Banishing Verona

by Margot Livesey

  “I’m not at death’s door.” She patted his hand. “Don will come with me. What I really need you to do is mind the shop. We could close for the day, but we’ve got all the produce rotting away if we don’t shift it.”

  “You’ll leave the money in the usual place?”

  “Of course,” she said, and made a scribbling motion to the waiter.

  Zeke had been feeling deeply sorry for himself, but as he walked home through the lamp-lit streets he spared a moment of sympathy for his mother, worried about her own health, burdened by his father’s, struggling to choose between old loyalties and new affections. Imagine, he thought, being with a man who would take you to visit the embalmed body of a dictator. He passed a pub, still loud with conversation, and paused to examine the display outside a late-night shop. The cauliflowers looked surprisingly fresh, but the bananas were almost black and the peppers limp and shriveled. Zeke resisted the impulse to pick them out and throw them away. Inside, half a dozen men were standing around the counter, holding cans of beer and watching television. For some reason, he thought of Jill. What was her word for today, he wondered.

  26

  In his parents’ modest front garden, Zeke raised his hand to ring the bell. One of his doctors had explained the way people greet each other—hello, how are you?—by saying it was like ringing a doorbell to see if the other person was home. So why can’t I just ignore them, Zeke had said. Like Mum and Dad do when it’s someone collecting for charity, or Mrs. Gillespie from across the street. The trouble is, said the doctor, clicking his pen, they can see that in a certain sense you are home, and so not answering seems rude. It’s as if your mother and father were sitting in the window when Mrs. Gillespie rang the bell. Zeke had protested that it wasn’t fair for people to always assume he was home. I’m sorry, the doctor had said, I don’t make the rules. I’m simply explaining the prevailing customs. During this century, in the West, we expect a certain consonance between body and person. When the former is present, we assume the latter is too, except in cases of sleepwalking or mental illness. So hello, how are you? isn’t really like ringing a doorbell, said Zeke. Right, said the doctor. Maybe forget the bell.

  Now Zeke lowered his hand and studied the forsythia. The last time he had been here, before he left for Boston, he had been in love with Verona and there had been one hundred and eleven flowers in bloom. Today he wasn’t sure how to describe his feelings. There had been another message from her on the machine, but once again he had left the house without phoning her; as for the flowers, bobbing in the wind, they foamed in all directions, too many to count. He was searching for some other source of numerical comfort when the door opened to reveal a ruddy-cheeked man wearing a blue fleece.

  “Zeke,” he said. “You’re back.”

  Just before the man’s arms closed around him, Zeke glimpsed to the left of his windpipe a livid scar, the faint dots of the stitches on either side still visible. “Dad,” he said, trying not to make it sound like a question. He counted the blooms on the nearest spray of forsythia—thirteen—and did his best to relax. As the arms slackened and the man stepped back, Zeke pieced together the limbs and features of his father, whom he had known for twenty-nine years: the broad lopsided shoulders, the eyebrows beginning to bristle, the prominent wrist bones and broad hands.

  “I phoned you a few minutes ago,” Don said. “You must have already been on your way. I was about to go for my walk. Come and say hello to Long John Silver, and then you can tell me all about your travels.”

  Not all, thought Zeke, following his father to the living room. How could he explain that he had flown three thousand five hundred and thirty-eight miles to meet a woman and failed even to lay eyes on her? Carefully ignoring the piano and the bust of Beethoven, he crossed the room to view the parrot. It was hanging upside down from its perch. “Say hello,” said his father. “He’s got a vocabulary of eighteen words so far.”

  The parrot eyed Zeke, swung himself upright, and said, “Hello,” in a voice exactly like Don’s.

  “Good boy,” said his father, offering a seed between the bars. “Best present I ever had. Thanks.”

  Zeke repeated the words he had heard so often in America. “You’re welcome.”

