Lost (26 page)

“Oh, I'm fine here,” said Winnie. “If John calls you, tell him that I thank him for leaving me the house to myself for a change. I'm getting some good work done.” The notion that John might talk to Allegra before attempting to reach her. The very notion of it. “I wouldn't be as kind to you in the same circumstances,” she added. “That wind.”

“Oh, it is fierce, isn't it? My late-afternoon client from Hampstead Garden Suburb called to cancel because trees are down and the power's been cut. You should see the traffic coming up the high street. A river of lights rising out of Belsize Park, and the wipers going mad. The rain's just too heavy for them to do much good.” She dunked her tea bag a couple of times and then let it sink to the bottom. “Shall we sit in the front room? I'll dry off before it's time to get wet again.”

“Maybe it'll stop.”

“Not till tomorrow morning, if then, according to Radio Four.” Allegra executed a beautifully balanced maneuver, setting her teacup on the copy of
The Black Prince
while at the same time lifting and positioning an ankle, heronlike, under her rear end before she sat down. “You're reading Iris Murdoch, or is that John?”

“It's his copy,” said Winnie. She didn't want to talk about John or who was reading what. She went over to her computer and
thought about turning it off. All its little electronic brains stewing about Wendy Pritzke in London, Wendy deluding herself over sensational Jack the Ripper nonsense while trying to avoid the more serious issues ahead in Romania. If late-nineteenth-century electrification brought a new grade of shadows into the world, computers ushered in a new category of ambiguity and untetheredness. All the possible lies and revelations that their million internal monkeys might type! “Did you know,” she said, “there was some notion at one point that a cousin of Virginia Woolf's was the Ripper? Someone who had delusions, a manic-depressive maybe, or a schizoid. She with her fine-grade madness was related to a cousin who I guess killed himself. Two versions of the family malady.”

“Are you writing about Virginia Woolf now?”

“I'm thinking about writing about a woman interested in Jack the Ripper.”

“I see.” Polite distaste.

And Wendy Pritzke sets her hooker revenge story
in your house,
Allegra,
in your kitchen
. A butcher boy delivers his merchandise right where you do your gluey handprints. Winnie didn't say this aloud. Instead, getting up to turn off the computer, she said, “You were going to tell me about your oddest experience doing those hand molds. Remember?”

“I do,” said Allegra. She laughed, but not prettily, not throatily. “You don't really want to hear it.”

“Oh, sure I do.”

“It was so silly. People can be perverse, when you come right down to it.”

“In their idiosyncrasies they reveal themselves, if they're lucky enough to have any.”

“A couple of parents had a premature baby who died, that's all,” said Allegra, looking away. “They were friends of a cousin of mine
and I couldn't squirm out of it. I had to go to the morgue in the hospital and take the mold there.”

“Surely that's against the law?”

“People bend around laws when it comes to times like that. Who cares, really?”

“You should move to Massachusetts, the baby trade is very strong there. You'd have no end of work. What did it look like?”

After a while, Allegra said, “Well, in the twentieth week the thumb can oppose the other fingers.”

“I see,” said Winnie. “Handy. No pun intended,” she added.

“I should think not.”

“I went to school at Skidmore,” said Winnie. “We got the Albany papers sometimes. Once I read a historical feature about a baby dying back in the early twenties. Some dark-haired teenager walked into a post office to mail a package going to an address just around the corner. Later the postmistress remembered the customer, but she'd disappeared. The package turned out to be a naked, lifeless girl child born three days earlier. She'd been smothered, and mailed with a five-dollar bill to help defray funeral expenses. No one could track down her mother so she was buried at the city's expense under a headstone calling the infant Parcella Post.”

“Winnie,” said Allegra, “it takes an awful lot to put me off my appetite, but
really
.”

Was there something about Jack the Ripper and his prostitutes, something about the babies that came and didn't come? What was it? Later.

She reached toward the off switch, a little panel to be depressed into the side of the screen. As her hand hovered, the endless snow-falling screen saver suddenly froze. (Screen saver of “The Dead,” she called it, after Joyce's last line.) Every corner, every centimeter of grid filled up with random figures,

For an instant she thought the image had mirrored the marks on the pantry wall. But it was gone too quickly to be sure. Like most clues. “Oh, Christ,” she said.

The lights flickered and went out. “What are you trying to store in that thing, you're draining the power out of all of Ham and High,” said Allegra drolly, getting up behind her. “Not enough memory. You've power-surged North London.”

“I just got a start. It's nothing. You've seen computer paralysis before, I'm sure.”

The pounding began again. “Oh, is that the noise?” said Allegra calmly. The room was furred gray, darkening as they spoke. “Is that what you were complaining of? And well you should. Who could write stories while that row is thundering on?”

