Banishing Verona (6 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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“Poor sod,” said Phil, gently bouncing Brenda. “He was always so careful. I remember him at the pub, never having crisps or peanuts. Who's minding the shop?”
“My mother, but she can't manage alone.” He scrubbed a particularly stubborn smear of red. “I'm afraid that once I start working there, they'll never let me go.” He did not add his other, newly acquired fear. If he were stuck in the shop, how could he find the non-niece?
In the early days, when his parents had begged Phil to fire their son so that he would come back to the shop, Phil had staunchly refused. But this afternoon, still bouncing Brenda, he said, “I don't see what choice you have. Of course they'll want you to stay. You'll have to fight that battle later.” As if the matter were settled, he launched into an account of Brenda's accomplishments. She liked the swings at the park; her favorite song was “Brown-Eyed Girl”; she could suck her toes and her thumbs with equal ease.
Listening to this litany, Zeke found all his own aggravations transferred to his friend. At last he burst out, “But you can't let her do this.”
“Do what?” said Phil mildly.
“Saddle you with Brenda. It's not fair.”
Phil raised Brenda so that her face was on the same level as his. “I wouldn't change places with the richest man in New Zealand. Why did you come round? Is something wrong besides your father?”
For the first time since he rang the bell, Zeke had Phil's undivided attention, and for a few seconds, as he scoured a saucepan,
he couldn't think where to start. Then he began to explain, not about the Barrows and the niece but how, finally, he had met someone he cared for in the way Phil cared for Mavis, how he had lost her, and had to find her. Across the room he sensed Phil's startled satisfaction at his avowal and then, as the story unfolded, mild annoyance.
“Well,” said Phil, “people can't vanish. What does she look like?”
This time he wanted to answer but it was surprisingly hard. A woman, five foot nine or ten, springy hair in many shades of brown, a high forehead engraved with three lines, one broken, two continuous, eyes somewhere between green and brown, a nose like a rudder, ears hidden by aforementioned hair but receptive, broad hands with chapped knuckles. Her feet were bony and made Zeke think of the wings of birds. And her voice? Deep, warm, mellifluous. As for what he had seen when he removed her coveralls, the swell of her belly traced by the linea nigra, that was not to be spoken aloud, even to his old friend.
Phil listened patiently and shook his head. “I can't say she sounds like anyone I know. She said she'd be in touch. Maybe all you can do is wait. Would you like to hold Brenda?”
Zeke was about to say something grumpy—waiting worked for you but you knew who Mavis was—but he saw that Phil was offering the most precious remedy he had. He dried his hands and reached for Brenda. Embracing her soft, warm weight, he did feel slightly better.
 
 
He arrived home to find his street jammed with cars. He had to circle twice before he squeezed the van in round the corner. As he walked back toward the house, the noise of riotous pleasure intensified with every step; someone was giving a party. He was just sparing a moment from his own troubles to sympathize with whoever had to endure this havoc at close quarters—and on a Sunday—when, reaching his front door, he discovered that person to
be himself. The party had spilled out of the downstairs flat into the common hallway, and Zeke had to fight his way past the revelers. On the stairs, two slender youths were urging a plump woman to chug a beer; all three were clad, minimally, in sheets.
His own flat provided the barest illusion of safety. The floor throbbed. The stove rattled. Not even the loudest of his clocks could be heard. He sat in the kitchen, miserably giving himself over to the vibrations. When he left home that afternoon, he had expected to be in her company by nightfall, at least to have a name and address. Now he was back again, and he knew only who she wasn't. For a few evil seconds the notion that he might never see her again raced through his brain. He leaped to his feet and seized a notebook he'd used for estimates last spring. On an empty page, he began a halting list.
1.
Search the city.
Suppose he could do two hundred houses a day. And suppose there were three million houses in London. That made a mere fifteen thousand days of going door-to-door. By which time he'd be close to eighty and Ms. F would have children of her own.
2.
Watch maternity wards.
More feasible, but even for those he would have to subcontract. Perhaps he could hire homeless men to work in shifts. Or maybe those Irish girls who begged with their babies in the underground. Emmanuel swore they fed the children cough syrup to keep them quiet.
3.
Find her brother.
