But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty-first century hated the Alice books, couldn’t read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex = death. Children murder each other. Parents lie, leaders lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benetton ads.
And faces of missing children staring out from milk cartons—imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn’t funny to read anymore: We live there full-time. We need a break from it.
“You,” said Winnie to the boot scraper hedgehog, “might as well make a statement. I’m standing here lecturing myself because I don’t want to go in there and find I’ve wandered into a madhouse. Life is mad enough already. For one thing, John is gone. Where is he?”
The hedgehog neither answered nor waddled away in search of greater privacy.
“Well, that’s proof of nothing,” said Winnie. “I like to keep my own counsel too.” She threw back her shoulders to appear proprietary, and entered John’s flat with what she hoped was convincing briskness. “That’s a stink you’ve raised, then,” she called out. “Ooh, Lordy. Something die in here?” She picked up the morning post and riffled through it to make sure there was no letter from John for her, then fanned the air away from her nose and went into the kitchen.
Mac and Jenkins had managed to remove most of the plaster. “Aha, progress,” she said. “Is this halitosis common to old houses?”
“It’s the stink of the devil,” said Mac.
“The devil is going to have a hard time getting a date, then.”
Mac poked out his lips at her; was it a grin or a sneer? “I have a bad worry, there’s things with dark wings hovering over this whole place. I don’t give a toss what she found out, Jenkins. We should get ourselves out of here and take the sacrament of absolution.”
“You’re as spooked as an old bog woman,” said Jenkins. “If you can be no help, at least keep your shite to yourself.” He was perspiring around the ears and forehead, and the collar of his sweatshirt was damp.
“What’s the matter?” said Winnie. She didn’t like the look of Jenkins, clammy as a cold boiled ham. “What are you yammering about?”
Jenkins picked up a hammer. He reached out his arm and held the hammer toward the newly exposed wall boards at the back of the pantry. When he was still two feet away, the hollow banging sound began. It was rhythmic and steady. As Jenkins moved the hammer nearer, the banging picked up in speed and volume.
“Well, that’s clever.” Winnie kept her voice flat, even steely. “A sound-and-light show without the light. Now do you mind telling me where John is? I’m beginning to be tired of this.”
“I make no representation, for how do I know?” said Jenkins.
“He’s in there; he’s dead,” said Mac. “We didn’t do it, but what could be the reason for the thumping of the bohrain? It’s a death drum, and his body is hammering to get out.”
“And so that’s the smell of his corpse, I suppose,” she said. “Well, he always was a man of tidy personal habits. He’d be mortified to know he was so aromatic.” She wrenched open a window and let some remnant of Hurricane Gretl, making its English landfall, sweep cold rainy air in across them.
“Look, look,” she said, and hustled for some paper, partly to turn her back on the pantry boards, to show them she wasn’t scared of noise or smells. “I had no luck with the downstairs neighbor, a sweet old thing named Mrs. Maddingly, who’s half loony herself. Probably her cat has gotten caught in some crawl space and, by the smell of it, has spectacularly died.”
“So it’s a dead cat, is it, striking its claws against the back of these bricks?” said Jenkins, but gently and mockingly, for Mac’s benefit, to tease him and console him both. Mac spit.
“Not a dead cat. Dead cats have no sense of rhythm. Listen to me. I told you how this old Georgian house sits next to a place on Rowancroft Gardens. For one thing, the houses share these party walls—like any abutting houses. But for another, when the Victorian house behind us went up, the developers put some back rooms onto this existing house, to enlarge it. Look.” She sketched a map of John’s flat, the older three front Georgian rooms in a lumpy square and a newer extension behind, running only half the width of the original house. John’s two workrooms took a chunk out of the footprint of the adjacent building. “You see, the equivalent flat in the Rowancroft Gardens building must be roughly a mirror shape to this one, only longer and with larger rooms. Its puzzle piece probably fills in over here, on the other side of our noisy chimney stack, assuming that these pantry boards do back onto a chimney stack.”
