It bothered me now that Theo had asked about him; I imagined her bringing it up at home, in the same way that she asked fat women if there was a baby in their tummies—and if so, how many—or why there were dark people on television but none at our house. I felt that the new life of Evendon—the happiness of Evendon—was delicate, a balance of things that were said and not said. I didn’t want Theo disturbing it with one of her sudden, unwelcome wonderings. So I said, “I don’t know, and you shouldn’t go on about him all the time. He’s dead. You’re not meant to talk about dead people because it upsets everyone. Didn’t you know that?”
“We talk about other dead people. . . .” Theo said, but she ran down into a murmur, gave up, and started filling her bucket with sand again.
“You have to get the sand packed in,” I told her, more kindly. “Or the towers will collapse.”
As we piled sand I noticed two boys watching us from a slight distance. Eventually, with tentative nonchalance, they approached us.
“Can we help?” one of them asked, in a heavy Welsh accent.
“Hurrah,” Theo cried, before I could say no. I would have preferred to be left alone, but the boys had a larger bucket, and for a while we built together in silence.
“Nice tower,” I said to one of them.
“Your moat’s good,” he said, nodding at it shyly. “Are you here on a holiday?”
“We live here,” Theo said, then added proudly, “We walked down to the beach by ourselves.”
“But you’re English,” the other boy said. “You talk like English people.”
Just then an older girl arrived awkward-footed across the sand, haughty in her flowered bikini. She took the boys by their arms and pulled them away, saying, “Come on now. Come on.” We couldn’t hear the rest of what she said, but the boys didn’t come back. They sat in the distance, building a new sand castle of their own.
“I don’t understand,” Theo said. “Why are they over there?”
I didn’t exactly understand either, but I knew dismissal when I saw it. “Because they’re idiots,” I said. “We don’t want to play with them.”
“Don’t we?” asked Theo.
“No.” We carried on, ignoring the spade that the two boys left, until one ran over to get it. I didn’t look at him, but Theo jumped up. “Please come back and help,” she said.
The boy shook his head, hard-mouthed. “We’re not playing with you,” he said. “You think you’re better than us.”
“No, I don’t,” Theo said, distressed.
“Yes, you do,” the boy said. “My sister says so.” He picked up his spade; Theo caught hold of the end of it to stop him going, and then he jerked it and she fell backward onto the sand. When she landed, tears spilled out of her eyes with surprise.
I jumped up and hit him, hard, just missing his nose. We stared at each other for a moment; bewildered. Then his face became shapeless and he turned around and ran, crying jerkily, tripping on the sand.
This incident on the beach continued to bother Theo long after I had forgotten about it. It was a few weeks later when she asked me, “Do people like us?”
“No,” I said. I had begun to understand how the locals—as Alicia called them—saw us. They were disapproving, like Mrs. Wynne Jones; I knew that the tiny pastel houses of the beach, crowded together like penny sweets, squeezed us out. I didn’t particularly care about this: I did not want admittance.
“Why?” Theo asked.
“Because we have more money than them.” (This was something Eve had told me.)
“I don’t,” Theo said promptly. “I spent all my money yesterday.”
“No,” I said. “Eve’s money. It’s sort of our money too.”
I didn’t pass on the information to Theo—that we would have this money when Eve died. It was not a possibility I really believed in anyway: the death of Eve. Death was something that might happen to Alicia; she was already its familiar, its wraithly inmate. But Eve was more present and alive than anybody I knew; her colors brighter, her edges more clearly defined. Eve was like the people in commercials—a magnified, amplified kind of real. Too real to just disappear.
“I don’t want money,” Theo said. “I’ll give it to the people who don’t like us, and then we’ll all be happy.”
“Where would you live if you didn’t have any money?” I asked her, “What would you eat?”
