Banishing Verona Page 4

  Or whoever the hospital had sent home in his place. There were always stories in the newspapers about babies being switched; why not fathers? He had last seen Don in late December, when they had gone to a performance of Iolanthe. He had been dressed to the nines in the shirt Gwen had given him for Christmas and the new suit he had bought himself in the Boxing Day sales. Give me a nudge, he had told Zeke, if I start singing along. He had joined his first Gilbert and Sullivan Society at the age of sixteen and been a robust member ever since. Now, a man with hair the color of dishwater, wearing pale blue pajamas and a tartan dressing-gown, sat in his father’s chair, staring blankly in the direction of the television. Beside the chair stood an odd metal contraption, like half a cage.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  Even the voice was different. Zeke glanced uncertainly over his shoulder. Was it possible that somehow he had come into the wrong house? But there was his father’s piano with the bust of Beethoven. While he continued to hesitate in the doorway, the man levered himself out of the chair, seized the metal contraption, and began to push his slippered feet across the floor. Six inches, six inches, six inches. Just past the sofa he stalled, clinging to the frame.

  “So, you’ve come to see your future,” the man said. “The doctors couldn’t find one thing to tell me to do differently: exercise—yes; low salt—yes; low fat—yes; smoking—no; drinking—moderate; reasons to live—plenty. Not one thing, except take the pills, take the pills.”

  He shuffled backward, plucked a bottle from among the phalanx on the table, and rattled it in Zeke’s direction. And with that gesture Zeke finally, unmistakably, recognized his father.

  “Dad, I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. Mum—” He was about to explain that he hadn’t known about the attack when he caught sight of a bandage bisecting his father’s neck. Rusty spots, blood perhaps, were seeping through the folds. This was worse, much worse than he’d imagined. “How are you?” he said lamely.

  “Weren’t you listening? I feel like shit warmed over. I feel like Lazarus before Christ hauled him out of his coffin. I’ve worked all my life, winter, summer, rain, shine, a fortnight’s holiday a year, I looked after my mum and dad, I’ve never been in debt, owed no man favors, and here I am, at fifty-two, a wreck.”

  Fifty-seven, Zeke wanted to say.

  “And”—his father glared—“here you’ll be one day.”

  He sensed his own heart pumping in steady contradiction, the valves deftly opening and closing. “You’re bound to feel rotten at the moment. You’ll soon be back on your feet.”

  “For fucking what? For how fucking long?”

  The words followed Zeke through the door. In the hall he rested his forehead against the wall, seeking comfort in the cool pressure of the plaster. I wish you were dead, he thought, swinging his fists against the wall. What’s the use of not being dead if you’re going to be like this? Then, between one fist fall and the next, he understood that, yet again, he had things back to front. Life had failed his father in several significant respects—his struggling shop, his pathetic son, his unreliable health—but that did not mean he was ready to die. In fact, the reverse. Christ, if he ever found out about Maurice.

  He straightened and let himself out of the house. All day, while he wasn’t reminiscing about his father, he had wrestled with the question of an appropriate gift. When he had had his breakdown, people had brought flowers and grapes, grapes and flowers. The flowers, for the most part, he didn’t mind. The grapes, however a fruit he’d always enjoyed filching in the shop, he had come to hate, rotting little spheres of sweetness, their slippery seeds poised to take root in stomach and intestine. Neither had seemed suitable for his father. Books, except for ones about Italy, he despised; he already had all of Gilbert and Sullivan. Zeke was still agonizing as, leaving the chef’s house, he spotted a pet shop with a parking space in front. Now, opening the back of the van, he thought, I hope this isn’t another of my blunders. He lifted out the cage from where he’d wedged it, between two buckets of emulsion paint, and hurried toward the house. Drafts, the salesman at Fur, Fin and Feathers had said, were, along with cats, the big danger.

  “Dad, I brought you this, for company.”

