The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  “Are you thinking of doing that?” Alex said.

  “More for Theo than myself,” I said. “She wanted . . . he—”

  There was a silence.

  “You don’t need to explain it,” Alex said, rearranging his hands in discomfort, until they sat more at odds than before.

  “Anyway, there was something else I wanted to tell you,” I said after a moment, “about your father’s death.”

  He interrupted me: “My father was a cruel bastard. I used to dread coming home for the school holidays—and I was bullied at school. Sam was always good to me. I’m actually sorry I didn’t make it over to visit him before he died. I know the circumstances of my father’s death were somewhat dubious: I reached my own conclusions about it a long time ago. Similar to those concerning my grandfather’s unfortunate fall down the stairs.”

  “Do you think she . . .?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a suspicion. I know she hated him, behind closed doors. I asked to see his picture once when I was a child and she said, ‘There he is, George Bennett. Clutching that ridiculous skull for all eternity.’ So who knows what he did to her? Not that it’s any excuse. We all have our formative influences. But at some point we become adults and become responsible for our own behavior. For example, I don’t think I would be a terribly good father and so I’ve refrained from procreating. Someone else might take some sort of class to familiarize themselves with some basic child-rearing skills. What I am saying is, there is nothing in Eve’s history that could excuse, for me, her failure as a parent.”

  Alex stopped speaking then, the way he always did: rushing his information out and then blinking off, like a computer printer. He made as if to drink his coffee, changed his mind as it got to his mouth, put it down again, and folded his hands up rigidly.

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m angry too.”

  Alex leaned forward for the first time, unfolding from his defensive position on the aluminium café chair. His eyes, far away behind strong lenses, were insistent.

  “Jonathan, I can’t help you with much, but I can give you some advice, when it comes to Eve. I couldn’t forgive her when I was young and I’m not capable of forgiving her now I’m old. I am alone and all I’ve got is my resentment. Don’t let that happen to you.”

  I nodded, unsure what to say.

  “I have to get back,” Alex said, standing. “Good luck with finding your father.”

  I stayed in the café for a while after Alex left. After having driven from Evendon to London, I wasn’t sure I could go back. I ordered another coffee and a pastry and left them on the table like a pay and display ticket, while I sat and thought.

  I didn’t know what I wanted from Michael but finding him was the only thing I could think of to do. If I didn’t search for him, I was left with nothing. Only her, trying to see her face beneath the night water, diving to take hold of an ankle or a hem, reaching over and over again.

  After talking to Alex, I quickly ran out of people to ask about my father. Eve had left no paperwork, not even credit card statements or telephone bills. Her computers were wiped clean of anything that could be used by journalists or detectives. Her solicitors’ faces were clean too, carefully empty, politely apologetic. Not at liberty to disclose. I searched the internet for Michael Caplins but found nothing except what Theo had found before me. So I looked up private investigators, and found Mr. Crace.

  “In a case such as this I’d say your chances of locating your father are good,” Mr. Crace told me. “Though you should also be aware that there is a possibility we may not find him.”

  “How long might it take?” I asked him.

  “Impossible to say,” Mr. Crace said. “When the person in question has been missing for over two decades, you can expect a certain number of blind alleys, red herrings, and so on. But, as I often tell my clients, this does not necessarily mean the overall exercise will be a wild-goose chase. I hope you appreciate my humorous point.”

  This being delivered in the same affectless tone with which Mr. Crace discussed payment schedules, it took me a moment to understand him. “Metaphors. Very amusing,” I said.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I have new information,” Mr. Crace said, before wishing me a good day, and then I was out of his office and on the way back to Evendon, to begin my wait.

  Even if Mr. Crace was unable to find my father, I thought, if he was out there—floating in some dusk of the world, where news of Eve’s death hadn’t yet permeated—maybe one morning he will switch on the television and there will be some earnest biopic of her life, with an actress faking a smile on a podium, or he’ll buy an outdated international newspaper from a street vendor, as bicycles and children flit around him in the humid sunlight, calling out like birds, and he’ll see her name there, past tense, and he’ll realize he can come back.

