An Evening of Long Goodbyes (15 page)

‘It must be really interesting, living in a house like this?’

‘Oh…’ Was I imagining it, or did I detect a change in her tone – an attentiveness that hadn’t been there a moment ago? ‘Oh, yes, well, it’s interesting, you know, but it can be taxing too –’

‘Oh, sorry –’ as her swinging hand brushed mine –

‘That’s quite all right – I say, this is rather like that scene in
La Dolce Vita
, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm, yeah, I was just thinking that…’

As if on cue, a low moan emanated from above. Laura gripped my arm.

‘Who is there?’ a cracked voice called. ‘Who is walking down there?’

‘Just us,’ I called back, as Laura pressed herself up to me. ‘That is, me and Laura.’

‘Who is it?’ Laura whispered. I could smell her breath, fecund with wine and Rigbert’s.

‘It’s Mrs P…’ The stairs groaned slowly. Mrs P rounded the banisters in a long white shift dimly visible through the gloom.

‘There’s been a power cut,’ I said. ‘We’ve got some candles, there’s no need for you to come down.’ The stairs continued to groan one by one. Laura’s fingers tightened around my arm. ‘Tell you what,’ I told her, ‘why don’t you go ahead to the dining room and I’ll be in as soon as I get her to go back to bed.’

After a moment’s delay, staring at the white shape, Laura relinquished me and flew off into the darkness. ‘Now then,’ I addressed Mrs P, ‘we happen to be entertaining, as you know, and I’m not sure it’s appropriate for you to be wandering about in your nightgown –’

‘What’s happening?’ she said. ‘What’s happening to our house?’

‘A power cut, I just told you,’ she was starting to unnerve me, ‘so if you want a candle, fine, and if you don’t then I think you ought to go back to bed, because frankly you’re being a little, ah, frightening.’ Her hair was undone and hung loosely down her back; her shift was old-fashioned, with buttons at the cuffs and the neck. She was close enough now for me to make out her glazed expression. ‘Now, Mrs P –’

She moved down the last few steps with one hand on the rail. She muttered to herself, then looked sternly at me. ‘They are coming, they are coming back. This is how it starts.’

‘How what starts? Where are you going?’

She reached the foot of the stairs and walked right past me, making a sharp right and calling, ‘Mirela, where are you? We must hurry…’

‘I say,’ I cleared my throat officiously at her receding form. ‘I say, now look, Mrs P – ow!’ A gobbet of hot wax had rolled down the shaft of the candle on to the back of my hand. ‘I – blast – look, I just have to go and put this down, you wait here –’ hastening to the dining room as Mrs P ambled away in the opposite direction, a mooching white square growing dim and small.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Laura asked as I searched for a candlestick.

‘Nothing, just a bit – where’s Bel and Frank?’ She was in the room alone, arranged languorously against a rosewood cabinet. I must say candlelight became her.

‘Dunno,’ she said, with a sort of allusive shrug – as if to suggest that this wasn’t necessarily a negative development. ‘Must have gone to bed.’

It seemed to me that she had placed an infinitesimal stress on the last word; but I couldn’t be sure. I thrust the candle into a holder. Now I could look at her properly. She was directing her gaze innocently towards the fireplace, as if reflecting: but some kind of transformation had definitely taken place. Even her
stance
was different. She leaned against the cabinet with her hips thrust brazenly forward, hands in her pockets; a button of her blouse had come undone and locks of hair hung in erotic disarray across her forehead.

‘It
is
getting late,’ I said ambiguously, making my way around the room installing candles in candelabra. With a barely perceptible sway she followed my movements, bestowing on me what seemed like singularly amorous smiles.

‘I suppose I should call a taxi.’ Her voice had dropped in pitch to something smoky and dry that called to a secret part of me.

‘I suppose,’ I said. She did not move. I continued with my candles. With each successive flame my vision blurred and my desire inched higher; until it seemed I was surrounded by a bacchanalian fire, through which Laura’s face danced up and down like the needle in a compass. I felt like Nero, leading Rome through her last waltz. ‘Must have been fun, though, catching up with old Frank like that,’ I said casually.

‘I wish work was always this much fun,’ she said absently. The Rigbert’s had left a carmine sheen on her upper lip. She rolled her head back, splaying her fingers and running them over the bevelled doors of the cabinet. ‘Though if I was this rich, I’d never do a day’s work again.’

