The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

She paused and looked reflective, then smiled at Theo. “You can do whatever you want in life.”

  Theo was always uncomfortable around Eve. She behaved as if Eve were a teacher about to ask a difficult math question—becoming quiet and small so as not to attract attention to herself. She gave a coerced smile now, twisting her napkin in her fingers.

  “Anyway, I always look forward to seeing what you’ll both achieve,” Eve continued. “You can change things. Take something, change it, then no one can forget you. Isn’t it simple? That’s all success is.”

  “Okay,” Theo said uncertainly. She reached for her wineglass but her vague fingers slid on the icy-wet stem of it and the glass gracefully arced down onto the table, where it smashed. The sound startled all of us; Eve drew back slightly in her chair, Theo gasped, even Alicia—gently bowed with alcohol, her eyes resting on her own glass coiled into her hand—blinked and looked up.

  I knew the glass was irreplaceable: Victorian, made from slender crystal, gold-leafed around its rim. We all stared at its bright pieces on the table, like a broken phoenix egg, and then at Eve.

  “Sorry, Eve,” Theo said.

  “Don’t worry,” Eve said lightly. “We have an even set of four now, I suppose.”

  “Why were there only five, anyway?” Theo asked. “Don’t glasses come in even sets? What happened to the sixth one?”

  Eve frowned, not as if trying to remember, but as if she were annoyed somehow by the question. She didn’t reply immediately and that, along with the scattered light in the remains on the table, raised some old nausea in me, some unknown fright, like a slow chill from a door previously left open and forgotten. I stared at the fragments, unable to identify what about them had disturbed me. Then Eve said, “Oh, there have only ever been five, for as long as I can remember. The sixth is . . . lost in history.”

  “That’s sad,” Theo said, struck by this thought.

  “Indeed,” Alicia said, making us all look at her, not just because her contribution was unexpected, but for the sarcasm of its delivery—her voice well shaped and lucid, and in that moment sounding exactly like Eve’s.

  I had decided I wouldn’t contact Maria—less from a reluctance to interrupt the flowering of her supermarket car park romance than from not wanting her to doubt the deeply casual nature of my feelings toward her—but after finding myself with nothing to do but sit for several of Theo’s subsequently discarded portraits, I called Maria to ask if she and Nick wanted to play tennis with us. Maria, her voice easy and sleek on the telephone, explained that Nick was in Bath visiting Emily, but she could bring David along to make up a four. I agreed pleasantly and hung up, pulling a face in the hall mirror.

  Maria arrived looking pornographically innocent in blazing white shorts and halter neck against the dreamlike green blur of the grass. The darkness of her ponytail swung over her shoulder like a whip. David, following on behind, was a suntanned athlete with well-structured arms, hands hooked into his shorts, wooden beads hinting at surfing prowess. I longed for him to be transformed into the original David, the pale shop manager in his flammable suit.

  Nick had already reported that David was involved with an environmental campaign group to prevent some bypass mowing its way through an ancient forest, that he enjoyed running, and had just saved to buy his own house by the beach. His father worked at a garage and his uncle ran one of the two pubs in Llansteffan. He was well liked locally and had taken the Dumas family to the market to show them the best places to buy fresh foods. In his spare time he volunteered at the local hospice. It was difficult to dislike him, but I thought it was to my credit that I succeeded.

  David was predictably capable with a racquet and Maria had a languorously moving trick of always reaching shots, but I had been playing all summer. Despite Theo’s forgetting to watch the ball, then looking at it with surprise as it dawdled past her, we beat them two sets to one.

  “Well-done, good game,” David called, loping genially up to the net and grasping my hand.

  “Jonathan’s been practicing against the machine,” Theo said proudly.

  “Be quiet,” I muttered.

  Not long after the game David excused himself to head a scout meeting or escort some old ladies to church, or something, and Maria, Theo, and I sat talking under the pear trees, where the sun had become a haze of blond, hay-scented stillness.

  “Look at that bumblebee,” Theo said, pointing at a bee making its way across the grass, clambering and tumbling over the long green blades. She laughed. “How lazy! Why doesn’t it just fly?”

