An Evening of Long Goodbyes Read Online Free PDF

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,