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Authors: Margot Livesey

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BOOK: Banishing Verona
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Mrs. Patterson's cheeks filled with color as if someone had pumped dye into them. “What are you doing?” she said in a small voice. “You can't just barge in.”
“You can't just not pay your bills. Is there a problem? Something in the estimate Zeke failed to do?”
“William, William.”
“What is it, dear? I'm busy.”
Zeke had forgotten how much he hated that plummy schoolmaster's baritone. The rest of William, when he appeared at the top of the stairs, pen in hand, was equally obnoxious. Several of Zeke's lecturers at university had perfected this air of self-importance; whenever he dared to appear at their office hours, one glance had been enough to make him swallow his questions and scurry away. Halfway down the stairs, William's pace slowed. His gaze had fallen on Gwen.
“Mr. Patterson? I'm Zeke's mother. As you know, my son spent a week painting two of your bedrooms, including replacing one of the ceilings. The agreed work was done at the agreed time, but for some reason ever since you've been unable to find your checkbook.”
She had noticed, Zeke saw at once, the direction of Mr. Patterson's eyeballs. Her chest in its low-cut red top rose visibly, and she delivered her speech with cutting firmness. Bad boy, naughty boy.
“Delighted to meet you.” Mr. Patterson came forward with outstretched hand. “Ethel”—she could have been an entire form of fifth-year boys—“I'll take care of this.”
Ethel, not so sheeplike after all, held her ground. Her feet, clad in rather smart slippers, dug almost visibly into the wooden floor. Something to be learned here, Zeke noted. You may not have the gumption to rush into combat, but you can still prevent the other person from sweeping to victory. Her obstinacy was rewarded by a brief scowl from Mr. Patterson before he set to work on Gwen.
“I'm so sorry you've had this aggravation. We've had trouble in the past, tradesmen billing us twice. I'm afraid I thought your son was on the fiddle. It was only when I looked at our bank statement the other day that I realized he'd failed to cash the check.”
On the couple of occasions when Emmanuel had tried to collect unpaid bills, he'd gone in guns blazing; if that didn't work, nowhere to go but down. In contrast Zeke admired his mother's deployment of steely politeness and veiled threats and her acceptance of face-saving surrender. Within a matter of minutes she was graciously agreeing to take a check and allowing Mr. Patterson to stand quite close while he wrote it.
“So sorry,” he said, “for any inconvenience.”
Driving home, she was exuberant. “Sometimes I think if I had my life over again, I'd be a bailiff. I love that moment when people realize you're not going to disappear, that it's their money or their kneecaps. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do,” he said. Although he didn't share her enthusiasm, not a speck of it, he could see that Gwen had felt as if her skin fit perfectly while she chided the Pattersons. Which was just how he had felt with the Barrows' niece.
“Such an improvement,” said Mrs. Barrow, Ariel. Arms outspread, she jerked around in a circle like a mechanical ballerina before climbing onto the sofa, where her feet, Zeke could not help noticing, dangled childishly several inches above the floor. He'd read a book once about an emperor in Africa who had a servant whose only job was to place the appropriate pillow beneath his feet whenever he sat down. “I'm glad you suggested white for the moldings,” she added.
“And you were right about the lining paper,” said Gerald. “You wouldn't even know it was there.”
The room, with its bright rugs and immaculate walls, was almost unrecognizable. So too were its owners. Not just his usual failure, though. The Barrows really did look different, cheeks plumper, hair glossier, as if ten days of Latvian cuisine—smoked fish? dumplings?—had rejuvenated them. Gerald had even attempted a mustache, a flimsy fringe on his upper lip that surely had not been present a fortnight ago.
“We'll certainly get in touch the next time we need work done,” he said.
As he spoke, Gerald edged forward in his seat—a sign, Zeke
knew, that it was time for him, well paid, well praised, to depart. He shifted forward in his own seat. “About your niece,” he said, and heard his voice sag unconvincingly. “I borrowed a book of hers. I was wondering, can you give me her address to send it back?”
He had worked hard on the phrasing, searching for the tone that, in this matter of utmost urgency, would convey humdrum duty. Now on the faces of the Barrows, he watched his words produce an identical expression, one he couldn't begin to categorize.
“We don't have a niece,” Gerald said. “Neither of us.”
“Perhaps you misunderstood one of our neighbors,” said Ariel.
Really, thought Zeke, do I seem the kind of moron who doesn't know a neighbor from a niece? “Maybe,” he persisted, inching even closer to the edge of his seat, “she's not exactly a niece. A friend, the daughter of friends, someone you think of as a niece?”
