An Evening of Long Goodbyes (29 page)

‘So this is the boom, eh?’ I said. ‘Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?’

‘I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ he said glumly. ‘It’s like being in Caligula’s Rome, and everyone around you’s having an orgy, and you’re the mug stuck looking after the horse.’ He pulled heavily on his cigarette. ‘The whole thing’ll come crashing down,’ he said bleakly, ‘and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.’

Rain had begun to fall outside. Beside us the office types were jawing noisily about some takeover or other. Hoyland smoked the rest of his cigarette in silence.

‘Seen any of the old crowd?’ he said eventually. ‘Pongo, that lot?’

‘From time to time,’ I replied. ‘Pongo’s in London now.’

‘Lucky blighter,’ he said. He stared a moment into the middle distance, then in a casual voice said, ‘I hear Patsy’s back.’

I made a little horseman of the salt cellar and marched him along the table. ‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes, someone met her working in a café.’

‘Oh,’ I said colourlessly.

‘Christ, Hythloday,’ Hoyland said flatly, ‘we’ve been dopes, do you know that?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘You know what I mean. Not patching things up. Letting the whole gang drift apart for the sake of a girl.’

I puffed up my cheeks and blew.

‘Well, damn it, what do you think?’

‘Oh hell,’ I said irritably, ‘I don’t know. It didn’t come out of nowhere, did it? Maybe it was meant to happen. Maybe that whole gang was past its sell-by date, and that was just the, you know, the catalyst. I mean, good God, if Patsy Olé was the only thing holding us together, Patsy Olé who has all the loyalty of the ball in a roulette wheel –’

‘So what?’ Hoyland said bitterly. ‘So now for the rest of our lives we just dwindle off into our own little private solitary worlds, is that it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, can we? How should I know?’

We fell into a fractious silence.

‘Sure, the public got burned in the buyout,’ one of the business types declaimed energetically next to us. ‘But that’s what
happens
in a revolution. You’ve got to understand that this is a
whole new paradigm of management
.’

Hoyland fumbled out another cigarette but didn’t light it; then, catching sight of his watch, he swore and started to his feet. ‘I have to get back,’ he said. ‘My masters don’t look kindly on tardiness. But look here, Hythers – I’m glad we met. We should go for a brandy some time. I’m free most evenings.’

I nodded mechanically. Suddenly everyone was leaving: massing round the door, unfurling their umbrellas. Hoyland reached into his wallet and handed me a card. ‘Do call,’ he said. ‘Silly to let everything just go to the wall.’ He hovered there a moment, blankly watching the exiting hordes, the unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. ‘I still think about her, you know,’ he said abstractedly; then he turned up his collar and passed with the others back on to the boulevard. In a few minutes, the café was almost empty.

Damn it, I had forgotten how a fellow couldn’t go twenty yards in this city without running into someone he used to know, wanting to dig up the past. Maybe that was why they were knocking the whole place down. As the waitress moved from table to table with her tray, piling up the dishes, the old faces appeared in front of me out of the rain, like the cast of a play taking its curtain call…

We had all been wild about Patsy, of course; though none of us would ever have claimed he truly knew her, or understood her. She was like the moon moving through the houses of the Zodiac – favouring each of us in turn, yet remaining always remote: her love a mysterious influence you couldn’t quite put your finger on but didn’t dare disbelieve. In retrospect it’s obvious she was quite happy in this orbit of her own, from which she could enjoy the chaotic effect she had, the squalls and storms and other aberrant weather patterns caused by her peculiar magnetism. But each of us had hoped that he would be the one who finally brought her to earth.

My chance had come that spring. She appeared by my side one day, more or less literally, amid a pageant of bluebells and forget-me-nots. I didn’t know how she had got there, exactly, but I didn’t ask questions. I fell instantly under her spell, just like everybody did.

I don’t remember exactly what we did together, or what we said to each other. It’s possible we didn’t do or say anything at all. It was the time itself that seemed enchanted: becoming a single evening that didn’t begin or end, through which we drifted along hand-in-hand as if plunged into a wonderful dream. And if she never quite yielded, if some part of her always seemed to be elsewhere, still I – spending my solitary hours frantically learning off Yeats, searching for the insight, the single line that would deliver her to me – still I assumed that this would only be a matter of time.

