The Horse You Came in On Read online

  Downstairs was a long sitting room that reached to the patio door at the rear and that, in turn, opened onto a little garden. This was the only room down here, except for the kitchen, from which must be coming that heady mixture of cooking smells that Jury couldn’t identify.

  “I’m Elsie. I’ve come to help cook.”

  “Well, Elsie, if my nose is any judge, you’re doing a great job of it.” Jury closed his eyes and sniffed. The mingled scents were absolutely voluptuous. For the last two or three weeks, he’d had no appetite to speak of; now he was starving hungry.

  Said Elsie, importantly: “We’re doing a venison and beef casserole. It takes a lot of cooking—two or three hours. She—we—put a lot of red wine in it. And, let’s see, there’s some trout mousse for starters, and some soup that’s been cooking forever.” Here she put her hands on her aproned hips and sighed hugely, as if there never had been such a beleaguered cook as Elsie. “And for the sweet there’s pudding. It’s Guinness pudding—” she paused to give him a chance to show surprise; he did—“that takes over five hours steaming. So you’re smelling a lot of things.”

  “With a menu like that, you must be having a dinner party. I expect I’ve come at a bad time,” Jury added, unhappily.

  Quickly she said no, and told him to sit down. Having judged him to be a very appreciative audience, she was now anxious for more applause. “Oh, there’ll be quite a few people here, I expect. Though I haven’t laid the table with her best silver yet. I do that, you see.” Her feet, which barely reached the floor from the high wing-backed chair, were crossed, and she pulled the apron down over her knees in a gesture she’d no doubt seen many young ladies use. Elsie was herself trying hard to be a young lady, proper and aubergine-worldly. The persona slipped as a pot in the kitchen started to clatter and she jumped up and ran. Then back she came, complaining that the old gas cooker wouldn’t simmer properly and was really messy and she was trying to talk Lady Kennington into getting halogen. The pronunciation of that word went the way of “aubergine.”

  “Does she entertain often, then?”

  “All the time. She has ever so many friends. She goes to the theater a lot and knows all the actors. She knows Daryl Jackbee”—Jury thought that one over: Derek Jacobi, he decided—“and she goes to London a lot. She likes to shop. She has cupboards full of clothes.”

  This did not sound like the Jenny Jury knew. He smiled. “A busy lady.”

  “Well, she is, you know. A Lady, I mean. She has a title.”

  Jury watched the black cat sway in from the kitchen and thought—could it be Tom? The cat they’d once taken to the vet? Oh, but that was years ago. “I don’t even like that cat,” Jenny had said, sitting in his car with the injured bundle of cat, a stray she’d found roaming around the house at Stonington, her old estate in Hertford. And here he was, still looking as imperious as a cat with mangy tail and a chewed ear could look. Stonington. Jury smiled a little and then felt saddened by the passing of those years. Something, he felt, had been wasted. He reached his hand out towards the cat, who was sitting on the hearth like a bucket of coal, and who ignored the hand and started washing.

  At the sound of the door opening, Elsie jumped up and went out into the hall, and Jury overheard a brief exchange. Then Jenny Kennington was in the sitting room, smiling.

  He had felt, until this moment, uncertain and even stupid, coming here unannounced. But when she spoke his name and smiled at him as if his appearance were the most wonderful surprise she could imagine, he no longer felt stupid.

  “Hello, Jenny.” He glanced, smiling himself, at what she was wearing. For a woman with a cupboard of clothes, she certainly stuck to one favored sweater.

  She noticed his expression, looked down at the sweater, and said, “Oh, lord! Same old sweater. I know you think it’s all I have to wear.”

  It was black, shot through with some metallic thread, with too-big sleeves that she kept pushing up on her arms. She’d been wearing it when they first met. And the nervous mannerism still went with it. “According to Elsie, you’ve plenty of clothes. Always doing the London shops. Selfridge’s, Liberty’s.”

  Elsie had shot off towards the kitchen immediately after Jenny had come in, and was now putting the silver on the table.

