No Word From Winifred

by Amanda Cross

  Dearest Toby:

  There has not been a moment to write, though I hoped to scrawl this letter in moments at Sinjin’s house as I waited outside for the great interview. I only hope you can read it; I doubt your work has accustomed you to outrageous handwriting; we poor biographers must get used to it. (How is everything at Dar and Dar going? I do think of it often, in between our dramatic moments.)

  Well, my dear, we arrived at dawn, as usual on these damn flights, and made our weary way through customs, immigration, etc. (I forgot to tell you, of course, that our Winifred’s passport, which I only thought of at the last possible moment, if you can believe it, turned out to be quite all right. I suspect her of leaving herself always the opportunity to fly back to England when the fancy took her. A good sign, I think.) Once we had cleared all the Heathrow hurdles, we took the bus to London, dumped our bags at the hotel, and went by underground to Ladbroke Grove, where Sinjin lives. I didn’t quite know how to prepare our Winifred for the meeting, except to say that the house was a bit of a rat’s nest: it was the home, I said, of someone who thought of nothing but Elizabeth I’s England, in all its detail, and, I suspected, lived there herself most of the time. I thought of describing Sinjin, but in the end decided not to. With anyone else, I would have gone out of my way to suggest, ever so delicately, that Sinjin in no way resembled the old ladies in films and BBC productions: neatly coiffed white hair, and lean, bony faces full of character. But Winifred, I felt certain, given her own obvious unconventionality, would not even notice if she met a woman who couldn’t have cared less what she looked like, as long as her work was sound. I thought I would just leave it to them to get on or not: maturity, my dear, in case you hadn’t noticed, is letting things happen.

  Have I described Sinjin to you? It suddenly occurs to me that you may not know quite what I mean. You know she is eighty, more or less, and mumbles about herself as the ancient of days. Stairs are difficult, though she lives, like all the English with their proud devotion to discomfort, in a narrow three-story attached house. She walks with a stick, and complains about her memory, which seems damn good to me, if rather limited to Tudor times and the further reaches of her own life. She answers slews of letters every day, partly from people wanting to know about Winifred’s aunt, what with all her books still being in print, and as far as I can see functions rather better than most of what are now called the old-old. The point, however, is that she is fat, with great dewlaps of flesh, and next to no hair on her head: what is there is white. “Wispy” is the best one could say for it. She has great fat legs that I’m certain impede her already difficult progress. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would snicker, but ninety-nine people wouldn’t give a damn for the Tudors or know what they were in the presence of. I trusted that Winifred would.

  It wasn’t a bit clear, when Winifred emerged and we left after the first visit, how it had all gone. (She went alone the next time, riding the underground like a native, but of course I keep forgetting that England is familiar ground to her, at least its geography: she did exclaim at the number of Arab women in the streets with little leather hoods on their noses.) Our Winifred is not one of your talky types. But she did mention how much she liked Sinjin, how much she admired her—“like my aunt, always saying it’s the work you do that matters”—so I am full of hope. George has been banished to his club, where it is supposed that he plays bridge all day, and prays, while dummy, that all will be well. He is even muttering about golf, so I am fairly sure we’ve got him off our hands.

  Dearest Toby:

  Sorry for all the time that has passed, but your marvelous call last night makes me feel better. Bless you, dear man, for thinking of it. It was heaven to hear your voice. By the time you get this I’ll have the final big news about the biography.

  Winifred and Sinjin talked, my dear, by the hour; I think Sinjin quite forgot the Tudors. “And what did you talk about?” asked I of Winifred. “Oh, her childhood—did you know she wanted to be a boy in a cap and a striped blazer?—and her meeting with my aunt, and the years at Oxford, and the times afterward, and their friendship and her marriage, Sinjin’s I mean, and George.”

