The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  After that meeting, Eve spoke to Theo over the telephone, laying out terms. She said she would not fund Theo’s trip to India. She offered to pay rent on a new London flat—if Theo would share with a friend’s daughter, who happened to need a housemate. She added that she would look for a job for Theo, something not too demanding.

  When Theo was younger Eve used to watch her with puzzlement, as if trying to work her out. But the way she spoke of her now was brisk and incurious, and the arrangements she made were for tidying purposes only: to fit Theo into a place in which she could be safely left.

  Eve’s disapproval of Theo bothered me, but Theo herself didn’t perceive any change in Eve’s attitude, acquiescing to her decision about the flat in the same way she had agreed that she ought to retake her A-levels. “I suppose I do need to earn some money,” she said. But she was unhappy about India.

  “I’ll probably never live in a temple now. That’s what I want. A simple place, with a sacred cow to look after me.”

  “Really,” was what I said, impatiently.

  “It could be a sacred anything, I don’t care,” she said, and looked away, out of the gray window, winding her hair through her fingers.

  Feeling faintly guilty about Theo’s thwarted plans, even though I had—when I thought about it—done nothing wrong, I went to London to visit her the next week. We met at Oxford Circus and walked together to a restaurant in Soho to meet Felix. I disliked this part of London; the clatter of the thickly peopled streets, the demanding shop signs blazing through the gray flicker of uncertain rain. I tucked my head down against it, as if weathering a storm. Theo was in a more than usually distractible mood, moving like a wren from one idea to the next, pointing and exclaiming as we walked, getting in everybody’s way.

  “You look nice,” I said, noticing the flower-print dress she was wearing. She looked at it with confusion.

  “Oh! I picked it out of the laundry because I was in a hurry. It must be Lucy’s. I hope she doesn’t mind.”

  She stopped, startled again, as we passed a bookstore. In the window, on the cover of a large book, under the title A Century of Style, was Eve. The picture was black-and-white, though it took a moment to tell, being so similar to her own coloring. Only the dark gray lips gave her away. Her eyes met ours; amused, slightly dismissive.

  “It’s like she’s watching us,” Theo said, nearly whispering.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, pulling her onward. “Come on, we’re going to be late to meet Felix.”

  Hurrying Theo that day turned out to be like gathering up a handful of ants. We made it down the road as slowly as if it were a church aisle, first stopping to pet a dog that had entranced Theo—she crouched to bury her hands in its fur, smooth its hanging velvet ears, let it lick her face—then stopped at the cash machine, then stopped to speak to a man sitting untidily on a wall, encircled by several cans of lager, to whom Theo gave the money she’d withdrawn. (“That wasn’t even a tramp,” I complained.) When we went back to the cash machine I took the money from her and put it in my own pocket—Theo submitting to this as if she were a child.

  Delayed again by a “hilarious” clock in a shop window, a small Japanese child with a balloon, and an unexpected purple flower growing out of a crack in a brick wall; when Theo finally stopped short I didn’t even look to see what had drawn her head around, sucked her breath out in a surprised “Ah!” I just carried on, muttering, “Theo, for Christ’s sake, come on.”

  “Jonathan, it’s him.” She caught my arm hard, pointing across the road, “That’s him.”

  In the sights of her pointing finger there were several teenagers, two older women, and what must be the him: a man’s back, walking away from us.

  “Who?”

  “Our father!” Theo cried, as if I ought to have known.

  I stared harder at the man we were watching, as if there was some way of establishing, through looking fixedly at the back of his blond head, his gray featureless jacket, whether this was indeed our dead father. Then I turned on her, exasperated. “What the fuck, Theo? Not this again.”

  “Come on!” She pulled my arm excitedly in the direction the man had taken. When I didn’t move, she let go and started after him.

