On the Blue Train (17 page)

Harry was early to the dining room and offended by the roughness of voices there. The Jackmans studied him with covert concern. He kept looking up for her, his head feeling fragile, wobbly and ridiculous, but Teresa never arrived to take the meal with them. His eggs, undercooked, were slimy, and his toast quite burnt around the edges and cold so that the butter refusing to melt mixed queasily with the flavour of charcoal.

Eating quickly, he began to cough when he came to the photograph of her in the
Daily Mail
. He could not stop coughing. The Jackmans plied him with water, although he gestured that it was nothing. Mr Jackman was bracing himself to stand and intervene.

‘Down the wrong way, I'm afraid,' Harry managed, just in time.

‘Unpleasant sensation,' the good man commiserated.

Harry nodded and went back to the newspaper. A curiously disturbing thing, the photograph had apparently been prepared by some newspaper artist by merging two different portraits of her, and Harry found it not only a poor likeness but not altogether human. An oddly meek woman was shown side on to the impudent viewer, holding her handbag inexplicably out in front of her. In a long cardigan she was quite shapeless through the middle. Her unfortunate stooped posture and even her expression, slightly bemused or discontented, recalled a turtle emerging somnolently from its shell.

This wasn't his darling, whom he imagined upstairs in her room, staring at the same image in dismay. Was she keeping herself hidden, nervous the other guests would identify her from it? The photograph, at least, he didn't think was cause for worry. It didn't show the woman they had seen among them any more than the portrait of the novelist and her daughter did. He hated this aberration all the more for the thought that it might scare her from him further.

He was on the watch in an armchair by the reception desk when she came downstairs in a dress patterned with violets, carrying a newspaper. She did not look at him.

‘I was hoping to find you,' Teresa said exuberantly to Mrs Jackman, who had just wandered in trailing her husband. ‘Shall we go to the baths?' At which the other lady was delighted.

She only acknowledged him with, ‘Oh, hello, Harry,' and the most perfunctory glance. He thought the Jackmans were disappointed by her coolness to him.

Harry appended himself to their party with the excuse that he was finally enthusiastic about trying a peat bath.

He and Mr Jackman followed the ladies down Swan Road and into Crescent Gardens. Teresa had donned her fur-trimmed coat and neat cloche hat.

At the baths, resigning himself to going without sight of her for hours, he shuffled like a truculent invalid into the men's dressing hall behind Mr Jackman. They made for their dressing-rooms.

He pulled off his clothes, feeling somewhat poorly. His breakfast wasn't sitting well. He still had in his mouth the gelatinous texture of egg white and the taste of charred bread. A glass of water might have helped, but not that wholesome kind, which would have turned his stomach even more.

A white-suited bath attendant led him to a tiled room equipped with small high windows and unfathomable tubes and fittings that seemed to belong to an elite hospital. All a
little alarming, though there was satisfaction in submitting to the attendant's directions and ministrations, in disrobing and simply acquiescing. An abdication of responsibility, a giving-in. Harry had to convince himself that he had learned, or was learning, to be a better man than he had been before. But he wondered, lowering his body into the tub of dark Yorkshire peat, if what had happened with Valeria had really taught him anything that could help him now. The downy odour of earth.

It was hard to say when things had started on their frightful course. There had perhaps been certain transitions to which he might have been more sensitive. Valeria's talk of taking up painting again and her subsequent failure to do so (his scepticism towards his own creative efforts—his magnum opus!—may have prevented him from rallying to this cause avidly enough and later from consoling her as he should have done). Her staid aloofness after Mrs Mortlake passed away. A moment when he realised that she hadn't been to the theatre in a long time or, unless it was to shop for their domestic needs, gone for walks.

And there was the intensification of her habit of reading novels. This was always her favourite occupation, but suddenly it took possession of her days like an invading force. She read on the brown sofa, the cat complacent at her side. Arriving
home in the evening, Harry would kiss her forehead and find it warm. Flash sometimes flicked her tail at his approach. ‘Hello, darling,' Valeria said, and smiled. Or only pouted a little, while she shifted, curling into herself to better see her page. In those days the kitchen had an evacuated air. His wife was never a cook but he had been used to finding traces of her there: a plate on the sink, a knife, a constellation of crumbs. Now her lunch was the digestives on which she also breakfasted and sometimes, despite his protestations, dined. She kept them by the sofa like something private and guarded. They no longer shared.

But perhaps it was all going wrong already on the San Carlo Wharf, as early as the day they met. ‘I have a proposal for you,' she had declared languorously. ‘I need to end a love story. Will you help me?'

They were standing at the end of the jetty, not far from Trieste's main square. It was his first visit to that subtle city, and indeed to Austria. Outside of France, he had travelled little on the Continent, having just begun to make such trips to transact business for his new employer, Mr Ainsworth. Harry had come by train and boat and train from London, bringing with him documents it had been thought better to deliver in person to the head of a company that was to assist them in importing coffee beans from Brazil. He'd left his luggage at the Hotel Roma, which was by the station, and weaved through a number of streets in search of the water.

He found it remarkably still. He was reminded of the Mediterranean at Nice, though this was possibly even more unruffled. Most familiar with the Pacific Ocean, a fiercer animal, he was disoriented by these lapping seas, their waves nearly as tenuous as those of a lake. Only the gentlest breeze rose occasionally, causing rigging to knock against the masts of sailboats, a sound that made him shiver, imagining long sea voyages. He watched the distant bulk of a steamer progress infinitesimally but inexorably. He was distracted from this by a much nearer rowboat, its scullers looking smart and relaxed.

