As the hours pass, the sky changes, becomes sci-fi, with suspended streaks of purple and white. Over this hangs a deep blue, fading to frozen white. It looks like glass, like the interior of a marble; a lifeless sky, not real.
I remember I have been given a free paper and take it out to read. It is my least favorite tabloid—far too outraged and moral for its own dirty stories, like a Victorian minister visiting fallen women.
My family has a generous double-page spread today: “The Curse of the Bennetts.” It reminds its readers that George Bennett excavated a few Mayan tombs in his time, some of which were said to be protected by curses. Therefore it would only be reasonable to expect his brother to die in debt, his wife to die young, and subsequent generations to be blighted by the ill will of the ancient kings. Eve is featured in the largest photograph. Then there is Alicia, “jilted” by her runaway husband; Alex, the embittered bachelor; Theo, the tragic granddaughter.
And finally me, cast as the estranged heir. My mother’s previous comments on my absence are recycled, accompanied by a photograph of Alicia, looking more glamorous than distraught, at a polo match. The picture of me does not resemble me particularly, which is a relief.
They got it wrong, the writers; it was not a curse. It was a spell of protection that finally dissolved, once the fairy godmother grew old and lost her powers, no longer able to stop time, to keep the palace asleep.
There were days back then when we would all sit outside, in summer, Alicia and Eve under the white umbrella like a sail, Theo lying on the grass. Happiness—of a sort—enclosed us, like a glass jar; everything outside was quieter than it should be. Theo would be smoking a cigarette, her eyes pale blue in the light. It was limbo, it was suspension; but all I want is to go back, lying with my eyes closed in the perfect, uncomplicated sun.
I fall asleep without meaning to, only waking when the plane—screaming and shuddering like the heroine of a horror film—begins its landing. As people shuffle off the aircraft, the woman next to me fails to wake up. She sits with her head resting against the seat in front, almost in her lap, folded up. I have the weary feeling that she might be dead, but then her mouth moves faintly. Before I can tap her shoulder to wake her up, she looks up at the people moving, picks up her bag, and joins them.
“Thank you,” the stewardess repeats over and over as we go past her, her smile becoming a little rigid at the edges, and I step blinking off the plane into the sudden and comprehensive heat.
PART IV
2007
She is gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair.
—Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Ocean to Cynthia”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I hung up the phone on Mrs. North’s voice, a voice I didn’t know pronouncing the name Theo, defamiliarizing it, taking away its associations—face, voice, body—each time it was spoken. I stared at the scrubby trees of the turnaround, the green of the staring fields, the dull gray of the road sliding past like running water, the sky holding itself distant, as if nothing joined these flat, artificial things together any longer and their essential vacancy, their emptiness, was laid bare. I couldn’t tell the emptiness apart from my own. I sat and waited for a thought but I was hollowed out and weightless. I sat, blank-faced and rigid as an eggshell, breathing lunglessly, blinking eyelessly.
That was when the guilt began. I emptied myself out and it came to fill me up, and from then on I was just a shape around it.
Mindlessly I restarted the car and drove on. I reached the Severn Bridge and passed the toll booths into Wales, which was colorless and cool, a shocked, suspended day hung with ghostly raindrops. As I drove past Cardiff, I felt a rising aversion to the idea of going back to Evendon. I turned off the motorway instead and stopped in the nearest town, an unpronounceable and dingy place with one small bed and breakfast, which appeared to be closed. I went in anyway and got a room for the night.
“There are no sausages,” the owner told me sadly.
“What?”
She pointed to a board which advertised a full English breakfast: two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, beans, and fried bread or toast.
“No sausages,” she repeated. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” I said, and we waited there while I searched for a response. “That’s fine.”
Once in the room I locked the door, closed the curtains, and lay on top of the bed staring at the lilac walls, the embroidery of flowers that hung on the chimney breast opposite. I felt as if I was trapped in the air currents rising up from a furnace; I breathed a bitter smoke that excoriated my throat, burned like grit on my eyes. I tried to sleep, but the lids of my eyes were too red, too bright. Then I tried to picture her face, and was frightened when I couldn’t. There was only a collection of shifting features, a blond mass of hair. I tried repeatedly to gather these pieces up, but they were falling through night water; my fingers brushed them, but they eluded me. By the time the room became dark, I finally slept.
The next morning I was weak, dried out, but lucid. Light welled through the thin chintz fabric at the window, the net curtains. Outside I could hear the boom and rattle of lorries on the wide road just outside, voices traveling down the corridor. There was a man’s voice, then a female shriek of a laugh, like a bird of prey.
I lay there confused in all my clothes, then got up and opened the curtains onto the sky, which was still wintry and heavy, billowing with brimming rain, silver with cold. I felt as if I had swallowed some of it; my stomach had that paralyzed dread.
I stood without thinking for a moment. Then I remembered that my sister was dead, and the cold extended through me, settled and deep, snowing me in.