  “A wonderful list of topics,” I said, with my usual mild irony, “but what exactly did you say about them; how did the discourse go? You know, and I said, and she said, and she said they said . . .” But our Winifred only smiled and said that she couldn’t talk about it yet, not that it was a secret, just that she didn’t want to talk about it till she’d digested it. And with that, of course, I had to be content, particularly as she was (and is) consideration itself. Which is to say, I may have missed the delicious tidbits, the memories, the scandal—which by now I am sniffing at every turn—but she has been frank enough about the decisions the two of them reached, cackling at the top of that narrow house, Sinjin’s fat legs and Winifred’s long ones stretched out, no doubt, toward the inadequate electric heater.

  “What you’ll want to know about,” our Winifred said, “is what she has decided about the biography of my aunt, the papers, all that. She hasn’t terribly much confidence in George, but she was willing to ‘leave it all to him, if I turned out to be a disappointment, or uninterested in her or my aunt. Once she saw I was interested, and wasn’t particularly disappointing, she said she would leave it up to me what was to happen to the papers, to the biography, to the lot. It seems her will, which was made in the States (I could hardly shout: ‘I know, by my lover’), is still OK. I’ll have control over all her papers, etc. She asked if I thought you would be a good biographer of my aunt, and I said yes, I thought you would be. So I don’t think there should be any problem about that. George and I are to split the proceeds from my aunt’s books; she offered it all to me, but I said no, I’d turned up only at the last moment and that was hardly fair to George. And, of course, all proceeds of the biography will be yours.”

  Well, Toby my sweet, one couldn’t ask fairer than that. She told me she’d grown to like and respect me, and thought I would do a good biography—anyway, there was no reason she could see why I wouldn’t. “But will you cooperate?” I asked. She said she couldn’t honestly say how much she would tell me of matters to do with herself, but most of it would be evident in the papers, anyway, and she didn’t intend to withhold anything.

  “Did you happen to ask,” I couldn’t keep myself from saying, “how Sinjin came to have a son like George? Bridge, golf, and but a smattering of brain?” “I didn’t ask, but she told me.” Winifred looked down at her hands, and after a pause that seemed to demand my saying something out of sheer decency, she went on: “Sinjin’s father was a charming man, quite smart, but he’d inherited some money and he did nothing but play golf and bridge. He thought them the two most delightful things in the world, certainly far superior to little Harriet and her mother. When little Harriet grew up she despaired of intellectual men, and saw no point in upper-class men like her father, who only amused themselves, so she married a garage mechanic.” “A garage mechanic!” I screamed. We were sitting in St. James’s Park, but I think they heard me in the Channel Islands. Winifred, of course, looked around like a startled doe, and I cursed myself for an idiot. But she did smile. “What Sinjin said, is: Unfortunately George inherited his grandfather’s frivolous interests but not his brain; his father’s mindlessness but not his craft; and my figure.” But, Winifred went on to tell me, all Sinjin really wanted for George, now that Winifred was found, was as much income as she could leave him, plus her house, which to judge from the real-estate agents who called every week, had risen marvelously in value. (“They’ll have to put in another loo,” I nastily added.) “The point was,” Winifred said, “Sinjin didn’t know what to do with my aunt’s stuff, and she wanted to leave the royalties, which are still handsome, to me. But I persuaded her to leave all that to George too; we finally compromised on splitting it.”

  “I don’t know why you should be so generous,” I said, “if you don’t mind my speaking blun
tly. You can’t go on milking cows all your life.”

  “I already have a small income,” Winifred said. “I do think it’s George’s by right. After all, he might very well not have found me.” “He’d certainly not have found you,” I said, “which is why Sinjin sent me along, knowing my motive besides. I think you owe it to me to take the money.” “I’m taking half,” Winifred said, and I couldn’t get another word out of her.

