An Evening of Long Goodbyes (9 page)

‘Say hello to your mother for me,’ he winked. ‘Good to have her back.’

I was tempted to pursue this, but the sight of his eagerly rubbing hands was enough to warn me away from opening any more Pandora’s boxes. I wished him good day, and opened the door.

‘And the repo men!’ he called after me.

I made my way back to the shopping centre sunk in thought. So they’d already called in the repossessors: that seemed rather unsporting of them. This interview might not be the formality I’d expected. I took a deep breath, and stepped through the doors of the bank.

It was a long, windowless chamber, with a rather elegant fan depending lifelessly from the low ceiling. A painted wooden counter ran down the left-hand side, bearing pens on chains, transaction dockets, leaflets about car loans, tracker bonds, inscrutable investment schemes. To the right, beside a small row of uncomfortable chairs, a louvred door led off to another room to which one went for cash, lodgements and so on. Two pictures hung side by side on a prominent area of the wall. One was an anaemic landscape of a soothing sun glinting through trees. ‘
RELIABILITY
,’ it said underneath in big, sincere letters. The other was somewhat more fanciful, depicting a tropical island with dolphins frolicking soothingly just offshore. ‘
QUALITY SERVICE
,’ this one said.

At the back of the room, a man in a badly-tailored blue jacket was smiling at me from behind a desk. His arms were folded and he was sitting at the exact midpoint between his computer and a fake-looking potted plant. He looked rather as if he had been sitting like that all day, smiling placidly; a sign saying ‘Information’ hung above him, with an arrow pointing down at his head.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said pleasantly, when he saw I had finished my examination of the dolphin picture.

‘Ah, hello,’ I replied with a whimsical brightness, as if I were just passing a few idle minutes on my way somewhere else.

‘How can I help you today?’ he inquired. He was a nondescript-looking fellow, with a kindly, roundish face and a little hyphen of a mouth.

‘Oh, just a small thing,’ I said breezily, waving a couple of red-stamped envelopes at him. ‘Just a few final-notice things we seem to have got by mistake.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Mind if I have a quick look at them?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Be my guest.’

‘Why not take a seat,’ he said, ‘Mr…?’

‘Hythloday – Charles,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

He scanned through the pages expressionlessly while I whistled something in keeping with the relaxed but respectful mood we had established, and tried to imagine what he might look like away from his desk – cheering on a boat race, or frowning thoughtfully over a jar of pickles in the supermarket. He slid his chair over to the computer and began to tap at it. He tapped for a good three minutes. ‘Oh,’ he said at one point, briefly pulling back from the screen. I leaned casually over to one side but I couldn’t make out what was on it. I continued uneasily with my whistling.

‘Well, Charles,’ he said eventually, ‘it says here that we haven’t received any mortgage payments from you in over six months.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said in a businesslike manner that might make this sound like an explanation.

‘It looks like we’ve been trying to contact you about it for some time,’ he continued, still gazing into the computer screen. ‘Didn’t you get our letters about legal action?’

He was trying to keep up his friendly tone but I could tell that he was hurt, as though I had deliberately misled him. I explained that the letters had been misfiled in the String Drawer but this didn’t cut much ice.

‘The String Drawer,’ he repeated to himself, labouring to understand.

‘It’s not just string,’ I expanded, ‘there’s other stuff in there as well: thumb-tacks, Sellotape, that sort of thing.’

‘Yes,’ he said, placing his hands on the top of his head and leaning back his chair. I felt like a heel. ‘Well, Charles, that could happen to anyone. But unfortunately that doesn’t change the fact that we have a bit of a problem here.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes – unless, of course, you’re going to tell me that you have in your wallet the sum of –’ He named the sum with a jocular laugh – ‘in cash, ha ha’ – but his eyes implored me to give him
something
, not to let a dreary, mundane old debt scuttle the friendship that was budding so beautifully between us. My heart sank a little more. Coincidentally, the figure he’d named bore some resemblance to the amount I’d lost playing baccarat that spring, on somebody’s yacht one day with Pongo and Patsy and Hoyland Maffey. How insubstantial it had seemed then, in the simmering below-deck; after too many Kahluas and with Patsy pressed against my arm, when she wasn’t outside playing some juvenile hide-and-seek game with Hoyland, that is – it hadn’t seemed to matter whether I won or lost; she’d clutched my elbow and laughed and cheered me on, little pearl earrings shining out of her ebony bob; and the cards all looked the same anyway, smiling in the light that washed in through the picture-window, as the croupier swept up another pile of chips…

‘There must be something we can do,’ I said.

