Banishing Verona Read online

  From her shopping bag she had produced a blue notebook. I’m writing stuff down, she said. So if anything happens the baby will know about me. She had held out the book until Verona realized that she was being invited to read it.

  This is a record by me, Cynthia Stenning, of my actions and feelings after I stopped pretending I wasn’t pregnant. Even though it’s what they call a mistake, I want to say that it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. If I was religious I’d say a big thank-you.

  Your father, Eddie, says …

  Before Verona could read further, the receptionist called her name. Your baby’s very lucky, she told the girl, and was rewarded with a shy smile. In the midwife’s cozy office, she had been overwhelmed by gloomy scenarios. What will happen to the baby, she’d asked, if something happens to me?

  You don’t mean a good something, like winning the lottery, said the midwife, unfurling her stethoscope, you mean the other kind. Hopefully, your parents or a family member could adopt the baby. That’s usually less traumatic for everyone. Or you can appoint a legal guardian. Tell me what you’ve been eating.

  She had spent several evenings making lists of potential adoptive parents and eliminating them. Henry was out of the question. Toby, when she asked, said he’d love to be a godfather but he absolutely wasn’t up to being a father—even for you, darling. The first two couples she picked had also said no, one nicely—they already had a prior commitment—the other less so. In the end she had asked her childhood friend, Lyndsay. She and her husband already had two children who were an excellent advertisement for Lyndsay’s humor and creativity and Tom’s interest in nature and sport. Besides how could they refuse, given that Tom was a vicar? Verona had intended to begin a notebook for the baby too, but that had never happened.

  The door of the coffee shop opened and a woman came in wearing a shiny red macintosh, followed by two older men in suits. “Do you know,” the bald one was saying, “which common four-letter girl’s name you just add one letter to and you get a completely different name?”

  “Tuna sandwich?” said the waitress, and thumped it down.

  What she needed, Verona thought as she started to eat, was a place to stay for a few days that had no connection with Henry or, if possible, with her own life. Between bites she got out her address book and turned the pages. They were filled with the names of people she knew, even some she liked, but as she read them, searching for a refuge, she felt the same futility as she had when considering her friends as prospective parents. Milly Cameron? No, even with the most robust woman, she would not feel safe. Ted and Jane Finch?

  “Janet,” she called over to the men. They both looked up. “Sorry, I couldn’t help eavesdropping,” she said. “Jane is the four-letter name, and you add a t to get Janet.”

  “Well done.” The bald man beamed. “You’d be surprised how few people guess.”

  Which means, thought Verona, that he must go around asking people about girls’ names like Diogenes searching for an honest man. But her small success cheered her. And there on the next page were Emmanuel’s details transcribed on their last day in Thailand. Of all her friends and acquaintances, he at once seemed the safest, precisely because they hadn’t spoken since they parted at Heathrow. And he had a reassuring loutish quality. If he came home to find two strange men in his living room, he would not sit down and politely answer their questions.

  “Well done,” the bald man cried again, as she left the coffee shop.

  Everything conspired to get her swiftly home. In the underground the train was drawing up as she reached the platform; when she emerged from the station, the bus that passed the bottom of her street was waiting. She climbed the stairs at top speed, trying to outstrip her fear. Inside her flat she went cautiously from room to room, turning off the radios and the TV, until she was satisfied that she was alone. Then she put the chain on the door, pulled out two suitcases, and began to pack.

  She didn’t telephone Emmanuel until the taxi was on its way. If he wasn’t at home, she would wait at a nearby pub. Anything was preferable to being here alone, dividing her anxiety between the door and the phone. As she dialed his number, she suddenly remembered how, giving him her own number, she had reversed the first and last digits. Happily he had not stooped to the same duplicity, and he answered on the second ring. “I’m in your neighborhood,” she said, trying to sound casual. “I thought I’d come by and say hello.”

  “When?”

  “Now, in twenty minutes, half an hour.”

