by Zoe Jasmine
“Average height. Trim. My age, a bit younger. Cocoa brown hair, I guess, longer than is the convention for men his age, but kept trimmed in back. Dresses casually, jackets and jeans mostly. Boyish, you'd say. A John Cusack type.”
“Sounds like most men in Hampstead. American?”
“English.”
“I'll keep the curtains twitching.”
“Oh,” said Winnie, “it's nothing to me whether they're seeing each other or not. I know they're an item. Out of respect for my feelings they both play it down, but I don't care. He's gone missing, or anyway he's out of town without notifying me. That's all, and that's the end of it.”
“Well, he's not staying upstairs, hiding out from you,” said Rasia, “though since Allegra has the key to the flat upstairs he could easily do it. But I'd hear the coming and going on the stairs, and the shower running and the loo flushing. There's been none of that.”
“Can I repay you by hauling one of these sacks down to one of the charity shops on West End Lane?”
“Thank you, no.” Rasia McIntyre crossed her arms around Fiona and kissed the scraps of baby fuzz on her scalp. “You can help me by coming back to see me sometime, if you want. You know something of what it's like to miss your man, I can tell.”
“How very kind,” said Winnie. She saw Rasia flinch at the sudden formality. But Winnie couldn't help it. She descended the stairs with no attempt at grace or silence.
She chose not to go back to Rudge House through the muddy right-of-way. Then, as she headed around toward the cross street, she changed her mind entirely. John had just abandoned her to his mess of redecorating problems and North London neighbors. Why was she taking this campaign on her own shoulders? Why get involved in it at all? She'd go find a bite of lunch first.
She looked at the pedestrians on the high street quickly, with interest, as if they might, coincidentally, be John. They weren't.
She stopped—a pain in her side, a twinge, a premonition, something—and steadied herself, one hand on a blue lighted Metropolitan Police display case. Or maybe she'd been drawn to the posters? Two pages, side by side. The first, printed both in English and in some exotic fringed script, appeared to publish the news of the disappearance of a soft-faced Southeast Asian boy whose photo showed him with streaked blond hair. The text said he had gone missing from the Imperial Karaoke Club in New Road, Dagenham. The second page, fully in English, pleaded for information about a man murdered at the August Notting Hill Carnival. He'd been attacked and killed at Westbourne Park Road. “Did you see the attack? Have you heard anything about the attack? Do you know those involved?” Both announcements printed an 0800 number for any leads. Anything at all.
And all these people on their way to lunch, walking by.
She found one of her usual haunts and used the facilities and ordered a beaker of cabernet. The place was filling up. She took a sip and thought of John, his theatrical exits and entrances. Despite herself—her condition and her therapy the same—her mind sidestepped toward the story of Wendy Pritzke. Would anyone like John be making an appearance in her story? Should he?
She took out the stenographer's notebook and flipped it open. There were the pages of scrawl from the Forever Families debacle. It seemed weeks ago already. She turned to the next white page and picked up her pen. She sat there and did not write.
There was wind, and more of it than she'd expected. Hilly North London, its thoroughfares made canyonlike by the facades of mansion blocks, was a maze of wind tunnels. Embattled, she headed back up the slippery paving stones to look at the redbrick house again. There was something about the mix of English rain and the effluvium of English petrol that made London pavements more slippery than any others she'd pounded. Or maybe it was her American rubber soles refusing to travel well. She reached out to steady herself. “Oh, I'm a bundle of nerves; that's being in the presence of a good idea, it does it to me,” she said. He didn't answer nor complain.
The house--it was always about houses--was as far from grungily redeveloped Whitechapel as you could get.
If you savored Dickens for the muck of it all, you were disappointed in the contemporary environs of Aldgate and Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Most of Dickens-land had been destroyed in the Blitz.
You could buy booklets, and she had, of Jack the Ripper walks. Anyone could hunt down those few remaining sites that Jack the Ripper would have known: the White Hart Pub on the corner of Gunthorpe Street, the Artillery Passage, Ten Bells Pub, which the prostitutes who became his victims must have frequented to drum up trade. Turn left and sample Tubby Isaacs's East End cuisine of eels. Straight ahead, Durward Street, murder site of Mary Ann Nichols.
