15

All the excitement must have overtired me, because I nodded off on the way. I was having the strangest dream, in which we were all buried in a terrible avalanche: but then I woke up to find we had stopped outside the old house, and that the avalanche was nothing more than the rumbling of Frank’s stomach.

I don’t know who Mother was expecting at that late hour, but she seemed surprised when she answered the door and found me there: in fact she turned quite pale, and her glass slipped out of her hand, sending sherry all over the floor.

‘I’m perfectly all right, leave it be, Charles,’ she recovered herself. ‘I wasn’t expecting any more guests, that’s all. Didn’t I tell you eight sharp? And honestly, is that what passes for a clean shirt with you these days?’

I began to explain about the rent and the race, but Mother cut me off. ‘Charles,’ she said, peering downwards, ‘there appears to be something dripping on my foot.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you – Mother, I’d like to introduce the newest member of the, the gang – An Evening of Long Goodbyes.’

‘You’re not planning to bring it inside, I hope.’

‘Well, yes, it’s a sort of a bon voyage gift for Bel, you see.’

‘Charles, if you think I’m going to let you take in some flea-ridden stray to die on my parquet when there are guests in the house…’

‘It’s not going to die. It’s just had a couple of knocks, that’s all. Give it some food and it’ll be right as rain – won’t you, old fellow?’

Mother sighed heavily and straightened up. Muffled sounds of merriment drifted past her from inside. ‘Where’s Patsy?’ she said. Raising her lorgnette, she stared into the shadows, then turned back to me. ‘Charles,’ she said sotto voce, ‘that is not Patsy Olé.’

‘No Mother, it’s Frank, you remember Frank –’

‘Not the boy from the cloakroom?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s him.’

The ends of her mouth took another turn south. ‘I know several people who would be very interested to hear his thoughts vis-à–vis the whereabouts of their handbags.’

‘Oh, that’s just silly,’ I objected. ‘Frank’s straight as a die. Why, just look at him…’

We considered Frank once more where he waited by the van. He waggled his fingers at us and grimaced horribly.

‘I promise I’ll keep an eye on him…’

There was a faint whistling sound as Mother exhaled through her nose. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But if there is so much as a hint of trouble…’ She let the threat hang unstated in the air. ‘And take that thing in by the kitchen.’

I wasn’t sure whether she meant Frank or the dog, but I didn’t press her. I gave Frank the nod: he lurched over and, picking up the stricken greyhound at either end, we navigated around the soggy garden.

Rococo Christmas decorations hung in the windows, and every light in the house was on, throwing buttery light over the grass and the leafless trees of the orchard; the bottle-green Mercedes sat proudly in front of the garage, like a mountain lion surveying its kingdom. From outside, the kitchen resembled a Greek funeral: black-clad caterers were rushing everywhere, carrying dishes and dropping pots into quivering mounds of soapsuds. No one paid any attention to us or to our strange cargo – not until we found Mrs P, fiddling about in the alcove by the refrigerator.

‘Master Charles!’ she cried, throwing her arms around me. ‘You have a face again! Your beautiful face!’ And then she caught sight of the dog. ‘Ay, Master Charles, you have run him over with the car?’

‘No,’ I said, annoyed. ‘It’s a bon voyage gift for Bel.’

She said something in Bosnian and Zoran, the round-headed son, came over and began pressing the dog’s ribs with his fingers.

‘I am thinking this dog is how you say a goner?’

‘He’s not a goner. I wish people would stop saying things like that, you’re upsetting him,’ although admittedly An Evening of Long Goodbyes wasn’t looking his best, lying there on the floor not moving. ‘He’s had a couple of knocks, that’s all. He just needs some food, and… what are you doing?’ Zoran had attached a thin metal clamp to the dog’s side and was rattling about in a case of sinister-looking instruments.

‘It’s all right,’ Mrs P whispered in my ear. ‘He is trained as a doctor.’

This was news to me, as all I had ever seen him do was drink beer and play the trumpet badly; and An Evening of Long Goodbyes didn’t appear too keen on those needles that were materialising out of the case. Still, Zoran seemed to know what he was about and, on consideration, it was probably better that the dog was patched up a bit before we surprised Bel with it.

‘Charlie…’ a feeble hand clawed at my sleeve.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, man, don’t be so melodramatic – Mrs P, I don’t suppose there’s any dinner left? Frank’s feeling a bit…’

Mrs P was doubtful, but said she would forage about and see what she could do. In the meantime, she directed us to clean ourselves up and join the others inside.

‘Here, Charlie, how come Mrs P isn’t invited to the party?’ Frank asked as we came down the hall.

‘Well she’s… well I mean it’s not that she’s not invited, as such. She prefers to stay behind the scenes at these things. Hates extravagance, you know.’

‘Oh right. I was just wonderin what was she cryin about.’

‘Was she crying?’

‘Yeah, when we came in.’

‘Probably chopping onions or something. Or maybe she’s upset about Bel. She’s very maternal, you know, cooks generally are.’

Individual voices could be heard as we approached the dining-room, Niall O’Boyle’s pre-eminent among them: ‘… new alloys we’re using mean that when you drop it down the toilet, for example, it won’t break, and if you stand on it – go ahead, stand on it – see? That’s the future of communications you’re standing on there. Or even, say, if you threw it against a wall…’ We pushed open the door to enter a seraglio of hushed lights and the most breathtaking golds and reds.

‘Good Lord!’ I said, taking Frank’s arm. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? I say, duck –’

‘What?’ Frank said, as Niall O’Boyle’s phone came whizzing through the air to catch him square on the temple, and he toppled to the floor like a felled tree. Two dozen pairs of eyes lit on us, and at the head of the table Niall O’Boyle and Harry, the phone-thrower, stood guiltily agape. Mother looked balefully at me. Hastily I picked the phone up and displayed its flashing screen. ‘Still working, ladies and gentlemen.’ Everyone exhaled a happy sigh of relief and resumed their chattering.

‘I was just trying to demonstrate,’ Niall O’Boyle blustered.

‘He’ll be all right,’ Mother assured him, drawing him back to his seat. ‘Bel, darling, get him some ice or something, will you?

Bel rose reluctantly from the far side, the warm glow of the candelabra catching in a slender gold necklace around her neck. She was also dressed in black. She came round and knelt down beside Frank, who was writhing about with his eyes closed, babbling incoherently. ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘What have you done to him?’

‘I haven’t done anything to him,’ I said. ‘It’s been rather an exacting day, that’s all.’

‘The pair of you smell like a distillery.’

‘Let’s just get him some food… is there any food left?’

‘There are truffles,’ Bel thought. ‘And maybe some bisque?’

‘What’s bisque?’ Frank said, opening his eyes.

We guided him to a chair. Bel went out and returned with an ice pack and a plate of leftovers that Mrs P had scraped together, which seemed to pacify him. I sat down opposite. I was feeling a trifle light-headed myself. I hadn’t eaten anything since that crêpe Frank had thrown in the dustbin and I was beginning to wish I’d taken his advice and we’d stopped at the takeaway for Chicken Balls on the way back from the dog-track. But it was too late now, so I made do with a bottle of smoky Rioja which was floating around, lit my briar and took in the table. Mother was seated at the top, with the guest of honour, Niall O’Boyle, on one side and Harry on the other in that repellent country-squire waistcoat. Mirela was next to Harry; I did not allow my gaze to linger. Beside Niall O’Boyle was a woman in a rather unfortunate lavender jacket – his personal assistant, I discovered – and then, Geoffrey, the woolly-headed old family accountant. I hadn’t seen him in the house since he’d executed Father’s will; he looked uncomfortable, as if something were caught in his throat. Our place in the new order was plain; we had been given unglamorous seats in the middle, just at the watermark past which the company descended into hooting actors and stage managers.

‘Must’ve thought we weren’t coming tonight,’ I said to Bel jauntily.

‘What is that thing?’ She reseated herself next to me with a choking cough. ‘Since when do you smoke a pipe?’

‘I have a lot of time on my hands,’ I explained. ‘As I was saying, though, we almost didn’t make it. It’s been a perfect nightmare of a day. But I said to Frank, this is Bel’s going away, and come hell or high water I’m going to be there.’

‘It smells repulsive,’ she murmured.

I was glad she was talking to me, even if she wasn’t exactly turning cartwheels; but she seemed removed from things, and everything she said had a rhetorical ring, such that I began to feel foolish replying to her. Try as I might, I could not breach this porcelain reserve: not only was I unable to get on to the subject of forgiveness, and the manifold speeches I had prepared on that topic, but – once I had passed on Jessica Kiddon’s message about the taxi and made a little smalltalk about the décor – I quickly ran out of anything to say to her at all; and frankly it came as something of a relief when Mother stood up and pinged a glass and I realized that, although we might have missed the food, Frank and I had arrived just in time for the dull speeches.

‘Tonight,’ Mother pronounced, ‘is a night of hellos and goodbyes. In one way, it is a sad occasion, because we will be taking leave, if only for a short while, of our dear Bel, who is travelling to Russia in the morning. But in the main it is a joyful one, for tonight we mark the beginning of a new epoch – a new passage in the history of this marvellous old house.’

We applauded dutifully.

‘It is also an opportunity for us to say thank you – to Telsinor Ireland, and more particularly to Mr Niall O’Boyle, whose personal vision and sense of social commitment, so rare in today’s business world, have played such a part in creating this unique partnership.’ As Niall O’Boyle basked like a basilisk on a rock, Mother asked us to reflect for a moment on the meaning the partnership – cemented tomorrow morning when the papers were signed – would have for the house. She outlined the plans to renovate the old west wing, expand the theatre, begin the long-promised instruction of children from underprivileged parts of the city; she explained how, on a more personal level, the signing of the papers would at last secure the house financially, something that her late husband, for all his years of work, was never conclusively able to do –

‘Charles, stop twitching.’

‘It’s Geoffrey, he keeps staring at me. He looks like he’s suppressing the urge to bless himself.’

‘It’s your face, Charles,’ Bel whispered back. ‘Haven’t you seen it? You look exactly like – oh –’

Mother had moved on to the goodbyes part of the speech and was calling on Bel to stand up and take a bow. ‘Our loss is Russia’s gain,’ Mother was saying. ‘Bel’s devotion to the theatre has never been in question. I can’t think of any other girl who would come to her own going-away party dressed like Hamlet…’

Everyone laughed obligingly and clapped again. Frank leaned over to Mirela, who had left most of her food uneaten, and asked if she was planning to finish it. Niall O’Boyle rose and thanked Mother and began to read from flashcards handed him by his PA to the effect that Amaurot was more than just a house, it was a symbol, the symbol of an ideal, and how inspiring he personally found it to see this ideal being perpetuated by modern technology in the form of the Telsinor Hythloday Centre for the Arts, and so on and so forth; I drifted away. There was a fresh sally of rain against the window. To my left Bel fidgeted with a doily. The tubby stage manager was rubbing his foot up and down the girl with barrettes’ ankle and trying to make her laugh.

