Banishing Verona Read online

  “Neither.” In the hope of asking about her, he offered himself. “My father was a greengrocer in Brighton. He got up at four every day except Sunday to go to market. Then he worked until seven at night, keeping the shop stocked, dealing with customers.”

  “Brighton is nice. Did you live near the sea?”

  “If I stood on my bed on tiptoe, there was a little triangle of water.” He had done this precisely once, dismayed at what his maneuver had revealed. Now he climbed down the ladder, moved it four feet, climbed back up, and started on the next stretch of cornice.

  “I used to think,” she said, “life would make sense if I could see the sea every day.”

  “Not for me.” He brushed away a cobweb. “A street makes sense, a house makes sense, but the sea just goes on and on: wave, wave, wave. I couldn’t wait to get away. We moved when I was ten.” In London, Highbury, his parents had a new shop, bigger and busier. “I used to help in the evenings, on Saturdays, stocking the bins, fetching and carrying. Then one day one of our regulars, Mrs. Oma, said when you’re the boss and suddenly I realized what my father was preparing me for. I started to pay attention in school, do my homework. It drove him mad. ‘Do you want to be a dreamer all your life,’ he used to say, ‘head stuck in a book?’”

  “Careful,” she said.

  Beneath his savage gestures the ladder swayed like a sapling.

  Over fresh sandpaper he admitted he had studied accounting at university. “I wanted to do anthropology—I’d read this book about the rain-forest tribes of Papua, New Guinea—but I didn’t have the nerve. I needed to know I was heading toward a job.” She didn’t ask the obvious question, and, as he finished the upper half of the wall, this enabled him to venture into that territory he’d imagined while making tea the previous afternoon. “The day after my final exams I couldn’t leave the house. The people I shared with had all gone away, and I’d been looking forward to having the place to myself. But as soon as I stepped outside I worried that I’d left the gas on or the iron or the lights or I hadn’t locked the door or I hadn’t locked the window or I hadn’t flushed the toilet or my mother was trying to phone. It didn’t matter how often I checked, it didn’t matter if I wrote down that I’d checked, I’d reach the street and have to go back. Remember in Gulliver’s Travels when the Lilliputians tie him down? It was like that. Hundreds of strands of anxiety tugging at me. Soon it was easier not to try to get away.”

  “That sounds horrid,” she said.

  He set the ladder aside and began to cut the lining paper. She was still listening, he could tell from the angle of her head, and to the accompaniment of the scissors’ muttering blades he finished his story. “When I got better I knew I couldn’t be an accountant. I like numbers, the way they can’t be two things at once, but I couldn’t cope with the people on the other end of them. One of our neighbors did odd jobs and I started helping him. Phil is different. Not like me,” he added hastily. A strip of paper released from the roll fell to the floor. “Words take longer to get from one part of his brain to another, like running in sand, but they always arrive. I felt okay with him and gradually—he wanted to be a piano tuner—I took over the business.”

  “Your dad must have gone nuts.”

  A hot, dry wind blew through the room. Zeke dropped the scissors. “Break,” he said.

  He started to ask her questions, the same ones she’d asked him, where she grew up, what her mum and dad did. After all these hours it was too late to ask her name. Other topics too, he sensed—her presence here, Ms. F’s father—would be unwelcome. She told him she’d grown up near York. Her father had managed a golf course and then bluffed his way into teaching at a private school. His only qualification was being able to talk the hind legs off a donkey. Her mother, after years as a bored housewife, had opened a junk shop. “She’d invent the most amazing histories for her goods: this was Marie Antoinette’s hot water bottle, this was Hitler’s fountain pen. I take after both of them.”

  “Do you mean that?” Zeke said.

  She looked up from the paper she was spreading with paste, her eyes narrowing as if to distinguish some distant landmark. “Yes and no. I grew up determined to be as different from them as possible, but since they died a few years ago sometimes I’ll catch myself tying my shoelaces in the same fussy way my mother did. Or overtipping in a restaurant just so no one will think I’m my father’s daughter.”

  “I’m sorry they’re dead,” he said.

