She swept up empty lager cans and the remains of the triangular packaging of ready-made sandwiches—tuna and sweet corn, chicken tikka, egg mayonnaise—proof of workers on-site, as recently as today, probably.
The answerphone was unplugged, she saw. But John had known she was coming, he’d known for weeks.
She flipped through piles of mail hunting for a note. Nothing. The postmarks went back eight, ten days. Could he have been called away with such urgency that there was no time for a note? John Comestor was in shipping insurance, specializing in the approval of policies to the aging merchant fleets that served the Baltic. He assessed the dredging of harbors, the temperament of the labor market, any pending legislation that bore on trade. He converted into cost analyses and risk thresholds the slim anecdotal information he could glean over glasses of vodka in dockside shacks. He hated working up the final reports, but he liked the vodka in dockside shacks, liked the smell of diesel, fish, and intrigue.
He avoided the main office in the City whenever possible. If he had to be home in England, he booked himself comatose with Latin American film festivals or lecture series at the ICA. Sometimes when Winnie was expected they’d schedule a motoring trip on the Continent, conducting haphazard investigations of the remains of Cistercian abbeys, or the Bavarian follies of mad King Ludwig, or, one wonderful time, vineyards in the Loire. John would read the guidebooks aloud while Winnie drove.
They made a comfortably unromantic team, their tempers strained only by Winnie’s preference for settling on a daily destination every morning and booking rooms ahead. Winnie knew that John enjoyed romantic enthusiasms elsewhere, and by long custom the discussion of it was avoided. It didn’t impinge. Winnie’s relationship with John wasn’t a relationship. It was cousinhood, and stepcousinhood at that.
It was a relief to see that John’s clocks weren’t going 00:00 00:00 at her. But the hour was late, too late for Winnie to hope to get Gillian, John’s office staffer, on the line. Unless, of course, there was a crisis in the Baltic, in which case Gill might be working late. But the phone there just rang its double pulse, over and over, unanswered.
John had friends, and Winnie knew them, but generally she preferred to keep her distance. How much easier for stepcousins to maintain a quiet truce about the nature of things, keeping everything informal and vague. How much easier not having to negotiate debts and favors, lies and silences, the rates of emotional exchange that would occur at the consolidation of two social systems into one.
A gentleman, John honored her feelings about this by forgoing invitations to soirées and drinks parties when she touched down. Obliquely, Winnie knew about Allegra Lowe, the lead so-called girlfriend, who did arts therapy of some sort, and about various university roommates now in places like Barnes and Wimbledon and Motspur Park. Their numbers were written in pencil in the back of John’s directory. But she liked standing apart from all that. So, for her own comfort tonight, she decided to forgo approaching anyone in her age bracket and instead to phone John’s friend and financial adviser, a divorced man nearing retirement. Malcolm Rice lived in St. John’s Wood, enjoying the chilly splendor of a big semidetached stucco house that sported too many French windows for the central heating to cope with.
She recognized the voice that answered the phone as that of Rice himself, since he spoke the digits of the phone number she had dialed, a phone habit probably dating from the days when local operators connected every call. She found herself slipping into a complementary formality whether she wanted to or not. “Mr. Rice, please.”
“Malcolm Rice speaking.”
“Good evening—Malcolm. It’s John Comestor’s friend Winifred here.” A latent Englishness—she heard it—came up in her voice, unbidden. It was an involuntary echo of her grandfather Rudge’s speech, not the American party game of attempting the superior spoken English of the English. “Sorry to bother you at home, Malcolm. I hope you’re well. I’ve just arrived this evening on a day flight from Boston, and I’d thought that John was expecting me, but he seems to be away and the place is torn up by the builders.”
“I see,” said Malcolm Rice, as if sniffing a request to crash at his place. Stalling, preparing a line of defense. “I see.”
She added, “I’m perfectly comfortable here, but I’m surprised that John changed his plans without telling me. Do you know where he is, or when he’ll be back?”
“I couldn’t say. Do you need to come round for a drink?”
