Banishing Verona Read online

  “Yesterday?” He was still trying to recover from the disappointment of hearing the wrong voice.

  “Did something happen after I went shopping?” Gwen hissed. “Did you drop a hint to Don?”

  “Mum,” he said weakly.

  “Wake up, Zeke,” she said, with such intensity that it was as if she had shouted, although, uncharacteristically, she was whispering. His father must be nearby. In an effort to get his bearings, he climbed out of bed and took the phone over to the window. When he last looked a crescent moon had hung over the rooftops. Now the sky was filled with white clouds lit by the reflection of a million street lamps. For a moment, caught up in the beauty of the spectacle, he almost forgot why he was standing there.

  “Ever since your visit, Don has been acting peculiar. Yesterday he even had supper waiting when I got home. I keep asking what’s up and he says nothing. He knows how hard I’m working. He’s just trying to be helpful.”

  “I told him.”

  What happened next was hard to describe. Little fragments of speech—furious, obscene, incoherent—began to spray in all directions, some into the receiver, some not. He put down the phone and went to take a shower. At this time of night, Gwen could be here in fifteen minutes. Washed, dressed, the outside door open, the kettle boiled, he sat at the kitchen table.

  It was odd, he thought, given his feelings about the sea, that he liked the sky. The coming and going of clouds was like the traffic on the London streets. He could count them, if he chose. And by night he appreciated the orderliness of the moon’s waxing and waning, the rotation of the constellations. He even welcomed the disruptions: shooting stars, satellites, airplanes with their concomitant jet trails. Not that he had ever actually been in a plane. Thousands, millions of people, including almost everyone he knew, entered these metal capsules as a matter of course, but he had never been able to get his mind around the improbable, terrifying prospect of leaving the earth.

  The one time he had been to Europe, the summer after his breakdown, he had taken the ferry and survived by dint of wearing his own life jacket and playing game after game of draughts with his father. Several years later, the sight of the black and white checkers could still make him queasy. They were traveling to Naples, where Don’s family came from; his parents had moved to London as newlyweds shortly before the Second World War and started an ice-cream shop. On the ferry, as they moved the counters back and forth, he had told Zeke about his first job as an apprentice to a dice maker.

  We boys were responsible for unloading the marble chips off the barges. The sacks weighed a hundredweight apiece, and we lugged them ashore across this narrow wooden gangplank. One wrong step and you were in the river. Wouldn’t be allowed nowadays. You should have seen the shoulders I had on me when I was sixteen.

  And did you make the dice? said Zeke. He kept his eyes fixed on the board, where his father was in the lead.

  I ran the polisher for a white—the dust was unbelievable—and then I had a stint on the machine that did the fours. You’d think it was easy, making a little cube with dots, but it’s hard to make a die that isn’t biased. The foreman would walk up and down exhorting us: “The fate of honest men and women lies in your hands. A single crooked die can ruin a man for life.”

  As he spoke, Don delved in various pockets until he found what he was looking for in his breast pocket. I made these on my last day at the factory. The foreman gave them to me as a souvenir.

  They’re beautiful, said Zeke, raising his eyes from the board. The black paint marking the dots on the dice was almost gone, and the stone had a yellowish tinge.

  I don’t know about that, but they’re true. They favor no man, not even their maker. Gwen used to tease me about that. You ought to have made a die that would help you, Donnie, she used to say.

  Only later, as they marched through the streets of Naples searching in vain for the addresses Don had written down nearly twenty years earlier when his father was dying, did Zeke wonder why it was that he had never heard about the dice making before. At the time he had thought it was just one of those odd things that you periodically learned about your parents. Phil, however, to whom he’d repeated the story, had a different hypothesis. I bet your dad didn’t want you to know that he hadn’t gone into the family business. Zeke had forgotten all about the dice until he’d seen his father throwing them the day he came home from the hospital.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” said Gwen, slamming the door behind her.

