The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  He inclined his head in weak acknowledgment, but apologized: “I’m not feeling very metaphysical today.”

  “No. Me neither.”

  “I never knew anyone like her,” he said, his voice blurring. “We wrote to each other—she forgot to write back half the time—she wanted to come and stay with me. . . .”

  “I talked her out of it,” I said. “It would have been better if she had.”

  “Not your fault,” Sebastian said, but I shook my head. There was a long silence before we both turned toward the dark door of the church, a black cutout arch. As I took his arm to steady him, I remembered him composing nonsense verse with Theo in the grass, consumed with his love; all that useless, redundant love.

  Maria had not come, though her flowers had arrived. Her flight was canceled because of a terrorist scare: she had been put down somewhere random in America, some patch of a state, and was there waiting now. Nathalie Dumas was here. She had visited us a couple of times already to offer her help, and stayed to talk. She was one of the only people whose conversation I could stand.

  I noticed several uninvited people, standing a little way back from the rest of the mourners, so I went over to speak to them afterward. I had not known Theo’s most recent friends, these left-out margin-people, though I recognized a couple of them from the village. A woman with black beads in her dreadlocks took my hand and sobbed. Her face was red from the cold and from crying; scrumpled up like a ball of paper. Dry-eyed, I envied her; I wanted to take those deep swallows of air, utter low, rolling sounds of misery. At night my eyes groped blindly for their remembered sights, spilling tears; I had no more for public use. I touched her arm uncertainly, startled and moved.

  Aside from the local undesirables, there were a few younger people, one of them a girl I recognized, who worked in a bakery in Carmarthen. They stood in a group, excessively polite, conscious of not being known. While I was speaking to them I saw the landlord of the pub in Llansteffan who had tried to give me a warning. Removed from the oppressive murk of his bar, he was small and old in the scarifying light, and I was ashamed of how I’d insulted him. I went over to him to apologize but he waved it away. “No need,” he said gently, patting my shoulder.

  I stood with Theo’s previously unknown friends as if I could immerse myself in them, re-create an entire version of her by gathering up everything she had previously loved, the other half of her life, that I had not been part of. After a while I noticed Alicia looking over nervously, so I invited them all to the reception.

  As we left the graveyard, the farmer Wendell, of the broken windows, appeared at the gate. I had heard he was sober and working, though he was still poor. He stepped back when I went over.

  “I just wanted to stop by; I thought it would be finished,” he said.

  “You would have been welcome. You’re welcome at Evendon.”

  He frowned abruptly; his eyes were almost hidden behind sagging, stony lids, but I saw he was close to crying.

  “I’ll never forget what your sister did. . . .”

  “Theo was like that,” I said.

  Silenced by the was, we shook hands. He went back down the road and I went back to my family and friends, standing indistinguishable in black, their faces white in the wind.

  It was difficult at the house to see the people I knew. Sebastian, who looked as if he might pass out, had been given one of Alicia’s tranquilizers and sent upstairs to lie down. I wished I could do the same. Groups of my friends had drawn together and were talking mindlessly. Eve was a popular subject of discussion. She had not stayed downstairs for the reception on grounds of ill health and I couldn’t speak to anyone without being asked about her. Present or absent, she was the biggest star, especially at Evendon, her own creation, her enchanted castle.

  The next most popular subject for conversation was the weather.

  “It looks like it might snow,” someone said next to me.

  “It’s a very clear day.”

  “The garden looks beautiful, it would be lovely to have a walk down there.” There was a pause and the girl who had said this, one of Theo’s school friends, turned to me, looking panicked. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  We all trod, agonizingly obviously, through a conversation of blown glass, attempting not to break down its delicate structure. After a joke was made and guilty, surreptitious eyes were turned on me, I excused myself to go outside. Everyone nodded, being understanding. I could have done anything—hit somebody, smashed a window—and I would still be nodded at.

