What was the time in France? Maria would be at home now, in her apartment, making coffee, enjoying the lag time of Sunday. I hesitated, then called her.
“Jonathan, hi!” she exclaimed when she picked up. I could hear music in the background, people talking. Someone gave a short, harsh laugh, like a magpie call. “This is a surprise. How are you?”
“Sorry—is this a bad time? Are you busy?” I asked.
“What? Oh no, no, it’s fine.”
“I was just calling to, ah . . . well, because I might be in Paris on business soon. That’s why I was calling.”
“What business?” she asked. “Are you designing something here? How exciting!”
“It’s not definite yet—I won’t tell you about it now, but I’ll call back another time and, yes, hopefully if it works out then I can visit,” I said, trying to end the conversation before my lie became too complicated.
The noise on the end of the line dimmed, as if Maria had left the room. “Jonathan, is something wrong?” she asked. “You don’t sound like your usual self.”
“No, nothing’s wrong. I do have a cold.”
“Oh, no, I’m sorry. . . . Poor old you.”
There was a pause, and then she said, “Well, let me know if you’re coming to France, anyway. That would be lovely.” And we said good-bye and hung up, and I went back to staring at my work, and wondering if there was any way I could get a commission in France, and feeling worse—more dissatisfied—than before I had called her.
Eve, who had been in America for the past month, called to say she was home and to invite me and Theo back to Evendon for the weekend.
“Just family,” she said, by which I understood it would be the four of us. Alex’s attendance at family events had abruptly ended, after an argument with Eve earlier in the year. I had been there; sitting in the gold parlor with a dozing Alicia, overhearing Alex’s raised voice, passing the door and ringing up into the heights of the hall, magnified like a choirboy’s.
“No you didn’t,” he said angrily. “Let’s tell the truth for once!”
Eve’s voice was too quiet to hear. There was a pause. Then he said, “Yes. But it’s because of you. And you’re going to do the same to them.” The door slammed, and that was the last I had seen of Alex. Eve didn’t mention him, and there was a general understanding that there would be no reconciliation this time. I didn’t mention the argument I heard, out of a vague feeling that it was better not to have Alex around anyway. I sensed in his shy rancor a kind of aggression: his anger toward Eve could do harm to our family, arranged like delicately balanced chess pieces, unmoving so long as nobody touched them, fixed in the strange, lovely peace of Evendon.
Theo and I drove to Wales late at night, so late that everyone would have gone to bed by the time we arrived. I was annoyed with Theo—I had arrived at her apartment to collect her and found her noisily asleep, with a cat’s nose and whiskers drawn on her face in eyeliner and battlements of wine bottles surrounding her bed. In an ashtray next to her head a cigarette had become a strip of ash. I shook her awake and found some clothes for her to pack.
“Sorry, Jonathan,” she murmured, trying to focus on me. “I had to go out last night. I had to say good-bye to Sebastian.”
Sebastian was going to India again to teach, which had upset Theo. She didn’t understand why he had come home, stayed only for the weeks it took to finish his PhD, and promptly started making arrangements to leave again. She took it personally—trying to be a better friend, making him pictures and buying him little presents; as if Sebastian were a sort of errant pet that could be tamed with treats. But I could see it was Theo’s friendship itself that pained him: he had to protect himself from England, the place where he wasn’t loved.
“Maybe I could go with him,” she said hopefully once we were in the car. “Maybe Eve will see it’s not one of ‘my fads’ this time and lend me the money. Or you could lend me the money?”
“Sorry, Theo, but I’m not getting into subprime lending. You owe me enough money already. Besides, you have a job here,” I said.
“Oh, I can’t work at the gallery anymore.”
“Why not?”
“They sort of sacked me. They said my sales style was ‘unusual’ and they didn’t like it that I didn’t work all the time. But there really wasn’t much for me to do so some days I just went home. So they called Eve and said I couldn’t stay. I guess she’ll find me something else. . . .” Theo fiddled thoughtfully with her cigarette lighter. “I think it makes her happy when I’m doing something.”
“That’s not really the point, Theo,” I said.
“The gallery was quite strange really,” Theo said. “I asked them how they can decide how much art should cost. They said it costs as much as people are prepared to pay. Then someone came in to buy a painting and it didn’t have a price on it, so I asked them what they were prepared to pay and so I just charged them that. Then I got in trouble.”
I started to laugh.
“I think all art should be free anyway,” Theo said, leaning her head back and yawning. “Don’t you think that?”
“Sure,” I said. “So long as we’re not counting what I do as art.”
“Oh no,” she said, which made me smile, but her eyes had already closed. She slept for the rest of the journey, as the indistinct road slipped past us with its punctuation of lights, the signs counting down the stops pasted against the darkness, the narrowing and narrowing of the motorway, until finally we were on the black track to Evendon, shrouded all around with trees.
The house was dark and silent when we went inside; with a single light burning at the entrance like a will-o’-the-wisp. I passed through the twin pillars and went up the stairs, feeling the cool air settle over me, the familiar scent of the house. I didn’t turn any lights on: I could see my outline in the shivering light from the windows, my feet knew how many steps they needed to take. Both Theo and I walked to our bedrooms like somnambulists, reentering the familiar tracks of our dreams.
