Banishing Verona (34 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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The windows of the radio station were ablaze; inside, the main evening show, the counterpart to her own morning show, was on. Verona paused to listen to the host reviewing a play. She signed Betty in and led the way down the corridor, searching for an empty studio. In the first two, interviews were in progress; in the third, Gary, the engineer, was bending over a switchboard. The next studio was empty.
Betty took off her hat but the small room was surprisingly chilly and they both kept on their coats. Verona set up the tape player on the table between them. As she slipped the tape into the machine, she found herself strangely nervous. This was not just about Henry; somehow it had become intertwined with her own fate. If she could persuade Betty to give her brother another chance, maybe she could persuade Zeke to do the same.
“So what are we listening to?” said Betty.
“It's a tape I made last week of Henry.” She did her best to explain the circumstances: that she'd decided not to speak; that they were in Boston during a blizzard. She expected Betty to ask what had taken them to America, but instead she said, “What was it like, being silent?”
“I didn't do it for very long, but it was interesting. I'm someone who talks all the time. Suddenly I understood that language is a major distraction.”
Betty drew her coat closer. “After my brother died, I didn't talk
for two months. At first it was because without Robin conversation seemed pointless. Soon I began to like it for its own sake. Everything was simpler and, I don't know, less fussy. Would you mind,” she said, “if we started?”
Henry's voice filled the room. Except for the occasional muffled word, perhaps when he had turned toward the window, he was remarkably clear. Betty leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Verona sat back, watching her as closely as she dared while Henry described buying the bungalows. After years of listening to him discuss various deals, she had not given the particulars of this one much thought. Now, seeing Betty's frown, she understood that he had been trying to cheat the villagers. They had, in the end, benefited from his greed, but that had not been his intention.
He moved on to Betty and their courtship, Glyndebourne, their engagement and subsequent rift. Then he returned to his present difficulties. “There was my old girlfriend Charlotte” he said, “you know, the one with different-colored eyes.”
Hastily Verona reached for the machine but Betty held up a hand. There it all was, the ruthless pursuit of the ex-girlfriend. Verona listened aghast. She had been so wrapped up in her own longing for Zeke that she had forgotten about Henry's dalliance. “We went skiing,” he said, “wined and dined. Etc.” Or perhaps, she thought, in some uncharted part of herself, she had wanted revenge. She gripped the arms of her chair until, at last, he fell silent.
“Thank you,” said Betty. She gave Verona her first wholehearted smile.
“I'm sorry.” All her hopes lay in disarray because of a few inches of tape. “I feel like an idiot. I'd forgotten about—”
“Charlotte,” prompted Betty.
“What I remembered was Henry's face as he talked about you and how I'd never seen him look that way before.”
“Too bad you didn't have a video.” She rubbed her hands together. “Is it this cold when you're working? You can practically see your breath.”
She seemed so unruffled that Verona could not help asking, “Why did you agree to see me?”
“Henry was always talking about you. Besides, it's not every day someone offers to play you a tape of your ex-fiancé.”
“I never knew Henry talked about me.”
Betty, however, did not add any details. She sat fingering the hem of her pink sweater. “I'm sorry,” she said, “after you've gone to all this trouble, but it won't work. I need someone I can rely on in certain fundamental ways. I don't think Henry would ever be that person.”
“Don't you love him?” She could barely get the words out.
“I do, but I'm hoping it will pass.” She was still looking down at her lap, and Verona noticed her eyelids, smooth and translucent. Betty
was
gorgeous. “Did he know you were recording him?” she said. “It seems an odd thing to do.”
“It was odd,” Verona agreed. “I don't normally go around taping people.”
“Did he know?” Betty repeated, raising her eyes.
“No.” Then she remembered her resolve to tell the truth. “Well, I tried to hide it but he guessed.”
Betty nodded approvingly. She would make a good teacher, thought Verona. She wanted to apologize again but it seemed useless. She had messed up everything: Zeke, Henry, Betty, herself. “There's an engineer here,” she said, “we passed him coming in, who refuses to get married because a friend met the love of his life at his own wedding.”
