After the initial small talk of arrival, Alex and Alicia didn’t seem to have much to say to each other. They just occupied the same rooms, cooling the air with their pale eyes and making occasional comments such as “The rain seems slightly less heavy today,” until night arrived and Theo and I were sent gratefully away.
At the time it used to be one of Theo’s and my games to pretend to go to bed, then sneak out of our rooms later and camp in one of the house’s hiding places; under a spare bed, under the dining table. (Really, it wasn’t much of a game, as Miss Black never noticed we weren’t in bed, but we didn’t know this yet and our camping was delicious with the fear of being found.) That night we had dragged our pillows and bedclothes down to the morning room, and made ourselves a nest behind one of the sofas.
Theo fell asleep first, and I was half asleep myself, when Alex and Alicia walked in and turned the lights on. I contracted, in a panic, but they didn’t see me and sat down at the other side of the room. Alicia was saying something I couldn’t hear, to which Alex said, “She will come back.”
I slowly extended my head out from behind the arm of the sofa to see my mother, refilling her glass from the decanter, not answering.
“What are you going to do when she does? Just keep on pretending nothing happened?”
There was a pause, and then Alicia said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Bullshit.”
“Please don’t use that language.”
“Fine. We don’t have to discuss it. Business as usual. I don’t know how you stand it, that’s all. How you remember what to lie about. Where, so to speak, all the bodies are—”
Alicia put her glass down with a sharp noise, and Alex stopped speaking. There was a while of silence, after which Alicia sighed and picked up the glass again. It was hard to tell from the sigh whether she was angry, or sad, or tired. They were quiet for a long time, then Alex continued more gently, “Remember when we were young, in that big house in California. Remember the maid? Leonie? I’d love to know where she is now. She always used to sing us that song . . . you used to dance to it . . . how did it go?”
Alicia shrugged and sipped her drink. She looked very beautiful in the light suspended from the chandeliers, and the dusk coming in at the window; her eyes lowered so the lashes formed shadows on her cheek. The ice chimed against the side of her glass.
“I’m afraid I can’t remember any of the maids,” she said.
I tried not to fall asleep, in case Alex and Alicia said something to explain what they were talking about, but they didn’t, and I couldn’t help myself. I rested my head on the cushions and my thoughts folded in on themselves like cake mixture, heavy and soft, unformed shapes.
I carried on thinking about Eve, whom I was familiar with only in the past or future tense; the ways everyone spoke about her. The only place she didn’t exist was the aimless present, where we all lived under the sense of her absence, dried out and husked by Evendon’s silence, the feeling that something important was missing. Because it wasn’t just Eve, it was all the lost people of Evendon—our great-grandfather George, in the corridors of the ruined temple with his flashlight; our father, carving his initials carefully into a tree—Eve was the one who had known them, heading a pantheon of characters more vivid than Alicia, who wouldn’t answer anything, and Alex, who looked at me with pity.
I wondered what would happen to Evendon if Eve came back, but sleepiness was obscuring her image, switching it in and out of focus. Eve in her painting like Snow White, holding an apple; Eve standing on her podium like a statue, in the moment before she began to speak; Eve turning and smiling, the professional shimmer of her teeth in the camera’s—in my own—unblinking eye.
Alex went back home the next morning, with an abrupt kiss on the cheek for Alicia, who accepted the contact with her usual mild distaste, and an uncertain ruffle of the head for Theo and me. After the door closed the three of us stood in the hall for a silent moment before Alicia turned and went back up to bed.
“Uncle Alex doesn’t like it here,” Theo said.
“Of course he does.” I was defensive of Evendon. “He wouldn’t visit if he didn’t.”
“But he only comes once a year. And no one else visits us.” Theo spun on the marble with her arms out, hair flying. “We visit other people. Like for birthday parties. But we don’t have our own birthday parties.”
She said all this matter-of-factly, inexperienced in the art of resentment. But I was older and further along; I silently hopscotched the next steps. People didn’t come to Evendon because Alicia didn’t want them to come. Eve never came to Evendon. Therefore, Alicia probably didn’t want Eve at Evendon either.