It was as if all that could never be known about the identity or the fate of Jack the Ripper was compensated for by loving devotion to whatever was left.
And, if you were interested, there was so much of the rest of London standing today that had stood in the winds of the late nineteenth century. It just wasn't in the City.
Could Jack the Ripper have fled Whitechapel eventually and disappeared into another neighborhood? Even, why not, to this street in bourgeois leafy Hampstead?
He (the great unknown he), the murderer of prostitutes, named the Ripper for his tendency to claw out their throats and prevent them from screaming, he could have struggled up this street as she was now doing. In his day it would have been sluiced with carriage ruts, a mess in this weather; filthy; horse manure softening and liquefying and running downhill in this rain as loads of red brick were trundled up from the kiln. The rise of a pink coral reef in the fog of coal-burning London . . . Had the exteriors of the buildings already been finished by the time Jack the Ripper appeared in the street? Were the final details of interior lath work, plasterwork, woodwork, the plumbing for gas lighting still being fussed over, when Jack the Ripper reached the house that would later be number sixty-two, and could, or would, go no farther?
“You're stuck on this,” he said, “I can see it on your face; you're drunk on it. The shame of it all! Can't you write something dim and domestic like Anita Brookner, some damp-browed seamstress too educated for her world? You'd like to wield bloody knives, but I tell you, you're not constitutionally suited for it.”
“Don't tell me what my constitution suits me for,” she said. “We all succumb to our contagion of choice. The question is, what if Jack the Ripper came to his senses and fled the scene of his crimes? What if he tried to set himself up as a laborer in outlying Hampstead Village? Or, of course, he could have taken a position as a butcher's assistant. Only he falls prey to the spell of some gamine young Hampstead woman? Perhaps an Irish maid, recently engaged to swell the staff of the new household? Maybe he makes a delivery here and catches sight of a pretty redheaded maid down there in that kitchen. Look how public the windows are! You can see three-quarters of the room, more if you stoop down and look. Maybe, having evacuated himself from the nightmare zone of Whitechapel, scene of his frenzies, maybe he doesn't even remember himself as Jack the Ripper. Maybe he reads about it in the used newspapers that he wraps meat in and he doesn't recognize himself. Split-personality type. But there's something about the pretty chin, the glimpse of stockinged ankle as a kitchen maid teeters to collect a basin from a high shelf. He slides the choice cut of lamb from side to side, and its blood gums through the paper and smears his apron.”
“We'll have some supper and we can rent Dressed to Kill or Psycho if you like,” he said. “I can tell you're way beyond reruns of Upstairs, Downstairs by now.”
She laughed. “Well, you know how much has been made out of the mystery of his disappearance. You know better than I. At one point they proposed that he was a syphilitic member of the royal family. He was a Mason, a surgeon, an insurrectionist. All this excites the fancy, as they say.”
“I can see your fancy is excited.”
“Don't go on yet. I want to look in that kitchen window and imagine what he might have seen.”
“You're looking for some leggy coppe
r-tressed maid for a serial murderer to sink his meat cleaver into?”
She murmured, “Why, if a prostitute were unable to defend herself, would a kitchen maid in a middle-class house do better?”
“You've said the prostitutes were mostly drunk,” he answered. “Besides, kitchen maids work with cooks, and cooks know cleavers pretty well themselves. But I like your plot better when the man in the household comes home and finds some thug messing with his child bride or his nubile teenage daughter or his parlor maid. The good paterfamilias kills him and bricks his body up in the chimney still under construction. Up there in the maid's quarters. Pater hides the evidence of the murder, to avoid the scandal and shame. The delicate ladies, after all! What do you think? And that's why no one could ever find Jack the Ripper to arrest him. The son of a bitch was done in himself.”
“The story would go better, John,” she said, “if the intended victim could do the murder.”
