by Paul Murray
She didn’t reply: she was lying with her hands folded limply over her midriff, staring at the ceiling as if picking out constellations. I set a cup down in front of her. ‘Bel, what are you doing here?’
There was a pause, and then she said slowly, ‘I’ve left Amaurot.’
I felt my heart sink again. ‘You’ve left?’
‘I couldn’t stay there another second,’ she said. She held her head still a moment, then pronounced, ‘Not another second.’
‘But you’d gone to bed,’ I beseeched her, clasping my hands. ‘When I left you’d gone to bed. I mean what happened, did someone spike your hot-water bottle?’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘They were making such a racket, singing songs and… So I came downstairs for a nightcap. And it made me feel better, so I stayed there. I was drinking White Russians but then I used up all the cream so I thought the logical thing to do would be to move on to Black Russians and I was looking in the kitchen for the Coke when he came in.’
‘When who came in? Harry?’
‘Don’t even say it.’ She turned over on her side. ‘I don’t even want to hear his name. He came in and instead of just leaving me alone he started talking to me. He just started going on and on. Apologizing for not saying anything earlier but there were all these people round and he didn’t want to make a scene, and then about how if we cared we shouldn’t want to possess each other, and then about how the theatre was bigger than both of us. And I was standing there listening to this, when all I wanted was the Coke, and I started thinking, this is unreal, this has got to be some kind of sign, this is like the universe saying once and for all would you please get out of there –’
My shoulders slumped. ‘You’re not going to start all that business about the house again, are you?’ I said wanly. ‘Because I have enough on my plate without being told I don’t even exist any more.’
‘No, but – well, yes,’ pulling herself upright and gazing at me earnestly through her mask of streaked colours. ‘I mean it made me realize that nothing there is ever going to change. Harry is one thing. I mean, you were totally right about him. But he’s probably better off with her, if you think about it. They probably deserve each other. But the truth is it doesn’t matter whether there’s a theatre there or not. That’s what I realized while he was making his speech. All the reasons I’ve ever wanted to leave – they’re still there. They’ll always be there. They’re like a part of the house. And suddenly it was like this fog had been lifted and I could see that everything I’d been doing was basically wrong, that it’s no good just waiting around for things to change. So I listened politely and then as soon as he was finished I went upstairs and packed my suitcase and called a cab. I should have done it years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. I was afraid, I suppose.’
Bel and her signs! Everything had to be a sign, nothing could simply be the result of lack of foresight or bad planning – ‘You can’t just leave, though,’ I said weakly. ‘I mean, where would you go?’
Her eyes widened, as if in surprise that I hadn’t guessed. ‘Well, I thought I’d stay here with you.’
‘Here?’ I repeated. ‘With me? Now?’
‘With you and Frank,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that? I thought it might be sort of fun.’
I passed around behind the sofa and paced about, distractedly wringing my hands and glancing back at the shut door. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather awkward? What with your and Frank’s, shall we say, history?’
‘It’s not a history,’ Bel said. ‘And he wouldn’t mind, I’m sure of it.’
‘Yes, but – well, where would you sleep, for a start?’
‘I thought I could sleep on the couch, please don’t get all moral guardianish…’
‘It’s not that, it’s just a little awkward, you see Droyd normally sleeps on the couch –’
‘Well, the armchair then, or the floor, I don’t care – Charles, why won’t you sit down? Why do you keep skulking around like that?’
‘I’m not skulking.’
‘You are, you’re making me nervous,’ she said.
I sat down in the armchair opposite her as unfurtively as I could manage.
‘Is it that you don’t want me to stay? Because if it is, just say.’
‘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 –
That time, however, I had been sure I was in the right. ‘I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up,’ I’d said. ‘Of course he’s not going to be angry. Why would he be angry?’
‘Don’t you know anything?’ she’d said, taking her finger out of her mouth. ‘That watch was grandfather’s.’
‘Well, so what? It was old. I don’t think it worked, even. This one is new. It has a radio and you can see the numbers in the dark. He needs an alarm clock. He always stays in bed too late, that’s why Mother shouts at him all the time. Come on, it can be from you as well. I don’t mind.’ But instead of leaping to accept this kind and unselfish offer, Bel covered her face with her hands, as if hoping to make the situation disappear.
‘Maybe we could get another watch, just to be on the safe side,’ I mused. ‘One exactly the same as the old one. Or maybe he won’t notice it’s gone. Or maybe he will, but he just won’t be angry.’
