On the crowded train to the airport I attempt to get to my carriage without stumbling or abruptly sitting down in people’s laps. This part of the train is not protected from the sunlight; passengers fan themselves and repeat “It’s so hot,” in the way English people always do. The sky out of the dirty window is distant, less believable.
I notice the people around me; certain things stand out. A teenage girl’s black eye, an old man with a missing arm, a woman reading something and wiping her nose surreptitiously, trying not to cry. A young man sits in a suit too big for him around the shoulders. His eyes are skittish, landing on mine and lifting away just as quickly; he looks like a child, spidery and unsure.
In another seat there is a caregiver with a small woman, who from time to time emits a high-pitched, soft wailing. She has a bird face, nose pointing to the floor, eyes looking up at odd angles. Her stare fixes on me; she says suddenly, “N-guh,” pointing away from me, at nothing specific. “N-guh.” It is a question—I know that—but I do not know how to answer. I can only look back at her. The caregiver next to her looks up from her book. “Quiet now,” she says.
PART III
2005
When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.
—Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
CHAPTER TEN
The next five years of university passed quickly—not so much a progression of time as a suspension, from the usual rules of living. I went to lectures and the library in the day and from there to the bars and parties; work and drink the two disciplines between which every drop of time was wrung out. During my two years of professional practice at the offices of Maher and Wade, I moved in with Felix in Kensington and continued the same routine; doing my work, getting in late, getting up early. (“We’re really living,” I said to Eve.)
But then sometimes late at night I found myself watching my friends laughing, stumbling, making their fuddled overtures—the same things that I did—and I wondered if I had missed something. I didn’t seem to feel the same enthusiasm that they did. Dressing, drinking, finding a girl, going to bed, opening my eyes into the shrill morning. Repeat. My heart wasn’t in it.
It was the work I really loved—though love wasn’t quite the right word. It was more than that; it was an absorption, a different state of existence outside which everything else was less colored, less immediate, less natural. When I came back to Cambridge for my final year in 2005 I was impatient to be qualified. I wanted to shrug it all off—glib Maher, lazy Wade, my tired lecturers—like a school tie. I wanted to do something. I understood this need in myself as a cumulative presence; the acquirement and hardening of my ideas, my ambitions, until finally they could become steel, concrete, glass.
When the Christmas holiday came I packed my books and laptop into carrier bags to take back to Evendon, with Theo huddled in a blanket watching from my three-legged sofa. Felix, Sebastian, and I now shared a large and empty old flat in the city center, which had white walls, tall oriel windows, and ceilings so high that our footsteps on the dulled wooden floors sounded like the knocking of a Victorian séance. The great boiler, which used to clang and boom ominously in its own room, had died quietly a few nights ago, and a preternatural chill hung in the flat like a white fog, sugaring the inside of the windows with frost.
“Don’t you have a suitcase?” Theo asked me, after one of my bags burst open, showering the floor with paper.
“I lent it to you,” I said shortly. “And you lost it.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She pulled the blanket up to her chin and peered over it reflectively. “I did think that you were the type of person to own a suitcase.”
Theo had quit art college in her final year. She and the course didn’t really “get along,” as Theo put it, by which we understood that she wasn’t turning up. Eve had convinced her to take a few extra A-levels at college with the intention of applying to university in future (“Perhaps it will settle her mind”) and Theo had been working at these intermittently for the past couple of years. She still lived with her Fairchild friends in Shoreditch, a group that always seemed larger than it was because its members changed their appearance so often. They customized everything; cutting up their vintage clothes, tattooing their necks and feet, dying their hair platinum blond or black. Theo had never colored her hair but they said approvingly that it looked fake anyway, and they loved what they thought was her ironic way of dressing.
“Hello all,” Felix called, arriving arm in arm with Sebastian, both of them plastic-antlered and drunk. “Cheer up, Jonathan, it’s Christmas! Let’s carol.” They started noisily singing a Christmas song and dancing around the room. Theo struggled delightedly out of her blanket and was picked up by Felix and twirled around. (At one time I had been concerned that Felix—constrained by friendship but compelled by his own prey drive—might make a pass at Theo, but it never happened. “She’s good-looking,” he said once, “but she’s not really like that, is she?”)
“Star of wonder, star of night,” they sang, “star with royal beauty bright,” before the song broke up into dissonant voices and they started arguing over the next verse.
“I’ll look it up,” Sebastian said, studying his mobile phone. Sebastian had gone traveling for a year after he finished his philosophy degree, then got a master’s in anthropology. He was currently studying for a PhD in South Asian studies in an attempt to further delay his inevitable entry into the job market, which he envisaged as the swimming pool of his school days, a cold, chlorine-smelling turquoise vastness, his toes curling fearfully on the rim of it, shoulders shivering.
“Christ,” he said now, “listen to this—‘Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, Breathes of life of gathering gloom, Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.’”
“Not a very merry Christmas present,” Felix said.
