The Missing World (21 page)

“For god’s sake, Charlie, you can’t lie around on the sofa all day.”

They glared at each other. For a moment they were back in their bedroom above the pub, Bernie scolding Charlotte night after night into whitening her gym shoes, learning her lessons, while from below rose the babble of voices and the stink of beer. Then Bernie relented. “She sounded so beleaguered. I thought you’d cheer her up. You are good at that, you know, when you put your mind to it. And they’d pay five pounds an hour.”

“I don’t lie around all day.” She was about to embark on an explanation of the creative process—Struan, the search for a new agent, the notion of writing her own play, which had occurred to her only yesterday—but suddenly she felt exhausted. Why was she being such a cow? She could read a couple of times, then quit. No big deal. And the extra dosh would be nice.

At least, Charlotte thought, she doesn’t
look
ill. Hazel was sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing a blue pullover a shade or two darker than her eyes and surrounded by large sheets of paper. If Charlotte had run into her, at the theatre or in a shop, she would’ve found an excuse to talk to her, to see those amazing eyes up close and how her face changed when she spoke.

“This is Charlotte,” Jonathan said. “Bernadette’s sister. She’s come to read to you.”

“If you like,” Charlotte added. Typical of Bernie not to
mention that her employer was terrifically handsome in a dark, intense way; she was glad she’d worn her new leggings and put on makeup.

Now he smiled, which oddly made him less attractive, and said he’d be working upstairs. Hazel pressed the point of a pencil against her finger while he fiddled with the doorknob, until Charlotte understood it was up to her to release him. “Thanks. We’ll give a shout if we need you.”

As the door closed behind him, the room seemed to grow lighter. Charlotte glanced around, searching for the source, but the sky beyond the bay window was the same leaden grey; the standard lamp next to the fireplace gave off the same steady glow. The mysterious change, she realised, emanated from Hazel. “What are you doing?” she said, crossing the room to kneel beside her.

Hazel explained she was drawing a map of her parents’ farm, or at least that was the objective; she kept spilling over from one piece of paper to the next. Scale was the problem: the duckhouse was bigger than the bier. Charlotte nodded, as if following this rigmarole: where was the farm?

“North of Kendall, in the Lake District.”

“Oh, I went to Dove Cottage a few years ago.” Vainly she tried to summon the documentary she’d seen last summer. “Great scenery.”

Hazel looked at her narrowly. “You can’t live on scenery. Or at least I can’t. It was fine when I was six or seven and liked baby animals, but as a teenager I thought I’d go mad.”

“And did you?”

“No, I ran away with a lorry driver.”

“Brilliant.” Charlotte couldn’t help giving a little bounce. “What was he like? Were you in love?”

Hazel laughed. “Colin was gorgeous. I met him at the pub. He had a weekly run through Kendall, up to Glasgow, and
back. I went to live with him in his flat in Preston. That turned out to be the opposite of romantic, too. The place was filthy, his feet smelled, and neither of us gave a toss about housework. I lasted four months before I got tired of take-aways and went home. What about you?”

“Me?” said Charlotte, filled with regret for her well-behaved childhood. “We lived near Northampton, and I started coming to London to see plays. I’d get student tickets or sneak in at the interval. Afterwards I’d hang around the stage door, hoping some actor would buy me a drink.”

“Jailbait,” Hazel said appreciatively.

Charlotte shook her head. “At the time, I was sure people just wanted to chat about perfecting their art.”

“Maybe they did. Did you have a boyfriend?”

Boyfriend, thought Charlotte, such a nice, innocent word. No, she’d never had one of those. Then Toby’s freckled face and lanky frame popped up. “I’d forgotten all about him,” she offered. “I only got interested because of Bernie. She had a mad pash for him.”

“Imagine your sister having mad pashes. Did you go all the way?”

“Certainly not.” Now it was Charlotte’s turn to laugh. She could still picture herself in the ghastly school uniform, even the knickers labelled, and the contortions she and Toby had gone through at the back of the gym. “You’re a journalist, aren’t you?”

“In other words, I’m being nosy. You can always tell me to shut up.”

People often made this sort of remark—tell me if I’m being a nuisance—but Charlotte could see that Hazel actually meant it. “Why are you drawing the farm?” she said.

