“Did you see Grandad Sam in America?” I asked Eve (she had already told us not to call her Grandma or Grandmother, but it was apparently alright for Sam). Sam Anthony wasn’t actually our grandfather; he was Eve’s second husband at one time, though not now. We hadn’t seen him since we visited L.A. as babies: there was a photograph of Theo crawling around a flat, kidney shape of blue; the glare of the sun, her white frilly hat. Every year at Christmas Sam sent us presents: rocking horses, sleds, a remote-control miniature Porsche—which famously toppled Mrs. Wynne Jones—a diamond necklace that Theo lost, an air rifle that Miss Black confiscated.
“I did indeed. He sends his love.”
“Is he coming back too?” Theo asked.
“No, darling. I’m afraid not.” Eve smiled after she said this, and Theo smiled too, looking confused.
“So . . .” Eve said, “I want to know how everything has been here. . . . Alicia of course has no idea.” (Alicia appeared not to hear this.) “Have you both been doing well at school?”
Eve was the first person, aside from teachers, who seemed genuinely interested in my high marks. She smiled and patted my hand with her fingers, which were cool and firm as if gloved. Hand-pats were all we had had from Eve so far; no embracing, and her lips didn’t touch our skin when she kissed us, as if we were adults. But she paid us a serious kind of attention, which we hadn’t experienced before. I was exasperated to see Theo contracting under Eve’s scrutiny, like a prodded shellfish. I didn’t want Eve to lose interest in us.
Eve told us the story of how she first came to England. “I was born in America, but my father always preferred the UK. He disapproved of New York—he thought it was crass. We sailed back here right after my mother died, when I was a little girl.”
“To Evendon?” I asked.
“Oh, no.” Eve twirled her wineglass in her hands. “We moved to a house in Mayfair, even though the blitz had only just ended. My grandfather James lived here—he was stuck here really. He couldn’t afford London by then. Besides, the two of them didn’t exactly get along.”
“Why didn’t they get along?” Theo asked.
“Who knows?” Eve said, raising her hands. “My father didn’t get along with a lot of people. He was a . . . disapproving type of man.”
Eve hated London back then, she said.
“It was nothing like the city it is today. It was so dark! It smelled of rubble, and poverty. In America there was chocolate; we had fruit. But in England those things were scarce even in the best houses. And the people were unfriendly. I saw none of the famous wartime spirit, they all hid under their black umbrellas and scuttled around the pavements like pigeons. Even in the summer it rained . . . and the winters . . . there was the thick fog. You couldn’t see farther than a few feet in front of you, because of the chemicals in the air.”
“From the bombs?” I asked.
Eve laughed. “No, from the coal London ate up every day. It was just pollution. We came to Evendon a couple of years later, after James died. I remember arriving and being shocked by the greenness and the beauty of it all. I had only seen London up until that day, and New York before that. It seemed as if when I closed my eyes at night everything was still green. And so quiet. I couldn’t sleep the first few nights because I was used to the noise of people and traffic and music, all night.”
“Poor Eve,” said Theo.
“Oh, it happens to everyone who goes from the city to the countryside. It was the same when I came back here in the late seventies. I remember Alicia and Alex being horrified. They were teenagers at that time. Alicia in particular was quite devastated to be away from her L.A. friends’ parties.”
Theo and I looked dubiously at Alicia, who we could tell—by the barest perceptible shift of an eyelid, the lowered angle of her neck—had fallen asleep.
“Anyway, I suppose it will be the same when I try to get to sleep tonight. . . . I have to get used to the peace and quiet again.” She looked around the room with satisfaction, while I thought that what seemed like silence to Eve was, to me, lighter and brighter than the silence of before, as if she had brought the secret of the people and traffic and music with her.
“Why have you been away for so long?” I asked.
Eve lifted her eyebrows exaggeratedly. “Business! I’ve been very busy for the last few years. I would have much rather been here, of course. But I left not long after your mother moved back in, with the two of you. You were only tiny then but I knew the three of you would look after Evendon until I got back.”
