The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  I waited for an hour with impatience before finally asking, “So, what’s going on with your sister?” as lightly as I could.

  “Doing really well, I think,” Nick said. “You know Maria.”

  “Do I?” I murmured.

  I had spoken to her on the phone to wish her Merry Christmas; I asked her in a mock-casual tone that made my throat contract to remember it, if she was still seeing Olivier. She said she was. I added quickly that I was with someone too. “Oh, that’s great,” she said, “we should all meet up when I come back.” Her voice was pearly with politeness; smooth-surfaced, nothing to hang meaning onto.

  I had an impulse to just ask her why she didn’t want to be with me—what she wanted that I wasn’t. But I couldn’t do that, and so I said good-bye and hung up, and that was the last I had heard from her except for Nick, telling me she was doing really well, whatever that meant.

  Later that night Theo and I sat together on the terrace in the cold, as she tried and failed to light a cigarette. The wind would fall still for a moment, like a crouching dog, before it leapt again, whipping up the dark shapes of the sky and catching our clothes like torn paper. I accepted a cigarette from her, from a packet I had paid for. Theo had no money at this time of year—it was tramp season in Carmarthen and she had given her allowance away within the first few days of the holiday. When I walked through town it seemed as if there were an unkempt shape under every cash machine, raking in the proceeds of festive guilt. They all knew Theo and would call out to her, “Hello Theo, how’s college going?”

  There were lights on in Llansteffan below us; only a few, scattered like stars on a rugged sky, a glitter perched on the edge of the fluctuating darkness of the sea. Out of our sight was the single light of Castle Hill House, giving its lighthouse wink out to the night; a signal come loose from meaning, calling to no ships.

  “Don’t you feel odd, coming back here?” Theo asked me, most of her voice missing in the wind. Her mouth was small and grave.

  “Of course not. Why would I?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking down. “I just wondered.”

  “You wonder some strange things,” I said, amused. We sat in silence for a while, with our black shadows side by side on the flagstones, surrounded by the flaming light of the windows behind. I stubbed out my cigarette once it was half burned down; I smoked a little only occasionally, to preserve the sensation of the nicotine, the faintly sickening buzz.

  Despite what I told Theo, I was already looking forward to going back to Cambridge. Eve had left for America the day before, and without her Evendon had a certain unease—not exactly a bad feeling, but a sense of time and place slipping and overlapping with the dim, penumbral past. Theo herself was a part of this; she encouraged the past, she called it up like a spirit. “Remember when we used to build castles in the garden?” she would ask. “Remember when we stole the cake from Mrs. Williams, and dropped it?” “Remember the musical box I had, that played the Nutcracker, with the broken doll?” “Remember the tree with the initials?”

  I didn’t like Theo’s habit of reminiscing, though I couldn’t have said why. Childhood for me was distant and brightly colored and strange, like a dream. It carried the overtones of fever, of helplessness. I would rather leave it as that dream, as something I had woken up from; unclenching my eyes and going gladly into the new, sensible light of the morning.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When I got back to the Cambridge flat the heating was back on, Felix was nowhere to be found, and there was a girl asleep on the sofa in her underwear. When I woke her up she turned out to be articulate and pleasant, unlike some of Felix’s female guests, who were screened only for appearance. We had a cup of tea together and she fixed our toaster so we could eat breakfast. About half an hour after she left, Felix came back with some carrier bags from the liquor store.

  “The toaster’s fixed,” I told him. “Your friend mended it.”

  “Did she leave her number?” Felix asked. “The kettle needs fixing too. It gave me an electric shock yesterday. Anyway, I said we’d go to a New Year’s Eve party in London tonight. Sebastian’s going to a different party—some friend of Theo’s. But her friends never have any decent drugs and I don’t want my phone stolen, so I said we’d leave him to it. I guess New Year’s Eve is his only chance of getting to first base with your sis.”

  “He’s wasting his time,” I said.

