Lost (16 page)

She could see it in her mind. It seethed with that vitality particular to stories. The swallow in her bird's-eye view circled about in haphazard fashion, admiring her ur-London. It included Primrose Hill, where the Twilight Barking of
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
started. Here was a street in Chelsea called Cherry Tree Lane, along whose sidewalks the perennial English nanny-goddess Mary Poppins hustled her charges. Here was Paddington Station, in whose airy concourse a bear called Paddington had been lost, then found. Here was Kensington Gardens, Rackham's bleak version, with sprites and root goblins just out of sight, and Peter Pan, the original lost and abandoned child, a baby dressed in oak leaves, still crouching there even when thousands of mourners were depositing floral bouquets at the death of Princess Diana.

London was a trove of the magic of childhood, for anyone who had read as obsessively as Winnie had done before the age of twelve. Pull back just a bit, and more of England became implicated: a bit of river out toward Oxford, on which a rat and a mole were busy messing
about in a boat. Peter Rabbit stealing under some stile in the Lake District. Somewhere on this island, was it in Kent, the Hundred Aker Wood, with those figures who have yet to learn that sawdusty toys die deaths as certainly as children do. The irrepressible Camelot, always bursting forth out of some hummock or other. Robin Hood in his green jerkin, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and just underneath it all, places only slightly less England, the dreary improbabilities of Alice's Wonderland, the bosky dells of the theocracy of Narnia, the wind-tortured screes and wastes of Middle-earth.

The memory of the power of this early reading was part of what had prompted her to write for children. The person who would become a lifelong reader should stumble upon very rich stuff first, early, and often. It lived within, a most agreeable kind of haunting.

And magic England was endlessly reinvented, modern masters like Philip Pullman and Sylvia Waugh and J. K. Rowling piling it on with their daemons and their Mennyms and their Muggles. All those books with side-by-side worlds, forever springing leaks into one another.

The only Dickens that had ever really appealed to Winnie Rudge was
A Christmas Carol
. Partly the family legend, to be sure, but also it was the Dickens story most like a children's book. The door knocker as Marley's face! What did Scrooge deserve, if he hadn't shaped up? To be left out of life, beyond the locked windows of the nursery like Peter Pan, or worse—

 

00:00

00:00

 

She startled herself awake. The security alarm going off again? No. It was the airplane window; it was streaked with sudsy blood.
She wrenched her neck, catapulting away, across the aisle. Or perhaps she had screamed. Fretta the flight attendant poked her head from the galley. “Everything all right, I hope?” she said brightly.

Winnie pointed to the window.

“Oh, that. Ground crew de-icing the plane. A warm substance called glycol or something.”

Pink, medical, watery. Winnie stood up and said, “I hope the restrooms are usable?”

“Oh, yes. We're not cleared for takeoff in this weather, so make yourself comfy.”

She stumbled to the toilet. She wanted the anonymity of takeoff. She wanted another London for a template, not one in which the promises of childhood lived on so adroitly to mock. She sat on the plastic seat and thought about it. Kenneth Grahame wrote about the idylls of childhood in
Dream Days
and
The Wind in the Willows,
and his son Alistair's death on a railroad track was probably suicide. One of the original Lost Boys for whom James Barrie had invented
Peter Pan
had also killed himself. Christopher Milne, the Christopher Robin of his father's tales, whinged in print up until his death. The curse of childhood fancy.

She pushed the lever. Power flush. The two neat ends of the toilet rolls, side by side, flapped their white paper hands at her in the powerful disruption of air, as if waving her back to her seat. This airplane is jinxed, she thought. “The Haunted Loo.” Just my luck.

She dozed fitfully again during takeoff, and only woke when a lukewarm breakfast thing was slung at her by Fretta, who seemed now to resent that the plane was required to carry any passengers at all. Winnie tore at the shrink-wrapped breakfast cheese and managed to spill the indifferent coffee. Later, walking about the cabin to wake herself up and shake the bad feelings down, she stopped to
peer out a window in one of the emergency doors. Perhaps the flight was already halfway there, accelerated by Hurricane Gretl. Nothing to see but the anonymity of clouds.

 

Nothing to see but blue. No islands or boats, no smaller aircraft veering away beneath them. Just three or four thin layers of cloud, unraveling like freshly laundered shrouds between her triple-socked feet and the seamless blue floor of the sea.

Standing still at 550 miles an hour.

Her London would be a way stop, and so she didn't bother to map it in the mind. There were a few friends to see, some last-minute purchases to make. She had Jack the Ripper on her mind, and wanted to look about Whitechapel and Aldgate, in the event there was a book in it for her. With her tendency to cheery morbidity she had fastened on a lane to the north of Whitechapel High Street, a loop of passage called Thrawl Street. None of the nine murdered women had been found there, but it was a central point around which several of the murders could be arrayed. Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Annie Chapman, and Mary Kelly. Anyway, the words
Thrawl Street
appealed to her.

