by Paul Murray
‘I was angry,’ she said.
‘I know you were angry – that’s not what I mean. I mean the pictures. MacGillycuddy. What possessed you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘He gave me a Gold Seal Guarantee of Success.’
‘MacGillycuddy’s Gold Seal Guarantee isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,’ I snapped. ‘You know perfectly well that everything that man touches turns to disaster. How could you have been so… I mean, I just don’t understand it.’
‘I just wanted to make it work,’ Bel mumbled through the cleft of her knees. ‘That’s what you do when you like somebody, isn’t it? You find out what things they like, you pretend you like the same things, you laugh at their jokes…’
‘But don’t you see?’ pulling at my ear in frustration. ‘Don’t you see there’s a difference, between laughing at someone’s jokes, and – and having them investigated by MacGillycuddy? I mean it’s just not like you…’
‘I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘I had to do something, didn’t I? You don’t know what it’s been like here, with her crowding me out all the time, trying to control everything, practically undressing in front of him at rehearsals, even though she didn’t even want him, it was just so, just because she could…’ Her brow puckered sorrowfully. ‘God, they must have rehearsed that kissing scene a hundred times…’
‘That’s no reason to try and fabricate an entire romance like that. I mean how did you expect it to turn out? How could anything good come of that kind of…?’
‘It worked, didn’t it,’ she said quietly.
‘That,’ I said, ‘is what they call a moot point.’
‘It did work,’ she insisted, as if to herself. ‘That night up on the roof, everything was perfect.’
‘Well, if it was all so perfect,’ I said sourly, ‘why did you have him trailed with a camera?’
Bel dipped her head, fiddled with the pendant that had been restored to her neck. I didn’t mean to be so harsh. I suppose I was just feeling a touch misused myself. I sighed. ‘What are you going to do now?’
‘I’m going,’ she said slowly, ‘to have another drink.’ She held out her empty glass.
‘All right…’ I took it from her and patted her on the knee. ‘Don’t go anywhere –’ although by the looks of her there was little danger of that.
‘She has a shock,’ Mrs P said, preparing a samovar of tea and placing it beside the glasses on a silver tray. ‘She should be drinking this, not the double brandies.’
‘Try telling her that.’
Mrs P paused and looked me in the eye. ‘What happen, Master Charles?’
‘Oh, nothing, really,’ I blustered. ‘Just the gals letting off a little steam. You know what they’re like.’
‘Mmm,’ Mrs P said equivocally, performing one of her half-shrug half-grimaces.
‘You should be happy though. Mirela’s gone down a storm.’
Mrs P frowned over at the middle ground, where her daughter and Harry stood deep in conversation with the telephone fellow. ‘I will be happier when it is over,’ she said. ‘I am old, I have seen enough fight. Excuse me, Master Charles, I must bring this man his drink.’
The party raged on. Not far away, Laura, who was already tipsy, pestered Mrs P’s sons to play her requests; Frank came in and out, carrying off entire sections of the buffet to the cloakroom, which he had kindly agreed to man while I stayed with Bel. The cast and crew, meanwhile, were full of themselves. The telephone fellow, after asking a newspaperman what he thought of the play, had pronounced himself delighted, and the air was alive with rumours: that he had commissioned Harry to write a new play with a vast budget; that Mirela was going to appear on a billboard for Telsinor; that everybody was getting a free phone in exchange for a phone mast being installed in the back garden at Amaurot.
Everyone acted as if the sabotaged ending had been planned all along. As for the pictures, when we went back up to the dressing room after the curtain call they had disappeared; no one mentioned them now, no one seemed to find it odd that it was Mirela, and not Bel, who cruised the room on Harry’s arm. It was as though here, too, the lines had simply been rewritten, with only the presence of Bel, sitting despondently in the wide berth the others had given her, to hint at the existence of an earlier draft.
On my way back to her I paused to eavesdrop on Niall O’Boyle and Harry, who had been buttonholed by a journalist. ‘And what do you see Telsinor getting from such an investment?’ the journalist was saying.