  “That’s what I told him. He’s like something from the sixteenth century . . . courtly love. Poor bastard. He should come out with us and get laid. But will he listen?” Felix paused, frowning, “I almost forgot to tell you—the party’s at Chessie Turner’s place. Are you and Chessie alright?”

  “Fine, as far as I know,” I said. “Why?”

  “I know you’re fine,” Felix said, laughing. “Well, she invited us both so I’m assuming she’s over it.”

  I was trying to remember whether there had been any bad feeling between Chessie and me, following the week or so last year that we were sleeping together. She was the one who finished the affair; she explained that we wanted different things. It was a polite ending, after which we had smiled at each other in passing, and I had thought we were friends.

  Before the party Felix and I went to a bar, where we were joined by some girls Felix knew, who persuaded us to drink absinthe, lining up the virulent green glasses like a chemistry experiment. After several shots my drunkenness became piercing and strange, time whipped past, a girl kissed me, and I found myself holding the edge of the bar and her arm like an unsteady fawn, trying to sing along to a song I didn’t recognize. “Come on, come on, it’s nearly twelve,” Felix was saying, agitated as Cinderella. “The best girls will be taken.”

  “Where’s Maria?” I asked as we left.

  “In France, Jonathan. In France.”

  The party was held in a few rooms of a terraced house in Camden, all of them choked with smoke and dark and moving bodies, like Newgate; the music heavy over the massed heads. We arrived as the clock was striking midnight and got mixed up in the general rush for kisses. Chessie was nowhere to be seen; another girl welcomed us and gave us a line of coke each. “Happy New Year,” she said.

  The coke sobered me; my head turned clear and crystalline, like a glass bowl. Light radiated through it, and sound; the noise of the party divided and became distinct as harp strings. One note I recognized—a low, persuasive laugh. When I turned around I saw Theo’s onetime friend Antonia sitting on a sofa with two other girls, looking at me. She and Theo had drifted affectionately apart, the way friends do when they have no reason to dislike each other, but nothing at all in common. She hadn’t changed much in the years since I saw her last, the morning after Charlie’s party; she still sat straight under the weight of everyone staring. Her hair was longer, curled at her shoulders like a doll’s. She wore a corset top above which the pale top halves of her breasts rose, smooth as mascarpone.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” she asked, so I did.

  Antonia told me she had been in America working for a film company; now she worked at a PR firm in London, though this was possibly the other way around. I tried to follow the conversation, but the clarity of the cocaine was slipping back gradually into an alcohol torpor, and the sharp, sweet perfume rising off her, the whiteness of her skin in the lower half of my vision, was distracting me.

  “I have to go now,” she said eventually. “I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” I blinked at her.

  “Don’t be sad,” she said, starting to laugh. “You can come back with me, if you like.”

  I remembered that I had felt not wary, but something close to wariness—an idea of caution—when I met Antonia at Charlie’s party. She struck me more than any other girl I’d been involved with, though I didn’t exactly know why. Her tone connected with something equivalent of mine, a reflection that had its own force, its own reaction. It made me think about Maria and my feeling for her, a longing and disappointment so
close that it was hard to tell which followed the other, or even how to distinguish them. I wanted to duck away from it, fold into someone else, be overwhelmed.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  In the taxi to her Fulham apartment my thoughts were suspended; she talked with a composure that I tried drunkenly to match. Finally, in her room, she turned all the lights on and stepped toward me. Her face was bleached by the sudden brightness, emphasizing its flawlessness; she looked for a moment like an advertisement, holding my eye. The way we kissed was deliberate, artificial. Her fingers unpicked the buttons of my shirt without faltering.

  “Let’s not sleep at all,” she said.

  I walked to the station the next morning with a new confusion with the world and—after the way she kissed me good-bye—an unreasonable erection. I couldn’t concentrate on the street or the people I nearly walked into; I saw only one thing, her hair over the edge of the bed, the steep dip of her white back, my hand on her. The night had been oddly defined, like looking through a telescope and seeing everything in perfect detail; the distance of it was almost voyeuristic, a thrill. Being near and far at once; I turned it wonderingly in my mind as I walked.

