Banishing Verona Read online

  At the table, Emmanuel sat back down and, with a fussy little gesture, adjusted his trousers. Why, Zeke wondered, was his friend suddenly dressed like a fashion plate? Only two black hairs beneath his nose testified to his former scruffy self. Throughout their acquaintance, Emmanuel had always seemed to take for granted his own innate and infinite attractiveness. Once on a hot summer’s day as they drove to a job, Zeke had remarked on a rank odor filling the van—maybe a cat had got into the back and peed?—only to realize when they reached the house and the smell followed them indoors that it emanated from his employee. Both his mother and Phil used to ask, with some frequency, why he kept on Emmanuel. Better the devil you know, Zeke would say, shifting his shoulders up and down in the way he’d seen people do when they wanted to emphasize their helplessness. How could he explain that, within a few weeks of hiring him, he had discovered Emmanuel to be selfish, pettily dishonest, inclined to ferret out the worst in people, boastful, clumsy, and lazy? On the credit side, he showed no sign of noticing that Zeke was different. He never made allowances or offered those little sidestepping evasions by which other people signaled their awareness, but persisted in inviting him to the pub, swearing, lying, telling jokes, all just as if he were dealing with a normal person. In response, Zeke did his level best not to force him to acknowledge his mistake.

  Now Emmanuel raised the beer bottle, drank, wiped his mouth, and at last allowed himself to be questioned.

  “Your friend?” said Zeke.

  “Verona,” said Emmanuel. “The big girl.”

  His hands started to describe a curve and stopped. Later, recalling his tone, Zeke guessed that Emmanuel found her intimidating and was anxious that no one, least of all himself, should be aware of this. But that was hindsight. At the moment everything else was swept away by the huge, wonderful fact: Emmanuel knew her. She was a person with a name, Verona, and a history. She had not simply vanished, with her suitcases, into the endless streets.

  “Where is she?” he said. “Have you seen her?”

  He had made a mistake. Emmanuel, taking another drink, demanded to know what had happened. On learning that Zeke had let her stay at the Barrows’, he gave a whoop.

  “I don’t understand,” said Zeke. “Why pretend to be their niece when she was your friend?”

  Emmanuel sprawled back in his seat, laddishly. “I told her what a Goody Two-shoes you are. You’d never have let a pal of mine stay at the Barrows’.”

  “But didn’t she realize they’d go berserk when I asked about her? Even if she didn’t want to tell me, she could have left a note.” Now that her story was beginning to make sense, he could allow himself to be irritated. His interview with Gerald and Ariel had been severely unpleasant.

  “Maybe,” said Emmanuel, with a bland stare, “that wasn’t her main concern.”

  Her name was Verona and he had met her in Thailand. Remember, when he went last year? Zeke did indeed. Emmanuel had taken off three whole weeks during the busy spring period. The flight is eleven hours, he had said. I can’t just pop over for a fortnight. Zeke had nearly gone mad trying to keep up with work until Phil had agreed to help out. Other painters, Zeke knew, didn’t mind falling weeks behind schedule—some even seemed to relish their customers’ escalating fury—but he couldn’t bear the pleas and insults rampaging around in his brain. Emmanuel had returned heavily tanned and even more careless than usual. Twice he’d used the wrong paint. Zeke had wondered if he might be suffering from sunstroke or drugs. Wasn’t Thailand one of those places where a joint cost no more than a bar of chocolate?

  “I was gobsmacked when she got in touch,” said Emmanuel. “To be honest, I didn’t think I’d made much of an impression. Mostly she palled around with a couple of dykes.” He shook his head in a way that alerted Zeke simultaneously to the meaning of the word and to Emmanuel’s attitude toward such a wasteful proclivity. “Then it turned out she needed a place to stay. I should have phoned you but I wanted her off my back, and you know how it is—you feel less of a prick when you make a suggestion—so I sent her to the Barrows’.”

  In the midst of his amazement, Zeke completely understood this part. People were always getting themselves out of sticky situations by offering his services. No, I’m afraid I can’t help you move house/fix your toilet/paint your living room, but my mate Zeke is ever so handy and has all the time in the world.

