Banishing Verona (11 page)

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Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Banishing Verona
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Coward, she thought, crybaby, telltale. With each childish epithet she hurled in Toby's direction, another burst of wailing rose from the garden. Then came a series of oaths followed by the thud of something—a brick, a book—hitting a wall. In the abrupt silence her anger vanished. She remembered how she had felt when she caught sight of the men on her sofa. Terrified didn't begin to describe it.
She let the fax fall to the floor and turned out the light. Again she thought about going to the police. But as she pictured herself talking to some well-meaning sergeant and Henry behind bars, her heart began to race. What could the police do for her and Toby, besides urge them to phone the moment the men reappeared? Round-the-clock bodyguards seemed unlikely.
She thought back to her last meeting with Henry. He had suggested an expensive restaurant overlooking the Thames. At the time she'd assumed he was trying to make amends for their previous encounter, shortly before Christmas, when her refusal, yet again, to name the baby's father had driven him to bribery, increasingly wild guesses, and finally anger. Verona, he'd exhorted, you're my only living family member and you're about to produce my second living family member. I think I have a right to know who I'm going to be related to. He had stalked out of the pub and driven off, gunning the engine by way of rebuke.
She had arrived at the restaurant first and been shown to a table by the window. She had sat, watching the barges and boats come and go, until someone hugged her and she smelled Henry's current cologne. Once, during those early years when she and Toby
used to talk endlessly about relationships, he had remarked that Henry was beautiful. Beautiful, she had said. You are besotted. But some facts about her brother were indisputable. He was tall but not awkward about his height like she was, and he chose his clothes with care and wore them well. His ears lay neatly against his close-cropped brown hair. His nose was smaller than hers, though only slightly, and, after he broke it—a car accident, he said on one occasion, a tennis ball on another—a little askew. His eyes were darker than hers, the color of roasted almonds, and only in full sunlight were the green flecks they shared apparent. His most striking feature, as Toby had pointed out, was the groove that ran from his nostrils to his upper lip. Like that pre-Raphaelite model, Toby had said. You know, the one with the mass of hair and a permanent pout. How typical of Henry, Verona had thought, that his best feature has no name.
He had enacted the little drama of arrival, for her, the maitre d', and the customers at nearby tables; he made a teasing comment about how radiant she looked, apologized for being late, complained about the traffic, and took his seat. Then there was the turning off of the pager and the mobile phone, a ritual which, even now that these accessories were commonplace, Henry performed in a way that simultaneously feigned modesty and signaled importance. See how I neglect even the most urgent summons for your company. Sometimes Verona found this fuss infuriating, but that evening she had watched with amused tolerance as he pressed various buttons and slipped the machines into the pockets of his jacket, one in each, so as not to spoil the cut. A significant pleasure of pregnancy was that, week by week, she grew less vulnerable to Henry's machinations.
But now, as a car rattled by in the street outside, she remembered herself saying, What's wrong? Is something the matter?
Bad day, he had said. I had one bolshie client after another.
His hands, however, had belied his casual words. Like his ears, they were small and neat; if in some party game they had been the only visible part of him one would have guessed them to belong
to a man of much shorter stature, or possibly a woman. They were also the only part of himself that he seemed to forget about. He had sat back in his chair, the picture of good-humored, relaxed attention, and all the while his fingers were testing the blade of the knife, raking the tablecloth with his fork, twitching from plate to napkin to salt dish. He didn't mention the baby except, obliquely, when instead of ordering a bottle of wine he said he'd just have a glass. They had talked about a friend who had finally got a part in a West End play and Henry's new espresso machine, which had arrived from Perugia.
The waiter brought their starters. While she ate her mushroom soup, Henry picked and chose among his whitebait as if some of the small fish were more worthy of being eaten than others. When the plate contained only a few rejects, he excused himself. This too was traditional. After ostentatiously turning off his phone, Henry could seldom get through an hour without looking for messages. Once again she watched the river. Just as she was about to send a waiter to check on him, he reappeared.
Sorry, he said. I've got a lot going on right now.