In their presence he could see that she did not, remotely, resemble either of them. Certainly not Ariel, with her oddly pointed nose and chin and those leaf-colored eyes so deep-set that she seemed to be peering out at the world. As for Gerald, his features were so regular as to look almost artificial; only his awkwardly angled ears were authentic. What must Zeke say to jog their memories? For the billionth time he wished he could retrieve her first words on the doorstep, when surely she had said her name, but those had flown—indeed, never landed.
“Neither of us has a niece,” Gerald repeated. “No one calls us aunt or uncle.”
Zeke had worried they might try to fob him off, insist on returning the book themselves, go all prim and say we don't give the address of our beloved niece to strange men. That they would deny her very existence was bewildering. “She said you were expecting her,” he said, relishing, in spite of his distress, the secret meanings of the word.
“Expecting?” queried Ariel, heels drumming against the sofa.
Suddenly Gerald was no longer on the edge of his seat but
looming over Zeke. “Are you saying”—the mustache wriggled—“that you let this person into our house?”
Later Zeke would remember his first reaction: not dismay, not chagrin, but a shout of admiration. All along he had known there was something off about her, something not quite legitimate. A black sheep, he had assumed. An unmarried mother. That she was not the Barrows' niece, not even a friend or acquaintance, was fantastic.
Of course they pounced, spewing out questions, so agitated they barely heard his answers. He offered only the dull facts; how she'd arrived one afternoon, spent two nights and one day under their roof. He did not mention the five lightbulbs nor that they'd painted, eaten, lain together. “The next day,” he concluded, “I got here soon after eight and she was gone.”
“And you're sure you didn't know her?” they kept saying.
“Why would I be asking you,” Zeke said crossly, “if I did?”
Gerald began to flail around the room. He bumped into a chair, grazed a table. “So while we were away and you were decorating our living room, a young woman claiming to be related to us was staying here and had the run of our house?”
“Not especially young.” That was one of the things he had liked about her.
“This is completely weird,” said Ariel, her deep-set eyes darting from her husband to Zeke and back again. “What I don't understand is why you let her in? Surely you knew we'd have told you if anyone were coming.”
“People have relatives who show up out of the blue,” he protested. “I was trying to be helpful.”
Echoing his own earlier thoughts, Ariel asked if the woman took after either of them. He pretended to consider. “Not really. She said she was Gerald's side of the family. She was tall and she looked a little like Beethoven.” There, that would have to do. No Ms. F for them, no glimpse of how she swung across the room, or blew out her cheeks, or bit her nails, or went berserk cooking, or made a sound when they made love like a clock poised to strike the hour.
“Your side of the family, Gerald,” said Ariel. “That suggests various possibilities.”
Crikey, thought Zeke. A few drops of her anger spattered him as she drove, full steam ahead, toward her husband. But Gerald seemed unaware. “The police,” he announced, rocking the standard lamp. “We should call the police. This is breaking and entering.”
“I don't see how,” said Zeke. “Nothing was broken. And I asked her in.”
“Perhaps someone you know,” Ariel continued, bright and relentless as a plumber's snake. “One of your hangers-on, your groupies?”
But even as she spoke, Gerald was gone, pounding up the stairs. After a moment, Ariel slipped off the sofa and followed. Alone, Zeke stood up and, in an effort to calm himself, walked over to the bay window. He peered at one of the sills, checking his handiwork. Except for a small pucker in the paint where a fly had met its demise, the surface was immaculate. From overhead came the scuffle of footsteps—searching, he presumed, for clues—but nothing remained save the nail holes, which were once again hidden by a rug. The day she left, he had returned upstairs hour after hour, tiptoeing into the room as if the coveralls were alive and might, if properly approached, confide in him. But however quietly he moved, however patiently he waited, they said nothing. Finally, just before he packed up for the day, he had fetched his claw-head hammer and levered out the nails. He had put them in an envelope and tucked them, along with the coveralls, into a shopping bag that he set beside his bed. What had sustained him since then was the belief that the Barrows would tell him what the garment had failed to do. Now he fingered the fly's grave and grappled with the confounding turn of events.
Upstairs the Barrows' voices rose. Usually Zeke did his utmost to avoid eavesdropping. For years, during his parents' stormiest rows, he had covered his ears and recited the instructions for
school evacuation. Today, anxious not to miss a syllable, he hastened to the door.
“Maybe she's a friend of Seth's,” said Gerald.
“Maybe,” said Ariel, “she's the Empress of Siam.”
“You're being ridiculous. She could just as easily be one of your friends. In fact”—there was a loud thud—“she must know one of us. It's too many coincidences—our holiday, the painter being here—to be a total stranger.”
