While the doctor launched into a disquisition on memory—the hippocampus was crucial but memories were stored throughout the brain; erratic losses, as with Hazel, were not unusual—Jonathan stared at the golden seal on the School of Neurology certificate and willed himself to stay in his seat. Now he understood that moment when Hazel had opened her eyes and claimed him. If she had lost three years, then their rows, his slip-up, her moving out were all gone. Only harmony and happiness remained. What was the last thing she remembered, he wondered. Might it be their making love? He tried to recall what they had been doing three years ago. Was that the winter they went to Lanzarote and came back to learn Hazel’s article on the railways of southern India had been accepted?
Then Hogarth invited any questions and Nora was speaking. “We did want to ask you, Doctor, should we tell her who we are?”
Christ, thought Jonathan. This was the sort of thing that happened when he drifted off. From the way Nora’s voice wavered, he knew she was fighting back tears. Several times in the last few days he had come upon her and George arguing over whether to reveal their identities. His own position was icy clear: Hazel had already remembered everything essential. Please, he thought, scratching furiously.
A bar of light from the neon strip bisected the doctor’s glossy hair. “I think”—he tapped his fingertips together—“you’re the best judge of that. You’re her parents, you know her better than anyone. What I would urge is not to deluge her with information. Her brain has experienced a series of tremendous shocks. We can’t expect her to recover all at once.”
Nora and George nodded. Jonathan let his fists relax. Again he was forced to admire the doctor’s diplomacy: strongly indicating the appropriate course of action yet leaving it up to them. He could see how glad they were to have their importance to Hazel acknowledged and, just for a moment, he shared their pleasure.
George cleared his throat and asked, as one of them always did, if there was a proper diagnosis, and Hogarth, as always, retreated into medical jargon. How variously people responded to apparently similar injuries. How crucial it was to proceed slowly with the different drugs. Same old shit, Jonathan had remarked to Maud after their last meeting; now he listened almost fondly to the litany.
“So,” said Hogarth, “we hope to discharge her shortly. I don’t need to tell you that she’s precarious, but with this kind of situation we often find a familiar environment works wonders.”
George and Nora were exclaiming as Jonathan shot from the room. In the corridor he collided with two men in wheelchairs, a mass of wheels and arms. “Shite,” he said, grabbing a handle.
“No worries, mate,” the older of the men replied with a flash of yellow teeth. They wheeled cheerfully on.
Jonathan set off, almost running, in the opposite direction. He had been so exhilarated by the news of Hazel’s missing suitcase that he hadn’t stopped to think what her improvement might mean. Coming to the hospital every day, sitting by her bed, reading to her, playing cards and dominoes with George and Nora, eating in the cafeteria, going home only to sleep—this had become his life. Now everything he had yearned for, worked for, was once again in jeopardy.
He stopped beside a window and pressed his forehead to the cold glass. In the car park below a man and a woman emerged from a blue minivan and walked towards the hospital, the man’s tie flapping, the woman’s coat billowing. Jonathan pictured himself rushing back to Hogarth’s office and seizing the doctor by his lapels. He couldn’t even discover what was wrong with Hazel, let alone cure her. And here he was proposing exactly what the newspapers complained about: throwing a seriously ill woman out on the streets.
Steady, lad, he murmured, steady. It was a phrase his father had used at critical junctures on the golf course and, later, when his emphysema worsened, leaning towards the television; Jonathan sometimes found himself uttering it as he slid the supers in and out of the hives. The hardest part of bee-keeping, he’d explained to Hazel, was not learning the various seasonal tasks but how to perform them calmly. The bees responded badly to anxiety and were hard to fool. The first summer he’d been stung almost daily. Didn’t it hurt, she had asked. To start with, he said, then one day I was watching a bee sting my hand and I realised all I felt was a little pinch. My body had adjusted to the poison. Like Mithridates, she said. Only less organised, he agreed, and went on to describe the victim’s complicity, that the muscle spasm drew the poison deeper into the bloodstream and, at the same time, killed the bee by pulling off the stinger.
