THIRTY-NINE

The kid with the purple hair (hadn’t that punk style gone out of punk fashion yet?) and wearing outsized earphones on the other side of the aisle was entranced by whatever he was listening to, his eyes closed, his fingers rapping on the small table on which sat his CD player. Music—though strictly speaking, it was likely not even music—leaked out around the earphones, trying to escape itself probably.

The scene reminded Jury of a similar one in Stratford-upon-Avon a few years back, and similarly having to do with trains and platforms, in which another lad with dyed hair and a boom box was playing (incredibly enough) a song sung by a French chanteuse, in heartbreaking accents of a love gone wrong and to which she was bidding her painful adieu. It was the only word he recognized in addition to amour and j’amais. But love songs being universally translatable along lines of hello and good-bye, usually the latter, Jury understood her sentiments perfectly. Yes, that was exactly how it felt; God only knew he’d felt it often enough. That time had been a bad one for Jury. He had lost someone he felt he couldn’t afford to. It had been January then, too. Or March? Did this music presage another loss? Was the lad some winter angel appointed to appear in Jury’s life when things were coming undone?

What was it this time, though? Or perhaps it was simply a cumulative process of undoing, a little unraveling here, a little there. Life sometimes seemed so fragile and weightless; it would blow away if he breathed on it.

But what was blowing away? What was wrong? Aside from the fact he seemed destined to listen to another man’s music.

The boy adjusted his earphones and the music spiked. Some group. Heavy thrumming. Jury would never be able to identify them; he couldn’t even recognize the groups of his own youth, much less the current ones.

An attendant came through trundling a well-stocked trolley: sandwiches, tea, coffee, soft drinks, crisps. Everything about the trains now was shipshape and Bristol fashion, clean as a newborn babe. Hell, you could change a baby on the floor without fear of germs. He bought some tea and a cheese salad sandwich he didn’t want.

He went back to his ruminations over this day spent in the company of the charming Sara Hunt and the almost-otherworldliness of the faded gardens, the crumbling stone, the unpolished silverplate, the rose pattern of the slipcovered chairs worn to liquidity—everything in need of tending.

Jury tried to reweave the unraveling tapestry. Living in that big house was, he thought, a rather Victorian notion, a woman mourning the death of her beloved. Wouldn’t it have been easier merely to put the pictures away instead of hiding them behind others? But that was the point, he reminded himself. She was stubborn; she would not give in; she would chance it. He leaned his head against the cold glass and watched the frosty pastures and fences pass. The fields looked antediluvian, left over, dead, nothing growing, nothing grown. A strange image. Jury closed his eyes, went back to Dan Ryder and Sara. The thing was, why should she even hide the fact they’d been lovers? She must have been aware he was the consummate bed hopper. It was public knowledge—well, at least the public who lived with one foot in the racing world. Dan Ryder slept around; Dan Ryder was—to use a Victorian appellation—a bounder. It could be pride on her part, of course; that might make sense of the end of the affair, of being dumped, but did not explain its beginning. There would have been no reason to keep quiet over that.

Jury realized he was basing this on intuition rather than hard evidence. No matter; intuition had eventually brought in the hard evidence.

The London train slowed and stopped at a station Jury could not pronounce, and the boy removed the headphones and darted out to a kiosk on the platform. Jury watched him buy a candy bar and a packet of cigarettes. The kiosk fellow carefully smoothed out the bill the lad had handed him, reached round to the cartons displayed in the back and handed over the cigarettes.

The boy had forgotten to turn off the CD player and the headset squawked with antimusic before segueing into the next piece, but still kept to its slightly tinny, raspy tone. He caught some of the words; it was a love song, surprisingly. Jury thought about Nell’s singing to the horses. What had it been? “Love Walked In”?

Love at first sight: it was a concept Jury had no trouble believing in. He had never understood it, how one person (such as he) could react with such certainty to another (such as he had to several women he’d known).

One look—as the song said—was all it had taken to fall for Vivian Rivington. That was years back. Helen Minton, Nell Healy, Jane Holdsworth—same thing. He had never really understood why so much of psychology refuted such an immediate attachment as shallow, banal, sentimental, romantic and adolescent. (He also thought that adolescence came in for too much of a bad rap.) Jury believed that love could of course come about along those lines that most people approved—that of knowing a person for some time before discovering one was in love. It struck Jury as dreary, rather like buying a car and not having to make payments on it for a year or two.

The boy had jumped aboard just in time, just as the train was moving. He plunked down the cigarettes and adjusted his headphones. Jury could put up with the hair, the rap, the noise, but not with the smoke. The lad made no move to light up, he was happy to see. He felt oddly depressed, a depression that seemed against his better judgment, as if he had a choice in the matter. He decided it was probably a hangover from Mickey Haggerty’s case—not that he needed any self-induced punishment from that quarter.

Jury closed his eyes and tried to put himself in Sara’s place vis-a‘-vis Dan Ryder. If reports were true, Dan Ryder had as much charisma as the Thoroughbreds he rode: all the glamor of a Samarkand, all the cunning of a Criminal Type.

The needle stuck. The record replayed that thought: Criminal Type. The needle stayed in that mental groove for a moment and then let it go. He could not build upon it to flesh out the man.

Another little galvanic burst of music came from the headphones as the boy dropped them on the table and left his seat to hip-hop down the aisle, still hearing the music in his head. The music rattled in the headphones enough to move them, although that was probably a movement of the train’s making the headset inch across the table.

And now the lad was back and clamping the headset on.

Oblivion. A kind of oblivion, thought Jury, and who was he to deny someone else his road to oblivion to transport him to a better world or connect him with this one? Yet this one Jury thought to be infinitely superior to the one we imagine, imagination being full of such flashiness that we mistake it for light and color. There was far more flash than genius in our imagined worlds.

When the train finally approached the edge of London and slowed on the outskirts, the boy rose, his trip apparently over.

“Hey, man,” said Jury, not at all sure that this word was still in the teenage lexicon. When the boy turned toward him, surprised, Jury said, “I like your music.”

The lad smiled, seeming pleased to get a compliment out of some middle-aged stiff, something he wasn’t used to. “You like Door Jam?”

Jury nodded. “The best.”

“Cool!” the boy said, slapping his hand against Jury’s palm in that handshake that always looked like a prelude to arm wrestling.

“Way cool,” said Jury.