  “Theo,” I called quietly, trying not to sound angry, but she didn’t turn back. The people around me hadn’t quite reached the point of stopping and watching us—the lovely girl and the angry-looking man, their brief tug-of-war—but the length of the looks had noticeably increased. Londoners, alert to possible soap opera in their midst, like hundreds of Mrs. Williamses. I stood furiously and watched as the man turned away down a different street, Theo running behind. He was a fast walker, already substantially smaller: it seemed unlikely that she would catch up to him.

  I walked in the same direction, calling her phone, but I couldn’t see her and there was no reply. I left a message instead telling her to meet me at the restaurant. When I arrived I found that Felix, who had been there for half an hour, had invited some girls at the neighboring table to join him, so that when Theo finally trailed in, in high color, breathless, eyes vivid with disappointment, I couldn’t say anything to her in front of them. I waited until later, in the taxi, to say, “What was that about?”

  I had meant to sound neutral but the words crashed out instead like stone blocks falling, loud and harsh, and she jumped. “I take it you didn’t catch up to him?” I said more quietly. She shook her head. “What is this thing with our father, Theo?”

  “I knew it was his face. From the picture,” she said. Then she turned her face down so far that her hair slid between us like a door closing.

  A long, unhappy silence followed, in which I decided not to say anything else. I wondered if Theo’s behavior was actually fairly common, in psychological terms—the delayed grief of the loss that is never experienced. A known type of grief, something documented and taxonomic. That would be reassuring; to read that people who have never met a dead parent often imagine that parent’s continued existence. But then, Theo wasn’t comparable to other people. She never had been.

  After a week of waking up in the night thinking about Antonia, I wanted to see her again. First I checked with Felix whether he had slept with her at Charlie Tremayne’s party. “No—I don’t know why she wouldn’t,” he said, puzzled. “I looked hot that night.” So I called and asked her out for a drink, and she said, “Why not?” in her voice that was like embers; soft, redolent of both sex and boredom. In the weeks after that we went out a few times, to bars, and to restaurants, then after that we dispensed with the consumption and just went to each other’s apartments, barely talking before we went to bed.

  I got to know a little of her this way; I saw that despite her sociability she was often dismissive of others. She collected friends idly and forgot them, she laughed about men whom she had broken up with or rejected, at the roses that appeared regularly at her door, the dropped phone calls, the tear-speckled letters. She was pursued by romance—the daily shots of love—but she ignored it all.

  I liked how casual she was with me, only tangentially involved with my life. She didn’t eat with me, she didn’t spend time with my friends. The greenish water of her eyes gave off the temperature of Icelandic hot springs, but really she was cool all the way through. The other men she had been with had been pained by it, but I understood her; I didn’t want love either, I didn’t want to be weighted with someone else’s needs. Antonia would lie back on the bed and look at me with a smile of something like disinterest after we had slept together—and I always went back, finding myself at her apartment door in the afternoon, late at night, the earliest hours of the morning, already taking off my coat. She was usually dressed and decorated—in evening gowns, business suits—for whatever events were going on in her own life, events we never discussed.

  There were times of course when I saw her in a less finished state: the rare mornings when she woke after me, looking confused, her face new, ready to firm and take shape. Without makeup h
er eyelids were touchingly naked, her mouth uncertain. Once I saw her in a face mask; she looked vulnerable, like a baby owl. I was intrigued by these glimpses of her but then, in another way, it made me uncomfortable. I knew her better with the gold plate, the mascara, the lace-and-silk underwear, the brilliant hair.

  In the summer Felix and I qualified for the final professional practice exam. The first person I called was Eve, then Theo, who shouted excitedly into the phone that we should celebrate in London.

  “Why not?” I said, so Felix and I met her in a Hoxton bar, a hot box of fog irradiated by tubes of glowing fluorescent color, like a 1980s vision of an electronic dystopia. There were a few celebrities there I recognized, dancing with self-conscious skill, otherwise indistinguishable from the tousled clientele with their clinging jeans and eyeliner. Theo ran over from the bar, her pale arms and face lambent in the gloom, like Ophelia in the dark water.