Now, staring out at the grey landscape, he longed for the buzzing orderliness of his hives. The mere thought of them, squatting at the bottom of the garden, soothed him. Nothing terrible has happened yet, he told himself.
He continued to walk, more slowly, past the linen room and the nurses’ lounge, trying to sort out the implications of Hogarth’s decision. This, after all, was what he was trained to do: evaluate possibilities and rank them. Hazel could not return to her flat alone; that was a given. George and Nora would want to take her back to Kendall, but he could make an argument for proximity to the hospital. As for Maud, her third-floor flat would turn Hazel into a virtual prisoner. Did she even have a spare room? Then it came to him. As far as Hazel was concerned, there was no flat. The terraced house they had shared for four years was her home, her only home.
The swish of wheels interrupted his exultation. The two men were rolling towards the orthopaedic ward. “And so all hell broke loose,” said the older one.
“Blimey,” said the younger. “What a fiasco.” Guffawing, they wheeled into the ward.
Would he be capable, Jonathan wondered, of joking around if he were crippled? Hazel used to pose those kinds of questions: If you had to lose either sight or hearing, which would you choose? If you had a year to live, what would you do? Once, in bed, she said, if the house caught fire and you could rescue one person, your mother, your father, or me, who would you save? You, he had answered. That’s awful, she said. You didn’t even hesitate. In his dreams that night, his parents had cried out.
In 407 the bed was empty. Hazel was taking a bath, but George and Nora were waiting. Obviously they’d been discussing him: what to do with the grouchy son-in-law. As he crossed the threshold, George raised his life of Wellington. Nora drew him over to the window. “I know it’s upsetting,” she said. “After all these tests they don’t have a firm diagnosis.”
Jonathan watched a seagull approach a rooftop across the street. Claws outstretched, it glided down onto the ridge-pole, a perfectly judged landing. If only he could muster such skill in putting forward his case. But Nora was speaking again. “Hogarth said that if all goes well, touch wood”—she reached for the sill—“she can come home on Friday.”
The gull minced towards the chimney and loitered at its base, studying the pointing. “Home?” Jonathan burst out. That double-edged word.
“Isn’t that marvellous?” She smiled, radiantly, and became businesslike. “We know the two of you have had some upsets, this nonsense about her subletting a flat, but there’s no way Hazel can go back there. Besides, she’s clearly come to her senses. Look at how she asks for you.” She gestured at the bed as if this sight were presently visible. “So we were wondering if we could stay with you while she convalesces? Hogarth was very firm that she mustn’t be left alone.”
Save for Hazel’s amnesia, he thought, Nora had laid out his argument as well as he could ever have hoped to, and now she was looking at him, head cocked in a manner reminiscent of her daughter, though really it was the other way round. “Absolutely,” he said. “Of course. Whatever’s best.…”
He was still pouring out agreement when Nora’s hand alighted on his arm. Before he could stop himself, he flinched. He saw her eyes widen, another of Hazel’s mannerisms; then, just as clearly, he saw her push the doubts away. “Thank you.” She patted his arm. “We’re just so glad the two of you are back together.”
“Did you know,” said George, lowering his book, “that Welli
ngton owned five busts of Napoleon and a life-size statue?”
On the pretext of a phone call, Jonathan excused himself. Do not panic, do not run, walk briskly to your nearest exit.
• • •
The phrase came to Freddie while brushing his teeth and seemed so apt that he went into the kitchen to tell Agnes. “Agnes,” he said, squatting beside the table, “I am beset by bitches. What do you think of that?”
Agnes, however, as so often these days, chose not to reveal her cognitive processes. She simply lay there, looking remarkably like an astrakhan pillow. Soon after he brought her home, Freddie had joked to Trevor she was becoming his I Ching: two wags of the tail, go ahead; a flick of an ear, forget it. Full of surprises, Trevor said he knew the feeling, though he himself was more a Book of the Dead kind of bloke.
“Okay.” Freddie prodded her lightly. “Be that way.”