“Too politically correct. Though your American readers would lap it up, no doubt.”
“Her father or beau could still dispose of the body to protect her honor and to shield her from prison.”
“You are incorrigible,” he said.
“I'm entirely corrigible,” she answered. “I think. Does that mean corruptible?”
“I know you're corruptible. Corrigible means correctable . Shall we get out of this vile weather and find a scotch and soda somewhere?”
They moved past the house, laughing, Gothic fancy serving as a rather hearty appetizer.
She felt herself in the muzzy grip of too much wine at lunch. As she approached the front door of Rudge House with her key in her hand, the door opened of its own accord. Or rather, she saw, of the accord of Mrs. Maddingly, who stood there dressed in a shapeless coat the color of beef gravy. “Ooh, a gale,” said the old woman appreciatively. “I'm off to the post office to get my pension. You haven't seen Nightshade I take it?”
“A cat? One of your cats? I have not.”
“She'll turn up, or he will; I forget which it is, not that it matters to me, I'm not a cat,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “In fact, it didn't matter to me as a human, either, except when dear Alan was interested, and he was the only one who ever was. You haven't seen him either?”
“Your dead husband?”
“The same.”
With some irritation Winnie said, “Was I expected to?”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Maddingly, passing her in disgust. “I meant to say did you ever see him? I can't remember if you and I were friends back then. How do you expect me to remember trivial matters like that?”
“I'm sorry,” said Winnie. “I'm just—no, I never had the pleasure.”
“And you never will now,” said Mrs. Maddingly in a smart tone. She glided past and hopped off the front step, and pattered down the pavement on unsure feet. Maybe she was drunk, thought Winnie; maybe that was what gave her the courage to venture out. She watched the old woman test the pavement, as if expecting it to give way. Her flyaway hair was a corona of white; she had the look of an old ewe too long unshorn.
Winnie pocketed the keys and went on up, pausing only to remove her muddy shoes and leave them on the drop cloths the fellows had laid out to collect their own boots and umbrellas. “Well?” she asked the hedgehog. “Any word from Interpol or Scotland Yard while I've been gone?” The hedgehog squatted on the plastic and again refused to comment. “Hello, hello,” said Winnie, entering the flat, willing John to have mercy and show up. “John?” she said in a voice of hopeful irritation.
Except that the smell had abated, the place was no different, unless it could be said that a stalemate can grow staler. She could feel rather than hear the presence of skeptical Jenkins and slight-minded Mac there, not working. She wasn't surprised to find them more or less as they'd been several hours earlier. “Good going, fellows. You've made no progress at all?” Her words came out tarter than she meant them.
“We were kept—” said Mac, and stopped.
“We're dying to learn what you've turned up in your walkabout,” said Jenkins. He made a gesture, as if to touch the brim of an imaginary cap. His deference was mocking. She regretted her temper, its small stings and seizures, and she amended herself in that room: drew a breath, crossed her hands on her waistline like a figure from an older generation. She tried to smile.
“You've been considering the matter still,” she said.
“The noise is louder,” said Mac, and crossed himself. “Mother of Christ.”
“The wind is picking up too,” said Winnie. “Maybe there's a break in the flue above, a chink in the plaster somewhere.” Bizarre, that it should be left to her to be the rationalist in the room. She who for several years had drawn sound five-figure royalty checks for The Dark Side of the Zodiac . John would have enjoyed that irony, were he around. “Have you considered that?” she said. “The chimney as a kind of huge pipe organ, coughing?”
“You've a daycent portion of comment,” said Mac, “for someone who just walks in without warning—”
“Don't, Mac, just stow it,” said the older man, “it does no good.” Something passed between them, but Winnie couldn't tell what it was. Dread, superstition, suspicion of some sort. Of her?
“A message come in on the answerphone,” said Jenkins, jerking a finger toward it.
“John,” she said with relief, “well, it's about time.”
“A man,” said Jenkins. “We heard the voice, but it wasn't for us.”
