The Missing World (2 page)

“Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed …”

Who on earth, thought Jonathan, was praying? Scanning his neighbours, many of whom had clearly come straight from the pub, he wondered if he had imagined the words, an attempt to conjure order from cacophony. The man next to him was singing inaudibly into his dirty white beard. Three seats down a stout woman was hectoring an even stouter one. “I told you,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you? I certainly did tell you.” At last, in the row opposite, Jonathan located the unlikely source of prayer. A boy of maybe twelve or thirteen was saying the rosary. Every part of him, including his head, was long and narrow, as if he had passed through a vice; his jeans were secured with string at both waist and ankle.

Watching him, Jonathan lamented his own lack of gods. This room was saturated in waiting, no one merely read a book or held a conversation, but here was someone who could wait usefully. As a schoolboy Jonathan had gone to church hundreds, maybe thousands, of times and been left with nothing but a few
hymns: “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Yet, standing in Hazel’s hall, he had made his vow aloud.

“Amen,” the boy murmured.

As for Hazel, in response to the receptionist’s rote inquiry he had claimed her for the Church of England. In truth, all he could vouch for was a certain feyness. She sometimes checked her horoscope in magazines and periodically came home with flyers for Mrs. Sophia’s Psychic Gallery.
Don’t fail to come and visit this God-Gifted lady, for she has the power to heal by prayer. She will explain your past, present, and future fully. She will call out friends and enemies by name
. But he had several of these himself. Two slender girls in kurtahs handed them out at the tube station. Or they slid through the letter box.

The doors behind which Hazel had disappeared parted to emit an ample woman in a raincoat. The boy spilled from his chair. “Mama!” he exclaimed. How quickly his prayers had been answered.

“Hush, Louis.” The woman patted his narrow head and led him serenely past the winos and bickering women.

A few minutes later the double doors opened again and a woman in a white coat strode to the reception desk. Jonathan’s name came over the Tannoy. At once he was on his feet. “Hazel—is she all right?”

“Mr. Littleton?” The doctor signalled him to a booth. “I’m Dr. Schuler.”

“How is Hazel?” he said, taking the proffered seat. “Can I see her?”

“Not just yet. I need to ask you a few questions.” With her flaxen hair, her round face, her neat nose, the doctor reminded him of someone. And as she sat down, pen poised over a clipboard, he realised who: Hazel, the vivid, mercurial Hazel he’d
met four years ago, a woman on such enviably easy terms with herself and the world.

“Ms. Ransome,” the doctor said, “has suffered a blow to the head. She’s unconscious at present. Have you any idea what might have caused this?” She gave him a quick, searching look.

Just for an instant, Jonathan wondered if he was being accused. Ridiculous. The only thing they both wanted was to help Hazel. As precisely as possible, he repeated what she had told him: the car, the zebra crossing, the wobbly feeling. “It didn’t sound that serious,” he said. “Then we were talking on the phone and she started speaking gibberish.”

Dr. Schuler wrote all this down, or at least she wrote something down. “Does she have a history of epilepsy?”

“Not that I know of.”

Did anyone in her family? Ditto. Was Hazel taking any medication? Ditto.

With each denial Jonathan felt his own guilt and uselessness. The doctor, however, when questioned, was equally uninformative. “She’s in IC. We’re still trying to contain the seizures.”

Contain? “But Hazel,” he said again, “she
is
going to be all right.”

“We don’t know yet, and we probably won’t until she recovers consciousness.” Now that Dr. Schuler was looking directly at him, he noticed that even her eyes were like Hazel’s, showing white all the way round the iris. As if aware of his scrutiny, she blinked and gave a small, catlike yawn. “Sorry,” she said, getting up. “We’ll let you know as soon as there’s a change.”

Swiftly, silently, the doctor was moving away. What about Hazel? Why couldn’t he see her? “Dr. Schuler,” he called, but she was gone.

Dispirited, he returned to the ghastly chair. I’ll do anything, he had vowed, but what if there was nothing? He went through his pockets, hoping for some forgotten piece of gum or chocolate, and discovered not even a scrap of foil. On the chair beside him lay a
National Geographic
, its yellow cover seemingly unchanged since he had given his father a subscription for Christmas thirty years before. Jonathan opened it to a picture of a black-and-white dog foraging in a meadow.
During the brief Antarctic summer penguins avail themselves of the chance to be herbivores
. He looked again and saw that the dog was indeed a penguin, a clump of grass in its beak.

