Banishing Verona Read online

He had persuaded Emmanuel to accompany him to Heathrow by offering his hourly rate and agreeing to take the fast train from Paddington. They met at the station. Emmanuel bought tickets and marched them onto the train. As soon as he stepped into the compartment, Zeke was filled with dread. It was so sleek and clean and filled with TVs. He sat facing rigidly forward, doing his best to follow the summary of the news. The key to surviving the hours ahead lay, he knew, in paying attention to other people’s dramas and ignoring his own. They got off the train and took the lift to the terminal. An overwhelming number of people were carrying suitcases back and forth. Alone Zeke would have come to a standstill but Emmanuel led them briskly to the correct queue.

  “Listen,” he said, “this is how you answer the security questions. Yes, you packed your bags yourself and they’ve been with you at all times. Yes, you’ve had all electrical appliances for more than a year. No, no one has given you anything to take on the plane.”

  The woman behind the desk did indeed ask these questions and accepted his answers as appropriate. He put his suitcase on a scale which in flashing red numbers registered seventeen kilograms and then the case was gone, trundling away on a conveyor belt to who knows where.

  “Aisle or window?” the woman asked.

  “Aisle,” said Emmanuel. “So you can get up if you need to.”

  The woman handed back his passport and a piece of flimsy cardboard and Emmanuel was leading him up a flight of stairs, past rows of predictable shops, and over to a sign marked DEPARTURES, where more long queues snaked back and forth. “I can’t go any farther,” said Emmanuel. He explained the security procedures. “Once you’re through you need to look at the monitors to see what gate your plane leaves from.”

  “Gate?”

  “Like the platform for a train. The number of your flight is on your boarding pass and you match that with the number of the gate. Follow the signs—sometimes the gate is ten or fifteen minutes’ walk away—and the airline people will tell you what to do next. You’ll be fine, mate. Give my love to Ms. MacIntyre.” And he was gone, absorbed into the crowd, a free man fleeing the galley slaves.

  Zeke stood clutching his newspaper and the bottle of water Emmanuel had made him buy, staring at the silvery hair of the man in front. Beneath his black jacket the man wore a flowing white robe. Several middle-aged women stood in front of him, all wearing robes with jackets over them. Collectively they emitted a comforting smell, like cedar. One robe, two robes, three robes … He survived the next thirty-five minutes by counting whatever there was to be counted. When at last he reached the metal detector, a woman, almost as small as Ariel, ushered him through in total silence.

  Sitting at the gate, gazing out of the window, he realized he had never seen a plane up close before. In the sky they often seemed no larger than birds; now he saw how big they really were. Even the wheels were taller than the humans who scurried back and forth on the tarmac. And the wing, the one he could see, was nearly thirty feet long. How was it possible that this huge piece of metal could remain airborne, let alone transport him and so many other people? He was still looking around for someone who might be able to answer this question when, in response to a loudspeaker announcement, everyone was on their feet, streaming toward the door, and he was too. It was like nothing so much as being swallowed by a whale. He passed down through the gullet. The metal door stood open before him. He stopped abruptly.

  It still wasn’t too late to turn around, to take a boat, to find some alternative.

  But Verona needed him, needed him now, and a boat would take too long and cost too much. Behind him someone was already saying excuse me and behind that person waited a hundred others, all willing him forward. He moved one foot, then the other. In his seat, 22B, Zeke bowed his head. There was nothing left to count, and he tried not to think about what would happen next. A woman in uniform bent over him and fastened two strips of fabric around his lap. A few minutes later the door closed, and a few minutes after that the plane began to move, first slowly and lumberingly, soon with increasing speed and noise until—Zeke clutched his armrests—they were suddenly, unmistakably, no longer keeping company with the earth.

