When I woke up it was sunny and there was no security guard in the room. There was not even an indentation on the sofa he had occupied by the window. But my elbow had a bruise on it, and when I sat up my stomach rolled itself up like a snail, slippery with unease.
The stairs and hall were quiet when I came down, but I followed the sounds of china to the breakfast room, where Eve, Theo, and Alicia were sitting. Eve was pouring some coffee, holding back the sleeve of her silk robe like a geisha. Alicia was reading a magazine on the sofa and ignored my entrance, as if it were any other morning. Theo, who was nibbling the edge of a piece of toast abstractedly, cried in lieu of a welcome, “There’s no more jam!”
I couldn’t make sense of what she had said at first; it was a call from another place, from before last night. It was as if the previous night had been a dream; the newspapers, the toast, the coffee, the sun floating in the fresh air rising off the damp grass outside all said so. I looked out the open French windows for the smashed glass. It wasn’t there.
“Good morning darling,” Eve said, smiling. “You look a little tired. Mark the security guard said you were up and about when he came to check on you. Did you sleep badly?”
“I slept okay,” I said.
“May I get down?” Theo asked. “I’m going to ask Mrs. Williams if I can make some jam.”
“Of course you may,” Eve said.
When Theo had gone she put down her cup and said, “Now, Jonathan, we thought it best not to tell Theo about the intruder yesterday. Everything’s fine now” (I looked across at Alicia, but her eyes did not miss a beat in their glide across the page) “and it’s probably better not to worry her. You know how sensitive she is.”
After breakfast I went into the kitchen, where everything was the same as usual. Theo was sitting at a chair putting strawberries alternately into a bowl, and then into her mouth. Mrs. Williams was picking up some fallen sliced tomatoes off the floor. She huffed on them.
“Blows the germs away,” she explained, laying the slices on top of a quiche, then changed tack. “You two don’t know how lucky you are. I had some bad news this morning. Perimodontal gum disease, whatever that is. Doesn’t sound like a disease if you ask me. They make half of it up, those dentists. That’s how they afford those cars. You two stay away from that business.” She looked at us accusingly.
“I won’t be a dentist,” Theo said, tipping golden syrup into the bowl of strawberries. “I’m going to be a cook, and I’m going to feed poor people in the Third World.”
“Feed them with your jam, eh? They won’t thank you for that,” said Mrs. Williams, laughing. “Will they, Jonathan?”
“No,” I agreed, not really listening. I sat down at the table and ate some strawberries as I put my thoughts together. I didn’t understand what had happened last night, but it was over now, and I wasn’t going to question the strange luck that had made everything go back to exactly the way it was—with a snap of its fingers and a brilliant smile; sweeping the night back like a curtain to reveal Evendon as it should be—Theo with strawberry round her mouth, the sun on the table, Mrs. Williams taking her cigarettes out of her bag. Nothing missing, and everything in its place.
Only one thing really changed after that day—the day of the bad dream, as I preferred to think of it. Theo, who had always slept so soundly, lost her powers of torpor. The next night she crept into my room, sobbing; I woke up to find my face wet with her tears, her hand gripping mine, hot and pulpy with fever.
“What’s wrong?” I sat up hurriedly, thinking of the burglar. “Is there someone in the house?”
“It’s the ghost,” Theo cried, “it crawled in and it’s under the bed.”
I lay back with exasperated relief.
“Theo! You worried me. There’s no ghost. It’s just a dream.”
“It wants to come back,” she said. “It wants to come back but it can’t.”
I lay there for a moment, my nerves still irritated and scratchy, my brain stupid with sleep. Then I noticed she was shivering, that her eyes were marked underneath with gray moth wings and her skin was clammily white, and I remembered she was my little sister, having a nightmare.
“You can stay in here tonight if you want,” I offered. I put my arm around her. “Ghosts aren’t allowed in my room.”
