Banishing Verona (25 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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“Have you seen the woman from the plane?” he asked.
“The woman? Oh, you mean the one who collapsed. No, I'm afraid I didn't think to look for her, though you're right. They might have brought her here.”
Together, both first looking in the wrong direction, they crossed into a smaller road lined with brick buildings, many of which housed either restaurants or antiques shops, and stopped at a café with several people sitting in the window. Inside, Jill asked for two cups of tea.
“Hot tea?” said the woman behind the counter.
“As opposed to?”
“Well, iced tea is very popular, though not,” the woman admitted, “at this time of year.”
They were handed Styrofoam cups of boiling water and tea bags. Jill asked for milk, and they seated themselves at a table near the window.
“Why do you think Americans won't put in the tea bag for you?” Zeke said, tearing open the little paper envelope and lowering the bag into the water.
“Laziness? Fear of being sued if it steeps too long?” Her mouth stretched wide. “Sorry. It's not you. I'm just shattered. And the flat they've given me is a tip.”
Oh. She was yawning. “A tip how?”
“Everything.” Her voice suddenly had a rusty sound. “The walls are a mess. There are fluorescent lights. The floors are filthy. The taps leak.” Behind her glasses, her eyelids started to wrinkle. A drop of water spilled from one eye. Then a drop from the other. She covered her face with her hands.
Zeke pulled out his tea bag and, after a moment's deliberation—she could always replace it—hers. He looked at Jill, her neat hands, so different from Verona's, spread across her face, her
shoulders trembling as she uttered small, squeaky noises. She had been sent to rescue him. “I can help,” he said. “That's what I do in London. I paint people's houses. Let's drink our tea and you can show me the flat.”
“You can't spend your holiday”—she hiccupped—“painting.”
“I'm not here on holiday. I came to find someone, but she's in New York. All I can do is wait, and I'd rather wait helping you than traipsing around like I did today. Though maybe, when you're not working, we can go to the Isabella-something museum. I would like to see that.”
Jill lowered her hands. “Stewart Gardner,” she said.
 
 
The block of flats resembled several he had seen that day, a tall brick building, probably dating from the twenties. In the hall Zeke saw that the ceilings were a graceful ten feet, two more than his hotel room, and dark wainscoting lined the walls. Once, not so long ago, this had been an elegant building. Now the walls and floors bore the evidence of much casually moved furniture. He followed Jill up the worn stairs.
“It's odd how they count floors differently, isn't it?” she said.
“Like the hotel,” he agreed.
Also like the hotel was the anonymous corridor into which they emerged. They passed half a dozen doors. Jill stopped at the last one on the left, opened it, and motioned him to go ahead. Stepping into a narrow hallway, his first sensations were of dry ferocious heat and cold, buzzing light. The latter came from a circular fluorescent tube mounted on the ceiling. As Jill closed the door, he unzipped his new jacket and slung it over a chair. He had expected the flat to be empty, but in the living room was a beige sofa with two matching armchairs, a dining room table, and four chairs. Cushions would help, he thought; a colorful tablecloth. Some of Jill's despair, he understood, came from loneliness.
“It's ghastly, isn't it? I signed a year's lease because everyone
told me how hard it was to find housing here.” Her voice had that rusty quality again.
Quickly he said, “It's not so bad. Places always need redecorating between tenants. A coat of paint will make a big difference. Maybe your landlord will pay for it. If you can stand the aggravation, you could ask him to refinish the floors. If not, get a couple of rugs. And some lamps. Have you by any chance noticed a paint shop nearby?”
Jill began to make a strange noise. He looked at her, checking for more tears, but as she bent forward, hugging her arms around her body, he recognized laughter. The cause eluded him but he was so glad to see her cheerful that he joined in, and as he laughed he realized that what the doctor opposed to trepanning had claimed was true: feeling did, sometimes, follow behavior.
When she could speak again, Jill said she hadn't noticed a paint shop. Between them, using the telephone directory and the map he'd been given that morning, they located one a few streets away. While she took a shower, Zeke, once again relishing the connection between a sheet of paper and the city, went to investigate. He found the shop on his first attempt and inside was engulfed by the familiar odors of wood and paint. He wandered up and down the aisles, examining the color charts and tools. At last he pulled himself together and bought spackle, sandpaper, a brush, a roller and tray, a drop cloth, and a gallon of paint. As he stepped out of the shop, he saw a woman walking down the sidewalk toward him, her belly advancing before her like a prow. She passed him without a second glance, but Zeke halted as if she had yelled
stop.
What was he doing, wandering around buying paint, when Verona had said she would call today? He might as well be in London if she couldn't reach him. He set off toward Jill's, walking at top speed, the tin of paint banging against his thigh, counting the parked cars. At one hundred and twelve, he switched to counting blue cars, then red ones.
“What's wrong?” Jill said, as soon as she opened the door.
“Verona,” he said. “She might be trying to phone me.”
“Come in. Let's call your hotel. That's where she'd phone, isn't it? They can tell you if there are any messages. You can always take a taxi back.”
In the presence of her immediate understanding, he was able to step into the flat. Jill dialed the number and handed him the phone. “No messages, sir,” said a voice suspiciously like that of the man who'd been so obtuse about the museum that morning.
“Have you checked?”
“No messages.”
Zeke put down the receiver. His heart had slowed and his breathing steadied, signs, he knew, that he was calmer. Also acutely disappointed. But at least this time he didn't faint: a pity in a way, given that Jill would have known exactly what to do.
 