  His father was back in his chair. Without looking at Zeke, he shook a little cup and dropped two dice on the table. He picked them up, shook them again, dropped them again. Zeke set the cage on the floor. For a moment, as he reached to remove the towel, he pictured the parrot magically flown, but there it was, its plumage a mix of mango and avocado, a red blaze on each wing, blinking on its perch. In the shop it had seemed the ideal gift, clean, companiable, possibly conversational: what could be better? My health, his father’s posture declared. Your obedience.

  “Good boy,” said Zeke. Best not even to consider this from the parrot’s point of view. Happily, however, the bird seemed oblivious to its chilly reception; it hopped from foot to foot and clicked its remarkable beak. The clicking, at last, roused his father.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A parrot.” He began to explain the advantages, including that he could return it at any time during the next three days.

  “Not enough,” his father interrupted, “that you’re sure to outlive me. You got me the one pet that will too. Twenty years from now”—he spat the words faster and faster—“you and Gwen will be having your tea and the parrot will start yammering, and one of you will look up from your baked beans and say doesn’t it remind you of someone? And the other will say, maybe that old geezer—Ron, John, used to be your husband, used to be your father.”

  “You don’t have to keep it.”

  The parrot unfurled a long purple tongue and flicked up a sunflower seed. Zeke lifted a pile of newspapers off a small table and set the cage there. Then he backed out of the room again, muttering that he was going to give a hand at the shop.

  His father made some unintelligible sound.

  In Tibetan temples, the niece had told him, they placed gargoyles at the entrances to scare worshippers out of their mundane concerns. He closed the door of the house and, hoping that the chilly air would do the same for him, opened his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and set off down the street. Where had she gone in such haste that she could leave only a one-line note? Tomorrow the Barrows would give him the answer.

  His mother, hair shining, face pale beneath the fluorescent lights, was tipping potatoes into a canvas bag held by a skinny androgynous figure dressed in flared jeans and a duffel coat.

  “Carrots, onions, parsnips?” Gwen asked. “Lovely cabbage?”

  As soon as she spoke, he guessed the shopper’s gender, a hypothesis that was confirmed when the figure said, “Just a bit of salad. A cucumber. Lettuce,” and, from beneath long dark lashes, shot him a sideways glance. Did he know her from somewhere? He turned determinedly to study the beetroot.

  “Well?” said Gwen, as soon as the wraithlike girl had paid and left the shop.

  “You didn’t tell me he was in such a state. He called me a coward, said I’d been running away all my life. If he ever finds out—”

  “It’ll kill him?” she suggested, with what he called an anti-laugh, a sound that approximated normal laughter while signaling its opposite. “I do have that in mind. But it’s odd that you should. If Don had to choose between a faithful wife and a son to take over the business, I bet a pint of blood—”

  Saved by a woman with a French accent asking if she was too late for a pound of mushrooms. At once Gwen was urging aubergines, offering half price on the peppers. He had witnessed this phenomenon before, on thousands of occasions; still, he couldn’t understand how a person could be grimly belligerent one minute, praising vegetables the next. Feelings don’t stay constant, his nurse had said. Mine do, he had insisted, constant as cathedrals. He began to carry in the crates of apples and oranges from the sidewalk, a job he had done so often that his body needed no instructions. Now, with every crate, he felt the weight of a possible future. It was one thing to he
lp out for a few days or a few weeks, another to see himself here year in, year out. Two more late customers appeared, one asking for okra, and then Gwen had the till emptied and the deposit organized, and he had everything stowed for the night and the grill down.

  As they walked home, she resorted to another of her old tricks, talking not about what concerned them both most closely, his father or the shop, but Zeke’s recalcitrant customers.

  “Any kids?” she said.

  “None that I noticed.”

  “Burglar alarms? Weight-lifting equipment?”

  “Why are you asking this stuff?” he said. “You’re not going to make a scene, are you?”

  “A scene may occur,” his mother said, opening their front door, “but I won’t be making it.” In her presence the new rubbery smell of the house was less noticeable. His father’s voice could be heard from the living room. “Oh, God,” she said, “now he’s off with the fairies.”

