The Missing World (8 page)

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 Wellington 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 with 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 morning star was hanging over the elderberry tree when Jonathan drew the bedroom curtains; surely, he thought, a good omen. His conversations with Hogarth and Nora had left him stunned, incredulous. I’ll do anything, he had vowed—and here he was, being allowed to do it. He and Hazel would have their life together over again, the good parts without the mistakes, yet with the benefit of those mistakes. You can’t change back, she had said, but you could, you could. Once again he would be the man she’d fallen in love with. And vice versa. This was the ultimate second chance.

By the time he’d washed and dressed, the dense night sky had thinned and the star was gone. On impulse he decided to visit his bees. Spending every day at Hazel’s bedside, he couldn’t remember when he had last checked the hives. He mixed sugar and water while making coffee. Then, pulling on his jacket and grabbing the smoker, he opened the back door. The air was so crisp he blinked. The bees were only sixty feet away, but as usual the short walk cheered him. How can you keep bees in the middle of London, Hazel had asked. Easily, he said. The houses around here have long gardens and I pick docile breeds. If they show any signs of hostility, I replace them.

He set his coffee on the ground, lit the smoker, and gave a few puffs in the entrance of the nearest hive. He would have to figure out how to work at home, he thought. As for Hazel, happily there seemed no immediate prospect of her returning to journalism. Perhaps he could steer her back into the more predictable world of teaching ESL. The first skirmishes between them, he recalled, dated from her having an article in a major newspaper. Well, they needn’t make that mistake again. He lifted the lid off the hive and found the bees gorged and barely stirring. The smoke made them greedy for fear that their food was about to go up in flames.

“I can’t stand it,” George was saying, his weatherbeaten face an even deeper shade of red. “This isn’t some comedy where you test your loved one by concealing your identity.”

Nora shook her head. “We’re not testing her, George. We’re nursing her back to health. She had three seizures yesterday. Whatever we can do to lighten her load is a good thing.”

They were standing on either side of Hazel’s empty bed, so absorbed in conversation that neither of them noticed Jonathan’s arrival.

“Won’t it lighten her load to know she has parents?” George asked, his arms flailing like those of a tired swimmer aiming for a distant shore.

“Not if she’s forgotten you.” As he stepped forward, Jonathan sensed rather than saw Maud come up behind him. “Sorry,” he said, striving to sound diffident, “I couldn’t help overhearing. I know this is hard for you, both of you, but we have to remember what Hogarth said. Hazel’s had a tremendous shock. Every day she’s a little better: she’s eating, walking, able to follow a conversation. I’d hate for us to do anything that might set her back.”

He did not dare to look at Maud, standing only a few feet away, but when George appealed to her, she too sided with Nora. “We mustn’t be selfish,” she said.

“Selfish?” George’s arms collapsed by his sides. Still muttering, he allowed Nora to lead him towards the cafeteria.

Jonathan followed with Maud. “I feel so sorry for them,” she said quietly. “Nora told me yesterday that George is convinced Hazel will die without recognising them. You smell of something. Smoke?”

Now he caught a whiff, lingering in his clothes and on his hands, the fragrance of honey. “Hazel’s not going to die,” he said, and explained about the bees. Was it possible, he wondered, that for once Maud actually approved of his behaviour?

Later that afternoon, for the first time since Hazel’s arrival, sunlight filled the drab room. Jonathan sat by the window, going through the papers his secretary had forwarded. In his absence most of the cases were progressing smoothly, claims awarded or denied, estimates queried; even several tricky subsidence claims, dragging on since last summer, were moving towards resolution. Near the bottom was a blue envelope.
McLusky—any thoughts?
Alastair had written.