by Zoe Jasmine
“Well, I don't think so. Not when he knew I was coming.” Winnie didn't want to focus attention on her own relationship with John, but it couldn't be avoided entirely. “I'm here doing some research for a book; of course I coordinated my flights and my schedule to accommodate his. If he'd been called away suddenly he'd have phoned me, or left a note.”
“I suppose,” said Allegra.
“When did you last see him?”
“This is a theatrical inquisition; are you writing a scene like this?” She busied herself with a cup and saucer and spoon, moving with lazy deliberation. “I'm not at all alarmed at John's comings and goings and they are no concern of mine. I don't make notes in my daybook. I haven't seen him recently, though. We had a meal earlier in the month, and we bumped into each other at the Hampstead Food Hall I should think, or in the road. Beyond that, Winnie, I have nothing to add.” A well-calibrated performance, remarks that led nowhere, said nothing, and therefore seemed full of portent. Winnie, admiring verbal dexterity, tried not to take umbrage.
“It's rude of me to barge in like this, and I didn't even ring up,” she said, hearing ring up slide into place and eclipse the call or phone she'd have said in Boston. By the smallest of substitutions could you change yourself from a you to a one . It was safer, in this big chilly shiny room, to be a one, especially with blush-cheeked Allegra getting prettier as her pale pomegranate hair began to curl in the rising steam. Why couldn't she and her befouling pigeons have bought a flat in some conveniently more distant place, like Highgate or Golders Green?
Winnie felt as if she had a learning disability. She sat down on a painted wicker settee and said, “I'm jet-lagged and cross, but to be honest, I'm concerned as well. Otherwise I wouldn't have come round here, Allegra. I'm not a glutton for punishment, whatever John says.”
“I'm sure John doesn't mention you at all,” said Allegra, balancing that knife of a remark on the tip of her tongue, daring it to fall.
“There's construction work going on in John's flat. Two fellows showed up this morning with a key and some supplies. They're redoing the kitchen and the place is draped in drop cloths.”
“It's green tea. Do have a cup.”
“No, thank you. Did John mention he was having renovations done?”
“I know he has designs on an illegal roof garden, if that's what you mean. I knew he was going to have builders in. But I do try to look the other way. The less he says to me about it the better, so I won't have to tell bold lies to the other freeholders in this building.” Her expression was priceless. “I make a good effort never to lie, Winnie.”
“I don't really like the workers. They're shady in some way, I don't get it. They're dallying, and there's a problem with pipes that they're not addressing.”
“I shall be sure never to hire them.” Tea made and left to steep, Allegra went back to her workstation and began to measure out some dry compound in a mixing bowl. She took some pigment, a bright puce color like some garish Indian spice, and spooned it in.
“I'm here also about the pipes, Allegra. There's a strange knocking in the walls, and it's freaking the workers out. It even has me jumpy, John being absent and all. I believe John told me once that your building and ours shares a party wall—” But she hadn't meant to say ours, that would be perceived as a gauntlet dashed down. “I mean the old place, Rudge House. You know what I mean.”
“Yes, of course,” said Allegra, flexing her largesse. “The estate agents told me all about it when I bought this place. Apparently the existence of the party wall dates from the 1810s or so, a device of economy. We share a more intimate domestic arrangement than most adjoining houses of different periods.”
“And when does this house date to?”
“Built in 1889. It's not the high Arts and Crafts. The pocketbook for this street wouldn't allow it. But these houses derive from standard pattern books of the period.”
“Do you have problems with your plumbing? Any knocking sounds lately?”
“Only at the door when the doorbell is out. Because I'm on the higher end of the slope, I have little trouble with drains or with rising damp on this level, unlike a lot of garden flats in Hampstead. I don't recall John mentioning any problem such as that, but as I say—” This time she left it unsaid.
“Perhaps there's something going on in one of the flats upstairs from you? Some reconstruction? Whatever it is, it's spooking the workers.”
“Irish lads?”
“Well, yes, though ‘lads' is a bit of a stretch. The foreman's quite grandfatherly.”
Me mither and father are Irish,
We live upon Irish stew,
We bought a fiddle fer ninepence,
And that was Irish, too. . . .
