“Miss Black,” I called with relief, seeing her standing with the telephone. “What’s happening?”
She didn’t hear me; she was saying, “Near Llansteffan. It’s empty. I don’t know.”
She kept looking up at the open door of the gold parlor, and so I slipped around her and went inside.
At first I almost laughed, because it was only Alicia, sitting on the sofa with her eyes closed. She had fallen asleep there several times before. Then I noticed that her hair was all over her shoulders; it looked wrong, unraveled. She was sagging so her head tilted forward, and her mouth was slightly open. I stared at her face, which was grayish, unclear, as if she were underwater.
One of the gardeners rushed in behind me and carried me back out. He was saying something I couldn’t quite understand. Then there were sirens, and the noise of wheels on the gravel like the crunching of broken glass. I sat on the front steps and watched the ambulance drive away, thinking not of my mother’s shape inside it, surrounded by so much haste and clamor, but of her drooping on the sofa, slack and white and drowned.
Theo’s bedroom was at the back of the house, and she was a heavy—almost inanimate—sleeper. She didn’t appear while the various denizens of the house were wheeling through it, cut loose and flapping with tragedy, drinking whisky (Mrs. Williams) and discussing the moments of the morning until they lost all human resonance and became an inane sequence, repeated continually.
“And then John saw her through the window. . . . And then he fetched Rhys. . . . And then they knocked on the window . . .”
There was a stillness in my ears, as if the air inside them was very dense. I sat on the floor and let the sound of them talking vanish into the cold, crystallized air, compressed into silence.
Finally the hospital telephoned and Miss Black came over and told me that I mustn’t worry about my mother; that she was absolutely fine and had gone away to have a short rest, and that she’d be back before I knew it. She was almost affectionate with relief and gave my hand a squeeze.
“Don’t tell Theo what happened,” she said. “She may not understand.”
I didn’t understand either, but I didn’t say anything. Mrs. Wynne Jones stood nearby with a pitying smile, which was nonetheless a smile, as if she knew that something bad had happened, but felt that it was deserved. She was a tall woman, with rigid pewter hair; there was something implacable about her. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head.
“Are you phoning Mrs. Anthony?” everyone asked Miss Black in the days that followed. By which they meant—Eve. Miss Black looked nervous at the idea of this. Almost a week later I still wasn’t sure whether she had called Eve or not. She often sat in the study on the telephone, but when I went past I could hear her saying things like “I don’t know if I could get a better salary,” which meant she was talking to her mother.
Theo certainly understood something of the atmosphere in the house. After she got up that morning she sat in her pink flowered pajamas, shadowy-eyed and quiet, while I explained that Alicia had gone on holiday.
“Where?” asked Theo.
“Er . . . Spain,” I said. “Costa del Sol.” This was where Mrs. Williams’s relatives went.
“Oh,” said Theo, thinking for a moment. Then her face was illuminated, like an opening flower, and she gave her trusting smile. “That’s where oranges come from. I like Spain.”
A week after Alicia’s removal, I was in the kitchen making breakfast. Mrs. Williams wasn’t there (her working hours having slipped and sagged like Dalí’s clocks, in Alicia’s absence) and the empty kitchen looked very cold, vast and white, like a laboratory or a hospital. This changed when Mrs. Williams got in, jaunty in her pink coat and yellow hair, took an ashtray out of the cutlery drawer, and put the kettle on.
“What are you up to? Hiding?” she said when she saw me. “If anyone asks, I got here at eight, alright?”
“Can I have this?” I asked, holding up a tub of sprinkles.
“Help yourself. It’s not like I’ll bother making a cake, I suppose.”
Mrs. Wynne Jones arrived at this point and bade Mrs. Williams a cheery good-morning. They seemed to have called a truce on disapproving of each other, in order to gossip about Alicia, which they began doing as soon as I had left the kitchen. I sat outside with my sprinkles to listen.
