The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  “So . . . I have a proposal for you,” Eve said, leaning forward. “How would you like to design a new hotel? In Edinburgh. It would be very high-profile.”

  “A new-build?” I asked. “Is Charis doing that now?”

  “Not Charis. Mensson; it’s a boutique hotel chain. We bought them out six months ago; boutique hotels are growing incredibly fast right now and it’s a very interesting concept. The hotels themselves are so striking, very space-age. I thought instantly that it might be the kind of thing that would appeal to you.”

  “It does,” I said with wonder. “But I’m in legal wrangles with that bloody German restaurateur. The contract had no clauses to cover one of us being sentenced to prison.”

  “Oh, you should have told me. We’ll get a team on that,” Eve said cheerfully. “How soon can you design something?”

  “I’d start now,” I said. I already knew what I wanted to do.

  “You’d have almost free rein,” Eve said. “There are a few issues with the local heritage organizations, but we’ll get them ironed out. Why don’t you come to Scotland for some very early-stage discussions?”

  We shook hands ironically and I opened a bottle of wine.

  “You know, Jonathan, the idea of passing on anything other than money to my descendants really hadn’t seemed a possibility to me before I met you,” she said. “But even as a child you were so hardworking, already knowing what you wanted to do. And over the years I’ve been so proud of what you’ve achieved. I’ll be even prouder to announce that we’ll be working together.”

  She put her hand on mine briefly; gave one of her smiles, so bright I felt the moment of its impact, pinned over my heart like an award.

  “It means a lot to me,” I said. “I hope I don’t give you any cause for disappointment.”

  “Never,” Eve said. (Though afterward I wondered at the missing words: whether she had meant “I never could be disappointed in you” or “you could never disappoint me,” or even a command, “never disappoint me.”)

  Later on I asked, “So how’s Theo doing?”

  Eve sighed and hesitated for a moment before speaking, as if unsure how to approach the subject.

  “Well, I’ve been away most of the time she’s been at Evendon—except for a couple of days—so I don’t really know,” she said slowly. “But she can be strange sometimes—the things she says. I think it’s a form of attention seeking. She sits up late at night, and is listless in the day. I don’t understand what’s wrong with her. She socializes not only with the maids, but with the most undesirable sort of locals.”

  “I heard about the Wendell thing,” I said. Wendell was a drunk farmer who owned a few weedy acres near Evendon. Recently some vandals had broken his windows, so Theo had given him all the money she had to replace them.

  “Oh, that’s just the tip of the iceberg—there are people lining up to take advantage of Theo’s . . . good nature,” Eve said. “I’ve had to stop giving her money, because she either gives it to these parasitical new friends, or whatever charity manages to beard her on the street. Whales and beggars! I simply don’t know what to do with her.”

  She looked down, and with her eyes off me I noticed her age appear; a quick specter over her lustrous face, a loosening of the skin under her eyes, a slide at the corners of her mouth. It was unsettling. But when she looked up the effect was gone, and she was herself again. She saw my expression and said, “Oh, I don’t mean to worry you, Jonathan. It’s nothing serious.”

  I wondered then if I had done the right thing, sending Theo back to Evendon. I felt suddenly that she and Eve were too different to be pushed together, like an ice cube and a match. Or scissors, paper, stone—though that didn’t quite work. Unless there was one for each of us; Theo the paper, Eve the scissors. I contemplated stone—the insensibility of it—solid, silent, achieving only the fact of its own stoniness. Jonathan the stone.

  I realized that Eve was talking about Mensson again and I hadn’t been listening. I was frustrated at myself—the currents of thought that I couldn’t help drifting down, more and more these days. Eve thought I was the same as her—clean and quick and strong—she couldn’t see this new fault in me, the wonderingness, the intimation of wrongness. I wanted her certainty; I didn’t want to be outside it with the rest of my family, wheeling unpredictable and fragile as moths, governed by their own winking neon, their mysterious signals. I wanted to go Eve’s way—no doubt, no fright, just a trajectory, straight into the future.