  By the time I got back to Cambridge the cold air and the first unpleasant needles of rain had sobered me, and I was feeling more like my usual self. The flat was empty: Felix and Sebastian presumably still lying unconscious on unknown beds, sofas, or floors somewhere in London. I switched on the kettle, which gave me an electric shock, and made a cup of coffee. Then I read the papers, letting tax and war wash over me, numbing the shocked nerve ends of last night, until I heard a shriek of crunching metal outside. I opened the window to see Theo in the street below, getting out of the driver’s side of a Cadillac.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Hello Jonathan! Happy New Year!”

  I went downstairs to inspect the damage; she had backed into a road sign, crushing it, and dented the bumper.

  “This isn’t mine,” she said. She looked thinner, which could have been the effect of the large man’s cardigan she wore over a loose pair of jeans; the comparative frailty of her collarbone.

  “No shit,” I said. “Are you insured to drive it?”

  “No—I’ve passed my test, though. Hurrah for me!”

  “You still need insurance. And whose car is it anyway? Do they know you’re driving it?”

  “Oh, I’m looking after it while Louise is on holiday. Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  “Of course I am. You’d better come in,” I said. A small crowd had gathered morbidly around the remains of the road sign. “That girl’s someone famous, isn’t she?” somebody said. “She’s that model, what’s her name?”

  Theo took two trash bags full of clothes out of the car. “I thought I’d stay with you for the weekend,” she said. “Isn’t Sebastian back yet? I got muddled with which party I was meant to be going to and we ended up in different places.”

  Once we were inside I began to make tea, forgetting the kettle was broken, and got another electric shock. “Shouldn’t you be doing some work before your term starts again?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I’m not really at college now. They asked me to leave. At the end of the autumn term. They said I wasn’t doing enough work. I don’t mind,” she said, fiddling with her unlit cigarette until it split and snowed tobacco onto the table.

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “Just be useless,” said Theo sadly. “It seems it’s all I can do.”

  “You’ll have to get a job,” I said, annoyed. I disliked the suddenness of my morning transition from pleasant after-sex apathy to exasperated parent. Every time I felt I could take my eye off Theo, she would do something unexpectedly stupid, like a toddler quietly feeding its toast into the DVD player.

  “I could go to India with Sebastian,” Theo said now, hopefully. Sebastian was leaving in February to live in Kerala for a few months as part of his PhD. “I’d like to go there. I could work in an elephant orphanage. Remember when we were little and we used to sit on the elephants in the morning room?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Anyway, you have to help me think of what to say to Eve,” Theo continued. “I don’t think she’ll like it, you know.”

  At this point Sebastian arrived home and I was relieved not to have to think of an answer that wouldn’t upset Theo, annoy Eve, or inconvenience myself. He and Theo began retracing the convoluted paths of the previous night like Hansel and Gretel in their twilight forest, excitedly following their bread-crumb trail of missed text messages and empty vodka bottles. I retreated to watch a TV program I had recorded, a dramatization of the life of George Bennett, but it wasn’t long before they followed me and started talking over it.

  “Look at that moustache,” Sebastian said, as the actor playing George sat thoughtfully in his claret-colored study, gazing at a globe of the world. “Do you think it’s fake?”

  “It’s a very grand moustache,” Theo mused.

  “It looks like a broom. What did Eve say about this thing? Do you think she’s watching it?”

  “Her solicitors probably are,” I said.

  (Eve, on the telephone, had said, “We should be grateful that George is a British hero and this is all we get.” She laughed, adding, “If it seems like the media are intrusive now, imagine what they’re like with their villains.”)

  A scene followed with George opening crate after crate in the black-and-white tiled hall of his London house, withdrawing turquoise masks and stone stelae to the delight of a small girl kneeling rapt in the straw packing. The light struck her white face and for a moment she did look like a younger version of Eve, newer and softer, but with the same deliberate motion, a thought-out grace evidently common to both child actors and politicians.

