The Stargazey (2 page)

He looked out the window at a small clutch of people standing in front of a shop that sold furs. Or would do, if the demonstrators would get away from the door. What were they doing here at night when the place was closed? They carried placards with terrible pictures on them of animals imprisoned in lab cages or caught in leg-hold traps. (Jury thought those traps had been outlawed.) People had to walk around the group and could not avoid the signs.

The bus left the animal activists behind.

He was thinking his life was like this bus ride, then thinking, How mawkish, how maudlin. But it was the aimlessness of the ride; he didn't even know where it was going. Putney, probably; it was a number 14. At the next stop it pulled in behind another 14 and there was a bus in front of that one, too. He couldn't see the number, though. There was a fair queue of people; they'd been waiting a long time. He wondered at that law of bus scheduling that had three identical buses piling up at a stop. Why did it happen? You waited for damned ever, and then along came three. Sergeant Wiggins would probably have an answer. He did to most things, though seldom a convincing one. Jury smiled.

Passengers came clattering up the stairs, and two of them rustled their packages into the seat behind him. Two women, one apparently American, for she was going on at length to her British friend about Thanksgiving. Would she be home in time to make all of the preparations? She spoke of her far-reaching family—the relatives who always came from out of state to join her immediate family, which sounded huge to begin with. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, children, babies. Last Thanksgiving (she told her friend, whose contribution to this was an occasional “Uhm,” “My,” “You don't say?”), they'd had twenty-three people at the table. She described the dinner—the turkey, the vegetables, the breads, pies, cakes—and it sounded to Jury like something going on in a medieval banquet hall.

The woman seemed besotted with the holiday. Why? Why would anyone want to prepare such an enormous meal for so many people? His idea of a holiday was to go to sleep, to read, to go to the Angel and have
an extra pint. Several extra pints. Her voice rose and fell amidst the flotsam of other voices, the subdued conversation, the blanketed noises coming from the Fulham Road. He wished she would be quiet. He was tired of her. He imagined her friend was too.

Jury closed his eyes, rested his chin on the palm of his hand. Finally, the two women rose, the American making a big fuss over gathering up her parcels and umbrella. Still talking, she followed her friend down the stairs to the lower deck.

He was sitting on the left and could see the passengers get off. It was the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital stop and he was momentarily distracted, wondering if this was the hospital in which he was born. There were a dozen or so people getting off, most of them women, so that he could only guess at which the American was. The tall one, he decided, the one with the most parcels and with a very couture look about her—well-tailored coat, shoes in the new heavy-heeled style. Yes, he decided, it was definitely she; she turned to a small, dowdy woman and talked to her as they walked along.

Finished with the American, Jury glanced across the road where several people were coming out of a pub called the Stargazey. He liked the name and thought he'd seen it before. He wondered if there was more than one Stargazey. The bus still idled at the stop, a minute early in its schedule perhaps, while Jury watched a blond woman in a sumptuously sleek dark fur coat crossing the road. He lost sight of her and then regained it when she came from around the front of the bus and boarded. In the fleeting seconds he had taken an impression of her; she was very blond, attractive. He hadn't gotten a good enough look at her face to tell just how attractive. The bus hove itself away from the curb, trundling along the Fulham Road.

An airy scent of perfume floated past him, and he looked up to see the blond woman taking a seat several rows up. He was delighted that he could sit here and stare at her, even if it was only at her back. But occasionally, within the next eight or ten minutes, she would turn to look out and down and he caught a glimpse of her profile. Shoulder-length hair pulled back, so light you could see the moon through it, a profile with that fragility which only the very fair-skinned seem to achieve. They rode
that way for perhaps ten minutes, he studying her back, her hair, her profile when she turned it to the window.

Just before the bus stopped opposite the Fulham Broadway underground station, she rose and swayed as she walked up the aisle. He wanted to look her full in the face, but in the way that people do who feel they'll be found out, he didn't risk even a glance. She walked on by.