  Verona

  14

  She had, she thought, borne up pretty well so far, but in the back of yet another fusty minicab, the seat sagging painfully beneath her, the air smelling of something perturbingly sweet which at once suggested something much less sweet, the driver listening to abrasive music as they jolted through the still dark streets, Verona began to cry. How had it happened that one day she was living comfortably in her modest flat, doing her job, seeing her friends, enjoying the last weeks of her old childless life and the next she was racing around the city, a fugitive, with all her immediate possessions in two suitcases, unable to go to work, unable to return to her flat, unable to see Zeke? This has to stop, she thought. I haven’t cried since I was twenty-four. Henry is not worth this.

  The cab braked, swerved, and leaped forward, all for reasons invisible to Verona but sufficient to jolt her out of her tears. She blew her nose and tried to think what to do next. Instead she pictured Zeke, sitting opposite her the night before, watching her across the card table. She had never felt so fully apprehended by another person. She tried to remind herself that he knew nothing about her. He didn’t know that she hated strawberries, he didn’t know what she did for a living, or about Henry, or that she seldom crossed the Thames without reciting the opening lines of Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge.” The list was endless, and yet she viewed the many entries with pleasure rather than dismay, things that might or might not be divulged and which meanwhile, in no way, contradicted her conviction that Zeke already knew everything that mattered.

  They passed the Holloway prison, the trees in front so severely pruned as to appear mutilated. For some reason, her normal defenses refused to organize themselves around this man. What if he had other attachments, other commitments, a wife, children even? Her last serious lover, a businessman she had met while doing a program on Canary Wharf, had turned out to have both, and neither were so easily dispensed with as he had at first intimated. After a few months of mutual pleasure—her odd working hours, early rising, early bed, had suited Jeffrey perfectly—they had entered into that distressing dance of supplication and denial, wishful thinking and hypocrisy. One day, walking across Hyde Park to the Victoria and Albert Museum, Verona had suggested that perhaps she should break the news to his wife. Even as Jeffrey’s mouth opened—was this a joke? a threat?—she had registered the shocking nature of her proposal. Why is it, she’d wondered aloud, that almost everyone would forgive her for having an affair, and him for lying about it, but almost no one would forgive her for telling his wife?

  Maybe you could do a program, Jeffrey had said. Get the Archbishop of Canterbury to comment on the idiosyncrasies of modern morality. He fingered the little blue spot on his throat, a relic of the chemotherapy he had had years ago when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. I know it doesn’t seem like it, he said, but I think about this all the time, trying to figure out what to do.

  An expression of such boyish anguish had passed over his face that she had relented and spent the remainder of the walk describing the film she had seen the previous evening. In the special photography collection, Jeffrey had filled out request forms for several of his favorite photographs. Each arrived in its own separate box. Gently he lifted off the lids to reveal a series of muted sepia landscapes: a lake with swans, a group of Edwardian picnickers, a vineyard beneath distant hills. Beautiful, he said, his face glowing. Don’t you think so?

  Verona didn’t, exactly, but she allowed herself to be carried along. Enthusiasm for both art and life was part of Jeffrey’s great charm. They talked about the exotic places they wanted to visit—Delphi at dawn, the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Giverny, the Etruscan tombs at Orvieto—and avoided talking about the many ordinary activities they failed to share: spending the night together, having dinner with friends, atte
nding his son’s school play, buying a pound of apples, having a baby. He doesn’t love his wife, Verona would repeat to herself; he doesn’t sleep with his wife, his children are almost grown, his friends don’t get on with his wife, he does love me, he does sleep with me, his friends would like me. The answer to her calculations seemed utterly straightforward. What was there to figure out? But of course it wasn’t that kind of sum.

  She lived for a year on daily phone calls, fleeting visits, a trip to Budapest, and a wonderful weekend at St. Ives before she tipped over a table in a restaurant—he had been talking about his wife’s dog—and walked out to a satisfying hush. Three weeks later she had rewarded herself with a holiday in Thailand, which was she thought at least partly responsible for her present situation.