“That’s something Mr. C never mentioned,” said Jenkins.
“So maybe I should go over to that building. I know someone who lives there I can ask.”
“You’ll not go alone. Yourself’d never know where a sound might be coming from,” said Mac, as if eager not to be left in the flat anymore, even with Jenkins to protect him. “I’ll join ye.”
“No, sir,” said Winnie. “I’ll get further on my own.”
She went to the bathroom and changed her blouse and freshened her face. The someone she knew who lived there was, damn it, Allegra Lowe. Through such mere proximity had Allegra Lowe and John Comestor originally met. They fought briefly over a coven of pigeons living under the eaves of her building and fouling the windowsills of his. They’d solved the problem with wire meshing, and good fences had made them better neighbors, and more than that. Winnie had not been to Allegra’s flat before, nor did she want to go now. But, face it, if John was holed up in connubial bliss there, well, better that she should know it.
She looked at herself in the mirror. “You ready to face the Queen of Hearts?” she asked herself. “Hello in there.” Her reflection did not reply. She saw the crow’s-feet, the jet lag drawing down the corners of her eyelids. The pursed mouth of mirror-Winnie displayed a clumsy application of lipstick. She did a touch-up.
Back in the kitchen to show herself off, she said, “Mind the fort, I’ll be back.” Jenkins shrugged, a noncommittal blur of gesture. Mac didn’t turn to look at her, busy thumping open a painted window frame, to create more of a draft. “Air out this stink,” he said. Winnie chose not to think he was referring to her cologne. (Had she overdone it again?) A draft swept through, and the paper on which she’d sketched the floor plans of the adjoining buildings skittered across the windowsill and disappeared outside.
He followed her down the stairwell, with the aim, he said, of finding the paper. She didn’t want his company but said to herself, Age, experience, confidence. Well, two out of three. At the front door, as Winnie worked the bolt, Mac murmured, “What do you think it is, really?”
“I really do think it’s something embarrassingly ordinary,” she said, in a regretful tone.
“It’s penance time for him, that’s what it is,” he said, jerking his chin upward. “It means fuck-all to me, though, and I ought to be released from this contract.”
“Here you go, then,” she said, flinging open the door, and then with dignity and fake nonchalance she fled.
She tried to compose her thoughts as she made her way around to Rowancroft Gardens. Though the houses shared a wall, the invasion of nineteenth-century villa architecture into Hampstead’s close-shouldered eighteenth-century village housing stock meant that she had a good five- or six-minute walk, including a desolate stretch of some few yards on a muddy public right-of-way. Over a weathered fence the branches of a hedge disturbed her mousy but carefully brushed hair. She tugged at her collar and felt like a cow in an alley, skidding in the mud, mooing curses. Emerging into Rowancroft Gardens, she saw that the rain had been replaced by an aeration of fog, the kind you get in the country during a winter thaw. The street ran down the Frognal side of Holly Bush Hill, disappearing around a curve in the mist, its redbrick Queen Anne–eries receding into nothing but pink Conté crayo
n suggestions, nearly rubbed out by a cloudy editorial thumb.
Rowancroft Gardens was lower down the slope of Holly Bush Hill than Weatherall Walk, but, laid out in a more prosperous era, the semidetached middle-class homes boasted higher ceilings. Consequently the roofs lined up with those shorter Georgian houses higher on the hill behind them. Number sixty-two was just about central in the stand of ten or a dozen structures apparently put up by the same developer. She knew where it was. She’d walked past it before, looking and not looking.
John had told Winnie that Allegra Lowe lived on dividends from investments. Winnie assumed that was how Allegra could afford two whole floors of number sixty-two: the garden flat with its muslined windows and winter pansies in window pots, and the first floor with the building’s best plastered ceilings and tallest windows. And—Winnie knew to expect it—the kitchen, below street level, was lit. Midmorning, and Allegra Lowe was at home.
