The Blue Last

Melrose surveyed the table. “You’ve eaten everything, even the butter.”

“I was hungry. Maybe I’ll have some more.” Jury craned his neck, looking for Young Higgins.

“Are you putting on weight?”

Jury shrugged. “How would I know? I can’t see myself.”

“There are mirrors.”

“I don’t look in them. Anyway, if I’m getting fat, you-know-who would let me know tout de suite.”

“I don’t know you-know-who.”

“Take my word for it. What’s for dessert?”

Thirty-six

When Jury returned to his flat, you-know-who was cooking a fry-up in his kitchen. The mingled scents of sausage, fried bread and Samsura made the air on the first floor landing positively seductive.

Carole-anne was frying away and humming a tune Jury thought he had heard. He tossed his keys in the large glass ashtray that had served him well and was now starved for ashes. He looked at the Christmas tree over in the corner, also starved, but for decorations, and assumed these metaphors were inspired by the action in his kitchen.

“Hey, Super! I’m out here!” called Carole-anne, as if the kitchen hovered somewhere between Islington and the moon. “My cooker quit working again.”

This happened periodically. The landlord, Mr. Moshegiian, had promised her a new cooker, but it hadn’t materialized. Jury assumed there was an honest difficulty here, as Mr. Mosh did not make empty promises to Carole-anne. Few did.

The kitchen swam in the mingled scents of sausage and perfume. He leaned against the doorjamb and said, “It’s nearly eleven; isn’t that kind of late for one of your fry-ups?”

“I was hungry. I’ve been dancing.” She went on humming.

“At the Nine-One-Nine? Stan Keeler doesn’t play dance music.”

“He does sometimes.” She sang a few bars of what she’d been humming. “ ‘My baby don’t care for furs and laces-’ ”

A little hip action here.

“ ‘My baby don’t care for high-toned plaaa-ces!’ ”

Some more hip action.

“That might be danceable coming from U-2, but not from Stan Keeler.” Dancing to Stan’s music would be like trying to glide over shards of glass. He wished she’d sing another couple of lines, though, with a little more hip action.

Carole-anne sighed. “You shouldn’t always be talking about things you don’t know about.”

Always? “And just what else do I not know about besides ‘My baby don’t care for sausage fry-ups’?”

Ignoring him, her humming became a sort of whispered singing as she flipped eggs-four, Jury noticed-“ ‘My baby don’t care for rings… da da de da da da daaaah.’ ”

The fry-up, he had to admit, was beautiful-sausages succulent, fried bread crisp and golden, eggs smooth as silk. It was sort of the taste equivalent of Carole-anne’s looks. Tonight she wore a turquoise blue tank top the color of her eyes and a sequined peachy miniskirt close to the color of her hair. This outfit on another woman would have clashed; on Carole-anne it merely melted like a Caribbean sunset.

She was dividing the contents of the skillet onto two plates.

“I ate dinner. I don’t want any of that artery-clogging meal.” Actually, he did; he was hungry again. It was hard for Carole-anne to look woebegone, given her dramatic coloring, but if she tried really hard, she could. On the spatula lay a beautifully fried egg. “Well, maybe just a little,” he said.

She smiled and slid the egg onto his plate, removing one of the two sausages from his plate to hers.

“No, no. Put that sausage back. I can manage two. Just.” He adored sausages.

Plates loaded, they went into his living room and sat down, Carole-anne at the end of the sofa near the starved tree. “That tree wants trimming, Super. You got some little blue and white lights somewhere, don’t you? Mrs. W has hers all done up with snow and tinsel over the lights and a silver star on top. It’s lovely.” When he just went on eating a sausage, she shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to do it as you’re not in a very Christmasy mood, are you?”

“I was the one who went and got the trees, remember?” He’d bought a large one for Mrs. Wasserman, a small one for himself, a smaller one yet for Carole-anne, since she had a studio on the top floor and little room.

Still, she looked sad at its unencumbered state. It was a bit shabby, Jury thought, a secondhand tree. He had waited too long and the shapely ones were gone.

“It needs lights, it needs color.”

“Go stand by it.”

She frowned over a wedge of fried bread. “Is that a compliment? I can never tell.”

Jury sniggered over his bread.

“Anyway, there’s a surprise present Mrs. W wants. Oh, and me, I want one, too. I said I’d tell you what it was.”

“If you tell me, then where’s the surprise?”

“Right now, before I tell you. What we want is that you take us to see The Mousetrap.”

He just looked at her.

“You know. That Agatha Christie play that’s been here for years and years.”

Dashing her hopes, Jury said, “I’ve seen it.” He did not add that it was so long ago he couldn’t remember it.

Carole-anne was the only woman he’d ever seen make a significant gesture out of hands-on-hips sitting down. “You could see it again.”

“I didn’t know you liked mysteries. You’re even reading an Agatha Christie.” He nodded toward the book on the coffee table. Books were not Carole-anne’s raison d’etre.

She picked up the book, tossed it down. “That’s just to study up on before we see the play.”

Study up on Agatha Christie before one sees her? Well, one might read Dante before going to Florence or T. S. Eliot before visiting Burnt Norton. “I don’t like mysteries, love; there’s already too much mystery in my own life.”

“Life? Mysteries don’t have anything to do with life! They’re completely unlife; they’re nonlife. There’s no relation to reality at all.”

Jury felt as if he should defend this sorry genre. “Some of them do, don’t they?”

“No. So if that’s why you don’t like them, well, you can stop now.”

How was it her argument was so inherently refutable, yet he could think of no refutation?

“I called and they had tickets for the week between Christmas and New Year’s?” It was put as a question; her look implored.

Jury was surprised she’d resisted buying them.

“You will, won’t you, Super?”

Of course, he’d take them. To tell the truth, he sometimes thought they were all in the same boat, whatever that might be. “I’ll think about it.” Her expression implored, but he refused to capitulate to that deep turquoise look, at least not immediately.

Carole-anne speared a sausage bite and continued. “We decided we’d have Christmas dinner at Mrs. W’s instead of here.”

By “here” she meant Jury’s own flat. Looking around his small living room and the round table covered with a runner that would seat one comfortably, he said, “Can’t imagine why. But why not go out to someplace where the furniture is actually geared to people sitting down and eating?”

She looked blank.