Theo looked confused. “How long are you staying this time?”
“Oh!” Eve smiled. “Well, darling, this time I’m back for good.”
Evendon changed after Eve came back. For example, Mrs. Williams started going outside to smoke. She also abandoned her habit of eating pieces of whatever she was cooking, and the one of taking home “leftover” chickens or steaks in carrier bags. Mrs. Wynne Jones too was a more frequent presence, supervising a tribe of black-clothed maids. The house itself became brighter, more present, and I realized that a layer of dust had been lifted off it like a veil, the thin film of gray on the windows wiped away. The dining table became reflective, the silver radiant. The drapes were lighter, clean as milk. The winter light, no longer barred, dived in and burst from the polished floors, the serpentine-edged rosewood, the oyster faces of the clocks. Evendon had emerged from its sleep, its subdued state of waiting; vivid and delighted, it glittered like Eve herself. It was like a piano that only she could play, calling up its eerie music.
Alicia was lost in the new Evendon; she seemed dimmer, smaller—though of all of us she was the only one who had not changed her behavior. Her hair was back in its perpetual chignon; the clocks could still be set by her afternoon gin and tonics, which she took careful, brittle-lipped sips from, as though at a Dorchester luncheon. Eve didn’t pay much attention to her, and so no one else did either. I had almost forgotten about the time that I had spent trying to make her angry.
Miss Black, like the dust, was an early casualty of Eve’s reappearance. One afternoon, when we got back from playing on the fences that bordered the estate, Theo’s dress torn and my shoes be-cowpatted, we saw Eve standing on the terrace watching us.
“Where have you two been?” she asked pleasantly.
“In the fields,” Theo said, before I was able to reply. “We saw some black-and-white cows.”
“And where is Miss Black?”
Neither of us knew.
A few days later Eve said, “I think you two are old enough not to need a nanny,” and that was the end of Miss Black. The day she left was odd, rather than sad, though Theo cried. Miss Black, disconcertingly, tried to hug us. (She was upset, I think, by Alicia’s dispassionately murmured good-bye.) When she leaned in I could smell her perfume, a thin, glassy scent.
Theo mourned Miss Black for nearly a month after her departure, for no reason I could think of other than the parting hug.
“There’s no reason to be sad,” Eve told her. “You can always write to Miss Black, if you miss her.”
“But what if she dies?” Theo asked. To which there was no answer.
Another change was that parties returned to Evendon, involving teams of precise white-and-black people like monochrome Christmas elves, assembling something astonishing. When their work was finished the gardens were lit with hundreds of lanterns, and ice sculptures of naiads presided mournfully over the circulating waiters, clustered champagne flutes, jazz pianists, the towers of flowers with their petals luminescent in the weaving, heaving light.
Before the parties began, Theo and I would sit with Eve while she got ready. She’d unlock a safe in the wall and draw out diamonds, pearls, and opals. The boxes of treasure made her playful: “Look at these, Theo,” she said, holding up a ruby pendant, glimmering and liquid like a rabbit heart—“remember, a woman should never have to buy her own jewelry.”
We were meant to go to bed long before guests started to arrive, but we couldn’t
sleep; drawn out to the landing by the noise of the people, the floor writhing with their reflections, heating the air floating in through the French windows and loading it with perfume and cigar smoke. The music rose fitfully up to us as we watched stunned and unblinking through the banisters at the top of the stairs. Once we sneaked under the dining table and settled down with a tray of canapés to watch people’s legs. The women’s feet—with their enameled toenails, shoes decorated with feathers and crystals and flowers, and once a silver lizard, its eyes made of purple stones—were more interesting than those of their black-shoed partners. The sounds of the party swung over our heads: pieces of conversations I didn’t understand:
I’m telling him it’s over for good unless he ends it with her. They aren’t having sex—he told me so.
What the public don’t know won’t hurt them.
She looked like a whore.
What we need is to sell the whole lot off. The insurance alone is crippling.
