‘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 pirouetting 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.
‘Are we still talking about me?’ I said.
‘
Yes
, Charles;’ bringing her foot down thunderously.
‘What – you’re suggesting that instead of trying to protect and care for my family I should be out working in some sort of a, a
job
, is that it?’
‘In a nutshell,’ Bel replied.
I was confused. ‘This isn’t how the conversation started out,’ I averred.
‘Maybe not,’ Bel said. ‘But it’s high time someone told you a few home truths.’
‘Actually, I think I can feel another nauseous spell coming on,’ I said hurriedly.
She said it anyway: she was remorseless, telling me that while possibly by some tortuous logic I was misconstruing my meddling behaviour as paternal, or protective, in actual fact it was intrusive and stifling, ‘and the only reason you do it is that you don’t have anything
else
, because for the last two years you’ve been either sitting around here on your own or drinking with your good-for-nothing friends and basically living without the remotest concept of
adulthood
or
maturity
… Well, I’ve had enough, Charles. I don’t care any more if you don’t go back to college. I don’t care if you want to ruin your life. But I don’t see why you should get to ruin mine as well. If you’re going to be a failure, fine. But please fail on your own time.’
‘Failure?’ I yelped. ‘Someone has to preserve the family tradition, don’t they? Someone has to keep the flag flying.’
‘Father never took a day off in his life,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Flag indeed.’
‘Yes, but he didn’t work his whole life so that his children would have to – to also work,’ I parried, ‘and besides, I don’t understand what you’re getting so het up about’ – although it was pretty obvious, Bel was relentlessly introspective and probably suffering from terrible guilt over this Frank character. ‘I don’t see why a few kindly meant words of advice have you sending me out to work shelling
peas
, or putting tops on jam jars in some hideous mechanical
barn
, standing all day at a conveyor belt, the roar of machinery in my ears, not even a chair to sit on and the endless gleaming jars rolling inexorably towards my little lid-placing device –’
‘I’m talking about responsibility, Charles, about living like an actual human grown-up person –’
‘This Frank of yours, I suppose
he
works, does he?’
Bel halted mid-stamp and adjusted the strap of her dress. ‘He works,’ she said evasively.
‘Well? Brain surgeon, hot-air balloonist, third violin…?’
She cast down her eyes. ‘He has a van,’ she said.
‘A
van
!’ I exclaimed, triumphantly jabbing a finger in the air. ‘A
van
! And any idea as to what he puts in this “van”? Opium? Elephant tusks? Well-intentioned but misguided young girls from good families?’
‘It doesn’t
matter
!’ she shouted. ‘God, I knew I shouldn’t have bothered trying to reason with you.’
From outside, the querulous creak of the weathervane rose over the wind. I sighed, sat up in bed and turned back the cuffs of my pyjamas. The thing was, I wasn’t just trying to annoy her this time; I really did have the uncanny feeling that with Frank she had crossed some kind of a line. ‘Bel,’ I said earnestly, ‘I’m sorry if I’m harsh with you. You’re grown up, you’ve finished college, you can make your own decisions. But although I may not have a respectable job in a jar factory, I have seen a thing or two. And this Frank…’ I racked my brains for a more diplomatic, more palatable expression for my fears, but I couldn’t think of one. So I took a deep breath and came right out with it. ‘Are you familiar with the figure from Yiddish mythology known as the Golem?’
Bel looked puzzled but suspicious.
‘The Golem, according to legend, is a creature composed entirely of clay – or in certain cases,’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘putty, seemingly –’
‘Here we go,’ she declared heavily, cutting me off. ‘Here we go!’
‘Come back!’ I cried, stretching my arms after her. ‘Come back, for pity’s sake! I’m not joking, Bel. What I am about to tell you could be of the utmost importance to both of us!’
She paused in the doorway, then with a slight, acidic nod of the head, coolly bade me continue.
