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Contents
2008
Part I: 1988
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
2008
Part II: 2000
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
2008
Part III: 2005
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
2008
Part IV: 2007
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
2008
Epilogue 2010
Acknowledgments
The Other Half of Me Reading Group Guide
About the Author
FOR CIAN
2008
It doesn’t take long to divide an old life from a new life—a few minutes, not even that. One quick, unfair blow, and you find yourself looking back across the uncrossable, to a place that can’t ever be reached again, despite the fact you were there—brushing your teeth or reading a paper or wondering where you left your umbrella—just a moment ago. But that’s over, the kind, old life, and you have to go out into the unknown, unbalanced world, where everything important is wrong. People vanish, the scenery changes. Things you loved become meaningless, and meaningless things stay that way.
After this happened to me last November, one of the worst things has been the swap between the hemispheres of asleep and awake. I used to shake myself out of my dreams with relief; I would rush into the day and not look back. But now I start to wake up from a dream of my old life, in the uneasy, empty twilight of the morning, and I think No all over again, with the same force as the No on the telephone that day, standing in the Arctic blank of the hotel room, gripping the receiver with my locked-up fingers, as if that could stop her disappearing.
This morning I turn away from it, diving down after my dream, which sinks like a coin falling through dark water, giving a faint flash (sun on glass, a voice) as it turns. The more I try to remember it the more I wake up, until I am just in bed—lying angrily in the bed, drawing my eyelids open like stiff shutters, onto my new life. The brown walls and carpet of my rented room, the gray light seeping in at the window, the framed picture of a miscellaneous khaki countryside. Then my situation comes back to me; filing in one piece at a time. I am in England. I am alone. Trailing along at the end of the queue—a little late, but reliable as always—is the guilt. It settles in with its familiar weight, humming like a faulty appliance. I was wrong.
There is a knocking at the door, which must have been what woke me up, knocked my precious dream out of my head. The only person who comes to my door is my landlord, Mr. Ramsey. He tends to visit early, which spoils my routine of sleeping for as long as I can, in order to skip as much of the day as possible.
“Mr. Anthony?” he calls finally. I imagine him plucking at his cuffs, wondering if I have committed suicide in the night, and how much this might cost him in unpaid rent, paperwork, and cleaning bills. “Are you awake?”
When I go to the door I am startled to see that he has applied an unconvincing smile to his face, like a false moustache, and is holding out a flowered teacup along with the usual Sunday papers.
“Good morning, Mr. Anthony, I took the liberty of making you tea. I have been meaning to check that your rooms are perfectly satisfactory—no problems, Mr. Anthony?”
I look at him curiously. Mr. Ramsey usually reminds me of a scarecrow, or a Bonfire Night guy—something sagging and stuffed, in his lumpen argyle sweater and old trousers, creased jowls, curlicues of gray hair. Now something has shaken and patted him into shape; he looks almost lively, watching me intently as I take my tea and papers.
“No, everything is fine,” I say, taking a step back to signal an end to the conversation. But he persists, standing in the doorway saying “It’s a pity about the weather,” rambling through his insights into the weather, the Met Office, the myth of climate change, and back to the weather again, before finally running out of unrequited small talk and retreating back along the brown landing, giving me one last beady look, and vanishing through his beige door.
I sit back down on the edge of my bed, confused, and pick up the paper. A broadsheet now can last me three hours. I used to churn through the newspapers in ten minutes each morning, picking out paragraphs on architectural commissions or appointments, but these days I have an excess of time to fill. It wells up, it swells sluggishly, like dough. I read everything: twins joined at the head, who will probably die; nurses in care homes killing the patients; wars in the Middle East. Then, amidst the assorted misfortunes of the world, my own face appears.
It was a picture taken just after I graduated from Cambridge; there was a party, a hired photographer. The day comes back to me, the rain in the morning—even though the sun had come out by the afternoon we were all sinking into the grass—the awkwardly social lecturers. After the picture I turned to a girl whose name I can’t even remember. She kissed me on the mouth, I spilled her champagne.
It hasn’t been long since that day—not even ten years—but I find it hard to see myself in this boy. He looks straight into the lens, wearing a pale shirt, his face pared down and exposed, giving nothing away.
The photograph is actually incomplete; Theo was originally standing next to me. I can see what looks like a fault, a fringe of brightness in the corner to my left—her hair, just visible after the crop. I try to fill in her face, assemble her features, but I can only capture each one in isolation. Narrowed, vagrant eyes, hopeful smile. When we were young she always used to resist having her picture taken; her face in the albums is usually in flight, a blur of heightened color, mouth downturned. As a result there was only one framed picture at Evendon of the two of us as children. Theo’s face was uncertain, caught briefly in the moment before she moved. She wore a dress like layers of whipped cream, patent leather shoes. Our mother, Alicia, had always dressed her in those insipid whites and pinks, as if to neutralize her, but the effect was never quite right. Theo’s hair was too yellow, her eyes too bright a blue, her lashes too black, like an old photograph where the color has been added with dyes. In her doll clothes she looked stagey, made-up, like a child star.
