Lost

  “Your field?” she said.

  “Western medievalism, English, Frankish, Norman, from the time of monks to the time of parliaments. Roughly. Kids take my courses wanting to do papers on The Name of the Rose and the Brother Cadfael mysteries. When I point out that Brother Cadfael’s worldview is decidedly post-Freudian, they think I’m defaming the dead of long ago. In the student guidebooks I get high marks because I give them high marks—grade inflation is contagious. But I can’t sell my old-fashioned notion, my pre-postmodern notion of history. I still think history is really the study of how we change, even how human psychology changes. Not how universal and interchangeable we all are across the ages. And you?”

  She dandled her spoon in the slurry-colored tea and considered the public relations campaign. She had no reason to mistrust him. So why had she started out with an alibi? Instinct? Neurosis? And it wasn’t an alibi, it was a lie: call it what it was. A habit that was getting more and more entrenched. Why couldn’t she shuck it off? A question she might have asked Ritzi Ostertag.

  “Recovering from a broken marriage,” she said.

  “Oh, that.”

  “Not to worry.” She hastened to extemporize her way out of danger. “Not broken in the traditional sense. Really, just frayed a little. He’s having a rest cure at a ranch in Arizona and I’m on my own for two months. The damp of English winters is just exactly what he can’t stand. It’s Jack Sprat and his wife; he can breathe no mold and I find dry sunny heat stultifying and it makes me drink gin at ten A.M.”

  “So the happy medium is . . .”

  “Ritzi Ostertag,” she couldn’t resist, “a happy medium, or gay anyway.”

  He blinked. She suspected he was willfully not following. She didn’t blame him; she was being feeble. “I was taking him this cloth I found,” she said, trying for honesty of some sort. “For a lark, and because I’m bored.”

  “Because you miss your husband.”

  “I do.” She looked him in the eye in case he was getting ideas.

  But he was looking fondly at her, fondly and without any predatory gleam of interest. “Don’t worry about me. I admire people who stick by their spouses.”

  “Meaning you don’t?”

  “Meaning nothing of the sort. May I see the cloth?”

  She drew it out. In this atmosphere it looked more brittle, filthy, more barnyard.

  He looked at it closely, as if he could read a language in its warp and weft. Then he pushed it away. “I don’t know anything about cloth.”

  “Some historian you are.”

  “It looks old,” he said. He laughed. “I’m a better historian when it comes to reading books than reading artifacts, I admit it.”

  “What’s your particular field?” she said. “Your professional idée fixe?”

  “Aspects of the supernatural in medieval thought. How Christian concepts of the supernatural derive in part from origins dating back to late antiquity. How the scribes and bishops encountered Roman and Teutonic myths and legends, and grafted them in a crafty local way upon Hebraic and early Christian theology and lore. How incompatible some of that lore was, how the Church used it anyway, that line of goods.”

  “Why aren’t you engaged in a history of, oh, cooking pots? Or the migration of nomadic populations? Of course your field is the occult. Naturally, supernatural. Everything is, these days. I’m feeling quite paranoid.”

  “Nothing odd in the supernatural as a field of interest. Nor in our sharing the interest. We did meet in a clairvoyant’s salon, after all.”

  “But what do you believe of it?”

  “You mean would I go to have my palm read, my I Ching thrown? My fate in the cards, the tea leaves? The crystal ball? Balderdash. Balderdash, idiocy, poppycock. Stuff and nonsense. You want more? Codswallop. I hardly even believe in the Internet. I can’t get my head around ley lines and crop circles and such.”

  “Makes you good at your job, then. The appreciative skeptic. Publish much?”

  “Too much, in the wrong journals.”

  But she realized she didn’t want to talk about publishing. “I have to go.”

  “You believe in some of it, or you wouldn’t have been there,” he said to her. “It’s okay. People believe in different things. Some people believe in dreams and voices. I think dreams and voices are important, but primarily as a way your psyche has of getting your own attention, that’s all.”

  “Have you ever seen a ghost?”