  Outside, they both commented on the wind. Zeke remarked how well his father was looking. Don agreed. “I turned a kind of corner,” he said, as they literally did the same. “When I was in hospital I couldn’t stop raging about why this terrible thing had happened to me. Suddenly I understood that I had it back to front. What I should be asking is why am I one of the lucky buggers who are saved? I had an attack but I’m not pushing up the daisies. According to the doctor, I could have another twenty or thirty good years if I keep exercising and stay off the fish and chips.”

  On the other side of the street a tall slender woman was walking a swaybacked dog.

  “Now of course,” his father continued in lower tones, “there’s this business about your mother.”

  Zeke placed each foot carefully in the middle of a paving stone. His father’s eyes were fastened on him. Three stones. At school he had asked several of his teachers why he could feel people looking at him, almost as if their eyes were reaching out and touching him; none of them had offered a convincing explanation. Eleven stones.

  “She did tell you?”

  He moved his head up and down, hoping to loosen his father’s gaze. Fifteen. Sixteen.

  “I’m sure she’s going to be fine. Ninety percent of these lumps turn out to be harmless. They just need to be sure.”

  They reached the intersection and, to Zeke’s surprise, came to a halt. His father had always used to plunge into the road, as if daring the cars to run him down. Now he waited patiently until there was a gap in the traffic. Inside the park he strode out, arms swinging. Zeke loped beside him. In the middle of the grass, half a dozen of the usual black birds were standing around on their sooty legs. They weren’t making any sound he could hear, but he had the impression from the way they cocked their heads that they were sending messages back and forth about which bench offered the tastiest sandwich crusts and where to find nesting materials. Oh, Verona, he thought. He said the first thing that came into his head. “When the plane came down in Boston, it bounced like those birds do when they land.”

  “How was the flight? I must say your mother and I were gobsmacked. After all these years of saying you couldn’t fly, you get on a plane for seven hours.”

  “It was okay. Once we were in the air I could see that no one else was afraid. A woman across the aisle helped me to watch a film. Then we had to rescue—” He broke off, realizing it might be tactless to mention the heart attack and the spooky-voiced defibrillator.

  “What?” His father walked even faster. “So, it didn’t work out with this woman?”

  Again he felt Don’s eyes upon him and again he did his best to avoid them, falling several yards behind. What was the answer to that question? He thought he had found a person who understood his shortcomings without sharing them, who could make sense of the world, who knew that the heart of Robert the Bruce was the ultimate weapon. And maybe—he wanted to be fair—all those things were true, but the same person also urged him to get on a plane one day and forgot all about him the next. He recalled how Verona had described her parents, her talkative father, her mendacious mother, and claimed that she took after both of them. She had warned him but he hadn’t listened. A clattering noise interrupted his thoughts. An empty beer can was blowing along the path. With one stride, he caught it underfoot and flattened it.

  His father stopped and waited. “You’ll find someone soon,” he said. “A good-looking hard-working boy like you isn’t going to get left on the shelf.”

  I don’t want someone, Zeke almost shouted, I want Verona. And at once added, no, I don’t. What I want is to have my brain back, my normal predictable life. He thought of the Romans tilling salt into the fields of their enemies. Was there some mental equivalent that would eradicate these longings
? A child—a boy, he decided—was pedaling toward them on his tricycle. He and his father separated, giving him a wide berth.

  “How do you think matters stand with your mother?” Don swung his arms out before him. “Other than her health?”

  Zeke turned his attention to the birds. If they felt his eyes, they didn’t show it. There were seven now. Had he miscounted before, or had a new one arrived? It was like the ash tree. Things changed when he wasn’t watching.

  “I won’t bite your head off,” his father was saying. “I’m actually glad you told me. I was so stuck in my own misery I didn’t see I was driving her away.”

  Seven beaks, fourteen wings, fourteen feet.

  “Careful.”

  He looked down in time to avoid a pile of dog turds.

  “People with dogs,” said his father. “Christ.”

  “I wonder if we’ll see the rabbit today.”

  “The rabbit?”

  “Last time we were here a woman was walking a rabbit on a lead. Brown with floppy ears.”

