This is it, he thought, glancing at his companions. If they keep silent now, they’ll never speak. Maud, after this morning’s conversation, seemed safe, and Nora was invariably discreet. George, though, with his red-rimmed eyes and his fear of mortality, was a loose cannon. Before he knew what he was doing, Jonathan was standing over him.
At the same moment Nora crossed the room. “Don’t worry, dear.” She put an arm around her daughter. “It will come back, piece by piece.”
“I’m not upset.” Hazel shrugged off her embrace. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“Can I get anyone a drink?” Jonathan said. “George, a dram?”
“Not for me,” said George. The others, too, refused. Then Maud suggested lunch and everyone seized on this as a stroke of genius. As they ate quiche and salad, Hazel was almost incoherent with pleasure. “Hospitals are awful,” she said. “And the food is a joke.”
“Some of the nurses were very nice,” said Nora. “June and Laetitia, they were lovely.”
“You know, Laetitia told me her mother was the first woman in Yorkshire to wear a bikini. Her father bought it because he thought anything connected with the atomic bomb was a good thing.”
“Am I being dense?” said Maud. “What do bikinis have to do with the bomb?”
“That’s what I asked.” Hazel smiled. “Apparently the man who invented the bikini named it after the site of the first nuclear tests.” She tapped her fork, a bird seeking escape from the egg. “I thought it might make a good article: bombs and bikinis.”
“Ridiculous,” growled George. “Not you, dear—I mean this inventor chap.”
At the end of lunch Maud produced a surprise: a cake with WELCOME HOME, HAZEL written in red letters on the white icing. Hazel clapped her hands and laughed.
This was the sound, Jonathan thought, that had been missing from his life. He had a dreamy, pastoral vision of the two of them living happily ever after. Hazel would cook while he read to her; he would tend his bees and she would garden; she would write her articles and come home and tell him stories about the people she’d met and the things they’d done; she would peel away his layers of reserve and show him how to be present in the world.
Yet even as he imagined these cosy scenes, a shadow passed over Hazel. Carefully, she set aside her cake. “I think I’d better lie down.”
She rose to her feet and stood looking around uncertainly as if everything in the room, including herself, had grown strange. Nora took her arm and led her upstairs. Jonathan, George, and Maud remained at the table.
“Well,” said George at last, reaching for the knife, “no use letting a perfectly good cake go to waste.”
chapter 6
Something in his familiar landscape had shifted. Freddie paused in the hall, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, wondering if he was simply sensing the aftershock of his prolonged absence. Since meeting Mr. Early, he had left the house only briefly until today, when he had gone to help his former boss the antiques salesman move a wardrobe and stayed on for supper. But no, he thought, standing on tiptoe, listening as hard as he could, it was presence he was sensing, not absence. Had Kevin come to borrow something? Unlikely. Although they still shared keys, their easy camaraderie was gone. Had a burglar, undeterred by his lavish use of lights, paid a visit?
Then he heard a low noise from the direction of the bedroom. A sort of sobbing, it stopped and started and stopped again. Agnes. He dropped his jacket and strode across the hall. In the clothes closet, her chosen refuge, she lay panting. “Agnes,” he said, falling to his knees. “Are you okay?”
Ignoring him, she moaned and pushed herself around in a circle. She had made a nest out of what, after a moment, he recognised as his blue bathrobe. Served him right for leaving it on the floor. As she moaned again, Freddie was overcome by panic. What the heck was he supposed to do? He thought of phoning Felicity. More usefully, he remembered Trevor. “I’ll be right back,” he assured Agnes. Her haunches quivered.
Trevor’s mother answered. “Freddie, how are you?” she said, as if he were ringing at noon, not midnight. “I hope you’ve been taking care of yourself in this bitter weather.”
“Agnes is in labour. I don’t know what to do.”
Mrs. Jackson laughed. “Fortunately she does. Where is she?” He told her that Agnes preferred the closet to the pen he’d built, and Mrs. Jackson said that was often the way, but now was the time to put her in the pen. “You want her somewhere warm and enclosed so she can’t wander off. Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“How will I know if it isn’t?”
Mrs. Jackson explained that each pup was born in its own sac. Agnes would break the sac and bite the umbilical cord, thus enabling the pup to breathe. If for any reason she failed to perform these duties, then it was up to Freddie. “Snip the cord a couple of inches from the belly. And be sure that the placenta comes out after each pup. If it doesn’t, or if she’s in labour for too long with no results, that’s when you should call the vet. I usually keep a bottle of Scotch handy. For myself,” she added.
