The Missing World (33 page)

Freddie had trailed her. “Look,” she said. “Jonathan is a beekeeper.”

“Come on, Charlotte. We don’t want to disturb them.”

As they drew near the house, she saw a pale figure standing at the window, in the gap in the curtains. Beside her, Freddie made a little sound. But could Hazel see them, she wondered, both in their different ways dressed in black? She raised her hand and waved. Nothing happened for half a dozen breaths, then the figure stepped back and the curtains closed.

Only when he put his arm around her and said “Let’s go” did Charlotte realise that the noise she’d been hearing was the chattering of her own teeth. In the van, he started the engine and turned on the heat. “Sorry,” he said. “I should’ve lent you a jacket.”

“At least we saw her.”

“She looked so sad.”

“She did, but you can’t be sure. If I wanted to play a sad woman in a movie, one way I’d do it is to stand at a window and gaze out into a dark garden, pretending to have thoughts too deep for words, while really I was fretting about the leaky dishwasher.”

“Well, that’s acting,” Freddie said. “Are you getting any warmer?”

On the Holloway Road they joined the shoal of black cabs pouring back into town. Charlotte began to count and, once she’d got to twenty, in both directions, asked why Felicity had dumped him. They passed a row of shops, eight more cabs.

“Too many reasons,” Freddie said at last. “Because I’d rather sit on the couch than earn money. Because I’m historically unenlightened. Because, finally, I couldn’t fool either of us any longer.” He rubbed his hand over his head. “What about you?”

“Me?” The traffic of Highbury Corner engulfed them. “I used to live with Walter. He’s an actor, too. One day I came home from the theatre and he’d done a bunk, taken his clothes, possessions, most of our furniture. He didn’t even leave a note.”

“I’m so—”

But she couldn’t stop now. “I’ve been a disaster ever since. I can’t act. I haven’t earned tuppence. I mess around, pretending to be busy. And the worst thing, the very worst, is that I know he isn’t worth it. He drank too much, he was sarcastic, he was stingy. But as soon as he left,
voilà
—the love of my life.” They were slowing down. “Are we home?”

“Nearly.” Freddie was turning to her, his gleaming, eloquent face bending towards her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He pressed his forehead against hers as if his sympathy, the whole fluent current of his goodwill, could pass from his cranium to hers; and somewhere, far behind her eyes, wherever she’d stored the pain of the last year, a small, clear light sparked.

chapter 19

The bottle of oil, deceptively whole, dripped steadily. A bag of flour cracked open in Freddie’s hands. As for the rice, it was a total loss, heaped beside the frying pan. For a moment, staring at his floured palms, his anxiety about Hazel vanished. All this mess and Arkansas, too. “Boy,” he said, “Felicity sure was thorough.”

Charlotte nodded. “Do you have a beater?”

“Who knows?” He moved uncertainly toward the cutlery drawer, and she said not to worry, she’d use a fork.

In stolen glances, he noted how quickly she seemed at home; probably something to do with being an actress. She showed him how to crack eggs one-handed, a skill she’d mastered for a cookery show, while he made the toast and tea. Once the food was ready, he started to clear the table but she stopped him. “Let’s eat in the living-room. It’s cosier.”

He carried in the mugs of tea, went back for his own plate, and returned to find her sitting cross-legged in the same corner of the couch as before, shoes on the floor. Her eyes, bloodshot earlier, were clear, and he could see that the tipsiness she had confessed to outside Littleton’s was fading. He took his corner
of the couch. Now, at last, he could ask if Hazel and Jonathan were really getting married. Like dog and cat, mermaid and human, it struck him as a completely unnatural union. Whatever happens, he thought, this shouldn’t. “Excuse me—” he started, but Charlotte was butting in.

“Have you ever been to Los Angeles?”

He told her about his last visit to Santa Monica, the earthquake sending the strawberries to the floor. “Crikey,” she said, “then you really would be history. Actually, I’m more interested in movie stars than tectonic plates.”

