‘We’re going to open up the old ballroom and put the stage in there. All we’re waiting for is the builders to come back from Tibet. Charles, isn’t it wonderful? No more trudging round to auditions, we can put on anything we want –’ She waltzed from her chair with her hands clasped to her breast, looking for all the world as if she were about to burst into song, and began to reel off a list of plays and playwrights, plans and strategies, with words like
artists
and
residence
,
space
and
community
ominously juxtaposed; while I sat there my head stewing inside the bandages like an enormous pudding,
Today is the first day of the rest of your life
glinting mockingly at me from the far wall –
‘But this is absurd!’
Bel halted mid-waltz and looked at me. Over my left shoulder, one of the monitors bleeped shrilly. ‘It’s absurd,’ I repeated. ‘The whole idea. Amaurot’s already a residence. I reside there. I’m sorry you’ve made all these plans for nothing. But it’s a house, that people live in. You can’t just come in and turn it into something else.’
‘But we’ve been through all this,’ she said. ‘You know we can’t keep it going the way it is, you
know
that. We have to adapt, or else we lose it.’
‘I don’t see how you building a theatre is going to help anyone.’
She hesitated a moment, then circled back carefully towards the bed. ‘Well you see it won’t be an ordinary theatre,’ she said. ‘We want it to be a place where people who normally wouldn’t get anywhere near a stage can come and learn to express themselves, where people from disadvantaged backgrounds can come and stay and –’
My head thumped back on to the pillow. ‘Are you out of your mind? Don’t you have any idea how society
works
?’
‘I know it sounds strange,’ she reached her arm out imploringly, ‘but if you’ll only
lis
ten, there’s a reason for it. I’ve talked to Geoffrey. He says that if we presented ourselves right we’d be eligible for all kinds of government grants. You know, if we’re helping people, and then there’s the cultural diversity element too, with Mirela being from the Balkans. If the theatre was successful we might even be able to have Amaurot registered as a charity. Then think of it, Charles, we could stay there as long as we wanted, and never have to worry any more about banks, or creditors, or how we’re going to keep it running…’ She sat back and hunched her shoulders earnestly. ‘And aside from the money, it’s a chance to put Amaurot on the map again, for it to
mean
something. Isn’t that what you want? We’d finally be using it for something
good
. And the possibilities are endless, once you start thinking about it. We can give classes – you know, drama classes, for inner-city kids, they can come out for the day and –’
‘Why stop there?’ I said. ‘Why not throw the doors open altogether? We could give guided tours: “This is Charles’s bedroom, visitors are asked kindly not to extinguish their cigarettes on his, on his childhood stamp collection –”’
Outside in the corridor a bell began to ring. Sighing, Bel picked up her jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘I’m asking you to understand that we’re not rich any more. We’re just not. Living in Amaurot, it’s like we’re struggling to maintain ourselves in a – on a little island that’s floating further and further away from what it means to actually
exist
–’ She sucked in her cheeks and let them out again. ‘Can’t you see, this is a good thing?’ she said, putting a hand on my arm. ‘We’ll be able to keep the house, and we’ll all be able to stay together…’
Even in my
distrait
condition, I realized that this hand was the first time she’d touched me since the whole accidentally-kissing-her farrago – that she was offering me an olive branch. But I wasn’t going to be bought off so easily. Without replying, I stiffly turned my head and fixed my gaze on the shard of sky at the window, until her hand lifted and I heard the chair creak beside me as she rose to go.
The thing was, though – the thing was that deep down I knew she was right, about the way everything was changing, about the new money taking over. You would see them at the weekends, these new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow winding roads in BMWs or hulking jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anaemic sharks. What if this really was the only way to secure the house from them? I tried to imagine Amaurot as a Residence, full of babbling strangers; I pictured myself at the breakfast table, the Disadvantaged sitting across from me. Would I be expected to make conversation? Would they want to borrow things? My razor, a tie? The notion was too painful to contemplate. A far better solution seemed to be to pretend that none of this was happening, and that my conversation with Bel had never taken place. I was getting enough painkillers to make this quite unproblematic: they made reality fat and viscous and blurred at the edges, broken only by the comings and goings of the doctors and nurses, and the mortal wheezing of the patient in the next room, like a dry wind through a petrified forest.
