The Missing World (26 page)

At the sight of her face, Bernie laughed. “What did you think? Because I’m a nurse I can get drugs at the drop of a hat? I need a prescription, like everyone else.”

She opened a bottle of wine and they made a plan, what Charlotte would wear to the audition, how Bernie would get a neighbour to collect the children, and it all seemed manageable. Why was I making such a fuss, Charlotte wondered. In her narrow bed she recited Puck’s speech:

Through the forest have I gone
,
But Athenian found I none
On whose eyes I might approve
This flower’s force in stirring love
.

Now there was a part to die for.

Next morning everything went smoothly. Bernie woke her as she left, and Charlotte emerged to find the prescription bottle on the table:
Take one about half an hour before. You’ll be fab
. She bathed and dressed in the clothes they’d chosen, a black skirt and light-grey jumper. Then she was out of the house and walking to the tube. The first edition of the
Evening Standard
was on sale at the station. The train came almost at once and she got a seat. She turned to the horoscopes.
Taurus: The winds of change are coming. Let them blow. Keep a good eye on financial matters today
.

She was at the theatre twenty minutes early, as she and Bernie had planned, and backtracked to a café to buy a cup of coffee and take her pill. One is plenty, Bernie had said; you don’t want to lose your edge, just for the world to lose its edge. More of the paper and, a whole five minutes early, trotting over to the theatre. Did she feel any different? She looked at the passing shops, the parking meters, a pillar box. The pillar box seemed a touch redder, but everything else was the same.

The woman who greeted her had a Glasgow accent—another good sign, thought Charlotte—and in the waiting room she saw that the half-dozen people clutching newspapers or books were all strangers. Opening her own paper, she felt
inexorably patient. She could sit here all day if need be. But if she should be called upon to move, if there was a next thing to do, that was fine too.

The door opened, closed, opened, closed. Two more for the gladiators. She didn’t look up until a voice said, “Charlie, is that you?” Into the chair beside her plopped Cedric.

She held tight to the paper, but it was no use; the familiar tang of his aftershave fell over her like a noose, and she knew she was done for. She should’ve left right then, folded her newspaper and walked out. “Hi,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I was going to say the same. Who would’ve thought you had time for poor little Battersea with all your movie deals?”

“Excuse me, I must get some water.”

In the corridor, she fumbled the pills out of her bag and dry-swallowed two. She recalled a woman she’d met at a party telling her about taking acid; she’d run round the park to make it kick in more quickly. Now Charlotte stumbled up and down the stairs, twice, then went to the ladies’ and held her hands under the cold tap for as long as she could stand.

Of course he was still there, his eyes fixed on the door. There were other empty chairs, several, but she couldn’t not sit beside him.

“So what are you here for?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I got a message.”

“Ah, from your agent, perhaps. I’m hoping for some sort of peon’s position, under-ASM. Wouldn’t that be a hoot, us working on the same show?” He crossed his legs and stared admiringly at his right foot, shod in immaculate black leather. “Louis told me you’ve got all your possessions in rubbish bags in his cellar. Maybe someday we’ll have a rummage.”

We, Charlotte thought. Who is this mythical we? But she didn’t say that, or at least she didn’t think she did. Instead she
went all Noël Coward—darling, she must concentrate now, for one teeny moment, a drink soon, very soon—and raised the paper so close to her face that a photograph of two teenage brides separated into a mass of dots. I’ll count them, she thought, beginning with the veil of the bride on the left.
Two, four, six, eight, one, three, five, seven
.

Her name was called and she was on her feet. “Good luck,” smirked Cedric. “Not that you need it.”

She did not deign to reply. Everything seemed distant, including her own chilly limbs—and Cedric, Cedric was no more than a piece of thistledown waiting to be blown away. Puff, he was gone.

Inside the theatre, various people descended upon her. The director shook Charlotte’s hand and launched into a fluent speech; she had beautiful braids. The play was set in the East End and used the background of the Mosley marches in the thirties to dramatise more recent problems of immigration. “There’s a mother and daughter. The mother works in a local sandwich shop, and her livelihood is threatened by the immigrant family who open a shop next door.”