At the time that he gave his father the subscription, Jonathan’s closest companion was a black poodle. Flopsy accompanied him on bicycle rides, waited for him to come home from school, and slept at the foot of his bed. Besides him, her other great passion was cars. Given half a chance, she sneaked into his father’s Morris Minor and accompanied him to his job at the knitwear mill. So when one October afternoon Jonathan arrived home to see neither Flopsy nor the car, he wasn’t worried until he came into the kitchen and found his father drinking tea.

“Where’s Flopsy?” he demanded, unzipping his anorak.

His father said something about a meeting in Glasgow.

“But what about Flopsy?”

His father puffed on his inhaler, a habit Jonathan hated, and stretched out a hand. “She disappeared. I’m sorry, Johnny, there was an accident, six cars in the fog. She bolted. I called and called but she never came.”

“She’ll be all right,” his mother added quickly. She was at the sink, peeling potatoes. “She’ll find a family who’ll take good care of her. Would you like some cake?”

“We have to go and fetch her,” said Jonathan, struggling back into his anorak. “She’ll come if I call. I know she will.”

“Our car’s at the garage.” His father kept looking not at Jonathan but at his mother.

“We can borrow one. The Dawsons will lend you theirs. We have to go now, before it gets dark. She’ll be scared all alone.”

But his parents had refused, stubbornly and absolutely, and at last grown so angry that they sent him to his room.

“It was the worst night of my life,” he had told Hazel over supper at Standard Tandoori. “Every half hour I tiptoed downstairs to see if Flopsy was on the doorstep. In the morning, I pretended to go to school and caught the bus to Hawick and then on to Glasgow. I asked the driver to let me off at Sutra. Whereabouts, he said. The beginning, I said, the very beginning. So he set me down in this godforsaken place, bleak grassland as far as the eye could see, and I started walking, calling for Flopsy. After about five miles a policeman picked me up.…”

To his surprise and embarrassment, he had been unable to continue.

“You poor boy,” Hazel said. “She was probably killed in the accident, wasn’t she?”

“Killed?” Gazing into her clear blue eyes, Jonathan had thought, of course. What else could explain his parents’ hardheartedness? They’d blurted out the lie to make him feel better and been too ashamed to take it back. Meanwhile, month after month, he had waited. He’d heard of animals finding their way home over hundreds of miles; why not his beloved Flopsy a mere thirty?

As he reached across the papadums for Hazel’s hand, not only his parents and Flopsy and his younger self were illuminated by the light of her understanding, but also his older self, of whom, so often recently, he had despaired.

By midnight the crowd in Accident and Emergency had thinned. The bearded man had sauntered off, still singing, and
most of the pubgoers had mysteriously vanished. Those who remained seemed to wait with neither hope nor expectation. When Jonathan tried to picture Hazel now, all he could see was her turning away as he entered a room; shrinking at his touch; muttering into the phone, I have to go, he’s home. Better not to think of her at all, if this was the best he could do. Better to say multiplication tables or recite the names of rival insurance companies than to recall the aberrant Hazel of these last few months.

He was debating whether to check with reception again when the outside door opened. A gurney appeared, propelled by an ambulance man, followed by three policemen. Wheels squeaking, it swept past within a yard. Only the feet, clean and remarkably white, were visible beneath the grey blanket. Jonathan stared at the neatly cut toenails. My god, he thought almost aloud, those are the feet of a dead man.

chapter 2

Jonathan glimpsed a field, stone walls, and sheep before the present rushed in, obliterating the dreamscape. While he was dozing, something dreadful had befallen Hazel; his inattention had been fatal. The awful thought of never seeing her again paralysed him. Then another part of him emerged from the fear. They would have woken me, he told himself, if anything had happened. He struggled out of the orange chair and went over to the water fountain to rinse his mouth with the dirty-tasting water. Back in his seat, he saw that Accident and Emergency had filled up again, a greyer, quieter crowd than before. Only one other person from the previous evening was still there, a middle-aged woman in a puffy purple jacket. Unblinking, unyawning, she sat poker-straight, gloved hands clasped in her lap. Perhaps her vow, Jonathan thought, had been not to move until good news arrived. Her angular features suggested furious concentration.

