I haven’t mentioned it up to now for fear of sounding immodest, but ever since I sat down Mirela had been staring at me. At first it had been in the form of plaintive, mea culpa-type looks whenever Harry’s head was turned, which I had politely ignored. Yet she persisted: and as the night wore on, they had increased in urgency — flickering constantly from the other side of the table as if she had some message she was attempting to send via a Morse code of blinks and flashes, until they came to resemble the entreaties of one of those silent-movie heroines who has been tied to a train track. But now, as the clock struck for midnight, she seemed suddenly to resign herself. She slumped down in her seat; at the same moment, a wine glass pinged, and Harry got to his feet.
‘Friends… friends.’ He held up his hand for quiet. ‘You’ll forgive me if I detain you with a few brief words of my own.’ His doltish hair looked even more snaky and annoying than usual. An Evening of Long Goodbyes began to growl. ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Bad dog. Be quiet,’ slipping him a truffle when Mother had stopped looking.
‘We’ve heard a lot tonight about “new visions”, “rebirths” and “new beginnings” —’
‘Gnnnhhhh,’ Frank ground his fists into his temples.
‘So in keeping with the general theme of the evening,’ Harry continued, ‘and with no further ado, it is my pleasure to inform you that at half past eight this evening, Miss Mirela Pribicevic agreed to give me her hand in marriage —’
Before he had finished the sentence, the female contingent of the table erupted and rushed over to swamp Mirela in squeals and embraces. ‘How wonderful!’ Mother clasped her hands to her cheeks as her eyes welled up with tears. ‘Oh, how wonderful!’
My first thoughts were for Bel, and I swung round with my arms half-outstretched, I suppose in case she might be about to swoon. But she was looking on placidly as if this were happening far, far away, to a group of people she had never met; and I was forced back to face my own emotions.
It was funny: if someone had put this situation to me hypothetically five minutes earlier, I’d probably have replied, quite honestly, that I didn’t think it would bother me in the slightest. Yet as I watched Mirela now, I felt as cold and sick and hollow as if I had been dealt a mortal blow. As I watched her emerge from the scrum of well-wishers, pink and fresh-faced and laughing and looking very much like a girl in love, everything she had said to me in our few contradictory exchanges ran through my mind; and in that moment, I realized with a terrible sense of finality that I had no idea, and I never would have any idea, how this world worked or what went on in the hearts of its inhabitants; that it was and always would be utterly opaque and mysterious to me, and that whatever happened from now on would not make any difference, because it would never come any closer.
‘Charlie,’ Frank confided sweatily, ‘I’m not feelin meself.’
‘Me neither, old chum,’ I said. ‘Me neither.’
Harry, meanwhile, had lied about a few brief words. Instead he was using his announcement as a springboard for more speechifying. ‘On the occasion of this double union,’ he raised his voice over the hubbub, ‘I would like to say a word of thanks. You hear a lot these days about how the notion of “the family” is one that can’t exist any more in our fast-paced modern world. But from the first day I came here, after Bel asked me to join the theatre group she was just starting, a family is exactly what it’s been. And it’s made me realize what a family can be. Coming from a typical middle-class, “petit-bourgeois” background, I suppose I had a fairly low opinion…’
From his position face-down on the empty plate, Frank informed me that he couldn’t take much more of this.
‘… realize that the family can be something political, radically political, can be a force which can be posited against the controlling groups of our time, a “free space” where differing opinions can come together and new unions can be made — like the one I am so fortunate to have made tonight.’
I gulped back a fresh glass of Rioja and felt a cold sweat break over me like a kind of necrosis. You can’t stop life from happening, that’s what Mirela said, that night in Frank’s apartment. It would carry you further and further away from yourself; it would make its way into your past and transform that too…
‘… learn that the market, like a gun, isn’t anything intrinsically good or bad, that we can use it for good, we can join forces with it. And just as we have grown, so Amaurot has grown with us…’
And meanwhile all anyone did was make speeches! It felt like he was dancing up and down on our grave, he and market forces, he and the asset strippers, he and the Golems of progress, and yet no one did anything, no one gainsaid or challenged him or said, It isn’t right, these things you’re saying aren’t right…
‘… a house weighed down by, or rather trapped in, its own history, to recontextualize it, realign it with modernity, and basically haul the place into the twenty-first century —’
I was reaching the point where I didn’t think I could physically stand any more; and evidently someone else in the room felt the same way, because suddenly a loud, exasperated voice called out, ‘Oh, balls!’
Everyone went quiet. Harry adjusted his bow tie, and said ‘Excuse me?’ as if to offer the perpetrator a chance to exculpate himself. But this protester was not to be silenced. ‘Balls!’ the voice cried again, even louder than before. I tittered to myself; and I was so enjoying seeing Harry squirm that it took a moment to realize that I was standing up, and that furthermore the entire table was staring at me.
Bother.
‘Charles, leave the table, please,’ Mother said.
‘No,’ Harry interjected. ‘If you don’t mind — let’s hear what Charles has to say.’
I wiped my palms on my trousers, unexpectedly finding myself addressing the room at large. ‘Well, I mean to say,’ I stuttered. ‘I mean… well, a house is a house isn’t it? It’s a place people live in. I don’t see what the twenty-first century’s got to do with it. I don’t see why, just because you’ve put up some new wallpaper, you should be allowed to claim the place in the name of the future, like some sort of… you know… time-travelling… pirate.’
‘That’s Harry for you,’ chuckled Niall O’Boyle. ‘I like a man who’s got his eye on the future. Because that’s where it’s all going to happen, mark my words. The past is one thing, but the future, that’s where the money is.’
‘I’m not trying to step on anybody’s toes,’ Harry said. ‘I’m just saying you have to move with the times. It’s in everybody’s interests. You have to admit this place was falling to pieces before we came.’
I thought back to that golden age when it was just Bel and me and the drinks cabinet. ‘It wasn’t,’ I said.
‘It was,’ he reiterated. ‘The paint was peeling, the floors were rotten — your mother told us that while she was in hospital the bank was practically calling in the sheriffs to repossess the place…’
‘That was all a misunderstanding,’ I claimed.
‘But you blew up the Folly for the insurance,’ Harry pursued, fingering the buttons of his lawyer’s waistcoat. ‘I mean — you tried to fake your own death. How can you say the house was better off then?’
I blinked stuporously, and cast about me for support. Bel continued to gaze dreamily into space like a patient under ether in the dentist’s chair. Frank was lying inert on the table like a giant rag-doll, as he had been for the last five minutes. All the others waited for my response, their eyes holding me pinned like so many skewers. ‘We knew what we were doing,’ I mumbled.