‘It’s not about us getting something out of it,’ Niall O’Boyle said. ‘What we’re talking about here is a – what did you say it was?’
‘Synergy,’ Harry said. He was still wearing his fusty costume from the play.
‘Exactly, a synergy. We’re both on the same team. This is the new Ireland, and it’s all about communicating. It’s about youth and young people talking to each other and turning over the old ways of doing things. And at Telsinor Ireland, we see ourselves as providing the equipment for creating that vision.’
‘The medium is the message,’ Harry put in.
‘And what about you?’ The journalist turned to him. ‘How do you feel about getting into bed with big business?’
‘Well,’ Harry said slowly, ‘I don’t think we’d say we were quote-unquote “getting into bed” with anybody…’
‘Exactly,’ Niall O’Boyle came in. ‘That’s a very old-fashioned way of looking at it. Because art, so-called big business, at the end of the day what they’re both about is people. For example, take Marla here,’ reaching over to take Mirela by the arm and presenting her to the journalist. ‘Someone like Marla is exactly what this centre, the Ralph Hythloday Centre, and Telsinor Ireland are about. It’s about creating a space for people where they can be who they want to be and say what they want to say. It’s about inclusivity and diversity. It’s east meets west, coming together in peace and harmony, young people forgetting about the past, turning their backs on war and politics and saying, It’s our turn now, and we just want to have a good time. For me, that’s really what the play was saying tonight.’
‘Was that what it was all about?’ the journalist said to Harry.
‘Well yes, in a way,’ said Harry, ‘because to communicate…’
I returned to Bel, still slumped dejectedly in her chair. ‘I don’t know what you ever saw in that charlatan,’ I said. ‘By golly, I’ve a good mind to go over there and clean his clock for him.’
The tea seemed to rouse her a little; she lifted her head and watched the ceiling flash white as the newspaper photographer went around the room taking pictures of cast members and guests.
‘It isn’t his fault,’ she said, after a long time.
‘I see,’ I said tartly. ‘I suppose Mirela put a gun to his head and made him do it. Or maybe it wasn’t her idea either, maybe they just tripped and fell into bed together –’
‘It’s the house,’ Bel said.
I turned around. ‘What?’
‘The house,’ she repeated. She was staring straight ahead of her, frowning slightly, as if trying to work out a complicated maths problem in her head: her voice was soporific, faraway-seeming. ‘It’s like it’s changing them,’ she said. ‘Like it’s making them do what it wants, so it can keep itself alive.’
I sat up with a jerk and pulled her head round so I could peer into her eyes. ‘Are you all right? Do you want me to get someone?’ Mrs P had just come in with a fresh tray of canapés: I waved my arm at her, but she didn’t see me.
‘Just look,’ Bel said simply, twisting the pendant in her fingers.
I looked, not knowing what I was supposed to be seeing. To the right there was a flash and a laugh and a group of people broke apart in front of the camera. ‘Why not get one of just you and the kids,’ I heard Niall O’Boyle say. ‘Take one of Georgie and the kids, why don’t you? Theatrical family, sort of thing.’
Bodies shuffled around: Harry linked his arm with Mother’s, Mirela doing th
e same on the opposite side, all three of them with their backs to us. ‘Ready?’ the photographer said.
‘Shouldn’t we have Bel in it too?’ someone – Mirela – asked; I heard Mother explain cursorily how Bel, for reasons of her own, preferred not to have her picture taken.
‘Perfect,’ the photographer said. ‘one more –’
‘Don’t you get it?’ Bel said. ‘They’re us.’
‘What?’
‘Everybody smile…’
‘They’re us,’ she said: and at that moment the flash went off and, though I was sure I was going to say something, the light caught me right in the eye, so that whatever it was I forgot it; instead I reeled back blinking and waving my hands – ‘Though in that case,’ she murmured invisibly beside me, ‘who are we?’
