But she settled against the pillow knowing that a bad night’s sleep was ahead. She was unsettled by everything today, from the accident on the JFK Expressway to the broken alarm. That storm had swept in bad cess. A power outage is a simple thing, but thinking about the emasculation of time:
00:00
00:00
Well, it gave her a clammy feeling in her throat.
Throughout the night, the house shuddered, the furnace gasping emphysematously, the windows bucking in their casings. A shade flapped up suddenly in the study under the eaves. Peter Pan breaking in? She turned away from the noise, not alarmed. Who says he stayed sweet and nonviolent? After all, his mother had closed the window against him. Why wouldn’t he come back and slay her? He never grew up, he was lost and still unclaimed, so by these modern days he’d have learned something about kids and guns, in schoolyards and high school cafeterias and railroad tracks. He’d know how to do it.
But she surprised herself by sleeping soundly, only waking a few minutes before the alarm at 4:15 A.M. She felt unperturbed and not even very tired. Already mentally shifting over to Greenwich mean time, she hoped.
She finished packing and brought her suitcases to the door. A scrap of paper she must have missed in clearing up the mail on the floor yesterday, a circular. She picked it up and glanced at it before dumping it in the wastebasket. She’d seen its sort a dozen times: a flimsy white card printed in blue ink, posted to “Resident” at 4 Huxtable Street. Mailbox Values asks: Have You Seen Us? Two photos printed beneath, one of a Hawaiian girl with eyes set close and outturned, another of a blond toothy woman in her fifties. Have you seen us? “Over ninety-five children featured have been safely recovered.” Call 1-800-THE-LOST.
She crumpled it up before throwing it out. Then she stood in the window bay so the taxi driver wouldn’t honk at that hour. The rain looked snowish again, the street a black hollow, the precipitation white and silver against it. Well-lit city streets at night, especially when empty, look like movie sets. Down Huxtable Street she imagined a small tribe of costumed children, trick-or-treating in the eternal dark. A patient, voiceless throng of ghosts, suited up with rubber masks of Frankensteins and Ronald Reagans, plastic faces of aliens and witches, hobo char. They waited before her house. They did not ring the bell. In their midst the taxi pulled up and stood there, its bumblebee yellow realer than they. She set the burglar alarm. She locked up her house. She didn’t know when she’d see the Huxtable Street house again, but she hoped when she came back the story of Wendy Pritzke would be far enough along on paper that it would no longer be haunting her.
She was hunting for a story that was but wasn’t the story of Wendy Pritzke.
It was the first time she’d flown to England on a day flight. The flight attendants looked casual, as if this were a busman’s holiday for them, and the departure lounge was nearly empty. Winnie half expected to be waved down the jetway without having her ticket or passport checked. The woman who checked her in, a tall lippy redhead whose badge said FRETTA, was yawning even as she made announcements over the PA system.
“This is close to upsetting,” said Winnie. “Why is no one flying today? Is the weather worse than I thought?”
“It’s a new route. People are still getting used to it,” said Fretta.
“I fly to England all the time. I’ve never seen a departure lounge so tomblike. Do you find passengers freaking out when it gets like this?”
“Oh, someone’s always freaking out. We’re not very busy today, but there are a few more people to check in behind you. Have a nice flight.”
“If the flight is so empty, may I be upgraded without cost to business class?”
“So sorry.” Fretta scanned the lounge for another passenger to check in, and cracked her knuckles.
Winnie found her seat—31K—and, feeling chastised, postponed searching for a better spot. There was hardly anyone in this section of the cabin. Not a squawling baby, not a pair of retirees chattering, no businessmen tap-tapping on their personal computers. Fretta didn’t even bother with a tray when she brought Winnie a plastic glass of orange juice. “Here,” she said, as if handing a sippie cup to a toddler.
Winnie shucked her shoes and donned the complimentary sanitary socks. She tortured herself into her assigned seat, feeling crowded even while alone. The rain on the runway made slices of colored light out of Charlestown or Winthrop or whatever town that was across the finger of black harbor. A pretty sight, but distant, and Winnie had scarcely nudged a Robert Louis Stevenson into her mind
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea
when plain rain had shifted once again to slow unnerving snow.
She’d forgotten to order a minicab to meet her at Heathrow. Damn. She might flag down Fretta and find out if the international phone was available, but the hostess was off somewhere, probably yakking with one of her girlfriends or offering the pilots No Doz. Winnie slumped her head against the window, half asleep, aware of how the folded blanket was liable to slip off.
Her first and most important destination was Rudge House in Weatherall Walk, that quiet cul-de-sac on Holly Bush Hill at the very crown of Hampstead. The Rudge family home was recent by English standards, its original rooms dating to the early nineteenth century. Yesterday, really. But in the 1930s the house had been partitioned, and by the time her generation came along to inherit something, the only part left in family hands was the top-floor flat. It might have been Winnie’s flat, had her father not died so young, had her father’s sister not married a widower with a child, John Comestor. Winnie loved the house and wished her stepcousin John could afford to buy the whole thing back, piece by piece, but he couldn’t, and it would be senseless of her to get involved. Nice enough that she had a place to stay, that he put up with his peripatetic faux relative. Especially since the house should have been hers.