  “I got paid today,” she cried, handing us a bottle of champagne each. “Congratulations!”

  “How’s the job going?” I asked. Theo had obediently become a “creative assistant” to an advertising executive with the agency that handled the Charis account. After a couple of weeks she appeared to have forgotten about India and sent me a card with a picture of a London skyline on it. Dear Jonathan, I am having a hoot here. Hope you like these buildings. I have enclosed a pen from my company so you can write your reply with it. Then I can read your letter when I have nothing to do at work and it will be company business. All my love (that’s true), Theo.

  “Oh, fine,” Theo said now. “The office has grass indoors. Not real grass.”

  “And your housemate? Do you get on?”

  “Sort of . . . Lucy’s very focused. She won’t go out for drinks. I’m not allowed to smoke in the house and I have to be quiet so she can do her work. I didn’t know why she’d live with me, but then I found out Eve is giving Lucy extra money so we can live in South Kensington. So Lucy is staff really, or a paid spy maybe . . .” She tailed off, as if someone had turned her volume down, and looked at me sidelong.

  “So, I think I’m going to get a place in Westminster now I’m qualified,” I said, to change the subject.

  “You’ll be in London?” Theo asked. “Oh! Why don’t you live with me? Instead of Lucy.”

  “Hardly fair on Lucy,” I said lightly.

  Theo seemed to accept the reasoning of this and agreed that Lucy did not deserve to be cast out of her home so summarily. “Maybe one day, when she moves out herself . . .” she said.

  By the end of the night I was trying to stay awake. Some friend of Theo’s was sitting on my knee and talking piercingly about the art of the liminal. Felix had his hand innocuously up the skirt of another girl, who smiled enigmatically and sipped her drink. Theo had been away dancing for a while, and when she came back I noticed she was behaving strangely; talking faster, gesturing erratically. She stared around at the dance floor, her eyes strangely fixed, pupils open like umbrellas.

  “I think we should call it a night,” I said to her.

  “It’s only three o’ clock,” Theo said. She looked at her watch and giggled. “Look at the hands! It’s like twitching . . . oh, but they’re like spider legs . . . I don’t like it.” Her mouth quivered with distress and she started trying to remove the watch. I took her arm.

  “Come on, Theo. I’ll take you home.”

  “I’ll catch you up,” Felix said when I told him we were leaving, waving with his free hand. I moved Theo through the crowds as she pried at the watch, and finally brought her out into the rainy night, the faint sadness of the collapsed heat of the day. She almost slipped on the damp glimmer of the paving stones, and again when getting into a taxi.

  “Is she alright?” the driver asked, looking at us with hostility. Theo had curled herself into my arm and appeared to be asleep.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Not going to throw up, is she?” he said. “’Cause I’ve done enough cleaning already tonight. These girls . . . drinking too much. They just can’t handle it.”

  Theo’s flat was dark and uninhabited when we got in. She stared at it as if it were an unfamiliar place, so I turned the lights on and shut the open windows that had allowed rain to blow in over the floor.

  “I’ll get you some water,” I said, but she refused to let go of me and started to cry. I stared down at her with concern. Theo was tenuously threaded together even when she was sober; I just didn’t know how to deal with her in this loosened and frail state. I was in a leaky boat myself, unsteady and sick with drink, bailing out the waves of my own nausea.

  “What have you taken?” I asked her, adopting the calm and capable manner of a TV doctor.

  “Taken! Taken away,” she shouted. “We have to stop them.”

  “Well, whatever it is, you need to sleep it off,” I said, half carrying, half marching her to her room and tipping her onto the bed, where she lay looking confused. I drew her curtains and cleared a path through the towers of mugs, books, tissues, and makeup on the table beside her bed, then reached in and switched on the lamp. “I’m going to get you some water.”