For years Henry had talked in terms of property deals, each larger and more profitable than its predecessor. Even in the best of circumstances she might not have listened closely to his account of the current one, but just as the waiter brought their entrées and Henry began to speak, a boat rigged with hundreds of tiny white lights sailed into view. All her attention was momentarily captured by this enchanting spectacle. When she turned back to the table, Henry was finishing his explanation.
Everything was in place, he said, taking a mouthful of lamb, the financing, the owners, the buyers. The only problem was we hadn't done our homework.
Looking at his glittering eyes, his ears, which had turned scarlet, she wondered if he had used his trip to the bathroom for other activities besides checking messages. But before she could say anything, he had asked a question of his own.
What's the first thing you remember?
At the time she hadn't thought twice about the abrupt change of topic. The two of them shared a taste for sweeping questions: who's the most interesting person you've met in the last year? What was the worst advertising slogan? I remember, she said, being stuck up a tree. I remember a dress I loved with blue bows. I remember peeling the pebbles off our pebble-dashed house. I remember holding you for the first time and Mum telling me to be careful of your brains. What about you?
The first thing I remember, the very first, is a pillow against my face.
You mean you were sleeping the wrong way?
No, Mum was holding a pillow over my face. It happened more than once. He ate the last mouthful of lamb and mopped his plate.
That's … A black hole had opened in her vocabulary. She set down her knife and fork and clenched her fists. Mum would never have done that. Besides, you can't possibly remember that far back.
Wouldn't she? He gave a small, bitter smile. Come on, Verona. You know how my crying drove her mad.
You're saying she tried to kill you?
Well, she probably didn't think of it like that. It would have been a crib death, one of those unfortunate accidents. Coffee, please, he added to the waiter who was clearing their plates. Black.
Now Verona pulled the duvet higher and remembered how, unable to look at Henry, she had stared at the snowy tablecloth. The idea of her mother trying to squeeze the life out of Henry, of Henry waving his puny limbs, was horrifying. Have you ever told me this before? she asked.
No, I'm telling you now. But I've always wondered if you knew. Sometimes you would look after me. I used to think you did it to protect me. And the woman who baby-sat, I'm pretty sure she knew that Mum was off her trolley.
The waiter set down the coffee and Henry asked for a brandy. Here, he said when it came. Have a sip. You look like you've seen a ghost.
He had given her a lift as far as the underground at Green Park.
Their good-byes had been hurried by the traffic, an awkward kiss, a promise to talk soon. She had climbed out of the car, and a moment later she could no longer be sure which among the many rear lights were his. The next day she had discussed the conversation with Lyndsay, who, before Tom, had once gone out with Henry for six weeks and who still regarded herself as an expert on him. Of course he can't remember that far back, she had insisted. He probably saw a TV program about crib deaths and decided it would make a nice addition to his autobiography. At the time Verona had agreed: Henry was dramatizing, as usual.
But gazing at the shadowy ceiling, the conviction swept over her that he had been telling the truth: their mother, nervous, shrill, alternating between periods of furious activity and profound lethargy, had at least once, perhaps often, tried to kill him. Maybe, she thought, that was when it all started: the belief that his ends justified almost any means.
She struggled to recall whether he had said anything else. She pictured his hands motionless on the table, his ears still flushed, the fairy-tale boat disappearing down the river toward Gravesend, but no more words came to mind. What if those ambiguous taillights were the last she saw of him? Don't be absurd, she told herself. Just because he had gone away without telling her or Toby, there was no reason to presume disaster. She couldn't count the number of times she had left a phone message, only to have him ring back three or four days later with the news that he had been, or sometimes still was, abroad. Why shouldn't he be in Normandy, as the receptionist claimed? Several friends had houses there. All I need to do, she thought, is find out where he is and tell him that two men are threatening Toby and me, and life can return to normal. On that optimistic note, sleep once more overtook her.
 
 
She was awoken, this time unmistakably, by the ringing of the phone. She reached the study as the fax machine disgorged its sheet of paper.
Verona,
For reasons I can't explain now I've made you a reservation at the Heathrow Hilton. Go there asap and I'll join you. Sorry to be so cloak-and-dagger.
