Banishing Verona Read online

  “I changed his will.”

  I am going to open my mouth, thought Verona, and let out a scream so loud that the roof will fly off this restaurant and the walls will fall to the ground and everyone sitting here will be deaf for as long as they live.

  17

  The hollow-cheeked man was still standing outside the café as she stormed by. She did not need to turn around to know that Henry was trailing behind her in halfhearted pursuit. During their childhood she had often run off with the luxury of knowing he would come after her. He was her loyal follower, and she in return had protected him against all comers. She had believed herself to be the sole exception to his bad behavior. Now a little red car fueled by fury and lost illusions hurtled round and round her brain. Heedless of shops and pedestrians, she strode up a broad one-way street. A man tried to waylay her with a petition but she brushed him aside. A girl with a pram darted out of her way. Then, on the far side of the street, she saw a woman in an orange ski jacket stepping out of an archway in the wall around Harvard University. Verona plunged in among the traffic.

  Automatically, as she did when entering the tunnels of London or Paris, she took a deep breath, but it was immediately clear that this tunnel was no refuge for the inebriated and homeless. The brightly lit space was lined with posters for a mime festival, several films, a lesbian night out, the classics club. “This is Harvard’s main campus,” Henry said behind her. “Oddly, it’s called Harvard Yard, as if it were some kind of high-class farm.”

  They were walking alongside a tall brick building. At the front a massive flight of shallow stone steps led up to a façade of pillars and a pediment engraved with the words HARRY ELKINS WIDENER MEMORIAL LIBRARY. In spite of herself, Verona paused and Henry took the opportunity to explain that Harry Widener had been a passenger on the Titanic. He had had a seat on a lifeboat but had run back to his cabin to fetch his book—according to rumor a volume of Bacon’s essays—and ended up going down with the ship. His mother had given the library to the university with certain conditions, including, until recently, that every student pass a swimming test. “As if,” Henry said, “swimming would have saved Harry among the icebergs.”

  Too angry to speak, Verona continued walking; he fell in beside her. The snow was falling faster now, and the snowflakes had grown in size. She could feel the damp seeping into her flimsy boots and down the collar of her coat. Around them young people with backpacks hurried back and forth, and an occasional adult with a briefcase. They passed a brick building with the names of famous philosophers around the top, then a modern building, and a bronze statue of a man and a woman seated side by side, their laps filled with snow.

  “By my namesake,” said Henry.

  If she went back to the hotel now, she could go standby on the evening flight; she could be with Zeke tomorrow morning.

  “We’re very near the Fogg Museum,” said Henry. “Why don’t we take shelter there? William James, the philosopher, lived on this street. He’s the one who wrote about scapegoats.”

  Trying to hold her coat closed against the wind, she caught fragments of Henry’s musings. Not for the first time, she was struck by how his obliviousness was an armor more powerful than all her self-awareness. “It’s still the right decision in certain situations.” He waved a hand at the snow. “Shoving Oates out of the tent. Not that it did any good.”

  “Didn’t Oates leave of his own accord?” she couldn’t help saying as she followed him up the steps of a handsome stone building.

  He held open the door. “That’s just the rubbish they tell schoolchildren to make them share their lunches. Who would go out in weather thirty times worse than this voluntarily?”

  Inside it was warm, dry, windless. She hung up her coat, and shook her head to get rid of the snow. Henry joked with the woman behind the counter about how intrepid they felt. “What would you recommend we see?” he asked.

  “It’s a small collection. You should have no trouble seeing everything, but if you’re pushed for time I recommend the Pre-Raphaelites on the balcony. Though of course”—she gave a little smile—“they come from your part of the world.”

  “Which means,” Henry said, smiling back, “that we’ve never seen them.”

  He was about to say more when he caught Verona’s glare and seemed to recall that they were in the midst of an argument. Ignoring the proffered admission button, she stepped forward into what, she couldn’t help noticing, was a beautiful two-story courtyard surrounded by arches. But the large open space only made the red car faster, louder. She had a vision of herself and Henry shouting at the top of their lungs, terrifying the other visitors. She doubled back to the stairs and, without stopping to look at the statues and paintings, ascended to the balcony.