“Verona,” said Betty gently, “it's hopeless but it's not tragic. My brother going blind and dying was tragic. I'll be fine.”
“And Henry?”
Betty stood up and pulled on her brightly colored hat. Then she reached over to the machine and pressed replay; the tape whirred backward. “If he had any sense,” she said, as she pressed ERASE, “he'd move in with Toby.”
“Toby?” Verona echoed.
“Yes. Toby dotes on him, and it would mean that Henry would
always be the center of attention. No distractions.” Betty patted her own flat belly. “No children.”
Of course, thought Verona. What better solution to Toby's passion, Henry's selfishness? She pictured Toby mastering the intricate espresso machine, Henry charming the patrons at gallery openings. She was suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. Her clever scheme had done nothing but harm. If it had not been for Betty standing there, she would have curled up on the floor and slept until morning. Slowly she struggled to her feet. Slowly she picked up her bag.
“Did you go to a sperm bank?” Betty asked, moving toward the door. Verona gave the slightest of nods. “I thought you must have,” she continued, “when Henry told me you wouldn't say who the baby's father was. If I don't meet someone in two years, that's what I plan to do.”
In the street, she helped Verona to flag down a taxi, kissed her on both cheeks, and walked away into the rain.
 
 
Back at her flat, Verona set the alarm, got ready for bed, and, once she was there, called Henry. They had not spoken since he brought her home from the airport. Now she heard voices, music. “Hang on,” he said. “Let me go somewhere quiet.” He was back in forty seconds. “How are you? I heard your show today. The interview with the tiddledywinks champion was a riot.”
The baby, tranquil since she finished work, began to twist and turn as she told Henry about her conversation with Toby. “I didn't realize quite how close the two of you are.”
“Good old Tobes.” He laughed, missing or ignoring the edge in her voice. “My secret sharer. He was scared to death by this business with Nigel and George, especially after they showed up at his flat. That's why he suggested you come to America. And, of course, I thought you'd be an asset, the mother-to-be, making witty conversation with potential investors.”
On the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed the white tulips
glowed. “What do you mean,” she said carefully,
“suggested?
His friend tracked you down on the Internet and then, when you didn't answer our calls, it seemed like one of us had to come and talk to you.”
“I'm sure he could have found me on the Internet—Nigel and George did—but he didn't need to. We talk every day.”
“So the two of you …” She trailed off. Toby had said the same thing, but she'd assumed he meant every day
except
the days when Henry had vanished. All along, while they'd been fretting over Henry's disappearance, Toby had known exactly where he was.
“We were worried about you,” Henry was saying. “You started behaving so weirdly, taking leave of your job, rushing around with suitcases. Toby was afraid it wouldn't be good for the baby. But we weren't sure you'd come to Boston if I just asked. It was his idea to make you feel you were rescuing me. Of course, that was before Charlotte entered the picture.”
“But”—the baby gave a sharp jab, as if it too were arguing with Henry—“when Toby and I were in the hotel at Heathrow, Nigel and George telephoned. They even dropped off my passport at the front desk.”
“Actually, Toby fetched your passport, I lent him your keys, but when Nigel phoned, he decided to pretend they'd left it for you. He said the timing couldn't have been better.”
No wonder, she thought, the handwriting on the little note—
Happy travels
—had looked familiar. She lay there holding the phone while Henry described their campaign to get her to America. The Internet search had been a joint idea. “The only fallout,” he said, “was your young man. Have the two of you kissed and made up?”
“Absolutely.” Whatever resolutions she'd made about telling the truth did not apply to Henry. “What about you and Betty?”
“Oh, it was a nice idea, thinking I'd be a good person and live in a mansion with tons of money, but she was much too high-minded for me. I'm back to slumming it with the bankers and secretaries. Hang on a minute.”
He turned away from the phone to say something she couldn't quite hear. He was still laughing as she replaced the receiver.
