Banishing Verona Read online

  Poor Millicent. She was high-strung and socially ambitious, and I have no idea what she saw in Dennis other than a meal ticket. When I finally met her on the eve of their wedding, I realised what my mother had gone through. Don’t do it, I wanted to tell him. The heavy breathing won’t last. But it seems to, or something has. He and Millicent are still married, and he has managed to keep the family afloat with his teaching. I wish he’d continued to run the golf course. My father was a scholar and I have an old-fashioned objection to a man who knows nothing passing on his ignorance, but that’s neither here nor there. At least it enabled Dennis to take care of you and Henry. The choice of the latter’s name was one of the few occasions on which my son truly surprised me. Forgive me. This is no way to talk about your parents.

  Do you remember when you were eight or nine and came to stay with me? I was glad to see that you resembled neither your mother nor your grandmother but your great-grandmother. One morning I took you up the hill at the back of the house to fly Percy, my peregrine falcon. He killed a rabbit and I didn’t get him back soon enough. By the time we reached him, a circle of grass was visible through the rabbit’s body. Percy had eaten the heart. I worried you might be upset but you turned to me, cool as a cucumber, and asked if you could hold Percy.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  You nodded, and I helped you pull one of my leather gloves halfway up your arm and set the bird on your wrist with my own hand underneath.

  Henry is a different story. I hope you are not aware of the fact that when he was sixteen he phoned out of the blue and announced that he was visiting a friend nearby. Could he break his journey by staying with me the following night? I confess I was pleased at the prospect. I drove into town and bought lamb chops and new potatoes and a good piece of Stilton. It seemed possible that he was of an age when we might have a conversation. At the station the next evening, I met an unusually graceful boy with my hair and Irene’s eyes.

  “Hello, Grandfather,” he said, offering his hand. “What shall I call you?”

  “Jigger.”

  “Jigger, thank you for coming to meet me.”

  He went on in this vein, chatty, polite, just this side of unctuous, as I drove us back to the house and took him down to the aviary. He was not really interested in the birds, not like you, but he was not afraid of them as some people are and he made the right noises. Inside the house he commented enthusiastically on the furniture; I pointed out the desk and some other pieces that had come from the vicarage. To my surprise he had brought a bottle of burgundy, and over dinner he plied me with wine and questions: my early life, my family, the railway. He told me that he was hoping to do something similar himself. “Not run a railway” —he smiled modestly—“but to do with property. I’ve got a good eye for commercial space. All I need is some capital.”

  “I was lucky in that regard,” I told him, trying not to smile at a boy his age using phrases like commercial space, and explained about Charles.

  Over the Stilton, he brought up the subject of wills. “Dad made his last month,” he said.

  I had drunk most of the wine but I knew at once he was lying. Dennis would never be so thoughtful. “Good for him,” I said. “Everyone over twenty-five ought to have a will.”

  “So I’ve got nine years,” said Henry. “But Dad is your heir, isn’t he? What would happen if he died before you?”

  He looked at me with his clear brown eyes, and it dawned on me what he was asking. I was seventy-nine years old; we were alone in the house. “Solicitors think of these contingencies,” I told him. “That’s what we pay them for.”

  “So, would Verona and I be next in line? Dad claims that we’re your only relatives.”

  “Not everyone leaves their money to relatives. There are friends, charities. How about some coffee? I’d be glad of a hand with the washing-up.”

  For an alarming moment I thought he was going to persist, but he let it go and loaded the dishwasher. That might have been the end of the matter but for the wine. I had to get up several times in the night, and on the second occasion I noticed a light on downstairs. Even as an old man I remembered the skills Tiger had taught me. I padded down the stairs without a creak. In the living room Henry was bent over the desk he had admired earlier that evening, going through my papers. “What are you doing?” I said.

  He turned to me wide-eyed. “Where am I?” he quavered. “Oh, it’s you, Grandfather. I must have been sleepwalking. I’m sorry, this hasn’t happened in ages.”

