“He gets his jokes from the TV,” Sebastian snapped, annoyed rather than amused. “And he can’t even get them right. He takes a good joke and just shits all over it.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Theo repeated, and Sebastian coughed, frowned, and rubbed his willful hair, waiting until she turned away before sitting back and looking at her with baffled longing. I felt sorry for him, but then I couldn’t help but feel a little impatient—scornful, even—because it had been months now, and how long was he really going to waste his time?
Later I went to Theo’s bedroom, where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sketching out a picture. She painted and drew without industry or commitment, but with a shrugging deftness; her pictures inspired and dropped in a day. I leaned in the doorway and looked around. Theo’s room was a manifestation of Theo’s inner life, every idea or impulse trackable across its messy landscape. Sequins affixed to the Lalique lamp, stickers covering the walnut four-poster, the unmistakable darkness of a wine stain on the Oriental rug. Her paintings were propped against walls covered in a Warholesque decoupage of cutout images from magazines; a hippyish throw was draped over the curtain rail, where it suffused the room with a dark pinkish light. Clothes, shoes, and teacups littered the floor. I noticed a missing cricket sweater of mine hanging over the back of a chair and picked it up.
“What are you drawing?” I asked.
“It’s going to be Sebastian,” Theo explained, “as a good-bye present.”
“You like him a lot, don’t you,” I said, wondering for the first time if Sebastian’s hopeful romance with Theo wasn’t entirely one-sided.
“He’s my best friend,” Theo said sadly.
“Oh.” I tried to think of something appropriate to say and settled for what I felt was a comforting silence.
“I know—why don’t the three of us get a flat together?” Theo cried, startling me. “In London! I could live there in the week while I’m at college, and you and Sebastian could come to stay in the holidays. We’d have so much more fun in London than coming back here every summer.”
“But Alicia would miss us terribly,” I said facetiously.
“She won’t miss us,” Theo said earnestly. “She doesn’t love us. Not really. Nor does Eve.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to this. The idea of love for or from Alicia was just blankly inappropriate. But, while I couldn’t explain it to Theo, I felt I understood Eve. Though she might not love us in a traditional, sentimental way, doling out indiscriminate kisses and embraces, I knew there was something reliable in her presence, something fixed and defined and more important than love, with its faulty batteries; the dim, uncertain showiness of love.
I was driving back from the liquor store later that day, bottles merrily chattering in the back of the car, when I saw Maria up ahead. She was wearing large sunglasses and a loose dress, and her hair was pulled back, but I recognized the arrangement of her limbs, their easy angles. The road was too narrow and hedge-bound to pull over, so I stopped next to her and waved. She leaned down to the window.
“Fancy meeting you here!”
“Would you like a lift?” I asked.
“Oh, no, don’t worry . . . I’m going home, it’s not on your way,” she said.
“Get in.” I opened the passenger door, motioning at the empty road behind us. “You’re holding up the traffic.”
Maria arrived in the car with a faint, sweet, draft of sun lotion.
“I’ve just been at the beach,” she told me. “I’m going to cover your car in sand.”
“It’s already full of empty cans and sweet wrappers,” I said. “A little sand won’t hurt.”
“I’m so glad to meet you here, actually,” she said. “It’s not that I can’t scale the hill—I’ve done it before, and I’m sure I can do it again. But I hadn’t packed any provisions, and there’s always the danger of running out of energy before the top, in which case I’d just have to lie there and hope someone finds me. . . . Oh! Look at the sheep!”
I had to stop for the flock of sheep being herded languidly across the road by a farmer, who nodded to us reprovingly as if we were in his way and not the other way round. We sat and watched as the sheep kept coming, banging and barging together, cushioned by their soft wrappings, with a despondent clamor that made Maria laugh.
“You won’t be so delighted to see the sheep after a few more weeks here,” I warned.
“You’re probably right. Anyway—speaking of here, you have to give me some tips on places to go. What pubs are the nicest? And restaurants?”
“I don’t tend to go to pubs around here,” I said. “In fact, I’m not sure I’m the best person to give advice.”
“Really?” she said, as the last sheep trotted past and I started the engine again. “What about your friends in the area? Where do you go?”
“I don’t know anyone in the area.”
She laughed, then realized I wasn’t joking and said, “Well, maybe Nick and I came at the right time.”
“I think so.” I tried to catch her eye so she felt the compliment, but she was looking at the road, swinging out around a bend as the sea vanished and reappeared over the wall.
“It’s funny,” she said, “you and Nick feel the same about this place, and he’s only been here for a few days.”
“I don’t mean to sound as if I hate it here,” I said. “I suppose everyone gets bored of their home. Nick’s just ahead of the game.”
“But when you leave for a while and come back, sometimes you realize what a place might mean to you,” Maria replied.
“Like going to university?”
“No, that’s not really leaving. I mean, when you’re a grownup,” she said, smiling.
“I used to think I would know I was a grown-up when I could have a pocketful of change and not know how much I had,” I said. “Instead of calculating how to spend my allowance to the penny.”
“I used to think I’d be a grown-up when I could buy my own biscuits, and not have to wait for them to be offered. And when I wouldn’t have scabs on my knees.”
