On the Blue Train (12 page)

He emerged into early evening, beneath a sky of that drastic heartfelt blue, the dawn of black, which had always seduced
him. He purchased
The Times
. The column of interest was in the middle of the paper.

The Colonel hadn't received any news as to the whereabouts of his wife.

In their search for her, the police had dragged Albury Mill Pond.

Someone said he had seen Teresa at Milford railway station, a few miles south of Godalming.

This unfamiliar geography began to take on hazy contours in Harry's mind. He saw a grim sort of marshland, spectral with fog.

He was nearing the hotel and it seemed that Teresa was standing in front of it. At first he wondered whether the vision was a trick of his imagination. But no. Drawing closer, he saw that she was wrapped in a luminous white shawl, its fringe trembling. He stopped before she had seen him, and rapidly folded the newspaper around the books he was also carrying. Hers.

Why was risk exciting? Resisted, the drive that should cause a person to flee worked like an intoxicant. He came forward. Her slanted head suggested contemplation of the sky.

‘Agreeable time of evening,' he said. ‘My favourite time of day, in fact. The blue hour. Would you call that Prussian blue? Lapis lazuli?'

‘Beautiful.' They considered the sky together. ‘God, I don't know what I'd call it. Good day, Harry?'

‘Quite tolerable.' He smiled. ‘And yours, Teresa? I see you found a shawl. Very handsome,' he added awkwardly. ‘It suits you.'

‘Oh, this.'

Ducking his compliment, she was toying with the ends of the shawl, swirls of moonlight flashes. Really, how absolutely different she was here, tonight, from the woman in the
Daily Express
picture. Now she was glamorous, vital. He still thought there was a giddiness to her, something like euphoria—or was he only seeing his own?

She said, ‘I've come out for some air, because a ridiculous thing just happened to me inside. I'd gone into the lounge. I thought I might see the Jackmans there, or you, but there was only an old man in an armchair by the fire. Elegant, with a cane. Quite magisterial. But he was so still—like a statue—I thought he was asleep. I approached and he didn't budge. I came closer. His eyes were open behind his glasses, though being so perfectly immobile he
had
to be sleeping or, it occurred to me,
dead
!' She laughed. ‘Nothing stirred, the whole room seemed under an enchantment. As I was thinking of bending over and putting a little mirror under his nose, something in that vein, he lifted his eyebrows rather drolly. You should have seen me jump.

‘“I assure you I'm with the living, if only just,” he declared. I couldn't think of a word of excuse, I was so ashamed. I blurted
a sorry and rushed out. You see how frightfully I lack social grace.' She laughed again.

Harry laughed too, disoriented. He hadn't heard so many words in a row from her since they'd met. ‘Yes, strange when you think how slight the difference is between a man and a corpse.'

Her eyes were back on the darkening sky and she didn't appear in the mood to follow him down this philosophical avenue.

‘Social grace is probably highly overrated,' he went on. ‘And are you well, otherwise?'

‘It's been a pleasant day.'

He'd begun to acquaint himself with her literary accomplishments. The tale he was reading was hardly Serious Literature. It wasn't the kind of thing he'd had the grandiose pretension as a young man to dream he might produce. But it didn't take itself for that. And it was clever. It ushered you in, as if into the reliably cheerful house of a spry rascally great-aunt. Teresa had to have a nimble, astute mind and considerable strength of character. Did he still think she could be plotting her own end? He found today's volubility zany and a tad brittle. But she did appear to be capable of amusement, and resilient, somehow. Someone who could enjoy herself. Even if she
was
horribly sad underneath all this, was he arrogant enough to presume he could do anything about it? He was suddenly impotent and tired.
His
mind
repeatedly showed its limits. He was not astute or strong. He tottered in darkness.

Was he even so sure that he had before him the escaped authoress of the book he had been reading?

‘What is it?' She had caught his change in spirits.

‘I'm just rather exhausted. I had a long walk on the Stray.'

They were quite near to one another. He blinked and saw the photograph in which Agatha's lovely daughter so upstaged her. If Teresa were to fall towards him in this instant, as Agatha allegedly almost had into the man who'd come upon her by Newlands Corner, he would catch her. Say into her warm neck, What set you on the run? Confide in me
.

He leaned forward slightly, recalling the feel of her in his arms when they'd danced. But had she recoiled? She'd reassumed that cordoned-off countenance, suggesting barred access to a space both desolate and charged.

‘Will you be coming to dine?' she enquired.

‘No. I had something at Bettys not long ago.'

‘Ah. Good food. It impressed me. Self-respecting food.'

‘Yes, rather.'

She looked towards the entrance of the hotel. ‘Perhaps we'll see you in the Winter Garden Ballroom, later?'

He oughtn't to dance with her that night. He was weak, uncertain and susceptible. What he needed was the comforting canniness of the mystery novel he'd begun. Books could be so much more soothing than people. ‘Don't think I'm really
in the right frame of mind. But you will promise me a dance for tomorrow night?'

‘I don't know that I should be making promises,' she said. ‘It's getting cold.'

‘It is.'

Were her words meaningful? Had he made her suspicious? Rain hadn't come. The dog walker's precautionary mackintosh a vain gesture. The sky by this time was onyx black, a thin shiver of moon upon it.

