Lost (17 page)

He avoided the main office in the City whenever possible. If he had to be home in England, he booked himself comatose with Latin American film festivals or lecture series at the ICA. Sometimes when Winnie was expected they'd schedule a motoring trip on the Continent, conducting haphazard investigations of the remains of Cistercian abbeys, or the Bavarian follies of mad King Ludwig, or, one wonderful time, vineyards in the Loire. John would read the guidebooks aloud while Winnie drove.

They made a comfortably unromantic team, their tempers strained only by Winnie's preference for settling on a daily destination every morning and booking rooms ahead. Winnie knew that John enjoyed romantic enthusiasms elsewhere, and by long custom the discussion of it was avoided. It didn't impinge. Winnie's relationship with John wasn't a relationship. It was cousinhood, and stepcousinhood at that.

It was a relief to see that John's clocks weren't going
00:00 00:00
at her. But the hour was late, too late for Winnie to hope to get Gillian, John's office staffer, on the line. Unless, of course, there was a crisis in the Baltic, in which case Gill might be working late. But the phone there just rang its double pulse, over and over, unanswered.

John had friends, and Winnie knew them, but generally she preferred to keep her distance. How much easier for stepcousins to maintain a quiet truce about the nature of things, keeping everything informal and vague. How much easier not having to negotiate debts and favors, lies and silences, the rates of emotional exchange that would occur at the consolidation of two social systems into one.

A gentleman, John honored her feelings about this by forgoing invitations to soirées and drinks parties when she touched down. Obliquely, Winnie knew about Allegra Lowe, the lead so-called girlfriend, who did arts therapy of some sort, and about various university roommates now in places like Barnes and Wimbledon and Motspur Park. Their numbers were written in pencil in the back of John's directory. But she liked standing apart from all that. So, for her own comfort tonight, she decided to forgo approaching anyone in her age bracket and instead to phone John's friend and financial adviser, a divorced man nearing retirement. Malcolm Rice lived in St. John's Wood, enjoying the chilly splendor of a big semidetached stucco house that sported too many French windows for the central heating to cope with.

She recognized the voice that answered the phone as that of Rice himself, since he spoke the digits of the phone number she had dialed, a phone habit probably dating from the days when local operators connected every call. She found herself slipping into a complementary formality whether she wanted to or not. “Mr. Rice, please.”

“Malcolm Rice speaking.”

“Good evening—Malcolm. It's John Comestor's friend Winifred here.” A latent Englishness—she heard it—came up in her voice, unbidden. It was an involuntary echo of her grandfather Rudge's speech, not the American party game of attempting the superior spoken English of the English. “Sorry to bother you at home, Malcolm. I hope you're well. I've just arrived this evening on a day flight from Boston, and I'd thought that John was expecting me, but he seems to be away and the place is torn up by the builders.”

“I see,” said Malcolm Rice, as if sniffing a request to crash at his place. Stalling, preparing a line of defense. “I see.”

She added, “I'm perfectly comfortable here, but I'm surprised that John changed his plans without telling me. Do you know where he is, or when he'll be back?”

“I couldn't say. Do you need to come round for a drink?”

“No, no, I'm fine. But I'll hope to see you sometime.” She hoped not to see him at all, and she hung up. As she unpacked her toiletries, she thought: Was Malcolm Rice's
I couldn't say
intended to mean that he didn't know where John was, or that he wasn't about to reveal it? Could John actually be off on a love adventure in Majorca or Tunis? Or had Winnie underestimated him, and had he and the deadly Allegra Lowe decided finally to elope?

Uninterested in Tesco's mild curry over pears, she took herself out to the street to hunt down what supper she could. She checked out various bistros in the steep glary center of Hampstead. She settled on the only restaurant with a couple of free tables and went in. Filled with chattery diners trying to be heard above the mood music, the place reeked of cigarette smoke and a fennely
saucisson
.