From her frequent visits and occasional short-term residencies, Winnie possessed a mental map of modern London. It revolved around Rudge House, just ten minutes from the drafty Heath. Her personal London included libraries, theaters, museums, parks, and a few homes whose memory she treasured for having been the setting of bedroom adventures.
She also had her own more immutable London, an older city of the mind, the one that she had been forming from the age of eight. As for so many Americans it was a literary London. But she didn’t care for overheated Bloomsbury. She’d never signposted her internal London for Dickensian inns, nor for the salons of Pope and Boswell. Even the universal allure of Shakespearian England and the Puritan London of Pepys and Milton had not stuck all that much. Winnie’s firmest London was a template of childhood reading.
She could see it in her mind. It seethed with that vitality particular to stories. The swallow in her bird’s-eye view circled about in haphazard fashion, admiring her ur-London. It included Primrose Hill, where the Twilight Barking of One Hundred and One Dalmatians started. Here was a street in Chelsea called Cherry Tree Lane, along whose sidewalks the perennial English nanny-goddess Mary Poppins hustled her charges. Here was Paddington Station, in whose airy concourse a bear called Paddington had been lost, then found. Here was Kensington Gardens, Rackham’s bleak version, with sprites and root goblins just out of sight, and Peter Pan, the original lost and abandoned child, a baby dressed in oak leaves, still crouching there even when thousands of mourners were depositing floral bouquets at the death of Princess Diana.
London was a trove of the magic of childhood, for anyone who had read as obsessively as Winnie had done before the age of twelve. Pull back just a bit, and more of England became implicated: a bit of river out toward Oxford, on which a rat and a mole were busy messing about in a boat. Peter Rabbit stealing under some stile in the Lake District. Somewhere on this island, was it in Kent, the Hundred Aker Wood, with those figures who have yet to learn that sawdusty toys die deaths as certainly as c
hildren do. The irrepressible Camelot, always bursting forth out of some hummock or other. Robin Hood in his green jerkin, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, and just underneath it all, places only slightly less England, the dreary improbabilities of Alice’s Wonderland, the bosky dells of the theocracy of Narnia, the wind-tortured screes and wastes of Middle-earth.
The memory of the power of this early reading was part of what had prompted her to write for children. The person who would become a lifelong reader should stumble upon very rich stuff first, early, and often. It lived within, a most agreeable kind of haunting.
And magic England was endlessly reinvented, modern masters like Philip Pullman and Sylvia Waugh and J. K. Rowling piling it on with their daemons and their Mennyms and their Muggles. All those books with side-by-side worlds, forever springing leaks into one another.
The only Dickens that had ever really appealed to Winnie Rudge was A Christmas Carol. Partly the family legend, to be sure, but also it was the Dickens story most like a children’s book. The door knocker as Marley’s face! What did Scrooge deserve, if he hadn’t shaped up? To be left out of life, beyond the locked windows of the nursery like Peter Pan, or worse—
00:00
00:00
She startled herself awake. The security alarm going off again? No. It was the airplane window; it was streaked with sudsy blood. She wrenched her neck, catapulting away, across the aisle. Or perhaps she had screamed. Fretta the flight attendant poked her head from the galley. “Everything all right, I hope?” she said brightly.
Winnie pointed to the window.
“Oh, that. Ground crew de-icing the plane. A warm substance called glycol or something.”
Pink, medical, watery. Winnie stood up and said, “I hope the restrooms are usable?”
“Oh, yes. We’re not cleared for takeoff in this weather, so make yourself comfy.”
She stumbled to the toilet. She wanted the anonymity of takeoff. She wanted another London for a template, not one in which the promises of childhood lived on so adroitly to mock. She sat on the plastic seat and thought about it. Kenneth Grahame wrote about the idylls of childhood in Dream Days and The Wind in the Willows, and his son Alistair’s death on a railroad track was probably suicide. One of the original Lost Boys for whom James Barrie had invented Peter Pan had also killed himself. Christopher Milne, the Christopher Robin of his father’s tales, whinged in print up until his death. The curse of childhood fancy.
She pushed the lever. Power flush. The two neat ends of the toilet rolls, side by side, flapped their white paper hands at her in the powerful disruption of air, as if waving her back to her seat. This airplane is jinxed, she thought. “The Haunted Loo.” Just my luck.
She dozed fitfully again during takeoff, and only woke when a lukewarm breakfast thing was slung at her by Fretta, who seemed now to resent that the plane was required to carry any passengers at all. Winnie tore at the shrink-wrapped breakfast cheese and managed to spill the indifferent coffee. Later, walking about the cabin to wake herself up and shake the bad feelings down, she stopped to peer out a window in one of the emergency doors. Perhaps the flight was already halfway there, accelerated by Hurricane Gretl. Nothing to see but the anonymity of clouds.
Nothing to see but blue. No islands or boats, no smaller aircraft veering away beneath them. Just three or four thin layers of cloud, unraveling like freshly laundered shrouds between her triple-socked feet and the seamless blue floor of the sea.