11

SIXTH DAY

The chambermaid's knock.

It was a romantic dream at the rudder of which a semi-waking awareness had sat for spells. Leaving it was like lolling in a pool of sun, then being ejected into cold.

Odd, to be waking once more with vibrant, detailed recollections of dreams. By nature she was a great dreamer, but in the past months any dreams (other than those starring the Gun Man) had been as shallow as barely unlikely digressions of thought. Inadequate pseudo-rest that left her brain grisly and aggrieved. Offended with the world and all the more so for the suspicion that she had in some manner sabotaged herself. In Harrogate, however, deep sleep was returning. She lay still, reluctant for that particular sweet dream to dissolve.

In came the chambermaid with tea and newspaper. A wedge between Teresa and the warmth she'd been forced
from. She said she'd take breakfast in bed, resentful of the young woman's efficient movements and elastic spine. Yet there were dark dips still under her too-penetrating eyes. She might know what it was to be betrayed by sleep. She probably had a child, several, and must be an old intimate of fatigue. How had she kept her pleasing waist? Her days would involve a great deal of hard work, of course, and possibly letdowns that may or may not be blunter than suffering. The beauty not quite managed was receding, a treasured friend waving on the quay, a shimmer in the distance. Light hair discolouring, silver strands creeping in like minor but disruptive misunderstandings. When the husband's eye roamed, she'd know it. Teresa continued to take exception to her energetic gaze.

Once she had departed, Teresa could dress. No penance of the green jumper and grey stockinette skirt for her today! Horrid baggy knits as slovenly as old skin . . . No, for her, hurrah, there was fresh tweed and a white blouse and a maroon jumper. Even new stockings and knickers.

Her shoulder seeming improved, the arm just a fraction weak, she gave a twirl and in the dizzy middle of it heard stately music—being played, she supposed, on Harry's gramophone—that she might have identified if it had been louder. He had been a little off the last times she'd seen him, ill at ease. (Better not to give this much consideration. She was keeping her thoughts silken, thin.) Last night he preferred not to dance with her. Though he
had
wanted to be near
her while they stood in front of the hotel. She was certain of that as a woman is of such things.

She put her head out of the window to gain an idea of the northern day. Sleep appeared to be sharpening her senses. Wood smoke and the opalescent silver and cream flecks of slate roof tiles. Clean, pristine cold. Light so fleecy it might have been filtered by cloud, when in fact the sky was quite clear. Even the stone of houses had a plush look, as if it were actually some stiff velvet or moss. No seagulls here, of course. No sea tang.

Two young people were down on the drive. His way of turning to her and arranging the scarf around her neck declared they were lovers. The girl's shiny brown head rather towered over him. It was the dancers—from when? The night she and Harry danced. The boy gazed adoringly up at Birthday Girl, and then noticed Teresa.

She withdrew, vaguely panicked. She sat down at the writing table to see whether she could dispatch the postponed letter to Mr Neele. A quick note might be sufficient.

But no development, apparently, on that front. No cooperative phrases to be found, the right ones still skulking behind a sort of dental-surgery woolliness of perception. When she muttered the simplest line aloud to coax it along (
Darling, I think of you constantly
), it came out ironic and mocking. The very touch of the pen against her hand was irksome. Hateful. Would she have been able to get something out on
a typewriter? The music she couldn't decipher went on and on. She wondered if it had somehow woven itself into her dream, as sounds sometimes intrude on sleep to reinvent themselves in a dream form. It might have been interesting to see Harry, but it was no doubt preferable to keep herself secluded this morning.

She needed an occupation, however. Not being able to write, nor even to think about writing in any diverting, strategic way, was so boring. And worse, more menacing, was the unkempt feeling it gave her, as if nothing could be taken charge of and made shipshape. If Peter were with her, she'd be less het up. Oh, for a piano! Yesterday, her spirits were high. Today the restlessness seemed fragile, and she didn't want to become agitated. What she could, should, do was go out to buy more clothes.

She achieved this, rather admirably, with a cardigan to show for it—mauve, her favourite colour—from Henry Moore's. And a black silk evening dress from Louis Copé, because she wouldn't be able to get away with just the georgette for long.

Then she carried on to Valley Gardens. She'd liked it there. Her ulterior motive may have been to see whether a saunter would help to raise the Wretched Book from its mortuary sleep. Walking had been the best approach to a vexatious literary problem before. She'd unearthed many a useful
piece of a puzzle in so doing. In fact, she couldn't remember a time when she hadn't worked through adventures while wandering alone through nature. The habit became formal, as it were, on Dartmoor, thanks to Mummy's characteristically capital idea that she go for a fortnight's holiday there, to the Moorland Hotel, to finish her first novel. But she had spent the better part of her childhood strutting around the garden and little wood at Ashfield—threading through ashes whose sighs imitated the sea's, circling the wondrous beech—lost in a kind of disconnected but fervent conversation with . . . whomsoever she chose. Virtuous or more curious girls her own age, captivating adults, cheeky anthropomorphic animals. Quite entertaining, frankly. Though there had been none of that for forever, as the stubborn Wretched Book was denying her such company.

And launching, now, her brain back into thoughts of Shy Thing and the morning's dream.