She emerged fifteen minutes later. The guys had set themselves up in the kitchen. The fellows moved with a feminine deliberateness, laying out tools precisely, like nurses arranging the sterilized implements for a surgery. “I’m Winnie, a friend of John’s,” she said, with relish smashing around an old percolator as she prepared her coffee.
“I’m Jenkins,” said the older man, “and this is Mac.” Mac grinned in a snaggle-toothed way, looking both innocent and weaselly.
“Didn’t John tell you I was coming? Do you know where he is or when he’ll be back?”
“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us where Mr. C is,” said Jenkins.
“I thought he’d be here, but he’s been cleared out a little while now, to judge by the mail,” said Winnie. “When did you last see him?”
“Monday,” said the older man. “Mr. C called us here and gave us our instructions. Some kitchen reconstruction. He drew out his plans for us well enough, and gave us a key, but he led us to believe he’d be in and out all week. And he’s just vanished.”
“How much work have you managed to get done since Monday?” asked Winnie, trying not to sound schoolmarmish. It didn’t look like much.
“We’ve been here eight hours a day, nearly, for four days,” said Jenkins, looking at Winnie in the eye, which seemed to suggest defensiveness.
Mac sunk his hands into the pockets of his loose workman’s trousers and rubbed his upper thighs in a slow motion. His voice went ominous even despite the late-adolescent squeak of it. “A bad job, this, but we’ve been at work.” Winnie felt a chill—she didn’t know these guys from Adam. And where was John? She looked up from the sack of ground coffee. “I’m not sure there’s milk,” she said as casually as she could, beginning to sidle away from them.
“Oh, there’s milk,” said Mac, “milk there is. We brought a carton.”
“I take two percent. I’ll just run out—” Was the security chain attached and the bolt drawn, or had they just let the door close behind them? “Why don’t you fellows find the plans and let me see them when I get back? Anything else you want while I’m out?” She held up the percolator and tried not to break into nervous giggles: hers was an interrogative gesture that could be read two ways: Coffee, anyone? or Would you care to be scalded into first-degree burns?
They didn’t answer, which froze her in her pose for an extra few seconds, and then she was interrupted in her campaign to flee by the sound of knocking. It originated behind the pantry wall, much like the rap of human knuckles on wood. Three, four, five times.
“Well, hello, SOS in the baseboards,” she said, and to conceal her unfounded sense of vulnerability, “so what have you done with John? Walled him up?”
“No, ma’am, we didn’t do it,” said young Mac, tensing and relaxing in an epileptic movement, a sort of shimmy.
“Ah, but it’s not her from in there, then,” said Jenkins, reaching out to touch Mac. “Steady, lad. She’s not the one.”
“What have you done with John?” she said. She couldn’t look toward the pantry as the raps began again, a sequence of five hollow ominous penetrating thumps.
“Oh, not a thing,” said Jenkins.
Mac blew out through his nostrils, a colt shying. “Give us a turn, will you? Showing up without notice? We thought it was you done that knocking. Coulda been so. But there it goes again.”
“You’re mad,” said Winnie in a voice she hoped sounded reasonable and disarming. There was some hesitant light in the greasy sky, some wind kicking grit and desultory rain against windows. It was London in November, neither more nor less. “How long has this been going on?”
“The week.”
“What are you talking about?” A knocking pipe, surely. A stone rolling in the backwash from a flushed toilet, echoing from the drain below. A bad board up on the roof, something telegraphing its Morse code into this space. “Tell me what John assigned you to do.” She was exasperated suddenly; why couldn’t her stepcousin oversee his own redecoration?
From an inside pocket, Jenkins took a sketch drawn in John’s meticulous hand. Winnie could read it easily. The elimination of the pantry door, the crowbarring of the doorframe. The removal of the pantry shelves, the removal of the plaster from the back and side pantry walls. All to gain fourteen inches. By exposing the brick of the fireplace stack, some turnaround room would be freed up. For what? “Oh, I see,” she said, “roof access here. A staircase more ladder than anything else, and the roof garden he’s been dreaming about ever since he inherited this place.”