In this picture I looked nothing like Theo. My eyes, combed-down hair, and eyebrows were almost black. Only a year older than her, I resembled a small forty-year-old, standing stolidly in a gray suit with a little tie, frowning in the flash, in which my face became simple, blocks of light and dark.
I don’t go over the print. The headline is enough for me—“Anthony Heir Missing.” Missing what? I suppose this explains the obsequious tea-offering of Ramsey, which is unlikely to make him rich. Even if the scale on the surface is ignored, its murky depths do not tempt investigation.
I’ll have to move now, away from recognition, the touch of eyes on me like creeping searchlights. I had felt a sort of safety here. The only other lodgers are two faded old ladies, and a family on a long weekend, who look increasingly puzzled and more subdued as each day brings greater awareness that the Sunny Seafront bed-and-breakfast is not the charming find of their brochure. The women have a harmless, gentle interest in me, th
e family ignores me. Yet I felt we had something in common, sitting opposite one another in the breakfast room with its lace tablecloths and antiquated hostess trolley, the light thickened and discolored like stagnant water; all of us bruised in one way or another, let down by our expectations.
I go to the window and look out over the gray sea, where a thin strip of sun has fought its way out from behind the clouds. The sight of it brings back the morning’s dream, clear and piercing. I was at Evendon, in the drawing room on a summer afternoon, the doors onto the terrace opened to let in the facing sun, a small procession of petals blown in across the polished squares of light. Outside, I could see Theo and Sebastian sitting on the steps, playing cards. (Sebastian had once tried to teach Theo poker but she could never learn to bluff: her eyebrows shot up, she giggled, spoke too deliberately.) As if the doorway were a train window, the view beyond it shifted, sped up, stopped. In the next moment of stillness I saw Maria, standing with the beach behind her. She was smiling. I could almost smell her perfume, in the movement of air off the sea.
Those thoughts are better left forgotten, I know. I haven’t thought about Maria since I came here. Remembering her now brings a strange feeling, of old desire, unfamiliar with disuse. I feel the longing I had for her like trying to remember music, a strain here and there, a flute note, touches of sweetness. I try to imagine what she might say to me now, what she would do if she were in my position—but I can’t. I used to think I understood her, but I didn’t, not at all.
Later I think about Eve. She was absent from the dream, but then her absence always was a stark space, forcing the eye to notice it. What would she say, if she found me here? I expected better of you, Jonathan. I see myself as she would see me, the grandson of Eve Anthony, mouldering in damp brown anonymity, in undignified grief.
Eve, standing—as she always seems to now—within the confines of a film reel, asks me, What good can the past do the living? She has her arms folded, her dark mouth glitters under the lights of photography, which swirl and condense around her like sparks.
But I have nowhere else to go, I tell her. Eve has nothing to say to this. She blinks her glossy black eyes, hardening like tar. She shrugs.
PART I
1988
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
CHAPTER ONE
When I look back for a place to start I always think of the same day—a day that didn’t seem unusual at the time, but was necessary to what came next. It is the last day of a backward trajectory: I arrive at it as if tracing a thrown ball back through the air to the spot where the thrower stood. At the time, of course, you don’t know that a ball was thrown. You hear the glass smash, then you rush to the window and look out, trying to see the culprit. This particular day begins with a summer morning; the lawn burning green; the new, nectared sunlight. I was nearly eight years old, sitting on the grass next to a patch of earth, having uprooted some irises to clear room for a castle made out of plastic blocks. I could see the top of Theo’s head through the remaining flowers. She was picking up ladybirds and snails and putting them lovingly into a toy pram, keeping up a gentle monologue of chatter and song that—unusually—didn’t seem to need my participation, and which I had mainly tuned out.
Behind us the house sat indistinctly, the sun dazzling off its many windows, too bright to look at without squinting. Evendon, built sometime in the gloomy fifteenth century and embellished in the ambitious nineteenth by a slightly insane ancestor, was nothing like the other manors in Carmarthenshire, pale and genteel and homogenous. It was gray—all different darknesses of gray—steeply slate roofed with crowstepped gables, pale cornerstones, black and white facings on the eaves, arched windows with white brick edging. It resembled an Escher palace for a witch, baroque and severe, sometimes beautiful, sometimes absurd—overly grand—standing out like a black-and-white hallucination in the tame planes of the garden. Even to us there was something odd about it.
At this early time in the morning Evendon held only two people, both of whom were still asleep. The first was our mother, Alicia. She didn’t like us much. That is not to say that she disliked us; she just didn’t seem to have enough energy to feel one way or the other. The second was our nanny, Miss Black, who genuinely disliked us.
