The Missing World Read online

  ALSO BY MARGOT LIVESEY

  Criminals

  Homework

  Learning by Heart

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 1999 by Margot Livesey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.randomhouse.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Livesey, Margot.

  The missing world : a novel / by Margot Livesey. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82223-9

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.L563M57 1999

  813′.54—dc21 99-35785

  v3.1

  For

  Eric Garnick

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  chapter 1

  They were quarrelling on the phone when it happened, although anyone overhearing them might easily have failed to detect the fury that lay behind their pragmatic sentences. “I don’t see why you need to bother Mrs. Craig,” Hazel said, “about a leak in your study.”

  “But my hunch,” said Jonathan, “is that the water’s getting in through her roof as well as ours. No use fixing one without the other.” He was standing beside the window, tugging at the dusty leaves of the indomitable cheese plant. Since Hazel’s flight the other plants had, one by one, succumbed to his lack of care and now sat, brown and desiccated, on windowsills and tables. This monster, however, almost as tall as he was with its perforated leaves and hairy roots groping from the lower stems, had not merely survived his abuse but positively thrived. In the midst of his struggle with Hazel, he found time to apostrophise his old enemy. Die, you bugger, he thought, and shredded a leaf.

  The brittle green flakes were still falling when Hazel’s steady speech swerved, slewed across several lanes, hesitated at the guardrail, and plunged off into a dark field. “Elephants,” she whispered. “Caracals.”

  “Hazel, is something wrong? Hazel?”

  The receiver emitted a gurgling sound, then a thud. Jonathan held it away from him, glaring at the rows of holes, as if the machine itself might be responsible for this aberration. But the black plastic was mute. He dropped the phone, grabbed a jacket from the stand in the hall, his keys from the table, and ran. Miraculously, his beleaguered company Saab started on the first attempt. Only as he pulled away from the kerb did he realise he could see nothing; the windscreen was dark with snow. He climbed out again to wipe it clear with his bare hands.

  The pillowed streets, rare in North London, had served as the pretext for his phone call. “Look at the snow,” he had exclaimed, so exhilarated by the downy, festive weather that, briefly, he had forgotten he and Hazel were no longer looking at anything together. He had felt like an idiot when she replied, in a peculiarly quiet voice, that she’d had an accident on the way home. A car, unable to stop, had knocked her down in a zebra crossing.

  “Oh, my god,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. It wasn’t going very fast. I just feel …” Her breath whistled into the phone. “… a little wobbly.”

  He offered to take her to the doctor, the hospital, but she said no, she’d have an early night; time enough to seek help if she still felt out of sorts in the morning. Then, eager to prolong the conversation, Jonathan had mentioned that he’d finally called the roofer about the damp patch in the ceiling and his belief that it was partly the fault of the next-door neighbour, who let everything go to wrack and ruin, and so they had drifted out of the calm waters of weather and health onto a familiar reef: his attitude towards Mrs. Craig.

  Now Jonathan drove heedlessly, swearing at red lights. The deep-seated vexation, at Hazel, at himself, at the cheese plant, which a few minutes earlier had possessed him utterly, was gone. This is an emergency, he told himself; unbidden, the Latin emergere, to rise up, came to him. He was rising up to meet … he didn’t know exactly what. Was Hazel under attack from someone? Some thing? He couldn’t imagine what had produced those odd words—caracals, for christ’s sake—or that gurgling. He turned off the Holloway Road. The car was still shimmying when, from between the parked cars on his left, a dark shape pelted into the street.

  Dog? Cat?

  A tiny interval existed during which Jonathan could have nudged the steering wheel or applied the brake. He did neither. The wheel jumped, and he was past it, whatever it was. The rearview mirror showed only the lights of other cars falling farther and farther behind as he hurtled down Camden Road. He leaned on the horn and overtook a taxi.

  Pausing for a red light, he had visions of scaling a drainpipe to Hazel’s second-floor flat, breaking down the door, and immediately doubted his own capacities; that kind of thing was much harder than it looked in films. Perhaps one of her neighbours had a key? Then it came to him: he himself had a set.

  He had acquired them in a manner he could scarcely bear to consider, the complete opposite of that happy occasion four years ago when he’d given her the keys to his house. They were in a restaurant when he handed her the envelope. Hazel had peered at it, held it up to the light, and, finally, as the waiter put bowls of pasta before them, torn it open. At the sight of the Yale and mortice, still glinting from the locksmith’s, her eyes widened. Shall we use them, she whispered. He had hesitated only a moment before taking twenty pounds out of his wallet and hurrying her home to bed. But last autumn, in the looking-glass world of separation, he’d agreed to pick up a light fixture for her flat—weeks of argument had reduced him to stony helpfulness—and she had asked if he could get some keys cut. For Maud, she explained. No problem, he’d said, dumbfounded once again at how poorly she understood his feelings.

  For weeks he carried the extra set of keys in his pocket. Just knowing he had access to Hazel, that she couldn’t keep him out even if she wanted to, made him feel better. Then one night, several Scotches to the wind, he ended up pacing her street and got as far as opening the outside door. After that, not trusting himself with such temptation, he put the keys in the glove compartment of the car and did his best to forget them.

