Lost

  Mrs. Maddingly had been put in a double room made to serve as a triple. At the right doorway, Winnie made herself appraise the room’s view first: nice bit of Heath, more trees than open land visible, terraced housing creeping on several sides. Buildings the color of tooth decay.

  A radio from another room was broadcasting a jug band’s rendition of “The Holly and the Ivy.” Winnie gritted her teeth and went in.

  Mrs. M lay like a drying sheaf of something, in sheets too clean and good for her. Two other old hens, one on either side, chattering to each other. “Are you here to quiet the duck down? She does go on,” said one, to Winnie and Irv.

  “She needs a tonic,” opined the other. “Or a jab.”

  “Not my way to whinge, but I never heard such chatter, not before that one; she’d talk the skin off a Cumberland sausage.”

  “Any decent child would remove the poor old thing and take her home.”

  The second woman turned to look at the first. “Then what are we doing here?”

  “We haven’t got children,” said the first, “at least, not decent enough.” This caused them both to cackle and then lie still, thinking things over.

  “Very sorry,” said Irv. “We’re just friends, looking in.”

  Mrs. Maddingly’s eyes were open and Winnie was relieved to see there was life enough in them. But the old woman did not seem to notice her guests. Her voice went on in a singsong, at a varying volume, first high, then low. There were phrases Winnie could catch, the stairs . . . I never use vinegar for that, dear . . . the blackout curtains in sad need of repair . . . But there were other chortled phrases, syllables backed up against one another. “Is she choking?” said Winnie. “Mrs M, are you all right?”

  “She’s not choking,” said Irv Hausserman, setting up the tape recorder.

  “We ought to have brought her some flowers, some candies or something.”

  “We’d not have said no to jellied sweets,” said one of the roommates.

  “Nor flowers,” said the other.

  “But don’t mind us. Just get her to belt up, will you? The bother of it!”

  “I’ll call the sister,” said Winnie. “I think she’s choking on her own spittle.”

  “She’s not choking,” said Irv again, pressing Play.

  “Talk about reliving your childhood. She’s wandering, then, back to before the days she had language.”

  “She’s reliving someone else’s childhood,” said Irv. “Sorry, that was a line I couldn’t resist. I don’t know what she’s doing. But she’s speaking, I believe, in medieval French, or something like it.”

  Winnie said nothing.

  “Let’s just get some of it down,” said Irv. “Sit tight, honey.” Winnie didn’t know if he was addressing Mrs. Maddingly or her, but she didn’t feel she could move in any case. Mrs. Maddingly’s utterances did have a roll to them, and a quality more guttural than nasal, to Winnie’s ear. Who knew what medieval French even sounded like? Winnie had not thrived in French class at Miss Porter’s, and she could not manage an Inspector Clouseau accent even when drunk. But she supposed Irv must know enough French grammar and vocabulary to make such an assessment.

  “Well, what is she saying?”

  “It’s far beyond me,” he whispered. “Shh. Let’s get a few minutes of it. I sat and listened last time. Incredible. She seems to do a kind of loop. Let’s get a complete recital of it and we’ll talk then.”

  They sat while the tape ran, nearly the whole side. The other old women lapsed into their own hazes, reviving at the hope of lunch, but it was only a sister bearing pills on a tray.

  “Got it, then, or most of it,” said Irv at last, and flipped the machine off. “Now. Shall we find the matron and get an update on Mrs. M’s condition?”

  “But what is she saying?” said Winnie. Her knees were locked, her gut clenched. “If you could tell it was French—I couldn’t even hear that, much less medieval French—what was she saying?”

  “I don’t know,” said Irv, “or not much. The accent is way beyond me. But it’s the simplest words that stay the same—I heard knife, and water, and, I think, fire.”

  “What’s happening to her?”

  “It sounds like some kind of personality split, like a—what do you call it—schizophrenic episode, brought on maybe by a stroke? I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. I think Mrs. M was talking to herself in English and answering herself in French.”