Doglike, Zeke shivered. What a dolt he was. Of course she knew the Barrows, though not as their niece. He wanted to run upstairs at once to offer a full description, but Ariel was still hurling gibes and Gerald was shouting, and interrupting either activity was unthinkable. He retreated to the living room and, carefully emptying the pockets, folded his jacket and laid it on the floor beside his chair. Then, he couldn't have said quite why, he walked over to the bay and slid open the side window. He was astride the sill, listening one last time to hear if the Barrows were calming down, when another bulb detonated. The room flashed to darkness.
 
 
Outside, forgetting about his van, he wandered from one gray city street to the next. The cold afternoon closed in around him. She was gone, vanished, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been when he rang the Barrows' bell an hour ago. The sidewalks, the passing cars, were filled with women, old, young, tall, short, fat, thin, black, white, but none of them were her. A police car drove sedately by and for a moment he thought of waving it down, but he could hear already the hopeless conversation. A woman, whose name he didn't know, had abruptly left a house she was visiting. So what? The coveralls and five nails were his only proof of her existence. There were machines, he knew, capable of identifying a person from a fleck of skin, a single hair, but how a civilian, not a scientist or a spy, got access to them he had no idea.
The exhilaration he had felt when he first grasped that she was not the Barrows' niece was entirely gone. How was he ever going to find her again?
Crossing yet another street without paying attention, he heard a horn and looked up to see a blue van, like the one Phil drove, swerving to avoid him. At once, for reasons stretching back over a decade, his old friend seemed like the perfect destination. Still studying every woman he passed, Zeke made his way through the side streets to Phil's house and was rewarded by a familiar figure answering the door almost immediately.
“Zeke, is something wrong? Is your dad okay?”
“Yes, it's me. Dad is terrible. How did—”
A sharp cry echoed down the hall and Phil was hurrying toward it. “Come in,” he called over his shoulder. “Close the door.”
One thing the two men had always shared was a habit of neatness. They put tools away, used masking tape and drop cloths, washed up meticulously. Once, after a particularly trying discussion with a customer, Phil had announced he was going home to clean the windows; Zeke had understood perfectly. Now the kitchen sink overflowed with dishes, the table and floor were strewn with toys and garments. Lying in a cot near the counter was the source of both cry and chaos: Brenda. Phil picked her up and began to walk back and forth. Zeke cleared a chair of clothes, dirty or clean he couldn't tell, and sat down. It was, he realized, almost exactly a year since the evening Phil had appeared at his door, standing very upright—a sure sign, in his case, of drunkenness—to announce that Mavis had said yes.
Yes to what? Zeke had asked.
Yes to getting hitched, tying the knot, marrying your humble friend. He swept his hand over his head and made a deep bow.
Zeke had felt his mouth open. For as long as they had known each other Phil had been courting Mavis. In winter they went dancing twice a week; in summer they shared a garden. Phil referred to her without irony, both in her presence and absence, as the love of his life. Whether Mavis, with her shapely arms and rippling
hair, reciprocated had never been clear. She did seem fond of Phil, but Zeke had met her several times in the company of other men. He was still adrift in amazement, each second taking him farther from the appropriate response, when Phil had straightened and—another of his tricks—was quite sober. You're thinking, he had said slowly, why would Mavis, who walks on air, settle for a chap like me.
I was, confessed Zeke.
Phil pulled out a chair, sat down, and placed his hands in his lap. Mavis is pregnant, he said. The three of us plan to live happily ever after.
So you do sleep together, Zeke thought. (He and Emmanuel had often debated the question.) And then immediately revised his thought: not necessarily.
Of course, Phil went on, this doesn't mean she'll settle down. Mavis can't help roaming, but I'll be the house she returns to, and if I choose to keep the door always open, whose business is it but mine?
Why Mavis, Zeke had wanted to say, when there are so many girls who would treat you well? He was torn four-square between envy, anger, exasperation, and bewilderment. Then, looking at Phil's straight back, his crisp jeans, his shining shoes, he recognized the truth: it was no one else's business. Belatedly, he had stepped around the table to embrace his old friend.
Now Brenda continued to cry at full volume, ignoring Phil's comic faces, his offer of a bottle, his soothing remarks. Then quite suddenly, as if a switch had turned, she stopped. Phil sat down. “It's not her fault,” he said. “Mavis has gone off and Brenda misses her.”
“How old is she?” said Zeke.
“Thirty-four.”
“I meant Brenda, actually.”
“Five months and eleven days.”
He was watching the baby, an expression on his face that Zeke had seen only once or twice before when Phil and Mavis were
working side by side in their garden. He ought to say something, something about Mavis and how he was sure she really did love Phil, but in fact he was sure of nothing. Instead, he stepped over to the sink. As he filled the dish rack, he talked about his father. “When I went round, I didn't even recognize him. I know for me that's not saying much, but everything about him was different: his voice, the way he held his head, his wrist bones. And he was angry in the worst way.”
BOOK: Banishing Verona
10.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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