The on-screen Eve, a woman smiling alongside Mother Teresa, swam forward in time to become a nearly identical woman smiling in front of her flower arrangement. “It’s not to my credit that Charis has grown so astonishingly,” she said. “It is down to the conscience of everyday people; tourists, lovers, businesspeople. People have an enormous well of compassion for other people. All I did was tap it.”
“It’s us!” Theo cried, as a helicopter view of Evendon and the surrounding hills appeared on the screen, accompanied by the voice-over, “When Eve Anthony returned to the UK in 1979, she took on the task of renovating her family estate Evendon and its architecturally significant house, which had fallen into disrepair following the death of her father.”
Eve’s face returned, more serious this time. “Evendon was my childhood home, but for a long time after my father’s death—which happened at the house itself—I couldn’t face going back there. But, after my divorce, I decided it was time to revisit Evendon, even if it meant facing painful memories. In fact, the restoration was a very cathartic process. Most of the furnishings I remembered were in such bad shape that they had to be stripped out. I was upset at first, but then I felt it was better to start again. To make the house my own.” She smiled seraphically. “I think my father would have liked that.”
“Not long after I had finished Evendon,” she continued, “I was speaking to a distant relative of mine, Lavinia Thorne, who couldn’t afford to live at her own estate any longer but couldn’t sell to the National Trust as it didn’t meet their criteria. I offered to buy it, renovate it, and operate it as part of Charis, as a hotel supporting a charity. Lavinia and I chose a charity very dear to her heart, the local animal rescue. That’s how Charis Heritage began. Letters came flooding in from acquaintances or extended family, asking if I wouldn’t mind ‘doing something with’ their own houses, most of which were falling apart or burdened by running costs. Overseas I had mainly bought commercial sites in city centers, but Charis Heritage had two functions, not only supporting charities with their profits but preserving our precious architectural history.”
The documentary then began following the redevelopment of Charis Heritage’s latest acquisition, a seventeenth-century manor in Buckinghamshire. Eve appeared briefly in a hard hat, apparently supervising the implantation of new central heating, the rising bricks of a spa in the grounds. She chatted pleasantly with a plumber, who was rather too chirpy and cockney to ring true.
“Whose house is that?” Theo asked, looking up from her doodle on the cover of one of my textbooks.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was never entirely sure what the rehomed upper classes made of Charis, run by one of their own, always ready with its checkbook when the electricity bills swallowed the legacy or when a will revealed a money pit. The former owners did not appear in the documentary, to see their human traces dusted away: the furniture carried out, the fingerprints covered over by fresh paint, the hotel room numbers nailed onto bedroom doors.
“Eve looks incredible,” Sebastian said. “She’s not exactly like a granny, is she?” We watched the on-screen Eve crossing a lawn, her legs scissoring sharply in a red dress. “My grandmother just watches television or complains to newspapers. She wears cardigans. And she looks old.”
“She sounds nice,” Theo said.
“Well, she always has cake, I suppose,” Sebastian said. “But Eve . . . do you think she would adopt me? Then I’d have someone to look up to. It might even give me some purpose in life.”
I didn’t forget Maria Dumas as the days passed. I noticed dark-haired girls who had some resemblance to her; a brown arm, a smoothly executed gesture, a shapely mouth under sunglasses, but when I caught up to them, always hopeful, they never had more than that one piece of her. I knew sensibly that there was a window of a week or two in which she might appear at Evendon, before the introduction would time out. This scratched at my nerves in a way I wasn’t familiar with—a vague stress, like the feeling of having forgotten something but not knowing what.
Theo, Sebastian, and I drifted through August like sinking stones, settling into a Sunday that was unbreathably hot. I’d been preparing a structure for a presentation during the last few days, in the cool, papery dark of the library with only the dead Bennetts for company, and when I finished that afternoon and went outside, I was surprised by the sudden pressure of the sun, the garden floating like strange water, its green stretch transfigured by the haze of light.