  Maria leaned over the bee. “It’s either old, or cold, or tired. Look”—she pointed at its wings—“if they have ragged wings it means they’re old and will probably die.”

  “Oh!” Theo said, dismayed.

  “But these wings are okay. And it’s not cold today. So basically, this bee has worked too much and exhausted itself.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said. “Though you might want to explain it to Theo.”

  Theo, not to be distracted, asked, “So is it going to be okay?”

  “It needs some honey,” Maria said. “Or sugar water. Have you got any?”

  As Theo hurried away across the lawn I turned to Maria. “That was well handled. I thought you were going to tell her it was a no-hoper. Right, I’ll get rid of that bee and we’ll tell her it recovered and flew off.”

  “No—it really is fine,” Maria said. “Wait and see. Theo’s sensitive about this sort of thing, is she?”

  “About any sort of thing,” I said. “She’s impossible to live with. If a newspaper has a headline about some tragedy I have to put it in the bin facedown, in case she’s confronted with ‘Five Dead After Car Bomb,’ or whatever, and then she’ll be upset.”

  “It’s lovely that you’re protective of her,” Maria said, looking at me from under the shade of her hand. Beneath the dark that hid her eyes her mouth was lit up in the sun, a classical cyma curve.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “I got it!” Theo came running back out of the house, holding a jar of honey above her head like the Olympic flame, dropping down beside us excitedly and examining the now-unmoving bee. “What do we do now? Is it too late?”

  Maria took the honey, spooned out a small amount onto a leaf, then—as we watched solemn and silent—slid the leaf toward the bee, which shivered, stirred, and unfurled its proboscis into the honey.

  “It’s drinking!” Theo said. She looked at Maria with the pure and devoted admiration of a Renaissance Nativity painting, the sunlight sliding in through the tree branches, enfolding them both where they knelt.

  “Maria, patron saint of bumblebees,” I said lightly, a little moved myself.

  After the bee had consumed an improbable amount of honey and flown off, Theo fell asleep in the long grass, the lurid straw hat she had bought at the beach slipping forward over her eyes. Maria sipped her lemonade. “What a stunning day,” she said. “Thanks so much for inviting us,” as if it had been her and David I had originally asked.

  “Well, David’s great,” I said, stiff-mouthed.

  “He is, isn’t he?” she said. “I think he was a little reserved about coming here. Perhaps that isn’t the word. A bit shy. I think people here have a perception of your family as different from them—rather aloof, I suppose. But I told him that really you were nothing like that.”

  I smiled vaguely, picturing what Alicia would say if I told her we had been playing tennis with the son of a local mechanic.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I meant to ask you earlier, David is playing football this weekend and one of his team can’t play. He wanted to ask you but wasn’t sure if you’d be interested. Nick’s playing too.”

  Without a prepared excuse, I said, “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  “Perfect. I’ll tell him to call you. Hey, remember in the car when you said you don’t have friends in the area? Now it’s just one new friend after another.”

  “Maria, I don’t want you to think
that I’m some sort of misanthrope,” I began, but she waved her hand to quell it.

  “I didn’t think that for a second.”

  We smiled at each other, then she looked away, and then there was a moment of hesitation in which she didn’t look back up at me, but gazed at the grass, as Theo slept on and the wind faded, leaving the air blue and tangible, enclosing us. I waited, and then she sat up and her politeness was back and impermeable as ever, like a fresh sheet of paper.

  “You know, I think we’ve been so incredibly lucky,” she said. “Coming here where I—if I’m honest—thought I wouldn’t know anyone and would be lonely and miserable—and then finding you two, and David, and us all being friends . . .” She smiled in summation. “It just couldn’t be nicer.”

  I had assumed Mrs. Williams had been on holiday for the past week, as I hadn’t seen her around the house and the food at Evendon had noticeably improved. There was a firming up of vegetables, a softening of meat. Gone were the impenetrable plutonic lumps of potato, the quiches like bogs of mulchy yellow with their weary side salads. Then one evening Theo came running up to my room, out of breath and distressed.

  “Oh Jonathan, she’s fired her, she’s gone.”

  “Who fired who? Who’s gone?”

