He was furious. “What in the bloody hell’s so funny, Sarah?”
The laughter was for the most part faked. “It’s just so… dramatic, the way you see it. Like a film.” She liked this analysis. “Really, it is. Just like a war film. Mrs. Miniver or one of those.”
He could scarcely believe all of this. How could he walk around all of his life, these few memories indelibly fixed in his head, and discover they were false, bogus, his own invention? How? But then he’d been free to make them up; no one had ever said anything to contradict them. If he had asked his uncle, a very kind man, then he would have told him. But of course most adults would steer clear of bringing up such a subject involuntarily.
She stubbed out her cigarette, finished off her Adnams and got up. “You wait just a minute.” She left the room and he could hear her moving about and swearing, as if someone were in the other room with her.
He half rose to see if she was all right, but she was back now with a white shoe box. Between the dark brown sofa and the blue armchairs was a round table which she hauled over to stand between them. She pulled her chair around to face his across the table.
Pictures, thought Jury. More pictures. She slid the top from the box and he felt a surge of adrenaline clamp him to his chair with a hard swift hand. If they were different, these pictures, from what he remembered, he didn’t want to know. He just didn’t. He had lived for too many years with these images of life and death in the Fulham Road. “She was wearing black.”
Sarah was sorting through snapshots, pulling out one here and there. Either he hadn’t said it aloud or she hadn’t heard him say it: she was wearing black.
As she put down the pictures, fanned out like a poker hand, and tapped one snapshot, square and poorly lit, taken perhaps with one of those boxy Brownie cameras. “This is all of us, except your dad. He was in Germany.”
Jury saw a group of four adults, a toddler and a girl of perhaps seven or eight. “This is you, isn’t it? Am I in this?”
“Don’t be daft, of course you are; you’re the little one. Here’s your dad.” She handed him a picture of a man in uniform, a flier. “You know he was RAF?”
“Yes, of course.” He felt defensive because she knew more than he. And how had she come to be the depository for memories? “Wasn’t his plane-a Spitfire-shot down?”
“You got that right, at least.”
As if memory’s fallibility were all down to him. “I remember being evacuated; I remember being in Devon or Dorset somewhere as a kid with a lot of other kids.”
“That wasn’t the war. You weren’t evacuated; you were in foster care with some others.”
Jury looked at her, frowning. “Foster care?”
“You don’t recall that woman, that awful Mrs. Simkin? Wasn’t she the one, though? Jesus, it must’ve been half a dozen she was getting a government stipend for. They took two away from her, and you were one of them.” Her fingers rooted in the shoe box again. “Look.” She pulled another snapshot from the box and handed it to Jury.
He looked at the awkward lineup of children. It was a relief to see that they were here as he remembered them even if he’d been mistaken about why he was among them. There he was, standing next to the tallest girl. Even though the picture was in black and white, he still knew the tall girl was the one with hair like a torch. It looked unconfined, as if not even the stillness of a photograph could still it. Jury smiled at her, the bane of his small existence. She had turned out to be a still point, this horrific child who teased and taunted him, still had the power to help or hinder. For some reason Jury liked that idea.
“Now, this one’s the best. It’s you and your mum.”
It was not a snapshot, but looked to be more a photographer’s work. It was larger, too. Her arm extended along the back of a settee, the back rising higher on one end. He looked about three or four and was sitting on her left, her left arm encircling him. He looked pleased as punch.
Sarah was talking but her voice seemed to come from a distance, as a sound trying to make its way around some obstruction. He did not comment on this picture. It was quite beautiful, he thought. “May I have this one of the foster care kids? And the one of mum and me?”
She shrugged, falling back to her original pose of indifference. “You can have the lot if you want.” Having produced this revisionist childhood, she was no longer concerned for its proofs.
Jury was tired and was ready to go; he would be relieved to get out. He said he’d a train to catch.
“You’re not stopping for tea? Brendan’ll be back-”
And as if her voice could call up spirits, the door opened just then and Brendan walked in.
“Speak of the devil,” Sarah said.