That afternoon I went to find Alicia, who was having her usual rest in her room. I knew we weren’t meant to disturb her at these times, but I also knew that no one had ever specifically told us this, so I pushed the door a little way open and slid along it and into the room like an eel. The curtains were closed, but they were white, like the walls and the sheets on the bed, so that the room was filled with a dull, pale shade, like clotted light. Alicia was lying on her bed on top of the sheets; her eyes open. She was wearing an oyster-colored dress and a string of pearls, almost the same color as her skin, as if she were herself a pearl in a shell. She rested her head on one hand to avoid disturbing her hair, and turned it to look at me. Her eyes were slow and distant.
“What are you doing in here?” she asked without altering her tone, so it sounded as if she wasn’t actually asking a question.
“When is Eve going to visit us?” I asked.
There was a pause in which Alicia looked at me; the dreamy dissipation of her gaze abruptly clarifying, like dust blown off a glass surface.
“Have you spoken to her? Did she call here?” she demanded.
“No . . .” I was surprised by the change in her; her bare eyes still fixed on me. “I was just wondering.”
Alicia turned her head away so she was looking at the ceiling. “Good,” she said, and said something to herself that I couldn’t hear.
As I hadn’t actually been sent away, and Alicia seemed in an odd, reactive mood, I lingered by the bed. The room itself was nearly empty; no photographs, no pictures, no stray clothes or shoes to indicate that a woman might inhabit this space. The only personal objects in the room aside from the two of us were a carafe, a glass of water by the bed, and a paper packet that I read sideways: Valium, diazepam.
I looked again at Alicia. Usually I would have heard one of her standard three responses now: I can’t remember. I have a headache. I don’t know what you are talking about. But she just lay there, eyes pointing upward.
“You don’t want her back,” I said.
Alicia laughed, a dry, white rustle, and said without looking at me, “I don’t decide anything. It isn’t up to me. She does what she wants to do. She wouldn’t care whether I wanted her here or not.”
Then the spell that had been on her broke—with a blink—and she was herself again. She looked at me as if I had only just arrived.
“I have a headache,” she said, with cold tiredness, and waved me away. “Shut the door quietly after you.”
CHAPTER TWO
In September Theo and I went back to pre-prep, our small school a half-hour drive away. Each morning the weather outside the car window became cooler and grayer, until most days the window itself would be covered in rain. We saw the familiar hills of Carmarthenshire through a lens of water, thinner, wiped of color.
I liked school; it was a warm circle of brightness, stuck together with glue and Scotch tape, a perfect papier-mâché globe. I had formed a ruling partnership of this tiny world with the small-headed and noisy Charlie Tremayne; we directed ball games in the playground and deconstructed the props of our lessons: potato clocks, plastic skeletons. Charlie’s marks suffered for our bad behavior; mine did not.
I didn’t see Theo very much at school, partly because we weren’t in the same classes, partly because I had
banned her from bothering me and my friends. At lunch she sat with a table of girls from her year, whispering and giggling just like the others, indistinguishable aside from her hair; a little dazzle of blond. Despite my school rules, I’d often feel her watching me hopefully, waiting for me to turn around, so she could wave, her smile full blown like a white sail, excited just to have been noticed.
After Christmas Charlie Tremayne came to stay with us. His own parents were going to Antigua and his nanny had apparently insisted on taking two weeks off over the holidays. “How awful,” Alicia sighed on the telephone to Anne Tremayne. Our own Miss Black had no such demanding social life and arrived back promptly on Boxing Day, so Alicia was unruffled about the prospect of another child in the house. “It won’t be any trouble,” she said to Miss Black.
Charlie Tremayne, the playground hero, didn’t translate so well at Evendon. He was too shrill, too effortful. I found myself looking forward to the end of his visit.
“Have you two seen any horror films yet?” he asked us. “I saw one at the cinema last week. It was about zombies.”
“You’re too young,” I said, to stop him from telling Theo about it.
“They let me in anyway,” Charlie said. He had also told us that a week ago he caught a cobra in his garden. “I let it go,” he added.