  “Imagine being there for that,” Sebastian marveled.

  “Sorry to break it to you, but Eve said that scene with the boxes being brought home would never have happened. He was very guarded about his work, apparently. Nobody was allowed near it.”

  “The television is . . . lying?” Sebastian asked with mock horror.

  After the drama ended, with a touching scene of the teenage Eve’s speech at George’s funeral, wrapped stiffly in so many layers of rigid black fabric that she resembled a sad Spanish doll, Sebastian shook his head.

  “But now I just don’t know what to believe,” he said. “Who knows what actually happened? Maybe he never died at all and really did find the Mayas’ secret of eternal life. Or maybe Eve got fed up with him being selfish with his treasure and pushed him down the stairs.”

  “Don’t forget this is our grandmother,” I said reprovingly. “These are real people.”

  “In a way, Jonathan,” Sebastian said, with the solemn “philosopher” face he liked to put on. “Only in a way.”

  Eve arrived in Cambridge for a visit in February, appearing from the car in one familiar, quickly unfolding movement. “You look well,” I told her. But under the white sky, the most searching light, she looked better than well—better than most of the students around us, with their alcohol-marked faces, their slept-on skin. For the first time I wondered, disloyally, whether she had had surgery.

  “Let’s go somewhere you usually go,” Eve said, “somewhere casual.” She looked around the small café with the obscure delight of a famous person slumming it, pronouncing, “It’s charming!”

  Eve already knew about Theo leaving college: it turned out her intervention had been the only reason the college kept Theo on so long. She hadn’t heard about Theo’s plan to go to India, which she had refused to drop. Sebastian had been teaching her Hindi (“Namaste, Jonathan!”) and she had bought herself a sari from a charity shop.

  “Which is silly,” I concluded, “because why would anyone expect her to wear a sari anyway? They’d probably think she was taking the piss.”

  “Theo does not have drive,” Eve said with finality, putting her teaspoon down like a gavel. “She isn’t a teenager anymore. If she do
esn’t want to study she’ll have to find something else to do.”

  There was a note in her voice I hadn’t heard before; something I couldn’t identify. I guessed Eve—like most people—was beginning to see Theo as idle, or lazy. But that wasn’t quite right: it was almost that there was something missing in Theo, with her aversion to the linear, the cumulative. She blew and flitted like a feather, never landing for long, alternately enthused and dismayed. It was impossible to keep track of her.

  “How’s business?” I asked Eve, to change the subject.

  “I’m going to Dubai next week to explore a few things,” Eve said. “It all has to be absolutely perfect; there’s no room for error when you open a hotel in such a crowded market. We need to organize some good media coverage.” She paused as the waitress passed us. “We’ve had a few problems with competitors; there was an editorial in the Emirate Times about how Charis has been buying up sites in an underhanded way. Some journalist essentially accused us of bribing a property developer to break its contract with another firm.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’ll deal with it,” Eve said, visibly enlivened. “As far as accusations go, it’s rather minor. I remember when I was investigated for tax fraud as a congresswoman; a team of accountants was virtually living at my house. I knew there was nothing that they could find to discredit me. A few weeks before it all happened, Henry Kissinger had called me. He was a good friend of mine, despite everything. A prudent, practical man. He didn’t like Nixon particularly—Nixon was such an awful old anti-Semite. Henry warned me, ‘Nixon will get you.’ ‘No he won’t,’ I said. And he never did.”

  “Do you miss it?” I asked her. “Politics, I mean.”

  “In a way. It was a ruthless time but also an exciting one. In the end I left politics not long after Nixon resigned. I suppose the fun went out of it a bit after that. But I’m not sorry I left. There was only so far, as a woman, that I could go. I knew it was time to take on something different. I was looking for that something when I had the idea to found Charis.” She smiled and leaned forward, lowering her voice. “Politics is a theater, business is a gold mine. You can look good in politics or you can make good in business. Since I switched I’ve made much more money, I’ve become much more powerful, and—most importantly—I’ve been much more able to help those in need.”