  “I’m sorry about the last couple of weeks,” Emmanuel said, tapping the beer bottle on the table—short, short, long, short, short, long—as if sending a message. “My back really was killing me, but it’s on the mend. The physiotherapist says I should be able to start work again next week.”

  “I still don’t understand. Why send Verona to the Barrows’?” The pleasure of saying her name almost lifted him out of his seat.

  Emmanuel’s mouth turned down, like an open umbrella. “It was all a weird rush. One minute I was watching the telly and the next she was standing in my hall with two suitcases, saying she needed a place to stay. Gina was due in half an hour and you know what she’s like.” The umbrella flipped over; Zeke had no trouble identifying his smile as smug. “So I said the first thing that came into my head. It never occurred to me that she’d wangle a bed at the Barrows’. Crazy,” he concluded.

  Not crazy, thought Zeke. Mysterious. And what is the point of mystery if not to lead us into new places? “She’s going to have a baby,” he said.

  “I noticed. She didn’t strike me as the type, but you never can tell.”

  “Does she have a job? Where does she live?”

  “You know what holidays are like,” said Emmanuel, which of course Zeke didn’t. Life was hard enough at home, where at least he knew roughly the number of dustbins in the street, without venturing to a place where they might not even have bins or streets. “A group of us came out on the same flight and we hung around together. There was a couple—Trevor and Sara—and the rest of us mixed and matched.” He raised his beer bottle and drank.

  What does this have to do with anything, thought Zeke, but experience had taught him that Emmanuel often grew sullen if interrupted. He did his best to listen patiently to an account of how one day Trevor had got into trouble in the water. Everyone else thought he was joking, but Verona had swum over and hauled him out. “When they got to the beach, we all ran up to see if Trev was okay. He coughed and spluttered for a couple of minutes. His face was that ghastly green we painted the Padillos’ living room. Then he walked off toward his hut without a word. That was the last we saw of him. Next morning the manager told us that he and Sara had left to look at temples.”

  What was Emmanuel telling him, that Verona was courageous and observant? That Trevor was the father of Ms. F? “And?” Zeke said, keeping firm hold of the table.

  “And,” said Emmanuel, “that’s how I became friends with her. The chick I had a crush on left for Tokyo. Trev and Sara headed for the hills. The dykes went home. Verona started to hang out with me.”

  “You?” As soon as the syllable left his mouth, he heard how it sounded. Quickly, he asked the question that Emmanuel regarded as his due whenever a woman aged between sixteen and sixty came up in conversation: did she fancy him?

  “Who can say? We went on a couple of expeditions, ruins she wanted to see.”

  How many hours, how many days of her company lay behind that sentence? “Do you know where she lives?” he asked again. “Does she have a job?”

  “I think her parents are dead. She has a brother who’s some sort of businessman. That’s all I know.”

  “Does she have a job?”

  “What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? There was a kind of rule that we didn’t pester each other about life back home. Still, with most people you found out what they did pretty quickly. Not Verona. One day she was talking about being a cleaner, the next she was chatting about market research. After she rescued Trevor, someone told me she worked in radio, not famous but well enough known not to want to spread it around.”

  Z
eke nodded. This made sense. If he closed his eyes he could hear her distinctive voice, deep and warm and a little hoarse, as if even late in the day you were the first person she’d spoken to and what she most wanted to do was invite you to a splendid party. “Why did she suddenly need a place to stay?”

  “Boyfriend trouble? Landlord trouble? I’m not exactly Mr. Sensitivity, but the way she showed up out of the blue, why wasn’t really in order. Didn’t you ask?”

  For a moment Zeke was taken aback. Had he really failed to pose such an obvious question? Then he remembered. “I thought she was the Barrows’ niece,” he said, and described her advent on the doorstep with the suitcases.

  Emmanuel bobbed his head. “She said you were cool.”

  The five words took up residence a few inches above the table. Zeke stared at them. “You’ve spoken to her.”