The rest of the house’s inhabitants would arrive as the morning went on: Mrs. Wynne Jones the housekeeper, Mrs. Williams the cook, then the temporary maids and gardeners whose names were never in currency long enough to be remembered. It was in these people that the hurry and noise of the house was contained; they took it home with them in the evening and brought it back in the morning, and so for the moment everything was still, as if no one was in the house at all. Theo and I, on our hill with the silent house on one side and only the end of the rising grass and a strip of distant sea on the other, could have been all alone at the top of the world.
Theo broke off from singing to her collection of insects and called, “Jonathan?”
Her face floated up over the flowers; one hand waving. Her nose was already red from the morning sun.
“Jonathan, do you think bees get hot? With all their fur?”
By the time I realized she was holding up a bee for me to see, it had twisted, fizzing with outrage, and stung her. She stared at me for a moment, her mouth fallen open and her finger pointing as if she were in the middle of a speech. Then she clutched her hand and started to cry.
I tugged Theo back to the house to find Alicia, who had got up and was now sitting in the shade in the drawing room reading a magazine. Her blond hair was almost colorless in the sudden dim, her eyes like raindrops, cool and vague. She looked at us with languid surprise when we ran in, Theo gulping and gasping nearly silently, holding her hand out like something in flames.
“What on earth are you two doing?” Alicia asked.
“Theo got stung by a bee,” I explained. Theo held up her finger and Alicia peered at it.
“Oh dear . . . Miss Black!” she called. “Miss Black! How awful.”
Miss Black failed to appear, but in the kitchen we discovered the newly arrived Mrs. Williams, who was in the process of transferring lasagna from its supermarket packaging into a baking dish. She jumped when she saw us and put her hand over her heart.
“You two are going to kill me one of these days. Not a word to your ma about this now”—she indicated the lasagna—“though I don’t know how people expect me to do everything. Think I’m bloody superwoman or something. I’ve got problems of my own, I have.” She paused and noticed Theo’s distress. “What’s up with you, lovey?”
Theo held her hand out again and Mrs. Williams looked at it with a particular type of satisfaction—one familiar to us from previous household mishaps—as if she had previously warned us to watch out for bees, and was now vindicated.
“That,” she said, “is a bad sting. What we need for a sting like that is lemon juice. Or vinegar. It neutrifies the sting.”
She found some lemon vinaigrette in the fridge and doused the finger with it until Theo stopped gasping and screamed.
“Is that wasps then?” said Mrs. Williams. “I don’t remember what it is for bees.”
Once Theo’s finger was rinsed and plastered and her sobs had subsided, we hung around the kitchen while Mrs. Williams lit a cigarette. She had a lighter in the shape of a matador, which she told us her son Gareth bought her from a holiday. She let us click its feet to make flames come out of the top of its head, and gave us some of her extra-strong mints. Then she sat back and put her feet on a stool and puffed speculatively. Mrs. Williams was about fifty, a short round woman with bright yellow hair, which was frazzled and acrylic-looking. She had an indeterminate number of children and other relatives, whom she would tell us about in the same way as she discussed the characters in soap operas, so that it was impossible to tell which were real and which fictional. “Whatever you say about Gareth, he’s good to his ma,�
�� she said now. “It were those . . . those solicitors that were the problem.”
Theo was sitting at the counter, her face tightly crimped.
“Does your finger still hurt?” I asked.
Theo shook her head, then started crying again. “Why was that bee angry with me?”
“It wasn’t angry with you,” I said, carefully, aware that if I told Theo that she’d frightened the bee she’d be even more upset and I’d have to play by myself.
“Was it angry because it was hot?” Theo asked. “Because of its fur?”
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so. Do you want to go back outside now?”
Theo cried even harder. “That poor bee,” she sobbed. “Why does it have so much fur?”
I considered telling her that the bee would be dead now anyway after losing its sting, but thought better of it. “Do you want to go back outside and play?” I asked again.
“You two better play inside now, with that sunburn,” Mrs. Williams said to Theo, smoke rising around her face as if she were an ancient oracle. “And you—keep an eye on your sister. Letting her get herself stung!”
This was so unfair that I decided not to answer, but Mrs. Williams had already switched the television on to her favorite show and was soaking up its fractious noises, her head tilted to one side like a canary. “Don’t tell me she’s the murderer,” she exclaimed.
“Come on, Theo. We can play in the library,” I said, helping myself to another mint.
As we left, Mrs. Williams said, “Families ought to look out for each other,” though whether this was intended for me or the television, I really couldn’t say.
The games we played in the library were as dimly lit and esoteric as the library itself, heavy with history, muffled with ritual. We piled books to make leathery castles, pushed at the shelves to find the one that would revolve us into a black and secret corridor, gave new titles and tales to the portraits of our ancestors that hung over us. They had once gazed majestically over the staircase, but in a past act of irreverence, someone (Eve) had demoted them to the library, where there wasn’t quite enough space, and so the walls were crammed with paintings of the dead Bennetts, with the longest-dead beginning at the door and my great-grandparents tailing off into a corner.
The Other Half of Me Page 1