The
whoomf
of the double doors interrupted his speculations, and a white-coated man headed for reception. Jonathan leaned forward—“Hazel,” he murmured—but after a brief exchange the man loped away with a snort of laughter. In his
wake, Jonathan approached the desk and discovered that the television watcher had been replaced by a woman his own age. A plume of frizzy brown hair waved over her formidable horn-rimmed glasses.

“Hazel Ransome … I’m afraid she hasn’t recovered consciousness yet. Why don’t you go and get a cup of tea?” Her plume bobbed. “I’ll page the cafeteria if there’s any change.”

“Thank you,” he said, relieved to be told what to do, and gave his name again.

Turning, he caught a trace of perfume and almost collided with the sleek-suited woman waiting to take his place. Her perfunctory smile, a mere twitch of the lips, brought home his own dishevelled state. His denim shirt and black cords, perfectly acceptable yesterday, were now not only crumpled from his night in a chair but also, mysteriously, ill-fitting. His slippers did nothing to help. And of course there was his fast-growing stubble, which in happier times Hazel had claimed made him look like an American film star.

In the cafeteria a slight, turbaned man presided over an immense teapot. Using both hands, he poured a cup and, after studying it, added more hot water to the pot, as if constant titration were the essence of his job. To his own surprise Jonathan asked if it was still snowing.

“I think not.” The man lowered the pot. “Rain as usual.”

“The papers claim we’re having a drought.”

“Drought,” the man sniffed, suggesting a superior and very different understanding of the word.

Another customer appeared. Jonathan helped himself to a scone and moved on to the cashier. Most of the people in the low-ceilinged room were hospital staff chatting over what was either breakfast or supper. He chose a table with a single nurse, slender, mousey-haired, eating a yoghurt in tidy bites. Jonathan eyed her longingly; could he ask her about Hazel? He was
poised to introduce himself when the PA growled—“Nurse Granger to orthopaedic … Nurse Bernadette Granger to orthopaedic”—and she was on her feet, licking her spoon and picking up her bag.

At last the sky began to lighten and the tea was gone. Jonathan stopped at a phone to dial Steve and Diane’s number.

“Hello, Steve. Sorry to ring so early.”

“Who is this?”

After nearly twenty years Steve still did not recognise his voice on the phone. It doesn’t mean anything, Hazel used to say, but Jonathan could never quite banish the idea that this failure in his oldest friend proceeded from a secret wellspring of dislike. Now he identified himself and, cutting through Steve’s exclamations, summarised the last twelve hours.

“Tell me again,” Steve said. “You were talking and … did she have a stroke? This is terrible.”

“Not a stroke. Seizures. They’re still trying to find the cause.”

“Poor Hazel—don’t do that, Katie. Sorry. Have you rung her parents?”

“Her parents?” His gaze fell on a notice next to the phone.
IN CASE OF FIRE DO NOT PANIC. DO NOT RUN. PROCEED CALMLY TO THE NEAREST EXIT, CLOSING WINDOWS AND DOORS BEHIND YOU
. “Of course not. Hazel speaks to them twice a year and that’s when things are going well. Besides, it’s not like they could help, up in Kendall.”

“Phone them,” said Steve. “Don’t be a martyr. I know you’d do anything for Hazel, but she isn’t your responsibility. There might be decisions.… Hang on.”

Jonathan watched the pence tick away: fifteen, thirteen. At nine Steve was back. “Sorry. Give a shout if we can help. Anything. Any time.”

In his address book Jonathan turned to the Ransomes’
number. How happy he had been when Hazel gave it to him and urged him to call when she went to stay for the weekend. She had started, he remembered, to dictate the number but, eager to possess another small piece of her, he’d passed her his book. I have a terrible scrawl, she said. In China I would’ve been an old maid. During the last few months he had scarcely known whether to welcome or repudiate these memories, they came barbed with such pain. Now, gazing at her untidy 5s, her tipsy 7s, he thought life was once again making sense.

Back in the waiting room, the receptionist shook her head. He sat down in the nearest chair and picked up a discarded newspaper. Satellite observation showed that spring in the Northern Hemisphere was arriving a week earlier. What effect, he wondered, would this have on his bees? An insurance scam was likely to give some of the frauds he dealt with fresh ideas. But after a couple of paragraphs his concentration fizzled. All he could think of was Hazel clawing the wall, her skin jumping beneath his touch. Surely there would be news soon.