Finally I offered to take him to the secret pool, where I hoped to enjoy the necessary silence of fishing. We hadn’t been since the summer, mainly because Theo didn’t want to, and after making her go with me a few times (when she would sit, uneasily, and wait for us to leave), I had given up.
“Oh no, let’s not,” she said now. “Mrs. Williams says it’s haunted.”
“But no one drowned there. You shouldn’t have told her we went back there. She’s just trying to put us off.”
“Please, Jonathan,” Theo said, “it’s nighttime . . . it’s scary. Let’s not.”
We looked outside, where the gardens had almost vanished into the darkly drawn-down evening and the horizon shone a fiery white edge at the rim of the hill. The view was suddenly unfamiliar, as inky and cold as the bottom of the sea.
“I don’t mind doing something else,” said Charlie.
“Scared?” I said, hitting him on the arm.
“Don’t be stupid,” he snapped, shoving me in the back as I opened the door and led us out, Theo trailing miserably behind. “You don’t have to come,” I said to her, but she only shook her head, because no matter how much she hated what I was doing, not to be able to follow me was the worse option. As we crossed the terrace I looked through the windows into the bright morning room. Miss Black was facing away from us and Alicia was falling asleep, her hand sagging around her glass. Neither of them noticed us go. The thin air had the tang of frost in it; the winter evening furled over us, a thick clouded dark. The grass tugged wetly at our shoes as we got closer to the beginning of the trees.
“If I saw a ghost I’d punch its head off,” Charlie said. “Baff.” He mimed a punch, then stuck his hands in his pockets and started whistling. I didn’t know how to whistle, though I had tried, and the sound—high and hostile—irritated me.
We got to the trees and forced our way through the ferns to the alleyway of willows, the dark, pewtery tunnel lit by faint patches of evening light, like a subterranean goblin path. We looked for the initialed oak but it was too dark to find it, and Charlie wasn’t interested anyway. (“Sounds stupid.”) When we reached the pool it was glimmering and quiet, reflecting the dark sky like an old, spotted mirror. It seemed different now that the summer had withdrawn, taking all its light and friendliness back. There was something damp and burdensome in the air, catching at our skin. When we stood still we could hear water moving slowly, the sodden, prickling sound of the moss.
“So . . . this is our pool,” I said, uncertainly. “We could catch some fish.”
“But what if the ghost comes out?” Theo asked, holding on to the sleeve of my sweater. “What if it doesn’t want us here?” I shook her hand off.
“There’s no ghost, Theo. Shut up.”
“We’ll see its face through the trees.” Theo pointed to where the darkness was thickest on the far side of the water, so dark it was only a heavy emptiness, the color of a bruise. We all stopped talking to listen to the low creaks and scuffles of the leaves and branches shifting in the dispirited wind. The dim light rose and fell in pieces above us. Theo looked around nervously until Charlie caught the unease and started doing the same. I made a scornful pfff sound, which was promptly gulped up by the dark.
“We’ll see it looking around . . . staring with its enormous ghost eyes—looking for us,” she continued, “and then it’ll see us . . . and it will reach out with its horrid claws, because it’s hungry, and it’s angry . . . and then—it will float right out and get us.”
This pronouncement was rewarded with a loud cracking noise in the trees behind us, and we all jumped.
“The ghost!” Charlie yelped, turned, and ran. Theo followed him, wailing. I sauntered after them at first, then, looking behind me, I scurried out too, until we all got to the edge of the trees and ran as fast as we could down the hill, sliding and tripping and starting to laugh. Evendon, reassuringly, was just below us, its windows colored with interior light, and we ran toward it.
Charlie and I, energized, chased along the grass and gave Red Indian howls; leaping and shoving each other. Theo hung back until I stopped and waited for her.
“Cheer up.” I buffeted her shoulder, and ran around her in circles, until her smile uncertainly hovered, unfolded, and finally was restored to full beam. But she said later, reflectively, “That scary person nearly got us.”
“What is it—a ghost or a person?”