‘… a central part of our project of renewal, who really embodied these values we’ve been talking about, and more importantly used them and shared those qualities with others in order to make the world a better place, a permanent monument to him.’

Noisy applause here. ‘What did he say?’ I whispered to Bel.

‘They want to put up a statue of Father,’ Bel said, absently twisting her doily into a garrotte.

With this announcement, the speeches came to a close, and the table fragmented into a happy babel of conversation. But Bel retreated further into herself, watching the proceedings as if they were occurring on the other end of a microscope. It didn’t matter what I asked her about – Yalta, Ramp, Olivier’s legal travails – she would answer politely in as few words as were humanly possible, and then withdraw into silence. It was like being seated next to a vacant lot.

I decided it was time to bring out the big guns. When Mrs P came in to ask about coffee (Frank was right, she did look rather out of sorts), I had a word in her ear. A few minutes later, An Evening of Long Goodbyes nosed into the room, bandaged up and looking much improved.

‘Well!’ I said. ‘Look who it is!’

‘Who is it?’ Bel barely lifted an eyebrow.

‘Don’t you recognize him?’ I said, seeking to disengage the dog’s head from its reproductive organs momentarily so she could see him properly. ‘It’s that dog you bet on at the races that time, remember? An Evening of Long Goodbyes. You thought it was romantic.’

‘What’s it doing here?’ Bel said.

I stifled my exasperation. ‘Well, it’s for you, obviously. I mean it’s a bon voyage gift.’

‘We robbed it from the car park,’ Frank chipped in unhelpfully.

‘We didn’t rob it,’ I said. I explained about the race and the dog’s heroics earlier that evening. Bel still didn’t seem to understand how this related to her; she nodded neutrally, patting the smooth area between the dog’s ears, and made some remark about not knowing if Aeroflot allowed dogs on as hand luggage.

‘You’re coming back, aren’t you?’ I said, beginning to feel a little browned off. ‘I just thought it would be nice to have a dog about the place again. I remembered how you used to dote on that spaniel…’ This I felt sure would elicit a response, but her face remained blank as the silver tag nestled in my pocket. I thought about producing the tag as evidence of her obsession, thereby proving that the dog was a good present, Aeroflot’s luggage policy notwithstanding; but I checked myself. I had done my best to make amends. If she was going to be infantile, that was her business. She returned to her reverie. I fell into a grumpy silence of my own. From the other side of the table, Frank resumed his muttering, mingling it with superstitious glances at Bel of the kind that a savage might throw at a bicycle. Oh yes, we made quite a party.

‘You know,’ Niall O’Boyle was telling Mother, tilting his chair back from the table, ‘I’ve always fancied one of these big houses. A man could get some thinking done in a place like this.’

‘Oh, these old piles are far more trouble than they’re worth,’ Mother laughed. ‘Don’t be fooled. So much work just to keep them going, and it’s only on nights like this that they truly come into their own.’ But even as she said it, her eyes roved over the lavish appointments, and sparkled with approval.

‘It’s those Slavic cheekbones,’ the lavender-jacketed PA said, stroking her wine glass and gazing at Mirela. ‘They photograph so beautifully…’

‘I’m calling it The Rusting Tractor,’ Harry said to Geoffrey. ‘It’s about a young woman moving from the city to an isolated village in Connemara, one of those places that’s totally stuck in the past, you know, no Internet access, two TV channels – anyway, she gets in a fight with the locals because she wants to put a mobile-phone mast up on her land, because I don’t know if you’ve been to the west but the coverage is really appalling out there, but to them this is a kind of sacrilege, because, you know, the “land”, capital L –’

‘Charlie!’ a hoarse voice called from across the table. ‘What’s he talkin about?’

‘I think he’s talking about mobile phones,’ I said.

‘… so what develops is a conflict between the quote-unquote “new” Ireland, the Ireland of technology and communication and gender equality, and the “old” Ireland of repression and superstition and resistance to change, which is represented by the rusting tractor…’

‘Why does he keep doin that thing with his fingers?’

‘Oh, it’s a sort of inverted commas,’ I whispered. ‘Just ignore him. It’s patent nonsense anyway. Mobile phones, the very idea is absurd. People don’t want to be bothered with phones when they’re out and about, that’s the whole reason they leave their houses.’

‘It’s like a strobe light goin off in me brain,’ Frank said through clenched teeth, holding his head with his hands.

‘What?’ I looked over at him. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and his eyes were doing this alarming trick of rolling back in his head. He was definitely behaving more sociopathically than usual. That blow earlier must have dislodged something. ‘Look at all these bastards,’ he said, gazing saturninely up and down the table.

‘Eat your truffles,’ I said hurriedly, pointing to his plate. ‘And maybe you shouldn’t drink any more.’ I poured his glass into mine.

I haven’t mentioned it up to now for fear of sounding immodest, but ever since I sat down Mirela had been staring at me. At first it had been in the form of plaintive, mea culpa-type looks whenever Harry’s head was turned, which I had politely ignored. Yet she persisted: and as the night wore on, they had increased in urgency – flickering constantly from the other side of the table as if she had some message she was attempting to send via a Morse code of blinks and flashes, until they came to resemble the entreaties of one of those silent-movie heroines who has been tied to a train track. But now, as the clock struck for midnight, she seemed suddenly to resign herself. She slumped down in her seat; at the same moment, a wine glass pinged, and Harry got to his feet.

‘Friends… friends.’ He held up his hand for quiet. ‘You’ll forgive me if I detain you with a few brief words of my own.’ His doltish hair looked even more snaky and annoying than usual. An Evening of Long Goodbyes began to growl. ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Bad dog. Be quiet,’ slipping him a truffle when Mother had stopped looking.

‘We’ve heard a lot tonight about “new visions”, “rebirths” and “new beginnings” –’

‘Gnnnhhhh,’ Frank ground his fists into his temples.

‘So in keeping with the general theme of the evening,’ Harry continued, ‘and with no further ado, it is my pleasure to inform you that at half past eight this evening, Miss Mirela Pribicevic agreed to give me her hand in marriage –’

Before he had finished the sentence, the female contingent of the table erupted and rushed over to swamp Mirela in squeals and embraces. ‘How wonderful!’ Mother clasped her hands to her cheeks as her eyes welled up with tears. ‘Oh, how wonderful!’

My first thoughts were for Bel, and I swung round with my arms half-outstretched, I suppose in case she might be about to swoon. But she was looking on placidly as if this were happening far, far away, to a group of people she had never met; and I was forced back to face my own emotions.

It was funny: if someone had put this situation to me hypothetically five minutes earlier, I’d probably have replied, quite honestly, that I didn’t think it would bother me in the slightest. Yet as I watched Mirela now, I felt as cold and sick and hollow as if I had been dealt a mortal blow. As I watched her emerge from the scrum of well-wishers, pink and fresh-faced and laughing and looking very much like a girl in love, everything she had said to me in our few contradictory exchanges ran through my mind; and in that moment, I realized with a terrible sense of finality that I had no idea, and I never would have any idea, how this world worked or what went on in the hearts of its inhabitants; that it was and always would be utterly opaque and mysterious to me, and that whatever happened from now on would not make any difference, because it would never come any closer.

‘Charlie,’ Frank confided sweatily, ‘I’m not feelin meself.’

‘Me neither, old chum,’ I said. ‘Me neither.’

Harry, meanwhile, had lied about a few brief words. Instead he was using his announcement as a springboard for more speechifying. ‘On the occasion of this double union,’ he raised his voice over the hubbub, ‘I would like to say a word of thanks. You hear a lot these days about how the notion of “the family” is one that can’t exist any more in our fast-paced modern world. But from the first day I came here, after Bel asked me to join the theatre group she was just starting, a family is exactly what it’s been. And it’s made me realize what a family can be. Coming from a typical middle-class, “petit-bourgeois” background, I suppose I had a fairly low opinion…’

From his position face-down on the empty plate, Frank informed me that he couldn’t take much more of this.

‘… realize that the family can be something political, radically political, can be a force which can be posited against the controlling groups of our time, a “free space” where differing opinions can come together and new unions can be made – like the one I am so fortunate to have made tonight.’

I gulped back a fresh glass of Rioja and felt a cold sweat break over me like a kind of necrosis. You can’t stop life from happening, that’s what Mirela said, that night in Frank’s apartment. It would carry you further and further away from yourself; it would make its way into your past and transform that too…

‘… learn that the market, like a gun, isn’t anything intrinsically good or bad, that we can use it for good, we can join forces with it. And just as we have grown, so Amaurot has grown with us…’

And meanwhile all anyone did was make speeches! It felt like he was dancing up and down on our grave, he and market forces, he and the asset strippers, he and the Golems of progress, and yet no one did anything, no one gainsaid or challenged him or said, It isn’t right, these things you’re saying aren’t right…

‘… a house weighed down by, or rather trapped in, its own history, to recontextualize it, realign it with modernity, and basically haul the place into the twenty-first century –’

I was reaching the point where I didn’t think I could physically stand any more; and evidently someone else in the room felt the same way, because suddenly a loud, exasperated voice called out, ‘Oh, balls!’

Everyone went quiet. Harry adjusted his bow tie, and said ‘Excuse me?’ as if to offer the perpetrator a chance to exculpate himself. But this protester was not to be silenced. ‘Balls!’ the voice cried again, even louder than before. I tittered to myself; and I was so enjoying seeing Harry squirm that it took a moment to realize that I was standing up, and that furthermore the entire table was staring at me.

Bother.

‘Charles, leave the table, please,’ Mother said.

‘No,’ Harry interjected. ‘If you don’t mind – let’s hear what Charles has to say.’

I wiped my palms on my trousers, unexpectedly finding myself addressing the room at large. ‘Well, I mean to say,’ I stuttered. ‘I mean… well, a house is a house isn’t it? It’s a place people live in. I don’t see what the twenty-first century’s got to do with it. I don’t see why, just because you’ve put up some new wallpaper, you should be allowed to claim the place in the name of the future, like some sort of… you know… time-travelling… pirate.’

