“I am visiting London,” she said. “Did you forget?”
“What a balls-up. I knew you’d been here. Thought you had left already. You were going on to Romania surely?”
“Maybe I was. But I haven’t.” She relaxed her spine against the chair back. Her voice didn’t tremble. “We’re talking so calmly. As if only about a missed bus or a lost library book. John, what happened? I was coming to London, you knew that. Where did you go? Why were you not there? Have you been at work? Why could Irv get through your secretarial defenses when I couldn’t?”
“Irv?”
“And where are you staying? You’re in town and you’re not at home—where have you been? And all the commotion at your house?”
“Well, that; who could put up with the dust? I relocated, of course.”
“Do you know how worried I was? Do you know what I thought—” Her voice was rising. John paid and they left.
Resumed talking only after a good walk, heading toward the Embankment. The air was clammy, and an unsavory smell of sewage and mud lifted over the riverside traffic, cutting through even the heady edge of exhaust.
“Look, I know I was taking a risk,” he said, “but I thought it might just help. I thought you might thank me in time. You might still.”
“Thank you for what? Scaring me out of my wits?”
“You’d no call to be scared.”
“Tell me where you have been.”
“I told you.” He shook his head with a brusque decisive movement. “I had business in Denmark. It was last minute and I tried to ring. There was something wrong with your line. I couldn’t get through. I knew you couldn’t change your booking at the eleventh hour, or wouldn’t, so it didn’t much matter that your phone was wonky. I assumed you’d arrive, find my note, do your little local investigations for your book, and in three or four days be on to Romania—”
“What note?”
“I left you a note. You didn’t see it?”
“There was nothing for me, no note, no you, only two crazy men doing God knows what to your kitchen, and the foolishness that followed on from that.”
“Well. No wonder, then. I don’t know what happened to it. I stuck it under the door knocker, wedged it in between the appliance and the wood. Quite firmly. Your name on it, no one else’s. Sorry about that.”
“Sorry about that?”
“Don’t get huffy, Winnie. A change of plans compounded by a mishap.”
“John, would you stand still a moment so I can”—she looked around—“wrench that pay phone box off its post and brain you with it? I’d be so grateful. Your house—Rudge House—is being haunted by something out of the chimney stack. You’re back in town and back at work, avoiding my calls and staying somewhere else. You know I’m here. You’re sidestepping the issues. Maybe you went away legitimately, but your workers said you’d been gone all week. Not just the night before. What are you hiding from me? Or why are you hiding from me?”
“I’m not hiding from you.”
“And where are you staying? With Allegra?”
He looked at her. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”
She felt she had stumbled into yet another ring of Wonderland, as if rabbit hole after rabbit hole dropped her down farther and farther away from reality. “Allegra lied to me when I asked her? Plain and simple, just like that?”
“I have only just come back to London the last day or so. Don’t blame her. You know what this is about. Winnie, look at me. You know what this is about.”
“I don’t know why you would lie to me.”
“It’s a way of telling you the truth, Winnie, the truth you are so reluctant to hear. You know this.”
“The truth about Allegra? I’ve known that for years. You’re welcome to her. If she’d lie for you, she’s not worth you. And what do I care anyway?”
“Allegra Lowe has nothing to do with this. I’m talking about you and me and Romania, Winnie. I’m talking about the truth of that. I’d hoped to make an easier passage for you by absenting myself. I’d hoped to put myself out of the picture and let you do your London stay, probably irritated by my absence, but maybe compelled toward Romania to do what you had to do by yourself. By yourself. When I got back and called Allegra from Stansted, she said you were still here, and enmeshed in some—”
She could tell he was trying not to say fiction.
“—puzzlement,” he chose at last, “having to do with the house renovation. And it seemed a sort of Romania all over again. Having started off on a campaign to let you work things out for yourself, I thought it only fair to continue.”
“Romania is a novel,” she said. “What’s happening at Rudge House is an apparition, a presence of some sort. And what you have done to me is a betrayal. Pure and simple. Save me from myself? Who are you to save me from anyone? You are my cousin and my friend. You’ve behaved like neither.”
“Who is Irv?” he said.
“No one, an accident, a friendly nobody. Whose male voice apparently caused your secretary to relax her guard against female callers, and put you on the line.”
“American, I hear. Are you traveling with him?”
“John, he is a passerby—a nonentity. He did me a favor. He prodded you out of the woodwork, and that’s that. Meanwhile, I’m staying in your house, and the place is good and haunted, and you’ve made me crazy with your strategies—”
She continued. “Certainly Allegra must have told you about the wild night of the storm, when we were nailed into your flat? That I found no note, that I had no way of knowing where you were?”
“She told me about the former. Bizarre, but no harm done, I trust. As to the note, she couldn’t tell whether you were lying about not having seen a message from me.”
“You are deeply charmed by this notion of lying.”
“You are capable of lying to yourself.” Suddenly she heard something new in his voice, not venom, not anger, but regret so fiercely stated as to seem a type of anger. “You are entirely capable of lying to yourself. As you no doubt know. Your professional training if nothing else. Are you sure you didn’t see a note from me, and conveniently forget it?”
