“Mrs. Wasserman, do you have a magnifying glass?”
Now that somebody was doing something about her problem (whatever that might be, Jury wasn’t sure yet) she was eager to do what she could. “Yes, yes.” She hurried over to the breakfront, opened a drawer, took out a large glass. This she handed to Jury.
Jury held it close to the picture. What he wanted to see was the date on the name of the newspaper. It looked like “Berlin” something. He could even see the date: November 9, 1938. The date had a familiar ring. Unfortunately, the headline of the paper was obscured.
Looking abstracted, she sat down on the edge of a chair with a rosewood frame.
“You lived in Berlin, didn’t you? Your father-” And then he remembered, her father had died as a result of one of those terrifying and random sweeps of the SS.
She frowned and looked away. “Yes, for a while. It must have been then.” She nodded toward the photograph, the snapshot. Yet the snapshot apparently wasn’t nudging memory further and perhaps that’s what bothered her.
He took out the snapshot of the children in the charge of the awful Mrs. Simkin and handed it to her.
She put her spectacles back on, looked and smiled. “But is this you, Mr. Jury? And your friends?”
“I think so, Mrs. Wasserman.” He wanted her to know that a failure of memory wasn’t hers alone. “Some things we can never be sure of, I guess.” Jury rose and said good night.
Walking upstairs, he thought of it: November 9, 1938. Kristallnacht. That was it. That was when her father was taken away, never to be seen again.
The loss of memory, he thought, can be fortuitous.
Later, in bed, hands folded behind his head, the pictures of his mother and the foster-care children tilted against the bedside lamp, Jury thought: it never ends. It might stretch around a corner or across the country or into death, but it never ended, this bond between parents and children.
Twenty
All the way from Northampton to the M1, and off at Newport Pagnel for a ploughman’s and a beer, then back to the M1 and around road works that kept them crawling at fifteen miles per hour, to Toddington and another stop at a Trusthouse Forte, and back on the M1 again, past the Luton exits and the suggestion (quickly shot down) that they get off at Haysendon to see the wild fowl park, and on to St. Alban’s, finally hitting the North Circular road and the A41 that would take them to the center of London, or would have done if they hadn’t got off onto the A-nothing and taken a wrong turn at Hornsley and wandered all around Finchley and Hornsley and Crouch End-all this way Melrose had listened to Trueblood’s lecture on the Italian Renaissance and art-not only the art of Masaccio, but also all of Masaccio’s friends and teachers and trainers-Masolino, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and branching off (much as they had at Toddington) onto side trips to Siena, Pisa and Lucca, and back to Florence and Michaelangelo and Mannerism, to Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral (and was that after or before he’d lost the competition for the Baptistery doors?), and the Baptistery’s south doors, done by Pisano in panels depicting the eight cardinal virtues (none of which were being catered for during this trip) through the ridiculous conflicts of Guelphs and Ghibellines, to the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi and Leonardo, back through Giotto and the invention of space in perspective to that witty little restaurant just off the Ponte Vecchio, whose name he had forgotten (unfortunately, forgetting nothing else)-
– So that when Trueblood at last squealed to a stop in front of Boring’s, Melrose felt he’d been hit by a stun gun.
“I’m off to Ellie Ickley’s. We’re dining at Fisole. She adores Florence, she lived there for ten years and all but ate it alive! You’re absolutely welcome to join.”
“Thanks, but I’m dining with Jury.”
Trueblood revved up the engine, gave him a wave and shot off down the street.
Melrose entered Boring’s with his brain churned to butter. Even so, he reckoned that what he’d been given was the larger picture, brush stroke by heavy brush stroke. Imagine the two of them, Trueblood and Ickley, able to dole out details of Brunelleschi’s construction of the dome, tile after tile, brick after brick, herringboned in place to be self-supporting. Melrose felt anything but self-supporting. Dinner, bookended by Florence enthusiasts, by Firenze fanatics. He’d be squashed to pesto sauce, stuffed into tortellini, grated with pecorino. At least if Trueblood was running around Florence on his own, Melrose would be spared an hour or two of the contribution of Giorgio Vasari to art (Giorgio Armani being quite another matter).
Boring’s, Melrose was happy to see, had recovered from the shock of the murder of one of its members a year ago and had returned to its usual state of somnolence. Even the fly on the parchment lampshade, whose subdued golden light reflected off the polished mahogany of the convoluted staircase which scrolled around and around to a final landing Melrose could not see, and for all he knew, went through the ceiling and up to the heavens in a Boring’s meditation on Brunelleschi’s dome, the fly on the lampshade on the desk seemed incapable of movement and would sleep through any swatting.
It was irresistible, this sense of moving through a bed of treacle, and he felt his eyelids go heavy. He shook his head to clear it. For all he was aware of it, he might have been standing here for hours. Boring’s ran on its own time, Greenwich Mean not even in the equation. Probably, Melrose thought, Boring’s was at the heart of the modern mad science of chaos theory.
When still no one had come to attend to him, he wondered if his feet stuck in this treacle could propel him into the Members’ Room and there find both whiskey and assistance. And if he was going to fall asleep, he might as well do it in front of a crackling fire, drink in hand, seated in a comfortable, worn leather chair.
Trueblood had come to collect him at such a grisly gray morning hour, Melrose hadn’t even had time to read his newspaper. This was a ritual undertaken only to see if the world was still up, not to see what it was doing. Yet here were issues of all the dailies and Melrose had no desire to look at a single one. He felt rather than heard a person behind him. He turned to see Boring’s porter, Young Higgins. Young Higgins was not young, and Melrose declined assistance with his bag. In what was a genuine if somewhat atonal sort of greeting, Young Higgins told Melrose how glad he was to see him at Boring’s once again, and asked if he required anything. Melrose said he’d come down later for a drink, thanked Young Higgins and carried his own bag up the wide, softly carpeted stair.
The level of activity in the Members’ Room at seven P.M. had increased incrementally with preprandial conversations, the good mood induced both by whiskey and the knowledge that dinner would soon be served. There were a half dozen members sitting here, drinking or snoozing, and Melrose waved to Colonel Neame, who was always in the same chair by the fire, usually with his friend Major Champs.
Richard Jury and Melrose Plant were drinking a very fine malt whiskey, with their own conversation nose-diving into inconsequentiality: both were betting what would be on the menu. Melrose slapped down a five-pound note and said, “Starter: Windsor soup.”
Jury frowned. “Five pounds? Don’t be daft. I’m a public servant; I can’t afford to lose fifteen pounds, which is what it’d come to with three courses. Anyway, I was going to say Windsor soup, too.” He dug in his pocket for change, his lips moving silently, figuring. “One pound seventy, that’s closer.”