  Not true to say he hadn’t heard her approach. He had simply allowed himself to have that final image of his father slumped in his armchair, looking like someone let out of the cemetery on bail, rolling the dice over and over as if the two small cubes had the power to decide whether he would live or die.

  13

  They talked for hours in lacerating circles, and there was nothing to do but give himself up to the words, rushing by like the winter wind. Yet, in spite of all these words, no meeting point was reached, no truce brokered. His behavior was unforgivable, incomprehensible, vicious, outrageous, and nothing he said could convince Gwen otherwise.

  “I understand,” she said, her hair swirling as if she were both source and subject of the wind, “that you have your precious phobias and fears, but you’re not stupid. You do know what you’re doing. Who the hell gave you permission to poke your nose into my affairs? For the first time in years, I’m happy. I wake up thinking about something other than whether to put the peaches on special or did I order too much lettuce. Can you imagine what that’s like? And you try to ruin it. If I hadn’t seen you come out from between my legs, I’d swear you were a changeling.”

  The final sentence, delivered at full volume, was underscored by a volley of thuds from above. Almost simultaneously, as if in answer, came a series of knocks from the floor: the toga boys banging on their ceiling. Next comes the phone call, thought Zeke. The police. Although he kept his own eyes safely on his knees, he could feel Gwen glaring at him.

  He worried that her response to the protests might be to raise her voice still more, but when she spoke again it was almost in a whisper. “The thing I don’t understand is why you would want to hurt me. Not to mention your father.”

  “I didn’t do it to hurt you,” he said hopelessly. His mouth had a cottony feel, and his tongue kept colliding with his teeth as if, in a matter of hours, it had outgrown its rightful home. He had apologized, he had tried to explain, he had groveled. The truth was that he had not, at the moment he spoke to Don, been thinking of Gwen, but she had greeted that information with a high-pitched shriek so terrifying that he lost all desire to explain about Verona and his reasoning and thought only of hiding behind the sofa. Now, feebly, he attempted to change the subject. “Would you like some breakfast?”

  “If I leave, you’ll be the one stuck with everything: the shop, him”—she pointed—“yourself.”

  Then something at the window, perhaps the lamp-lit clouds, caught her attention. Her eyes retreated and her hair fell around her face. Since she burst into the flat, she had been in constant motion; now, at last, she took the chair he offered. “One thing I’ve always envied you,” she said, “is that you don’t seem to know what it’s like to want two contrary things at once. Maybe that’s the positive side of your condition. I love your father. Of course I don’t want to leave him. At the same time, I’m desperate for something new. We’ve been married for nearly thirty years. I’ve been working in the shop for nearly a quarter of a century. I can finish his sentences four times out of five.”

  He barely heard her enumerations. Surely Gwen understood that wanting things that pulled him in opposite directions was at the heart of his condition. Not only did he not know his parents—witness his mistake in talking to his father—but they, after twenty-nine years, were equally ignorant about him. Which confirmed his belief that knowing another person could not be measured in normal solar time. After less than twenty-four hours he knew Verona better than anyone.

 
; Now that Gwen had taken a seat it seemed safe for him to leave his. Without asking again, he measured water and oats into a saucepan. Soon the porridge was bubbling with comforting fierceness. He laid the table, warmed milk, set out honey and sugar, and ladled the porridge into two blue china bowls that he had bought years ago on a day trip to Oxford. He ate in quick, greedy spoonfuls, the first food he’d had, he now realized, since lunch the day before. Gwen did the same. When her bowl was empty she sat back in her seat. “That was just what I needed,” she said. “Look at me.”

  He raised his eyes across the expanse of her pullover, up the tendons of her neck, over her firm chin, her lips, slightly chapped with traces of lipstick still lingering in the corners, her nostrils, shiny and pink as if she had a cold and then—the last inch took an extreme effort—her dark eyelashes still clotted with mascara, the whites of her eyes, her blue irises, and her pupils in which he glimpsed his tiny self.