Freddie hung up feeling slightly better, although the reference to instinct was not reassuring. Agnes hadn’t had a clue about the dangers of overeating, so why should she grasp this much more complicated process? He was in the kitchen, rinsing the scissors in hot water, when he heard the click of nails and turned to see her waddling into the hall. By the time he caught up with her she was head-butting the outside door.
“No,” he said. “Good girl. We’ll go out later.”
A small, dark lump popped out and fell to the floor.
Agnes turned. She looked at the lump, then at Freddie, her amazement mirroring his own. This is it, he thought. What had Mrs. Jackson said? Break the sac, snip the cord. “Agnes! Do what you’re supposed to.”
He dashed into the kitchen, grabbed the scissors, and ran back to where Agnes stood, still looking blank. Trying not to think about it, he knelt down, gingerly tore open the sac, and snipped the cord. The puppy made a mewling sound. Agnes bent to sniff the tiny body without enthusiasm. The placenta lay on the floor.
“Jeepers, Agnes. Don’t be such a retard.”
Carefully he scooped her up, carried her into the kitchen, and set her down in the pen. Then he went back for the puppy—so slippery he almost dropped it—and nudged it against one of Agnes’s teats. At last someone knew what to do. The puppy latched on, and Agnes began to lick it clean.
Freddie sat on the floor, wishing for the whisky Mrs. Jackson had recommended. For half an hour nothing happened. The pup nursed blindly and Agnes fussed over it. He was beginning to nod off when the panting started again. He sat up, scissors ready. Again the dark lump popped out, seemingly with no effort, but this time Agnes was all business. No sooner had it landed on the newspapers than she turned around, tore the sac, bit the cord, and began washing the newborn puppy. All Freddie had to do was guide it to the teat.
“Agnes,” he said, “you’ve got it. You’re a bona fide mom. Number two and counting. Go for it, baby.”
Within forty minutes another puppy appeared. Freddie put on The Magic Flute, drank tea, cheered Agnes on. “No pain, no gain,” he admonished. After the third birth came a pause. An hour passed, ninety minutes, nearly two hours. He eyed the clock, paced the apartment, studied the dog. Was Agnes through? Three was a perfectly respectable first litter, the vet had said. Cautiously he reached to feel her belly, but she growled and snapped. A few minutes later the panting started again.
After a noticeably longer period, a fourth sac slid out. Agnes simply slumped to one side, allowing the three pups to reattach themselves. Even as he broke the sac, Freddie knew the puppy was dead.
His first thought was to get the body away from Agnes and her brood. He carried it over to the table. Under the light he studied the small being. At the sight of the neat ears, the unmistakable paws, Freddie’s eyes watered; he hadn’t seen a fatality since the day he forced that door in Dalston. With
one finger he stroked the sleek fur. In the morning he would bury it near Kevin’s Brother Cadfaels. For now he wrapped it in a clean tea towel and laid it in the airing cupboard.
By the time he came back from washing his hands another surprise awaited him. Agnes was panting again, sounding bored rather than pained. A few minutes later a fifth puppy appeared. Agnes performed her duties with brisk efficiency, and somehow Freddie knew it was over. He brought her a bowl of milk, which she lapped greedily. She settled to rest and he arranged the puppies along her teats. Only when they were all suckling did he at last turn off the light and get into bed. In the darkness he held his breath. Four new beings were sharing his apartment, but they were doing so in utter silence.
“Prick,” said Hazel.
The word emerged distinctly through bubbles of saliva. For the second time since breakfast her heels were drumming the floor, fortunately in the carpeted living-room. Jonathan was doing his best to keep hold of her head and arms. Meanwhile George tried to restrain her legs; already he had let go twice.
“Hazel, love,” said Nora. “Relax. Take a deep breath and relax. We’re all right here.”
“Gooseberries. Top and tail. Top and tail.”
Her head whipped from side to side, and just as Jonathan was about to lose his grip, the seizure ended. Hazel’s limbs grew heavy, her breathing slowed. He cradled her head while Nora brought a cushion. Together they covered her with a blanket. George hurried from the room; he would be making an entry, Jonathan knew, in the notebook where he detailed each seizure, searching for a correlation with weather, exercise, diet, household events. Sometimes Nora followed him but today, no such luck. She knelt in what Jonathan regarded as his rightful place, next to Hazel. He resigned himself to the nearest armchair. “That was terrible,” he said.
“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 a
n 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.
The Missing World Page 9