  The day before I was due to fly to Edinburgh I got a letter from Theo. The envelope was wrapped in so much Scotch tape it was almost unbendable. I had to cut it open with a knife. When I opened it I could barely make out the words, her writing scrawling and billowing over the paper like lightning.

  Dear Jonathan,

  Do you remember us ever having a camera, like normal people do? All we have in that album are photos by people who never knew us. There are ones of us all on the lawn and me and you sitting at the front. None of our father. It is hot outside and I can smell the roses. They smell of fakeness—I can’t change the fakeness and it’s all true now anyway.

  Who cares what I do? If I go out or if I get lost or if I tell people about the ghost, even. We have a new housekeeper who I might tell. She likes to feed me, she’s called Mrs. North. She thinks I am looking thin. I suppose I am thin. But even if I was big, underneath I am just bird bones and mice ankles, all wrapped up to stop me coming to pieces. Eve says I am a burden on you and I shouldn’t make you worry about me, but I had to write.

  I want to shut my eyes and not hear things. I want to be with you. Please, please, please can I live with you? Please answer even if you just say no. I’m frightened you can’t answer because you’re not here anymore. I’m frightened you’ve been taken away.

  Theo

  I read the letter through again, my hands tight on the paper. One of her new friends in Carmarthen must have given her some acid or something. I had read before that an addict could manage to get hold of drugs no matter where they were, but I had not thought that Theo was one of these people. I read the letter another time, and another. It did not seem to arrive from a real Wales, green and bright and simple, but from an eldritch, darkly forested country, cold, haunted with strange fires. I could only think of the German word—unheimlich, literally, unhomely—to describe it, the feeling of the known becoming foreign. Theo’s letter, accidentally or on purpose, had taken the familiarities of Evendon—the roses, the photos of us on the lawn—and made them painful, frightening. It was oddly like a transcript of one of my own dreams.

  I called Theo but her mobile was out of service, so I called Evendon and Eve answered.

  “Hello Jonathan,” she said. “Is it about the hotel? I’m leaving in a moment so I can only talk for ten minutes.”

  “Actually, I got a rather odd letter from Theo today and I just wanted to check if everything was okay at Evendon? She was . . . unlike herself.”

  Eve sounded surprised. “Everything’s fine here. Theo’s the same as usual, though you know what usual is for Theo. I certainly wouldn’t have said there’s anything wrong with her. She’s probably being melodramatic.”

  “Is she at home?” I asked.

  “Yes, she’s still in bed, though. Shall I wake her?” Her voice, rich and cool and slightly impatient, steadied my unease, sobered it. I felt rapidly embarrassed that Theo’s letter, which she had probably forgotten having sent, had bothered me so much.

  I hesitated. “No. No, don’t worry. In fact, don’t mention that I called.”

  What was I meant to say to Theo anyway? Just the usual, and that wasn’t ever going to fix her. I was tired of the way she refused to take any responsibility, any meaningful position. Even the things she cared about were absurd, unchangeable: homelessness, pandas, the death of our father. It was just more childishness; hiding in drugs and lost causes. I had always resisted calling Theo lazy, or aimless, but I thought now that both were true, and I’d probably m
ade her worse by my fussing and nagging after her, like a dogged old nanny. Maybe if I left Theo alone for once she’d pull herself together.

  What did the window say to the curtains? Theo had asked, at the Christmas table. Pull yourself together. What did the curtains say to the window? Shut it.

  I hung up the telephone, threw her letter in the bin, and went to work on some ideas for the Mensson hotel.

  Nick called me later that night to tell me he had lost his job.

  “It’s the fucking credit crunch,” he said, drunk. “It crunched me. Fuckers. I might move to America, except it’s worse there. Maybe I’ll go and teach with Sebastian in India. That’s how I feel at the moment. Like not telling anyone and just fucking off somewhere.”

  “What about Emily?”