Brendan brought with him the memory of more than one John Jamison. He was happy as a lark when he saw Jury. “Richard! Where in hell did you drop from?” He gave Jury a comradely punch on the shoulder.
Sarah asked, querulously, “Where’re Jasmine and Christabel? You were to collect them from Raffertys.”
“I went by. They wanted to go to Burger King with the others.”
Jasmine. Christabel. The names she had chosen (certainly Brendan hadn’t) for her children. You could always tell the parents with no confidence. They went for the exotic names, afraid that just plain Mary or Alice wouldn’t set their own kids apart.
“You spent the giro already at Noonan’s, I expect.”
“Oh, leave off, woman.” Brendan drew a folded, grimy bit of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to her. “It ain’t even cashed, lovely. Speaking of Noonan’s, Rich, how about it?”
Jury didn’t much want to go, but this would probably be the least awkward way of making an exit. “Thanks, I could do with a pint.”
Brendan did a little jig-never had Jury known a more ingrained Irish-man than Brendan-and washed his hands in air. “Let’s go, then.”
Jury gave Sarah a look, inviting her along, though he knew she wouldn’t take them up on the invitation.
“Me? Me go? Then who’d look after the baby, I want to know? You haven’t even seen him,” she said to Jury.
“Maybe when we come back.” Jury was not coming back.
“Why does she dislike me so much?” Jury asked Brendan as they stood at the bar of Noonan’s, a noisy pub. There were, of course, some men in here who had jobs, whom the Job Center had actually lined up with employment. For them the pub was the way to escape the tedium of work as it was the way to escape the tedium of not working for the others.
Brendan raised his pint and said, “Hell, man, she doesn’t dislike you, at least not when your back’s turned.” He wiped his handkerchief under his nose. “She’s always bragging on you to friends.” He went on in fluting tones, “ ‘A detective superintendent, that’s right, Scotland Yard, no less.’ ”
Jury smiled. “We were talking about childhood. It seems all my memories were wrong.”
Brendan waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Hell, she was windin’ you up, man, she was takin’ the piss out. She does it to me, does it to the kids. Don’t take it to heart.”
Jury drank his beer and went back over the afternoon. He wondered. He patted the pocket of his coat that held the two pictures.
When Jury walked up the steps of the terraced house in Islington, Mrs. Wasserman, who had the so-called garden flat, came up the stone steps outside her door, hurrying as much as she could. Jury had helped Mrs. Wasserman over the years with “security,” installing locks, inspecting windows and any other way of entering, and anything else that would make her feel more secure. She had been a young girl in the prison camp; she had watched her family die before her eyes, first one, then another. And worse.
“Mrs. Wasserman,” Jury said, retracing his steps, going back down, “is something the matter? It’s late for you to be still up.”
She clutched her bathrobe more closely about her throat. “No, no, many times I’m up till morning. Such a hard time sleeping. Could you come in just a minu
te, Mr. Jury? One minute and I won’t keep you.”
Jury smiled. “I can make it more than a minute.” He followed her down the steps and into her flat. It was a comfortable flat with good old armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa. A breakfront, some side chairs and tables.
“Would you like something? Whiskey? Coffee? Chai?”
“What?”
“Carole-anne got me some. She says it’s much healthier than other drinks. It’s kind of a mixture of tea and spice.”
“In matters of health, I wouldn’t look to Carole-anne, queen of the breakfast fry-up.”
“Well, what she told me was to drink it for a week and tell her if I felt better. It’s supposed to do wonders, but the taste, Mr. Jury! It’s awful.”
“That explains Nurse Carole-anne’s motive. She wants you to test it so she won’t have to. A cup of plain old English black tea would be fine.”
She left the living room. Jury saw there were a couple of old photograph albums on the coffee table, one of them open. Sitting down on the sofa, he sighed. Pictures, more pictures, old ones.
Mrs. Wasserman returned with two mugs of tea that Jury knew would be sweeter than he liked, but would drink. When she saw Jury turning the pages of the photograph album, she said, “They have been making me feel… well…”
Jury waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “Are these of your family, Mrs. Wasserman?” He knew they must be and was a little surprised he had never seen them before. But she still stood there by the sofa, holding her cup of tea and looking anxiously at the photographs. He said, carefully, “Mrs. Wasserman?”