  Tomorrow we are both to meet with Sinjin. I was rather surprised when Winifred told me, but pleased, as you can imagine. I expect to be lectured about being nice to George, and the responsibilities of a biographer, which I shall take with even more than my usual good grace since I am so fond of the plucky old bag. Winifred clearly thinks Sinjin is some sort of miracle, dropped into Winifred’s path like manna for the Hebrews. I can’t think why; it isn’t as though Winifred were writing a biography. Don’t think (I know you won’t fail to think, you beast) that such a fear didn’t grasp me by the very entrails. But Winifred seemed to sense all this, and has reassured me that writing a biography of her aunt is the very last thing she would ever want to do, next to being a bridesmaid. She has even burst forth from time to time, as this will evidence, with a quip. I rather think that our Winifred detests the whole question of clothes and what to wear, and may have been drawn to Sinjin, who, God knows, gives the matter no thought whatever, because of this. Even a dowdy old woman can be a respected scholar—that sort of thing.

  After Sinjin, Oxford, I think, for a day or two. Winifred has agreed to show me some of the spots in her childhood, in London and in Oxford, where she and aunty set forth upon the world. I think already, my love, of returning to you soon. I do hope you’ll call again, before you get this, to start my day in the right frame of mind, because . . .

  Chapter Seven

  The private detective who came to see Kate, after she had finished reading the documents given her by Charlie, was calm, businesslike, and so little resembling any American novelist’s idea of a private detective that Kate wondered, for several moments, whether he was an impostor sent as a joke by Toby and Charlie. Such, she thought, are the impositions of fictions upon our minds. She had invited him home to tea, serving this from a set bequeathed her, as the only daughter, by her mother. Kate’s housekeeper, who entered into the spirit of things with a remarkable verve, especially when she sensed the revival of the manners of an earlier era, had made watercress sandwiches and thin, elegant cookies. Kate, asking him if he wanted cream or lemon, felt transported back into an English detective story of the twenties. The detective, whose name was appropriately Mr. Fothingale, but who asked to be called Richard, requested lemon and sugar and settled down to his longish tale of frustration and few results. Kate, sipping tea with lemon and no sugar, and relishing the delicate watercress sandwiches, urged him on with smiles and nods of appreciation.

  “I began,” he said, “with what you’ve seen in those documents. Minus the Ashby journal, of course. I found that after I began on the job. It was just about all I did find. After the last letter of Charlie’s you have there, Winifred Ashby disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since. By anyone.”

  “Was the journal in her A-frame house on the farm?” Kate asked.

  “It was; locked away in the drawer of a table she used for writing. I honestly don’t think she’d have left it there if she didn’t intend to come back, and as far as I was concerned that was the best evidence we had that she hadn’t done a bunker. Of course,” he said, holding up an admonishing hand as Kate started to speak, “it’s always possible she left it there to mislead us. She was such a private person that I did wonder if she wouldn’t have been more likely to have taken it with her. But she was only going for a week. I think she trusted the farmers enough not to riffle through her things, and she did take the precaution of putting a strong lock on the table drawer. I mean, someone would have really had to jimmy it to get at her stuff, as we finally did.”

  “I wonder,” Kate said. “If she were really secretive, as I used to be, wouldn’t she have hidden it somewhere unlikely, where it would never be found?”

  “I thought of that too. But I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an A-frame from the inside. There just aren’t that many hiding places—it’s not like an old house with paneling and nooks and crannies. And there is no storage space whatever, to tuck something away in the back of. She could have put it in the refrigerator, or the stove, or in some other piece of furniture, or she could have hidden it in the barn—but that wasn’t really her territory. No, in the end, I think she did the safest thing, always supposing she was intending to come back.” Kate nodded.

  “And, after all,” he went on, “what did that bit of journal tell us? A lot about her childhood in Oxford, and how she came to work at the farm, but nothing you could go on. I mean, the fact that she would have liked to have been a boy doesn’t really lead anywhere when you really think about it, does it? Except, of course, if she decided she’d wanted it so long she’d try, and turned herself into a man—you know, passing herself off as one. That could be rather hard to trace.”