After lunch the next day I spent a few hours talking to Eve, while Theo went to the local pub with a couple of the maids.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea?” Eve asked me. “They are employees, after all.”
“I told her that. I think she wanted to go to the village more than anything else.”
Eve shook her head. “It baffles me that your sister would want to go and sit in that place listening to local gossip.”
“Maybe she’ll hear something about our family,” I joked, but she frowned. There was a pause. I was reminded obscurely of that day by the reservoir several years ago; Theo’s faltering story about our father, the oystery, cold smell of the water. I had the same feeling of queasy, nervy unsettlement now, noticing my leg twitching, my fingers slipping on the handle of my teacup.
“Speaking of that,” I said, putting the cup down, “I saw Maria’s father a couple of months ago. He made a reference to Alicia’s wedding.”
Eve looked surprised, her eyebrows rising upward like stage curtains, so that her eyes stood alone in full force, black on white in black. “I had forgotten he was there,” she said lightly. “What did he say?”
“He said something about it being a bad business.”
“Your father’s death?”
“No . . . the marriage. He didn’t know that he was dead.”
“How peculiar,” Eve said. She watched me curiously, eyebrows still hovering, as if to say, Well?
“He mentioned a custody issue,” I said, almost unwillingly. I hadn’t intended to bring up the subject, but like a broken tooth, I couldn’t help but pry at it; find out the extent of the damage.
“Darling,” Eve said, “your parents’ marriage wasn’t a very happy one. Do you really want to hear the details?”
There was something in her look of set calmness, her straightened mouth, that unsettled me, as if I were edging close to disapproval. I felt the cool boundary of it, like stepping into water; the first shock on the
skin.
“Give me a précis,” I said.
Eve paused, then said, “The marriage barely lasted a year. I’m sorry to say that Michael was a troubled man: depressed, angry, drinking too much. He never managed to emerge from his past, really. He was an adopted son and his parents had died. He met your mother at a bar when she was on holiday. I was concerned about his motivation, but he seemed pleasant and had a career of sorts as a photographer—and by then it had become clear that Alicia had no grand ideas of her own. They certainly were happy at first.”
“So what happened after that?” I asked.
Eve looked questioningly into her teacup, as if she were a Gypsy deciphering its dregs. “The divorce wasn’t amicable. After he left, your father tried to get full custody of you and Theo, accusing Alicia of not being a fit parent, in which I suppose he had a point, but then neither was he. He probably realized that in the end, which is why he dropped the suit. I made it clear that he could see you both at any time, but it seemed only full custody would satisfy him. After that he simply vanished. That was the last any of us heard from him, until the news of his death in Australia. An accident at a junction, apparently.”
“What a shit,” I said. “He obviously just wanted the money for our care.”
“I’m sorry, Jonathan,” Eve said. “I had wanted to spare you and Theo these details. I don’t know the whole story, of course. I don’t want to jump to conclusions about money, although of course he would have stood to benefit financially. . . .”
I nodded, already tired of the subject. My curiosity had sparked and died like an old lighter, halfheartedly tested. The nerviness had withdrawn from my legs and fingers, as if it had never been there at all. Hearing about my father was like hearing about a stranger; it had no more relevance to me than one of Mrs. Williams’s monologues.
“Oh,” I said. “It all sounds rather . . . pointless.”
“In a selfish way there has been a silver lining for me,” Eve said. “I was very busy politically when Alex and Alicia were growing up, and I was busy with the hotels when you and Theo were small. Your mother’s ‘crisis’”—she pronounced it with the delicacy of a Victorian lady picking up a dead mouse—“was of course terrible, but it finally brought me home. Once I was here and I got to know you two, I realized that I could play a role in your upbringing. It was my second chance at parenting, in a way.”
“Well, I’m glad we have you,” I said. She smiled at me, affectionate again, as if her magnetic field had dimmed briefly before returning to full power.
“I remember when I saw you in the hall for the first time, looking so solemn but at the same time calm and collected—even though you were only eight and your mother had been taken away. I saw myself in you—the way you had to learn self-sufficiency so early. And since then I’ve often marveled at how alike we are.”
“That’s a huge compliment to me,” I said, moved. “Though I’m not sure I can do the comparison justice.”
“Rubbish,” Eve cried. Then, becoming serious again, she leaned toward me, eyes moving over my face investigatively. “Anyway, I’m sorry I don’t have anything better to tell you about your father. I hope you won’t dwell on it, though, Jonathan. I’ve never seen the point of brooding over one’s ‘roots.’ It’s really just a refusal to let go of what is gone. What good can the past do the living?”
“I feel the same,” I said quickly, and she smiled at me, but darkly, muffled like a finger pressed in damp velveted moss—it was only an indenture—there appeared the shape of the other question, which I didn’t ask. What harm? What harm can the past do the living?
I waited until evening for Theo to get back from the pub, sitting in the morning room half-reading a paper, with the lamps shimmering around me and a scrabbling sound at the black window from some overhanging clematis. I kept sliding into a doze, then starting and glancing up at the tapping sound, before dozing again.
