Lost (42 page)

“What? You're bringing her a picnic hamper? Just because the hospital cuisine isn't up to snuff?”

“No. Underneath the food. A tape recorder.”

“What for?”

“Come,” he said. “You'll see.”

 

They made their way gingerly along the sidewalk, the paving stones plastered with wet leaves. Winnie said, “I can't imagine why you're doing this. Why you went to see her.”

“Can't you really?” He looked at her almost fondly. “Want to take a guess?”

“Oh, that?” She felt horrible, ancient, an exhumed mummy herself. The waistband on her panties was unraveling, and she had a charley horse in her left calf. Also a lump in her throat. “I told you I'm not free for a sentimental attachment.”

“What a lovely old-fashioned way to put it. And anyway, that makes you all the more novel to be with. Just in case.”

She felt cold and superior. “You're following me about because I'm the only citizen of this modern world, at least of your acquaintance, to claim any truck with ghosts. You're examining me like a specimen. Maybe you'll have some flash of inspiration about how the medieval mind worked. Or are you intending to trot out a sidebar to some newspaper piece, or work me into the preface of your book, to give it commercial appeal?
Hauntings in the Twenty-First Century
?”

“You know, you are occasionally paranoid to the point of being delusional yourself. Would you like me to find you a room here at the Royal Free Hospital, as long as we're on the premises, so you can take a rest cure?

“Not,” he added, holding open the door for her, “that your commercial instincts are off, at all. Mostly I do modest little essays in professional journals no one reads except professionals. Would that I had your grasp of what sold.”

They rode a lift to the seventh floor: Health Services for Elderly People. Outside the elevator doors, Winnie paused and put her hand out to stay Irv, for a moment, as she readied herself to see Mrs. Maddingly. The throbbing of heat and ventilation systems, the hush of elevators rushing in their shafts, it all made a ringing in the air, as if the building had tinnitus.

They passed through the doors in the Berry ward, one of four
arms reaching out from the heart of the building. The linoleum floor was the color of white coffee; the air smelled, inevitably, of overboiled brussels sprouts. There was a quiet buzz of competence in the nurses' station overlooking a central ward with multiple beds, all filled, none with anyone familiar.

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?