And that was where I first encountered her – one summer’s day when, with nothing to do, I had stolen into Bel’s bedroom on an ongoing and fruitless quest for her diary, and instead found the new yearbook, and sitting on the bed cast my eye over the rank-and-file of twelve-year-olds, until suddenly I stopped and caught my breath; and my lust gave way to something purer, translucent and doomed as a wish. Those eyes, that mouth, the thrilling glimpse of throat through the school blouse; that array of tresses – hazel or blonde, it was hard to tell – that hung so magnificently still… With a strange sense of destiny I’d traced through the block of names at the bottom of the page – Audrey Courtenay, Bunty Chopin, Dubois Shaughnessy – until I arrived at hers: Laura; Laura Treston.
Ever since then, although the fates had conspired to keep us from meeting, I had followed her progress in the yearbooks, each one bringing a new metamorphosis; in the pillow fights of my dreams, it was the throw-cushions of her breasts more than any others that shook and resounded with the light thump of feathers. Even now, years after school had ended and she had gone I knew not where, she lived on in my heart like a hologram. The Patsy Olés of this world could come and go; this, I felt sure, was to be my grand love story.
Bel herself never appeared in the class photographs, nor in any other photographs for that matter. She’d always been sensitive about her looks; whenever photos came back from the chemist after a family occasion she would invariably grab them first, and look through them compulsively, and put them down disappointed two minutes later, saying sadly, ‘I look like
that
? Why didn’t someone
tell
me…’ I never understood what she got in such a fuss about, because even then you could tell she would be pretty – but the girl in the pictures evidently didn’t match up to the girl she was in her imagination, and she began to dread them, these moments that didn’t die away but would come back to haunt her in all their objective, inescapable truth. So, at the age of twelve, she’d decided she would simply no longer allow herself to be photographed. In school she’d engineered ways to get out of it, coming down with ever more extravagant ailments on Photograph Day (the nuns who taught her were old and doddery and always fell for her painted-on measles, lesions, yellow fever). In family portraits, she’d feature as a blank space, a decentring, inexplicable inch of room furnishings beside Mother, Father and me. To this day, the moment a camera appeared, Bel seemed to vanish into thin air.
I was too excited to get back to sleep and for an hour I lay there happily considering my new life with Laura. But as the night wore on the excitement curdled, and I began to be tormented by doubts. That everything should fall into place this way: suddenly it seemed too neat, too easy. Should I have turned down the pact? Had I sold Bel down the river? And then I thought I heard noises, and I couldn’t reassure myself that it wasn’t him, stalking deadly through the halls and corridors, making sure all was quiet before beginning his maleficent enterprise.
Chiding myself, I put on my slippers and went out to the landing. But all was silent, save the distant clanks and rumblings the house made in its sleep, and somewhere a clock ticking to itself. There was no one in the bathroom, although there was an unfamiliar stench. I drew the curtains in Mother’s bedroom, then went to the door of Father’s study. And there I paused: seized, as I turned the handle, by memories, as if they had been waiting there coiled inside the metal. They were from when I was very small, before he started locking the door, and I would come to see him with a glass of milk or a snail or my homework (
norway has alot of fjords, nobody does much there
), and find him brooding in the recesses of his enormous chair; how the room had seemed enchanted, with its vertiginous walls of arcane books and ledgers, the murky carpet that he wouldn’t let Mother change, the obsequious plaster head waiting hopefully on its plinth – the room like an alchemist’s lair, that both was and wasn’t part of the house, where Father both was and wasn’t with us…
‘What’s this about Dad,
bones
?’
‘
Cheek
bones, Charles, see some people don’t really have ’em, and these colours –’
‘And what’s this?’
‘Ah, well that’s a chemical formula, is what that’s called, this fellow here’s a stearate radical and – no, don’t touch that, Charles –’
‘Oops, sorry…’
‘Doesn’t matter. Look, there’s Mother out in the garden, I wonder if she needs a hand,’ steering me gently but firmly out the door…
Nothing in the room had been touched since his death. Everything was as he had left it, as if he’d just stepped out and would be returning momentarily: the vials of dyes and tinctures, the colour charts and cross-sections; the desk overflowing with magazine-cuttings of tempestuous models in hair and dresses already passed out of fashion, like spirits that had been called into being for that moment alone, sprung like flames from shadows before disappearing back to that essential realm where it was forever 1996. The only addition was the portrait that Mother had installed – opposite the window, so that he could continue to enjoy the grounds and gardens, this empire he had built from nothing. Or not quite nothing: our family traced its lineage back to the first Norman conquerors, although some regrettable dalliances with the local peasantry over the centuries had somewhat thinned the bloodline, perhaps accounting for an occasional lassitude in judgement such as exhibited by my sister. Standing in the moonlight, leaning back with my arms rigid against the desk, I studied the aquiline nose, the thinly smiling lips, the ruddy cheeks. It had been painted posthumously, from photographs, but the picture really captured the spirit of my father, a man devoted to life in his own inspiring if inexplicable way.