  For a few seconds she conjured up the endless blue horizon. Then all possibility of blueness was obliterated by the reality that lay outside the windows of the cab: the sky stalled at a sullen gray, somewhere between pewter and silver, the interminable rows of grim houses. The cab, which had raced along the narrow streets, was now, on the motorway, revealed to have a top speed of forty. When occasionally, going downhill, it reached forty-one, the entire vehicle vibrated as if every nut and bolt were about to shake loose. “Please,” she called to the driver above the music, “be careful.”

  “What?” Lowering the volume, he turned, disconcertingly, to look at her.

  She repeated her request and, smiling, he assured her that all was well, he was an excellent driver and fully in command of this excellent vehicle, but he did slow down, or at least the vibrations lessened. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the prickly seat. Why was she thinking of Jeffrey now when a month could pass without his entering her brain? The answer was immediately available. The temptation for her in the garden of love was not knowledge of good and evil, but doubt.

  A few weeks ago she had gone to the pub with some people from the radio station and ended up talking to the senior engineer, a darkly rabbinical young man named Gary. He had tried, as people did now that her pregnancy was advanced, to find out about the father; she had retaliated by asking why he wasn’t married. Gary set down his pint, neatly fitting it into the previous circle left by the glass. Because, he said, my best friend met the love of his life at his own wedding. She came as the guest of his uncle, and as soon as James laid eyes on her—he was walking down the aisle—he knew she was the one.

  How can you think that about a person you’ve never met, Verona had said. That’s ridiculous.

  Inconvenient, certainly. James said I do, six years later he got a divorce, a year after that he married his uncle’s guest. So that’s why I don’t get married. The idea of being completely wrong about my own deepest emotions strikes terror in my heart. He raised his glass. Not to put too fine a point on it.

  Jeffrey, she had wanted to shout, her own example of the condition Gary dreaded. For months she had believed him to be her Platonic other half, yet sitting in that raucous pub she could find no trace of the emotion that had made her want to walk hand in hand with him across the desert to the pyramids. What if her psyche was playing the same trick with Zeke, acting out of some ancient song of need? As the cab wobbled along, she entertained the traditional fears. She didn’t really care for him; she had been misled by his good looks and by his apparent interest in her. He didn’t really care for her; he had been curious about what it was like to sleep with someone seven months pregnant.

  A thunderous noise made her eyes spring open. Her first thought was that the car was finally disintegrating. Then through the grimy window she saw, passing overhead like a giant bird, briefly blotting out the sky, its wings and belly flashing with lights, an airplane. I must have faith, she thought.

  “Where are you going?” the driver asked, pulling into the hotel car park. “Somewhere with a bit of sunshine, I hope.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said flatly. “Your car shakes a lot.”

  “My car,” he said, abandoning his earlier self-promotion, “is a piece of crap. I’m hoping to buy a new one at Easter. Until then we’re riding on a prayer and the coat hanger that my dad used to fix the exhaust.”

  He parked between two buses, each spewing dark clouds. Verona maneuvered herself out of the backseat, handed him twenty-five pounds and, suitcases in tow, made her way over to the hotel. Even at this early hour, the lobby was so crowded that for a moment she simply stood there, baffled. It was as if she had never been to a hotel before, had forgotten the purpose and the procedures. “Excuse me, ma’am,” said a voice, and she found herself surrounded by a family of Americans: three dark-haired boys and both parents, the mother bovine, the father gaunt, all wearing plaid shirts and jeans.

  Oh, bugger off, she thought, glaring at the five of them, but they had reminded her of what to do next. She joined the queue at the front desk. In the taxi she had imagined herself eating one of those substantial hotel breakfasts. Now as she edged forward, following a man in a camel coat, nothing seemed more delicious than the prospect of climbing into a warm clean bed and giving herself back to sleep.

  She held out a credit card, and the woman behind the desk took it without raising her eyes. “Good morning, Miss MacIntyre. Did you have a good flight?”

  “I didn’t … . Yes, thank you. Do you have a room for me?”

  The woman was already processing her card and assuring her that she had the perfect room, on the fifth floor, nice and quiet. “One night?” she asked.

  “One night. What about the planes?”

