The Winds of Change Read Free

the plain spokenness of someone like Larkin or Robert Frost. But then poetry was never plainspoken; it gave only the appearance of it. Like something almost being said. He could never have put that into any other words, yet it came as close to truth as he could get, he knew.
    He told himself again he hadn’t even liked her. Then what was this tightness in his chest, this suffocating feeling (which he was glad Wiggins wasn’t around to witness)?
    What came to him all of a sudden was a memory of Jenny Kennington the first time he’d seen her, running down the steps of her house in Littlebourne, holding a badly injured cat. She didn’t know Jury but she accepted a lift to the vet’s. She talked about the cat, which wasn’t hers, but a stray that must have gotten hit by a car. I don’t even like that cat, she’d said, once he was safely in the vet’s hands. Several times she’d assured Jury, I don’t even like that cat.
    Right, he thought. Sure.
    He walked down Piccadilly and turned into Fortnum & Mason, which was always in a state of pleasurable havoc. Everyone (and when wasn’t everyone in Fortnum’s?) seemed to be staggering under the canopy over the display of foie gras and cheese and prosciutto sliced so thin you could see through it. The wonderful black-coated staff, the bright fruit, the collective swimming smells of tea and citrus and money.
    Then into Hatchards, a bookshop that smelled like books - leather, wax, dark woodwork. An atmosphere, a sensual experience that the mammoth Waterstones up the street couldn’t begin to match.
    He walked on, stopping here and there, at a kiosk for a Telegraph, which he later tossed in a rubbish bin, unread. How had he got to Oxford Street? He looked in Selfridges’ windows. The faceless manikins seemed to know the windows weren’t much to look at, not a patch on Fortnum’s. In their lightweight summer-to-come clothes so insubstantial a breeze could blow them away, their heads were bowed or jutting forward as if searching for an exit. On the sidewalk, a Jamaican selling his unlicensed wares, sharp, but not so sharp that he picked up Jury’s cop aura. Sticks of incense, tiny bottles of perfume so heady it would drop you in your tracks in a desert.
    ‘You wife, you laddy fren, she like this, mahn. Women, they like this stuff.’
    Jury purchased a few sticks of incense and a little stone holder.
    Every time - the newspaper, the manikins, the peddler - he’d forget for those moments and then turn away and it came back to consciousness that she was dead.
    He had thought more about his cousin Sarah in the last couple of hours than he had in the last two decades. That’s what it was, death’s legacy - now there was plenty of time to think about the time wasted, the words unsaid, the history unshared, until it was too late. It’s always too late, he remembered someone saying. One can never have done enough, said enough. It was like the lager you could never finish: jokes about the wooden leg, the hole in the pint. An unquenchable, alcoholic thirst. You can never do enough for the dead. You search around for comfort but there is no comfort; there never was and never will be. There is only a gradual wearing away of the sharp edges, so that you don’t feel ambushed at every turn, as if you saw the dead suddenly rounding the corner.

    For a while he rode the Piccadilly Line, then switched over to the Northern Line at King’s Cross. It was only in the underground he thought he saw such faces, no one looking happy, except for the teenagers banded noisily together, but even they, in an unguarded moment, looked pretty desperate.
    While the antique Northern Line rattled the riders’ teeth, he looked at the girl facing him across the aisle, who was beautiful, but wasn’t taking comfort in it. She sat primly, knees together, hands clasping a small bag on her knees. Her hair was the kind you see in Clairol ads, long and shining. Above her in the parade of advertisements was one