Because he didn’t know she was innocent, and she knew he didn’t know.
And he still didn’t know. Amour. Adieu. Fini.
Jury left the station.
• • •
I owe you an apology, Charly,” he said, back in the pub, which was less crowded now. They had found tall stools to park round the tall table.
Melrose Plant raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that—”
Jury thought Plant did not seem to be focusing as well as usual.
“—and then we’ll sing!”
Charly Moss giggled, coughed, aborted a sneeze all at the same time.
Melrose was trying out scales—“mi-mi-mi-mi-”—apparently tuning his voice.
“You’re drunk,” said Jury, in near-total wonder. “The both of you are drunk.” He looked from one to the other. He had never seen Melrose Plant like this.
Charly made that sound through her nose again, as if Jury were the funniest thing in the world.
Jury shook his head, picked up his old glass, still with the dregs of ale in it, started for the bar, looked back and saw that the other two glasses were empty, and said, “Oh, what the hell,” and walked back and picked up those glasses too.
He stood at the bar watching the pleasant, pretty, slightly overweight proprietress refilling the glasses. Then he turned and watched a sallow young woman feed some coins into the jukebox. Almost immediately, as if he’d just been waiting in the wings, out stepped Frank Sinatra belting out “My Way.” Was there anyone more ego-affirming than Old Blue Eyes? Jury turned back to the bar, where the proprietress was topping up Charly’s half-pint of Guinness. Drunker than a skunk that stuff would make her, had made her, he thought. As Jury was trying to get hold of the three glasses, Frank’s voice was joined by others’ that kept sliding in a beat too late to the close of the lines. Suspiciously familiar those voices sounded, and Jury saw that, yes, Sinatra’s chorus was sitting at the table Jury had just left. He sighed and started back. Still hours to closing and they’d just got started.
“. . . each and every byyyyyyy-waaaay
. . . dah dah dah dahhh . . . duh dah dah dahh . . .
I did it myyyyyy waaaay.”
Frank was out of a job in the Lion and Snake. The two did not stop upon Jury’s return, only looked at him as if they had no idea who this was (this purveyor of drinks, this sober judge) and kept on singing along.
“People are staring,” said Jury, drinking off a third of his glass and wondering how long it would take him to get to their level of drunk.
“I chewed it up
And ssssspit it out!”
They certainly did. Jury got out his handkerchief and wiped his jacket. Actually, he rather liked the fact that the two of them were drowning out all of the unctuous talk of torts and codicils, deals and plea bargains. He had already finished his beer and was feeling, if not drunk, at least a little carefree.
Charly, actually, had a very pretty voice, almost professional sounding. Melrose was the laggard, the one who didn’t know all the words and just la-di-da’d to fill in. Except he did know the finale, and when Frank socked it out, Charly and Melrose were halfway off their stools to join him. They collapsed, laughing. It didn’t look as if Melrose would be leaving tonight for Northants.
Jury was surprised by the tap on his shoulder. It was the manageress, or bartender, or whoever she was, telling him sotto voce that his “friends” were being just a wee bit too loud, customers were complaining. Jury took out his ID, showed it to her with a smile, and said, “Look, they’re celebrating. They’ve both just been acquitted of a really heinous crime—”
“Like singing?” She walked away.
36
He got to Stratford-upon-Avon shortly before ten P.M. and to Ryland Street fifteen minutes later. The town’s one-way street system was more difficult to negotiate than most; make a wrong turning and you were halfway to Warwick. He supposed the town fathers had to work out something to accommodate the flow of tourist traffic, and this system was the one they’d devised. At last, he did find a parking space near the church and not far from Jenny’s house.
Through the sheer curtains of the front window, he could see Jenny moving between kitchen and dining table. Late for a meal, he thought, but perhaps she’d missed dinner on the train or perhaps she hadn’t been home long. She was wearing an apron and holding a glass of wine; in the next moment she was picking up a plate from the table where they’d shared a meal not long ago. Watching her as she carried the plate to the kitchen, he thought it was a homey scene, its domesticity almost a cliché.
