When we finally turned the car up the drive to Evendon, Sebastian had fallen asleep, lulled by the slurring rain and the gentle clamor of empty cans rolling at his feet. His head—with its tired lower eyelids, hair collapsed in various directions—had the sudden rumpled simplicity of a child’s. I was grateful to be left in silence just then; I had the familiar vision of the trees in the curving road to myself, the peculiar radiance of the light. Then Evendon itself moved gradually into view, its dark roof slick in the wet, all its windows as white as the sky.
I was surprised to see several unfamiliar cars and vans around the drive, all of them black, none of them occupied, their sides blankly reflective in the rain. I turned off the engine and opened my door into a wide quiet; the sound of birds, the drowsy tap of water on the car roof. The trees were very still, the house expressionless. A flat note hummed in the hall of my chest like a wrong-footed conductor. I glanced at Sebastian, still sleeping, and back at the house. Then I heard Theo cry out, “Jonathan!”
She was sitting on the front steps, nearly hidden behind one of the vans, a small shape under a large golfing umbrella, a pale spray of curls, swinging her bare feet. Waving energetically, she stood up and began picking her way across the gravel drive.
“Wait, Theo!” I called. She ignored me, hopped and winced over to us, then clung to my arm until I dropped a suitcase on my foot. Sebastian yawned and unrolled himself from the other door.
“Oh, Jonathan, I thought you were one of them,” she said into my shoulder. “Hello, Sebastian!”
“What’s going on?” Sebastian said with disbelief. “Is this your house? Are we in the middle of a wood? How barbaric. It’s like the Brothers Grimm. I’m going to be pushed into an oven by a witch, aren’t I, all because I didn’t want to go to L.A. to drink pomegranate cocktails and watch my mother flirt with her yoga guru.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Who’s here?”
“Lots of people,” Theo said darkly. “That’s why I came outside. They’re making a documentary about Charis.”
“I hadn’t heard about this,” I said, relieved, though I couldn’t have said why I had been worried in the first place. We carried the cases into the house, stepping over a mass of cables that lay across the doorway, and entered the hard white heights of the hall, which lifted our suddenly small voices up above our heads. The hall, filled with its motionless light, was as deserted as the front of the house, so we followed the path of the cables like a puzzle, Theo following warily behind us.
Finally in the drawing room we found Eve in the center of a tableau like the Botticelli Venus, surrounded by people, a titanic arrangement of flowers perching on a pillar behind her, a silver umbrella reflecting light onto the cool oval of her face, cables converging around her feet like snakes, a furred boom mike hanging above her head. Someone turned and made a hushing signal to us, so we stood in the doorway and watched Eve speaking to the camera.
“I always saw my youth as being shaped by three unfair deaths,” she said, in her distinctive accent, not quite English, not American, yet not flatly transatlantic. It was, it occurred to me now, a voice particularly for television, full and gold and liquid. “After my mother’s death in 1943, my father, George, decided to move to England. Then, after his death in 1955, I went back to New York. I suppose my father and I shared that instinct, to leave home after a devastating loss. Then, finally, in 1969, my husband Freddie died. We had been holidaying in Cape Cod with some friends, the Bressards, and Sam Anthony. I’ll never forget the conversation we had that morning, trying to decide whether to take the boat out. The Bressards were the more experienced sailors and we almost didn’t go out because they were ill. But it was such a beautiful sunny morning that Freddie convinced us to go. The boom knocked him overboard; it knocked him unconscious. Neither Sam nor I could swim well—I had a broken wrist at the time from a silly fall—and we just couldn’t reach him, he sank so fast. That was the last I ever saw of him, his shape in the water, falling away from me. The divers were sent down afterward but he was never found.” She paused, drawing her face away from the camera briefly. The crew was silent, before she resumed.
“I think that was the hardest thing. So there I was at thirty-two, with two young children, at a funeral with an empty casket. Beyond my own personal grief, it seemed a symbol of Freddie’s career—something left unfinished, a space that should not be empty. That was the day I decided to go from the world of charity work into the world of politics. And the first, as I found out, was certainly not good preparation for the second.” She laughs wryly.
