‘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 —’