by Zoe Jasmine
“What's your range?” said an agent, bobbing forward between desks.
“I saw a sign,” said Winnie. She gave the address.
“That's in the three-to-five file,” said the agent. He meant three to five hundred thousand pounds. A hot market again.
“Oh, yes,” said the receptionist, finding the specs. “It happens we've got a broker over there at the moment. Aren't we lucky. Can you pop round?”
“I'm on foot,” said Winnie. “I don't pop anywhere, but I trudge pretty efficiently. Have him wait.”
“Let me get him on the mobile. He'll have to let you in. Hold on. Hello there Kendall Amanda here are you at the Weatherall Walk first-floor one-and-a-half bedrooms? Right. You just stepping out or will you be there a bit?” She aimed her pinky toward her mouth, ready to kill time by destroying her nails, then cocked her chin up toward Winnie to say, “You can get there in ten minutes, he'll still be there, your name is?—”
Winnie paused and then said, “Wendy. Wendy Pritzke.”
“She'll be right over, American lady. Miss Pritzke.” Amanda slammed the phone and withdrew a photocopied map of Hampstead Village from a drawer, but Winnie said, “I know where it is, I've told you. I'll just head over there.”
“He's Kendall Waugh,” called Amanda after Winnie.
Waugh was an overweight estate agent with a belt made of rattlesnake skin. He huffed and panted as he led Winnie toward the back of the flat, where a man and a woman were muttering to themselves in disagreement. “My clients are nearly through here but we have another place to see down on Honeybourne Road,” said Kendall Waugh. “Let me just answer their questions, Miss Prizzy, and then I'll show you round quickly.”
“I can have a look myself,” she said. She was looking as she spoke. The layout of the flat for sale was identical to John's flat above and, she assumed, to Mrs. Maddingly's flat below. Three small rooms in the older building, facing Weatherall Walk, two additional rooms snugly joined to the newer house behind. The flat had belonged to Mrs. Maddingly several decades ago, but there was no sign of her whimsical disarray. The place was empty of furniture and sorely in need of sprucing up. The coping was dingy. But Winnie wasn't in the market for a flat, she was supposed to be hunting for some natural cause of the unnatural disasters occurring in John's flat upstairs.
She could see nothing of interest. The chimney stack rose from below and continued above, exactly as geometry and architecture would have it. In the large room it had once heated and lit, the chimney breast was boarded over. “Could this fireplace be opened up and made to work?” she said to Kendall Waugh.
“I'll just finish here if I may have a moment, one moment,” he called, affecting patience, but unconvincingly. Winnie stood in the gloom, in a box of cold room, and heard the voices in the annex. In certain sorts of rain, when the clouds come down close as they were today, it was sometimes hard to keep the mind fixed to the current year.
She'd noticed the syndrome mostly on gray February days, back when she was living in the more expensive and so more thinly developed Boston suburbs. The wet tree trunks, the low sky the color of tarnished silver, the muted smoky green of yews and white pines and arborvitae, the retracting mounds of dirty snow, the skin of the world pulling in phlegmy puddles, the occasional stab of red in holly berries. In palette, at least, it was the same cold world of the Wampanoags, the Puritans, the colonists and revolutionaries, the Federalists and revivalists and Victorians and so on.
Similarly, in London, the wind bullied the windows in their casings as rattlingly as it must have done all through the past three hundred years and more. The gray skies drawn in over the mighty and inattentive Atlantic were the very same gray, corrected for reduction of pollution from coal fires, of course, thanks to the Clean Air Act.
She roused herself back to whatever of the here and now she could still trust, or care about. She heard Kendall Waugh answering a question. “That, I can tell you actually. We've got at the office a very fine pamphlet that talks about this street and actually mentions the structure. It was put up in the early nineteenth century, which makes it almost two hundred years old of course as you know, by a merchant named Rudge. Rudge House and all that. He was in imports, the tea trade.”
“He wasn't a merchant,” said Winnie, “he wasn't in tea. He started in Cornwall tin mining and became an expert in beam supports. Excuse me, and not to change the subject, but have you been showing people through here all day today?”
