“How cold you are,” she said quietly, and began to say something else, then stopped. She turned her face away and walked out, and I stood with my hand on the door, until I realized that there was no point standing there, and went back inside.
The Britton House, designed by me and Felix, was entered for a RIBA Award in 2007. The house was all in white, resembling a basic staircase when viewed from the side. At the front of the building another staircase ascended up a glass wall to a door that floated in the glass like an image from Alice in Wonderland. Britton had already broken his nose tripping over the threshold, but insisted he was delighted with it. “I got a double spread. Look! We got a double spread. Well-done, boys.”
I had just started work on a new project: a house made to look like a simple block of white stone, with a black roof tilted like a top hat. It was trimmed all around with a ribbon of window, below which the walls were black granite. I had designed it myself, aiming for a striking, discrete strictness of border. No element merged, nothing was compromised. (After seeing the plans the client had called it the Humbug House, a name that irritated me, especially when it caught on at my office.)
I had expected to find something to push against in my career, but I had slipped smoothly up to the top like a salmon, with a few lucky leaps. My name did not often appear in the press without the word wunderkind attached to it. I worked hard without needing to think or motivate myself; the hard thing was to stop working. When I said it to Eve she laughed and said that was my most valuable inheritance.
And yet . . . I didn’t tell her about the bad days, the afternoons where I would be in my office and I would feel I was only half sitting at my desk, my hand only half moving. Sometimes I had the urge to call Theo and ask her what she thought of my designs, though I knew already she found them baffling. (I could picture her in my office—frowning, mouth loose, twisting her hair—while she tried to think of something appropriate to say.)
I was finding it harder to concentrate on the future, which had previously seemed so exciting: my work spearing the skyline, slicing the tired streets with chromeful purpose. I looked outside, where the clouds of London had hung a cool glaze over the city. I was worried there was a weakness in me, something that would stop me. Eve was here, fifty years ago, untarnished and intent, and now look, a Charis in Belgravia, a Charis in Bloomsbury, Marylebone, Soho. She saw the disassociated grays outside and saw a city to win. I looked out and I saw rain over the sea, the stone of a broken nymph, the blink of a far-off window.
Sometimes I wondered about going away for a while, staying somewhere remote, though I wasn’t sure how that would help. I didn’t want to find myself—I already knew what myself was. I could be no one other than Jonathan Anthony, sitting in my London tower, working on greatness.
During a weekend at Evendon (these family gatherings had become rarer, but I still drove myself and a reluctant Theo to Wales every few months), Eve was reading through the papers that she had brought to her at the breakfast table. While she was rustling through one—a tabloid—she stopped, frowned, and opened it out to read. Her fingers moved reflexively across to her mobile phone, then put it down. Upside-down across the table I could read the headline—“New Light Shed on President’s Murder”—and see two pictures, one of Eve and Sam Anthony on their wedding day, and a large picture of Eve in a ball gown, talking to JFK.
Eve turned the page to finish the article—the remains of the frown still on her face—then flipped back and began to read it through again. I looked over at Theo, but she was winding her hair in one hand and buttering toast with the other, and hadn’t noticed the silence building next to her. Watching Theo, I noticed she had developed a habit of looking up suddenly, as if someone had said something, someone not even at the table but beyond it. A new tic for the collection. Alicia was staring off out the window. I decided to pretend to read a supplement. None of us spoke to Eve, who closed the newspaper and sat still, appearing to be in impenetrable thought.
“Well,” she said after a few minutes, “I’m terribly sorry but I must rush off. I have a few appointments to reschedule.”
“Appointments,” said Theo suddenly, “it sounds funny because it divides into a and point and meant. Like, a point is meant. But what’s the point? You could make a cracker joke out of it, maybe.”
