On the Blue Train (21 page)

Harry nodded—wondering whether he would, and at the queerness of this man's profession. Even in this territory of prosperous tranquillity, what a river of vulnerability he must daily watch passing.

The afternoon drifted into a wicked evening of waiting. He finished Teresa's novel, enjoying it. There was a ploy in it that she had handled dexterously, with cunning calm. Once he was out of the convivial enclosure of the book, he was on tenterhooks. It didn't suit him to be inactive.

Not wanting to go far, he wandered the hotel grounds and smoked. It wasn't especially cold. Though sundown had passed, two men of middle age, one very bald and the other endowed with a berserk chestnut mop, took to the tennis
court. Harry watched them for twenty minutes or so, relieved at the diversion, but they were playing a haphazard, frustrating game not aided by the risibly poor visibility or any talent to speak of.

He was in one of the lounge's armchairs looking at the grandfather clock at a quarter to seven, the time at which, on a lightly snowy night, Valeria hadn't been lying on their sofa as usual with her feline companion, a book and a hoard of digestives, because her life had ended.

He hadn't eaten anything, knowing he couldn't have coped with the dining room, nor even with the Winter Garden Ballroom—that unseasonable conservatory ambience and would-be insouciance.

The grandfather clock was striking ten when Teresa passed quietly in. She didn't look discontented.

17

SEVENTH AND EIGHTH DAYS

On Thursday, Teresa had to take action regarding her finances, which were running low. The rather comfortable sum of pounds she'd had the foresight to be supplied with was naturally enough after a certain number of purchases depleted. Bothersome.

She'd noticed a sign in a jeweller's on James Street—with a tempting Pearl Salon—declaring that old items would be bought for cash. She directed herself there, after forsaking Mrs Jackman at the baths, and was able to bring off an adequate exchange for her wristwatch and a ring to which she refused to wonder if she might be attached. Both being respectable pieces, her funds were decently replenished. They'd last until her husband's arrival, which shouldn't be delayed much longer.

But the moment had come to accelerate proceedings with that message in a bottle.

An advertisement in
The Times
?

Yes, capital. More stylish than a letter. The kind of gesture required of one living under a pseudonym, clinically clean. But standing in the post office, preparing to deliver a line or two, blankness came over her. The fuzziness, the dental-surgery fog. Damn and blast this writing fiasco. She was positively unfit to combine words to set on paper. Senseless.

Somehow, she calmed herself down.

And finally, a miracle.
Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele
, she jotted messily but there it was,
late of South Africa, please communicate
. And a box number.

Ha! Clever, really. Was it?

Errands concluded, she returned to the Hydro with the itchy impression back that something was approaching. The day had felt ghost-thin. At dinner, there were the challenges of eluding the Russian, discouraging the Jackmans, who wanted her to go on their driving excursion, and ignoring Harry without seeming to. She felt observed. It could have been her imagination.

The next morning, waking from another heavy sleep, she found her mind veering into her elaborate romantic dream from two days before. She and Shy Thing were outside inhaling the stormy air.

Embarrassed by having almost slid over in the mud, she told him, ‘You have the most
amazing
fruit here.' It
came out sounding saucy. She hurried on: ‘I've been terribly disappointed, however, to learn that pineapples grow on the ground. I was expecting grand trees offering them to you at a civilised height.'

‘I know what you mean. When I first saw bananas growing as a child, I was aggrieved because I'd imagined they'd be yellow, not green. Where's the pleasure in something you can't enjoy immediately?' The Australian boy was speaking without his colonial accent, in deep, pleasantly hard-to-place English tones. Rather like Harry.

‘You remind me of my mother. High expectations. Mummy had a terrible hunger for wonderful things and excitement, which makes it hard to be content for very long. You're always waiting for the next strong, decisive sensation. That's why she tried out so many religions, I suppose.'

‘Greedy for the sublime . . . But
shouldn't
one want a lot from life?'

‘I've lost my darling Mummy, you know.'

He looked at her for a lengthy interval, then exhorted, ‘Listen carefully. We've no time to lose. Will you trust me? You must decide. I'm leaving now and you'll have to come with me, or I'll have to leave you behind. I'm engaged to marry. The daughter of a wealthy family. It's you I love—only you, darling. If you thought you could ever care for me in that way, well, we'd have to run off to elope before the others return.'

