by Zoe Jasmine
“Do you know how old the house is?”
“Absolute ages. These front rooms are the showpieces you know, late Georgian. Not a very prepossessing Georgian, one might add, a bin-end variety. Hardly more than a cottage, really. But the rooms are low and cozy, and I have walnut coping about my boudoir. It's gone wormy they tell me but so will I before long, so I don't mind. The back bit goes into the new building; I have some steps to a useless box room that I can't get to. The floors don't agree with each other and the steps don't agree with my knees. Do you want to see?”
“No.” Winnie studied Mrs. Maddingly. Despite herself Winnie was looking at life as if for her book. She was double-living through a day with genuine concerns because the needs of her fictions were as strong as those of her life, or stronger. Domestically, while John Comestor was AWOL, there was a conundrum rapping its fingers on his walls, but narratively it was also knocking on her forehead, pretending to be a ghost or a specter of some sort, and she couldn't concentrate.
Winnie sensed herself looking at this house not as John Comestor's house, but as a place where brash capable Wendy Pritzke could come across the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Winnie was channeling Wendy Pritzke, dialing her up. She couldn't help it.
Jack the Ripper was late 1800s. So this house would have been standing when he disappeared without a trace, to leave the most famous unsolved murder mystery of his day, and ours.
What if Jack the Ripper had gotten boarded up behind a reconstructed wall? What if that was why he had never been found? What if he had followed some toothsome filly home to her Georgian house in the village of Hampstead, only to meet a filthy end there at the hands of some vengeful husband or father or brother, and had his body bricked into a chimney stack?
Only to be exhumed more than a century later?
It was a worrisome habit she had, of vacating the premises mentally and transposing herself into the same premises, organized otherwise, fictionally. Like Alice and the mirror over the mantel, where the world looks the same but different: not just backward, but uncannily precise, and precisely strange. Or as Lewis Carroll had otherwise put it:
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A hippopotamus.
“I must have my pills,” said Mrs. Maddingly, as if Winnie had been lobbying for their removal.
“It's not noon, and your signs say MIDDAY,” said Winnie.
“If I don't have them now I might forget. I should take them while I remember.” She teetered toward a sideboard and with a crash she let the drop front of an antique desk fall open. Within were three small crystal glasses on a shelf lined with old newspaper, a grimy decanter of amber liquid, and an empty bottle of prescription drugs.
“What are you doing?” said Winnie as Mrs. Maddingly poured herself a healthy portion of whatever it was.
“I am afraid of dropping the damn things and having them roll under the hearth rug, so I dissolve them in sherry and drink my obligations down. So sorry I can't offer you any.”
“It's not even ten o'clock in the morning,” said Winnie, not so much scandalized as disbelieving. “I wouldn't touch sherry at this hour if you paid me.”
“It's terrible to be old and sick,” said the woman agreeably, smacking her lips. “In praise of modern medicine, though, which keeps us alive enough to criticize ourselves and others.” She lifted her glass in a toast, and downed the contents. “Now then, where's Chutney? It's time for his little tot too.”
Winnie left the cats, the flat, the dotty old dame, and the clutches of the Wendy Pritzke story, or at least as much of it as she could.
Maybe Chutney was trapped behind some baseboard, and scratching, and Mrs. Maddingly just hadn't noticed.
Oh, but it could be anything, anything but what it seemed to be: a figure trying to communicate through the wall at them, trying to say something, something. What was it? Beware your childhood reading, Winnie said to herself: There is no Narnia in the wardrobe, there is no monkey's paw with a third and damning wish to grant. You live in a world with starving Eritrean refugees and escaping smallpox viruses and third-world trade imbalances and the escalating of urban violence into an art form. You don't need the magic world to be really real; that would be a distraction.
