“Who are they?”
“A widow, Rasia McIntyre, and her three urchins. She might be there now, though she does her big weekly Sainsbury’s shopping on Friday mornings. You want to hurry upstairs and catch her before she goes. I can tell you very little more, Winnie.” She finished mixing the dusty porridge and poured out her thin green tea. “You’re welcome to something hot, but I don’t know about renovations nor the whereabouts of your cousin, and. So.” She shrugged and grimaced. Then she looked down at her work and pinched a bit of the mixture between her fingers and frowned.
“What are you making up?”
“Dental compound.”
“What for?”
“I do hands, impressions of hands,” said Allegra. “Child hands mostly, presents for grandparents, that sort of thing.” She walked to a broad table in the corner and flung off a gummy blanket. The surface of the table was tiled with pink squares and rectangles, some framed, some loose, some inscribed with names, some not. Each tile showed the imprint of one or two little hands, like instant fossils, blunt starfish impressions. “It started out being therapy for learning-handicapped adults and developed into a lucrative little cottage industry for me. Of course, a piece in the Sunday Times color supplement several years ago didn’t hurt my business.”
Winnie found it grotesque, but didn’t say so. “What’s the strangest impression you ever made?” she said.
“I went to a Hallowe’en theme party last week. It was Vicars and Whores, and I went as a Vicar. Maybe that wasn’t so strange, though, as most of the men went in drag as Whores.”
“I mean,” said Winnie, “the handprints; what’s the oddest experience—”
But Allegra said, “Look, I was joking, right? Anyway, there’s the knock. I’ve got my morning client at last. I’ll see you out as I go to let them in. If you don’t mind? There’s nothing else?”
“Nothing else, there’s nothing at all,” said Winnie. Vicars and Whores. The sight of adults in costume, unless it was on the stage, always unnerved her. Even the thought of it. She hustled herself up the stairs in front of Allegra, trying to focus. “What did you say the neighbor’s name was? Rose, Rosie? McIntosh?”
“Rasia. It’s a Muslim name. Rasia McIntyre. She married a Glaswegian who fell into an unexpected coma and just, just died, no fanfare or fare-thee-well. You’ll like her. Tell her I would make the introductions if I could, but duty calls.”
She flung open the door and scowled at a frantic-looking mother restraining a squirming bundle of toddler. “I want you to submerge his whole body in the cast and keep it there,” the mother rattled at Allegra, “and when he’s dead and rotted we’ll crack open the mold and make a better-behaved plaster version that does. Not. Squirm. So.” Winnie nodded her thanks to Allegra and headed up the stairs.
She could hear the fuss of Rasia McIntyre’s household spilling down the stairwell. The sound of quarter-tone sitar music accompanying midmorning toddler meltdown almost stopped her in her tracks. But the more time she took up, the likelier that before she got back, Mac and Jenkins might have cleared out, and anything else objectionable too. So she rapped on the door.
“Yes, who is it,” said the Rasia woman, throwing open the door and continuing to yak into the portable phone, two tiny children clinging to her trouser legs. To Winnie: “I’m absolutely strapped, can’t manage a quid.” To the phone: “Look, there’s a do-gooder at the door, will you be in? I’ll ring back when they go down for naps. Very good very good, ciao.” She slapped the phone on a hall surface and said, “I couldn’t get her off the phone so I’m glad you knocked, but I don’t give to those who knock at the door, and you ought not to have been let in.”
“I’m not collecting for charities,” said Winnie, “I’m a friend of one of your neighbors next door. I’m here to ask about some strange noises in the building—”
“Navida, I’m telling you, no more sweeties until teatime, you’ll just have to cry,” said Rasia, detaching Navida’s arm from her thigh. “Yes, I tap the kids on their bottoms sometimes, but they’re my kids and I do what I want. They don’t cry more than other children their age. You can’t be from the Council. Not with your accent.”
“I’d hit them too,” said Winnie, looking at them, “and I’ll take turns with you if you like. They’re very noisy.” She didn’t mean it but it worked. Rasia laughed.
