The Missing World (10 page)

“What a team.” Jason laughed. “So you’ve discovered my little secret. I thought I was the only ordinary person who ever came here. All my naff colleagues go to Pizza Express. May I join you?”

“Lovely. In fact I was about to have a second round.”

Leaving her bag to hold the table, Charlotte followed him to the salad bar and they chatted their way through the choices. Once they sat down, Jason said, “Well, this calls for a celebration. Red or white?”

“Just what I was thinking, but I’m totally broke.”

“My treat. I’m working these days.” He ordered a carafe of red, and they toasted. It turned out that Jason, an aspiring actor when they met, had moved on to radio and now helped to
produce an arts programme. “Basically I’m a glorified dogsbody, though I do get to make suggestions. Hanif Kureishi was on last week—what a thrill! I fetched him Perrier.”

He asked if she had any ideas for guests. Charlotte mentioned an actor she knew who was now starring in a soap, and Jason said they’d done him. “We need ought-to-be-famous, rather than actually is.”

“Oh, I’ve got the chap for you.” She flourished her wineglass. “Donald Early. He was my tutor at RADA. He used to be a designer, now he does heads and stuff for TV, but he’s worked with everyone—Gielgud, Olivier, the Redgraves,” she improvised. “And he’s a great talker, touch of the blarney, besides being awfully nice.”

“Sounds perfect.” Gratifyingly, Jason produced a Filofax and made a note with an asterisk.

“I expect recognition and ten percent,” Charlotte joked. She took a bite of pasta salad. “So how’s your love life?”

“Grim. I’ve been seeing this older man, and from being a kind, intelligent person he’s turned into a possessive monster. Maybe I’ll say I had lunch with Charlie just to wind him up. How about you?”

“Still with the toy boys, I’m afraid.” She described Cedric. “A babe in arms, so utterly ruthless. He’s looking for an older woman to teach him bedroom manners, and I seem to have volunteered.”

“And is he a good student?” Jason fluttered his dark eyelashes.

“A for effort, B for execution. Interested?”

“Absolutely not. It’s bad enough putting up with myself. I can’t stand anyone else under twenty-five.” He refilled their glasses.

The new shift of waiters was arriving by the time they wandered, flushed and exuberant, out into the street. Jason had
ordered a second carafe, then coffee, and paid for everything. They’d played desert-island sex and discussed his screenplay, and Charlotte had told him about Struan, the film for Channel 4, and promised to recommend Jason to him. “Well, I’m off to see the older man,” Jason announced, bussing her cheek. “And you?”

“Errands,” Charlotte said firmly. She headed down Baker Street.

She was standing in front of the flower shop at Selfridges—where did they grow such beautiful lilies in February?—when the phone bill surfaced again. It was already too late to get to the office today, but it might be worth giving them a call. No point in being an actor if you couldn’t persuade people to do what you wanted.

One of Freddie’s small extravagances was never to go out at night, even in summer, without turning on several lights. When Felicity scolded him about waste and the environment, he argued that her habit of leaving on only the hall light was like putting a sign
BURGLARS WELCOME
in the window. In truth, his own behaviour had nothing to do with security; he simply hated coming back to a dark apartment. So when he pedalled down Mr. Early’s street and saw his house lit up like a Christmas tree, he both recognised a kindred spirit and was fairly sure Mr. Early was at home, awake. He dismounted, leaning the bike against a lamppost across the road.

A fine drizzle filled the air and as he stood, staring up at the room of heads, droplets clung to his face and hands. Why, he wondered, this evening of all evenings, had he suddenly been able to leave the couch? He was stamping his feet, feeling increasingly dumb, when a figure appeared at the window. Mr. Early, pate glowing, was looking towards the lamppost—indeed, seemed to be looking right at him—but Freddie,
confident of his own invisibility, did not budge. When I was a kid, he’d told Felicity, the three things about being black were: people picked you first at sports; they assumed you had all the rhythm moves; and they joked about running over you in the dark. Same in London, she’d said.

Mr. Early raised his hand. Darn, so much for being one with the night. Across three thousand miles of ether Freddie heard his mother’s voice: Get your lazy butt over there right now, Frederick Lewis Adams, and apologise to that poor man for being crazy as a loon. Miserable, embarrassed—only yesterday he’d phoned to say he was too busy to do the roof—Freddie was nearly at the gate when he realised Mr. Early had been wiping the glass, not waving. A cat meowed in the next garden. He retreated to the bike and was poised to depart when he saw Mr. Early’s lips moving. Perhaps he was singing to himself.