The bank official chewed his ballpoint pen pessimistically. ‘Charles, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘The family has
assets
, though – I mean it’s not as if we’re down to our last few pennies. This is just a temporary thing. Couldn’t we sort out a… a loan, or a moratorium or something? At least until I can talk to Father’s accountant, and he can… he can divert funds from our dividends…’

The bank official looked up at me with a weary little smile; he knew I didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘that would be all well and good. I would love to do that for you, Charles, and if it were personally up to me, you’re right, arrange a moratorium, that’s exactly what I’d do. But you see, I have to look after the bank’s interests too.’ His eyes looked earnestly into mine, hoping that I would understand. ‘It’s so far behind, and the sum is so large, and – though I personally believe you do – on paper I can’t see that you have the collateral to pay this off. I want to take care of this for you, Charles, but I have to make sure that the bank gets a square deal.’

I swallowed, looking helplessly back at him. Didn’t he think he could trust me? Did he think we were some crowd of snaky conmen, trying to take advantage of the bank’s good-heartedness? In a fatuous slip of mirror beside the fake-looking potted plant I caught a glimpse of my hands wringing, and wondered curiously whose, what they were.

‘The thing is, Charles – you see, the mortgage as it stands seems somewhat
irregular
. That’s what really bothers me.’ The pen went back in his mouth.

‘Oh yes?’ distractedly mopping my brow.

‘Yes. You see, normally, Charles, how a mortgage works is that when the first party passes away – Mr Ralph Hythloday, that’s – that was your father, I assume?’

I nodded.

‘I’m sorry,’ the bank official said quietly.

‘Thank you,’ I said. For a moment we reflected in silence.

‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘what usually happens is that, on the occasion of the borrower’s death, the life insurance is put towards outstanding debts. For some reason, that hasn’t happened in your father’s case.’

‘No?’ The atmosphere in the room was unbearably close; I glanced hopefully up at the fan.

‘No… and then when I go back further, I find that the original
structure
of the loan was… well, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The payments are totally irregular. And they come in from somewhere new practically every time. Look,’ turning the screen round to me, ‘this is just in the last four years. Instead of us simply debiting your father’s account, the money’s paid in by this company on this date, and a different company here, and then there’s nothing for months, and then this lump sum from this bank which I have to say I’m not familiar with – do you know who any of these people are?’

‘Assets?’ I croaked weakly. My head was spinning and I could make no sense of the numbers dancing up and down on the screen. Why wouldn’t he let me go?

‘I don’t know who set this up,’ he was saying, ‘but it’s most irregular, most irregular.’

‘So what should I do?’ I said feverishly, simply to bring this to an end. ‘You can’t give me a loan, you say, and you can’t give me any more time.’

He looked at me with a sorrowful, stoical expression. ‘Charles, my hands are tied,’ he said. ‘If you can find your family’s accountant, and if he can make head or tail of this – well, then, maybe we can work something out. But as it stands… the debt
will
have to be called in.’

‘Meaning the house will be repossessed?’

‘That’s the standard operating procedure, yes.’ He brooded behind a steeple of fingers.

‘I see.’ That was the bottom line. I reached behind me for my jacket and got to my feet. ‘Well,’ I said, reverting to the breezy style I had begun with, as if none of this were really important anyway.

‘Yes,’ the bank official followed suit, ‘thanks for dropping by.’ He stretched over the desk to shake my hand.

‘Thank
you
,’ I said without quite knowing why, and made my way to the door.

‘Oh, Charles?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why not have one of these?’ He took something out of a drawer and held it out to me.

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking it. It was a keyring. The plastic tag had the Irelandbank logo on one side, and the legend ‘We Pledge Unto You’ on the other; with a metal ring attached to it on which, presumably, I could hang the keys of the house I no longer owned.

‘You’re welcome,’ he said warmly. ‘Mind how you go.’