I am not by nature a superstitious man, and the next day I wondered if the kidney beans were to blame for the wild thoughts riding roughshod through my mind that night. Looking back on it now, though, I can see that I was part right, at least: that the coming of Frank did mark the beginning of our downfall – although each of us had many, many contributions of our own to make. ‘The Golem does not think for itself,’ I told Bel. ‘It is an automaton, animated by mystical powers – usually malevolent, it has to be said.’
‘Charles, it’s late. Have you a point to this, other than pretending that the reason you don’t like Frank isn’t that you’re a snob and a sociopath, but because he’s some kind of a mystical being sent to corrupt me?’
‘I know it sounds outlandish,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how else to explain this sense of
foreboding
. None of your boyfriends ever made my skin actually crawl before.’ I shuddered, imagining the dark slab of Frank driving his van down crepuscular suburban streets, eyes gleaming emptily as he awaited the call from his master…
Bel’s shoulders slumped. ‘Then it appears we are at an impasse.’
‘Almost literally,’ I said, picturing Frank moonlighting as a roadblock or a small dam.
Bel sighed, and sank wearily on to the foot of the bed. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘it’s quite obvious that in Mother’s absence the power has gone to your head. I don’t know what’s going to come of it, or if there’s anything I can do about it. But I know that I can’t go on like this. We have to sort something out if we’re going to keep living here with any semblance of normality. So though I do this with a bad conscience, I propose we make a pact.’
‘A pact?’
‘A pact.’ She rubbed her eyes with the edge of her hand. ‘If you let this relationship take its course, without any more complaining or allusions to Jewish mythology, I hereby promise that if –
if
– Frank and I then break up, I’ll – I’ll stay in for three months before seeing anyone else. How’s that?’
‘That sounds very cynical, Bel,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, I just want you to be happy.’
‘Charles, just tell me what it will take to get you to leave me alone.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. Cynical it might have been, but I was rather taken with the novelty of this arrangement. Usually my arguments with Bel ended in her hurling something breakable at me. The sad truth was that she was going to see this fellow whether I liked it or not. At least this way I would be offered some kind of recompense – something, for instance, that under normal circumstances she would never be persuaded to do…
‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘Three months, and…’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘
And?
’
‘And you also have to introduce me to that friend of yours. That Laura Treston.’
‘Laura Treston?’ Bel repeated disgustedly. ‘She’s not my friend, I haven’t spoken to her in – wait a minute, what made you suddenly think of
her
, anyway?’ I made an indistinct coughing noise and smoothed some bumps out of the eiderdown. Bel groaned and tugged her hair. ‘Oh Charles, you haven’t been going through my old yearbooks again, have you?’
‘I had to check something,’ I mumbled.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, it’s creepy and morbid, those photographs are from four years ago at least, those girls are practically still
children
…’
‘Be that as it may,’ I said gruffly.
‘I mean, none of them looks the same now. A couple are
dead
, even.’
‘Coming back to the matter at hand,’ I said.
Bel groaned again. ‘Don’t make me call her, Charles. She’s so
boring
. The last time I talked to her I practically had to be drip-fed espresso for the rest of the week.’
‘Those are my terms,’ I said. ‘Take them or leave them.’
She surrendered. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. I’ll call her tomorrow, and you’ll promise to leave Frank and me alone. Promise?’
‘Where is he now?’ I sat up. ‘I hope he’s in the spare room, Bel.’
‘Starting now.’
‘All right, all right, I promise.’ I outstretched my hand; she shook it, and the pact was sealed. She went off yawning to her room, and I laid down my head, thoughts awhirl like galaxies.
Bel’s yearbooks had been a secret vice of mine since my girl-less schooldays, when I’d spirit them away from the pile under her bed and bring them in to show my classmates and be hailed as a hero for the day. We would gather behind the cricket pavilion and huddle round in the glow of the pages: boggling at the sheer number of faces and names and possibilities, rating every single girl out of ten, speculating on their sexual proclivities, imagining lights-out in the dorms and the pillow fights that, if we knew anything about girls, must surely ensue… and before long a silence would fall, as each of us drifted off into his own private reverie – lost in the photograph, this seeming Elysium where our feminine counterparts dwelled beaming or scowling in black-and-white rows, distant and unknown to us as stars.