Eve was away in London, so Mrs. Williams was in the herb garden, sending lazy plumes of smoke into the still sky, and most of the maids had gone to the beach. Alicia was sitting on the terrace under a large white parasol, in a large hat and large opaque sunglasses, steeped in Vogue.
I squinted out over the lawn where Theo and Sebastian were lying in the grass under a pear tree, playing cards. Theo was wearing a yellow sundress; her legs and arms androgynously slender and straight—almost a young boy’s limbs—marooned in the fierce light. I was about to join them when I was interrupted by Mrs. Wynne Jones, emerging at her usual swift pace onto the terrace, magnificently unencumbered by the heat in her self-imposed uniform of black cardigan, black tights, and wool skirt. Not for her the polyester dresses sported by Mrs. Williams, lone bra strap lolling from brightly flowered sleeve.
“Jonathan, Theo,” she called. “There are visitors here for you.” And before I could possibly be prepared for it, Maria and her brother were shown out into the garden, blinking their leonine eyes as they crossed the line from interior to sun.
“Hurrah!” Theo shouted, rushing up to kiss them. In the round of naming, the compliments and countercompliments, my introduction to Maria was brief and flurried.
“I knew you would come to visit,” Theo cried. “Didn’t I, Jonathan? Jonathan never believes me. But I liked you both and when you like someone I think there is a ninety-nine-percent chance they must like you back. Or it would just be unreasonable.”
Nick shaded his eyes and gave Theo an uncertain look. “Well, we would have come sooner except we didn’t know where Evendon was. Then it turned out everybody knew where it was.”
“Really?” Theo said, delighted. “I wonder why more people don’t visit us?”
There was a brief pause.
“Maybe because you’re at the top of a hill,” Nick said diplomatically.
“So you’ve moved here?” I said to Maria, who was standing next to me. I had been trying to look at as much of her as I could before she noticed. The slope of her cheek, the blazing white of her shirt peeling out from her tanned skin, the symmetry of her well-shaped fingers. I examined her eyes now under their massed lashes, like a Victorian scientist trying to discover the secret of their electricity.
“From Bath,” she said. “Our mother’s divorcing our father.”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
Maria looked at me for a moment, then she smiled.
“Don’t worry, we’re not traumatized. Not much.”
“It’s Maria’s fault anyway,” Nick said, with an irritated laugh. “She persuaded our mother to leave. I just went along with it. I had no idea we’d be moving so far.”
Theo gazed at him with deep sympathy.
“Our father doesn’t live with us anymore either,” she said.
“If he’s anything like ours, then you’re lucky.” Nick said, “Where’s yours?”
“Everyone thinks he’s dead,” Theo explained, “because nobody wants him back. But I do.”
“Right,” said Nick, looking puzzled.
“He is dead,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about, and could only send her a severe frown, which she didn’t notice.
“Let’s all have a drink,” Sebastian said hastily.
I was relieved to see that Alicia had gone inside to avoid social exertion, taking her glass with her. I had never brought a girl to Evendon before and the arrival of Maria was a new kind of pressure: one I wasn’t exactly enjoying, with my determined smile, my tapping
fingers. But she was sitting down now—talking and laughing—and I made an effort to relax myself and join in.
Nick was talking about a girl called Emily he had left in Bath. “She’s beautiful. I told her I wouldn’t be away long if I can help it, so she’s waiting for me. I’m going to visit her every weekend.”
“Won’t she come here?” Maria asked.
Nick gave a surprised cry. “She’s used to the best of everything, Maria. I can’t ask her to stay here.”
“Nick thinks anywhere you can’t buy a mojito within a hundred yards may as well be the North Pole,” Maria said, laughing. “But I like it here. I always wanted to live next to the sea. And you could take Emily to the beach, Nick.”
“Emily doesn’t like sand,” Nick said shortly.
“I had a cat called Emily once,” Theo said. “Well, she wasn’t really my cat. I don’t know whose cat she was—”
“So are you at university, Maria?” I interrupted.
