenced. ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ she said.

I rose numbly, threw on a dressing gown and went out to the living room, where the door juddered on its hinges. ‘All right, all right, for God’s sake…’ Cursing, I pulled it open. ‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Can I come in?’ Bel said.

‘Hmm,’ I said with a finger to my lip, ‘you know now might not actually be the best time…’

But she had already tottered past me, pulling a suitcase behind her. ‘It’s pitch dark in here,’ she declared. ‘I mean how are you supposed to see anything?’

Surely this couldn’t be happening — I swallowed and wiped my hands on the dressing gown. ‘Yes, that’s because do you know what time it is?’ rushing in to redirect her as she veered dangerously towards a promontory of junk, then with trembling fingers taking a match to the lantern — ‘what are you doing here anyway — good God…’

She looked an absolute state. Her make-up had run all over the place, giving her smudgy black rings around the eyes and a luridly Cubist appearance. Beneath her red coat, the lovely champagne-coloured dress hung bedraggled around her, like the wings of an affluent moth that had been caught out in the rain: except that it wasn’t raining. She swayed beneath me in the glow of the lamp, emanating not so much a smell as an aura of alcohol so toxic it made my eyes water just standing next to her.

‘You’re all pink,’ she said, squinting at me. ‘What’ve you been doing?’

‘Doing?’ I squeaked, glancing back reflexively at the sliver of darkness at my bedroom door. ‘Nothing at all. Probably just that it’s warm tonight, haven’t you found it unseasonably warm?’ But she had already forgotten her question and continued on her dizzy tour to the couch, where she deposited her suitcase. ‘Now, Bel,’ I skipped past her, hurriedly removing the lipsticked wineglass and secreting it in the pocket of my dressing gown. ‘Now, Bel, I —’