  Jenny whispered: “It’s because I’m ‘Lady’ Kennington. She invents all sorts of romantic and expensive pastimes for me.”

  “Like tonight’s dinner party?”

  “No dinner party. Did she tell you the entire cast of Henry IV, Part II was coming?”

  “Only Daryl Jackbee. If it’s no party, what’s that incredible menu for? Unless Elsie was exaggerating and it’s really cabbage and mash cooking?”

  “For me. Now us. You will stay, won’t you? There’s also some excellent Sancerre and Stilton with apricots that no one knows about except me. And I can rummage around and find a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that we can drink with the casserole.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  • • •

  Elsie had been paid her “salary” and had flown off—almost literally, the way she danced, with that little skipping step, out the door.

  The dinner lived up to its romantic preview. It was wonderful.

  They had between them settled a number of things over the soup and the venison casserole: that Jenny hadn’t made any plans to leave Stratford; that she had made plans to buy a new outfit following their last meeting in London; that the cat was Tom—the Tom.

  “The cat you can’t stand.”

  “I couldn’t just leave him there, at Stonington.” Pushing up her sweater sleeves, she looked nervously at Tom, as if he might think his fate still in abeyance. Tom walked away, towards the source of the trout mousse.

  “That cat doesn’t appreciate you.”

  “I know. That’s one reason I can’t stand him.”

  They ate their pudding in silence for a few moments. Then Jury said, “I never called you to apologize or to thank you.”

  “Apologize for what?”

  “The way I just walked out of the Salisbury that afternoon and left you sitting there. To say nothing of the insults I hurled at you about your sweater.”

  She laughed. “You couldn’t hurl an insult if someone put a gun to your head. You told me black didn’t suit me, that’s all. And you were just nervous or upset about—” Jury heard the pause, though she picked up on it quickly enough—“a case, I expect.”

  He just watched her calmly pouring from a decanter of port. If she wanted to be delicate, he would let her. He smiled. “I expect.” For he knew she knew about the whole business; anyone who read the papers would have done. And Jenny had also done something about it, without ever telling him. “It wouldn’t have worked out, in any event,” he said, elliptically.

  “I’m very sorry.”

  Beside one of the white marble candlesticks was the little alabaster figure of a woman that she had bought that day in St. Martin’s Lane, in the same shop where he had got the ring. Jury picked it up, turned it round in his hand. He thought of the marble figure in the inner courtyard of Stonington, the figure that could be seen from every room, at different angles. The first time he had ever seen Jenny Kennington had been with the black cat, Tom, on the steps of Stonington and, later, in those big, empty rooms from which she was moving. Some of the pieces here in this cottage had come from there: the marquetry secretaire, the ivory-inlaid writing desk, the delicate-looking but sturdy neoclassical chairs on which they now sat.

  “You were thinking of going back the last time I saw you, to Stonington.”

  “It’s been let since then,” she said sadly, the small glass of port raised to her lips. “I’m thinking of opening a restaurant.”

  “What?”

  She looked round the table. “It wasn’t that good?”

  “The meal? It was superb. It’s just a long way from superb cooking to a restaurant.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  He laughed at her genuine surprise. He sup
posed the confidence pleased him. Jenny was shy but by no means shrinking. “No reason, I expect.”

  “What I’m doing is practicing. I cook up these elaborate dinners for myself; sometimes I invite one or two people, and sometimes just Elsie. She really is learning to help out.”

  He pictured it: Elsie and Jenny, sitting opposite each other across this festive little table, talking about food and the Royal Shakespeare Company. It stabbed him a little, this picture of poignance. “It’s a wonderful idea, Jenny. Is there somewhere around here you’re thinking of?”

  “Outside of town there’s a pub that needs a new manager. They could do thirty, maybe forty covers.”

  “You’ve really looked into this. I can see you as a landlady.”

  “No, you can’t.” She smiled and changed the subject. “You said something about ‘thanking’ me. For what?”

