by Zoe Jasmine
“Well, I tried to ring,” said Allegra, “but the phone seems to be out. The machine doesn't pick up and I got worried.”
“Oh, yes,” said Winnie, “we had a problem with the phone. I ripped the wiring out of the wall by mistake. I'll have to go down to Camden and get a replacement line. Is there still a Rumbelow's in Camden?”
“I wouldn't know,” said Allegra. “It's beastly and I'm soaked through after a mere five-minute walk. I'll make a cup of tea, if I might.” Before Winnie could approve or forbid it, Allegra slid into the kitchen and flipped on the light. “Oh, the mess of home repair,” she called; “how can you stand it? I'd take myself out to a hotel.”
“I'm at home in mess,” said Winnie. “It's my natural habitat.” She turned over the pages of the book without seeing them. “I don't suppose you've heard from John?”
“Right you are,” called Allegra. “Nor you?”
“No, and now the phone's gone out, so I won't, I guess,” said Winnie. As before, in the interest of finding out what had happened to John, she wanted some intimacy with Allegra, but she also wanted to preserve her distance. She threw the paperback down and followed Allegra at least as far as the door of the kitchen. Displaying her own familiarity of the terrain Allegra was complaining, “The workers have shifted everything; the tea is not here, and all the spoons are filthy. Don't they ever wash up?”
“Tea's on the window ledge there.”
“Foul smell. That's what you were over talking about? What about that sound?” said Allegra. “I became interested despite myself. I thought I should come round to see how things stood—”
“Things are as I said before,” said Winnie, shrugging, “except the sound seems to have stopped, I'm afraid. The way an ache inevitably does when you finally get to the dentist with your bad tooth.”
Allegra filled the electric kettle. “I really came round to see you, I suppose,” she admitted. “I wondered how you were getting on here.”
“I'm not moving,” said Winnie, dreading an invitation to stay at Allegra's.
“Oh, it's your choice, of course. I only thought you seemed on edge a bit, and when I ran into Rasia McIntyre in the hall she said you'd been up there visiting for an hour or so.”
“Rasia was the one on edge. She was in a mood to confide. I couldn't get away.”
“Well, she asked me if you were all right, and I got to thinking I might have been more—I mean, if John should be in touch and I chat with him before you do, I'd like to say that I had come round to make sure.”
“Oh, I'm fine here,” said Winnie. “If John calls you, tell him that I thank him for leaving me the house to myself for a change. I'm getting some good work done.” The notion that John might talk to Allegra before attempting to reach her. The very notion of it. “I wouldn't be as kind to you in the same circumstances,” she added. “That wind.”
“Oh, it is fierce, isn't it? My late-afternoon client from Hampstead Garden Suburb called to cancel because trees are down and the power's been cut. You should see the traffic coming up the high street. A river of lights rising out of Belsize Park, and the wipers going mad. The rain's just too heavy for them to do much good.” She dunked her tea bag a couple of times and then let it sink to the bottom. “Shall we sit in the front room? I'll dry off before it's time to get wet again.”
“Maybe it'll stop.”
“Not till tomorrow morning, if then, according to Radio Four.” Allegra executed a beautifully balanced maneuver, setting her teacup on the copy of The Black Prince while at the same time lifting and positioning an ankle, heronlike, under her rear end before she sat down. “You're reading Iris Murdoch, or is that John?”
“It's his copy,” said Winnie. She didn't want to talk about John or who was reading what. She went over to her computer and thought about turning it off. All its little electronic brains stewing about Wendy Pritzke in London, Wendy deluding herself over sensational Jack the Ripper nonsense while trying to avoid the more serious issues ahead in Romania. If late-nineteenth-century electrification brought a new grade of shadows into the world, computers ushered in a new category of ambiguity and untetheredness. All the possible lies and revelations that their million internal monkeys might type! “Did you know,” she said, “there was some notion at one point that a cousin of Virginia Woolf's was the Ripper? Someone who had delusions, a manic-depressive maybe, or a schizoid. She with her fine-grade madness was related to a cousin who I guess killed himself. Two versions of the family malady.”