Hesitating, she said, “Yes. And yet-”
She appeared very distraught. He looked more closely at one picture of a girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, flanked by a middle-aged man and woman who must surely be her mother and father. It was not that he recognized the child as Mrs. Wasserman, but the older woman who looked so much like his Mrs. Wasserman, looks that weren’t yet delineated in the face of the teenage girl.
“This is you as a girl, isn’t it?” He tapped that picture.
Mrs. Wasserman laughed a little and without humor. It was a nervous laugh, an anxious one. “Yes. My mother, the woman must be. The man is my father?”
What she seemed to be doing was asking for Jury’s assurance. “You certainly look like your mother.” He studied the picture, the background, the building in front of which they stood. On the right-hand border he saw the heel of a shoe and a tiny patch of leg. It was a public street and someone had just passed by. He imagined others, not wanting to block the picture taker, were no doubt waiting in the wings to pass. Behind the little family was a sign, the first half obscured by their bodies. It said ANIST and Jury wondered if it was the end of the word tobaccanist. To the right, a couple of stiles of postcards sat alongside a rack of newspapers. Jury squinted.
“Mrs. Wasserman, do you have a magnifying glass?”
Now that somebody was doing something about her problem (whatever that might be, Jury wasn’t sure yet) she was eager to do what she could. “Yes, yes.” She hurried over to the breakfront, opened a drawer, took out a large glass. This she handed to Jury.
Jury held it close to the picture. What he wanted to see was the date on the name of the newspaper. It looked like “Berlin” something. He could even see the date: November 9, 1938. The date had a familiar ring. Unfortunately, the headline of the paper was obscured.
Looking abstracted, she sat down on the edge of a chair with a rosewood frame.
“You lived in Berlin, didn’t you? Your father-” And then he remembered, her father had died as a result of one of those terrifying and random sweeps of the SS.
She frowned and looked away. “Yes, for a while. It must have been then.” She nodded toward the photograph, the snapshot. Yet the snapshot apparently wasn’t nudging memory further and perhaps that’s what bothered her.
He took out the snapshot of the children in the charge of the awful Mrs. Simkin and handed it to her.
She put her spectacles back on, looked and smiled. “But is this you, Mr. Jury? And your friends?”
“I think so, Mrs. Wasserman.” He wanted her to know that a failure of memory wasn’t hers alone. “Some things we can never be sure of, I guess.” Jury rose and said good night.
Walking upstairs, he thought of it: November 9, 1938. Kristallnacht. That was it. That was when her father was taken away, never to be seen again.
The loss of memory, he thought, can be fortuitous.
Later, in bed, hands folded behind his head, the pictures of his mother and the foster-care children tilted against the bedside lamp, Jury thought: it never ends. It might stretch around a corner or across the country or into death, but it never ended, this bond between parents and children.
Twenty
All the way from Northampton to the M1, and off at Newport Pagnel for a ploughman’s and a beer, then back to the M1 and around road works that kept them crawling at fifteen miles per hour, to Toddington and another stop at a Trusthouse Forte, and back on the M1 again, past the Luton exits and the suggestion (quickly shot down) that they get off at Haysendon to see the wild fowl park, and on to St. Alban’s, finally hitting the North Circular road and the A41 that would take them to the center of London, or would have done if they hadn’t got off onto the A-nothing and taken a wrong turn at Hornsley and wandered all around Finchley and Hornsley and Crouch End-all this way Melrose had listened to Trueblood’s lecture on the Italian Renaissance and art-not only the art of Masaccio, but also all of Masaccio’s friends and teachers and trainers-Masolino, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and branching off (much as they had at Toddington) onto side trips to Siena, Pisa and Lucca, and back to Florence and Michaelangelo and Mannerism, to Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral (and was that after or before he’d lost the competition for the Baptistery doors?), and the Baptistery’s south doors, done by Pisano in panels depicting the eight cardinal virtues (none of which were being catered for during this trip) through the ridiculous conflicts of Guelphs and Ghibellines, to the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi and Leonardo, back through Giotto and the invention of space in perspective to that witty little restaurant just off the Ponte Vecchio, whose name he had forgotten (unfortunately, forgetting nothing else)-
– So that when Trueblood at last squealed to a stop in front of Boring’s, Melrose felt he’d been hit by a stun gun.
