On the Blue Train (26 page)

‘
Birk
is birch, you know, in Scottish.'

‘Oh? I met my husband at a ball near Exeter. We danced. He impertinently insisted I cut some of the other men from my dance card in order to dance with him twice more.' Why
discuss him? ‘The evening ended and I thought that was the end of that. I was, after all, engaged to another boy at the time.'

‘You were? Be careful of the path—it's muddy in places. Then what happened?'

The twang of curiosity in his voice. So congenial to inspire interest, to have a man intent on tunnelling with a lamp into the dark of your mind. ‘He came to Ashfield on his motorbike. I wasn't at home when he called. I was across at a neighbour's house, dancing again.'

‘You were quite the dancer.'

‘I was. A tango, if memory serves me.'

‘One last tango . . .'

‘Yes, something like that. Hard not to wonder what would have happened if one had gone on dancing. But that's not possible, is it? One gets older and at some point the dancing stops.'

‘Hmm.
I
never really danced—as you no doubt concluded from my recent performances. Of course you mean settle down, put away childish things, and so on. And in that sense, maybe I never did stop dancing. I've never been much good at feeling like an adult. To my dishonour.'

She glanced at him. ‘Nor I. Though you do find yourself having to accept being bored a lot.'

She may have reddened. Should she have been talking so? Was Harry her ally? Chatting while moving through the
trees—right now, some lithe, glitteringly ashen birches—had the fatalism of sleepwalking. Hearing herself speak of her other life terrified and relieved her. They walked side by side, one of them sometimes passing ahead if the way narrowed. When it was his turn, she had the opportunity to observe his slenderness and slightly asymmetrical gait, one arm around the parcel of their picnic provisions and the fingers of the other cradling the guidebook.

‘How swiftly the foliage changes,' he commented. ‘Notice all these ferns suddenly, and the heath and gorse.'

There was a sound of falling water, and soon they saw a small waterfall coursing down the side of the ridge to their left. The gentleness of their fluid progress through the wood and Harry's reserve, now that he had finally stopped referring to the guidebook, were working on her. She wanted to ask him what it was that he had promised to tell her, but she sensed it growing in him. Meanwhile, the agreeable disorientation of having him for a confidant was tempting. ‘You know I'm a writer, I think. Not a renowned one—not very—but I've done some little things.' He wouldn't have read anything of hers, would he?

He stared ahead. ‘Yes.'

‘Well, you asked how I failed my husband. It was in that area, too. I didn't just neglect him after my mother died—but also before, by writing. To write you have to leave people alone, you see. Absent yourself. And even when you're in
company again afterwards you're different, no doubt quite unsatisfactory as a social creature. A bit exalted in an inward, probably very irritating way. Or thoroughly tired and cross. Absolutely beaten, at times.'

‘I think I can imagine.' They were ascending, the gradient increasing quite rapidly. Perhaps both taking account of this at once, they gazed down into the valley. He was smiling ambiguously. ‘But surely he absented himself from you every day, when he took himself off to work in the City? Surely on occasion he returned weary and peeved?'

‘Oh, often. But men are excused for being like that, aren't they? We don't expect them to be constantly willing and sweet. Or even to be all that
with
you, when they are with you. In any case, he was working to maintain his wife and household. I was entertaining myself.'

‘Not solely. Your books entertain others. They'd make some money, too?'

Having to accept this made her smile. ‘I bought a Morris Cowley. It was one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me. Like growing marvellous metal wings.'

‘There, you see. You were earning.'

‘You know, the writing was something to do in my wifely solitude and I don't know if I could—or should—have avoided it. I don't think I am truly remorseful about it.'

‘I take off my hat to you. For a while, in my foolhardy youth, I thought I'd be a writer. In France. I fancied the idea
of it. The problem was that I turned out to be quite good at avoiding actually doing it.'

‘You were lucky, I'm sure. Yes, it's wonderful fun for a few seconds here and there—like driving a Morris Cowley. You careen along through picturesque countryside. Mostly, though, you're a wretched foot passenger trudging in inferior shoes through indifferent scenery. And it's mizzling. For hours and hours on end. The next day you'll have to set off again. The tedium deranges you.' She reached out to caress the trunk of a birch, her hand falling short of it. ‘One day you might even discover you haven't the slightest notion of where you are. You recognise nothing, and you can't walk anymore. You have no legs.'

‘You've felt that?'

‘Yes. I'm legless at present.' She could tell that her attempt at a smile was failing. ‘I'll probably never publish another word. There's a trifle I was working on, but I can't go on with it. I can't.'

‘Would you hate it if I asked what it's about?'

‘Yes. The answers always sound so stupid. It was about a woman having a spot of bad luck on the
train bleu
.'

‘She was going to Nice!'

‘Alas, she never arrived. She died. I despise everything about it. It fills me with pure revulsion. Can't we talk about something else?'

‘Of course. I'm sorry. Insensitive of me to bring it up.'

‘Most. But it's my fault for telling you things. I'm afraid it's rather easy to talk to you. You're dangerous.'

‘I am?' He turned towards the valley, and when he faced her again she caught another ambivalent half-smile. ‘Mrs J was right. It's very lovely here.'

‘Proper countryside.'

‘You're wrong about one thing.'

‘Hmm?'

‘You
are
a famous writer. You've become one over the last week.'

She stopped walking. He appeared to wish he could take the words back. She didn't know what her face showed but she gathered it alarmed him. The path rose ruggedly before them. The crag they were climbing towards was an almost perpendicular precipice, possibly one hundred and fifty feet high. Her light mood had knocked into foreboding, and mud's slippery possibilities started to concern her.