She slept with the phone on her bedside table, but for the first time since she returned from America she didn't dream, and the next morning, as she rode down the crowded escalator at the underground station, Verona glimpsed a new feeling. Perhaps, just possibly, it was time to accept that Zeke didn't want her. The price of helping Henry in his hour of need had been losing Zeke. No, she corrected herself as she made her way along the crowded platform, she had lost him because of fear and anxiety and stubbornness. If she couldn't understand her own behavior, how could she expect Zeke to? Her task now, she thought, as the train squealed into the station, was to prepare for the baby. She set to work at once by asking a loutish-looking young man if he would mind giving her his seat.
He jumped to his feet with a sweet smile. “Sorry. I was dreaming I'd won the lottery.”
Seated, she took out a notebook and began a list of things to buy in the next few weeks: a mockingbird—plus or minus a golden ring—a bottle of burgundy to drink in twenty-one years' time, a slow-growing bonzai tree for company, a plot of land in the Outer Hebrides, a copy of
Steppenwolf,
a paintbrush.
Ten days after she spoke to Betty, Verona found herself interviewing an expert in behavior modification. Ms. Taylor turned out to be a large greasy woman with fierce dark eyes and badly crowned teeth; her clothes, a shapeless cardigan and a baggy skirt, looked as if they had been pieced together out of old blankets.
“Welcome, Ms. Taylor, and thank you for being with us today. Could you describe for our listeners what it is you offer parents and children?”
Ms. Taylor leaned into the microphone and asserted that there had been a crisis of confidence among parents. “Mothers and fathers,” she said, “no longer see themselves as automatically in charge. They consult children about such major decisions as what kind of car to buy and where to go on holiday. At the same time, they no longer feel able to discipline their children in appropriate ways.”
She had a surprisingly pleasant voice, firm, clear, well-modulated. No one listening, thought Verona, would guess at her grotesque appearance. “And how do you help?”
Ms. Taylor explained that she retrained the parents, teaching
them to adhere to clear rules and to administer fixed punishments and rewards. They telephoned her nightly for reinforcement.
“So you don't actually meet the children?”
“No, that's not necessary. The parents are the problem. My system, if followed, works for all save the most exceptional cases.”
“And how,” asked Verona, “did you get into behavior modification? You don't have children yourself and you don't”—she hesitated—“have a degree in psychology or social work.”
She had hesitated not because she was worried about upsetting Ms. Taylor but because suddenly, midsentence, it had occurred to her that Zeke might be listening. This was her chance, perhaps her only chance, to send him a different kind of message, one that came without demands or expectations. As Ms. Taylor explained her qualifications, she scribbled a couple of notes.
“What you're saying sounds awfully sensible,” she said, as soon as the woman paused, “but surely there has to be room for mistakes and forgiveness, not just punishments and rewards. At some point almost everyone, parent or child, does something they profoundly regret, something that can't be undone.” Ignoring Henry's theory of lost illusions, she argued for love and mercy.
Ms. Taylor opened and shut her mouth several times during this speech. “I'm afraid that's all a bit too cerebral for me,” she said, when Verona finished. “The kinds of problems I work with have to do with bedtime and homework and chores. You'd be amazed how one child refusing to go to bed can bring a whole family to a standstill. I aim to get the machinery running smoothly again.”
They chatted for a few more minutes about her down-to-earth approach, her notions of suitable rewards and punishments; then an assistant led Ms. Taylor away and it was time for Verona to read the news and report on the traffic. Later, as she emerged after the second half of the show, she ran into Gary in the corridor.
“Good interview,” he said, “though that Taylor woman seemed a little scary.”
“She was a toad. I'm sure she does worthy work, but I couldn't bear her.”
“I liked what you said”—his dark ringlets swayed—“about mistakes and mercy. We grow up thinking everything can be fixed, but some stuff there's just no way around except forgiveness.”
So there was more to his not getting married, she thought, than his friend's story. One of these days she would have to ask him. Now she nodded and said she had a meeting.