  She dipped the brush in the paste and drew it steadily across the paper. “I studied English at university. That’s almost as useless as anthropology.”

  At lunchtime she opened a tin of tomato soup and he shared the ham sandwiches he’d brought. They worked on through the darkening afternoon. Oughtn’t she to take a rest, he wondered, but now that they were putting up the lining paper she seemed determined to finish. She shrugged off his suggestion that they wait until tomorrow. The streetlights came on, buzzy amber splodges; in the houses opposite, curtains were drawn. He bungled the last piece of paper, a tricky corner, then bungled it again. “If at first you don’t succeed,” she chanted from the foot of the ladder, “try, try, and try again. My English teacher used to say that all the time.”

  While he mounted the ladder once more she described Robert the Bruce, a rebel leader hiding in a cave on some Scottish mountain, drawing inspiration from the arachnid’s repeated efforts to anchor its web. Zeke smoothed the top of the paper into place and, slowly descending, pressed the seams together.

  Now what, he thought, glancing around the bare room. Dismissal?

  “Maybe you could make a fire,” she said, “while I see if there’s anything for supper?”

  “A fire?” For a moment he saw himself soaking the dust sheets with petrol, the flames leaping at the pile of furniture, but then she pointed at the fireplace, the grate messy with cinders. She left the room and he knelt to roll newspapers, add kindling, firelighters, and coal, tasks he hadn’t performed since leaving his drafty house at university. When he came into the kitchen, she was at the stove, stirring a saucepan. “Frozen lasagna,” she announced. “Tinned spinach, fresh carrots. There’s beer in the cupboard under the stairs.”

  “Thanks. I think I’ll have some juice.”

  “Don’t you drink?”

  “Not often. It makes me …” He hesitated between weird and stupid.

  Presumably he chose the latter, because she said, “Not so stupid you don’t know it.” She reached for a glass and he saw the golden-brown liquid topped with froth. Stop, he wanted to say. Ms. F doesn’t deserve to start life with a hangover. But before he could think of a polite way, or indeed any way, to voice his concern she was shouting, “Christ!”

  He watched, bewildered, as she grabbed the saucepan and began to bang it against the stove.

  And then he was in the hall. He had seen her full mouth stretched wide, her eyes glinting, not gestures that had appeared on his poster but, combined with the shouting, fairly unequivocal. In the living room he bent to tend the fire, fighting the desire to climb out of the window and never come back. The first flare of the firelighter had died down and the coals were glowing dully when he heard her footsteps. Fourteen steps carried her into his presence.

  “Sorry. I got a little carried away.”

  He could feel her standing behind him. Don’t touch me, he thought.

  Do.

  “I take my cooking seriously,” she said, “even when it is just tins. What makes you angry?”

  You drinking beer, Emmanuel being a wanker, my life. Using the tongs, he moved a knob of coal an inch to the right, an inch to the left.

  “If I promise to be quiet will you come back and keep me company?”

  She walked away, not waiting for an answer, and he thought of all the tiny motions, the vertebrae sliding against each other, the hip joints swiveling in their sockets, the tarsals and metatarsals flexing and straightening, that make up departure. Yet the most essential motion, the one that couldn�
��t be named or diagrammed, was what spilled a mood into a room. How he knew, with absolute certainty, that she wasn’t taking his answer for granted, in either direction, but leaving him alone to figure it out.

  Follow, said the fire, and he did.

  As he sat back down at the kitchen table, she was peering into the oven. “Is there a reason,” she said, directing her words to the lasagna, “for upstairs to be plunged in Stygian gloom?”

  He told her about the five lightbulbs of the day before.

  “Interesting.” She closed the oven door and turned to face him. “I’m usually all right with appliances, but I can’t wear a watch for more than a few days before it goes haywire. It’s happened four times now.”

  “Why?” he said, fascinated.

  She moved her shoulders up and down. “Who knows? The watchmaker I went to had some mad theory about personal electricity.”

