“Here’s another puzzle: Why can’t Jonathan do his essay?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“Because Theo’s distracting him.”
How many times did I send her away like that? Now I am paying for it, empty and unsleeping, my memory of her like a lightbulb I can’t turn off, irradiating the bare cavity of my head.
Terri “pops over” again—hoping that I’m not feeling lonely out here by myself. She has realized it was silly of her to give me her number when the phone here has only just been reconnected. “I guess I assumed you had a mobile,” she says, smiling at me. She has me down now for an old-fashioned English gent, I can tell.
She offers for me to use her pool in the hot weather; she lives only a short drive away. She has little barbecues, and she would be pleased if I could come; they don’t have enough men. I tell her I like the isolation of the lake, as politely as I can. “Oh I completely understand—I’m a very solitary person,” she confides. “I find it hard to trust people. But, you know, people like us, we need company sometimes. . . .”
When Terri is gone I find myself thinking of Maria—her mouth turning up in its not-quite smile, her brown skin—and there it is. The return of love. I hadn’t thought about it all winter, but I suppose it never completely goes away.
Did she really put her hand on mine, the last night I saw her? I didn’t think she did it out of pity, but then I never did understand her very well. The half-real rainy light was shining over us both, lying on the bed. In that short time before her phone rang I had felt happy—happier than perhaps I had ever felt in my life. Her little mistake and my greatest moment.
Maria is someone who still exists; she’s working in Boston, in the Reiss-Carlow Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders. I know the telephone number of her office. It seems absurd that I could go into the house and within a few minutes I could be speaking to her. It is not Maria who is gone—it is the Jonathan who might do this. He is lost in a summer in Llansteffan, sitting on a beach with all the possibilities of the world in his head, complete and ignorant and heroic, like a medieval knight. He sits with the girl he loves, and thinks that he could have her, that it is all up to him.
One night I pull a chair out to sit by the lake. The water is almost invisible in the darkness, close by my feet. The house creaks gently behind me with the slight disturbances of the air.
My grief over Theo is love, and guilt, the two of us on the lawn at night, the tears in her eyes, my voice like a flat hand, pushing away the dark. My grief over Eve is something toxic and complex. It is not only to do with disappointment but with outrage, which makes it worse. I am angry with Eve, for not putting up a good enough show, one I could still believe in. She sits at the head of the dining table again, as the light in the windows sinks, telling a story. Her voice pulls me along, stringing misfortunes together like an outtake reel, the actors falling off horses, tumbling downstairs, dropping through water. Her face by now almost lost, soft as ash, the words running on, uncoupled, no longer tied to a mouth.
I realize I have started to fall asleep, but I can’t move, sitting there cold and heavy and upright. I dream I am on a plane. Out of the window, deep down, there is the water, where my sister waits. I could slip down there, and my life would come rushing back, and I would not be alone. I lean my face against the window, chilly with its closeness to the sky. The stars beyond it hang hazy and icy; they press down on me, pushing me into the morning.
I write on a piece of paper:
Maria
After a few hours I fold it up into halves, then quarters, and put it into a drawer in the kitchen.
I go to the supermarket under a flat, synthetic blue sky, thick around me, the heavy reek of a storm in the air. I take the same plastic bags I used last time; I seek out products that are traded fairly—organic corn, ethical meat. The origins of my dinner never used to bother me; these days I want to cause as little damage as possible to anybody, whether it is a Costa Rican banana grower or a pig in Denmark. I smile at the checkout staff, sitting up like a row of meerkats. They all smile back widely, and I can’t help but miss Mrs. Edwards, sullen and dense beneath her canopy of smoke.
I pay for my food and walk out into the beginning rain, where an enterprising tramp has set up near the trolley bay. I don’t see him until he says, “Any change?” He has bright green eyes, startling in his pocked face. I give him the rest of my notes.
“Thank you,” says the man, startled. “Thank you very much.”
His hand retreats into his large blanket with the money, so that only his head and shoulders remain visible, hooded from the rain.
“You’re welcome,” I say. He looks at me curiously; perhaps I have breached some kind of street etiquette, standing here too long. Or maybe other change-givers do this too; feeling that they should get a return for their money, hear a sad story of drugs or abandonment. I get in my car awkwardly.
Something about this man reminds me of Theo. Sitting there in full view, he has the same inside-out revealing of himself. I cannot work, they both say, I cannot be mended. Their dependency catches others like burrs, pulling out sympathy; they refuse to be separate, defined at the edges.
I, on the other hand, bowled through life like a marble, a rolling stone. I didn’t gather any moss; but then I didn’t gather much love either. Now I come to rest at the lowest point.
I go back to my empty house and listen to the clinking where the roof is leaking into buckets. Outside the rain hisses, like hundreds of pieces of paper being torn.
I start again, sitting with my pen in my mouth, staring at the square of white until it leaves its afterimage on my eyes. Then I write,
Maria, I
I consider the I, standing alone. As a letter, it doesn’t seem appropriate for its subject. I is too simple—one line, straight up and down like a pillar or a flagpole. I can’t identify with it. A spiral would be better, or just a scribble. I sit there for a while, but I can’t get past the inexorability of the I, and finally I put the paper back in its drawer again and I sit outside, watching the flickering cinema of the rain.