 
It was only five-thirty but they both admitted to being ravenous. Jill suggested they go to an Indian restaurant a few streets away. “I do notice restaurants,” she said. Like the paint shop, the Star of Goa had a familiar fragrance, in this case the comingling of cloves, garlic, coriander, cumin, and turmeric, and the waiter who led them to their table could have stepped straight off a London bus. They ordered a chicken biryani, a vegetable korma, raita, aloo nan, and sag paneer. “I'll have a beer,” Jill added, and gave the name of a bird.
“So,” she said, when the waiter had brought a sleek brown bottle and poured half the contents into a glass, “I don't mean to pry, but would you like to talk about it? Why you're here, why Verona isn't?”
“What's today's word?” He raised his glass of water and, finding it full of ice cubes, set it down again.
“Disequilibrium. Obviously it means loss of balance, which is part of what I wanted when I took a job here, but I hadn't bargained on quite so much.”
The nearest customers, two bearded men at the next table, were
also discussing words. “I hate to sound like a grad student,” Zeke overheard the one in a checked shirt say, “but I do think the word
seminal
applies to his later films.” Seminal, thought Zeke, I'll use that tomorrow. He felt an odd reluctance to talk about Verona, to expose their intimacy to any kind of judgment that might brand him a fool, her something worse. But as he reached for a pappadum, everything came tumbling out. While Jill sipped her beer, he told her about Verona's sudden appearance in his life, her abrupt flight, her silence, and her summons.
“So you arrived at the hotel and she was gone?”
“She'd booked me a room and left a letter, saying she had to go to New York and would be in touch soon.”
Jill made a growling noise, which he suspected indicated disapproval, but to his relief she didn't voice it. “It sounds like she's in trouble,” she said, tearing off a piece of nan. “Or her brother is. She's lucky you came to help.”
“How am I helping by wandering around museums?”
She moved her shoulders in the way people did when they didn't know the answer. “I came here for love too, the other kind.” Meaning what, he was wondering, when she added, “Unrequited.”
“I'm sorry.”
“So am I. We'd been living together for four years and I didn't think everything was perfect—I wasn't that stupid—but I thought we had problems like everyone else. We'd negotiate, we'd compromise, we'd go to Crete and drink ouzo.”
“And?”
“Leslie said we'd tried all those things and I was too set in my ways and it was time to move on. She made me feel like a bus stop.” She gave a little anti-laugh. “When people spoke about being heartbroken, I used to think it was a feeble figure of speech. I've seen a heart beating in the chest cavity. I know it doesn't break like a china plate. But since Leslie left my chest aches all the time. On the plane yesterday, just for a moment”—her face screwed up—“I envied that woman.”
The men at the next table were pulling on jackets and hats. The
door opened and half a dozen girls came in, carrying brightly colored shopping bags.
“Oh, hell,” said Jill. “I'm sorry. I promised I wasn't going to talk about it to anyone on this side of the Atlantic. I can't stand to hear myself whining.”
“I'm not really on this side of the Atlantic.” He braved his water glass; the ice cubes were mostly gone. “Mightn't she change her mind? I mean, if she knows how much you love her, won't she want to”—he groped for the expression—“try again?”
“No. What she wants is to break up with me and not feel like a bad person.” She was clutching her knife and fork, holding them upright on either side of her plate. It was against the order of things, the way two followed one, the combining of hydrogen and oxygen, that so much feeling should go unanswered, yet such, she was telling him, was the case. “I'm sorry,” she went on, in a lower voice, “I've spent sixteen months thinking thoughts like that.
Amor vincit omnia.
But it isn't true. Love conquers fuck-all. Leslie doesn't give a toss about my feelings. As for me”—she lowered her silverware—“I think of Mithradates getting used to poison by eating a little every day. I eat dishfuls and it doesn't seem to help. So if you feel strongly about Verona and there's even a small chance that she reciprocates, don't give up.”
The waiters, who had been loitering nearby, now advanced as a group. One took their plates, another the metal curry dishes, a third removed the trio of chutneys.
When they were once more alone, Zeke said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“You already have.” She cocked her head. “Sorry, primary school humor.”
“Do you think that there's life after death?”
Behind her glasses her eyes widened. “I don't know. Maybe for some people, maybe for a while. One of the rabbis who used to visit the hospital claimed that the spirit lingers near the body for eight days, and that's why it's important to keep the dead company. Myself, I think we're conscious and then we're not and that
it doesn't matter very much, except to a few close friends. What do you think?”
He fingered a few grains of rice that had escaped the waiters. “I've had a lot of time recently to wonder why we fall for one person rather than another. I know hardly anything about Verona: she has big hands, she can stop clocks, she had a friend who died. So I've been thinking that perhaps there's some secret part of ourselves that recognizes the secret part of another person. Maybe that's what we mean by the soul.”
“I want some tea.” Jill waved toward one of the waiters. “You think you're philosophizing, but this is the kind of nonsense you talk when you're in love. When you fall out of love, you'll realize it was just your cunt talking. Pardon me, prick.”
His face felt hot and something odd was happening in his chest, not an ache, more like an explosion. He focused on the objects still on the table, including Jill's hands, and the pictures he could see on the wall behind her. When the heat began to recede, he thought, I'm angry because Jill is suggesting that I don't really love Verona. But he had made Jill angry too by going on about this feeling she was trying to forget.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I shouldn't have said anything.”
“I'm good on fear of flying, poor on love. Let's drink our tea and talk about something else.”
Perhaps it was her mention of Mithradates, but he found himself telling the story of Verona's grandfather, how he'd fought in the war, started a railway, married Irene, and how, after more than a decade, for no apparent reason, she'd taken poison. And then her deceased parents had appeared at the funeral.

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