Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘No, no,’ leaning forward to reassure her, ‘it’s not that at all. I’m just worried that you’re being over-hasty.’

‘I’m not being over-hasty,’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve been talking about it for years .’

‘Yes, but —’ unconsciously bounding up from my chair and returning to my pacing, ‘do you see, it’s just that in this situation the danger would be — I mean quite often the best thing to do in these matters is to — to go home and sleep on it, and then in the morning when you wake up and you can consider it in the cold light of day —’

‘I’ve had all the time I need to consider it. I’m totally sure about this, Charles. That’s why I had to leave the house right away, before it caught me up in it again and everything got confused. Because maybe I’m not meant to be an actress, even. Maybe I’m supposed to be something else and I don’t even know what it is yet.’ She rubbed her eye excitedly, spreading a streak of kohl out to her hairline. ‘So what I was thinking was that I could stay here with you until I’ve worked out what I should do with my life, and then maybe we could look for a place together —’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘Together?’

‘I don’t have much money, so you’d have to tide me over for a little while. But I could get a job, and then in a few months I’ll have my trust —’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Together?’

‘It’s easier to find a place for two,’ she said. ‘And you want to get out of here, don’t you?’

I flopped into the armchair, running a hand over my jaw. ‘Are you being serious?’ I said. ‘This isn’t some sort of White-Russian-pink-elephantish whim?’

‘I can’t go back there, Charles,’ she said quietly. ‘I can’t go back there, to him, and her, and Mother, and that awful phone company with their marketing strategy. It feels like — it feels like Vichy France . And just the thought of getting up there and reciting those lines, his lines, it makes me feel physically sick.’

‘But what about — what about old Chekhov? What about that play you wanted to put on, what about that?’

‘They’ve decided they’re not doing Chekhov,’ she said.

‘They’re not? Why not?’

‘There aren’t any phones in it,’ she said darkly, then shrugged at me through the dimness. ‘So you see, you’re the only person I have left, Charles. Sad as it sounds, you seem to be the one person left in my life that I can actually trust.’ She put down her cup and knocked her knees together. ‘But what do you think? Wouldn’t it be amazing, a totally fresh start?’

I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t able to think. Everything suddenly seemed terribly unreal. Could we really just start again? Forget about the house, abandon it to those unbearable people, when all of our lives, everything we were was bound up in it? When even here, exiled in Frank’s rat-trap, I had always assumed I would some day be going back, that Amaurot’s fortunes and my own would go forever hand-in-hand… But maybe she was right: maybe the house really did have interests of its own to protect. Maybe it really had found replacements, and forged them into the son and daughter we had never quite managed to be, and it was this new pair that would map out its strategies from hereon in, would fill its halls with gaiety and laughter and the best brocade, and live the lives of the scions of the great…

Well, if it had: we had done our best for it, hadn’t we? Wasn’t this the best course now? The two of us united at last, on a Grand Digression through the world… As the idea took wing in my mind, and the city unfolded in front of me with all the places we could go, a gust of wind came blowing through the window: billowing through the dusty crannies, through the gingham tablecloth, the stringless tennis racket and the yellowed Chantilly lace, through all the dingy evidence of a hundred used-up lives. I felt a foolish, astonished smile spreading over my face; and for an instant, superimposed over the benighted Bonetown skyline, I had a vision of sunlight glinting through branches, and the words Today is the first day of the rest of your life …

‘Charles, don’t move.’ Bel’s dilated pupils were fixed on a point just above my right shoulder.

‘Eh?’

‘There’s an enormous spider sitting on the back of your chair.’

‘Ugh!’

‘Don’t move ,’ she said again, squinting through the shadows. ‘God, it’s the biggest spider I’ve ever seen …’

‘Help, quick, kill it!’ I moaned.

‘It’s bad luck to kill a spider,’ Bel recollected.

‘Well, do something — ugh, I can feel it eyeing me…’

‘All right, hold still…’ I clenched my teeth, sitting there entirely immobilized as she reached her hand slowly for the TV guide, rolled it up and then — with an agility quite unexpected, considering all those White Russians — leapt over and dealt a lightning blow to the back of the armchair, and then another and another — until with a soft thud the unfortunate spider hit the ground. I sank back in a pool of sweat while Bel lurched behind the chair to examine the remains.

‘Is it dead?’ I said, patting my brow.

She didn’t reply.

‘I say,’ I said.

But the curious silence continued. And then I heard her say, ‘Wait a second. That’s not a spider.’

As soon as she said it, I realized what had happened, and in an instant was out of my seat. But it was too late. Bel was already getting to her feet, holding in her hand a long black glove.

She recognized it, naturally: not to labour the point, but it fitted her like a glove. There was no way I was going to be able to lie my way out of this. I back-pedalled to the threshold of the kitchen, watching her stare in bafflement at the glove, struggling to comprehend its appearance in my apartment. As the blood drained from her face, I knew she had figured it out; as she sank back down on to the sofa, gazing into space, I knew she was recalling everything she had just said about trust, and fresh starts, but especially trust. The glinting sunlight, the trees, retreated into the ether.

‘I can explain,’ I said, but only as a matter of course.

‘Is she here?’ she said, swallowing. ‘Has she been here the whole time?’

‘Don’t ask me that,’ I pleaded. ‘I mean it’s not what it looks like.’

‘That’s just what Harry said,’ she remarked desolately, behind her smudge of colours. ‘That’s exactly what he said.’

‘Yes, but,’ I strained. ‘Yes, but, that is to say…’

‘Oh, Charles,’ she murmured, shaking her head.

She didn’t say it damningly or vindictively; I might not have felt so bad if she’d said it like that. Instead it was more that tone of tired, unjudging sadness one hears in people’s voices after something terrible has happened on the news, when humanity has let itself down in some significant way; it was a tone Bel had reserved since childhood for my more spectacular blunders. And standing there in the gloom, I found myself transported back to an afternoon many years ago: the afternoon when, having spirited it away from the drawer in his study, I had successfully sold Father’s fob watch via a newspaper classified to a private buyer, in order to raise money to buy a digital alarm clock for his birthday. I didn’t often come up with plans — that was more Bel’s forte — and this one I had kept secret even from her until I’d come back from Dun Laoghaire with the alarm clock carefully hidden in my lunchbox, and could present it to her as a fait accompli. But she didn’t take it with the level of unbounded admiration I felt a plan of this order deserved. Quite the opposite: she’d opened her eyes very wide and shaken her head very slowly and said ‘Oh, Charles,’ in this awestruck way, as if like a character in those Tales from the Greek Myths she was always reading I had broken something big, very big, and beyond anybody’s power to fix, such as the World –