Winnie was tired and unsettled about John's absence. But she was here to work, and work she would. She tried to think not of
herself but of Wendy Pritzke, and of how London might seem to a Wendy just passing through on her way to the haunted Carpathians. She didn't yet know who Wendy Pritzke would turn out to be, but whoever she was, she was agreeably lustier than Winnie. Wendy Pritzke would have lavishly thick, spiritually profound hair, not Winnie's lackluster fringe. What would Wendy order? Everything bloody and garlicky, that foul sausage in its ditch water juices. A beer. Whereas Winnie told the Italian waiter with the drooping eyelids to bring her a salad and a wine. The salad arrived, frills of green doused with vinaigrette and arranged around a single withered olive, accompanied by a sad little Chardonnay. It seemed ridiculous and fitting, and she wolfed it down, wishing she'd brought a book to read, or a newspaper.

Over the years Winnie had earned a name for writing short novels about kids with limited access to magic. Her books were early chapter books, designed to help third-graders develop confidence in reading. The circumscription of children's lives had suited her. She could avoid the dreadful and the absurd, she could be funny, she could poke a moral at her readers when they weren't looking. Problems could be solved in sixty-four pages. Pushing herself—maybe prematurely, she realized—she wanted to find in the character of Wendy Pritzke some more tension. Give her a task more Herculean than domestic, and see how she'd make out. Winnie also wanted to see, of herself, how she'd fare at starting a book whose end she couldn't predict.

What was Wendy Pritzke doing in London, with her vague, sentimental morbidity? She was a novelist obsessed with the story of Jack the Ripper. Winnie didn't know if Jack the Ripper would end up being a character or a red herring in some domestic trial of Wendy's. The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.

“Looking bleary. You're ready for another glass of wine.”

Britt, what was his name, Chervis or Chendon or Chimms, something out of Noël Coward. Another pal of John's, from the same staircase at Oxford or the same club or posting.

“No, I'm ready for the check,” she said, striving to be civil. “Sit down for a minute, though, if you want.”

“I thought I'd ask you to join my party.”

Winnie didn't glance over—did his party include Allegra Lowe?—as not to know somehow preserved her own American right to occupy this worn red plush English chair. “Just arrived, and the time differences,” she said inconclusively, then brightly, “but, Britt, I haven't seen John yet.”

“No more have I. Is he expected?”

“He's always expected. That's part of his public relations profile, isn't it?”

“Ah,” said Britt, “you have me there. At the end of the day, though, what's the difference between public relations and private identity?”

She had no idea of the answer in general, let alone what he meant about John. She rose to leave so as not to appear to have been stood up. She kept her shoulder turned against the corner of the room from which Britt had emerged. Insincerely she promised to phone him, and made her way out with a deliberate lack of speed, feeling bovine. La Pritzke under the same circumstance would have bounced, she decided. But too bad.

She went up and down Hampstead High Street, stained a savage yellow by the street lamps. In English winds no brisker than usual for the season, Winnie dallied before the windows of the shops. Though it was only the day after Hallowe'en—only November first, for the love of God!—the candle shop was pushing beeswax candles striped to resemble candy canes.

She bought a Wispa before she could talk herself out of it and ate it with an air of defiance. When she got back to Rudge House and climbed the two flights of steps to John's place, which occupied the whole top floor, she threw the wrapper in the pile of rubbish the contractors had left. Then she felt abusive of John's hospitality, especially since something was, if not wrong, certainly out of the ordinary, so she hustled all the trash into a white plastic garbage bag. A bin liner, that is. A pipe began to knock, someone in a flat downstairs using a protesting shower, and she was startled momentarily. The phone rang once, but stopped before she could get it. Not yet 11
P.M
. here, which meant her body was remembering it was not yet six in Boston. Far too early for bed.

In his bedroom John kept a small television set, which with grave propriety they always shifted to the sitting room while she was visiting. She opened the door to his room, suddenly thinking she might find his corpse swinging from a beam, naked but for black net stockings, one of those accidental hangings resulting from a mismanaged exercise in autoeroticism. No corpse was there. No TV either. The room was orderly, no sign of panic or haste. Well, John was the type who would stop to straighten the bedclothes before leaping out of a burning building.

She remembered the other morning arriving at Forever Families, and the wreck of furniture in the community room there. As if something had flown up at the darkened windows, terrifying the families away.