“They said after she had Theo,” Mrs. Williams said, “she didn’t speak for three days. Postnatal repression.” I couldn’t imagine Alicia—our porcelain and silk mother—with a distended stomach, moving effortfully, like the other pregnant women I had seen. Perhaps that was what was wrong with her; she couldn’t imagine it either. The way she looked at us with faint surprise—curiosity, even—that we should be her children.
“No wonder he left,” Mrs. Williams continued, more quietly.
“What did they tell the little one about Alicia?” Mrs. Wynne Jones asked.
“Holiday.”
“Does she believe it?”
“Theodora . . . well, you know. She’s not all there, in my opinion. And it’s not surprising.”
“Eve should come back,” Mrs. Wynne Jones said.
“She should,” said Mrs. Williams. “But whether she will or not . . .”
“You’re the expert, I suppose,” Mrs. Wynne Jones said coolly.
Mrs. Williams was immune to sarcasm. “She won’t come back,” she pronounced. “Not in a million years.”
I made a face in the direction of the kitchen. I pictured Eve, a flickering black-and-white figure, with her glowing smile, arriving like Snow White in a cinematic, blinding vision. She would fly in on her own plane and land on the lawn, she would tell us how glad she was to see us, she would dish out extravagant presents and cakes, and Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wynne Jones would be proved wrong, wrong, wrong.
Around this time I went through a phase of watching a lot of television. Not for the shows—it was the ads I liked best. Theo would sing loudly along to most of the jingles she knew until she recognized the opening images of a particular laundry detergent commercial and had to rush behind the sofa to block her ears. She used to run upstairs when someone came to the house, in case it was the Whiter than White man, coming to get her.
My favorites were for supermarkets or food. They usually featured a mother and at least two children, in colored T-shirts and jeans. They smiled at each other with absorption or conducted good-humored arguments, eating their prepackaged food with loud noises of approval.
At night I lay in bed and imagined I was in an advertisement. I followed my mother—not Alicia, but a woman in a pink sweater and neat jeans—as she wheeled a trolley around the supermarket, packed food into striped bags. I sat with my brothers and sisters around a table, while our mother set out a dish of roast potatoes, a glossy joint of beef, luminous green peas. Before I got to the gravy, I fell asleep. The door from the kitchen opened—it was Alicia after all, bringing in the gravy. Her hair was loose over her shoulders again, dusty blond, like spider-webs. She was wavering; focusing on me, she drifted toward me. I was frightened, but I couldn’t get up. I could feel my mouth moving like somebody else’s mouth. Then she was not holding gravy anymore, but a big silver covered dish, like a gleaming robot breast. She placed it in front of me, the lid came up—and there—was nothing.
Nearly two weeks after Alicia’s removal (time for me was measured by this date, like BC and AD. Before Alicia was driven off in the ambulance. After Alicia was driven off in the ambulance), I was lying on the floor of the morning room stacking all our sets of dominoes to make a fort. It was a warmish day, but I didn’t feel much like playing outside. The wintry sun drifted in through the open window, showing the dust rising off the cream damask of the sofa and the drapes at the window, firing the jeweled eyes of the gold elephants, resting on the vase of Alicia’s roses still standing on the side table. The roses were drying out like crepe paper, shedding petals, but no one had noticed or thrown them away.
Theo danced in, making exaggerated
sweeps around the room, toes pointed, singing, “When will I be famous?”
“Sssh,” I said. I was balancing the blocks to make a gateway at the front, which threatened to collapse.
“Eve’s famous, isn’t she?” Theo said. “But I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want my picture in the paper.”
“Then you can’t be a ballerina, can you?” I said. This was Theo’s latest ambition.
“I’ll be an artist.”
“Artists are famous too.”
Theo was silent for a moment. Then she started singing again, turned a clumsy pirouette, and jerked the rug with her foot. The fort was rubble.
“Leave me alone, can’t you?” I said, and she backed out, mouth sagging, eyes flooding.
I put the domino pieces back in their boxes. I didn’t believe that Eve was going to come to Evendon, not now. After the first days, when she had been invoked like a genie, over and over, or like Bloody Mary summoned in the mirror, I thought she would have to come back. But no one mentioned her anymore, and they didn’t talk about Alicia either.