My heart skipped a beat. For a long, strange moment, as she smiled at me, her form seemed to take on an extra lustre from somewhere that made the candles seem dim by comparison; and I was afraid to move in case I should disturb it. Had I misjudged her, after all? Was this the real Laura, shaking off the dust of the quotidian world? I glanced at the clock. It was midnight: there was still time enough for us to find out.

‘Then again,’ she added carelessly, ‘I might get bored, being rich on my own.’

I brought the last wick to life and extinguished the taper.

‘What do you do,’ she said, ‘when you get bored?’

‘I don’t know.’ I took a sauntering step towards her. ‘Have things insured.’

She brought her head down and stared directly at me. ‘Are you insured?’

I drew back sharply. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘I mean,’ she giggled, ‘maybe I should have a look at
you
… while I’m here, like. Just to be complete.’

I took her hand. Candlelight chased back and forth across her face. ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ I said. Our arms curled around each other’s waist, her blouse lifting to expose a cool, silvery swatch of stomach. Under the lintel she stopped and looked up at me. ‘Are you just going to leave all those candles lit?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It’s a fire hazard,’ she said indistinctly. ‘Forty-four per cent of fires are caused by naked… naked…’ She sank her head on my chest. ‘God, Charles, I’m so drunk.’

‘Nonsense,’ I urged her. ‘You’re quite sober. Just all that heavy food.’

We reached the stairs. I tried to balance her on one hand and a candle in the other. She was increasingly unsteady: I realized suddenly that there was a real danger she would fall asleep before we could get around to doing anything. ‘Tell me about
Titanic
,’ I suggested as we negotiated the third and fourth steps; she had seemed quite exercised about it earlier on.

‘So sad,’ she sighed, ‘so sad… all those people… they’re all on this boat, the
Ti
–, the
Ti
–… I’ve seen it six times at least ’n’ I always cry…’

‘Oh yes?’ I gasped. She was getting heavier, too.

‘Leonardo DiCaprio in his tuxedo, such a babe… and Kate Winslet so pretty, even if she’s a tiny bit fat, so what?’ Her feet clunked against the steps. ‘But Kate’s Winslet’s fiancé, right, ’s a fucking, a fucking bastard… thinks he can control her, doesn’t even care she loves someone else… hate people like that think they’re better than you…’ Her brow clouded. ‘Like Bel thinks she’s so special cos she’s an actress – don’t get me wrong, Charles,’ whirling around to place a finger on my lips and nearly hurling us both down the stairs, ‘don’t get me wrong, I love her to bits – but even in school she was thinking she’s like this great actress and everyone else’s too boring t’talk to… but she’s no
fun
, he’ll see that sooner or later. Never even come out for a drink with us, stuck in her own little world, made herself miserable ’n’ doing all that weird stuff to herself, that’s her business if she wants to go –’

She stopped abruptly, and pulled back to study my face. Perspiration glistened above her lip and soaked my shirt. She had grown pale, and the candlelight had turned against her, giving her hollows, making her gaunt. ‘Charles, don’t get me wrong,’ slurring the words slightly, ‘I mean like she’s great and I love her to bits… and it’s so nice to finally meet you, she always talked about you in school, you all sounded so grand, like kings and queens…’

She trailed off. We looked sadly at each other.

‘I think,’ I said gently, ‘we ought to call you that taxi now.’

‘Charles,’ she said tearfully, biting her lip.

‘Yes?’

‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

‘Oh. Oh well, quick, this way…’ I led her sniffling up the remaining stairs and down the corridor to the bathroom. I handed her the candle at the door. ‘Do you want me to hang on for you out here?’ She was about to reply, but then her eyes bulged and she put her hand over her mouth and rushed in.

‘I’ll just wait in my room then,’ I called. ‘Come and get me when you’re finished. Down and to the right, the second door.’

A series of evacuatory noises ensued. I shrugged and walked down the dark corridor to sit on my bed and toy morbidly with my cufflinks. I remembered putting them on that evening, so full of nerves and hope. It felt like a week ago. I stretched back on the mattress, staring up at the invisible ceiling. I was beginning to feel thoroughly depressed. It wasn’t Laura’s fault she was beautiful, nor that I found her boring; it was mine. If I had got her so utterly wrong, what did that mean for the rest of my plans? Were they just as misconceived? Perhaps Bel was right – perhaps, after all, there was nothing to preserve here; perhaps Amaurot had outlived its time, and now it was better to let the world take it, pull it under the waves.