Back in the bathroom, he finished his teeth and stepped back to examine his reflection in the mirror. Swivelling his head from side to side, he tried to imagine his hair shaved. No way he’d look as good as Mr. Early, and he might turn out to have one of those little slabs of fat at the back of his head. Still, he was getting a tad wooly. Time to visit the barber but, like almost everything else, that meant leaving the house. He was wondering whether he could ask Kevin to take him, when the phone rang.
“Oh, I caught you,” said his mother. As if, at two in the afternoon, he was about to rush out. “Guess what loony tune your father’s gone off on now? He’s convinced I’ve got something going with the man at the service station.”
“Have you?”
His mother giggled. “Freddie, you know me better than that. No, I was thanking him, and your dad saw me pat his arm.”
“Sounds like a good move, Mom. Maybe he’ll take the car in for a change.”
“Maybe. Meanwhile, every time I put on a nice blouse he gives me grief. Says I’m getting all dressed up for my boyfriend. But how are you? How’s the weather?”
“Rain. I’ve got customers queueing round the block.”
“ ‘Queueing’! Aren’t you English? It’s too early to say what kind of day we’re having here. Yesterday was very nice. Sunny with a little breeze.” His mother, who’d owned a washer and dryer for as long as Freddie could remember, still judged weather in terms of wash days. Then she asked about Agnes, in whose condition she was keenly interested, and Felicity, about whom Freddie sensed she had some reservations, though none she would divulge.
After their love-yous and goodbyes he stood staring at the bookcase, momentarily amazed to find himself in the hallway of a run-down London flat rather than his mother’s cosy kitchen in North Avondale. One of these months … For now, wanting to do something that would please her, he headed for his kitchen and last night’s dirty dishes. Beset, he murmured again as the sink filled, especially by Felicity. When they met last spring, at a lecture on socialism in the nineties Kevin had dragged him to, she had seemed the ideal girlfriend. Her wrist was broken from a rollerblading accident and, drawn to her cast like a turtle to water, Freddie offered her a ride home. On the way to Bethnal Green, she talked about her dissertation, on the Brown Dog Riots of 1907, and he happily succumbed to her tales of the battles between medical students and antivivisectionists, which—and this was Felicity’s real area of interest—often included the suffragettes. For months they’d had fun, going to movies and exploring the neighbourhoods in Battersea and Southwark where the riots had taken place. Recently, however, more or less since Christmas, Freddie thought, she’d been flying off the handle for any reason, or none at all.
A few weeks ago, for instance, one rainy afternoon in bed, he was trying to tell her about Lourdes. Life there had been simpler, he said. Underneath the bullshit, people knew what they wanted and weren’t afraid to ask. Prayer refined desire.
“Lourdes.” Felicity had popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “The whole thing makes me furious. People who are ill need doctors, not mumbo-jumbo.”
“No, you don’t understand.” He nuzzled her shoulder, hoping to coax her back into that dreamy state she entered only after lovemaking. “This isn’t the Dark Ages. These people have seen doctors and been told they’re incurable. They don’t have anything to lose, except hope. I never meant to get involved. I was just passing through. Then this miserable old guy on crutches needed help. While I waited for him to be blessed, I noticed the stretcher bearers and I knew I had to be among them. That’s why I was there, six foot two and able-bodied.”
“Freddie, you’re six foot two and well educated. You could do something a hell of a lot more useful than cart invalids around—or fix roofs, for that matter.”
“Fixing roofs is useful,” he said. “We all need shelter.”
And just when he thought the storm was lifting, another arrived. Felicity had made it clear that, in lieu of an immediate career change, more horizontal activity would be welcome. Had he finked out, feigning sleep, or performed? Thankfully, memory failed.
As for Agnes—he began to dry the wineglasses—at least her fussiness in the final weeks of pregnancy had a clear cause. Trevor had lured him into breeding her by mentioning that a purebred Scottie could fetch over four hundred quid. Easy money, Freddie thought, but from the moment the dog mounted Agnes he had had qualms. She seemed to get so little pleasure from the coupling, and then the vet lectured him about the dangers of letting her gain too much weight. Awful things could happen if the puppies got too big during a first pregnancy. Unfortunately, Agnes showed not the slightest instinct for these possibilities.