  “If I had, I’d have to be a believer, and you already know I’m not. Of course I haven’t. But people in the Middle Ages thought they did, all the time.”

  “Maybe their innocence allowed them to see what our eyes are clouded to.”

  “More things in heaven and earth, et cetera. Have you ever seen a ghost?”

  “I have to go,” she said again. “Our meeting was an accident and I don’t read significance into it. I’m not looking for a dalliance while my husband is recuperating with a pulmonary ailment in Scottsdale. Thanks for the coffee. I’ll leave the tip.”

  “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by the questions. Hell, I wouldn’t know a ghost if it stopped and asked me for directions.”

  The day was nice. She walked all the way back up the hill to Hampstead, thinking of anything except for the catalog of ghosts scrolling in her head. Medieval, Jack the Ripper, some Irish housemaid he might have killed, the ghost of Marley, the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and to Come.

  The ghost of old Scrooge himself, bequeathed to the world by Dickens, and still haunting it.

  The ghost of old Ozias Rudge, hovering about Rudge House?

  The Either/OR of it.

  No, she was not thinking about ghosts, not at all. The day was bright now, clouds sent scudding southeast toward the lowlands, France, and beyond that the Alps, the Tyrol, the great Danubian plain. All this clutter, this nonsense, swept with the biggest broom, cobwebs torn from the sky. Exercise always made her mind cleverer. The sun a merciful tonic, the November brightness a bromide.

  They landed in Bucharest long after dark. The Alps behind them, physically and mentally, bunched and puckered in slow silken ripples of stone and snow. The airport was in a state of construction, or demolition, or both. Arriving passengers had to step over slabs of stone left higgledy-piggledy, had to avoid staggering into electrical wires that snaked out of unfinished walls.

  John took her by the elbow--she was tired, the seats had been lumpy and the food poor--and as she began to fret, he rose to the occasion. He loved the obstacles of the third world, the wooden-handled seals thumping down into the passport, the self-importance of two-bit officials, the smell of open drains. The world seemed realer to him there.

  “This place is total mayhem. Everything’s in the most ghastly state,” he said gleefully. The driver was waiting with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He pulled out of his belt two other cigarettes, straightened them, and offered them around. He had a lovely gap between his teeth. His eyes for that matter were broadly spaced, and even his nostrils seemed an inch apart. And bovine in temperament as well as physique. He drove as if he’d only been behind a wheel for several hours, which they later learned to be true; his brother had been arrested, and so he’d got the keys and taught himself to drive on the way to the airport. His name was Costal Doroftei.

  He took them to the best restaurant in town and pushed them in the door, announcing that he would wait outside while they ate. They were the only diners in a large square Second Empire room badly in need of refurbishing. Doroftei drifted back in from the sidewalk almost immediately, realizing he hadn’t told them exactly where they were. The Capsa Restaurant. He pulled out a chair and joined their meal. John was thrilled, remembering characters in Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy eating there. Wendy decided that the fictional characters had apparently consumed everything in the country worth eating. The waiter, answering their question about the best item on the menu, lavishly described something tha
t sounded like Muscat Otonel, turkey and mushrooms in sweet white wine, but just as in a cheap movie, he concluded the description by admitting the chef hadn’t any left. All he could offer, really, was soup made from cow’s stomachs.

  “We don’t need to eat, we’re full from airline food,” said Wendy firmly.

  Doroftei took them on a night tour of the capital. It was lucky that the peace dividends hadn’t been paid yet in outposts as far as Bucharest, because the streets were almost empty of cars. This meant Doroftei could swerve and veer as he tried to master the controls, endangering only the few pedestrians unlucky enough to be scrambling home on this very cold night.

  “You’ll remember every scrap of this,” said John, delirious with joy as they nearly felled an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow full of old clothes.

  “That’s precisely what I’m afraid of,” she said.

  By the time Winnie had reached Hampstead, she was panting, and she had to stop at a café and get a cold drink. She made a note to herself of things yet to do before ducking more fully into the Jack the Ripper novel. She would go over to the Royal Free and check on Colum Jenkins; by now he must be up to visitors. She would tell him that Mac was dangerously wacky and that anyway he had disappeared and never returned. She’d try John’s office again for the umpteenth time.