For a minute, maybe two, Freddie watched, entranced. Then Mr. Early moved away and his senses returned. We are freezing, came the message from fingertips, feet, ears. As he mounted the bike, the front door opened and a woman stepped out, hefting a large box in her arms, and headed to a nearby car. Pedalling past, it occurred to Freddie that the box contained Bethany and then that Mr. Early hadn’t been singing but talking to the woman.

Back at the house, Kevin popped out of his apartment the moment Freddie came through the door. In the shadowy hall light his afro, the best Freddie had ever seen on a white boy, hummed with indignation. “Freddie,” he said softly, “you can’t keep borrowing my bike without frigging well asking. I wanted to go to the off-licence and by the time I walked there, it was closed.”

“I’m sorry.” Freddie leaned the bike against three others. “Why didn’t you take one of these?”

“The same reason you didn’t. They’re locked. How would you like it if I kept using your van without permission?”

“Plenty, if you filled the tank, but then I never claimed to be an anarchist. I’m just a fellow traveller.”

“Oh, bugger off.”

Poor old Kev, Freddie thought, climbing the gloomy stairs. Not a happy camper. As usual, it didn’t pay to take people at their word. When they met, during Freddie’s locksmith days, Kevin had preached against the evil of keys. “We have to trust each other,” he said. “It all comes back.” At the time he was leaving his flat unlocked, an experiment he abandoned after his second CD player was liberated. Freddie, who shared Kevin’s taste in cookies and beer, had lamented the erosion of his ideals. And look at him now. You could hardly tell him apart from an ordinary, grubby socialist.

Inside his apartment all thoughts of Kevin vanished. Agnes was gone. She was not mooching in the hall or under the kitchen table. She wasn’t napping behind the couch. Heart pounding absurdly, he searched the three rooms, calling her name. At last he found her in the closet where he kept his clothes. “Agnes,” he said, “is this it? Are you about to drop?” She pushed her hot nose against his hand and gave a single wag of the tail. Fire on the mountain. The Lord is coming. He sat beside her for twenty motionless minutes before going to bed.

The four of them divided the tasks of bringing Hazel home. While George and Nora took care of paperwork at the hospital, Maud borrowed Jonathan’s car to go to Hazel’s flat, and Jonathan organised what they all referred to as “the house,” as if the definite article could expunge his ownership. Walking home that Thursday evening, he made a mental list: clean sheets, groceries, a quick flick with the duster. The prospect of
Hazel once again beneath his roof was like sliding into a warm pool of bliss.

As he turned into his street, a figure shambled towards him through the gloaming: the Tourette’s boy. The young man, faintly Oriental in appearance, with a crest of black hair and a ragged backpack, had been a fixture in the neighbourhood ever since the summer after Hazel moved in. They’d diagnosed him from his odd method of locomotion; he could walk no more than thirty paces without turning in a circle.

“Good evening,” said Jonathan.

The boy spiralled beside him, mute, and continued on his way.

Jonathan woke an hour before the alarm—Hazel, he thought—and could not linger in bed another second. Downstairs, he filled the kettle and, reaching for a mug, found every last one of them piled in the sink, along with whatever dishes he’d used since the accident. The kitchen, he now saw, was filthy, the counters rimmed in dirt, the floor mossy with crumbs. Even the stain on the wall, where a glass of tomato juice had landed, seemed more livid. In the months before she moved out, Hazel had ceased to clean, and he too had abandoned his normal tidiness. Carrying his coffee from room to room, Jonathan discovered that the entire house had become a grubby shrine.

Furiously he began to scrub and hoover, polish and dust. He gathered up the dead plants from the living-room, lining them up in the garden, and hung last year’s Amnesty calendar over the tomato stain. He made Hazel’s bed, their bed, with clean sheets and put the dirty ones in the washing machine. Later there would be time to organise the spare room for her parents, the study for himself. He turned on the heat and extravagantly opened the windows.