She looked up. She hadn’t looked closely before. The old pantry doorframe had indeed been crowbarred out and the pantry shelves removed, and a few spot lamps shone brightly on the wall beyond. Half the plaster was already gone, revealing behind it not bricks but dingy white boards, vertically laid. On the plaster that remained she could see some faint dried brown streaks that suggested roofing problems. “So it’s not such a huge job, is it? It took you four days to get this far? What’s kept you? Bad weather for punching through to the roof?”
“It’s that thumping,” said Mac. “It’s dangerous news.”
“Well, you’re out of your minds,” said Winnie, but less unkindly. “Have you gone downstairs to talk to the other residents in the building?”
“The flat below is for sale, represented by Bromley Channing,” said Jenkins. “I don’t think it’s occupied. Nor did we go to the pensioner on the ground floor. Mr. Comestor didn’t want us to let anyone know we were interfering with the original structure. There are regulations about this kind of job. He’s doing this without planning permission from Camden Council.”
“I know the downstairs lodger. Well, I’ve met her anyway, in the vestibule,” said Winnie. “I’ll go see if she’s having secret renovations of her own done. That’s the eerie noise, no doubt. You’re held up all week long by the sound of rapping?” She began to laugh. They looked affronted, and she didn’t blame them, but she couldn’t help it.
“Don’t be daft,” said Mac. “It’s not just that.”
Jenkins put his hand out. “Let her investigate, and if we get thrown out, it’s a job we’re well rid of. You’d choose to take it on your own shoulders, miss, we shouldn’t say no to you.”
They stood there momentarily. The rapping was silent now. As if something inside the wall were holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do. “Boggarts?” she said. “Goblins? Nice.”
“Nothing so mild,” said Mac. His eyes slid away, his lower lip tightened.
She was amazed she’d been alarmed at them, even for a moment. They were out of a pantomime, Good Gaffer Jenkins and his grandson, Dull Jack. Still she mustn’t laugh at them. “Rudge House backs up on a property over on that other street, what is it, something Gardens. Rowancroft Gardens? Rudge House shares a party wall with one of those late-nineteenth-century redbrick homes around the way.” She pointed at the step down into the two-room nook he used as an office and a library space. “John’s flat walks through right there, and borrows some space from that newer building. Anyone in that house could be buttering toast and you’d know it up here.”
She went and slapped on some makeup to take care of the bags under her eyes, and thudded down the stairs with a will. Still stinging with the unexpected absence of her host, she felt brighter of spirit, at having something to do.
The tenant on the ground floor of Rudge House was home. She opened the door timorously and peered through the crack. Winnie revved her volume up in respect for old-age deafness. “I’m Winifred, a friend of John Comestor from upstairs. May I come in?”
“I’m hardly respectable on a Friday morning,” said the woman, “but enter at your own risk.” Winnie was let into a small, cramped front parlor with impressive molding and a fruity smell of flowers left in greening water. The tenant was a Mrs. Maddingly, and she behaved as if she were scared her name might come true. The front room was shingled with Post-it notes lecturing on household management. CLEAN THE LINT TRAP said the
TV. IS THERE POST TODAY? asked the bookcase, which sported a shelf of Hummel figurines with their faces turned to the wall. MESSY! suggested a doorpost, apparently referring to a pile of newspapers on the floor. PILLS AT MIDDAY PILLS PILLS said a sheet of paper taped to a sofa cushion, and several other items of home decoration chimed in PILLS, PILLS. “How may I help you?” said Mrs. Maddingly, interrupting the published opinions of her furniture.
Winnie perched on an ottoman without being asked, and said, “Forgive me for barging in like this. I’m staying upstairs while John is away, and I’m curious about the noises in the building.”
“Oh, do you hear them too?” said Mrs. Maddingly. She was a tiny woman, and when she lifted one hand to steady herself on the mantelpiece she gave the impression of a commuter hanging on to a strap on the Tube. “I can’t understand the language of it, can you?”
“We hear a rapping noise upstairs, in the pantry wall I think, something that backs into the chimney stack,” said Winnie. “We thought you might be having some renovations done here.”
