Banishing Verona (35 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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Back at the flat, Emmanuel announced he would start on the bedroom. Zeke wanted to object—it would be more efficient if they finished the living room together and then separated to work on the smaller rooms—but Emmanuel's eyes were so bright, his jaw so taut, he didn't dare. Not a hangover, Zeke thought, perhaps a row with Gina.
He had just started on the edge of the ceiling when Emmanuel called out that he was going for cigarettes. As the door closed behind him, one of his favorite songs came on the radio and for a few seconds Zeke thought of going after him. But it was too much trouble to come down from the ladder. They would play the song again. He finished the section he was working on. As he climbed down to move the ladder, he felt that peculiar prickling sensation: someone's eyes were touching him. He turned around and there, standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of pristine coveralls, was Verona. He recognized her instantly.
Very carefully he set down the paint and fastened his own gaze on the wrinkled drop cloth.
“Emmanuel let me in,” she said, and her voice was all the colors he'd imagined. “But it's not his fault. I begged and begged.”
Her feet—she was wearing rather dirty tennis shoes—stepped forward and stopped. He pressed his fingers to his forehead. He could feel the thoughts beating against his skull, trying to get out. She was here at last. He was trapped. She was as tall as he remembered. Emmanuel had betrayed him. He was terrified she would beg, or cry, or shout. One clear thought rose above the others: I don't want to feel this way.
“Please,” she said. “Let me at least try to explain.”
“No,” he said, raising both hands. “I don't believe in explanations.”
She stopped again. Her voice grew pale and watery. “I've come to take Emmanuel's place for the day. He said to start on the white wall by the window.”
He raised his eyes a few inches and discovered Ms. F even more prominent than when they first met; her mother was already holding a paint tray and roller. Without another word she moved toward the corner by the window and began to paint. He didn't know what to do. He could feel the key of the van in his pocket against his thigh but even as his hand reached toward it, he remembered the ceiling, barely begun, and the carpet fitters were due on Wednesday. If she just stays quiet, he thought, I can manage.
 
 
She had spent all weekend thinking of what to say, going over and over her apology as if it were the most important script of her life, but as soon as she laid eyes on Zeke in his ragged sweater and jeans, saw the tender hollow between his collarbones, saw the way he pressed his hands to his temples, she knew she must bide her time. He was on the edge of flight. She did the only thing she could think of to keep him there. She kept quiet and painted.
For two minutes and ten seconds he remained rooted to the spot. Then at last, finally, he retrieved the can of paint and climbed back up the ladder. He dipped his brush into the paint. After eleven minutes, during which he had moved the ladder three times, she came to a small hole in the plaster.
“Do you have any spackle?” she said.
“Emmanuel has it in the bedroom. I'll get it for you.”
He descended, left the room, and returned with a can. As he started across the room, she could feel him hesitating. She stepped back, well out of his path, and pointed out the hole, to the left of the window. While he stood there, meticulously pressing spackle into the wall, it was all she could do not to fling her arms around him. She stared at his fair hair curling over the neck of his sweater. One thing he didn't do in America, she thought, was get a haircut.
He stepped back, still not looking at her. “I'll put it over here,” he said, “in case you find more holes.”
“Thank you.”
When he was safely back up the ladder and they had both resumed their painting, she said, “Growing up, one of my favorite stories was about a princess who's immune to gravity. If she isn't tied down, she keeps floating away and she finds everything funny. The only time she's like other people is when she goes swimming in the palace lake.”
“How can that be?” he said. “Gravity isn't something you can shut out, like weather or light.”
“I think it's a metaphor,” she said. “Emmanuel told me your parents had both been ill. I'm sorry.”
“My father had a heart attack and my mother found a lump in her breast, but they're better, mostly.”
She moved to the next stretch of wall and let the silence grow. If she waited, might he say something else? She fetched more paint and took the opportunity to go to the bathroom. He moved his ladder and continued his careful painting. Just as she was losing hope, he said, “A woman on the plane had a heart attack too.”
“That must have been awful.” She dipped the roller and spread the paint as high as she could reach. “Was she all right?”
“There was a nurse, Jill. We did CPR together; then she used a defibrillator. Everyone had to stand back and you could see the woman's body jump with the electricity, not like anything you could do on your own. But her heart started beating again.” He
paused to wipe away a smear. “It's what they used to do to people whose brains were out of order. Maybe she woke up feeling completely different. I need to paint the ceiling where you're standing.”
She stepped back while he moved the ladder into place; for just a second his blue eyes rested on her face. Oh, please, she thought. He turned back to his brush. “I'm not positive,” she said, “but I think the current they use in electric shock treatment is quite a lot less.”
“I hope so.”
 