I glanced at her knees, smooth and brown as hazelnuts with their light sugaring of sand—my eyes leaping along her legs; the rumpled patterns of her short dress, her hand resting loosely on her thigh—before I remembered to look away.
“This is my turning,” she said, looking amused.
When I dropped Maria at the house, we agreed we’d all meet up later in the week (“I’d love to see your sister again,” she said, warmly. “I’d like to see Nick too,” I said, insincerely), and she got out of the car before I could make a show of opening her door for her. She looked back once over her shoulder, with her usual ambiguous smile, then waved, before she went into the house and closed the door, and I went back to Evendon flustered, and drove too fast, causing a group of teenagers crossing the road to scatter and shout at me as I passed, in accompaniment to the clashing of all the bottles of wine.
When I got home Theo was asleep on the terrace, snoring softly in the low sun, and Sebastian was sitting nearby, reading through a book from one of his courses and making notes.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” I said, opening the wine and pouring a tumbler for us each.
Sebastian looked at me curiously. “You look smug,” he said. “What happened while you were out?”
“I just went to the shop,” I said. “I saw Maria actually. Gave her a lift home.”
“Oh, I see,” Sebastian said, putting his book down. “And how was that?”
“Maria seems nice,” I said. “Not sure about her brother. But she’s okay.”
Sebastian started to laugh. “Maria Dumas . . . well, yes, I suppose you could say she’s okay. Maybe if you’d just landed on Earth and she was the first girl you saw and you hadn’t had a chance to compare her to anyone else and find out she’s about ten times more beautiful.”
“Do you think she has a boyfriend?” I asked. “I can’t tell.”
“Does this mean she ha
sn’t made it clear she wants to sleep with you yet? I’ve never seen that before. I’m curious to see the effect it might have.” Sebastian inspected me with interest. “You might have some sort of breakdown,” he warned.
“I don’t know why I asked,” I said.
“Maybe you’ll actually have to put in some effort for the first time in your life,” Sebastian continued.
“Unfair.”
“Is it? Okay, I’m going to run through a list of romantic gestures. Stop me when I name something you’ve actually done. Bought a girl flowers. Bought a girl . . . anything. Celebrated Valentine’s Day. Invited a girl to dinner. Written a poem for a girl—”
“Oh, come on. Nobody does that. Except for you.”
“Which makes it even more unfair! I write poems and try to think about people’s feelings. You’re forgetful and dismissive and women can’t get enough of it.”
“Maybe you should think about changing your approach,” I say, amused. “Listen—women say they want poems and flowers, but in practice that’s bullshit. They like the thrill of the chase more than we do. They see someone who isn’t that interested in them, and they try to change their mind. And the better-looking the girl is, the more effort she makes, because she can’t handle being ignored.”
“How depressing.” Sebastian sighed.
“Not everyone’s like that,” I added. “But a lot of girls are, and they’re the ones I end up with. I’m not interested in them—beyond the obvious—and that’s fine because they’re not that interested in me. Not really.”
“I don’t think Maria’s like that,” Sebastian said. “She’s not the type.”
“What makes you think I just want to sleep with her?” I said loftily. “I might want a relationship.” Which made Sebastian laugh so much he woke Theo up.
I understood why Sebastian didn’t believe me. Girls, girls—I’d had a few, since I was fifteen, shucking off my virginity in someone’s parents’ bed to a girl I never saw again. All I remembered of that was the brief heat and the dark, the smell of vanilla and alcohol on her skin, the plastic-feeling lace of her bra. Afterward I didn’t feel happiness exactly, more an easing of stress, like walking out of an exam. Since that time I had got a lot better at sex, but not much better at lingering afterward. The lazy calm of the bed made me uncomfortable. I tried not to go back to girls I’d slept with before; the better I knew someone, the more I felt the weight of expectation, the pressure of history.
I’d never had this kind of want before; I’d never cared if a girl said yes or no to me—and I rarely had to ask. I’d never experienced this sternness of memory, its attention to detail. I could remember the topography of her thigh—a mole above the knee, the pale brown turning paler at her thigh—I knew the precise copper color of her eyes, the length of her fingers. But I didn’t know what she thought of me. When I said something serious, she laughed. When she smiled, her smile could mean anything. I didn’t like the uncertainty, so I decided I’d invite her to the beach tomorrow night. We could all go, in fact: I sensed that rushing things would be a mistake. I’d take the Grandmother’s Footsteps approach—softly, softly, but always moving forward.
When I called Maria’s house the next day, Nick answered and was so enthusiastic about the idea that I smirked as I hung up. I could imagine the boredom, the solid green Welsh isolation that must be pressing in on the two of them, turning even their mobile calls into a fuzz of blank blips and impenetrable hissing. Whether or not in their real lives they would have come to the beach, here there was no other choice.
Theo and Sebastian had bought some discontinued Romanian wine from the supermarket, delightedly urging me to guess at its price. The wine turned out to be as thin and sour as it was cheap, so we took turns holding our noses and drinking it as we walked down to the beach. The sky was a rose color, the sun setting slowly, dreamily. The road, constellated with leaf shadows, still gave off the heat of the day. Near the trees the gathering midges made their batty circles around our heads, forcing us to talk with our mouths half closed, like gangsters.