  Nick came out after me. “Sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry. I saw her a couple of weeks ago. I thought she was depressed or something, I just didn’t realize. I should have looked after her.” His mouth as he said it moved strangely, upset, and I thought it was me speaking, and my face. The music was coming out through the open door, something sentimental that Theo would have liked. I put my hand on his arm but couldn’t speak. Then Nick went away and I found myself in the empty dining room, sitting at the head of the great cold table with a glass of whisky.

  The coroner’s report said that Theo hadn’t used drugs, not for months. I was still floundering in this information, in how badly wrong I had been. I didn’t understand what had happened, I was still retracing my mistakes. If Theo hadn’t been taking drugs then she was ill. I knew there were rules for healthy people and ill people. The healthy people look after the ill people. They protect them, and watch over them, and bring them the things they need. They don’t ignore phone calls, throw letters in the bin, they don’t lecture and complain and eventually get rid of the ill people, sending them as far away as possible. They don’t turn their faces away and leave them to die.

  Since Theo drowned I had been unable to see her face, to recover a cohesive picture of her, in sound and color. I had lost the ability to relive the past, got stopped somehow, only halfway back to Evendon, to how it used to be. I closed my eyes and for a moment I was almost there, half-blinded in the sun, the scent of the jasmine over the door. Theo was under the tree in the garden, her hair alight, looking away from me. “Theo,” I called, but she didn’t hear me, and she didn’t turn around. I opened my eyes and I was back in the dining room, just me, and the picture of Eve, alone in the long chill, in the open dark.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After Theo’s funeral, Eve stayed in her rooms. There were hundreds of condolence letters for her that went unopened, a tide washing up through the door and piling by her bed. Finally Mrs. North tidied them optimistically into boxes, for when Eve might feel well enough to read them.

  Eve wouldn’t take calls, though I heard her speaking on the telephone. She received her solicitor once and her accountant twice. I knew something about what she was doing from the national press: she was retiring and selling Charis Hotels Group to its management. She was not keeping a seat on the board. The company’s managing director made a speech about how hugely they were indebted to Eve, who had been not only an enormously successful businesswoman, but an inspiration. I saw his photo in the newspaper; his glasses reflecting sincerely in the camera flashes, talking shit.

  Then there were no more visits and no more calls. Everything went silent. The knowledge I had about Eve came from Mrs. North. It was hard to tell if she was eating any of the food she sent back to the kitchen. She sent another doctor away. The maids were to stay out of her rooms. Her light was to be left on, at all times.

  “At night?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how she can sleep with all the lights blazing like that,” Mrs. North said. “I don’t know if she does sleep.”

  So she knew now, as Theo had, that darkness was not simply the absence of light. It had its own life, clinging on in the edges and crevices of the day, emerging at night, jumping from the corners and the horizon to eat everything up. I myself was not so fond of the dark, these days.

  Eve came down only once after the funeral. She had walked all the way down the stairs and toward the hall before the exerti
on swept up to her head and she fainted. I was the one who found her there. When I saw the piled fabric on the stairs I thought for a moment that Theo was alive and had dropped a coat on her way inside. Only Theo left that kind of casual mess.

  Then I realized it was Eve, and thought at first she must have fallen down the stairs. It was not horror I felt then, but a rising, tentative relief. I hurried over to her and checked her unmoving face, then looked for her pulse. Before I had hold of her wrist, the thin voile skin there, her eyelids moved. Lying so clumsily, with the new central track of gray in her unpinned hair, without makeup, she looked like one of the women Theo used to befriend, the women propped in shop entrances with their ragged faces and swollen eyes. Her face had lost its lacquer, its luster, the skin exposed like plaster.

  I got her back upstairs myself and she leaned on my arm and sat down next to the bed. She looked at me speculatively, watchfully.

  “I’ll call you a doctor,” I said. She turned her face away.

  The doctor came, pronounced her bones unbroken, tried to convince her to eat more, asked a few questions to establish if she was senile, then left.

