The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  In all the tears of the congregation—the words good and perfect and kind over and over—the features of Eve melted, swamped and softened, became more ideal. She was the newspaper article again, the printed speech on the side of a mug, a shining celluloid creature, a public possession. There was nothing else of her left.

  Nathalie and Nick Dumas came to the funeral, but Maria still hadn’t been able to leave America; one of the autistic teenagers she worked with—Nick stumbled when he got to this bit—was on suicide watch. Maria was the only person who’d been able to do anything with the child. All this information I heard blankly. Maria had called and written to me, asking to come over, to help, but I couldn’t answer her. With Theo’s death a gulf had opened in me, grave-shaped; everything I saw or heard since vanished into that darkness, growing smaller and smaller. I lost track of who I spoke to that day, of whose hands I shook or cheeks I kissed. Flesh and wool and perfume and jewelry and hair; it revolved past senselessly, a collection of textures. And then it was night, and I went home and put my head down and dreamt not the bad dreams, but strange limping sequences of detail, half-lit, oddly joined together. The gold elephants in the morning room, a green drink on a glass table, a tree with a heart carved into it, a fire blowing on a deserted beach.

  After Eve’s funeral the house became silent, in a close, airless kind of way. Outside whatever room I was in I would hear whoever was speaking or walking outside. Sitting in the morning room now I could hear two maids talking.

  “I’ll scrub it. These old carpets are stronger than they look.”

  “Are we meant to be staying out of Theo’s room?”

  “Keep out of there, Mrs. North said.”

  “Poor Theo.”

  “Sssh. Keep your voice down. God, these pinch.”

  “New, are they?”

  “They pinch like bastards.”

  “You know what, I think if I was Mr. Anthony I’d sell.”

  “Don’t say that! He’s gorgeous. I don’t want him to leave.”

  “You never saw him before. He looks tired now. He ought to get out of here. Go somewhere nice for a while. If I had all that money I’d go to the Bahamas.”

  “The Bahamas won’t bring his family back.”

  “No,” the other maid agreed, and then they passed out of my hearing.

  “I thought a doctor should have been called for your sister. A psychiatrist,” Mrs. North revealed suddenly, under cover of bringing me tea. “I said it to your mother and grandmother.”

  “What? Why did you think that?” I asked, my voice harsh with surprise. I could see Mrs. North gathering up with fright, and I had to encourage her to sit down and talk.

  “Well, Theo was shy with me,” she said, “I never heard her say anything odd. But apparently she told one of the maids—Laura, the girl who found her—that she thought you’d been kidnapped, or killed, something like that. She thought there were ghosts here too. I thought it sounded like schizophrenia. People think that means having lots of personalities, but it doesn’t. My friend had a cousin who was like that. He used to say the government was spying on him. Wouldn’t have anything with a screen in the house.”

  “What did Eve say to you when you told her?”

  “She said ‘Thank you for your concern, Mrs. North.’ I don’t think she liked me saying it. They didn’t call a doctor. I don’t think Mrs. Anthony realized how ill your sister was. She wasn’t home very often. And she and Theo—they didn’t seem close.”

  “I’d like to speak to the maid who found her,” I said. “Do you think she would meet me?”

  “Laura? I could ask her,” Mrs. North said. “It might be a relief to her. I don’t think she’d like to come back here, though.”

  I looked around at the dimly lit room, the line of windows looking out onto the scrawny April garden, wet and wind-whipped, the cool light spilling over the floor like water, raising a bleak shine. Silence blanketed over us, hung from the heights of the ceilings, thick and unyielding. I agreed with Mrs. North that perhaps it would be better to meet Laura in her own home.

  Laura lived near the center of town; to reach her house I had to walk through Carmarthen for the first time since Theo’s death. People turned and looked at me as I passed the market but I barely saw them. The area had become a kind of doubled landscape. My memories were attached to everything, past sounds echoed weirdly alongside present voices, new faces lay like tracing paper over old ones. I saw a dark, serious child and I thought it was me; I saw a large woman and thought it was Mrs. Williams.

  “Jonathan!”

  It was Mrs. Williams, approaching at speed, towing a young child with chocolate all around its mouth. She stopped, out of breath. “Oh, that’s done it,” she said, wheezing. “Running like that.” She handed me a card. “I was just going to post it.” Her face abruptly turned red; she wiped her eyes with her coat sleeve. “Oh, Jonathan, she was a good girl. It’s awful what happened. Terrible.”

  Unsure what to say, I patted her arm, wondering how I could easily get away. But people who had been looking around at me cautiously now began to drift over. The woman who ran the cheese stall came over and started crying before she could say anything. Then a man told me a story about how Theo had left her wallet in his shop and been so sweet and charming when he contacted her to return it. “She always used to pop in for a chat after that,” he said. “I can’t believe it—what happened.” A group of girls came up shyly to ask if they could have a photograph of her. In the end I had to tell them I was meeting someone. Mrs. Williams decided she would show me the way, as it wasn’t far from her own house.

  “She was an angel,” she repeated before leaving, adding unwillingly, “I’m sorry about Eve.”