  “Zeke.” Don grabbed his arm. “I need your help. I know your mother and I have had our differences—we’re both too stubborn for our own good—but I don’t want to lose her.”

  Zeke stared down at his father’s hand, the nails slightly ridged, pale with pressure. He pictured Maurice, his dimple waxing and waning, as he talked about Lenin’s tomb. He pictured his mother, standing in the doorway of his kitchen, admonishing him, whatever happened, to say nothing more to his father. “Dad, I’m sorry I can’t help. This is between you and Mum. Ask her your questions.”

  The fingers grew paler. “You son of a—”

  Zeke kept himself, every bone and muscle, absolutely still.

  His father let go, his hands falling by his sides. “Please,” he said, as if he were carrying a huge trunk up a narrow staircase. “I need to know whether she’s still planning to leave me.”

  Zeke watched three of the birds rise in clumsy circles toward the leafless treetops. And just like the last time he had gone for a walk with his father, he followed them, fleeing down the path toward the gate, heedless of Don’s cries.

  So long as his legs were moving his head remained empty, but—as he turned into his street and his pace slowed—the familiar thoughts began to show up. As he fitted his key in the front door, there she was quoting Steppenwolf and dropping her boots. Climbing the stairs, he recalled her descending in her crumpled green dress to press her lips to his. Be gone, he admonished. But what was he left with? For a few seconds he could not think of a single thing he had ever done besides pursue Verona. Nonsense, he had all kinds of hobbies: having nervous breakdowns, fixing clocks, seeing his friends, disappointing his parents.

  It took every molecule of willpower to go and sit in the kitchen without looking at the answering machine. “I have to be very careful,” he said aloud.

  And even as he said the word careful he was on his feet and, as if some huge magnet had pulled him there, standing beside the machine. It was flashing the number 4.

  Mavis, whom he recognized at once, answered the door, wearing a kimono the color of the sea in a Japanese painting and holding Brenda. “Zeke,” she exclaimed. “What a surprise.” She kissed him on the cheek and said how glad she and Brenda were to see him. This last seemed quite untrue. The baby’s arms and legs were pumping furiously, as if she were swimming in the deep water of her mother’s robe, and when he bent to kiss her she gave a little yelp.

  In the kitchen, Mavis set Brenda on a blanket on the floor and offered him tea and, if he’d stay for supper, macaroni and cheese. Then she asked if there was any news about Gwen. As he explained that the biopsy was tomorrow, she moved around the kitchen, kimono swishing, getting things out of the cupboards and the fridge.

  “Your mother is so brave,” she said, handing him a wedge of cheese and a grater. “Do you mind?”

  She bent down to ask Brenda which she’d prefer for supper: pureed carrots or potatoes and peas. How Brenda announced her choice he couldn’t tell, but within a few minutes she was seated in her high chair, the agitated owner of a bowl of green mush. While Mavis coaxed her to eat, Zeke made tea for both of them, grated the entire block of cheese, drained the noodles, and made the sauce. When the casserole was in the oven and Brenda was absorbed in banging her stuffed elephant with a wooden spoon, he at last asked after Phil and learned that he was out on his rounds, tuning pianos. “He fell terribly behind while I was away,” Mavis added.

  Away, he knew, meant sleeping with the market gardener—or was it a Portuguese sailor?—but Mavis showed no sign of remorse. Instead she asked how he was after the big trip. “Forgive my saying so,” she said, “but you seem a little glum.”

  “Verona doesn’t care for me.”

  “Oh.” Mavis wrinkled her nose. “How do you know?”

  He described the utter failure, at every stage, of his journey to Boston. “Well,” Mavis said, as he fell silent, “I have to say it sounds as if you’ve broken up without ever getting together.”

  Zeke clutched the edge of the table and stared at his knees. Why did he feel as if she had raised a saucepan and brought it down, hard, on his head? In spite of everything, it seemed he had been hoping that Mavis, an expert on unorthodox romance, would find a way to contradict him. He was in the midst of once again expelling Verona from some niche or alcove when Phil arrived home.