That night, however – my first night back on earth after my hiatus – I wasn’t able to sleep. I lay awake for hours, gazing at the banks of screens and monitors arranged around me telling the ineffable story of my body in blips and graphs and pulses. It seemed to me that I could see things in the saw-toothed waves; all kinds of things: explosions, prophecies, impending disasters, all hastening in on top of one another until I couldn’t bear it any longer and, seized in a cold grip, I pressed the panic button and cried out ‘Help, help!’ until the night nurse’s clipping stride came down the corridor, not the attractive buxom nurse in charge of sponge baths but the thermometer-happy one with no behind.
‘Yes?’ she demanded. ‘What’s wrong?’
I cleared my throat and pointed at the spikes and troughs on the monitor and said, ‘I’m a little concerned about, ahem, that is…’
‘Do you feel sick?’ she stamped impatiently. ‘Are you in pain?’
‘Well, no, not as such,’ feeling all of a sudden that I could possibly have blown things out of proportion. ‘It’s just that – those sort of spikes there, don’t they look a little, you know, off?’
‘No,’ she said with an abrasive sigh, ‘they are perfectly normal, just like the last time, and the time before that.’
‘Oh. It’s just that I thought they were a bit off.’ There was a moment of silence broken only by her tapping foot; ‘Busy?’ I said, because even if she was hatchet-faced and anally fixated she was still someone to talk to –
‘
Very
,’ she snapped as if she’d been waiting for it, turned on her heel and whipped out of the room, back to her crossword puzzle or her tray of entrails or whatever it was she did in her glass box down the hall; leaving me to the silent procession of the waves, to think of home, the blossoms on the trees, the ballroom where ghosts in tails and enormous hooped dresses whirled each other round in quadrilles and cotillions, as the walls mildewed and spiders made nests in the chandeliers…
Someone pushed open the ballroom door. ‘There you are. You didn’t wait for me.’
‘Oh – I didn’t think you meant actually wait…’
‘It’s
freezing
.’ Mirela rubbed her hands over her bare arms. ‘What are you doing down here? You’re missing the party.’
‘Oh, you know… just thought I’d take a breather.’
‘Your mother’s been looking for you.’
‘I know,’ I said bleakly.
She sat down on the other side of the aisle. ‘Are you all right? Is your head hurting?’
‘No, no…’ I crossed my legs towards her, suspected it looked effeminate, crossed them back again. ‘I suppose it’s just the first time I’ve seen everything finished. Gives me an excuse to be maudlin.’
‘ “Maudlin”?’
‘Sad, you know, like when you think about the past.’
‘It must be strange, to come home and find everything changed like this.’
I looked up at the raised stage, the flat planes of colour, the exposed wooden beams that had replaced the fusty wallpaper and rococo plasterwork. ‘It’s all right,’ I said nobly.
‘I’m glad you were able to come back today,’ she said. ‘In time for the first performance.’
‘It did help to have the painkillers still in my system,’ I agreed.
She laughed. ‘Poor Charles! Didn’t you like it even a little bit?’
I liked
you
, I wanted to say: even if your wig kept slipping, even though you pronounced love like
laugh
and made
joyriders
sound like something from a Transylvanian folk tale, still whenever you were onstage the dialogue momentarily stopped grating and almost began to sound a little like music. But I didn’t say it; I just mumbled something about the realistic costumes.
‘Mmm,’ she said, looking down into her clasped hands as if she were carrying a ladybird in there, out to the garden. ‘Charles – now that you are back – there was something I wanted to say to you.’
‘Oh?’ I said, and cleared my throat.
‘It’s a bit difficult.’
‘Well – try anyway,’ I said. Because the truth of it was that I had been wondering… I mean, what happens in films when something extraordinary happens to a fellow, like he goes on the run or he gets blown up or his sister turns his house into a community theatre, is that he then meets a beautiful woman who immediately falls in love with him and helps him along on his new path. They don’t go into why she falls in love with him. It’s just the way it works. Maybe it’s a kind of reward from the Fates for daring to disturb the universe. I was thinking that none of this might seem quite as bad with a girl like Mirela by my side.