She went back to her seat. While she was gone, a woman had moved into the empty seat across the aisle. A teenage mother in a sequined cowboy blouse, coddling a fussy lump of infant wrapped in butter mint blankets. Where had this mountain mama gotten the cash to fly? She was a one-woman
crisis, ringing the call bell every three or four minutes.
The bottle, could you warm it? The bottle, it's too warm now, could you try another? Don't you have no apple juice?
The mother had a dirty face and wore her exhaustion proudly. Her baby was her license to be demanding. Perhaps no one had ever listened to her whining before.

You had to feel sorry for the sprout, though, and didn't blame it for fussing. How its mother brayed!
How big of a deal could it be to crank up the heat in this frigging place? It's, like, freezing
.

Thank God for the airline magazine, she thought, diving into it with phony enthusiasm.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

 

She woke with a crick in her neck, for the moment thinking, perversely, of Mabel Quackenbush. Mabel giving her the bum's rush out of Forever Families! The indignity. But in her sleepy mind Winnie also thought of another Mabel, the dull friend of little Alice in Wonderland. Alice, frightened at the monstrousness of Wonderland, wondered if she'd been changed in the night, turned into someone different—maybe Mabel, who knew such a very little.

How do you know, waking out of your nepenthean pardon, that you have returned back to the prison sentence of your own individuality, and not someone else's?

The flight came in over Windsor Castle almost a full hour early.
Winnie watched with the usual anxiety. Now the landscape was still seen from the air, for one more instant, and now the bare thorny trees around Heathrow were springing up like pop-up figures against the horizon, snapping the third dimension back into the world. It made her feel nauseated and safe at the same time.

She stumbled up the jetway and was herded into the correct immigration line by a stout unsmiling Asian woman buttoned too tightly into a uniform. The immigration officer glanced through her passport, unimpressed by its stamps and seals and page-broad visas, and he said simply, crisply, “Reason for your visit?”

She must not be awake; for a moment she couldn't understand the question.

“Business or holiday?” he continued as if she were drunk, or slow.

“Just passing through.”

He didn't even bother to ask her final destination, but that was fine with her as, in so many ways, she didn't know it.

Since the Piccadilly Line originated at Heathrow she easily found herself a seat. Now there was nothing to do but sit back and wait to see John, and plan out more of the weeks to come, to cram them full of artifice and nonsense, as if the more detail, the more significant. She worked up some jovial remarks so she could enter with a flourish.
And the choice of airplane movies! Keeping the sound off, I watched something done by the Muppets—a version of
Madame Bovary,
near as I could tell
.

She changed at Leicester Square and then alighted the Tube at Hampstead Station. She pushed with the evening commuters into the lift that heaved them up, away from the smell of Northern Line burning rubber brake pads, to disgorge them onto Hampstead High Street. From there it was a short slog up the hill at Heath Street and left into Holly Bush Steps, the steep stairs cut into
Holly Mount. Winnie's suitcase and leather catchall and computer slowed her down, like physical manifestations of jet lag. Then, around the corner and out of sight of the neighborhood: the house in its secluded half-square, part gracious courtyard and part car park. Brown brick like old puddings, a somewhat squashed-looking fanlight over the door, small bleak flush-framed windows, flecked with the impurities in the glass, and double-flecked with the speckling rain.

 

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

 

Well, there was the western wind, bringing the first bad breath of Hurricane Gretl, and the small rain too, but nothing would bring that lover back.

She rang the buzzer first, to alert him, and slid her key into the lock. She stepped over a mound of mail on the floor. The stairwell smelled of prawns and Dettol. She paused, fixed her hair, and arranged a less-tired look on her face, and went on up. At the top, a few plastic drop cloths were folded on the carpet by the bristly hedgehog shoe scraper. She pushed open the door with one hand, calling, “Brace yourself; sadly, it's only me.” He was not there at once to help with the luggage; strange. The foyer looked curiously dark and chilly. Struggling with her bags on the threshold, she saw no note on the hall table. Yet the place seemed full of something anticipating her, the way her own house on Huxtable Street had seemed, was it just yesterday? “John?” she said, and went in.

there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit, little to plan a meal around but tinned pears and a jar of Tesco's mild curry. The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves. The museum-quality nineteenth-century prints of bugs and wild boars and roses leaned against one another in a corner of the parlor. The kitchen was being torn up, and plaster dust had settled uniformly in any room without a door. Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John? How come?

She swept up empty lager cans and the remains of the triangular
packaging of ready-made sandwiches—tuna and sweet corn, chicken tikka, egg mayonnaise—proof of workers on-site, as recently as today, probably.

The answerphone was unplugged, she saw. But John had known she was coming, he'd known for weeks.

She flipped through piles of mail hunting for a note. Nothing. The postmarks went back eight, ten days. Could he have been called away with such urgency that there was no time for a note? John Comestor was in shipping insurance, specializing in the approval of policies to the aging merchant fleets that served the Baltic. He assessed the dredging of harbors, the temperament of the labor market, any pending legislation that bore on trade. He converted into cost analyses and risk thresholds the slim anecdotal information he could glean over glasses of vodka in dockside shacks. He hated working up the final reports, but he liked the vodka in dockside shacks, liked the smell of diesel, fish, and intrigue.