“They’re high-spirited and they miss their daddums, and I can’t blame them. Is this a formal complaint?”
“No,” said Winnie. “May I come in just for a moment?”
“If you must.” She looked more pleased than she sounded. “Though I’ve more than enough to do without preparing the house for unexpected callers.”
Rasia McIntyre had a full face with strong bones and high brow. It was like looking at one of the Picassos and seeing front and profile simultaneously. Rasia had hips and shoulders, she had depth and round breadth, nothing whittled away through a diet of mere lettuce. Winnie felt bleached and parched next to the Asian woman’s vigor, but she didn’t mind. Rasia was realer than a missing stepcousin or a confounding knock in the walls.
The room into which Rasia led her was a kerfuffle of scarves and candles, throw pillows and expensive Turkish carpets. The floor was covered over with children’s games in ten thousand pieces. On a workstation in the corner teetered several television sets, two computer screens, a stack, a printer, and a VCR. Winnie half expected the abundance of Post-it notes to read PILLS PILLS. “I’m trying to get back into film editing, but I’m not sure I can upgrade my skills,” said Rasia. “Everything’s computerized now and I have so little patience for the manipulation of tiny bits of information.”
Nor for the tiny bits of Lego and Duplo and dollhouse furniture that crunched and splintered underfoot. “Shit. You guys. Are you going to collect any of this or do you want me to ruin all your playthings?” she said. “Navida. Tariq. We have to go out and do our errands, and this looks like the Rubble of Dresden.”
The children disappeared, shrieking down the hallway. “If you wake the baby I’ll boil all your bones,” called Rasia, but without conviction. To Winnie, “Sorry. This place is such a tip. If you’re not here to complain about the noise of the children, then what?” She sat down in her workchair and began to lace her boots, looking up at Winnie from beneath a curly abundance of anthracite hair.
“No. I don’t care about the noise kids make. I’m only visiting next door anyway.” Winnie took a breath and described the layout of the intersecting houses. Then she told Rasia about the sound of knocking from the chimney stack. “Your downstairs neighbor, Allegra Lowe, said she thought you might have some ideas, or maybe you were doing some building yourself in here.”
“Would that I were,” said Rasia. “The children thump and play, and sometimes the baby hits her head against the wall when she wants uppies and I’m in the loo, but not this morning. I wouldn’t think it loud enough to be heard in another building, anyway. We can look if you like. Excuse the housekeeping. I have a Brazilian girl named Zuli who disappeared a few weeks ago and hasn’t rung to tell me when she’s coming back. Did you ask everyone in your building?”
“There are only three flats in Rudge House, and the middle one is on the market.”
“Well, that’ll be it, then, don’t you think? The owner of that flat must be tarting up the kitchen to get a better sale price. Have you gone round to ask at the estate agent’s?”
Winnie hadn’t thought of that, and indeed, it was the most logical conclusion. Though wouldn’t she have seen sign of other workers moving in and out in the stairwell of Rudge House?
The children had settled themselves in front of a television in a side room, and were shooting suction-rubber-tipped darts at Trevor MacDonald doing a newsbreak. “Baby,” said Rasia, “nappy time. I can smell it three rooms away.”
At the rear of the flat, in a corner of the main bedroom, the baby lay in a crib with pink plastic bars. She was breathing heavily, but not crying. Rasia stoo
d and looked at her. Winnie didn’t; she studied the proportions of the room, the molding. “Could I be really pushy and peer in your closet? Put my ear to the wall? I think the chimney stack from Rudge House might be on the other side of your closet wall, and the sound would be muffled by your clothes; maybe that’s why you haven’t heard it here.”
“But it’s a mess, I haven’t cleaned out a thing,” said Rasia irritably. “I can’t, you see, I can’t.”
“Oh, that won’t bother me, I’m a slob too.” She laid her hand on the cupboard door. “I mean—”
“What do you mean? And why are you here?”
Winnie turned at the changed tone. Rasia’s eyes had become plums, and she covered them with the heels of her fists. The baby stopped breathing as if she felt responsible for her mother’s tears, and then started up again, ever more shallowly, tentatively. “It’s Quent’s clothes in there, how can you walk in here and go straight to his clothes?”
