Banishing Verona

by Margot Livesey

  “So what we were thinking,” said Nigel, “is that we’d hold on to your passport.”

  “No.” She was on her feet, her chair falling backward, the table rocking. “This has nothing to do with me. What if I have an emergency, what if—”

  Nigel was standing beside her. He grabbed her arm with his crooked hand and, just as she opened her mouth to scream, let go. “Sit down,” he said quietly. “We don’t mean yours. Henry’s will be enough.”

  George righted her chair and she sat down again. Slowly, still giddy from the shock, she resumed her seat. The baby, who had been quiet since she got off the plane, kicked fiercely, as if protesting these sudden antics.

  “You can’t make me hand over my passport in a public place,” said Henry.

  “We can’t,” agreed Nigel. “But we can phone your boss and tell him what’s been going on.”

  As he flipped open his mobile phone and recited a London number, Henry reached into his breast pocket. “What do I have to do to get it back?” he said.

  A flurry of negotiations followed. Henry would try to talk to Adrian today. He would suggest a notarized agreement that he could show to Nigel and George. Optimistically, the money could be wired to his bank account within the week.

  “One piece of advice,” said Nigel. “Don’t let him go too long thinking this is a friendly visit.”

  “Got you,” said Henry. “Do you think there’s any way to use Verona?”

  Now the allegiance had shifted. She was the outsider, and the three men turned to study her. “Wait a moment,” she said, clasping her belly.

  “Maybe nothing too explicit,” said George. “Just suggest that she’s worried sick about you. I hope, by the way, you’ve got medical insurance. You two don’t need any more debts.”

  “Absolutely,” said Henry. “As soon as we’ve spoken to Adrian, we’ll be on the next plane.”

  “All things being equal,” said Nigel, holding up the passport.

  Perhaps it was the aftermath of the morning’s exertions or the sense that a solution was in sight, but as Verona watched them put on their jackets, she remembered her exchange with Henry about the stolen Vermeer. “Do either of you know anyone who’s stolen a famous painting?” she asked.

  George glanced up from buttoning his jacket. “Art theft? Not our line. I do have a pal who’s been involved in a couple of switches—you know, when they nick the real painting and leave a forgery.”

  “So some of the famous paintings we’re looking at in museums are fakes?”

  “Almost certainly.” He eyed her more closely. “Did you have something in mind?”

  Any moment he would be making a note of her request: Renaissance masterpiece, plenty of scarlet and gold leaf, no St. Jeromes please. “I do this radio program,” she said, feeling foolish. “I thought it might be an interesting topic.”

  George inclined his massive head. “Well, we’ve all got work to do. Phone us as soon as there’s news.”

  One behind the other, he and Nigel deposited their dirty mugs in the dishpan and threaded their way between the tables and through the glass door. Only when they disappeared into the mass of pedestrians did Verona turn back to Henry. “How did they find—” she started to say, but he was already in full voice.

  “You idiot. ‘I do this program,”’ he simpered. “When will you get it into your head that not everything is about you?”

  He was sitting bolt upright, his cheeks still flushed, his eyes wide and furious. She stared back with a quick kindling fury that matched his own. Wasn’t a resolution finally in view? Hadn’t she done well with Nigel and George when Henry was at his most pathetic? But as he continued to rant, she was distracted, first by a feeling, then a thought. The feeling consisted of a stabbing pain in her throat. The thought was that there were absolutely no guarantees that Adrian would agree to the loan. Tentatively she swallowed. Her throat felt as if a fork had been dragged up and down the inside for several days. It must be the central heating, all the changes of temperature. “I’m not feeling very well,” she interrupted. “Could we go to Adrian’s flat?”

  She slept for the remainder of the day and much of the next, and for once the baby, normally at its most energetic when she lay down, moved gently. She woke to drink and go to the bathroom and read a few pages of the book she found by the bed, a thriller set in New Orleans, before slipping back into antic dreams. People came and went—Henry, Adrian, his wife, Suzie, who looked a little like the therapist on the ferry—asking if she wanted anything but she didn’t, except more hours of darkness, more sleep. Toward the end of the second day a man appeared at her bedside, a doctor friend of Suzie’s, who took her temperature and listened to her chest. “She doesn’t have a fever,” he said. “All she needs is rest and plenty of fluids.”