“I’ll live with you,” Theo said, leaning her head on my arm and smiling at me. “And we can eat pizza.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I think my favorite times back then were the summer evenings, with the French windows open onto the cool blue-green of the gardens, its edges appearing to vanish into the black glittering sea. In the red morning room the lamps would be glowing; the papers under Eve’s hands shone as she moved them. This was her reading time, she said: newspapers, contracts, letters disemboweled with a jeweled knife, paper-clipped press cuttings.
“Why don’t you read stories?” Theo asked her once.
“I have enough stories of my own,” Eve said.
I preferred Eve’s stories, when she chose to tell them, to the pirates and firemen of my own neglected books. Her life as she told it was defined by a series of events—big bangs and revelations. These moments fell easily into conversation; at times there would be an anecdote, over dinner; other times she would feel prompted to tell a longer story in the evening, sitting perfectly still except for one hand gesturing, gliding in the air like a conductor’s. If she was in the mood she’d tell us about how Senator This drank too much, or how Prince That’s children weren’t really his own. Eve said it was alright for us to hear these things because we had to know how the world worked. Infidelity and addiction; she was educating us.
The stories Eve told best were the ones about herself. But she rarely offered them; she had to be pressed into it, cajoled and entreated. In this way we heard about why she left England (“It’s really not that interesting . . . but if you insist”), when some American friends of hers were having dinner with us.
“Well, I left to go back to my mother’s family in New York, when I was eighteen, after my father died,” she said. “It wasn’t just because of grief—though that was part of it—but because it hadn’t been long since the Second World War had ended, and at that time it just seemed America had more to offer.”
“Was England very badly affected?” asked one of the guests.
“Of course. The English were rebuilding after the blitz and the Americans were dancing to “Rock Around the Clock.” Everyone was poorer here—even the rich. The great houses of the aristocracy were being sold one by one. There were backslides for women too. During the war some women I knew had their own Tiger Moth planes, and one of my friend’s aunts drove a canal boat for the river emergency service. But these freedoms were withdrawn when the men came back. Our world had contracted again. I was a debutante but I felt I was at the beginning of nothing at all. Missing my coming-out ball seemed like an escape. I had no reason to suppose that things would be much better for women in America, but at least they weren’t getting worse. And money was being made, people were hopeful. America—right then—seemed a place for success, rather than remembrance.”
“So brave of you to go alone,” one woman murmured.
Eve laughed. “I didn’t feel brave! That was the first time I traveled on a plane. When we took off I was frightened I might die—I could hardly breathe. Then when I finally opened my eyes I saw the stewardesses, bringing around the tea. They looked like soldiers in their rigid little hats. Their hands didn’t even quaver. I admired them terribly. That was the moment I made my own plan. I decided I’d go to university—be the first woman in my family to do it—and then I’d become something important in America. It was an awful plan really—I had no idea how I’d do it, but I was confident I could. I suppose that’s the beauty of being young.”
“I wonder if your father felt something similar going off into the jungle,” one guest said. “You obvi
ously inherited the desire for adventure.”
“I suppose I did,” Eve said, with a mouth smile, above which her eyes remained cool.
After the events of the following day, I wondered whether it was this story—Eve’s story—that had done it. She had invoked the paternal dead, stirred up the missing past, and wrong things were made to resurface.
The day itself, a Sunday, was not particularly unusual. Eve was at home but spent most of the time in the room she had turned into an office. Alicia sat on the terrace with gardening gloves, a wide-brimmed hat, and a glass on a small table next to her, getting up every now and again to make feints toward the rosebushes. Theo was at a school friend’s birthday party, and I was left aimless. My favorite toys—the remote-controlled car, the tin soldiers, the battered football—didn’t inspire me. I found a magnifying glass and some dry sticks and tried unsuccessfully to build a fire out of Alicia’s sight, near the open window of Eve’s office. The day was hot, but an unsettled wind blew from the sea and pulled the drapes of Eve’s window out toward me, then back, like a ship’s sail. It carried the electric bell of a telephone with it, then the ringing ended, and I heard Eve’s voice quite clearly. I had overheard her speaking on the phone before without paying much attention, but her tone now made me pause and listen.