  I stayed in her room, and I came to sit with her the next day, and the day after. Mrs. North was visibly relieved at this display of family feeling but really it was a kind of punishment, for us both. I hated to do it but I couldn’t stop myself. I needed to sit there and let the guilt hang between us like perfume, like the smoke from a roll-up, the faint hum of a vanished evening.

  On the fifth day, lying in her bed, Eve said, “Two funerals.” I thought she had spoken in her sleep at first, but then I saw her eyes were open. They were still unexpectedly sharp, with their distinct irises, their patina like black enamel, but they moved over me and the room without interest or expectation. Her voice was acrid, as if blown off the hot sand of a desert, choked by its own dryness.

  “What did you say? Theo’s funeral?”

  “No, George’s funeral. Freddie’s funeral. Those . . . were my freedom.”

  I had to lean close to make out what she was saying. No heat rose up from her, no scent. She could have been a dried leaf come to rest, a piece of balsa wood on the shore, her voice rustling and dry. I had to repeat what she said to myself to make sense of it, unsure I’d heard properly.

  “What do you mean?” I remembered the visit to Sam. “Did Freddie hit you?”

  “Yes. Not just that,” she said. There was a long pause. “I didn’t . . . didn’t want children.”

  As I caught up with her meaning she began talking again, more forcefully now, “Freddie didn’t drown. He got on the boat but he didn’t fall in. Sam’s friends took him away—Sam helped me. But Alicia must have overheard us, afterward. She was young. She hid under tables . . . behind sofas. I never used to know where she was. But we only talked at night about what happened, when the children were in bed. . . .” She paused, and I thought she would stop, but she was gathering up more power to propel the sound out of her throat, to stop it dipping and failing, and continued, “I didn’t know she knew. Not until her divorce. I wasn’t going to let Michael have you two. Alicia was unfit. But he was . . . no good. Not as a father. Then he said Alicia had told him what happened to Freddie . . . she confided in him. He wanted money, he said, or he would go to the police. So I gave him money. He agreed to stay away.”

  Her voice gave out and she coughed. The sound was like tissue paper being crumpled. She didn’t say anything for a while but her eyelids drew down, almost closing.

  “Eve, you should sleep.”

  Her eyes opened again effortfully.

  “Not finished,” she murmured.

  “I’ll come back and sit with you tomorrow.”

  “Promise.”

  The last person I made a promise to was Theo, age eight, tear-marked and crumpled, falling asleep in her elephant pajamas. What became of that promise? Never mind. Eve’s hand half-rose toward me. I couldn’t move to take it.

  “I promise,” I said.

  There was a silence and her eyes closed again. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, though she didn’t appear to hear me.

  After I left her room I walked away quickly, as if she might call me back. It was only when I was lying in bed later that I tried to think about what she’d said. But I couldn’t find a context for what she told me. I couldn’t connect it to the Eve I thought I knew, because she hadn’t existed for me since the day of the telephone call, and I couldn’t assemble a new Eve, one that made sense.

  I didn’t know what Eve had expected from me either, a display of shock, curiosity, sympathy. I wondered if I should tell her that I just didn’t have a full deck of feelings to hand, to apply to the appropriate situations. All I had when I shut my eyes and turned myself inward was my own shame. A wide plain of it, shimmering like water, dark and salt-tasting. I looked into this water and I saw nothing. But I knew that Theo was down there, just under the surface, her skin glowing pale, her lips blue and unmoving in the cold.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next morning I was going up the stairs to Eve and met Mrs. North running down. When she saw me she stopped, her mouth open. “Oh, Jonathan, quickly—”

  “Call Alicia,” I said. “She’s in London. She might not be on her way back yet. Try the Montmorency Hotel—she was at a wedding there yesterday.” I ran up the rest of the stairs, shouting back to Mrs. North as I went, “Call Alex. His number’s in the book.” Then—because I had almost forgotten that there was a chance of cure, of repair—“Call a doctor.”