  “She’s from, oh, someplace like Manchester.”

  “I’m telling you what it sounded like to me. She was this way the other day—she keeps on all night, apparently, even in her sleep, if she does sleep. Listen—you’ll hear it—”

  “What am I listening for?”

  “I think she’s given a name to the other half of her. She addresses herself.”

  “The dark side of Mrs. Maddingly. Unbelievable. What’s it called?”

  “Listen: it crops up over and over, in the English phrases—”

  “What am I listening for?”

  “Jersey,” said Irv in a low whisper.

  Mrs. M bucked a little, as if perhaps she’d heard him say it. Her head moved from side to side. Winnie strained. The syllables slipped out, a kind of Jersey. Jervsey? Jarvis? One edge of Mrs. M’s mouth was pulled taut and the sound was indistinct. “I don’t know. Jersey as in the island? Maybe she had holidays there as a child and picked up some patois. Do they speak French in Jersey?”

  “Beats me.”

  “If you’re not going to take her home, do us the pleasure of gluing her teeth together,” said desiccated woman number one.

  “Or have her tongue removed?” said the other hopefully. “By a procedure?”

  “We need our sleep.”

  “It’s worse than Spitting Images, this prattle.”

  The introduction of Mrs. Maddingly into their room had given them something wonderful to resent. They laughed and laughed as Irv and Winnie crept out. Winnie hung back while Irv made an attempt at getting an update on Mrs. Maddingly’s prognosis. The staff was reluctant to give specifics, since Irv wasn’t a relative, but they let it be known that they didn’t expect her to be released anytime soon.

  Once outside, Winnie felt no urgency to spend more time with Irv. The sense of people being on display, a freak show—not just poor Mrs. Maddingly, but herself as well—had begun to sting. “What are you going to do with that tape?” she said.

  “See whether I can find someone in town to have a listen and do a spot translation. If I have to go to Oxford or Cambridge, I will. There’ll be medievalists willing to have a go at deciphering this.”

  “I think you are the crazy one. How could Mrs. Maddingly be speaking medieval French? Are you proposing, in some Chomsky-esque fashion, that we hold the grammar and syntax of ancient languages in our brain-boxes, passed down like Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious? That some aneurysm or the like has turned Mrs. Maddingly into a latter-day medieval scholar?”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting. Maybe once she went to a lecture with her husband and sat there knitting while some old coot read a medieval text. And though she didn’t know it, her brain was turned on like a tape recorder, like this tape recorder. And the mental tape has been accidentally retrieved and she can’t turn it off. How do I know?”

  “This is so wildly crazy. You might as well say she was possessed.”

  “I haven’t said that. I’d opt for my theory first. I don’t believe in possession.”

  “Are you leading me on? To see whether I believe she’s possessed?”

  “You don’t need to trust me about much. But you can risk trusting that I’m not such a dog as that.”

  “I don’t know what I trust,” she said. “Go to your expert and leave me the hell alone.”

  The voyeurism of it. She walked down the hill, angry enough to pass the entrance to the Northern Line at Belsize Park, and keep going, past Primrose Hill, right into Camden, where she pretended to look at racks of colored T-shirts.
Thinking; trying to think, anyway.

  There was something. Jersey. Jervsey.

  Then she remembered the letters on Post-it notes stuck to Mrs. Maddingly’s mantel.

  What if she’d misread the B? What if it were an E that, in rounded scrawl, had looked B-ish?

  And if the W was either a sloppy V, or pronounced as a V? The way Ritzi V’d his W’s? And the letters crowded to make a word? A name?

  Jersey? Jervsey?

  Gervasa?

  For the first time in her life she doubted—well, what? Not her sanity, for she could not remember ever feeling more alert than walking back into the hotel in Bras¸ov, and seeing John there. So her grasp on reality was not in doubt. It was just that she had not, since childhood, ever felt like a child.

