The Grave Maurice

ashamed; he could sense it. She was ashamed to go back and it wasn’t because she could have done it sooner. No, the shame was something else, and it was probably accompanied by these periods of disorientation she was talking about because she wanted to get rid of it, to have the shame out of her head and her life. But he would get nowhere by questioning her, even if he had a mind to; it would simply drive that part of her back into hiding.

“All right, I’ll go back. But not today, Vern, please not today. I need to get myself ready for it, you know, psyched up.” She picked up a smoked salmon sandwich, looked at it as if it might hold a clue to something she’d forgotten and took a bite.

They went on with their picnic, Nell turning to listen to the mares, any little sounds of impatience or distress. “They need some exercise, some freedom. What I do is, I take turns riding them and the others look for graze, pretty hard to find in January, but they always find something. I don’t ride Daisy because she needs to stay near Charlie. And of course, Aqueduct has to be ridden; he’s used to hard riding. At least he was once.”

Vernon asked, “Why did they take Aqueduct?”

Nell was inspecting another sandwich. “Aqueduct’s a ’chaser. He can jump over almost anything. Hadrian’s walls, you know. Then I’d guess they wanted a horse who’d been successful at stud. I don’t know.” She looked at Vernon as she finished off her mystery sandwich and smiled. “You can ride with me. You can ride, that I know. You used to chase me, remember?”

It was abysmally sad, the way she spoke of this, as if her childhood had been swallowed up by her experience and her adolescence shattered like glass. “Caught you, too,” he said.

“Never.” She grinned.

“Bet?” He held up a chocolate hazelnut tart.

“I can have the whole thing if I win?”

“Most of it.”

She got up from the blanket. “You can ride Aqueduct and I’ll ride one of the mares.”

“Those poor horses are in pretty bad shape. And how could they beat Aqueduct?”

“Oh, I wonder.”

“The sinister implication being not if I’m riding him?” They walked toward the barn. “You have enough tack?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bits? Bridles? Saddles?”

“Yes.”

Inside the barn, Nell went into a stall that held a beautiful bay. “This one, I think, might be one of those French saddle horses. They’re especially good jumpers. And she’s had three weeks to build up some strength. Her name’s Lili.”

Vernon was leaning against the half door, arms crossed over the top of it. “Why would you want a jumper?”

“Only because Aqueduct is. It evens things out.”

“Why? Are we doing any jumping?”

“No, but you never know.”

“Then the answer’s not no, it’s ‘maybe.’ ”

She laughed. “You really don’t want to compete, do you?”

“No, but we won’t let that stop us.”

Nell was fitting a bit into the mare’s mouth. Over her arm was a saddle.

“All of this gear has gone unused for God knows how long,” said Vernon. “But it looks shiny new.”

“I’ve been cleaning it, polishing it up.”

She had led the mare out of the stable by now. Aqueduct was already out, eating oats from the bucket Vernon had left there. He was chewing solemnly and looking at Vernon.

(God.)

Aqueduct snorted.

THIRTY-NINE

The kid with the purple hair (hadn’t that punk style gone out of punk fashion yet?) and wearing outsized earphones on the other side of the aisle was entranced by whatever he was listening to, his eyes closed, his fingers rapping on the small table on which sat his CD player. Music-though strictly speaking, it was likely not even music-leaked out around the earphones, trying to escape itself probably.

The scene reminded Jury of a similar one in Stratford-upon-Avon a few years back, and similarly having to do with trains and platforms, in which another lad with dyed hair and a boom box was playing (incredibly enough) a song sung by a French chanteuse, in heartbreaking accents of a love gone wrong and to which she was bidding her painful adieu. It was the only word he recognized in addition to amour and j’amais. But love songs being universally translatable along lines of hello and good-bye, usually the latter, Jury understood her sentiments perfectly. Yes, that was exactly how it felt; God only knew he’d felt it often enough. That time had been a bad one for Jury. He had lost someone he felt he couldn’t afford to. It had been January then, too. Or March? Did this music presage another loss? Was the lad some winter angel appointed to appear in Jury’s life when things were coming undone?

What was it this time, though? Or perhaps it was simply a cumulative process of undoing, a little unraveling here, a little there. Life sometimes seemed so fragile and weightless; it would blow away if he breathed on it.

But what was blowing away? What was wrong? Aside from the fact he seemed destined to listen to another man’s music.

The boy adjusted his earphones and the music spiked. Some group. Heavy thrumming. Jury would never be able to identify them; he couldn’t even recognize the groups of his own youth, much less the current ones.

An attendant came through trundling a well-stocked trolley: sandwiches, tea, coffee, soft drinks, crisps. Everything about the trains now was shipshape and Bristol fashion, clean as a newborn babe. Hell, you could change a baby on the floor without fear of germs. He bought some tea and a cheese salad sandwich he didn’t want.

He went back to his ruminations over this day spent in the company of the charming Sara Hunt and the almost-otherworldliness of the faded gardens, the crumbling stone, the unpolished silverplate, the rose pattern of the slipcovered chairs worn to liquidity-everything in need of tending.

Jury tried to reweave the unraveling tapestry. Living in that big house was, he thought, a rather Victorian notion, a woman mourning the death of her beloved. Wouldn’t it have been easier merely to put the pictures away instead of hiding them behind others? But that was the point, he reminded himself. She was stubborn; she would not give in; she would chance it. He leaned his head against the cold glass and watched the frosty pastures and fences pass. The fields looked antediluvian, left over, dead, nothing growing, nothing grown. A strange image. Jury closed his eyes, went back to Dan Ryder and Sara. The thing was, why should she even hide the fact they’d been lovers? She must have been aware he was the consummate bed hopper. It was public knowledge-well, at least the public who lived with one foot in the racing world. Dan Ryder slept around; Dan Ryder was-to use a Victorian appellation-a bounder. It could be pride on her part, of course; that might make sense of the end of the affair, of being dumped, but did not explain its beginning. There would have been no reason to keep quiet over that.

Jury realized he was basing this on intuition rather than hard evidence.