She turned to leave his bedroom. This room had never meant anything to her, of course, but in general the bedrooms of single men had a certain seedy danger even when kept orderly, and appointed with good eighteenth-century furniture. Her eye was caught by the mid-Victorian portrait of a gentleman in his declining years. She knew the piece well; John liked to display it above his
chest of drawers. The plate screwed into the oak frame, which was overwrought with gilded acanthus leaves and pears, read S
CROOGE
. But she knew from being shown it by John that someone had once scribbled on the painting's back
NOT Scrooge but O. R
. Meaning Ozias Rudge.

Being familiar with the painting, she rarely gave it notice, but tonight she was jumpy and obeyed her instincts to focus on what came to mind. So she looked at it again, its occluded figure hardly more than silhouetted against patches of icy blues and pale browns.

The man stood in a curiously modern pose, anticipating the drama of Pre-Raphaelite compositions. Or perhaps this painting did date from the era of Holman Hunt, and the features of the figure had been cribbed from some older, more conventional portrait. The effect was more illustrative than biographic. Seen from below, the figure faced the viewer at a looming slant, one hand out to steady himself on the doorsill of the threshold he was crossing. In the room behind him, an unseen fire in a grate cast up a dramatic blue backlight. On the right, a scrape the color of bone seemed to imply a bed-curtain, but it was torn from its rings in two places and the fabric had the gloomy effect of an apparition raising its arms over a headless neck. The piece had no special merit except in its sensationalism. If this was indeed Scrooge, those must be the bed-curtains that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come said would be stolen from around his sorry corpse. Or were they a mediocre painter's failed attempt at the limning of
a ghost? Whatever. The old man staggered toward the viewer, but his eyes were unfocused and his knees about to unhinge. A lovely tortured Scrooge, if such it really was; if, improbably, it really was the portrait of a relative, it was an insult. Most likely the annotation on the back had been done by some wag disappointed to have inherited so little from the old miser. Scrooge, or Rudge? It didn't matter. Whoever it was, he
didn't know where John Comestor was, either. Or if he had seen anything, he wasn't telling; his eyes were trained inward, at some abomination in his own mental universe.

Enough of this. She was working herself up into a good case of the jitters. She located the TV eventually in the kitchen, underneath a drop cloth. The workers had been keeping an eye on something while they worked, or ate their sandwiches. She dragged it into the lounge and propped it on the massive Iberian credenza that probably had housed the salvers and spoons of some order of nuns now extinct. But before she could find the remote, she dialed her number at home to check her messages, in case John had called while she was in the air.

The voice of the recording told Winnie that she had seven new messages. The first five were hang-ups, worrying in their own right, as most callers who didn't want to leave a message slammed down the receiver quickly once they realized it was a recording. Not to do so was in itself a message: This is a hang-up: I know you're not there, and you know I know, but you don't know who I am.

Maybe computerized telemarketing calls, she asked herself, or Ironcorp, responding at last?

The sixth call was from Winnie's agent, asking how long was she going to be away, and when could they expect the new manuscript; her editor would love to begin to breathe word of a second Ophelia Marley book in the pipeline even if it was a year upstream yet. “This is the novel?” said the agent with dubious enthusiasm, having pressed for a
Dark Side of the Zodiac II
in one form or another. “Your Romanian book, isn't it?” He sounded defeated already. A month in Romania is hardly
A Year in Provence,
he meant. Winnie deleted the message. Whether it would be a second book by Ophelia Marley or a first-ever Winifred Rudge adult novel, she wasn't sure. She still couldn't know if she would be
able to write the story of Wendy Pritzke. Nor if there was any story there to be written.

The seventh voice was familiar but newly so, and she couldn't place it at first. Male. “You mentioned you've suffered a breach of security; what is
that
all about? Are you cowering behind a potted palm with nothing to defend yourself but a plastic spatula from Williams-Sonoma? If so, come out, come out, wherever you are. We're going to have a meal at Legal Seafoods over near M.I.T., and we'd love you to join us. We'll tell you what you missed during the second half of the indoctrination session. And by the way, I'm cute but I'm
real
dumb. Only in my fourth-grade classroom this morning did I put you together with the W. Rudge who wrote
Crazy Hassan's End-of-Season Flying Carpet Sale
. My students die over that one.” He left a number. It was that Adrian Moscou of the Forever Families meeting. He was feeling guilty over having blown her cover. And well he might. Still, it was decent of him to call.