“That’s enough, Theo,” Eve snapped, picking up her phone and leaving the room. There was a brief silence. Theo looked confused. Alicia was still gazing out the window. Just then I felt a black admiration for Alicia: she had managed over time to remove herself so completely from her body, there was something almost spiritual in her disappearance. When Eve spoke, she didn’t even blink. She just looked out into the garden, her mermaid face pale and unearthly in the towering light.
As soon as Eve had left the house, her heels rapping the marble in the hall with the sharp sound of ice cracking, I reached across the table for the paper and found the same page.
. . . But under the glamour and charisma of the Democrat elite there lurked more than a few sordid secrets. No one looking at the beautiful Eve Nicholson, newly married to the promising young politician Freddie Nicholson, laughing with the gentlemanly JFK in 1961, would have suspected that the two were having an explosive affair. Yet that is precisely what Johnny Wymans, imprisoned for stealing letters and documents from Eve Anthony’s home and one of the only men to see these letters before they were confiscated by the FBI, has alleged.
“What are you reading?” Theo asked.
“Something bad.”
I scanned the rest.
Eve Anthony’s career has always been driven by unusual coincidences and unlikely twists—damaging information on her political rivals had a habit of emerging at very convenient times. Some might say she was born under a lucky star—others might point at her longtime associate and eventual husband, Sam Anthony. The head of the film studio SA, Sam Anthony not only had connections with prominent mafiosi but was one of the last people to see Marilyn Monroe before her mysterious death in 1962. . . . When Eve Nicholson left politics to move to Los Angeles in 1976 and marry Sam Anthony, their wedding was attended by celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, and Elizabeth Taylor, to name but a few. Less photo-friendly attendees included Paul Castellano and other members of the notorious Gambino crime family. . . .
Among the allegations the article approached then shied coquettishly away from was that the Anthonys’ marriage was a mutually beneficial sham, a structure intended only to protect their secrets. It hinted that Freddie Nicholson, as a friend of Sam’s, may have wittingly or unwittingly become a target for a Mafia hit. Freddie’s underwater bones being unavailable for comment, the article quoted Wymans heavily, photographing him at his shabby L.A. split-level house, a man like a worn-out old iguana, squinting defensively in the sun.
Theo picked up the paper after me and read it. “Do you think Eve will be angry?” she asked.
Eve was angry. I didn’t see much of her in the days following the article, but I saw the evidence of her movements: the sacking of the journalist, the legal action, the printed apology, the broadsheet editorial sighing at the standards of lower forms of publication. (Wymans himself was not heard from again and died not long after: he had sold the story to cover his medical bills, paying off a greedy disease that could not, finally, be satisfied with money.)
Sam himself called Evendon later that day, after Eve had left. I took the call.
“What a disgrace,” he said, a voluminous American voice yawling out of the telephone. “What a load of bullshit. I know she can deal with this herself but I had ta call. What a disgrace.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. “Thank you.”
“Anyways, this gets me thinking. Why not come over for a visit. All of ya. Eve, the kids, the grandkids. Get the family together.”
I responded vaguely to this suggestion. Eve had explained their divorce to me: “We realized we had become nothing more than friends. And we still are. Sam was always very
good like that. A very civilized man.”
Civilized as Sam was, and friendly as the two were, I suspected that if Eve hadn’t visited him since their divorce she would be unlikely to visit now. But I was curious to see him for myself. Not because of the claims made about him in the article—which I had found almost disappointingly predictable—but because of an older fascination with him; the invisible sender of presents, the cigar-smoking tycoon I had pictured since I was little, a big Italian in a suit with a gold watch and a blonde on each arm. He was the only person in Eve’s stories who still had an existence independent from those stories, and that made him interesting to me. And in a few weeks I was meant to go to Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of designing an office block for a U.S. developer. I decided I’d go to see Sam while I was there.