But Bel just stood there, shaking her head, swaying to and fro, repeating ‘Oh, Charles,’ in a way that after a while got under your skin and then really started to nag at you –
‘Well, what are we going to do, then?’ I shouted at last. ‘You’ll have to run away,’ Bel said automatically, and a trifle glibly for my liking. ‘Fine,’ I retorted, ‘so will you, then.’ ‘Why will I have to?’ she said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said irritably. ‘Because they’ll punish you too.’ ‘Why would they punish me? I didn’t do anything.’ ‘They just will, that’s all, you know what they’re like – well, so long, I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again –’ ‘Charles, wait!’ running after me out of her bedroom and down the stairs and out the door to begin our new life in the gazebo, which continued happily enough until nightfall, when Bel – who was at that time deeply afraid of the dark, indeed unhappy about the entire concept of darkness, having developed grave doubts as to the likelihood of the sun, once it had been allowed to set, ever rising again, even when one told her that in one’s own experience, which remember was eight years compared to her five, it had always risen in the past: ‘But what if it doesn’t?’ she’d say, whispering in case it might hear, ‘what do we do then?’ – when Bel began to cry, and continued to cry, and would not be comforted even when I switched on the radio part of the radio alarm clock, till at last, worried that she was going to stop breathing, I took her hand again and led her back across the lawn, the house rising forbiddingly out of the twilight, ice-bolts of terror plunging through me, but still fair was fair, she’d been a good sport about the whole running-away business in the first place, she was good about that sort of thing, Bel was, even if she was a girl, if only she wouldn’t cry so much, and we went round to the back door to knock to be let in by whatever maid was there at the time, to troop in to Father in the drawing room and take our punishment…
Only this time, of course, there was no gazebo to run to, no higher power to arbitrate or condemn; there were only the facts, lying there inert as the glove on the table. Neither of us was sure of the protocol; so we merely stood, wilted slightly, as though the room were short on oxygen. It must have looked rather comical, the two of us with our hands in our pockets, staring at nothing, searching for the words to resolve or express or at least reanimate the scene, to carry it out of this awful moment. Then Bel got up and walked out. I tried to follow her, but I got my foot caught in the stringless Dunlop tennis racket, and by the time I’d pulled it free and gone down to the street she was nowhere in sight. And so, like a man in a hall of mirrors, or in an endless Chinese box of dreams, I stumbled back upstairs, and thrust open my bedroom door – only to find the room empty: emptier than a magician’s cabinet, emptier than anything ought possibly to be.
14
THERE’S BOSNIANS IN MY ATTIC!
A Tragedy in Three Acts
by Charles Hythloday
SETTING: A crumbling chateau on the banks of the Marne.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
COUNT FREDERICK A Count, the young master of the hou
se. Battling with the past and with the dog-eat-dog world of the French wine industry to restore his Father’s vineyard to its former glory.
BABS His sister, a beautiful if judgemental would-be actress.
LOPAKHIN A Machiavellian bank manager/theatre impresario, who is staying at the chateau but secretly plotting to destroy it and build a railway through it and steal Babs away from Frederick.
[Note. Why has Frederick let Lopakhin stay in the house in the first place?]
MAM’ SELLE A comically inept French maid
HORST AND WERNER Some Bosnians
INSPECTOR DICK ROBINSON, SCOTLAND YARD
ACT ONE SCENE ONE
(The drawing room. COUNT FREDERICK is gazing pensively out the window when BABS bursts in in a state of agitation, followed insidiously by LOPAKHIN. )
BABS (agitatedly): Frederick! Oh Frederick! The peasants are revolting!
FREDERICK: I know! Don’t they ever wash?
(pause for laughter)
BABS: How can you joke at a time like this? The harvest is next week! How are we supposed to reap it with no peasants?
FREDERICK: (grimly): I know. Just when it seemed that the vineyard was finally getting back on its feet. (Turns pensively.) I can’ t understand it. They’re normally such a jolly bunch. It’s as if someone had been stirring them up by circulating false data about the EU’s new Agricultural Policy. But who would do such a thing?
LOPAKHIN: Why don’t you just give up, Frederick? That’s what I don’t understand about you. You’re an intelligent man. Why do you persist in trying to revive this old dump? When you could have a railway station right here where we’re standing, or a multiplex cinema.