I was reading a note that had fallen out of my Le Corbusier book, an old love note, undiscovered until now. (Sometimes I glimpse the possibility of a deep connection with you. . . .) I vaguely remembered the author: a psychology student with ambiguous, whisky-colored eyes, who had given up on our connection in the end. At the time I had been going through a phase of dating psychology students, but they turned out to be just the same as everyone else; hurried, worried, vibrating with effort. I didn’t meet anyone like Maria.
She had wanted us to be friends, and in accordance with this, I had seen her a few times over the years when she was back in the UK; the last being almost six months ago. We met for coffee in London, sitting on small hard chairs with a circle of marble between us. Her eyes contained all the light in the café, liquor color, late-sun color. I was aware she had been seeing someone, from what Nick said, a colleague named Olivier, but I didn’t want to talk about him. Instead we talked about her apartment in a reasonably upmarket area of Paris, her work with a famous specialist in autism, her mother’s recent attempts at dating. I went away knowing all the facts of her life and none of the substance, though I couldn’t have said what was missing from what she told me. She was funny and interesting, as ever, but her conversation was like a glass wall going up between us.
I thought about her now, studying for her PhD in Paris. In my picture she was black-and-white and indistinct, in a café with coffee and cigarette smoke flavoring her mouth. She was laughing; jazz music played. An unwelcome shape appeared next to her, casual and prowling, a man—Olivier, his arm curling around her shoulder. I shrugged the image away, tilting my head; as if, after all these years, I might finally be able to tip her out of it.
Theo and I arrived back to the worst of winter in Wales. I recognized the petulant billow and whip of the air; the wind that lies low, then bursts up with a well-timed shower of rain in the face, smashing umbrellas into foreheads and grabbing hats. The drive as we pulled up was husked around by the gray arms of the trees, under a hard, colorless sky, but Evendon’s windows were bright, the rooms blazing like the heart of a fire; the Christmas trees in the hall, the
chandeliers, the lustrous wood, the deep red of the drapes lit by the clusters of candles.
“Remember how Christmas was when we were little?” Theo said. “Really little, before Eve came back.”
I thought of the afternoons once Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wynne Jones had gone home and Alicia had retreated to her rooms with a headache. Theo and I would sit on the sofa with all the wrapping paper around us, glittering like a festival, and watch the queen’s speech, and The Wizard of Oz, eating our chocolates. Theo was happiest at Christmas; it was as if her hair were brighter, her eyes bluer; the color and the baubles and the lights kept her buoyant, invisibly working their magic.
“I remember,” I said, and she smiled at me.
I went to Eve’s study before unpacking, pushing the door gently half open to see her talking on the telephone. She looked up and winked, so I went in, stretched out on her sofa, and pretended to study the framed photographs on the wall behind me while listening to the conversation. I had done this since I was small, watching her talk, sitting unmoving except to make the occasional note.
“I need you to be more innovative when it comes to identifying opportunities,” she was saying. “Remember what we did in Dublin? I’ll speak to the developer and we’ll make an offer. . . . No, I’ll deal with that side of things. I can’t see that it will be a problem if we handle it properly.”
The longer I spent away from home, the more peculiar it was returning and seeing Eve in the flesh. University always made her seem unreal; there she was public currency, a picture in a magazine, a politics essay topic. I had even seen a poster in a friend’s room of “inspirational quotations,” which included the “blood of humanity” speech that she made when Nixon accused her of not being American enough. (It is the blood of humanity that flows through my veins. It does not mark me out as English or American, male or female, black or white. It marks me out as a human being—one who is determined to fight for all people, for the end of walls and wars, for trust and unity, for our children and our future.)
But then there never had been any simple division between the Eve sitting a few feet away and the world’s Eve. I remembered going to a talk she gave for the UN, the way she walked onto the stage and stood there for a moment alone, absorbing the strange light, like the first visitor to the moon. She was so white and complete, hair glassy, more like a tiny kokeshi doll than a human. Then she smiled and started talking, as intimate and at home as if she were with us at Evendon, leaning over to tell a joke.
“Jonathan!” she said now, hanging up the receiver. “What do you think of the UAE? Charis Dubai . . . Charis Abu Dhabi.”
“Really? That’s fantastic. When?”
“Next summer. We already have the first sites. It’s about time really,” she said. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Where is Theo? Unpacking?”
“I think she went out to see the swans,” I said.
“The swans,” she repeated, as if unsure what swans might be. “And how are her A-levels going? I’d have thought Theo would breeze through them—she’s already had a practice round, after all.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You know,” Eve said, “I spent a lot of my political career promoting female rights, female freedom. My generation fought for these abstract principles, but now the battle is over and the dust has settled, I try to get to know the women of subsequent generations—my own descendants—and I find very little common ground. In practice I don’t often understand women at all.” She tapped the pen she held on the side of her desk, as if it were a restless thing in her fingers, and she was trying to restrain it. I wasn’t sure what to say, but she didn’t seem to expect a reply, adding more brightly, “Well, we’ll be having dinner in about an hour, so if you could find her before that time? Thank you, Jonathan.”