  “Eve! And Mrs. Williams!”

  “Well, that was long overdue. Didn’t you ever eat her food? When she made any, that is. She was always smoking in the kitchen, and she just watched that Welsh soap all day.”

  “I used to watch it with her,” Theo sniffled. “She gave me cigarettes.”

  “Is that why you’re so upset?” I said. “I’ll get you some cigarettes if it will cheer you up.”

  “She needs the money! Her cat needs an operation and her daughter’s husband has run off and left her, and now her daughter’s turning to drink. They could lose the house! She said it seems like God only helps the rich.” Theo recited this as passionately as if she were Mrs. Williams herself. “And we’re rich, aren’t we? So we should help her.”

  “I’m sure Mrs. Williams will be paid for a few months, while she gets another job.”

  “She says she doesn’t know where on earth she’s going to find a job now,” Theo said, with all the faint reproach she was capable of. “I’m going to visit her.”

  While Theo was visiting Mrs. Williams, I found myself spending more and more time playing football, tennis—even going fishing—with David. He would invite me and I couldn’t seem to say no. It wasn’t that I had started to like him, though he remained no less likable. I did it to find out the extent of the problem; David being the problem. I would talk to him and wait with patience for him to say “we.” He confided that he wasn’t really sure how Maria felt about him. That they had not slept together yet. He thought maybe she was uncertain about the relationship; that she was holding something back. I listened with satisfaction.

  I didn’t think my outings with David were good for me; they made me a little more deceitful, a little less kind. Beside him I saw the hazy form of Maria; on his skin lingered the touch of hers. I even felt like giving him a shove sometimes, as if his arms still rested around her. I wasn’t proud of it—the compulsion to draw him out—but at the same time, I wasn’t prepared to stop.

  I suppose I got what I deserved in the end, reeling in my line to find not the silvery solidity of a fish, but a previously abandoned piece of rubbish—a rotting shoe, a tin can—brought to light instead. We had been talking about David’s father, who was apparently good and caring and kind and hardworking and generally represented everything that could be hoped for in a father. I was trying not to appear bored, but he misinterpreted my expression and flushed.

  “Uh—sorry. That was tactless.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “Really. I can hear about other fathers without bursting into tears. Mine died a long time ago.”

  “But I should have remembered . . . the divorce, and everything”—I watched the distress spread across his genial, evenly featured face—“I forgot about that.”

  “No worries,” I said, shrugging, and we went back to fishing. But I had seen that brief look on his face, before his embarrassment, an expression I hadn’t seen since Uncle Alex visited when we were children: the unmistakable flush of pity, and I felt my own discomfort, in the face of this unwanted connection, the bare vivid sting of it, the mutual exposure.

  I remembered that David was not always Maria’s boyfriend and my convenient friend: before that he was simply a local, and he was still a local. Now, I didn’t believe the people of Carmarthen and Llansteffan actively hated me, but there is a lot of ground between hatred and affection and they were scattered across it, a gray no-man’s-land of mild dislike. They laughed about me, discussed and added new Technicolor to my life and my family history, or simply watched me with the amused interest of spectators at the zoo every time I came down from the hill. There was nothing I could do that wouldn’t seem wrong to them: evidence of difference—or worse—of a degrading attempt not to be different. When I took my dated hatchback to the garage the mechanic hooted at it (“Can’t you afford something better than this?”), but when I used Eve’s car, armored in its aggressive black gloss, I could feel the hostility sizzling off the street like a pantomime hiss. While an exception had been made for Theo—who could no more be called snooty and distant than could a puppy—these thwarted epithets were flung enthusiastically at me. I was nothing more than a spoiled rich kid. My reserve was arrogance, my politeness was condescension. For my part, I refused to make any effort to overturn the unfair verdict and dismissed the locals as small-minded sheep fuckers. And so the distance grew.

  Now when David, whom I had casually made use of, brought up my parents’ divorce, I realized that he was on the other side of the iron curtain between Evendon and the locals—subject to who knows what propaganda and misinformation—and that, finally, was what put an end to our fishing trips.

