Lost

Lost

By Gregory Maguire

Waugh was an overweight estate agent with a belt made of rattlesnake skin. He huffed and panted as he led Winnie toward the back of the flat where a man and a woman where muttering to themselves in disagreement. “My clients are nearly through here but we have another place to see down on Honeybourn Road,” said Kendall Waugh. “Let me just answer their questions, Miss Prizzy, and then I'll show you round quickly.”

“I can have a look myself,” she said. She was looking as she spoke. The layout of the flat for sale was identical to John's flat above, and, she assumed, to Mrs Maddingly's flat below. These small rooms in the older building, facing Weatherhall Walk, two additional rooms snugly joined to her newer house behind. The flat had belonged to Mrs. Maddingly several decades ago, but there was no sign of her whimsical disarray. The place was empty of furniture and sorely need of sprucing up. The coping was dingy. But Winnie wasn't in the market for a flat, she was supposed to be hunting for some natural cause of the unnatural disasters occurring in John's flat upstairs.

She could see nothing of interest. The chimney stack rose from below and continued above, exactly as geometry and architecture would have it. In the large room it had once heated and lit, the chimney breast was boarded over. “Could this fireplace be opened up and made to work?” she said to Kendall Waugh.

“I'll just finish here if I may have a moment, one moment,” he called, affecting patience, but unconvincingly. Winnie stood in the gloom, in a box of cold room, and heard the voices in the annex. In certain sorts of rain, when the clouds came down close as they were today, it was sometimes hard to keep the mind fixed to the current year.

She's noticed the syndrome mostly on gray February days, back when she was living in the more expensive and so more thinly developed Boston suburbs. The wet tree trunks, the low sky the color of tarnished silver, the muted smoky green of of yews and white pines and arborvitae, the retracting mounds of dirty snow, the skin of the world pulling in phlegmy puddles, the occasional stab of red in holly berries, it was the same cold world of the Wampanoags, the Puritans, the colonists and revolutionaries, the Federalists, and revivalists, and Victorians, and so on.

Similarly, in London, the wind bullied the windows in their casing as rattingly as it must have done all through the past three hundred years and more. The gray skies drawn in over the mighty and inattentive Atlantic were the very same gray, corrected for reduction of pollution from coal fires, of course, thanks to the Clean Air Act.

She roused herself back to whatever of the here and now she could still trust, or care about. She heard Kenndall Waugh answering a question. ”That, I can tell you actually. We've got at the office a very fine pamphlet that talks about this street and actually mentions the structure. It was put up in the early nineteenth century, which makes it almost two hundred years old of course as you know, by a merchant named Rudge. Rudge House and all that. He was in imports, the tea trade.”

Lost. Photo by Elena.