  She circled twice, three times, trying to rein in her fury, before she came to a halt in front of one of the Pre-Raphaelites. A woman stood in front of a window that was mostly obscured by hair so abundant that Verona’s neck ached. She had worn her hair long through her teens and early twenties until her friend Marian had persuaded her to get it cut. Your hair is a liability, she had argued. It’s too gorgeous for the rest of you. Not a problem for this woman, whose green eyes gravely regarded something to which the viewer was not privy.

  “What a poseur,” Henry said, joining her.

  She couldn’t bear to look at him. “I know we’ve had hundreds of rows,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “but I always thought we were on the same side when it came to everyone else.” Briefly, the red car slowed and she realized it was easier to be furious than to acknowledge what fury concealed.

  “We are,” he said affably. “The odd thing about this picture is that she seems to be simultaneously indoors and outdoors. Look at the sky behind her. Don’t you want to know how I did it? A few months after my visit to Jigger, I was over at my friend Blake’s house and he showed me this copy of the Magna Carta he’d made for his dad. He went on and on about how he’d made the paper from old rags and practiced the handwriting because you never got the same effect with tracing.”

  At the time Henry had been bored rigid but later, walking home, he had had a Eureka moment. “It was one of those misty autumn evenings, and I suddenly thought if Blake could copy the Magna Carta, he could copy Jigger’s will. I remember I was opposite the corner shop and I burst out laughing. People must have thought I was drunk. It wasn’t even the idea. It was the sense of knowing what I was good at.”

  “So you stole Jigger’s will,” she said slowly, “and you and Blake rewrote it.”

  The sound of footsteps made them both turn. A couple were approaching, the woman wearing a cream-colored pullover, a long brown skirt, and high-heeled boots, the man in a beautiful charcoal suit. They were talking in French, the woman moving her hands, the man smiling. Occasionally one or the other would glance at a picture.

  “She’s saying,” said Henry, “that he’s a superb lover and that he has the most beautiful member she’s ever seen. He seems to be agreeing. She’d probably go into more detail if they were in France and she thought other people could understand.”

  He began to walk in the opposite direction from the couple; Verona trailed alongside. Far from sounding penitent, Henry sounded increasingly jubilant as he explained what he and Blake had done. They had only changed one page so they didn’t have to forge the signatures. The tricky part was getting hold of the will. It wasn’t as if Jigger went to work every day. The other part that had required planning was who the money should go to. He couldn’t just replace Verona’s name with his. He did some research and used his savings to set up a private company.

  “I can’t tell you how odd it was, waiting to see if it would work. I went off to university facing two very different futures: one in which I’d have a head start and another in which I’d have to scramble.” He paused in front of a Canaletto, the Piazza San Marco, so exquisitely detailed, even down to a small dog, that it could have been a photograph.

  “Scramble like me and every
one else. How much did Jigger leave to the private company?”

  “A hundred and thirty thousand. Not a fortune, but enough to get me started on the property ladder. Then I just kept going.”

  “And”—she could scarcely get the words out—“what about me?”

  He turned to her, smiling his most brilliant smile. “You were fine. I always knew you would be because, unlike me, you have a real talent. But if there’d ever come a time when you needed something—if you’d fallen ill or lost your job—I’d have helped. I regarded myself”—he put a hand on his chest—“as obligated.”

  It’s like the snowflakes, she thought. He doesn’t know down from up, wrong from right. “Henry, you stole a hundred and thirty thousand pounds from me.”

  “Ages ago. Given the statute of limitations, you can’t prosecute.” He was still speaking in an affable, slightly bemused way. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “But you’re not sorry you did it, are you? You’d do it again, given half a chance. Mr. Sayers was right about you. You were born without a conscience.”

  “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t say that.”