  “I wonder if I can ever forgive you,” she said, sounding as if she were commenting on his choice of shirt or asking if he wanted more tea.

  She stood up and pulled on her jacket. “If your father asks questions, wants to know persons and positions, whatever you do don’t tell him anything. And if he asks what made you think I was seeing someone, be as vague as possible. You can be vague, can’t you?” She tugged at the lowest button on her jacket. It was already loose, dangling by an inch of thread. He had noticed that before, how people slammed a loose cupboard door, poked at a hole in their shoe, making sure that what was already fragile fell apart. Under normal circumstances he would have offered to sew the button back on; he liked the feel of a needle slithering through cloth. “You could say a joke someone made at the shop. All right? Even if he threatens to break your neck, I don’t want you interfering in my affairs again. Whatever happens next is up to me and”—the button came off in her hand—“Maurice.”

  He sat there in front of his empty porridge bowl, moving his head up and down in a way that was meant to signal yes, yes, yes. Anything to get her out of his flat. The pressure in the room was once again becoming unbearable. When he had heard how divers, working at low depths, sometimes got the bends, he had understood at once that there was a landlocked equivalent; his mother’s presence in a room could cause the same hallucinatory ache in every joint. Perhaps Gwen sensed this, even relished it, for she remained standing with one hand on the doorframe. And then—he was still nodding—she was gone.

  He hit the first nail so hard that the hammer left a saucer-shaped dent in the molding. The second, the same. A fortnight ago, even last week, he would have removed the wood, cut a fresh strip, and started over. Making his work as good as possible was one of the cornerstones of his life. Now he looked at the two small hollows surrounding the nails, evaluated the position of the molding—in an alcove destined to house the fridge—and realized that what Emmanuel had been telling him for years was true. No one besides himself would notice. As he drove home the rest of the nails, the thought came to him that he had, unwittingly, accomplished his father’s curse; he had made himself an orphan. But how to apologize when all he had done was tell the truth? The very word—or-phan—seemed to embody his alternative status.

  He was still murmuring orphan when the chef, on his way to work, stopped to ask if something was wrong. Yes, said Zeke, and laid aside the plastic wood to describe the recent tumult. His mother hadn’t said anything about talking to other people. The chef leaned in the doorway, flexing his eyebrows in the way that made his hairline ripple. When Zeke finished, he volunteered that his parents had separated when he was sixteen. “It’s one of the major regrets of my life that I didn’t try to stop them. All they really needed was to go to the Loire and eat good food. So I take my hat off to you”—he touched his forehead—“for trying to help. If your mother was dead set on divorce, she’d be gone by now.” He announced that he’d left a panini for Zeke in the fridge and let himself out.

  So I’m not the only one who reads the problem pages, Zeke thought. Still, he felt comforted. It was true if Gwen wanted to bolt, he had given her the perfect opportunity. That must mean something. But as he fitted the next strip of molding, what came into his head was the question Gwen had asked so stridently, the chef more subtly: was he taking into account the welfare of both parents? I’m happy, his mother had shouted, as if that word could outweigh any amount of pain. Was it possible, Zeke wondered, that her feelings for Maurice resembled his for Verona? No, he corrected himself, not in any respect whatsoever.

  He was rinsing the polyurethane off his brush, swishing it back and forth in the turpentine, when his mobile rang. For several seconds after he flipped open the lid, he heard only the fizzing of electrical space.

  “Hello, Zeke. It’s me, Verona.”

  She had never known that he had not known her name.

  Lacking a table to climb beneath, a chair to hide behind, he slid to the floor, pressing each vertebra in turn against the door of the cupboard. Speak, he told himself. Push air out of your lungs, up your windpipe, across your larynx into this piece of plastic. Speak.

  “Verona. Verona MacIntyre.

  “I’m sorry I had to leave so suddenly,” she said. “I was worried about my brother. There were things I needed to sort out, and I couldn’t involve you.”

