On the Blue Train (13 page)

She had lost her heart to him during the Empire Tour. Her husband, not an imaginer, wouldn't have suspected it. Shy Thing was the youngest of the Brood. She had been acquainted with them in Sydney and was invited to go and stay on their gargantuan Queensland cattle station while her husband and the major undertook a dull, arduous tour of country towns.

She was always insatiably greedy for fruit, but the varieties served in the Brood's homestead, at breakfast, for dessert, at any hour, made English fruit seem commonplace and rather flavourless. Their pineapples, oranges, grapes, sugar bananas and mangoes had a gaudy sweetness, almost candied. Given the chance, she'd have devoured mangoes like chocolate truffles, face running shamelessly with juice. She had to control herself. They were a frisky, warm, amusing family, the Brood, people who expected to enjoy themselves and therefore did. The three girls managed to be extremely attractive—each one more svelte than the last—and forceful. A dazzling combination. How did they pull it off? Teresa was also drawn to all four of the brothers, who treated her with an endearing reverence that had nothing to envy in the most gallant Englishman. The siblings evidently shared a great deal of affectionate mutual regard, and she was struck by how they continually showed it. Touching, giving and receiving kisses. She watched, beguiled.

Her true crush was the quieter, musical brother they called Shy Thing. They related to him as to a jolly idiosyncrasy. It turned out that he and Teresa had in common inferior riding skills, and this fact, which she'd confessed to him, caused him to plead for her to stay behind one afternoon at the homestead in his company instead of having to embark with the others on a strenuous horseback expedition across the scrub.

‘She has promised to sing for me,' he told the Most Svelte One, who conceded but smiled with a hint of mischief.

When the bubbly party had gone, Shy Thing turned to Teresa in the growing quiet and said, ‘Shall we?'

She approached the piano. He sat at it, lifted the lid, and drew back his broad shoulders. His seriousness usually made him appear almost middle-aged among his livelier, more physical siblings, and for the first time, though he was just as sober as ever, she
noticed
his youth. He was, after all, more than a decade her junior. Barely a man. Was it his concentrated energy as he prepared to play that was boyish? Or the reddish-brown hair falling into his eyes? Just that extreme undamaged pallor of the skin beneath a smattering of mahogany freckles? She was ordinarily much less nervous singing than playing the piano, but she had a flittering then of stage fright's elemental doubt, the sense of nearing a trapdoor in herself.

His hazel eyes on her, eyelashes quite golden. His dusky-rose lips were rather self-consciously set. It darted into her mind that he might be stimulated by
her
age, by her greater experience of the world. Even by her being a married woman.

Fixing her gaze on the gracious ceiling rose, she sang. His accompaniment was understated and confident. They'd agreed on a program, Purcell's ‘Passing By' and Metcalf's ‘Absent', to get her going, then Cherubini and Puccini, beginning with the aria from
Medea
, ‘
Dei tuoi figli la madre
'. Her
voice wavered slightly initially but was, she hoped, tolerable. She couldn't tell. To be singing again like this, so excited, brought back her adolescent self in Paris, the one poised to become an opera singer enrapturing devoted crowds in the best theatres of Europe. It was as holy as ever. Jumping free of the mundane. She was half abandoned to the music, and aware of him beneath the melody, plumping her up. They performed many pieces to an audience of no one. She'd experimentally commenced the soprano's part from the finale of
La Bohème
, ‘
Sono andati? Fingevo di dormire
', when something made her pause.

The house was silent, with that rural silence that can seem timeless yet final. His widowed mother had gone to call on a neighbouring estate, and the servants gave no signs of life. It started to rain. A downpour arriving as if from nowhere. Stunning after the preceding lull, the sound frightening upon the corrugated-iron roof.

‘Storms here are first rate,' he said, his usual modesty replaced by a kind of pride. ‘Come, I'll show you.'

She followed him to a red sofa in a bay window, where they kneeled side by side on brocade cushions. The deluge was a vast gunmetal sheet stretching the entire length of the long field behind the house. Closing them off from any more distant landscape, it had a stupendously implacable appearance.