  “The planes?” Finally the woman raised her eyes to examine this odd customer.

  “Is the noise bothersome?”

  “You hear them, of course, but there are so many of them and we have such thick windows. It’s more of a dull background roar, like the sea.” She slid the key across the counter. “Some of our visitors say they find it relaxing.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Verona, picturing a beach lapped, absurdly, by runways. This might make a good program, she thought, this peculiar hotel, everyone coming and going. She fell in behind the stocky young man who had been summoned to carry her luggage; he barely came up to her chin.

  “So,” said Toby, “where was I faxing you? And what’s with the fax, anyway?”

  “I was staying with a friend.” She moved away from the door to draw the curtains. “Not exactly with him. At a house he’s painting.” Oh, there was no way to explain this. “As for the faxes, I read somewhere that they’re harder to intercept than phone calls.”

  Outside while she slept nothing had changed. Earth and air still seemed to be composed of the same dirty-gray fabric. Turning back to the room, she found Toby seated on the bed, taking off his shoes. He had always been dexterous, the person one asked to fasten a necklace or open a bottle of wine. Now as he fumbled with his laces, she saw what his elegant clothes, a purple cashmere pullover and black trousers, had initially concealed, how pale he was and haggard.

  “What’s happening?” she asked. “Why are we here? This room is insanely expensive, not to mention inconvenient.”

  “Unless”—he nodded toward the window—“you’re flying.”

  “Am I flying?” She felt her voice grow small and cold. Already she was twenty-five miles from Zeke, as far as she could walk in a day; now Toby was suggesting that she go still farther.

  “I know it’s only noon,” he said, at last discarding his shoes, “but I’m starving. Can we get some lunch?”

  She asked again what was happening and, when he insisted on eating first, gave in and rang room service. While she ordered, he checked his messages. The mundane task seemed to calm him. His boss, he announced, had approved the catalog for their next show. She too felt revived by the brisk assumption of the man who answered the phone that two chicken sandwiches were a perfectly reasonable request.

  Still seated on the bed, Toby gave a delicate yawn; his teeth, either by nature or artifice, were perfect. “On the way here, I was thinking that these l
ast few days remind me of when my father was ill and all I did was go to the hospital. I feel as if I’ll never have a normal life again.”

  “That was awful.” She had accompanied him one afternoon to the intensive care unit and watched in horror as his father moaned and thrashed among the machines and Toby tried in vain to quiet him.

  While they waited for the sandwiches, he brought her up-to-date on his mother, a surprisingly merry widow, and her latest escapade. A knock came at the door and a stout red-haired man stepped in. Looking neither to right nor left—indeed, somehow managing not even to look straight ahead—he crossed the small room and set the tray on the table by the window. Verona signed the bill. He bowed and departed.

  “So,” she said, pulling out a chair and seizing a sandwich, “tell me why we’re here.”

  Toby, who had picked up his own sandwich, set it down again. “The men came to see me. The same as with you. They were sitting in the dark when I got home. I didn’t even realize they were there.” He looked at her, making sure she understood, and she nodded. “They wanted to know where you were. They’re convinced you’ve gone to join Henry. I kept saying that was impossible, that neither of us knew where he was. As you can imagine, they weren’t very happy about all this ignorance, but it was obvious that if I had known anything I would have told them.” He grimaced. “So much for courage and loyalty.”

  “It was the same for me,” she said. “I’d always fancied myself as someone who would heroically resist torture, never betray her comrades. The instant I saw Nigel and George—they didn’t even lay a finger on me—I was beyond all that. This is good,” she added, indicating her sandwich.

  At last he began to eat. “So, we’re a couple of lily-livered scum. I did ask what Henry had done. They just repeated what they told you: he’s run out on a debt.”

  “That sounds like Henry.” She ate an olive, almost tasteless. “Although surprisingly stupid. After five minutes with Nigel and George, you know they’d never let you get away with anything. I still don’t understand why we’re eating sandwiches in this absurd hotel.”