He raised the glasses to check the shine and decided to take her for a walk. Since his visit to Mr. Early she’d had to settle for a turn around Kevin’s rosebushes, but in the aftermath of his mother’s phone call, he thought, if he moved fast, he could get to the corner and back. He pulled on clothes, grabbed the leash, and announced the drill. Predictably, Agnes showed zero interest.
“Okay, baby. Time for matter over mind.” He hoisted her into the air and headed downstairs. Once he reached the sidewalk, he set her down—there was no denying she smelled—and clipped on the leash. Agnes scanned the wet streets, peed, sniffed, retreated several steps, peed again.
“I wish I’d gotten a greyhound,” Freddie told her. “You’d fit right in at Lourdes.” Me too, he thought. Malade imaginaire. Still, so far, so good. He was in the next street, Agnes was waddling ahead, and the sky was empty.
“God it’s freezing,” said Felicity. “Where can I put my jacket?”
Bending to kiss her, Freddie discovered, as usual, that she was smaller than he remembered. She was wearing his favourite red pullover, a black skirt, and her ever-present combat boots. Sitting at the kitchen table, she began to clean her glasses. He’d been asleep when she rang the bell. Now he put the kettle on and watched her fondly. Barefaced, she had an endearingly helpless look. “Can I make some toast?” she asked. “I missed lunch.”
“Sorry, I’ve run out of bread.”
“A biscuit?”
To be sure, he checked the cupboard again. Maybe something had materialised since last time. “I didn’t get to the store today,” he explained.
Felicity stopped polishing. “That’s what you said yesterday. Were you out on a job?”
“Just hanging around. You know I don’t work in the rain.” He handed her the tea. “No milk.”
“But”—she slipped her glasses back on—“how can you do nothing all the time?”
“I’ve told you, I’m a nothing kind of guy. I wake up, have a cup of tea, sleep, look out the window, count the clouds, nimbus, cumulus, cirrus, mackerel, sleep some more.”
“Sugar?”
“That we can do.” He brought her the jar and urged her to heap it in.
“I still don’t get it,” she said, taking a modest spoonful. “You’re thirty-five. You owe your dad twenty thousand dollars and you’re totally broke. Aren’t you tired of having no money?”
Freddie sighed. More and more conversations wit
h Felicity took this form: her demand for explanation, his attempt, her incomprehension. She had even grilled him about his not swearing. Some Catholic thing, she concluded so definitively that he could only nod. Now he said, “Sure, I’d like some dough, if it was handed to me on a plate. I’d have some shirts made, buy a good tennis racquet, eat at the Savoy. The question is, am I going to bust my ass working for that junk? And the answer is—” he did a drumroll on the table—“no way. So, what did you do today?”
Felicity, however, was in rottweiler mode. “But just last week, the day we went to Southwark, you were going on and on about adopting children. How you’d rent a house in the country, here or Brittany, with a big garden. You had everything organised.”
“You’re great.” He squeezed her arm. “Doesn’t all this remembering wear you out? Yeah, if someone gave me a few hundred grand, I’d be scouring the orphanages tomorrow. I think I’d make a good father, so long as I wasn’t genetically involved.”
“Genetically involved? Do you know how old I am?”
What’s come over people, thought Freddie. First Mr. Early, now Felicity. “Thirty-two?” he guessed, trying at least for the right decade.
“Thirty-seven. I’m a thirty-seven-year-old woman.” Behind her newly polished glasses, her eyes were suspiciously bright.
“Who doesn’t,” he said quickly, “look a day over thirty-two.” He jumped up, as if he’d just noticed Agnes noodling over her bowl, and pretended to be absorbed in measuring dog food, getting fresh water, until Felicity gave up and went to the john.
When she came back her mood, or whatever it was, had lifted. She told him she’d finished the footnotes for a new chapter that morning; in the afternoon there’d been a crisis at work. Freddie listened and asked questions. He liked hearing the details of her day, though he was powerless to describe his own. That he could do nothing better than most people was true; still, his current hibernation was extreme, and he had no idea what would constitute spring this time around.
The Missing World Page 6