‘That’s Harry for you,’ chuckled Niall O’Boyle. ‘I like a man who’s got his eye on the future. Because that’s where it’s all going to happen, mark my words. The past is one thing, but the future, that’s where the money is.’

‘I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes,’ Harry said. ‘I’m just saying you have to move with the times. It’s in everybody’s interests. You have to admit this place was falling to pieces before we came.’

I thought back to that golden age when it was just Bel and me and the drinks cabinet. ‘It wasn’t,’ I said.

‘It was,’ he reiterated. ‘The paint was peeling, the floors were rotten–your mother told us that while she was in hospital the bank was practically calling in the sheriffs to repossess the place…’

‘That was all a misunderstanding,’ I claimed.

‘But you blew up the Folly for the insurance,’ Harry pursued, fingering the buttons of his lawyer’s waistcoat. ‘I mean – you tried to fake your own death. How can you say the house was better off then?’

I blinked stuporously, and cast about me for support. Bel continued to gaze dreamily into space like a patient under ether in the dentist’s chair. Frank was lying inert on the table like a giant rag-doll, as he had been for the last five minutes. All the others waited for my response, their eyes holding me pinned like so many skewers. ‘We knew what we were doing,’ I mumbled.

There was a momentary delay; then, as one, the guests around the table burst into laughter. It was warm and full; everyone joined in, even people I had never met before, like Niall O’Boyle’s PA; even Mother, her anger dissipating in the general gaiety.

Harry threw his hands up humorously as if to say, I rest my case; I slunk down in my seat and thought that maybe I was just a dope – in all likelihood I was, I wasn’t debating the matter: but still it didn’t seem right that a man should be made to feel like this, not in the dining room of his own childhood home.

And then, abruptly, mechanically, Frank lifted his head from his plate. With a glazed yet curiously purposeful expression, like a man acting with orders from on high, he rose and tucked in his chair; then he crossed the floor and began strangling Harry.

For a couple of seconds we sat watching dumbly as plates flew, glasses smashed, chairs tumbled. Then the girls began to scream. At the same time, the bit-part actors at the end of the table hurrahed and stood on their seats to get a better view; the dog barked; Mirela turned grey; the businessmen puffed themselves up and waved their hands about –

‘Do something, Charles!’ Mother shrieked. ‘Do something!’

‘Right,’ I responded, getting to my feet. ‘Who’s for brandy? And I believe we have some cigars…’

‘Charlie?’

‘Yes, Frank?’

‘You awake?’

‘Yes, Frank, I’m awake.’

‘Where are we, Charlie?’

‘We’re in Father’s study. You had a sort of a funny turn.’

‘Oh right. I gave your man a box.’ There was a pause: the darkness recomposed itself over the shelves, the vials and periodicals and thick portfolios of photographs. ‘I’d say he wasn’t expectin that.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he was.’

‘Your ma was awful angry, wasn’t she? Like sayin she was goin to get us arrested and stuff.’

‘Oh, Mother says these things, you know…’

‘Sorry, Charlie. I dunno what happened. It was like I wasn’t in control of me own mind.’

I charitably let this pass.

‘He kept goin on and on with all that shite. It was drivin me mad. And I couldn’t just let him make a laugh of you.’

I coughed. ‘Well, I don’t know that he was making a laugh of me –’

‘Like I wasn’t just goin to let him make you look like some geebag that didn’t know his arse from his elbow.’

‘Well… well, thanks, old man.’

Silence.

‘Charlie?’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘Fuckin cold in here, isn’t it?’

‘…’

‘Charlie… d’you ever see a ghost here? I bet there’d be loads of ghosts in an old gaff like this… fuck –’ the camp bed creaked painfully, ‘just like that bit in Bel’s play, like all these faces like starin at you from the fuckin trees and shit –’

‘Look, there aren’t any ghosts, all right?’ I said irritably. ‘If there were, Harry would have roped them into serving dinner, or helping in his wretched play. Lord knows if I was a ghost I’d have fled the minute he walked in the door.’

‘Ah yeah, I s’pose…’ He laid himself gingerly back down. I turned back to the window. I was at my old vantage point behind Father’s desk, where I’d used to look out at the Folly and occasionally see an angel, or an actress. There weren’t any angels tonight; we had used up our quota, probably, or else they had hitched a ride with the ghosts.

We had ruined the dinner party so thoroughly, so unequivocally, that even after the furore had died down and the paramedics had gone, the wisest course of action had still seemed to be one of ignominious retreat. I wasn’t at all sure that Mother had been joking about pressing charges, so with Mrs P’s help I had smuggled Frank up here, and here the two of us had stayed. Only now, as I sat at the windowsill, did it occur to me that this was the end: that our parts were, at last, played out. Tomorrow was already today. Bel would leave for Yalta and Amaurot would be reborn as the Telsinor Hythloday Centre for the Arts. Our contributions had made, when it came to it, not the slightest bit of difference.

I had been utterly defeated on every front; I should, at that moment of all moments, have been steeped in despair. And yet, as I sat at the window, I did not find myself despairing. For out of the gloom, the hopelessness, the humiliation of the day, certain images kept defiantly floating up: Frank with Droyd in his arms, lurching out of the stinking basement; Frank thumping the Plexiglas, cheering on the dogs; the glorious moment of Frank, tongue tucked between his teeth, crisply punching Harry on the nose. I didn’t ask for them; they didn’t appear to change anything; yet there they were, floating up out of the darkness before my eyes, over and over again, and with them now something Yeats had said once: ‘Friendship is all the house I have.’

I frowned out through my ghostly reflection at the swaying trees, the rain. Friendship is all the house I have. It wasn’t a line I’d given much thought to before. Still, you could see what he meant, given all the problems one encountered with actual houses – heating bills and mortgages and wayward domestics, rack-renting landlords, actors moving in, all that. What kind of house would my friendship make? The day’s events paraded palely by again, like the tapestry of a long-ago battle. On the evidence it seemed that, for all my aspirations to the courtly life, I hadn’t provided much protection from the elements. Bel, Amaurot, Droyd and the Latvians… the closer you looked the more it appeared that, in terms of houses, it was your Charles Hythlodays who were the seedy overpriced flats with wobbling walls and dubious plumbing; while it was the Franks of this world – even if they thought a French press was some sort of ungentlemanly wrestling move, even if they were under the impression that Stockhausen was a Swedish furniture shop, even if one had heard them with one’s own ears telling Droyd when he asked that Donatella Versace was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – it was the Franks who were the grand old mansions overlooking the sea. And it struck me that the last time we all of us had been happy – really happy, even if we hadn’t been aware of it – was when Frank and Bel were still together.

‘I say…’

No response.

‘Frank?’

‘Whhnnnhhh?’

‘You know, I’ve been thinking. Bel’s only going for six months. It’s not such a long time really…’

‘…’

‘I was just thinking that if – if you ever wanted to, you know, give it another shot with her…’

‘Yes, Charlie?’

‘Well, I might be able to put in a word, that’s all.’

I had never dreamed I would be saying this; and yet suddenly I could picture it so clearly – me restored to my room, the theatre disassembled and scattered to the four winds, Bel and I laughing gaily as Frank attended to any heavy lifting work that needed to be done around the house, as all the flurrying elements of our lives drifted back down into place, like the flakes in one of those little snow globes…

‘Cheers, Charlie,’ Frank said. ‘You’re a sound man.’

‘Well, it’s the least I could do. I mean I should have mentioned it earlier.’

‘Yeah,’ he scratched his nose thoughtfully. ‘’Member, though, how you were sayin that about plenty of fish in the sea?’

‘Yes?’

‘Yeah, cos like, eh, me and Laura, we’ve been, eh, you know…’

‘You’ve been what?’

‘Well like, you prob’ly noticed she’s been around a good bit lately…’

‘I thought she just liked DIY,’ I said in a small voice.

‘You don’t mind, do you? I wuz worried you might have a bit of a boner for her yourself.’

‘Not at all,’ I said; as the restored Amaurot receded over the horizon into the Land of Might-Have-Been, and with it the bounteous Laura, her grabulous melons… ‘I’m delighted, old chap. Delighted.’

‘Yeah, cheers Charlie. I’ll give her one for you, ha ha.’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly.

Mercifully his breathing deepened into snores; and after I had listened to the snores for an hour or so, I decided that maybe what I really wanted was a drink; so I rose again and went downstairs.

The caterers had gone home hours ago. Everything was tidied away. The long table had been stripped of its trappings, the chairs ordered with geometrical precision around it; the blood-splashes from Harry’s nose had been mopped up, the dishes washed and dried and stacked in the cupboard. Father waited, waited, in his frame in the hallway. Without knowing why, especially, I began to go from room to room, picking things up and putting them down again. In the vague blue darkness, everything seemed to tingle; I felt a little like the Prince in Sleeping Beauty, creeping through the slumbering castle, observing the secret life the objects led while everyone lay in their enchanted sleep. Then I found myself beside the drinks cabinet, and thought that seeing as I was in the neighbourhood, I might as well make myself a gimlet. After a moment’s thought, I decided that it ought really to be a double. Then I took the bottle and put it in my pocket.

Bel was in the drawing room on her own, staring out the window with the lights off.

‘Didn’t think I’d find you still up and about…’ I attempted a jolly avuncular tone.

‘The taxi’s coming at four. There hardly seemed much point going to bed.’

‘Interest you in a…?’ I held up my glass and jingled the ice cubes. She looked round.

‘How can you still be drinking?’ she said affectlessly, returning to her vigil.

‘Years of practice, I suppose…’ I took a seat on the chaise longue. A pink vinyl suitcase rested at one end. Outside thunder groaned and the sky lit up silver. ‘Lord, what an awful night. Don’t know if your plane’ll fly if it keeps up like that.’

‘It’ll fly,’ Bel said.

‘Aha,’ I returned emptily. I shunted myself forward, attempting to balance my drink on my knee. ‘Glad I caught you, as a matter of fact. Didn’t get much of a chance to say goodbye earlier on, what with all the fuss and all those paramedics swarming around. Cripes, you’d think even a haemophiliac would be able to deal with a bloody nose, ha ha…’ She didn’t appear to have an opinion on this. I rubbed my hands together miserably. ‘Wanted to ask you how you felt about the Harry and Mirela thing too. Must have been a bit of a shock for you, after all.’

The slender shoulders shrugged indifferently. ‘She’s marrying him for citizenship. If he doesn’t know that now, he soon will.’