Kendall Waugh blinked as if she'd blasphemed against the Queen Mother. “There's quite a lot of interest in this property actually, I don't think it'll be on the market for long, everything is being snatched up, you won't see its like, its”—he glanced about the icy dusty cramped space—“period flavor.” Only of course it sounded like flavour the way he said it.
She said, “I'm very sorry but I have to ask. Have you seen or heard anything unusual in this flat while you've been here? Any poundings or noise? Anything out of the ordinary?” The prospective buyers looked sniffy, as if they suspected her of trying to scare them from making an offer. She gave up and closed the door as silently as she could on her way out.
Upstairs, Mac and Jenkins were pacing. “Mr. Jenkins. Please. Call John Comestor at work,” she said to them, slamming her satchel down on John's good eighteenth-century occasional table and the hell with it. “Ask for him. I'm at my wit's end.”
He did as he was told. “Put it on speakerphone,” she told him, and when he wouldn't, she leaned over him and pressed the button herself.
There was the snippy receptionist again.
“I'd like to speak to Mr. Comestor, please. Mr. Colum Jenkins calling.”
“I'm afraid Mr. Comestor is away for a while. May I put you in touch with one of his partners?”
“Do you know when he'll be back, or can you tell me where he went?”
“I'm afraid I don't know the answer to either. If you call again when his regular secretary is in you'll be able to find out, I'm sure. She'll be back tomorrow.”
“Well,” said Winnie when Jenkins had rung off, “you got more than I did. She wouldn't even admit to me that he was away. But if that's the line she's giving out, then at least the company knows he's gone somewhere, and that eliminates the likelihood of”—oh, but she couldn't say the overheated words foul play .
They walked back to the kitchen, where they found Mac looking wild-eyed. “Christ,” said Jenkins.
“You're fecking right,” said Mac in a throttled voice. “I just thought of this at last.” Among the crowbars and screwdrivers on the floor lay a butcher's knife and a piece of Ethiopian silver. “I found it in the study, on the wall.” She knew the piece; John had bought it in a market in Lamu, on the Kenyan coast. It was an elaborate cross, not all that finely finished, but beautiful in proportion and design, which probably derived from Byzantine-Coptic models. John was scarcely religious, but he'd liked the rectilinear turnings of its basket weave patterns. “A key as much as a cross,” John had said.
“I went up to the wall—” Mac was almost in seizures. “The thing shuddered, buckled; I mean the whole wall convulsed; the boards shook and waved; they went like this—” He undulated the air with his palms, waist to shoulder heights. “I was holding the cross and praying—”
“And well might the house protest; you're in no state of grace to be anywhere near a cross,” said Jenkins irritably. “Now you're only pathetic, Mac. Get off home. You don't even believe in Jesus, you fool; you might as well be holding a plastic statue of Princess Diana. Give over.”
“Ah but—” Mac said, and then said, “you bloody turncoat, denying me what my own eyes saw while you moon over your sorry dreams: look at that and call me pathetic.” He pointed. It seemed that the upright boards of the pantry wall were beginning to sweat.
“Rain coming in,” said Jenkins, “surely? We oughtn't have moved that chimney pot. The wood is swelling from moisture.”
“You're a bloody eejit. Look at it.”
&nbs
p; About chest height, in the center of the paneled section, the old white paint was beginning to blister bluely, to fester in small pustules, making a rash. Something—an earlier application of paint, surely?—was showing through. It looked like a bruise, eggplant now, now yellow-blue. There was a gash forming, like the place a knife would drive if it were slicing the heart out of a body. As they watched, the gash bled a ragged ghost of a line twelve, fourteen inches long, perpendicular to the floor, as if following the line of a row of buttons on a vest. Other marks began to appear, some on either side, slowly dripping on diagonals toward one another.
“A tree? A key? A snowflake?” said Winnie. “A diagram of the Underground?”
“Jaysus mercy,” said Mac, “look what it is. It's a crucifix with a figure on it, struggling to get off. It's a cross with an X through it.”
“It's a bad problem with moisture in the walls is what it is,” said Winnie, “and if there's an older wall of plaster behind those boards, it's all crumbled? Something like that?”