Now why would he think of that? As far as he could recall, she had only mentioned him once. And the brother too was nameless. He was about to score out this suggestion but, as he raised his pen, the memory of how she'd frowned stayed his hand.
4.
Put up posters.
He could follow the example of people who mislaid pets or bicycles: put up notices on lampposts giving a description and offering
a reward. MISSING WOMAN: tall, white, pregnant, last seen wearing nothing. If only he could draw. She was so vivid inside his head, and yet he was utterly unable to convey her to anyone else.
 
He couldn't think of a number five. In his agitation, he rose from the table and went over to the window. This was an impossible list, the labors of Hercules with no goddess to lend a hand. That night in the Barrows' living room, while the fire burned and their plates emptied, they had talked about whether a person could ever disappear. People used to be able to, she had said, but not anymore. Everyone is in a computer, even the homeless. That's not true, he had argued. When I couldn't leave my house no one noticed for a week. People don't care about their neighbors, at least not in London.
Below, in the light from the streetlamp, several partygoers were holding cigarettes and cans of beer. “I hope I'm wrong,” Zeke said, “and you're right.” The words misted against the glass. Then he recalled his jacket lying on the floor. The Barrows were still the only key he had to finding her, though so much harder to turn than he'd imagined. Gerald was too irascible, but Ariel, if he could just get the appropriate pillow under her feet, might be more forthcoming.
Someone was knocking at his door. “Coming,” he shouted, and rushed to answer.
The plump girl, her sheet even more precarious, looked at him wild-eyed. “I'm going to be sick,” she said, and, before Zeke could intervene, promptly fulfilled her prediction.
“Long John Silver. Say Long John Silver.”
Zeke had let himself into the house as stealthily as a teenager. Now he lingered beside the coatrack, trying to place his father's words in the appropriate Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Pirates of Penzance
perhaps? Or
H.M.S. Pinafore
? Then he remembered the parrot. He walked briskly down the hall and, knocking once, stepped into the living room. Neither his father in his armchair nor the parrot in its cage looked up as he came in.
“Good bird,” said Don. “Say Long John Silver.”
The parrot squawked and raised a claw to its beak with a dexterity that reminded Zeke of Brenda. Standing a few feet away, he felt an emotion that it took him several seconds to identify: not pleasure in his father's improvement, not satisfaction at having for once chosen the right gift, but envy. All his life he had been disappointing his father—one might even call it his main occupation—and here was this antediluvian bunch of feathers, in a matter of days, securely lodged in his affections. As the exchange continued, he registered that, barring the bandage on his neck, Don, clean-shaven, clear-eyed, was looking markedly better than he had on Saturday; indeed, better than in several months. His cheeks
no longer had a purplish tinge, and even his hair seemed to have regained its color.
“What are you doing here?” he said, at last acknowledging Zeke's presence. “Shouldn't you be messing around with a paintbrush?”
“Dad,” he pleaded, “it's five-thirty. I've finished for the day. How are you feeling? Is there anything I can get for you?”
“The doctor prescribes a walk every day.” Don patted his thighs as if to encourage them. “Next week he wants me to start going to a gym. I told him it was nuts, me trotting around like a hamster on a treadmill with all the work at the shop, but he insists. Sit down.”
Zeke did, in the chair nearest the door. “I saw Phil the other day,” he offered. “Brenda is five months old.”
“And you,” said his father, turning his knees, his chest, his chin toward Zeke, “are twenty-nine, and for most of those years your mother and I have taken care of you. We helped you go to university, we took you in when you were ill. We've done our honest best for a quarter of a century and how do you repay us?”
If only the parrot would speak, if only the phone would ring.
“Do you have a problem with my arithmetic?”
Zeke managed to move his head from side to side.
“I'll be blunt with you,” Don continued, eyeing him unwaveringly. “We need you. We need you to work in the shop, even if it's only half days at first. Gwen does a super job, but she can't manage alone. You know the hours, you know how much heavy lifting there is. When can you start?”
Every part of him felt squeezed. He appreciated, absolutely, the justice of his father's calculations. But if he were in the shop twelve hours a day, how could he hope to find her? “Soon,” he said. “When I finish this kitchen.”