“Movie stars are a dime a dozen. I saw Dustin Hoffman at an Indian restaurant. Michelle Pfeiffer at a bookstore.” By the time he finished his list, she was mopping her plate and swallowing the last mouthful of eggs. His heart was doing a kind of tortured flip-flop. If Charlotte hadn’t been with him tonight, he would’ve fetched his ladder and climbed up to talk to Hazel, make sure she was all right. But if Charlotte hadn’t been there, he reminded himself, he would never have risked going into the garden. At the far end of the couch she yawned. Maybe he should wait, hold off questioning her until morning. “Let me take that,” he said, reaching for her empty plate.

“We can clear up later.” She licked her fingers and set her plate beside his on the floor. He felt a twinge of disloyalty; Felicity had always insisted on doing the dishes right after a meal. But then he pictured Arkansas, whimpering, alone. Tomorrow, he promised, they would get the puppy back and sort out Hazel. All he needed was a chance to have a decent conversation with her. Surely Charlotte could help to arrange that.

“Why do you live in London?” she asked. “Everyone here wants to go to America.”

From the street below came the sound of heavy footsteps, a neighbour making a last pass with a dog or coming home from the pub. Freddie stared at the crumpled
Herald Tribune
, the gas
fire, the floor lamp with its faded pink shade. A year ago Felicity had asked the same thing and he’d reeled off his standard answer, no problem. But something about this crazy day—his conversation with Mrs. Craig, the glimpse of Hazel, Charlotte’s miraculous arrival and her own confession—had opened him up like a can of sardines, all his thoughts and feelings, stretched head to tail, side by side, undeniable. Some deep wrong would be done if he didn’t at least try to answer this woman honestly.

Slowly, dodging and weaving past the tiny hands, he explained what had happened after graduation: the awful jobs in Silicon Valley, his escape to Paris and Lourdes, the drifting which year by year took him further from his contemporaries and compounded his fear of disappointing his parents. “My going to Stanford was like you guys going to Oxford, a big deal. They were sure I’d made it. Now, as long as I’m over here, they don’t have to deal with the fact that I’m not some big-shot professor or lawyer.” Her eyes were fixed on him. “And I guess I don’t, either. Living in a foreign country is a kind of disguise. All people see when they look at me is an American in London.”

In the silence, the heavy footsteps returned. Dog, thought Freddie. Everything depended on his keeping absolutely still. Let me answer again, he wanted to say, but if he so much as moved a muscle, he’d start crying like a baby.

“If you want to be truly invisible,” said Charlotte, “try being an actor. I’m so busy playing other people that no one even notices who I am. And when I fail, well, it’s especially ludicrous. I’m failing at something that doesn’t matter anyway, a kids’ game of make-believe.”

“I bet you’re terrific.”

Charlotte studied her nails. “No,” she said, gently. “Okay in the right role, far from terrific. At least I used to be.”

Open mouth, he thought, insert foot. “You must be
exhausted. Let me show you the bedroom. It’s a mess, but at least the sheets are clean.”

“Where will you sleep?”

Suddenly, for once, she was entirely still. Throughout her arrival, the drive, the meal, and their conversations, Freddie now realised, she’d been in constant motion, not fidgeting exactly, but always making little accompanying gestures—a lift of an eyebrow, a crook of a finger. Only a jerk, he thought, could resist such an unmistakable invitation.

Side by side they lay on top of the duvet. He kissed her cheek. “Should I be doing this?” he whispered, and kissed her again. “I’m doing it.” Someone was trembling. Charlotte, he thought, but his own limbs were shaking, too.

She lay on her back, her small, straight nose pointing toward the ceiling. “I haven’t made love,” she said, “in nearly a year. I think I’ve revirginised myself.”

“We don’t have to.”

“We do,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?” In the faint light he saw her face, set and solemn.

“Let’s get under the covers.” As he heard his own suggestion, dread seized him. He felt something but not, he knew, what Charlotte meant. With Felicity this had been easy, in the beginning. She’d made clear that what they did in bed meant no more than a meal or a movie. When he told her he was Catholic, she’d said, too Catholic for this? and held out a foil package. Later, the complaints started. All my friends assume I have a great sex life, she said bitterly. You know me, he tried to joke. I just can’t stay awake. How could he tell her he had confused Lourdes and love?

Now, fully dressed under the duvet, he felt his limbs grow languorous, and Charlotte’s hand warm and damp in his.

