Leaving the World Read online

  About the Book

  On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents – she would never get married and she would never have children.

  But life, as Jane discovers, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then she falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise – but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.

  Just when Jane has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision – stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.

  Like Kennedy’s previous highly-acclaimed novels, Leaving the World speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.

  About the Author

  Douglas Kennedy’s eight previous novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship, State of the Union and The Woman in the Fifth. He is also the author of three highly praised travel books. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2006 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris and Maine.

  ALSO BY DOUGLAS KENNEDY

  Fiction

  The Woman in the Fifth

  Temptation

  State of the Union

  A Special Relationship

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  The Job

  The Big Picture

  The Dead Heart

  Non-fiction

  Chasing Mammon

  In God’s Country

  Beyond the Pyramids

  LEAVING THE WORLD

  Douglas Kennedy

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409061243

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Author 2009

  Douglas Kennedy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Extract from The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen reproduced with permission of the estate of Elizabeth Bowen Copyright © Elizabeth Bowen 1935

  Extract from ‘The Hollow Men’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

  Excerpt from The Collected Stories Of Leonard Michaels by Leonard Michaels

  Copyright © 2007 by Catherine Ogden Michaels. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,

  Straus and Giroux, LLC

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Hutchinson

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099509684

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Douglas Kennedy

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  for my daughter Amelia

  ‘The question of authority is always with us. Who is responsible for the triggers pulled, buttons pressed, the gas, the fire?’

  – Leonard Michaels

  ‘Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.’

  – Elizabeth Bowen

  ON THE NIGHT of my thirteenth birthday, I made an announcement.

  ‘I am never getting married and I am never having children.’

  I can remember exactly the time and the place where this proclamation was delivered. It was around six p.m. in a restaurant on West 63rd Street and Broadway. The day in question was January 1st 1987, and I blurted out this statement shortly after my parents had started fighting with each other. Fuelled by alcohol and an impressive array of deeply held resentments, it was a dispute which ended with my mother shouting out loud that my dad was a shit and storming off in tears to what she always called ‘the little girls’ room’. Though the other patrons in the restaurant gawked at this loud scene of marital discontent, their fight came as no great shock to me. My parents were always fighting – and they had this habit of really combusting at those junctures in the calendar (Christmas, Thanksgiving, the anniversary of their only child’s arrival in the world) when family values allegedly ruled supreme and we were supposed to feel ‘all warm and cuddly’ towards each other.

  But my parents never did warm and cuddly. They needed shared belligerence the way a certain kind of drunk needs his daily eye-opening shot of whiskey. Without it they felt destabilized, isolated, even a little lost. Once they started baiting and taunting each other, they were in a place they called home. Unhappiness isn’t simply a state of mind; it is also a habit . . . and one which my parents could never shake.

  But I digress. New Year’s Day, 1987. We’d driven in from our home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut for my birthday. We’d gone to see the New York City Ballet perform the famous Balanchine production of The Nutcracker. After the matinee, we adjourned to a restaurant called O’Neill’s opposite Lincoln Center. My dad had ordered a vodka Martini, then downed a second, then raised his hand for a third. Mom started berating him for drinking too much. Dad, being Dad, informed Mom that she wasn’t his mother and if he wanted a goddamn third Martini, he’d drink a goddamn third Martini. Mom hissed at him to lower his voice. Dad said he was not going to be infantilized. Mom retorted, telling him he deserved to be infantilized because he was nothing more than a little baby who, when reprimanded, threw all his toys out of the crib. Dad, going in for the kill, called her a failed nobody who—

  At which point she screamed – in her most actressy voice – ‘You pathetic shit!’ and made a dash fo
r ‘the little girls’ room’, leaving me staring down into my Shirley Temple. Dad motioned to the waiter for his third vodka Martini. There was a long awkward silence between us. Dad broke it with a non-sequitur.

  ‘So how’s school?’

  I answered just as obliquely.

  ‘I am never getting married and I am never having children.’

  My father’s response to this was to light up one of the thirty Chesterfields he smoked every day and laugh one of his deep bronchial laughs.