“Oh, hullo,” she said, to Winnie’s knock. Without the curse of an accompanying cough, Allegra had the sort of deep smoker’s alto through which you could really hear hullo instead of hello, like someone horsey and capable, straight out of Enid Blyton or Jilly Cooper, maybe. She was drying her hands on a tea towel and looking immediate and blowsy. Winnie framed a remark intended to be admiring—“I couldn’t manage a look like that without a support group and a month’s advance notice”—but suppressed it and smiled in what she hoped was an irritatingly direct American way.
“I was sure you were my client,” said Allegra tersely.
“Do you remember me—Winifred Rudge,” she said. What a clunky name she had. Winifred Rudge. Allegra Lowe. Winnie. Allegra.
“Of course I remember you, but I was hardly expecting you. Do come in.”
She didn’t move aside, exactly. Winnie didn’t exactly push by, either. But she gained the threshold. “I won’t be a minute, or I can come back later after your appointment.”
Allegra flapped the towel. “They’re late, they’re always late, they think a miracle is going to happen and a parking space will appear automatically. Then they come in annoyed as if it’s my fault. I keep my car in Chipping Norton like any sensible soul and use a minicab when in London. Daft otherwise. You may as well dry off—still raining, is it?”
“No, just bushes being wet.” She followed Allegra into a grand front hall, its lower walls sheathed in golden oak and its floor tiled in a pattern that looked copied from a kaleidoscope, trapezoids of chalky vermilion, peacock, sand, white. The imposing staircase rose up to other flats, and Allegra ushered Winnie through a pair of tall doors into her private space. In the gloom of a deeper hallway, Winnie saw other doors, slightly ajar, revealing high rectangles of Sargent-like interiors slicing through the gloom, tantalizing bits of museum-quality furniture, glints of ormolu. But Allegra led her down a set of stairs to the capacious Victorian kitchen. “No, thank you, no tea, I’m not staying,” Winnie said.
“Tea for me, then. I get cold down here, but this is where I work.”
On the far wall the kitchen boasted the usual appliances, looking expensive, unused. Le Creuset cookware from a wrought-iron chandelier, Henckels knives gleaming on their magnetized rack. Not a single crumb of bread or smear of butter. But the center of the room was the site of some sort of activity having to do with modeling clay or plaster of Paris. A table crammed with spatulas crusted with pink gunk, bits of molding clamped and weighted down. An adjacent tea trolley was jammed with bottles of turpentine and plastic tubs of paint, and brushes standing up in a chipped earthenware jar.
Allegra said, “I’ll die of poison from whatever carcinogen they discover in my supplies. The tea gets dusty but there you have it, occupational hazard. Sure I can’t tempt you?” It was something of a joke, acknowledging and trying to defuse the tension between them, and Winnie was caught between being grateful and being affronted at the gesture.
“I’m here on an investigative errand,” said Winnie, “with apologies for not calling you ahead to ask. I arrived from Boston last night and John doesn’t seem to be in residence. Do you know where he is?”
With her back to Winnie, Allegra studied the kettle. She held her hands over the beginning steam and rubbed them, warming herself, before answering, “Well, no, Winnie, I don’t know where he is.”
“It’s not like him to take off just like that,” said Winnie.
“Is it not?” said Allegra. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, I don’t think so. Not when he knew I was coming.” Winnie didn’t want to focus attention on her own relationship with John, but it couldn’t be avoided entirely. “I’m here doing some research for a book; of course I coordinated my flights and my schedule to accommodate his. If he’d been called away suddenly he’d have phoned me, or left a note.”
“I suppose,” said Allegra.
“When did you last see him?”
“This is a theatrical inquisition; are you writing a scene like this?” She busied herself with a cup and saucer and spoon, moving with lazy deliberation. “I’m not at all alarmed at John’s comings and goings and they are no concern of mine. I don’t make notes in my daybook. I haven’t seen him recently, though. We had a meal earlier in the month, and we bumped into each other at the Hampstead Food Hall I should think, or in the road. Beyond that, Winnie, I have nothing to add.” A well-calibrated performance, remarks that led nowhere, said nothing, and therefore seemed full of portent. Winnie, admiring verbal dexterity, tried not to take umbrage.
