The Grave Maurice

She had wanted him to stay the night, but he had not, making the excuse that he really needed to return to London. He had promised Nell Ryder. She had argued, but not vehemently, that it wasn’t after all his case.

So once again he was on the train, now its familiarity soothing. He wanted to sleep, not so much because he was tired but because he’d rather sleep than think. There were too many insensate moments in life not to be grateful for pure sensation and the last hours had certainly been that.

At the station’s newsstand he had bought a Telegraph and The Sporting Life. Jury had read a racing form about as often as he’d read Ulysses and thought Joyce’s density no match for the racing form.

It was something that Sara had said. It bothered him, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what it was, except that it had to do with racing. Cheltenham, Newmarket, Doncaster were places she’d gone to following Dan Ryder around. He didn’t doubt that she’d done this, for what man or woman would confess to such an obsession unless they were sociopaths? That kid who stalked Jodie Foster, the nutcase who shot John Lennon. Obsession was often not benign and harmless. But what was it, that detail that made him, right now, uncomfortable?

It looked like the same attendant who’d been on the train before, and who now came clattering through the car, shoving the food and drink trolley. As he’d done before, Jury bought a cheese salad sandwich and tea in a plastic cup. He hadn’t eaten the other sandwich, and wouldn’t eat this one; there were so few people in the car that he felt it must be discouraging not to sell your wares. He’d give the sandwich to Carole-anne; he now remembered that she loved cheese salad. He’d tossed the first one in the dustbin at the station.

Jury had called Plant to let him know he’d be spending the night in his Islington digs and would try to get to Ardry End tomorrow. The nice thing about Plant was that he didn’t ask questions beyond “Are you all right?”

He took a few sips of the tea. He was getting to be as bad as Wiggins, who would have drunk the lot so as not to have the fellow think his tea wasn’t any good. Wiggins watched flight attendants going through safety precautions, too. The tea was the same tea that he’d had on the other trips. Why did train tea always have that bit of whitish foam on top, as if its ingredients couldn’t coalesce?

He returned to his meditation on Sara Hunt. He opened the print-condensed pages of The Sporting Life and ran his eye over the various kinds of races—claim, handicap, stakes—and the horses entered in them. Nothing jarred his memory for whatever it was, or perhaps it wasn’t. It might have been something or someone else—

Davison. George Davison, Ryder’s trainer. That afternoon they had been standing with Wiggins and Neil Epp in front of Criminal Type’s stall. The Derby, at Epsom—that was what Sara had said. The last time she’d seen Dan Ryder race before his defection to France a few weeks later was in the Derby, up on Criminal Type. But Davison had made a point of that race. “Only time I ever lost me temper at the board it was over that weight allowance. They said Criminal Type’d have to carry another twelve pounds. Bloody unfair. So I scratched ’im.”

Davison had scratched the horse almost at the last minute. Criminal Type was taken out of the field, and the horse and its jockey didn’t race.

Why had Sara told him she’d seen the race? It seemed such a pointless lie, as he wouldn’t have thought one way or the other about that race, the only thing setting it apart being that George Davison had taken his horse out. It made no sense, what Sara had said. He slid down in his seat and closed his eyes.

She had been with Ryder that day? But in that case she would have known he wasn’t racing at Epsom. She could fairly well assume that Jury wouldn’t know that the Ryder horse was scratched. (Certainly, he’d pled ignorance of the racing world in general.) His head was hurting, probably in sympathetic response to his side, which throbbed. Dr. Ryder would thrash him if he knew Jury wasn’t following instructions. So would Wiggins. So would Carole-anne. He’d be thrice thrashed, a pleasant little tongue-twister. He made sure the cheese salad sandwich was in his coat pocket. It might fend her off for a little while.

A very little while. Carole-anne, dressed in emerald green, had deposited the sandwich wrapper in the trash can and was now picking crumbs from her gorgeous green bosom.

The eyes that leveled on him would have been cold had they not been so goddamned turquoise. Flashing turquoise, to boot. There she went now, hands on hips:

“Super! You know you promised that doctor that you wouldn’t exert yourself in any way, that you wouldn’t go out pub-crawling, that you’d stay in bed as much as possible—”

Well that flummoxed her. She was gathering up her argument, getting it into full gear, which of course demanded a fellow arguer, and Jury wasn’t doing it. He smiled.

“It’s just not very considerate, that’s all, I mean to me and Mrs. W, as all we do is worry, wondering where you are and if you’re okay. Not dead in a ditch somewhere. Like Wales.”

That she saw no flaw in this argument was one of the things he loved about her. Jury rose, walked over and embraced her. “Sorry.”

Jury thought of the rain-swept, snow-swept garden, of its oddly aromatic winter scent. Carole-anne gave off that scent somehow. He released her. She went back to the sofa, argument momentarily suspended. “Then why’d you go to Wales, anyway? Nobody I know goes there.” She uncapped her nail polish.

Not bloody likely. Jury thought he would doll up the description and ran the faces of several film stars by his mind’s eye, discarding each of them in turn as perhaps not beautiful enough to fan the fires of jealousy. Would Judi Dench or Helen Mirren capture her imagination? (They captured his.) No. Right now she was tapping her foot, which didn’t register very high on the impatience scale since she hadn’t any shoes on.

“Well, if it takes you this long to describe what she looks like,” she said, drawing her unpainted toenails back to rest on the edge of the table—“then she mustn’t have made much of an impression.”

“Oh, her.” Unmoved, Carole-anne dipped the tiny brush in the neon-bright pink polish and let it hover over her foot as if sizing it up for the glass slipper.

“Am I to understand you do not think Ms. Binoche has the most alluring complexion in the whole world? No—the whole universe? Her skin is absolutely luminous.” Though luminosity in another when he had Carole-anne right in front of him was definitely coals to Newcastle.

Jury had always taken a secret delight in Carole-anne’s non sequiturs, but this one puzzled him. “She’s French. That removes her completely from our purview, does it?”

Ah! That was it. Juliette was inaccessible! And in Carole-anne’s seamless accounting, Wales merely took off where Paris began. “Yes, she probably does live in France, but a man could easily have a lover there, what with the Chunnel making it so convenient.”

Was she splurging on non sequiturs tonight? “I am?” She nodded. “You wouldn’t last five minutes in the Chunnel.” Down went that foot, up came the other.