“And cut,” said one of the men standing near her. “Nice.”
He and Eve gave each other the thumbs-up, then someone put a towel around her shoulders and solicitously dusted her face with a brush.
It had been almost a year since I had seen Eve, who had been away the last time I was back, but she hadn’t changed. Her hair was as black as her eyes, which looked newly painted, a clear demarcation between the ink of the iris and its porcelain setting. The skin of her face was still lucent, still moving smoothly over the symmetrical bones, where it should have loosened into powdery sags and creases. Her beauty was not something static and passive—it had its own peculiar power, forcing the people around her to scurry and trip, irresistibly turning their heads around in her direction, catching and recapturing their eyes. She looked over, noticing us, and winked.
“Hello, darling. I’ll be half an hour,” she said. “And this must be Sebastian! So sorry you have to arrive to such chaos.” Sebastian became shy for the first time and murmured something, before a producer began trying to recapture Eve’s attention. She smiled at us as if to say, What a bore this is! then gave her consideration to the question of whether having a soundbite from the Prince of Wales might work, or whether it would be seen as stuffy.
The camera crew was gone a week later, which Mrs. Williams was very sorry about, as she had been in the habit of drinking tea and smoking in the herb garden with the production assistants and gossiping about various celebrities. Mrs. Wynne Jones, in contrast, had maintained a dignified disdain for the whole thing, though it was to be noted that her hair was now in a Thatcherish curl, and her straight lips had become a fanciful salmon-tinted bow.
Several of Eve’s famous friends had been enlisted to show off their dentistry and tell amusing stories, which they did with professional ease (“She was absolutely ruthless at musical chairs, as I recall”), but our family, for the most part, did not appear in the documentary. Alicia had agreed to sit on the terrace in a low-cut dress and say that Eve was not only a great mother but an inspiration (“Very tiring,” she said about this experience). The director had in fact developed something of a crush on Alicia, and in the final documentary she was shown juxtaposed with her roses like some airy flower spirit. They omitted her snapping at Mrs. Wynne Jones and the time when, moving with stilted grace, she tripped on one of the electrical leads. It was also suggested that Theo—wearing makeup and an outfit chosen by a stylist—stand laughing with me in the garden for a “family moment.” “That face should not be wasted,” the director protested, but Theo tipped the face obstinately down, and shook her head.
My uncle Alex was the only one of the family not asked to participate, possibly because of concerns over damage to his academic credibility, possibly because he and Eve were in the midst of some unspecified disagreement. He had not visited at Christmas for the past few years, and no one had heard from him—or, indeed, asked about him. I didn’t really care whether he visited or not. Alex was hard to talk to; his alternating silences and outbursts made him difficult company. Worse, he reheated the old, cold tensions of Evendon moving as sluggish as glaciers between Eve and Alicia, until they simmered into fractious flurries of raised eyebrows and tightened lips. Even Theo, patron saint of the lost and afflicted, didn’t question Alex’s absence. “Uncle Alex is just so . . . cross” was all she could think of to say about him.
Eve herself, despite her air of tol
erant amusement during filming, took the documentary seriously and had insisted on final approval.
“I wouldn’t have dreamt of it otherwise,” she said to me. “Good God! It would be like throwing myself to the lions. Never, ever, let somebody else edit you.”
“Why did you do it anyway?” I asked. I had been a little hurt not to have been told about it; I was used to considering myself “in the know” about Eve’s various projects.
“Partly to prevent an unauthorized version. It’s only a matter of time before something like that comes out. They’ve done poor Betty Ford. If I died tomorrow there would be a Secret Life of Eve Anthony within a month. And then, partly because this thing will be perfect publicity. It seems people want something personal from corporations now. No one ever expected to feel like they were a part of Aristotle Onassis’s life. People just bought things that they believed would work. But if the public needs to see me pouring tea or laying pipes, if they want to empathize with me, then so be it.”
“Did you have a secret life?” I asked her.