“No, no, I’m fine. But I’ll hope to see you sometime.” She hoped not to see him at all, and she hung up. As she unpacked her toiletries, she thought: Was Malcolm Rice’s I couldn’t say intended to mean that he didn’t know where John was, or that he wasn’t about to reveal it? Could John actually be off on a love adventure in Majorca or Tunis? Or had Winnie underestimated him, and had he and the deadly Allegra Lowe decided finally to elope?
Uninterested in Tesco’s mild curry over pears, she took herself out to the street to hunt down what supper she could. She checked out various bistros in the steep glary center of Hampstead. She settled on the only restaurant with a couple of free tables and went in. Filled with chattery diners trying to be heard above the mood music, the place reeked of cigarette smoke and a fennely saucisson.
Winnie was tired and unsettled about John’s absence. But she was here to work, and work she would. She tried to think not of herself but of Wendy Pritzke, and of how London might seem to a Wendy just passing through on her way to the haunted Carpathians. She didn’t yet know who Wendy Pritzke would turn out to be, but whoever she was, she was agreeably lustier than Winnie. Wendy Pritzke would have lavishly thick, spiritually profound hair, not Winnie’s lackluster fringe. What would Wendy order? Everything bloody and garlicky, that foul sausage in its ditch water juices. A beer. Whereas Winnie told the Italian waiter with the drooping eyelids to bring her a salad and a wine. The salad arrived, frills of green doused with vinaigrette and arranged around a single withered olive, accompanied by a sad little Chardonnay. It seemed ridiculous and fitting, and she wolfed it down, wishing she’d brought a book to read, or a newspaper.
Over the years Winnie had earned a name for writing short novels about kids with limited access to magic. Her books were early chapter books, designed to help third-graders develop confidence in reading. The circumscription of children’s lives had suited her. She could avoid the dreadful and the absurd, she could be funny, she could poke a moral at her readers when they weren’t looking. Problems could be solved in sixty-four pages. Pushing herself—maybe prematurely, she realized—she wanted to find in the character of Wendy Pritzke some more tension. Give her a task more Herculean than domestic, and see how she’d make out. Winnie also wanted to see, of herself, how she’d fare at starting a book whose end she couldn’t predict.
What was Wendy Pritzke doing in London, with her vague, sentimental morbidity? She was a novelist obsessed with the story of Jack the Ripper. Winnie didn’t know if Jack the Ripper would end up being a character or a red herring in some domestic trial of Wendy’s. The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.
“Looking bleary. You’re ready for another glass of wine.”
Britt, what was his name, Chervis or Chendon or Chimms, something out of Noël Coward. Another pal of John’s, from the same staircase at Oxford or the same club or posting.
“No, I’m ready for the check,” she said, striving to be civil. “Sit down for a minute, though, if you want.”
“I thought I’d ask you to join my party.”
Winnie didn’t glance over—did his party include Allegra Lowe?—as not to know somehow preserved her own American right to occupy this worn red plush English chair. “Just arrived, and the time differences,” she said inconclusively, then brightly, “but, Britt, I haven’t seen John yet.”
“No more have I. Is he expected?”
“He’s always expected. That’s part of his public relations profile, isn’t it?”
“Ah,” s
aid Britt, “you have me there. At the end of the day, though, what’s the difference between public relations and private identity?”
She had no idea of the answer in general, let alone what he meant about John. She rose to leave so as not to appear to have been stood up. She kept her shoulder turned against the corner of the room from which Britt had emerged. Insincerely she promised to phone him, and made her way out with a deliberate lack of speed, feeling bovine. La Pritzke under the same circumstance would have bounced, she decided. But too bad.
She went up and down Hampstead High Street, stained a savage yellow by the street lamps. In English winds no brisker than usual for the season, Winnie dallied before the windows of the shops. Though it was only the day after Hallowe’en—only November first, for the love of God!—the candle shop was pushing beeswax candles striped to resemble candy canes.
