Phyllis was studying him. Did he himself look like a puzzle? He was stalling for a reply to the neurologists’ prognoses. He could think of nothing.

“You’re at a loss.” She tilted her head. “There was never anything you could do, Richard. There’s nothing now.”

He shook his head. “I know. It’s not so much what I could do as what I could feel. Should feel.” He looked up from his fish, then back again. He wasn’t very hungry.

“Ambivalence is-”

“It’s more than that. Or less than.” Jury leaned back and took in the room, crowded as always. Here the crowding didn’t bother him; the customers, perfect strangers, seemed familiar. In the familiar din and chatter, there was privacy. He caught sight of Danny Wu, bending over a table, being solicitous of the couple there. Danny could work a room as well as any politician. He smiled. “This place is comforting.”

“It is, yes. It’s one of those home places, a place that’s a stand-in for home, whatever that might mean. For me, there’s a chemist’s near my flat. It’s a little sort of run-down place, but I like to go in it. There’s even an armchair. I sit in it and read labels.”

“Phyllis-” He laughed, more delighted than surprised. This woman was so accomplished. Also beautiful, also rich. The source of her money was a mystery to him.

“For some people it’s a certain kind of shop, for some, book-stores-it doesn’t have to be a place, anyway-what we think of as home. For an artist it might be paint; for a writer, words.” She sighed and cut off a bite of fish.

“I was at the hospital this morning,” she continued. “One of her doctors is a good friend and he told me. It’s still possible she’ll come out of it, Richard. This makes it difficult to decide-well, Lu’s uncle was there.”

Jury waited.

“He’s the closest relation she has or, at least, according to him.”

“You saw him?”

She nodded. “Yes, he was there with Dr. McEvoy. My friend.”

“Lu told me a little about him, the uncle. She was very fond of him. Other than that, she never talked about her life.” He picked up the chopsticks, moved them awkwardly. “Now, what’s left of it?”

“I’m really sorry, Richard.”

She was, too.

It wasn’t, thought Jury, one of Phyllis’s “home places,” the hospital, but he thought the nursing staff made an effort to keep it from being absolutely foreign.

A grandmotherly looking nurse, small and rotund, whose uniform badge gave her name as Mae Whittey, came round from behind the nurses’ station to tell him Ms. Aguilar had been moved earlier that day and that she would take him to her room. He did not want to know to what section, for he was afraid of the answer. It might be the Hopeless Ward.

Nurse Mae Whittey’s crepe-soled shoes made gasping little sucks at the floor as she walked. She told him that one of the rooms they passed was being “refurbished,” hence the thick plastic across the doorless doorway. The heavy plastic put Jury in mind of one of those temporary tents thrown up at an archaeological dig.

“Mind those tools,” she said, indicating a bucket and equipment left lying against the wall. Her role seemed less nurse and more guide through an excavation, seeing to it that Jury didn’t put a foot wrong.

Their steps echoed in the soundless corridor. He didn’t understand the silence, given many of the doors to the rooms were halfway open.

“Here you are,” she said, but it was apparently “Here we are,” for she went in with him.

And as if she were a member of their tiny family, she stood beside him to look down at the still form of Lu Aguilar, as composed as an effigy in a church. Yet Nurse Whittey’s presence was oddly unobtrusive. Jury had to admit to himself he was even grateful for it. He remembered the heavy weight of aloneness he had felt two months ago, back in March, when his cousin Sarah had died up in Newcastle. He had walked around London for several hours, unable to settle on a park bench or a coffee bar or in his thoughts. There was an orphaned quality to loneliness.

This room looked just like the other room, except for the addition of fresh flowers, sprays of the most gorgeous orchids he had ever seen, sitting in a vase on the bedside table. They reminded him he had always come empty-handed. “Someone’s been to see her. Was it her uncle?”

“Oh, no, it was Dr. Nancy brought those. Aren’t they gorgeous? So many shades of red. Brazilian orchids, she said. Ms. Aguilar’s from Brazil, apparently. Dr. Nancy said something from her own country to keep her company.” Nurse Whittey smiled. “That’s just like her. Doctor Nancy, I mean.” She turned to him. “You know Doctor Nancy, don’t you? I believe she mentioned you. I thought myself that perhaps she must be a friend of the patient, but she said, no, just the good friend of a good friend.”

“Yes.” Jury didn’t know what to say.

“Well, I’m just terribly sorry,” Mae Whittey said. She looked down at Lu. “She’s so terribly young.”

Of course, all rules of protocol should have had the nurse leaving, and leaving him alone. Yet they stood there together for some moments in a companionable silence for which Jury was grateful, but which he didn’t understand. Perhaps Nurse Whittey always had that effect on people.

While she made microscopic adjustments to the bedclothes, Jury went to the window and looked out. A view different yet the same. He looked around to see the nurse rearranging the orchids that blazed in the colorless room. Prometheus returning fire to benighted mortals.

He said, “You know, there was a great actress named Dame May Whitty. Same name, spelled differently.” He smiled at her.

“Oh, my, yes. I remember her well. There was that one where she was on a train-yes, and just disappeared, didn’t she?”

“Hitchcock,” said Jury. He looked off through the window that gave out on the same square of land as the one Lu had been in before. “The Lady Vanishes.”

46

Alice Dalyrimple.

How could one take seriously as an escort a woman with such a Victorian name as Alice Dalyrimple?

“Miss Dalyrimple will be your escort.” Alice Dalyrimple, so snobbily intoned by a Miss Crick of the Smart Set escort service. Miss Crick had been entrusted with the appointment book. Melrose felt he had landed in the middle of a Jane Austen novel.

“Now, Mr. Plant, a bit more information. What is your given name?”

Why, wondered Melrose, had he used his last name? Men seeking the services of escort agencies gave out fictional names, surely. At least he could make up a first name: “Algernon. That’s my first name.” From Jane Austen to Oscar Wilde.

“Algernon. Very good.”

Did the name have to meet with her approval?

“Now, we were to decide upon a meeting place.”

His mind ranged over venues, from the Hole in the Wall underneath Waterloo Bridge to Buckingham Palace, where he fantasized presenting Miss Dalyrimple to the queen. In the midst of these unfruitful thoughts, Melrose looked round at the several sluggish old gents in various stages of slumber and said to her, “Boring’s. My club in Mayfair.”

“Oh. And this is permitted by the club, is it?”

Miss Crick’s question was the first indication that they knew Smart Set wasn’t turning up in Burke’s Peerage. It encouraged him to be fulsome: “Oh, my, yes. Yes, we’re quite an open and wide-awake group here.” He decided this after one of the old men snuffled himself out of a coma. The only thing less awake would be the burial vaults in Westminster.

“Yes,” he began, “all she-”

“Miss Dalyrimple?”

Ah! Had he shown bad escort manners in his overly familiar use of “she”? “Miss Dalyrimple need only present herself at the reception desk and they will inform me.”

“I see. You will not be at the door yourself?”

Only if I’m the doorman. “I’ll be in the Members’ Room.”