 
As he was nearing the end of the ceiling, he looked down and saw that her tawny hair was flecked with white paint. He had a sudden piercing memory of what that hair had felt like beneath his hands: warm, thick, alive. Before he could apologize for spattering her, she glanced up. Their eyes—he'd never really understood the expression—met. Then she was saying something about lunch; she had brought sandwiches. Would he like to take a break? To his own amazement he said he would be ready in ten minutes. She went out into the hall and returned with a backpack, from which she proceeded to produce various bags and bottles. I can't sit down with her, he thought, share a meal. She'll get back inside my brain again, take over every room, and it will be just like before when she got inside me. She'll vanish on the outside.
He heard a thud and looked over to see her wrestling with a five-gallon bucket of paint: she was setting up a little dining area with buckets for seats and an empty box for a table. “Don't lift that,” he said, and jumped down to help.
She had brought smoked salmon sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, apples, and a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of water for each of them. He positioned his bucket as far away as he politely could.
“According to my pregnancy books,” she said, “my appetite ought to have stabilized by this stage but I still feel hungry all the time. Who owns this flat?”
This was the first time, he thought, he'd heard her mention Ms. F. He explained that they were working for a letting agent. She nodded, took another bite of her sandwich, and asked what he planned to do after lunch.
“The kitchen.”
Had the last few weeks been a mirage? Had he really endured first her long silence, then her increasingly shrill messages, then again her silence? And now here she was so calm and ample, talking about the differences between farm-raised and wild salmon. It was like his mother in the shop, one moment scolding him and the next praising the parsley. As she set her sandwich down to drink some juice, he saw that her knuckles were still faintly chapped. No wonder, given the cold in Boston. If he had been sitting closer, he would have touched the rough, red skin. Thank God, he wasn't.
They finished eating, she went to the bathroom, and he set up the drop cloths in the kitchen. The small square room reeked of neglect, but two days from now, freshly painted, with a new fridge and stove, it would be transformed. He started her off applying blue paint to the walls and got busy cleaning and masking the skirting boards.
“I'm sorry,” he said, kneeling in the corner, his face hidden, “I didn't answer your phone calls. It's not like me. But then going to America wasn't like me.”
“I am very sorry,” she said so slowly that it was almost as if she were spelling each word. “I'd like to tell you what happened, if you can bear it.”
She took a step to the left and ran the roller through the tray. He edged to the right, rinsing the sponge and wiping the next stretch of skirting board. He made his
hmm
sound and she took it for permission.
“It all has to do with my brother,” she began.
As they circled the small room, she told a story about deals and debts, her brother and two men called Nigel and George, and how she herself had done some shameful things. “Henry tricked me,” she said, “but it isn't all his fault. I behaved badly too.” He listened
as best he could, but some parts of the story were so bizarre and others eluded him altogether. The more she talked, the more her voice took on the colors he didn't like.
“I did try to stop you from coming to Boston but I was too late. Then I thought I'd be back from New York almost immediately but I had some kind of flu. I couldn't lift my head off the pillow. And I was worried about the baby being born in America. None of this excuses my behavior, but maybe you can understand a little better.”
But, but, but, he thought. He focused intently on a brown stain on the skirting board that refused to yield to his scrubbing. It turned out to be a knot in the wood. He moved on to the next stretch.
“Can you ever forgive me?” she said.
Eighty-two seconds elapsed. She rolled the paint up and down, up and down, the same stretch of wall. Finally, without raising his head or ceasing to scrub the skirting board, Zeke spoke.
“My mother is divorcing my father. She's met someone else. I thought the lump in her breast would make her change her mind, but it only seems to have made things worse. She keeps saying she doesn't have a minute to waste. People used to tell me that feelings changed and I was sure they didn't, not mine anyway. It turns out I was wrong.
“I don't really understand what you just said: why you left me, why you didn't phone. I know I have my shortcomings but I wouldn't have done that to you. I never want to feel again what I felt when that man in Boston handed me your letter. So maybe I could forgive you—I'm not even sure what that means—and we could be together, the three of us, for years and years, but I'd always be afraid that one day you'd nail your clothes to the floor and disappear again. Or take poison.”
She had been listening intently, hoping for a chink of light. Now—what did he mean about poison?—she prepared herself to answer, to swear she'd never, ever do anything like this again. But before she could speak, he rose to his feet and stood there looking at her across the small room.
“I would die if that happened,” he said. “And that's not a metaphor.” His eyes shone with unshed tears. “I think you'd better go.”
She had been prepared to plead, to promise anything and everything, but as she looked into his face, his eyes almost the same color as the paint she was applying, his high smooth forehead with the delicate veins visible in each temple, words left her. This was not an argument or a debate or even a romantic quarrel. This was another person speaking to her from deep within the country of the self, offering her his painful hard-won knowledge. What use to say that life is change? Her own eyes filled. She set down the roller and turned away.
 
 
Outside, unbelievably, the sun was shining. A calico cat lolled on the pavement. People were coming and going in the street, talking and carrying groceries and books and small children. Several of them stared at her, and she could imagine the spectacle she presented, bulging out of her now paint-smeared coveralls, her face red with the effort not to cry. She put her hand on her belly. Only a few more weeks and she would have someone of her own, someone who would never leave her, at least not for a decade or so. She was at the corner of the street, wondering which way to turn—she had come by taxi—when she remembered Jigger's book.
She stopped irresolutely. She could ask Emmanuel to collect it for her. No, she thought, if this was the end, she wanted it to be the end, however bitter, however heartbreaking. She would go back and ask Zeke to drop the book off at the radio station and there would never be anything between them again. They would each continue to live in this large city as if the other did not exist. She walked determinedly up the street. She hadn't, in her despair, bothered to pull the outside door shut. Now she found it still ajar, wedged on a flyer for a new tandoori restaurant.
In the gloom of the hall someone was coming down the stairs.
“Verona,” he said.
“I didn't come to bother you anymore,” she said, speaking as quickly as she could, not daring to raise her eyes. “I just want my grandfather's book back. Ariel, Mrs. Barrow, said you found it at their house. Could you drop it off at the radio station? Emmanuel knows where it is.”

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