‘Ah. Well, that’s good, then.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Dinner seemed to go fairly painlessly otherwise, didn’t it, apart from the, the fighting I mean… The statue, for example, I thought that was a nice touch.’

This at least evoked a response. ‘A statue,’ she murmured, staring out at the night. ‘A statue…’

I took a good draught of my gimlet. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to beat around the bush. Maybe you want to hear this and maybe you don’t, but you ought to know that what happened between Mirela and me, it was a mistake. I had – that is, I didn’t…’ I broke off, trying and failing to untangle the words that were coiling up in my brain like Silly String.

‘What happened between you and Mirela is entirely your own business,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I said unhappily. ‘Good. Because I thought, you know, I was worried you might be going to Russia because of me, ha ha.’

She shook her head, came away from her curtain and plucked an azalea from an enormous bunch on the table. ‘Think of Russia as a last hurrah,’ she said. ‘A whistle-stop tour of my childhood dreams, before I settle down and marry money.’ She clasped the stem between her two hands and waved the flower at me. ‘It’s late, Charles. You should go to bed.’

‘Right, right,’ I agreed, clambering off the chaise longue. ‘Well, bon voyage,’ I said, then, impulsively, went over to hug her. It was awkward and stiff; I felt her body pulling back. ‘Right,’ I said again, and backed falteringly out of the room.

‘Oh, Charles?’ She stopped me as I reached the door. ‘That tag, do you have it?’

‘What? Oh… yes.’ I fumbled about in my pockets. ‘I have your phone too, if you want it.’

She told me that she wouldn’t need that. ‘I would like the tag though. Just as a memento. Silly, I suppose.’

‘No, no…’ I found the dog tag, and flipped it in the air like a coin; as I caught it I laughed. ‘When I think about how you used to worry about that dog, night and day. You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart. I never did understand it, those were such happy days…’ Bel had picked up several more flowers now and held them in a fan across her face. ‘Do you remember,’ I chuckled, ‘how we used to pretend your mattress was a raft, and the stairs were a river, and we were sailing away escaping from the Serfs? And how we’d act out scenes from Eugene Onegin, and you’d get cross because you didn’t think I was sad enough when you told me you didn’t love me?’ The fan nodded infinitesimally swayed by the lightest of breezes. I rubbed my chin excitably. ‘Remember how we used to help Father inventing make-up? He’d give us poster-paints, you’d get yourself up as Tinkerbell, and I’d be Bela Lugosi. I was absolutely convinced there was a fortune to be made from this untapped market for Bela Lugosi make-up – what is it?’

Bel had lowered her fan, and was looking at me with a kind of impatience. ‘It wasn’t always happy days,’ she said. ‘There were things to forget, too.’

‘How do you mean?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s late, that’s all. You should go to bed.’ Then, pretending not to notice me stare, she held out her hand. ‘The tag?’

I closed my fist around it and lowered it slowly down by my side.

‘Don’t be childish, Charles, just give it to me.’

‘First tell me what you meant.’

‘Nothing, I didn’t mean anything…’ She had turned an angry beetroot colour.

‘It wasn’t nothing, if it was nothing you wouldn’t have said it, and what do you want this old thing for anyway, it hasn’t even got a name on it…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, just keep it then!’ she wheeled away exasperated. Immediately I felt sorry and lunkish and I was just about to apologize and hand it over when she spun round, catching me unawares –

‘Ow – what are you doing?’

‘Give me it, Charles –’ digging her nails in my hand to try and get me to release it. I pushed her away: she pressed her elbow into my chest for leverage, and we tussled for another minute before I twisted her arm to disempower her, but did it too hard so she was thrown back on to the drawing-room floor.

‘Oh hell…’

‘Get off me –’

‘I didn’t mean it, I was just –’

‘You were just drunk, you’re always drunk…’ She wriggled away from my outstretched hand to lean against one leg of the chaise longue.

‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘It’s not broken, is it?’ She didn’t reply, just sat folded-up by her suitcase, nursing her wrist.

‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ I said, feeling guilty. ‘It’s just, I don’t see why you always have to run things down…’

‘Oh Lord – just leave me alone, will you?’

‘You do, Bel. I mean maybe you don’t notice, but –’

She looked up with tears of pain in her eyes. ‘Why do you keep doing this to me?’

‘Doing what?’

‘Why do you keep making me have the same conversation again and again and again?’

‘I don’t.’

‘You do, with your happy memories and weren’t-we-blessed, you make it seem like this the whole time I’ve been living in a totally different life to you, you have no idea how it makes me feel…’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The way you talk about us, the way all your stories are about when we were little children, like nothing ever happened after we were ten years old, and everything bad you can just paint over and forget –’

‘I’m not painting over anything.’

‘Me in the hospital, why don’t you ever talk about that? Didn’t that happen? It was you who called the ambulance, wasn’t it? Or did I imagine it?’ The embers from the fire cast a deep-red livid glow over her face: she rubbed her wrist agitatedly, brushed her nose with her sleeve.

‘It was a painful period in our lives,’ I said. ‘Just because I don’t talk about something doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten it, or painted over it…’

‘You do!’ She struggled to her feet, the injured wrist held in one hand giving her a martyred aspect. ‘Even tonight when I’m going you come home with some stray dog you found half-dead because you don’t want me to remember the first one, because you think you can just erase the memory when the whole point is we shouldn’t be trying to forget it, we should be remembering it and what a rotten thing it was for Mother to take a little puppy and –’

‘It was just a bon voyage gift,’ I protested. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be some kind of existential –’

‘It was, Charles, it always is, and then you start in on me with remember this remember that and everything you don’t want to remember either just disappears or else you twist it around to make it fit this illusion you live in, just like the rest of them with their statues and their tradition and perpetuating Father’s legacy – but it’s worse when it’s you, because you were here, you know it’s not true.’

It was late, and I should have known to leave her be. In a very short period of time she had worked herself into quite a state. But I was a little the worse the wear myself by this point, and suddenly I had had enough of her put-downs; so I told her rather harshly that I hadn’t the faintest clue what she was talking about.

She ground her hand against her cheek frustratedly. ‘This, Charles. The whole house. All the lying and pretending and putting on masks, everybody doing whatever they can to avoid having to actually confront reality, everything paid for by conning old ladies into thinking they can be young again – it’s a total fiction, all of it. That’s all it’s ever been, it’s what the house was built on.’ She paced out to the fireplace and back, circling like some tormented moth. ‘And now it happens all over again, with Harry and Mirela, and this phone company using us to make itself look like something instead of a bunch of Scandinavian venture capital. And Mother trying to look like she cares, and more lying and pretending, and that’s Father’s legacy, Charles, that and a hundred bank accounts that we don’t even know where they are, and yet you still won’t admit it, even when you know what went on up there, Jesus Christ you know how he died, and then you think to ask me why I’m going to Yalta – God, when I think of spending another second here…’

In the window lightning snapped, transforming the room momentarily into an engraving. ‘Are you finished?’ I said quietly.

‘Yes I’m – why, wait, where are you going?’

‘I’m going to wake Mother,’ I said.

‘What?’ She scurried round and interposed herself in front of the door. ‘What?’

‘I’m going to get Mother, and then I’m going to call the doctor,’ I said, setting her aside. ‘You’re hysterical.’

‘I’m not hysterical,’ Bel said, shocked. ‘Why do you think I’m –’

‘You’re hysterical, and I’m calling the doctor. You’re not in any shape to be going anywhere.’

‘That isn’t fair, Charles, just because I tell you something you don’t want to hear doesn’t mean I’m hysterical,’ she stretched out a hand, which I dodged easily, ‘just because something happened once you can’t keep –’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said stolidly. ‘I have to do it.’

‘But it isn’t – wait!’ springing back nimbly to block my path again. ‘Wait, Charles – Charles, wait –’ She hung her head, pinched her nose with one hand, took a deep breath. ‘Wait, there’s no need to drag Mother out of bed. You’re right. I’m overwrought. It’s been such an exhausting day. I’m sorry. I just need a minute to calm down, that’s all. Why don’t we just –’ she cast about her, then caught sight of the bottle poking out of my pocket, ‘why don’t we just sit down, and pour ourselves a drink, and calm ourselves down.’

She tugged at my shirt buttons pleadingly. I wavered. Her eyes seemed chaotic and far too white: still, a drink would really hit the spot about now.

Bel fetched a glass and poured a healthy shot for herself, then one for me. We sat on the chaise longue and sipped and looked out at the storm, as placid and genteel as if we were taking tea on the lawn. Unprompted, she began to chat about this masterclass in Yalta, and how the residence had been Chekhov’s country house when ill health forced him from Moscow; how he’d lived with his actress wife Olga and written his last play, The Cherry Orchard, there; how on his birthday he’d returned to Moscow for its first performance, and had a coughing fit when the audience called him out on stage; how he’d died peacefully two months later, at the age of forty-four. And what she’d said, or almost said, a moment before, hung undispellably in the room, invisible and odourless as asbestos. And after we’d lapsed back into silence, and sat there a while longer, I said: ‘Do you remember the night of the school play, Bel?’

‘Mmm?’ she said absently.

‘When you did The Cherry Orchard, and you forgot your lines. You went totally blank, do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember,’ she said.

‘I was telling Frank about it and I realized I never did ask you what happened.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose I mustn’t have learned my part very well.’

‘You had that big fight with Mother,’ I said. ‘And the next day you got sick. But we never talked about it.’

She looked at me curiously. ‘I have a better idea, Charles,’ she said, getting up. ‘Go to bed. Drink your drink and go to bed, and tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about this.’

‘I thought you said we ought to be remembering things.’

The vodka made the air seem close and velvety like a cushion. Behind her the sky sparked silver again and reeled into darkness and I thought suddenly of Gene Tierney waking up in her hospital bed after her electric-shock treatment not knowing where, or who, she was.

‘You know what happened,’ she said quietly.

‘Tell me again.’