I’d almost forgotten why I came in at all, when by chance I spotted something unusual. Two red dents in a velvet square: two pieces of Father’s coin collection mysteriously absent. Frank! So that was his game – start slow, no one will notice, until the whole house was cleaned out! I pictured him at one of those vile suburban pubs, sitting at a faux-marble table top, drinking a fizzing lager with his fence, satellite television blaring above them as they laughed and clinked glasses in their pork-pie hats. Now from downstairs came the sound of a cupboard opening. In a fury I rolled up my pyjama sleeves. Just let me catch him in a fresh act of thievery, I would settle his hash for him, Golem or no!
I padded softly down the stairs. I took the poker from the drawing room, then saw a faint glisten of light along the wooden floorboards of the hall: I whirled about in the eye of the sweeping staircase, glancing from one shut door to the other, and then a noise! I pounced, poker high, through the scullery door – and checked myself just in time, so that Mrs P was dealt only a glancing blow, although unfortunately enough to bring the silver tray she was carrying crashing to the floor. ‘Young Master Charles!’ she cried. ‘You are giving me the heart failure!’
‘Oh, yes, sorry Mrs P, didn’t think you’d be about this late –’
‘Yes,’ she faltered, ‘I am – I am making the breakfast…’
I picked up a tender sliver of pheasant from the floor. Morsels of roast potato clung to it alluringly. Making breakfast at three in the morning? And no ordinary breakfast either – on top of the pheasant, or rather beside it on the floor, was a heavenly looking soufflé and a bottle of rather fine Armagnac. It looked like
someone
was in the running for a first-class breakfast in bed. And there could be little doubt as to who that someone would be – the poor thing was still upset about the kidney-bean debacle; indeed, now that I looked at her properly, I could see the rings that worry and tiredness had left on her simple rustic face.
She protested, but I would not hear of her making another breakfast at this hour; I told her to forget about the kidney beans and go directly to bed as soon as she had cleaned up the floor. She bowed gratefully, and I left the room, marvelling at her diligence even if increasingly concerned about her mental stability – I mean to say, pheasant for breakfast? In all the excitement, the Frank conundrum went clean out of my head; and it wasn’t until some time later that I noticed the disappearance of the ottoman, and the ornamental teapot.
2
Perhaps it might seem that Bel had a point, about me not having a job, I mean. To the casual observer it may have looked like I was living a life of indolence, compared to the noisy industry with which the city to the north was ripping itself to pieces. It was true that, after a brief but regrettable entanglement with Higher Learning, I had fairly much confined my activities to the house and its environs. The simple fact of it was that I was happy there; and as I didn’t have any skills to speak of, or gifts to impart, I didn’t see why I ought to burden the world with my presence. It was not true, however, to say that I did
nothing
. I had several projects of my own to keep busy with, such as composing, and supervising the construction of the Folly. I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. In Renaissance times, they had called it
sprezzatura
: the idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one’s every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless. Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully. This, they said, was the true meaning of being an aristocrat. I had explained it several times to Bel, but she didn’t seem to get it.
Our house was called Amaurot. It was situated in Killiney, some ten miles outside of Dublin, a shady province of overhanging branches, narrow winding roads and sea air. Most of the houses had been built in the nineteenth century by magistrates, viceroys, military and navy men; in recent years, however, the area had become something of a tax haven for foreign racing-car drivers and
soi-disant
musicians. But it still possessed a sequestered elegance, an arboreal hush: I would not have lived anywhere else. On bright mornings I might take a walk up to Killiney Hill, climbing mossy steps under canopies of ash and sycamore; at the top stood the Obelisk, a monument to the kindness of the landed gentry to the local peasants during the famine year of 1741, from where you could look out over the half-hidden rooftops to the blue mountains and the golden sickle of the beach. Beside it was a little ziggurat, and the legend was that if you ran around each level of it seven times your wish would come true. But neither Bel nor I had ever managed to make it to the top; and even if we had, we would have been too dizzy to wish.
Amaurot was big and hundreds of years old, and it seemed to me while Bel and I were growing up that as long as we were there nothing bad could ever happen to us; the world outside could go up in flames and we would continue to play, safe in the shadow of the high stone walls. As far as we were concerned, Amaurot
was
the world – and it belonged to us, like the waves belonged to the sea, or certain shades of blue to the sky.