I took a deep breath and placed my hands over my eyes, waiting for my vision to compose itself before I told Bel that what she was saying didn’t make one iota of sense and perhaps it was time to get Mrs P and go for a lie down somewhere quiet. But then her voice broke in my ear, ‘I’m going to get a drink,’ and I looked up through a glaze to see her move away across the floor, the long dress, the still-settling light, the roomful of strangers combining to give her the appearance of floating…
13
She didn’t come back. I knew she wouldn’t; still I waited an hour or so, there on the outskirts of the party, drinking gimlets and drifting along the peripheries of other people’s conversations: the men in suits discussing offshore investment, property, golf; their wives discussing property, holidays, surgery, good causes.
On my way out I encountered an argument in progress at the cloakroom. ‘I’m not sure you understand the severity of the situation,’ a lady was telling Frank in a chandelier-shattering falsetto. ‘It’s not just a question of expense. That fox fur is irreplaceable. It is a piece of history, can you comprehend that?’
‘Well, it’s not there,’ Frank said with an air of finality.
‘But where else could it be?’ The woman’s voice rose another couple of octaves. ‘Where else could it be?’
‘Maybe it ran off,’ Frank suggested. ‘Maybe it didn’t want to live in a house any more.’
‘It’s dead!’ the woman wailed, bringing a jewel-laden hand down on the table; then, as though horrified at what she had just said, she staggered backwards with the same hand clutched to her throat. I got the impression that this discussion had been in train for some time; I felt a little sorry for her, but I turned my collar up and kept my eyes on the front door.
Outside the night was clear and cold and bit at my lips and nostrils. One of the company’s underlings was standing at the top of the driveway in an old-fashioned bellhop’s uniform (discovered among the seemingly endless store of antiquities Harry was having excavated from the attic), directing cars out with blue fingers and a stoical expression. As they left their swinging lights created crazy shadows, conjuring knotty, elfish faces from the boles and branches of the sleeping trees. Through the hedge another light could be made out, burning in Old Man Thompson’s den. Mother had sent Olivier an invitation to the play, though I don’t think she’d really expected him to come. No one had seen him since the old man’s funeral; he wouldn’t even answer the door. There were all kinds of stories flying around: that the will, which left everything to Olivier, was being contested by an obscure nephew living in Australia; that this nephew was planning to knock the old place down and build new houses to sell on; that Olivier, out of whatever perversity, was refusing to speak to Thompson’s solicitors, or for that matter anyone else.
I descended the steps, making for the line of taxis waiting at the gate, in the hope that one of them could be persuaded to take me back to Bonetown. But as I passed the laburnum, a figure stepped out in front of me. I rocked back on my heels. For a moment neither of us moved; we stood there, eyeing each other up.
‘I thought you’d gone to bed,’ I said eventually.
‘No,’ she said, shaking out her wrists. Her entire body was trembling; I wondered how long she’d been waiting, out here in the trees.
‘Well –’ Having exchanged our pleasantries, I made to move on, but she anticipated me and blocked my way again.
‘Take me with you,’ she said.
I looked at her.
‘I need,’ she said falteringly, ‘I need to get out of here for a little while.’
I paused and then said, without warmth, ‘Where is it you want to go?’
‘Anywhere,’ Mirela said.
I should have walked right past her, I suppose. What could we possibly have left to say to each other, after tonight? But there was something in her disorientation – the panicked eyes, the gestures that had come unmoored from their meaning – that was hypnotic, in the same way that a car crash is hypnotic; it struck a chord in me, in spite of everything, or because of it. And life isn’t like the movies: there’s no ominous swell to the soundtrack, no fatalistic overhead shot, nothing to tell you that this moment is the one your life will turn on; instead it’s like a train silently switching tracks, sheering off mid-journey into a whole other part of the night. She looked at me again with that strange uncloaked expression. ‘Please, Charles,’ she said; and I remembered her hand moving to cover mine on the banister that time, her eyes falling on me with the weightless insistence of a petal on water.