The drive to Evendon curved at the top of the hill, so rather than seeing the house grow steadily as the car approached, the road unrolled through a meshed corridor of trees, which finally dropped back like theater curtains, revealing the tall frontage. The sight of it now—the rain slick on the gray stone, the closed doors—was too hard, too sudden. I sat blankly in the car until the new housekeeper, Mrs. North, came hurriedly outside to meet me, forcing me to get out and greet her. She was only about forty, with a wide, unhappy face. She murmured how sorry she was. I had to go into the house with her then, where the familiar scent struck me, polished floors, lilies, perfume, and air. It was the same as always. The red walls and Turkish carpets in the morning room, the parlor like a golden egg; the haughty, drafty hall, the ivory drawing room. My head hurt with the sameness of it.
“Did she leave a note?” I asked Mrs. North.
“Not that any of us found,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Who found her?” I asked. “A gardener?”
“Actually, it was a maid—a new girl—and her boyfriend. They were smoking, I think, before they started work. Because it’s secluded there. They heard her phone ringing.”
It was unbearable to me that the people to see Theo that way were not known by either of us. I think I must have winced, because Mrs. North looked at me with concern.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
Then Alicia came down the stairs, moving faster than usual. She clung to me briefly, uncharacteristically; a sharp, alcoholic smell came off her. Her fingers laced over my shoulders, weak and mindless, like seaweed.
“This is all very, very hard,” she said, plaintively. “I’m not sure I can deal with it all right now.”
I spent most of the morning speaking to police, doctors, and reporters. I was aware of Eve not far from me, in my peripheral vision. We didn’t talk to each other. I could hear her voice occasionally, saying things such as “completely out of character,” and “a great tragedy,” in the same way that she talked to the camera, and I wondered whether this death would become another of Eve’s turning points, another significant event in the story of Eve Anthony. Alicia wandered in and out, looking increasingly inebriated.
“Why didn’t she swim? Surely you would automatically start swimming?” I asked the policeman.
“The
pool is very deep in the middle,” he said. “Your sister had stones in her pockets.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Anthony. There are unlikely to be any complications with the verdict. It appears to be a straightforward suicide.”
“But what about the drugs?” I asked the doctor.
“Drugs?” he asked, startled.
“I don’t know—LSD, something. She must have taken something?”
“There was no evidence of drug use,” he said. “Though we can’t be certain of anything until we receive the coroner’s report.”
After that I’m not sure exactly what I felt or thought. When the crowds in the house had gone I lay on the sofa in the morning room with the doors closed. It seemed like the simplest thing to do. I floated in the damp, leaden light, static, eyes on the ceiling.
After an indeterminate amount of time I realized there was a figure in the room, blacked out by the window behind her, gradually turning into Eve. She stood very still, like always: no movement except the necessary movement, watching me.
“Jonathan?” she said now. “Are you alright?”
“Did she say anything, before she left?” I asked. “Did she say she was seeing a friend?”
“No. I barely spoke to her before she left. I had assumed she was with a friend.”
“What was the last thing she said to you?”
“I can’t really remember. It was something odd. But then that wasn’t out of the ordinary, for Theo.”
“You can’t remember anything about what she said? Or you’re not telling me because it was to do with our father?”
Eve stepped closer to me, the shadow from the window sliding off her like an unveiled statue, suddenly white and hard.
“I know you’re upset,” she said. “We’re all upset. But you’re not being rational. Your father is dead. I don’t know where this sudden interest in him has come from, or what it has to do with Theo, but it’s not fair to accuse me of lying about him. Please be reasonable.”
I stood up then, hurriedly, and Eve stepped back just as quickly. If she were a different woman I would have thought in that moment she looked alarmed. But I was mistaken; there was nothing unusual about her expression, except for her eyes, which were lit brighter, the skin of her face tenser, colder than usual.
“Jonathan, listen. I don’t deserve this treatment. I don’t understand why you are angry with me.” I didn’t say anything so she continued, more kindly, “We are all grieving, darling. But this is the time to support each other, not turn on each other.”
“You’ll never tell me the truth, will you?” I said wonderingly. “Even now that I know it anyway. The Secret Life of Eve Anthony! Our father never died—you did something with him. You paid him off.
“But he came back for us, the burglar—that was him, wasn’t it? And Theo saw him in London. She knew he wasn’t dead. And I told her she was wrong.”
“You’re not in control of yourself,” Eve said, but she was angry too, speaking forcefully, her eyes trying to get hold of me. “You need to calm down.”
“Where’s the death certificate? If I look, will there be a record of his death?”
She stared at me, silent.
“I suppose there won’t be any record of you paying him because you’d know how to hide something like that.”
“And is that the father you’d want back?” she asked, inkily quick. “Someone who could be paid off?”
“You did pay him off!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, of course you fucking didn’t. And she saw him and I tried to pull her back. I told her she was wrong, because I trusted you. I admired you. I tried to be like you! I don’t even know what you are. What does that make me? A bad copy of something fake. Worthless, worse than worthless. Theo was right, but I told her she was wrong about you, wrong about our father. And who knows what you told her in the time that she was here? She would have been fine if everyone hadn’t lied to her and fucked her up. She found out the truth because she heard you talking to your solicitor and then she killed herself. It was your lie that killed her. And if I had been anybody other than the fake I made myself into, I would have helped her. Not sent her here to die, to drown in that fucking wasteland, that water, all alone.”
