The Other Half of Me

by Morgan McCarthy

  After Maria and I left the lake house we stayed in America for a few months while she finished her research term, then moved to England, where she opened her own clinic. She is becoming well known for her theories on autism and Asperger’s syndrome, her avoidance of drug treatments. She spends hours with the youngest children, one who shaved off her eyebrows and hair; another, a musical prodigy, who has not spoken for two years. Like a parent she brings home the pictures one draws for her and puts them on the fridge, except these pictures are not of stick figures; they are fleshed out, they show light and shadow falling on the sides of a face, structured hands—the work of her genius child.

  I am still an architect: a better architect than before. My first commission after I got back and rejoined Anthony & Crosse was a C-shaped Renaissance-influenced mansion for an internet billionaire, with ornate mirrored glass, patterned brick, arches, and domed ceilings. Architectural Review called it a “welcome volte-face from Jonathan Anthony.” Developers are phoning; they want office blocks, hotels, apartment buildings that won’t annoy the locals. The words postmodern, neo-eclectic—even neoclassicist—are used. Of course, a lot of modernists won’t speak to me now, and a piece appeared in one paper hinting that I was losing my nerve; seeking refuge from the demands of taut steel and concrete in the frilled parlor of period nostalgia. Another journalist defended me, claiming I have brought a “new coherence to architecture,” which is not really true either.

  What I like about buildings now is not just their own structure but the way they fit, the way they ease themselves into the landscape, wrap around their inhabitants. When I think of successful architecture I think of the row of small houses facing Llansteffan beach, vividly pastel, the ice-cream colors of the coastal sky. They are the idea of living by the sea, the small hope that comes from being at the borders of the land, and at the beginning of something else.

  I told Maria I would build us a house by the sea, and she laughed and said, “Where else?”

  After I came home I realized I hadn’t lost any of my friends, with the exception of Emily, who fell into the category of friendship only in the loosest possible sense. She and Nick divorced after a year or so, then Emily married a billionaire and became Emily Miloslavkaia—the dull ruler of her pricey corner of South Kensington. I hear she has struck up a friendship with Alicia; they meet for lunch to discuss their lives on the up-and-up.

  After a while of pajama-wearing introspection, Nick emerged from his divorce exactly the same man he had always been. He works in Dubai now as a sort of financial gardener, planting and trimming large sums of money for investors, so that more money can grow. I think he is happy.

  After Theo’s death Sebastian had gone back to India, and aside from the occasional, vaguely worded postcard of a monkey or a mango tree under a white-hot sky, no one had heard anything from him. Then he moved back, bringing a Keralan girl named Seema, who had lived near the school where he taught. She passed his window most days and winked at him, so he chased her and gave her a flower, and they started a secretive, cinematic affair. When her parents found out they shut Seema in a bedroom while prospective husbands were hastily surveyed. She escaped in the traditional manner—knotted bedsheets, the nighttime drop into the garden—and now lives with Sebastian in Truro. When I met her I noticed her smile; wide, hopeful, the beautiful white of a shoreline. It struck me with force—not painful, as it might have been—but strangely reasonable; as if a smile like that is greater than the sum of its parts; a Platonic form, constant and pure.

  Not long after I got back I had to attend my mother’s wedding, an autumn panoply of orange blossom, antique lace, sugared almonds, and gold-leaf place settings, which set upon London society like a sparkling dragon, eating up the rich. A nightmare from start to finish, it did have the advantage of distracting Alicia from my recent absence. All peevishness was aimed at the wedding dress, the wedding planner, the wedding guests.

  “It’s such a lot of work,” Alicia said on the telephone, her voice an enervated near-whisper.

  “Why don’t you just elope?” I suggested. “Go to Vegas. You could be married by Elvis.”

  “You can be very strange sometimes, Jonathan.”

  “May I bring a guest?” I asked her. “Maria Dumas. You remember—from Llansteffan.”

  “Oh, the daughter of Sir John Bankbridge. Of course you may bring her.”