The problem was that the part of her that I felt was always somehow elsewhere was usually, more specifically, with Hoyland Maffey Indeed, Hoyland was frequently there with us, helping us to witness the spectacular spring. It seemed to me rather unorthodox for two people who were falling in love to have a third party present for so much of the falling. At last I put this to Patsy.

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘I mean, usually it’s just the two people on their own.’

‘But Hoyland’s our friend, Charles. Our
bosom
friend. It’s not fair leaving him out just because we’re so terribly, terribly in love.’

The way she said
bosom
would probably have been enough; but when she went on, completely unprompted, to deny that there had ever been anything between her and Hoyland, any doubts I had left were extinguished. At that moment I knew that she was telling Hoyland exactly the same story about me; I knew she knew I knew, and I knew that Hoyland knew it too.

The enchanted spring was quickly poisoned. Every moment was shadowed by mistrust and deception. Time and time again Patsy and I would be alone together in the library – a candle burned low on the ledge as we approached, seemingly inexorably, a moment of ecstatic union – when the doorbell would ring and Patsy would spring up from the billiard table saying, ‘Oh good, that’ll be Hoyland,’ as casually as if we’d just been playing an uninspired round of Scrabble; and there he would be, his mirthless grimace and darting eyes the mirror image of my own: ‘Hello, Hythers, just thought I’d stop by…’

‘Ha ha, always a pleasure, old man, get you a glass of something?’

Before long my love for Patsy had been totally superseded by my hatred for Hoyland. Every hour apart from her I spent in torment, imagining the two of them together. When I was with her I oscillated between desperate bids to impress her and equally desperate attempts to find out her true feelings. Every dainty sniff, every equivocal cough, every half-raised eyebrow, I would pore over for hours seeking to decode. Patsy, of course, had no true feelings; or if she did they had nothing to do with us. But even if I had known this it would have made little difference. What mattered now above all was that I thwart my former friend.

Finally, towards the end of April, things came to a head. Patsy was travelling to Rome for a couple of weeks to do some work for her thesis, something to do with Raphael and his courtesans. I had thrown together a send-off party, and had managed to pip Hoyland’s rival party by hiring Patsy’s favourite local jazz trio for the occasion. It was quite a soirée, or so I am told. The night was sweltering, presided over by a full silver moon; all kinds of carousing took place out on the lawn, including (allegedly) a striptease by Bel’s old schoolmate Bunty Chopin, right down to a couple of peacock feathers.

But Hoyland and I cared nothing for the celebrations. For the entire night we sat staring balefully at each other from armchairs in opposite corners of the recital room, rising only to top up our whiskeys. From time to time Patsy would breeze in from the garden where the trio had set up and drape herself over one of us, with the express intention of infuriating the undraped party in the opposing armchair, which it invariably did.

At four o’clock, both Hoyland and I arrived at the sideboard to find that only a single measure of whiskey remained in the decanter. We looked at each other, and the rest of the party – the conversations, the bragging trumpet, the hoots from the lawn – seemed to fall away. There was only the two of us: deadlocked.

‘Help yourself,’ I said.

‘No no, please,’ he returned.

‘My dear fellow, you’re the guest.’

‘It’s fine, really, I’ve had quite enough.’

‘Oh, you have, have you?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have.’

‘Well, so have I, in that case.’

‘Well, “in that case” I’d be interested to hear what you intend to do about it.’

‘I – ah… that is…’ The ball was in my court but I had gone completely blank. The whiskey had turned my brain into a furnace of dry heat. All around me I could hear whispers like the crackle of kindling, and Patsy whistling ‘Sophisticated Lady’ as she drew up the hall – when I saw that as luck would have it someone had left her gloves on the piano. I seized one of them, and threw it down at Hoyland’s feet. A gasp went around the room. ‘I’m challenging you to a duel, that’s what,’ I said.

Hoyland looked surprised. ‘Really?’ he said.

‘Well…’ I said uncertainly. Just then Patsy came in and asked a girl on the periphery what was going on. ‘Charles wanted Hoyland to finish the whiskey, but Hoyland thought Charles ought to have it, so Charles challenged Hoyland to a duel,’ the girl said.

‘Oh,’ Patsy said. She sounded impressed.

‘Yes,’ I said to Hoyland.

‘Good,’ said Hoyland, who had had time to regain his composure and was superciliously buffing his cufflinks. ‘Swords or pistols?’

