The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  “I’m sorry, that must have been unbelievably boring for you,” she said. “I know it’s selfish of me, but I am glad you came. It imposes limits on the conversation; he’s a little more sociable than usual too, believe it or not.”

  “Nick doesn’t visit him?”

  (I had been at Nick’s new flat in Canary Wharf the previous week, which he had showed me proudly: “It’s crazy how much they let you borrow if you can get self-cert. I see it as an investment—property prices are only going to rise around here. Emily’s going to move in soon, which should finally put a stop to all the arguments we’ve had lately. And once I’m qualified I’ll get into one of the big finance houses.”)

  “No. Which is fair enough, given the way our father’s behaved in the past. I’m guessing that’s the reason anyway . . . Nick doesn’t really talk about it.”

  I had heard too much from Nick on his family’s various failings to entirely agree, but I said, “I don’t blame him. You have to get on with things—you don’t need to let family history affect you. You just put it behind you.”

  She rubbed her temples with her face tilted downward, and for a moment I couldn’t see her expression.

  “So, what’s the important business meeting?” she said when she looked up.

  “Felix and I are starting our own firm,” I told her. “Anthony and Crosse. We hadn’t really thought of going independent so soon, but we’ve been given commissions already. I have to meet Marcus Britton tomorrow to talk about a house he wants to be built. He’s the son of a film producer Eve knew.”

  “That’s a lucky opportunity,” Maria said.

  “Well, not really. The architect he originally hired committed suicide. He needed someone else in a hurry. I suppose it’s an honor that he would trust us, though. He said we could submit any designs we thought might be postmodern enough to make the Times property supplement.

  “Anyway,” I added, “I didn’t know you wanted your own practice. That’s great.”

  She looked at me with amusement.

  “Why great?” she asked.

  “Well, success can never be a bad thing,” I said, shrugging. The bar must have passed some invisible marker between day and evening, because the lights over us dimmed. The booth took on the interior glow of a rose, warmly shadowing our faces. She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward on them.

  “How would you define success?” she asked.

  I thought of Eve—of her world at the top floor of a tower, governed by the laws of profit and acquisition, moving up the gradings of fame like an earthly version of Pilgrim’s Progress: Christian stripping back the past, attaining a state of corporate purity.

  “Your name being known,” I said. “Power . . . money.”

  “Do you want to be powerful?”

  “Well, in society some people will always end up with more power than others,” I said, trying to sound light. “So why not me?”

  Her smile was becoming more indecipherable. “You are very much like Eve,” she said.

  “I do get told that sometimes.”

  She glanced away as the waiter approached, then asked, “So . . . how’s Theo?”

  “Fine,” I said. Actually, I had been avoiding Theo for the last couple of weeks, after the episode at the club. She had called several times, usually late at night, and left some strange messages, but I couldn’t follow these monologues, interpret the smoke and hiss of her chemistry experiments. Yesterday I had absentmindedly answered the phone when she rang, but the line was bad, and I could make out only the outlines of words, delivered in a buzzing clatter. The only thing I heard her say was something that sounded like “take half, and lose half.” Then the connection blanked out, taking her voice with it.

  “I’m glad she wasn’t here today,” I said. “God knows what she would have made of what your father said—about my parents.”

  “I had no idea he even knew them,” Maria said. “I’m sorry if he offended you.”

  “No, not at all,” I said, and laughed. “It was nothing. But Theo gets carried away—she reads too much into that sort of thing.”

  “What happened? With your parents? You never mention it,” Maria said.

  “There’s nothing to say,” I said, not liking the direction of the conversation. I wanted to bring it back to the two of us, excluding everything else—fathers, sisters, Antonia, Olivier. “They divorced, that’s all. Then my father died.”

  “You just put it behind you,” Maria said.

  I realized, as the conversation eddied onward, that her polite friendliness had returned—so polite it bordered on coolness—but late at night in my flat when I thought back over the evening, I couldn’t tell how or when it had happened. The night with her ended as my time with her always did—a brief wave, a postcard smile, already far away.