  To his own surprise, but not apparently theirs, Zeke accepted Phil and Mavis’s invitation to spend the night. Lying on the sofa, staring up at the glow of the streetlights seeping through the blinds, he pictured his answering machine blinking away: 4, 4, 4. Or perhaps now some other number: 5 or 6 or 7. Was her voice one of those inside the machine? Almost certainly. Now, when he didn’t know what to do with her messages, she called all the time. From the room above came Mavis’s rather heavy tread and lilting tones, followed by Phil’s saying a single unmistakable word: Yes. Yes to what, he wondered. Yes, the macaroni and cheese was good? Yes, you can run away with an underground engineer? Yes, let’s have another baby?

  Zeke was struck again by the unknowable nature of other people. Other things, when you got close, revealed themselves—clocks, doorbells, trains, wallpaper steamers—but humans only grew more puzzling with proximity. Look at Phil, who for ten years he had believed hated untidiness and who was now thriving amid disorder. Had Zeke been wrong about him? Or had Phil been wrong about himself? Once again he recalled the story of Verona’s grandparents. He imagined the two of them, having lunch together that damp March day, talking about the plumber and the war. And afterward Jigger sitting reading the paper, until Irene shouted from the kitchen, “I’ve taken poison, Jigger. I’ve taken poison.”

  Throughout a decade of marriage, she had concealed from her husband the most important facts about herself: her living parents, her dead lovers, her despair. Now his own parents, after more than quarter of a century, were growing increasingly estranged. His conviction that he and Verona knew each other in some special way was mere vanity; by his best reckoning they had spent seventeen hours in each other’s company. If she had been waiting in America and they had gone on to live together, he would have had to endure the knowledge that at any hour, of any day, she might set fire to the house, come home with twenty dogs, sail naked down the Thames.

  In the shadowy darkness there was nothing tangible to count. I’ll count forms, he thought. He pictured the three kinds of triangles: scalene, isosceles, equilateral; then a pyramid, a circle, a sphere, a square, a cube, a rectangle, a parallelogram, a trapezoid, a spiral. Arnold, the counselor who had taught him the hmm sound, claimed that was how he should visualize his return to health. I don’t feel better, Zeke had been insisting. After all these months I’m still afraid I might suddenly be unable to leave the house or that the paving stones will swallow me up. Arnold made that sucking sound which, Zeke had learned, indicated exasperation. You don’t feel better, he said, but take my word for it, you are. This isn’t like taking the train from London t
o Brighton, a few delays but basically a straight journey in one direction. You’ll feel better, then worse, then better, but the better periods will get longer, and eventually you’ll be sure that they’ll return. No one feels good all the time. Not even you, said Zeke. Not even me, said Arnold firmly.

  By the next morning, the cold wind of the previous day had brought rain. As Zeke drove through the choked streets toward the shop, he wondered if maybe he could avoid the answering machine forever. Move to another flat, buy whatever he needed at the Oxfam shop, change his name. Or perhaps he could give away the machine and change his phone number. She’d call for a few days, a week at most. What she was suffering from, he guessed, was not love but guilt: the feeling you had when you’d done something irreversible and wished you hadn’t. But soon he would disappear from her brain as surely as the Chinese mushroom had disappeared from his flatmate’s. When Astrid returned after the Christmas holidays, he had been braced to explain how he’d been doing his best to protect it, but his father had thrown it out before he could stop him. She had never once inquired about the former occupant of their fridge.

  As he pulled up at the rear of the shop, he saw a white rectangle hanging limply from a nail in the middle of the back door. For a nanosecond he thought that Verona had made her way here, through rain and wind, to leave him another letter, but as soon as he was close enough to read his own name—Zeek—he guessed that Kevin was making his excuses for the day. Which was fine by him. He didn’t care for his mother’s swaggering shop boy with his endless chat about football and nightclubs.