‘Pistols, obviously,’ I said, adding contemptuously, ‘
Swords
.’

The arrangements were quickly made. The antique pistols were brought down from the study, where Father had kept them loaded in his desk – a secret Bel and I weren’t supposed to know about. Solemnly, we chose our seconds: Boyd Snooks was mine, and Fluffy Elgin Hoyland’s. After trying vainly to talk us out of it, Pongo agreed to adjudicate. Other than these parties, everybody, including Patsy, was asked to remain inside. At five, we left the house by the back door.

We strode over the long grass to the gazebo, recently vacated by the jazz trio. Above us the sky was tinged with pink and a few early birds chirruped in the branches. Fluffy Elgin couldn’t stop giggling. Hoyland blinked at me from under the apple tree on which he’d hung his blazer. Pongo’s voice, when he spoke, was high and taut and cut into the quiet of the morning. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, summoning us together before the gazebo and requesting that we shake hands, before holding up the mahogany box: ‘Choose your weapons.’

The pistol was heavy and dull with a long barrel. Pongo ushered me into place, standing with my back to Hoyland’s. I realized how cold it was. Every detail of the garden blazed at me.

‘When I give the word, you must take ten paces. Then, at my signal, turn and face one another. When I throw my hat in the air, you may shoot. Understood? Right. Commence pacing. One…’

As I took my paces, stretching out my leg stiff at the knee, dew soaking the cuffs of my trousers, I did wonder what exactly I was doing. But it all made a kind of sense: in fact, a singular kind of sense.

‘Two… three…’

Every element of my life had, at this moment, cohered. If the worst came to the worst, and I died here, it would be in my own garden, surrounded by friends, for the honour of the woman I knew beyond a doubt to be my true and eternal love. As deaths went, this didn’t seem a bad one.

‘Five… Six…’

Bother, I realized I hadn’t said goodbye to Bel. She was away putting up lights for a show. It was probably just as well – she tended to be a wet blanket when it came to parties and I daresay would have frowned on duels too; furthermore she disapproved strongly of Patsy Olé, whom she referred to as the Dalkey Chameleon. I made a mental note to mention her in my dying words.

‘Eight…’ Pongo called. ‘Nine…’

Fluffy Elgin’s giggles had turned into hiccups and she had to sit down.

‘Ten… Oh hell, hang on a second…’

There was a padding sound and then silence. Moments passed. I stood trembling with the muzzle cold against my cheek. I stared into a clump of peonies, emptily taking in the form of the leaf, the gleaming stem, the petals. Fluffy hiccuped dolefully.

‘I say, Boyd,’ I called out, after a little more time had passed.

‘Yes?’ Boyd replied from the log where he was trying to get Fluffy to hold her breath.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Boyd said. ‘Pongo suddenly ran off somewhere.’

‘What?’ Hoyland’s voice wafted over from his position under the larches.

‘I think he had to get something from inside,’ Boyd said. ‘I shouldn’t think he’ll be long.’ He started humming to himself.

‘It’s deuced cold,’ I observed.

‘Can’t we sit down?’ Hoyland wanted to know. ‘Or turn around, at least?’

‘I don’t know,’ Boyd said. ‘You’d have to ask Pongo, he’s the adjudicator.’

We remained where we were. More birds joined in the tweeting. ‘The sun’s shining directly into my eyes,’ Hoyland complained. Somewhere a car raced down the road.

My teeth began to chatter.

‘Raaaaaah!’ Boyd exclaimed suddenly, making us all jump.

‘What on earth –’

‘I was trying to scare Fluffy,’ Boyd apologized.

‘Hiccup – hiccup – hiccup,’ Fluffy hiccuped miserably, twisting a peacock feather limply between her fingers.

‘This is ridiculous,’ I said and turned around, whereupon Hoyland immediately began jumping about shouting that I had forfeited the duel and that he was the winner by default.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ I said. ‘I’m going to find Pongo. This is no way to run a duel.’ I tossed my pistol under the apple trees and set off back towards the house, Hoyland scrambling after me.

Pongo wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was he in the dining room. Hoyland checked the library while I looked in the drawing room, but he wasn’t there either. He wasn’t one of the slumbering bodies in the recital room, nor was he among the mésalliances that had unfolded in the bedrooms.