‘We don't have to go up to the highest point.' His tone implied he thought it better they not do so.

‘It's all right.' She entreated herself to keep her eyes on the ground.

‘Take my arm, if you need it.'

‘I'm all right.'

Presently, coming to the summit, they stood on a projecting rock covered with hoary lichen and searched for a view the guidebook had promised. Still not possible to see
very far. In place of a view, a pleasant if vague impression of misted woods falling away towards other even hazier woods and farmland. She held her breath, listening, distinguishing the sedative strains of streaming water.

‘How secluded and serene,' she said. ‘I love this sort of position, high above water. From the road outside Ashfield, where I grew up, you could see the sea in the distance, down below. You get used to that. It ruins you. I've started to think that coming from Torquay on its seven hills is probably a curse for those of us who leave, because you expect you'll always be gazing at wonders from lofty vantage points, everything laid out before you. You can't imagine sameness. There, if you tire of one particular view, there are other hills to explore. It must make you—must have made me, at least—insufferably restless.'

‘This is perhaps not so grand as Torquay, but it is very pretty in a tucked-away fashion.'

She agreed. Approaching the edge, she peered down.

‘Don't stand too close,' he said.

She laughed and, without thinking, responded, ‘Do you think I mean for this to be my end?'

He moved towards her rapidly. His eyes spooked her.

‘I'd likely make a bosh of it and only break a few bones.' She tried to laugh again.

Before she could digest what was occurring, he had taken hold of her shoulders, with considerable strength. She heard
the slap of his guidebook against the rock, the chink of the cider bottle and its brief rolling, the softer papery percussion of the other picnic things falling. ‘How can you joke like that?' he almost shouted.

‘What are you doing? Ouch!'

‘What am
I
doing?' he asked, more quietly but with a sleepwalker's face—as if he were there and not there, only watching persuasive happenings unspool in his imagination.

A moment of truth had arrived. She flicked her head. ‘If a body was found down there, it would be hard to know if there'd been any intention behind the fall, wouldn't it?' His grip tightened and her stomach flooded with fright. ‘How easy it would be for you to throw me over.'

‘Or for you to throw yourself.'

Attempting to wrench free, she pulled back as violently as she could. He held fast, but half stumbled forward. She endeavoured to take advantage of his loss of balance by raising her hands to his chest and shoving. Yet he was firmer on his feet now and they stayed locked in a strained embrace, a grim skirmish of a dance that seemed to have no conclusion.

In their struggle they had neared the rim of the rocky perch. She made the mistake of looking over her shoulder—the feeling of a great drop.

‘No, Teresa,' he was saying. ‘You don't understand . . .'

Vertigo.

She closed her eyes against the dizziness, seeing an alternative landscape: a small, profoundly still lake, sheltering box trees, dark intricate roots. The end point—was this it?

He had lifted her. She was cognisant of steps, the strange magic of moving as one, their volumes combined into a dual human. Like Harry, she was there and not. Her body had in some fashion been curtained off from her mind.

But he stopped walking. And, ‘No!' she cried, thrashing.

His arms loosened, and she slid or fell out of them. She was in a crouch, rock beneath her. She dragged herself backwards until a little distance separated them.

He too dropped to sit on his haunches, and they regarded one another, animals poised mid-fight.

Her dizziness was subsiding, her mind returning to fully occupy the present. ‘What don't I understand, Harry?'

‘Teresa, do you think I could
hurt
you? That I . . .' His voice was low and clogged with emotion.

Her own breathing was jagged. She remembered her shoulders in his hands. ‘Harry, you must tell me. Now!'

21

WHAT HARRY TOLD TERESA

It was at a quarter to seven on a snowy Friday evening in 1923 that he arrived home from work to find the sofa empty of Valeria. Flash lay there alone, wound tight and unresponsive. This was a sight he'd looked forward to, yearning for an end to his wife's lassitude, but found jarring, encountering it in reality. In the bedroom he was happy to see the shape of her in their bed, because she hadn't slept in it with him for weeks.

He loosened his tie and came to sit gently beside her, not yet realising that something had spoiled the air in the room. He had no inkling of catastrophe.

But it was there in their bed that, judging from the temperature and rigidity of her—of what remained—she had died some hours before.

On the bedside table were boxes of Veronal cachets, to which they both had recourse every so often when unable
to sleep. However, this number of cachets, with their insides removed, was unreasonable. Inconceivable.

Deranged.

Harry stood up quickly. Sat down. He touched her, her face. He covered his mouth. Took in his hands the weight of her lifeless head.

Completely dumbfounded that all her sighs and gasps, disjointed stories and half-sentences, the shadows he'd contented himself to know from the corner of his eye, the entire universe of her, should have been extinguished.

He was babbling, apparently. Darling,
amore
,
bambina
, baby, my darling, sweetheart, dear heart, oh God,
amore
, love, Valeria.

Any name for her rang hollow. Any name for what she was—had been—to him was inadequate for such total feeling.

He looked for, but did not find, a note.

Briskly he went to the kitchen as though he might happen on a solution to the problem there. He picked up a tea towel and, after a hesitation, abandoned it. He retched a little. He returned to their bedroom.

Just
the
bedroom.

He recognised something in his confusion. He remembered waking as a very young child from an enforced nap, his mind bleary, time in disarray. A piece of the day, of the life he might have known, had been subtracted without his permission. What he was standing on had moved. Possibly nothing was
trustworthy any longer. At around the same age he had sat marooned on a bed beneath a tented blanket, reflecting that death must have been like that blank blackness.