  “For Pete Apted. Pete Apted, Q.C. The man does not come cheap. It took me a long time to work that out, who had retained Pete Apted.”

  “You of all people should remember that I had a little money. And also that if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have.”

  That was a massive exaggeration. She was talking about the emerald necklace, but her husband had not died a poor man. And she had also inherited money from that relation of hers she’d travelled with.

  She said, “It was something good to do with the money I got from that necklace. Something really worthwhile, after all the hell it caused. And Pete Apted’s fee wasn’t that high. I think he made concessions; I think he liked you. And he didn’t have to go to court.”

  “No, thank God. But he’d have won. You just have that feeling about him. I don’t think Pete Apted, Q.C., ever loses. He helped out a friend of mine. Three friends, actually.” Jury smiled. The smile faded. It was also that whiz of a barrister, Pete Apted, who had worked out just what was going on. And had made Jury face it. For a few moments in his office a year ago, he had hated Pete Apted as he had seldom hated anyone. Did Apted have to be so damned clever?

  “Something wrong? You look furious.”

  “What? Oh, no. No.”

  A pleasant silence drew out while Jenny sat there turning the stem of her glass. She asked: “Did you come to Stratford just to see me, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  He laughed. “In addition to you, I wanted to see Sam Lasko. Warwickshire constabulary. I’m job hunting.”

  She gasped. “What?”

  “I’m tired of London. And for God’s sake don’t quote Dr. Johnson, will you?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That it’s London you’re tired of?”

  “You mean, am I tired of something else?”

  She looked away. “Memories, perhaps.”

  “Like Jane, you mean?” There was no need, really, to avoid the subject.

  “If that was her name.” Her voice was bleak.

  He looked at her for a moment. “I think I always knew it wouldn’t work out with Jane. I knew something was wrong; I only wish Pete Apted hadn’t told me what, exactly,” he said dryly. She did not ask what, and he was a little disappointed that she did not. “I expect I’ll never be sure just how she felt, now.” He paused, smiled. “Anyway, I thought, hell, it might be nice, for a change, just to get a bicycle, mooch around, drop in every day at the pub for a good old natter with my mates.”

  “Sounds bucolic.”

  “You don’t think it’s a good idea.” When she didn’t comment, he felt, again, disappointed. He had been depending on her enthusiasm for his making a change, especially if it were here he were to change to. He picked up the alabaster figure with the broken arm and stared at it in the candlelight. “You might be right.” When she smiled slightly, he realized he’d assumed she had said what he himself was thinking. “Perhaps it’s not being ‘tired’ of something at all.” He kept his eyes fixed on the little figure, not wanting to meet Jenny’s eyes, afraid of what he might find in them. With the thought of that notion possibly gone, the notion of release from his present malaise or lethargy or accidie—whatever it was he’d been feeling over the last couple of years—another feeling crept over Jury. It was the old sense of desolation, similar to this so-called accidie, or perhaps disguised by it. But it was also different, and devastating, and inescapable.

  Dressed in that dark sleeve, Jenny’s arm lay languidly across the table, her hand briefly touching his own and then turning over, palm upward, as her finger touched the tip of one of the brilliants that dripped from the marble candleholder. Jane had been dressed in black the last time he’d seen her. But beneath that image was what might have been an even sharper one. More painful, if that were possible. The memory was always with him of the bombed-out house on the Fulham Road, and he wondered if it wasn’t waiting just below the surface of any event, any meeting, any touch, any kiss to engulf him again. His mother’s body beneath the plaster ceiling rubble—buried in it, except for that arm flung out in its black sleeve, fingers curled in that beckoning gesture.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Her tone was anxious.

  “It’s nothing.” He got up with his glass of port.

  “Nothing.” Her smile was very slight, a mere glimmer.

  He left the table and walked over to the window facing towards the stone wall that edged the pavement beside the church. He remembered, years ago, walking over there in the park between the church and the theater. It was night, and he’d been walking along thinking about his lack of tranquility in the midst of such a tranquil scene. Even in the dark one sensed the sunlit riverbank, the gliding swans, the ducks sawing to shore for their bread crumbs. He was tired then, and he was tired now, of slogging through London’s sulphurous atmosphere.

