The Grave Maurice

It was nearly dark, that purple no-man’s-land before nightfall. “Let’s go in,” said Jury.

As she had done before, she rose and held out her hand to him. He liked it; it was as if someone were wanting, for a change, to care for him, and he took advantage of it. With the hand she’d reached out, he pulled her toward him very quickly and kissed her quite hard. It happened in only a few seconds.

“Come on,” she said, pulling at him. “Let’s continue this discussion inside. And why are you laughing?”

Jury said, “I’m on sick leave; I’m supposed to relax.”

“So? We’ll relax.”

Once inside, she led him into the kitchen, also large, also cold. She opened a cupboard and reached in and brought out a bottle of red wine with a label that looked as if it had been picked at over decades.

“Special occasion. Puligny-Montrachet. One of the absolute best years. Quite old, quite rare, and very relaxing.”

“I’m depending on it.”

With the wine held above her waist, she pressed up against him and kissed him lightly. “And if wine doesn’t do it, there’s always-” She laughed. “You know.”

“Oh, I’m definitely depending on you know.”

They climbed the back stairs leading from the kitchen to the first-floor bedrooms. She was holding his hand again.

The bedroom that she led him into, obviously hers, had high windows that gave onto that part of the garden in which they had been sitting. Jury looked down at the bench and felt he was looking at some distant self, the one he had brought here, the one that would not be going back with him. You don’t need this, mate, he told himself. You really don’t. This woman is trapped in a dream and she’s not going to wake up because you’re so bloody wonderful. You know something’s wrong-

Fuck off, friend.

He tasted the wine. Delicious. But it could have been plonk and he’d still think it was delicious.

Sara rested her head against his chest, and he ran his hand over her hair and smiled. Yep. Definitely taffy colored. Pulling away, he set down his glass, and she pulled him back and started unbuttoning his shirt. He reached his arms around her waist and unzipped the skirt, which fell to the floor in a black puddle. There was so little effort required in undressing. It was as if the clothes were so lightweight, so transparent, they blew off.

In bed, with his mouth slightly opened, barely touching hers, he asked, “Is this better than a dream? What do you think?”

And back she murmured, “It is a dream.”

He looked off at the cold windows. A dream within a dream. He did not think he liked that.

She said, “I just can’t seem to help it.”

Jury rolled over, grabbed her. “That’s what they all say.”

FORTY-SEVEN

She had wanted him to stay the night, but he had not, making the excuse that he really needed to return to London. He had promised Nell Ryder. She had argued, but not vehemently, that it wasn’t after all his case.

“I think I made it mine.”

“You’re supposed to be taking things easy. That’s what you said.”

He laughed. “You call what we’ve been doing ‘taking things easy’?”

So once again he was on the train, now its familiarity soothing. He wanted to sleep, not so much because he was tired but because he’d rather sleep than think. There were too many insensate moments in life not to be grateful for pure sensation and the last hours had certainly been that.

At the station’s newsstand he had bought a Telegraph and The Sporting Life. Jury had read a racing form about as often as he’d read Ulysses and thought Joyce’s density no match for the racing form.

It was something that Sara had said. It bothered him, but for the life of him he couldn’t think what it was, except that it had to do with racing. Cheltenham, Newmarket, Doncaster were places she’d gone to following Dan Ryder around. He didn’t doubt that she’d done this, for what man or woman would confess to such an obsession unless they were sociopaths? That kid who stalked Jodie Foster, the nutcase who shot John Lennon. Obsession was often not benign and harmless. But what was it, that detail that made him, right now, uncomfortable?

It looked like the same attendant who’d been on the train before, and who now came clattering through the car, shoving the food and drink trolley. As he’d done before, Jury bought a cheese salad sandwich and tea in a plastic cup. He hadn’t eaten the other sandwich, and wouldn’t eat this one; there were so few people in the car that he felt it must be discouraging not to sell your wares. He’d give the sandwich to Carole-anne; he now remembered that she loved cheese salad. He’d tossed the first one in the dustbin at the station.

Jury had called Plant to let him know he’d be spending the night in his Islington digs and would try to get to Ardry End tomorrow. The nice thing about Plant was that he didn’t ask questions beyond “Are you all right?”

He took a few sips of the tea. He was getting to be as bad as Wiggins, who would have drunk the lot so as not to have the fellow think his tea wasn’t any good. Wiggins watched flight attendants going through safety precautions, too. The tea was the same tea that he’d had on the other trips. Why did train tea always have that bit of whitish foam on top, as if its ingredients couldn’t coalesce?

He returned to his meditation on Sara Hunt. He opened the print- condensed pages of The Sporting Life and ran his eye over the various kinds of races- claim, handicap, stakes-and the horses entered in them. Nothing jarred his memory for whatever it was, or perhaps it wasn’t. It might have been something or someone else-

Davison. George Davison, Ryder’s trainer. That afternoon they had been standing with Wiggins and Neil Epp in front of Criminal Type’s stall. The Derby, at Epsom-that was what Sara had said. The last time she’d seen Dan Ryder race before his defection to France a few weeks later was in the Derby, up on Criminal Type. But Davison had made a point of that race. “Only time I ever lost me temper at the board it was over that weight allowance. They said Criminal Type’d have to carry another twelve pounds. Bloody unfair. So I scratched ’im.”

Davison had scratched the horse almost at the last minute. Criminal Type was taken out of the field, and the horse and its jockey didn’t race.

Why had Sara told him she’d seen the race? It seemed such a pointless lie, as he wouldn’t have thought one way or the other about that race, the only thing setting it apart being that George Davison had taken his horse out. It made no sense, what Sara had said. He slid down in his seat and closed his eyes.

She had been with Ryder that day? But in that case she would have known he wasn’t racing at Epsom. She could fairly well assume that Jury wouldn’t know that the Ryder horse was scratched. (Certainly, he’d pled ignorance of the racing world in general.) His head was hurting, probably in sympathetic response to his side, which throbbed. Dr. Ryder would thrash him if he knew Jury