  ‘Like hell you won’t,’ he said. ‘You think you’re gonna dodge all this, you’ve got another think coming.’

  One thing I’ve got to say about my dad: he never spared me the truth. Nor did he think much about cosseting me from life’s manifold disappointments. Like my mom he also operated according to the principle: after a vituperative exchange, act as if nothing has happened – for a moment or two anyway. So when Mom returned from ‘the little girls’ room’ with a fixed smile on her face, Dad returned it.

  ‘Jane here was just telling me about her future,’ Dad said, swizzling the swizzle stick in his vodka Martini.

  ‘Jane’s going to have a great future,’ she said. ‘What did you tell Dad, dear?’

  Dad answered for me.

  ‘Our daughter informed me that she is never going to get married and never have children.’

  Dad looked right at Mom as he said this, enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘Surely you don’t mean that, dear,’ she said to me.

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘But a lot of people we know are very happily married . . .’ she answered. Dad cackled and threw back vodka Martini number three. Mom blanched, realizing that she had spoken without thinking. (‘My mouth always reacts before my brain,’ she once admitted to me after blurting out that she hadn’t had sex with my father for four years.)

  An awkward silence followed, which I broke.

  ‘No one’s actually happy,’ I said.

  ‘Jane, really . . .’ Mom said, ‘you’re far too young for such negativity.’

  ‘No, she’s not,’ said Dad. ‘In fact, if Jane’s figured that little salient detail out already, she’s a lot smarter than the two of us. And you’re right, kid – you want to live a happy life, don’t get married and don’t have kids. But you will . . .’

  ‘Don, really . . .’

  ‘Really what?’ he said, half shouting in that way he did when he was drunk. ‘You expect me to lie to her . . . even though she’s already articulated the fucking truth?’

  Several people at adjoining tables glared again at us. Dad smiled that little-boy smile which always crossed his lips whenever he misbehaved. He ordered a fourth Martini. Mom strangled a napkin in her hands and said nothing except: ‘I’ll drive tonight.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ Dad said. Martini number four arrived. He toasted me with it.

  ‘Happy birthday, sweetheart. And here’s to you never living a lie . . .’

  I glanced over at my mother. She was in tears. I glanced back at my father. His smile had grown even wider.

  We finished dinner. We drove home in silence. Later that night, my mom came into my room as I was reading in bed. She kneeled down by me and took my hand and told me I was to ignore everything my father had said.

  ‘You will be happy, dear,’ she told me. ‘I just know it.’

  I said nothing. I simply shut my eyes and surrendered to sleep.

  When I woke the next morning, my father had gone.

  I discovered this when I came downstairs around eleven. School wasn’t starting for another three days – and, as a newfangled teenager, I had already started to embrace twelve-hour zone-outs as a way of coping with that prevalent adolescent belief: life sucks. As I walked into the kitchen I discovered my mother seated at the breakfast bar, her head lowered, her make-up streaked, her eyes red. There was a lit cigarette in an ashtray in front of her. There was another one between her fingers. And in her other hand was a letter.

  ‘Your father has left us,’ she said. Her tone was flat, stripped of emotion.

  ‘What?’ I asked, not taking this news in.

  ‘He’s gone and he’s not coming back. It’s all here.’

  She held up the letter.

  ‘He can’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, he can – and he has. It’s all here.’

  ‘But this morning . . . he was here when you got up.’

  She stared into the ashtray as she spoke.

  ‘I cooked him his breakfast. I drove him to the station. I talked about going to some barn sale in Westport this Saturday. He said he’d be home on the 7:03. I asked him if he wanted lamb chops for dinner. He said: “Sure . . . but no broccoli.” He gave me a peck on the cheek. I drove to A&P. I bought the lamb chops. I came home. I found this.’

  ‘So he left it before you went to the station?’

  ‘When we were walking to the car, he said he forgot that Parker pen of his and dashed back inside. That’s when he must have left the note.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘No. It’s private. It says stuff that—’

  She stopped herself and took a long drag off her cigarette. Then suddenly she looked up at me with something approaching rage.

  ‘If only you hadn’t said . . .’

  ‘What?’ I whispered.