It gets to the end of August quickly, and Bob asks me, “You’ll be moving before Christmas, won’t you?” He explains that it will get very cold soon and as the house doesn’t have working heating, living by the lake will be out of the question.
Bob has taken to hanging around the verandah after I have given him his rent, making unpracticed conversation, looking at me curiously all the time we are talking. I realize now that he is worried about me, so I don’t tell him that I haven’t planned so far ahead as winter. I give him a vague lie about moving to New York.
“I guess maybe you can design some buildings there?” is Bob’s last attempt at drawing me out.
“Perhaps,” I say.
The rural American buildings I have seen, in this land of no ruins, are mostly a new, internationally familiar type; purposeful and hasty. They tend to be box shaped, as if for storage—even the churches, storing worship. Where money has accumulated the buildings are more lavish, such as the luxury apartments I see around the lake, those jaunty hybrids of Swiss chalets and Tudor mansions, Disneyland-style châteaux with pink roofs.
It strikes me now that what I would have built is worth nothing more than this kind of rubbish. I would have designed something large and demanding out of steel and glass; I would have hoped to win an award for it from somebody who would never live there. It didn’t occur to me that buildings should be harmonious, much less beautiful: I thought the love of beauty was plebeian. I didn’t want anyone to be uplifted by a building of mine—I wanted them to look at it and think of my name: Jonathan Anthony, Jonathan Anthony, a name without meaning, an empty waving placard.
Maria,
I’ve had a lot of wrong ideas about love in the past—ideas I am ashamed to remember. You probably wondered why I chased you and called you when I never had anything worthwhile to say, but it was because when I was with you I had an idea of what love should
be. I was just too cold and stupid to know that’s what it was.
I understand love better now and it’s still yours—it always will be—if you ever want it.
Jonathan
After a sudden week of bad weather, I wake up to see that the sun has rolled softly into the house. The stale rug and bleached-out floor have become an expanse of luminous, polished oak, veiled with long squares of light from the terrace. Instead of old salt and decay, there is the scent of jasmine, of lilies. I can hear a woman’s voice, in another room. I close my eyes again, but Evendon vanishes anyway. Outside the seagulls carp and squawk.
Later that morning I drive to the post office in town. I stand for an uneasy moment, hesitant, when the woman behind the counter asks, “Is there anything else?” Before I can decide what to say, the woman smiles at me with recognition. “Are you the Englishman staying at Bob’s lake house?” she asks. “I’ve got mail here for you.”
When I get home I put the stack of letters on the cardboard box I have been using as a table. A bound pile of paper, following me across the world. I eye it as I eat my breakfast. Then I take the pile and go outside to sit on the verandah, which is a well of sunlight. The week’s rain has dried away already; the raspy hush of the trees sounds parched, the cornflowers are the palest of blues. Heat lies like a shiver over the water, blazes up again from the dusty white road.
I have two letters from Alicia. The first is almost energetic in its reproaches. Apparently some of her furniture was damaged in its journey from Evendon, which she stops coyly short of blaming me for. She complains that the optician has prescribed that she wear reading glasses, and manages to imply a fragile state of health. “It is difficult when one is alone,” she writes. The second letter, which arrived last week, is shorter: “How long are you going to stay away?” she asks. “I have some news—I am getting married, to Sir Marcus Balfour. He is a close friend of Prince Charles. I hope you will return in time to come to the wedding. It is becoming very awkward answering questions about you, as if you are a recluse.”
It makes sense really; Alicia isn’t the type to be left alone for long, she is a natural dependent. Of course she would get herself a husband. She signs off, “Your mother, Alicia,” as if she is reminding herself of our relationship.
Among the other letters are a few from our lawyers concerning a book that’s about to be published, a biography of George Bennett. It’s a shocker all right. Some of the details I had no idea of: apparently there was a high turnover of maids at his houses; one leaving after he slapped her for dropping his tea, one hit by a flying paperweight. He also ran a profitable sideline selling some of his more dubiously acquired artifacts on the black market. This George Bennett’s veneer of gentility barely covers the primitive instincts of the bandit, the raider of not only foreign tombs and palaces but sickly American heiresses’ fortunes: his spectacular, somersaulting death the natural culmination of a life of subterranean violence.
I know I ought to tell solicitors to challenge these claims, as Eve would have, but even if they are all untrue—which I doubt—I’m not sure I see the value in it. Eve had some power to prevent these things, but she has become copy herself for the journalists, and soon the biographers will move in, to write the “real” story of Eve. Stories and stories and stories, appearing like rats poking their heads out of the cracks, after the last war is over.
Reading my letters disturbs me more than I expected; feeling the long reach of my family across the Atlantic. No reply from Maria; but then I hadn’t really believed there would be one. As an apology letter it was too little, as a love letter, too late. I pour a glass of water and go out to the verandah again, where I sit thinking nothing much for hours, moving in and out of a doze, until the sun is almost gone and I am still leaning against the old, warmed wood of the house, wondering what to do next. I don’t care, that’s the problem. My heart could be meat packed in ice; I can’t feel it, though I know it clenches and unclenches, it goes on, unreasonably and pointlessly. My life has stopped, but I am still here.
