She finished, running out of breath, and looked at me with her mouth open, eyes earnest and bright.
Baffled and disquieted, I managed a “Theo—that’s absolutely ridiculous,” and watched as her agitated, hopeful face sank downward, like a deflating balloon. “Where did this all come from?”
“But sometimes people make mistakes about deaths,” Theo said in a little voice. “And the internet—”
“Why would his death be reported online?” I said, trying to sound patient. “It’s Eve that’s famous, not the rest of us. Even if it was reported, Michael Caplin is a pretty common name to search for, and it was years ago. You’ve been looking for a needle in a haystack. And now you’ve created a conspiracy theory around the needle’s disappearance.”
“You think I’m silly,” Theo murmured. She stared at her cigarette, which had burned down to a long strip of ash in the grass.
“No, I think you wish our father wasn’t dead. But it’s not fair to believe that Eve would sack someone for no good reason.” Then, trying to lighten her depression, “You remember Mrs. Williams’s overboiled carrots, right? Trying to pick them up with your fork?”
Theo giggled. “They were like ghost carrots.”
“All you could hear at dinner was the ping, ping, of everyone stabbing at their carrots.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t visit Mrs. Williams anymore,” Theo said later. “She is a bit . . . negative. And her daughter’s husband has come back. I don’t think he likes me being there. He called me ‘Fucking Lady Bountiful.’”
“I think it’s best to let her go,” I said. “What did Eve say the other day?—‘lost in history.’ Let Mrs. Williams be lost in history.”
I didn’t mention this conversation to Eve. I almost did, because I thought she’d find it funny, but then I realized that it didn’t reflect very well on Theo, and it would be unfair to draw unnecessary attention to her strange theories. Not only that, but the attempt to shoehorn our long-gone father back into the present day, into our living family, was almost ungrateful to Eve, who had been an unexpected and welcome parent to us—a ready-made role model parachuted serendipitously into our dim and borderless childhood.
I also found it hard to understand that Theo could have felt the absence of our father so sharply that she had begun to believe he could be alive. But then, Theo had always picked up on odd things to cherish and keep hold of: our father had obviously taken on some significance in her imagination. Whereas I couldn’t imagine him at all. MC, the wandering artist, gone up in smoke in Australia. He was not real to me, he was a character from an Arabian fairy tale, exiled from court to the fierce, bare desert, to meet his tragic end. The more I thought about him, the less believable he became.
CHAPTER NINE
The day of Charlie’s party arrived, along with the end of the summer. It wouldn’t be long before I would be back in Cambridge with Sebastian and Felix. Maria would be in France. Theo would be in London. Nick, responding to family pressure, had gone through clearing and would be going to St. Andrews to study economics. “That’s got to get me some money,” he said.
My car had broken down, so Eve lent us her car and driver to get to Aberthin. The Tremaynes, having lived uneventfully at Aberthin House since one of them slept with Henry V in the fifteenth century, were a dull family, grand with the weight of their feudal responsibilities (which, after so many years of social change, were now wholly imaginary). Despite this fond sense of noblesse oblige, each summer Charlie’s parents, Leo and Anne, packed up and abandoned their indifferent Welsh subjects to spend a month in England. In their absence we had convinced Charlie to have the party.
I felt slightly guilty now about the number of people crowding the steps of the long, white manor and revolving erratically past the windows, the noise clattering out into the fading summer night. In the venerable depths of the house the party crowed and capered; borne along in a rush of faces, a spillage of sounds. There were paper hats on the skeletal deer heads, a pall of smoke hung over the Aubussons and the oak paneling, the steady, voluptuous bass of the music traveled through the stone floors. Charlie, whom I skirted, already had the bemused and antagonized look of the host whose party is no longer under his control.
We found Nick first, in the kitchen, leaning his elbows on the top of the range and trying to light a cigar off a plate. “Found a box of these,” he explained, offering them to us. “I’ll need to get a lift home with you, by the way, Maria’s staying with a friend. She’s breaking up with David apparently. It was completely short notice, I had to get the train down from Bath. Emily was really annoyed about dropping me at the station. She’s not a very experienced driver. She’s terrible, really. Fuck knows how she passed her test.” He gave up and put down the cigar. “Have you seen how many people are here? It’s packed upstairs.”
“Is Maria alright?” I asked, hope unfolding inside me like a birthday card. “Is she still coming tonight?”
“Oh, yeah, she said she was. She’s coming with her girlfriends.”
I stayed with Nick for a while—lying in wait—in the hope that Maria would call him when she arrived. Nick told me about the argument he and Emily were having, which was something to do with Nick’s not having answered his phone because of the reception on the train, and then Emily not answering her phone out of spite. We finished our beers, then some girls joined us and we began a bottle of whisky that was conveniently at hand.
In the meantime the night turned dreamy and obscure. The light vanished; one minute it was summery dusk, the next it was a dark blue heaviness, filling the windows with a quiet chill. The party ran on regardless, like a circus train, musical and violent. It seemed like I’d been wondering so long where Maria was that the question had become an underlying process in my body, like a heart pulsing or oxygen circling, silent and regular. Sebastian arrived and joined us, then Felix arrived, then Theo vanished, then we were all on a rug in the drawing room, smoking a joint. I saw Nick tipping out the last of the marijuana into a paper and said, “That didn’t last long.”
