The Missing World (7 page)

Rory nodded. “She made us each write down who we’d slept with. Said it would clear the air.”

“Clearing the air” was one of Bernie’s expressions; still Charlotte doubted. “You mean Bernie had a list? I thought you were it, besides her weedy nursing-school boyfriend.”

Rory laughed. “What an innocent you are. While you were poncing around doing
Romeo and Juliet
, your sister was carving a swathe of safe sex through the hospitals of North London.”

“I’m gobsmacked,” Charlotte said, and she had been, though not so much as she was now, sitting opposite Bernie in that awful uniform. Who on earth would want her neat, dull sister?

As if reading her thoughts, Bernadette stood up.

Charlotte realised she was about to be shown the door. “Bernie,” she blurted, “I need a favour.”

“Surprise, surprise.” She carried her mug to the sink and turned, arms folded, to face Charlotte. “Well?”

“I need to rent out my flat, just for a few months, and I was hoping I could stay with you. As you said, parts are scarce. And even with a new agent, it’s going to take a while for the tide to turn. I’ll collect the children from school, babysit, shop, whatever you want. Mr. O’Grady”—she dwindled—“thinks it’s a great idea.”

Throughout the day she’d been acting out scenarios in her head, but the basis for all her scripts was her superiority to Bernie: the artist versus the drone. Suddenly Charlotte understood that her sister was an opponent to reckon with. Sweat trickled between her breasts at the prospect of rejection.

“Who would rent your flat?” Bernie said. “It’s a pigsty.”

“Students. I’ll tidy it up. I’m sure I can get seventy pounds a week each. Sixty, anyway.”

“I suppose people are desperate.”

“Exactly,” said Charlotte, overlooking the insult. “So I’ll spruce it up, rent it out for three months, get caught up on my bills, and really focus on my career.”

“That sounds fine, so long as you can find somewhere else to stay.” She stepped over to seize Charlotte’s mug, still half-full, and put it in the sink.

“But you haven’t even thought about it,” Charlotte said above the noise of water. “Only a minute ago you were saying how hard it is being a single parent. Of course I’m not a parent, but I could help. Think how much you’d save on babysitting.”

“I’m going to bed now,” Bernie said, drying her hands.

“I don’t expect you to answer right away. Just please say you’ll consider it.”

Bernie left the kitchen and returned with Charlotte’s coat. “Did you know there’s something on your blouse?” Her finger pointed at the trail of splotches.

Demon nurse, thought Charlotte, tyrant. She could see Bernie taking positive pleasure in gouging a needle into someone’s veins. And that surge of anger prevented her from pleading further or from asking to borrow the bus fare home. Forget Mr. Aziz, she’d sooner starve. She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and set out to walk. Barnsbury to Kilburn couldn’t be more than a couple of miles, maybe three. Crossing the Caledonian Road, she remembered visiting a squat here; the walls of
the living-room had been lined with geraniums, row upon leafy row. Where did you get all these? she’d asked. Cuttings, her friend Una replied. One big incestuous family. Too bad she didn’t know any squatters now.

She was waiting at a red light, the wind whipping through her threadbare coat, when a taxi pulled up in front of her,
FOR HIRE
sign glowing, and she opened the door to ask if the driver would take a cheque. A moment later she was being borne through the streets of London, discussing the importance of children studying foreign languages. The driver’s daughter was in her third year of French and his son had started Russian—not as useful as a few years ago, but still a major language.

Charlotte confided that she’d spent the evening babysitting her nephew and niece. “We decided to have a French night. We made crêpes and spoke French all evening.”

“What a great idea. I wonder if the wife and I could manage.”

“You don’t need to be fluent. The children enjoyed correcting me.”

The driver said he could see that and she was welcome to babysit for him anytime. Reluctantly, he agreed to drop her at the corner. “I hate to leave a young lady on the streets this late.”

But she insisted there was no place to turn around, and wrote the cheque with a flourish, adding a pound tip. “Thanks, love. Hope to see you again.”

For a few seconds watching his taillights dim, Charlotte felt buoyed by the ease and comfort of her journey. As she started walking, however, her spirits sank. Though the driver wouldn’t know her exact address when the cheque bounced, what the hell was she going to do? What did people do when they had no money? She opened the door of her flat and stumbled over the red cushion, still propped against the wall. Several unpleasant answers presented themselves.

chapter 4

“Think of her,” Dr. Hogarth suggested, “as having fallen off a mountain. In the Himalaya, for example.” He nodded towards the photograph of white peaks and blue skies which hung beside a certificate from the London School of Neurology. “Or even a hill in your Lake District. The descent is swift, the climb back proportionately arduous.”

From his seat near the door of the office, Jonathan followed the doctor’s gesture. Julian Hogarth had appeared at Hazel’s bedside the day after she opened her eyes. No relation, he had said cheerfully when he introduced himself, as if a Kashmiri neurologist might easily be mistaken for a descendant of the polemical printmaker.

“The good news,” he said, smiling at the three of them in turn, “is that the subdural hematoma has gone down. We hope to see steady improvement to the point of full recovery.”

George and Nora were bobbing, but Jonathan scratched his palms. Hogarth was so indefatigable, always another drug, another test, and so cheerful, that only the bitter experience of Hazel’s continued seizures had enabled Jonathan to discern the
guarded nature of his predictions. Wasn’t hope a matter for him and for her parents?

“As you’re well aware,” Hogarth continued, “Hazel’s memory has been affected. Some degree of amnesia is fairly common in the case of head injuries. Often it proves to be temporary, passing off by degrees. Hazel, as far as I can determine, has lost the last three years. Like a large suitcase, she just put it down and walked away. Or, more precisely, she put it down and a thief came by.” Again a smile for each of them. Other things, he went on, were missing too—her parents, for instance, and Maud, though clearly she was fond of these people who hovered over her bed. She remembered the emotion if not its origin.

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.…”