The clock ticked. I took the 8 × 10 of Gene from under the bed and held it up beside the window. There was an undeniable resemblance: the cold marble contour of her brow, the shapely swoop of her cheek, the beguiling naivety that dallied so enticingly with her beauty. And the name, Laura: its noirish elegance. Names were important, if only one could work out what they meant. I closed my eyes, replayed the famous scene in the movie –
Laura
, I mean – where the detective spends the night in her apartment – reading her letters and diary, smelling her perfume, going through her wardrobe, drinking her Scotch: always watched by, always circling back to, the portrait of her on the wall. She’s dead before the movie begins, of course, shot with both barrels right in the face: it’s the portrait the detective falls in love with. Tierney was equivocal about her role in the film – ‘who wants to play a painting?’ she’d say – but audiences fell in love with Laura too, and it made her a star. And despite what she said, it seemed the perfect role for her: this fabulous shadow that could lift like smoke above the intrigues and obsessions of her lovers – that existed among the rafters, so to speak, the interstices between life and death; even as offscreen her marriage and sanity crumbled. The GET girl, who’d come back from boarding school in Switzerland aged sixteen to find the family home repossessed; who’d stand on a fourteenth-storey window-ledge in New York in 1958, realize through a fog of unreason that the apartment opposite belonged to Arthur Miller and his new wife Marilyn Monroe, worry at the last minute about leaving an unpretty corpse…

At least five minutes had gone by, and of my Laura, the real-life Laura, there was still no sign. I went to the door and looked down the pitch-black corridor. I couldn’t make out a single thing. Was she still in the bathroom? Had she passed out somewhere? Or – I remembered the way she’d been hanging off Frank earlier. Had she slipped off into a corner with him? I began to panic: imagining her in the back of his rusty white van, rocking back and forth on the way to his mantelpiece –

I hurried sightlessly in the direction of the stairs – but then from a doorway a hand reached out and grabbed my wrist, and before I had a chance to tell her we were in the wrong room, she was kissing me. It wasn’t the sort of kiss one cared to interrupt; in fact, as soon as her lips met mine, everything –
everything
– went out of my head. It was a kiss that surrounded one, delicate and bewildering as a flurry of snowflakes; and as they fell so gaily around me, they seemed to be telling me that no matter what happened tonight, I should not despair; that there would always be old stone houses and long reverberant kisses, things that existed eternally alongside the mutable world; things in which I belonged.

‘Laura,’ I crooned the word into her cheek, ‘Laura…’

Immediately I said it, something palpably changed. At the same moment our hands stopped moving; we stood there frozen in a tense silence that seemed to go on for far too long…

‘
Charles?
’

‘Great Scott!’

‘Get
off
me!’ Bel cried, pushing my hand from her thigh and recoiling with such vigour that I stumbled backward and whacked my head on the door-jamb. ‘Oh my God, are you all right?’ She stretched a hand towards me before being overcome with horror and recoiling again. ‘Oh my God, oh my God…’

‘Ow…’ I picked myself up off the floor, massaging my bump, and tried to get my bearings. ‘Ow…’

‘Oh my God – Charles, this is… this is extremely bad –’

‘I think I’m having an aneurysm,’ I gasped. ‘Bel, call an ambulance –’

‘Charles, get
out
of here!’ She pulled her hair, stamped her foot. ‘Would you please get
out
, please?’ Her voice hovered on the verge of tears. ‘Don’t you get that this is really, really bad?’

‘Well, don’t blame
me
,’ I said, beginning to feel somewhat offended. ‘You were the one who dragged me in here, I mean you practically
manhandled
me –’

‘It’s
my room
, Charles, I thought you were Frank, obviously.’

‘How could you possibly mistake me for
Frank
?’ I tucked in my shirt tails. ‘Frank’s wrists are like fire extinguishers. And he has that sort of characteristic smell…’

‘Fire extinguishers?’ She sounded quite agitated now. ‘Charles, what’s the matter with you? Where
is
Frank?’

‘Well, I thought he was with you.’ Although it was obvious where he must be: downstairs swiping the family heirlooms. Laura was probably helping him, she’d drooled over them enough –