‘Will they find shelter?' She meant his siblings, though she found it difficult at that moment to think of them.

‘Oh, they'll be all right,' he said carelessly. ‘They're used to being out in all weather.'

‘You're quite a band.'

‘Tell me about
your
brother and sister.'

During her singing, he'd seemed to listen to her, or to his own playing, with tremendous fixity. His voice now suggested this same scrutiny.

‘My sister is brilliant,' she began awkwardly. ‘What energy. A natural storyteller. Uproarious—screaming! She once dressed up as a Greek priest to meet someone off a train. And while in Paris being finished, she accepted a dare to leap from a window, which involved landing on a table at which ladies were taking tea. She can and will do anything. She's uncommonly intelligent.'

He raised his eyebrows. ‘The Clever Sister. I have three of those.'

‘The Clever Sister.' She smiled, emboldened. ‘And then there's the Adventuring Brother. Just returned to England from Africa with a long-suffering native manservant. He'd had various schemes there for years. He's quite intransigent but mysteriously charming—hugely popular, actually. Very expensive tastes. A great hunter. He and Clever Sister are both originals, you might say. Personalities.' She paused. ‘I was the
un
remarkable one. The painfully diffident simpleton without anything amusing to say.'

He shook his head incredulously but said, ‘Me too. I'm the overshadowed child in my family. Receding into a corner with his books and his music. Oh, they love me, of course. Indulge me. They just don't take me overly seriously.'

She pictured him as a little boy, humming muffled tunes by the cool glass of windows. ‘You appear to be such good playmates, though.
I
was practically an only child. Well, Clever Sister is ten years older than me and Adventuring Brother eight, so when I was growing up they were always away at school. I adored my nurse and my governess, but I played alone mostly.'

‘Were you lonely?' In spite of the casual lightness with which he asked this, the question made her think he'd have climbed into her mind with a lamp, if he could have done, to investigate the dimmer regions of her character. There was a private flavour to their talk, and something of the interrogation.

An astounding crack of thunder intervened then, like an immense dry thing exploding, and incredibly the flood increased. The absolute opacity they gazed on reminded her of certain storms in Torbay. A rush of craving hit her, for Devon, she thought. They might have been sea voyagers in that house, so cut off were they from anything else.

She mumbled, ‘I was glad to have Mummy to myself, I guess. And after my father died—I was only nine—she
and I became closer still. We were everything to each other. Ashfield is, was, our world. In any case, I had fun on my own.'

‘Ashfield is your family home?'

She nodded, looking around the long music room. ‘This reminds me of what we called our schoolroom.'

‘Your mother must dote on you.'

It had been such a long time since a man had made her feel her own significance, listening to her as if any detail of thought or memory she might value was consequential. After the early days of courting and especially once a married life went on for some years, one listened less fully to one's companion, on the whole. Perhaps it was less troublesome to view that familiar person as an eccentricity not requiring fathoming. Or as some lesson mastered long ago. This attentiveness was irresistible. ‘Yes. Dear Mummy.'

He put a hand to the window, long fingers spread. She caught a young man's odour she recognised and was at the same time taken aback by. ‘She loved your father very much?'

‘Oh, utterly. She was his cousin by marriage, but they grew up in the same household, more or less as brother and sister, though he was much older and spent a lot of time away being a young gentleman in America and France. She'd worshipped him since she was a girl.'

The window glass had clouded from his heat, and when he took his hand away it left behind an exaggerated, wraithlike record of itself. Beyond this, torrential water glowed greyly.
She was much less sure of her charm than she had been at twenty. She was growing discomforted.

‘Were you jealous of your father?'

‘
Jealous?
No. I don't think so, no.' Too thoroughly affable a man, too well satisfied with everything that befell him to have been a threat. He had possessed a mental transparency, the complacency of one not disturbed by an unremitting imagination, perhaps—or trust, an earnest reliance on people that made his life peaceful. At least until the money and medical worries came along. He had thought, having never worked but only enjoyed himself, that fortune and health were an inexhaustible capital to the management of which he needn't pay active attention. She had known that Father and Mummy would not share such dreamy, unpredictable conversations as mother and daughter braided between them. ‘I may have felt a little betrayed when he became ill. Isn't that like a child? Oblivious and selfish! When I think of how she must have suffered . . . I was always happy enough at Ashfield, of course.'