“Nonsense, stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “I haven’t lit a fire since the last time. I don’t care for nosy neighbors, I’ll tell you that, and how they alert the emergency services at a moment’s notice. All their questions. Don’t be forward, I told him.”
“Are you alone here?” said Winnie. “Have workers been in?”
“Well, there’s the little ones,” said Mrs. Maddingly, “but I’d hardly call them workers. Slackers, more, skiving off whenever I’m not looking.”
Winnie raised an eyebrow, feeling as if she hadn’t actually woken up yet. This seemed a half-dream corrupted by jet-lag weariness. “Workers? On the premises?”
Mrs. Maddingly nodded to the figurines but put her finger to her lips, as if she didn’t want to say anything that would cause them to turn around.
“Oh,” said Winnie. “But has anyone else been in your flat this week?”
“Chutney sunlight, chamomile nightshade,” said Mrs. Maddingly. Winnie was prepared to write the old woman off as being, as the English so mercilessly say, completely gaga, when a straw-colored cat passed a doorway. Mrs. Maddingly remarked, “There’s Chamomile now.” So the figurines were pressed against the wall to keep the cats from knocking them off the shelves, probably.
“Mrs. Maddingly,” Winnie tried again, “there’s a funny noise upstairs and I don’t know what it is, and John isn’t around to tell us. When did you last see him?”
“Who?”
“John Comestor.”
The woman gave a wry smile that seemed to be detachable, like a Cheshire Cat smile, and said, “Days ago, or weeks, or was he down the stairs this morning?” She looked at a sign on the mantelpiece. “I must remember not to forget my pills, you know.”
“What language do you think it was?” said Winnie.
“I’m not following you,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “The young are so imprecise in their speech. It’s not their fault, but there you are.”
“You said you’d heard noises and didn’t know the language.”
“Oh, I can’t hear a thing except the cats,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “If you hadn’t come to call they’d be yowling up a storm. Now as a rule I’m deafer than a stone wall. But all week they’ve been speaking very urgently indeed, as if they have something to tell me, only of course, who can speak the language of cats? Chutney is quite impossible, doesn’t enunciate for one thing, and what vocabulary he has ever had is sorely dwindled to a few well-chosen syllables. The word for ghost is lost, for instance. But the cats are going on about something, although who can tell what it is?”
Oh, John, thought Winnie, why aren’t you sitting next to me to hear this? “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?” said Winnie, trying another approach.
“Indeed I have,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “My husband and I moved in after the war. We once had two floors, don’t you know, and we’d have liked to buy the whole house, but then I’m not talented at climbing stairs any longer, so maybe it’s for the best. Anyway, poor Alan is dead, and that’s fine, that’s all right. We don’t need the space now, and a good thing too. At today’s prices, too dear by half. I couldn’t afford to purchase an envelope anymore, so it’s good all my friends are dead and not expecting the annual letter.”
“You remember the upstairs. You lived there once,” deduced Winnie.
“Oh, I did. Rooms, you know, rooms and rooms.” She waved her hand vaguely, as if there might once have been half a city block’s worth of spare bedrooms and salons annexed to the house. “They’ve all been invaded by others.”
“Do you know how old the house is?”
“Absolute ages. These front rooms are the showpieces you know, late Georgian. Not a very prepossessing Georgian, one might add, a bin-end variety. Hardly more than a cottage, really. But the rooms are low and cozy, and I have walnut coping about my boudoir. It’s gone wormy they tell me but so will I before long, so I don’t mind. The back bit goes into the new building; I have some steps to a useless box room that I can’t get to. The floors don’t agree with each other and the steps don’t agree with my knees. Do you want to see?”
“No.” Winnie studied Mrs. Maddingly. Despite herself Winnie was looking at life as if for her book. She was double-living through a day with genuine concerns because the needs of her fictions were as strong as those of her life, or stronger. Domestically, while John Comestor was AWOL, there was a conundrum rapping its fingers on his walls, but narratively it was also knocking on her forehead, pretending to be a ghost or a specter of some sort, and she couldn’t concentrate.