“What about Felicity?” she said. “Is this too soon?”

“Felicity’s been leaving for a while.” Then, lord knows why, he offered a statement misleading on more levels than he could count. “Whatever you and I do, there’s only the two of us in this bed.” And, in some amazing way, his remark did succeed in banishing Hazel; now it
was
only the two of them. He propped himself on one elbow. “Will it scare you if I take off my jeans?”

Charlotte pulled away. At first he didn’t know what to think, then saw she had taken his question as an invitation. Side by side, they arched their backs. “Do you have any siblings?” she asked, bending to lay her leggings beside the bed.

“James. He’s a doctor in Illinois.”

She made a little noise. “My sister’s a nurse.”

“You know”—he reclaimed her hand—“I think I met her once at Littleton’s. Ponytail, efficient-looking.”

“That’s Bernadette. Did you think she was pretty?”

She slid her bare leg between his, and the shock emptied him of speech. “Yes,” he finally managed, “though not like you.”

“She drives me mad.” Charlotte’s voice was slow and dreamy. “She can be so self-righteous. I mean, throwing me out of the house this evening, like Goneril and Regan.” Her leg pressed against his thigh. “From her perspective I’ve been a loser for years. She has the steady job, the husband, the kids. In one way all that lets me off the hook. In another it makes me seem even more of a ne’er-do-well.”

He buried his face in her neck, breathing in the sweet, complex odour of her skin. Everything she said could just as easily have been spoken by him.

Nothing was magical or effortless. He undid her blouse, each button sliding out of its neatly stitched hole a marker on their journey, then removed the rest of his own clothes, except for underwear. Lying down again, he wished he could say, let’s stop
now; sleep and dream and wake up together. But he knew Charlotte would splinter into a hundred pieces, that she’d been hurt and hurt over and over, and that for him to turn aside now, for any reason, could spell nothing other than rejection.

She counted his ribs, traced his nipples and biceps, her fingers quick and slow, caressing and calibrating, never venturing below the waistband of his underpants. And he touched her as best he dared, her shoulders, her smooth stomach, but not yet her breasts.

“Why do you think,” she said, stroking his collarbone, “you’ve turned out like this, so different, so far from home?”

So she hadn’t bought his answer on the couch, or not completely. Here was his second chance, no sooner recognised than blown. He muttered something about growing up Catholic.

“Freddie.” She patted him as if he were a small boy.

The words, never spoken before, came together as simple and stubborn as a stack of slates: measure one, then the next; fasten one, then the next. His last year at Stanford, a party near Santa Cruz, a house out in the woods.

“You can’t imagine how beautiful it was, all these giant redwoods, and when you leaned back in the hot tub you could see the Milky Way. It got late. I’d only had one beer. The friends I’d come with weren’t ready, and I decided to leave anyway.

“I remember coasting down the driveway, without the engine to keep from spoiling the quiet. In the woods I could see glinting eyes—skunks, raccoons, I guess. Near the main road, near the ocean, the mist started, wisps drifting in and out among the trees. At the intersection I pulled out and started north. The mist came and went, clouds and patches, but never for more than a few yards. I was doing sixty, maybe sixty-five, when I passed a car parked on the shoulder. A second later, this guy stumbled out into the road.

“His name was Roy Harper, a guitar maker. White, drunk,
twenty-nine years old. His body flew forty feet off the road and landed against a tree.

“Everyone said it was an accident, that there was nothing I could’ve done. But I was driving, breaking the speed limit and daydreaming—about what I’d do after graduation, about going to the beach the next day. If I hadn’t gone to that party, if I hadn’t left early, if I’d been paying attention …”

Charlotte put her hand on his heart and leaned over, her hair falling around his face. “Hush,” she said.

“Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold
.
There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings
,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.”

She pushed back her hair. “Lorenzo, in
The Merchant of Venice
. It’s what made me want to be an actor, that plus people telling me not to show off.” She shrugged off her blouse and did something that made her underwear disappear. “I’m so sorry.”

Her mouth opened into his, her hand was slithering past his waistband, and—Freddie couldn’t quite say where or how—the dread was gone. When he touched her, she was waiting.