She bought a Wispa before she could talk herself out of it and ate it with an air of defiance. When she got back to Rudge House and climbed the two flights of steps to John’s place, which occupied the whole top floor, she threw the wrapper in the pile of rubbish the contractors had left. Then she felt abusive of John’s hospitality, especially since something was, if not wrong, certainly out of the ordinary, so she hustled all the trash into a white plastic garbage bag. A bin liner, that is. A pipe began to knock, someone in a flat downstairs using a protesting shower, and she was startled momentarily. The phone rang once, but stopped before she could get it. Not yet 11 P.M. here, which meant her body was remembering it was not yet six in Boston. Far too early for bed.
In his bedroom John kept a small television set, which with grave propriety they always shifted to the sitting room while she was visiting. She opened the door to his room, suddenly thinking she might find his corpse swinging from a beam, naked but for black net stockings, one of those accidental hangings resulting from a mismanaged exercise in autoeroticism. No corpse was there. No TV either. The room was orderly, no sign of panic or haste. Well, John was the type who would stop to straighten the bedclothes before leaping out of a burning building.
She remembered the other morning arriving at Forever Families, and the wreck of furniture in the community room there. As if something had flown up at the darkened windows, terrifying the families away.
She turned to leave his bedroom. This room had never meant anything to her, of course, but in general the bedrooms of single men had a certain seedy danger even when kept orderly, and appointed with good eighteenth-century furniture. Her eye was caught by the mid-Victorian portrait of a gentleman in his declining years. She knew the piece well; John liked to display it above his chest of drawers. The plate screwed into the oak frame, which was overwrought with gilded acanthus leaves and pears, read SCROOGE. But she knew from being shown it by John that someone had once scribbled on the painting’s back NOT Scrooge but O. R. Meaning Ozias Rudge.
Being familiar with the painting, she rarely gave it notice, but tonight she was jumpy and obeyed her instincts to focus on what came to mind. So she looked at it again, its occluded figure hardly more than silhouetted against patches of icy blues and pale browns.
The man stood in a curiously modern pose, anticipating the drama of Pre-Raphaelite compositions. Or perhaps this painting did date from the era of Holman Hunt, and the features of the figure had been cribbed from some older, more conventional portrait. The effect was more illustrative than biographic. Seen from below, the figure faced the viewer at a looming slant, one hand out to steady himself on the doorsill of the threshold he was crossing. In the room behind him, an unseen fire in a grate cast up a dramatic blue backlight. On the right, a scrape the color of bone seemed to imply a bed-curtain, but it was torn from its rings in two places and the fabric had the gloomy effect of an apparition raising its arms over a headless neck. The piece had no special merit except in its sensationalism. If this was indeed Scrooge, those must be the bed-curtains that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come said would be stolen from around his sorry corpse. Or were they a mediocre painter’s failed attempt at the limning of a ghost? Whatever. The old man staggered toward the viewer, but his eyes were unfocused and his knees about to unhinge. A lovely tortured Scrooge, if such it really was; if, improbably, it really was the portrait of a relative, it was an insult. Most likely the annotation on the back had been done by some wag disappointed to have inherited so little from the old miser. Scrooge, or Rudge? It didn’t matter. Whoever it was, he didn’t know where John Comestor was, either. Or if he had seen anything, he wasn’t telling; his eyes were trained inward, at some abomination in his own mental universe.
Enough of this. She was working herself up into a good case of the jitters. She located the TV eventually in the kitchen, underneath a drop cloth. The workers had been keeping an eye on something while they worked, or ate their sandwiches. She dragged it into the lounge and propped it on the massive Iberian credenza that probably had housed the salvers and spoons of some order of nuns now extinct. But before she could find the remote, she dialed her number at home to check her messages, in case John had called while she was in the air.
The voice of the recording told Winnie that she had seven new messages. The first five were hang-ups, worrying in their own right, as most callers who didn’t want to leave a message slammed down the receiver quickly once they realized it was a recording. Not to do so was in itself a message: This is a hang-up: I know you’re not there, and you know I know, but you don’t know who I am.
Maybe computerized telemarketing calls, she asked herself, or Ironcorp, responding at last?