I was aware that Eve had turned and left the room, that I was shouting after her, but it didn’t seem to matter whether she heard or not, whether my words were even coherent, smashed and blurred as they were, with anger, and tears that I hated myself for because for all the times I’d made Theo cry over something I said or did, she had never made me cry, not once.
After that day Eve went to bed and stayed there. I had only a tenuous sense of the days and nights, the lights going on or off, the curtains open or shut, but I was told it took a week to arrange Theo’s funeral, and in that time Eve was not seen outside her own rooms. Her food was brought to her but she ate very little of it. The doctor had been called to determine if she was ill but she sent him away.
“She hasn’t seen a GP in years,” he said petulantly. “Your grandmother should be seriously encouraged to have some sort of checkup.”
I made the funeral arrangements for Theo myself. Alicia didn’t offer to help, though she took an interest. After the shock of the first few days passed, there was something oddly energized about Alicia. She read the letters that began to arrive and took a lot of the phone calls. She was almost articulate when describing the minutiae of funeral arrangements, and once I heard the unusual sound of her laugh slip in from the hall. She had even started putting on more makeup than usual, sealing up fissures, plumping hollows, coloring herself in. Tragedy, and the displacement of Eve, seemed to have given her a new zest for living.
She came into the dining room one morning holding one of the black-edged funeral invitations, frowning. I wondered if that had finally done it; such a solid little piece of card, its hard, graceful lettering. Dear Alicia, I would like to remind you that your daughter is dead. She drowned herself. The funeral will be on Friday; bring a bottle. Her mouth was drawn up with disappointment.
“Jonathan, do you really want these invitations to look like this?”
“How do you mean?”
“They look . . . cheap.”
I revolved around on my chair with my mouth open. All I could think of to say was, “Well, they weren’t cheap.”
“The font . . . the card feels shiny.”
“They’ve been sent already. You can send more if you like. You could send apology notes, for the first set. Tell them I chose them, that I was deranged with grief. Hopefully people will still come.”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant.”
There was a silence and then Alicia left, running her fingers over the card distractedly.
Because she was a relation of Eve Anthony, Theo’s death was reported by the papers and on the news. The female newscaster told the camera that Eve had been made very ill by the stress. She put on a grave face as she said it, looking down at her notes and then up again, sincerely. Her hair was stiff around her face, her eyes made-up, but not too much. Then she said, Now the weather, and started joking with the weatherman about his humorous tie.
Theo was buried at the small church nearby, in the plot that contained the mossed entablatures of the Bennetts, under the shadow of the broken-nosed cherubs of Sir James’s tomb. The funeral was closed casket, though the undertaker had told us that since Theo hadn’t been in the water long, we could have it open, if we preferred. I had refused, not wanting to see her bleached by death, the beginning of erasure. But as we stood around the grave I felt a sudden, agitated need to see her face. She was disappearing, slipping into a black gap, the disjunction between my memories of her and her burial. It was barbaric, that she could be put into the ground like this. The coffin, the sound of the soil and stones hitting it. The earth, the box, the bones and flesh. I stood in horror and repeated prayers.
Eve left her room for the funeral: Mrs. North had kept her in
formed on the arrangements. I was grateful for this. Mrs. North didn’t question why I hadn’t spoken to Eve since my return, or why I took convoluted routes around Evendon to avoid Alicia. She just simply and quietly did her job. She was the only one in the house who hadn’t stopped, seized like an old clock, a paralyzed cuckoo halfway out of its door.
At the service, Eve sat in a wheelchair in a thick veil, her back rigid, hands stiff. She had decided to get up and had found she couldn’t. I could tell she was furious. She had accepted the wheelchair from the doctor with barely concealed anger. Alicia stood on my other side, making a delicate face at the cold air of the world, dabbing her eyes in the way she imagined other people might blot tears. In daylight, wearing black, the decline of her beauty could easily be tracked. The skin over her eyes draped in tiny delineated folds, like tissue paper, thinner and translucent over the rest of her face. Her hand on my arm was as light as dried flowers. Alex stood on the other side of me. He was cautious around me, though I tried to be welcoming. Alex, Alicia, and I; we might have had some solidarity, but we were voiceless and divided, even now.
My friends stood behind me: Nick, Felix, Sebastian, with his hand over his eyes. I had waited outside for him to arrive so that I could speak to him alone. He stumbled as he got out of the taxi and again before he reached me, as if he had coordinated his limbs consciously before, and now that he wasn’t concentrating they had all gone awry. His face, tanned by the months in India, was an intaglio of itself, a distraught negative.
“So it’s true,” he said. “This is real.”
I understood what he meant. “Maybe only in a way?” I said. “Right?”
The Other Half of Me Page 24