The Horse You Came in On by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online Page A

need, really, to avoid the subject.
    â€œIf that was her name.” Her voice was bleak.
    He looked at her for a moment. “I think I always knew it wouldn’t work out with Jane. I knew something was wrong; I only wish Pete Apted hadn’t told me what, exactly,” he said dryly. She did not ask what, and he was a little disappointed that she did not. “I expect I’ll never be sure just how she felt, now.” He paused, smiled. “Anyway, I thought, hell, it might be nice, for a change, just to get a bicycle, mooch around, drop in every day at the pub for a good old natter with my mates.”
    â€œSounds bucolic.”
    â€œYou don’t think it’s a good idea.” When she didn’t comment, he felt, again, disappointed. He had been depending on her enthusiasm for his making a change, especially if it were here he were to change to. He picked up the alabaster figure with the broken arm and stared at it in the candlelight. “You might be right.” When she smiled slightly, he realized he’d assumed she had said what he himself was thinking. “Perhaps it’s not being ‘tired’ of something at all.” He kept his eyes fixed on the little figure, not wanting to meet Jenny’s eyes, afraid of what he might find in them. With the thought of that notion possibly gone, the notion of release from his present malaise or lethargy or accidie—whatever it was he’d been feeling over the last couple of years—another feeling creptover Jury. It was the old sense of desolation, similar to this so-called accidie, or perhaps disguised by it. But it was also different, and devastating, and inescapable.
    Dressed in that dark sleeve, Jenny’s arm lay languidly across the table, her hand briefly touching his own and then turning over, palm upward, as her finger touched the tip of one of the brilliants that dripped from the marble candleholder. Jane had been dressed in black the last time he’d seen her. But beneath that image was what might have been an even sharper one. More painful, if that were possible. The memory was always with him of the bombed-out house on the Fulham Road, and he wondered if it wasn’t waiting just below the surface of any event, any meeting, any touch, any kiss to engulf him again. His mother’s body beneath the plaster ceiling rubble—buried in it, except for that arm flung out in its black sleeve, fingers curled in that beckoning gesture.
    â€œWhat is it? What’s wrong?” Her tone was anxious.
    â€œIt’s nothing.” He got up with his glass of port.
    â€œNothing.” Her smile was very slight, a mere glimmer.
    He left the table and walked over to the window facing towards the stone wall that edged the pavement beside the church. He remembered, years ago, walking over there in the park between the church and the theater. It was night, and he’d been walking along thinking about his lack of tranquility in the midst of such a tranquil scene. Even in the dark one sensed the sunlit riverbank, the gliding swans, the ducks sawing to shore for their bread crumbs. He was tired then, and he was tired now, of slogging through London’s sulphurous atmosphere.
    â€œI was thinking of the war.” He told Jenny about the air raid, when he was six, and his mother.
    After he finished, Jury shook himself loose from those inchoate images, and there was a long silence. He kept looking out the window, thinking, and then wondered how long he had been standing here, dreaming away, and turned and saw that Jenny was still sitting at the table, looking not at him but straight ahead, her gaze fixed on another window, the front one. Jenny had thoughts of her own. That made him smile. A calm settled over him at the idea of this shared silence. He moved over to the armchair in which he had sat before, sat down, looked at her. Her attention was still fixed elsewhere, probably inward.
    This experience he found