  When I opened the door the room was dark for the first time; only the strip of light running down the curtain gave Eve edges and a face where she lay in bed. She sighed when she saw me, a brittle noise, a crackle. Her hand lay folded and thin next to her. I sat down and was unsure whether to reach for it. I understood that this was a deathbed, and that I should take her hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The hand lay there, reproaching us both.

  She sighed again and turned her head half toward me, eyes closed, and said, “I have done very much . . .”

  “There’s no need—”

  “. . . that is wrong.” Her eyelids were blank; it was a shock when she opened them and her eyes gave off their pained glitter. “Should have done more . . .” There was another silence. Alicia won’t make it, I thought. The doctor won’t make it. There was a burning in my head, in my mouth.

  “. . . for Theo.”

  Snow was falling over her face, dissolving its animated lines. They drifted, settled, gentler than they had been. I took her hand; her pulse was there, for less and less time. It ticked away; she was not conscious, and then there was the silence and the stillness, but more silent, and more still, than I had expected.

  Alicia took the news well.

  “Oh,” she said. Then after a while, “I suppose we’ll be having another funeral.”

  I stood outside Eve’s door while the doctor and ambulance drivers wrapped her up to take her away. Alicia had stopped on the threshold, thoughtfully, then went downstairs murmuring something about having her coat on, as if this were not quite comme il faut when meeting dead people. Later I saw her in the gold back parlor, studying her address book.

  Eve’s death caused quite a stir in the media. She had been suffering from several small and hidden types of cancer, we were told by the coroner, any of which could have killed her, though the stress of dealing with Theo’s sudden death could have played a part. Despite this, rumors began on the internet that she had been assassinated because she knew too much about JFK, or the Mafia, or both, and these made their way into the newspapers.

  “It’s a little late for all this, surely,” I said to Mrs. North.

  “It’s disgraceful,” Mrs. North said, glancing out of the window in the direction of the drive, where journalists had been turning up with regularity. “I’m very sorry you have to go through this, Mr. Anthony.”

  It was Mrs. North who had thought of an epitaph for Eve, after looking through some Renaissance
poetry she had found in the library.

  “Truth and Beauty buried be,” she read to us. “It’s from a Shakespeare poem.”

  I looked at her when she said it, trying to find fraud, but it seemed she really believed in the same Eve everyone else believed in. She thought Eve had been a heroine for women and the oppressed; she was proud of finding the epitaph, and conscious of presumption. She was watching us with worry now.

  “Eve would have wanted that,” I said, and Mrs. North cried a little, and Alicia went back to reading a magazine, and everyone was agreed.

  Theo had no epitaph: no last word, it seemed, had been able to enclose her, and so under her name I had left the stone blank.

  Eve’s funeral in Wales was family only, but her memorial service at Westminster Abbey in March attracted crowds of people, standing outside under the cold clouds that plastered over the sky, stifling the light. Inside I stood with Alex and Alicia next to me. Alex was pale, and I was worried he might stumble or even pass out. He had given an angry laugh when he heard about Eve’s death.

  “Typical Eve, sidestepping the issue,” he said. Then he started to cry. I had invited him to stay at Evendon, but he refused. “I can’t stand it there.”

  I glanced at him, his flimsy hands, his profile a scrap of flesh above the solidity of the suit. I tried and failed to connect him with Eve, who in death had suddenly looked like herself again, lying like Snow White with her black hair restored, her serene face as hard and white as if it were all bone.

  Some celebrities and politicians stood up to give readings at the service. In these Eve was benevolent and generous. She was courageous and hated injustice, she overturned prejudices, she fought like a lioness for the oppressed and vulnerable. She was warmhearted and witty and a great conversationalist; a few quotations were attributed to her, some that she had genuinely said, others that she hadn’t. Alicia nodded along to all of it next to me, eyes lowered, clasping her gloves like a suffering saint.