  In the first room off the balcony, he stopped before a landscape: a village street in winter. A few feet away Verona stared at a painting of a train standing in a sunlit high-ceilinged station, surrounded by hydrangea-like clouds of steam. Glancing at the label, she saw to her amazement that it was the station in Paris where Jigger had gone with his friend Charles. Suddenly she grasped the other part of what Henry had told her: Jigger had chosen her as his heir. No one else approved of her, but he did. Another thing that she was robbed of. The red car was at a standstill; Henry had tipped sugar into the fuel tank, disconnected the battery. Whatever his more recent crimes, surely nothing could be worse than this youthful betrayal.

  From the next room came a voice: “Tu es fantastique.” Unthinkingly, Verona stepped back to let the French couple pass and fell in behind them. She could make her feet move as long as she watched theirs. She was back out on the balcony again, once more passing the woman at the window, the Piazza San Marco. Where were the stairs? Over there, by the pillar. She was at the top of the stairs and then she was heading down, past the ground floor and on, down, to the door marked LADIES. In the wooden cubicle, she bent over the toilet until every morsel she had eaten that day lay in the white china bowl.

  She remained in the bathroom, leaning against the wall, until someone knocked at the door; she opened it to discover that Henry had enlisted the woman from the counter. Beneath her solicitous gaze, Verona felt obligated to go through the motions of recovery. She washed her face and hands in the large marble basin and rinsed her mouth with the lukewarm water. “Are you sick?” the woman kept asking. Behind the counter she had radiated respectability; now she was revealed to be wearing torn black clothes and combat boots. “Do you need a doctor?”

  Obviously I was sick, thought Verona, then remembered that Americans used the word to mean ill. “No, I just had a shock, several shocks, and they upset my stomach.”

  “Oh, I’m the same.” The woman patted her studded black leather belt. “I used to think I’d grow out of it but I’m not sure one does grow out of things at thirty-four. Is there anything I can get you? If only”—her eyes darted around the empty room—“we had some ginger ale. Here, why don’t you sit down?”

  Verona sank into a small metal chair. The relief of being told what to do was profound. The woman was still talking, something about a car, did they have one, was it parked nearby? When Verona said they didn’t, she hurried out of the room.

  Alone, Verona rested her head on the edge of the basin and surrendered to misery and self-disgust. Why had she ever thought Henry treated her differently? “Traitor,” she whispered. In childhood it had been a terrible insult. As an adult, she had seldom used the word, except in a sexual context.

  From somewhere in the building came a faint steady beeping. Last spring she had interviewed a woman who, as a teenager, had stopped speaking for two years. Wasn’t it awfully frustrating, Verona had said, not being able to ask for what you wanted? No, the woman had said. That was easy. Besides, I did ask: I wrote notes. I pointed. It felt so safe not putting things into words. No one lied to me. And I got so much thinking done. I really came to understand why silence is often part of religious practice.

  She did have a nunlike face, long and pale. So why did you stop talking in the first place? Verona asked. Why did you start again?

  I don’t think I can explain why I stopped. There wasn’t some shock. I didn’t even make a decision. One morning when my mother asked me a question I didn’t answer, and I didn’t answer the next one either. As for why I started again, I missed it. Not speech so much but all that goes with it, even the bad parts.

  And have you ever wanted to stop talking again?

  Oh—the woman smiled wistfully—all the time.

  Now, shifting her cheek against the cool porcelain of the basin, Verona thought, I should take a vow of silence. No talk, no lies. And soon she would have company. She was picturing herself and the baby pointing and nodding and frowning together when the woman from the counter knocked at the door again.

  “Henry’s got a taxi. Can you manage the stairs?”

  Henry, thought Verona. Since when did they get so matey? She could imagine exactly her brother’s flirtatious manner as he drew this innocent bystander into their affairs. She pushed herself out of the chair and headed for the door. The woman followed, urging her not to rush. Upstairs he was holding her coat. She pulled it on. “Take care,” said the woman, wedging open the door with one of her boots. “Drink some ginger ale or Coke.”