He thought she might be going into the station, but she didn't; she simply walked on in the direction the bus was headed. Would have headed, had it not been for the snarl of cars and buses where two principal arteries came together, and neither of them big enough to accommodate the traffic. The bus wasn't making any progress. It was one of those inevitable traffic tie-ups where the flow of cars, lorries, and buses vied with roadworks to see which could create greater havoc. One could walk faster, which was probably why the woman in the fur coat had left the bus.

The bus pulled away again and found an untrafficked stretch of road, which it shot down for two blocks while she fell behind. Jury strained to watch her, but a Sainsbury lorry eclipsed his view. Then she came into view again, having gained the time the bus had lost stopping for a red light, a zebra crossing, and another traffic snarl. Her hair, shoulder-length and abundant, was fastened at her neck with a silver clip that glittered above the dark pelts of the coat. Where on earth could a woman like this, wearing a coat like that, be walking? She should have been passing below him in a Jaguar or BMW, together, perhaps, with the man in the tux. Then the bus sped away for another fifty yards, passing a pub called the Sporting Rat and a few cafes, all trying for the Paris left-bank look, all with cafe chairs and tables set about on the pavement, even in November. The blond woman caught up again when the bus had to stop at a zebra crossing for two very old people, one with a walker, the other, looking as if he should have one, doing his best to assist her. Probably man and wife, probably had been for a hundred years. Jury wondered about that; it must surely be like a second skin, must surely be like an attachment that had always existed.

Jury watched the progress of the woman in the fur coat, thinking, in a rather romantic way, of the bus as the boat that follows the long-distance
swimmer, keeping a little away but there in case of crisis, cramp, or potential drowning.

At the next stop, the romancing couple across the aisle rose and clattered down the stairs, followed by the man in the tux. The party must be here. Jury could see them jump off before the bus had stopped completely, could see the conductor hanging on to the pole, looking up and down. He was surprised, then, to see her board the bus again, across from a pub called the Rat and Parrot—Fulham seemed big on rats. She was preceded by a mother and a surly-looking child, the boy straining back against the mother's hand. The mum took his arm and shook it as if he were a piece of clothing she was trying to get the wrinkles out of. The boy bellowed. The bus pulled out into much thinner traffic.

She did not come up to the top deck.

He watched passengers get off at the next two stops. Then, at the third—Fulham Palace Road—he saw her get off again.

Jury rose quickly and maneuvered, bus-drunk, down the semicircle of steps, wondering why more people didn't go hurtling down them, given the sudden stops and starts. Then he jumped off in the same way he'd disapproved of the others doing it.

It took him less than a minute to get to the street she'd turned in on, called Bishops Avenue. It surprised him to find he was going in the direction of Fulham Palace. It was past nine and had been dark for several hours. It surprised him far more, though, that he was following her. He kept well behind her, walking past some tennis courts, part of a park complex.

She stopped in front of the high iron gates that were the entrance to the palace grounds, diaphanous light from a nearby lamp silvering the dark fur.

Falling back, he stopped too. What on earth was she doing here? (What on earth was
he
?) He would have thought the palace grounds closed at this hour, yet he saw her go in through the gates, which were still open. When he covered the twenty or thirty feet to the entrance, she was gone. He could see nothing but murky blackness beyond. The lamp pooled weak light on the ground. For some moments, Jury stood, wondering why he didn't walk in. But he didn't. He just stood there.
Like a great twit.
He
knew it was always much safer to decry one's actions than it was to understand them. At any rate, he stood there beneath the lamp, decrying.

That she and her mission were absolutely none of his business was not, he was sure, what stopped him. It certainly hadn't stopped him from coming this far. What, then? He paced back and forth before the black mouth of the iron entrance to the palace grounds.

Jury was dying for a cigarette, but he hadn't smoked for nearly a year now (ten months, anyway). Smokers these days had to huddle in the entrances of office buildings, exposed to wind and rain, taking furtive jabs at their cigarettes, the outcasts, the cast-outs. Society would not share its office with them. Jury did not need society to cast him out, only Sergeant Wiggins.

He then suddenly realized that what he felt was just that: cast out. But from what and by whom?

