The Horse You Came in On (5 page)

She did.

“But she'll be back. She's only gone to the top of the road, to get an aubergine.”

He loved the way she said it. But she seemed uncertain as to how to deal with him.

“I'm an old friend,” he said. He handed her his card and watched her trying not to be impressed by its origins.

Finally, she said, “Well, I expect it'll be all right.”

She had been accompanied, in her visit to the front door, by a rough-looking black cat that was not impressed at all. Jury frowned over the cat: Didn't he know it? Hadn't he seen it before?

The little house was in the old section of Stratford-upon-Avon, off the
road that wound around the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the churchyard. He had been here a few years before, that time he was working on Lasko's case. It had been just before she let the house in order to take an ocean voyage with an aging relation. The woman had since died.

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 supposed 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.