“Are you writing about Virginia Woolf now?”
“I'm thinking about writing about a woman interested in Jack the Ripper.”
“I see.” Polite distaste.
And Wendy Pritzke sets her hooker revenge story in your house, Allegra, in your kitchen . A butcher boy delivers his merchandise right where you do your gluey handprints. Winnie didn't say this aloud. Instead, getting up to turn off the computer, she said, “You were going to tell me about your oddest experience doing those hand molds. Remember?”
“I do,” said Allegra. She laughed, but not prettily, not throatily. “You don't really want to hear it.”
“Oh, sure I do.”
“It was so silly. People can be perverse, when you come right down to it.”
“In their idiosyncrasies they reveal themselves, if they're lucky enough to have any.”
“A couple of parents had a premature baby who died, that's all,” said Allegra, looking away. “They were friends of a cousin of mine and I couldn't squirm out of it. I had to go to the morgue in the hospital and take the mold there.”
“Surely that's against the law?”
“People bend around laws when it comes to times like that. Who cares, really?”
“You should move to Massachusetts, the baby trade is very strong there. You'd have no end of work. What did it look like?”
After a while, Allegra said, “Well, in the twentieth week the thumb can oppose the other fingers.”
“I see,” said Winnie. “Handy. No pun intended,” she added.
“I should think not.”
“I went to school at Skidmore,” said Winnie. “We got the Albany papers sometimes. Once I read a historical feature about a baby dying back in the early twenties. Some dark-haired teenager walked into a post office to mail a package going to an address just around the corner. Later the postmistress remembered the customer, but she'd disappeared. The package turned out to be a naked, lifeless girl child born three days earlier. She'd been smothered, and mailed with a five-dollar bill to help defray funeral expenses. No one could track down her mother so she was buried at the city's expense under a headstone calling the infant Parcella Post.”
“Winnie,” said Allegra, “it takes an awful lot to put me off my appetite, but really .”
Was there something about Jack the Ripper and his prostitutes, something about the babies that came and didn't come? What was it? Later.
She reached toward the off switch, a little panel to be depressed into the side of the screen. As her hand hovered, the endless snow-falling screen saver suddenly froze. (Screen saver of “The Dead,” she called it, after Joyce's last line.) Every corner, every centimeter of grid filled up with random figures,
For an instant she thought the image had mirrored the marks on the pantry wall. But it was gone too quickly to be sure. Like most clues. “Oh, Christ,” she said.
The lights flickered and went out. “What are you trying to store in that thing, you're draining the power out of all of Ham and High,” said Allegra drolly, getting up behind her. “Not enough memory. You've power-surged North London.”
“I just got a start. It's nothing. You've seen computer paralysis before, I'm sure.”
The pounding began again. “Oh, is that the noise?” said Allegra calmly. The room was furred gray, darkening as they spoke. “Is that what you were complaining of? And well you should. Who could write stories while that row is thundering on?”
“But it's not in the kitchen,” sai
d Winnie. “Before, it was in the kitchen.” Despite herself she reached out and gripped Allegra's elbow. “Now it's in the hall.”
“Calm down,” said Allegra. “I know you're excitable; just relax.”
They went into the dark foyer. The thudding was out in the stairwell, something hitting the door to the flat. “There's a back entrance, isn't there?” Allegra said conversationally.
“No, there isn't, how could there be? The back of the house rears up against the back of yours, as you yourself explained to me. This is the only way in.”
A voice, a human voice out there. “Damn.”
“Mac?” said Winnie with relief, and went to the door. “What are you up to now?” She turned the handle. The door was locked—from the outside. She twisted the knob.
“I'm driving nails,” said Mac from the other side of the door, “but the light's just gone out and I've bashed my fecking thumb.”
“What are you nailing?”