“What’s a whore?” Theo whispered.
“I think it’s a kind of animal,” I said, scraping the gleaming black beads off the top of a canapé before eating it.
Finally Eve’s voice came close, humming overhead, distinct from the others.
“Oh, we can solve that,” she said, replying to a question I didn’t hear, and then she was gone.
The most exciting event of the night happened very late, Theo curled up asleep next to me with parsley stuck to her cheek. A woman in a shiny green dress threw her glass onto the floor and shouted something at a man. She was carried out of the front doors by two other people through a rising silence, raging and twisting like a snake, until the door shut and everyone turned back around and started talking again.
The next day we sat at breakfast with Eve. I was trying not to yawn, while Theo ate croissants and orange juice with vivacious zeal, telling Eve about how she dreamt she had a party too but didn’t have any insurance.
“Mmm,” Eve said, smiling at her as she opened the Financial Times.
“Why doesn’t Uncle Alex come to parties?” Theo asked. We hadn’t seen him since Eve’s return.
“Oh, they’re not his sort of thing,” Eve said.
“Aren’t they fun?”
“Of course they are! But you can’t make people have fun.” Eve sighed. “What your uncle Alex doesn’t understand is how to be sociable . . . how to meet people who could be important to you.”
Eve’s parties were always purposeful. There was always someone she had intended to come, tempting him within her reach, offering alcohol and celebrities. “Then get them with the business stuff,” she told us cheerfully.
“What’s business stuff?” Theo asked.
“Well, for me it’s hotels. But it’s different for everybody. Some people’s business is money. Other people might make jam, or drill for oil, or anything really.”
“What is Mrs. Williams’s business?” Theo asked, as the lady herself appeared at the breakfast table with a plate of burnt bacon.
“Making delicious food,” Mrs. Williams replied shamelessly.
“I want to build houses,” I informed Eve.
“Oh yes, you could be a builder,” Mrs. Williams interrupted. “Fit right in on a building site, you would!”
As Mrs. Williams exited, laughing, Eve looked at us both thoughtfully. Then she said, “Hold on,” and went out, coming back with a large photograph album.
“Look at this.” She opened the album to show us a black-and-white image of a beautiful girl with waved hair like a stiff little hat. She wore a coat with a fur collar; patent shoes tipped her narrow legs. “I was eighteen,” she said.
“When will I be eighteen?” asked Theo.
“In a much better year than I was, darling. It was 1955, and people weren’t very happy at that time. I remember one day I was coming out of a theater in London after seeing a new Coward play. It was raining and I wasn’t looking where I was going, and I collided with another girl. She had a cheap coat and no umbrella, a shopgirl perhaps, walking quickly. Of course I apologized to her.
“She said to me, ‘What have you got to be sorry about?’ and walked off before I could say anything else. I think all she saw when she looked at me was an empty fur, a pair of floating pearl earrings.
“But I did have something to be sorry about. I was a woman too. I was tiny and pointless. We used to call the twentieth century the great engine of change—we said it a lot. Or the men did. Women weren’t meant to be engine drivers.” Eve gave a small smile, which quickly cooled, as if she was thinking about something else.
“Where to?” Theo asked, interested. “Where were they driving the engine?”
“Oh, it’s a figure of speech. Anyway, that day I decided that I wasn’t going to be held back by the men anymore. And for you two—things are different now but there are still people who will try to hold you back. If you want to build houses, Jonathan, you must build houses. And Theo, if you want to . . . whatever you want to do—don’t let anybody stop you either.”
“I want to drive a red-and-yellow train to Africa,” Theo said, sliding down from her chair off to stamp and wheel a tribal dance around the table.
“Do you now!” Eve said, and laughed, going back to her newspaper.
Afterward I said to Theo, “You act like such a baby sometimes.” Then when she looked at me with uncomprehending hurt I had to apologize. (Sometimes I would have welcomed a fight—just once—with her. Name-calling, hair-pulling; a more even distribution of guilt.)