XXO Toby
In the midst of her confusion one clear thought surfaced: she must leave before Zeke returned. He must not be implicated in this mess. She bathed, dressed, carried her suitcases downstairs, and, standing in the kitchen, forced herself to eat a slice of toast and drink a cup of tea. The minicab company promised to have a car there in fifteen minutes.
At the kitchen table she tried to compose a letter to Zeke, but everything that came to mind seemed either too much or too little. Finally she wrote
Thursday, 7 A.M. Thanks for everything. I'll be in touch soon.
She glared at the paltry words, thought to amend them, thought to score them out. Instead she seized a hammer and nails from the toolbox in the living room. Upstairs, she rolled up the rug at the foot of the bed. Then she spread out the coveralls she had worn the day before and and nailed them at the collar, the sleeves, the ankles. No way he could think that this gesture was an accident, part of her careless housekeeping. And perhaps he would understand what she was trying to tell him: that what had happened here was as important as the events at any crime scene.
This account of my life is for my granddaughter, Verona MacIntyre.
I was born in the town of Kendal in the Lake District in 1898. After several pregnancies that ended badly—one small stone in the churchyard, others too brief even for that—my mother was threatened with dire repercussions for any further attempt. She persisted, for which, I suppose, I ought to be grateful. In the heat of argument she would sometimes remind me of the act of heroism to which I owed my existence; of course it might equally be attributed to another kind of act on my father's part. I was christened Edmund Alfred MacIntyre and, for reasons that remain obscure, known as Jigger.
My father, Henry, was the first incumbent of a small parish a few miles north of Kendal. Until his marriage, he had been the bishop's golden boy, destined to rise to dizzy heights in the diocese. But the day before he was due to walk down the aisle, a deacon took him aside and intimated that advancement was now unlikely. As my mother, Susannah, said, “Those prigs.” She had wanted to be an actress, and well into middle age she retained the
appearance and mannerisms associated with such ambition. She chain-smoked, she wore a swirling blue velvet cloak, and she was seldom seen without her hairpiece, a hank of vivid orange hair that clipped on behind her own fringe to form an unconvincing bun. Sometimes, when I was poorly, she let me play with it.
Almost every day, hail or shine, my mother went out visiting in the parish and talked to whoever she met, old and young, well-to-do and hard up, asking after them and their families and making extravagant claims and promises. I will die if we do not go to Blackpool this Easter. Nothing could be better than haddock for lunch. I detest Jane Austen. Everyone in the parish made fun of her, and everyone adored her. My father stood happily in her shadow, the pergola to her honeysuckle; marriage was his one great adventure. He was a scholarly man, who read both Greek and Latin for pleasure, and he supplemented the meagre living by preparing boys for school or university. In conversation he was witty and droll, but his sermons were uniformly dull. As I got older, I would urge him to liven things up. On the few occasions when he tried, the congregation coughed and fidgeted, vexed at the unexpected interruption of their Sunday nap.
Both the church and the vicarage had been built by the parishioners. To compensate for the pitiful salary, they had chosen a beautiful situation on top of a small hill with a view thirty miles down the valley; to the north the bare hills rose toward the Scottish border. During my childhood I explored most of this wild countryside, as far as I could walk in a day, often in the company of one of my father's private pupils. The most memorable of these was a Tibetan prince whom we called Tiger. How Tiger made his way from a palace in Lhasa to the Lake District, I never understood. He had skin the colour of our local honey and eyelashes so long that my mother claimed to envy them; he wore scarlet robes. I taught him to swim, to tie knots, and to recognise birds. In exchange he taught me the courtesies of his language, how to start a fire without matches, how to walk through a flock of sheep so quietly they didn't pause in their grazing. He lived
with us for nearly two years. A year after he returned to Tibet a letter brought the news that his throat had been cut in a palace uprising.
I had never seen my mother so upset. “I don't understand,” she kept saying. “A boy who wouldn't hurt a fly. Why would anyone want to kill him?”
The part about the flies was literal. I shared a room with Tiger, and all summer long he ushered the bluebottles out of the open window rather than letting me swat them. As for my mother's question, we were all about to start asking variations of that.
