The Blue Last

“Why does she dislike me so much?” Jury asked Brendan as they stood at the bar of Noonan’s, a noisy pub. There were, of course, some men in here who had jobs, whom the Job Center had actually lined up with employment. For them the pub was the way to escape the tedium of work as it was the way to escape the tedium of not working for the others.

Brendan raised his pint and said, “Hell, man, she doesn’t dislike you, at least not when your back’s turned.” He wiped his handkerchief under his nose. “She’s always bragging on you to friends.” He went on in fluting tones, “ ‘A detective superintendent, that’s right, Scotland Yard, no less.’ ”

Jury smiled. “We were talking about childhood. It seems all my memories were wrong.”

Brendan waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Hell, she was windin’ you up, man, she was takin’ the piss out. She does it to me, does it to the kids. Don’t take it to heart.”

Jury drank his beer and went back over the afternoon. He wondered. He patted the pocket of his coat that held the two pictures.

When Jury walked up the steps of the terraced house in Islington, Mrs. Wasserman, who had the so-called garden flat, came up the stone steps outside her door, hurrying as much as she could. Jury had helped Mrs. Wasserman over the years with “security,” installing locks, inspecting windows and any other way of entering, and anything else that would make her feel more secure. She had been a young girl in the prison camp; she had watched her family die before her eyes, first one, then another. And worse.

“Mrs. Wasserman,” Jury said, retracing his steps, going back down, “is something the matter? It’s late for you to be still up.”

She clutched her bathrobe more closely about her throat. “No, no, many times I’m up till morning. Such a hard time sleeping. Could you come in just a minute, Mr. Jury? One minute and I won’t keep you.”

Jury smiled. “I can make it more than a minute.” He followed her down the steps and into her flat. It was a comfortable flat with good old armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa. A breakfront, some side chairs and tables.

“Would you like something? Whiskey? Coffee? Chai?”

“What?”

“Carole-anne got me some. She says it’s much healthier than other drinks. It’s kind of a mixture of tea and spice.”

“In matters of health, I wouldn’t look to Carole-anne, queen of the breakfast fry-up.”

“Well, what she told me was to drink it for a week and tell her if I felt better. It’s supposed to do wonders, but the taste, Mr. Jury! It’s awful.”

“That explains Nurse Carole-anne’s motive. She wants you to test it so she won’t have to. A cup of plain old English black tea would be fine.”

She left the living room. Jury saw there were a couple of old photograph albums on the coffee table, one of them open. Sitting down on the sofa, he sighed. Pictures, more pictures, old ones.

Mrs. Wasserman returned with two mugs of tea that Jury knew would be sweeter than he liked, but would drink. When she saw Jury turning the pages of the photograph album, she said, “They have been making me feel… well…”

Jury waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, “Are these of your family, Mrs. Wasserman?” He knew they must be and was a little surprised he had never seen them before. But she still stood there by the sofa, holding her cup of tea and looking anxiously at the photographs. He said, carefully, “Mrs. Wasserman?”

Hesitating, she said, “Yes. And yet-”

She appeared very distraught. He looked more closely at one picture of a girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, flanked by a middle-aged man and woman who must surely be her mother and father. It was not that he recognized the child as Mrs. Wasserman, but the older woman who looked so much like his Mrs. Wasserman, looks that weren’t yet delineated in the face of the teenage girl.

“This is you as a girl, isn’t it?” He tapped that picture.

Mrs. Wasserman laughed a little and without humor. It was a nervous laugh, an anxious one. “Yes. My mother, the woman must be. The man is my father?”

What she seemed to be doing was asking for Jury’s assurance. “You certainly look like your mother.” He studied the picture, the background, the building in front of which they stood. On the right-hand border he saw the heel of a shoe and a tiny patch of leg. It was a public street and someone had just passed by. He imagined others, not wanting to block the picture taker, were no doubt waiting in the wings to pass. Behind the little family was a sign, the first half obscured by their bodies. It said ANIST and Jury wondered if it was the end of the word tobaccanist. To the right, a couple of stiles of postcards sat alongside a rack of newspapers. Jury squinted.

“Mrs. Wasserman, do you have a magnifying glass?”

Now that somebody was doing something about her problem (whatever that might be, Jury wasn’t sure yet) she was eager to do what she could. “Yes, yes.” She hurried over to the breakfront, opened a drawer, took out a large glass. This she handed to Jury.

Jury held it close to the picture. What he wanted to see was the date on the name of the newspaper. It looked like “Berlin” something. He could even see the date: November 9, 1938. The date had a familiar ring. Unfortunately, the headline of the paper was obscured.

Looking abstracted, she sat down on the edge of a chair with a rosewood frame.

“You lived in Berlin, didn’t you? Your father-” And then he remembered, her father had died as a result of one of those terrifying and random sweeps of the SS.

She frowned and looked away. “Yes, for a while. It must have been then.” She nodded toward the photograph, the snapshot. Yet the snapshot apparently wasn’t nudging memory further and perhaps that’s what bothered her.

He took out the snapshot of the children in the charge of the awful Mrs. Simkin and handed it to her.

She put her spectacles back on, looked and smiled. “But is this you, Mr. Jury? And your friends?”

“I think so, Mrs. Wasserman.” He wanted her to know that a failure of memory wasn’t hers alone. “Some things we can never be sure of, I guess.” Jury rose and said good night.

Walking upstairs, he thought of it: November 9, 1938. Kristallnacht. That was it. That was when her father was taken away, never to be seen again.

The loss of memory, he thought, can be fortuitous.

Later, in bed, hands folded behind his head, the pictures of his mother and the foster-care children tilted against the bedside lamp, Jury thought: it never ends. It might stretch around a corner or across the country or into death, but it never ended, this bond between parents and children.

Twenty

All the way from Northampton to the M1, and off at Newport Pagnel for a ploughman’s and a beer, then back to the M1 and around road works that kept them crawling at fifteen miles per hour, to Toddington and another stop at a Trusthouse Forte, and back on the M1 again, past the Luton exits and the suggestion (quickly shot down) that they get off at Haysendon to see the wild fowl park, and on to St. Alban’s, finally hitting the North Circular road and the A41 that would take them to the center of London, or would have done if they hadn’t got off onto the A-nothing and taken a wrong turn at Hornsley and wandered all around Finchley and Hornsley and Crouch End-all this way Melrose had listened to Trueblood’s lecture on the Italian Renaissance and art-not only the art of Masaccio, but also all of Masaccio’s friends and teachers and trainers-Masolino, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and branching off (much as they had at Toddington) onto side trips to Siena, Pisa and Lucca, and back to Florence and Michaelangelo and Mannerism, to Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral (and was that after or before he’d lost the competition for the Baptistery doors?), and the Baptistery’s south doors, done by Pisano in panels depicting the eight cardinal virtues (none of which were being catered for during this trip) through the ridiculous conflicts of Guelphs and Ghibellines, to the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi and Leonardo, back through Giotto and the invention