The Missing World (12 page)

“Really.” Hesitantly, as if the lightest touch might offend, Nora began to stroke her daughter’s hair. “You know, the year she ran away from home, I slept fourteen hours a night. I couldn’t bear to be awake. After twenty-seven days she sent a postcard saying she was okay.” She looked up at Jonathan and he saw on her cheek the bruise where Hazel had struck her during yesterday’s seizure. “It’s awful to admit, but the first few days at the hospital I thought, this is easier.”

He had heard Hazel’s version of running away, the excitement and the boredom. Now he glimpsed those adventures from her parents’ point of view; like him, they had been abandoned. “She is getting better,” he said, “just not as steadily as we would like.”

“Oh, Jonathan. You’ve been splendid. You know, when Hazel told us she’d sublet that flat, well, I haven’t seen George so upset in years. He was sure it would be right back to the old days. No word for six months, then a call at two in the morning, from god knows where, over some crisis. You’re so good for her.”

He stared at the cheese plant, trying to hide his pleasure. The truth was, since he’d learned what to do, he found the
seizures more fascinating than distressing. After ten days at home Hazel was still having at least one, sometimes several, a day. A few were so minor as to be barely perceptible: she would put down her cup, blink, and continue with what she had been saying or doing. Others, like this afternoon’s, were a force of nature. And it was during these, while she foamed and thrashed, that she made her odd pronouncements. Much of what she said was gibberish, but Jonathan sensed an ancient power seeking a conduit. He understood why, in other times and places, epileptics were regarded as prophets.

For him the hardest part of Hazel’s illness was how seldom he had her to himself. When friends and colleagues phoned, he lowered his voice. Lovely of them to call, he’d pass on their good wishes, yet at the moment, as he was sure they could understand, a visit was out of the question. Still, no matter how many well-wishers he fended off, her parents were always around—where else would they be?—and in the evenings Maud often dropped in. She would read Hazel to sleep and after George and Nora retired, they kept farmers’ hours, settle in to watch television. The best way to get rid of her, Jonathan discovered, was to go to bed himself. Once there, he fell asleep promptly, only to wake, an hour or two later, to the semi-gloom of a city night.

What occurred then he at first called thinking but soon conceded could scarcely be dignified by that term. Here was the first quarrel, the cross words uttered and never, quite, forgiven; the first lie, uneasily offered and, to his amazement, blithely accepted.

Sometimes he tried to drive out the memories by summoning his bees. Was the middle hive sufficiently insulated? Had he glimpsed wax moths in the third hive? But even the bees led back to Hazel. During their courtship, he’d told her that the Egyptians used honey in embalming the pharaohs and that the bees themselves understood this property of their food. If a
mouse climbed into the hive and died, they would coat the corpse with honey to prevent it from spoiling their home. Magic, Hazel had said, nibbling his ear. Last November she’d accused
him
of being embalmed, “like your precious bees.”

The night Hazel said “Prick,” the memories circled until Jonathan gave in and switched on the light. From the pillow, the damp patch on the ceiling winked at him. Tomorrow, he vowed, he would call the roofer again. In the meantime he debated turning on his computer, and instead opened a book on memory he’d borrowed from the library. An American study showed that witnesses remembered events quite differently, depending on how questions were phrased. Perhaps his silence about the past was a mistake. What he ought to be doing was mentioning their difficulties—well, at least some of them—in such a way as to adjust Hazel’s memories.

He set aside the book and at last succumbed to the impulse that had been tugging at him since he opened his eyes. On the landing he paused to listen. Reassured by the silence from her parents’ room, he slipped into Hazel’s. As usual after a major seizure, she was sleeping deeply; it was as if she had left her body, sloughed it off like a selky her sealskin, and gone elsewhere. In the amber glow of the nightlight, Jonathan bent down. Except for the faint rise and fall of her breathing she lay motionless, but when he tried to take her hand, she pulled away. “Hazel,” he whispered. “Please.”

“My sister,” Charlotte explained, “is flat on her back, some ghastly virus. And her husband, wouldn’t you know it, has done a runner. So”—she leaned closer to the window—“I’m looking after the kids. I’ve barely been home in the last month, except to change my clothes.”