  She raised the letter to her face. And read out loud:

  ‘When Jane last night that “no one’s actually happy”, the decision I had been pondering – and postponing – for years suddenly seemed no longer inconceivable. And after you went to bed I sat up in the living room, considering the fact that, at best , I will be alive for another thirty-five years – probably less the way I smoke. So I couldn’t help but think: enough of you, enough of this. Our daughter got it right: happiness doesn’t exist. But at least if I was out of this marriage, I’d be less aggrieved than I am now.’

  She tossed the letter onto the counter. There was a long silence. I felt for the very first time that strange traumatic sensation of the ground giving way beneath my feet.

  ‘Why did you tell him that?’ she asked. ‘Why? He’d still be here now if only . . .’

  That’s when I ran upstairs and into my room, slamming the door behind me as I collapsed onto the bed. But I didn’t burst into tears. I simply found myself in freefall. Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import. And my words had sent my dad packing. It was all my fault.

  An hour or so later, Mom came upstairs and knocked on my door and asked if I could ever forgive her for what she had said. I didn’t reply. She came in and found me on my bed, curled up in a tight little ball, a pillow clutched against my mid-section.

  ‘Jane, dear . . . I’m so sorry.’

  I pulled the pillow even closer to me and refused to look at her.

  ‘My mouth always reacts before my brain.’

  As you’ve told me so many times before.

  ‘And I was so stunned, so distraught . . .’

  Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import.

  ‘We all say things we don’t mean . . .’

  But you meant exactly what you said.

  ‘Please, Jane, please . . .’

  That was the moment I put my hands over my ears, in an attempt to block her out. That was the moment when she suddenly screamed: ‘All right, all right, be calculating and cruel . . . just like your father . . .’

  And she stormed out of the room.

  The truth of the matter was: I wanted to be calculating and cruel and pay her back for that comment and for all her attendant narcissism (not that I even knew that word at the time). The problem was: I’ve never really had it in me to be calculating and cruel. Petulant, yes. Irritable, yes . . . and definitely withdrawn whenever I felt hurt or simply overwhelmed by life’s frequent inequities. But even at thirteen, acts of unkindness already struck me as abhorrent. So when I heard my mother sitting on the stairs, weeping, I forced myself up out of my defensive fetal position and onto the landing. Si
tting down on the step next to her, I put my arm around her and lay my head on her shoulder. It took her ten minutes to bring her weeping under control. When she finally calmed down, she disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes, re-emerging with a look of enforced cheerfulness on her face.

  ‘How about I make us BLTs for lunch?’ she asked.

  We both went downstairs and, yet again, pretended that nothing had happened.

  My father made good on his word: he never returned home, even sending a moving company to gather up his belongings and bring them to the small apartment he rented on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Within two years the divorce came through. After that I saw my dad sporadically over the ensuing years (he was usually out of the country, working). Mom never remarried and never left Old Greenwich. She found a job in the local library which kept the bills paid and gave her something to do with the day. She also rarely spoke much about my father once he vanished from her life – even though it was so painfully clear to me that, as unhappy as the marriage was, she always mourned his absence. But the Mom Code of Conduct – never articulate that which is pulling you apart – was clung to without fail, even though I could constantly sense the sadness that coursed through her life. After Dad left, Mom started drinking herself to sleep most nights, becoming increasingly reliant on vodka as a way of keeping at bay the low-lying pain that so defined her. But the few times that I danced around the subject, she would politely but firmly tell me that she was most aware of her alcohol intake – and she was well able to control it.

  ‘Anyway, as we used to say in French class: “À chacun son destin.”’

  Everyone to their own destiny.

  Mom would always point out that this was one of the few phrases she remembered from her college classes – ‘and I was a French minor’. But I’m not surprised that she kept that expression close to mind. As someone who hated conflict – and who went out of her way to avoid observations about the mess we all make of things – it’s clear why she so embraced that French maxim. To her, we were all alone in a hostile universe and never really knew what life had in store for us. All we could do was muddle through. So why worry about drinking three vodkas too many every evening, or articulating the lasting grief and loneliness that underscores everything in daily life? À chacun son destin.