‘You don’t mind, do you? I wuz worried you might have a bit of a boner for her yourself.’
‘Not at all,’ I said; as the restored Amaurot receded over the horizon into the Land of Might-Have-Been, and with it the bounteous Laura, her grabulous melons… ‘I’m delighted, old chap. Delighted.’
‘Yeah, cheers Charlie. I’ll give her one for you, ha ha.’
‘Yes,’ I said faintly.
Mercifully his breathing deepened into snores; and after I had listened to the snores for an hour or so, I decided that maybe what I really wanted was a drink; so I rose again and went downstairs.
The caterers had gone home hours ago. Everything was tidied away. The long table had been stripped of its trappings, the chairs ordered with geometrical precision around it; the blood-splashes from Harry’s nose had been mopped up, the dishes washed and dried and stacked in the cupboard. Father waited, waited, in his frame in the hallway. Without knowing why, especially, I began to go from room to room, picking things up and putting them down again. In the vague blue darkness, everything seemed to tingle; I felt a little like the Prince in Sleeping Beauty, creeping through the slumbering castle, observing the secret life the objects led while everyone lay in their enchanted sleep. Then I found myself beside the drinks cabinet, and thought that seeing as I was in the neighbourhood, I might as well make myself a gimlet. After a moment’s thought, I decided that it ought really to be a double. Then I took the bottle and put it in my pocket.
Bel was in the drawing room on her own, staring out the window with the lights off.
‘Didn’t think I’d find you still up and about…’ I attempted a jolly avuncular tone.
‘The taxi’s coming at four. There hardly seemed much point going to bed.’
‘Interest you in a…?’ I held up my glass and jingled the ice cubes. She looked round.
‘How can you still be drinking?’ she said affectlessly, returning to her vigil.
‘Years of practice, I suppose…’ I took a seat on the chaise longue. A pink vinyl suitcase rested at one end. Outside thunder groaned and the sky lit up silver. ‘Lord, what an awful night. Don’t know if your plane’ll fly if it keeps up like that.’
‘It’ll fly,’ Bel said.
‘Aha,’ I returned emptily. I shunted myself forward, attempting to balance my drink on my knee. ‘Glad I caught you, as a matter of fact. Didn’t get much of a chance to say goodbye earlier on, what with all the fuss and all those paramedics swarming around. Cripes, you’d think even a haemophiliac would be able to deal with a bloody nose, ha ha…’ She didn’t appear to have an opinion on this. I rubbed my hands together miserably. ‘Wanted to ask you how you felt about the Harry and Mirela thing too. Must have been a bit of a shock for you, after all.’
The slender shoulders shrugged indifferently. ‘She’s marrying him for citizenship. If he doesn’t know that now, he soon will.’
‘Ah. Well, that’s good, then.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Dinner seemed to go fairly painlessly otherwise, didn’t it, apart from the, the fighting I mean… The statue, for example, I thought that was a nice touch.’
This at least evoked a response. ‘A statue,’ she murmured, staring out at the night. ‘A statue…’
I took a good draught of my gimlet. ‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to beat around the bush. Maybe you want to hear this and maybe you don’t, but you ought to know that what happened between Mirela and me, it was a mistake. I had — that is, I didn’t…’ I broke off, trying and failing to untangle the words that were coiling up in my brain like Silly String.
‘What happened between you and Mirela is entirely your own business,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ I said unhappily. ‘Good. Because I thought, you know, I was worried you might be going to Russia because of me, ha ha.’
She shook her head, came away from her curtain and plucked an azalea from an enormous bunch on the table. ‘Think of Russia as a last hurrah,’ she said. ‘A whistle-stop tour of my childhood dreams, before I settle down and marry money.’ She clasped the stem between her two hands and waved the flower at me. ‘It’s late, Charles. You should go to bed.’
‘Right, right,’ I agreed, clambering off the chaise longue. ‘Well, bon voyage,’ I said, then, impulsively, went over to hug her. It was awkward and stiff; I felt her body pulling back. ‘Right,’ I said again, and backed falteringly out of the room.
‘Oh, Charles?’ She stopped me as I reached the door. ‘That tag, do you have it?’
‘What? Oh… yes.’ I fumbled about in my pockets. ‘I have your phone too, if you want it.’
She told me that she wouldn’t need that. ‘I would like the tag though. Just as a memento. Silly, I suppose.’
‘No, no…’ I found the dog tag, and flipped it in the air like a coin; as I caught it I laughed. ‘When I think about how you used to worry about that dog, night and day. You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart. I never did understand it, those were such happy days…’ Bel had picked up several more flowers now and held them in a fan across her face. ‘Do you remember,’ I chuckled, ‘how we used to pretend your mattress was a raft, and the stairs were a river, and we were sailing away escaping from the Serfs? And how we’d act out scenes from Eugene Onegin, and you’d get cross because you didn’t think I was sad enough when you told me you didn’t love me?’ The fan nodded infinitesimally swayed by the lightest of breezes. I rubbed my chin excitably. ‘Remember how we used to help Father inventing make-up? He’d give us poster-paints, you’d get yourself up as Tinkerbell, and I’d be Bela Lugosi. I was absolutely convinced there was a fortune to be made from this untapped market for Bela Lugosi make-up — what is it?’
Bel had lowered her fan, and was looking at me with a kind of impatience. ‘It wasn’t always happy days,’ she said. ‘There were things to forget, too.’
‘How do you mean?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s late, that’s all. You should go to bed.’ Then, pretending not to notice me stare, she held out her hand. ‘The tag?’
I closed my fist around it and lowered it slowly down by my side.
‘Don’t be childish, Charles, just give it to me.’
‘First tell me what you meant.’
‘Nothing, I didn’t mean anything…’ She had turned an angry beetroot colour.
‘It wasn’t nothing, if it was nothing you wouldn’t have said it, and what do you want this old thing for anyway, it hasn’t even got a name on it…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, just keep it then!’ she wheeled away exasperated. Immediately I felt sorry and lunkish and I was just about to apologize and hand it over when she spun round, catching me unawares –
‘Ow — what are you doing?’
‘Give me it, Charles —’ digging her nails in my hand to try and get me to release it. I pushed her away: she pressed her elbow into my chest for leverage, and we tussled for another minute before I twisted her arm to disempower her, but did it too hard so she was thrown back on to the drawing-room floor.
‘Oh hell…’
‘Get off me —’
‘I didn’t mean it, I was just —’
‘You were just drunk, you’re always drunk…’ She wriggled away from my outstretched hand to lean against one leg of the chaise longue.
‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘It’s not broken, is it?’ She didn’t reply, just sat folded-up by her suitcase, nursing her wrist.