Banishing Verona Page 14

  Recognizing his father’s version of an apology, Zeke explained what still remained to be done at the chef’s house and re-presented the Lion King tickets. He would watch the shop so they could make an evening of it. That sounds great, his father said, and suggested a cup of tea. They were sitting at the kitchen table, companionably sharing the newspaper, when Gwen reappeared.

  “I’m going into town,” she said, hovering in the doorway, “to do some shopping.”

  “Shopping?” said Don. “You already have enough stuff in your wardrobe to clothe half of London.”

  Oh, please, Dad, thought Zeke. Simultaneously he understood that his mother’s fancy clothes meant she was on her way to see Maurice and that his speculations of the night before were just that. His father had no notion of Gwen’s secret life, though if he had lowered the newspaper at just that moment, he would have seen her lips curl in a way that surely would have made him suspect. Turning to Zeke, she said, “You’ll stay and go for a walk with your dad, won’t you?”

  He nodded, speechless. As the door closed behind her, he moved toward the sink. He scrubbed a plate and another, hoping they would carry him to safety, but each soap bubble seemed to ask Should I tell him? without yielding the answer. By the time he finished, he felt farther out at sea than ever in a small, rudderless boat. Meanwhile, his father had discarded the paper and was standing in the middle of the kitchen, stretching his arms first up to the ceiling, then down to the floor.

  “Ready?” he asked, twisting from side to side as if doing some primitive dance.

  Zeke dried his hands and seized his jacket. In the street Don strode out as if determined to prove his vigor. Passing the corner shop, he began to talk about Gwen again, how hard his illness had been on her, how, when the doctor gave the okay, he’d like to take her somewhere. Maybe back to Malta, where they’d had a brilliant holiday a few years ago. “She’s been working like a dog, and I haven’t helped with my g and d. Gloom and doom,” he translated. “My cardiologist says the prognosis is good, actually very good, but I’m such a superstitious bastard I can’t stop behaving as if I’m about to kick the bucket.”

  His parents’ local park, unlike Zeke’s own, was fenced all the way round. As they stepped through the gate, a flock of black birds launched themselves a few feet into the air, then returned to earth, claws outstretched, wings wide. They bumped along the sodden grass, touching down two or three times, before finally coming to rest.

  “Dad.”

  “You could manage the shop for a fortnight, couldn’t you? We’d make sure you had help.”

  Stiff light-green leaves, the first daffodils, pierced the faded brown grass along the edge of the path. “Dad,” he said again. The sentence about Maurice was perfectly formed in his brain; still he hesitated. It was one of those sentences that, when released, would change everything. Although he had thought that before and been proved wrong.

  Two women in purple jogging suits approached, talking loudly. Then a voice shouted, “On your left,” and while Zeke was still trying to sort out who had spoken an electric wheelchair whizzed by, bearing a middle-aged man. As he gazed after the man’s wispy ponytail, he understood that his longing for Verona had carried him to a new place, still at sea but with a rock to cling to. The rock was this: if he had known she was going to disappear, he never would have left the Barrows’ that night. He would have hidden under the desk or slept in his van, anything to prevent her vanishing. Next to that rock was another. One day soon his father would come downstairs to find Gwen gone because no one, meaning Zeke, had warned him.

  “Dad,” he said again, and when his father broke off his holiday plans he pushed the words out into the chilly air.

  “Seeing someone?” Don came to an abrupt halt. “How do you mean seeing someone?”

  Zeke faltered. “You ought to talk to her yourself.”

  “Please.” Don swayed slightly. “Tell me what you know.”

  Zeke stepped around a pile of litter and—it took him a moment to be sure—overtook a woman who was walking a brown rabbit in a harness. He had been braced for accusations, shouts, but this was harder. Whether it was the sight of the rabbit hopping along or his father sounding so old and sad, he had suddenly had enough. He had betrayed his mother’s confidences, he had warned Don, he could not deal with one more question or demand. He turned and began to run toward the gate of the park.