“Just finished my first year,” she said. “I’m studying psychology in Paris. How about you?”
“Architecture,” I said, “in the same year as you. I’m at Cambridge—so is Sebastian. He’s studying philosophy.”
“It’s hilarious,” Sebastian confirmed.
Nick was a year younger than Maria but he wasn’t starting university this autumn, and he wasn’t working. “I’ll do something,” he explained. “I just want to make sure it’s not going to be a waste of time.”
After several jugs of Pimm’s, I was feeling pleased with the way the afternoon was going. Maria was telling Sebastian a joke, eating cucumber and apple with her fingers, while Nick’s look of restless disapproval had eased into something like a smile. I leaned back and poured myself another drink.
“I just had an idea,” said Sebastian. “Theo was telling me about this creepy secret pool hidden in the woods. Apparently a ghost lives there. We could look for the pool.”
“Why not?” Nick said. “Let’s go on a ghost hunt.”
“I don’t want to go there,” Theo interrupted, startling him.
“There’s no ghost,” I said. “Our grandmother fell in a long time ago. But she didn’t drown, so I’m not sure why she’d haunt the pool. That’s without getting into whether there is such a thing as ghosts.”
“I don’t like it there, anyway,” Theo said obstinately.
I watched in resignation: the flushed face and distressed lower lip of Theo, the surprise of the others. Theo had never lost her childhood talent when it came to unexpected conversation stoppers; collapsing various hopeful moments of mine like so many tugged kites. There was the time she managed to let slip to one girl that I was also dating her friend. The time I brought a holidaymaker home one night to be met by Theo sobbing over a dead mole: my date—drunkenly shocked by the tears, the animal blood, or the unexpected memento mori—insisting I call her a taxi back to her Tenby hotel.
I glanced at Maria now, but she only raised her eyebrows and said, “This isn’t Scooby-Doo, Nick. Anyway, it’s too hot for ghosts. Why don’t we just have another drink?” And she turned to Theo, talking to her until Theo’s smile wavered back into place, ice-cream-white and sunny, and the conversation was set back on its tracks.
When Maria and Nick left in the late afternoon we took them back through the house, which had become a deep lake of shade, cool and silent after the blaze and hum of the gardens. Maria stopped when she noticed the painting of Eve in the dining room.
“That’s Eve Anthony, isn’t it?” she asked. “Are you related to her?” We all looked up at the picture with a collective superstitiousness, as if it might suddenly open its mouth and answer.
“She’s our grandmother. She’s in London at the moment.”
“How strange! I remember studying her for modern history,” Maria said. “You know, I never quite thought of her as a real person. And that means your great-grandfather is George Bennett?”
“Yes, but we never knew him. I don’t think Eve even knew him that well. I came home once from school and brought her a tracing I’d done, of a famous mosaic mask he’d discovered. When I showed it to her she said, ‘Very nice, darling, but what is it?’” Maria and Nick laughed.
I remembered what Eve had said after I explained the mask to her—“So George Bennett lingers on in the school textbooks, does he?”—her smile fixed to her mouth, as if she’d forgotten to take it off. Since then I’d noticed Eve only spoke of her father in the vaguest terms: he was always in another country, obscured by jungle and crumbling stones, or glimpsed at the end of a long, long dinner table. It seemed as if George for Eve was like a story she had heard and was passing on, rather than a person she had known.
“Quite a weighty family history,” Maria murmured.
“I saw a trailer for a program about that hotel company on television the other day,” Nick said. “Are you two next in line to run the business?”
“Oh, no.” Theo shuddered. “I want to work in a shelter for monkeys.”
“You won’t win Miss World with that,” said Sebastian. “Why not battered women?”
“Monkeys are less complicated.”
I said, “Well, I’m going to be an architect,” though the idea of working with Eve had occurred to me before. Sometimes I wondered if Eve herself had thought of this; the way she would ask me what I was working on, looking through my sketches and notes with a quick, professional hand. “So how much would this sort of thing cost?” she would ask; “How many floors does it have?” and then she would nod, as if my answers were exactly what she’d hoped to hear.
