‘Still, that was your first one in a while, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Something better’s bound to come along.’
‘Mmm.’ She flushed. ‘Charles, I really do have to change now, do you mind?’
‘I mean something that you actually want to – you’re not wearing moccasins with that dress, are you?’
‘Charles, I’m changing, would you please get out?’
I retreated without further comment and went downstairs to fidget in the kitchen until I heard her descend the staircase and rejoin Frank.
‘Don’t wait up,’ she called from the hallway.
‘Ha!’ I returned, but they had already gone.
It might seem that I was being a little hard on my sister, but with Mother away at the Cedars I felt it was my responsibility to look after her. Bel was twenty-one, three years younger than me, a strikingly pretty girl with Father’s pale-blue eyes and Mother’s autumn-leaf hair and a streak of recklessness, a dismissive impatience with her own life, that she’d inherited from no one. In June she’d finished at Trinity, where she’d taken a rather indulgent degree in Drama – ‘Bel study Drama,’ Father had sighed as he signed the cheque, ‘there’s coals to Newcastle for you’ – which wasn’t entirely fair, because while she did have a tendency for melodrama and a keen sense of any injustice that pertained to herself, she wasn’t really the flamboyant type. Although acting was her passion, in college productions she’d always preferred to work behind the scenes, designing sets or editing scripts, and any time she got on to the stage her roles were swallowed up by her own shyness.
Ever since her finals she’d been at a loose end; the void bothered her, I could tell. Over the last months, she’d gone through a series of male companions of diminishing quality, even by her haphazard standards; the rest of the time she’d spent closeted away in her room, listening to Bob Dylan records and smoking joints out the window into the evening air.
‘It’s time off,’ I’d counsel her. ‘Just enjoy it. Slow yourself down a little, like I do.’
‘It’s not time off,’ she’d say. ‘It feels like Purgatory. Stuck out here on my own in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everyone I know, just waiting I don’t even know what for, and I have no money, and I’m nothing, I feel like a zero –’
‘You’ve only been finished a month. It’s a transition period, that’s all. I don’t see what you’re so worried about.’
‘I’m worried that I’ll turn into you,’ she’d wail, and return despairingly to the endless pages of computer-programming jobs in the appointments section of the newspaper. Which was a pity, because that summer we enjoyed beautiful stretches of sunshine, and the grounds had rarely looked so fetching. With Mother away, I was free to stroll around at my leisure, admiring the verdant tint of the oak leaves, the fleecy flowers of the horse-chestnut, the tall amaryllis and columbine; it was a peaceful time, and, in spite of what Bel had said, I felt unusually contented, although naturally from time to time I thought it would have been nice to have a companion for my rovings – a wolfhound, perhaps, or a setter, to wag along beside me as I tramped over the grass, and curl up at my feet as I sat under a tree with my Improving Book.
After Bel and Frank departed, I spent a good half-hour massaging the chaise longue to remove the dent Frank had left in it. I was feeling dinnerish but there was still no sign of Mrs P; I was standing at the window waiting for her when I saw the postman rolling drunkenly up the path. One of the disadvantages of living where we did – the house was on the coast, two miles of devious road from Dalkey village – was that the postal services found it hard to bring themselves to deliver; on rainy days, or days when it looked like it might rain, or days before or after days when it had rained, you could forget about it. But it had been relatively clement lately, and the postman, a white-haired geezer of untrustworthy aspect, had evidently decided to take a chance. I opened the front door just as he was bending to the letterbox with a sheaf of correspondence.
‘Morning,’ he said, the brazen untruth of which knocked the wind out of my sails and with it the lecture I had been preparing for several days to give him; instead I just snatched the mail from his hand and slammed the door, and he sauntered off whistling across the lawn, which is not meant to be walked on except by the peacocks.