I attended the local grammar school and in 1916 did what most boys my age were doing: enlisted. That was my real education, the war and the men in my company. Many of them could barely read or write, and I became their scribe. You can imagine these soldiers in their twenties, a few in their thirties, writing to their wives and sweethearts and mothers, courtesy of an eighteen-year-old brat. There was one corporal, Ralph, whose letters were so dull I couldn't stand it.
Dear Eliza,
he would dictate.
How are you? I hope your cold is better. I am still all right. Thank you for the socks. Love, Ralph.
After the first few, I gave him the advice I'd given my father. He squirmed and said he was rotten at that kind of thing but if I had suggestions, go ahead. So I cut loose, wrote about the countryside, the food, the Romanesque churches. We weren't allowed to comment on the war. The next letter from Eliza had a postscript.
Forgive me for remarking, but the last letter didn't sound like Ralph. Keep up the good work.
It was signed
JS
.
Of course, Eliza too was using an intermediary. From then on, JS and I continued to embellish the letters and to include postscripts to each other. After a couple of months I asked if I could write to her separately. The reply contained an extra page:
Dear Jigger, I'd be glad to correspond. I live down the street from Eliza and I'm going to be eighteen this summer, so if the war keeps up, I'll be joining you in France soon.
I was too embarrassed to admit that I'd been seeking female
company. Odd what the imagination can do. I'd turned JS into a lovely young woman who shared my interests in nature and books. All those things were true, except the gender. When I asked Ralph if I could check something in one of the letters (he kept them under his pillow) and reread them, I realised that there had never been a hint of femininity. I had invented everything, out of loneliness.
But embarrassment had its rewards. Next time I was home on leave, JS took the train from Streatham into Charing Cross and we met at a tearoom. I have no feelings that way, but he was one of the most beautiful boys I've ever laid eyes on, slender, upright with a bright, open face. In the street, both women and men turned to look at him. At first our conversation was awkward and stilted. He asked about my journey; I mentioned a concert I'd attended; he said something about a novel. Then he asked about France. “I can't imagine”—his voice fell to a whisper—“killing a man. Maybe in the dark, maybe with my eyes closed, but if I can see a man's face—”
I drank my tea and thought of the scenes I'd witnessed, and of some I'd taken part in. I couldn't imagine them either. After the first month in France I had decided not to keep count of anything. “You could become a conscientious objector,” I told him.
His face reddened as if I'd slapped him. “I don't have the guts,” he said. “When you see how they're treated … . And my parents, they dread me going, I'm an only child, but my staying would shame them past bearing. Everyone on our street has gone.”
I wanted to protest—they'd rather see you dead or maimed than have the neighbours gossip?—but my parents would have failed the same test. Winter after winter my mother cautioned me to dress warmly and not to venture onto the frozen lakes; in summer similar rules applied to swimming and the farmer's old mare. But when I came home to announce that I'd enlisted, she flourished a pair of needles and said she was already knitting me a scarf to take to France. “What about driving an ambulance?” I suggested.
JS's face brightened and he said he'd investigate. Then he reached into his satchel and shyly handed me a brown paper parcel: Housman's
A Shropshire Lad.
On the flyleaf he had written:
For Jigger, with admiration and affection. In the hope of many years of friendship.
“I hope you like it,” he said, smiling earnestly.
For an odd moment I felt like crying.
Now here's the funny part of the story. JS did join an ambulance team and came to France. Our paths crossed several times, and each time he was more altered. No one could have survived over there the way he was, quivering like a blade of grass with every passing word, but JS changed out of all recognition. My recommendation had been meant to spare him; I had had no idea of the terrible choices he would face. Once when we met, he'd just lost a dozen wounded men because the pipe they'd led from the exhaust through the van to heat it had leaked. “But if we hadn't done that,” he said, “ninety percent of them would have died of cold and shock. Hobson's choice.”
I told him about Albert, a man in my company who had shot himself in the foot. “Cleaning my gun, sir,” he had said, when I asked how it happened. His eyes were blue as the sky above Lake Windermere. “Bad luck,” I said. The official line on self-inflicted injuries, Blighty wounds as they were called, was severe. Unofficially I couldn't help admire a man who would hurt himself in order to get sent home. Several hours later, I watched the stretcher bearers carry Albert away down the trench, the first stage of his long journey.