  I told him to get a glass of water and go back to bed.

  Next day, after I dropped him off at the station, I sat down and wrote a new will. He was right; I had done the traditional thing and made him one of my heirs. Now I changed it to leave you the bulk of my estate and only five thousand pounds to Henry. This record is for you, if you care to read it, so that you will know something about me and why I chose to leave you my money. I also want to warn you about your brother. Whatever is worst in our family has converged in Henry.

  11

  Gently Zeke closed the book and laid it beside his smallest clock. As he stood up, he discovered again that his shoulders ached from working in the shop, and his mouth felt stiff from the innocuous phrases—just over a pound, just under, that will be seventy-three pence—but he could no more go to bed than walk on the ceiling. He let himself out of the flat, down the stairs, and into the street. There the night was waiting for him, misty and reassuring. As he set off along the sidewalk, his clothes released the odors of the day. Rounding the corner, he caught a whiff of brassica; passing a bus stop he inhaled the tang of citrus mingled with the earthy aroma of root vegetables.

  He counted nothing, not lights, not trees, not dustbins, not even the occasional sets of lovers so entwined he wouldn’t have known whether to identify them as one or two, until he crossed the road into the park. In the playground the swings hung motionless; the seesaw tilted at half mast. A few steps farther and he spotted a dark circle on the grass which marked the site of last year’s Guy Fawkes bonfire. He had come that evening with Phil and surprised himself by the pleasure he had taken in the explosions of sound and color that celebrated, as Phil pointed out, the failed attempt of a Catholic revolutionary to bring down the government and his subsequent excruciating death. In the finale, a dozen rockets burst into clusters of white and golden stars that fell and fell and never came to earth.

  Gazing up now at the starless sky, Zeke recalled that Verona had spoken of her grandfather, how he’d enlisted at seventeen and ended up running a railway. He thought of the soldiers he saw on television: young men barely old enough to drive, wearing those blotchy uniforms meant to suggest a muddy field and carrying weapons any one of which could destroy a small town. At school, when his class made a trip to the Imperial War Museum, he had tried to beg off—two of his most hated words over one roof—but there was no provision for pupils to stay behind. The first sight of the building, with the cannons in front aimed at the road, had confirmed his worst fears. Inside, however, he had discovered a display of wartime fashions and spent the afternoon studying how to fake a stocking seam and make lipstick rather than experiencing the reenactment of the blitz or, as he learned later from his classmates, watching the grainy, flickering films of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

  Somewhere nearby a clock chimed the hour, followed immediately by another, more distant. One day, he thought, I’ll get permission to synchronize all the clocks of London. But if every clock struck in unison might the noise be too deafening, rocking even the Tower, even Canary Wharf? As the last notes faded, a white cat dashed across the street and disappeared beneath a parked car. Sometimes he found his own behavior as baffling as that of other people. For a week it hadn’t occurred to him to look at the notebook, but as soon as Emmanuel left he had fetched it from beneath his pillow and read it from beginning to end. He had had her name all along.

  Walking through the soft darkness he understood, as he had not while he was turning the pages, that Jigger
’s story was organized around three deaths. He pictured Tiger in his scarlet robes, walking in the walled garden of some palace high in the snowy mountains. He sat under a fig tree reading a poem; he threw a ball for a small dog; no one mentioned the unrest in the town below. If only he and JS could have changed places. But perhaps JS did not really want to die either. Maybe he was simply out walking one night, a night much like this one, when he found himself alone near the Thames and succumbed to a fleeting impulse of despair.

  In that respect, Irene’s death was the most troubling of all. Her life was so full of falsehood that even taking the poison seemed a lie. Zeke had tried, over and over, to talk to the doctors about mendacity. If lungs, larynx, lips can produce the words “I am eating an orange,” when the teeth are closing around a stick of celery, then everything about human existence is called into question. Still, almost in spite of herself, Irene had committed certain facts: she had borne a son, she had lived with Jigger for more than a decade, she had cooked their last lunch.