“We listened by to hear if it was you ringing us,” said Mac, as if put out that she hadn't called in with her findings.
She went to the machine and pressed Play.
She thought at first that it was John. No. Adrian Moscou again. “. . . you said don't call but you left your number so I thought I would. London's a long way to go to avoid our dinner invitation. But you've got a rain check. So give a call when you get back. I'm still wearing hairshirts for blowing the whistle about your being a writer—I may have to kill myself if I don't hear from you. Besides, Geoff wants to push ahead in our application, but I'm more Capricorn and skeptical, so we wanted to hear your impressions of the child merchants of Forever Families. We feel somewhat—uh—marginalized in that crowd. Anyway, we like your books, or my students do anyway, so there might be—” The tape cut off.
She was tired of not getting where she wanted, of not being able to flee what she'd rejected. “Give me the damn crowbar, the adze, whatever it is,” she said, pacing into the kitchen. “If you won't do the job John hired you for, I will.” She picked up an L-shaped lever with a wedged tip. She approached the boards of the newly exposed wall and ran one hand over them. The fellows must have been working this already; she could easily nudge the pronged edge around the nailhead she'd found. “Is this the idea?” she said, and put her weight on the implement.
The nail allowed itself to be worked out to a distance of two inches or so. “Hard work,” she said icily. She couldn't loosen it farther so she replaced her tool around a lower nail, in line, and did the same. Again it stopped at a certain distance. “These nails have clawed points or phalanges back there?” she asked. “Or bolted tips, somehow? Well, we ought to be able to work this board away with our fingers, if we all put our backs into it, and then yank it off, shouldn't we? Come on, something, anything.”
“She'd charm the Y-fronts off Jaysus himself,” said Mac. “The noise is stopped. What's she done?”
It was true, the pounding was gone, but the silence itself was eerie, like the running down of a clock timing something urgent.
“I probably just let a little air into the space,” she said, getting to work on the third nailhead. “Now that I've started, are you going to take over? I've got some business in the City. . . .”
But when Jenkins came forward to take the crowbar, the rapping began again. Fiercely, less mechanically, more like the scrabbling of a trapped beast. Mac said, “Bloody hell!” and Jenkins flinched and retreated.
“Ah, the blood pressure,”
said Jenkins, “and me just run through the last of the tablets.”
They all backed up and Winnie laid the crowbar on the floor. She said, “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”
“What the fuck?” said Mac.
“Dr. Seuss,” she answered.
“We'll be needing some doctor or other,” said Mac. “Dr. Freud. Or maybe Dr. Kevorkian.”
Winnie's voice was softer than she'd have liked. “It's just annoying. How can we be spooked by redecorating? The kitchen that rejected new fixtures? What does it want?”
“Holy shite,” said Mac.
The nails, one by one, began to retract into the walls, like a cat sheathing its claws.
It was like trick photography, like watching a video in rewind. Cool and constant. Time in reverse, time broken. Winnie felt her grasp of things shudder, her thoughts wheel out, seeking for a scrabble hold elsewhere, in a world more obedient than the aberrations on display at this hobbled moment. Somewhere else, children on playgrounds were quietly ganging up on the unpopular isolate. Junior varsity teams were suiting up for a scrimmage. Middle-management types were plotting office putsches over the watercooler. Some bored child was tossing a book of Winnie's on the floor. Some mother frantic for a cup of Tension Tamer tea was hacking through the cellophane wrapping with a meat cleaver. Everywhere else, furnaces were firing up, trucks were backing up, computers were booting up, things were going forward, except here, where the nails were retreating.
In a moment there was no sign of Winnie's efforts, and the flat had gone silent again.
“A whole week of this?” she said.
“No,” said Jenkins, “we haven't been able to get as close as you just did. Nerves.”
She put her weight on her heels, her back against the kitchen cabinets. “You'd better tell me everything,” she said. “You'd better just start at the top. Where are you guys from? Have you done work for John before? What's the first thing you noticed that was strange?”
They didn't speak. “Why would you not trust me?” she said. “You just better,” she added.