“Poor ghost,” said Theo, and closed her eyes. I sat still, unwilling to disturb her, until she breathed more regularly and I thought she was asleep. Then she said in an indistinct and anxious mumble, “Look after me.”
“I will,” I said.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Then, quickly and easily, she fell asleep.
I couldn’t sleep. I remember lying awake for a long time. The sky was so clear it seemed like the stars were inside the window; the air on my face kept my eyes open. Theo was on her back with her mouth open, her hair silvery in the faint light, rising up in curls around her face, her eyelids serenely blank, like shells. She murmured in her sleep, without making sense; a low, unintelligible hum, the music of my uncomfortable night.
For months after that Theo would go to bed obediently, if Eve was around, and allow her light to be turned off. But in the morning I would find her on the floor of my room, or next to me in bed, wrapped in her blanket as if it were a chrysalis, my hand or even just a corner of my sheet pulled over to hold to her cheek. Some nights she would roll herself in my sheet as well as her own; when I tried to wrestle it back she would cling inside it like a baby monkey, still asleep.
Theo’s night fears exasperated Eve, who said I should lock my door until Theo learned to sleep alone. But I couldn’t do it. I knew that Theo needed me, more than another person might ever need me: she was less resilient, less easily fixed.
“Do you remember your nightmares?” I asked her once.
“I think so,” she said, and her mouth drooped.
I tried to remember my own dreams, but I couldn’t. Night for me was a closed eye, a blank space; I was nowhere inside it.
2008
It’s almost three o’clock when I look up from the newspaper brought by Mr. Ramsey, which I have long stopped reading. On the surface of the full cup of tea next to me, separated milk drifts like broken ice, reminding me that I ought to go out and buy something to drink. Something to eat, too. I have to make an effort to remember these things—the normal motions of life—that for me keep seizing, like old gears.
As I leave the house I bump into the family from below issuing out of the door and into a people carrier. They look delighted now that they are going home; they wave at me in an excess of high spirits. Then they all whirl off, the woman turning to speak to her husband, the boy with his face pressed into a comic book. Their happiness circles in the car; self-contained, tenacious as rubber. I wonder what my happiness would be like if I could have another chance at it. I can’t imagine it being so clean and bright: there would be something murky about it, something dull and slow and wounded.
On the seafront I see a chip shop and head toward it, walking faster when a halfhearted rain begins. Two teenage girls go by, wearing short skirts. Their English legs are whipped red and white in the wind; they walk like hurried storks, gawky in their high heels, drinking from bottles. One looks at me, and after they pass they giggle. The sound floats back, an odd, soft note amid the rush of the sea and the shriek of gulls.
For me the smell of chips has ever associated itself with only one place: the little hut next to Llansteffan beach, where the chips were served in small trays, with fat little two-pronged wooden forks, to be eaten with the sun dimming behind us in the evening, looking over the bluish sand. Here there is no beach; the concrete road turns sharply into boat masts, staking the opaque, steel-gray water. The wind gusting off the ocean smells cold and raw, like oysters, colliding queasily with the warm, oily air of the chip shop. Its interior is tiled like a lavatory, lit with a fluorescent blue cod wearing an improbable smile. A fat woman stands behind the counter like a warning, her dyed
blond hair greenish in the light.
“You want salt and vinegar?” she asks me shortly, then wraps the food without waiting for an answer. I take my chips, my warm can of cola, my parcel with its bleeding spots of grease, and before I can thank her, she is calling to the next person.
When I finish the chips I realize they are wrapped in the same newspaper article that surprised me this morning. My younger face smirks up at me, reflective with oil. “Anthony Heir Missing.” I wonder how my missingness was decided. I’m not missing—I’m gone. Furthermore, I told everyone I was going. When I read the article properly I see that my mother, with “tears in her eyes,” has confided in a journalist that she does not know where I am.
