“Birthday party. Except the little one, Georgie, he’s asleep. My niece’s boy, Ruth’s? You remember her? When he wakes up you can see him. You never have done and he’s eighteen months.” Her mouth tight, she shook her head as if Jury were himself eighteen months old and more hopeless than Ruth’s Georgie. “So, Richard. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
Sarah seemed unable to say anything to him without that bite, that begrudging air.
“Had to come here on police business,” he lied, “and just wanted to see you. I’m sorry it’s been so long. No excuse except the same old thing: busy on the Job.” He paused, wondering how to commence. He knew that what made all of this so painful was that he would be trying to get information from someone who wouldn’t want to give it to him, who wouldn’t want to help him remember. Being able to fill in gaps in Jury’s memory would be a source of power for her, to give or to withhold. It was hard to believe she could still resent his childhood self. But, he reminded himself, it was also himself now, the life he had examined in the station buffet.
“Remember when we were kids?”
She raised her eyebrows in question. “Remember what?”
“Oh, I guess just… you know. Nothing specific.” When she offered nothing, just sat there smoking and drinking, he didn’t know how to go on. His chair faced a west-looking window and the sun in its descent edged the clouds in white gold. “I was just thinking about my mother. And the war. You remember the house in the Fulham Road was demolished. I can still hear the bombs; I can still hear the one that hit the house.”
She frowned. “The house was hit by a bomb but you weren’t there. This was one of those ‘nuisance’ raids, in 1944, I think. Well, that’s life, you get through the blitz, through the worst of it and then get killed in the last one that never even made a difference.” She shook her head at the irony of it.
Jury was stunned. “But I always thought I was there. I mean I
“You really are bloody fucked up, Richard. Maybe you need a shrink.” She smiled slightly, as if finding an inroad into Jury’s mind, a place where she might play about, play with facts, with memories, pleased her.
“The house in Fulham. I keep seeing Mum… under all that plaster and boards.” And he couldn’t do anything about it.
Inconceivably, she started laughing.
He was furious. “What in the bloody hell’s so funny, Sarah?”
The laughter was for the most part faked. “It’s just so… dramatic, the way you see it. Like a film.” She liked this analysis. “Really, it is. Just like a war film.
He could scarcely believe all of this. How could he walk around all of his life, these few memories indelibly fixed in his head, and discover they were false, bogus, his own invention? How? But then he’d been free to make them up; no one had ever said anything to contradict them. If he had asked his uncle, a very kind man, then he would have told him. But of course most adults would steer clear of bringing up such a subject involuntarily.
She stubbed out her cigarette, finished off her Adnams and got up. “You wait just a minute.” She left the room and he could hear her moving about and swearing, as if someone were in the other room with her.
He half rose to see if she was all right, but she was back now with a white shoe box. Between the dark brown sofa and the blue armchairs was a round table which she hauled over to stand between them. She pulled her chair around to face his across the table.
Sarah was sorting through snapshots, pulling out one here and there. Either he hadn’t said it aloud or she hadn’t heard him say it:
As she put down the pictures, fanned out like a poker hand, and tapped one snapshot, square and poorly lit, taken perhaps with one of those boxy Brownie cameras. “This is all of us, except your dad. He was in Germany.”
Jury saw a group of four adults, a toddler and a girl of perhaps seven or eight. “This is you, isn’t it? Am I in this?”
“Don’t be daft, of course you are; you’re the little one. Here’s your dad.” She handed him a picture of a man in uniform, a flier. “You know he was RAF?”
“Yes, of course.” He felt defensive because she knew more than he. And how had she come to be the depository for memories? “Wasn’t his plane-a Spitfire-shot down?”
“You got that right, at least.”
As if memory’s fallibility were all down to him. “I remember being evacuated; I remember being in Devon or Dorset somewhere as a kid with a lot of other kids.”
“That wasn’t the war. You weren’t evacuated; you were in foster care with some others.”
Jury looked at her, frowning. “Foster care?”
“You don’t recall that woman, that awful Mrs. Simkin? Wasn’t she the one, though? Jesus, it must’ve been half a dozen she was getting a government stipend for. They took two away from her, and you were one of them.” Her fingers rooted in the shoe box again. “Look.” She pulled another snapshot from the box and handed it to Jury.
He looked at the awkward lineup of children. It was a relief to see that they were here as he remembered them even if he’d been mistaken about why he was among them. There he was, standing next to the tallest girl. Even though the picture was in black and white, he still knew the tall girl was the one with hair like a torch. It looked unconfined, as if not even the stillness of a photograph could still it. Jury smiled at her, the bane of his small existence. She had turned out to be a still point, this horrific child who teased and taunted him, still had the power to help or hinder. For some reason Jury liked that idea.
“Now, this one’s the best. It’s you and your mum.”
It was not a snapshot, but looked to be more a photographer’s work. It was larger, too. Her arm extended along the back of a settee, the back rising higher on one end. He looked about three or four and was sitting on her left, her left arm encircling him. He looked pleased as punch.
Sarah was talking but her voice seemed to come from a distance, as a sound trying to make its way around some obstruction. He did not comment on this picture. It was quite beautiful, he thought. “May I have this one of the foster care kids? And the one of mum and me?”
She shrugged, falling back to her original pose of indifference. “You can have the lot if you want.” Having produced this revisionist childhood, she was no longer concerned for its proofs.
Jury was tired and was ready to go; he would be relieved to get out. He said he’d a train to catch.
“You’re not stopping for tea? Brendan’ll be back-”
And as if her voice could call up spirits, the door opened just then and Brendan walked in.
“Speak of the devil,” Sarah said.
Brendan brought with him the memory of more than one John Jamison. He was happy as a lark when he saw Jury. “Richard! Where in hell did you drop from?” He gave Jury a comradely punch on the shoulder.
Sarah asked, querulously, “Where’re Jasmine and Christabel? You were to collect them from Raffertys.”
“I went by. They wanted to go to Burger King with the others.”
“You spent the giro already at Noonan’s, I expect.”
“Oh, leave off, woman.” Brendan drew a folded, grimy bit of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to her. “It ain’t even cashed, lovely. Speaking of Noonan’s, Rich, how about it?”
Jury didn’t much want to go, but this would probably be the least awkward way of making an exit. “Thanks, I could do with a pint.”
Brendan did a little jig-never had Jury known a more ingrained Irish-man than Brendan-and washed his hands in air. “Let’s go, then.”
Jury gave Sarah a look, inviting her along, though he knew she wouldn’t take them up on the invitation.
“Me? Me go? Then who’d look after the baby, I want to know? You haven’t even seen him,” she said to Jury.
“Maybe when we come back.” Jury was not coming back.