She chewed her knuckle thoughtfully. She looked at the clock, the dying embers in the fire. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You won’t believe me anyway.’ She picked up the azaleas again and went to the curtain, beating them rhythmically against her palm. ‘But it wasn’t that night everything happened,’ she said. ‘It was a few days beforehand. We all got half-days that week, so we could go and practise our lines. It must have been a Wednesday, because the maid was off. I was in my room, going over a couple of scenes, when I heard this – I don’t know how to describe it. In my memory it’s just this sound of… trouble. I didn’t know what it could be. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone in the house. I opened the door to see what it was, and I found this girl, standing there, totally naked. Just standing there, it was like something out of a dream. She had this blue eyeshadow on and she was staring right at me but I don’t think she knew I was there. I don’t think she knew where she was. Her eyes were just these blanks. For a minute we stood there blinking at each other, and then Father came round the corner and she bolted off down the stairs. I was left there looking at him. I think I said something like, ‘What’s up?’ And he grabs me and goes, ‘Christabel, there’s been an accident, I need you to help.’ He kept saying it over and over. He wouldn’t let me go. There was no accident, obviously. But whatever had happened the girl was in hysterics, and she wouldn’t let him go near her. So I had to go and look for her. She was in the utility room, wedged in behind the dryer, you know where Mrs P keeps the ironing board? I found her in there and Charles, all I wanted to do was get in beside her, she looked so small and thin, so defenceless, like a little animal. Wearing nothing at all except this eyeshadow, all this dark-blue eyeshadow, that made me think of those scary Egyptian goddesses, Isis and Nephthys and those ones? But I talked to her and took her to the bathroom and washed her and calmed her down. She was okay after a while. There was nothing really the matter with her. She’d just freaked out. She was just so young. She went upstairs to put on her clothes and I called her a taxi. Father stayed out of sight. Then she was gone, and I went back to my room to read my lines, and it was like nothing had happened. He didn’t say anything to me about it and I didn’t intend to tell anyone else. Not to protect him, necessarily. More that I thought if I didn’t tell anybody it would feel less like something that had really happened. But of course I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Suddenly it was like everything in the house revealed this new meaning. The locked doors, the photographs. I’d stand in my room and look at all the things he’d given me, the clothes, jewellery, perfume, and I’d think, did he give the same things to his – to the models? Did he pickup three of everything at the airport? Or did he see something looked nice on some girl he was…’ She paused decorously. Outside the night shuddered and boomed. ‘And then I started throwing up. I couldn’t keep anything down. Mother thought it was nerves because of the play. Maybe it was, partly. And the night it was on, she was so sweet, telling me not to worry and how she’d played Varia when she was a little older than me and then before I could stop myself it all came out. I was crying and everything just came out. I didn’t think how she’d react. Or I thought she would want to know. I mean I thought that that was the whole point of the truth, that you told it. And you know she was always the one chasing after us to stand up straight and tuck in our shirts and not steal Thompson’s apples. For a while when I’d finished she didn’t say anything. I remember she was standing beside the sink with her mouth closed, and I was sitting at the kitchen table in this ridiculous Russian ballgown just wishing she’d say something. But then when she did I wished she would stop because it was so horrible. The main thrust of it, though, was that I had made the whole story up. She was so angry – so angry I was worried she might damage herself, and I started thinking that I must have made it up, and I wondered why I would do such a horrible thing, which is when everything got confusing.’

She stepped across to the mantelpiece and trailed her fingers over the marble; I lifted the glass to my lips and found it was empty. I reached for the bottle.

‘If I hadn’t told her, everything would’ve been fine. She knew anyway, that’s what I realized afterwards. Everybody does it. It’s a part of the fashion world. They take these fourteen-year-old girls away from their homes, they turn them into fantasies, they make them famous and rich and in return… well, who could resist it, making love to an actual work of art, to your very own creation? It’s a kind of a droit de seigneur, I suppose. And then they wonder why two years down the line their artworks are anorexic or swallowing razor blades. But of course Mother knew about it. I presume they’d come to some kind of arrangement. Or maybe she didn’t care what he did, so long as it was discreet. All she wanted was to have the city at her feet again, everybody paying her compliments like in the old days. Like at that dinner party tonight, she was so happy. She was even thinking of giving you a room in the new wing, Charles, if you hadn’t made such a mess of things. But she never forgave me. I broke the rules. Everything’s fine as long as nobody tells. Everyone knows and everyone pretends not to and that’s how the world keeps turning. But once the truth starts coming out, the entire artifice crumbles. There’s too much at stake for that to be allowed to happen. That’s what she was trying to tell me the night of the play. And you know, she always did say an actress should never concern herself overly with the truth.’ She cupped her hands round her vodka glass and hunched her shoulders. ‘But I never was much of an actress.’

She paused and drank and refilled the glass. I wanted to stand up and say something but there was a weight pressing down on my chest and I was having some kind of problem with my vision. I didn’t seem to be able to make out the whole room: instead individual areas were being illuminated one by one, like lights in a pinball machine – the pink vinyl suitcase at my right foot; the hounds tearing at Actaeon; the swell of green metal over the front wheel of the Mercedes outside the garage; Bel’s legs white as candlesticks under the whipping black dress as she came back and stood in front of me.

‘But you know all this,’ she said. ‘I know you know. Maybe not all of the details, necessarily. But enough. That’s why you’ve been falling over yourself trying to get out of the place, first that half-witted plan to go to Chile, and then when that didn’t work you storm out after some tiff with Mother? Because she told you to get a job, you leave your ancestral home and move in with Frank?’

She sat down next to me on the chaise longue. ‘Don’t you see, though, that’s why I get angry with you, because you pretend not to know, because you act like you think everything in the world’s just a digression from the grand noble lives Father had mapped out for us, and that if you ever did anything or became part of anything, you’d be betraying him. But there is no map, Charles. There are no values. All Amaurot ever was was somewhere to fill up with his delusions and walk around with his head in the clouds, pretending the world outside didn’t exist. I’m not judging him for it. But none of this means anything at all. Except maybe money.’

The balls of my fingers were sweating, and the glass kept wanting to slip away from them. The mad skirl of the storm came rushing down the chimney. It felt rather as if we had arrived at the end of the world; and all that was left now was this drawing room, this chaise longue, her body beside mine. Summoning all my energies I heaved myself forward, like some old dinosaur struggling out of the swamp, so that my forearms leaned on my thighs; then, clearing the dust from my throat, I said in a slurred voice: ‘Poppycock.’

I might have gone on. I might have told her that I’d never in my life heard such vile trash; I might have gone through her points and refuted them one by one. But I found that the effort of sitting up had exhausted me; so I set my glass down by the suitcase and sat staring sourly at the floor, ignoring her gaze on my cheek.

‘Geoffrey’s been arraigned,’ Bel said: her voice had regained its parsed, melodious distance. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard. One of Father’s companies turned up in this offshore thing the government’s investigating. They haven’t traced it as far as us yet. But it’ll hardly take them long. It’s pretty obvious once you start looking at the books. Front companies, holding companies, dummy accounts, leading here, there, into the ether. Donations to these mysterious charities, trust funds – you must have wondered what happened to your trust, Charles, you must have realized even you couldn’t have drunk it all.’

I said nothing; eventually she sighed and got up and went to the curtain again, as she had been when I came in.

‘I mean it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The place’ll go on regardless, and get stronger and stronger. They’ll create synergies and put up statues. How could you ever stop something as big as that?’ She looked round at me over her shoulder. ‘So you can wake Mother now, if you want. Tell her I’ve gone crazy again.’

I still did not reply; I was thinking of something else now.

‘But Charles, promise me one thing. When I’m gone, promise you won’t come back here. Even if Mother offers you a room. There isn’t going to be any more face-painting, do you understand that?’ She crossed the floor, frowning to herself. I suppressed a giggle. She hadn’t noticed, but there were two of her now, pacing along side by side. The room was beginning to wheel slowly, in a cosy, rockabying sort of a way. ‘And you have to stop falling in love with beautiful girls you don’t know anything about…’ A chorus-line of Bels lifted their hands and pushed the bangs out of their eyes. ‘Because what you have to remember, if there’s one thing, it’s that everybody’s human, that’s the first thing they are, whether they’re beautiful or not, or rich or poor, or actresses from the 1940s or Frank… they’re all humans, the first thing they are is human, do you see? Do you see, Charles?’

I was only dimly aware of the kaleidoscope-Bel that shimmered up and waited expectantly at my foot. I was thinking of that time when she was seven, when she’d watched the documentary about the famine in Ethiopia and decided she was going to make a cake to send over to them: ‘Do you remember, Bel? Everyone was out and the kitchen went on fire, and Father said, when the firemen had gone, Father said –’ hooting with laughter now, ‘he had a good mind to ask the blasted Ethiopians to send some of their food to us, seeing as we’d have to eat takeaways for the next month…’

The shimmer paused, then said quietly that she remembered. The clock struck something-or-other, and she said she really did have some things to do.

‘Yes,’ I said, rising unsteadily and sinking again. ‘I might just need a – a small hand, however…’

She took my wrist and hauled me up. When I had found my feet, she draped my right arm over her shoulders and linked her own arms tightly around my waist, and in this fashion we made our way down the hall, with her slight frame braced against mine, adjusting itself forwards, backwards to counter my errant centre of gravity. It seemed, as we began our ascent of the stairs, that I could hear the sound of chopping wood somewhere; but Bel was already huffing under my weight, so I didn’t mention it. Probably just some left-behind spook, I thought, as she hefted me onward; probably just some Golem, dragging its sad, sleepless feet of clay through the darkened grounds.

The next thing I knew, we were standing outside Father’s study door. ‘Well,’ I said to the place where I thought she was standing.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Give my regards to old Chekhov.’

‘Of course.’

There was an awkward lacuna: suddenly I was aware of something having been brought up that had been left unresolved – or was it something left unsaid that should have been said? I couldn’t remember, so hazarding a guess I said, ‘You know, that business we were talking about before. You and I finding a place to live, so forth. We should have a talk about it when you get back, thrash out something definite.’

‘Of course,’ she said again: no more than a smudge now, a thumbprint on the photograph of the night. She planted a kiss on my cheek. ‘Goodbye, Charles.’

‘Goodbye,’ I said. But she had already vanished down the stairs.

I tripped into the study and took my share of the blankets back from Frank and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep; as Bel returned downstairs, went out to the garage, climbed into Father’s Mercedes, and drove it at full speed into the garden wall.

‘Why should people be trapped with just one face?’ Father liked to say. ‘Or stuck in just one life?’

The mask, he’d say, was something that you wore but was opposite to you; because it was not wholly real, it could withstand pain that you could not; because it was not wholly human, its beauty was not diminished by age or feeling. Father’s hands never smelled of the same thing twice; and fragrances hung in the house like sweet invaders, like opulent chains of memories that no longer belonged to anyone.

We’d encounter his models on their way up or down the stairs, in the ordinary prettiness of their unmade-up daytime faces; it was always a shock to find them in the magazines a few months later, and see what Father had made from them. Louche, tomboy, prissy, gauche; Cleopatran, Regency, Berlin decadent; flappers and hippies and Arabian princesses – he mined their faces for stories and myths and desires old as history, or older, like seams of rare ore that lay buried in the earth of their youth.