I need to go back and tell Theo she was right. I thought I was whole, but I was a blind eye. I thought I was unaffected, slick-sided, but I was afraid. I left Theo to take the weight of the lie herself, crowding in, getting into her breathing space. No wonder she never knew what was real.
I lie on the decayed verandah and the idea of never seeing her again swallows me. I am in the secret pool, immersed. My memories tangle around me like weeds, clotted and slick. The sky is water, the air is unbreathable, looking up at the dark leaves through a weight of condensed green light. We’ll be far away, and we’ll be so happy, she said. I could do it—go into the lake—reach the distant place and see her waiting there. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I want to reach out in some way, put my hand out, feel the blood extending through my cold fingers.
I breathe, I open my eyes. The night has started to slide over the lake, a purple like spilled watercolor graduating, merging into the horizon. I can hear the crickets; the birds have fallen silent. The pale cracked ground has turned a faint lavender color in the light; the water is silverish. The sky above me is strange, lovely, like mother-of-pearl.
Maria is here. She stands there on the white ground, not far away, looking at me. There is a car behind her, its door left open. She is wearing a cream coat that glows like a moon in the dark, her legs dark and thin against the pale dust, her face a gathered radiance. It is the Maria of the last night in London, her eyes serious, her mouth sad. I don’t say anything. I don’t know whether I believe in her, appearing like this out of the shady corridor between awake and asleep, standing here by the dilapidated house like a projection, looking like my best memory of her, like something I’d made up.
She walks over, and kneels next to me on the verandah, without speaking. She is so close that I can feel the air around me shift; resettling with her familiar perfume. She puts her hands out and they curl round mine; the surface of her palms like a small shock on my skin. Her eyes are dark topaz, amber; gold haloes out from her pupils like flares off the sun. Her hair falls down, a curtain descending; the heat from her flows into me, traveling toward my guttering heart.
EPILOGUE
2010
I am driving down to Carmarthen from our house in Berkshire, the car window slightly open, a thin stream of air knifing its way in, expanding into a rush of coolness. Maria holds her hair in one hand to prevent it licking across her face. It is a hot, blue day; we can see clearly all the way over the Severn as we cross the bridge.
“I dreamt last night we were on Llansteffan beach, making a sand castle,” Maria says.
“Sand castles . . . I haven’t built one for years.”
“I’m not surprised. I would have thought you’d be completely against them. Mock-medieval, derivative: career suicide.” She laughs and then says, more thoughtfully, “I often dream about us all, back in Wales.”
She touches my hand, because I know who she means by all of us. Maria, Jonathan, Nick, Theo.
“I don’t have dreams anymore,” I say.
“You still dream,” she tells me. “You just don’t remember them.”
“I’m happy with that. I like the night without them. It’s peaceful.”
“Let’s sit out tonight,” Maria says. “We can just watch the sea from the garden.”
Maria: fan of the sea, of gardens. I know these things about her now. She likes horses, Bach, liberalism, whisky, ballet. She dislikes beards, religion, oysters, fur, hiking. I know that today, under her dove-color shirt, scarf, and jeans, she is wearing cream silk lingerie, with lace straps, tiny pearls. I know that this morning when she woke up, her hair had willfully sprung out over one ear, necessitating a flurry with the blow-dryer. It still seems unbelievable to me sometimes, that I am in a position to possess all this knowledge about someone who was once so far; so strange to me.
“How did you find the house?” I asked her on the plane home from America. “It wasn’t signposted from the road.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” I felt protective of the house.
“I spoke to the owner, actually. He was relieved that I’d come. He said, ‘It’s getting cold—take him home.’”
“And so you did,” I said.
“So I did.” She widened her eyes with mock astonishment: “And here we are.”
“Why did you come?” I asked.
“I would have come sooner. But you didn’t answer any of my calls or letters, and in the end I flew to Wales anyway, but by then you’d left and nobody knew who you were. Then I got your letter.”
Maria said that when she first arrived at Evendon that summer and I came over from the garden to meet her, she saw a boy who had something bright about him, something interested. She felt excited, nervy, and possible. He had a hopefulness like Theo’s, but it was more protected, he cradled it like a wound. She realized he wouldn’t let someone else get close to that. “Then we saw the picture of Eve.”
“That picture . . .” I frowned.
“I understood you better when you talked about her. You had this future, just like her. It took up all your space.”
Maria said she was always half waiting for something to change in the Jonathan she knew, because she didn’t forget him. She thought about him in France; she bought magazines if she saw his name in them. She was sad and pleased that he was getting what he wanted—solidifying, becoming more famous—building himself like a monument with no doors and windows.
Then she saw his uncertainty in London, hovering over him like incipient rain, but the timing was wrong—the phone call—and she let him leave, and then everything happened and after that he vanished. Then she got his letter and went to find him. He was not a man inside a monument anymore. He was lying on the ground in the night, like something dead, something newly hatched, uncased and lost, bright again at last.
The Other Half of Me Page 29