“The door shut,” said Mac thickly. “I'm locking it in there. I'm going for a priest or something.”
“Don't be a fool. Open this door,” said Winnie.
“Winnie, who is this? One of the builders?” said Allegra. “What do you mean by this?”
“Ah, it's got a voice now: and it is the voice of Jenkins's daughter,” cried Mac. He sounded bereft and beyond. A few moments later Allegra and Winnie were at the open window looking down into the forecourt, shouting at him, calling for help, but the wind was rising and their voices were lost. As Mac streaked away, he flung his hammer into the bushes. He didn't look back.
Chapter Three: The Chimney
—that was the best Winnie could imagine it for herself, a succession of shafts within shafts, like nesting dolls—the sound unsettled the silence. A hammering precisely parroted the noise of Mac's labors, as if the space behind the chimney breast harbored some thrumming armature. The realization dawned on Winnie—and, she guessed, on Allegra—that they were indeed imprisoned in John Comestor's flat, and the chimney's unmusical thud began to recede, but slowly, a long train passing very far away, on a very still night.
“Phone?” said Allegra.
“Disconnected. You remember—you tried to call,” said Winnie.
“We'll climb out through a window. He may be coming back here—with his mates or something.”
“We'll keep an eye out the windows. We'd see him coming. Don't be hysterical.”
“It would seem to me this is a singularly apt time for hysteria.” Allegra raised an eyebrow, which in her circle probably passed for an expression of extreme nervous agitation, Winnie supposed.
They paced the apartment. The back two Victorian rooms were windowless, boxed in by the vacant flat rented to Japanese in the adjoining building. Some dingy skylights were pocked with pellets of gray rain. “Could we climb up there?”
“Doubtful.”
The forward Georgian rooms—the older rooms—were not much better. The side windows gave out on a bleak yard of rubbish bins, the front ones on the recessed forecourt. There was no convenient drainspout to scrabble down. And they could scream all they wanted—feeling idiotic, they tried—but the storm was hitting its stride, and the winds barreled abroad with vigor and commotion. And the lights were out, and the gloom was rising in the room.
Winnie, hunting for candles in the kitchen, afraid to turn her back to the chimney stack but doing it anyway, thought: Allegra Lowe is almost the last person I'd like to be incarcerated with. John Comestor's “friend.” How those imagined double quotes clenched around the word friend . They squeezed the real meaning out of the word and made it vulnerable to infection by irony.
Winnie commanded herself to speak levelly. “Here's some dinner tapers anyway, and there'll be matches by the fireplace, no doubt.”
“Trust John to be equipped with beeswax tapers and no torch.”
“How extensive do you think this power outage is?”
“Impossible to tell with the clouds so low. I suspect the damage is only local, though that doesn't do us any good.”
“Or any harm, either.”
“I'm not at all superstitious. But I don't care for the thing in the chimney. I'm glad it's quietened down some.” And so it had.
“It doesn't like the fellows.”
“What's the name of that cretin?”
“Mac. Our poltergeist doesn't trust him, or either of them. Maybe for good reason.”
They settled themselves in the front room, near the most public window. If Mac should come back and start opening the door, they'd holler bloody murder again, and maybe this time some neighbor struggling home in the storm would hear their cries. “What in the world do you think the thing is?” said Allegra.
“I have no idea,” said Winnie, looking away.
They sipped. Somewhere, probably down the hill at the Royal Free Hospital, Jenkins's lungs were going up and down, up and down. Somewhere farther out, in the City, perhaps his errant daughter was having a twinge, pausing in the downpour, regretting the distance from her father. “John told me,” said Allegra, “your side of the family has some pretense to descending from Ebenezer Scrooge?”
“Oh did he. What else did he tell you?”
“Don't be like that. I'm only trying to make the best of a tiresome turn of events.”
Winnie thought it better to talk about the Scrooge nonsense than about John Comestor. If she slipped and let herself think he was dead, in any way—half dead, part dead, gone as gone—she would rise up shrieking.