Jury’s coming here had been purposeful, at least he thought it had, but now he hesitated at the door, fell back into the misgivings he’d felt standing on the platform of the train station. Certainly, he had qualms about his reception. After all, if she’d wanted to see him, she would not have left Lincoln so hastily. He knocked.
When she opened the door and saw him there, her “Richard!” seemed spoken with delight, not dismay, but, he thought, with too much genuine surprise. Why should she be surprised that he had followed her? Her almost perverse refusal to acknowledge his feelings made him angry, but he tried not to show it.
Tried, but failed. “Why in hell did you run off that way?”
They still stood in the doorway. She was removing her apron. “Come on in. Have you eaten?”
He hadn’t, but he was damned if he’d let a meal distract him. “Yes. Smells good, though.” He felt the stiffness of his smile.
“Pot au feu,” she said, smiling and closing the door behind him. “Give me your coat. My lord, did you drive all this way . . . ?” The question trailed off, as if she wanted to ask him something but could only fall back on the obvious. She insisted on getting him some coffee and brandy, as if he’d caught a sudden chill. Perhaps he had. His fingers felt like icicles. He sat beside the fire, opposite the chair she’d obviously been sitting in before she got up to tend to the kitchen. In a moment she was back with two cups of coffee and a decanter on a tray.
“I wish to God I had a cigarette,” Jury announced, taking his coffee and snifter. He sipped the brandy. Cognac, delicious. He might drink the entire bottle.
Jenny reached up to a shelf and took down a porcelain box. “You say it as if they’d stopped making them.” Smiling, she held out the cigarette box.
Jury looked stupidly at the cigarettes and warded the box off with the push of a hand. “No, but I’ve stopped smoking them, remember?” He felt irrationally angry.
“I’d forgotten.” She replaced the porcelain box. “Is that why you’re so irritated?”
He nearly choked on the cognac. Irritated! When he’d recovered a particle of coolness, he said, “No, Jenny, that’s not why. But I’m growing more ‘irritated’—as you put it—by the moment. How can you smile like that?” The smile vanished, and that only stoked his anger, as if she were a mannequin, something soulless or mindless who only had to be told to do another’s bidding and she’d automatically respond. “Jenny, why in hell did you run off that way?” He asked it a second time.
“I just wanted to get back here, that’s all. Out of Lincoln. Surely, you can understand that.”
Putting him on the defensive that was, making him appear a callous brute if he could make his own claim on her outstrip her own needs. And this was the problem, wasn’t it? That his needs were not hers. She seemed honestly not to know why he—or Plant or Charly or anyone—would find it strange that she hadn’t waited until she’d seen them. More than that, and perhaps worse, she apparently hadn’t needed to see them. “There are some of us who were and are interested in your reactions to the trial.” That was certainly pompous and stiff enough, he supposed.
“I’m sorry.” She looked at her brandy snifter.
Did she fancy he’d driven from Lincoln to exact an apology? His hands were still cold, barely warmed by the cup or the glass. “We wanted to know how you felt. I wanted to know.”
“It doesn’t mean it’s ov
er,” she answered with some trepidation.
“It’s most unlikely the prosecution will bring further committal proceedings,” he said, echoing Charly Moss’s words, though perhaps not her certainty. For an instant, and against his bidding, a smile materialized on his face and quickly fled. It was the memory of Melrose and Charly out on the pavement, staggering along, still singing. He knew that image would stay with him for a long, long time. And that it would always make him smile. And he thought, further, about that unfortunate meeting of the three of them at Stonington, when Jury had come upon Jenny and Melrose by accident. Innocent as it all was, Melrose Plant had assessed Jury’s state of mind in a heartbeat. No, more than that: he had felt Jury’s feelings. He had simply known, in a way that Jenny hadn’t.