“No building work in this place, that I know of,” said Allegra, cutting through Winnie's unspoken rehearsal of the nursery rhyme. “But if it's causing you worry, please walk upstairs and ask the tenants yourself. Not that you'll find anyone at the very top. That's a flat owned by a business in the City—MaxxiNet computer payroll systems—for the putting up of Japanese and Korean colleagues when they come for training. But the company's in receivership and no one has been in residence for months. I know because MaxxiNet requires that temporary residents stop and introduce themselves to me, and the obedient Japanese and Koreans do everything they're told. For several months I haven't heard anyone in the hall other than the family that lives immediately above me.”
“Who are they?”
“A widow, Rasia McIntyre, and her three urchins. She might be there now, though she does her big weekly Sainsbury's shopping on Friday mornings. You want to hurry upstairs and catch her before she goes. I can tell you very little more, Winnie.” She finished mixing the dusty porridge and poured out her thin green tea. “You're welcome to something hot, but I don't know about renovations nor the whereabouts of your cousin, and. So.” She shrugged and grimaced. Then she looked down at her work and pinched a bit of the mixture between her fingers and frowned.
“What are you making up?”
“Dental compound.”
“What for?”
“I do hands, impressions of hands,” said Allegra. “Child hands mostly, presents for grandparents, that sort of thing.” She walked to a broad table in the corner and flung off a gummy blanket. The surface of the table was tiled with pink squares and rectangles, some framed, some loose, some inscribed with names, some not. Each tile showed the imprint of one or two little hands, like instant fossils, blunt starfish impressions. “It started out being therapy for learning-handicapped adults and developed into a lucrative little cottage industry for me. Of course, a piece in the Sunday Times color supplement several years ago didn't hurt my business.”
Winnie found it grotesque, but didn't say so. “What's the strangest impression you ever made?” she said.
“I went to a Hallowe'en theme party last week. It was Vicars and Whores, and I went as a Vicar. Maybe that wasn't so strange, though, as most of the men went in drag as Whores.”
“I mean,” said Winnie, “the handprints; what's the oddest experience—”
But Allegra said, “Look, I was joking, right? Anyway, there's the knock. I've got my morning client at last. I'll see you out as I go to let them in. If you don't mind? There's nothing else?”
“Nothing else, there's nothing at all,” said Winnie. Vicars and Whores. The sight of adults in costume, unless it was on the stage, always unnerved her. Even the thought of it. She hustled herself up the stairs in front of Allegra, trying to focus. “What did you say the neighbor's name was? Rose, Rosie? McIntosh?”
“Rasia. It's a Muslim name. Rasia McIntyre. She married a Glaswegian who fell into an unexpected coma and just, just died, no fanfare or fare-thee-well. You'll like her. Tell her I would make the introductions if I could, but duty calls.”
She flung open the door and scowled at a frantic-looking mother restraining a squirming bundle of toddler. “I want you to submerge his whole body in the cast and keep
it there,” the mother rattled at Allegra, “and when he's dead and rotted we'll crack open the mold and make a better-behaved plaster version that does. Not. Squirm. So .” Winnie nodded her thanks to Allegra and headed up the stairs.
She could hear the fuss of Rasia McIntyre's household spilling down the stairwell. The sound of quarter-tone sitar music accompanying midmorning toddler meltdown almost stopped her in her tracks. But the more time she took up, the likelier that before she got back, Mac and Jenkins might have cleared out, and anything else objectionable too. So she rapped on the door.
“Yes, who is it,” said the Rasia woman, throwing open the door and continuing to yak into the portable phone, two tiny children clinging to her trouser legs. To Winnie: “I'm absolutely strapped, can't manage a quid.” To the phone: “Look, there's a do-gooder at the door, will you be in? I'll ring back when they go down for naps. Very good very good, ciao.” She slapped the phone on a hall surface and said, “I couldn't get her off the phone so I'm glad you knocked, but I don't give to those who knock at the door, and you ought not to have been let in.”
