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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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Had he ever been so glad to see a suitcase? The larger of the two lay open at the foot of the bed, revealing a tumble of garments, red, purple, white, blue; the smaller, still closed, stood by the window with a red sticker proclaiming FRAGILE. Neither, unfortunately, had a label with her name. He stepped over to the bed and knelt to bury his face in the pillow. Here she was, and here.
The scrape of a door hurled him to his feet. The last thing he wanted was to be caught mooning over a pillow. “Hello,” he called, starting down the stairs.
She was in the hall, her cheeks glowing, her hair darker than the day before, bearing the marks of a comb. “I went to get us fried-egg sandwiches.” She flourished a paper bag.
Us, he thought. “Thank you,” he said, and explained, though she didn't seem concerned, that he had broken in. In the kitchen he set out plates, salt and pepper, sheets of paper towel. He had had his usual bowl of cereal only an hour ago; now, following her example, he ate ravenously. She was wearing a faded blue sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up as if it had once belonged to someone else, the hem stretched tight over her belly. How far along was she, he wondered, trying to recall various friends. Six months, maybe seven. Watching her raise the bread to pepper the egg, he realized he had dreamed about her the night before.
Only a fragment remained, her winching a metal bucket, brimming with water, out of a well. But before he could tell her, she was talking again. One spring, apparently, she had worked as a cleaner in an office building and had eaten a fried-egg sandwich every day. From the way she spoke, he understood that this was not her present occupation.
“So what are we doing today?” she said, wiping her hands on the paper towel. “Putting up lining paper?”
He began to stammer. He was making good progress. Besides, her aunt and uncle were paying him a fair wage.
“But you must need help,” she said, “and I need something to take my mind off things.”
At the time he assumed a covert reference to her pregnancy. Later, when he scrutinized her every utterance, it became one of those mysterious manhole covers, briefly raised over the dark river of secrecy. Meanwhile, before he could urge further objections—the dust, the fumes—she had spotted a pair of coveralls hanging on the back door, and the next thing he knew she had scrambled into them and was demonstrating how well they fit; her belly split the front like a chestnut its shell. “Come on,” she said. “I bet you're paid by the job, not the hour.”
At first he was embarrassed telling a woman, older he guessed by perhaps a decade, what to do, but she turned out to be much more biddable than Emmanuel. As they finished the sanding, he on the ladder, she on foot, she lobbed questions in his direction. Despite her careless manner, he sensed that she was in fact listening to whatever he chose to answer. Whereas the doctors, without exception, as soon as he opened his mouth, had focused on pencil sharpeners, radiators, doorknobs. They were paid—not enough, not by him—to barely feign attention, scribble a couple of notes, and finally write a prescription that would propel him, thank God, out of their offices. But this woman with her fierce brow, her chapped knuckles, for whatever reason actually seemed interested.
“So.” She folded sandpaper onto the sanding block. “How did you become a painter? Is it the family business, or your heart's desire?”
“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.

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