I wondered when Alicia would come home; what she might be like when she did. The idea that she might come home and be different was too strange to imagine. Yesterday Theo said, “Maybe when Alicia comes back from holiday she’ll be happy,” but I couldn’t answer. For if Alicia wasn’t happy, did that mean she was sad? I didn’t think so, not even in her irritable phase. She never laughed, but she never cried either. She emerged from her room each morning at nearly midday, scented, hair pinned up; lit and polished for display. Then she read magazines, cut roses, answered the occasional invitation (I must regretfully decline), and called for drinks. Then she went to bed. Happy or sad were not concepts that could be applied to her; she simply didn’t occupy the same emotional space as the rest of us.
Theo had never really understood this. When she was very young, she used to follow Alicia around the house, reaching out to touch her legs, or her hands, until Alicia noticed and waved her away. They both looked baffled; not comprehending the other. Eventually Theo stopped following Alicia, and started following me instead.
Sometimes it’s hard, being the one who is followed. With nothing to follow yourself—no one looking back, to beckon you on. No one up ahead.
On the exact month’s anniversary of Alicia’s exit, we sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wynne Jones, eating our lunch. The domestic rule—of sorts—we once had was now wholly broken down, and we insisted on having our meals in the kitchen, where we could watch television and add mayonnaise to everything.
Mrs. Wynne Jones was leaning against the fridge with her woolly arms folded, saying; “So, no chance of an appeal?”
“He’s a good boy,” said Mrs. Williams. “It was that judge who was the problem.”
Mrs. Wynne Jones gave her a tight smile. “I’m sure.”
Mrs. Williams was not above making a face behind Mrs. Wynne Jones’s back, as she now demonstrated.
Theo had discarded her sandwich and was pouring chocolate sauce on some cornflakes, saying to Mrs. Williams, “My mother’s gone to Spain and she’ll bring us back some oranges.”
“Is that so?” Mrs. Williams said, raising her eyebrows over Theo’s head.
“We’re going to have a cactus,” said Theo.
“Nasty prickly things, cactuses,” said Mrs. Williams. Theo, not listening, started eating her cornflakes, humming a tune from a television show.
“Just like her mother, see,” Mrs. Williams murmured to Mrs. Wynne Jones, tapping the side of her head.
I stared viciously at their two backs, which were heavy and final, like their voices. They had the power of summary, of sentencing. Compared to Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wynne Jones, our family was weightless; they could blow us away, just by talking about us.
“I hate you,” I said to Mrs. Williams, and went out noisily. I closed the door to my room and drew pictures of her trapped under a landslide, or on fire, aware that Theo would be waiting outside for me. When I went out she was sitting on the window seat of the landing with the sash wide open, looking down at the curve of the drive where it disappeared into the trees. She often sat this way, with her head poking out to rest on the sill, the glass hanging over her like a guillotine. She shifted and put her head on my shoulder when I sat down next to her.
“Why did you shout at Mrs. Williams?” she asked, reproachfully.
“She said . . .” I hesitated. “She’s stupid.”
“Oh.” Theo considered this. “Okay.”
We sat in silence and looked out the window at the bend in the road where Alicia was last seen.
“What will we do if Alicia doesn’t come back?” Theo asked. I glanced at her, checking for incipient tears, but it seemed the question was a practical one.
“We could do whatever we wanted,” I said. “We could sack Miss Black and Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wynne Jones and live all by ourselves.”
“Could we make meringue?”
“Yes, and trifle.”
“Could we make a water slide on the stairs?”
“Definitely.”
“And get a trampoline? And then we could jump up to our bedrooms on the trampoline and slide down on the waterslide and we wouldn’t have to use the stairs ever again.”
“Yes, and we could get a dog,” I said. “Two dogs. And a horse.”
“And an owl,” Theo cried. We sat for a moment, shoulder to shoulder, gazing out not onto the empty drive but on our rain-bowed dream selves, sailing down our waterslide, hands full of trifle. I was starting to hope that, like our father, Alicia wouldn’t ever come back.