“We'll sort it out Monday,” said Jenkins. He seemed better now.
“Sort it out Monday?” said Winnie. “I'm not averse to a little inconvenience during renovations, but really: the hall has begun to do involuntary . . . hieroglyphics at us? And now's the time you decide to clock off?”
Jenkins said, “Things in their own time, miss. Now, don't get riled up any more than you need. Mac's a good boy but he's barmy. Mac, get your things and let's go.”
“We can't leave now,” said Mac. “She's right: something's there. Have you no eyes?”
“I have my duties.” Jenkins was going stodgy on them all at once. “Obligation before hallucination, that's my order of business. I'm off, and I suggest you come with me.”
“God is talking to you and you're scarpering?” Mac was incredulous.
“God can get my ear anytime he wants, including on the Tube. Are you coming or are you waiting for another installment?”
“He's obsessed,” said Mac bitterly, kicking at the silver cross; Winnie scurried after it and picked it up. “Every Friday and Saturday night up and down the Strand, interviewing the workforce to see if they know where his daughter is. She's probably emigrated to Australia.”
“I'll thank you to mind your own affairs.” Jenkins burrowed into his coat and hunched himself into its raised collar. “He's a good boy, miss, but I'd turf him out, were I you.”
“I'll just pack up here and be out in a flash,” said Mac. “I'm keeping vigil for no ghost, not if you're leaving.”
Jenkins shrugged and nodded ambiguously, and left the kitchen without looking again at the wall. One only needed a mission, that was all, and Jenkins had his mission. It was how he got through: committing himself to something impossible.
She heard his feet tramp down the staircase, and the wind picked up.
The pantry stopped performing for them, but there was a thud overhead. The wind whistled almost with the sound of a pig's squeal, or a baby's, and it was underscored by a percussive roll—Winnie thought it might be thunder. They heard an interior wallop, something breaking through in this flat, and an exterior crash, as of smashing pottery. She knew what that outside noise was, and so did Mac.
They hurried to the front room and craned to peer out the window. Jenkins had been struck on the back of the head. The chimney pot was in shards around him.
Winnie said, “What is it, what is it in London, the number for emergency, I can't remember,” and she ran to the phone. “Mac,” she said crossly when he didn't answer; she turned so abruptly that as the phone came away the plastic housing of the tip of the jack split into plastic fragments. The dial tone dried up.
Mac had gone downstairs to tend Jenkins. She hoped he would pull him out of the forecourt anyway in case someone nosed a car in and tried to park on the sidewalk as Hampstead locals often did. Winnie descended one flight and thumped on the door of the flat, in case the estate agent was still in there collecting a deposit check, but as far as she could tell the flat was deserted again. She continued to the ground floor to find Mrs. Maddingly huddled in the doorway, several cats snaking around her ankles, and Mr. Kendall Waugh on his cell phone dialing for rescue services. At the edge of the forecourt the rain-cloaked figures of neighbors hovered. “Lost that sale,” Kendall Waugh was murmuring while he was on hold with emergency. “The whole place is collapsing, said the husband, and they fled. Hello? Yes, are you there?”
“It's a good thing the cats are house cats,” said Mrs. Maddingly in a carrying tone, as if addressing Jenkins's prone form reprovingly. “It might have been one of them took the blow.”
“He's alive, he's breathing,” said Mac, on his knees in the wet, “but they always say not to move the body in case of snapped spine.”
“Heard that before, and this one's no rag doll,” Winnie muttered. She came forward. Jenkins had a look of peace on his face, but his nose and mouth tilted too near the gushing gutter. She took off her sweater and folded it into a damp mound and elevated his head an inch or so, hoping she wasn't misaligning vertebrae in the neck column. Then Mrs. Maddingly in her house slippers was leaning over with a vinyl tablecloth. “Will keep the water off him, don't you know,” she said, and so it proved to do. He rested, comatose, under the red-and-white checks until the relief crew arrived and carried him away on a stretcher, with Mac in attendance—she could see it once he was in the ambulance—weeping.
