‘Here we go,’ she declared heavily, cutting me off. ‘Here we go!’
‘Come back!’ I cried, stretching my arms after her. ‘Come back, for pity’s sake! I’m not joking, Bel. What I am about to tell you could be of the utmost importance to both of us!’
She paused in the doorway, then with a slight, acidic nod of the head, coolly bade me continue.
I am not by nature a superstitious man, and the next day I wondered if the kidney beans were to blame for the wild thoughts riding roughshod through my mind that night. Looking back on it now, though, I can see that I was part right, at least: that the coming of Frank did mark the beginning of our downfall — although each of us had many, many contributions of our own to make. ‘The Golem does not think for itself,’ I told Bel. ‘It is an automaton, animated by mystical powers — usually malevolent, it has to be said.’
‘Charles, it’s late. Have you a point to this, other than pretending that the reason you don’t like Frank isn’t that you’re a snob and a sociopath, but because he’s some kind of a mystical being sent to corrupt me?’
‘I know it sounds outlandish,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how else to explain this sense of foreboding. None of your boyfriends ever made my skin actually crawl before.’ I shuddered, imagining the dark slab of Frank driving his van down crepuscular suburban streets, eyes gleaming emptily as he awaited the call from his master…
Bel’s shoulders slumped. ‘Then it appears we are at an impasse.’
‘Almost literally,’ I said, picturing Frank moonlighting as a roadblock or a small dam.
Bel sighed, and sank wearily on to the foot of the bed. ‘Charles,’ she said, ‘it’s quite obvious that in Mother’s absence the power has gone to your head. I don’t know what’s going to come of it, or if there’s anything I can do about it. But I know that I can’t go on like this. We have to sort something out if we’re going to keep living here with any semblance of normality. So though I do this with a bad conscience, I propose we make a pact.’
‘A pact?’
‘A pact.’ She rubbed her eyes with the edge of her hand. ‘If you let this relationship take its course, without any more complaining or allusions to Jewish mythology, I hereby promise that if — if — Frank and I then break up, I’ll — I’ll stay in for three months before seeing anyone else. How’s that?’
‘That sounds very cynical, Bel,’ I said, surprised. ‘I mean, I just want you to be happy.’
‘Charles, just tell me what it will take to get you to leave me alone.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. Cynical it might have been, but I was rather taken with the novelty of this arrangement. Usually my arguments with Bel ended in her hurling something breakable at me. The sad truth was that she was going to see this fellow whether I liked it or not. At least this way I would be offered some kind of recompense — something, for instance, that under normal circumstances she would never be persuaded to do…
‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘Three months, and…’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘And?’
‘And you also have to introduce me to that friend of yours. That Laura Treston.’
‘Laura Treston?’ Bel repeated disgustedly. ‘She’s not my friend, I haven’t spoken to her in — wait a minute, what made you suddenly think of her, anyway?’ I made an indistinct coughing noise and smoothed some bumps out of the eiderdown. Bel groaned and tugged her hair. ‘Oh Charles, you haven’t been going through my old yearbooks again, have you?’
‘I had to check something,’ I mumbled.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, it’s creepy and morbid, those photographs are from four years ago at least, those girls are practically still children…’
‘Be that as it may,’ I said gruffly.
‘I mean, none of them looks the same now. A couple are dead, even.’
‘Coming back to the matter at hand,’ I said.
Bel groaned again. ‘Don’t make me call her, Charles. She’s so boring. The last time I talked to her I practically had to be drip-fed espresso for the rest of the week.’
‘Those are my terms,’ I said. ‘Take them or leave them.’
She surrendered. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. I’ll call her tomorrow, and you’ll promise to leave Frank and me alone. Promise?’
‘Where is he now?’ I sat up. ‘I hope he’s in the spare room, Bel.’
‘Starting now.’
‘All right, all right, I promise.’ I outstretched my hand; she shook it, and the pact was sealed. She went off yawning to her room, and I laid down my head, thoughts awhirl like galaxies.
Bel’s yearbooks had been a secret vice of mine since my girl-less schooldays, when I’d spirit them away from the pile under her bed and bring them in to show my classmates and be hailed as a hero for the day. We would gather behind the cricket pavilion and huddle round in the glow of the pages: boggling at the sheer number of faces and names and possibilities, rating every single girl out of ten, speculating on their sexual proclivities, imagining lights-out in the dorms and the pillow fights that, if we knew anything about girls, must surely ensue… and before long a silence would fall, as each of us drifted off into his own private reverie — lost in the photograph, this seeming Elysium where our feminine counterparts dwelled beaming or scowling in black-and-white rows, distant and unknown to us as stars.
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.