The new, unexpected shape of our family made me happy, but it wasn’t without its worries. I felt more responsible, as if I were its custodian; guarding the harmony that had descended, keeping things the same. One of my worries was that there were certain things about Theo that Eve, unfamiliar with the quirks and crinkles of Theo’s personality, might find odd—or, worse, might not like.
Around that time Theo was “experiencing some challenges” in school, according to the letters and phone calls from her teachers. The most recent challenge was Theo’s horror about learning how to tell time. She had asked the teacher what the time was counting down to.
“Nothing,” said the teacher. “It just carries on.”
“How do you know it’s doing that?” Theo asked.
“Things get older and older,” the teacher replied. “Like you. Every year you’ll grow bigger, until you’re a grown-up.”
“That’s horrible,” Theo protested. “It’s not true.”
Eve had stood with the telephone in the morning room murmuring to the teacher, her smooth head held straight and unmoving, one hand tapping an irregular percussion against her leg. Theo overheard the conversation and said to me later, “Eve thinks I’m a strange child.”
“You must’ve heard her wrong,” I said.
But I saw that Eve had developed a certain expression when she was thinking about Theo. It appeared the first time when she told us the story of the ant and the grasshopper and Theo cried. She couldn’t understand why the ants wouldn’t help the grasshopper at the end. (For my part, I was on the ants’ side. The grasshopper irritated me, with his refusal to prepare for cold, for the simple hostility of the winter.) Then there was the day Theo watched the Wicked Witch of the East die under the house and couldn’t sleep for a week. The expression appeared again every time Eve had to tell her that there were no ghosts, no fairies, no lion in the wardrobe. Eve’s mouth would lengthen, her eyebrows turn questioning, and I thought it was because she was trying to work Theo out. I suppose I was worried about what she might decide, when she finally came to a conclusion.
Summer came around again, and on the days when Eve wasn’t at home, Theo and I would cross the border between Evendon and Wales and wander up and down the quiet hills, to the surrounding villages or farms. One day we walked to Carmarthen, where the stone ramparts and battlements of the former castle could be tracked around the narrow roads. We found a chocolate shop, where sated flies dawdled under the glass counter, and admired the cakes
until we were asked to leave. In the high street we were mostly ignored, gently buffeted by shopping bags and wheelchairs. At first Theo said “Hello,” and smiled to people as we passed, but mostly they looked back at us, without replying. They were not exactly unfriendly; but very few of them said hello back, and eventually I told her to stop.
On another day we walked down to the beach at Llansteffan. It took us almost an hour in the solid sun, but we didn’t mind; we were dizzy with the smell of it, the glimpses of the sea through the gaps of the hedgerow, the sky like a purer distillation of the blue water. Most of the way we walked a thin lane lined with trees, keeping back from the occasional cars that went by. The barred gaps in the light that slid over the car windows alternately revealed and veiled their puzzled inhabitants, looking at Theo with her pink straw hat and bucket and spade, smiling and waving at them, me with a rolled-up blanket over my shoulder, two dwarf tourists.
Llansteffan was small, a few streets of tiny houses painted in jaunty pastels, with balconies and palmlike trees in the gardens and an air of the carnival about them. On the cliff above the village there was a ruined castle, peering down at us with its one-eyed window, a bright blue eye like Theo’s. We laid out our blanket near the rocks at the edge of the bay and started building a sand castle. I went to the sea to get water, wading into the slow thinning of the tide, sliding over the flat cream sand into a moving glass pane. When I got back, Theo was watching a man and a woman with a small child; holding its hands as it wobbled in the shallow water.
“Why didn’t we see our father before he died?” she asked me.
This startled me. Our father was something that hadn’t been talked about in a while. When Eve first came back I had thought she might tell us more about him—the mysterious Michael Caplin, beginning and ending in his antipodean car crash. But she was as vague about him as Alicia always was; she even gave me the same blink, the same repressive frown, when I asked what he was like. I caught the sense of unease, and didn’t mention my father again.
The Other Half of Me Page 5