In the magazines, the faces of these transient girls had a power, a power that my father could summon and balance, like those old music-hall acts that spun plates on sticks. They could call into being any age or emotion or state of mind; and everything around them would be transformed too, turned from diffuse, unwieldy life into a story, something with direction and significance. Looking out from the glossy pages, their faces seemed to promise everything; they promised that you could become anything; they promised that they would take you with them, that you could leave yourself behind.

She had probably gone right through the windscreen, the forensics man said; through the windscreen and over the wall into the sea. An old car like that wouldn’t give you much protection in the event of a collision. Examining the wreck, he hadn’t found any reason why it should have taken off like that – but then again it was so badly damaged it was hard to tell; and anyway these old cars always had their own idiosyncrasies. They were museum pieces, really, they weren’t meant to be driven.

Mother thrived in certain kinds of adversity. For the following week, as the rest of us stumbled around in a daze, she handled the policemen and detectives who swarmed about the house – answering their questions, providing copies of old medical reports, making sure they got lunch. When the crash was placed at roughly half past four, it was she who remembered that the taxi had been supposed to come on the hour; it was she who put forward the idea that Bel, realizing it wasn’t going to arrive in time, had in a panic decided to take the antediluvian Mercedes to the airport, only for it to spin immediately out of control on the wet grass. The police agreed subsequently that this was by far the most likely explanation.

They took statements from all of us, but most of the time stayed out in the garden, taking photographs of the garage, measuring the doorway with tape, making plastercasts of the tyre tracks that led over the lawn through splintered wood and split branches to where the car sat in a spray of ground glass and broken stonework, salt air blowing through the smashed windscreen, by the low wall that bounded the bluff from the steep drop down to the sea: only a few feet, coincidentally, from the spot where Father would take Bel and me on long-ago evenings, to look down at the waves and recite to us: Come away, O human child, To the waters and the wild.

There were divers too, with a boat, but the water at the base of the cliffs was so choppy that it was impossible to conduct a proper search. We would have to wait, they said meaningfully, and we nodded comprehension. All this time I was expecting her to walk in the door, laughing, and explain that it had all been a prank, a set-up, a misunderstanding. But she didn’t; nor did she wash up on the shore; and after a week the coroner filed a verdict of death by misadventure.

At the service at the tiny church, her absence only added to the already sharp air of unreality. There was a curious sense of rehearsal to the proceedings (but for whom? for what?); people were wary with their grief. Mother worked hard to counter this and give the occasion the appropriate gravitas. The actors in their orgy of lamentation; the college-friends from Trinity; the girls I knew from her school yearbooks, already marked a little by time; the countless oafs, oiks, nitwits and pettifoggers she had dallied with against my advice; the litany of bumptious uncles and dreary second cousins, headed by that poisonous maiden aunt of Mother’s, who only seemed to come alive at times like this; friends of the Family, with a capital F: society types one had met only once or twice, the shiny-headed fellow with all the supermarkets, a couple of the lesser Smorfetts, the Earl of somewhere-or-other, who at a do many years ago had been sick down Mother’s décolletage – she greeted every one of them with a smile and a heartfelt word of thanks; she was so good at these things.

That night she assembled the theatre people and told them that the family would prefer to be left alone for a while; and it was only when they had gone that I realized that ‘the family’ now meant just the two of us, and our slight retinue.

The house seemed to grow bigger in the silence of the succeeding afternoons, bigger and colder, no matter how many fires were lit; one felt, as one rattled purposelessly through it, a little like an Arctic explorer trekking through some icy wasteland, where the only sources of warmth were endless cups of tea, and the convalescent dog licking one’s hand. Vuk and Zoran had retired to the garden shed, where they could be heard very quietly rehearsing ‘You Are My Sunshine’; Mirela stayed in her room and did not come out. It became possible to spend the whole day without speaking to anyone.

Occasionally I’d meet Mother in her dressing gown, on the stairs or in the hall with a whiskey glass in her hand, and we’d exchange a few desultory lines about the cobwebs, or the dust. Mrs P cooked meals that nobody ate, that sat all night long on the dining-room table; she cleaned and dusted and hoovered from dawn till dusk, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Every day more of the house was given over to shadows. Older forces were reasserting themselves now; we did little to resist.

Most of the time I’d sit up in Bel’s bedroom and flick through her yearbooks, or old photographs predating her ban. In one of them she sat with her arms thrown around the anonymous dog, as if pleading, on its behalf, for mercy; and I wondered if she’d never let go of that childhood idea of the world as a place where nothing could be held on to, where every step was on thin ice, where every sunset might be the last; if we’d never managed to convince her otherwise. Sitting there in an aureole of pale November sunshine, I’d look around the room as if seeing it for the first time, as every surface – the rosewood doors of the wardrobe, the ruched velvet of the curtains, the satin sheen of a half-dozen formal dresses – became a tableau on which her image appeared and fled from just as my eye lit on it, dancing capriciously from point to point until I was too dizzy and tired to chase it any more and I laid my head down on the pillow, with the sunshine like a friendly palm on my cheek, and the smell of her so close; and then I would smile, for how silly it seemed, here among her warm sheets, that she could be gone, how like a storybook with the wrong ending, here on the mattress that was the raft that we had sailed on so many Sunday afternoons, down tumbling rapids and shady meanders, to St Petersburg and Timbuktu, to Narnia and Never-Never Land…

Until one day I went in, and the things had gone back to being merely things. It was as if overnight some spirit had left them; I found myself in a roomful of anonymous objects, a rabble of wood and plastic that no longer had anything to do with anything, waiting to be gone through and put in boxes, or thrown away. That was when I realized I had to go.

By chance, the day I chose to return to Bonetown was the day the builders came in bulldozers to demolish Old Man Thompson’s house, and found Olivier’s body hanging from the remotest end of the verandah. He had been there for some time; the auction-house people must have missed him when they were clearing out the interior.

The builders had to cut him down. They were rattled and they left off work for the day to come in and sit in our kitchen. They hadn’t heard about Thompson’s death, or the rival claim for the estate that Olivier had refused to challenge. I explained it to them and they shook their heads. ‘It would have had to’ve been knocked down whether your man had sold it or not, Mr H. That place is only waitin for a stray spark to go up like a matchbox. You know the way with these old places. Just to put in new wiring you’d have to rip up so much of it it’s hardly worth it. Cheaper in the long run to knock it all down and start again. No point gettin upset about it.’

The new development was being called Romanov Arbour: five luxury residences with gym and sauna, each one named after a different Russian writer: the Pushkin, the Tolstoy, the Gogol and so on. They had already been pre-sold for record sums.

‘Computer money, Mr H,’ the builders said. ‘Give these people a place with an electric fence and a foreign-sounding name and the sky’s the limit.’ They didn’t like it, but as they said, you couldn’t get too upset about these things: especially being a builder, especially in Dublin. Anyway, this was their last job. They had saved enough money to get out of the rat race.

‘Out?’ I said.

‘Mexico,’ they said. In the New Year they were taking their equipment and moving out to join some crowd who had set up their own state in the jungle of the Chiapas Mountains. The leader wore a black balaclava that he never took off. ‘He says it’s a mirror,’ the builders told me, ‘for the faces of the dispossessed.’

‘Must get awfully stuffy, though,’ I said. ‘You know, it being the jungle and everything.’

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ they said, climbing into their bulldozers. ‘So long, Mr H! Vive la révolution!’

I never thought of Bonetown as anything more than a temporary solution. Yet the longer I stayed, the more the idea of living away from Frank came to trouble me. It wasn’t that he said anything, nor indeed that he did anything; it was more the basic fact of him that was reassuring. He seemed to prop things up, somehow: he was like a buttress, holding up a very important wall.

It seemed to make a kind of sense, moreover, being back amid the junk, the discarded pieces of failed lives. So I brought over the piano from home in his van, and squeezed it into the living room, and in the evenings after work – as Droyd, to whom Frank was teaching the rudiments of Panel Beating, hammered away at the kennel he was making for An Evening of Long Goodbyes, and Laura hung pictures of flowers in wooden frames from Habitat, or combed the day’s salvage for treasures that might fit the colour scheme she was devising for the apartment, and beneath the window the pushers pushed and the addicts grovelld, and Frank snored gently, patriarchally in front of the muted television news – I tinkered with fragments of melodies that had come to me, or that perhaps I had heard somewhere before: on Bel’s record player, maybe, the Dylan fellow, or the woman with the grace notes who sang the song about the dishwasher and the coffee percolator. And one day I stopped at the front door and, with the lipstick I had never given back to her, added to the graffiti a bright-red C.

‘Charm the Homeless,’ read a reedy voice behind me. I turned to see a scruffy boy in a sweater. It took me a moment to recognize him without his trolley and his accomplice: and before I could ask him where they had gone, he had scurried away.

I had taken that job, in Frank’s friend’s warehouse: I worked the late shift, from two o’clock till half past ten, readying everything for pick-up the next day. The warehouse was the distribution centre for a company that manufactured uniforms. They made them in Africa then shipped them here to be delivered to various points about the country. My job was to separate them into individual orders: with my billhook plucking each item from rails that went all the way up to the ceiling, packing the goods into boxes I had assembled earlier, checking off names and addresses against triplicate order forms. The only other worker was a deaf-mute called Rosco who generally left me alone. It was peaceful there, among the aisles of empty pants and jackets – like a museum, I thought, a museum of the present. Usually by nine o’clock or so, everything was done; and when I had swept the floor and assembled a few dozen boxes for tomorrow, I would retire to a chair and a rickety writing desk I had stowed away at the end of the nurses’ aisle; and hidden by their crisp white hospital skirts and tunics, begin to write.

On Christmas Eve 1958, the day before she was to return to Hollywood after her four-year absence, Gene Tierney suffered her most total breakdown yet. She had been fine: she had convalesced with her mother in Connecticut; Life and Time had written articles about her to the tune of ‘Reborn Star’ and ‘Welcome Home for Troubled Beauty’. But the night before the flight, quite without warning, she dissolved utterly; and instead of California, she woke – like Dorothy returning from Oz – and found herself in Kansas. This was the Menninger Clinic, her third and last institution. The doctor who ran the clinic didn’t believe in ECT. Instead, Gene was encouraged to do what she wanted: and what she wanted to do, it turned out, was knit. She knitted rugs and pillows. She knitted throws and shawls and full-length dresses. She knitted and knitted for months on end and, gradually, she was restored to herself.