  “Oh, we’re having a ‘trial separation,’ as she calls it. I’m the one on trial, basically. Except I don’t know what my crime is. I did shout at her the other day when she spent shitloads in Harvey Nicks. But she thinks our parents will just bail us out, and I can’t go groveling to them all the time. Fucking marriage. What a load of shit.”

  “Why don’t you come out tonight with me and Felix?” I suggested, alarmed.

  “Why not,” Nick said, suddenly cheerful. “Let’s get drunk.”

  Felix and I got drunk and Nick got drunker at a newly opened bar in Soho—called something like Q.P. or M.Q., initials nobody understood—roaming the mercenary white ballroom under the patterns of light and twinkles of darkness that made ghosts of everyone. The people on the dance floor flickered, faded out, reappeared. I recognized a few people I knew, and whom I had never really liked—the kind of people who would go to a bar like this in its first week, the consciously in-demand grandees of the guest list—but I didn’t recognize them as being warning signs until I saw Antonia.

  She was facing away from me, her hair shorter, showing the perfect slopes of her cheek and jaw. I traveled toward her unthinkingly, without any idea of what I would say, and found myself next to her ear.

  “Antonia, how are you?” I asked it.

  She turned around and looked at me silently for a moment and I felt the radius of her dislike, as if I’d walked into an abruptly cold room. “I’m well,” she said at last.

  “I’m sorry.” I stepped back. She nodded without expression, and I went back to rejoin the others. I sat heavily at the glass table, looking down through my green drink at my green-tinted feet, beginning to feel a little suspicious of myself. I wondered if I was the kind of man that women hate, one of those half-man, half-animal composites: a love rat, a dirty dog, a cold fish.

  I liked women, I argued to myself tipsily. I wanted women to be happy; I just didn’t want to have the responsibility of making them happy. I couldn’t slow down enough to focus on them properly; they were like shapes outside a car window, still and highly defined for a moment, then streaking away. Maria was the only woman I could have done it for—always Maria—but she was too far away to catch hold of, a retreating smile hovering in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s.

  I tried to focus on the voices around me, but it was difficult. In my drunkenness I could hear only distantly the fierce chatter of the bar, rattling like coins in a money box.

  “I’m telling him it’s over for good unless he ends it with her. They aren’t having sex—he told me so.”

  “What the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “She looked like a whore.”

  “What we need is to sell the whole lot off. The insurance alone is crippling.”

  I couldn’t tell where these conversations were coming from; I was slipping down, eight years old and under a table with a stolen canapé, watching the flash and flicker of shoes. I thought I heard Eve’s voice just above me but that was wrong, and I realized I had started to fall asleep, my head keeling down onto my shoulder like a bag of flour.

  I left Felix and Nick talking to some women and went home, tripping as I got into the cab, and again on the threshold of my flat. I sat on the bench on my palm-barred balcony, high up and silent; looking out at the sky, which in London was always seen as if through frost. For the first time I missed the Welsh stars, so perfectly clear and white. I was too drunk already, I knew that, but I poured myself a large whisky, and another. The second spilled out of my shaking hand and onto my leg.

  What did Theo say? The fakeness of the roses, was that it? Theo in her dark place, filled with possible things and lost things; everywhere she looked there could be a father, everything she turned over was untrue. MC and AA on every tree, broken glass on every flagstone, a curtain blowing out from a window and a steady voice. The ghost again, after all this time, the sad, ridiculous ghost. Last seen in a smashed-up jalopy south of Darwin, last seen on the terrace, the dark cutout in a violent square of light, last seen on the busy street. I didn’t know how to answer her—I didn’t know what I was anymore; on the inside or the outside, eyes open or closed, with Theo or without her. The thin edges of my skin were like the rim of a glass, holding me in. I tilted, but I righted myself; I didn’t spill. My frustration with Theo and her letter returned, and I held on to it like a rope, to lead myself out of the dark.