  He was walking along the edge of the park, the leafless plane trees on his left, an eighteenth-century terrace on the right. Most of the houses were dark or dimly lit, but on the middle floor of a tall white house an uncurtained window shone and in the window sat a woman. As Zeke watched, she raised her arms and began to braid her long brown hair. A few feet away, with his back to her, stood a man. He too raised his arms and pulled a sweater over his head; he shrugged off a shirt. From a far corner of the room, a woman in a red dress appeared and reached for the first woman’s hair. As the braid grew, the man ducked down to remove his trousers and turned, like the women, to face the park. Across sixty feet of misty air Zeke saw his lips move.

  Footfalls roused him to his own behavior. Beneath the plane trees a burly woman was approaching. For a moment he entertained the notion of stopping her and explaining that this was how he felt about his life most of the time, as if he were viewing even the people he knew best through a pane of glass, but she passed without a second glance. Reluctantly he fell in behind her. Who was whose lover, he wondered. The woman with the braid and the man? The woman in the red dress and the man? The two women?

  These speculations led him to another. Was it possible that his father, in spite of Gwen’s deceptions, had found out about Maurice? What if his attack had been triggered by the news? Heart attacks, Zeke had heard, were often preceded by some kind of shock.

  At the top of the high street the burly woman disappeared into a block of flats. Zeke paused in front of a shop displaying baths and basins so radiant they seemed to have nothing to do with human functions. Center stage a perpetual stream of water poured into a scalloped basin. He eyed the glistening column, thinking he should tell the chef about this place; the fixtures might appeal to his tastes. And if his speculations were correct, then his father, discovering Gwen’s infidelity, had reacted by doing the one thing he most dreaded and had spent his life trying to avoid, which was also the only thing guaranteed to stop her from leaving.

  Continuing down the high street, he recalled the final pages of Jigger’s notebook. What had happened, he wondered, when Henry discovered that his grandfather had outwitted him? Unpleasant scenes, Zeke was sure. A night bus roared by. In its wake he imagined, fleetingly, inappropriately, a large dimpled ostrich egg leaking sulfurous fumes. Verona’s brother was a bad egg. Whatever was driving her to leave home, he thought, and flee from one place to another, had something to do with Henry.

  Even as he opened the gate to his parents’ abbreviated front garden, the strident hubbub of television was audible. He rang, knocked, counted the blooms on the forsythia, and finally, setting down the bag of birdseed he had purchased from the local garden center, let himself in with the key he tried to use as seldom as possible.

  “People get ill all the time, every day, people who are younger, fitter, nicer than you. It doesn’t mean you have the right to turn into a—”

  “Don’t you think I bloody well know that? I shouldn’t have to bring up my heart if you’d behave with common decency. For thirty years I’ve been watching you go google-eyed at everything in trousers that comes into the shop. I’m not even sure—”

  “As if you don’t lather it on too.” Gwen’s voice deepened. “‘That’s a very becoming top, Mrs. Fletcher. I hope your husband knows what a lucky man he is.’ ‘Oh, I like your hair, Polly. The new color really suits you.’”

  Zeke hesitated beside the coatrack, trying to avoid both the sound of his parents’ quarrel and the sight of himself in the mirror. You’re the opposite of Narcissus, one girlfriend had told him. At first it’s refreshing, she added; then it’s weird. At the mention of the shop, he had understood that the drama he was listening to emanated not from a machine but from his parents. For some reason his mother was home early and the two of them were embroiled in an argument that seemed to cover the whole history of their marriage, from Agincourt to D-Day.

  He was backing down the hall, planning to step into the street and use his mobile phone to interrupt, when the living room door flung wide and a woman in a white pullover and dark trousers appeared. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes had a metallic gleam as if they could rearrange iron filings across a room.