  All the attention she paid to childish things! . . . the Pooh bear (Disney version) on her desk at home. The vague opinions spelled out by the arrangement of the stars in the sky. The scraps of verse, hoarded like prophecies--all these distractions had not made her carefree, just busy. Mentally cluttered.

  I like this book, said the King of Hearts.

  It makes me laugh, the way it starts.

  I like it also, said his mother.

  So they sat down and read it to each other.

  Sure, she had managed a career, building a reputation out of limited talents. She had taken her father in until he died, despite the cost to her marriage. She’d done quarterly taxes, collected for the American Heart Fund, et cetera. She had honored and loved her husband, and she had rarely found it hard to obey him, either. Up until now, when he was unpardonably missing from this most significant campaign of their marriage, and she had become demented--drunk maybe--and fallen into bed with the one fellow she had ever really wanted, and never imagined she’d be able to get.

  So what was she now, walking into the hotel, shaking the snow off her shoulders? No more than a teenager, trembling, more full of lust than she’d ever conceived possible. The old mocking truisms held. She was naked underneath her respectable wool coat and matching blue serge suit and bra and panties and hose. Her middle-aged body was reamed out with shock and desire. She had reverted to a being with breasts that felt things, didn’t just provide a nice slope for the display of better necklaces. She could feel the blood flushing her buttocks. With a briefcase full of notarized files up in her room, extra money for bribery stitched into the padded shoulders of her pinstriped suit coat, she was nothing if not a woman of today: competent to the point of being a maniac about it. And here she stood, on the hotel lobby’s terrazzo floor strewn with sawdust, the room circling because she was dizzy with hunger for John, again. She could not be sure who she was, a married woman or a teenager in love for the first time.

  He should be here, she thought of Emil. Damn him! And John looked up from his club chair and smiled. Not, she saw, a smile of complicity, or passion, or even embarrassment, but perhaps a smile of worry.

  “What, what is it?” she said, wondering if Emil had called.

  “Oh, the snow, that’s all; we’re stuck here for some time, I think,” he said.

  “We needn’t see each other, if it seems I’ve taken advantage of the situation.” She felt like an Audrey Hepburn character. It was standing here in this retro lobby, which had not been redone to evoke an older, more sober time, but was the genuine article, seedy and tired, gently decadent. “Perhaps I misunderstood--I am afraid that I moved too near.”

  “It was not what I expected,” he said, “last night I mean. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “What?”

  “It’s quite a serious storm, they say. Sighisoara is right in its path, and there have been power outages. It might be several days more before we can get through.”

  He meant--she thought--that they would be locked in this hotel together, as snow hemmed them in, imprisoned them, kept them from completing their mission. Not like Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, marooned in a fairy-tale dacha, but here in a hotel that smelled of diesel fuel, with little of interest to eat, nothing to read, the task ahead postponed indefinitely, and only their illicit and accidental romance to occupy them.

  She said to him,

  “Davy Dumpling,

  Boil him in a pot,

  Sugar him and butter him,

  And eat him while he’s hot.”

  He answered, “Davy’s hot.”

  So they went upstairs to bed, though not out of passion this time, but out of regret and a certain variety of terror. And this time, because perversity is perverse, the sexual undertow was more unfathomable--in the meaning of the word that connotes not just the hidden distance of depths but their secret nature as well.

  Halfway back to lower Bloomsbury, she decided it was time to go. Go for good. She got off the Northern Line at Camden and crossed to the other side of the platform to head back to Hampstead. She could never regain her sense of moral decorum, but at least, with effort, she could act as if she had. That would have to do. And surely the first thing, or anyway the best thing, that she could think of to do was to evacuate herself out of John’s digs. Get the last piece of luggage, get out, get out, and then worry about the next step later.

  She didn’t want to run into him, so she waited until dusk, when his presence would be marked by the switching on of lamps. When she noted no such illumination, she let herself in and went upstairs.