  “I doubt it,” Kate said. “For what my opinion’s worth, and at this stage that’s not much, I doubt it. She had wanted to be a boy—what girl of spirit hasn’t? Both the women scholars Charlie writes to Toby about wanted to be boys. But that’s a long way from disguising yourself as a man for any length of time. Particularly these days, when women can dress with all the comfort to be found in men’s clothes, if they want to.”

  “One of the many leads I followed,” Richard said, holding out his cup for more tea, “was that she’d taken another job as a farmhand. Mind you, I didn’t believe it for a minute. But that was because I believed what she said in her journal, which could have been a trap to lead me to exactly that conclusion. So I did a lot of investigating about farmhands recently hired in the area, and even out into other parts of New England. It’s easy to say in a sentence, isn’t it, but it took a long time, asking the questions, paying the tokens of appreciation, waiting for news to trickle back. Fortunately, most farmers love to gossip, men and women both. Theirs is a lonely life, so why shouldn’t they? The upshot was, the new hands, recently hired, all turned out to be too short, or too fat, or with a beard, or definitely not Winifred Ashby. Disguise will go only so far. And for what it’s worth, the farmers she was working for didn’t believe she’d run out on them, any more than Charlie did. Winifred Ashby may have been the world’s greatest con artist, but if you’re that talented, why waste it all on some farmers and a woman biographer who’s going to go ahead with her biography anyway? I mean, whom was she conning, and why? For what?”

  “The answer does seem to lie in England, with the two women scholars, Charlotte and Sinjin, doesn’t it?”

  “That certainly seems clear. I spent a lot of time in England, and a lot of money—Charlie’s money. I don’t come cheap, and there were fares, et cetera. What I’m here to tell you is that I found out nothing; that is, everything I found out was negative. Charlie said I could charge her for this talk with you, but I won’t. I hope you can see something I haven’t seen. It probably will turn out that the farmers murdered her for some nest egg we don’t even know about, buried the body on their farm, and left her journal because it led to a false trail. I just don’t believe it.”

  “Isn’t there some record of her return to this country by airplane?”

  “Not really. One of the airlines did cough up, after what nudging on my part I can barely describe, the fact that a passenger listed as Winifred Ashby flew back to the U.S. right after she disappeared in England. But that proves nothing. Anyone can say they’re Winifred Ashby. Don’t say it, I know what you’re going to ask: What about her passport? The airlines are not that careful about checking passports against tickets, and anyway, handing them a different passport than one’s own, supposing someone else were traveling as Winifred Ashby, wouldn’t be hard. The U.S. has no record of her enter
ing or leaving the country, and wouldn’t give it to me if they had. There would be a record on her passport, of course, but that disappeared with her. I hope you begin to see the dimensions of the problem.”

  Kate smiled at Mr. Fothingale. She admired him, not only because he was frustrated beyond the call of duty, but because he was willing to turn all he had learned over to her, which was an act of true generosity. She was not a competitor exactly. She took no fees for her investigations—indeed, they usually ended up costing her money. Nobody poor can be an amateur detective for long. Yet, despite all this to Mr. Fothingale’s credit, Kate was troubled by a doubt. She decided to state it, not without considerable trepidation.

  “Please don’t let this question offend you,” she said. “No, that’s not the honest way to put it. Please realize that I have to ask it, and that no doubt of your probity inspires it.” Richard Fothingale nodded. “Can I be certain,” Kate asked, “that you aren’t giving me the case now because you suspect, or guess, that Charlie herself or Toby Van Dyne is involved in Winifred Ashby’s disappearance? Please don’t misunderstand,” Kate added nervously.

  Richard put his cup down on the table. “If you hadn’t asked that,” he said, “I’d have thought you a fool. The plot you mention crossed my mind very early in the investigation. Coming to me that way had to be the cleverest ploy possible, if Charlie had done away with Winifred. I can’t prove she didn’t, or that Mr. Van Dyne didn’t. I don’t believe they’re other than they seem, and I didn’t give the case over to you because I feared my clients were guilty. That’s the truth, but if I were you, I’d check it out.”