  12

  Whenever a passing lorry shook the flat, whenever his neighbors came and went, whenever someone at the house being renovated down the street used a power tool, Zeke assumed that his parents, separately or together, were about to break down his door, seize him by the part of him that had betrayed them—the throat—and shake him until his teeth chattered. But no one rang his bell or pounded on his door. No arrows of outrage leaped from the phone, which, for once, he was answering in the hope of hearing from Verona. When the doorbell did ring the following morning, just as he was leaving for the chef’s house, he discovered not her, not his parents, but a small angular figure, fidgeting from foot to foot: one of the schoolgirls he passed at the bus stop on the way to work? The daughter of friends?

  “Zeke,” she said, holding out a wad of dark fabric, “I found your jacket.”

  “My jacket?” Still he could not place her.

  “Remember you thought you left it at our house? Well, you did. Gerald hung it up by mistake.”

  Now he recognized her: Mrs. Barrow, Ariel, her hair neatly brushed and even, if he wasn’t mistaken, a little mascara. Her black jacket and dark-green skirt also showed signs of effort, though the lapel of the jacket was marked by several milky smudges. At one of his clinics he had met a woman who spilled almost everything she touched and had only to walk by a table of food for some of it to end up on her clothes. Perhaps Ariel suffered from the same condition. “Thanks,” he said, taking the jacket out of her hands. “It’s very kind of you to bring it round.”

  “Can I come in for a moment?”

  Zeke tried a trick he had learned from Emmanuel. He stuck out his left wrist and stared in the direction of his watch. “I’m on quite a tight schedule—”

  “Excuse me, mate.”

  One of the boys from downstairs was standing in the hall, holding his bicycle. Ariel stepped back into the street and Zeke was forced to follow. It was, he noted with surprise, a remarkably pleasant morning. The windows of the houses opposite glittered in the sunshine and the air was crisp and smelled faintly of moss.

  Ariel perched in the middle of a paving stone, and gazed up at him. “If you’re driving I could come with you. That way you wouldn’t waste any time.”

  The boy, who was standing behind Ariel, putting on his bicycle clips, turned to regard her. After a few seconds he raised a hand, thumb down.

  “Really,” said Zeke, “passengers make me nervous and I’m already late. What do you want?” Why was he being so stern with this woman he scarcely knew, especially after she had done him the kindness of returning the jacket he had left, deliberately, in her house? As she lowered her head, he guessed the answer.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m parked this way.”

  Whatever spurt of energy or optimism had brought Ariel to him seemed to wither in the face of his reluctant generosity. “I’m sorry,” she said, as he unlocked the passenger door, “this was a dreadful idea. It was the only time of day I thought I could be sure of finding you at home.”

  He went round to his side of the van. Up to Ariel if she chose to get in or not. She was still standing there as he jiggled the ignition key into the lock; ever since Emmanuel borrowed the van last spring it had had a slight kink. The engine caught and she scrambled in, pulling herself up using the dashboard and barely managing to close the door before he drove away. For the first mile she said nothing, and save for a sweet fragrance—shampoo? hand cream?—he was almost able to forget her presence. On the radio a dietician with a Liverpool accent discussed obesity in America. Americans were large and growing larger. They ate t
en times as much fat as the average Japanese.

  He was accelerating away from a traffic light when Ariel spoke. “I was fat as a child.”

  “You were?”

  “I had an operation when I was nine, to fix my eyes. Afterward I had to stay indoors for six weeks, and my mother kept bringing me meals. By the time I went back to school I was huge. The other girls teased me horribly, so of course I kept eating.”

  If these were her eyes after an operation, he hated to imagine them before. “And what happened? You’re the opposite of fat now.

  “Careful!”

  In turning to look at her he had come within inches of a small blue car. “I did warn you that passengers make me nervous.”

  “I thought that was just an excuse to get rid of me. What saved me was our gym teacher. She took me aside one day and told me I had the perfect build for a gymnast. I burst out that I was too fat, the first person I’d ever said this to other than my mother. But Miss Christie said she was sure I’d soon lose the extra pounds. Within four months I was thin again and I could walk on my hands. I still can.