  He started to say that this wasn’t a good time and she made the standard excuse about losing reception. Again, everything conspired to make the journey easy. The taxi was clean and the driver, save for the small moist sounds of sucking a sweet or a cough drop, silent. From the moment Emmanuel opened the door, however, it was apparent that he was not going to accommodate her. He looked so aghast at the sight of her suitcases that, in spite of everything, she almost laughed.

  “You weren’t just in the neighborhood,” he said.

  “No,” she agreed. “For reasons I can’t go into right now, I need a place to stay for a few days.”

  “Not here,” he said quickly, stepping forward to fill the doorway. “Gina, my girlfriend, will be along any minute. She’d go nuts.”

  I’m the one who’s nuts, thought Verona. Why on earth would a man she hadn’t seen in nearly a year, and had scarcely known then, take her in? “I understand,” she said, “but can I come in for a minute, while I figure things out? I don’t want to stay with friends—I mean,” Emmanuel’s frown made her add, “people I’ve known for a long time.”

  He glanced up and down the street and, perhaps reassured by the empty sidewalks, relented. “Okay, but just for two ticks.” He bent to lift her suitcases. “You oughtn’t to be carrying these around in your condition.”

  Leaving the cases in the hall, unambiguously ready for departure, he showed her into a living room riotous with flowery wallpaper. Against the tangled mass of roses, the large-screen television and the posters of Thailand and Spain looked oddly subdued. Emmanuel offered neither a seat nor tea. “So you want to stay with a stranger,” he said.

  He seemed different: smarter and better-looking than she’d remembered. She nodded, bracing herself to explain even as it dawned on her that he wasn’t interested in explanations.

  “Let me think,” he said. Suddenly exhausted, she sank, uninvited, onto the sofa and watched as he paced back and forth.

  “I know,” he exclaimed, after half a dozen laps. “You need my mate Zeke. We work together. He’s painting a house not far from here. The owners—their name is Barrow—are away on holiday. You can go and talk to him right now.”

  Verona listened dully. Zeke, Emmanuel, who cared? She let Emmanuel call her another taxi. But when she suggested he phone Zeke, he shook his head and said he’d rather not; he’d taken the last week off work and was dodging his employer’s phone calls. “Not that Zeke isn’t a nice guy,” he said, “but he’s a bit of an oddball.”

  “What do you mean, oddball?”

  Emmanuel pushed both hands through his shockingly well-cut hair. “He’s not slow—I’ve never seen anyone figure out prices or measurements quicker than Zeke—and he knows every shortcut in north London, but he gets freaked out by things most people wouldn’t even notice: like someone parting his hair differently. And he’s hopeless at lies. He doesn’t tell them himself, and he doesn’t—”

  Whatever else Zeke didn’t was lost in the blare of a car horn. Emmanuel almost ran to pick up the suitcases. By the time Verona reached the street, he had them safely stowed and had given the driver the address. “Great to see you,” he said, edging toward the door. “Be sure to tell Zeke my back’s wrecked.”

  As the taxi neared the corner, Verona saw a woman with brightly colored braids falling almost to her waist striding down the sidewalk, but before she could discover if this was the tempestuous Gina, they were in the next street. The taxi was bracingly cold, and as it jer
ked along she tried to figure out her next move. In no possible world was she going to ask a man she’d never met for a bed for the night, but now it occurred to her that the fact that he didn’t know she was coming gave her a certain freedom. Hadn’t Emmanuel said the owners of the house were away? Perhaps if she pretended to know the Barrows. No, better still, pretended to be related, nothing too close like a daughter or a sister. After all she had no idea how old they were. But a cousin, or a niece? Yes, that was it. She would announce herself as the niece and act bewildered that they hadn’t told him she was coming to stay. “I’m the Barrows’ niece,” she practiced.

