On the Blue Train (14 page)

They were on the cusp of delicate words and dangerous actions. She let go of his arm, not wanting him to feel her trembling. ‘Thank you, I can stand.'

‘Shall we go out?' he proposed. ‘The best thing about a storm is being outdoors and smelling it.'

It was the kind of romantic urge she herself would feel but had learned not to share with her husband, who classified such inclinations as childish whimsy. ‘Yes!' she exclaimed, too loudly.

Stepping off the veranda, she almost stumbled. The rain was finally abating, a great curtain opening onto a view of soaked fields. The last drops were only slightly more chill than tears, the sky a moody marvel, undulating rolls of blackish grey. An unprecedented odour. Not like the rank salt perfume of marine storms, but as transcendental in its way. A pungent fullness. Of earth, wet, pasture and leaf. In Australia one was assailed by impressions as vivid as the flavours of the extravagant fruit. It was almost dissolute. She glanced sideways at Shy Thing. His head hanging back, he was breathing as if absorbing into himself the wonder of drenched fields.

It was his pose, so open. That appetite or striving. She realised that what drew her to him, more than his foreignness, was his familiarity. It wasn't exactly that he and she were alike: bookish, musical and overshadowed, timid and avid, outwardly conforming to the wishes of others. It wasn't just that. What she recognised wasn't a version of herself. Not quite.

It was a version of Mummy.

An attitude of ecstatic expectation that gave experience such power to transport or dissatisfy. A meticulous, fastidious curiosity. The requirement that life be a grand bridge between
an inner and an outer world. She had, in a manner, come home. And she was not safe. Demonstrating this, she nearly slid over on a muddy patch. But caught herself.

‘Be careful,' he said.

‘You're a fine pianist. I meant to say so. We were distracted.'

‘Yes, we were distracted.' He laughed, appearing to laugh at
words
—at how ludicrously approximate they were. ‘Thank you.'

Somewhat drunkenly, they wandered further from the house. He spread his arms wide. She noticed, benevolently, mud on her skirt, and spread her own. There was a spare, perfect moment.

Next they were lurching into one another and hip to hip. She decided he initiated this, but could not be certain. Their spread arms had made the encircling of one another's waists artless. They took a staggering step in unison. Turning a little towards him, she was confounded by his closeness, greenish eyes, mahogany freckles over skin as white as the thickest, most unsullied mist. He watched her watching him. They were practically embracing.

It took a heartbeat or two to decipher the pummelling rhythm of hooves, and then the raised voices of the returning riding party. In something like panic, they remained thus a few instants longer. And stepped apart.

‘Hello, you two,' the Most Svelte One greeted them. ‘Did he do himself justice?' She grinned winsomely. ‘On the piano.'

‘Oh, very much so,' Teresa said.

The Most Svelte One dismounted fluidly in her breeches and her next smile, as she took them in, was positively delinquent. Teresa was struck once more by how slight and how tough she was. She ruffled her brother's hair and kissed him, quite near to the mouth. Teresa didn't know that she'd ever seen such self-assurance in a woman. Terrific. An ideal young lord of the manor, adorable and steely.

She and Shy Thing were never alone together after that. The only unusualness anyone studying them would have remarked on was how very little they spoke to one another, and the occasional ungainly colliding of their gazes at the dinner table under cover of others' conversations. She went on consuming immense quantities of preposterously sweet fruit, her throat tight to think she'd never feed so again.

She soon rejoined her husband.

She had not ceased to love her husband as she was becoming enamoured of Shy Thing. If you were to consider the mind as a train, you might say she had simply sat for a while in a different compartment to the one she normally occupied as a wife. Such adjustments happened more easily when one was away from home. They were natural and perhaps necessary for successful travel. To contentedly inhabit new surrounds, one had perforce to turn away from certain habits, preferences, affections, and so on. She was a good traveller, predisposed.

In the compartment in which she traversed an afternoon storm with Shy Thing it was disclosed to her that she had been missing something. Badly. For it was still possible, at thirty, to feel altogether alive in the company of a man, for her dreaming heart and her skin to lean together. The smallest gesture between two people could still have a reverberation that seemed part animal, part mythical. She was shocked to have nearly forgotten that.

In her marriage, yes, there had been a certain lack. She must have known. She knew that she and her husband had been awkward together at times during the Tour. That there was an increasing irritation or chafing, causing stray comments to curdle into tension, leaving tenderness sporadic. But while a Queensland storm played itself out, she took the measure of what had been absent. She took its measure, and then exited that compartment of her mind. The knowledge of it put aside. Some instinct intoning that it should not be handled. It might be rigged to detonate.

Had she confronted and acted upon what a young man had shown her during a storm, she might have prevented what in time came. Her husband had also felt a lack, of course.
Of course
. She would pay for it. Maybe she should have gone with him on that tour of country towns, should not have been so quick to pass from compartment to compartment.

In the dream the curtain of rain opened, as it had in life, but the riding party did not return. Then . . . No, don't think of it.

She emerged from Valley Gardens and crossed the road in shambolic fashion, making for the Pump Room. A motorcar was forced to come to a halt to let her pass. She hadn't noticed it and the driver swatted her with an uncharitable look. She turned into the lane behind the Pump Room, seeming to taste the sulphurous water she'd dutifully drunk before breakfast. Sure to do miracles.

She was sliding—like on the wet lawn with Shy Thing. This time, she did not catch herself. Legs going loose and light, a small cry shooting from her.

It felt like a long moment that she spent plunging through space, and next she was surprised to be sitting on cobblestones. She looked quickly around. No one appeared to be watching, thank heavens. Then she saw a gentleman headed towards her. Why was it so much worse to have one's humiliation seen by an onlooker? She began to stand.