And the world—she stood in the hall outside John's doorway, afraid for a moment to go in—the world was already upside down or inside out; it was already Alice's mad Wonderland. That was the secret of Alice, Winnie remembered, she'd spoken about it once at a conference of fantasy writers. Even if Tenniel had drawn her with an encephalitic head, little Alice in the stories had been the correct junior citizen, sober and sane. It was the world around Alice, the Wonderland, that had gone mad. From the authority of the podium Winnie had theorized about it jocularly. Back in Winnie's great-great-grandfather's day, England had been soldered together with trust in the eternal verities of God's divine plan as worked out in Crown, Empire, the class system, and the family. And then mild unlikely insurrectionist Lewis Carroll had written the first Alice in the late 1860s, 1871 for Looking-Glass . Absurdity, sedition, planted at almost the very epicenter of the Victorian epoch.
A reading child back in those early days, corseted, even straitjacketed by Victorian certainties, could delight in a story stuffed with nonsense. Time was malleable during a mad tea party in which there could be jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. Creatures could shift shapes, a sheep into an old lady, a baby into a pig. Fury could win out over reason. In the nineteenth century, reading Alice was refreshing because it was an escape from strict convictions about reality.
But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty-first century hated the Alice books, couldn't read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex = death. Children murder each other. Parents lie, leaders lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benetton ads.
And faces of missing children staring out from milk cartons—imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full-time. We need a break from it.
“You,” said Winnie to the boot scraper hedgehog, “might as well make a statement. I'm standing here lecturing myself because I don't want to go in there and find I've wandered into a madhouse. Life is mad enough already. For one thing, John is gone. Where is he?”
The hedgehog neither answered nor waddled away in search of greater privacy.
“Well, that's proof of nothing,” said Winnie. “I like to keep my own counsel too.” She threw back her shoulders to appear proprietary, and entered John's flat with what she hoped was convincing briskness. “ That'sa stink you've raised, then,” she called out. “Ooh, Lordy. Something die in here?” She picked up the morning post and riffled through it to make sure there was no letter from John for her, then fanned the air away from her nose and went into the kitchen.
Mac and Jenkins had managed to remove most of the plaster. “Aha, progress,” she said. “Is this halitosis common to old houses?”
“It's the stink of the devil,” said Mac.
“The devil is going to have a hard time getting a date, then.”
Mac poked out his lips at her; was it a grin or a sneer? “I have a bad worry, there's things with dark wings hovering over this whole place. I don't give a toss what she found out, Jenkins. We should get ourselves out of here and take the sacrament of absolution.”
“You're as spooked as an old bog woman,” said Jenkins. “If you can be no help, at least keep your shite to yourself.” He was perspiring around the ears and forehead, and the collar of his sweatshirt was damp.
“What's the matter?” said Winnie. She didn't like the look of Jenkins, clammy as a cold boiled ham. “What are you yammering about?”
Jenkins picked up a hammer. He reached out his arm and held the ham
mer toward the newly exposed wall boards at the back of the pantry. When he was still two feet away, the hollow banging sound began. It was rhythmic and steady. As Jenkins moved the hammer nearer, the banging picked up in speed and volume.
“Well, that's clever.” Winnie kept her voice flat, even steely. “A sound-and-light show without the light. Now do you mind telling me where John is? I'm beginning to be tired of this.”
“I make no representation, for how do I know?” said Jenkins.
“He's in there; he's dead,” said Mac. “We didn't do it, but what could be the reason for the thumping of the bohrain? It's a death drum, and his body is hammering to get out.”
“And so that's the smell of his corpse, I suppose,” she said. “Well, he always was a man of tidy personal habits. He'd be mortified to know he was so aromatic.” She wrenched open a window and let some remnant of Hurricane Gretl, making its English landfall, sweep cold rainy air in across them.
“Look, look,” she said, and hustled for some paper, partly to turn her back on the pantry boards, to show them she wasn't scared of noise or smells. “I had no luck with the downstairs neighbor, a sweet old thing named Mrs. Maddingly, who's half loony herself. Probably her cat has gotten caught in some crawl space and, by the smell of it, has spectacularly died.”