“It’s three o’ clock,” someone said. A slow fright came over me. Three o’clock. In six hours something mysterious had happened; when I wasn’t looking, time had wheeled away and Maria had been taken with it. I had the strange feeling that I was dreaming. I thought Felix was next to me but he had been replaced by a girl I didn’t recognize. I got to my feet, drunk but determined that I would not be tricked by clocks and musical chairs. I was going to find Maria.
I went from room to room, small rooms filled with smokers, cupboards of lovers, bedrooms of coke-sniffers, hallways of crying girls on their mobile phones. It was like a ridiculous puzzle, essentially unsolvable, because of course Maria wasn’t here. I sat down on the stairs, drunk and miserable, and an unpleasant coldness settled over my shoulders and face. Like a stranger, I saw the dark-paneled hall clearly, the music deconstructed into its constituent noises, the smell of smoke cooling, stagnating. A boy stumbled past me, bouncing off one wall then the other. Muffled laughter came from the room in front of me, sounding as if it had passed through a great distance. I looked at it, surprised, and went over to the door, at the same time that Maria opened it and came out. She gave a startled exclamation, then recognized me.
“Jonathan! How funny, I was just wondering where you were.”
I glanced through the door and realized my mistake—this room was the drawing room. I had thought we were in there earlier but we had actually been in a smaller room at the front of the house. I had been the obscure one—not her—hidden at the edge of the party, easily missed.
“I was just trying to explain to someone who had invited us here,” Maria continued. “I think everybody thought we might have just crashed the party.”
I saw in her enchantingly slow smile that she was at least half drunk: drunk enough to improve my chances, not so drunk that it would be unethical. I took in the wineglass she held, the bottle in her other hand, the top that left her back a clean brown sweep, nearl
y naked. Her eyes were darker, larger with makeup; her lips shone like the inner recesses of oyster shells.
“Let’s sit down,” I said quickly. “Come this way.”
With my new awareness of the geography of the party, I brought her to a back parlor and through French windows into the silence outside. The garden was covered in a light that, in the beginnings of the dawn, gave the impression of existing several hours later than the dark interior of the house. There was an empty terrace and a stone bench, beyond which the hills stretched far off into the dark clouds of the woods. The smudged charcoal of the sky was rising from the eastern horizon like smoke, to make room for a clear bluish purple. The light painted Maria’s body in economical contrasts; her fawn throat, the dark slice between her breasts.
“I was looking for you too,” I said. I sat down and she joined me, not quite close enough to touch.
“Not very hard, surely? I arrived hours ago. In fact—I haven’t seen you much recently at all. Were you only friendly before because I was new? Or were you just using me to get to David?” She spoke lightly but her smile was an artificial version of the original.
“What happened with him?” I asked.
“I’m going back to France . . . we thought it wouldn’t work.”
“It would be very difficult,” I said sagely. “Probably too difficult.”
“You sound like you have experience of this sort of thing,” Maria said.
“Well, sort of,” I said. “At the end of sixth form. It was only a few months, though—it wasn’t love or anything. It ended when we went to university.”
“How did you feel?”
“I was okay. I don’t know how it went on so long really—the longest I’ve been with someone—it was just a casual relationship.” I grew uncomfortable; to call it a relationship felt like overstating it. It was a thing, I supposed. I had a thing with her, which ended because she decided she wanted something more than a thing.
“Why do you think she went out with you?” Maria asked.
“I don’t know.” I glanced at her, sensing the emphasis of the conversation had swung out of my reach, but she was smiling and unreadable. “It’s just what you do when you’re teenagers. Pairing off.” As I said it I remembered the past girlfriend, Sophie, crying in a corridor at school after I told her that letters and weekend visits weren’t really “me”; the dutiful glare of her friend.
“Maybe she did it for the sex,” Maria said. I was startled to hear her say it, casual and without emphasis. Her mouth barely moved. “You’re good-looking. It’s a hazard.”
“You’re teasing me,” I said, relieved to begin a familiar exchange. “You’re the beautiful one.”
“Thanks.” She turned her face away, but even tipped down and shadowed, it was near to mine; I could see the curve of her cheek patterned by the heavy lashes, the corner of her mouth.
“Maria,” I ventured, “you must know I really like you.”
She frowned, then said, “How can you decide that?”
“What?”
“Am I a happy person?” she asked. I sat up straighter, beginning to feel unsure of myself.
“What do you mean? Aren’t you happy?”
“What kind of temper do I have?”
“Maria—”
“Am I religious? Am I liberal or traditional? Am I for or against drugs? Nuclear power? What do I think about art, or music, or sports?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Of course you don’t,” Maria said. Then she laughed, and got up. “And you don’t really like me. You have . . . a favorable impression of me.”
“Isn’t that enough?” I asked her, not understanding.
“It’s enough for friends,” she said. “And I want us to be friends. I’m not just saying that—I really do. But I have to go now. I’m sorry. Our taxi is arriving in a minute.”