  And then she’d have done what she could, and the hell with him. She’d clock on to her work, and begin to roam about Angel Alley, Thrawl Street, Brick Lane, with the ghost of Jack the Ripper in her mind. With luck her narrative mind would waken and seize what it could.

  A few days in the big city were more than enough. An hour would have been more than enough, really: she was eager to get going. But they had to follow the schedule as given them.

  At last, though, they were out, begun on their motoring trip, circling in, nearer and nearer. Gas queues on the road. Some of the pollarded trees whitewashed with lime, to shoulder height, like lanes in rural France. Doroftei singing Christmas carols to them, because the snow began to fall. Heading toward Brasov. On the highway the snow seemed as gray as the bread. Once off the road, though, on rural stretches, it whitened: snow dense and heavy on the ground, as if heaved in by winds from the very heart of the Siberian steppes.

  “On to Poiana Brasov. Is the plan,” said Doroftei. “Means Sunny Clearing. Weariness and monotony to disappear. We rest and wait.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” said Wendy, “why must we?”

  “Is the plan,” said Doroftei. “Trust me.” He smoked the way you would if you were hoping to die of lung cancer by morning.

  At the front door of Rudge House, the estate agent was just letting another couple in. “Oh, a neighbor,” he said, and hustled them through the entranceway before Winnie had a chance to queer the deal, intentionally or by accident.

  “Oh, it’s you again,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “Would you come in here and look for Chutney?”

  “I don’t have an inkling of how to find a cat, I’m afraid,” said Winnie.

  “That’s all right, he doesn’t have an inkling of how to be found, so you’re made for each other,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “It would be a kindness.”

  “I do have work to do,” Winnie said, as if she did—well, she did, if she’d get around to it—but she let herself be led into the old woman’s rooms, which if anything looked more disheveled and captioned than before. WHERE ARE YOU, CHUTNEY? said one note. I MEAN IT, COME BACK, said another. THE DAMN PILLS said a third.

  “Sit down,” said Mrs. Maddingly.

  “I’ll stand,” said Winnie, after she noticed each chair had an instruction taped to its seat: SIT or HERE or DON’T FORGET TO REST ONCE IN A WHILE IT’S ONLY THURSDAY.

  “What do you think?”

  Mrs. Maddingly looked perched on a notion, Winnie thought, like someone badly wanting a drink with an olive in it. Winnie tried to be patient. “About the cat? I don’t know. Have you any ideas?”

  “Ideas I have plenty of, but ideas!” She waved her hand, as if perfectly aware how demented she was becoming. “It’s fur and claw I want, not ideas!”

  “The other cats are around, I guess?”

  “Around, I guess, yes, I’d say they were.”

  Winnie neither saw nor heard anything of them, but the distinctive house smell was recently refreshed, even ripe.

  “Did you look outside?”

  “He’s not an outside cat,” said Mrs. Maddingly with sudden irritation. “How many times have I to remind you?”

  “Has he died, maybe, under a piece of furniture?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But what a shame if he has done.”

  “All cats die. Do you want me to bend down and look?” Considering the poor housekeeping, she was somewhat afraid of what she’d find, but once embarked on a mission of charity it was hard to justify changing course.

  “I know all cats die,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “I’m not a fool. But if it was his turn I wish he’d warned me. I’d have given him a message for Alan.”

  “Oh, Alan?” The husband, that’s right. “What message?” Winnie was on her hands and knees, looking under a cherry sideboard. No cat. Several dropped bottles of pills, though. She left them there; they could be years old, and poisonous by now.

  “I’m afraid if I go in hospital, matron will cut my hair,” said Mrs. Maddingly.

  “You won’t go in the hospital. Why should you?”

  “I’m an ailing old lady and it’ll happen sooner than I think. But what if they cut my hair?” She began to cry. Jesus.