  They ate off a card table in front of the fire in the freshly papered room. In the light of the candles the ladder cast a hangman’s shadow and the pile of furniture loomed. They talked about computers, and whether a person could ever really disappear, and if life was better in Papua, New Guinea. She told a story about her grandfather, who had fought in the First World War and come home to start a railway. As she finished, the phone began to ring in the kitchen and upstairs. They both sat silently until it stopped. At last she spoke about herself but almost, Zeke noticed, as if she were talking about another person. Well, that was something he understood. He often felt as if the events in his life, the things people claimed he’d said and done, were really part of a stranger’s story.

  “Once, years ago, I had a friend called Marian. She was the opposite of me: tiny, ferocious, funny, incredibly well-organized. We shared an office at my first real job, and four or five nights a week after work we’d go out for a drink. We couldn’t get enough of each other’s company.”

  But when she’d been promoted and Marian hadn’t their friendship had dwindled. “She would phone and write, but I was always too busy to get together. We’d meet every two or three months. Then one night she phoned around eleven. She said she had the flu. She kept talking about a cat she’d had as a child. ‘I’m worried about Pushkin,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m worried I forgot to feed him.’ I promised to come round first thing in the morning. When I got there at nine-thirty, the ambulance was already parked outside.”

  He watched her lips, her eyes, her cheeks, the muscles of her throat and forehead, and fewer and fewer of her words reached him. But when her story was done, the candles guttering, the fire dying, her face wore an expression he understood. He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “You did what you could. You don’t expect people to die of the flu, not young healthy people.” As he squeezed her palm against his own, her face changed, the light in her eyes leaping and fading. Had he been too bold? No, the candles were the culprits. Together they snuffed the flames.

  She led him up the stairs. “Help me,” she said, presenting the coveralls. Soon she was naked, ample and unabashed. Can this be happening, Zeke thought. Then she was pulling back the covers and he was lost.

  When he found himself again, minutes or hours later, basking in the warmth of her proximity, he began to talk about his clocks. “I buy them from jumble sales and junk shops and repair them. I have nine up and ticking, though two are still erratic.”

  “Do you know about the clock in Prague, in the Old Town Square?”

  “Tell me.”

  A famous clockmaker had made it for the king. When it was finished and everyone had agreed it was a masterpiece, the king ordered his soldiers to blind the clockmaker so that his clock could never be surpassed. For years the blind man lived on the king’s charity in a cottage below the castle. At last, on his deathbed, he asked to be carried into the presence of his masterpiece. He passed his hands over the mechanism, and the clock was silent for two hundred years.

  “You mean”—Zeke stared up into the darkness—“he did something to the springs?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But how could he bear to?”

  She kissed his shoulder. “Revenge,” she said. “How else can we rewrite the past?”

  He kissed her back. “I can’t answer that right now, but I will eventually.”

  As her breathing grew louder and slower, he felt his anxieties gathering. He tried to calm himself by counting the parts of their bodies that were touching, the parts he still had to touch. He counted her breaths, his own, the cars passing in the street outside until at last he realized the situation was hopeless. “I have to go home,” he said.

  “Must you?”

  No, he thought, not if you’ll talk to me all night long in that drowsy voice. “I’m sorry. It’s not you. I just can’t handle strange houses, strange beds.” He touched her cheek. “But I can learn.”

  The next morning Zeke knocked only once before setting aside the fried-egg sandwiches—he’d chosen brown bread in an effort to offset last night’s beer—and sliding the blade of his penknife under the catch of the side window. He left the bag of sandwiches on the kitchen table and climbed the stairs, hoping to find her still in bed, warm and sleepy, hoping to slip in beside her. And this time, he thought, however stupid, however embarrassing, he would ask her name.

  The bed was unmade, empty and cold to the touch, the suitcases gone. At the foot of the bed the rug was rolled up, and spread-eagled on the bare wooden boards lay the coveralls, neatly buttoned, arms and legs stretched wide, like an empty person. Only when he knelt to pick them up did Zeke discover the three-inch nails that skewered the collar, pinned the cuffs and ankles to the floor.