Then he set out to Sainsbury’s and bought food for lunch
and dinner as well as everything he could remember Hazel liking: mozzarella, olives, Camembert, raspberry jam, avocadoes, oranges, cream crackers, tuna, olive oil, wine, apples, and three large bars of chocolate. The cashier’s announcement—“Eighty-eight pounds twenty-six pence, sir”—filled him with satisfaction; too often recently his purchases had barely dented a ten-pound note. Sitting in the taxi, however, he fell prey to a mysterious anxiety. Had he forgotten something, he wondered, eyeing the bags at his feet, but the market round the corner was open until midnight. The shabby houses of the Liverpool Road with their lovely fanlights flashed by. Maud, he thought, scratching his palms. He remembered her face when Nora broke the news that Hazel would convalesce at his house. Really? she’d said.

Years ago, at an exhibition on the Spanish Civil War, he and Hazel had seen the Orsini bomb. Orsini, the placard explained, was an anarchist who had risked his life to hurl the bomb at an important personage in the Madrid opera house only to have it roll under the skirts of a nearby lady and fail to explode. Side by side, Jonathan and Hazel had studied the gleaming silver sphere, no bigger than an orange, and speculated as to the fate of the unnamed woman. Was it possible to recover from such a spectacular intertwining of good and bad luck? Yes, Hazel had argued; she had gone on to have two beautiful daughters and become a famous portrait painter. No, said Jonathan; she fell into depression, her husband left her, her dog was run over, even her mother found her boring.

He was trying to recall the date of the exhibition, more or less than three years ago, when the cab pulled up outside the house. The driver apologised for not helping with the shopping. “I slipped a disc right after Christmas. Bloody murder.”

He’s lying, Jonathan thought, and perversely tipped him a pound rather than the fifty pence he’d already sorted from his
change. Once inside he went through the fridge, dumping two frothy pints of milk and a seething carton of yoghurt down the drain, before installing fruit juices, wine, hummus, gleaming dairy products. Then he moved on to the fruit and veg. He was pondering whether a bunch of rubbery carrots might still be good for soup when the doorbell rang. He raised his hand as if to ward off a blow. He wanted Hazel across his threshold more than anything, but not yet, it was too soon, he wasn’t ready.

“Sorry,” said Maud. “I didn’t realise packing would take so long.” She held a suitcase in either hand.

“No problem.” He tried to exhale quietly. Even his apprehensions seemed unreliable today. “Is there more?”

“Lots.”

While she carried the cases inside, he set the carrots on the radiator and went out to the car. At the sight of the back seat full of bags and boxes, his hands unclenched. For five minutes he and Maud trotted back and forth. “That’s it,” she said in the kitchen, handing him the car keys. “Thanks.”

He was about to comment on the amount of luggage but superstitiously caught himself. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?”

“A glass of water. Maybe tea in a minute. You’ve been busy.” She indicated the piles of groceries on the table and the floor.

“Sainsbury’s. The cupboard was a little bare. I took a taxi,” he added, answering her unasked question.

She drank the water in slow, steady swallows. The shadows beneath her eyes were even more pronounced than usual; most evenings after leaving the hospital she had gone back to the florist’s to place orders and check the accounts. It was on the tip of his tongue to make some euphemistic plea, don’t rock the boat, let sleeping dogs lie. Instead he said, “You look tired.”

“You too.” She turned the glass round and round as if it were a crystal ball. “I have something to tell you.”

Carefully, not taking his eyes off her, Jonathan sat down at the table. He pushed aside the jars of jam and boxes of pasta, not so much to make room as to remove temptation. Whatever happened, he must not lose his temper. Maud went to the sink and refilled her glass. As she stepped back, the blood rose in her cheeks; her hands trembled and water splashed onto the newly washed floor. “I’ve sublet Hazel’s flat,” she said. “A friend of Graham’s—you know, my banker friend—needed a place for four months.”

“Four months.” If Maud had floated up to the ceiling, he could not have felt more astonished, or more delighted.

Her colour deepened. “I should’ve asked Hazel but the businesswoman in me took over. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, she’ll be well enough to worry about her finances again. This way her flat is safe and paid for until the end of June. As soon as she’s better, she can come and stay with me.”

Across the crowded table her eyes glowed at Jonathan. He stared back, a cautious incredulity mixing with his relief. Surely she must know she’d given him exactly what he wanted. “Thank you,” he said, but she was speaking again.