  “I was thinking of the war.” He told Jenny about the air raid, when he was six, and his mother.

  After he finished, Jury shook himself loose from those inchoate images, and there was a long silence. He kept looking out the window, thinking, and then wondered how long he had been standing here, dreaming away, and turned and saw that Jenny was still sitting at the table, looking not at him but straight ahead, her gaze fixed on another window, the front one. Jenny had thoughts of her own. That made him smile. A calm settled over him at the idea of this shared silence. He moved over to the armchair in which he had sat before, sat down, looked at her. Her attention was still fixed elsewhere, probably inward.

  This experience he found unusual, and very pleasant, this ability to coexist in perfect privacy, thinking one’s own thoughts, and not having to be filling up gaps and silences or straining to engage, to connect.

  She said, into the surrounding stillness, “That’s horrible; that’s awful.”

  The context was her own, in her own mind. Jury assumed she was still thinking about what he’d told her.

  “How often have you done it since?” she asked.

  “Done what?”

  “Pulled women from burning buildings.”

  8

  I

  “It’s the Stendhal syndrome,” said Diane Demorney, holding her glass aloft as a signal to Dick Scroggs to run and fill it.

  They were sitting, the four of them—six, if one counted Lavinia Vine and Alice Broadstairs at a distant table—in the Jack and Hammer. The pub, its mechanical Jack freshened up once again with a coat of turquoise paint to his trousers, sat on the High Street next to Trueblood’s Antiques. The group sat at their favorite table, the one in the half-circle of casemented windows through which shone light, almost misty, a light suitable for a late-January afternoon. The Jack and Hammer had been open now for less than an hour, but the settled state of its custom made it appear that a substantial inroad had been made into the working day.

  Or nonworking one, since those who took up the two tables could not be said actually to work, if by “work” was meant some regular occupation of reporting somewhere in the morning and leaving at some time in the afternoon. Before Diane Demorn
ey had dragged in her arcane topic, hoping for an audience, “work” had been the topic of discussion. Joanna Lewes denied that any work at all was involved in writing her books (in reading them, yes, plenty). Marshall Trueblood, on the other hand, being a shopkeeper, should have been able to lay claim to “work”; he, however, spent his time loafing about amidst his king’s ransom in antiques next door, his flexible hours allowing him to use the Jack and Hammer as his anteroom. (No one knew precisely what his background was; he made vague references to London, but Melrose Plant insisted he’d been found in a Chinese urn.)

  The subject of “work” having been raised and quickly dropped (none of them being, as Plant said, in any way expert in this area), the visit of Richard Jury was the next topic for speculation. Where was he, and when was he coming to Long Piddleton?

  Melrose Plant, having known Richard Jury for more than a dozen years, was again put in charge of Jury’s whereabouts. Melrose had no idea where Jury was or when he was coming, beyond a vague promise from Jury of “in a few days.” That had been a few days ago, so it could be any time now.

  What Melrose Plant said was: “He’s taken the 9:10 from Paddington.” He was glancing at one of the books in the pile near his pint of Old Peculier. “And he should arrive in Glasgow early this afternoon.”

  They were uniformly surprised. “Glasgow? What the devil’s he doing in Glasgow?” asked Trueblood.

  “A triple murder.” Actually, The 9:10 from Paddington was the title of Polly Praed’s latest thriller and a blatant theft of one of Agatha Christie’s titles. “In a prominent Glaswegian family.”

  “Really?”

  No, thought Melrose, not really, but now they wouldn’t hound him hourly for an update on Jury’s movements.

  Joanna Lewes lit a cigarette, frowning. “Thought he was working on that business at the Tate.”

  And it was just then that Diane Demorney, who’d been sitting in the fading limelight, dragged attention to herself with her comment “It’s the Stendhal syndrome.”