“I saw nothing but ghostly presence and human absence.” The tears of a teenager leaped stupidly to her middle-aged eyes, those aching eyes flanged with crow’s-feet, her lashes thinned out by nocturnal rubbings. Straining to see whatever was real and reliable in this story of deceptions and revelations. The tears were comforting, though the mucus from her nose a mess. Still, she felt better after a moment or two. But then, he was holding her to keep her safe.
At last she said, “Aren’t you going to ask me about the ghost?”
“Some other ghost than you?”
“This time, yes.”
They went to a restaurant, but Winnie couldn’t eat. She rearranged the translucent rounds of tomato on the plate and required cup after cup of tea, and then several visits to the cold toilets. The meal was recreational and neutral. A pas de deux composed entirely of sidesteps. John drank a bottle of Riesling by himself. “The afternoon off,” he said.
When the waitress had removed their plates and the debit card had been taken and returned, John said, “I suppose I do want to know what you think is going on in the house.”
“Aren’t you coming back to see for yourself?”
“I am not sure that’s entirely sensible.”
“Oh, well, nothing about this is sensible.” She had intended to sound irate, but in fact there was nothing sensible about any of these events. And maybe admitting that and moving on was the only way through.
“Just tell me what you think.”
She did not start at the beginning, she did not tell a story. So often the details obscured the—the intention. She gave a précis, an abstract, as best she could.
“There is a paranormal presence in the house, and I believe it’s been blocked up for decades, and your home handymen inadvertently woke it up. It was wrapped in a shawl or a shroud of some sort,
age indeterminate, hanging on a nail against the Georgian chimney stack, though whether it was put there then or when the house was renovated in late-nineteenth-century Victorian times, I don’t know.”
He didn’t comment on this. He looked at her with a waiting expression. She felt obscure, difficult, like a computer screen that hadn’t finished booting up properly, offering him nothing yet to work with. The Microsoft icon of the hourglass frozen in one place, no single grain of cybernetic sand sifting through to change a blessed thing. “There’s a part of my mind that thinks in story—”
“Do you have any other part?” he inquired, the first sign of affection today, albeit a patronizing one.
“Don’t interrupt. Imagination could be partly intuition. It could be. And my imagination is caught on the idea of a Jack the Ripper figure—or figurine, since Ritzi Ostertag thinks the ghost is a female.”
“Ritzi who?”
“But I also wonder if this thing has been there longer, maybe as long ago as when our own Ozias Rudge built this house. Perhaps the story of haunting he is said to have told young Dickens was derived from some apparition he had, courtesy of this same poltergeist.”
“What is the dickens in the phrase ‘What the Dickens?’ ”
He was humoring her. She struggled to keep her voice level. “Allegra will have told you all. The sounds in the chimney, the accident of the chimney pot braining poor Jenkins. None of this, I might add, would have taken on such an overtone of doom if I had known where you were, or even why you were absent. I half thought the malicious sprite was the ghost of you.”
“Winnie.” He held her hand briefly. “It wasn’t me. I’m right here.”
“I know that, I’m not a fool, don’t condescend.” She snatched her hand away, triumphantly. Perhaps her recoiling was what he had intended, what he was intending through this whole campaign of absence he’d been waging. “But I thought it was you. And I’m sure I was on edge.”
“Reading into things.”
“Not paranoid, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Of course not. But sensitive. Or sensitized. You get like that.”
“John,” she said, “there is a ghost in your house. Are you coming to see it or not?”
“If you can show it to me,” he said, “I’ll see it.”
They left, and hailed a cab.
Then, for a small and agreeable respite, everything went back to normal, only, of course, normal did Winnie no good in this instance. Normal meant, on the one hand, that John was there, that they were together, that small practices and domestic policies were reinstated. He paid the cab, always, a longstanding agreement between them born of some forgotten misunderstanding dating back twenty years and now aged nicely into a joke of sorts. She did the key, saying, “Ah, Rudge House, back where I belong, smack smack,” and patted the Georgian surround to the front door with affection. There was no sound from Mrs. Maddingly’s quarters, just a familiar reek of stewing celery. No prospective buyers were nosing about the flat on the next level. In fact, the house seemed empty, except for them. The ghost had disappeared into a vacuum.
John scowled at the supplies stockpiled on either side of his door, at the drop cloths laid out for wet boots, the ladders and unremoved detritus from the deconstruction of his kitchen pantry. “You can hardly blame them,” said Winnie. “Where did you get them anyway? Wasn’t it a bit risky leaving your home to them for a whole week or so?”
“I’d tidied away anything of real value,” said John. “Besides, thieves take cash or electronic appliances, usually. They don’t riffle through your poetry bookcase looking for signed first editions of Larkin or Betjeman.” He nodded to the door knocker. “See, there is where I left you a note—stuck under the edge of that thing.”
“Oh, well,” said Winnie, trying not to think he was lying. “The door knocker in Dickens’s version of Great-great-great-grandfather’s story talked to him, remember, but this one kept silent.”
“Amazing, when the rest of the house wouldn’t shut up.” John’s tone was dry and even. She was determined, for as long as she could manage, not to take offense. It was sweetly relieving to have him home.