“But it's not in the kitchen,” said Winnie. “Before, it was in the kitchen.” Despite herself she reached out and gripped Allegra's elbow. “Now it's in the hall.”

“Calm down,” said Allegra. “I know you're excitable; just relax.”

They went into the dark foyer. The thudding was out in the stairwell, something hitting the door to the flat. “There's a back entrance, isn't there?” Allegra said conversationally.

“No, there isn't, how could there be? The back of the house rears up against the back of yours, as you yourself explained to me. This is the only way in.”

A voice, a human voice out there. “Damn.”

“Mac?” said Winnie with relief, and went to the door. “What are you up to now?” She turned the handle. The door was locked—from the outside. She twisted the knob.

“I'm driving nails,” said Mac from the other side of the door, “but the light's just gone out and I've bashed my fecking thumb.”

“What are you nailing?”

“The door shut,” said Mac thickly. “I'm locking it in there. I'm going for a priest or something.”

“Don't be a fool. Open this door,” said Winnie.

“Winnie, who is this? One of the builders?” said Allegra. “What do you mean by this?”

“Ah, it's got a voice now: and it is the voice of Jenkins's daughter,” cried Mac. He sounded bereft and beyond. A few moments later Allegra and Winnie were at the open window looking down into the forecourt, shouting at him, calling for help, but the wind was rising and their voices were lost. As Mac streaked away, he flung his hammer into the bushes. He didn't look back.

—that was the best Winnie could imagine it for herself, a succession of shafts within shafts, like nesting dolls—the sound unsettled the silence. A hammering precisely parroted the noise of Mac's labors, as if the space behind the chimney breast harbored some thrumming armature. The realization dawned on Winnie—and, she guessed, on Allegra—that they were indeed imprisoned in John Comestor's flat, and the chimney's unmusical thud began to recede, but slowly, a long train passing very far away, on a very still night.

“Phone?” said Allegra.

“Disconnected. You remember—you tried to call,” said Winnie.

“We'll climb out through a window. He may be coming back here—with his mates or something.”

“We'll keep an eye out the windows. We'd see him coming. Don't be hysterical.”

“It would seem to me this is a singularly apt time for hysteria.” Allegra raised an eyebrow, which in her circle probably passed for an expression of extreme nervous agitation, Winnie supposed.

They paced the apartment. The back two Victorian rooms were windowless, boxed in by the vacant flat rented to Japanese in the adjoining building. Some dingy skylights were pocked with pellets of gray rain. “Could we climb up there?”

“Doubtful.”

The forward Georgian rooms—the older rooms—were not much better. The side windows gave out on a bleak yard of rubbish bins, the front ones on the recessed forecourt. There was no convenient drainspout to scrabble down. And they could scream all they wanted—feeling idiotic, they tried—but the storm was hitting its stride, and the winds barreled abroad with vigor and commotion. And the lights were out, and the gloom was rising in the room.

Winnie, hunting for candles in the kitchen, afraid to turn her back to the chimney stack but doing it anyway, thought: Allegra Lowe is almost the last person I'd like to be incarcerated with. John Comestor's “friend.” How those imagined double quotes clenched around the word
friend
. They squeezed the real meaning out of the word and made it vulnerable to infection by irony.

Winnie commanded herself to speak levelly. “Here's some dinner tapers anyway, and there'll be matches by the fireplace, no doubt.”

“Trust John to be equipped with beeswax tapers and no torch.”

“How extensive do you think this power outage is?”

“Impossible to tell with the clouds so low. I suspect the damage is only local, though that doesn't do us any good.”

“Or any harm, either.”

“I'm not at all superstitious. But I don't care for the thing in the chimney. I'm glad it's quietened down some.” And so it had.

“It doesn't like the fellows.”

“What's the name of that cretin?”

“Mac. Our poltergeist doesn't trust him, or either of them. Maybe for good reason.”

They settled themselves in the front room, near the most public window. If Mac should come back and start opening the door, they'd holler bloody murder again, and maybe this time some neighbor struggling home in the storm would hear their cries. “What in the world do you think the thing is?” said Allegra.

“I have no idea,” said Winnie, looking away.

They sipped. Somewhere, probably down the hill at the Royal Free Hospital, Jenkins's lungs were going up and down, up and down. Somewhere farther out, in the City, perhaps his errant daughter was having a twinge, pausing in the downpour, regretting the distance from her father. “John told me,” said Allegra, “your side of the family has some pretense to descending from Ebenezer Scrooge?”

“Oh did he. What else did he tell you?”

“Don't be like that. I'm only trying to make the best of a tiresome turn of events.”

Winnie thought it better to talk about the Scrooge nonsense than about John Comestor. If she slipped and let herself think he was dead, in any way—half dead, part dead, gone as gone—she would rise up shrieking.