Lost (35 page)

“Give me an example.”

“Can't. I don't know you well enough; you might cut me off entirely. There, that's suspicion for you, see? And I—” She did not say, I like you, nor, worse, I need you, or someone.

“Oh, go ahead. There are only so many sentences you can stop in midstride before you yourself stop in midstride.”

She tried to smile wanly at that, but it was too true to ignore. “All right. Let's leave aside all the business of a haunting. The ghost of Jack the Ripper, the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghost of Ozias Rudge, the ghost of some poor murdered housemaid from the early nineteenth century.” He had heard none of this before; he bravely refrained from flinching. She rushed on. “I'm a hack and I'm slightly haunted by my own professional skills—it's an occupational hazard. I accept that. I can't get through to my main character and so my novel is stalled. I accept that. I accept that I'm driving the neighbors crazy. Even the dotty old bat on the ground floor has begun to avoid me. Fair enough. But why do I get the feeling that my cousin's disappearance is a conspiracy against me?”

“So that's really what you're overwrought about.”

“Overwrought implies hysteria. I'm not overwrought, I'm just wrought. I feel as if his office is hiding something from me. The whole thing makes me feel paranoid, and then the world is all—oh—a shrill lemon color, a place without comforting shadows, or without clear lights. I can't think of the metaphor. Music has no charm to soothe this wild beast.”

“Sounds like depression to me.”

“Yes, doesn't it?”

“But could you be right? That there
is
a conspiracy?”

“You met me at a professional clairvoyant's,” she reminded him. “Doesn't that suggest I'm a bit fringy? You're there buying your tools for academic research, I'm there getting a seer's evaluation of a horse blanket? Why shouldn't I be delusional too?”

They had walked out of Cowcross Street and meandered along, aimlessly heading deeper into the City. Finally, she repeated, “I'll prove it to you, if you like,” as they paused on a street corner, unsure whether they were continuing together, but not ready to press on, nor to break off.

There was a phone box on the corner. “I could call and be put off. You could see that. If you need proof.”

“Well, if you think it's a conspiracy against you,” he said, testing her, “I could call. Let me. Shall I?”

“Why not? What is there to lose?”

What was there to lose?

He had coins and dropped them in. She told him the number by heart. The connection took a little while to make. She stood, struggling with all manner of perturbations.

Was there anything in the literature that ascertained for certain that Jack the Ripper was male? Could the Ripper have been a woman? Why would a woman kill other women? And if Jack the Ripper was a woman, could this shroud have been hers?

“Yes, I'll wait,” said Irv Hausserman. He leaned against the Plexiglas edge of what passed for a phone box—a boxless phone box, these days—obscuring the advertisements of hookers and lady companions and their phone numbers and special talents. The edge of Ripper territory, still served by prostitutes all these decades later.

She didn't want to appear too eager. She looked at a full-color advertisement of a dominatrix, a card about four by six, affixed to the glass with gum tack. The woman was laced into a corset of black leather. Her color was high and her eyes were hidden by a bar of
black ink put in by the printer's studio. On either side of the photo her services were listed. Psychological Manipulation. Strict Discipline. Inescapable Bondage. Fetish Enhancement. Intense Torment Scenarios. She carried a riding crop like a cowgirl about to enter a bullpen. The typeface was Ye Olde Gothick.

What if this were Jenkins's daughter, her eyes hidden behind that privacy-protection device? What if Jenkins stopped to use this phone and saw her? Would he recognize her? Would he dare to call the number?

“So what's the deal?” she said belligerently, poking Hausserman in the shoulder.

“They said to hold the line,” he answered, “they're putting me through.”

hears the voice of his Beatrice before he sees her—by a good few lines, if Winnie remembered rightly—she heard the voice of John Comestor before she laid eyes on him. She didn't hear what he was saying, just his voice, his real living voice, around the iron pillar of a glossily overrestored late-Victorian pub off Fleet Street. She called out to him, “John,” before she saw him.

The room full of lunching account execs—lunching on pints, that is—and he there, no fuller or realer than ever, banter to the bartender on his lips—then he was turning to Winnie. Apology and defense and, was it, a sort of mock inquisitiveness in his features. Cataloging these emotional stances helped her ignore things like the diverting color of his eyes, the killer-lover haircut, et cetera. “Who could

ever have guessed all
this,
” he said to her, and leaned forward. She was impatient with relief and anger, and so full of contradictions that her embrace in return felt like a kind of whiplash. She stiffened and yielded simultaneously.

“It's far too noisy here,” she said. “Since when have pubs become so upmarket?”

“The rah-rah nineties. Have a quick bottoms-up and we'll find someplace else.”

“I don't know that I care to.” But she accepted a pint of Murphy's. They settled in the ambiguous light of frosted glass. “Cheers,” she said, as if daring him to feel cheerful in the presence of her well-regulated fury.

Up to the challenge, he. “Here's to us.”

“And,” she added, “you have a lot of explaining to do.”

“Not as much as all that. If you give it a think.”

“I'll have a word with you. And the word is: why?”

A door opened in the wall; on a tray, out came jacket potatoes steaming and starchy, both moist and dry. A reek of Branston pickle. On an abandoned napkin that the busboy had overlooked lay an old hunk of cheese cracked like the glaze in an heirloom plate. She could harvest any moment and stuff her senses with nonsense, and that was what nonsense was: a kind of antimatter, a sexy sleight of hand that deflected attention from the urgent world.

“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?”