Surprisingly, Uncle Alex came for Christmas dinner. It had been a long time since we last saw him, something no one mentioned. My last contact—of sorts—with him had been a few months ago; I had been startled by his voice on the radio, bursting erratically loud then quiet on the topic of free will in society, until I turned it off, unsettled.
Now he is sitting at the table next to Alicia and opposite Theo, silently looking over the division of the feast like someone from a much poorer country confronted for the first time with Western excess, and I could see for a moment what he saw: the vaguely obscene glisten of the meat, the hungry flare of the candles in their snaking candelabras, the icy clash of wineglasses, the heat rising off the bowls, the hectic glare of gold, from the painted china, the baubles, the chandelier, the wreaths, and from Eve herself, sequin-scaled and queenly.
All Eve had said about the blackout in relations when Alex arrived was, “Darling, how long has it been!” in a playfully rhetorical tone. Alex himself looked disconcerted, and asked if it had rained much lately.
“It’s rained solidly for three weeks,” Alicia sighed, untruthfully.
“Oh,” Alex said, then was silent.
Looking at Alex I could almost have believed that stress and work had their own physical force, like a tide beating away at the wearable flesh of his face, abrading it down to the barest structure. (Alicia’s skin, in contrast, had a peculiar smooth, set quality, like butter.) Academia had not been kind to him; aside from spoiling his looks, it had left him with an awkwardness of manner: sudden, faltering gestures, a habit of ducking eye contact. Eve, sitting perfectly still as usual, watched him now with interest and faint concern.
“So, what are you writing about at the moment?” she asked him. “Haven’t you published a book recently?”
“That does not preclude my writing another,” said Alex.
Eve lifted her hand to concede this. “It always amazes me how you can sit for so long writing,” she said cheerfully. “What is this one about?”
“It’s a study of how the structures of religion and social morality have influenced the way we are governed and the way we live. I’ve made connections with the welfare state, the legal system, drug taking, homelessness. Things that can be changed if our public consciousness becomes one of personal responsibility. Letting people live the way they want to, if you will.” Alex stopped, as if suddenly hearing the voluminous solitude of his voice over the table, and blinked out like a lightbulb, murmuring, “It has many aspects.”
“It sounds very interesting,” Eve said. “Are these kind of books popular?”
“No.”
“Oh. But it will have an impact on society?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh. I see.” Eve sipped her wine, looking at him brightly over the rim. Alex frowned at the paper hat lying next to him. Only Theo, who had insisted on crackers, was wearing her hat. She had also collected all the jokes from the cracker carcasses.
“Why did the man get sacked from the orange juice factory?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Because he couldn’t concentrate.” She looked up and laughed. “Like me!”
After Christmas, Nick and Nathalie Dumas came back from a visit to Maria in France, so the next day I drove over to their house, knowing shamefully that my hastiness as I slid along the snowy roads to Castle Hill was not for Nick’s company. He and I were very different—sometimes I found him genuinely irritating—but still, he carried a faint impression of Maria; what she had said, what she had done, in the most recent past. From him I had her secondhand.
Nick had in the end taken a year out before university and gone traveling with a friend. He had found traveling “pretty boring” and came home after a month, starting a degree in management studies. He dropped out of this course after deciding it wasn’t relevant and started another degree at Bristol University, in business this time. After a sluggish hour of conversation I wondered why I had bothered visiting him. Looking for Maria in her brother was like looking at an eclipse in a bucket of water.
“I don’t really want to be at Bristol,” he told me now. “I’d rather be out earning some real money. As I’m not asking my
father for anything.”
“Real money?” I asked.
“As in, lots of money. Emily’s hardly going to be able to contribute much on a teacher’s salary,” Nick explained.
I had met Emily a few times, a ringleted blonde with large, heavy breasts and a very slender body, as though she had been modeled by an adolescent Pygmalion. We had a short discussion on one occasion about how the sun gave her a rash, and another, longer, talk about the surliness of sales assistants in Harvey Nichols. I had avoided a third conversation so far.
“It’s okay when she’s living with her family,” Nick continued, “but I can’t ask her to move in with me into some shitty one-bedroom flat.”
“It should not be important how big the flat is,” Nathalie, who was making coffee, interjected. “Look at this place. We are happy here.”
“It’s too small,” Nick said. “I mean, good for you that you left, et cetera, et cetera, but I don’t want to live in this kind of house.”
“My ambitious son,” Nathalie said, with a laugh. She handed Nick his cup, which he accepted with an air of faint annoyance.
“Can you get some proper coffee?” he asked. “This stuff is appalling.”
“Proper coffee!” Nathalie left the kitchen with dramatic emphasis.
“What’s up with her?” Nick asked, rhetorically.
“Your mother’s great,” I said. “You’re lucky to have her.”
Really, I enjoyed Nathalie’s company more than Nick’s; there was something quick and attentive about her, always doing several things at once, as if the energy with which she had negotiated the difficulties of her former life had been loosed and might alight on anything. Nick had told me about their father once before. “He’s a shit,” he said. “He was awful to my mother. None of us could ever please him.”
The Other Half of Me Page 14