CHAPTER THREE
The silence at Evendon was a distinctive one: lethargic, torpid, heavy with the expiration of many years, the gradual cooling of time. It was thickest in the vaulted entrance hall, with its two great columns (looted from Greece by a dead Bennett) and marble floor like an Arctic sea. I think we were all used to it; it was just another of those things that we breathed in so often we stopped noticing. Like the lack of Eve, the lack of our father, the lack of Alicia. The ambulances that came for Alicia rattled the silence briefly, but then they went away and it settled back cold and white, not to be disturbed until nearly two months later, in March.
The first sign that something unusual was happening was the sound of the engines of several cars outside. As the engines stopped and doors started opening, Theo and I ran into the hall and stood to listen to what sounded like dozens of different voices, the hungry crackling of the gravel. I remember in particular the laugh just outside, that fluid, clear sound. I don’t think I had ever heard any of the adults laugh like that before. Miss Black hurried in after us awkwardly.
“What on earth—what’s going on?” she asked us.
Mrs. Williams, who never moved so fast as when she sniffed incipient drama, appeared close behind her.
“It’s Eve,” she said. “Did you call her, then?”
“No!” Miss Black said, as there came the sound of a key connecting with a lock, the scratch and clunk. “I was going to, but—” And then the doors opened and the silence shivered and tore and scurried to the corners of the house, away from the clamor and color of the people, anonymous in the initial blinding slice of light, fanning out into the hall. The first person I made out was Alicia, who walked in wearing a peach jacket and pearls, and then stood looking bored, as if she had been there all day. Her skin had an unreal sheen, her irises diluted as if water had got into them, her pupils large and dark. Despite her appearance of fragility there was something flatly unapproachable in her face; even Theo, hovering and uncertain behind me, didn’t move toward her. We stood still and watched instead. All around Alicia were people I had never seen before, carrying large leather suitcases and hat boxes, tripping over one another. The last person to walk through the door was different—carrying nothing, moving decisively and quickly—a woman with hair like blackbird wings, white skin, a red suit.
It was Eve—it had to be, smiling as if she was enjo
ying the effects of some huge joke she had planned. Her eyes ticked off the activity around her, made a sharp swoop of familiarity over the hall, then alighted on me.
“Jonathan!” she said, and looked behind me. “And this is Theo! It’s Eve—come back to stay.” Her voice on the television, while lovely, had been as small and distant as if it really were trapped in a box. Here in our ears it was unusually substantial; not loud but smoothly cohesive, rolling like mercury.
Theo gazed at her, visibly frightened, and then at Alicia, who appeared to notice us for the first time.
“Hello, you two,” she said, the same way we recited our responses in school assemblies. She handed her coat to one of the unfamiliar people, gave a vague wave in our direction as she walked past, up the stairs, then we heard the sound of her door closing.
Eve frowned for a moment, then retrieved her humorous air and dipped down on her knee to shake our hands. After the surprise of first seeing her, I realized that she was not as tall as I had thought—not even as tall as Alicia. She had a compact slenderness that looked almost unyielding; her legs next to me were hard, smooth with silk. It was her eyes that made her so striking—her eyes or her mouth—or possibly something else. I tried not to stare at her.
“Your mother is very tired after traveling, I’m afraid. Let’s get all this unpacked, and then we can sit down in peace and talk,” she said to us, winking, then stood up to direct the people holding cases and boxes, who left one by one until only Theo and I were left in the hall.
“Is that really Eve?” Theo whispered.
“Who else do you think it would be?” I said.
“She brought Mama back from Spain,” Theo said, thinking. “So it must be her.”
That night we stayed up in the morning room with Eve. I sat next to her. Theo had tucked herself into a nest of cushions on the floor in front of the fire, hands wound together, the light moving over her face. The colors of the fire extended beyond her; lapping up the carpet, becoming hundreds of flames in the windowpanes, falling just short of Alicia, who sat across the room, her gaze lost somewhere in the middle distance.
The Other Half of Me Page 4