The sixth call was from Winnie’s agent, asking how long was she going to be away, and when could they expect the new manuscript; her editor would love to begin to breathe word of a second Ophelia Marley book in the pipeline even if it was a year upstream yet. “This is the novel?” said the agent with dubious enthusiasm, having pressed for a Dark Side of the Zodiac II in one form or another. “Your Romanian book, isn’t it?” He sounded defeated already. A month in Romania is hardly A Year in Provence, he meant. Winnie deleted the message. Whether it would be a second book by Ophelia Marley or a first-ever Winifred Rudge adult novel, she wasn’t sure. She still couldn’t know if she would be able to write the story of Wendy Pritzke. Nor if there was any story there to be written.
The seventh voice was familiar but newly so, and she couldn’t place it at first. Male. “You mentioned you’ve suffered a breach of security; what is that all about? Are you cowering behind a potted palm with nothing to defend yourself but a plastic spatula from Williams-Sonoma? If so, come out, come out, wherever you are. We’re going to have a meal at Legal Seafoods over near M.I.T., and we’d love you to join us. We’ll tell you what you missed during the second half of the indoctrination session. And by the way, I’m cute but I’m real dumb. Only in my fourth-grade classroom this morning did I put you together with the W. Rudge who wrote Crazy Hassan’s End-of-Season Flying Carpet Sale. My students die over that one.” He left a number. It was that Adrian Moscou of the Forever Families meeting. He was feeling guilty over having blown her cover. And well he might. Still, it was decent of him to call.
The juddery pipe slammed again, deep in the walls, so loud that it startled her. She dialed the Massachusetts number, her finger readying to break the connection if one of them answered in person. Mercifully a machine picked up. “Winnie Rudge returning your call. I’m away for a while, in Europe. Back, oh—whenever. But do keep in touch. And beware going ahead with that adoption group, they’re all charlatans and hucksters.” She stuttered the sentence to a stop, and then added, “I don’t mean that, of course, I’m trying to be witty and it doesn’t work at this distance. Here’s my number, but don’t call me.” She left John’s number. The shallow good wishes of an Adrian Moscou were probably the more welcome, since John Comestor seemed to have abandoned her without a moment’s thought.
The TV was unusually banal for Britain. Channel Four seemed to be importing more and more American sitcoms and the standard was droppi
ng. She turned it off. The room known as “her” room, a half-bedroom forced into a space created because the staircase didn’t continue to the roof, was dingily comfortable, warm at least, and she pawed through some paperbacks on the windowsill. Edmund Crispin, Hilary Mantel, several Ishiguros. Then an old Iris Murdoch, its orange Penguin spine bleached citron by sunlight. She settled under the duvet and opened the book at random, and read.
“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . .”
She put the book down. The pipes in the back of the house continued to bang, intermittently, well into the first stages of sleep, when her body could only remember flying, pitching through nothingness at all those hundreds of miles an hour, and then she was sleeping faster than the speed of sound, so the clanging pipes were left behind.
She lay in bed. Through the gauze she could see the sun, an imprecise disk in a sky the color of weak tea. The bells of St. John-at-Hampstead tolled the hour of nine, and a few minutes later she was in the bathroom when she heard a key in the lock. She called out, “Hi, you!” in case he’d be alarmed, though she knew if he was coming home from an escapade he’d be as embarrassed as startled by her presence.
She finished her teeth and came out. It wasn’t John, but a couple of workers in sweatshirts and jeans.
“Well,” she said. “Good morning. I’m the house guest.”
She could sense them holding back from glancing at each other. An uneasiness to it. “Come in, come in, I’m presentable, aren’t I?” Her terry-cloth robe was snugly wrapped up to her clavicle. “I won’t be in your way, will I?”
“Sorry, we weren’t expecting you,” said the slighter one, an Irish slip of a kid, barely in his twenties. “Or not exactly you.” The older man shrugged off his wet jacket and just looked over the top of his glasses at her. Winnie took a step back and decided not to speak again until she was dressed.