I saw Mrs P as I passed the supermarket, deep in conversation with a foreign-looking woman. The woman wore an identification badge and was selling magazines. ‘Mine are in one little room,’ she was saying, ‘above a butcher’s shop, we pay and pay, and when he say, oh, police, is trouble, we pay more –’ I covered my face with my hand and slipped by them, breathing stinging, shallow breaths. What was happening? What did they mean, those irregularities? Could it really be so complicated that they couldn’t begin to sort it out? Because it seemed to me to be so obvious; it was Father, he had assets, there was plenty of money, there had to be – Gasping, I leaned against a mock-Corinthian pillar, flooded by nightmarish images: hordes of machine-stitched blue suits pouring into the house, dismantling it with their dead Golem eyes, rebuilding it as a luxury aparthotel, a leisureplex, the eighteenth hole of a cross-town golf course…

There was nothing more I could do here, however. I detached myself from my pillar and, deciding a walk home might calm me, I headed up Ballinclea Road and through the iron gates of Killiney Hill Park. But instead of calming me, the pathways –
my
pathways, which I had trodden a thousand times – seemed to curl indifferently away from me; the trees bowed with the wind like elders shaking accusing heads, the birds screeching and yammering as if raising an alarm. And the mountains, and the sky, and the dark gorse and grey-blue rolling sea, they remained steeped in the clouded afternoon, withholding their beauty from me as from an undeserving passer-by.

Soon it began to rain, and by the time I got to Amaurot I was thoroughly soaked. Ascending the driveway, I saw the house appear through a shifting veil of precipitation. Already I seemed to feel its weight on my shoulders. ‘I can’t do it!’ I whispered inwardly. ‘You’re too heavy!’ And the house, even as I got closer, retreated further back into the rain.

It was pouring now. I went into the kitchen in search of a towel. From the window I saw Mrs P making her way in the direction of the clothes line, tucked discreetly in the lee of the Folly, with a basket of washing. Covering my head with one of Bel’s theatre monthlies, I chased out after her. ‘What are you doing?’ She froze, her shoulders leaping up around her neck. ‘Give me that basket,’ I said, taking hold of it. ‘You can’t hang clothes out in the rain.’ She handed over the basket without a word. I looked through the contents – blankets, towels, sheets, once again those fearful underpants, capacious with dread and mystery – everything already dried and pressed. ‘Go inside,’ I directed sternly. Mrs P looked as if she were about to cry. ‘Go inside and go to bed. You’re not well. I’m suspending you from your duties until we get you a doctor.’

And then she did start to cry. I set the basket down on the ground and, taking her arm in mine, led her back to the house. She sobbed and sobbed and as we walked over the wet grass I felt for all the world as though I was leading a prisoner to the scaffold. In the kitchen I sat her down and made some tea.

‘What’s
wrong
?’ I demanded. ‘What’s
wrong
with you?’ But she just waved her hands in front of her face, before giving way to a fresh stream of tears.

I stood at the sink and looked out at the rain and the sky, the same stolid grey as the bricks of the tower. Suddenly I felt smothered in there, as I had in the bank. ‘I need to think,’ I said, going to open the back door. ‘Will you please go and get some rest?’

Mrs P looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks, but she leapt up and dragged me back from the door. ‘Please, Master Charles, don’t go back outside!’

‘I have to get the basket,’ I said. ‘The clothes are getting wet.’

But she didn’t hear. ‘It rains,’ she kept saying, ‘you catch cold.’

‘All right, all right…’ sitting down again at the kitchen table. ‘Happy?’

‘Good.’ She wiped her cheeks and pretended to be cheerful again. ‘Now, everything is good. Here we are, safe and dry. I make you hot chocolate and you watch television, yes?’

Try as I might, I couldn’t persuade her to lie down until she had installed me on the chaise longue, with a cup of cocoa resting on the floor where the table had been. As luck would have it, there was a movie on:
The Killers
, aka
A Man Alone
, handsome old Burt Lancaster murdered in flashbacked increments by faithless Ava Gardner. I eased my head back and tried to immerse myself in that world, the bare dark apartment where Lancaster sat and smoked, waiting for the assassins to come. But I couldn’t do it. I was thinking of the impossible mortgage, the exhausting interview with the bank official. It seemed to me that it all came back to Frank somehow: that after all these years, all Father’s fortifications, one little cancerous cell of reality had at last slipped through; and now, inexorably, it was metastasizing.