Finally I heard her crossing the marble of the hall, her footsteps small and echoing like a child’s in a goblin cave.
“Theo?” I called.
She peered around the door and then smiled with relief and came in. She smelled of alcohol and the after-odor of cigarettes, but her eyes were lucid, her face flushed with the cold. She sat next to me and put her head on my shoulder.
“Why are you still awake, Jonathan?”
“I was just reading the paper,” I said. “Fun night?”
“It was the funnest,” she said, and repeated a joke the barman had told them, forgetting the punch line. “Oh dear! I’ll remember it in a minute.”
“I think I’ve heard it anyway.”
Theo sighed, already thinking of something else. “Remember when we used to go to that secret pool?” she asked. “And Mrs. Williams told us it was haunted?”
“I guess that was a good way of stopping us playing there—scaring the shit out of you. She knew you were frightened of ghosts. She probably made the whole thing up about Eve falling in too.”
“No, I asked Eve about it and she did fall in,” Theo said. “She said she couldn’t remember it very well. She said she was probably playing hide-and-seek there—hiding from George. Then she slipped in and nearly drowned.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing we stopped playing there,” I said, amused. “Hooray for Mrs. Williams after all.”
“Yes,” said Theo, “I still don’t like it there. The trees are so dark down there. So close.”
I looked out the window, where the gardens were vaguely visible. Elongated shadows stretched out from the dim shapes of trees over the lawns, as if the black towers of the sky had begun to crumble down; the shadows where they landed like holes, swallowing up the grass.
“Cheer up,” I said, noticing how somber Theo had become, and patted her hair. I didn’t know why she did this, always reaching for the wrong or absent past, defocusing in sudden reveries, to find herself back in her old bedroom, at a children’s party in her white dress, under a dining table peering out at a theater of legs. No wonder she couldn’t concentrate.
“It’s late,” I told her, standing up. “We should get some sleep.”
But when I went to bed I found I couldn’t shake off the grayness of her mood, the unsettlement. Her shiver clung to me, and I dreamt strange things. I remembered pieces of it like a sunk ship seen through dark water. The staircase in front of me, vanishing away under my feet. Phantom light, shining through the bedroom door, as if the rest of the house was awake. Maria’s father’s face, saying, “a bad business,” his hands knotted and old around a small glass of port. I stared at the hands, which looked monstrous to me. Finally Eve was there, standing below me with her shadow pouring away from her on the flagstones.
I woke up sweating, with my sheets knotted around my legs like a kraken. I was clutching the pillow over my head and it took me a moment to realize what was over my face, and another moment to relax my arms and hands, to stop holding on so tightly.
When I slept again I dreamt of Maria, but it was not a nice dream. She was standing on the deck of a ship that was moving away from me. Her lips moved and she smiled, but there was no sound except the churn of water and the whipping of the air. She became bluish, cold, and faint, and finally was lost in the haze between the sea and the sky, the vanishing point.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Over the winter months, while Christmas blared and bullied its glittering way around the shops and streets, Antonia grew cooler and quieter. Her wit, which had always been mocking, wasn’t so subtle these days; she couldn’t hide its metal, its jab of annoyance. Sometimes she didn’t meet me, or would forget to call me. She flirted with other people in front of me, mouth set, implacable as a soldier’s. I remembered when we would spend hours in bed having sex, and afterward she would tell me stories about people we knew, to make me laugh. I realized she had been happy then, incandescent and weightless, and that this had gone. I didn’t know why things had changed. I hadn’t changed, but it seemed her time with me had gradually weighted her
down, turned her hard and still like sedimentary rock, a shape pressed under the seabed.
I didn’t know what I felt about the prospect of our breaking up. The term breakup implied some sort of cohesion to begin with, a structure that could be demolished, and our relationship had never been structural. That’s what I said to Felix, anyway. To myself I admitted that the concept of a breakup with Antonia—its finality—had a guilty allure; open like the sea, empty in the dark . . . and then the small light, high on the edge of the land. I wanted to see what Maria would say when she asked, “How’s your girlfriend?” and I could confide in a grave voice, “Oh, we’re not together anymore.”
And yet, though I had expected it to happen for several weeks, during many arguments, the breakup itself when it came was unexpected, and oddly jarring. It happened at the end of an argument I thought was run-of-the-mill, having been lulled by our previous arguments into thinking I knew the shape of them by now.
But then she said, with a jerk of her mouth, “I’m seeing someone else, you know. I have been for a while.” She faced me tensely, looking uncertain and victorious.
I had guessed this but said, “Oh,” not wanting to stir her into a fight. I could see the end of us, new and glowing like molten glass: I wanted to take the heat away from it, allow it to cool and set, into its new form.
“Well, good luck to you both,” I said politely. “I assume—as you’re telling me—that you two are getting together.”
She took a step back. Her eyes, dark and wet, had no expression I had seen before. The light on them was trembling and angry. I was shocked by her tears; her lips, which had become brighter and redder, like crumpled, poppy petals.
The Other Half of Me Page 18
