“I hope so.”
As he was nearing the end of the ceiling, he looked down and saw that her tawny hair was flecked with white paint. He had a sudden piercing memory of what that hair had felt like beneath his hands: warm, thick, alive. Before he could apologize for spattering her, she glanced up. Their eyes—he’d never really understood the expression—met. Then she was saying something about lunch; she had brought sandwiches. Would he like to take a break? To his own amazement he said he would be ready in ten minutes. She went out into the hall and returned with a backpack, from which she proceeded to produce various bags and bottles. I can’t sit down with her, he thought, share a meal. She’ll get back inside my brain again, take over every room, and it will be just like before when she got inside me. She’ll vanish on the outside.
He heard a thud and looked over to see her wrestling with a five-gallon bucket of paint: she was setting up a little dining area with buckets for seats and an empty box for a table. “Don’t lift that,” he said, and jumped down to help.
She had brought smoked salmon sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, apples, and a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of water for each of them. He positioned his bucket as far away as he politely could.
“According to my pregnancy books,” she said, “my appetite ought to have stabilized by this stage but I still feel hungry all the time. Who owns this flat?”
This was the first time, he thought, he’d heard her mention Ms. F. He explained that they were working for a letting agent. She nodded, took another bite of her sandwich, and asked what he planned to do after lunch.
“The kitchen.”
Had the last few weeks been a mirage? Had he really endured first her long silence, then her increasingly shrill messages, then again her silence? And now here she was so calm and ample, talking about the differences between farm-raised and wild salmon. It was like his mother in the shop, one moment scolding him and the next praising the parsley. As she set her sandwich down to drink some juice, he saw that her knuckles were still faintly chapped. No wonder, given the cold in Boston. If he had been sitting closer, he would have touched the rough, red skin. Thank God, he wasn’t.
They finished eating, she went to the bathroom, and he set up the drop cloths in the kitchen. The small square room reeked of neglect, but two days from now, freshly painted, with a new fridge and stove, it would be transformed. He started her off applying blue paint to the walls and got busy cleaning and masking the skirting boards.
“I’m sorry,” he said, kneeling in the corner, his face hidden, “I didn’t answer your phone calls. It’s not like me. But then going to America wasn’t like me.”
“I am very sorry,” she said so slowly that it was almost as if she were spelling each word. “I’d like to tell you what happened, if you can bear it.”
She took a step to the left and ran the roller through the tray. He edged to the right, rinsing the sponge and wiping the next stretch of skirting board. He made his hmm sound and she took it for permission.
“It all has to do with my brother,” she began.
As they circled the small room, she told a story about deals and debts, her brother and two men called Nigel and George, and how she herself had done some shameful things. “Henry tricked me,” she said, “but it isn’t all his fault. I behaved badly too.” He listened as best he could, but some parts of the story were so bizarre and others eluded him altogether. The more she talked, the more her voice took on the colors he didn’t like.
“I did try to stop you from coming to Boston but I was too late. Then I thought I’d be back from New York almost immediately but I had some kind of flu. I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. And I was worried about the baby being born in America. None of this excuses my behavior, but maybe you can understand a little better.”
But, but, but, he thought. He focused intently on a brown stain on the skirting board that refused to yield to his scrubbing. It turned out to be a knot in the wood. He moved on to the next stretch.
“Can you ever forgive me?” she said.
Eighty-two seconds elapsed. She rolled the paint up and down, up and down, the same stretch of wall. Finally, without raising his head or ceasing to scrub the skirting board, Zeke spoke.
“My mother is divorcing my father. She’s met someone else. I thought the lump in her breast would make her change her mind, but it only seems to have made things worse. She keeps saying she doesn’t have a minute to waste. People used to tell me that feelings changed and I was sure they didn’t, not mine anyway. It turns out I was wrong.
“I don’t really understand what you just said: why you left me, why you didn’t phone. I know I have my shortcomings but I wouldn’t have done that to you. I never want to feel again what I felt when that man in Boston handed me your letter. So maybe I could forgive you—I’m not even sure what that means—and we could be together, the three of us, for years and years, but I’d always be afraid that one day you’d nail your clothes to the floor and disappear again. Or take poison.”
She had been listening intently, hoping for a chink of light. Now—what did he mean about poison?—she prepared herself to answer, to swear she’d never, ever do anything like this again. But before she could speak, he rose to his feet and stood there looking at her across the small room.
“I would die if that happened,” he said. “And that’s not a metaphor.” His eyes shone with unshed tears. “I think you’d better go.”
She had been prepared to plead, to promise anything and everything, but as she looked into his face, his eyes almost the same color as the paint she was applying, his high smooth forehead with the delicate veins visible in each temple, words left her. This was not an argument or a debate or even a romantic quarrel. This was another person speaking to her from deep within the country of the self, offering her his painful hard-won knowledge. What use to say that life is change? Her own eyes filled. She set down the roller and turned away.