  For a few seconds, as the snow swirled around her, Verona forgot everything. She could have been setting out, across glaciers and crevasses, for a base camp twenty miles away. She let the wind grab her coat and started down the snowy steps. At the bottom a taxi waited, windscreen wipers swishing, engine throbbing. She climbed inside.

  “Well,” said Henry, when he’d given the driver the name of their hotel, “are you going to keep giving me the cold shoulder, to use a seasonal metaphor?”

  She gazed out of the window. At the traffic light a man with a large fluffy dog was waiting to cross the street. The dog had its dark nose lifted into the snow. While Henry continued his barrage, she formulated her resolution. She would talk for the common courtesies: food in restaurants, requests, and directions. But no conversation. No questions or accusations. No arguments or half-truths.

  At the hotel she struggled out of the taxi and, without waiting for Henry, tramped through the snow toward the doors. A few weeks ago, even a few days ago, she would have bet good money that he would try to wheedle his way back into her good graces. But this morning she had been forced to understand that, in certain major respects, she did not know her brother. She had touched his fontanel, she had accompanied his first steps, applauded his first words. She had, even now, spent more time in his company than with any other human. Yet he had lied to her at the deepest level and she had had not the slightest inkling.

  Upstairs in her room, she double-locked the door and added the chain. Pausing only to remove her outdoor clothes, she climbed into bed. Was there any chance, she wondered, that Henry had been lying about Jigger? The idea of two teenage boys altering a will was preposterous. But it made sense of the way he had always been ahead of his peers, had a better car, a bigger flat, nicer clothes. It wasn’t even—why was this so hard to accept?—that he didn’t care for her. Her needs, her well-being, as she’d tried to explain to Toby, were simply not a consideration. So much for his fear of losing her.

  Staring up at the grainy ceiling, she remembered how hard she and Zeke had worked to smooth the walls at the Barrows’. Soon, she thought, the two of them would be together in a room filled with golden light. She still didn’t know how Henry had cheated Nigel and George or what had happened in Seattle, but she no longer cared. In the morning she would write him a note and catch the next pl
ane home. Nigel and George weren’t about to make unnecessary trouble for her. And if they did, there would be no more nonsense about protecting Henry. She would go straight to the police. She pictured him reading her note, crumpling it into his pocket, and going on to charm the next waitress or museum custodian, for no better reason than a cat kills birds or a hedgehog eats eggs.

  18

  An hour later she was in the bath, scooping up handfuls of bubbles and smoothing them over her belly, when she heard a faint scratching sound. She stopped to listen. The small room was full of noises—the popping of the rapidly cooling bubbles, the rush of water in the pipes in the walls, the whir of the heating—but no scratching, and at last, after half a dozen attempts, Henry had stopped phoning. She returned to the foam. If you’re a boy, she thought, I’ll call you Edmund, after Jigger. If you’re a girl, Marian. But perhaps Zeke would have opinions about names. The idea was so delightful, so presumptuous, that at once, superstitiously, she had to pretend it hadn’t occurred. The noise this time was different, the unmistakable sound of metal on metal. Someone was doing something to the door of her room. For a moment she felt herself sliding toward blackness. Nigel and George: they were forcing the door. She heaved herself out of the bath, sending a tidal wave over the rim, and seized the hotel bathrobe. She was rushing toward the phone, still tying the belt of the robe, when the door swung open. Mid-scream, she heard Henry.

  “Thank you. Verona, it’s me. Are you all right? I’ve been so worried. You didn’t answer the phone. I thought something had happened to you. Or the baby.”

  His voice was perfect, warm, anxious, concerned; his expression the opposite. Behind him stood an all-male chorus: the porter whom she often passed in the lobby, the young man with spiky hair from the front desk who had greeted her on the first day, and two men in coveralls, one holding a toolbox, the other a pair of pliers. Each was staring at her with an expression of mingled relief and disappointment.