“I never,” said Winnie, horrified, “I never meant, how could I know? I’ll just go. I’m very sorry. Stupid of me. Please. You’ll scare the baby. Please.” Rasia was bawling now. “Please, you don’t have to do this. I’ll go. I’ll let myself out. Are you all right? Let me get you a tissue.”
They had tea for an hour. Winnie felt hijacked, but she deserved it. She pretended an interest in seeing pictures of Quentin McIntyre and Rasia Kamedaly at their wedding, on vacation in Madagascar, or visiting the old Kamedaly family home in Kampala following the repatriation of Asian properties seized during Idi Amin’s reign. Quentin looked like a well-used shaving brush, his blond hair bristling in all directions. Quentin at home in Loch Dunwoodie. Quentin at Keble College. Quentin and Rasia with the kids. In the end, Fiona whimpering on her shoulder, Rasia led Winnie to the bedroom again and drew back the heavy drapes. “Open the wardrobe, pull out his things,” she said, “it’s been nine months now, I’ve got to think about Oxfam sooner or later.”
Winnie was beyond resisting. She’d unlocked this Pandora’s box and clearly there was no stuffing the vermin back within. She pulled out suits and sports coats, tailored trousers and boxes of laundered shirts. When she opened the topmost drawer she saw a heap of men’s briefs, white, blue, and tiger skin. She closed the drawer on all that.
“Here’s the wall, then,” she said, reclaiming some briskness at last, and she put her ear to it. “Look, it is plastered unevenly; this probably is the early-nineteenth-century chimney stack, just as I guessed. Might this have been a fireplace once, boarded over when central heating came in?”
Rasia, playing with Fiona, didn’t answer.
Winnie leaned into the shadows vacated by Quentin’s clothes.
There was a sound in the stone, or so she thought, but it could just be the sound of a vacuum, like the seashell magnifying back to the ear the sound of the ear’s own echo chamber. In one ear Winnie heard the aeons creak, the sound of stone speaking its lone word; she heard it translated, today, as the moment-by-moment evaporation of the McIntyre-Kamedaly marriage, only a ghost of itself and dissolving by a few more molecules every hour or so.
Then she pulled herself together, stood up, said, Stuff and nonsense, but to herself, and aloud, “I can hear nothing, really. I feel a fool to have barged in like this,” and helped Rasia McIntyre carry the heaps of old clothes out to the landing.
But Rasia seemed better, and Fiona was gurgling at her sippie, and the older children began to grin at Winnie and flirt with her despite her ignoring them. As the women pummeled clothes into Marks and Spencer shopping bags for carrying to one of the charity shops, Rasia said, “Your friend Allegra holds a duplicate key to the upstairs flat. For emergencies. Didn’t she tell you?”
“She didn’t. But never mind. She must know nobody’s there, so it didn’t occur to her.”
“If you want to be thorough, ask her for it.”
“I’m not such good friends with her—”
“You’re not such good friends with me, and you’ve helped me clear out Quent’s clothes,” said Rasia, “something my sisters have been begging me to do for months. They offer to come up from Poole every weekend and I have said No, no, I’m not ready. Then you barge in and rip the place to shreds without a flinch of shame. Surely you can go ask your friend for the key.”
“Oh, I could if I wanted,” said Winnie, “but really.”
“Really what?” It was Rasia’s turn to be nosy, and Winnie had no intention of satisfying her curiosity, no matter what Rasia was owed.
Pulling on her jacket, Winnie said, “Do you know my cousin? A friend of Allegra’s? John Comestor?”
“She has plenty of people come and go and I don’t make it my business to supervise,” said Rasia with an attempt at primness that she spoiled by continuing, “but I see what I see. What does he look like?”
“Average height. Trim. My age, a bit younger. Cocoa brown hair, I guess, longer than is the convention for men his age, but kept trimmed in back. Dresses casually, jackets and jeans mostly. Boyish, you’d say. A John Cusack type.”
“Sounds like most men in Hampstead. American?”