“So it's a dead cat, is it, striking its claws against the back of these bricks?” said Jenkins, but gently and mockingly, for Mac's benefit, to tease him and console him both. Mac spit.
“Not a dead cat. Dead cats have no sense of rhythm. Listen to me. I told you how this old Georgian house sits next to a place on Rowancroft Gardens. For one thing, the houses share these party walls—like any abutting houses. But for another, when the Victorian house behind us went up, the developers put some back rooms onto this existing house, to enlarge it. Look.” She sketched a map of John's flat, the older three front Georgian rooms in a lumpy square and a newer extension behind, running only half the width of the original house. John's two workrooms took a chunk out of the footprint of the adjacent building. “You see, the equivalent flat in the Rowancroft Gardens building must be roughly a mirror shape to this one, only longer and with larger rooms. Its puzzle piece probably fills in over here, on the other side of our noisy chimney stack, assuming that these pantry boards do back onto a chimney stack.”
“That's something Mr. C never mentioned,” said Jenkins.
“So maybe I should go over to that building. I know someone who lives there I can ask.”
“You'll not go alone. Yourself'd never know where a sound might be coming from,” said Mac, as if eager not to be left in the flat anymore, even with Jenkins to protect him. “I'll join ye.”
“No, sir,” said Winnie. “I'll get further on my own.”
She went to the bathroom and changed her blouse and freshened her face. The someone she knew who lived there was, damn it, Allegra Lowe. Through such mere proximity had Allegra Lowe and John Comestor originally met. They fought briefly over a coven of pigeons living under the eaves of her building and fouling the windowsills of his. They'd solved the problem with wire meshing, and good fences had made them better neighbors, and more than that. Winnie had not been to Allegra's flat before, nor did she want to go now. But, face it, if John was holed up in connubial bliss there, well, better that she should know it.
She looked at herself in the mirror. “You ready to face the Queen of Hearts?” she asked herself. “Hello in there.” Her reflection did not reply. She saw the crow's-feet, the jet lag drawing down the corners of her eyelids. The pursed mouth of mirror-Winnie displayed a clumsy application of lipstick. She did a touch-up.
Back in the kitchen to show herself off, she said, “Mind the fort, I'll be back.” Jenkins shrugged, a noncommittal blur of gesture. Mac didn't turn to look at her, busy thumping open a painted window frame, to create more of a draft. “Air out this stink,” he said. Winnie chose not to think he was referring to her cologne. (Had she overdone it again?) A draft swept through, and the paper on which she'd sketched the floor plans of the adjoining buildings skittered across the windowsill and disappeared outside.
He followed her down the stairwell, with the aim, he said, of finding the paper. She didn't want his company but said to herself, Age, experience, confidence . Well, two out of three. At the front door, as Winnie worked the bolt, Mac murmured, “What do you think it is, really?”
“I really do think it's something embarrassingly ordinary,” she said, in a regretful tone.
“It's penance time for him, that's what it is,” he said, jerking his chin upward. “It means fuck-all to me, though, and I ought to be released from this contract.”
“Here you go, then,” she said, flinging open the door, and then with dignity and fake nonchalance she fled.
She tried to compose her thoughts as she made her way around to Rowancroft Gardens. Though the houses shared a wall, the invasion of nineteenth-century villa architecture into Hampstead's close-shouldered eighteenth-century village housing stock meant that she had a good five- or six-minute walk, including a desolate stretch of some few yards on a muddy public right-of-way. Over a weathered fence the branches of a hedge disturbed her mousy but carefully brushed hair. She tugged at her collar and felt like a cow in an alley, skidding in the mud, mooing curses. Emerging into Rowancroft Gardens, she saw that the rain had been replaced by an aeration of fog, the kind you get in the country during a winter thaw. The street ran down the Frognal side of Holly Bush Hill, disappearing around a curve in the mist, its redbrick Queen Anne–eries receding into nothing but pink Conté crayon suggestions, nearly rubbed out by a cloudy editorial thumb.
