The Horse You Came in On (6 page)

“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.”

“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 Demorney 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.”

The only thing that kept Diane Demorney from being a pathological liar (a role she would have relished), was that she didn't need to be, since her particular cachet was marshalling esoteric and arcane bits of knowledge, just enough to make her look as though she really knew something. Which she didn't.

Ordinarily, Melrose Plant refused to rise to Diane's bait, but now he couldn't help himself. He squinted at her. “The
what?
”

“The Stendhal syndrome.” She played her eyes round the table, resting her look upon the three of them in turn. She toyed with her ten-to-one dry martini and said, “Well, I assume you've heard of Stendhal?
The Red and the Black, The Charnelhouse of Parma?
”

Joanna rolled her eyes heavenward; Melrose choked on his Old Peculier. Trueblood said, “So what's this ‘syndrome'? You're dying to tell us.”

Diane sipped her martini, making them wait. “Stendhal, you see, was a passionate lover of art. He'd stand about for simply
hours
looking at it. But it had a strange effect on him. He was always fainting. In Florence, especially. Well,
you
know what the art there is like.” This was directed to Joanna. “It was too much for the poor man.”

“No, I've never been to Florence,” said Joanna.

“But one of your
books
was set there,” said Diane, smoke from her cigarette pluming delicately upwards.

“So? You don't think I actually have time to
visit
those places, do you? Are you telling us Stendhal collapsed whenever he looked at paintings?”

Diane was pleased as punch that she'd bested them, one and all, yet again. “If he looked too long.”

“Fainting in Florence and pegging out at the Tate don't strike me as especially like,” said Melrose, adjusting himself on the window seat.

“It's looking at art that does it, whether it's in Italy or London or wherever. Stendhal was such a
marvellous
writer, wasn't he?—”

As if Diane had ever read him, thought Melrose.

“—that it makes me almost
green
I can't do it, too. Doesn't it
you,
Joanna?”

Completely ignoring the taunt, Joanna said, “Any idiot can write a book. Not like Stendhal, of course, but a book. I should know.”

“Yes, you should,” said Diane, sweetly agreeing.

“You're always selling yourself short,” said Melrose. “But it's encouraging, what you say.” He shifted uncomfortably.

Marshall Trueblood plucked a thread from his wool silk jacket sleeve. “Good heavens, dear Maddy, that's too much self-denigration.”

“Maddy” was Trueblood's fond diminutive for Joanna Lewes, who was known as Joanna the Mad, a nickname that had nothing to do with her mental state, but with the coincidence of her dead husband having been named Philip. Joanna had found it rather jolly that King Philip I of Spain had driven his wife, Joanna, round the twist, and the benighted queen had come to be known as Joanna the Mad.

Joanna Lewes had just been belittling her own writing (“romantic tripe”), which nonetheless enjoyed an enormous commercial success. This seemed to embarrass her. “Believe me, Marshall, if people will buy
Petersburg Passion
, they'll buy any damned thing.” Joanna used place names as titles:
London Love, Mexico Magic, Florentine Fancy, Rome Romance
. Her latest place was St. Petersburg, and when asked about the setting, she said, “Russia, Florida—who cares?” Long ago she had discovered that all roads that lead to Rome (and Petersburg) lead farther and farther away from the Inland Revenue. Joanna never seemed to take advantage of travel tax deductions, though. She was too busy writing about foreign love-affairs to visit the places. Authentic background was never one of her strong points.

“You two are collaborating or something? I thought I saw you writing.”

“No—oh, no,” said Melrose.

Trueblood sucked in his lower lip. “It's just . . . my accounting book. You know, for the shop. Melrose was helping me with the entries.”

“Cooking the VAT intakes, I hope.” Joanna sniggered.

Since they did not want its existence bruited about, Melrose had immediately whisked the black notebook off the table and sat on it when
they saw Joanna approaching. It was this little book that was causing him discomfort. He shifted his weight and rearranged the others in the stack; ordinarily he could sit in the Jack and Hammer for hours and read.

It was these books that Joanna pulled over to inspect. She looked at the dust jackets, smiled kindly over Polly Praed's latest effort, but seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the one called
Windows
. “This,” she said, tapping it with her fingers, “is fascinating. A good example of a minimalist novel.”