The taxi ride took the best part of an hour and we spent it in silence. She sat at the far window with her head resting against the glass and the dark city passing through her reflection. When we came closer to Bonetown, however, she seemed to rouse: she sat up and looked around her, taking in her environs with a little nod, as if the dismal towers, the crumbling roads were the answer to some unframed question in her mind.
I directed the taxi to stop outside Frank’s building. Without a word to me she got out and waited shivering in her ballgown on the kerb while I paid the cabbie. At the end of the street a shopping trolley rattled and was silent, like an animal bolting for the undergrowth.
Frank hadn’t come home yet and there was no sign of Droyd. The room was full of smoke and a chemical odour. I took a match to the lantern and, not knowing what else to do with her, offered Mirela a drink. I came out of the kitchen with the glasses and a bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet to find her making her way slowly about the back of the room, gazing at the galleries of salvage, which in the ungiving light looked more forlorn than ever. ‘What is all this stuff?’
‘It’s Frank’s. It’s his work. Things he gets out of houses. He sells it on to dealers, decorators, so forth.’
‘Mmm-hmm…’ She picked up a moth-eaten cloth head that must once have belonged to a child’s hobbyhorse and turned it over in her hands.
‘That particular lot he picked up at an auction. Belonged to a recluse. Junk, mostly. Went in for stuffed animals in a big way. They don’t really sell, Frank says, not these days.’
She nodded absently, replacing the horse. Heavy swathes of smoke were still descending from the ceiling, slipping like so many diaphanous stoles over her bare shoulders. ‘We used to see this kind of thing in some of the towns we came through,’ she said, running her fingers over the bricolage. ‘When the people had run away, and the soldiers would go in and take whatever they had left behind. Washing machines, video recorders, picture frames, rugs, heaters, you would see it all sitting out on the street, waiting to be put in lorries and driven away and sold. When the houses were empty they burned them.’
I had never heard her speak about what had happened over there; I waited, not moving, in case she might say more. But instead she turned away with her drink and took a chair opposite where I sat on the windowsill. She smiled artificially and drew her hands into her lap. ‘So this is where you live now,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Hard to imagine, you in the middle of all the pots and pans.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ I said defensively.
‘I suppose not.’
I tapped my foot. What did she want
from me? Did she really expect me to sit here and make small talk while she took in the derelict ambience? I looked her over biliously willing her to leave; then following her line of vision down to her clasped hands I said suddenly, ‘Aren’t those Bel’s?’
‘What?’
‘The gloves.’
‘These?’ Somewhat bewildered, she held them in the air in a hands-up position, as if I had pulled a gun on her. ‘Yes, they are. She gave them to me.’
They had been another gift of Father’s, I remembered; he was always buying her expensive things she never wore. Bel didn’t like new clothes – she preferred her clothes to have lives, she’d say, that was the whole idea of clothes, wasn’t it?
‘It was a while ago,’ Mirela said. ‘When you were in hospital, probably. I didn’t have any clothes of my own.’ She splayed her fingers and wiggled them experimentally. ‘We were getting on better then.’ She gave me a rueful smile, which I did not return. She sighed, and with her right hand began bending back the fingers of her left, one by one. ‘I didn’t want this to happen, Charles. I never intended to hurt anybody. These are just the things you have to do when you’re a girl. This is what you have to do. For your sister it’s the same. She would have done exactly the same thing, even though she won’t admit it.’
‘If you’re referring to what happened with Harry –’ I began.
‘Oh, let’s not talk about Harry!’ she cried, hair flying across her face. ‘I don’t want to talk about him, you can understand that, can’t you?’
I withdrew back into the window-frame. She took a hasty gulp from her glass and looked down at her lap. ‘I’m saying that this is what’s it’s like, when every man you kiss thinks he’s unearthed you, and everyone has a role for you to play, the brave little refugee, the obedient daughter, the foreign girl with loose morals…’ Her hand made a quick mechanical gesture. ‘You do what you can with that. You can’t stop life from happening, can you? You don’t get to choose what parts you get. So you take your opportunities. You use the means available to you. Your life becomes something that takes you further and further away from yourself. It sounds cynical, I know. It is cynical.’