Standing still at 550 miles an hour.
Her London would be a way stop, and so she didn’t bother to map it in the mind. There were a few friends to see, some last-minute purchases to make. She had Jack the Ripper on her mind, and wanted to look about Whitechapel and Aldgate, in the event there was a book in it for her. With her tendency to cheery morbidity she had fastened on a lane to the north of Whitechapel High Street, a loop of passage called Thrawl Street. None of the nine murdered women had been found there, but it was a central point around which several of the murders could be arrayed. Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Annie Chapman, and Mary Kelly. Anyway, the words Thrawl Street appealed to her.
She went back to her seat. While she was gone, a woman had moved into the empty seat across the aisle. A teenage mother in a sequined cowboy blouse, coddling a fussy lump of infant wrapped in butter mint blankets. Where had this mountain mama gotten the cash to fly? She was a one-woman crisis, ringing the call bell every three or four minutes. The bottle, could you warm it? The bottle, it’s too warm now, could you try another? Don’t you have no apple juice? The mother had a dirty face and wore her exhaustion proudly. Her baby was her license to be demanding. Perhaps no one had ever listened to her whining before.
You had to feel sorry for the sprout, though, and didn’t blame it for fussing. How its mother brayed! How big of a deal could it be to crank up the heat in this frigging place? It’s, like, freezing.
Thank God for the airline magazine, she thought, diving into it with phony enthusiasm.
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
She woke with a crick in her neck, for the moment thinking, perversely, of Mabel Quackenbush. Mabel giving her the bum’s rush out of Forever Families! The indignity. But in her sleepy mind Winnie also thought of another Mabel, the dull friend of little Alice in Wonderland. Alice, frightened at the monstrousness of Wonderland, wondered if she’d been changed in the night, turned into someone different—maybe Mabel, who knew such a very little.
How do you know, waking out of your nepenthean pardon, that you have returned back to the prison sentence of your own individuality, and not someone else’s?
The flight came in over Windsor Castle almost a full hour early. Winnie watched with the usual anxiety. Now the landscape was still seen from the air, for one more instant, and now the bare thorny trees around Heathrow were springing up like pop-up figures against the horizon, snapping the third dimension back into the world. It made her feel nauseated and safe at the same time.
She stumbled up the jetway and was herded into the correct immigration line by a stout unsmiling Asian woman buttoned too tightly into a uniform. The immigration officer glanced through her passport, unimpressed by its stamps and seals and page-broad visas, and he said simply, crisply, “Reason for your visit?”
She must not be awake; for a moment she couldn’t understand the question.
“Business or holiday?” he continued as if she were drunk, or slow.
“Just passing through.”
He didn’t even bother to ask her final destination, but that was fine with her as, in so many ways, she didn’t know it.
Since the Piccadilly Line originated at Heathrow she easily found herself a seat. Now there was nothing to do but sit back and wait to see John, and plan out more of the weeks to come, to cram them full of artifice and nonsense, as if the more detail, the more significant. She worked up some jovial remarks so she could enter with a flourish. And the choice of airplane movies! Keeping the sound off, I watched something done by the Muppets—a version of Madame Bovary, near as I could tell.
She changed at Leicester Square and then alighted the Tube at Hampstead Station. She pushed with the evening commuters into the lift that heaved them up, away from the smell of Northern Line burning rubber brake pads, to disgorge them onto Hampstead High Street. From there it was a short slog up the hill at Heath Street and left into Holly Bush Steps, the steep stairs cut into Holly Mount. Winnie’s suitcase and leather catchall and computer slowed her down, like physical manifestations of jet lag. Then, around the corner and out of sight of the neighborhood: the house in its secluded half-square, part gracious courtyard and part car park. Brown brick like old puddings, a somewhat squashed-looking fanlight over the door, small bleak flush-framed windows, flecked with the impurities in the glass, and double-flecked with the speckling rain.
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Well, there was the western wind, bringing the first bad breath of Hurricane Gretl, and the small rain too, but nothing would bring that lover back.
She rang the buzzer first, to alert him, and slid her key into the lock. She stepped over a mound of mail on the floor. The stairwell smelled of prawns and Dettol. She paused, fixed her hair, and arranged a less-tired look on her face, and went on up. At the top, a few plastic drop cloths were folded on the carpet by the bristly hedgehog shoe scraper. She pushed open the door with one hand, calling, “Brace yourself; sadly, it’s only me.” He was not there at once to help with the luggage; strange. The foyer looked curiously dark and chilly. Struggling with her bags on the threshold, she saw no note on the hall table. Yet the place seemed full of something anticipating her, the way her own house on Huxtable Street had seemed, was it just yesterday? “John?” she said, and went in.
STAVE TWO
At the Flat in
Weatherall Walk
there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit, little to plan a meal around but tinned pears and a jar of Tesco’s mild curry. The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves. The museum-quality nineteenth-century prints of bugs and wild boars and roses leaned against one another in a corner of the parlor. The kitchen was being torn up, and plaster dust had settled uniformly in any room without a door. Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John? How come?