I call her using my new mobile phone, the number of which I have not given to anybody except Mr. Crace. I don’t want anybody to contact me now, not after the first grim weeks. Who sends a text message to convey condolences? I wouldn’t have thought such people existed, but it seems they do, and it seems they are my friends.
“Jonathan?” Alicia says when she answers, but her tone is hard to interpret. “Where are you?”
“I said I’d be away for a while, I told you. I’m not missing. Did you talk to the papers about me?”
“No, of course not.”
“There’s a quote from you.”
“Oh, I don’t know what I said . . . I was distraught.”
“Yes, it says that here too—‘“I’m distraught,” Alicia Anthony told us.’”
“I didn’t expect to have to deal with the press.” Now I recognize the tone; petulance. “You’ve left me to deal with them alone.”
“You’re not alone. You have plenty of people around you.”
“Only staff. The cook gets everything wrong, the maids . . . oh, they may as well not be here.”
“Alicia, you’ll have to work that out for yourself. I was only calling to let you know I’m alright.” Then I lie, “This phone has no battery left, I can’t talk much longer,” and I hang up.
I don’t put the phone down, which has warmed in my hand, as if waking from hibernation. The screen displays no voice-mail messages but I check it anyway, in the hope that the call from Mr. Crace has become hidden somehow, fallen victim to one of the unknowable and obscure rules by which the phone is guided.
There is no call, which is partly a relief, because I don’t know what will happen when I hear from him. What I might find out, whether I would rather not know. But on the other side of that relief is the practical awareness that it would be better for me to be summoned somewhere else. It was probably a mistake to come to Southampton, to drive until I reached the sea, drawn to the edge of it, to watch it as it breathes in and out, giving its changeable sighs and cries, telling me that it can hold me, if I want it to: envelop me, turn me into a tiny speck, a blink. Facts will fall away from me like dried mud; Jonathan Anthony: architect, heir, brother, grandson. I will forget she is dead, and I will be nothing at all, hopeless and free.
PART II
2000
We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
CHAPTER FIVE
At the end of my first year at Cambridge I drove back to Wales with the motorway sloughing either side of me in the July rain, trying to focus on its gray width rather than my own hangover. The car’s motion was rocking my brain in a sickening wallow; my eyes were stiff and reluctant in their bearings. I was surviving by watching the road and thinking no thoughts, not listening to my passengers’ busy reconstruction of the previous night, not imagining the time it would take to get back to Evendon, the hours stretching out ahead of me.
“So, did you sleep with that girl last night?” Sebastian asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to avoid the people carrier that had bumbled blindly into my path like a stag beetle. I mouthed a halfhearted fuck off to the children in the back who turned and waved.
“Any good?” asked Felix. He was wearing a policeman’s hat and had his arm around Caroline Tyler, a third-year famous for her beauty and humorlessness. Caroline’s lovely head rested enervated on Felix’s shoulder, her eyes lost behind large sunglasses. She hadn’t spoken so far during the journey, though her hand moved occasionally to forestall Felix’s, which he was attempting to ease onto her breast.
“I suppose so,” I said.
“You can’t remember her name,” Sebastian said slyly.
I had worked hard during the past year at remembering names: Foster, Gaudí, Lloyd Wright. Atria, mansard, cantilever. Louvre, Casa de los Botines, Guggenheim Bilbão. In all these stacked, solid names there wasn’t much room for female names—temporary names, drunk names, lacy and insubstantial in the dark, slipping into bed, hanging around lecture-room doorways, signing off text messages.
“Yes I can,” I lied.
“What is it then?”
“Shut up.”
Sebastian laughed and peered around at Charlie, who was slumped like a bankrupt financier on the other side of Caroline. “I can’t believe Charlie’s face. It’s green. Look! Have you ever seen that color on a human face?”
“Sick,” Charlie mumbled.
“I think he is actually going to be sick,” Felix informed me.
“Christ.” I switched on the turn signal. “Hold on, Charlie. I’ll pull over.”