“What sort of things will you design?” Maria asked.
“Something . . . significant,” I said. “Something that people will remember me for.”
“Jonathan’s incredibly dedicated,” Sebastian said, a mocking overlay in his voice, and Maria looked at me sidelong, then looked away.
After they left I sat outside in the early-evening sun and remembered the way Maria had looked at me, with the edges of the smile she wore earlier—polite and shadowy—lying dormant in the corners of her mouth. As if she had thought of something, but had decided to keep it to herself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Unexpectedly, Eve knew about Maria and Nick Dumas—or their mother, anyway—down to the date they arrived in Llansteffan. Not through local gossip, for Eve did not chase and scatter pieces of information in the usual way; I never saw her conducting anything that could be described as a “chat.” Rather, the knowledge of the workings of others seeped through to her silently and completely, as if she had known it all along.
“What a waste,” she said. “A sad story. Dumas is Nathalie’s—their mother’s—maiden name; she was married to Sir John Bank-bridge, whom I knew years ago, as it happens. A well-respected man, perhaps rather a hard husband.” She didn’t elaborate. “It seems she didn’t take any of the money, nothing. That may be appropriate for her, but what about the children? She has incapacitated them. It’s a good job their education is almost over. She works as a proofreader now or something.”
“The Bankbridge family?” asked Alicia, who paid attention to conversations like someone tuning a radio, hovering for a moment on a sound that interested her; in this case the word Sir. “Where are they living?”
“The cottage on Castle Hill,” I said.
“Oh, yes, that tiny place,” she said, with a sigh that was either expressive of the inexplicable cruelty of fate, or disapproval of Nathalie Dumas and her cramped living arrangements.
After a few weeks of Sebastian’s staying with us, his mother called from L.A. to tell him she was flying back that weekend.
“I’ve got to get back to London before she arrives and finds out I put her dogs into kennels,” he told us.
“Don’t go.” Theo looked stricken.
“I’m back in Wales next week,” he said, “for Charlie’s party, remember. Our party really, since it was us that organized it. It’s going to be the party of the year. Everyone will have sex. Even me.
Even Charlie. God help that girl.”
At the end of pre-prep I had bid a cheery farewell to Charlie Tremayne, who went to Harrow, only to encounter him again at Cambridge, where he assumed our friendship would pick up where it left off. The unshakability of this conviction of his had seen him become a concrete, basic figure in our group, oblivious to the bafflement he caused in my newer, shinier friends. He spent a surprising amount of time with us, considering nobody ever phoned him. I wouldn’t have said I liked Charlie—his childhood boastfulness had congealed into a lumpy self-satisfaction and a disapproval of anything he considered “weird” (a wide and murky category that encompassed everything from cocktails to people who didn’t like fox-hunting)—but I didn’t find him objectionable enough to actively oust him. Sebastian despised him.
“Maybe we could get Victor to come to the party,” I suggested.
Sebastian smiled but didn’t take up the joke. Victor was a long-running theme of Sebastian’s. Outraged that Charlie had got into Cambridge without any evidence of intelligence, Sebastian insisted that his place had been bought at the expense of a young and bright black kid from Hackney. Sebastian had named this kid Victor and was fond of regaling Charlie with extended monologues on Victor’s life; dwelling on the crushing of Victor’s hopes of higher education, the late nights Victor was forced to work at the supermarket, Victor’s dedication to his sick grandmother, and so on. Charlie remained stolidly unmoved by this, dismissing Sebastian’s riffs as the mumbo-jumbo of a philosophy student: philosophy being categorized by him at his most charitable as “weird” and—at worst—as somehow analogous to mental illness.
“He told a good joke the other day,” I said, trying to provoke Sebastian, to revive our game and prod him and Theo out of the melancholy quietness that had sagged down over them both this afternoon.
The Other Half of Me Page 9