  “You,” she exclaimed, “what the hell are you doing, tiptoeing around like a burglar?”

  “I knocked, I rang, I slammed the door. I told you yesterday I’d be round to see Dad this afternoon.”

  “Take a good look at him.” She waved her arm toward the living room. “There he is, feeling as sorry for himself as it’s possible for a person to be.”

  “Mum, what are you doing home?” As a small boy in Brighton, he still remembered the time he’d gone to play at Frank’s house. Only after several hours did Zeke grasp that the tall, calm woman who kept bringing them juice and biscuits and saying well done and lovely, darling was in the same relation to Frank as Gwen was to him.

  “Kevin’s minding the shop,” she said. “I’m going to change.”

  She swept past him and up the stairs, leaving him with a trio of unappetizing choices: departure, immobility, his father. Reluctantly he made his way past the mirror. In the living room, a man wearing a blue fleece and jeans was sitting on the sofa, his head buried in his hands. Trying not to disturb him, and doing his best to ignore the bust of Beethoven, Zeke stepped over to the cage by the window. He opened the metal door and held out a handful of birdseed. The parrot stared at him, unblinkingly. With no warning, it gave a piercing scream. Zeke jumped back, startled both by the noise and by how much the bird sounded like Gwen.

  The scream roused his father. When Don raised his head and lowered his hands, Zeke saw that his cheeks were damp. Not rain, not water, unless Gwen had thrown some at him, not sweat unless he had suddenly developed a fever; no, those little smudges must be tears, though what had caused them was impossible to say. Silently Zeke approached, once again offering the birdseed. His father peered inside the bag and began to utter a series of harsh cries. His version of an anti-laugh, Zeke thought. He stood waiting patiently for a suitable moment to proffer his other two gifts, tickets for The Lion King—didn’t all the problem pages recommend a good night out?—and his willingness to work in the shop. Now that he knew who Verona was and that she would phone him, he had no excuse for not helping his parents.

  “Tell us,” said his father, when he could at last speak, “tell us one respect in which you and I are similar.”

  “We’re both good at mental arithmetic. We both read newspapers neatly. We both hate okra and don’t mind the bother of artichokes. We both always signal at intersections.”

  “Okra,” said Don, with a crack in his voice.

  “Listen, Dad, the birdseed was a joke. The main thing I want to say is that I hope you’re feeling better and the minute I’ve finished my current job, this kitchen in West Hampstead, I’ll work in the shop whenever you need me. You’ve helped me lots of times, lots. And this”—he held out the envelope—“is a get-well present.”

 
His father made no move to take the envelope or to reply. A feeling of hopelessness came over Zeke. How would he ever find his way around the world when, even in the case of his own family, he so often got things wrong? Now, for example, when he had expected some sign of satisfaction, some acknowledgment that here was the compliance his father had been seeking, the opposite occurred: Don seemed as irate as ever. Before Zeke could sort all this out, the parrot gave another scream and his mother swept in, wearing a long skirt, a low-cut top, and so much perfume he had to clear his throat.

  “You might be interested to know,” she said, coming to rest beside the coffee table, “that your father has got it into his head that there’s some question about your paternity.”

  Here at least was a problem with a solution. “Don’t worry, Dad, there are tests nowadays. I’m happy to have one if you want, but I don’t see what difference it would make. We’d still be stuck with each other.” He took in the faces of his parents, briefly united by their open mouths. “Funny,” he added, because the thought struck him, “I’m afraid of a million things but not needles.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Don, and he and Gwen started to laugh: real, exuberant laughs. The parrot, anxious not to be left out, squawked. Zeke looked on, pleased but bewildered. What had he said that was so amusing?

  When the merriment subsided and Gwen, still shaking her head, had once again retreated upstairs, his father turned toward him. “You caught your mother and me at a tricky time. It’s not good for either of us, me being a lump on the sofa. When will you have this kitchen finished?”