  “I’d like to see that,” said Zeke. “I used to have a friend who could do perfect cartwheels. I don’t know how to make excuses. It’s one of my major faults, much worse than my driving.”

  “Wasn’t your jacket, I mean leaving it at our house, an excuse?”

  Ariel’s tone was one of interrogation rather than accusation, but Zeke felt his palms grow slippery against the steering wheel. Looking around, he saw that they were passing the library near the chef’s house. He turned into a side street and stopped in the first available space. “You’re right,” he said. “I did leave the jacket on purpose. I wanted to be able to ask you about Verona, the woman I met at your house.”

  “I thought you didn’t know her name.”

  “I didn’t then. She turned out to be a friend of a friend: Verona MacIntyre.” As always, he enjoyed hearing the syllables enter the air.

  “What a coincidence,” said Ariel. “There’s a Verona MacIntyre who hosts a radio show every morning on Mars Radio. Have you heard her? She has an unusually deep voice. But she wouldn’t be roaming around London with a suitcase.”

  Was there any difference between the feeling one had when one recognized a true fact and when one leaped to a false conclusion? On the slenderest of evidence, Zeke was convinced that this was his Verona MacIntyre. And hadn’t Emmanuel, he now recalled, said something about radio? At once, so many things made sense: her talent for questions, her gift for listening, her reluctance to talk about herself. He gazed into Ariel’s leafy eyes. To think he had done his best to send her away. “Thank you,” he said. And then, because he felt he owed her an explanation, he added, “I’m in love with her.”

  “I guessed. Or to be more precise, I changed the sheets on the spare-room bed. The reason I brought your jacket over is that I keep thinking you can help me sort things out with Gerald.” She made a jerky motion with her head, neither a nod nor a shake but something more birdlike. “It’s ridiculous. I have a degree in economics and I edit business books, but for some reason I’ve got it into my head that you’ll know what I ought to do.”

  This was ridiculous, thought Zeke; romance was his worst subject but he was in Ariel’s debt. In an effort to repay her, he folded his arms, tucked in his chin, and did his best to sound authoritative. “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “I think so. He’s often late home and sometimes people call the house and hang up when I answer.”

  “Still you went to Latvia together. The first time I came round about the painting, he seemed very keen for you to go with him.”

  He could not have named the states that Ariel was passing through, but he had no trouble seeing that her whole manner changed as if he had offered her an exquisite rose. When she wasn’t in the grip of some dismal obsession, he realized, she could be an attractive woman, her strangeness alluring rather than repelling. She began to babble about how wonderful Riga had been, how hospitable Gerald’s colleagues were, how they had skated by firelight and eaten trout so fresh it tasted of wild strawberries.

  “Maybe I’m being presumptuous,” he said, “but I wonder if you’re right about Gerald? Sometimes it’s easier to attribute difficulties to a third person rather than confront them directly. In any long relationship there are going to be ups and downs.” He had read this advice on numerous occasions, but Ariel listened as if an oracle were speaking. When he fell silent, she undid her seat belt, leaned over, and kissed him on both cheeks.

  “Good luck with Verona,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “I hope she knows how lucky she is.”

  Zeke longed to detain her—she had become one of the small group who in some sense knew Verona—but even as he searched for the words Ariel had slipped from the van and was hurrying down the street.

  At the chef’s house, to his relief, no one was home. He carried in lengths of skirting board and molding, maneuvering them through the kitchen and out into the back garden, where the beautiful day once again accosted him. A bird with a speckled chest was perched in the apple tree, chirping, and the same stiff leaves he had seen in the park were coming up all over the garden. Back indoors he filled the kettle. As the water began to boil, a low musical humming entered his consciousness. Cautiously he crossed the hall and opened the living room door. Every spare inch was crowded with provisions and dishes from the kitchen, but the hum grew instantly louder. A few steps inside, he saw the chef seated on the floor, cross-legged, in front of the ficus tree. Hastily, hoping to escape notice, Zeke tiptoed out of the room.