  In just a day or two he had managed to get another contractor, though they had not shown up that day or she’d have seen them leave. The pantry wall was now down entirely, and the brick fire wall beyond had been scrubbed with an iron brush. The bricks looked perky, very period, as if baked to order by Martha Stewart. A few sawn bits of timber, the beginning structure of a staircase that would wrap about the bricks and head illegally to the roof. She wished it all well. A house gives up its ghosts every time some window is punched out, some molding is removed, some faded wallpaper is stripped or painted over.

  She gave thought to placing a well-aimed kick at the sorrowing face of Scrooge/Rudge. Deal with it, she told him. Either stay in your house or get out of it. Just move over the threshold. How long can you stand there threatened by the bed-curtains?

  Only, of course, maybe they weren’t bed-curtains threatening him, but the shroud of the Jervsey creature.

  Either way, get out, old man. Remove yourself to Brazil or the Punjab or the Antipodes. There isn’t enough room in this place for the both of us to be haunted.

  She threw open her suitcase and pulled things from the closet. Things she had left there in between visits. Her state of mind was becoming grim. As long as she was going to be here alone, she might as well steep herself in it. Looking for some music to wallow by, she found a CD of Die Winterreise and immediately began to hanker after its harrowing sonorities.

  She folded her clothes with unusual slowness, unwilling, she guessed, to leave very quickly—why? To listen to the music? She even pressed the straps of her bra together and inverted one cup inside the other, for maximum efficiency. The fourth song came up in its sequence: “Erstarrung.” She checked the libretto to make sure she was remembering the translation correctly. “Numbness.” How strange that numbness should be given such an aggressive setting, the piano thrumming percussively rather than with languorous legatos. As if Schubert’s idea of the nature of numbness were best characterized not by paralysis but by obsessive motion and iteration, ceaseless noise and distraction.

  She heard:

  “Ich such im Schnee vergebens

  Nach ihrer Tritte Spur,

  Wo sie an meinem Arme

  Durchstrich dei grüne Flur.

  Ich will den Boden küssen,

  Durchdringen Eis und Schnee

  Mit meinen heißen Tränen,

  Bis ich die Erde seh.”

  And then she found the text of, whose was it, Wilhelm Müller’s poem, and sat on the edge of the bed, one leg over a knee and kicking in a bored way, and read:

  Vainly I search in the snow

  for the foo
tprint she left

  when arm in arm with me she

  passed along the green meadow.

  I want to kiss the ground,

  pierce ice and snow

  with my hot tears

  until I see the soil beneath.

  But the wanting, she thought, the wanting was an active thing, not a numbness. It was the world that was numb with cold and snow, not the singer. The singer was fiercely alive in a dead environment.

  She heard the key in the lock and the door open, and sat up straight, determined to be neither frightened nor hostile. “John?” said a voice.

  “He’s not here,” said Winnie.

  “Oh.” Allegra paused at the door of the small room, holding something to her breast. A book? “But you are. I thought you’d gone.”

  “Nearly. As you can see.”

  “Well.” Allegra seemed to be trying to decide what to do. Winnie did not get up. “I suppose,” said Allegra, “I can put to you what I was about to put to John, with some irritation.”

  “Put what to me?”

  Allegra lowered her arm. Not books, but two tiles. She held them out. “I am clearing up the old work, ready to begin building the frames, and there are two extra plates on my drying rack in the kitchen.”

  Winnie squinted at one. “So?” she said, and then looked at the other. “Oh,” she said in a different voice.

  “Winnie. Have you been in my flat without my permission? Have you found a key that John had tucked away somewhere? Have you been letting yourself in?”

  “I don’t know about these. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “This is your symbol.” Allegra pointed to the slashed cross that had been scraped and dug into the medium with a sharp implement. The motions had been swift and imprecise, and the hard edges were rucked back from the furrow.

  “It’s not my symbol, I don’t have a ‘symbol.’ Leave me alone.”

  “And then these aren’t your big hands?” said Allegra, pointing to the other tablet.