They entered the flat. Late-November light, already graying in the early afternoon, seeped through the rooms. Dust motes of plaster picked out the grain of the air. Winnie noticed she’d let grit build up on John’s mahogany sideboard. Hell, the house is haunted, she thought; who am I to be cleaning up on his behalf? As John wandered into the kitchen Winnie trailed a finger along the surface, absentmindedly graphing the slashed cross pattern that had attended the more inexplicable of the recent events.
“Well, this is a fine mess,” said John from the kitchen.
“They’ve made a good beginning,” she said. She, defending Mac and Jenkins? Topsy-turvy everything.
“Yes, but a beginning of what?”
He poked about a while and then came back into the foyer. Alert, he saw the drawn mark in the dust. “Messages from the resident apparition?” he said. She suffered an instant’s temptation to play it that way, but shook her head.
“This is all?” he said. “It seems like my place in a mess, no more, no less.”
“I know. Except that you’re here, it feels silent as the tomb.”
“Empty as the tomb too. The tomb isn’t supposed to be a carrying case for the spirit, is it? Just a storage unit for the body, while the body lasts.”
“The body is the transport vehicle for the spirit. I mean, if you think that way.”
“We’re the bodies here, we’re the spirits. I deduce no others, Winnie.”
“We’re enough. Aren’t we?”
During the evening the auditorium at Poiana Brasov grew cold. The columnar radiators stationed every forty feet knocked and hissed for all they were worth, but the effect was negligible. “Look, the ice in our drink isn’t melting, it’s growing,” said John.
Though the room could have accommodated a national congress, no more than two dozen tables were in use. But the floor show was no less aerobic for that. A stout fellow singing Placido Domingo numbers in Romanian. A corps of busty mountain girls, with legs like professional cyclists, made it their business to kick and cavort behind him. A magician pulled a white dove out of a box. The dove hopped to the edge of a table covered in purple sequined cloth. It flapped its wings once and then fell over, apparently dead.
“Hypothermia got him,” said Wendy.
“How long do we have to stay?” muttered John. They sat with their knees close, for warmth.
“You have better entertainment in mind back at the room?” Wendy whispered back.
“Is good, is very good,” said Doroftei. “Peoples come from every places to see, to laugh, to sing.” He grinned as if, anticipating their need for pleasure this very evening, he had spent a lifetime erecting the entire mountain range beyond, and training the performers from infancy.
“I’ve got some decent whiskey smuggled in my luggage,” said John. “I was keeping it for a bribe, but maybe we need to bribe ourselves.”
“I’m all for that.”
They began to work their way into their outer garments, but Doroftei didn’t take the hint, as the room was cold enough that most of the audience was already sitting in overcoats. Even the taffeta-bound fat lady singer who waltzed onstage sported a grim shawl the color of old iron, with matching hat perched jauntily over her left eyebrow.
Wendy was warmed, though, by the notion of a return to the hotel. So she could wait through the performance. She smiled at John. Nothing served a friendship so well as mutual discomfort.
“Well,” he said, “look what’s here.”
As they were leaving, he was organizing the mess on the landing. He had picked up the boot scraper hedgehog to fold the drop cloths back nearer the wall. And underneath the canvas, underneath the hedgehog, a letter on its back. Winnie saw it there, emerging; John couldn’t have just sneaked it there to corroborate his story. He turned it over and winced, and handed it to
her. Winnie it said.
“Do I have to read it now?” she asked.
“You have to read it sometime.”
“Where are you going? Back to work?”
“I can’t stay here while you’re here. And I certainly won’t ask you to leave. Just let me know what you plan. You’ll be able to reach me at the office.”
“You’ll stay with Allegra, then?”
“No,” he said. “Not now.”
“It means nothing to me.”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“John, you’re not listening. It means nothing to me. I don’t care.”
“I don’t believe you, but it doesn’t matter if I did. I’ll do what I want.” He was testy and severe, and paused at the head of the stairs to look back at her. “I’m not easy with all this. Think what you like. The company retains a suite in a Swiss Cottage hotel for visiting luminaries and functionaries. I can use it for a while. I’ve done so in the past, when I was having the front rooms redone. That’s where I’ll be. You can have the phone number and we can meet for meals from time to time. The place is yours until you go. You are going on to Romania?”
“I think I am. But it’s hard to think.”
“Take your time,” he said, turning around. He sounded so like another therapist, dismissing her, she imagined kicking him in the back of the head while she had him in such close range. She could see him sprawl against the corner, his teeth scraping the wallpaper as he fell, his lip split open, gushing, his forehead a sudden explosion of color.
“I can as easily go,” she said. “I can find a B-and-B, or just—go. Just go. This is your house and frankly, my love, it’s your mess.”
But he didn’t hear her, or attend. As they descended to the main entrance hall, they saw now that Mrs. Maddingly’s door was ajar an inch or two. Perhaps it had been so earlier and they hadn’t noticed.
“Mrs. M?” said Winnie. She moved ahead of John.
“Do you think—?” he said, but followed. “Someone is annotating the text of this room?”