The man reached her, and she identified him.

‘Dear me,' said Mr Jackman.

‘Hello.' Prey to a childish shame, she hoped he hadn't heard her cry. ‘How clumsy of me!'

‘Not at all. Are you all right, my dear? I nearly came over myself, earlier.' He gestured and she noted belatedly that here and there the stone was darkened with clots of decomposed
leaves. ‘Awfully slippery. That rain in the night has made the streets a hazard.'

Teresa brushed herself down as best she could. The generosity in Mr Jackman's concern was upsetting.

He must have observed this in her face. ‘You've had a bit of a shock, my dear. Are you sure you're all right?'

This was worse. ‘Oh, quite all right.' She stared at the slimy cobblestones. ‘And thank you—thank you so much for coming to my rescue.' They smiled at one another.

‘Will you go back to the hotel now?'

‘I think so, yes. I've made a mess of myself.' Muddy smears across the palms of her gloves. Her back was complaining, too. It must have received some of the impact of the fall.

He smiled again, and proffered his arm. They started gently back towards Swan Road. Lightly supported by him, she observed that he was not tremulous or rickety, as men of his age could be, but quite sturdy. And there was a sort of subdued hopefulness to him that cheered her. She wondered about his marriage—if he was visited by romantic dreams from which he was sorry to wake.

‘I didn't hear rain in the night.'

‘No? Well, I suppose my sleep
is
light. I don't sleep all that much, actually. Oh, it's not so bad now as when I was a young man.' He glanced at her, as if checking that she was recovered from the fall and welcomed talk.

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. You know, it's a nice consolation that while some things deteriorate with age—your girth and the thickness of your hair and the colour of your skin, your joints, and a few things like that'—he scowled amiably—‘others improve, curiously enough. That's how it was for me, for instance, with the insomnia. I used to suffer from it terribly. Still do, on and off. At times more on than off, but I've become less solemn about it and that makes a world of difference, let me tell you. I used to look sometimes at the sleeping faces of my wife and daughter, so peaceful.
Normal
. And I'd curse myself for being a freak of nature, some restless demon, so unworthy of them. You'll laugh.'

‘No,' she said, giving his arm a slight squeeze. ‘Not at all.'

‘I took it very seriously, you see. Do you know what it is to barely sleep for several days running? And for this to repeat itself rather frequently?' She kept her eyes down. ‘You feel . . . well, badly done by. It's not nice. When you might as well be squinting at everything through a soiled veil, you don't find too many reasons to be light-hearted.'

They were passing a house where, through the windows of what appeared to be a comfortable drawing room, a man was pouring himself tea. Unfortunately, the teapot was rather like the faithful old white one she had been accustomed to using every day, in another life. It brought to mind an occasion on which that familiar teapot had sailed through the air.

Thrown.

It had not struck her husband. He'd dodged it easily, sportsman that he was, looking hardly surprised. Though the lid did not come off, a little tea looped from the spout, aesthetically. She could not believe she was responsible for this, but there was no taking back the gesture, or the intention it clothed. No taking anything back.

He had muttered tight-mouthed to the maid, who must have heard the kerfuffle, ‘We've had an accident, I'm afraid.'

It was an end to the pretence of civility. Such cowardice to call any of it an accident.

Teresa looked away from the man drinking tea and shook her head a little as Mr Jackman continued, ‘I couldn't say what changed. Henrietta was always very patient. Knows how to take me with a pinch of salt when I get lugubrious.' She remembered that he was talking about his insomnia. ‘But over the years, it stopped mattering quite so much. I bore it. Saw that I was bearing it. It wasn't killing me, was it? Because you do start to wonder whether it might. In a slow, degrading sort of way.' He laughed. ‘It's one of nature's sneaky little tricks that if you mind less about sleeping, you sleep a sight more and better.'

‘You're right. I was sleeping poorly, recently. And the worst thing is knowing how much you
need
rest. Really needing something makes you . . . weak. You're caught, because how can you go about suddenly being indifferent?' She thought he might question her if she stopped there. ‘Harrogate is
putting me right, though. My sleep here is thick and full of dreams.' She glanced at her muddied gloves. ‘You
do
sleep better now, by and large?'

‘By and large. And when I do, it's as if a great honour has been conferred upon me, a knighthood or something. I'm invincible. When I don't, it's not pleasant, but I take it like a man.' His lips twitched. ‘I try to be gracious. Sometimes I even find it interesting.'

How much more loquacious he was without his wife, and impish. They had almost reached the grounds of the Hydro.

A hangdog smile, and he added, ‘I've rather grown to fancy insomnia itself a mark of distinction, like some tolerable obscure illness. Anyway, it gives you an excuse to drink whisky in the evenings. Copiously enough so that you might have been beaten lightly about the head. One tends to black out beautifully that way. Here we are.'

‘Thank you for chaperoning me. And for the words of wisdom. I wish I liked alcoholic beverages.'

‘You don't? Not at all?'

‘Afraid not. I've never been able to stand the taste.'

He looked crestfallen. ‘I
am
sorry. My most sincere condolences.'

‘You've been splendid.'

‘It was my great pleasure. And, my dear, while I think of it, I don't suppose you've come across Harry today? I passed
him last night on the stairs and he struck me as being a bit out of sorts.'

‘Ah? He's not a great sleeper, either, from what I understand. Perhaps that could account for it? I haven't come across him.'

‘Indeed? Well, poor sleep must be a common ailment, alas, in places such as these . . . He's not what you expect of an Australian, is he?'