“You’re amused. Why?”
“What? Oh, just something about Melrose Plant.” He asked, “Didn’t you think Pete Apted did a remarkable job?” Was he criticizing her for not being grateful enough? Yes, he supposed he was.
“He’s remarkable. It’s just that I was hoping I’d be—” She moved her shoulders in a small shrug, bent her head over the glass.
“That you’d be acquitted, I know. Who can blame you? Short of that, though, a dismissal was the best thing that could have happened. I don’t see how you could have been cleared in the absence of any other suspects.”
She did not answer immediately; she gave him a speculative look.
“If I’d come up with anything, I’d certainly have passed it along to Bannen.” He hated this feeling that he’d failed her.
Again, she was silent. Then she said, “I think I should go away from this place.” A silly-looking shawl hung over the arm of her chair; she picked it up and wrapped it around her.
Jury felt the chill again. “I don’t understand.”
“I think it might do me good simply to leave here.”
“Go away from here, well, possibly. Turn up, though, where? That’s the problem. At least for me, it is.”
Jenny pulled the shawl so tightly about her, it might have been a second skin. She seemed to want it to be, as if the first one were not enough to protect her. A log sparked, crumbled, collapsed, throwing embers on the hearth, which she shoved back with the toe of her shoe.
Jury felt a similar collapse of his resolve. Or, rather, of its strength to sway her. Behind her gentle, almost quiescent manner, she had great determination. He could sense, could feel her withdrawing in the same way he felt it years ago in Littlebourne churchyard where they were separated by the length of a grave. He was afraid they were still separated by a grave. He waited for her to return to the subject of the trial, but she didn’t. They sat with their coffee and cognac on either side of the fireplace, she gazing into it; he, watching her. He wondered how she could so seal herself off from people.
And he counted back and realized he had actually seen her a mere handful of times in the ten or more years he had known her. He knew, really, little about her. It was with a kind of cold clarity he realized that this silence of theirs now was not the comfortable silence of old friends who had no need to speak in order to feel close to one another. He felt their separation acutely; the silence stretched between them filled with unspoken words—of blame, or hope, or desolation—like white noise.
But if these unspoken words bothered her, there was no way of knowing it. That was just the trouble. He was apparently not attuned to her feelings, when feelings were what he was very good at decoding. Had it always been like this? Probably, but obscured by his own willingness to talk about himself. There had never been from Jenny such a monologue as he himself had spoken just a few weeks before, about his childhood, his parents’ deaths. It came with a small shock, the realization that he knew nothing about her that hadn’t been immediately evident: that is, the death of her husband, the move from Stonington, the taking up of quarters here in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Jury drank off his cognac and sat looking at her, and if she knew he was looking, she gave no sign. She seemed totally immersed in whatever pictures the flames were casting up. Discomfort turned to desperation; he could feel whatever had been there slipping away, and he was at a loss to account for this and knew that if asked, she would look at him in dumb surprise. He could not rely on their long and close association, for it hadn’t been long even though it had covered a number of years, and now he was forced to admit to himself that it hadn’t been close. It was probably this desperation that got him out of his chair and in a step across to hers. He held out his hand and with a smile that was truly inscrutable, she let him pull her up and more than let him kiss her—more than “let”—then she sighed, reached her arms even more tightly around him, and laid her head against his shoulder. He had the strangest sense of her insubstantiality, as if she were not flesh and blood, but a figure in a Magritte painting, walking away through cloud banks.
Saying to him: “But there’s no reason, is there, we can’t occupy ourselves while you’re doing all of this thinking?”
Even though her face was buried on his shoulder, he could sense her smiling. “I can’t think of one.”
Insubstantial as she might have been, still she led the way upstairs.
• • •
Physical love (he had told himself) would bridge the distance, but he hadn’t believed it then and didn’t now. On their backs they lay looking at the ceiling.