  “Why not? Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” The pause this time was hers, not the airwaves. “I’m fine, but everything with Henry is a mess. I’m in America, in Boston.”

  “America?” He held the phone at arm’s length as if the machine itself had made this far-fetched claim. She said something he didn’t catch and he quickly brought it back to his ear. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How can you be in America?”

  “I came because Henry is here. It’s too complicated to explain on the phone. I miss you.”

  Later he couldn’t recall whether, in the thrill of hearing her say this, he had managed to articulate his own missing. “Is there anything I can do. Can I help?”

  “You could come here, to Boston. I know,” she added, “it’s a lot to ask.”

  “But I can’t fly.”

  “Actually it’s quite easy these days to get last-minute tickets. Emmanuel could help you, I’m sure he’s good at that kind of thing. Please, will you come?”

  He started to explain again about his inability to fly, but even as he shaped the words he had a vision of climbing the stairs at the Barrows’ only to discover her gone. By his refusal to stay the night he had jeopardized everything; now he had a second chance. If he turned away who knew if he would have a third. “Yes,” he said.

  “I—” she said, but what verb she meant to utter he never discovered. The silence expanded and expanded until it was clear that she was gone.

  He finished the dishes. He carried his tools and equipment out to the van. He piled the remaining skirting boards neatly on one side of the kitchen and wrote the chef a note containing the phrase family emergency and giving him Emmanuel’s number. Only when he was in the van, driving toward home, did he grasp the magnitude of his promise. He was going to get into a plane and stay there for however many hours it took to cross the huge body of water that presently lay between him and Verona. For five seconds, perhaps six, he was tempted to turn around, drive back to the chef’s house, pick up his hammer, and resume work.

  Then, as he braked at a zebra crossing for a boy on a skateboard, his apprehensions vanished. She phoned, he thought, she cares for me. During the days of waiting and searching, he had never allowed himself to doubt her affections. Still, that was not the same as knowing that his image was still firmly lodged behind her high forehead.

  Everything fell into place. Verona had already called Emmanuel, and after the requisite amount of joking he bought Zeke a ticket for the following day and agreed to take over at the chef’s house. Zeke packed a small green suitcase, the same one he had taken to Naples, with two of everything plus extra socks and underwear. Emmanuel said it might be cold, so he added a scarf, gl
oves, and a hat. He went to the bank machine and took out as much money as it would permit. How many fried-egg sandwiches would three hundred pounds buy in America? A lot, said Emmanuel, and you can use your credit cards there.

  Then, with all his preparations made, he faced an obstacle nearly as vast as the ocean: telling his parents. A large number of well-organized forceful brain cells massed in the main hallway of his brain, urging him to say nothing, to just go. But a persistent contingent lurking in the kitchen, occupying the stairs, argued that this was the coward’s way out, that his parents would never forgive him, and moreover that such duplicity would taint his relationship with Verona. How could he be worthy of her if he wasn’t pure of heart?

  His father answered the phone, sounding like his old robust self. “Zeke, how are you? How’s the kitchen going? I was watching the weather. We’re in for rain.”

  “Dad, I’m going to America tomorrow.”

  “America? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You know, America, the country across the Atlantic. I’m going there tomorrow on a plane. I have a ticket. I’m sorry to let you down about the shop.”

  “Let me get your mother.” And then they were both on the phone—which even at the best of times he found trying—united in their rage.

  “I have to go,” he kept saying. “Verona needs me.”

  “Verona? Who the hell’s Verona?” said Gwen.

  “After all this shilly-shallying,” said his father, “you finally agree to help at the shop, like Moses coming down from the bloody mountain, and now you announce you’re buggering off to America and we can sink or—”

  Silently, Zeke replaced the receiver. He did not attempt to sleep that night. Instead, he sat at his kitchen table taking apart his eight-day clock, laying out the springs and coils in careful sequence and putting them back together.