“I’m off to Ellie Ickley’s. We’re dining at Fisole. She adores Florence, she lived there for ten years and all but ate it alive! You’re absolutely welcome to join.”
“Thanks, but I’m dining with Jury.”
Trueblood revved up the engine, gave him a wave and shot off down the street.
Melrose entered Boring’s with his brain churned to butter. Even so, he reckoned that what he’d been given was the larger picture, brush stroke by heavy brush stroke. Imagine the two of them, Trueblood and Ickley, able to dole out details of Brunelleschi’s construction of the dome, tile after tile, brick after brick, herringboned in place to be self-supporting. Melrose felt anything but self-supporting. Dinner, bookended by Florence enthusiasts, by Firenze fanatics. He’d be squashed to pesto sauce, stuffed into tortellini, grated with pecorino. At least if Trueblood was running around Florence on his own, Melrose would be spared an hour or two of the contribution of Giorgio Vasari to art (Giorgio Armani being quite another matter).
Boring’s, Melrose was happy to see, had recovered from the shock of the murder of one of its members a year ago and had returned to its usual state of somnolence. Even the fly on the parchment lampshade, whose subdued golden light reflected off the polished mahogany of the convoluted staircase which scrolled around and around to a final landing Melrose could not see, and for all he knew, went through the ceiling and up to the heavens in a Boring’s meditation on Brunelleschi’s dome, the fly on the lampshade on the desk seemed incapable of movement and would sleep through any swatting.
It was irresistible, this sense of moving th
rough a bed of treacle, and he felt his eyelids go heavy. He shook his head to clear it. For all he was aware of it, he might have been standing here for hours. Boring’s ran on its own time, Greenwich Mean not even in the equation. Probably, Melrose thought, Boring’s was at the heart of the modern mad science of chaos theory.
When still no one had come to attend to him, he wondered if his feet stuck in this treacle could propel him into the Members’ Room and there find both whiskey and assistance. And if he was going to fall asleep, he might as well do it in front of a crackling fire, drink in hand, seated in a comfortable, worn leather chair.
Trueblood had come to collect him at such a grisly gray morning hour, Melrose hadn’t even had time to read his newspaper. This was a ritual undertaken only to see if the world was still up, not to see what it was doing. Yet here were issues of all the dailies and Melrose had no desire to look at a single one. He felt rather than heard a person behind him. He turned to see Boring’s porter, Young Higgins. Young Higgins was not young, and Melrose declined assistance with his bag. In what was a genuine if somewhat atonal sort of greeting, Young Higgins told Melrose how glad he was to see him at Boring’s once again, and asked if he required anything. Melrose said he’d come down later for a drink, thanked Young Higgins and carried his own bag up the wide, softly carpeted stair.
The level of activity in the Members’ Room at seven P.M. had increased incrementally with preprandial conversations, the good mood induced both by whiskey and the knowledge that dinner would soon be served. There were a half dozen members sitting here, drinking or snoozing, and Melrose waved to Colonel Neame, who was always in the same chair by the fire, usually with his friend Major Champs.
Richard Jury and Melrose Plant were drinking a very fine malt whiskey, with their own conversation nose-diving into inconsequentiality: both were betting what would be on the menu. Melrose slapped down a five-pound note and said, “Starter: Windsor soup.”
Jury frowned. “Five pounds? Don’t be daft. I’m a public servant; I can’t afford to lose fifteen pounds, which is what it’d come to with three courses. Anyway, I was going to say Windsor soup, too.” He dug in his pocket for change, his lips moving silently, figuring. “One pound seventy, that’s closer.”
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