She exhaled preparatively, and then said, ‘I wanted to apologize for what Mama did, for her stealing from you.’
‘Ah, right.’ I masked my disappointment with a cough. ‘There’s no need to, really. Water under the bridge, so forth.’
‘You must think we’re all crazy,’ she said in a low voice. Wisps of light crept in under the door, picking out silver on her downy arms.
‘No, no…’ I hurried to set her at ease. ‘I’ve heard far worse stories. For instance, this one chap I know, Pongo McGurks, his family had a butler, name of Sanderson – had him for years, used to swear by him, best butler they’d ever had, etcetera. Then they came back early from a weekend away to find him in Pongo’s mother’s wedding dress, about to have the toaster marry him to the cuckoo clock.’
‘Oh.’ She seemed not quite to know what to make of this. ‘And this happens often?’
‘No, I suppose it’s pretty rare,’ I conceded. ‘I mean it’s rare that you have a butler who’s a perfect size ten.’ This wasn’t coming out right at all.
Mirela frowned, and hooked a strand of black hair with a finger. ‘I must not be explaining it right,’ she said. ‘What I want to say is that Mama’s not really like that, you see. She’s not a thief. I told her over and over again, why do you steal from these people, they care about you, they will help us. But you must understand that it’s hard for her to trust people, after what has happened. At first she takes only small things you wouldn’t miss. But when she finds out about the bank, that you might lose the house, she starts to panic, she doesn’t sleep, she gets an idea she can steal enough to get us back home. As if there is anything to go back to there.’ She grimaced sardonically. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is, the reason she did these things is not because she is mad or a bad woman. She is just someone who terrible things have happened to.’ The sizzling cobalt eyes swivelled to confront me: I felt like I’d been skewered and lifted from my seat. ‘I wanted you to know that we are just a normal family that things have happened to. Do you understand me?’
‘Of course,’ I croaked, ‘of course.’
‘I knew you would,’ she said quietly. She looked down at her hands again and then suddenly said: ‘Did you notice my leg onstage tonight?’
‘Your…?’
‘My
leg
, Charles. You must have, everyone must have. I don’t want you to be diplomatic about it. Just tell me.’
‘I didn’t notice it,’ I said. ‘Honestly. Maybe a little at first. But I soon forgot.’
‘That was something else Mama wanted to do with the money,’ she reflected. ‘They can do amazing things these days, everyone says.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘I mean I think it rather suits you.’
Possibly this wasn’t the right thing to say; I wasn’t sure of the etiquette on missing limbs. But she started to laugh. ‘It’s good to finally have someone I can talk to about being blown up!’ she said.
‘It’s no joke,’ I averred.
‘The world never looks the same afterwards, does it?’ She stopped laughing. ‘When you realize that things can just happen like that.’ She bowed her head: I let my gaze settle on her face again, tried to figure out what it was about it that mesmerized me so.
‘I really am grateful to you for taking us in, Charles,’ she said. ‘Most people don’t even know what happened over there. They think we just come here to beg.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ I said.
Sfumato
, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux.
‘I knew you would understand,’ she repeated. A moment of silence drifted by. It was quite plain what she was getting at. The time had come to make my move. ‘That reminds me,’ I said, ‘there was something I wanted to say too. About the play, that is.’
‘Oh?’ She looked up.
‘Yes’ I said, thrusting my wrists out of my cuffs. ‘I meant to say that one thing that I found interesting – I found
heartening
about it – was what it said about love.’
‘Love?’ she repeated uncertainly.
‘Yes, the way it showed love could triumph over all the, ah, poverty and car-theft and so on.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Mirela said. ‘Yes, though it’s not really a love story, I don’t think.’
‘But the love between Bel’s character, for instance, and the, the chap with the moustache – what it said to me was, you know, that even when terrible things happen to you, and your life is uprooted, there’s still hope, because that’s just when you’ll meet that special someone who’ll sort of help you along with it all. That’s what I really took from it.’