Outside, unbelievably, the sun was shining. A calico cat lolled on the pavement. People were coming and going in the street, talking and carrying groceries and books and small children. Several of them stared at her, and she could imagine the spectacle she presented, bulging out of her now paint-smeared coveralls, her face red with the effort not to cry. She put her hand on her belly. Only a few more weeks and she would have someone of her own, someone who would never leave her, at least not for a decade or so. She was at the corner of the street, wondering which way to turn—she had come by taxi—when she remembered Jigger’s book.
She stopped irresolutely. She could ask Emmanuel to collect it for her. No, she thought, if this was the end, she wanted it to be the end, however bitter, however heartbreaking. She would go back and ask Zeke to drop the book off at the radio station and there would never be anything between them again. They would each continue to live in this large city as if the other did not exist. She walked determinedly up the street. She hadn’t, in her despair, bothered to pull the outside door shut. Now she found it still ajar, wedged on a flyer for a new tandoori restaurant.
In the gloom of the hall someone was coming down the stairs.
“Verona,” he said.
“I didn’t come to bother you anymore,” she said, speaking as quickly as she could, not daring to raise her eyes. “I just want my grandfather’s book back. Ariel, Mrs. Barrow, said you found it at their house. Could you drop it off at the radio station? Emmanuel knows where it is.”
As she spoke, the baby kicked with such urgency that she gasped. She clasped her belly. Not yet, she thought, you’re not ready. Please, wait a few more weeks.
Then a hand appeared beside hers, pressing gently against her hard flesh.
“Verona,” Zeke said again. “I’ll try.”
Also by Margot Livesey
Learning by Heart
Homework
Criminals
The Missing World
Eva Moves the Furniture
Additional Acclaim for Banishing Verona
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“In Livesey’s deft hands, their connection is as credible (and incredible) as love itself … . [She] pulls it off effortlessly.”
—The Boston Globe
“Remarkable … In Banishing Verona, [Livesey] weaves a story that has plenty of heft—and that challenges the reader to rethink their own notions about the power of romantic love.”
—People
“Livesey’s sparkling novel is part oddball love story, part suspense tale, about the wondrous and terrifying ways life can change when fear is no longer the master.”
—The Miami Herald
“Livesey’s winning new book … captures the magic of an unlikely young romance by never subjecting it to too much analysis … . [Her lovers’] longing for each other, tender, mutual, and inexplicable, is this lovely book’s powerful underlying chord.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Livesey’s finest achievement yet.”
—The Seattle Times
“Delightful … Livesey’s utter faith in her two main characters makes Banishing Verona the coziest love story about alienation ever written.”
—Newsday
“An enthralling novel of desire, deception, and trust.”
—O magazine
“Perhaps because she doesn’t adhere to any one genre, Livesey has stayed out of the blockbuster bestseller spotlight … . All that may change with Banishing Verona, a suspenseful, satisfying, lovely story … . One of Livesey’s greatest gifts is a quiet, lyrical authority that makes it easy for her readers to follow her anywhere, and believe in the journey every step of the way.”
—Elle magazine
“Anyone who picks up Banishing Verona will be dazzled by Livesey’s ability to plumb the depths of the terrain she knows best—the inner workings of the human heart.”
—Boston magazine
“[Livesey’s] great gift is for concrete, tactile detail. Characters’ appearances are rendered with startling vividness … . And Livesey has a wonderful way with evocations of atmosphere and states of mind.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to those who talked to me, both professionally and personally, about their experiences with Asperger’s syndrome.
The MacDowell Artists’ Colony gave me time and space: my gratitude to this splendid institution.
I would like to thank my wonderful editor, Jennifer Barth, for her fierce engagement with this novel and her many indispensable comments. My thanks are also due to her assistant, Sam Douglas, and to the many others at Henry Holt who’ve supported this novel, among them George Hodgman, Richard Rhorer, Maggie Richards, Annsley Rosner, Kenn Russell, Elizabeth Shreve, and John Sterling.
Once again I want to thank my remarkable agent, Amanda Urban, for her help and guidance.
And happily, as always, I am deeply indebted to Andrea Barrett, who kept me company in every sentence.
BANISHING VERONA. Copyright © 2004 by Margot Livesey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company
eISBN 9781466815223
First eBook Edition : February 2012
A version of Chapter 1 appeared in a slightly different form in The New Yorker.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Livesey, Margot.
Banishing Verona : a novel / Margot Livesey.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42520-1
EAN 978-0-312-42520-3
1. Women broadcasters—Fiction. 2. Problem families—Fiction. 3. Pregnant women—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction. 5. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. 6. Carpenters—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.L563B36 2004
813’.54—dc22
2004052383
First Picador Edition: September 2005
Banishing Verona Page 34