‘My decision is made.' She laid her hand on his arm.

He led her to two very fine horses that were standing at the ready. They mounted and set off. Side-saddle, she rode with panache. It had never been so natural. At first they passed through Australian fields, untold dryness, then the terrain began to resemble the rough, bleakish beauty of Dartmoor in its autumn mauves. The immoderate Australian light diminished and rain was gathering.

A storm. Wild rivulets coursed beneath the horses' feet and Shy Thing, leading the way, fell, his horse appearing to lose its substance beneath him.

She jumped down from her own steed and rushed to his side. When she touched him, he sucked his breath in, smiling weakly. His leg was injured.

The horses had taken fright and fled. However, not long before she'd noticed an abandoned hut to which she now managed to guide him, much of his weight upon her.

She nursed him there for days, months perhaps, preparing ointments from medicinal herbs she collected on the moor. Her wartime training as a VAD and a dispenser came in handy, though she worried sometimes that in this wilderness she couldn't discern a poison.

She cared for him with such devotion that she tended to get badly overtired and delirious, fancying herself with numberless boys in her charge, arriving from France and Flanders and Gallipoli. How to accommodate them? The tone of it all was warm. She wasn't green now as she'd been
in her VAD days, no longer as hesitant and self-regarding. ‘Darling,' she'd say. ‘Oh, darling.' Then slim dark roots would twine themselves around her wrists and ankles, binding her to something cold and perfectly still.

And lucidity would return.

Just as she brought back Shy Thing's health, they realised she was suffering from an overpowering frailty. He was desolate. When would they ever get themselves to a church and become man and wife?

One day there was something black on her leg. A growth on her fair skin, a horrifying spider-like filigree. Swamped by shame, she screamed, and wouldn't look at it. To soothe her, Shy Thing stroked it. He found beauty in it, somehow.

They thought her strength might return if she could bathe in the sea. Her secret hope was to be freed of the black growth. He carried her over one shoulder like a sack of coal for so long she lost track of time, or maybe she was passing in and out of consciousness. They reached a place similar if not identical to the ladies' bathing cove of her childhood. Torquay! However, mixed bathing being some years off, as distant as adolescence, Shy Thing shouldn't have been there. She told him so. Saddened, he waved to her as she entered one of the bathing machines operated by a wizened, testy old man.

The door bolted, she changed into her flattering little emerald-green bathing dress from Hawaii, feeling all the old exhilaration but also confusion, because she was already
an adult, after all, and what she wanted was to be with Shy Thing. The contraption began its bumpy roll from the stony beach into the sea. Abruptly she knew that he
was
inside it with her. He'd made himself minute, and hidden inside the black growth on her leg. Rather original.

‘Good heavens, you're here,' she said.

Do you mind?

She did not respond. The situation made her timid. As they could apparently now talk without speaking, she tried to avoid thinking. Like with Mummy.

Don't worry. No one will find out.

The bathing machine had travelled as far as it would on its straps. She'd liked the sense of close confinement, but she unbolted the door on the water side.

The sea, its smell intensifying. She descended into the softly repetitious waves. They were separate again and he had returned to normal size, though he was keeping beneath the surface.

Won't you have to come up for air?

Not so much.

My father says that
gentlemen
from the Torbay Yacht Club watch the ladies bathing or lying on that raft through opera glasses.

Dirty old devils. Seeing me would teach them!

He was taking care not to touch her. There were the faintest whispery movements against her, like ribbons of
seaweed or fish quivering past. Her bathing dress was gone. She was sure, then, that the black growth on her leg had gone, too. She was no longer frail. It was a little like the release of urinating after a long time of holding in, tension leaving, a burning melting between pain and rapture. Feeling was finally accepted and owned.

She wasn't taking care not to touch him now. Delicious—so long as no one saw.

Bringing in tea, the chambermaid disrupted Teresa's reverie, as she was wont to do. All at once keyed up, Teresa petulantly refused a newspaper and asked for breakfast in bed, evading the sensitive eyes of that well-formed, faintly sapped girl.

Alone again, she attempted a new tack. There was a notepad by the bed. At times you could catch the artistic part of yourself off-guard. I couldn't care in the slightest how you pass your time, brain. This here is just in case you should need to make some list unrelated to work, to a train or anything like that. Shh, softly, softly. Thinking of nothing much, quite relaxed, thinking of nothing.