No matter; intuition had eventually brought in the hard evidence.
The London train slowed and stopped at a station Jury could not pronounce, and the boy removed the headphones and darted out to a kiosk on the platform. Jury watched him buy a candy bar and a packet of cigarettes. The kiosk fellow carefully smoothed out the bill the lad had handed him, reached round to the cartons displayed in the back and handed over the cigarettes.
The boy had forgotten to turn off the CD player and the headset squawked with antimusic before segueing into the next piece, but still kept to its slightly tinny, raspy tone. He caught some of the words; it was a love song, surprisingly. Jury thought about Nell’s singing to the horses. What had it been? “Love Walked In”?
Love at first sight: it was a concept Jury had no trouble believing in. He had never understood it, how one person (such as he) could react with such certainty to another (such as he had to several women he’d known).
One look-as the song said-was all it had taken to fall for Vivian Rivington. That was years back. Helen Minton, Nell Healy, Jane Holdsworth-same thing. He had never really understood why so much of psychology refuted such an immediate attachment as shallow, banal, sentimental, romantic and adolescent. (He also thought that adolescence came in for too much of a bad rap.) Jury believed that love could of course come about along those lines that most people approved-that of knowing a person for some time before discovering one was in love. It struck Jury as dreary, rather like buying a car and not having to make payments on it for a year or two.
The boy had jumped aboard just in time, just as the train was moving. He plunked down the cigarettes and adjusted his headphones. Jury could put up with the hair, the rap, the noise, but not with the smoke. The lad made no move to light up, he was happy to see. He felt oddly depressed, a depression that seemed against his better judgment, as if he had a choice in the matter. He decided it was probably a hangover from Mickey Haggerty’s case-not that he needed any self-induced punishment from that quarter.
Jury closed his eyes and tried to put himself in Sara’s place vis-a‘-vis Dan Ryder. If reports were true, Dan Ryder had as much charisma as the Thoroughbreds he rode: all the glamor of a Samarkand, all the cunning of a Criminal Type.
The needle stuck. The record replayed that thought:
Another little galvanic burst of music came from the headphones as the boy dropped them on the table and left his seat to hip-hop down the aisle, still hearing the music in his head. The music rattled in the headphones enough to move them, although that was probably a movement of the train’s making the headset inch across the table.
And now the lad was back and clamping the headset on.
Oblivion. A kind of oblivion, thought Jury, and who was he to deny someone else his road to oblivion to transport him to a better world or connect him with this one? Yet this one Jury thought to be infinitely superior to the one we imagine, imagination being full of such flashiness that we mistake it for light and color. There was far more flash than genius in our imagined worlds.
When the train finally approached the edge of London and slowed on the outskirts, the boy rose, his trip apparently over.
“Hey, man,” said Jury, not at all sure that this word was still in the teenage lexicon. When the boy turned toward him, surprised, Jury said, “I like your music.”
The lad smiled, seeming pleased to get a compliment out of some middle-aged stiff, something he wasn’t used to. “You like Door Jam?”
Jury nodded. “The best.”
“Cool!” the boy said, slapping his hand against Jury’s palm in that handshake that always looked like a prelude to arm wrestling.
“Way cool,” said Jury.
FORTY
“Of course you can do it,” Nell said, sitting atop her mare. “Of course you can. That’s Aqueduct you’re up on, remember?”
Vernon remembered. Aqueduct took no prisoners. He was mounted on the horse now, feeling less and less in command of the situation. “He’s got my number. Look at the way he’s turning his head and leering.”
True, the horse was turning his head and trying to look at Vernon.
“I don’t remember you being so diffident around horses.”
“ ‘Diffident’-good word. Better than ‘coward.’ ”
Aqueduct was shaking himself as if Vernon were a big, annoying fly. “He’s trying to get me off, just wait…”
Nell laughed; her horse whinnied. The whinny sounded amazingly like laughter.
“Anyway, the weight’s off. You should be giving me another ten or twelve pounds, at least.” As if Aqueduct actually needed it.
“I don’t have any weights. Don’t be such a stickler.”
She was moving back, positioning her horse to face the first wall, which was quite low. “Come on, starting gate.”
“Hold it, hold it. You said we weren’t jumping!”
“I lied. Vern, you’re a very good rider. Remember when we used to chase anything that moved around the pasture? Rabbits, foxes?”
Remember? Could he have forgotten? There had come to him, over the last two years, a recurrent dream that Nell had been up on Samarkand, a talented horse, but no ’chaser, about to jump Hadrian’s walls. She had taken the first three with perfect grace, but the horse had shied at the fourth. At that point, as if this were a flat race, the flag had dropped and when it was raised, the horse was cropping grass between the walls and Nell had disappeared.
Vernon-and it would have surprised anyone who knew him-was superstitious. He believed in portents and prophecies, although he hated to admit it. And this dream had come out of Nell’s disappearance. Only, he had dreamed it again just last night. The flag was dropped and she was gone. What worried Vernon was that he was the person with the flag. It was absurd for him to think that her disappearance had been somehow his fault. But he had set in motion a thought that plagued him. It was clear what it stemmed from: he was thirty-six and she was seventeen. All the same-
“That horse is no jumper, Nellie.”
She flicked Lili’s reins and turned the mare aside, saying, “Well, I admit we’ve been practicing a little.”
Aqueduct jerked the reins and turned in a circle.
“Cut it out!” said Vernon, who’d never ridden the horse before. “What in hell’s he doing?”
Nell laughed. “He’s a ’chaser, Vern. He wants to jump. With or without you, he’s going over that wall.”
“Hell. Okay, okay.”
He positioned himself beside her, both horses about forty feet from the first low wall. They flicked their reins and galloped toward it. Vernon was paying more attention to Nell’s horse than to his own, now sailing over the wall. Aqueduct didn’t need him to do it.
Lili did need Nell, though. Nell’s hands, legs, tongue. Vernon had never seen the horse she couldn’t get something out of. The horse made a graceful slide over the wall, though not with