I called Eve to tell her about the trip, but she said she was too busy. “It’s sweet of him, I suppose, but I can’t just go out there on his whim, darling. In any case, I’m not sure it would be appropriate so soon after that muckraking article. It might look as if we were plotting.” Alicia was at her spa, and I didn’t know Alex’s number. In any case, I didn’t think either of them would have wanted to come with me. Alicia had no interest at all in Sam, which in itself wasn’t unusual. Sometimes, however, I thought I detected a distinctive will in the lack of interest, as if the cool fog of her detachment had cleared, revealing the unexpected stone of the mountain face beyond it.
Alex had been more forthcoming and not so quellingly hostile as Alicia when it came to his onetime stepfather. In one of the rare times when he wasn’t estranged from us he had told me that he and Alicia barely knew Sam when they were young, being at boarding school for the majority of Eve’s marriage to him. “And besides, you have to understand that he was only our stepfather because we were part of the deal. Though he was kind enough. A shady character, doubtless, but a decent stepfather.” Alex and Sam hadn’t kept in touch: “What on earth would we talk about?” he asked rhetorically, with his hurried laugh. (When Alex laughed, it was always quickly, as if the sound was rushing to free itself, worried it might be recaptured.)
I called Theo to invite her, but she couldn’t come either. “My new job won’t let me,” she explained sadly.
“What is this job?” I asked, relieved to hear that she had one.
“Oh, putting numbers into a computer. It’s okay. If I get the numbers wrong no one seems to notice. Sometimes I wonder if they’ve just made up the numbers to give me something to do. Eve probably posts them sheets of numbers, and money to pay me. The numbers could be anything at all. But I get money, which I suppose is the point, so that my money becomes rent and food and clothes, and then my money becomes someone else’s money and they buy more houses and food and clothes. . . . They said I was practically part-time and I’m not allowed to take any more holiday.”
“Okay,” I said, not really listening. “I’ll send your love.”
“Do you want to come to a protest tomorrow?” she asked. “It’s for human rights.”
“That sounds pretty vague.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know exactly what it’s about. But it’s this Chinese company, I think, and they’ve been really mean to people in China, and now there’s going to be a protest outside their offices here. All my friends are going.”
“Jesus Christ, not that protest,” I said. “That’s the firm that’s going to be the tenant of this office block I’m hoping to design in America.”
“Oh no!” Theo cried. “What are you going to do? Are you going to tell them you don’t want them to be your tenant?”
“It doesn’t work like that. I can’t do that. Besides, nothing’s been proven about what Tang Beijing has actually done.”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone, which I began to argue with. “Listen, I’m not supporting this firm. I don’t work for them. I don’t deal with them directly. My link to them is probably more tenuous than most of the people who’ve bought things from the shops they own here. You’ve probably bought their products yourself! Your money has become their money.”
“Oh dear . . . so, I ought to go to the protest, to make up for it,” Theo said uncertainly. “Right?”
“No! These things always get out of hand. You should stay out of it.”
“But people should know you don’t have a link to them. . . .”
“Don’t worry about me, Theo, for God’s sake. Okay?”
“Okay,” Theo said, sounding confused.
The next evening I put on the news and there she was, standing in front of people rushing one way and then the other, like litter moved by an invisible tide of shouting and security alarms. Theo looked with a wondering wariness at the camera that homed shakily in on her face. Her eyes were larger than usual, the pupils fiery dark. She had a peace sign drawn on her cheek and what appeared to be either blood or red paint on her arm. For a moment I thought the broadcast was live until I realized the sky over her was the pale, luminous gray of the afternoon.
“Would you say this protest has been compromised by the criminal damage that has occurred?” a reporter shouted at her.
“Oh no,” I said. Images were relayed on the screen: broken windows, cowled teens, police like the palings of a dark blue fence, before Theo’s face reappeared, hesitating. I could see a couple of her friends standing behind her, one of whom I recognized as her disorganized dealer, clown-haired, waving vacantly at the camera and mouthing something.
“I’m just trying to make up for the things I might have bought,” Theo shouted earnestly. “It’s a conspiracy. A conspiracy of buying things.”