  Alicia’s new husband, Marcus, reminds me of a background character from a novel or film: fundamentally one-dimensional, he fits neatly into a paragraph with room to spare. Every day he does battle with ramblers and the National Trust over his Surrey estate, and every evening he has a snifter of brandy and checks the racing results. He looks almost exactly like a Greek statue, with his hard blond hair and thin nose. He treats Alicia proprietarily, which she doesn’t seem to notice.

  At the wedding the bride and groom resembled the wax couple on top of their cake; elegantly made, pale eyes, pale skin. Alicia wore a strange constricted dress; high at the neck to hide the ribs bracketing her upper chest. The priest recited his parts theatrically, staring up at the ceiling like a tilted doll. The congregation sat in well-dressed rows, looking disinterested, as well they might. I was the only family member there, aside from a few distant cousins. Alex didn’t come, which didn’t seem to bother Alicia. I think she was pleased at not having to introduce a shabby, nervous man in a cheap tie—freshly unearthed and blinking from the depths of a library—as her brother.

  I wondered if Alicia, whose Xanaxed gaze had an appearance of misty emotion, was in her vague state remembering her wedding to my father. I couldn’t even imagine it. The reek of the church must have been the same; the pews and tapestry and vaporized wax and the velvety heaviness of the lilies pooling in my lungs. Time began to reel backward as I stared at the two of them in front of the altar; their figures began to change. Alicia’s dress ballooned, her hair curled down, age dropped off her. Next to her there was an indistinct man. Blond hair, dark suit, facing away from me, his shadow stretching back across the stone. My father, the missing person, lost and found and lost again.

  I imagine sometimes that Eve meant to tell me more about him, right at the very end, and she didn’t get a chance. I could almost see the sheen evaporating from her eyes as she spoke, her life rolling off her like steam. Just like a film, her head sinking back onto the pillow, eyelids dropping closed, like petals falling.

  I’ll never know what kind of man my father was. He and Eve stand at opposite ends of a long rope in a tug-of-war. Whichever one pulls on the rope, the other is dragged toward the mire in the middle. If my father was an innocent man, resorting to blackmail only to get custody of his beloved children, Eve was ruthless, making threats, half-orphaning her grandchildren in order to protect herself. But if Eve was telling the truth, my father was a money-grabbing villain and she was protecting us too. It seems the truth, as usual, is somewhere between the two ends of the rope.

  Do I blame Eve for Theo’s death? I don’t know. Eve didn’t hurt her on purpose; it was just bad luck that they ended up sitting down at the same card table, the innocent and the consummate cheat. And sometimes I think of the Eve in the photograph she showed us a long time ago, the girl with the tightly waved hair and the face like something newly shaped, not yet fired. In the interim between Eve Bennett and Eve Anthony, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know everything about why funerals and deaths were her open doors, her escape routes. I don’t know what was left out of her stories. I just saw a character, as incomplete as all her other characters, as powerless. She was a princess who fell asleep in a glass coffin and didn’t wake up, a witch, a genie with all its power confined in a diamond, granting three wishes: George Bennett, Freddie Nicholson, Michael Caplin. She disappeared in the flash of a thousand cameras, she was sparkling and unreal, and when I remember the way she used to move across a room, sharp and pure and alien, I am not sure I can apply the usual standards of life to someone who never really took part in it.

 
; Do I blame myself? Yes. More than anyone else, I should have understood what was happening. I was always between them: Eve and her structured fiction, her tropes and archetypes, Theo and her instincts, living in the flashes and dives of feeling, drawn to the lacunae, the blank spaces of the past. I stood at the boundary line, not listening, not looking, not speaking: Jonathan the stone, set like concrete. I look back and I long to shove my past self—punch his complacent mug, pull his hair—anything to shake him out of his sleepwalking state.

  I told Maria that one night, trying to explain it, because in those early months the sleeplessness came and went like a dying neon light and she would find me awake at four or five in the morning, watching advertisements and gardening programs. She sat next to me and fitted her body against my side, touching my forehead with her own.

