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The Other Half of Me: A Novel - Softcover

McCarthy, Morgan

 
9781451668230: The Other Half of Me: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1451668236 ISBN 13: 9781451668230
Verlag: Free Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

For fans of Atonement and Brideshead Revisited, a gorgeously written, darkly wise coming-of-age novel about the pull of the past and the destructive power of the stories we tell ourselves.

“What good can the past do the living? What harm?” Growing up in their family’s ancestral home in Wales, Jonathan Anthony and his little sister, Theo, are inseparable. Together they explore the wild acres of Evendon, inventing magical worlds and buttressing each other against the loneliness of life with their alcoholic mother, Alicia, and a shifting cast of gossiping cooks and maids. When a family tragedy brings their glamorous grandmother, Eve, home from America, Jonathan and Theo are initially elated by the attention she lavishes on them. But soon it becomes clear that there is more to the Anthony family history than either Eve or Alicia will acknowledge, trapping Jonathan and Theo in a web of dark secrets that have haunted Evendon for generations.

Written in luminous prose, with richly endearing characters and a profound appreciation for the rustic beauty of the Welsh countryside, The Other Half of Me is a darkly wise coming-of-age novel and a masterful portrait of a family and the burdens of the past.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Morgan McCarthy was born in Berkshire, UK, where she still lives. She has worked in a supermarket, a small independent bookstore, and, most recently, as a media analyst.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

When I look back for a place to start I always think of the same day—a day that didn’t seem unusual at the time, but was necessary to what came next. It is the last day of a backward trajectory: I arrive at it as if tracing a thrown ball back through the air to the spot where the thrower stood. At the time, of course, you don’t know that a ball was thrown. You hear the glass smash, then you rush to the window and look out, trying to see the culprit. This particular day begins with a summer morning; the lawn burning green; the new, nectared sunlight. I was nearly eight years old, sitting on the grass next to a patch of earth, having uprooted some irises to clear room for a castle made out of plastic blocks. I could see the top of Theo’s head through the remaining flowers. She was picking up ladybirds and snails and putting them lovingly into a toy pram, keeping up a gentle monologue of chatter and song that—unusually—didn’t seem to need my participation, and which I had mainly tuned out.

Behind us the house sat indistinctly, the sun dazzling off its many windows, too bright to look at without squinting. Evendon, built sometime in the gloomy fifteenth century and embellished in the ambitious nineteenth by a slightly insane ancestor, was nothing like the other manors in Carmarthenshire, pale and genteel and homogenous. It was gray—all different darknesses of gray—steeply slate roofed with crowstepped gables, pale cornerstones, black and white facings on the eaves, arched windows with white brick edging. It resembled an Escher palace for a witch, baroque and severe, sometimes beautiful, sometimes absurd—overly grand—standing out like a black-and-white hallucination in the tame planes of the garden. Even to us there was something odd about it.

At this early time in the morning Evendon held only two people, both of whom were still asleep. The first was our mother, Alicia. She didn’t like us much. That is not to say that she disliked us; she just didn’t seem to have enough energy to feel one way or the other. The second was our nanny, Miss Black, who genuinely disliked us.

The rest of the house’s inhabitants would arrive as the morning went on: Mrs. Wynne Jones the housekeeper, Mrs. Williams the cook, then the temporary maids and gardeners whose names were never in currency long enough to be remembered. It was in these people that the hurry and noise of the house was contained; they took it home with them in the evening and brought it back in the morning, and so for the moment everything was still, as if no one was in the house at all. Theo and I, on our hill with the silent house on one side and only the end of the rising grass and a strip of distant sea on the other, could have been all alone at the top of the world.

Theo broke off from singing to her collection of insects and called, “Jonathan?”

Her face floated up over the flowers; one hand waving. Her nose was already red from the morning sun.

“Jonathan, do you think bees get hot? With all their fur?”

By the time I realized she was holding up a bee for me to see, it had twisted, fizzing with outrage, and stung her. She stared at me for a moment, her mouth fallen open and her finger pointing as if she were in the middle of a speech. Then she clutched her hand and started to cry.

I tugged Theo back to the house to find Alicia, who had got up and was now sitting in the shade in the drawing room reading a magazine. Her blond hair was almost colorless in the sudden dim, her eyes like raindrops, cool and vague. She looked at us with languid surprise when we ran in, Theo gulping and gasping nearly silently, holding her hand out like something in flames.

“What on earth are you two doing?” Alicia asked.

“Theo got stung by a bee,” I explained. Theo held up her finger and Alicia peered at it.

“Oh dear . . . Miss Black!” she called. “Miss Black! How awful.”

Miss Black failed to appear, but in the kitchen we discovered the newly arrived Mrs. Williams, who was in the process of transferring lasagna from its supermarket packaging into a baking dish. She jumped when she saw us and put her hand over her heart.

“You two are going to kill me one of these days. Not a word to your ma about this now”—she indicated the lasagna—“though I don’t know how people expect me to do everything. Think I’m bloody superwoman or something. I’ve got problems of my own, I have.” She paused and noticed Theo’s distress. “What’s up with you, lovey?”

Theo held her hand out again and Mrs. Williams looked at it with a particular type of satisfaction—one familiar to us from previous household mishaps—as if she had previously warned us to watch out for bees, and was now vindicated.

“That,” she said, “is a bad sting. What we need for a sting like that is lemon juice. Or vinegar. It neutrifies the sting.”

She found some lemon vinaigrette in the fridge and doused the finger with it until Theo stopped gasping and screamed.

“Is that wasps then?” said Mrs. Williams. “I don’t remember what it is for bees.”

Once Theo’s finger was rinsed and plastered and her sobs had subsided, we hung around the kitchen while Mrs. Williams lit a cigarette. She had a lighter in the shape of a matador, which she told us her son Gareth bought her from a holiday. She let us click its feet to make flames come out of the top of its head, and gave us some of her extra-strong mints. Then she sat back and put her feet on a stool and puffed speculatively. Mrs. Williams was about fifty, a short round woman with bright yellow hair, which was frazzled and acrylic-looking. She had an indeterminate number of children and other relatives, whom she would tell us about in the same way as she discussed the characters in soap operas, so that it was impossible to tell which were real and which fictional. “Whatever you say about Gareth, he’s good to his ma,” she said now. “It were those . . . those solicitors that were the problem.”

Theo was sitting at the counter, her face tightly crimped.

“Does your finger still hurt?” I asked.

Theo shook her head, then started crying again. “Why was that bee angry with me?”

“It wasn’t angry with you,” I said, carefully, aware that if I told Theo that she’d frightened the bee she’d be even more upset and I’d have to play by myself.

“Was it angry because it was hot?” Theo asked. “Because of its fur?”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so. Do you want to go back outside now?”

Theo cried even harder. “That poor bee,” she sobbed. “Why does it have so much fur?”

I considered telling her that the bee would be dead now anyway after losing its sting, but thought better of it. “Do you want to go back outside and play?” I asked again.

“You two better play inside now, with that sunburn,” Mrs. Williams said to Theo, smoke rising around her face as if she were an ancient oracle. “And you—keep an eye on your sister. Letting her get herself stung!”

This was so unfair that I decided not to answer, but Mrs. Williams had already switched the television on to her favorite show and was soaking up its fractious noises, her head tilted to one side like a canary. “Don’t tell me she’s the murderer,” she exclaimed.

“Come on, Theo. We can play in the library,” I said, helping myself to...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451668236
ISBN 13 
9781451668230
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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Verantwortliche Person
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