‘I never asked how you got on today,’ I said casually. ‘Did you get the part?’
‘No,’ she mumbled, tilting the cheval glass and holding the dress up against her. ‘It was awful, it was for an ad for some company selling doors over the Internet. I’d never read anything so asinine in my whole life. The idea was that me and this guy who’s supposed to be my boyfriend are in an apartment having this huge fight — I mean he’s shouting at me and insulting me and just being a bastard for about two minutes, until I storm off and slam the door behind me. And then the slogan is, “Doors. It’s good to leave.” Isn’t that poisonous?’
‘Still, that was your first one in a while, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Something better’s bound to come along.’
‘Mmm.’ She flushed. ‘Charles, I really do have to change now, do you mind?’
‘I mean something that you actually want to — you’re not wearing moccasins with that dress, are you?’
‘Charles, I’m changing, would you please get out?’
I retreated without further comment and went downstairs to fidget in the kitchen until I heard her descend the staircase and rejoin Frank.
‘Don’t wait up,’ she called from the hallway.
‘Ha!’ I returned, but they had already gone.
It might seem that I was being a little hard on my sister, but with Mother away at the Cedars I felt it was my responsibility to look after her. Bel was twenty-one, three years younger than me, a strikingly pretty girl with Father’s pale-blue eyes and Mother’s autumn-leaf hair and a streak of recklessness, a dismissive impatience with her own life, that she’d inherited from no one. In June she’d finished at Trinity, where she’d taken a rather indulgent degree in Drama — ‘Bel study Drama,’ Father had sighed as he signed the cheque, ‘there’s coals to Newcastle for you’ — which wasn’t entirely fair, because while she did have a tendency for melodrama and a keen sense of any injustice that pertained to herself, she wasn’t really the flamboyant type. Although acting was her passion, in college productions she’d always preferred to work behind the scenes, designing sets or editing scripts, and any time she got on to the stage her roles were swallowed up by her own shyness.
Ever since her finals she’d been at a loose end; the void bothered her, I could tell. Over the last months, she’d gone through a series of male companions of diminishing quality, even by her haphazard standards; the rest of the time she’d spent closeted away in her room, listening to Bob Dylan records and smoking joints out the window into the evening air.
‘It’s time off,’ I’d counsel her. ‘Just enjoy it. Slow yourself down a little, like I do.’
‘It’s not time off,’ she’d say. ‘It feels like Purgatory. Stuck out here on my own in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everyone I know, just waiting I don’t even know what for, and I have no money, and I’m nothing, I feel like a zero —’
‘You’ve only been finished a month. It’s a transition period, that’s all. I don’t see what you’re so worried about.’
‘I’m worried that I’ll turn into you,’ she’d wail, and return despairingly to the endless pages of computer-programming jobs in the appointments section of the newspaper. Which was a pity, because that summer we enjoyed beautiful stretches of sunshine, and the grounds had rarely looked so fetching. With Mother away, I was free to stroll around at my leisure, admiring the verdant tint of the oak leaves, the fleecy flowers of the horse-chestnut, the tall amaryllis and columbine; it was a peaceful time, and, in spite of what Bel had said, I felt unusually contented, although naturally from time to time I thought it would have been nice to have a companion for my rovings — a wolfhound, perhaps, or a setter, to wag along beside me as I tramped over the grass, and curl up at my feet as I sat under a tree with my Improving Book.
After Bel and Frank departed, I spent a good half-hour massaging the chaise longue to remove the dent Frank had left in it. I was feeling dinnerish but there was still no sign of Mrs P; I was standing at the window waiting for her when I saw the postman rolling drunkenly up the path. One of the disadvantages of living where we did — the house was on the coast, two miles of devious road from Dalkey village — was that the postal services found it hard to bring themselves to deliver; on rainy days, or days when it looked like it might rain, or days before or after days when it had rained, you could forget about it. But it had been relatively clement lately, and the postman, a white-haired geezer of untrustworthy aspect, had evidently decided to take a chance. I opened the front door just as he was bending to the letterbox with a sheaf of correspondence.
‘Morning,’ he said, the brazen untruth of which knocked the wind out of my sails and with it the lecture I had been preparing for several days to give him; instead I just snatched the mail from his hand and slammed the door, and he sauntered off whistling across the lawn, which is not meant to be walked on except by the peacocks.
I glanced cursorily through the letters. Nothing for me, a few official-looking things for my sister, several others addressed to Mother with a similar red stamp, special delivery or something. I put these aside for Bel, who was in charge of family correspondence while Mother was indisposed, and turned my thoughts back to the whereabouts of Mrs P. I hadn’t seen her since lunchtime and by now was getting weak with hunger. What I’d said to Frank had been no exaggeration: her bonhomie and excellent cuisine had carried the household through some difficult times. Yet recently she hadn’t seemed quite as devoted as usual. She’d been keeping rather erratic hours, and she seemed preoccupied, as if her mind was elsewhere. I hadn’t said anything to Bel yet, but the truth was that I was getting a little worried. I wondered if she hadn’t something troubling her — or worse, if she had simply come to the end of her useful days and was ready to be put out to pasture.
On the upside, by this time my hangover had dissipated so I went down to the cellar to pick out a bottle for dinner. I liked the cellar: the air down there was cool and rarefied, and clung to one damply in a comforting way, like a blanket over the shoulders; and all around the dim light glinted crimson, mauve and burgundy on the bottles, rainbows within rainbows, one of the few unalloyed joys of my father’s life. Of late, it had to be said, the ranks were looking somewhat depleted. It had been a rather frenetic few months — all the old crowd together again, those fabulous, foolish parties merging into one another like the giddy breathless space between night and day. In retrospect I suppose it had all the hallmarks of a Last Hurrah. I wondered if everyone had known it except me.
Not that it mattered; none of it had come to anything, not the flings nor the booze nor the girls with peacock feathers in their hair. Patsy Olé had been the one I was after: Patsy Olé, who was suave and pretty and didn’t give a damn, and who, like all girls that are suave and pretty and don’t give a damn, always had a string of fellows grovelling at her heel. She was one of those girls, furthermore, who enjoyed the strife and hatred she engendered among her suitors at least as much as the relationships themselves, and as such was quite amenable to conducting two or more romances at the same time. And yet, on certain nights, she and I had seemed on the verge of something quite…
I roused myself. She was in India now; we were all probably better off. I selected a bottle and returned to the kitchen. It was easy to get caught in the cellar; if I wasn’t careful I could end up mooning about down there for hours, getting myself covered in cobwebs.