But how much to tell? “It's this house,” she said. “Rudge House. The Scrooge stories that got passed down the family may derive primarily from that accident of sound. Rudge, Scrooge, Scrooge, Rudge. There's a little something in the family letters about it, but most of the references, after the fact, are mocking.”
“So what kind of story is it, to be mocked or believed?”
She didn't want to say. “The builder of this house was my great-great-great-grandfather. Five generations back. A man named Ozias Rudge. His dates are—oh, I don't remember exactly, 1770s into the mid–Victorian age. He was involved in tin mines in Cornwall. He worked for a large firm—the Mines Royal or something like that—as an expert in timber supports. Something of an architectural engineer, I suppose you'd say now. There was a mine collapse, and many deaths, and Rudge lost his nerve in a big way. He came to London, took rooms in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and set himself up in the building trade. But bad London air scared him. Fearing consumption, maybe suffering from lung ailments from his mining days, he built a country house for himself in Hampstead to take the airs from time to time. This house, at the crown of Holly Hill, of course. To which he repaired alone, a middle-aged man without a wife and family.”
“This sounds very little like Scrooge. But you have the conviction of the natural storyteller. Do go on. I'm enjoying this hugely.”
Winnie doubted that, but went on anyway. “Be patient. Ozias Rudge had designed supports for the adits and stopes of tin mines. He parried this expertise into designing structural reinforcement of old buildings, using iron beams. He must have been close to a pioneer in the field. His clients included governors and overseers of ancient institutions, churches, the older colleges, that sort of thing. Here, and in France. There was good money to be had in architectural renovation and preservation at that time, and Ozias Rudge raked it in.”
Allegra suppressed a yawn. This pleased Winnie somehow and she continued more happily. “During one particular exercise in the early 1820s, Ozias Rudge was called to Normandy—to Mont-Saint-Michel—where the walls of some crypt had begun to buckle, threatening the stability of the buildings that leaned upon it. Rudge went and did his work, and while he was gone, a business associate in London made himself overly familiar with a woman that O. R. had been courting, on and off. Rudge, on returning to England, learned the truth, and dueled with his partner and killed him. Or so it's said.”
“A horrible tale. Our ancestors were so . . . sincere. This did not win the w
idow back, I take it.”
“No.” Winnie was disappointed that Allegra wasn't more shocked. “But now I'm arriving at the confluence of stories. All of that is prologue. Old O. R. apparently became a curmudgeon worthy of the title Scrooge. He grew sullen and inward. He retired full-time to his country house. I mean here.”
“Yes, yes, I understand. Rudge House.”
“Maybe Ozias Rudge suffered remorse about the man he'd killed, or the miners who lost their lives in the mine collapse. Maybe he had weak nerves. Anyway, he became celebrated in Hampstead as a man who was pestered by ghosts. You can see a reference to him in the histories of Hampstead under ‘ghost stories.' The tourist pamphlets don't make the Dickens association, though. That's our own private family theory.”
“How do you work out such an association?”
“As a twelve-year-old boy Charles Dickens came to stay in Hampstead. In 1824, I think. All recollections of the young Dickens suggest that he had a lively and receptive mind. It's said that when Ozias Rudge was about fifty, a garrulous single man, probably lonely, a nutcake, he met the young Dickens and told him—as he told everyone—about his being haunted. Hampstead wasn't a large village in those days, and Rudge would have been a figure of some importance. And Dickens was always impressed by people of importance, and spent some time, especially as a young person, trying to be impressive back. We guess he may have befriended O. R., and listened to his tales of woe.”
“Shockingly thin evidence.”
“In adult life, Dickens said that the memory of children was prodigious. It was a mistake to fancy children ever forgot anything—those are nearly his exact words. So if he heard some tale of nocturnal hauntings of a guilt-ridden scoundrel, mightn't he have remembered enough of it to turn it into A Christmas Carol, twenty years or so later? It's not a very big jump from Rudge to Scrooge.”