  He didn’t realize he was standing until Emmanuel rose too and put a hand on his arm. “Hey, take it easy. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. She phoned.”

  The light above the table was swinging—one of them must have knocked it—and Emmanuel’s face was going in and out of shadow as if he were two different people. “She phoned,” Zeke repeated. “When?”

  For a few seconds he understood why one might want to pry open the plates of another person’s skull, not to harm them but to retrieve essential information. Emmanuel sat down, making the same fussy gesture with his trousers, and began to tap his empty beer bottle again, though no longer rhythmically. “A few days ago,” he said. “She said you’d been very kind and she was worried you would worry about her.”

  “Where is she? How I can reach her?”

  “She was calling from a pay phone. We kept having to shout over the announcements, like in a station or an airport. She said to tell you she’d be in touch. I gave her your phone number—home, not mobile. Sounds like you two got something going.”

  One of Emmanuel’s eyelids drooped in a way that Zeke recognized as both comment and invitation. Trying to fend off either, he asked the first question that came to mind. “Why are you looking so posh?”

  Instead of telling him to get lost, Emmanuel shifted from side to side in his chair. Gina, he mumbled, had won him a makeover. He had spent a whole day getting his hair cut and learning how to coordinate his wardrobe. “A Saturday,” he added, as if Zeke might think this was why he hadn’t been at work.

  Zeke nodded, trying to imagine his obdurate employee spending a day choosing shirts and trousers; then he thought of the women involved and the scene made sense. “It was really interesting,” Emmanuel went on. “We leap to all these conclusions about people based on their appearance, without even knowing that we’re doing it. Take shoes, for instance. You can always tell a homeless person by their shoes, even if they’ve got everything else together. Expensive shoes are the same, they send a message: Here’s a person who won’t bounce a check.”

  Zeke pictured Verona’s shoes: the suede boots she wore when she arrived and the next day’s trainers, nice blue ones he’d warned her might easily get messed up.

  “You should try it,” Emmanuel was saying. “It doesn’t cost that much. Gina says you’re okay looking.”

  Very slowly and very clearly, Zeke said, “Do you know her last name? Do you know how to find her?”

  Emmanuel faltered, stopped, peered at Zeke, and sat back in his chair. “You’ve got a crush on her,” he announced. “Who’d have thought it? After all the chicks I try to set you up with, you fall for a woman ten years older who’s in some sort of major trouble.”

  Zeke stood up and took a step toward him.

  “MacIntyre. And no, the phone number she gave me is wrong.”

  She had a name, two names, she was not just a ghost of the system. Forgetting about Emmanuel he gave a little jump, and at that very moment his clocks began to strike, all nine of them, almost in unison.

  “Well,” said Emmanuel, pushing back his chair, “ask not for whom the bell tolls.”

  “You can’t just leave. What do you mean by trouble? Why is everything so confusing?”

  “Christ if I know,” said Emmanuel. “I came round to give you the message and let you know I’ll be back at work soon. Verona isn’t my problem. Yours either.”

  As Emmanuel’s footsteps receded down the stairs, Zeke looked around his familiar kitchen and saw that his possessions had heard the news. The stove gleamed, the fridge purred, the cupboards kept their orderly secrets, the saucepans shone, even the grout between the tiles was lustrous.

  “Verona MacIntyre,” he said. He could not imagine six more perfect syllables.

  Verona

  7

  Until that Monday afternoon, a damp, drab day in early February remarkable only for fulfilling all expectations of the season, Verona would have claimed herself to be among those few, those happy few, who see themselves clearly. It was a point of obscure and prickly pride that she, unlike her hapless parents, both dead now for several years, or her ne’er-do-well brother, alive and well in Kentish Town, did not harbor illusions, flattering or otherwise, about her own person or nature. She knew she was tall, ambitious, hot-tempered, stubborn, eloquent, an excellent cook, attractive to a fairly small number of men, and, as she’d been slower to realize, a significant number of women. If pressed, she would also have said that she believed herself perfectly capable of following in the footsteps of her grandfather, who had fought in the First World War, of pointing a gun at the enemy, and pulling the trigger. She had ridden a motorcycle at university, tried parachuting and rock climbing, and had twice consumed drugs rashly purchased in public places; she was not afraid of arguments, or dogs, or fast cars, or bad water, or foreign travel.