  And somewhere in the midst of this, Henry bent over her to whisper that Adrian had agreed.

  On the fourth day she woke at dawn and knew herself recovered. Her elbows and knees, ankles and neck still ached, but her mind was fresh and lucid, like the countryside after a storm. In this landscape one feature stood out, obdurate as Everest. She must talk to Zeke. When she had bathed, dressed, and tried to stay out of Suzie and Adrian’s way as they hurried to work, she was at last able to commandeer a phone.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she noticed for the first time the presence of a large television. The screen gave back her ghostly reflection. All morning she had been longing to hear Zeke’s voice; now that she was poised to do so, her palms were slippery and her heart drummed in her ears. She spoke to the hotel switchboard, listened to Pachelbel’s canon, spoke to another operator, and at last heard the phone ringing. “The guest you are calling is not available. Please wait for the tone and leave a message.” The tone came, insistent and uninviting, and then, even more uninviting, that buzzing silence into which her words were meant to fall. She hung up.

  Oh, why wasn’t he there, she thought. She needed to talk to him.

  So how had Zeke felt, demanded her reflection, when day after day she had left him in silence with no way to reach her?

  Whatever scrim had obscured these facts had vanished during her illness. She was acutely, vividly aware of how her behavior must seem from Zeke’s point of view. She had tricked him into letting her stay at the Barrows’, disappeared with no explanation, invited him to Boston and disappeared again, promised to call and failed to do so. How could any of this make sense to someone who didn’t know about Henry? Or how could it make any but the worst kind of sense? And now she and Henry were returning to London. As soon as she emerged from her room, he had taken her aside to ask if she was well enough to travel that evening.

  None of this, though, would have stopped her from hurrying to Boston and begging Zeke’s forgiveness. What gave her pause was the dream. It had come to her that first evening at Adrian’s and several times since. She was at the airport, waiting to board a beautiful white plane. Her row of seats was called; she walked toward the door. But as she reached the threshold of the plane, her water broke and before she could cry out she was surrounded by Americans—Adrian, Suzie, the therapist on the ferry, the men from the hotel—all holding her down, all insisting that she give birth in America. She had woken up, clutching her belly. It was just her subconscious, she thought, processing George’s gibe about medical insurance. But every time the baby moved, she was afraid.

  In the end she left a message so flat and faltering that as soon as she hung up she wanted to reach into the machine and retrieve it. And she’d forgotten to tell him she’d been ill. If he didn’t know that, then she must seem like the most heartless person alive.

  Before she could call him back, Henry came in to say that their sandwiches had been delivered. He was in a boisterous mood. “The limousine will be here at three so you can pack after lunch. Come on,” he added. “Time to be charming. Let’s make Adrian feel that lending me money is the best thing he’s done in years.”

  If she hadn’t still been tired, still under
the spell of her dream, still at the mercy of these unfamiliar surroundings, surely she would have stood firm and excused herself for five minutes to make the call. As it was she rose and followed Henry docilely out of the room. She would phone from the airport.

  Zeke

  24

  Two or three times an hour, once four, the girl in the seat beside him uttered a series of high-pitched coughs, sounding so much like a small animal that, on the first couple of occasions, Zeke bent down to search the aisle for a stowaway. Save for these periodic eruptions, she sat remarkably still. Perhaps, he thought, she was meditating. Meanwhile, he noticed with surprise that his dread of flying had lessened. Once they were airborne and he had examined each of his fears—being sucked out of the window, landing in water, a turbine bursting into flames, a wing falling off, the pilot having a seizure or deciding, for his own obscure reasons, to head for the Sahara—he was able to settle down to anticipating the nicely partitioned meals and choosing a film. First, though, he got out of his seat and went to the back of the plane to see if he could find the triangular rip in the upholstery he had noticed four days earlier above the toilet door. But the light was poor, and before he could complete his search a flight attendant pointed out that the toilet was free and he felt obliged to go inside.