“When did he arrive?” she said without saying hello. The sail billowed in again and I couldn’t hear for a moment. Then it blew back and Eve was saying, “Where else would he be going?”
There was a pause, and I stood up just under the window to try to hear better. Then Eve’s voice said, right above me, “Just send some people over,” and I heard for the first time that she was angry.
Eventually the windy day blew the sun out like a light, leaving the house shimmering in the cool vagaries of the evening. There was another telephone call; Theo’s birthday party had run on late and the car Eve had sent for her was still waiting, far away at a zoo in England.
Listening at the foot of the stairs, I felt an increasing misery about Theo’s not being back. The shadows growing on the floor like a tide bothered me, and I didn’t want to go to sleep. I went to join Alicia in the gold sitting room, with the idea that if I stayed quiet enough I would evade being sent upstairs.
Alicia was watching an old film, her face grayed in its dusky projections, her eyes beginning to close. The people on the screen were fuzzed, obscured by a great weight of time as they moved toward each other. I was uninterested by the romance—the crackling edges of the black-and-white lips and teeth—but I stared sleeplessly anyway, feeling anything was better than going up to bed and shutting my eyes against the darkness outside, the new security men I had noticed occasionally passing the window. I knew that, for some reason, we were under siege.
I felt worse when Eve came in and snapped, “What rubbish are you watching, Alicia?” She didn’t usually comment on anything my mother did, and Alicia woke up and looked at her with serene surprise.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Eve looked at me next.
“Jonathan! Shouldn’t you be in bed?” she said. “Come on, I’ll go with you.”
As we walked up the stairs, she took my hand in her cool hand, and smiled at me with something more like her usual sangfroid.
“Wanted to stay up tonight, did you?” she said teasingly.
“Why are there security men here?” I asked.
“Oh, darling, you mustn’t be worried about that. There have been a few burglaries nearby and so I thought for a few nights we should have a couple of men about, just to act as a deterrent. Of course, we have cameras and alarms, so it’s not as if anybody could just . . . get in, anyway. . . .” she trailed off, then laughed and squeezed my hand when we got to the top of the stairs. “We’re perfectly secure. Now, off you go to bed.”
As she turned there came the sudden, deep chime of the doorbell, rolling up like a cold bronze wave, hitting Eve and me. For a moment we both looked at each other blankly, shocked. Then she blinked and said, “Goodness—it must be Theo. I’d almost forgotten her!”
Theo was brought in asleep by the driver, her mouth open. She always slept like this, as if she had slipped into an unfathomable coma. Her hair was wound around her neck, plastered to her flushed pink cheek. In her blue party dress she was a surprising patch of color in the pewter lake of the hall.
“Follow me,” Eve said to the driver, who carried Theo upstairs. I lingered to look at the front doors, which were promptly closed by the navy shape of one of the security men. Then I ran up after them.
As soon as Eve had gone I went into Theo’s room, where she was snoring in her bed, and shook her. She gasped and sat up with a shocked splutter as if resuscitated from drowning, then looked at me with delight.
“Jonathan!” she cried. “I missed you.”
“How was the zoo?” I asked, half watching her bedroom door, from which a line of light stretched across the black void of the floor, crossing toys and clothes like a laser. The house was silent.
“It was fun,” Theo whispered happily, “and I got a hat, but I lost it, but I made a plan, to get a zoo when we grow up, and I can feed the animals, and we can live at the zoo, in a house, with flamingos in the garden and you can have a pet lion.”
“The lion would eat the flamingos,” I said, trying to listen for sounds outside.
“We could get a crocodile to protect them from the lion,” Theo said reasonably. “I don’t want them all to live in cages. I was sad when I saw the lion in the cage.”