Once again the room changed, and this time she was close enough to watch a kind of scrim fall over Hazel’s brightness. “I
had an accident,” she said, “that wiped out part of my memory. Your sister thought making a map of places I do remember might help me to reach some of the ones I don’t.”

“What would you like to remember?”

“Everything.”

Charlotte stared, dumbfounded. “You would? There are so many things I’d love to forget.” She struggled for a safe example. “Once I closed a door in a set and it wouldn’t open for the rest of the play. Another time I skipped two scenes in
Tooth of Crime
. Half the actors skipped with me and the rest didn’t.”

“But you have the choice. What if you really couldn’t remember? Wouldn’t you feel other people had an advantage over you?”

“They do anyway.” Charlotte shrugged. “I know all this Santayana stuff: that which we do not remember, we are doomed to repeat. As far as I’m concerned it’s the other way round. We repeat what we remember. Only forgetfulness sets us free.”

Hazel was frowning, a sign of disagreement, Charlotte assumed, until she saw Jonathan peering round the door. She’d heard no footsteps, she now realised, since he left the room. Might he have been loitering, this whole time, in the hall? “I came to see if you wanted anything.” He smiled in his disquieting fashion at Hazel, and raised an eyebrow at Charlotte. “I thought you were going to read.”

“We are. I was just telling Hazel about a play I’d been in.” Did her salary depend on so many pages per hour?

He withdrew again and this time, seeing the door ajar, she stood up and, without checking, closed it. Together, they sketched the farm. In Melissa and Oliver’s company Charlotte had rediscovered a knack for drawing, and now she happily followed Hazel’s directions to mark the stone farmhouse with its orchard on one side of the road and the farm proper on the other. “What was here?” she asked.

“An old Land Rover, where we put the hens when they were sick or broody.”

“And here?”

“The bier where we kept the cows. The muscovy ducks used to roost in the manger.”

“You know,” said Charlotte once several sheets were full, “you remember an astonishing amount, at least compared to me.” She recalled a radio programme she’d done on the rise and fall of memory palaces. Had Hazel heard of them? “It was a trick the Roman orators used. You stored the paragraphs of a speech in a familiar house. Then, when you had to give the speech, you walked through the rooms and there were your sentences, all nicely lined up in atriums and frescoes, waiting to be uttered.”

“What if you were poor and didn’t have a house?”

“You had to find one. Apparently young men used to wander the Forum, memorising it column by column. The farm would make a terrific memory palace. You’d put first love in the duckhouse, your first job in the midden.”

“India in the stable. Running away from home in the granary. Boris in the water trough.” Hazel was gesturing at the pages as if moving the events of her life to the different locations when, suddenly, mid-sentence, she fell silent.

“Are you all right?” said Charlotte.

With a small shake of the head, Hazel leaned against the sofa. Charlotte spotted a rug on one of the armchairs and spread it over her. She could see the tendons standing out in Hazel’s neck. “Should I fetch Jonathan?”

Somehow, again, she understood no. Hazel indicated a book on the sofa, a guide to India’s flora and fauna. After five dreary pages about irrigation in Goa, hard even for Charlotte to read eloquently, the door opened and Jonathan appeared with a tea tray. “Refreshments,” he announced.

“Good timing,” she said.

As he approached, his eyelashes were fluttering. He’s nervous, she thought, absolutely on tenterhooks. She turned to Hazel, who was smiling up at him, broadly, fiercely. The ground had shifted. Who’s in charge here, thought Charlotte.

“This is the stable where we kept Ginger, the gelding,” Hazel said. “And this was where the cats lived, far too many of them. Sometimes they ate their own kittens.”

“Here’s the tractor shed,” said Jonathan, pointing to a shaded area along one side of the bier. The actress—she’d left an hour ago, smiling coquettishly as he paid her—had done a surprisingly good job with the map. “The farm was one of the first places you took me,” he added.

“Have I ever been to your home?”

“No.” In the last week or two he’d stopped worrying that such questions, either in the asking or the answering, would precipitate a landslide of memories. “We talked about going when we went to Edinburgh, but Denholm isn’t really on the way. And there’s absolutely nothing there.”

“Except your mum and dad.”

“We’ll visit them one day, after we’re married.”

“Won’t they come to the wedding?”