I glanced cursorily through the letters. Nothing for me, a few official-looking things for my sister, several others addressed to Mother with a similar red stamp, special delivery or something. I put these aside for Bel, who was in charge of family correspondence while Mother was indisposed, and turned my thoughts back to the whereabouts of Mrs P. I hadn’t seen her since lunchtime and by now was getting weak with hunger. What I’d said to Frank had been no exaggeration: her bonhomie and excellent cuisine had carried the household through some difficult times. Yet recently she hadn’t seemed quite as devoted as usual. She’d been keeping rather erratic hours, and she seemed preoccupied, as if her mind was elsewhere. I hadn’t said anything to Bel yet, but the truth was that I was getting a little worried. I wondered if she hadn’t something troubling her – or worse, if she had simply come to the end of her useful days and was ready to be put out to pasture.
On the upside, by this time my hangover had dissipated so I went down to the cellar to pick out a bottle for dinner. I liked the cellar: the air down there was cool and rarefied, and clung to one damply in a comforting way, like a blanket over the shoulders; and all around the dim light glinted crimson, mauve and burgundy on the bottles, rainbows within rainbows, one of the few unalloyed joys of my father’s life. Of late, it had to be said, the ranks were looking somewhat depleted. It had been a rather frenetic few months – all the old crowd together again, those fabulous, foolish parties merging into one another like the giddy breathless space between night and day. In retrospect I suppose it had all the hallmarks of a Last Hurrah. I wondered if everyone had known it except me.
Not that it mattered; none of it had come to anything, not the flings nor the booze nor the girls with peacock feathers in their hair. Patsy Olé had been the one I was after: Patsy Olé, who was suave and pretty and didn’t give a damn, and who, like all girls that are suave and pretty and don’t give a damn, always had a string of fellows grovelling at her heel. She was one of those girls, furthermore, who enjoyed the strife and hatred she engendered among her suitors at least as much as the relationships themselves, and as such was quite amenable to conducting two or more romances at the same time. And yet, on certain nights, she and I had seemed on the verge of something quite…
I roused myself. She was in India now; we were all probably better off. I selected a bottle and returned to the kitchen. It was easy to get caught in the cellar; if I wasn’t careful I could end up mooning about down there for hours, getting myself covered in cobwebs.
My stomach was really beginning to hurt now and Mrs P remained AWOL. This was ridiculous. I couldn’t be expected to hang about all night. There was a Gene Tierney double-bill on television later that I’d been looking forward to for ages. I decided I would teach Mrs P a lesson by cooking my own meal.
The larder presented some difficulties initially. The fish needed gutting, the meat cutting, the vegetables peeling, slicing, sautéing. But then I chanced on some beans in a jar, and thinking that one could not go wrong with beans, put them in a pot with a cupful of rice. I waited until some steam began to brew over the water, then drained it and put it on a plate and took my meal into the dining room. It was quite edible if you ate it quickly enough between swallows of wine, and I was rather proud of myself. I dined alone, watched over by the sombrely ticking clock and a moth that fluttered atmospherically against the shade of the lamp by the long mahogany table. Afterwards I made myself a gimlet and returned to the drawing room and the by-now-restored chaise longue.
The first half of the double-bill was the negligible Heaven Can Wait, in which Tierney has only a small part as Don Ameche’s saintly wife; but it was followed by Otto Preminger’s magnificent Whirlpool, in which her curious com
bination of magnetism and vacuity, so suited to Hollywood’s purposes that she might have been constructed in some Burbank lot, was exploited to its fullest: drawing in the viewer as at the same time she retreated from the plot, fading and fading until, Siren-like, she had pulled you right into the picture just at the moment that she disappeared from it; so you found yourself alone in the space where she should have been, in the shadows and spiderweb of Preminger’s cruel machine.