  2

  His first thought was that she had been taken by force, kidnapped, stolen, but when he returned downstairs he saw the keys lying on the kitchen table. In his distraction he had not noticed them as he set down the sandwiches, nor the sheet of paper with a single line written in pencil: Thursday, 7 A.M. Thanks for everything. I’ll be in touch soon. So then he had to consider the other dreadful possibility: he had driven her to flight. Somehow he had misunderstood when she led him upstairs. His attentions—such a cool word for the exquisite shock of flesh on flesh—had been unwelcome. If that were the case, though, why had she reached into her suitcase and, after some searching, produced a pack of condoms? Well, not his attentions but something in the aftermath, some inadvertent comment or gesture. He went over and over what he recalled of their exchanges as they lay side by side, touching at ankle, thigh, elbow, shoulder. Still nothing came to mind. She had kissed him when he got up to leave and said see you tomorrow. Perhaps there was a third alternative: an emergency had arisen not for her but demanding her immediate presence—a friend or family member in trouble—which had made her rush off without so much as a proper note. Even as he labored over the explanation, meticulously fitting the cogs and springs together, oiling the movement and tightening the tiny screws, the image of the coveralls, nailed to the floor, hovered on the edge of his vision.

  He could not have said how long he sat at the table before he had his first truly consoling thought. She was the Barrows’ niece. When they returned from Latvia, all would become clear. With this in mind he was able, at last, to open the paper bag and eat one of the sandwiches, now cold and limp. The other he kept, just in case. Soon, she had said.

  He didn’t turn on the radio, he didn’t go out for lunch, he left the bathroom door ajar and refrained from using power tools, but no one rang the doorbell and the only phone call, on either his answering machine at home or his mobile, came from his mother, who had already left several brief imperious messages. He worked until his usual time and left a note fastened to the stepladder: Thursday, 5 P.M. I’ll be back first thing tomorrow. After some hesitation he used both locks on the front door; he still had responsibilities to her aunt and uncle. He was loading the wallpaper steamer into his van when he heard a distinctive tapping sound. The fake blind boy was making his way along the sidewalk. Forgetting his fraud, Zeke star
ed openly.

  “Alms, give me alms for the love of God,” croaked the boy, stopping right beside the van and aiming his black sunglasses at Zeke. “How about a pound, man?”

  Zeke fished a coin from his pocket. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Who?” The boy rapped his cane twice, hard, on the sidewalk as if he were the one demanding answers. Beneath the jagged strands of brown hair, his right ear, Zeke noticed, was missing a V-shaped piece from the lobe.

  “The Barrows’ niece. She came to the house and helped me and now she’s gone.”

  “How the fuck,” said the blind boy, “would I know where anyone is? I don’t even know where I am myself.” He seized the pound and continued tapping down the street.

  Zeke could have finished the living room the day she left, he had already painted the woodwork, but he lingered hopefully through the following day, postponing his next job. The Barrows—as he retouched an awkward corner, applied an extra coat to the skirting boards—were the winners. At last, when all his tools were packed, the floors swept, the kitchen cleaned, he gave in and climbed the stairs one more time. He stopped first in the master bedroom and then in the study, delaying as long as possible the moment when he must confront her absence. If only he had stayed here, he would know why she had carried away her suitcases and Ms. F. The coveralls, he felt sure, were a message, but not in any language he could understand. Were they a promise or a threat? Was she saying: wait, I will return? Or help, I am in danger? He had removed them the day before when he couldn’t stand the sight of them any longer.

  Finally, he entered her room. He had not touched a thing, besides the coveralls, since he found her gone. Now he stood just inside the door, taking in the desolate space. Who could believe that furnishings and objects were inanimate when you saw how, ownerless, they lost their luster? And what of us, he thought, turning on the bedside light where she had reinstalled a bulb. Aren’t we too diminished when nothing reflects our spirits? That was how he felt about his clocks; their presence amplified his own. He looked at the chest of drawers, the wardrobe, the chairs, and, last of all, the unmade bed whose wrinkled sheets still held, barely, the shape of her. They miss her, he thought.