Talking to Theo I understood why I had come to wake her up; it was this normality I wanted, the sunny atmosphere she had retained from her day out, the sparkling traces of birthday cake and paper hats. But she was frowning now, her smile gone, as if the pressure of the house had descended on her too.
“It’s hot in here,” she said suddenly.
It was hot. All the windows in the house had been closed earlier despite the high July temperature. I went to her window and quietly opened it, leaning out for a moment. Cool air swept over my damp face. Theo’s room overlooked the gardens, which were empty, faintly patterned by the gold-colored light from within the house. The only sounds from outside were the susurrations of the trees and the sea, and an owl far away, calling out with no answer.
Theo had fallen asleep again on the bed behind me, eyelids flickering. I pulled the sheets over her, hesitated, then climbed in next to her, and finally slept.
I remember being woken up by the thick, obscure sound of voices, in the room below me. The room was dark; the sky outside showed no signs of the morning. The voices moved up and down rapidly, loud with unhappiness, before traveling out of my hearing again. After a while of waiting—head lifted, still and tense with the effort of listening—for the voices to come back, I let myself sink back into the bed.
Then I heard someone crying outside; a quiet noise, rising to the window. It sounded like it could have been my mother, except Alicia did not cry. I got out of bed, my muffled head dreamlike and unsteady, and went to the window, where I stood on a chair to look out onto the terrace. I saw my mother, standing alone in a long shadow. The shadow, long, thin, rippling like a dark stream of water, must be made by someone else, standing in the French windows below, just out of my sight. There was a glitter on the flagstones of the terrace, from a smashed glass. I could see Alicia’s face clearly, broken up like a reflection on water. Her pale skin was barred with the black lines of her dissolved eye makeup.
My mother put her hands to her face, as the shadow was joined by other shadows, until it shook and grew into a monstrous, many-limbed thing, drawing gradually away from her. As it did so I heard a shout, a man’s voice breaking up into an elemental cry, its sense lost. It could have been “Don’t do this,” or equally it could have been “I knew this,” or “You Judas,” or “Who’s this.” Alicia said something through her hands that I couldn’t make out, in a voice I had never heard before, full of different things.
Then Eve walked out onto the ter
race. Unlike Alicia, who stood unsteadily, Eve was quick and decisive. She stood near Alicia, and spoke as if she wasn’t really talking to Alicia but to herself, and in turn Alicia didn’t look at her. “I suppose this should have been foreseen,” Eve said. Her voice—as always—was so clear that it rose right up to my window with all its intonation intact, sharp and incensed. “We obviously haven’t been clear enough.” She turned to Alicia now, impatiently. “For God’s sake, there’s no need to cry. It’s over. Nothing happened.”
At this point I was frightened by the sound of the door opening, and jumped back from the window, forgetting I was standing on a chair. A security guard put his head around the door, saw me lying on the floor, and came in frowning.
“What are you up to then, Jonny?” he asked.
“My name’s not Jonny,” I said, getting up and holding my bruised elbow angrily.
We both looked at the open window, and then the security guard went over and closed it. Theo made a snoring sound from the bed.
“Let’s not wake your sister up, shall we?” he said with the same uncomfortable heartiness. “Where’s your room?”
After that there was not much I could do except allow myself to be led to my bedroom and suffer the security guard to sit with me until I “dropped off,” as he put it.
“Seems a burglar’s got into the grounds,” he said cheerfully, “but we got him. He didn’t get anywhere near the house.”
“I thought someone was in the house,” I said.
“Nope. Just us security guards. The police will be here soon, so you get some sleep.”
His face was opaque; his mouth moved seamlessly. I realized there was no point asking him what the burglar shouted to my mother, or why Eve hadn’t been clear enough, because his mouth would have that covered too. Adults talked and talked, I thought. They talked over everything, and eventually flattened it all into their own shapes. I could not compete with that.
The Other Half of Me Page 6