“Like Jonah,” murmured Charlotte.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“We’d like you to do a couple of scenes, one when the mother first meets her opposite number, the mother of the immigrant family. And at the beginning of the second act, when her white boss puts pressure on her about the new neighbours.”

She was on stage, the lights blazing, a sheaf of pages in her hand. Words came from her mouth, gestures from her body. She moved in and out of the lights and at last, the pages gone, climbed down into a dark silence out of which the director finally spoke.

Later she described to Bernie how the ASM, reading the immigrant mother’s part, kept missing her cues. “She couldn’t tell when I’d got to the end of a sentence. Just a flat line of speech, no heartbeat.”

“Why in the world did you take three?” Bernie said for the twentieth time. “I should never have given you the bottle.”

Again, Charlotte tried to explain about Cedric. “But I could see, before he showed up, that they would help. One put me on quite a cosy plateau. Don’t be upset. There are other auditions. Now, thanks to you, I know I can handle them.”

No point in mentioning that two more of the pills, wrapped in tissue paper, lay in her purse, beside her library card: a small umbrella against the next rainy day.

chapter 15

Freddie was raising the knocker when he saw the note:
WELCOME. PLEASE ENTER QUIETLY. SHOES!
Inside was ample evidence that his fellow students of the Golden Road had heeded this last request. The row of grubby, down-at-the-heel footwear made him recall his visit to the shoe museum in Northampton. The whole history of feminism is here, Felicity had claimed. On the one hand, she gestured at a jewelled slipper, women forced to lead useless, ornamental lives; on the other, she indicated a factory worker’s clog, working like animals. Men too, he had said, pointing to a coal miner’s boot. But even the poorest man had someone to boss around, said Felicity. We were the slaves of slaves. At which point he lost it. However poor, a freeman was no slave. You’re right, she said, briefly penitent, and began to discuss how industrialisation had affected women. Now, he thought, setting his boots beside a pair of running shoes, surely she would understand Hazel’s situation.

Entering the living-room was like leaving London. The air smelled of lavender, the photo of the guru again had an offering of white flowers, and a dozen people were lying on their stomachs, holding their ankles and rocking. Freddie found a space
near the window and joined in. After a minute or two, he managed to keep time to the mournful drumbeat.

“And now,” said Mrs. Craig, whom he hadn’t seen, lying near the guru, “let’s try this the other way round.”

He had come to talk to her, but exercise by exercise grew more absorbed until, during the final meditation, he drifted off. He woke to someone rubbing the balls of his feet. Mrs. Craig, wearing baggy purple trousers and a white T-shirt, cut short his apologies. “The class is meant to leave you relaxed. I often wish I taught in a commune or a boarding school where people could go directly to bed rather than back out to the streets. So how’s your spine?”

He stood up and twisted from side to side. “Better,” he said. Although he hadn’t felt in particularly bad shape before, his whole body did now feel loose and vigorous. “What do I owe you?”

“Five pounds.”

“Is that the top of your scale?”

“The bottom.” She pressed her palms together.

“Here.” Freddie held out a ten-pound note. “I have a sliding scale for roofs, and I charged you near the top.”

“Do you mind putting it in the basket by the door? It’s a little superstition of mine, not to handle money directly.”

Freddie eyed her with renewed admiration. Stooping to the basket, full of five- and ten-pound notes, he said, “I’m here under false pretenses.”

“That’s all right. I told you you didn’t need to believe for this to work.”

“No, I mean I have an ulterior motive. I came because I wanted to ask you about Hazel.”

Behind him the door swung open and the silver cat stalked in, gave him a yellow-eyed stare and continued across the room to weave around his owner’s ankles. Mrs. Craig, busy with the
combs in her hair, ignored him. “I ran into her the other day,” she said. “She was better than when we had tea, though still shaky.”

“Did she say anything?”

“We’d barely exchanged greetings before Jonathan appeared.”

