The Blue Last

“Not eating, not eating,” the voice went on fluting, and then the whole table picked it up-“Richard’s not eating, not eating.” And a violent rapping of spoons grew in volume before the old lady brought her hand down to silence them (and it had taken her a long time to do it) and she herself commanded him to eat. Who was she? Not the aunt, who with his uncle had taken him in after his mother was killed when their block was bombed… No… Jury’s head and shoulders had barely cleared the table at the old lady’s. So he must have been very young.

His eye fell on the middle snapshot of the evacuation. All of those children. He saw his child’s face there, looking over the shoulder of an unknown woman, carting him away.

It was he and two or three other boys and a girl-he recalled her vivid hair-she was older than the others, nine or ten perhaps, and she seemed to be the leader. They were trooping across a field. He could not read the signs posted all around but the skull and crossbones on one of them told him the place was dangerous. The girl had told them all the signs were danger signs, DANGER was what they said. The field was full of unexploded bombs, she said.

“We’re going to the sea!” she said.

It was there, in the distance, the grim gray sea and low cliffs. So it couldn’t have been Oxfordshire, it must have been the West Country-Devon or Dorset, Cornwall maybe. He hung back, stopped on the inside of a listing fence made of wire and wood, fallen down in one long section. It was meant to keep people out of this danger zone, but they had walked right over it. He stood there, small and stocky as they yelled back: “Richard’s a scaredy cat!”

He wondered why his mother had left him in such a place. Everywhere was dangerous-the stubbly fields, the sea, the long table where they ate, the gray sausages, the games. The redheaded girl.

Secretly he must have envied her. She did not seem afraid of anything, not the field of bombs, not the old lady whose house it was. “Dried up old prune!” was what she had called the old lady. The redheaded girl filled him with dread. Dread.

So did the old lady’s parlor, for there were photographs of dead servicemen all around. He knew some of them were dead for around two of the frames she had draped black velvet and in front of a few had placed little candles. He spent long times studying the faces of these men, who were all in uniform, all young. Of the others, the ones who must have still been alive, he wondered if one was his father. There was at least one who could have been, for he wore the uniform of an RAF pilot. Maybe his mother had brought it here to be placed where Richard could see it whenever he wanted.

The hellion, the redheaded girl, had told them about the photographs, making them sit as she picked up one after the other and told them who the subject was. When she came to the one who might have been his father, he slid from his chair and told them all who the fighter pilot was. They laughed and laughed.

“Then he’s dead! Pilots die a lot more because it’s more dangerous!”

Richard shouted that he was not. He still flew his plane.

“It went down-” Her hand made a spiral toward the floor.

Richard was beside himself. He could no more have controlled the spasms of rage that overtook him than he could have manned that Hurricane. He went for her. The old lady was summoned by shouting voices. The girl was screaming and the old lady came diving at the two tangled bodies, ripping Richard away and all but flinging him into the cold fireplace.

“What’s going on here? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” the redheaded girl had said. “Playing is all.”

At least, he thought now (for he could not then, probably), there had been some code of honor at work. They might have warred among themselves, but it was still them against the old lady. He had lain in bed heaving with sobs and anger. Later, he had crept down to the parlor, grabbed up the photograph of the flier that might have been his father and carried it up to his small room. He had stood looking out of his dormer window at the black sky, littered with stars that he imagined exploding and turning to silver rubble and wondered if his father’s plane was up there now. He remembered that spiral motion of the redheaded girl’s hand, diving toward the floor. But that wouldn’t happen to his father. God holds certain people up by strings and he was sure his father was one.

Jury had not thought of all this in a long time. It was Mickey and his pictures bringing it to mind again; it was the mystery. He picked up the snapshot of the fighter squadron and remembered that downward spiral of her hand. He wondered what had happened to her, the girl with the hellfire hair.

He felt a feathery touch on his cheek and looked up. The waitress had touched his face with a napkin or perhaps her own handkerchief.

“It’s just the one tear.” She held out the handkerchief, smiling uncertainly.

He smiled back. “I’m not crying, am I?”

She raised the bottle of Glen Grant she’d brought with the coffeepot, and he nodded and held up the shot glass, then pushed over his cup. “Thanks.”

Inclining her head slightly toward the counter, she said, “I guess it’s the sad pictures. They look like old ones, those snapshots.”

“They are.” He turned the one of Alexandra Tynedale and her baby so that the waitress could see it. “I was trying to think who you reminded me of.” He tapped the snapshot. “Her.”

The waitress smiled. “People are always telling me I look like Vivien Leigh. She was that actress a long time ago. I’ve only seen pictures of her; I never saw her movies. Do you remember her? Was she that beautiful?” She was blushing because she hadn’t meant to say she herself was beautiful.

“Oh, I remember her. And, yes, she was that beautiful. Like you.”

The girl’s color deepened even more. “Oh…” She flapped her hand, waving the compliment away. Then she asked, “Was she a friend of yours?” She nodded toward the snapshots.

“No. They’re not my pictures.”

The hell they’re not.

Jury drained the coffee cup in one go, put more than enough money on the counter and turned to leave. The cold-eyed brunette was still there, putting another cigarette between her lips. So the one before had been the next-to-the-last cigarette in the world.

This one was the last.

Four

The dog Stone preceded Carole-anne Palutski into Jury’s room and lay down in front of Jury’s easy chair and fell asleep. Dogs amazed Jury.

Not as much as Carole-anne Palutski amazed him, though. She stood in the doorway, dressed in a short dress of burning blue. Standing in her vibrant rays, Jury thought he ought to be wearing sunscreen. Wordlessly, he held the door wider. She entered.

He did not know why she had hesitated on his doorsill, since she immediately plopped herself down on his sofa. Invisible strings seemed to pull and tug Carole-anne from place to place, as if even space wanted a taste of her.

“It’s Saturday night and I don’t expect you’d like to go down to the Nine-One-Nine?”

This was Stan Keeler’s regular gig when he was home. The flat directly overhead was home. “Don’t be so defeatist. When did Stan come back?”

“Last night. You weren’t here,” she added, accusingly.

The second-floor flat had been empty for years as a result of Carole-anne’s managerial skills. She had convinced the landlord that he should put its letting in her hands in order to keep out the riffraff, the riffraff being females, married couples and all men who failed to meet her standards. So there was silence overhead until Stan Keeler had come along with his guitar and his dog Stone, a caramel-colored Labrador now draped across Jury’s feet, dreaming of empty fields-

Which brought Jury back to the present, or, rather, to the past. Carole-anne reminded him a little of the redheaded girl, though Carole-anne’s hair had more gold mixed in with the red. And she hadn’t a mean bone in her