  Laura’s house was small and hot; printed flowers around the walls, a pink carpet and a small pink mother who showed me in. Laura was a slightly plump and nervy seventeen-year-old sitting on the edge of the sofa; I noticed she wore a skirt suit, as if she were in a job interview. After I inquired politely about her A-levels and so on, she was still looking at me with an uncertain frown, so I just asked her, “Did Theo seem . . . unstable before her death?”

  “She was unhappy. But she wasn’t like a crazy person. She was just worried about weird things. She thought there were ghosts in the house. And she went to the graveyard looking for you, because she thought you might be . . . dead. She kept saying that at the end. I told her and told her you were only on a business trip. She said you’d been taken away and hidden. Then she said you’d been killed.” She looked up. Her eyes were a gingery, clear brown, slightly combative. “Mrs. Anthony wasn’t sympathetic,” she said, her voice filling out. “She wouldn’t listen to her and she’d just walk out. She told Theo that if she didn’t pull herself together that you wouldn’t come back, because you were tired of her acting so childishly.”

  She started to cry.

  “Theo was such a nice person, she really was. Mrs. Anthony shouldn’t have told her things like that. I don’t think she knew how much it upset her. Theo didn’t say strange things for attention. I think some people thought she did.”

  “I’m so sorry you have had to deal with this,” I said. The room was crushingly warm; too pink, too dense. I stood up, with the sudden need to put as much distance as possible between myself and the healthy brown-haired girl, her tears dropping with energy; I would contaminate her somehow just by being near her, exposing her to the fumes from my nuclear heart, the dead river of my blood.

  “Did you get severance money?” I asked before I left.

  “Mrs. Anthony gave me a lot of money. Too much money. I’m really grateful—”

  “Of course, of course.” I was making for the door. “I’m sorry. Good luck with your A-levels. Thank you for letting me visit.”

  “Oh, it’s okay . . . good-bye,” she said, looking confused, and then I was out in the rain again, and safety.

  A week or so after my visit to Laura I overheard Alicia on the telephone as I passed the morning room. A
licia’s social life had apparently been entirely reinstated, as though it had been frozen in time thirty years ago, ready to be taken up where she left off. Her friendships were not governed by the usual rules of affection and emotional connections, they were social alliances, historic and rigid edifices, standing grandly whether or not their human element was actually present. But now it appeared Alicia was present, wide awake and ready to join the party.

  “Yes, it was,” she said. “It’s very sad that both of them died at the same time. Though Eve can’t have expected to have an awful lot longer, at her age.” She managed to talk about it as if it had happened to another family.

  As Alicia seemed in better spirits—the best spirits, in fact, that I’d ever seen her in—I waited outside the door until she had finished her conversation, then went in and asked her how my father was these days.

  “What are you talking about?” she said, looking past me to the door as if she might be tempted to sidle around me and make a break for it.

  “Eve told me,” I said. “She and Sam had Freddie killed. You found out about it. You told my father. He tried to blackmail Eve. So she gave him the money but in exchange he had to go away and then you all pretended he was dead.”

  As the silence set in Alicia stood still, opposite me but turned away. No part of her moved, not her lowered eyelids, her gracefully held fingers, her neatly placed feet. She looked as if she were at an official ceremony, standing decorous and quiet. I waited, uncertain of what might be gathering in her, moving under her motionless exterior. I was beginning to regret having spoken so harshly, to someone so frangible, only delicately held together. Her face was colorless above the intense black of her dress. I thought I saw her lip shudder. Then she said, “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you going to tell everyone this? Ruin our family name?”

  She stared at me for a while, and there, unsettlingly, was Eve; that impermeable surface of the eye, the face sharpening, coming into clearer focus. I stepped back, startled.

  “Don’t you think my life is difficult enough without you bringing all this back up now? If this is made public I’ll say I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to be involved. You’ll embarrass us all.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I marveled. “Your mother and stepfather murdered your father and you’re worried about the embarrassment?”

  “I barely knew my father. I barely knew any of them. And they’re all dead. There is absolutely no point telling people this now. What would it achieve? Except to make us the family of a murderer.”

  “I hadn’t even considered that. I hadn’t thought about making it public. My main concern was how you’d kept this secret so long and how you felt about it. Forgive me! I should have been thinking about what was really at stake—your place in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Not to mention the possibility of being snubbed at Henley Regatta.”

  She ignored this. I felt the unfriendly light of her gaze moving over me, like an MRI scan, analyzing my soft tissues, trying to determine which of them might be likely to fail.

  “I won’t make it public,” I said with disgust. “But for different reasons than how it might affect your social calendar.”

  “Your architectural practice—” she began.

  “I don’t give a shit about that! I won’t say anything simply because it’s no one else’s business.”

  “Thank you,” Alicia said, with a long distressed sigh, as if our conversation had been solely held in order to torment her. Her stare slid off mine and the resemblance to Eve vanished with it: she was Alicia again, turning away reproachfully. I watched the transformation with disbelief.

  “And what if my father comes back, now that she’s dead?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m sure he’d rather keep his income.”