  In the café in London I realized it was impossible for me to carry on living at Evendon. I was drinking too much, sleeping too little, feeling too angry. The estate had been left to me in Eve’s will: I told Alex and Alicia that I didn’t want it.

  “Would you like Evendon?” I asked Alicia.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps not . . .” Alicia said. “Philippa Steele has been rather pressing about a vacant house next to hers, actually, in Chelsea.”

  “Would you like Evendon?” I said to Alex.

  “Oh, God, no. Thank you, but no. It has Eve written all over it. It’s her house. And those pillars—no, thank you.”

  I spoke to my solicitor and the estate agent and told them to organize the sale of Evendon between them. Things moved quickly. A buyer was found—a Mr. King—and the process of packaging antiques for auction began. Alicia wanted a lot of the furniture, jewelry, and paintings for her new house; Alex didn’t want anything. I spoke to all the staff to tell them the new owner would keep them on. The faces in front of me were curious, belonging to people I hardly knew: the days of Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wynne Jones were long gone.

  Along with the house, Eve had left nearly all of her money to me. Alex and Alicia got five million each. Alex didn’t seem to care, but Alicia frowned, and said, “Well. That seems odd.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “It’s too much.”

  I had never known how much money Eve had; I had never wondered about lack or surplus. All my life money had simply appeared to make the staff prompt and abundant, to feed the cars, to be turned into plane tickets and paintings; clothes, wine, food. Flowers and lights blazing all through the house, thriving on money. I never had to engage with the financial process of life, the cold, hurtful sale and exchange that drives people out of bed, lashes them into their suits, confronts them with a glimmering screen, sends them home late and tired, presents them with the paper and the plastic at the end, to spend. I did all that because I wanted to. Now I found I didn’t want to anymore.

  The department store developers I had been dealing with before Theo’s death had already sent a stern letter about my contract, which had been making its laborious way through layers of lawyers over the last month. I went in to see them and the contract was dissolved. The partners of the firm looked intimidated when I sat in front of them. I was haggard from not eating or sleeping and I must have looked mean, slightly desperate; no longer the kind of person to address press conferences about cutting-edge design in the twenty-first century.

  I bought a new phone and sent the number to Mr. Crace. Then I locked up my own London flat with my laptop and mobile phone inside. The last call listed on the phone was from Maria. I didn’t return it. I had nothing to say to her: the North Star of an abandoned course, the love of my old life.

  In the weeks before the sale I was not as busy as I thought I might have been, so I went out walking. I avoided Llansteffan and Carmarthen; I felt a directionless fury at times and I didn’t trust myself not to break the wing mirrors of cars, kick signposts, throw things at shop windows. Worse, I was afraid I might lose control of myself and attack somebody. The first person
who mentioned Theo, or Eve, just for their casual daring in carrying on living, in rolling the names of the dead out of their warm red mouths.

  So I walked all around the quietest roads; meeting only sheep or tractors, a few stray cars. Often I got lost. Sometimes I would sit down in an isolated place, until the sun would fade and I would realize I’d been there for hours. Once, very early in the morning, I visited Theo’s grave in Carmarthen, all the grass sparkling in the wet, pale light. There was no one there except me and a few bouquets; cheap carnations, flowers picked from gardens.

  I imagined her with her eyes closed, not far down. Her hair, that thick brightness surrounding her face like a sparkler; her pale skin. I said I didn’t want to see her before the funeral; now I couldn’t picture her face. Mrs. North said she was much thinner, before I came back. Wasted away; all that living gone to waste.

  A week before we were due to leave Evendon the rooms were almost bare; their contents boxed up, ready to travel away in different directions. There was something uncertain about the house in its denuded state; it had lost its original power, when before it had seemed the essence of what could be aspired to, the blind, beautiful core of entitlement. Looking around now at the vastness of the sitting room, the white desertion of the hall, I felt the sour pleasure of victory—a bolshevik pleasure—watching as the house’s imperial finery was stripped and dismantled and taken away.