When she finally made it back to Hollywood in 1962, the studio system that created her was long gone, and because of her history, the insurance companies wouldn’t cover her to work. It was Otto Preminger – who’d directed her in two of her best films, Laura and Whirlpool – who bailed her out, threatening his producers that he would quit the picture if she wasn’t given a part, insurance or no insurance. She was given the part: her cameo in Advise and Consent allowed her to complete her contract with Fox. After that she retired to Houston and married a millionaire and never set foot in an institution again.

The doctors speculated that her problems might never have surfaced if she hadn’t chosen to act. She had grown up a society girl and to society she returned: it was only when she stepped before the camera that everything went haywire. It seemed to me, though, that this was missing the point.

There were her men, for one thing. ‘For a beautiful intelligent girl,’ Dana Andrews tells her in Laura, ‘you’ve certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.’ She’d always had a weakness for aristocratic types – the disinherited Russian count, the presidential candidate, the billionaire gadabout, others – Howard Hughes for instance, before he crashed his plane in a street in Beverly Hills. They wanted her for the same reason as the studios: her stellar beauty; and just as she did for the studios, she morphed and mutated and recomposed this beauty into the precise form of their desires, until there was nothing of her left.

These relationships, however, were merely variations on a theme that had been set long before with her father, Howard Tierney Sr. Growing up, Gene had worshipped him. He was without doubt a compelling figure: the stern moralist, who brought her to church every Sunday; the financial wizard who had built his family two houses, enlisted them in the best country club in Connecticut, endowed them with servants, horse, boat, sent his daughter to a Swiss boarding school with the daughter of Marlene Dietrich and the future wife of a maharajah.

She worshipped him and through the thirties she watched him dwindle to a man so crippled by debt and the Depression that he took to carrying a gun in his pocket so that if the worst came to the worst and they had nothing left he could kill himself and the family could claim on the insurance. When Gene first decided to act – after that fairy-tale discovery on the Warners’ lot, on the holiday across America with Pat and Howard Jr and Mother – it was with the intention of helping the family, helping him, restoring him to what he had once been.

And so he brokered her first deal, while warning her against the meretriciousness of the movie business; when her mother moved out to Hollywood to chaperone her, he stayed in New York and set up the Belle-Tier Corporation to manage her earnings. She lived within the parameters he set – she drove a small car, made her own clothes – and everything was dandy, until she eloped with Cassini and her mother flew home in disgust to New York and found that her husband had been having an affair with her best friend, whom she had charged with ‘taking care of him’ while she was away. The best friend was the daughter of a railway tycoon and had a fortune of her own: in her, Howard Tierney Sr saw at last a way out of his debts. In fact, this relationship had been going on for some time; in fact, the reason he’d sent his young family on that fated holiday across America in the first place was so that he could spend the summer alone in New York with her; and now, fresh from denouncing his daughter to the press, he announced he was divorcing Gene’s mother and marrying her best friend.

It would be an understatement to say that Gene was disillusioned to find her father had feet of clay. But there was more to come: because when she demanded a new deal with the studio, so that her salary went straight to her and not to the company her father had set up, he sued her for fifty thousand dollars for breach of contract; and when she won the suit, and for the first time saw a statement of her savings at the Belle-Tier Corporation – of all the money she had earned in Hollywood and obediently sent on to her father, who had administered it with such draconian rigour – it came to zero, nought, nothing: there was nothing in the account.

She only saw him two more times. Once, she was under sedation and didn’t recognize him. The other time he came to her house and said, as he left, ‘Well, Gene, I suppose we both got what we wanted.’

Hence, surely, the succession of millionaires, the trade-off of her beauty for the security of knowing that no matter how else they betrayed her, she would never have to see them diminished like that: she would never have to see them dismiss the maid, or sell the crystal piece by piece, or carry a gun in case the worst came to the worst; no matter what else happened, there would always be security, there would always be enough to pay her hospital bills, her daughter’s hospital bills.

One would have a strong case for arguing that it was the men in her life – the lovers, the father, the directors, producers, critics – who destroyed it. And yet when you looked at the broad sweep they appeared more as agents, collectively, of a darker, wider force of ruin that pursued her. It was as if her epic beauty somehow angered the gods, and drew down a suitably Promethean punishment; and the girl behind the beauty, the nice girl from Connecticut who at the end would wonder whether, if her life had been a movie, she would have been cast to play her part – found she had wandered off the lot into a Greek tragedy.

Sitting amid the uniforms in the cavernous warehouse, I tried not to think about this. I tried to concentrate on the good things: the Oscar nomination for Leave Her to Heaven, in which out of nowhere she gives a performance of jealousy and insanity and anomie that is quite chilling; the premiere of The Razor’s Edge in New York City, the first big premiere after World War Two, when she’d walked a red carpet in a black tulle dress in front of thousands of fans…

But I couldn’t help but hear echoes of another life: in Gene’s mother Belle, in the Belle-Tier Corporation her father had sucked dry, in A Bell for Adano, Belle Starr, whose heroine’s name she’d chosen for an alias when she eloped with Cassini to Las Vegas; and I wondered if she’d ever, in the midst of those dreams and hallucinations, thought of the girl who would come fifty years later, who would also sit in a hospital ward and wonder who she was… And in the end I decided it might be kinder to forget: to let her disappear back into the twilight of late-night broadcasts, of dusty stills in the back of dusty junk shops patronized by lonely men with too much time on their hands. I put my notes in a shoebox and stowed it under the davenport in my room.

I asked Frank one time if he could remember how The Cherry Orchard had ended. After some deliberation he said that as far as he could recall, they all just leave.

‘They all just leave?’

‘Yeah, s’far as I remember.’

‘What kind of ending is that?’

‘Dunno, Charlie. Must have been the only one he could think of.’

The Amaurot Players never reconvened. The papers had never been signed and the lavender-suited PA had taken Harry aside after the funeral and told him that Telsinor were pulling out of the deal. No one was pointing fingers or making judgements, she said; still, the company had a responsibility to listen to its shareholders, and in the shareholders’ eyes these recent events were simply not in the spirit of youth and change and communication that Telsinor represented.

Initially there was some talk of looking for funding elsewhere, but it quickly petered out. Nobody’s heart was in it any more. Soon everyone went their separate ways. Harry made some sort of a statement claiming that the theatre was an élitist art form and that the Internet was the only medium capable of expressing truly revolutionary ideas; he got a job writing copy for the Snickers website, and to my knowledge The Rusting Tractor was never produced.

Mirela seemed to have taken the crash especially hard. For weeks afterwards she barricaded herself in her room; she would not speak to Harry, and the engagement was quietly forgotten. She left the house shortly afterwards. For where I did not know: Mrs P would not speak about her. I never saw her again, at least not in the flesh.

It was only a short while after that Vuk and Zoran’s application for asylum was turned down. The former Yugoslavia, in the eyes of the Irish government, was no longer sufficiently dangerous to merit their staying on here; the next thing we knew they were heading back to Croatia with Mrs P. It all seemed very sudden. The truth of it, though, was that the citizenship issue was only an excuse. Mrs P had been pining to go back home since the day she arrived, and the ‘recent events’ had only bolstered her resolve.

‘To her it doesn’t matter there is nothing left there,’ Vuk said to me. ‘Always she is thinking only of my father, who was lost, and she does not want to live away from.’

‘What about Mirela?’ I said. ‘Is she going too?’

‘Ay, Mirela,’ he sighed. ‘Maybe she is right. Maybe it is better to stay here, to forget. But Mama is determined.’ He tapped his head and grinned. ‘We go with her, make sure she doesn’t go too crazy.’

I knew Mother must be lonely in the house on her own. I had been nagging her to get in someone new, but she didn’t listen. In fact, I was never sure how aware of my visits she was. She confined herself to one or two rooms these days, leaving the rest of the house to the great draughts that roamed through it. I would find her sitting by a cold hearth, with a glass in her hand and cinders all over the floor. We would talk, or rather I would listen as she talked: about the old days, invariably – Trinity College, the Hunt Ball, Father and her star turns in this or that production. Sometimes I would try to get her to talk about Bel, but whether real or put on, I could not pierce this cloudy nostalgia. Once only, when I asked her straight out about the night of the school play, did it seem that the cobwebs fell away. She paused, ran her finger around the rim of her sherry glass, and then said: ‘A true actress, Charles, never lets herself be seen. Every time she walks on stage, she creates herself anew, using what’s around her; and when she walks off she divests herself of it just so –’ lifting her arms and shrugging off an imaginary gown. ‘Her life is merely a peg on which to hang it. But Bel, you see, Bel…’ She paused once more, and smiled sadly. ‘Bel always insisted life skip to her tune. She never would learn the value of compromise. So like her father in that way, making things harder than they already were…’

The fingers ran around the glass: then, abruptly, she brightened. ‘But in the old days, Charles, how jolly it was. Now, of course, it’s all little people and their rules. But then… but then, when the house was full of life, when the grooms would bring round the brougham, and the maids would present in their frocks, and curtsey at the knee, and the valet and the chauffeur and the cook, and every room bustling with life…’

‘No, Mother,’ I contradicted gently. ‘That wasn’t here. We never had all those people working for us in Amaurot.’

‘I don’t mean us, Charles,’ she said irritably. ‘I mean in the old days. The last century, before we ever arrived. Now we’re starting a new century, of course,’ she added with disdain, and her eyes glazed over as she poured herself more sherry, absently tilting the bottle up and up till the drink trembled right at the rim of the glass. ‘But how jolly it must have been, how jolly…’ shaking her head and smiling fondly and not noticing as I raised the latch and let myself out into the gusty hall.

I couldn’t get out to her as often as I should have liked, and I did worry about her. I rang the Cedars once, to inquire about the possibility of having her return there, just for a short while; but there had been some sort of trouble with the last cheque, so I let the matter drop.

Thus I passed my new life. My work hours meant that I rarely had to speak to people, and the quiet order of it suited me; it was like swimming underwater, through the ruins of some drowned city.

And then one night I got a call.

It was one of those bitter, sleety winter nights, so desperately cold that in the warehouse even the uniforms seemed to shiver on their rails and yearn to clap their hands together, if they’d had hands. I had gone into the village on my eight o’clock break in search of coffee to warm myself up. There was nothing visibly out of the ordinary when I got back. Rosco was working at the far end; the pile of cardboard boxes was just where I had left it. And yet the air seemed somehow heightened; hyperreal, as if the focus wheel had been turned and a new clarity been added. I waited a moment there at the door, looking over the cold hall, then realized that a phone was ringing.