I looked at her with what must have been an expression of injury or surprise, and she said again “I’m sorry,” brushing my arm with her hand. “See you soon, okay?”
After Maria left I think I passed out; when I woke up the light was rising and my whole body had soaked up the cold torpor of the stone bench. I stood and saw a group of people lying on the lawn in the thin, early sun, singing “Wonderwall.” Theo was among them, wearing a top hat. She noticed me and started waving.
Closed and spoiled by disappointment, I turned and went back inside, where I found the party was being energetically continued as if time, previously so hasty, had at last stopped. The house was almost exactly the same as when I left it; the same girl was crying on the stairs, the same couple was kissing against a window. I saw Felix sitting on a radiator in the hall, smiling indulgently while two girls who looked about fifteen tried to undo his shirt buttons.
“I need to talk to Felix now,” I said to them, and they both darkened and sulked away.
“That was unnecessary,” Felix said.
“I just saved you from prison. Come on, we’ll find some other girls. Our own age.”
Felix half leaned on me as we walked, saying, “Seb says you’re in love. He showed me this girl, Maria. Oh! Maria. She’s phenomenal, isn’t she? I can see why you’re in a bad mood now she’s gone. Vanished into the night. What have I told you? Tits first. Then the rest. But you can’t wait, can you, Jonathan.”
“You’re hurting my head,” I said, contracting myself onto a sofa in the darkest, noisiest room. The girls here were dancing like Balinese temple dancers to a lethargic hip-hop track. Their hair and weaving arms glimmered in the hot dusk of the curtained room, looking somehow unreal. The air was thick with the pear-drop scent of hair spray and perfume, circulating in the botanical fumes of tobacco and marijuana.
“Anyway,” Felix said, handing me a beer and opening one for himself, “Maria looks . . . what’s the word? Self-assured. That’s not a good thing. What you need is someone a bit crazy, a bit insecure. Easier targets. Or someone a bit . . . attention seeking.” He paused thoughtfully, looking past me to where Theo had appeared with another girl.
“Jonathan! Felix!” Theo cried. “This is Antonia.”
Antonia, the siren of Theo’s sixth-form mythology, stood haloed in the stares from other partygoers, a small, bright dress rising over her legs in a red ferment, bottle of vodka swinging in her fingers, face and naked shoulders pale in the masked light. She had near-black hair, lifted back off her face, and tapering, heavy-lidded eyes, which she raised with a showgirl’s panache, as if aware of their potency.
“Hello, Jonathan; hello, Felix,” she said with mocking courtliness. “Are you having a nice party?”
“Jesus Christ,” said Felix in my ear.
“Go for it,” I said, turning away, though there was something about her that jarred me, that prickled and stirred the hairs on my arms. Unsettled, I went to find myself another drink, and didn’t go back. My head had Maria in it, her brown back and sympathetic smile, the coolness of the air in the garden. I wasn’t up to Antonia; I couldn’t raise the effort due to a girl of such stark sexiness. What was it she had done—made someone mad? That seemed plausible to me, and also good reason to avoid her. So I stayed away, made new friends in the drawing room, and ended up kissing a girl wearing a fake fur coat, though my heart wasn’t in it. I was wondering where the evening went off its tracks, how I ended up tired, and baffled, unlatched like a vacillating gate, and not having a nice party at all.
Later in the morning the car arrived for us. The house was gradually subsiding into inaction; the music throbbed on but the people had fallen one by one, as in an epic war film. Bodies lay on sofas, floors, and under tables, unmoving in the fresh light. About fifteen people had formed a tight knot of survivors in the sitting room, Antonia charmingly presiding, her dress slunk up over the soft pale polish of her thighs, with Felix at her side, like the prom King and Queen. As I skirted them and called good-bye she looked up and smiled. Between the flush of her lips and cheeks her eyes glinted, her teeth. Then she turned away, back to the g
roup.
I picked my way through the bottles scattered across the steps of the house with Nick, who was exhausted from the nightlong continuation of his telephone argument with Emily, a dispute dropped and revived over and over, and was now mulishly silent. In the purring car interior he fell asleep, sagging like an older man. Theo, still top-hatted and with a monocle drawn on her face in pen, jumped into the car like the March Hare—crying “How funny!” to no one in particular—before putting her head on my shoulder and passing out.
I couldn’t sleep. I was still sitting next to Maria; the promising closeness of her, wondering what happened. I sat awake until the car climbed the hill to Evendon, past the trees, past the familiar kinks of the drive, turning the corner and seeing the first gold of the sun wreathing the front of the house, rising up the stone and soaking the lawn in light. It had dissolved the ribbons of cloud that traced the face of the sky, turned all the windows of the house into flashing blue jewels. Once inside I went to bed, pulled the sheets up over my eyes to shut out the sun, and finally slept.
When I woke up it was with a sudden shock, at the wrong time. The blank night was staring at the window, my head hurt with a slumped, heavy exhaustion, my brain was wet clay. I moaned and tipped myself out of the bed. Then I heard Theo cry out, and realized she had called me already, and I had thought it was a dream.
The Other Half of Me Page 12