Not a word had been spoken except for a few endearments, and he wondered now if each of them was waiting for the other to speak. For the other to make something out of their being in bed together. To explain it. All he could think to say was “Don’t go, Jenny.”
“I feel I have to, after all of this.”
There was no negotiating, no argument.
Yesterday, this morning even, he might have said, Stay here and marry me, but not now. “I don’t understand,” he said for the second time, and said it almost to himself as well as to her.
“I think you do.” Her head turned sideways, studying him.
“No.” He shook his head.
There was a long silence, and he again became aware of the problem: she had never, during the whole course of the trial, said she was innocent. He had never asked her. He thought it, but it was Jenny who said it.
“You’d never be sure about me; about my relationships to—other men. You’d never be certain that I didn’t do it.”
“That’s ridiculous.” He said this with great feeling, knowing he was lying.
“Then why don’t you ask it?”
He paused. “I shouldn’t have to.”
“You mean, I should have told you.”
Jury closed his eyes, letting the web of shadows on the ceiling go. “I mean, you shouldn’t have to.”
There was more silence, finally broken by Jenny. “The argument with Verna? Do you want to hear what that was really about?”
“Of course.” He could not help the tinge of sarcasm. “I’d have liked to hear that the first time you told me.”
His tone did not daunt her. “It began with Jack Price, you see. That’s where I was; I wasn’t on the footpath. That’s why Major Parker didn’t see me.”
Hell, thought Jury. Then, the cop got the better of him, and he asked, “Why in God’s name didn’t Price say so.”
“I didn’t want him to. It had nothing to do with these murders, and it wouldn’t have given me an alibi.”
“God, you amateurs who make your own rules! If Bannen had known that, he would have had a completely different—” Jury stopped, heaved a long sigh. What difference did it make now?
“I just didn’t want anyone knowing. I have that right, haven’t I?”
The question was rhetorical. “And Verna Dunn?”
“Told me they were having an affair, had been for some time. Well, I imagine she was lying, Jack certainly denied it—”
“When you got together on the Tuesday night?” His tone was bitter.
“Yes. We met in Sutterton. I felt . . . I felt I needed—I don’t know. Comfort,
reassurance—I don’t know. I’ve known him for a long time.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
Somehow, that made Jury angrier than a simple “yes.” He sat up, put out his hand instinctively for the cigarettes on the nightstand, realized it wasn’t his nightstand and that there were no cigarettes. He sighed. How was he supposed to get through such moments without one? He put his head in his hands, stupidly unsure which was the greater need: a disclaimer from Jenny about Jack Price, or a cigarette. “How can you not know, Jenny?”
She didn’t answer. There was no answer. Instead, she lifted her hand and waved the question away, as if she were clearing smoke.
Jury raised himself. “Why all of the secrecy? Why didn’t you say you knew Verna Dunn even if you didn’t want to admit knowing Price? I can see her not doing it simply because deception seemed to be her meat and drink. But you—it just doesn’t make sense. You don’t play mind games.”
“I wanted to find out what she was up to.”
He knew that wasn’t so; she’d just made it up. “I don’t believe that, Jenny.”
She sat up, threw an old chenille robe round her shoulders. There was a hard edge to her voice when she said, “You think I’m lying?”
“Yes.” Jury lay there, looking at her, at her angry face.
Jenny said nothing; she got out of the bed and thrust her arms into the robe, tied it in front. Then she said, “You don’t know what the answer is, do you? Whether I’m innocent or guilty.”
“Listen, love: I don’t care what the answer is. It’s the fact you won’t give me an answer—yes, that hurts.” Jury pulled his legs from the bed, sat on the edge. He picked up the wrinkled shirt and pants that had fallen in a heap from a side chair. He pulled on the trousers, then socks. “You must not trust me very much,” he said, feeling inexpressibly sad as he might do if he were about to lose something.
“Trust works both ways. You must not trust me,” she said, not looking at him.
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