With a tight feeling in my chest, I tracked the sound: past the foreman’s cabin, past the shuttered doors, down the aisle of nurses’ uniforms till I came to my writing desk, and lifted a pile of order forms to find Bel’s phone.

I had kept it more as a souvenir than anything else, a souvenir or a pet. Droyd had showed me how it worked, how to unlock it and keep it fed; but I never used it, other than to wonder at its little green display, and hardly anyone ever called me. Yet here it was singing away. I picked it up and pressed a button; and a voice said, ‘Charles?’

The entire warehouse, the entire world, the particles in the air seemed to freeze and hang motionless in suspension.

‘Hello?’ the voice said.

‘Yes, yes, I’m here,’ hurriedly.

‘I was hoping you’d pick up,’ the voice said.

I sank on to the chair.

‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’

My heart was racing, that was why. I wiped a frost of sweat from my forehead, and said, with some effort, ‘Is this you?’

‘Of course it’s me, don’t you recognize me?’

‘No, I – damn it,’ the damn phone was so small, it kept losing itself in my hand, ‘damn it, we all thought you were –’

‘I suppose that was the idea.’

‘That was the…?’ rising again, caught in a bewildering mixture of emotions that ranged from relief to gratitude to apoplexy: ‘we’ve been so worried – not even worried, we’ve been – I mean of all the wretched, selfish…’

There was a silence at the other end. For one terrorized instant I thought I’d scared her off. Then the voice said: ‘I know. I’m sorry. But I didn’t think you’d think – I mean I thought you’d work it out.’

‘Work what out?’

‘The name.’

‘The name?’

The name, she repeated, the name, come on, Charles: and slowly it stole across me. Jessica Kiddon: Jess Kiddon: Just Kidding.

‘MacGillycuddy,’ I breathed.

‘Maybe I should have gone with Tempora Mores,’ Bel mused.

Just kidding: it was one of his conceits, I’d have recognized it a mile off; and once I did I couldn’t believe I hadn’t guessed before. I should have known he’d be in this up to his neck; I should have known that banishing him from our lives was like asking a genie to kindly get back in its bottle, or trying to shoo a charging bull with a big red rag. Before she said another word, several unexplained phenomena suddenly became clear. The dinner invitation that hadn’t arrived; the mysterious school-friend who wasn’t in the yearbook; the chopping noise I had heard that night, clearing a path through the trees for the car, to the same cliffs MacGillycuddy had been so determined I fall off instead of exploding myself. There was no masterclass in Yalta; there was no Jessica Kiddon. Bel had lifted the entire idea from me and my abortive flight to Chile – which, given the uncomplimentary things she’d said about it at the time, I thought was pretty rich.

In fact her plan, as she explained it to me that night, was significantly more detailed than mine. It had to be, she said; she hadn’t had any money of her own, and the only way to fund her escape had been to create this new persona, the respectable girl who could persuade Mother to part with the necessary sum. Furthermore, familiarizing us all with the fictitious Jessica (I thought here of our flirtatious conversation after the greyhound race, and blushed) would lend her both time and a means of muddying the waters after her initial departure. The idea was to travel to Russia in her own name, under cover of the Chekhov trip: as far as we were concerned, Jessica would be with her and everything would appear above board. It was only when she was over there that the phoney papers, passport, etc. that MacGillycuddy had arranged would come into play. The way she had set it up, she would then have a six-month window (the length of the spurious class) in which she could merge into Jessica – Jessica, who had no roots, no background, could disappear quite easily and never be traced – and let Bel Hythloday simply melt away, without any of the mess or pain or logistical headaches of an actual faked death, a drowning or an explosion or a car crash.

But she did crash the car, I said, confused. What was the point of setting up such an elaborate plan, doing all that groundwork, and then at the last minute abandoning it in favour of a crash – inflicting all that chaos on us, all that pain?

‘How’s the theatre?’ she asked lightly, suddenly, changing the subject. ‘How’s Harry and Mirela and all those plans for Amaurot?’

I was rather thrown for a moment. Because the theatre was gone, of course. The plans for Amaurot – the refurbishment, the statues, the marriage of art and commerce, Harry and Mirela’s engagement – all of these things had been destroyed along with the bottle-green Mercedes. But only then did it dawn on me that this could have been deliberate: that the crash could have been a deliberate act of sabotage, severing the house from its future and leaving it in darkness as surely as if someone had cut the power; or a stay of execution, whichever way you chose to see it. I kept quiet as this thought established itself, and all my other thoughts reordered themselves around it. Then I said, ‘Everyone’s fine. Everyone’s right as rain.’

I got to my feet, and walked over to the warehouse door. ‘What’s it like over there, Bel?’

‘You’d like it,’ she said. ‘Everybody drinks a lot of vodka.’ She laughed, and I laughed too, cradling the phone against my jaw and scanning the car park outside: because in the movie of our lives, that’s surely how the scene would play; I’d see her looking at me from a telephone kiosk mere yards away…

‘Are you ever coming home? May I remind you there’s no place like home?’

‘Maybe someday,’ she said. ‘Or maybe someday you’ll come over here. But I ought to go now. Let you get back to your work.’

‘Well… thanks for calling.’ I turned back inside, to the perspex roof, the silently hanging garments.

‘My pleasure.’

‘Happy New Year, old thing.’

‘Happy New Year, Charles.’

Or maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. Maybe that was just a silly fantasy I made up myself; maybe we had already received a very nice letter from a former school-friend of Bel’s who had waited for Bel to come that night, who had rung the house but not been able to get through and in a panic had taken a taxi out to the airport herself, had taken the plane alone and arrived alone in a resort-town in Russia where the news was waiting for her, where she watched for a week as a blizzard raged outside her window until the roads were clear enough so she could turn around and come home again, too late though, too late for the funeral. Or maybe it was just a wrong number on the phone that time, or it was Frank, calling to see if I wanted him to pick me up a kebab when he and Droyd were down at the kebab shop, or someone else, Patsy Olé for instance, asking if I’d like to meet up later on.

You can take the alternative if you want, with the endless dreams of seaweed-braided arms, the countless glimpses of her in clouds, billboards, the faces of strangers. But this one is the version I prefer: the one where she lies awake at night, drawing up her plans; where she is set free from her life, from her unspellable name, and spirited away; into the MacGillycuddian universe, where people disappear only to resurface elsewhere, with French accents and false moustaches, where everything is constantly changing and nobody ever dies.

‘Why do they call it being on your uppers? Surely uppers ought to be good things. Upper class. Upper hand. Surely you’re on your downers, if you have no money.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

Patsy and I were walking along the strand behind the warehouse. It was late and impossibly cold, and the night scrolled up over the sea blue and starry like cheap paper scenery. Patsy was still wearing her foam antlers from work. She had come back from her Grand Tour to find the family embroiled in one of those ghastly tribunals; her father was up in Dublin Castle practically every week, answering questions about these supposed payments, and meetings he’d had three or four years ago, how was he supposed to remember that? ‘And in the meantime all the accounts have been frozen. So here I am, serving coffee and damned panini to idiots.’

‘It can’t be that bad.’

‘It is. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ She pulled on her cigarette. ‘Antlers, Charles. What kind of despot forces a person to wear antlers? In Nazi Germany they didn’t make people wear antlers. Someone ought to write to Amnesty International.’

‘I think they’re rather deer.’

‘Charles darling.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I expect it’ll blow over soon enough, though,’ she said, exhaling a long plume of smoke. ‘I mean that’s the beauty of white-collar crime, isn’t it? Nobody really minds.’

‘It must be dreadfully hard on you, all the same,’ I said gently.

She clapped her hands together meditatively. ‘I know Daddy’s no saint,’ she said. ‘But Charles, who is? You have to get your hands dirty if you want to succeed in life, don’t you? And anyway, do you know what these tribunal lawyers get paid? They get paid heaps more than Daddy paid himself. Someone should haul them up in front of some old judge.’ She sighed. ‘It’s so wretchedly tiresome. All Daddy seems to do any more is run around the house looking for bits of paper and burning them in the back garden. You should have seen our Hallowe’en bonfire this year, Charles. It was like the Towering Inferno. And he’s taken my credit cards.’ She flicked her cigarette out to the sea. ‘It’s all so unspeakably tiresome,’ she said, narrowing her eyes in judgement of the whole of civilization.

We walked on a little further. Somewhere along the way, her hand found its way into mine, and we swung them back and forth against the cold, like children.

‘What about you?’ She gave me a sidelong glance.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘My heart will go on, I suppose.’

She gazed reflectively at the misty banks of rain blowing in from the sea. ‘It’s this damn country,’ she said. ‘How’s a person supposed to live in a country where it rains all the time?’ She sighed. ‘Maybe Hoyland has the right idea – I saw Hoyland the other day, was I telling you? He thinks we should all just give up on this ghastly place. Move to some tropical island, and start our own superior society there. You know, we could have a beehive, and a polo ground and so forth.’

‘Nine bean-rows will I have there,’ I recited absently, ‘a hive for the honey-bee…’

‘What?’

‘Oh, sorry. Yeats. Sorry. Had sort of a similar notion, back in the 1900s. Couldn’t stand this place. Had this idea of a magical mystical Ireland, wanted everyone to come along. Utopian sort of a thing. Didn’t work, needless to say. Never does.’

‘You’d have to get someone in to clean, obviously…’ Patsy said thoughtfully, stroking her chin; then throwing her hands up, ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, it’s all perfectly hopeless!’

A billboard on the road above overlooked the strand. It showed a beautiful girl in ragged, dusty clothes. Her face was stained with grime and tears; she stared out impassionedly from the rubble of a bombed-out city. CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT IT? the slogan read at the bottom of the billboard, with the Telsinor logo in the right-hand corner. I used to know that girl, I said to Patsy.

The wind blew; the water crashed. The headlands to the east and west threw their arms out around the sea, as if to hold in place something that really, really wanted to go. Like a photograph, I thought: like those pictures in the yearbooks, the girls in their plaits and pony-tails who had stared out at my friends and me as we huddled round behind the cricket pavilion; who were embarked on digressions of their own now, but would remain with us, to be guessed at and sighed over, in the shape of that split-second before the shutter fell; before the shutter fell and the camera clicked, and everybody laughed and clambered over each other, and giggled off into the next lost frame of their lives, and the next, and the next.