Rowancroft Gardens was lower down the slope of Holly Bush Hill than Weatherall Walk, but, laid out in a more prosperous era, the semidetached middle-class homes boasted higher ceilings. Consequently the roofs lined up with those shorter Georgian houses higher on the hill behind them. Number sixty-two was just about central in the stand of ten or a dozen structures apparently put up by the same developer. She knew where it was. She'd walked past it before, looking and not looking.
John had told Winnie that Allegra Lowe lived on dividends from investments. Winnie assumed that was how Allegra could afford two whole floors of number sixty-two: the garden flat with its muslined windows and winter pansies in window pots, and the first floor with the building's best plastered ceilings and tallest windows. And—Winnie knew to expect it—the kitchen, below street level, was lit. Midmorning, and Allegra Lowe was at home.
“Oh, hullo,” she said, to Winnie's knock. Without the curse of an accompanying cough, Allegra had the sort of deep smoker's alto through which you could really hear hullo instead of hello, like someone horsey and capable, straight out of Enid Blyton or Jilly Cooper, maybe. She was drying her hands on a tea towel and looking immediate and blowsy. Winnie framed a remark intended to be admiring—“I couldn't manage a look like that without a support group and a month's advance notice”—but suppressed it and smiled in what she hoped was an irritatingly direct American way.
“I was sure you were my client,” said Allegra tersely.
“Do you remember me—Winifred Rudge,” she said. What a clunky name she had. Winifred Rudge. Allegra Lowe . Winnie. Allegra .
“Of course I remember you, but I was hardly expecting you. Do come in.”
She didn't move aside, exactly. Winnie didn't exactly push by, either. But she gained the threshold. “I won't be a minute, or I can come back later after your appointment.”
Allegra flapped the towel. “They're late, they're always late, they think a miracle is going to happen and a parking space will appear automatically. Then they come in annoyed as if it's my fault. I keep my car in Chipping Norton like any sensible soul and use a minicab when in London. Daft otherwise. You may as well dry off—still raining, is it?”
“No, just bushes being wet.” She followed Allegra into a grand front hall, its lower walls sheathed in golden oak and its floor tiled in a pattern that looked copied from a kale
idoscope, trapezoids of chalky vermilion, peacock, sand, white. The imposing staircase rose up to other flats, and Allegra ushered Winnie through a pair of tall doors into her private space. In the gloom of a deeper hallway, Winnie saw other doors, slightly ajar, revealing high rectangles of Sargent-like interiors slicing through the gloom, tantalizing bits of museum-quality furniture, glints of ormolu. But Allegra led her down a set of stairs to the capacious Victorian kitchen. “No, thank you, no tea, I'm not staying,” Winnie said.
“Tea for me, then. I get cold down here, but this is where I work.”
On the far wall the kitchen boasted the usual appliances, looking expensive, unused. Le Creuset cookware from a wrought-iron chandelier, Henckels knives gleaming on their magnetized rack. Not a single crumb of bread or smear of butter. But the center of the room was the site of some sort of activity having to do with modeling clay or plaster of Paris. A table crammed with spatulas crusted with pink gunk, bits of molding clamped and weighted down. An adjacent tea trolley was jammed with bottles of turpentine and plastic tubs of paint, and brushes standing up in a chipped earthenware jar.
Allegra said, “I'll die of poison from whatever carcinogen they discover in my supplies. The tea gets dusty but there you have it, occupational hazard. Sure I can't tempt you?” It was something of a joke, acknowledging and trying to defuse the tension between them, and Winnie was caught between being grateful and being affronted at the gesture.
“I'm here on an investigative errand,” said Winnie, “with apologies for not calling you ahead to ask. I arrived from Boston last night and John doesn't seem to be in residence. Do you know where he is?”
With her back to Winnie, Allegra studied the kettle. She held her hands over the beginning steam and rubbed them, warming herself, before answering, “Well, no, Winnie, I don't know where he is.”
“It's not like him to take off just like that,” said Winnie.
“Is it not?” said Allegra. “I wouldn't know.”