  But then—there were Theo’s rooms. They had not been touched since the funeral. As the final week ticked down, Mrs. North asked me tentatively what I was planning to do with her things. “Oh, I’m dealing with that tomorrow,” I said, as if it were just an orderly item on the house-moving agenda, but I think we both understood that it wasn’t true. I had no plans for Theo’s rooms. I hadn’t even planned how I was going to open her door. I went past it every morning feeling a long cord of dread, connecting me to it as I walked away, stretching but never snapping.

  When the next morning came I lay awake in bed wondering how I would “deal with” Theo’s things. I had dreamt that I was standing outside the room, not knowing if Theo or Eve was behind the door, which had no handle, and no lock, and appeared to be drawn onto the wall. It was a strangely painful dream—pushing and shoving the not-door, half knowing that it was only a wall—and in the end it was worry that I might dream the same thing again, or something worse, that propelled me out of bed.

  I crossed the hall, then stood outside her door for a while, coming to the conclusion that I couldn’t go in after all. I looked at my watch. It was late in the morning, the time Theo would usually be getting up, leaving towels, cast-off cups of tea, and half-eaten toast in a trail; the time I would be in my office, working. Here I was instead, staring at a door. In the end it was the sound of approaching footsteps on the stairs that startled me into opening it and going inside.

  The curtains were open and the room was light, in a peculiarly still way. It smelled of emptiness; frozen breathing, old, cold perfume. I looked around and everything was familiar to me. I don’t know why I thought it might have changed. The furniture was still plastered with a decoupage of magazine pictures, carved with nail scissors a long time ago, to spell our names. A poster of an Indian temple was tacked over the bed, along with an article about the Humbug House, postcards, sketches. There was her bureau, with its tatty crowd of toys, a small dressing table piled with leaking cosmetics and jewelry. I picked up a brush, choked with long bright hairs.

  It was in the drawers by Theo’s bed that her treasure was kept. In one there was a heap of things that a child might hide away, an old pencil case, a blusher compact with no powder inside, a silver necklace, used-up pens and beer mats, a flattened origami swan, a small statue of Ganesha that Sebastian had sent her, an old action figure discarded by me. In the next drawer down I recognized my own postcards and letters. There was a photograph of Sebastian, Nick, and me, sitting in the kitchen at Charlie’s party; I was raising my hand indulgently at the photo taker. Then a few photographs she must have taken from the family album, of us as children. Another picture of me, this time as a two-year-old, glaring up at the camera, holding a red spade. The picture of my parents on their wedding day, a square of bright color like a lit screen. My father’s generous smile.

  The third drawer down was filled with paper. I picked up the piece on the top, which said:

  I’ve lost my brother, he’s over the sea,

  Over where I want to be.

  He’s the other half of me.

  . . . Tree Bee Happily?

  I held it as if a glimmer of life clung to it, a suggestion of her hand or her eye. I gathered up more pieces of paper to read, and then the unfairness of them struck me; that they should be here while she was not, this obstinate material, the signal of something that is gone.

  I put it all into boxes along with the rest of her things, until the room was dark and everything was gone. Then I sat in the quiet next to the pile of boxes. Sound rose vaguely up through the floor. The thump and scrape of furniture below, the occasional word from one of the maids. Outside I could hear birds calling; an engine running. A depleted clock ticked slowly. Inside, my heart drumming, the interior noise of my breath.

  When I stood up to leave I realized I had left the door open, and her scent had all blown away.

  I asked Alicia if Theo’s boxes could be kept at her new London house until I got back.

  “Oh dear . . . well, there’s not a great amount of space really. Not now all the furniture has gone in.”

  “It has seven bedrooms. Put it in a guest room.”

  She sat passively, eyes slipping off mine down to the floor. “But,” she said after a pause, “what if the other guest rooms are full and I need the—”

  “Find somewhere. She was your f—your daughter!” Alicia looked alarmed and I lowered my voice. “Remember?”