The house was set on a promontory, bordered on two sides, at the bottom of steep hills, by the sea. At every hour of the day you could hear it whispering or roaring, slipping from jade to amethyst to grey to deepest black; I loved it as the companion to my thoughts and the ear to which I disclosed my desires. A long avenue swept proudly over the lawns back to the road; ancient trees rubbed shoulders with saplings and wild flowers along the perimeter. To the rear of the house were the vegetable garden, which had gone to seed rather in recent years, the apple trees and cherry trees and a small rivulet that bore frogs down to the sea. This was where Bel and I had spent most of our childhood, in the long grass and pine needles.
Bel had been a recalcitrant playmate. She went through long periods of not talking to anyone; instead she’d read, for days on end, her bare legs dangling from the windowsill. But she had a gift for invention, and on days when she jumped down from the ledge to join me in my stick fort, all of the fabulous ideas that she nursed over her books came bubbling out as complex adventures which I had to struggle to keep up with.
She liked to read about Russia, and Amaurot often doubled as the Winter Palace. Sometimes we would be orphaned children of the Tsar, fleeing the clutches of the evil Revolution, crossing invisible wastes on phantom troikas; sometimes she would be the diffident, entrancing princess and I the dashing suitor trying, with difficulty, to win her over. I would be called Karl and Bel Tanya, after the heroine of Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, which she had fallen in love with at the age of eight. (In fact, even when the toys had been put away for ever and the games forgotten, she hung on to this name: to her friends at school, she was Tanya until well into her teens. ‘Christabel’ had been Father’s idea, after a Coleridge poem – a murky and rather depressing thing about nymphs and vampires, which breaks off abruptly at a point of confused identities and general malaise. She couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s not just the fact that nobody can
spell
it,’ she would fulminate periodically, ‘but he never even got around to writing the happy ending. I mean, couldn’t they have named me after a poem that someone had actually
finished
, would that have been too much?’ Eventually, ‘Bel’ was arrived at as a sort of compromise, and Father became the only person to call her by her full name.)
Mother thought she might be a genius; I overheard her talking to Father about it sometimes. ‘The way she reads!’ she’d say. ‘The library is looking positively bare, she’s smuggled off so many books.’
‘I was thinking perhaps we should get a billiard table for it,’ Father said.
‘And such an imagination!’ she went on. ‘The things she comes out with, really –’
‘Hmm… you don’t think she might be a bit
over
-imaginative, do you? She does seem to spend an awful lot of time in this dreamworld of hers.’
‘That’s a sign of intelligence, Ralph. That girl will go places, believe me.’
‘Hey, Your Highness,’ I’d say to Bel, listening in on the windowsill, ‘escaping from these sorfs is making me hungry, I think there are apples in yonder wood, yonder…’
‘You can’t say “Hey” to a princess, Charles,’ jumping down, ‘and it’s
serfs
, not
sorfs
…’ and we’d steal through the gap in the hedge to Old Man Thompson’s garden and throw sticks up into the branches, until apples began to thud around us and, inevitably, Olivier, his sinister German manservant, appeared on the verandah: ‘Herr Zompson! Zey are scrumpfing our apfeln!’
Old Man Thompson would come hobbling out waving his cane, yelling, ‘After ’em, Olivier! After ’em!’ and we’d shriek and run away as Olivier gave chase – a spindly black spider in his tight PVC suit – and burst back through the gap just in time, Old Man Thompson howling from the other side, ‘Bloody children, I’m going to call your father up, you bloody…’
I don’t know if he ever did call Father up; I don’t know that it would have done him much good anyway. Father could be a difficult man to get through to. He was full of unfulfilled romanticism and wilful, unspoken delusions; he spent long hours at the office or in his study, and only the husk of him was brought home to us at the end of the day. Through the evening he’d maintain a weary, benevolent silence, and only address us to deliver abstract lectures, or ask disinterested questions about school. But sometimes he would take walks out through the trees to the hillside, to look down at the flying vapour of the sea, and bring Bel and me along with him; we would fidget restlessly while he gazed into the darkness, and then, just as we were wondering what the point of all this was, and how long we would have to stand there doing nothing while valuable television-watching time was being eaten up, he would turn to us and without introduction launch into a poem from memory, spooky verses about lonely lovers and capricious fairies, tricking spectres and murmuring seas. And as our faces turned pale with not-understanding, and we tingled with the haunting, equivocal magic that crackled around the poems, he would chuckle out, ‘Yeats, children. Yeats would have liked to be up here with you and me, on a night like this.’ And before we could express our indifference as to the presence or otherwise of Yeats, he would be marching off again, back to the house.