“It’s rude of me to barge in like this, and I didn’t even ring up,” she said, hearing ring up slide into place and eclipse the call or phone she’d have said in Boston. By the smallest of substitutions could you change yourself from a you to a one. It was safer, in this big chilly shiny room, to be a one, especially with blush-cheeked Allegra getting prettier as her pale pomegranate hair began to curl in the rising steam. Why couldn’t she and her befouling pigeons have bought a flat in some conveniently more distant place, like Highgate or Golders Green?
Winnie felt as if she had a learning disability. She sat down on a painted wicker settee and said, “I’m jet-lagged and cross, but to be honest, I’m concerned as well. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come round here, Allegra. I’m not a glutton for punishment, whatever John says.”
“I’m sure John doesn’t mention you at all,” said Allegra, balancing that knife of a remark on the tip of her tongue, daring it to fall.
“There’s construction work going on in John’s flat. Two fellows showed up this morning with a key and some supplies. They’re redoing the kitchen and the place is draped in drop cloths.”
“It’s green tea. Do have a cup.”
“No, thank you. Did John mention he was having renovations done?”
“I know he has designs on an illegal roof garden, if that’s what you mean. I knew he was going to have builders in. But I do try to look the other way. The less he says to me about it the better, so I won’t have to tell bold lies to the other freeholders in this building.” Her expression was priceless. “I make a good effort never to lie, Winnie.”
“I don’t really like the workers. They’re shady in some way, I don’t get it. They’re dallying, and there’s a problem with pipes that they’re not addressing.”
“I shall be sure never to hire them.” Tea made and left to steep, Allegra went back to her workstation and began to measure out some dry compound in a mixing bowl. She took some pigment, a bright puce color like some garish Indian spice, and spooned it in.
“I’m here also about the pipes, Allegra. There’s a strange knocking in the walls, and it’s freaking the workers out. It even has me jumpy, John being absent and all. I believe John told me once that your building and ours shares a party wall—” But she hadn’t meant to say ours, that would be perceived as a gauntlet dashed down. “I mean the old place, Rudge House. You know what I mean.”
“Yes, of course,” said Allegra, flexing her largesse. “The estate agents told me all about it when I bought this
place. Apparently the existence of the party wall dates from the 1810s or so, a device of economy. We share a more intimate domestic arrangement than most adjoining houses of different periods.”
“And when does this house date to?”
“Built in 1889. It’s not the high Arts and Crafts. The pocketbook for this street wouldn’t allow it. But these houses derive from standard pattern books of the period.”
“Do you have problems with your plumbing? Any knocking sounds lately?”
“Only at the door when the doorbell is out. Because I’m on the higher end of the slope, I have little trouble with drains or with rising damp on this level, unlike a lot of garden flats in Hampstead. I don’t recall John mentioning any problem such as that, but as I say—” This time she left it unsaid.
“Perhaps there’s something going on in one of the flats upstairs from you? Some reconstruction? Whatever it is, it’s spooking the workers.”
“Irish lads?”
“Well, yes, though ‘lads’ is a bit of a stretch. The foreman’s quite grandfatherly.”
Me mither and father are Irish,
We live upon Irish stew,
We bought a fiddle fer ninepence,
And that was Irish, too. . . .
“No building work in this place, that I know of,” said Allegra, cutting through Winnie’s unspoken rehearsal of the nursery rhyme. “But if it’s causing you worry, please walk upstairs and ask the tenants yourself. Not that you’ll find anyone at the very top. That’s a flat owned by a business in the City—MaxxiNet computer payroll systems—for the putting up of Japanese and Korean colleagues when they come for training. But the company’s in receivership and no one has been in residence for months. I know because MaxxiNet requires that temporary residents stop and introduce themselves to me, and the obedient Japanese and Koreans do everything they’re told. For several months I haven’t heard anyone in the hall other than the family that lives immediately above me.”