The Old Silent

suggested she was listening and expectant; there was the air of an assignation missed.

She had certainly not registered his presence; her glance had swept across his face as if it were another Bronte artifact, a portrait or bronze bust. If she were introduced to him five minutes later, he doubted she would remember ever having seen him. Where she stopped the longest and seemed to really look was at the display behind glass of Angria and Gondal, those imaginary kingdoms invented by Branwell.

Then she turned and walked toward the stairs.

Well, he had meant to leave anyway (Jury told himself) and followed her. He stopped on the staircase to look at the famous portrait of the sisters painted by the brother. Jury could see the dim outline, the space once full where Branwell had painted himself out.

The Paddington family had left, too, headed across the narrow street to the tearoom, the children managing somehow to swarm as if there were ten of them rather than two.

At first he thought the woman might be going for a cup of tea herself, but she simply stood on the curb, hesitating as if she were in London at a zebra crossing. The only traffic here at the top of this hill up which the pilgrims toiled was one cab idling by the tourist information center and a boy trying to urge on an intractable dray horse wearing blinders.

A chill wind whipped up the cobbled pavement, bringing with it a taste of rain, and the woman pulled up the collar of her coat so that her hair was tucked into it. Then she plunged her hands into the pockets and turned up the street. He thought she might be making for the enticing warmth of the whitewashed hotel on the corner, perhaps (he hoped, for he could use a pint of something) to the saloon bar there. But she passed it and stopped instead before a narrow house called the Children's Toy Museum. She went in.

Jury stood looking at the facade and then into the dim interior where she was paying for a ticket. He was beginning to feel not only like a fool, but a voyeur. He hadn't followed a good-looking female since he was sixteen, except if a case he was working on required it, and it had been some years since he had had to do that sort of footwork himself.

The little foyer or outer room was crammed with small toys-tops, wooden figures, sweets and souvenirs clustered on shelves. An amiable young man in a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt and a forlorn-looking girl sat behind the counter, his happy expression and her sad one like the coupled masks of comedy and tragedy. She seemed surprised that here yet was another person over ten or twelve who was handing over fifty pence to go inside and see the toy display. The man smiled as if he approved of such larking about on the part of adults. Jury returned the smile and handed over the ticket money.

Just then a sallow kid with a lick of strawlike hair shooting up on the crown of his head came from the inner room into the outer room, frowning, as if he hadn't got his money's worth. The girl was generous; she realized the problem and told the boy to go back in and push the button. She then instructed Jury in a similar fashion, in case he too was a bit thick about getting the train setup to work. It wouldn't work, after all, unless you pushed the buttons. He thanked her and followed the boy into the museum.

She was standing at the end of the narrow aisle that ran between the glass walls crammed to overflowing with the detritus of childhood. Stuffed dolls and bisque dolls; elaborately designed dollhouses; mechanical toys and wooden toys.

He wondered, really, if the boy there at the end, standing beside her before the train display, could appreciate all of this. It was, in some sense, a museum for adults. He looked at the replica of a skyscraper built from a Lego set and remembered how much he had wanted one. Against the wall opposite was the most intricately built dollhouse he'd ever seen. Its little rooms were furnished on four sides, and it was probably meant to turn on a mechanical wheel. It even had a billiard room, a green baize table at which were two players, one holding his cue stick, the other bent over the table.

While he looked over this catalogue of childhood, he was aware of the faint buzzing noise of the trains, set in motion by the towheaded lad at the end.

Their backs were to him, the lad and the woman in the cashmere coat, standing side-by-side. Were it not that the lad could have done with a scrubbing and darning, and she so expensively turned out, they might have been mother and son, their coloring was so similar. The trains went round and they stood in a sort of comradely silence, watching. It was the boy who seemed to tire of this first; he walked back up the aisle, brushed by Jury, and left, still frowning, as if the trains, the bits and pieces of miniature buildings, and perhaps toy people and animals hadn't done something clever enough.

Still she stood there, pushing the button that operated the train again. He could see only her back and the faintest impression of her reflection in the glass.

Then she made a strange gesture. She raised her gloved hand, fingers outspread against the glass, and leaned her forehead against it.

It was as though she were looking at something she had once wanted terribly, as Jury had wanted the Lego set.

It was at that point that he had felt intensely ashamed, felt himself to be a voyeur, an intruder, an invader of privacy. He left the toy museum, feeling he would have to let her go.

'Let her go': certainly an odd, proprietorial way of regarding a person with whom he'd had no contact, hadn't even exchanged a word. Hadn't even, really, exchanged a look, given the glance she had passed over him had probably not registered.

And he was picking it apart, too, adolescently, going back over their mutual occupancy of the two different places as if something might come back to him that would suggest he had kindled at least a passing interest…

It was all one more sign-his doctor would say 'symptom'-of just how tired he was.

The only thing to do to stop this adolescent desire to hang about was to walk back to the car park, collect his rented car, and get on with his trip back to London.

He got as far as sitting behind the wheel of the Austin-Rover, letting the engine idle, staring through the windscreen at the almost-deserted car park and the gardens beyond where the children's swings lifted slightly and twisted in the wind.

It had been a lark, a cheering thought, after the wasted week at headquarters in Leeds, to drive the short distance to Haworth and spend the night.

He slid down in the seat, thinking this sudden decision to return was equally ridiculous (and symptomatic, Mr. Jury), since he had meant to stop here overnight. He was just too damned tired to make the four – to five-hour trip back to London. Part of the weariness came from the week in Leeds doing little more than getting baleful looks.

This self-deprecatory notion was all part of the malaise. 'Accidie, Mr. Jury,' (his doctor had prissily termed it, mouthing the word as if it were a tasty new drink). A larger part of this depression came from the knowledge that he had agreed to this assignment to get out of London and away from Victoria Street and New Scotland Yard, where he felt he had lately been bumbling about, making errors of judgment, taking wrong decisions, giving in to uncharacteristic outbursts of temper.

Sitting here now, looking down the slope of snow-patched park where the light drew back, away from the swings, he wondered how much of his recent behavior was actual, how much exaggerated. Nothing dramatic had happened, beyond the occasion of his having got so bored listening to Chief Superintendent Racer's litany of Jury's recent failings (no matter how minor) that Jury had offered to put in for a transfer. What concerned Jury was not the melodrama of this but the lack of it; the suggestion had merely come off the top of his head and he hadn't even enjoyed, particularly, the dilemma it had caused Racer.

Accidie. A holiday, that's what you need. Been working too hard. Then there were the prescriptions Jury had tossed in the nearest dustbin after leaving his doctor's office.

Accidie. It was as good a word as any (he had thought, lying awake at three a.m., which had lately become habitual); perhaps it was better in its foreign-soundingness, defining a condition that his own language was unable to describe. Malaise did not really fit, though he preferred it, for it sounded like a passing fancy, something that could probably be caught lying in the sun on the Amalfi coast and possibly left there, like sunburn.