  She murmured something about letting go of the past.

  “Find somewhere,” I repeated, and went outside, where I crossed the terrace and walked away from the house and said, “Your fucking daughter, you fucking bitch.”

  Once I had started walking I didn’t turn back, traveling farther from the house, not realizing the direction I had taken until there I was, standing in front of the trees at the start of the path.

  I trod through the long grass and followed it; almost completely overgrown now with ferns and brambles. The dark green light splashed my clothes and face; there was that smell of water, of earth turned over in cold air. My feet rustled through layers of leaves, fallen bark, mulch. There were several sets of footprints in the bare, muddy patches of ground, crossing and overlying the one-way set that Theo would have left.

  I hadn’t come here since I was a child, with Theo and Charlie Tremayne. The path was shorter than I remembered, the pool when I reached it was smaller. The water was still; whirls of tiny flies hovered above its empty glaze, patched with the chilly light. The overhanging branches of the willows sifted its surface into faint motion each time the wind penetrated through the trees, erasing and remaking my reflected face.

  For almost a day Theo was here, they told me. I went over to the spot where I guessed she might have sat and saw the nymph still in place, almost completely green now, leaning down in dismay. Her face, dreamy and sad, was the same as Alicia’s when she lay on the sofa that morning, such a long time ago.

  Then Theo had walked out, down this shallow slope. The water must have been as cold as this; curling up around her, climbing up her coat toward her neck, passive but greedy. She looked down into it, through the tense pewter of its surface, and saw our father. All I could see was darkness, greenness, the damp light broken on the surface. I couldn’t see her.

  I was knee deep in the water when I realized what I was doing. I waded awkwardly back, and then, the same as I had over twenty years ago, I turned around and ran.

  2008

  Every time I have been to New York I arrive at night, seeing it only as a dark, tall city out the window of a taxi. I can’t make out the
buildings: the windows of the bars and the streetlights obscure the structures above them, blazing them out. Unwilling to go to the Charis hotel I usually stay at, I ask the cabdriver to take me to the first hotel whose name occurs to me.

  “Good choice,” the man tells me, eyes sectioned by the mirror. “You’ve been to New York before?” He has a look of friendly determination. I try to smile.

  “A couple of times.”

  He is pleased. “Yep. You get to learn a lot about people driving a cab. I could tell you’d been here before. Do you know how I know? You don’t look out of the windows. The new tourists can’t get enough of looking out of the window. You know, I got relatives in England, distant cousins. Where do you come from in England? Wales . . . I don’t know Wales. My relatives live in Surrey. You know it? John and Linda Woods. No, I guess you wouldn’t know them. So what do you do? Architecture! That figures. That’s why you stay in nice hotels. I bet you’ve built some nice hotels. Is that why you’re here—building something?”

  I spend the journey defending myself against these conversational shots until the cab finally pulls up to the side of the road. “Well, here we are,” he says, sounding disappointed that our relationship must end so abruptly. “Have a nice stay.”

  As I get out I see the frontage of the flagship Charis hotel across the road, dimly grand in its brown stone, and almost turn back to the cabdriver, startled. Then I wonder if, in my unreliable state, I actually said the name Charis to the cabdriver without realizing it. Finally I turn and see my own hotel behind me, situated opposite Charis, facing off like two dowagers at a society ball.

  “Of course,” I say, surprising the doorman. Of course it wouldn’t be so easy. But then, Eve is with me whether or not my window faces the palace of her former empire, so I go inside anyway and take a room for the night.

  In the end my room overlooks a different street. It is an extravagantly simple room: muted lighting, deep towels, prissily parceled soaps. On the bed, a large square of glaring white, sits a box of chocolates, which I eat in lieu of a meal. I remember when Theo and I were ten and eleven, and we stole a bag of toffees each from Mrs. Edwards’s shop. I persuaded Theo into it, so that I wouldn’t take the blame on my own if we were caught. On the way home in the car, before I could stop her, Theo put one in her mouth.