“English.”
“I’ll keep the curtains twitching.”
“Oh,” said Winnie, “it’s nothing to me whether they’re seeing each other or not. I know they’re an item. Out of respect for my feelings they both play it down, but I don’t care. He’s gone missing, or anyway he’s out of town without notifying me. That’s all, and that’s the end of it.”
“Well, he’s not staying upstairs, hiding out from you,” said Rasia, “though since Allegra has the key to the flat upstairs he could easily do it. But I’d hear the coming and going on the stairs, and the shower running and the loo flushing. There’s been none of that.”
“Can I repay you by hauling one of these sacks down to one of the charity shops on West End Lane?”
“Thank you, no.” Rasia McIntyre crossed her arms around Fiona and kissed the scraps of baby fuzz on her scalp. “You can help me by coming back to see me sometime, if you want. You know something of what it’s like to miss your man, I can tell.”
“How very kind,” said Winnie. She saw Rasia flinch at the sudden formality. But Winnie couldn’t help it. She descended the stairs with no attempt at grace or silence.
She chose not to go back to Rudge House through the muddy right-of-way. Then, as she headed around toward the cross street, she changed her mind entirely. John had just abandoned her to his mess of redecorating problems and North London neighbors. Why was she taking this campaign on her own shoulders? Why get involved in it at all? She’d go find a bite of lunch first.
She looked at the pedestrians on the high street quickly, with interest, as if they might, coincidentally, be John. They weren’t.
She stopped—a pain in her side, a twinge, a premonition, something—and steadied herself, one hand on a blue lighted Metropolitan Police display case. Or maybe she’d been drawn to the posters? Two pages, side by side. The first, printed both in English and in some exotic fringed script, appeared to publish the news of the disappearance of a soft-faced Southeast Asian boy whose photo showed him with streaked blond hair. The text said he had gone missing from the Imperial Karaoke Club in New Road, Dagenham. The second page, fully in English, pleaded for information about a man murdered at the August Notting Hill Carnival. He’d been attacked and killed at Westbourne Park Road. “Did you see the attack? Have you heard anything about the attack? Do you know those involved?” Both announcements printed an 0800 number for any leads. Anything at all.
And all these people on their way to lunch, walking by.
She found one of her usual haunts and used the facilities and ordered a beaker of cabernet. The place was filling up. She took a sip and thought of John, his theatrical exits and entrances. Despite herself—her condition and her therapy the same—her mind sidestepped toward the story of Wendy Pritzke. Would anyone like John be making an appearance in her story? Should he?
She took out the stenographer’s not
ebook and flipped it open. There were the pages of scrawl from the Forever Families debacle. It seemed weeks ago already. She turned to the next white page and picked up her pen. She sat there and did not write.
There was wind, and more of it than she’d expected. Hilly North London, its thoroughfares made canyonlike by the facades of mansion blocks, was a maze of wind tunnels. Embattled, she headed back up the slippery paving stones to look at the redbrick house again. There was something about the mix of English rain and the effluvium of English petrol that made London pavements more slippery than any others she’d pounded. Or maybe it was her American rubber soles refusing to travel well. She reached out to steady herself. “Oh, I’m a bundle of nerves; that’s being in the presence of a good idea, it does it to me,” she said. He didn’t answer nor complain.
The house--it was always about houses--was as far from grungily redeveloped Whitechapel as you could get.
If you savored Dickens for the muck of it all, you were disappointed in the contemporary environs of Aldgate and Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Most of Dickens-land had been destroyed in the Blitz.
You could buy booklets, and she had, of Jack the Ripper walks. Anyone could hunt down those few remaining sites that Jack the Ripper would have known: the White Hart Pub on the corner of Gunthorpe Street, the Artillery Passage, Ten Bells Pub, which the prostitutes who became his victims must have frequented to drum up trade. Turn left and sample Tubby Isaacs’s East End cuisine of eels. Straight ahead, Durward Street, murder site of Mary Ann Nichols.
It was as if all that could never be known about the identity or the fate of Jack the Ripper was compensated for by loving devotion to whatever was left.