Winnie sensed herself looking at this house not as John Comestor’s house, but as a place where brash capable Wendy Pritzke could come across the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Winnie was channeling Wendy Pritzke, dialing her up. She couldn’t help it.
Jack the Ripper was late 1800s. So this house would have been standing when he disappeared without a trace, to leave the most famous unsolved murder mystery of his day, and ours.
What if Jack the Ripper had gotten boarded up behind a reconstructed wall? What if that was why he had never been found? What if he had followed some toothsome filly home to her Georgian house in the village of Hampstead, only to meet a filthy end there at the hands of some vengeful husband or father or brother, and had his body bricked into a chimney stack?
Only to be exhumed more than a century later?
It was a worrisome habit she had, of vacating the premises mentally and transposing herself into the same premises, organized otherwise, fictionally. Like Alice and the mirror over the mantel, where the world looks the same but different: not just backward, but uncannily precise, and precisely strange. Or as Lewis Carroll had otherwise put it:
He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A hippopotamus.
“I must have my pills,” said Mrs. Maddingly, as if Winnie had been lobbying for their removal.
“It’s not noon, and your signs say MIDDAY,” said Winnie.
“If I don’t have them now I might forget. I should take them while I remember.” She teetered toward a sideboard and with a crash she let the drop front of an antique desk fall open. Within were three small crystal glasses on a shelf lined with old newspaper, a grimy decanter of amber liquid, and an empty bottle of prescription drugs.
“What are you doing?” said Winnie as Mrs. Maddingly poured herself a healthy portion of whatever it was.
“I am afraid of dropping the damn things and having them roll under the hearth rug, so I dissolve them in sherry and drink my obligations down. So sorry I can’t offer you any.”
“It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning,” said Winnie, not so much scandalized as disbelieving. “I wouldn’t touch sherry at this hour if you paid me.”
“It’s terrible to be old and sick,” said the woman agreeably, smacking her lips. “In praise of modern medicine, though, which ke
eps us alive enough to criticize ourselves and others.” She lifted her glass in a toast, and downed the contents. “Now then, where’s Chutney? It’s time for his little tot too.”
Winnie left the cats, the flat, the dotty old dame, and the clutches of the Wendy Pritzke story, or at least as much of it as she could.
Maybe Chutney was trapped behind some baseboard, and scratching, and Mrs. Maddingly just hadn’t noticed.
Oh, but it could be anything, anything but what it seemed to be: a figure trying to communicate through the wall at them, trying to say something, something. What was it? Beware your childhood reading, Winnie said to herself: There is no Narnia in the wardrobe, there is no monkey’s paw with a third and damning wish to grant. You live in a world with starving Eritrean refugees and escaping smallpox viruses and third-world trade imbalances and the escalating of urban violence into an art form. You don’t need the magic world to be really real; that would be a distraction.
And the world—she stood in the hall outside John’s doorway, afraid for a moment to go in—the world was already upside down or inside out; it was already Alice’s mad Wonderland. That was the secret of Alice, Winnie remembered, she’d spoken about it once at a conference of fantasy writers. Even if Tenniel had drawn her with an encephalitic head, little Alice in the stories had been the correct junior citizen, sober and sane. It was the world around Alice, the Wonderland, that had gone mad. From the authority of the podium Winnie had theorized about it jocularly. Back in Winnie’s great-great-grandfather’s day, England had been soldered together with trust in the eternal verities of God’s divine plan as worked out in Crown, Empire, the class system, and the family. And then mild unlikely insurrectionist Lewis Carroll had written the first Alice in the late 1860s, 1871 for Looking-Glass. Absurdity, sedition, planted at almost the very epicenter of the Victorian epoch.
A reading child back in those early days, corseted, even straitjacketed by Victorian certainties, could delight in a story stuffed with nonsense. Time was malleable during a mad tea party in which there could be jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. Creatures could shift shapes, a sheep into an old lady, a baby into a pig. Fury could win out over reason. In the nineteenth century, reading Alice was refreshing because it was an escape from strict convictions about reality.