“A secret life!” Eve started to laugh. “Darling, I didn’t have the time.”
CHAPTER SIX
A few days after we arrived, the ever-hovering rain was burned out of the sky by the late-July sun, and Theo, Sebastian, and I walked down the hill to the beach at Llansteffan, lagging in the heavy gold heat of the afternoon. The pattern of leaves under my feet barely shifted; the drifts of wind from the sea were exhausted, the water itself flat in the distance.
“If you had to write the story of your life, what would you call it?” Sebastian asked us. He had been smoking weed since nine o’clock. “I’d call mine Underprepared.”
Theo thought hard and loud for the next ten minutes but was unable to come up with an idea.
“I’ll do yours for you,” Sebastian offered. “It should be something confusing, like you. How about Pajama Owl Riddles.”
“I love it!” Theo cried. “Do Jonathan’s.”
“I don’t want one,” I said. “He’ll only put a pun in it.”
“It should be about architecture,” Theo said.
“The Remorseless Rise of Jonathan Anthony,” Sebastian announced. “Subheading: The Story So Far—story as in building storey, obviously.”
“Awful.”
“Let’s get ice cream,” Theo said. “The shop’s on this corner.”
“Good idea.” Sebastian nudged me. “Interesting views you’ve got round here.”
I looked up, not understanding, then saw a girl farther along the road, standing in the bowl of shade under a tree. She was not immediately striking; thin, brunette, her face turned slightly away, but as I got closer I could see that she wasn’t just the standard pretty girl around town; and there was an excitement in realizing that, like tapping away in a mine and seeing something unexpected; the beginnings of a fierce brightness. I stared at her with the possessiveness of the frontier man; her almond skin and thoughtful mouth, the white dress resting against the steep heights of her thighs. Her hair lifted and fell as the coastal wind picked up, dividing into streamers that ran down her back. She looked up as we passed—her eyes a brief, gold color under the lashes, like the glint of a tossed coin—but it was only a routine glance, not allowing itself to be held.
“She looked nice,” Theo said once we were past.
“Nice!” was all Sebastian could say, with an incredulous laugh.
Theo went into the shop while Sebastian and I waited outside in the sun. I looked back at the girl stealthily, partly to check that she was still there. There was no one else in the empty road, spare and bright in the sun; no idling car, bus stop, telephone box, or anything else to tie her to her surroundings. And her beauty was so unlikely, almost absurd. She was like a person in front of a blue screen, a complete and dissociated image, set against the background but not of it. I looked back at her again—wanting the look to be sensed, to make her turn around—but she was gazing out to the sea and didn’t notice.
Sebastian, who had been watching me, laughed. “Look, I’m going to go in the shop and get some water,” he said. “Then she can approach you and suggest some sort of sexual adventure. That kind of thing always happens to you.”
He exited, leaving the girl and me alone outside for a moment that shivered and stretched into a tense, infinitely promising blank space. I straightened my back, took my hands out of my pockets, wondered briefly how my introductory smile would look to her—lecherous possibly, or worse, nervous—and then a dark-haired boy came out of the shop and walked away, taking the girl with him. I frowned at their backs until Sebastian and Theo came out.
“I’m upset,” Sebastian complained. “Theo and I have made an enemy and all we did was ask for ice creams.”
“That’s just how Mrs. Edwards is,” I said.
Mrs. Edwards, the shop’s proprietor, could usually be found sitting toadlike in the dim, crowded depths behind her counter, staring unblinkingly at the flies circling her ceiling. She would address even Welsh customers perfunctorily, but if she overheard the accent of an English tourist or ex-pat she wouldn’t speak at all, silently handing over her wares; the soft, white-laced chocolate, the obsolete fizzy drinks with their faded labels.
“A lot of the older Welsh people are like that with us,” I explained. “Though they aren’t usually so obvious about it.”
“She smiled at me once,” Theo said.