“Soon,” repeated his father, as if it were a swearword. “This loony stuff can only take you so far. You know, one of your doctors suggested it was a way of hiding from us. Well, that's not going to work any longer. I nearly died, and if you can't help now
we'll follow your example. You ignore a quarter century of affection and we will too. Our house will be closed to you. And—I can't say this more clearly—you will no longer be our son.” He looked at Zeke for one final moment and turned back to the parrot. “Say good morning,” he said.
How long he stayed in that chair, how he left the room and made his way home, Zeke would never know. The one thing he could have sworn to, on the pendulum of his grandfather clock, was that his father neither looked at him nor spoke to him again. This is the future, he was saying; this is what you're asking for.
 
 
Even before Ariel opened her mouth, Zeke recognized that he was in the presence of someone having a difficult day. He had decided not to phone ahead but had driven over in his lunch hour, hoping for the best, and here she was, standing in the doorway, blinking. Her hair was flattened on one side as if she had been lying down, her sweatshirt had a large stain on the sleeve, and the fly of her jeans was an inch short of closed. Normally he would have backed away from such disorder, fearing contagion; today he hoped it might make her an ally.
“Hello,” he said. “I'm Zeke Cafarelli, your painter.” Always wise to assume that other people shared his difficulties. “I'm sorry to disturb you, but I think I left my jacket here on Sunday.”
Ariel's deep-set eyes receded still farther. Really, she was almost too small to be an adult. “I haven't seen it,” she said.
For a moment he didn't know what to say. “I remember,” he insisted truthfully, “taking it off in your living room.”
“I'm sure I'd have noticed a strange jacket in my own home. Well, maybe not.”
“Please, could I take a look? Perhaps you thought it belonged to Gerald.”
Ariel stepped back and headed toward the kitchen. After a brief hesitation—surely she did not expect him to check the living room by himself?—Zeke followed. Waiting for the Barrows' return,
he had managed, just barely, to keep his anxieties at bay. Now, entering this room where everything, except for the pile of papers on the table, looked the same, whatever tiny layer of fortitude he had developed shattered. He longed to throw himself on the floor and beg for Ariel's help. One glance at her untidy person, however, was sufficient to make him sit down and continue to apologize. “I'm sorry about the other day,” he said. “I couldn't seem to stop putting my foot in my mouth.”
“None of us were at our best. You can imagine the shock. Coming back from a trip to discover that some—” She paused and Zeke kept his face very still, fending off the insults he could feel her longing to hurl at the non-niece. “Some stranger,” she concluded, “has been staying in your house.”
“But”—he repeated her husband's speculations—“how would a stranger know that you were away and I was working here? She brought two suitcases.”
“Suitcases?”
Too late he realized what these might suggest. “For her clothes,” he explained. “That was another reason I never doubted she was a friend.”
“Gerald thinks that too.” She sat straighter, and Zeke recognized a not unfamiliar moment—himself coming into focus—and with it the danger of Ariel, for all her self-absorption, detecting his true motives. He looked back, trying to keep his features calm and pleasant. “Did you hide the stuff, the water and biscuits, under the desk?” she said.
“Yes.”
He could see the syllable making its way through the corridors of her brain. Would she ask why? The possibility of their being allies once again opened before him. But she didn't, and they weren't.
“I can't tell you,” she said, stressing the verb, not the pronouns, “how strange all this is. A few years ago, at Whitsun, we were burgled. They only took the CD player and the VCR, but my shoes were all over the floor and I had the same awful feeling of
people knowing things about me, even stupid things like my shoe size, and of me knowing nothing about them. Still, at least that made sense. Whereas this woman …”
“I think she just needed a place to stay.” He was about to add that she hadn't seemed that interested in Ariel, or Gerald either, but maybe that would be insulting. “I have to find her,” he said simply. “I hoped you would help.”
He began to describe her, trying, as he had with Phil, to capture some part of her in words until Ariel held up her hands. “Please,” she said. “Perhaps I'm crazy, but I can't get it out of my head that she's connected with Gerald.”
“Do you think”—Zeke reached out to straighten the four pencils lying on the table—“he'd tell me where she is?”
“Tell you?” Ariel stood up, although given her size it made little difference.
“Sometimes people talk to me,” he said, “because I'm different.”
“I can see that.” Ariel nodded. “You also—forgive me for being personal—have the face of a Raphael angel.”