  Only after the cab pulled away, leaving her alone with two substantial suitcases in a strange north London street on a cold February afternoon, did Verona realize how completely she was counting on her scenario working out. Emmanuel had been unable to recall the number of the house but it was a short street, he said, and the house was on the left, coming from the main road. The front door is bright blue, he had added, like a swimming pool. Standing at the foot of the street, she spotted an uncurtained bay window, brightly lit and, as she approached, a door of emphatic blueness came into view. A stepladder stood in the middle of the window. She paused, hoping to catch a glimpse of the person on whose good nature and naïveté she planned to impose for the next twenty-four hours.

  After seventy seconds the ladder rose into the air and was carried out of sight, but whoever had moved it remained hidden. She took a firmer hold on her suitcases, carried them over to the blue door, and rang the bell.

  9

  Even as Verona recognized what had woken her—the stubborn song of a blackbird singing its rounds—she realized she had been dreaming. It was the blackbird that reminded her and that, as it continued its song, carried her back, just for an instant. A bird was clutching her wrist. She was holding a hawk, one of her grandfather’s, not his pet, Percy, but a smaller, sleeker bird with brindled feathers. No sooner had she looked into its golden eyes than it hurled itself into the air, a tumult of wings, and was gone, as was the rest of the dream. All that remained was the knowledge that, in the midst of so much disarray, her night life had returned; for months after she became pregnant, her sleep had been dull and empty. As for her grandfather’s appearance in the dream, that made perfect sense. The previous evening, after Zeke’s departure, she had fallen asleep reading the leather-bound book she had found at Henry’s. Catching sight of it now, still lying on the duvet beside her, she tucked it under the pillow and climbed out of bed.

  She drew the faded curtains to discover the windows streaked with rain. A low mottled sky promised more. Cold air streamed around the ill-fitting sash and she moved closer, offering the taut skin of her belly to the drafts. Below her lay a garden neatly divided into flowerbeds and what looked like rows of leeks, or onions. The blackbird, seemingly oblivious to the weather, was perched on the wall, yellow beak open in lusty song. Oh, Henry, she thought. Where are you?

  She pulled on her clothes, not the dress of yesterday, which was also the dress of the day before, but leggings, a T-shirt, and sweatshirt. Downstairs she headed for the kitchen, intending to eat the sensible cereal she had found during her search for food the previous evening, but something about the birdsong made her long to be out on the streets with people heading to work and school. As she slipped on her coat, her fears of the last thirty-six hours seemed vastly exaggerated. The men’s visit and their subsequent phone call had been upsetting, but it was Henry they were looking for, not her or Toby. She unlocked all three locks, redid two, and set out to find the row of shops she had seen from the taxi.

  She passed a bakery, the window full of plump buns and tarts, and a video shop with a cardboard cutout of a well-known actor dressed as a Roman centurion. Next to that was exactly what she needed: a café with a blackboard outside offering the Builders’ Breakfast and the Heart Attack Special. Inside, the windows streamed with condensation; every molecule of air bore its burden of fried food. Behind the counter a pale woman with thick dark braids was talking energetically to a small girl.

  Verona waited, listening to the mysterious language full of t’s and z’s. All the other customers, save for a group of women by the window, were men. At the nearest table, two boys in leather jackets were tucking into bacon and eggs. The boy facing her, she noticed, had lost a piece of his earlobe. Next to them a man with massive cheeks had his napkin tucked into his collar and was eating, with great delicacy, a plate of baked beans.

  “Can I help you?” asked the woman in impeccable English.

  Verona ordered a fried-egg sandwich and then, an inspiration, “Make that two.”

  “It’ll be three any day now.”

  “Not for a while,” she said, reaching for her purse. After months of being visibly pregnant, she was still taken aback that almost everyone felt free to comment. If you were in Niger, her midwife had told her, people wouldn’t just talk; they would touch your belly for luck, yours and theirs. “What language were you speaking?”

  “Slovak,” said the waitress, seeming neither pleased nor affronted by her curiosity. “The sandwiches will be a couple of minutes.”