Kendall Waugh departed for the office. Mrs. Maddingly repaired to her parlor for her pills. There was nothing for Winnie to do but go back inside and see whether the place was less creepy now that the workmen were gone. They had after all been on-site for most of the day, and their superstitions had been contagious. She'd felt claustrophobic. Now the blistered cross on the pantry wall looked more imprecise, less a message from the otherworld and more a problem of woodworm and rot. The room was silent.
Winnie made herself a fresh cup of tea and spread her sweater out on some towels to dry. She changed her stockings and lit a few candles and looked at John's CD collection. She selected a Shostakovich compilation that led off with the String Quartet no. 8. A bit unnerving when it came to the first iteration of the three staccato notes, the same notes played in succession like a fist hammering against a door. But then she laughed at her imagination, at last, and felt better, and entirely alone in the flat, for the first time. The problem of John's absence was still unresolved, but at least his office knew he was away. It seemed less worrisome now that she could be alone here with her own thoughts.
Then she remembered that there had been two noises, one of them inside. All of the flat was open to visual inspection from the front hall except John's room. She hesitated at the doorway and then she went in.
The painting of Scrooge or Rudge, whoever, had fallen off its picture hook. It had landed at an angle, wedged between floor and wall, face out. To her ignorant eye the thing seemed undamaged. The figure looked strange from this viewpoint, as if lurching up toward her from the depths of a pool, swimming lightward out of a menacing void of icy depths and pursuing spirits.
She slid the painting under the bed, so that she would have to look neither at the image nor its inscription.
She sat down at the table in the front room and peered out the windows again. No sign of the accident. No sign of much of anything, really; John's front window had a protected view. The house to one side was built forward by nine or ten feet; its tie-beamed wall facing Weatherall Walk was hung with ivy, since no windows looked out in this direction. The house on the other side, across the passage, had several windows; one was a medallion sort, clearly set high in a stairwell, and another had been bricked up. For all the intimacy of near buildings, there was no way to glimpse neighborly comings and goings. One might have been sitting in a Manhattan apartment looking into an unusually capacious air shaft, albeit one ornamented with vines and architectural niceties. In the gray rain-light, the privacy was intensified. Welcome too.
Rain on the rooftop
&
nbsp; Rain on the tree
Rain on the green grass
But not on me.
She opened up her laptop and sat there thinking about the day and, inevitably, about Wendy Pritzke.
The row of new buildings in Rowancroft Gardens, erected in 1888, was among the first in Hampstead to be designed with electrification in mind. A household illuminated with clean safe light! The wattage was low at first, probably, only a half-step up from the murkiness of oil lamps or the dreary seepage of gaslight behind amber glass panels.
In the new modern shadows, a daughter of the paterfamilias, or a maid, might go upstairs, thinking herself alone in the house as she steps from room to room. Thinking the butcher's apprentice had left the premises when shown to the door, not knowing that he had cannily released the safety latch when she wasn't looking, so he'd be able to get back inside. Her shadow now preceding her, now following her, as she goes up the stairs to the top landing, along the passage, to the back of the house where the new house linked knuckles with the old one around the chimney stack. Her electrified shadow being met by the shadow of the intruder, and merging with it, so that the two shadows became one, and she doesn't notice until he flips the light off behind her, and the two shadows merge into the full darkness of the room, and she hears his breathing.
She jumped and cursed at the sound of the doorbell—then thought: John, wanting not to frighten me, as I had wanted not to frighten him. She ran to the buzzer and said, “Yes, yes?”
“Winifred, it's Allegra. May I come up, please.”
The tone of voice made it sound as if this were a rhetorical question. Allegra was there to prove she had the run of the place. “Oh, of course,” Winnie answered, and pressed the electric door release, but once she heard the street door close and the footsteps on the stairs, she couldn't help but add, to herself, “if you must.”
Winnie left the front door open and retreated—not as far as the kitchen, but to the more neutral arena of the sitting room, where she picked up the paperback copy of The Black Prince, as if she'd been interrupted. She wanted to be sitting. Allegra came in with a gymnastic lightness, shucking off her Burberry and draping it on a coat stand in the hall before Winnie looked up again and said, “You've picked bad weather to come calling.”