  I moved away and sat down, baffled. I realized that Eve’s death had given her a type of freedom I hadn’t initially recognized—not the freedom of truth, but the prospect of never having to be truthful, of living untroubled and thoughtless at the golden apex of society, our family’s shame safe under the ground with the old queen, under the water with the sibyl.

  No longer fixed in place by my attention, Alicia had begun to float slyly toward the door, like a child playing “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” so that I was tempted to jump up and chase her out of the room. Instead, I asked her, “Don’t you have any feelings about it?” not in the hope of a meaningful answer, but to be awkward.

  “How I felt about it? Does that ever matter? Eve and Sam decided everything between them. Then Eve and Michael decided everything between them. I was on the verge of collapse but nobody cared. Then I was simply abandoned, left alone to deal with two young children. And now you’re questioning me and dragging these things back up. At a time like this. And now”—she delivered her trump card with oppressed nobility, slipping out of the door—“I have a headache and I am going to lie down.”

  The next day I called Alex and said I wanted to talk to him. He was surprised and uncertain on the telephone and I suspected he had only agreed to meet me for a drink at a café near his university because he couldn’t immediately think of a reason why not. But that was enough for me. The café was small and tired, its light coming from a cold fluorescent strip, coloring Alex with ill health, picking out each depression in his face. His body appeared guarded against it, head tucked down defensively.

  I took a sip of the coffee that had been brought over, which was bitter and lukewarm, but I didn’t know what else to say just then, so I said, “Good coffee.”

  “It’s horrible, I’m afraid,” Alex said. “But I can only take an hour before my next lecture and this was the closest place to meet.”

  There was a pause as we both inspected our coffees. Then I said, “I wanted to talk to you about my father.”

  “Ah,” Alex said. “He didn’t really die in Australia, did he? Do you know where he is?”

  “I was hoping you might know that.”

  “No, I never knew anything about what happened to him—I only had my own suspicions. Eve and Alicia have always insisted that he’s dead.” He paused and looked at me with pity, the same look I remembered from childhood. “I’m sorry. You were hoping for something more than that, weren’t you?”

  “Maybe you could tell me what he was like?” I said, after a while.

  “Oh, yes, I can do that,” Alex said, then started talking hurriedly. “Well, he and your mother married young. Too young, without question. They met while Alicia was in sixth form, on a ski holiday in Klosters, and then dated for all of three weeks before they decided they wanted to marry. I think partly Alicia was desperate to leave home and it was the quickest way to do it without having to do something intellectually demanding such as get a job or go to university. And of course she also must have had a longing to be ‘loved’”—he said the word uncertainly, as though it were foreign and he wasn’t comfortable with its pronunciation—“because that wasn’t something we had much of, at home.

  “After three weeks’ acquaintance, I can understand how Michael and Alicia thought they liked everything about each other. They were both sociable, fun-loving, that sort of thing. Your mother was quite different back then too. She didn’t care that he wasn’t ‘one of us.’ You didn’t know that? Well, don’t start picturing a cockney barrow boy or a Yorkshire miner or something. Alicia had her limits. But Michael was quite a vague person; his parents were dead and he had been in care when he was young. Went to a grammar school, I think. Eve was concerned about his history. She said he had come out of nowhere.

  “Eve wasn’t exactly pleased by the relationship but she never explicitly opposed it. I think she was relieved to get Alicia off her hands anyway. We were both of us a disappointment to her, in our different ways. It was you she saw as her heir. Which was probably harder, for you, than being another disappointment.

  “Your mother and Michael’s relationship got worse, as relationships do, tho
ugh I didn’t see much of them or hear the details. I had never been close to Eve or Alicia, and I think Michael correctly identified me as a bookish bore and went to great lengths to avoid my company.”

  “Eve said he drank too much, he was depressed.”

  “Well, I suppose both things could have been true. But none of that really defined him. I remember he was always very entertaining. Always full of ideas. I think he had periods of depression, but I’m not sure he would be diagnosed as depressed. And your mother certainly kept him company when it came to the drinking.

  “I don’t think Eve expected him to file for custody. God knows why he did. He was no match for her. I was at Evendon when she took a call from him about it. She didn’t look so beautiful then. I know much has been made of her ‘radiance,’ but she actually lit up like that”—he pointed at the fluorescent light—“it was unhealthy, disturbing to see it. I’d never seen her so angry. The next time I saw her, Eve told me Michael had dropped the case. The next thing I heard, he’d left the country. Then the next thing I heard, he was dead. Ah, the whole thing stunk, as Sam would say. I didn’t believe he was dead but I don’t know why he never came back. I always suspected she threatened him.”

  “He was paid off.”

  Alex looked at me with concern, frowning. “That’s what Eve told you?”

  “Yes, and Theo overheard a conversation between Eve and her solicitor to that effect. All he wanted was the money. Alicia said something similar.”

  “It’s true that he had no money of his own, no job. But, for all his problems, I think he cared for you two. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some pressure put on him aside from money. Some ‘offer he couldn’t refuse.’ And Alicia—she would say that. She’ll never forgive him for leaving her.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t need to say that.”

  “I’m not saying it out of tact. I’ve never been good at that.”

  “Well, I suppose we’ll never really know unless he turns up. Or I find him.”