I watched a lot of old movies, and from the first time I saw her, Gene Tierney was my favourite star of that era of true stars. Although she’s largely forgotten now, in her time she was regarded as the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen. But her beauty took the form of a smouldering, purely feminine darkness, without the reassuring masculinity of a Bacall or the frivolity of a Hayworth, and it seemed to terrify the movie-makers; they would cast her resolutely against type, as a dullard housewife or a good-natured ninny or a cartoonish Arabian princess, roles devised to restrict and minimize the awesome power of her face, emphasizing instead her natural and deep-rooted uncertainty. Critics and industry, even as they fell in love with her, insisted unanimously that she couldn’t act. (Of Whirlpool, for instance, in which she plays a kleptomaniac taken advantage of by an unscrupulous psychoanalyst, one reviewer said: ‘it is sometimes difficult to tell from Miss Tierney’s playing whether she is or is not under hypnosis’.) Preminger was the only director who seemed to understand her and what she meant to those who saw her; in his and her best film, Laura, she spends most of her time dead, appearing on screen in the form of a painting and in the flashback testimony of the suspects for her murder.
I’d seen both films before, though, and drained by the exertion of making dinner I dozed off. As I did so I experienced the curious sensation, not for the first time in recent months, that in some inexplicable way the film was watching me; I slept tormented by bad dreams, in which vampiric images of women enticed me, withholding focus and changing at the last minute into hideous monsters that grinned toothlessly and made meaningful gestures at a vast chimney lined with empty bottles. I woke to the sound of voices at the door and a new, more crippling pain in my stomach. The voices belonged to my sister and the Thing and had distinctly romantic undertones, but I found myself unable to get up and intervene. ‘Cease,’ I cried weakly, but my voice cracked and my head swam and I lay there powerless in a pool of sweat. In the corner the muted television showed pictures of people in some kind of makeshift campsite – thousands and thousands of people, weeping and lamenting. Then, in one of those moments of extreme clarity that nausea brings, I perceived that my cocktail glass had been removed from the table. Mrs P was back! With the last of my strength, I pulled on the bell-rope and its clang echoed distantly around me as I passed out of consciousness.
When I came to again – parched, pain rampaging through my intestines – I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs P’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was effectively through her negligence that I had been forced to poison myself), and one gormless and oblivious, face, which belonged to Frank. Biting her lip and putting a hand on my shoulder, Bel asked if I were all right.
‘Beans!’ I gasped.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I think he has eaten many kidney beans,’ Mrs P shuddered. ‘Many kidney beans not cooked.’
‘Beans!’ I cried again deliriously.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ Bel said. ‘Charles, listen carefully, did you soak the beans before you cooked them?’
‘Of course I didn’t soak them,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘What do you think?’ Bel said to Mrs P. Mrs P threw her hands in the air and turned away, speaking agitatedly in Bosnian, or whatever it was.
‘They did seem rather crunchy,’ I recalled.
Frank gave me a wink. ‘On the batter, eh? Hair of the dog’s what you want.’
‘What?’ I said, then ‘Oh,’ as he produced a hip flask. The thought of putting my lips where his had been repulsed me but I would have done anything to rid myself of this mortal agony, so I steeled myself and swallowed a mouthful of very cheap whiskey – and it worked, in that soon I was copiously throwing up into a silver champagne bucket. After that I felt a little better, better enough to request a moment in private with Bel.
‘Charles,’ she said, sitting beside me and stroking my brow, ‘when are you going to learn to stop being such an idiot?’
‘Never mind that for the moment,’ I snapped. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on.’
‘Well, we came home and found you rolling around the floor, so we –’
‘Not that, damn it, Bel – that Frank, what is he doing back here?’
Bel drew back. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘I mean, I’ve never laid eyes on him before today, and already he’s spending the night? Just because Mother isn’t here doesn’t mean the house can be turned into a, a bordello, you know.’
She flushed a deep scarlet. ‘How dare you,’ she said coldly.
‘I’m only thinking of you,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to stop you doing something you might regret. One of us has to keep a level head, after all.’
‘My head is perfectly level, I assure you.’
‘Well, is it, though,’ I said.