  “No, I forgot to tell you. I did something daft.” He explained about the bird.

  To his surprise, she was nodding. “You say we’ve got three days, so let’s wait and see. Don can’t say thanks for anything these days. A parrot may be just the ticket.”

  Priscilla, the nervous divorcee next door, was asked to keep an ear out for Don and they were off. Sitting beside Gwen in her car as she darted through the local streets, Zeke realized that she was not merely unafraid of the Pattersons but looking forward to this encounter. She had changed into a tight red top and put on fresh makeup. How can I be her child, he thought, knowing that she often asked the same question.

  “Here we go.” She tucked the car into a space as deftly as a pie into the oven. “Leave the talking to me, and whatever you do don’t apologize.”

  He began to propose alternatives: a letter, the small claims court, those rabbis in the East End who solved people’s quarrels using the Talmud.

  “Shush. Stand out of sight, and when they open the door follow me inside.”

  Feeling worse by the second, he lurked in the shadow of the wall. Gwen knocked once, then stood waiting, shoulders straight, heels together, the model of a demure library campaigner. “Mrs. Patterson?” she said, when the door opened. “I phoned about the library. If I could come in, just for a moment, to explain our petition.”

  The affirmative noises were still sounding, when, with a quick glance in Zeke’s direction, she stepped smartly over the threshold. He followed. In the dreary hallway he resisted the temptation to crouch behind her. The light oozing from the overhead bulb was the color of weak tea, and everything but Gwen seemed diminished. Certainly the woman backing down the hall offered no particular threat. With her white hair and plump cheeks, she reminded Zeke of a sheep in a children’s story.

  The smell of paint was gone, and briefly he wondered if the whole thing were a dream. Perhaps, after giving them an estimate, he had never actually done the work. Then he saw the barometer in its wooden case, hanging on the wall beside the coat stand, and remembered tapping it, day after day, as he came and went, waiting for its pronouncements: dry, fair, unsettled, rain, stormy.

  “Let me start again,” Gwen said. She was holding out a piece of paper, not the promised petition but a copy of Zeke’s bill. “Is there some problem with my son’s work?”

  Mrs. Patterson’s cheeks filled with color as if someone had pumped dye into them. “What are you doing?” she said in a small voice. “You can’t just barge in.”

  “You can’t just not pay your bills. Is there a problem? Something in the estimate Zeke failed to do?”

  “William, William.”

  “What is it, dear? I’m busy.”

  Zeke had forgotten how much he hated that plummy schoolmaster’s baritone. The rest of William, when he appeared at the top of the stairs, pen in hand, was equally obnoxious. Several of Zeke’s lecturers at university had perfected this air of self-importance; whenever he dared to appear at their office hours, one glance had been enough to make him swallow his questions and scurry away. Halfway down the stairs, William’s pace slowed. His gaze had fallen on Gwen.

  “Mr. Patterson? I’m Zeke’s mother. As you know, my son spent a week painting two of your bedrooms, including replacing one of the ceilings. The agreed work was done at the agreed time, but for some reason ever since you’ve been unable to find your checkbook.”

  She had noticed, Zeke saw at once, the direction of Mr. Patterson’s eyeballs. Her chest in its low-cut red top rose visibly, and she delivered her speech with cutting firmness. Bad boy, naughty boy.

  “Delighted to meet you.” Mr. Patterson came forward with outstretched hand. “Ethel”—she could have been an entire form of fifth-year boys—“I’ll take care of this.”

  Ethel, not so sheeplike after all, held her ground. Her feet, clad in rather smart slippers, dug almost visibly into the wooden floor. Something to be learned here, Zeke noted. You may not have the gumption to rush into combat, but you can still prevent the other person from sweeping to victory. Her obstinacy was rewarded by a brief scowl from Mr. Patterson before he set to work on Gwen.

  “I’m so sorry you’ve had this aggravation. We’ve had trouble in the past, tradesmen billing us twice. I’m afraid I thought your son was on the fiddle. It was only when I looked at our bank statement the other day that I realized he’d failed to cash the check.”