 
 
Zeke had the table covered with tiny cogs—his eight-day clock had persisted in running slow since he returned from Boston—when the doorbell rang. His mother was on the doorstep, her face unusually pale but not, he could see at once, from sickness. She was vibrating with excitement, as if she had just sold an entire box of pineapples or successfully exhorted money from several delinquent customers. “I tried to phone,” she said, “but as usual you seem to be relying on telepathy.”
Upstairs, she sat quietly across from him. No, she didn't want tea or water. She just wanted to talk to him. He picked up the tiny screwdriver and, replacing the loupe—he always wore it in his right eye—began to fit one of the screws.
“There's no easy way to say this,” she said. “I've decided to leave your father, and I've told him so.”
He finished inserting the screw and turned to look at her. Through the loupe she was large and fuzzy, which seemed oddly appropriate.
“Could you take off that thing?” she said, pointing. “Do you understand what I just said?”
Without the loupe, she at once became smaller and more distinct. “Yes,” he said.
“Is that all you're going to say?”
He looked around his brain. He couldn't see anything else he wanted to say. “I think so.”
“Do you blame me?” The three little lines had appeared between her eyebrows.
“No. I'm sorry for Dad but I don't blame you.”
“I do,” she said. “I thought I'd be married to the same person forever, but this is my one life, my one shot. The thing that threw me”—she was clasping her hands together; perhaps she was wringing them?—“was that Don didn't get angry. He actually seemed to understand.”
“Isn't that good?”
“Yes, of course, but it made me feel like I'd made a terrible mistake. You know I always wanted more children. I'm even sorrier now that you're on your own.” Her cheeks turned pink; briefly she seemed to be holding her breath. He was about to remind her that he had never wanted a sibling when she launched into the practical details: her new address, what was happening at the shop. “I'll be there for the next few weeks, until he finds a manager. You'll keep an eye on Don, won't you?”
“I'll do my best.”
She stood up. “I hope—” she began, but she didn't say what. For a few seconds her blue eyes tugged at him. Then she turned to examine the neatly displayed innards of the clock. Zeke stood up and put his arms around her.
 
 
Verona was sitting on the sofa, studying one of her baby books, when the phone rang.
“Hi,” said a familiar voice that she couldn't quite place. “This is Emmanuel.”
“Hello.” Her hand tightened around the phone. “How are you?”
“I was wondering, would you like to get together, have a drink?”
Her first instinct was to refuse—she wanted to work on her list for the baby—but after the reprimand of their last conversation, she didn't have the nerve. She would go and apologize and take a
proper interest in him and his tumultuous life with—what was her name, Tina? Gina? She wrote down the address of the pub and said she'd be there in an hour.
She had hoped for the slight advantage of arriving early, but as she stepped through the door the first person she saw was Emmanuel with a half-empty pint before him. She walked over, acutely conscious of her bulk. “Sorry if I'm late,” she said, bending to kiss his cheek. “Can I get you another?”
“I'm okay. Here, you sit down. What would you like, juice? Lemonade?”
“Orange juice with sparkling water would be great.” While he went to the bar, she took off her coat and reminded herself that she was not here to ask a single question about Zeke. She was here to listen and talk about Emmanuel.
He set a glass before her and resumed his seat. “Cheers,” he said, tilting his own glass in her direction. “When are you due?”
“Early April. I'm hoping to keep working for another month so I can take all my maternity leave after the baby's here.”
“That makes sense. You're mostly sitting down, aren't you? Wouldn't do in my line of work.”
“How are things? How's your back?”
“My back?” He sounded startled. “My back is okay, touch wood. I have some exercises the doctor gave me, and they seem to help.”
“And what about your girlfriend? Last time I came round you were expecting her.”
“The only time,” he corrected. “Gina's fine. She keeps me on my toes, which is no bad thing.” He took a long drink of beer. “She wants us to do what you're doing.”
What I'm doing, she wondered and then, seeing his glance, understood. “You mean have a baby?”