  I had trouble sleeping that night. In the early hours of the morning I got up and sat at the computer, half working, half browsing aimlessly, ending up typing Eve’s name into a search engine and finding her entry in a newspaper feature on Top Ten Female Politicians.

  Eve Anthony was born in 1937, the daughter of another twentieth-century icon, the archaeologist George Bennett, and the American heiress Louisa Cleveland. She studied economics at Wellesley College before graduating and marrying the Democrat politician Freddie Nicholson, who had recently been elected to Congress as a Representative from California. After Freddie Nicholson’s death in a boating accident, Eve Nicholson was elected to the House of Representatives in 1969 to serve the rest of her late husband’s term.

  As a politician, Eve Nicholson became an early heroine for the rising number of women seeking greater personal and political empowerment in the 1970s. She gave a speech in which she urged women to find their voice and become “more involved in the future of (their) country.” She said, “When women were granted the vote, it was a hard fight. Now women are becoming politicized, it is a hard fight. The next hard fight will be for a woman to become president, and after that happens, people will look back and marvel that it was a fight at all.”

  Nicholson’s popularity and her family’s longstanding friendship with the Kennedys put her on an early master list of Nixon’s enemies. She compounded this by attacking Nixon’s actions in Vietnam in 1972. He had said early on that there was no greater title than that of peacekeeper: Nicholson retorted, “He is a ‘peacekeeper’ who bombed Laos and sent troops into Cambodia. And now he bombs Hanoi. It is dangerous to have a president who gets muddled about what is war and what is peace.” Nicholson’s entry on Nixon’s notorious list—subtitled “screwing our political enemies”—read “High support. Get her on association with Sam Anthony or JFK.” The media seized on the physical disparity between the famously beautiful Congresswoman and the gruff President, dubbing the pair “Beauty and the Beast.”

  Nixon’s administration consequently attempted to deseat Nicholson on charges of tax fraud, which she successfully disproved. A subsequent break-in at her Manhattan house, in which several files and letters were stolen, was found to have been carried out by a Johnny Wymans, who had received payment from the Nixon aide Edward Delores. Nixon denied all knowledge of the affair and Delores was sacked. After this incident Nixon was forced to abandon his pursuit of Nicholson, who emerged from the political battling with public sympathy on her side. “Truth wins out,” she said. “I have always believed that.”

  I shut the computer and went to bed. For some reason reading the article had made me feel more uneasy than before. I wasn’t sure why I had looked it up—almost as the impulse to confirm something, as if to touch land after an unsettling sea journey, but it hadn’t had the desired effect. It took a long time, the light between the blinds striping my face and the traffic noise rising outside, before I could finally sleep.

  After Theo’s strange weeks, as I had begun to think of them, she seemed to go back to—if not exactly normal—at least Theo normal. We met for lunch a few times and she seemed happy; she was technically living with Lucy still
, but spent most nights on the floors and sofas of her carousel of friends, each of whom she expected me to remember. (“Floss, I told you about her . . . she’s got black hair and it used to be red—she’s a DJ, she wants to make a CD of jazz and hip-hop, she’s really nice.”)

  I didn’t ask about the strange weeks, and she didn’t explain them. I put it down to the influence of some past friends, fallen out of rotation. Anoushka, perhaps, who was in Thailand; fat Michael; tattoo-graffitied Carrie. Maybe Floss was a good influence after all; I felt a relieved swell of benevolence toward her.

  Theo had lost her advertising job after she forgot to go to work for a week (“I really did think I’d asked if I could have a holiday,” she said, puzzled) and was working now at a London gallery, though she didn’t seem to be there very often either. She spent a lot of time at my apartment in Westminster.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” I asked her one afternoon, trying to sound trusting.

  “Oh, I hate the underground, tunneling around all the time. It makes me feel like an ant. And there’s not so much for me to do at the gallery, really. They pretend there is, but usually I just do little things, like going to get them sandwiches.”