  “She knew what we had been told about our father wasn’t true—she sensed it,” I said. “She had these crazy delusions, I know, but it was because of that lie about our father. It was the beginning of her illness. Then in the end she spied on Eve and found out she was actually right, that we had been lied to, and so she thought all her delusions were true.”

  “The lie couldn’t have made her ill,” Maria said. “I’m sure she did pick up on the tension surrounding the subject of your father—but you have to believe that if it wasn’t that, she would have focused on something else.”

  “I just wish I’d known. If I’d known what was going on I wouldn’t have been so dismissive. I could have helped her.”

  “What would you change,” she said, “if you could have known everything?”

  “I’d have looked after her. Taken her to a doctor.”

  “So, you take her to a doctor and she gets a diagnosis,” she said. “It’s not good. So she goes to live in an institution, or she is given drugs that can’t cure her, and she hates them because with the side effects she can’t think properly, but you tell her she has to take them. So sometimes she takes them and sometimes she forgets, and her life is unhappy, and she might make the same decision in the end anyway. And whenever you see her you are either frightened, or resentful, or you pity her.”

  I couldn’t answer, so she carried on, her voice softer.

  “The idea of that would horrify her. All Theo ever wanted was to be with you, with nothing else between you; no sadness, no guilt. You can give her that. Let her exist that way in your thoughts: just you and her.”

  I nodded and took her hand, because I was grateful and I knew she was right. But I couldn’t do it. I closed my eyes and tried to see Theo, but her expression was hidden by an umbrella, a straw hat, the light on the window, the high stalks of the grass where she lay, the layer of water. I didn’t know how to get her back, without going back, to the place where she got lost.

  Mrs. King was surprised when I called to ask if I could walk around Evendon’s gardens. This is not an odd request, from tourists, but it is odd coming from me. “I’ll be out, I have a hair appointment,” she said, “but Carmen can let you in. . . . Such a shame to miss you, but make yourself at home. Well, it is your home—was . . .” She sounds embarrassed and says good-bye rather hurriedly. I remember when I met her around the time of the sale, she seemed unnerved, reaching out once to touch a table then retracting her hand, like a stricken snail’s eye.

  After dropping Maria at her mother’s house I drive up through Llansteffan; the small houses, gray and pastel, the tiny roads and their thick fringing of trees. I can feel the layers of memories accumulated over the land, the edges and surfaces of things wavering in time. There is Mrs. Edwards’s shop, the spot where I first saw Maria, the road Theo, Sebastian, and I used to walk down. The beach rolls out below me; at the same time the cream half-moon where we made sand castles, and the flickering dark flat, sweeping out beyond our fire. The sea is the blazing tide in the peak of the sun, gray and rainy, a black night sea, pale and periwinkle in the light of the morning. Finally I pass under the arched trees up the hill, the light darting through the branches and hitting the car window like arrows. I slow down slightly, delaying the turn in the road, but the trees are swinging out before me already, and then Evendon comes into view.

  The house seems bigger, harder in its checkered gray and white; its windows blurs of reflective anonymity. The sun glances off the dark roof, having tracked its usual path over the house since morning, leaving the front in shadow. There are no cars in the drive except mine, which I realize I have just parked in its usual place, under a sycamore; pulling up there without even thinking about it.

  I get out and stand by the car for a moment, looking up at the house and the large, square shape of shade it casts onto the gravel, the impermeable windows, the six stone steps up to the door, the clematis above the portico, dripping its heavy perfume. As I loiter the door suddenly opens, and I have to hastily go over so that the maid—presumably Carmen—can show me in. She is shy, and is grateful when I tell her I can make my own way to the gardens.

  When she leaves I stand by myself in the empty white hall, which gives no indication of having been the scene of the dramatic death of George Bennett. The pillars seem thinner, stripped down, like two candles for a vigil. The small rosewood table with the telephone is gone, the two bowls of lilies at the foot of the stairs. The rest of the hall is the same, the marble floor, the tall windows, filled again with silence, the glacial haze of desertion.