  “You’d still look fine even if they did. Though they won’t. They don’t do things like that.”

  “They might,” she said. “And then I’d die of shame, probably, and go to heaven or—Brighton—or wherever Alan is, and he won’t know me without my hair!”

  “Please, they won’t touch the hair.”

  “You’ll tell them?”

  She gritted her teeth. “Yes. Should I look in the other rooms?”

  “If you like,” said Mrs. Maddingly doubtfully, drawing her sweater the tighter about her shoulders, as if afraid Winnie was about to propose a full-body search.

  Winnie began to push doors open and disturb stacked sections of cold air, in rooms where the windows weren’t true in their frames or the heating was broken. Eddies of lavender-scented chill, in shadowed alcoves and heavily curtained rooms. She thought she saw the tip of a whisker, but really she couldn’t see anything much. And not having met the other cats, anyway, how would she recognize Chutney when she saw him?

  Winnie felt a certain sympathy for poor dead Alan, blearily trying to identify his shorn wife as she came through Processing with the streams of hundreds of thousands of other old geese.

  “I don’t suppose he’d come if I called?” said Winnie. “Chutney? Kitty?”

  “I address him all the time,” the old woman called from the front room. A cork came sucking out of the throat of a bottle.

  Then Winnie saw him, a flash in a Victorian mirror in the gloom of the old gal’s boudoir. Calling it a mirror was rash: it was a genuine looking-glass, for sure. The glass was beveled, frosted, and etched. In its smoky backward recitation of reality Winnie caught just the flip of a tail. An eye like a nugget of smoldering bronze. She saw a sliver of feline sneer without seeing anything as recognizable as a small, perfect mouth with its small darts for teeth. It was like the Cheshire Cat—the smile without the cat, the attribute without the subject. Free-floating disdain.

  Then it was gone.

  “Oh, sweetheart, come out,” said Winnie. “What are you scared of? Your old mama out there is going bonkers with grief. Come on.” She raised her voice. “You’ll have some tinned fish or liver, something with a smell?”

  “Not for me, thank you, I’ve had my elevenses.”

  “I mean for the cat. Here, kitty kitty kitty.”

  Mrs. Maddingly didn’t answer. Perhaps she’d forgotten what Winnie was doing. “Oh, well, I suppose another little drop won’t hurt, if you must,” she was s
aying to herself. The sound of sherry pouring gluggily.

  “Here, kitty,” said Winnie.

  She switched on a bedside lamp; the bulb, all ten watts of it, flickered. She angled the shade, a cone of cinnamon-colored cardboard, to try to get more light. Something twitched. A sliding heap of old-lady housedresses or nightgowns, their nylon surfaces whispering against one another. “Come on, you cat; no sense scaring the poor thing out of her mind. God knows she’s half there already.” Yeah, she and who else? Winnie thought to herself: Here you are being jittery about a housecat?

  Fearing a slicing claw, Winnie picked up a walker that the old woman no doubt used to get out of bed. She touched the laundry with the leg of it. Then she reached and tugged at a hem. The top garment lifted up at an angle, caught on something unseen. With a crusty ripping sound, it came away. A clot of dried sherry or some other more intimate fluid, patching one garment against another? The far edge of the next garment rippled; the cat was backing up underneath.

  She said a poem to stiffen her nerves.

  “Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?

  I’ve been to London to visit the Queen.

  Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?

  I frightened a little mouse—”

  She stifled a gag as she peeled back the top nightgown.

  Two, then three cats came to light, blood matting their fur to the nightdress below. Each one had wounds about the head or neck. They’d been chewed at. And they’d been dead long enough to stiffen. The smell was atrocious.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  The nightgown twitched some more, and the living cat beneath it flexed and complained in a voice more alto than, in Winnie’s experience, was customary for a cat. She held the walker in front of her, ready to poke its rubber-tipped feet into the animal’s face should it attack her. Then she whisked away the garment. The cat was a burnt persimmon color, like ancient orange rind. It looked twice its size, hissing, its back a wicket of radiating spikes.