The woman, she had the waxen skin and garish lips of a vampire, tapped the computer keys. “Our most recent printouts
show a high level of telephone usage, many of the calls late at night. And”—she raised her hand like a policeman—“many to numbers that frequently appear on your bills.”

Who was it, Charlotte wondered, who had invented the computer? Babbage? How she hated him and his descendants, the overlords at IBM and Apple. Ten years ago, even five, however sceptical, the woman would have been alone with her doubts. Now these machines, like huge spiders, spun their webs, trying to ensnare Charlotte at every turn. The bank was the same. Life had been much pleasanter in the old days, when a cheque took a week to clear and her manager begged to inform her that she had an overdraft. “I didn’t say I hadn’t been there at all,” she said, going for patient long-suffering. “Of course I occasionally dashed over for a few minutes.”

Behind her, two men, a woman, and a small girl stirred restlessly. In the confined space of the basement office, they were privileged to share every syllable of Charlotte’s performance. At first she had assumed they were cheering her on—lone woman versus capitalist giant—but, minute by minute, it was becoming apparent that they didn’t give a toss. All they wanted was for her to surrender the window.

“A seventy-minute call to Greenwich last Monday? Eighty-three minutes to Victoria?”

“I told you, I’ve had family difficulties, and I myself am unemployed.”

“Perhaps then”—the red lips curled—“it would be better to wait until you are employed to have the phone reconnected.”

“But I’m an actor,” Charlotte burst out. “I can’t work without a phone. People need to be able to call me about TV and films.”

Even these magic words had no effect, on either the queue, newly joined by a man in a duffel coat, or the ghoul behind the glass. “I’m sorry, Miss Granger. British Telecom does take hardship
into account, but frankly I find no evidence for this in your case. In the last year most of your bills have been paid at the final notice.”

“This is outrageous.” She drew herself up to her full height and beyond, standing on tiptoe. “My sister’s doctor will be phoning your supervisor later today.”

The woman, seemingly unaware that she was being treated to a West End performance, flicked a speck of dust off the screen. “All right. If you bring in cash or the equivalent within forty-eight hours, we’ll let the reconnection charge go.”

Even as she spoke, the man at the head of the queue stepped forward, waving his cheque book like a flag. No arguments here, thought Charlotte, hastily gathering up the contents of her bag. Think family silver, she murmured as she stalked up the stairs. Think servants and bad plumbing.

Back in the swirl of Oxford Street she walked to the corner as Lady Granger and managed to make it across the road and through the narrow darkness of Christopher Court, but as soon as she reached the pub on Wigmore Street and the bartender said “What’ll it be, love?” she was returned to her plebeian, heavily indebted self. Mr. Aziz loomed. Bernadette, far from being bedridden, was obstinately refusing to let her move in. She once again had not won the lottery. The phone was gone. She ordered a half of lager, all she could afford, and began to draft her advertisement on the back of an envelope.
Spacious, furnished flat to sublet. Feb–June. Suit couple, students? £100 p.w. inc. Deposit
.

She broke off. Now, who had an answering machine and wouldn’t mind getting calls? Her first thought was Jason, who’d sprung for lunch as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but she felt reluctant to muddy the clear waters of his enthusiasm. As for Ginny, in their last conversation, just before the phone was cut off, she had let fly a volley of
reproaches about Richmond. “I recommended you over all these other people and you didn’t even have the decency to show up. I don’t know why I bother. The same thing happened at the King’s Head.”

When at last Charlotte managed to tell her about Struan, Ginny, far from being mollified, had reacted like Bernadette. “Films,” she snorted. “I mean, if it works out, great, but you need a job right now.”

The conversation had left Charlotte with a sick, shaky feeling. She paced back and forth amongst the newspapers until she remembered the bottle of vodka jammed at the back of her fridge. Armed with a glassful, she climbed onto the futon and, a stroke of luck,
A Man for All Seasons
was on the box. By the time she fell asleep, her own struggles were subsumed in those between church and state.

“Do you have a light?”

Charlotte looked up to find her face mirrored in an absurd pair of rose-coloured spectacles which exactly matched their wearer’s velvet coat. “Probably,” she said.

“Do I know you?” said the second girl. Unlike her vivid companion, but like Charlotte and almost everyone else in the pub, she was dressed in black.