“I'm not collecting for charities,” said Winnie, “I'm a friend of one of your neighbors next door. I'm here to ask about some strange noises in the building—”
“Navida, I'm telling you, no more sweeties until teatime, you'll just have to cry,” said Rasia, detaching Navida's arm from her thigh. “Yes, I tap the kids on their bottoms sometimes, but they're my kids and I do what I want. They don't cry more than other children their age. You can't be from the Council. Not with your accent.”
“I'd hit them too,” said Winnie, looking at them, “and I'll take turns with you if you like. They're very noisy.” She didn't mean it but it worked. Rasia laughed.
“They're high-spirited and they miss their daddums, and I can't blame them. Is this a formal complaint?”
“No,” said Winnie. “May I come in just for a moment?”
“If you must.” She looked more pleased than she sounded. “Though I've more than enough to do without preparing the house for unexpected callers.”
Rasia McIntyre had a full face with strong bones and high brow. It was like looking at one of the Picassos and seeing front and profile simultaneously. Rasia had hips and shoulders, she had depth and round breadth, nothing whittled away through a diet of mere lettuce. Winnie felt bleached and parched next to the Asian woman's vigor, but she didn't mind. Rasia was realer than a missing stepcousin or a confounding knock in the walls.
The room into which Rasia led her was a kerfuffle of scarves and candles, throw pillows and expensive Turkish carpets. The floor was covered over with children's games in ten thousand pieces. On a workstation in the corner teetered several television sets, two computer screens, a stack, a printer, and a VCR. Winnie half expected the abundance of Post-it notes to read PILLSPILLS. “I'm trying to get back into film editing, but I'm not sure I can upgrade my skills,” said Rasia. “Everything's computerized now and I have so little patience for the manipulation of tiny bits of information.”
Nor for the tiny bits of Lego and Duplo and dollhouse furniture that crunched and splintered underfoot. “Shit. You guys . Are you going to collect any of this or do you want me to ruin all your playthings?” she said. “Navida. Tariq. We have to go out and do our errands, and this looks like the Rubble of Dresden.”
The children disappeared, shrieking down the hallway. “If you wake the baby I'll boil all your bones,” called Rasia, but without conviction. To Winnie, “Sorry. This place is such a tip. If you're not here to complain about the noise of the children, then what?” She sat down in her workchair and began to lace her boots, looking up at Winnie from beneath a curly abundance of anthracite hair.
“No. I don't care about the noise kids make. I'm only visiting next door anyway.” Winnie took a breath and described the layout of the intersecting houses. Then she told Rasia about the sound of knocking from the chimney stack. “Your downstairs neighbor, Allegra Lowe, said she thought you might have some ideas, or maybe you were doing some building yourself in here.”
“Would that I were,” said Rasia. “The children thump and play, and sometimes the baby hits her head against the wall when she wants uppies and I'm in the loo, but not this morning. I wouldn't think it loud enough to be heard in another building, anyway. We can look if you like. Excuse the housekeeping. I have a Brazilian girl named Zuli who disappeared a few weeks ago and hasn't rung to tell me when she's coming back. Did you ask everyone in your building?”
“There are only three flats in Rudge House, and the middle one is on the market.”
“Well, that'll be it, then, don't you think? The owner of that flat must be tarting up the kitchen to get a better sale price. Have you gone round to ask at the estate agent's?”
Winnie hadn't thought of that, and indeed, it was the most logical conclusion. Though wouldn't she have seen sign of other workers moving in and out in the stairwell of Rudge House?
The children had settled themselves in front of a television in a side room, and were shooting suction-rubber-tipped darts at Trevor MacDonald doing a newsbreak. “Baby,” said Rasia, “nappy time. I can smell it three rooms away.”
At the rear of the flat, in a corner of the main bedroom, the baby lay in a crib with pink plastic bars. She was breathing heavily, but not crying. Rasia stood and looked at her. Winnie didn't; she studied the proportions of the room, the molding. “Could I be really pushy and peer in your closet? Put my ear to the wall? I think the chimney stack from Rudge House might be on the other side of your closet wall, and the sound would be muffled by your clothes; maybe that's why you haven't heard it here.”
“But it's a mess, I haven't cleaned out a thing,” said Rasia irritably. “I can't, you see, I can't.”