  Perhaps it was only his imagination, but recently his employer seemed to be showing a marked tendency to prolong any conversation. So long as Zeke was doing something mechanical—grouting tiles, for example—and the chef was satisfied by his hmms, Zeke hadn’t minded too much. His counselor, Arnold, had taught him to make the sound. When you listen in total silence, Arnold had explained, people worry you aren’t paying attention.

  But I’m here, Zeke said. They’re talking. What else would I be doing?

  Planning your summer holidays? Thinking about your next meal? You have to understand—one of Arnold’s eyelids closed and opened—most people aren’t as confident as they pretend to be. He had shown Zeke how to make the appropriate noise, keeping his lips together and allowing his palate to vibrate. They discussed frequency.

  Every twenty seconds, Zeke suggested.

  No, no, it can’t be to a timetable. They’ll think you’re making fun of them.

  So Zeke had pressed grout between the tiles and hmmed at irregular intervals, more or less following the Fibonacci sequence. But this initial docility had only brought more conversations, each longer than its predecessor. Even as he worked ten-hour days, trying to finish the job for the sake of his parents and Verona, it had become increasingly hard to get any but the simplest tasks done when the chef was around.

  Forgetting the kettle, he returned to the garden and began to measure the skirting boards, checking and rechecking the measurements. He was sawing the first length, still finding the rhythm that would make the little metal teeth gobble up the wood, when the chef appeared in the back doorway wearing baggy brown trousers and a bright red T-shirt. His feet were bare.

  “Hi,” he said. “I hope I didn’t seem rude just now.” He pointed over his shoulder, locating the now. “I try to meditate for fifteen minutes each morning. It ruins the whole thing if I jump up every time the door goes.”

  Zeke paused, holding the saw steady. “Have you heard of someone on the radio called Verona MacIntyre? She does a show every morning on Mars Radio.”

  “No, I’m a Radio Four man, but it’s morning. Let’s try to find her.” In the kitchen the chef twirled radio dials resourcefully until he found the station; then he offered to make breakfast on the camp stove he had borrowed.

  What a day I’m having, thought Zeke. “I’ve already eaten,” he said gently. “Besides, I need to get these boards cut. It’l
l be easier for you to make breakfast once I’m out of your kitchen.”

  The chef raised his eyebrows, which in turn made his hairline ripple. He uttered his own hmm sound before retreating to the living room. Soon the odor of bacon wafted into the garden. Zeke balanced the radio on his toolbox and continued sawing. Nothing at nine, nothing at nine-thirty but at ten, after several minutes of advertising, the announcer said, “And now the ten o’clock show with Verona MacIntyre.” Then another voice explained that Verona was taking a brief leave. “My name is Casey Lawson, and I’ll be doing my best to make the next two hours as lively and indispensable as Verona always does.”

  Zeke listened spellbound to this woman who was sitting in Verona’s chair, speaking into her microphone, discussing property values in London and whether trade unions were still relevant. These airwaves, these frequencies, had within recent memory carried Verona’s voice. Surely, like him, they missed her. Only after the show ended as he began to fit the skirting boards into place—miraculously, he had cut them all true—did the import of this new information strike him. He had already understood that trouble must have brought Verona to the Barrows’; now, knowing the kind of job she had, he glimpsed the magnitude of that trouble. He put down his hammer and touched his forehead to the floor.

  That night when he got home he arranged five clementines in front of the answering machine, a reminder of the five lightbulbs, and sat down beside them. Verona, he thought, wherever you are, please telephone me. He focused every brain cell on reaching her; he begged the molecules of air to carry his request to her; he promised not to move, not to eat until she rang; he vowed to do a good deed a day for the rest of his life; he promised to learn to ride a bicycle, to tell jokes.

  Nothing. Silence. More silence.

  Finally, reluctantly, at eleven-thirty, he gave up his vigil and went to bed. Half an hour later he was on the edge of sleep when the phone rang.

  “Did something happen yesterday?”