She bent to fondle Lionel, and Freddie asked if they could sit down for a minute. He hoped for a cup of tea or some root infusion, but Mrs. Craig just floated onto the nearest cushion and looked at him expectantly until he did the same. Telling her was easier than Mr. Early. She knew the cast of characters. And when Freddie got to the point, that he was afraid Jonathan was keeping Hazel against her will, Mrs. Craig nodded. “Now that you mention it, our meeting in the street was quite charged. He was so tense, there were sparks coming off him—and she wasn’t glad to see him, either.”

“I want to help her.”

Like Mr. Early, Mrs. Craig seemed nonplussed. “What did you have in mind?”

He’d pictured Hazel in this room, seated on a cushion while Mrs. Craig fed her beetroot and Lionel offered his feline attentions, but her slight stress on “you” did not encourage such revelations. “I want to be sure she’s living there because she wants to, not because he’s somehow tricked her.”

“And if she isn’t?”

“Then I’ll take her wherever she’d like to go.”

Mrs. Craig regarded him thoughtfully. “Hazel may not have many alternatives. She can’t be alone, and there’s no family besides her parents.”

“She can always stay with me.”

“Mightn’t that be like exchanging Broadmoor for Wormwood Scrubs?”

Freddie felt his jaw sag. “You think I’d keep her locked up? No way. She’d have keys, cash, she could come and go as she pleased.”

Mrs. Craig patted the air. “Forgive me. People do tend to assume the worst of a man offering hospitality to a woman.”

“Oh, you mean the sex business. No problem. I have a girlfriend.” He smiled. “If you knew Felicity, you’d understand I don’t normally think women need rescuing.”

“What do you want me to do?”

There was something witchy about this woman, for sure. He tugged at the tassles of his cushion. “I wondered if you might go over, to see how she’s doing.”

“And should I say I’ve spoken with you?”

“You’re the best judge of that. I don’t want to add to her problems.”

“Good answer. I’ll pop round when the time feels right. Meanwhile, maybe you should have a chat with Felicity.”

More witchy behaviour, for hadn’t he suggested that Felicity was already on board? Mrs. Craig rose in her effortless fashion and, followed by Lionel, left the room. Perhaps, Freddie thought, that was something he’d learn later on the Golden Road. Kneeling to retrieve his boots, he saw the basket with its crumpled pile of money still by the door. Pigs could fly before this would happen in Cincinnati.

“Out,” said Felicity, “of the fucking question.”

She had listened to the story without a single interruption—a bad sign, he now recognised. “I thought you’d been acting funny these last few weeks. If you want to leave me for someone else, go ahead, but don’t expect me to pull the trigger. God, Freddie.” She heaped biryani onto her plate. “It’s so sleazy. We spend all this time talking about how society uses
women, just discards them when they don’t look a certain way, and you pretend to be so sympathetic. Then you meet a pretty woman and that’s it. Bye-bye, principles. Bye-bye, Felicity.”

He’d heard her angry before, plenty of times, but never this note of self-pity. As she helped herself to raita, he remembered the early days of their relationship, her arm in a sling, her stories. I should tell her, he thought, that I don’t have what it takes, but the need to enlist her help with Hazel overshadowed the demands of truth.

“Felicity, this isn’t about love. This is about a person who happens to be in trouble. I was sure you’d be glad to help. You’re the one who taught me how many women are in abusive relationships, how hard it is for them to leave. What if I stayed at your house, and you stayed at my flat with Hazel?”

At the next table, two men and a woman were squabbling. “Rabbit,” the larger man said loudly.

Felicity cracked a papadum. “We live in a big city, in the twentieth century. If this woman’s in trouble, there are plenty of people who can help.”

“Who?”

“Social services. Or call rape crisis and they’ll give you advice.”

Freddie imagined himself phoning offices. If he couldn’t convince Mr. Early or Felicity, how was he going to convince a stranger? “Listen,” he said, “maybe I’m completely off the wall. All I know is that Hazel is sick and confused and even her next-door neighbour agrees there’s something weird about the setup. If you were in that state, wouldn’t you be pleased to know you had a place to stay, no strings attached, for a few days?”

“Don’t try to manipulate me,” said Felicity between mouthfuls. “Forget about this woman. Let’s try to sort out why things are so difficult between us.”