The blue hour was approaching. The sky and sea had grown identical in hue, the horizon become negligible, a needless distinction in a vastness of creamy azure. There was considerable activity behind him, perambulating couples, small groups of perhaps soon-to-be passengers gathered around a docked liner, stevedores proficiently unloading crates from a mercantile ship. But the voices that reached him were not raised or rowdy, and the only other souls at the end of the jetty were a young woman and a fisherman of advanced years, smoking peaceably. There was a sense of respite or suspension here, it seemed to him, resembling the letup that might precede a new turn in the weather. He thought it a wonderfully lulling place. For some reason, he hadn't expected to find Trieste so, yet something in him responded with deep pleasure and possibly relief. An inexplicable feeling of
camaraderie prompted him to speak to the young stranger close by.

‘Excuse me,' Harry addressed Valeria, whose name it would take him a little longer to discover. ‘Do you speak English?'

Her nod was dismissive.

‘I wonder, could you tell me what that is, over there on the shore?'

She looked across a distance of water to the white edifice he was pointing at. ‘The Castle of Miramare,' she drawled as if she should not have had to bother herself stating the obvious.

‘Oh, I see.'

They went on to establish that Harry was Australian. Her interest awaking at this flamboyant detail, she informed him that he spoke like an Englishman, and that she herself spoke English because she had had a tutor—from the Berlitz School—since she was a child. She claimed, when he enquired, not to know whether her first language was the
triestino
dialect (which he'd never heard of nor, for that matter, imagined existing) or Italian. Her father
believed
in the importance of speaking foreign languages. ‘How else can you appreciate culture?' She shrugged, adding that she read a lot of English books. ‘Every sort.'

Her use of Harry's mother tongue, adorned with light grammatical idiosyncrasies and a thick, pleasing accent, was able.

‘French is the only other language I speak anything like decently, alas,' Harry said. ‘But I believe in the need to learn foreign languages, too, I think. No one else in my family did. I started to teach myself French when I was about ten, with some old grammars we'd inherited from somewhere. Don't know why. It was so different from everything else in my life. As an adolescent I did a desultory year or two of it at school. Then I surprised myself by struggling through a whole novel in French. Gide. By the time I moved to Sydney I was reading so many French novels that I was thinking for snatches and even on occasion dreaming a little in the language. Beautifully improbable thing.' He watched her, seeing that she was finding all of this reasonable and waiting for more. It seemed he could say anything. ‘I'd entered a hidden space by magic. Open sesame. Or I was flying—gauchely, but flying. Or, I don't know, I'd become my own shadow. Does that sound strange?'

‘No,' she said.

They were silent for a moment. ‘When I knew what it was to think in and breathe a foreign language, I understood that I'd have to live in other countries. I think there'd always been a hankering in me for travel. For . . . elsewhere.'

‘You went to France?'

‘Yes, at first. Paris. Then Nice. Tried to be a writer there for six months.' He was too embarrassed to say that by then the end of his savings was nearly upon him and he'd seen
that, given his rate of progress, it would be years till he'd complete any book. ‘But I happened to meet Mr Ainsworth at the Negresco Hotel, which had just opened.'

Harry had gone there in a spirit of melancholy recklessness for an aperitif he could scarcely afford. His life in Nice had been far more solitary, less festive and dissipated, than he'd dreamed.

‘It was one of those bits of chance that fall from the sky. Mr Ainsworth invited me to share his bottle of champagne and we found we got along. He was marvellously well dressed, in spite of a rather obvious toupee. It transpired that he was a very successful businessman—importation and exportation, mainly—and was looking for a new private secretary. For my part, while I still intended becoming a writer, I was beginning to consider other options in the meantime. I'd been a clerical employee in a textile factory in Sydney—promoted in the end to private secretary—and I had two pretty fair references. He was impressed by my French and what he called my unobtrusive accent in English. There was another bottle of champagne, and that was that. Mr Ainsworth is quite serious when we're working, but never unkind, and truly gentle with a little drink in him. My duties aren't too bad, either, and it really won't be forever.' He smiled. ‘It gives me opportunities like this. And, well, I love London. It's a world unto itself.'

‘I would like to live in another place,' she said. ‘I also thought of being a writer, but I've decided I'll be a better painter.'

‘You paint? You'd love the picture galleries in London.'

The fisherman reeled in his catch matter-of-factly, and a hush followed, upholstered with the murmuring of water and a fishy, clouded sweetness. Then there was that peculiar rattling of rigging against masts again, and she made her proposition. A young man newly arrived in a foreign country, though startled, he was enticed.

The ‘love story' that she wanted his assistance in bringing to a close had been going on for five years, since she was seventeen. The fellow was a teacher of classics, an acquaintance of her father's. Her father was a psychoanalyst. Harry nodded knowingly at everything, impressed by the intellectual allure of it, so wildly at odds with his memories of his own family life in rural Australia. Her beauty was dawning on him. Neither tall nor short, she was sleek. Her hair was what he thought of as Moorish black, as dark as liquorice, while her complexion was pale.

She took out a cigarette case and offered it. They smoked. The glowing tip of Valeria's cigarette kept leading him back through the escalating dark to the planes of her face. He was riveted by her presence at his side and by the indigo melding of sea and sky—the two were somehow of a piece. There was a vague dourness or cynicism to her that he took for mystery and urbanity, or simply for fashionable European coolness. Laying out her brief account, she used no superfluous words
or gestures. But if Valeria was restrained, she appeared sure of her own mind.

He was flattered that she was asking for his participation. ‘What could I do?'