Caroline shrieked. “Too late,” Felix said, laughing. “Oh dear.”
We pulled into a turnaround, opened the doors, and made Charlie stand in the rain, which swept over him in sheets, flattening his hair against his forehead. He swayed slightly and wiped at his shirt front disconsolately.
“So, let’s not change the subject,” Felix said to me. “You were supersmooth last night. It was like watching Casanova.”
“Whereas the most we had to look forward to was being raped in prison,” Sebastian said, opening a can of cola and spilling it down himself.
I had come home from the party at nine in the morning, without having slept, and was just getting into bed for a nap when the phone rang and I had to go to the police station to collect Felix and Sebastian. They’d spent the night there after stealing a ladder they had found near a building site on their way home. Apparently a police car passed them at four in the morning carrying it between them, and they thought it would be funny to pretend they were burglars. They were so convincing that the police refused to believe they were students, and took them back to the station.
“I should have left you there,” I said.
Sebastian whispered to Felix, “Jonathan’s grumpy.”
I squinted out of the rain-sluiced window: the traffic ahead appeared to be slowing to a halt. Charlie was still retching on the grass verge. I effortfully assembled my few pieces of the girl from last night. Dark hair. A short polka-dotted dress, which at the time had reminded me of Minnie Mouse. Her mouth had the bitter, dusty taste of cigarettes, her breasts surprisingly heavy for her narrow build. She had fallen asleep afterward in the unknown person’s bedroom, and I had gone back to the party.
“Laura Chamberlain,” I said with triumph. “She’s studying architecture. She’s in our seminars, Felix.”
“Oh yeah, I slept with her last term,” Felix said. “She was a dirty bitch.”
“I wish I could remember,” I said, resting my head on the steering wheel. Tiredness moved into my vision like a crowd of gray birds, wheeling and scattering. “Someone go and tell Charlie he can come back now.”
Several hours later, Felix and Caroline had been deposited at his parents’ house in London (Felix giving a quick thumbs-up behind her back), Charlie had been dropped off in Aberthin, and the rain had started to ease off, becoming a light, comprehensive mist that clouded the windows of the car.
“Never heard of it getting less rainy in Wales,” Sebastian said. He was energized with his fourth cola and concertinaed in his seat to gaze up at the h
ills rising on either side of the motorway.
“It doesn’t usually,” I said. “Now that it’s too late, you may as well know it was a mistake to stay with me.”
“Better than spending the holidays with my family,” Sebastian said, grimacing. “My mother wanted me to go to L.A. But I have this weird feeling that L.A. is where I’m going to die. . . . Hey, when does Theo get back?”
“She’s home already,” I said. “She’s left several messages every day asking when we’re coming.”
“Did she ask about me?”
Sebastian had been visibly in love with Theo since she first visited us at Cambridge. His initial eager attentiveness had settled—as the months passed without her noticing it—into an unhappily poignant attentiveness, which none of us ever mentioned: tactful and cheery as hospice nurses.
“Sure,” I said kindly, unable to remember whether this was true.
I wondered how Theo, who was also spending the summer at Evendon after finishing her A-levels, would be when we got back. The last time I saw her she had brought me a cross-eyed stray dog she thought could live with me, and before that she had forgotten what time I was collecting her from her flat and slept in, and I had to throw my shoes at her window to wake her up.
Theo and I were still as unalike as when we were children, back when I looked like a stolid little businessman and she was made of glass and feathers, fiery and weightless. “That’s your sister?” people said when they met us; they thought we were joking. We shared a family outline—Eve’s template—but it was colored in differently. I was dark-haired, Theo was bright-haired. My eyes were opaque; hers as sheer and ingenuous as a gas flame. I followed familiar laws and rules; sow and reap, action and reaction, inspiration and perspiration. Whereas Theo—Theo’s motives were a mystery, even to herself.
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