  I flew to Edinburgh early the next day, though I was feeling increasingly uneasy about the hotel. When we visited the site there were posters put up by local protesters, clamoring to save the defenseless nineteenth-century bricks and glass, deliberately neglected and slipping into damp and disrepair. The local press had remained neutral about the development, but Private Eye had called Mensson’s proposals “barbaric.”

  I looked at the street with its tall Victorian structures and saw how the hotel would stand out against them, the shape of an armored shell, plated in mirrored glass. I had thought this would be dramatic, but now—looking at it with flat, hungover realism—the absurdity of it struck me; a crash-landed satellite in the dark dignified stone of the neighborhood.

  I called Felix. “What do you think about the protesters?”

  “Not the sort of thing that bothers you, surely?” he said. “To be honest, I don’t care one way or another. It’s down to you whether we take this on. I mean, we’re pretty much going in different directions anyway. I’m quite keen on the whole sustainable thing personally. It’s a growth industry. And it doesn’t . . . you know, hurt one’s conscience.”

  “Yes.” I said, discomfited. “Well, I’ll think it over.”

  By the time I got back to London that evening the squalid, swampy feeling of my hangover had given way to a clenching headache, and I still hadn’t managed to have a nap. I got home, discarded my crushed suit and conveyor-scarred case on the floor of my apartment, and was just pulling the bed sheets over myself when Maria called.

  “Jonathan, guess what—I’m in London tonight. There’s a conference on and they said we could have the night off. Do you want to have dinner, if you’re free?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I know a good place.”

  I arrived at the restaurant first, moving within an acetaminophen swaddling, in time to watch Maria walk in, wearing a black dress, smiling at the maître d’ who ushered her over. Her eyes when she saw me were darker than usual, sweltering gold in their blurred-black edges. I felt her gaze—the velvety weight of it—almost as something physical. But the contact didn’t last long; she kissed me briefly then looked all round the restaurant, clearly amused at the pomposity of it, muffled up with drapes and napkins and heavy silver, patrolled by its multitude of waiters. We sat in the light of the same lamp and talked about all the things we usually talked about, and I saw despairingly how the night was going to go.

  Finally, fiddling with my coffee cup, I asked, “Have you ever been in love?”

  She looked startled, then laughed. “That’s an interesting question. Yes, twice. Nearly three times.”

  “What happened?”

  “What do you want, the whole history?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what I want.”

  “Well, I’ll try t
o tell it as a story, though really I didn’t experience it that way. Love seemed more of a . . . mess, a heap of things. Then you try to put it in some sort of order, after it’s over.

  “So, once upon a time, when I was at sixth form in Bath, I got together with Guy. We were together for three years. We weren’t suited at all; we had to fight our way away from each other when we went to university. It was painful. He was very wild afterward; he liked drugs, sleeping around, the usual. I heard finally he met a girl and went the other way. She converted him—he’s either a Mormon now or a Jehovah’s Witness. Something strict, anyway.

  “After that, while I was working in France, I was with Olivier. I loved him, though we were only together for about a year. Things started to go wrong when I brought home a backless dress. He made me promise I wouldn’t wear it—not if he wasn’t with me. I overlooked that, and I overlooked his moods when I mentioned my male friends. After a while I stopped overlooking things and was just unhappy all the time. I think part of the reason I was so unseeing at first was that I felt loose, unattached to anything in a country that wasn’t my home. Like I might just blow away if I didn’t have someone to hold on to me.

  “Then in America I went on a few dates, just a kiss on the cheek—good night—nothing else. I had so little time I would actually just date people for months, without spending long enough with them to find out it wasn’t going to work. In the end I started dating another psychologist at the clinic, Jack, and that turned into this strange relationship. It was like an endless period of ‘seeing each other,’ putting off making a decision. He was an extremely decent man, but not quite right. Do you know that feeling?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “I think I’m cautious, after what happened to my parents, and after those first two relationships didn’t end very amicably. So when I met someone who—when I looked at him rationally—met all the ideal requirements for a partner, I convinced myself that I would be silly not to be with this man. Even though my heart wasn’t in it.”