  On the couple of occasions when Emmanuel had tried to collect unpaid bills, he’d gone in guns blazing; if that didn’t work, nowhere to go but down. In contrast Zeke admired his mother’s deployment of steely politeness and veiled threats and her acceptance of face-saving surrender. Within a matter of minutes she was graciously agreeing to take a check and allowing Mr. Patterson to stand quite close while he wrote it.

  “So sorry,” he said, “for any inconvenience.”

  Driving home, she was exuberant. “Sometimes I think if I had my life over again, I’d be a bailiff. I love that moment when people realize you’re not going to disappear, that it’s their money or their kneecaps. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” he said. Although he didn’t share her enthusiasm, not a speck of it, he could see that Gwen had felt as if her skin fit perfectly while she chided the Pattersons. Which was just how he had felt with the Barrows’ niece.

  4

  “Such an improvement,” said Mrs. Barrow, Ariel. Arms outspread, she jerked around in a circle like a mechanical ballerina before climbing onto the sofa, where her feet, Zeke could not help noticing, dangled childishly several inches above the floor. He’d read a book once about an emperor in Africa who had a servant whose only job was to place the appropriate pillow beneath his feet whenever he sat down. “I’m glad you suggested white for the moldings,” she added.

  “And you were right about the lining paper,” said Gerald. “You wouldn’t even know it was there.”

  The room, with its bright rugs and immaculate walls, was almost unrecognizable. So too were its owners. Not just his usual failure, though. The Barrows really did look different, cheeks plumper, hair glossier, as if ten days of Latvian cuisine—smoked fish? dumplings?—had rejuvenated them. Gerald had even attempted a mustache, a flimsy fringe on his upper lip that surely had not been present a fortnight ago.

  “We’ll certainly get in touch the next time we need work done,” he said.

  As he spoke, Gerald edged forward in his seat—a sign, Zeke knew, that it was time for him, well paid, well praised, to depart. He shifted forward in his own seat. “About your niece,” he said, and heard his voice sag unconvincingly. “I borrowed a book of hers. I was wondering, can you give me her address to send it back?”

  He had worked hard on the phrasing, searching for the tone that, in this matter of utmost urgency, would convey humdrum duty. Now on the faces of the Barrows, he watched his words produce an identical expression, one he couldn’t begin to categorize.

  “We don’t have a niece,” Gerald said. “Neither of us.”

  “Perhaps you misunderstood one of our neighbo
rs,” said Ariel.

  Really, thought Zeke, do I seem the kind of moron who doesn’t know a neighbor from a niece? “Maybe,” he persisted, inching even closer to the edge of his seat, “she’s not exactly a niece. A friend, the daughter of friends, someone you think of as a niece?”

  In their presence he could see that she did not, remotely, resemble either of them. Certainly not Ariel, with her oddly pointed nose and chin and those leaf-colored eyes so deep-set that she seemed to be peering out at the world. As for Gerald, his features were so regular as to look almost artificial; only his awkwardly angled ears were authentic. What must Zeke say to jog their memories? For the billionth time he wished he could retrieve her first words on the doorstep, when surely she had said her name, but those had flown—indeed, never landed.

  “Neither of us has a niece,” Gerald repeated. “No one calls us aunt or uncle.”

  Zeke had worried they might try to fob him off, insist on returning the book themselves, go all prim and say we don’t give the address of our beloved niece to strange men. That they would deny her very existence was bewildering. “She said you were expecting her,” he said, relishing, in spite of his distress, the secret meanings of the word.

  “Expecting?” queried Ariel, heels drumming against the sofa.

  Suddenly Gerald was no longer on the edge of his seat but looming over Zeke. “Are you saying”—the mustache wriggled—“that you let this person into our house?”

  Later Zeke would remember his first reaction: not dismay, not chagrin, but a shout of admiration. All along he had known there was something off about her, something not quite legitimate. A black sheep, he had assumed. An unmarried mother. That she was not the Barrows’ niece, not even a friend or acquaintance, was fantastic.