Windows
was Ellen Taylor's new book—new in England, that is, for it had been published in the United States two years before. It was by no means that Brontëesque extravaganza Melrose had feared would come out of Ellen's acquaintanceship with the North York moors; nor was it like her earlier
Sauvage Savant,
which had threatened to be the first in a quintet about the New York boroughs.
Windows
was entirely different. It was also entirely opaque—to Melrose, at least.

“Minimalist?” said Melrose.

“Minimalist?” repeated Marshall Trueblood, who was anything but, at least in dress. Beneath the Armani jacket was a shocking-pink shirt with an iridescent shell-pink stripe and a tie that looked as if it had wiped a painter's easel clean.

“You know.” Joanna's attention was caught by the two women in the back of the pub, Lavinia Vine and Alice Broadstairs.

Actually, Melrose didn't. He could not make head or tale out of Ellen's story, and he hadn't been able to think of a single intelligent thing to say about it when he'd talked to her only that very afternoon, an hour or two ago.

Lavinia and Alice were waving at their table. They were Long Piddleton's avid gardeners, who got together only for their pub port and biscuits. Otherwise, they were generally warring. Always, they were the first to purchase “the latest Lewes,” and Lavinia was now holding up
Petersburg Passion,
waving it like a hand. They wanted it signed.

“I'm not surprised,” said Joanna, speaking of Ellen Taylor's book, “that it won that literary prize.”

The nice thing about Joanna Lewes was not only her realistic assessment of her own talent but her utter lack of professional jealousy. She was the sort who would cast blurbs upon the water, encouraging for first-time-around novelists. She would read tattered manuscripts, answer letters, and so forth.

Such generosity of spirit could not be claimed for the next person who came through the Jack and Hammer's door, Melrose's aunt.

Whenever she saw Joanna Lewes, she bridled. And never failed to
mention that she, too, had a book in the works. “The world is full, Miss Lewes, of unsung writers.”

“Yes, and too damned many sung ones, too. Pardon me.” Joanna left to join her book-buying fans, a subspecies to which Lady Ardry had never belonged, finding her nephew's library sufficient, if she ever got round to actually reading a book.

“Conceited,” murmured Agatha, with a sniff. “That's the trouble with all this celebrity. What are you two doing? Ah, here's Theo,” she added with evident displeasure.

Actually, Theo Wrenn Browne was only winning by default with Agatha. He disliked the same people she did, with the exception of Diane, over whom he fawned. Theo owned the village's only bookshop and had refused until just lately to stock the novels of Joanna Lewes.

Diane Demorney, hardly a charitable person, looked like Mother Teresa when put side-by-side with Theo Wrenn Browne. She had stopped by the bar to instruct Dick Scroggs as to the precise ration of vodka to vermouth in her martini. She supplied him with her own brand of vodka—some unpronounceable mouthful of consonants, “Wybrvka” or “Zrbrikov,” that she swore by, and that nobody stocked. She said it was buffalo grass vodka, and it did indeed have a long plume of stuff stuck in it. Trueblood claimed she made it in her bathtub and pulled up weeds from her back garden.

Theo Wrenn Browne glanced at
Windows,
dismissed it as pretentious, and shoved it aside. If there was anything Theo Wrenn Browne hated more than a writer's commercial success, it was a writer's literary prize. Owner of the Wrenn's Nest bookshop, he was in constant danger of apoplexy, since he was surrounded on all sides by evidence of both—and in the case of writers such as Updike, Brookner, Byatt, Ishiguro, of both
together
. The dilemma was that he had to sell the stuff; it was his livelihood. Thus he could only solace himself with the fates of benighted writers who during their own lifetimes had found neither—the Melvilles, the Hart Cranes, the Chattertons. Theo had himself written one astonishingly bad book years before, called
The Last Race,
about guerrilla warfare at Doncaster (which made his disdain of Ellen Taylor as “experimental,” “avant garde,” “minimalist,” or anything else just a little hypocritical). He had tried to get Joanna the Mad to send this to her own editor and she had refused. With his own book unpublished, he had aligned himself with the unappreciated, maligned, betrayed, and even suicidal. Theo Wrenn Browne was a connoisseur of failure.