  The day before Charlie’s party, Theo and I were sitting by the reservoir that bordered Evendon’s land, the swans floating past motionlessly, eyeing us. It was cooler here under the Nordic green of the trees, stretching their images across the silver bowl of the lake, broken and remade by the air skirling across the water’s surface. I cut through a drift of Theo’s cigarette smoke with my finger, disrupting its transient filigree.

  “Why are you smoking roll-ups anyway?” I asked her. “You’re not an art student yet.”

  “I don’t have much allowance left this month.”

  “But you haven’t bought anything.”

  “I gave it to Oxfam.”

  I frowned. Theo was always falling victim to the fluorescent-coated charitable young people lying in wait on Carmarthen high street, the black-and-white television commercials and their intoned digits, the drunks slumped in their doorways. I fully expected her visits to Mrs. Williams to end with the house being repossessed and Theo inviting the whole family to stay with us—Mrs. Williams, alcoholic daughter, criminal sons, unwell cat. The daughter could be good company for Alicia, so long as she minded her p’s and q’s.

  “Anyway, I wanted to show you something,” Theo said, searching through her bag. “Oh dear . . . where did it go?”

  I watched as various items were unearthed and placed on the grass like exhibits from an archaeological dig: one striped glove, an acorn, a pack of cigarettes (“Oh, I do have some left!”), a religious pamphlet she must have been handed on the street showing people of various colors dancing in a field under a rainbow, a diamond bracelet belonging to Alicia, a mouth organ, a magpie feather, and finally, a photograph, which she pushed enthusiastically at me.

  The photograph was of a bride and groom, gradually establishing themselves as Alicia and a man who had to be my father, standing under a storm of confetti. This Alicia was younger, fuller, her hair in a round thick wave rolling back from her plum-shaped cheeks. She held my father’s hand, her bouquet askew in the other hand as if she had forgotten about it; she looked gathered up, excited. There was nothing
about her expression to identify her as my mother. Her broad skirt frothed whitely against my father’s black-suited legs, hiding them, so he appeared to be floating. The uneven sunlight had hit my father’s face so that his eyes were just dark patches, his blond hair glowing. His resemblance to Theo was apparent despite this—he even had the same way of looking into the camera: head turned down slightly, defensively, but then that wide, hopeful smile.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked, running my finger over it.

  “It was in an album in the library, just inside the back cover. I spent a whole day looking through every single album and that’s the only picture I found of him. I don’t think anyone meant to keep it.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Alicia’s always been a bit weird about the subject. I don’t think she ever got over the divorce, or something.”

  “Well, that’s what I have to tell you about,” Theo said, eyes lit with sudden fever. “I showed the photo to Mrs. Williams and she said I’d better keep that picture to myself because my dad wasn’t so popular around here. I said, what did she mean? And she said that Eve and my dad didn’t like each other at all, and best not to say any more about it.”

  “You can bet if she did know any more about it she would have told you all the gossip,” I said, amused.

  “She thinks she was sacked because Eve found out that she told me about Eve not liking our father. She says Mrs. Wynne Jones probably told Eve what she said because she wanted to get rid of Mrs. Williams, and then Eve sacked her.”

  My good humor dissipating, I snapped, “She has no place to say that—to imply that Eve would sack her unfairly. She got sacked for being a shit cook. Anyway, it’s hardly going to be top secret that Eve didn’t like the man who divorced her daughter. That crazy old hag is just trying to stir up trouble. You should stop visiting her.”

  Theo looked down and fiddled with her cigarette.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “please don’t tell me you believe this rubbish?”

  “Well, I looked on the internet,” Theo said, rushing along, not meeting my eye, as if expecting to be stopped, “and I looked up all our names and everything and I found the wedding announcement with Alicia Anthony and Michael Caplin and there was a piece in a magazine, but I couldn’t find one single thing that said our father—our Michael Caplin—was dead, and I was thinking about what Mrs. Williams said, that no one liked him—and they must really not like him because there are no photos of him, and Eve doesn’t even let us talk about him—and I was thinking that maybe what if he wasn’t really dead, that it was just a mistake in Australia, and nobody checked it because they hated him and they were just relieved he was gone and didn’t want him back.”