He nodded. “The whole bit: live together, have a kid, maybe two.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I say I'm not ready, but she claims I'll be saying that when I'm eighty. This way the baby and I can grow up together.”
“So you think you'll do it?”
The bartender had turned up the television, and around them the voices of the other customers rose in competition. Emmanuel flicked something—a crumb? a piece of lint?—off his sleeve. “Unless she changes her mind,” he said, “about being with an idiot she has to drag kicking and screaming every step of the way. How do you feel about it?”
“It's funny,” she said, “no one ever asks me that. I suppose it's got beyond the stage when my personal preferences count. I'm meant to be a hundred percent radiant. I'm thrilled but scared. You know: the pain, will I be a good mother, all that stuff.”
“Well, best of luck.” He drained his glass and, after asking if she wanted anything, went off to the bar. He returned with another pint and two bags of peanuts. “Not very healthy,” he said, handing her one, “but better than nothing. I had an idea about you and Zeke.”
Before she could tell him it was no longer relevant, he was outlining his plan. He and Zeke were painting an empty flat in Camden. On Monday morning he would phone and say he was under the weather; then Verona could go to the flat. “You can call in sick, can't you? I don't feel comfortable giving you his address, but this way you'd get to talk to him face-to-face.”
All her resolutions vanished. Wasn't this what people claimed? You just had to stop struggling and the door would open. If she hadn't felt so unwieldy, she would have jumped up and hugged Emmanuel. “Or better still,” she said, “I know this isn't so convenient, but maybe you could go to work with him, and then you could let me in and leave.” She looked at him, hoping he wouldn't force her to spell out her fear that Zeke might, quite literally, shut the newly opened door in her face.
“Okay, we'll do it that way. I did try to talk to him about this whole business and he's dead set against seeing you. Gina reckons he's protecting himself.” He wrote down the address of the house for her; they agreed on a time.
“I can't thank you enough,” said Verona, “but why did you change your mind?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I was in the newsagent's the other day, buying fags, and they had the radio on. I heard what you said about mistakes, you know”—he lowered his voice—“forgiveness. This thing between you and Zeke is beyond me. I don't get why you like each other. I don't get why you stood him up. But I've screwed up plenty of times.” He raised his glass. “This may be one more.”
She began, once again, to offer her thanks. “If there's ever anything I can do for you—”
“As a matter of fact,” said Emmanuel. Haltingly, he explained that Gina had a small business, making cakes. “She has a whole special line for Valentine's Day, stag parties, that kind of thing. And she'll copy any photograph in icing.”
Verona listened, bewildered. Should she be asking Gina to bake her a cake? She'd happily order a dozen. Finally he got to the point.
“It would be a big boost for her if she could be on your show.”
How distracted she must be to have missed this familiar request. She got out her notebook and wrote down Gina's details. “She sounds perfect,” she said. “I'll talk to my producers about her at our next meeting. Just so you know, though, I'm not the only person involved in the decision. I can't promise it will work out.”
“So that's two things,” said Emmanuel, “we have to keep our fingers crossed for.”
 
 
On Saturday, after helping Gwen with the morning rush, Zeke went to a couple of rummage sales and returned with two new clocks. The one from the fifties, which he had thought just needed adjusting, proved on closer inspection to be hopeless. But the other, a lovely Edwardian traveling clock, looked as if it could be
fixed. He would work on it later. For now he laid out the vegetables he had brought from the shop and set to work, making minestrone soup. This isn't forever, he told himself as he chopped an onion. I'm still on the train, going forward; we've just paused for repairs. Soon we'll be chugging along.
He was glad when Monday came and he could rise purposefully at his normal hour, eat a bowl of cereal, and head off through the morning mist to collect Emmanuel. Here too things were back to normal; there was no sign of his friend. Zeke had to double-park and jump out to ring the bell. After eight minutes Emmanuel appeared. He was uncharacteristically quiet during the drive to the house, a hangover perhaps, and for once Zeke caught every word of the morning news. At the house, they carried up the paint and headed to the nearest café. They both read the newspaper while they ate.

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