“A conspiracy?” the reporter asked.
“It was only a CD,” Theo said. “They wouldn’t let me return it! Because they’re using the money to kill people!”
The camera moved closer in to Theo’s passionate face, as I covered my own face with my hands. She continued, “You mustn’t blame Jonathan for this! He doesn’t have anything to do with it. He doesn’t want a bad company in his office! He doesn’t want to be in the conspiracy and neither do I. . . .”
At this point everyone’s attention was caught by a protestor in the background pissing on a police car and Theo wandered off-camera.
“They don’t know it’s me,” I said into my hands.
“Now back to the studio,” I heard from the television, the squeal and roar of the protest abruptly gone, as if someone had closed a window. I took my hands away. A woman in an electric-blue suit and the makeup of a prostitute and a man with tan-color hair and a tan-color face were now discussing the protest with the enjoyment of people granted a break from genuine atrocity and disaster. On the screen behind them a man was dancing naked in front of a wall of police shields.
“So that was Theo Anthony, the granddaughter of the hotel tycoon and former U.S. politician Eve Anthony. She is of course referring to her brother, the architect Jonathan Anthony, whose firm is currently bidding for the contract to design Tang Tower in Los Angeles.”
“What are the implications of this?” the tanned character asked with mock perplexity.
“Without an official statement from Anthony and Crosse, we can only speculate—”
I switched the television off, allowing the silence to flood me, the relief of the dark screen, but the little knot of anger and fright in my stomach was untying itself, loose ends extending into my arms to my curled fingers, down my legs to my retracted toes. Then the phone rang and I burst out of the chair like a torsion spring.
“Jonathan?” Theo’s voice sounded very tiny in the wide, blank background of the call. “I’m at the police station. Can you come and get me?”
Theo emerged from the police station looking like a moth in a denim jacket, crushed in the building’s brutalist concrete, her chemical shimmer worn away. She hadn’t been charged with anything but was warned by a grimly avuncular policeman to take more care with the company she kept. She hadn’t wanted to call me, either, but they thought it was better that she be taken ho
me rather than let fly on the breeze, as if she were a little feather or parasoled dandelion seed, incapable of getting on a bus.
“I told you not to go,” I said when we were inside the car.
“I know, I just thought that maybe I could make things better, and . . .”
“What the hell did you take anyway? I thought you were off drugs.”
“I didn’t take anything.” Her eyes widened, as if surprised that I’d asked.
“Come on, Theo, I saw that loser dealer friend of yours behind you. And if you weren’t taking anything, then what you said was just insane. It was nonsense. And you named me! Do you even have any idea what the consequences of your celebrity guest appearance on the news will be?”
Theo bowed her head, and the dimmed blue light in her eyes quivered and spilled out. I was too angry to comfort her.
“So what was it—drugs or madness?” I demanded, but she just shook her head fiercely, and I couldn’t say anything else: her lie had separated us, suspended darkly in the air. She was traveling down a path away from me and I couldn’t follow; I just sat there inert while she sobbed, wiping her eyes with her coat sleeve, my own eyes full of dust and rubble.
Sam lived in a pink Spanish mansion with palms outside and a security guard at the gate who looked at me without taking off his mirrored sunglasses. It was hot there, hot and empty; the sky a slow blue burn above the scruffy, bare hills. A maid opened the door to show me into the sudden coolness; the great distance of glittering tiled floor, occupied by a white carpeted staircase, white leather sofas and tall glass sculptures, then more palms, so the overall effect was of an ice palace that someone had tried to enliven with greenery.
When Sam came in I was surprised to see that he was in a wheelchair, though he was still tanned and fat as a seal. His almost bald head had the full sheen of a nut, his eyes small and shinily opaque. He made an involuntary noise of effort when he reached up a small, manicured hand for me to shake.
The Other Half of Me Page 19