“Oh, that won't bother me, I'm a slob too.” She laid her hand on the cupboard door. “I mean—”
“What do you mean? And why are you here?”
Winnie turned at the changed tone. Rasia's eyes had become plums, and she covered them with the heels of her fists. The baby stopped breathing as if she felt responsible for her mother's tears, and then started up again, ever more shallowly, tentatively. “It's Quent's clothes in there, how can you walk in here and go straight to his clothes?”
“I never,” said Winnie, horrified, “I never meant, how could I know? I'll just go. I'm very sorry. Stupid of me. Please. You'll scare the baby. Please.” Rasia was bawling now. “Please, you don't have to do this. I'll go. I'll let myself out. Are you all right? Let me get you a tissue.”
They had tea for an hour. Winnie felt hijacked, but she deserved it. She pretended an interest in seeing pictures of Quentin McIntyre and Rasia Kamedaly at their wedding, on vacation in Madagascar, or visiting the old Kamedaly family home in Kampala following the repatriation of Asian properties seized during Idi Amin's reign. Quentin looked like a well-used shaving brush, his blond hair bristling in all directions. Quentin at home in Loch Dunwoodie. Quentin at Keble College. Quentin and Rasia with the kids. In the end, Fiona whimpering on her shoulder, Rasia led Winnie to the bedroom again and drew back the heavy drapes. “Open the wardrobe, pull out his things,” she said, “it's been nine months now, I've got to think about Oxfam sooner or later.”
Winnie was beyond resisting. She'd unlocked this Pandora's box and clearly there was no stuffing the vermin back within. She pulled out suits and sports coats, tailored trousers and boxes of laundered shirts. When she opened the topmost drawer she saw a heap of men's briefs, white, blue, and tiger skin. She closed the drawer on all that.
“Here's the wall, then,” she said, reclaiming some briskness at last, and she put her ear to it. “Look, it is plastered unevenly; this probably is the early-nineteenth-century chimney stack, just as I guessed. Might this have been a fireplace once, boarded over when central heating came in?”
Rasia, playing with Fiona, didn't answer.
Winnie leaned into the shadows vacated by Quentin's clothes.
There was a sound in th
e stone, or so she thought, but it could just be the sound of a vacuum, like the seashell magnifying back to the ear the sound of the ear's own echo chamber. In one ear Winnie heard the aeons creak, the sound of stone speaking its lone word; she heard it translated, today, as the moment-by-moment evaporation of the McIntyre-Kamedaly marriage, only a ghost of itself and dissolving by a few more molecules every hour or so.
Then she pulled herself together, stood up, said, Stuff and nonsense, but to herself, and aloud, “I can hear nothing, really. I feel a fool to have barged in like this,” and helped Rasia McIntyre carry the heaps of old clothes out to the landing.
But Rasia seemed better, and Fiona was gurgling at her sippie, and the older children began to grin at Winnie and flirt with her despite her ignoring them. As the women pummeled clothes into Marks and Spencer shopping bags for carrying to one of the charity shops, Rasia said, “Your friend Allegra holds a duplicate key to the upstairs flat. For emergencies. Didn't she tell you?”
“She didn't. But never mind. She must know nobody's there, so it didn't occur to her.”
“If you want to be thorough, ask her for it.”
“I'm not such good friends with her—”
“You're not such good friends with me, and you've helped me clear out Quent's clothes,” said Rasia, “something my sisters have been begging me to do for months. They offer to come up from Poole every weekend and I have said No, no, I'm not ready. Then you barge in and rip the place to shreds without a flinch of shame. Surely you can go ask your friend for the key.”
“Oh, I could if I wanted,” said Winnie, “but really.”
“Really what?” It was Rasia's turn to be nosy, and Winnie had no intention of satisfying her curiosity, no matter what Rasia was owed.
Pulling on her jacket, Winnie said, “Do you know my cousin? A friend of Allegra's? John Comestor?”
“She has plenty of people come and go and I don't make it my business to supervise,” said Rasia with an attempt at primness that she spoiled by continuing, “but I see what I see. What does he look like?”