  “That’s not what you’re paid for, is it?”

  “I don’t really know . . . that’s the thing about these Eve jobs. I don’t go to any interviews or anything. I don’t know what my job title is. Anyway,” she said, “I don’t mind dusting all that much.”

  In the end I stopped questioning her when she arrived, and would just work at my desk while she piled cushions on the floor and lay on them to watch the cookery and gardening channels on television.

  “Why do you like that rubbish?” I said, turning the volume down.

  But I could see why she liked it. It reminded me of when I was very young and used to watch commercials instead of television shows. It was the bright cleanness of that world, the simplicity; where triumph could be found in a soufflé or a flowering border. She watched it with absorption, her hair glowing backlit by the television screen, her eyes the color and clarity of the Atlantic.

  Antonia tended to come to my apartment at different times from Theo, though lately she was visiting less and arguing more, our nights together often devolving into an angry silence. I could feel her impatience with me hovering as if she were waiting for a reason to fight, like a drunk knocking into somebody deliberately hard, pretending it was an accident. But I wasn’t interested in arguing with her; I would walk away, or sit in silence, letting the bad feeling swirl over my turned-down head. The last time I saw her was when we went to a party together, where a woman discreetly gave me her number. When we got back to the apartment Antonia ignored me, and read a magazine rather than come to bed.

  “What’s wrong?” I said finally. “I’m not going to call her.”

  “You obviously encouraged her,” she said. “Not that I particularly mind. It’s just unfair on the woman, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so caring,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  “Also, it looked ridiculous. You flirting with her. It’s beneath you.”

  “Forget about it,” I said shortly. I was starting to feel irritated; her bad mood was blowing in on our uncomplicated night like a coating of dust and grit; I wanted to brush it off. “Are you going to come to bed or not?”

  She was silent for a while, looking at her closed hands in her lap and frowning as if they might suddenly open and show something unexpected. I went to the kitchen and made myself a glass of water, then brushed my teeth. When I went back into the sitting room Antonia stood up, took off her dress, and came over to me, smiling.

  Felix made a sympathetic wince when I told him about it. “You and her—it’s just sex?” he asked. “Is that all she wants? Is that all you want?”

  “It’s always been that way. We’ve never even needed to discuss it.”

  “Okay . . .,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “You must be pretty good in bed, that’s all I can say.”

  When it was working well, I liked my relationship with Antonia. I could enjoy her cinematic sexiness, her showy beauty, without having to fully engage with her life. I didn’t wonder why she wasn’t interested in love: I was grateful for it. I didn’t have the time to be more involved in the few hours left over at the end of the day after the meetings with clients, builders, engineers. More than that—I didn’t feel capable of sustaining someone else’s happiness, rolling it up the slope of the day, over and over, like Sisyphus. There were times now when I felt only partly functional, like the overused music box we used to have when we were small; its Nutcracker Prince turning round and round, then stopping, then turning again. I wondered what happened to the other figure, the little Clara. I vaguely recalled her being snapped off—an accident—after which she must have got lost.

  Sebastian came back from India at the start of winter, after extending his trip for so long that when he told us he was coming home this time, no one believed him. Felix and I then had to rush to arrange a welcome back party for him at a bar. Sebastian was hard to recognize: darker and stiller than before he left, short-haired as a greyhound. He ordered a lot of drinks and drank them efficiently; there was something almost serious about the way he set about it, the way he played his old self for us.

  “If you had to make a TV series, what would it be about?” he asked us. It was the kind of question he had loved when he stayed with us over that summer, and I saw what he wanted, to recapture that heat and light, cup it in his hands like a match.

  Theo clapped her hands, “Animals that can sing.”

  Sebastian said, “I’d call mine Salt and Pepper. It’d be about Dr. Jason Salt, a rural vet who is also a detective, and his assistant, Judy Pepper. It would be really gritty. At the end of the Christmas special, Judy dies. Caught in some farm machinery.”

  “Can it have a singing pig in it?” Theo asked.