T
he next day was Sunday, and Jury decided to catch up on his life. He opened his bills, glanced at them, tossed them in the desk drawer. There was one personal letter, this from Melrose Plant, which he set aside for later reading. Then he opened the Sunday paper he'd nicked from in front of Stan Keeler's door upstairs. Stan wasn't there; he often wasn't. Carole-anne and Mrs. Wassermann fed Stan's dog, Stone, and Jury took him for walks, or Carole-anne did. Occasionally, they took Stone for a walk together.

He finished the paper, along with a cup of tea and some toast.

Having thus caught up on his life in Islington, he thought he'd go out. He would go to a museum, the Tate, perhaps. Museums were what one “did” on a Sunday, at least before the pubs opened. He hesitated. One part of himself cautioned the other part against doing the Tate; better to go somewhere else—the V and A, perhaps, or to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. But he still wound up taking a bus along the Embankment, getting off at the Tate, and trudging up the wide white stairs, all the while telling himself this might not be a good idea.

Stopping off in the Tate Gallery had, in the quite recent past, had rather dramatic consequences. Early in the year, in January, he had wound up in the States, in Baltimore. A short while later, a couple of
weeks, he had wound up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Tate was a chancy venue, especially the gallery housing the pre-Raphaelites.

Which is where he went, of course, and stood in front of the Chatterton painting, where he always ended up standing (wondering if the painting was sentimental, not caring if it was), and let the memories take hold. Perhaps he thought there was the possibility of exorcism in all of this. Maybe, but he didn't know.

He spoke to no one for the whole day, beyond the mere request for a pint of this, a half pint of that. Jury rarely went pub-crawling, usually confining himself to the Angel, in Islington, or one of the places in St. James's near New Scotland Yard.

Almost without conscious intent, he worked his way, via bus and tube, to the Fulham Road. It ran parallel to the King's Road, and if he stayed on this last bus (the number 14), which went to Putney Bridge, he would be at Fulham Palace again. No, he would not do this, he told himself, and left the bus at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for the pub on the corner. It was a compromise move, he decided. He had kept himself from going to Fulham Palace.

Under its black and gold sign, the Stargazey looked quite promising and not in the least scruffy. Before he went in for a pint, he stopped at a newsagent's and bought a fresh Sunday paper to take back for Stan, in case Stan were suddenly to return, which he often did. The pub was handsome, well appointed. He was not sure whether this was actually Chelsea or Fulham and decided it must be right on the border. Fulham had come a long way over the last thirty years towards gentrification. It was no longer “foul Fulham” (as a friend of his on the force had christened it). It seemed almost flowery, somehow; it seemed blooming. Certainly it had all the indicators that it was an area where the chattering classes would flourish: property values zinging upwards, cappuccino bars, pricey boutiques and antiques, fancy grocers who “dressed” their windows in arrangements of fruit and foie gras.

Islington had gone the same way, only sooner. The terraced house where he had a flat would probably bring at least a quarter million pounds these days. It seemed to be a prime topic of conversation in the Angel, property values, and those people with their cell phones were
probably estate agents. They walked up and down outside of the pub, cell phones glued to their ears, the “pavement prancers.”

But at the same time, areas in a long slide downwards had slid more. The fabric of life for many was still worn thin. The divergence between upper and lower became more noticeable; the fraying of a seam had become a rip, and Tony Blair would do sod-all to stitch it up. He sighed, opened Stan's fresh paper, and read the sections he hadn't read in his flat.

The pub was crowded and smoky and filled with the familiar air of Sunday desperation. Sundays had less structure. The paper, the pub; that was about it. Jury shoved his glass to the back of the bar, caught the bartender's eye, and signaled for a refill. Then he slit the envelope of Melrose Plant's letter. Two pages in Plant's elegant script on thick, creamy paper that took the ink so beautifully the pages looked engraved. Old stationery, which still bore a crest and his old titles. The crest was left, but the titles were x'd out. Jury laughed all the way through it. The usual “nothing” was happening in Northants, but if there were ever a man who, like Nature, could fill a vacuum, it was Melrose Plant. He could fill in a black hole; he could void a universal void. Jury laughed again and returned the letter to his pocket. He would answer it when he got back to his flat.