  In the one-way system of Kentish Town, afraid of a wrong turn, he slowed down. During the months before Hazel moved out, he had twice lost his way walking to the tube station and once, in a moment of fiercely lit, jostling panic, been unable to find his office. But now the same irradiating urgency that made him careless of the dark animal’s fate guided him through these unfamiliar streets towards Hazel’s shabby terrace. Skidding slightly, he double-parked and extricated the hateful keys.

  The outside door was open. Rushing up the stairs, he pictured Hazel unconscious on the floor, clutching the phone. He would carry her into the bedroom and hold a cool cloth to her forehead until she opened her eyes and begged him to
lie down beside her. As soon as he unlocked the door of her flat, Jonathan knew this was the easy version. Sounds he could not parse into sense came from the living-room. “Hello,” he said, not loud enough to be heard.

  He stopped to pick up the phone, beeping on the hall floor, and went slowly into the living-room. Hazel was lurching away from him across the carpet, as if her legs were of different lengths or different substances, one wax, one lead. A table lamp, directly in her passage, fell to the floor. She was wearing a black pullover and, surprisingly, a blue skirt he had given her.

  “Hazel,” he said.

  She reached the wall but still she did not stop. She kept walking until she was pressed right up against it, her toes nudging the skirting board, her thighs moving in a parody of an exercise machine. She raised her hands and began to claw at the plaster, her fingers scraping the magnolia paint, over and over.

  When at last she turned around, he would not have recognised her. The whole shape of her face had changed. Her cheeks were puffy; her eyes, always so large and luminous, were rolling back in their sockets; saliva frothed her lips, and even her jaw seemed to undulate oddly. Only her fine, feathery hair was the same. “Barasingha,” she said in an unnaturally deep voice.

  Jonathan fled. In the hall he seized the phone and dialled Emergency.

  “Which service do you require: police, fire, or ambulance?”

  “Ambulance,” he shouted. And then he was speaking to a calm-voiced woman. Next to the phone was a bookcase, and as he recited the address he caught sight of the faded binding of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his second gift to her, squeezed between The Poems of Rumi and A Guide to Seashore Birds; at least she hadn’t thrown it away.

  “How long will it be?” he asked, but the operator was gone.

  At the prospect of returning to the living-room, dread washed over him. Whoever was staggering back and forth, that person, that creature, was not Hazel. Barasingha? It sounded exotic: a small monkey, perhaps, or a complicated curry. He touched the spine of Metamorphoses, the gold lettering almost gone.

  “Anything,” he vowed, “I’ll do anything to get her back again.” His fingertips came away flecked with gold.

  Hazel had sunk to her knees and was scrabbling at the wall, a desperate prisoner. Cautiously he knelt beside her and reached his arms around her, then almost let go. Deep, uneven zigzags were leaping through her, not like the vibrations of cold or grief but rather as if she were plugged into some wayward generator. He tightened his grip against the shocks. She continued to claw the paint. “Hazel,” he pleaded, “stop it. Please, stop!”

  Like the beginning of an answer came the faint seesawing of a siren.

  At the hospital, there was an alarming sense of urgency. Last spring Jonathan had brought a friend here after an accident on the squash court. Steve was dripping blood, and they had both believed, mistakenly, that his nose was broken; yet an hour or more passed before anyone did more than bring him a towel. Whereas so many people converged on Hazel that by the time Jonathan arrived, only seconds behind the ambulance on whose coat-tails he’d flown through the icy streets, she was completely surrounded. Even as he rushed into the waiting room, the gurney disappeared through the double doors at the far end. He stared after her until a burly nurse tapped his arm. “Would you mind checking in with reception, sir?”

  Following his downward glance, Jonathan discovered he was still wearing his maroon slippers; no wonder his feet were freezing. At the reception desk a plump-faced young man pried his gaze away from a portable television and typed Hazel’s particulars into the computer. Hazel Ash Ransome, thirty-three, freelance journalist. Unthinkingly, Jonathan gave his address as hers and himself as next of kin. “I’ll be right here,” he said. “You’ll call me as soon as there’s news?”

  The young man, his eyes once again locked on the glowing screen, nodded.

  Across the counter, Jonathan imagined a red handprint springing up on one of those doughy cheeks. Then he gave in, he’d talk to a doctor soon, and retreated to the orange plastic chairs. His leather jacket creaked as he tried vainly to get comfortable. Another effect of Hazel’s departure, besides the scourge of the houseplants, was the abrupt fleeing of his own flesh. Whenever he remembered, he wrote “sandwich” in his diary and, on the rarer occasions when he ate one, ticked it off.

  Images flitted in and out of his mind: Hazel taking him to see the curse tablets at the British Museum; Hazel playing darts at the pub, scoring three bull’s-eyes in a row; Hazel exclaiming over the honeycomb he had brought her, his first gift. She had insisted on baking bread. Hours later they emerged from bed to eat the warm loaf with honey.

  “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 h
ave 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.