“And then last week,” I said to JS, “a letter came from his widow.” The foot had turned septic and he had died in the local hospital. She was beside herself. He had been determined to go home not out of cowardice but because he'd got it into his head that she was carrying on with a local blacksmith.
I never looked at another man,
she wrote,
but nothing I said made a difference. Something or someone had poisoned his thoughts about me.
A year earlier, even six months, JS would have cried out against the waste, the irony. Now he drummed his fingers on the table. “At least she can get cracking with the blacksmith,” he said.
“Why do you stay?” I asked.
“Because (a) I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot and (b) what would I do at home? Read the obituaries in
The Times?
Dig for victory?” Then he looked me full in the face, which was something he hadn't done in months. “Why didn't you tell me?” he said.
“Tell you what?” I said, though I'd been waiting for the question ever since he came over.
“What it was like here. What
we
were like here.”
Our combined ages—he was eighteen, I was nearly twenty—were less than half my present age. We were talking by candlelight in my dugout while the rain fell outside, and our talk was treason, or close to it. The rather good merlot in our glasses had been given to JS by a farmer in exchange for splinting his son's wrist. I started to stammer out an apology, and he laughed.
“Don't,” he said. “You couldn't have told me, even if you'd tried. You know it's two years, almost to the day, since Edith Cavell was shot. One of the men in my corps worked in her hospital in Brussels.”
He raised his glass. “To Edith, who didn't change.” He tipped his head back and drank until the glass was empty. “Did I mention the farmer's daughter,” he said, “as sweet a piece of crumpet as ever I squeezed? She made such a racket, I had to put my hand over her mouth.” He winked, and I turned away.
 
 
Two years later I was in my room at Clare College, Cambridge, struggling with a translation of Pliny, when the porter brought a rather grubby envelope to my door. Ralph, bless his heart, had found someone to write to me. Three days earlier, JS's body had washed up at low tide in the Thames. “His dad says he slipped, but down the pub the word is he jumped from the Battersea Bridge. His pockets were full of stones.”
After the war the two of us had grown even farther apart. I was living the snug life of an undergraduate—one of my father's parishioners, who had lost a son at Ypres, was paying for my studies—and JS was drifting round London, trying his hand at journalism. Our occasional meetings, usually in a drab pub near his current digs, were a disappointment, I think, to both of us. Eventually, as he moved from one rented room to another, we fell out of touch.
But those wretched evenings in some smoky room, those weren't what I thought of when I read Ralph's letter. Instead, I recalled the tender openhearted boy who had bought me a book of poetry and begged me to save him. And then I remembered his remark about the farmer's daughter. Perhaps, unbeknown to himself, JS had left behind a son or daughter with the same bright, curious gaze.
 
 
The week after Armistice I met a man who changed my life. The regiment had a couple of days' leave in Paris while they organised transport. The weather was seasonal, cold and damp, and there wasn't much to do except go to cafés and try to keep warm. One drizzly afternoon a friend and I found ourselves sitting at a table with two men from another regiment. My pal and the older of the two discovered a liking for dominoes; I fell into conversation with the other. “Charles Howatson,” he said. He proffered a bottle of Calvados and began to talk about how he'd been trying to find someone to rent him a bicycle so he could visit Versailles. “It seems daft to be this close and not see the Hall of Mirrors.”
A few minutes earlier, when I first laid eyes on Charles's pudgy red face, I had thought, now here's a dim bulb. For years afterward, I was to have the pleasure of watching other people make the same mistake. Sometimes Charles encouraged them; he was canny about the advantage his unprepossessing looks gave him. He kept talking about how the war had changed everything, how people wouldn't be content any longer to work and die in
their own little villages. “They know the world is larger,” he claimed. “They want to see it.”
“Not me,” I said. “I've had enough travel to last a lifetime.”
“That'll pass,” he told me, and we wrangled, amicably, back and forth. Shortly before dark he said, “Come on. There's something you have to see.”

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