  “Don’t leave!” She struggled upright. Her face reminded me of the times when we were young and she would wake up from one of her dreams, sitting up half asleep, her hair sticking to her fiery cheek, eyes bowls of fright. It could have been the same girl but for the makeup trailing over her cheeks like writing, the scent of smoke rising from her rumpled clothes.

  “Stay there. I’ll be one minute. Look, I’ll keep talking so you can still hear me”—I went into the kitchen, calling to her as I went—“Just getting a glass . . . pouring the water . . . coming back now . . .” But when I got back to her room she had gone to sleep. I sat on the armchair in the corner, planning to watch over her for a while, before giving in almost immediately and passing out, letting my grip relax, my eyes close, tumbling gently into the soft ocean.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At the beginning of autumn Maria came back for a few days. She was meeting her father in London at the Dorchester, then going to Llansteffan later that night, she told me on the phone.

  “I can’t come to Wales; I have a meeting I can’t miss,” I said with dismay.

  “Well, meet us for lunch, if you like,” she said. “It’s his birthday; the more the merrier. Though it won’t be very merry, I’m afraid. Otherwise I could meet you for a quick drink before I catch my train?”

  I wasn’t giving up on this couple-like activity. “The Dorchester it is,” I said firmly.

  “Who was that on the phone?” asked Antonia, after I hung up.

  “Maria Dumas . . . she’s a friend of the family.”

  “I remember her from Charlie Tremayne’s party, I think,” Antonia said. “She was a nice girl—beautiful, actually.”

  “I suppose,” I said casually. I was protective of my unrequited feeling for Maria, like a little Fabergé egg with nothing inside. I didn’t want Antonia’s ill will—which could be quite sudden and decisive—identifying this feeling. “If you like that type of look.”

  Antonia looked at me sharply. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Everyone likes that type of look.”

  As I walked to meet Maria I wondered whether I would always do this for her—cancel all my afternoon appointments, get home to shower, put on a scarf (bought for me by Antonia) I thought she might like, rush out to the Dorchester. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help but want her, seeing her turn toward me, wrapped in a dove-colored coat with her hair pinned up, looking even more collected than usual. I couldn’t even identify what it was about her that made her seem so necessary; something in her centrality, her calmness; this mysterious thing she had that I didn’t. But I sensed the value of it, like a thief in possession of a painting by an artist he doesn’t recognize.

  “You look serious today,” she murmured, as we waited for the table.

  “Just thinking about work,” I said. “Sorry.”

  Maria’s father, Sir John Bankbri
dge, was a good-looking man, but side by side there was little in his appearance to remind me of her. Perhaps if he had smiled there would have been a similarity; but all through lunch I never saw it happen. “Eve Anthony’s grandson,” he said when we met, as if I weren’t there and he was telling a friend about me.

  After initial civilities, Sir John got down to what appeared to be his most serious occupation—complaining. He complained about his house, about his shares; he complained about the waiter, to whom he was rude. He still kept a butler, probably for the purpose of complaining about him. He despised the government, the shadow cabinet, the general public, the foreigners. He was, however, pleasant to Maria, with an effort that was painful to watch, gazing at her with his heavy yellow eyes, though he couldn’t help frowning when she said she planned to work with autistic children.

  “What, as a nurse?” he said.

  “No, as a psychologist. I’d like to have my own practice.”

  “Well,” he said, and stared down into his cup. Maria didn’t seem to expect anything more, smiling and changing the subject.

  Before we left he said to me, “I remember your parents’ wedding now. Alicia and Michael Caplin. He seemed solid enough at the time. There really was no way of knowing what a bad business it would be. I heard about the custody fiasco . . . though as I recall nothing was mentioned in the press.” He paused, reflective, then added, “I suppose credit is due to your grandmother for that. A very great lady.”

  After we left we went to a bar I liked in Belgravia, where we could sit alone in a low-lit, silk-lined booth, close and low-voiced over a small table. Maria refused wine, ordering tea instead.