  I don’t take the opportunity to nose around: I pass through only a few rooms toward the terrace, same-shaped spaces that have become unfamiliar. The morning room is no longer red; there are no gold elephants, no Persian carpets. It is papered a chilly, dusty blue, with some pastel flowered rugs, an immense television on the wall, a couple of modern sofas like slabs of marshmallow. The dining room is presided over by a large photograph of the Kings, posing with two children and a boss-eyed cocker spaniel; a long reproduction mahogany table has been installed in place of the Georgian original. I see through a doorway the beginnings of the gold parlor, which now holds a pool table.

  I have the feeling that the Kings, once they bought Evendon, realized they didn’t know exactly what to do with it. The rooms are only halfheartedly furnished, their prosaic furniture scattered across the space like cargo after a shipwreck. In the time of Eve, the house was filled with collected light; it had an overt, watchful beauty. Now it is cool and gloomy, like a closed-down store. I thought that seeing it this way would have been satisfying, or painful, but it’s neither, it’s nothing. Evendon feels like what it is—someone else’s house.

  I step outside into the sun, its incandescence closing over me, forcing me to squint. Then the gardens slowly re-form in my vision, perfect and unchanged. The wide smooth stones of the terrace, where Alicia’s roses are in flower, the neat herb garden. The lawn, banked with magnolias and beeches, bright rather than deep green, recently cut. The sky is fluorescent blue in between the leaves of the oaks that stand at the edge of the lawn nearest me, a cloudless, dreamlike color. It is extremely quiet now it is the end of the summer. There is a clarity to the heat, to the day, as if the fitful, humid fever of the last few months has collected and distilled.

  In the still suspension the garden stops, becoming what it once was. There, a swan from the lake, walking obstinately round the topiary patterns. The cook smoking a cigarette in the herb garden. The glass of gin and tonic sitting next to a large white umbrella on the terrace, the tennis balls scattering the well-kept court. The girl lying in the shade under a tree, her bright hair in her eyes, making daisy chains and drinking wine from the bottle. In the earth between the flagstones of the terrace, the wink of gold-leafed crystal. The woman’s voice, like dark water, talking on the telephone.

  The past isn’t a story. It isn’t Eve’s story or my story. It is not linear, it is not fixed. The past is an unknown pool, its cool brim the border where memory begins. It ripples as the light changes, it is cohesive, a different substance from the present, it cannot be breathed. You can’t tell it: whatever you repeat is not the truth beca
use it is not complete. All you can do is stare into the water and try to see as much as you can.

  I walk out onto the open slope down toward the trees, until I reach the edge of the lawn, stopping where the path used to start, where the light shivers and breaks into pieces of shadow against the shifting lace of the tall brambles. It’s a place no one knows about now, grown over, boarded up with long grass.

  I know that if I walk to the water there will be no witch, no spell, no face appearing from the trees. It is not the ghost that holds me back; it is the absence of ghosts. I stand there a little longer, and then I turn back, and walk away across the grass, back through the hall and out of Evendon. As I pull away the house shimmers small in the reflected car window like a television image, then blinks out.

  I thought I had left something there, but I was wrong. Evendon is empty: it is windows and bricks, dust and fingerprints. She is not in the gold parlor on the cushions, not lying on the grass, not wreathed and still in the water. She is not part of a story. She is the other half; one awake, one dreaming in the young night. She is with me, just like always.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Nicole, Diane, and Sue for advice, support, and what must have seemed like endless rereads. Thanks to Richard for paper and ink and to Cian for putting a (half-finished) roof over a struggling writer’s head. Thanks to Penny for introducing us to Carmarthenshire. Thanks to the team at Conville and Walsh: to David Llewelyn for his initial recommendation and Jo Unwin for all her hard work and good advice. Thanks to Leah Woodburn for her insightful analysis. And many thanks to Millicent Bennett and everyone at Simon & Schuster for all the work and support that goes into every stage of publication.