For Theo had—not completely or without difficulty—charmed our neighbors. She had picked up fragments of Welsh and with it addressed shopkeepers, farmers, passersby, most of whom spoke only English. She bought things from Carmarthen market and remembered everybody’s name. Sooner or later people ended up liking her, asking after her, making excuses for her, with the half-enthralled, half-confused expression that characterized all Theo’s fans.
“Did you talk to that girl?” Sebastian asked me. I shook my head.
“Maria,” said Theo. “She’s called Maria Dumas.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I spoke to her brother in the shop—Nick. They’ve come to live here, they have a house on Castle Hill. Do you know that house?”
“Her brother?”
“Anyway, I said that they should come over this week and play tennis. I told Nick he didn’t have to worry because the cameras are gone now.”
“Oh, Theo . . .” I said, but was too pleased to add anything other than “That must have confused him.”
At the beach Theo ran off to swim, quickly becoming indistinguishable from the dark arms and heads of the other seagoers, scattered in the luminous water. We lay on the flat cream sand under the blue blaze of the sky; Sebastian, sandy-fingered, rolling another joint. We were half dozing when Theo came back running up the beach, stumbling occasionally as she trod on other people’s beach towels and buckets.
“Jonathan! Sebastian! I almost got swept out,” she said breathlessly, throwing herself down on the towel. “But I shouted for help and I got rescued.”
“Swept out?” I sat up. “Why did you go out so far? Who rescued you?”
“Another man who was swimming,” Theo said. “He looked like a dad, with a hairy stomach, and a bald spot.”
“A bald spot on his stomach?” inquired Sebastian.
“No, on his head. He said I ought to be careful next time,” She smiled reflectively. “That’s the kind of dad I’d like—stern but nice.”
“He was right. You shouldn’t swim out so far,” I said.
“I wasn’t swimming, I was floating,” Theo explained. “I didn’t notice how far I’d drifted out.”
“Then pay more attention to where you’re going,” I snapped, and she contracted, winding her fingers through her hair.
Theo’s lack of survival skills bothered me. She had never learned when to say no to strangers, when to look both ways. When I lectured her about the various things she did—accepting lifts from people she had met the same day, walking alone at night—she would just smile and nod at me, leaving
the house like a balloon heading gaily into the broad, cold sky.
“Look,” she said now, forgetting to be shamefaced. She pointed up at the hill. “That’s the house I told you about . . . where Maria and Nick live. I remember that house from when we were little, because you can see it from the edge of Evendon too. I always used to wonder who lived in it. Isn’t that funny!”
“I suppose it is,” I said, squinting up to where the small house sat on the highest point of the hill, like a white tooth, a white mint, isolated in the blue.
Theo, Sebastian, and I watched the final cut of the documentary after it was sent to Eve, drinking in my room from a decanter lifted earlier that day and shushing Theo when her attention slid off in random directions. On-screen a camera was sweeping up a New York street, taking in some strategically placed beggars before rolling its gaze up the facade of a grand hotel. The voice-over sonorously explained that after Eve’s retirement from politics and her marriage to the film studio head Sam Anthony, she had spent the day at a homeless shelter in New York run by a charity of which she was a board member.
The camera returned to Eve in close-up, her face vivid with its own contrasts, sharply edged. She said, “I stayed that night at the Waldorf after spending the day talking to people who for one reason or another had found themselves dispossessed, owning nothing. Going back to my suite with its champagne glasses and silk wallpaper made for an uncomfortable night. I thought then that people like me, enjoying a good night’s sleep, could help less fortunate people to get a night free of fear and cold.”
The voice-over came back, along with footage of Eve standing in front of various grand hotels and homeless shelters, cutting ribbon after ribbon. “Eve founded Charis Hotels in 1977,” it explained. “A large cut of the profit from each Charis hotel is used to fund a nearby homeless shelter, soup kitchen, or free health clinic. It was an innovative venture, at a time when big business had little thought of social conscience. At first Eve opened hotels in upscale areas of New York and other cities, then during the eighties, Charis expanded to Europe, Australia, and Canada, even Mumbai. In a 2006 poll of business leaders, Charis was voted one of the most highly regarded global brands.”
The Other Half of Me Page 8
