“Want a beer?”
It was what she was drinking, but Jury had had too much already. His stomach was sour, more from stress than beer, he thought, but he still didn’t want any. “I’d really love some tea.”
Rising, she said (in that baiting way of hers), “My, my. You’re turning down a beer?” as if drink were a particular problem with him. Then she turned toward the kitchen, a bit of which he could spy from where he sat: the white countertop, the Aga cooker of which she was very proud.
It always began that way, some deprecating remark made in her attempt to undermine him. Though he wondered if it wasn’t really Brendan she was addressing, Brendan whose drinking was the problem. Jury sat down in the blue armchair, one of a pair and both the worse for wear. He retrieved the embroidered pillow she had tossed down and ran his thumb over its delicate embroidery and wondered if she’d done it.
He leaned back, feeling absurdly weary and knew the cause lay in coming here. But it wasn’t Sarah herself, no, it was how she stirred up a host of complex emotions about his past. His discomfort was fueled by fear. Sarah had had the upper hand-she had held every hand-when they were kids: she was older, and she belonged. That he was afraid of her struck him as ludicrous; he was ashamed of the feeling. But the fear was very old, as old as childhood.
He was being handed a mug of tea. He sat up (feeling much like an invalid). “Thanks.”
Inexplicably, she shrugged, perhaps saying, So what? I’d do it for the dustbin men. Then she sat down on the matching blue armchair with a bottle of Adnams and a cigarette. When Jury didn’t drag out his own pack, she offered him her Silk Cut. When he shook his head, she said, “Don’t tell me! You’ve stopped!”
“Right.”
Throwing back her head, she said, “Please, God, not another one. I hope you’re not about to go self-righteous on me and start lecturing.”
Jury half smiled. “Hardly. I’m in much too weak a position to do that. I could start back any day.”
There was a moment of silence as she languidly smoked, drawing in deeply, exhaling tiny smoke rings, smoking in silence. Jury would bet that Newcastle had one of the highest smoking rates in the country.
“Where are the kids?”
“Birthday party. Except the little one, Georgie, he’s asleep. My niece’s boy, Ruth’s? You remember her? When he wakes up you can see him. You never have done and he’s eighteen months.” Her mouth tight, she shook her head as if Jury were himself eighteen months old and more hopeless than Ruth’s Georgie. “So, Richard. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
Sarah seemed unable to say anything to him without that bite, that begrudging air.
“Had to come here on police business,” he lied, “and just wanted to see you. I’m sorry it’s been so long. No excuse except the same old thing: busy on the Job.” He paused, wondering how to commence. He knew that what made all of this so painful was that he would be trying to get information from someone who wouldn’t want to give it to him, who wouldn’t want to help him remember. Being able to fill in gaps in Jury’s memory would be a source of power for her, to give or to withhold. It was hard to believe she could still resent his childhood self. But, he reminded himself, it was also himself now, the life he had examined in the station buffet.
“Remember when we were kids?”
She raised her eyebrows in question. “Remember what?”
“Oh, I guess just… you know. Nothing specific.” When she offered nothing, just sat there smoking and drinking, he didn’t know how to go on. His chair faced a west-looking window and the sun in its descent edged the clouds in white gold. “I was just thinking about my mother. And the war. You remember the house in the Fulham Road was demolished. I can still hear the bombs; I can still hear the one that hit the house.”
She frowned. “The house was hit by a bomb but you weren’t there. This was one of those ‘nuisance’ raids, in 1944, I think. Well, that’s life, you get through the blitz, through the worst of it and then get killed in the last one that never even made a difference.” She shook her head at the irony of it.
Jury was stunned. “But I always thought I was there. I mean I remember… you know, being there.” The blackout, his mother buried under rubble. He couldn’t process this new information.
“You really are bloody fucked up, Richard. Maybe you need a shrink.” She smiled slightly, as if finding an inroad into Jury’s mind, a place where she might play about, play with facts, with memories, pleased her.
“The house in Fulham. I keep seeing Mum… under all that plaster and boards.” And he couldn’t do anything about it.
Inconceivably, she started laughing.
He was furious. “What in the bloody hell’s so funny, Sarah?”
The laughter was for the most part faked. “It’s just so… dramatic, the way you see it. Like a film.” She liked this analysis. “Really, it is. Just like a war film. Mrs. Miniver or one of those.”
He could scarcely believe all of this. How could he walk around all of his life, these few memories indelibly fixed in his head, and discover they were false, bogus, his own invention? How? But then he’d been free to make them up; no one had ever said anything to contradict them. If he had asked his uncle, a very kind man, then he would have told him. But of course most adults would steer clear of bringing up such a subject involuntarily.
She stubbed out her cigarette, finished off her Adnams and got up. “You wait just a minute.” She left the room and he could hear her moving about and swearing, as if someone were in the other room with her.
He half rose to see if she was all right, but she was back now with a white shoe box. Between the dark brown sofa and the blue armchairs was a round table which she hauled over to stand between them. She pulled her chair around to face his across the table.
Pictures, thought Jury. More pictures. She slid the top from the box and he felt a surge of adrenaline clamp him to his chair with a hard swift hand. If they were different, these pictures, from what he remembered, he didn’t want to know. He just didn’t. He had lived for too many years with these images of life and death in the Fulham Road. “She was wearing black.”
Sarah was sorting through snapshots, pulling out one here and there. Either he hadn’t said it aloud or she hadn’t heard him say it: she was wearing black.
As she put down the pictures, fanned out like a poker hand, and tapped one snapshot, square and poorly lit, taken perhaps with one of those boxy Brownie cameras. “This is all of us, except your dad. He was in Germany.”
Jury saw a group of four adults, a toddler and a girl of perhaps seven or eight. “This is you, isn’t it? Am I in this?”
“Don’t be daft, of course you are; you’re the little one. Here’s your dad.” She handed him a picture of a man in uniform, a flier. “You know he was RAF?”
“Yes, of course.” He felt defensive because she knew more than he. And how had she come to be the depository for memories? “Wasn’t his plane-a Spitfire-shot down?”
“You got that right, at least.”
As if memory’s fallibility were all down to him. “I remember being evacuated; I remember being in Devon or Dorset somewhere as a kid with a lot of other kids.”
“That wasn’t the war. You weren’t evacuated; you were in foster care with some others.”
Jury looked at her, frowning. “Foster care?”
“You don’t recall that woman, that awful Mrs. Simkin? Wasn’t she the one, though? Jesus, it must’ve been half a dozen she was getting a government stipend for. They took two away from her, and you were one of them.” Her fingers rooted in the shoe box again. “Look.” She pulled another snapshot from the box and handed it to Jury.