The Old Silent

He could only really think of it in its much simpler guise of depression. In a way, it was a comforting term, for everyone had it, or thought he had it, now and again. It was just that Jury did not feel it would pass off like sunburn or sore eyes. Indeed, he wondered why people seemed to think of it as a condition in which one felt merely dull, stupid, and disinterested in the day's events, when it was actually almost the very opposite. It was an active condition; close to an agony of conflicted feelings and feverish thoughts about one's work, life, ability to fulfill some expectation that was in itself ambiguous, shrouded in mystery. He was not, he knew, ordinarily a contented man. But he was very good at borrowing the expression, the mannerisms, the outward calm of one. And such a facade was helpful, perhaps necessary to his effectiveness as a policeman. What he felt as he lay wakefully staring at the ceiling was that the veneer was chipping.

And it occurred to him now, sitting in the musty car, that he had probably made this little side trip for a day or two of anonymity. Was it this feeling of lack of purpose, of vague possibilities and unformed hours that had made him feel a sense of kinship with the woman in the museum? For she seemed to be wandering here as much as he.

Locking the car again and starting toward the tourist information center with his gear, he felt angry with himself for yet another flight of fancy, totally unbecoming in a man whose whole life was devoted to sifting through facts and, yes, occasionally playing hunches.

Leeds thought he was in London, London thought he was in Leeds. He could not quite expunge the fancy from his mind that he and the woman in the cashmere coat were stopping off in a no-man's-land.

And that was why, when Jury had walked into the dining room of the Old Silent where he'd booked his room, his feeling had been less one of surprise than of justification.

She was sitting at a table in the corner, the only other occupant. With her dinner she was reading a book, and she did not lift her eyes from it when Jury walked in and sat down.

He had his own book. Perhaps it was symptomatic, Mr. Jury, that he ate solitary meals with a book more often than he dined with others. Fictional characters, he had lately found, were generally more interesting dinner companions than flesh-and-blood ones. He had the night previously suffered through a small dinner party at the home of an inspector from Wakefield headquarters. The hostess, like a television sponsor, seemed to think any silence at the table was as dangerous to her product as dead air on the telly. Weather, property values in the North and the South, London, the theater, New Scotland Yard-the same old questions and answers ebbing out with the soup and flowing back with the sweet.

So here the two of them sat in the silent dining room, silently reading their books, sipping their wine, buttering their bread. It was ten, which probably accounted for the lack of custom. Several other tables showed signs of diners having departed.

He wondered what she was reading and whether she was absorbed or whether she wanted, as he did, company. Dependable, well-spoken company. He thought he should have chosen something properly Bronte-ish, but he was reading instead a book by the late Philip Larkin called A Girl in Winter that fed his mind as well as the roast beef fed his body with its simple plot, elegant style, and sad heroine. It was a calm book.

When she laid her napkin aside, rose and passed by his table (still without seeing him), she had her own book pressed to the side of her leather bag. He angled his head slightly to see the title: The Myth of Sisyphus.

Not a calm book at all.

There was no one now in the lounge of the inn but them. A couple who had come too late for the dining room had finished up their meal in that part of the long front room reserved for the lounge bar and left. The Old Silent was a warm and friendly pub: copper and brass glinted; dark wood chairs and benches with flowered cushions were set in configurations around tables that invited the sort of comradely talk that had engaged the couple who had just left.

It was in the saloon bar that Jury was sitting, near the door that led to the public bar through which he heard muted voices. There was no other sound except for the steady ticking of the long-case clock, the occasional spark and sputter of a crumbling log in the fireplace.

There was no reason that he couldn't have taken his drink and moved into the lounge proper to sit nearer the fire. Indeed, as they were the room's only occupants now, nothing would have been more natural than for him to displace the black cat from the sedan chair with some comment about the way cats always took the best seat in the house.

But there was something about her that discouraged such an approach; she seemed so totally immersed, not in that book (of which a page hadn't turned) but in some private world, just as she had been in the museum, earlier. When she looked over the edge of the book, up and past him, she might have been reviewing some inner terrain and, frowning, found something wanting in it, something missing.

Then she would return to Camus, to the same page, holding the book in one hand before her face. Without the coat she seemed thinner. Her hand remained resolutely on the bag planted firmly beside her; the other held the book in such a way it blocked her face. The wrist below the elegant hand-long, tapering fingers-was slightly bony; the gold bracelet had slid halfway down the arm; and the gold band on her finger looked loose.

She was wearing a silk shantung suit, a narrowly pleated skirt and a short jacket, very plain and (he thought) very expensive. The diffused light of the lamp and fire lent the same pale umber to both suit and hair.

For another twenty minutes they sat there. When the clock struck eleven, she looked up. Jury could hear, from the public bar, the publican make his final call for Time. She closed her book, set it beside her handbag, and he thought she meant to rise and leave. But she still sat.

Sounds of the customers from the bar leaving carried in from the small car park; a few of them came out through the lounge.

Then the headlamps of a car dazzled the window before they were switched off. A door slammed, and Jury heard the approach of footsteps on the walk.

She sat in that rather stern and spinsterish way she had adopted after putting aside her book-hands folded in her lap and feet planted firmly together.

A man walked in the door-a man as well- and expensively groomed as she. He was perhaps in his late forties, the sort who looks fit from exercise (the sort Jury never got) and time spent under a sunlamp. He glanced at Jury without interest.

His attention was concentrated on the woman, who now rose, pushing herself as would an elderly person who has difficulty getting out of a chair. She still held her bag tightly.

There was no greeting, no handclasp, kiss, or even an exchange of smiles. Her visitor sat down without removing his coat, a dark Chesterfield, which he unbuttoned before he threw his arm across the back of the sofa in a careless, even indolent fashion. The fine features, the cut of his clothes, the grace of movement, bore the stamp of the gentleman. Yet the woman still stood while he sat. If his general demeanor hadn't told Jury that the visitor must be on very intimate terms with her, this failure of social grace surely did. He then said something to her and she sat down with a sadly compliant look.

It struck Jury as odd that he had been able to observe so closely the physical details of her person, right down to her wedding band, and yet was not close enough to hear the words that passed between them. The man spoke softly but in a rush. To his low current of words, her own contribution was no more than a word tightly wedged in, much like the bag between herself and the chair arm, breaking in whenever her companion showed the slightest sign of stopping the flow; even then, his hand raised up against her own response.

That what he said was evidently not to her liking was clear from her adamantine look, her glancing away from him to gaze at the fire, and back again as if there was no place, really, for her eyes to travel. The pale coral of her lips took on a golden glaze from the light, and her mouth was set like marble. She looked resolute and unbending.

Having said his piece or made his argument or whatever it was, he sat back, withdrew a silver case that winked in the firelight, and tapped a cigarette on it before lighting it. After waiting a few moments while she stared into the fire, he leaned forward as if willing her to loosen her resolve, to return her eyes to his face. Eventually, she did so, very slowly.

He said something and rose, still with that rather insouciant manner coupled with an air of belligerence.

Her head, gilded by the light, was bent slightly as if she had been bested or beaten in some serious game. Her