  Apart from the black miasma filling every corner of his skull, leaving America had turned out to be much easier than entering. No plump ventriloquist had questioned him as to why he wanted to go to London, no dog drooled over his suitcase, no man wearing obscene rubber gloves fumbled through his possessions. Zeke almost wished they had; a little aggravation might have dispelled the dreamlike quality of his departure. As it was, only the flecks of magnolia paint rimming his nails testified to the bizarre events of the last few days. He had got on a plane, he had stayed in a hotel, he had explored Boston, and now he was sitting on another plane, all without seeing Verona.

  The day after the conversation with his mother, he had finished painting Jill’s living room and returned to the hotel to find the message light on the phone once again blinking. Cautiously he followed the steps Jill had shown him and was rewarded, at last, with Verona’s voice, but not her voice as he remembered it, warm and inviting. She sounded hoarse and hesitant; she was in New York, she sent her love, she hoped he was out doing something nice. Then came a noise like his own hmm sound.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Henry’s finally got things organized and we’re flying back to London tonight. I’m so sorry, but every time I sneeze I’m afraid the baby will come early. I need to get on a plane while they’ll still let me.”

  He had played the message eight times, each time thinking that he might hear something different, might hear her saying I’m in the lobby, meet me at the Fogg Museum, and feeling more incredulous than the time before when the message ended, “See you in London; I can’t wait.” He had always understood the expression uprooted as a metaphor. Now he avoided looking down for fear that he would be able to discern the forking white roots that he had torn so painfully, at such inconvenience and expense, out of the shallow soil of his life. As he listened, he understood that every minute since he landed, even those when he claimed to be full of doubt, he had believed that Verona was about to appear; he would round a corner, turn over in bed, step into a restaurant, and there she would be, her lovely, large, specific self.

  He had taken refuge in the cupboard with the ironing board, leaving the door ajar so that he could count the coat hangers lining the rail and the nails in the molding. Why, he had wondered, for perhaps the four-thousandth time, did he want to be with this woman? She was not beautiful, like Mavis, nor did she seem to need him, like Cecily. But Mavis was taken several times over. As for Cecily, who had been nominally his girlfriend for the last two years of university, he had had the uneasy feeling that compassion played a larger part in their relations than affection; she had shown him the scars on her wrists on their second date, described what a stomach pump felt like on the third. Her vague angst was initially compelling, then terrifying, and finally dull. When he told her that no, he didn’t want to meet her parents, no, he didn’t want to stay the night, she had wailed like a siren, tried to jump in front of a bus. Sometimes he thought his own breakdown had been partly a way to avoid her, in which case it had been entirely successful. Since his recovery, a series of other women had rung his doorbell or his phone, but an acute sense of his own limitations, and of how quickly both misunderstandings and agreements arose, made him wary. And then, with Verona, something about the way she listened, the stories she told, her dead friend, her sweeping belly, her personal electricity, had made him forget all his sensible doubts and reservations.

  When he had counted every hanger and nail hole, he had emerged from the cupboard and phoned Jill to tell her he was leaving as soon as possible. Christ, she had said, you’re like a toy on a string. Whatever Verona says, you—

  I only came to America, he interrupted, because of her. Why would I stay when she’s gone? Apart from anything else, I can’t afford it.

  Oh, she said, I thought … . Then he heard a little gulp, as if she were taking a deep breath, several deep breaths. When she continued her voice had that rusty quality it had had when she was upset about her flat. Forget it. I can’t thank you enough for helping me these last few days.

  You know my mother isn’t well, he had said, and was both pleased and ashamed when, sounding more like her old self, Jill said of course and that if he ever wanted to consult her about medical matters he shouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone. He thanked her and urged her to get in touch when she came back to London. They exchanged addresses.