Fans, thought Charlotte, feeling what could be a box of matches. “Maybe you’ve seen me in something.” No, a sewing kit. Then came the familiar questions, and she was all becoming modesty, explaining that she was the person having a haircut in
Pie in the Sky
or the third patient in
Casualty
.

“I was sure I knew you,” said the one with ridiculous glasses. “I never forget a face.”

“Bollocks,” said her friend. They began to argue about each other’s mnemonic powers just as Charlotte’s fingers closed around a box of matches.

“Here.” She handed it to the nearer girl. “Can I ask your
advice?” For a moment they looked uneasy, as if she were turning into a Scientologist before their eyes, until she told them about her flat and showed them the ad so far.

“Whereabouts is it?” said the first girl.

“Why not say you’re an actress?” said the second.

An hour later, as Charlotte rode the bus north, both the envelope and the final bill were covered with their suggestions. Perhaps it was their youth that had reminded her of Cedric. She had been neglecting him lately. True, she’d left several messages on his answering machine, but of course he couldn’t call her back. Briefly she considered phoning now, from the call box at the bus stop, then decided to take her chances. Her optimism was rewarded. As she turned into his street, a light shone in the window of his bed-sit, like a good deed in a naughty world.

“Who is it?” called a muffled voice.

“Charlotte.” A prolonged silence greeted her name. “Come on, Cedric. It’s bloody freezing out here.” She jiggled from foot to foot, wondering if he might have someone with him. No, more likely he’d been asleep or doing some drug he didn’t want to share. Cedric had a dog-in-the-manger side she was finding increasingly hard to ignore.

The door opened and there he was, looking ravishing in a red silk dressing gown. He had the longest neck Charlotte had ever seen and a coltish, Modigliani body. He can’t possibly be straight, her friend Luke had insisted. Well, she’d said, he certainly goes through the motions with enthusiasm. Now she smiled warmly, wondering if he would kiss her.

“Why the hell didn’t you phone like a normal person to say you were coming?”

“I didn’t know,” said Charlotte, breezing past. “I was at the bus stop and the first one came right by your door. I took it as a sign.”

“No bus comes right by my door.” He followed her into the room. “Here.” He moved some books off the sofa and straightened a cushion. She took off her coat, sat down in one corner, and stretched her toes towards the gas fire. Lovely. Cedric’s room, though not much larger than hers, was so warm and tidy. She waited eagerly for him to offer her a drink. He usually had a bottle of plonk on the go.

“So.” Cedric stood over her, hands in the pockets of his dressing gown. “How are you?”

“Oh, the usual. Hectic. I’ve been offered a small part in a film and I’m auditioning for a couple of plays.”

“Sounds good.”

Why was he still standing, not budging or offering her a glass? “Yes, the film will make a huge difference. That was one reason I wanted to see you. But were you in the middle of something? I don’t mean,” she offered cheerily, “to be the man from Porlock.” Cedric had pretensions to write poetry, although Charlotte would not have used that word for the verses he’d read to her one slow afternoon at the pub. Still, far be it from her to discourage anyone in artistic pursuits.

“I was writing a letter, actually, but I can take a short break.” He pointed to the desk and at last focussed on Charlotte and his responsibilities as host. “Would you like a cup of tea? I just put the kettle on.”

“Lovely.” She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice.

He disappeared into the alcove that served as a kitchen, and she glanced around the room for telltale underwear or surprising publications. A heap of coins glinted on the mantelpiece. She listened to a cupboard opening and closing, then sprang up and helped herself to three pounds, a small gesture towards repaying the many drinks she’d bought for him in palmier days. By the time he reappeared, she was back in her seat. He put the
tray on a table between them and settled himself at the other end of the sofa. This was more like it, she thought, eyeing the plate of biscuits—chocolate-coated ginger snaps, if she wasn’t mistaken. She ate three without thinking and was reaching for a fourth when she felt Cedric’s gaze. “I didn’t have lunch,” she said.

“Comme d’habitude.”

Quickly Charlotte drew back her hand. She’d forgotten how sharp-tongued Cedric could be. “So how are you?” she said, accepting her tea. “I haven’t been into the Trumpet in ages.”