Jonathan had a sudden, appalling picture of his parents in London, his father in his baggy, old man’s trousers and worn cardigan, gasping like a fish, his mother in her apron, constantly offering to help. “It’s too far for them to travel. My father can’t go anywhere without an oxygen cylinder. What’s this?”

“Two old carts. They had wooden shafts and wheels with iron rims. I used to climb on them and pretend I was going places.”

“Prophetically. What did you think of your reader?”

“Nice. More fun than her sister. Bernadette is okay, but it’s always clear I’m just a job. She told me about memory palaces.”

“Cicero. Fancy her knowing that. Did she mention Simonides?” He described the early Greek poet who had first understood the link between spatial order and memory. Hazel nodded happily; she’d always relished his stories, those random bits of information which—apart from his affection for her, for his bees—seemed to occupy most of his brain. Seeing the smooth curve of her ear, he wanted to say your body is my memory palace. At last he knew what he must do. No wonder things were messed up when they still weren’t lovers. She was well enough now; the seizures had dwindled and, of course, there would be no more nonsense with Maud. That had never happened.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Hazel, “does Maud seem different to you? She was so odd about us getting married. And I often have the feeling she’s avoiding me, even though she’s here every evening. Did I do something when I was ill?”

He stood up and walked around the room, twitching the curtains, straightening a card on the mantelpiece. This was like the old days: Hazel glimpsing the shape of his thoughts almost before he did. Steady. Here was a chance to reinstate one small piece of the truth and to be less at Maud’s mercy; he mustn’t waste it. “When you recovered consciousness you didn’t recognise her. She found that upsetting.” He eyed the cheese plant. Barasingha. “Also, I’m not sure she entirely approves of me, of us.”

“Why not?” It was her journalist’s voice, curious but dispassionate.

“Partly—” he pretended to consider—“chemistry. You know,
I do not love thee, Doctor Fell, but why it is I cannot tell
. Partly she thinks I’m a bit stuffy, a claims adjustor, that I don’t appreciate you sufficiently. You used to go out with these arty types.”

“Like Boris and Paul.”

“You remember?”

She nodded. “I don’t need a memory palace for everything. Boris thought he was Sartre. Unfortunately I wasn’t de Beauvoir. And while Paul was sweet, he turned me into Boris. I suppose, in the final analysis, I wasn’t in love with either of them.”

What happier words? He bent to nuzzle her cheek.

Hazel gathered up the drawings. “Isn’t it time for my pills? Should we start supper?”

Not until he heard Maud saying “Plantworks” did he realise he couldn’t simply tell her not to come round. Quickly he blurted out the first excuse that occurred: he and Hazel were going round to Steve and Diane’s. Oh, said Maud, that’ll make a nice change. Back in the kitchen, he confessed what he had done, another step towards veracity.

“Jonathan—” Hazel was sorting vegetables for a salad. “You said Katie had chickenpox.”

He apologised, even offered to phone Maud back, and she relented. “Actually I’m glad. I could do with a break from her.”

As he put on water and peeled garlic, he told her about his visit to the registry office the day before. A boxy room in the Town Hall, the tall veiled windows overlooked Rosebery Avenue. “What I didn’t expect was all the babies.”

“Of course,” Hazel exclaimed. “It’s where you register births too, isn’t it?”

“And deaths. But everyone seemed pretty cheerful.”

“So what happens next?”

“We show up and say ‘I do.’ I filled out a form with our particulars, ages, occupations, etc., and handed over the money. We’re all set: eleven-thirty on Tuesday, March nineteenth.”

He lifted the lid off the saucepan and studied the barely steaming water. There had been babies, half a dozen of them,
but what he remembered was the woman who’d interviewed him, opening Hazel’s passport and saying, “Oh, she’s lovely.” At the sight of the passport in her hands—he’d retrieved it from Hazel’s flat on his way—he had felt like a thief twice over, stealing first the document, then its owner.

He didn’t know how to do it. That pullover really brings out the colour in your eyes, he said. I like your hair this way. When she announced she was going to bed, he wanted to say me too, but the prospect of refusal stopped him. He took her upstairs and returned to the kitchen to drink a whisky, then another, before daring to make his approach. In the bedroom doorway he stood listening, until the soft sough of her breathing reassured him. He retreated to the spare room, undressed, and padded down the corridor. Hazel did not stir as he slid in beside her. He lay shivering, checking himself for warmth.