Father had been a master cosmetician. In the skin of the human face he divined what a Renaissance master might have seen on a blank canvas: the possibility of a transcendent beauty. Though the Renaissance master painted to testify to God’s greatness, while my father, one of those agnostics who spends his life doing battle with the God he doesn’t believe in, worked more out of defiance, as if to say,
Where you have failed, I succeed; I can lift people up out of your squalid Creation
. He had worked with all the greats – Lancôme, Yves St Laurent, Givenchy, Chanel – inventing unguents, balms and lotions to retard the ravages of the sun, to preserve the black sparkle of mascara from rain and tears, to maintain the bloody red kiss of the mouth through a thousand bloody red kisses; to soothe, to rejuvenate, to enhance and restore, in short an act of such great love for the human race that, through his cosmetics, the years could be rolled back and the tale of anyone’s life – written always in lines, scars, desiccation, no matter what they say about the beauty of wisdom and life’s rich tapestry – could be untold.
His death was more than two years ago now: it followed a long, wasting illness which had caused him great suffering. In his last days he had faltered badly. His mind had slipped, and he misused his art. He tried to disguise the desecration the disease had left, and thus, by his thinking, counteract it. ‘There’s no escaping it,’ he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, ‘the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.’ And so the make-up was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half-darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge. For a time the house teetered on the verge of becoming some kind of hospice
Cage Aux Folles
, everyone flapping about in hysterics and occasionally French accents. It was a mercy when he died and we could restore him in our memories to what he had been before all this mortal vaudeville. I can still hear his last words to me, with a crumbling, crooked finger beckoning me out of the shadows to kneel at his side: ‘Son… the world is cruel…’ he’d whispered. ‘Always… moisturize…’
Although before his death Father’s was the mood that generally prevailed in the house – a sort of brittle otherworldliness, an ethereally edged detachment, as though saying to the world, ‘We will indulge you for the moment, but bear in mind, please, that as soon as Father’s work is done, we will leave you’ – Mother had always been the steelier of the pair, strict about correct behaviour and what she called ‘breeding’. She knew just about everyone there was to know, and was forever flying about to lunches and gallery openings and book launches and dinner parties, with or without Father in tow. In later years especially she became more and more independent of him, and ran the show in the house as he receded from it.
Shortly after his death, however, she too began to disintegrate. It happened gradually but unmistakably, a slow, irresistible shutting-down, until eventually she wouldn’t go out at all, or even take telephone calls. At the same time she exhibited a sunniness that was quite out of character. Bel and I constantly found ourselves cornered in silly, chatty, endless conversations with her. She’d rabbit away to us with gossip about the neighbours or vague plans to take a holiday or work that needed doing round the house – whatever came into her head, like a kind of domestic Reuters, tickering constantly in her armchair in the drawing room. It was a side of her that we hadn’t known existed, that (we presumed) used to be bounced off Father and now came babbling through to us. We didn’t know quite how to respond, and it wasn’t even clear that she was listening when we did, because she was drinking all the time, martinis for breakfast and whiskey sours to see in the evenings, drinking and talking, talking and drinking. Finally, one night, the situation came to a head.
Over the years, she and Bel had developed quite a fiery relationship, which could be ignited by the most trivial things. I didn’t know what lay at the heart of it, but I had my suspicions. Before we were born, Mother and Father had been quite the stars in Dublin dramatic circles – never professionally, of course, but they were certainly well known – and now some kind of showbiz rivalry seemed to have arisen between Mother and Bel. It was funny, because for the first years, when Bel was still in school, Mother had been very encouraging about her acting ambitions. Then, suddenly, she changed. Suddenly – almost overnight – she seemed to resent them; suddenly she was full of needling opinions and advice, far more than Bel was happy with. ‘Every great actress has an inner core, on which all her performances are hung,’ she’d say: most of her pronouncements were along these metaphysical lines. ‘Your trouble, Bel, is that you have still to find your inner core.’
That, I conjectured, was the source of the bad feeling; that was how it was even before Father got sick. In the months that followed his death, it deteriorated to the point where they could create a fight out of almost anything. Mother would accuse Bel of forgetting things, or neglecting things, of selfishness, narcissism, disloyalty, deceit. At first, Bel was so surprised that she simply took it; but after a while, when everything she did incurred a criticism from above, she began to retaliate. Bel’s practice, when she was hurt, was to shout and scream abuse of every kind until whoever it was went away; the fights got ugly very quickly. One night about six months ago, I arrived home to find Bel standing in the hallway with a face quite drained of colour. Her hands were shaking; Mother was nowhere in sight. She refused to tell me what had happened. All she would say was that, after a protracted discussion, Mother had agreed that she wasn’t herself, and that perhaps she needed some time on her own to think. The black car that had passed me in the driveway belonged to the nice people from the Cedars, taking her away for an indefinite stay.