Nevertheless, even the house had been slightly changed, grown somewhat insecure. She had a sharp image of herself striding about the garden, unsure of how she would ever go about being one of life's dramatis personae, petulantly declaring, ‘I will
not
be
bored
!'

Witnessing an Australian storm, she said, ‘He was ill more and more. They were secretive about it. It seemed an adult,
grim business. I saw that my mother was afraid and possessive of him. I don't know that I've said all of this to anyone before.'

Either he asked it very quietly or the rain was particularly loud at that moment. To understand him, she had to turn and study his lips. ‘Not to your husband?' It was the first mention of
him
.

‘Oh, he doesn't ask many questions.' She smiled, strained. ‘Or much like hearing about feelings. He hates any talk of sadness or illness. Anything gloomy.'

‘Ah.'

A silence formed, thickened by the rain enclosing it. The piping on the cushion was pressing through her skirt into her knees. She wondered if it would leave a branding, as a crumpled bedsheet will, a pattern that might take some time to fade. A clock sounded from afar. Count the chimes: it was three thirty—three-quarters of an hour after the expected return of the riding party. She remarked on this. Shy Thing appeared unconcerned.

‘They'll have taken shelter somewhere.' The quick reiteration of his earlier assurance and something in his tone jarred. ‘You have,' he said, just as fast, ‘a very lovely soprano.'

Was it not the rain causing their lateness, but some agreement the Brood had come to? Would he be so unworried otherwise? She had been regarding him as deeply honest, youthfully innocent. But as he stretched and folded his arms, these gestures seemed calculated. Her heart beat
more emphatically. Her attraction to him did not decrease. A proclivity for subterfuge in a shy person shouldn't have surprised her. Looking down with a kind of queasy churning, she saw her wedding ring and blushed.

In the years that followed, the sensation she had had that afternoon came back every so often in the teasing fashion of half-known melodies. She thought on it as if it might be got to the bottom of and laid to rest. It had no bottom. There were no conclusions to be drawn. There was only the strangeness of a foreign country. Had it been simply that: travel's manner of unsettling you with its visions of other lives? And certainly the circumstance of she and Shy Thing—but perhaps not so shy, after all—being isolated together on a fine country estate had played a part. She was easily won over by seclusion in a manor house.

The storm, too, had collaborated. Without that peculiar heavy atmosphere, would it all have had such richness? Without the possibility that they would come too near to one another, touch in a way not befitting her married state, without a kind of inching towards a threshold of wrongdoing or forsaken opportunity, would the pauses between words, the arrangement of bodies in space, the distance between the piano and the window, the fact that it was just going on four o'clock, would any of it have had the potency of a sign? Would any bit of that afternoon have shone, distinguishing
itself from the background of life's morass of common detail, time's indifferent turning over?

She'd started at the clock striking four. Her left leg had gone to sleep. It felt bled of strength, half-dead, alien. With a strangled chortle, she announced, ‘I have to stand. My leg.' The inevitable soreness flowed in. ‘Ouch!' She tried to get to her feet.

He sprang up to assist her. While less solidly built than his brothers, he had their limberness. Impaired and somewhat ashamed, she leaned against his arm, her leg continuing to throb.

‘I've never known anyone like you,' he said.

He saw her, she thought, as an older woman, as a writer, as English—and these qualities intrigued him. Since the
Aeneas
had docked in Adelaide, she had found the Australian voice disorienting and distasteful—exceedingly rough or at best laughable. As a guest in Queensland, she had begun to forget to wince and smile at it. But that afternoon Shy Thing's pronunciation and inflexion disarmed her. His oddly wrought vowels were remarkably
direct
. Speech that was quite nude, half bold and half abashed.