  “Yes,” Sebastian said magnanimously. I had noticed he treated Theo with the same half-teasing, half-wary deference as before, looking at her when she wasn’t looking at him, moving to block someone who was about to stumble into her. Theo was oblivious to it, laughing and dancing in the silver bracelets and silk scarf he had bought her.

  I was tired from work and went back to the apartment first. I sat up with a coffee in the wan circle of a lamp, trying to decide whether to call Antonia. In the end I put the phone down and dropped into a concrete, unsatisfying sleep.

  I was woken up at five by Sebastian calling me and knocking on my bedroom door. He was supporting Theo, who lolled in his arms as if asleep. The hair was damp around her face, her eyes only half visible under the drooping lids. Her skin was pale and slick, giving off an unhealthy radiation.

  “I think Theo’s taken too many pills,” he said. He looked frightened. “She was talking earlier but now she’s stopped.”

  Theo looked up when he said this and made us both jump.

  “We need to open the door!” she said, her voice high and compressed in the back of her throat. “The door’s shut. I can’t hear them—what are they saying?”

  “The door’s open,” I said.

  “No . . . that door,” she said, pointing at the blank wall impatiently. “We have to watch the door. They’re talking about the ghost.”

  “You let her take them?” I said angrily to Sebastian. I was trying to get her to sit down on the sofa but she was resisting me; her body went rigid, girdered. I gave up and let her stand, eyeing the wall suspiciously.

  “I didn’t know! Her friends arrived. I didn’t even know where she’d gone. But I’ve never seen anyone like this after a few pills. She must have taken something else—but that’s all they said she had, pills and a bit of weed.”

  “We should take her to the hospital,” I said.

  “No!” Theo shouted. We must have woken up my neighbors; one banged on the wall, the same place Theo had been staring at. She cowered away from the noise.

  “If we do it’ll get i
n the papers,” Sebastian pointed out.

  “Yes.” I thought about Eve. “Shit!”

  “It’s probably acid, and she’ll calm down,” he suggested.

  “What if she gets worse?”

  “Then we should definitely take her to the hospital.”

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Theo moaned. “I don’t want to get taken away, I don’t want to end up there. I can’t shut my eyes.”

  “Then you’d better calm down,” I said to her sharply.

  The words seemed to have a sudden effect on her; she sat down and stopped talking. Sebastian brought her water and we made her stay sitting upright, watching the television, which she insisted on switching to the gardening channel. We all stayed up that way, watching a woman dashing about an uncanny, bluish lawn talking about bamboo, until the morning burned through the curtains and Theo started looking more lucid.

  “It’s half past nine. I’m going to bed,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my cold hands. I didn’t know if I could even sleep now: left tired but alert, burning with an unearthly brightness.

  “I’m sorry,” Theo said, starting to cry. “I didn’t mean to be any trouble.”

  “I didn’t say anything before, but you have to stop the drugs now, Theo.” I was stern. “You can’t handle them. You always go too far with everything. Promise me you won’t do them anymore.”

  “I promise,” Theo said quickly.

  “Good,” I said, getting up. I left her with Sebastian, her blackened cheek resting on his shoulder, his hand stroking her damp hair. I went to bed and lay there with my eyes closed, waiting for the slow fog of sleep to roll down over me, but as it drew in, my thoughts were someone else’s thoughts—Theo’s—fitting wrong like old clothes, uneasy and familiar. The last of these was a memory of the secret pool at Evendon, its water thick like heavy metal, shivering under the low night wind.

  After Theo and Sebastian left the next morning, I couldn’t concentrate on the work I had to do, so I switched on the television and couldn’t concentrate on that either. I wondered whether I should make myself a drink, but halfway to the store to buy something strong, I was reminded of Alicia and turned back. By the time I got back to the flat a crow-colored dark had dropped unceremoniously down over London, met with the yellow of the street lights, the white glare of the shops. I switched the lights on in my flat and was surprised how strange my hands looked; bluish pale, roaming restlessly over the computer keyboard when I tried to start my work.