Zeke nodded back. Women had made this comment before, though with different artists: Donatello, Leonardo, Botticelli. What they meant was that he had fair skin, blue eyes, hair that approximated the color of lemons, and a full mouth. His misfortune, mostly. At school and in the shop, girls had followed him, and later at university a girl called Rhea had sat outside his room, wrapped in a blanket, for a whole unnerving month. Nothing to do with him, just some notion she had because of the incidental conjunction of flesh and bone.
“You'd better go,” said Ariel. “If you do find out anything, please don't tell me. I used to believe knowledge was power. But sometimes it's exactly the opposite, plus all the pain.”
Thank goodness, thought Zeke, I didn't tell her about Ms. F. “I think,” he said carefully, “when we find this woman, she will turn out to have nothing to do with your husband, at least not in that
way. And I think—forgive me, I hardly know you—that you might like her.”
“Spare me.” Ariel's sharp features grew still sharper. “If you want to find Gerald, try the French Bar in Soho. He usually drops in after work, or whatever it is he does all day.”
Zeke stood up. Before he could move, she circled the table and put her arms around him. “Poor Ariel,” he whispered, and took the opportunity to rearrange her hair. It did not seem appropriate to mention his jacket again; just as well he had emptied the pockets.
 
 
As he worked on the traveling clock that evening—it had gained thirteen minutes since his mother's visit—Zeke felt as if two large figures were standing on either side of him, tugging. To his left was the non-niece whom he needed, desperately, to find. To his right was his father, who had left four messages and who now preferred a parrot to his son. How could he choose between them? But as he puffed compressed air into the tightly coiled movement, he decided that tomorrow, come what may, he must go to the shop. He bowed to the shadowy figure of his father and, at least for the present, his father bowed back and released his hold. And in the evening—he turned to the non-niece—he would visit Soho and find Mr. Barrow. She too retreated, smiling.
The next morning, shortly before seven, he was out of bed and driving toward the shop. As a teenager he had risen even earlier than this to accompany his father to market. He remembered the shock of entering the brightly lit warehouse after the dark streets, the aisles already crowded with vendors calling their wares: freshly picked mushrooms from Kent, Guernsey tomatoes, apples from New Zealand, oranges and avocados from Spain, beans from Kenya. At that age almost everything Zeke knew about the world came from fruits and vegetables.
When he pulled into the parking space at the back of the shop,
his mother's car was already there. She answered the door, mouth open, eyebrows arched. “Oh, it's you. What are you doing here?”
“I came to help.” Wasn't that obvious? “The tiles for the chef's kitchen aren't in yet.”
Her eyebrows dropped. “Well,” she said, “your timing couldn't be better. Kevin has a dreadful cold. I had to send him home.”
Like Phil's kitchen, the shop was in a state he had never seen before, even after the busiest Saturday. The newly purchased produce lay, haphazardly, in the middle of the floor and the floor itself was filthy; worst of all, the bins of fruits and vegetables—his father's pride and joy—were half empty, their contents shriveled, sprouting, sinister. One rotten apple, Don used to say, can lose you a dozen sales. Taking all this in, Zeke understood again the truth of his father's claim that he had almost died. He counted grapefruit as fast as he could until his mother said, “Let's put this stuff away.”
After he'd carried the produce into the cooler and swept the floor, he fetched a rubbish bag and started to go through the vegetables. Sometimes leeks could be saved by peeling off the slimy outer layers, ditto celery and cabbage, but no time for that kind of fiddling today. On the other side of the shop, Gwen was working on the fruit. Her hands moved with their customary speed and her dark trousers and blue sweater were familiar, but something was different. Was he just being his usual obtuse self, Zeke wondered, taking in the set of her shoulders, the curve of her jaw. As they converged on the salad, he figured out what the change was: his mother was not wearing makeup. The effect was the opposite of natural. Put on some foundation, he wanted to say. Where's your eyeliner? But neither of them interrupted the radio until everything was ready, the door of the shop unlocked, the awning unfurled, and the crates of apples and oranges stacked on the table in front.
Then Gwen made second cups of tea. “I don't know what happened when you came round the other day,” she said, “but Don's been in a foul mood ever since.”
Zeke watched the cars in the street outside speeding back and forth, like a separate species. “He's ill,” he said.

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