  She had come home that Monday after a production meeting of exasperating length and inconclusiveness, carrying two bags: one containing milk, bread, and muesli, the other orange juice, apples, beetroot, and bananas. Later she was to think of her banter with Lionel at the corner shop—so you’re going to call the baby after me? Leonie if it’s a girl, promise—as the last exchange of her old life. At the house, she had to juggle the bags in order to fit her keys in the locks: first the outside door; then, upstairs, her own door. When she stepped inside, she switched on the hall light, an ugly fifties fixture that cast a nice rosy glow over the pale walls, and, without stopping to take off her coat, headed to the kitchen. Only after she had set the bags on the counter did she turn on that light. And only then, as the light spilled through the kitchen door into the living room, did she see, seated on the calico-covered sofa she had purchased last autumn after the results of the amniocentesis, two men watching her. For a fraction of a second, such was their dress and demeanor, she was convinced she knew them: that she had asked over some friends from work, lent them a set of keys, and somehow forgotten the whole arrangement.

  “Miss MacIntyre,” said the man nearer the kitchen, the paler, plumper one, rising to his feet, “don’t be upset. My name is Nigel, and this is George. We’re friends of Henry’s and we just need a word with you. Here, take a seat.” He turned on the standard lamp and motioned for her to sit in the wicker armchair, before returning to the sofa.

  She could have run for the door, she could have screamed, but she did neither. She did exactly what he asked. Her fear was still tinged with confusion and indignation. Besides, the man had invoked her brother. But as she sat down, the wicker creaked beneath her weight and the small sound brought home what was happening: two strange men had broken into her flat and she was alone with them. Was this a burglary? A kidnapping? A rape? The men seemed so calm, so respectable, more like policemen than thieves.

  The other man, the one who’d remained seated, took over. “You must be wondering why we’re here,” he said. “Your brother is one of our clients. Or perhaps I should say was. He gives every sign of wanting to quit the relationship.” His voice had a hint of a West Country accent and his lips moved in a slightly exaggerated way, as if he had grown up in the company of deaf people. Now that she was looking
at him, Verona could see that he was older than she’d first thought. In his forties, perhaps. “We were meant to meet last Thursday,” he went on. “Henry didn’t show up, and since Saturday we’ve found neither hide nor hair of him. Which, you’ll agree, is a little odd for a man who has a pager, two cell phones, an answering machine, and a secretary.” Even in the midst of her terror, Verona was briefly comforted by his mild sarcasm. “So,” he concluded, “we were hoping you might know his whereabouts.”

  “Isn’t he at home?” Seldom had she struggled harder to produce an audible sentence.

  “He hasn’t been there in forty-eight hours. And”—the man grimaced—“he phoned his office to say he had the flu. He told a couple of friends he’d gone to Paris. Apparently he didn’t phone you.”

  Involuntarily Verona glanced toward her answering machine.

  “We checked,” he said.

  The plumper, younger man weighed in again. “He’s only making things worse by trying to avoid us. If you speak to him, tell him that. Right now, no harm done. Pay us what he owes and we’ll forget the whole shenanigans.” He flung his arms wide, indicating the extent of the shenanigans and forcing his companion to lean back into the sofa. The pinky on his left hand, Verona saw, stuck out at an odd angle. “But pretty soon it will be too late. No way he’ll get away with this unless he’s prepared to live in a frigging cave”—his arms flew again—“in frigging Patagonia.”

  He stood up, came over, and held something out toward her. Automatically her hand rose to accept the small cardboard rectangle: a business card.

  “What Nigel’s trying to tell you,” said the older man, shifting to a more comfortable position now that he had the sofa to himself, “is that as Henry’s sister it’s in both your and his best interests to get a message to him. Are you all right?” he added.