“A ghost person. A dead person. We shouldn’t go back there.”
After that night Theo refused to go anywhere near the pool. It was the first time she was prepared to separate herself from me—a shadow pulling her feet free—but if I went without her it was with the guilty knowledge that she would be at home; not playing by herself, but waiting at the window for me to come back. And, though I didn’t like to admit it, the pool wasn’t so much fun alone, muffled with the cold quiet of winter, broken only by the occasional flurry of wind through the dry remnants of leaves, hissing and sudden, and in the end I abandoned the whole thing—pool and fish and tree and ruins—and didn’t go again.
After Christmas something changed in Alicia, as if an oddity had appeared in her tranquil glassiness, a chip seen only from certain angles. She still sat with the usual magazines, but she frowned at them, or stared at the same page for a long time, and I could tell she wasn’t reading. Sometimes she was snappish; she asked Mrs. Williams why her food was burnt or undercooked, rather than just leaving it on the plate, as she used to. Her face was not so still as it once was; there was a drawn-up energy about her, puckering and fraught, disturbing her smooth forehead.
I took it upon myself to encourage this developing fault in my mother. I cut all the heads off her roses, which she didn’t appear to notice. Miss Black did, and I got no pocket money for a week. Then I set one of her hats floating in the bath with a crew of action men. Alicia said to Miss Black, “I don’t understand how children can be so destructive,” and lowered her eyebrows vaguely when she saw me for the next few days. For this I went without pocket money for another two weeks, though Theo spent all her own money buying me sweets. But I was encouraged by the response. Through all this I had no clear purpose; I didn’t know why I wanted to heighten the pressure—to provoke a raised voice, even a slap.
My pièce de résistance was to dress an obedient Theo in Alicia’s silk scarf, gloves, and white fur coat, take her to the steepest slope of the garden, and roll her down it. She vanished in a white blur, like a dandelion head, and hit the mud at the bottom with force. Then I escorted her back to the house: Theo dripping and high-spirited, and me, quiet with the adrenaline-tasting anticipation of rage to come.
Things after that didn’t go as plan
ned. Miss Black gasped when she saw us: overawed by the gravity of the crime, she took us straight to Alicia, who was napping in the morning room. Her lower lip had dropped slightly ajar; a magazine lolled out of her hands. When Miss Black said, “Excuse me, Alicia?” she woke up suddenly, her mouth snapping back into line.
“Is there a problem?” she said to Miss Black, who explained what we’d done, holding out one of the sullied gloves like a dead pet. Alicia frowned at it. She turned away and looked out the window for a while, as if she had asked a question and was waiting for the window to answer. She didn’t look at me or Theo.
“I wasn’t sure what to do. . . .” Miss Black said eventually.
“Just keep them out of my rooms,” Alicia replied. “Isn’t that why you’re here?” The sound of her voice was peculiar—not angry—not anything. Just an echo, on a blank wall.
Miss Black was surprised by the reprimand; I heard her crying in her room later that night. Neither Theo nor I got any pocket money for a month as punishment, to pay for the cleaning bill. I told Theo that this was the reason we had to behave better from now on, which was a lie. Really it was the thought of Alicia saying “Keep them out of my rooms”; the stillness of her voice, the pale ellipse of her face like an empty bowl, turned away from the small Jonathan, waiting wrong and unwanted.
“Sorry, Jonathan,” Theo said, as if it were all her fault.
It wasn’t long after my campaign of provocation that I was woken up by what I thought—propelled upward to consciousness—was a shout. The early light through the parting of the curtain was milky and gray; I squinted at it and wondered slowly what the noise had been. Then there was another shout, from below, and the sound of more than one person crossing the loud marble of the entrance hall. I got out of bed, my legs still uncertain from sleep, and went downstairs, where two of the young gardeners were standing near the foot of the stairs, with turned-down shocked faces, hands hanging forgotten like gloves. Rhys, my favorite, usually said, “Alright, boss,” when he saw me. But that morning they both looked at me with an odd, almost frightened evasiveness.
The Other Half of Me Page 3