  But the brief exchange had broken Verona’s mood. Among a hundred customers, she would be the one the waitress remembered. Oh, yes, the tall pregnant woman. As soon as the sandwiches were ready, she hurried out of the café and down the street, taking no pleasure now in her fellow pedestrians and unexpected leisure. She wanted to be indoors, safe, at the Barrows’. Only when she spotted a dusty white van parked across from the house and recognized the vehicle in which she had watched Zeke drive away the night before, did her pace slow. She remembered his face, the solemn surprise, when she had kissed him.

  As she closed the door of the house, Zeke in his paint-stained clothes was coming down the stairs. Apollo descends, she thought. Hermes arrives. Although the Greek gods were surely dark-skinned, more aggressive beings, and why was she thinking such thoughts about a man she scarcely knew, at a time like this? He raised his hand, a gesture halfway between handshake and wave.

  “I went to buy us fried-egg sandwiches,” she said, holding out the bag.

  After a tiny hesitation, his lips parted in a smile. He stepped forward to accept her offering and said he’d broken into the house. A clean, soapy smell wafted from him to her. In the kitchen he laid the table, and offered tea. The sandwich was delicious, sweet with butter, sharp with pepper; she wished she had bought a third. Zeke too ate with gusto. Meanwhile he asked simple, considerate questions: Had she slept well? Was the house warm enough? She told him about a period in her life when she had worked as an office cleaner and eaten a fried-egg sandwich every day. “We were meant to start at six. Instead, we’d come in at eight-thirty and run around with furniture polish. When the manager arrived at nine, he thought we’d been working for hours.”

  In the face of Zeke’s clear-eyed attention, she faltered. It had been an article of faith with her and her friends that cheating large businesses was not a crime, but there was another point of view. Then she pulled herself together. He was a house painter and she was never going to see him again. The night before, after he left, she had sat at the kitchen table and tried to come up with a plan. Her entire list was Find Henry. Or, more exactly, Find Henry before the men do. As to how to accomplish this, surely someone with the right skills could trace him on the Internet. Toby would know such a person. They could figure it out as soon as she had the house to herself, which would be sooner if she offered to help Zeke.

  “So what are we doing today?” she asked. “Putting up the lining paper?”

  He reacted as if she had suggested they carry the fridge up and down the street. “Your aunt and uncle,” he protested, his hands gripping the table, “are paying me for my work.”

  “Look, I can wear these.” She was already on her feet, moving toward the navy-blue coveralls she had spotted hanging on the back door. Only later did it strike her as odd that, during her sojourn at the Barrows’, she had lost all c
onsciousness of stealing from them. Her attitude was like someone in a fairy story who comes across an abandoned well-stocked palace in the woods; everything beneath their roof was hers for the taking. Which must, she thought, be what Henry feels most of the time, everywhere.

  As soon as they started work, Zeke’s whole manner changed. He was confident, organized, calm. He showed her how to cut the sandpaper and fit it to the sanding block and set her to smoothing the part of the walls that lay within her reach—don’t stretch, he urged, don’t bend—while he tackled the upper half of the room, using the stepladder. As they worked, he answered her questions with increasing ease and began to ask his own. She tried to answer politely but minimally. Sometimes with strangers she had enjoyed embellishing her life story. Now she was surprised to find herself longing to tell the truth. But the less Zeke knew, the better. She pictured Nigel and George appearing in this room. So you’re saying you thought Miss MacIntyre was the Barrows’ niece? That seems rather far-fetched.

  “Careful.” He touched her arm.

  Looking down, she discovered she had rubbed the same spot for too long. A hollow was appearing in the wall.

  Their hours of sanding made little visible difference, but with each strip of lining paper that Zeke guided into place, another section of the motley-patterned wall disappeared. Verona was torn between satisfaction and dismay. The wildness of the room had made it theirs; now it was becoming the Barrows’. At the same time, she could see that this was the perfect job for Zeke, creating order out of chaos. Her own job, questioning people about minor crimes and novelties, often seemed more like a way of increasing whatever chaos there was around.