Bel stood up. ‘What do you mean, “is it, though?”’
‘I mean, you’re not in good form. You said it yourself, Bel. You’re feeling bereaved. You’re ticked off because you’re not with your pals in college any more. You’ve been like this all summer. It’s perfectly understandable. But there comes a point where someone has to step in and take charge. Because the fact is that bereaved or extremely sad people often reach out for support to the wrong places. Their heads are clouded, you see, so they make these ferociously bad decisions –’
Bel’s teeth ground audibly. ‘Charles, how dare you say what you just said and then presume to think you know how I feel. God, if anything’s pushing me to make bad decisions and do something I’ll regret, it’s –’
‘I’m simply thinking of your welfare. Can’t you just sit down and listen for a moment?’ I winced and pressed my hand to my side as a flame of pain shot up from my gut. ‘I mean, who is this Frank? That’s what we have to ask ourselves. What does he want with us?’
‘I know who he is, I’m what he wants with us.’
‘Ah, but do you? I mean he could be anyone, he could be a – a serial killer, or a very well-disguised master criminal after the family fortune –’
‘Why do we keep having this conversation?’ She directed her question to the ceiling. ‘Why are you like this every time I bring someone home? You snipe and you complain till I can’t face it any more. It’s insupportable.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s because you have such uneducated tastes –’ adding hurriedly as she looked about set to hit me, invalided or not, ‘Because you’re such an exquisite creature, Bel, you deserve so much better.’
‘Charles, two minutes ago you basically called me a prostitute.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘You did, you said I was turning the house into a bordello.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said. ‘I only meant, you know, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on imbeciles. I know how hard it is to find the right person, but that’s no reason to exhaustively work your way through all the wrong people. You seem to be living your romantic life by some kind of process of elimination. It’s like matching a Louis Quatorze armchair with one of those plastic patio tables. It simply doesn’t work.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Bel said. ‘I’m an armchair, is that it?’
‘A Louis Quatorze armchair,’ I qualified.
‘And my boyfriends are patio tables.’
‘Actually,’ I remembered, ‘this one’s more like one of those self-assembly Swedish wardrobes.’
‘I worry about you,’ Bel said, getting up and p
irouetting angrily in the pool of light thrown by the lamp. ‘I seriously do. I think you have real demons to struggle with, Charles. Every single relationship I have you do your best to destroy. You make every boy I bring home feel uncomfortable and you make me look like I come from some sort of uppity zoo. No one is good enough for you. Kevin was too badly dressed –’
‘The sandals? The socks?’
‘Liam was too Scottish –’
‘Oh, but so Scottish, Bel! Come on, the bagpipes? The interminable quotations from Braveheart? Anyone who’s proud of coming from Scotland obviously has issues –’
‘David?’
‘Duck-walk.’
‘Roy?’
‘Repressed homosexual.’
‘Anthony?’
I scratched my head. ‘Picayune,’ I said.
‘Thomas, what about him? How did he offend you?’
Why do birds sing? Why is the sky blue? Thomas, the alleged body-artist, who looked like he’d fallen face-first into a bag of nails: I refrained from comment, contenting myself with a supercilious chortle.
‘But haven’t you ever considered,’ Bel went on in an ironic tone, ‘whether the problem might not be with you? Have you ever thought to yourself, why am I so obsessed with my sister’s love-life, isn’t that a bit unhealthy, especially when the rest of the time I do nothing except wander around the house drinking Father’s wine and watching television and romping around with singularly stupid girls who haven’t a hint of brain in their pretty little heads like that awful whatshername who sounded like a bullfight, even as I criticize my unfortunate sister for her attempts at a normal, real relationship and a real actual life – am I,’ she heated up and started stamping about, ‘am I going to spend the rest of my life hanging around Amaurot doing nothing but spy into other people’s affairs as if I owned them when in fact it is none of my business?’ Trembling with fury, she turned to look at me, as if expecting a response.