Lost: A Novel by Gregory Maguire

Author:Gregory Maguire
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Ghost, Women Authors, General, Literary, Fantasy, Literary Criticism, Ghosts, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061960574
Published: 2010-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

Lost

STAVE FOUR

As Dante in the

Lost

Purgatorio

hears the voice of his Beatrice before he sees her—by a good few lines, if Winnie remembered rightly—she heard the voice of John Comestor before she laid eyes on him. She didn't hear what he was saying, just his voice, his real living voice, around the iron pillar of a glossily overrestored late-Victorian pub off Fleet Street. She called out to him, “John,” before she saw him.

The room full of lunching account execs—lunching on pints, that is—and he there, no fuller or realer than ever, banter to the bartender on his lips—then he was turning to Winnie. Apology and defense and, was it, a sort of mock inquisitiveness in his features. Cataloging these emotional stances helped her ignore things like the diverting color of his eyes, the killer-lover haircut, et cetera. "Who could

ever have guessed all this, " he said to her, and leaned forward. She was impatient with relief and anger, and so full of contradictions that her embrace in return felt like a kind of whiplash. She stiffened and yielded simultaneously.

“It's far too noisy here,” she said. “Since when have pubs become so upmarket?”

“The rah-rah nineties. Have a quick bottoms-up and we'll find someplace else.”

“I don't know that I care to.” But she accepted a pint of Murphy's. They settled in the ambiguous light of frosted glass. “Cheers,” she said, as if daring him to feel cheerful in the presence of her well-regulated fury.

Up to the challenge, he. “Here's to us.”

“And,” she added, “you have a lot of explaining to do.”

“Not as much as all that. If you give it a think.”

“I'll have a word with you. And the word is: why?”

A door opened in the wall; on a tray, out came jacket potatoes steaming and starchy, both moist and dry. A reek of Branston pickle. On an abandoned napkin that the busboy had overlooked lay an old hunk of cheese cracked like the glaze in an heirloom plate. She could harvest any moment and stuff her senses with nonsense, and that was what nonsense was: a kind of antimatter, a sexy sleight of hand that deflected attention from the urgent world.

“I am visiting London,” she said. “Did you forget?”

“What a balls-up. I knew you'd been here. Thought you had left already. You were going on to Romania surely?”

“Maybe I was. But I haven't.” She relaxed her spine against the chair back. Her voice didn't tremble. “We're talking so calmly. As if only about a missed bus or a lost library book. John, what happened? I was coming to London, you knew that. Where did you go? Why were you not there? Have you been at work? Why could Irv get through your secretarial defenses when I couldn't?”

“Irv?”

“And where are you staying? You're in town and you're not at home—where have you been? And all the commotion at your house?”

“Well, that; who could put up with the dust? I relocated, of course.”

“Do you know how worried I was? Do you know what I thought—” Her voice was rising.

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