  Only after he hung up did Zeke realize he had forgotten to say anything about her, how he hoped she found true love or whatever she was searching for, but she was on duty at 7 A.M. and he didn’t want to disturb her again. Later, in the middle of the night, the phone had rung. Still half asleep, he had picked up the receiver. Hello, he had said. Verona? No one spoke, but as he lay with the phone pressed to his ear, looking up at the tiny light of the smoke detector, he was almost sure he heard another of those gulps.

  Now, as he began to eat the omelet the flight attendant had set before him, he calculated that his late-night caller couldn’t have been Verona; she was already flying. While the sky outside the oval window lightened and darkened, he watched a romantic comedy and tried not to look at his watch too often. He couldn’t wait to be home with his clocks and his neatly organized drawers and well-known street. They were over Ireland, the pilot announced, then the Bristol Channel. Soon he saw a spreading mass of orange lights on the ground below and recognized the city where he lived.

  Inside, the terminal was different from America but not immediately like London. He and his fellow passengers walked along endless corridors lined with advertisements to passport control. The woman at the desk barely glanced at his passport, and a few minutes later he retrieved his suitcase. Without Emmanuel, he ignored the sleek expensive train and headed for the underground. As soon as he got on the train and saw the rows of upholstered seats, the abandoned newspapers, the grotty wooden floor, he had the reassuring sense of being close to home.

  The plane had landed at five past eight. Soon after ten he turned the corner into his street. The wind ruffled his hair. It was a cold night for London, but still much warmer than Boston. A magnificent stand of white clouds rose up to the south; at the far end of the street, the church steeple stood out like a witch’s hat. For a few seconds, looking at his dark house, Zeke entertained the notion that his keys would no longer work. Or that if they did, the flat they admitted him to would be utterly different from the one he had left a few days ago. A flowery three-piece suite would dominate the living room; his bedroom would be lined with huge televisions like the one in his hotel room. Nonsense, he thought, everything will be just where I left it.

  But before he went inside, he must check the street. He set his suitcase down in the doorway. In the gloom he made out the t
wo dustbins to the right of his front door. Next door his neighbors’ three bins were tucked neatly against the privet hedge. He moved down the street, making an inventory of every house until he reached the corner. He crossed over and did the same on the far side until he was again facing his own unlit house. Suddenly he saw that his imaginings of catastrophic change had been correct, though not their details. The ash tree, two doors down, was gone.

  He raced across the road. Perhaps he was misremembering; the tree was farther away than he recalled, four houses down, say, instead of two. But no, here was a stump, calf high, the diameter of a large dinner plate. He bent down to feel the rough grain of the wood beneath his palm. It had been one of the few trees he genuinely liked. Once, during a dodgy period, he had counted the number of larger branches every day: forty-six. Now in a matter of days, a matter of hours, all those years of patient growth had been annihilated. Surely this wouldn’t have happened if he had remained at his post. He added it to the list of all he had neglected in his life because of Verona: his father, his mother, his customers, his clocks.

  25

  He woke, bewildered, to discover it was nearly noon. How had he slept so late? Picturing his hotel room in America, he knew the answer. Some part of him had failed to board the plane, was still loitering in the cupboard with the ironing board or staring at the gloomy thrice-painted St. Dominic. He went through his refrain, begun in boyhood, later adapted: My name is Zeke Antony Cafarelli. I have two arms and two legs. I am a member of Homo sapiens, a species of placental mammal that lives on the planet Earth. I live in the metropolis of London at 35b Chester Street, and there are twenty-two white tiles above my kitchen sink.

  He bathed, dressed, and, finding that the milk in the fridge was still good, had a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal. Then he forced himself to go into the living room and approach his answering machine. Eleven messages. As he fetched a notebook and pen, he suddenly noticed the silence. For the first time in several years no clock was ticking. Verona, without even touching them, had brought them to a standstill. Four prospective customers had called; Gwen twice; Emmanuel said he’d finished the chef’s house; Phil said Mavis was home. His credit card company wanted to confirm his new vigorous usage. The first and last calls were from Verona.