“So who’s going to Charlie’s party?” I asked Sebastian.
“Antonia said she would come,” Theo said.
“Who is that?” I asked, trying to remember the faces of Theo’s friends. Theo’s eccentricity had strangely never alienated her from the hard core of popular girls at her schools. When she was little, a set of pretty, well-behaved girls would invite her to their houses to dress their Barbies up and practice dance steps. Later at boarding school she was friends with the same kind of girls, and they would dress each other up and go out to dance. Theo was half cosseted by them, half admired. They thought she was quirky, but not weird, and they quoted the bizarre things she said. In this way she had ended up with a group of fluorinated, glamorous females whom my friends would try to pick off during the holidays, with varying degrees of success.
“My friend from sixth form. Anty’s really nice,” Theo said. “She’s nice to everyone but she makes her boyfriends miserable. Not on purpose. One of them had to go to a mental institution. Another one had to take anxiety pills. And another one moved to Australia because he said she’d murdered his soul. He used to stand outside her window and shout it and she’d ask us to go out and tell him to go away.”
“Poor old Antonia,” said Sebastian gaily. He had made his way through a second bottle of the wine and every so often would tilt and plow into the hedgerow before setting himself back on course, his shoulders covered in small leaves and pollen.
“Let’s ask Nick and Maria to the party,” I said. “The more the merrier, right?”
Nick, when we met him, was as pleased about the party as he had been about the beach.
“Anything to get out of this shithole,” he said rattily.
We had built a fire, which wavered and bloomed in the exhaling sea, stretching our black shadows out across the sand like blowing laundry. The earlier pink of the sky had seeped below the horizon, pressed down by a dark, serious blue. It was late, and Maria was not here.
“So, does Maria like it here?” I asked Nick. I was hoping he might explain why he had arrived alone, but he seemed to take it for granted that his presence was the top billing of the evening and that we would be indifferent to who else might or might not show up.
“Who knows,” Nick said. “She says she does, but she’s probably pretending. She’s worried about our mother—she doesn’t want her to feel guilty for moving us here. I think she ought to feel guilty.”
“Where’s Maria?” Theo asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “She didn’t come home this afternoon. Probably with David.”
“David?” I asked.
“She met him in a car park earlier today.”
“A car park?” I repeated.
“The supermarket car park,” Nick explained. “Our mother dropped a shopping bag and he helped her pick it up, or something. It was a boring story.”
I thought it was a ridiculous story. The supermarket, the dropped bag, the unfairness of it all. I wasn’t able to prevent Maria being preyed upon in the romantic confusion of torn plastic, rolling apples, burst eggs. I tried to remember the employees of the local store, but couldn’t think of a single fluorescent-lit face from which to pick an enemy.
“What does he do at the supermarket?” I asked sourly.
“He doesn’t work there,” Nick said with amusement. “He works at a school near here. Children with learning difficulties or something.”
“Ahh,” Theo cried. “So he’s kind.”
I grimaced, which wasn’t noticed, and thought again how unfair the whole thing was. Apparently I was just as bad as Sebastian, with his hopes carefully constructed out of tissue paper and glitter. But at least I hadn’t given away how I felt; I could quietly dismantle my attraction without anyone—especially Maria—feeling sorry for me, or laughing about it. That was something.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In August Theo got her A-level results, a set of murky let
ters with the exception of an A in art, which Eve put up on her office wall next to my prim row of certificates. Theo and I stood and looked at the frames. “I’m glad one of us is good at this stuff,” she said thoughtfully. “The important stuff.”
“You could have got better results if you’d worked harder,” I said reprovingly. Throughout school Eve had made phone calls and allowances were made for Theo, but there was a limit to what influence could achieve at her sixth form. She had read all the books in English lit, but her essays were inconsistent, if they appeared at all, her teachers said. Her French was “appalling,” and her sociology tutor said she had assumed Theo was a mistake on the schedule, because she’d never seen her. Theo said she hadn’t realized she was meant to be studying sociology either.
“Sorry, Jonathan,” Theo said.
“Don’t apologize! Anyway, at least Fairchild is accepting you.”
Eve wasn’t exactly pleased that Theo was going to art college, but she approved of Theo’s freedom, in principle, to make such a choice. She remarked later, cheered, that it might always lead Theo into advertising.
“How much the world has changed!” she said warmly at a dinner to celebrate the results. “I would have been laughed at if I said I wanted to go to art college. Husbands were all we heard about—you weren’t considered a woman if you didn’t have one. It was like an education in itself . . . a stage one had to go through.
“I remember at the end of university back in America, talking to a friend about the results we wanted. We’d both been scoring the highest essay marks, and I always thought we were in a sort of friendly competition. I said to her, ‘We both ought to win a prize this year.’ She looked at me, obviously surprised, and said, ‘Oh, Eve, there’s more to life than marks. I’m getting married this year. I don’t care about graduation.’ And then I realized we had never been in any kind of competition; we weren’t even playing the same game.”
The Other Half of Me Page 10
