On the Blue Train (29 page)

He shook his head again and neared her a little. ‘Thank you for telling me.' He held out a hand.

She took it, bobbed her head. The most rapid, skimming kiss. The lightness of her lips and hands, and the tenebrous slopes of her inner arms, bared by the sleeves of her dressing-gown that had fallen to her elbows, affected him. But before he knew it, his hand appeared to be levitating in space. She'd stepped back. This tentative approach, together with his own actions earlier in the day, and especially her fear of him that he'd felt with his own hands, all stopped him from reaching for her.

‘I'll go now. I don't know that I trust myself to stay longer.'

‘You know I'd like it, if you did stay longer? If you didn't—perhaps—trust yourself.'

She smiled. So soon the door was closing and Teresa had gone. His fugitive. He saw her still in the lamplight. The image jumping, coming close and vanishing. She'd been in Harry's room.

The smoky net of slight drunkenness had been jerked from his mind, leaving an acute transparency. Blatantly obvious that he wouldn't sleep. He smirked at the very idea. His wakefulness was so absolute it didn't distress him. If he was troubled it was by Teresa, who went on flickering before him. Offering, and withdrawing. He lay down on the bed to reflect, and did so for many hours, never quite dreaming. For some predawn time, he thought of Valeria.

His wife had seemed ideal to him, subtle and dramatic, blasé and sober. As unobtrusively superb as the city of her birth. Swanlike in her sliding through of existence, invisible, striking. If she'd lacked anything, it was surely nothing one needed.

But then Mrs Mortlake had passed away.

Before, though, when everything had appeared normal, would he have seen sadness if she'd been displaying it? With Harry's glum moods paraded around the house as brashly as peacock feathers, how would she have revealed her own? The idea mortified him.

If the unhappiness she'd confessed in passing all those years ago was larger than dissatisfaction with Giacomo, what could its true source have been?

When Mrs Mortlake took her last bad turn, the old thing had started talking a great deal, uneasily, about her childhood. She was very keen, rather feverishly intent, on clarifying something from ‘when I was small'. Valeria did not often admit to possessing a tender heart, but Harry could tell she found the notion of Mrs Mortlake as small poignant because her voice stumbled in her throat when she recounted this.

‘I try to help,' she said, ‘listening, asking questions, but I can't give her the relief she is looking for. We never quite get to what troubled her. It might have something to do with fearing horses—or storms—or one particular storm that frightened some horses.'

This was possibly their last proper conversation, Valeria losing the inclination to talk at any length after Anne Mortlake's death. He wanted to see a clue in it. Could the old lady's obsession with childhood have caused Valeria to reflect on her own? He'd no reason to suspect that any of his wife's memories of her own smallness would have seriously unbalanced her. Valeria had visited her parents once after their marriage. Only her sister had come to them in London, twice. Maybe her family felt rejected by Valeria's choice of a colonial and London over newly Italian Trieste. Disappointed by the humbleness of her life. She wrote them long, impressively detailed letters each week with the martyrdom of a diligent schoolgirl. (Harry's parents received two or three unenthusiastic missives from him each year. With a clinging
culpability, he imagined his mother reading them on the veranda in eucalypt-scented, coppery afternoon sun, while in his armchair in the sitting room his father glowered over something, perhaps missing his days of active work on the farm, when Roger was still at his side—the mutt who had long since passed on, not to be replaced.)

True, it was her father's profession to know humanity as distressed and secret. He wondered if the presence of such knowledge in a childhood home could spawn difficulties and a tendency to hide. If you accepted the existence of ghosts, wasn't it more likely you'd happen to see one? Fancy yourself one?

The only other thing that occurred to him was that mishap during carnival. Joy at the beautiful costume. Running forbidden, promising to obey. Forgetting, rebelling. Her mother's handiwork profaned. Beauty spoiled, bare legs and humiliation. But surely all normal enough and harmless. No, the unhappiness she had evoked in the square was her failure to be fulfilled by Giacomo, or some impulsive dolefulness tinged with sensuality that young people experiment with. Harry should know, having unpardonably indulged in such sulks long beyond youth. He didn't want to blame Valeria's childhood.

He was, in fact, most attracted to seeing the fault as his own. Giacomo hadn't satisfied her—but nor had he. (
He
was the origin of her melancholy. Flash had appeared to know
this and hold it against him.) If Harry had managed to make himself a writer, or at least grasp the trick of contentment, their life would have been lighter. She might have painted. Blaming himself was the way to avoid blaming her (the great dark temptation) for betraying him with the lover with whom one could never compete. Yes, Harry's blue moods had to have been the culprit, seeping through their house like ink spilled on the most lush, corruptible paper. His magnum opus.

At around eight o'clock in the morning on Monday, the thirteenth of December, he took out a sheet of stationery with the legend
The Harrogate Hydropathic
across its top. He was going to write to Giacomo, his wife's first lover, whom he'd last seen thirteen years ago at the Caffè degli Specchi wearing a look not so much of despair as of dissolution. He didn't know how he'd find an address, or even if the man still lived, but with dawn entering the room, these were minor points for later consideration. He wrote a letter he might have written years before. However, there could be something unpredictably headstrong in the timing of one's actions, an impossibility quite suddenly turning into a possibility and even a necessity. Harry had long held Giacomo in his mind as a competitor, or at least as someone who had enjoyed experiences that he envied. He had begrudged Giacomo opportunities he had profited from—to feel the pressure of her
hand, the temperature of her cheek or lips or neck, to regale himself with her scent, to watch her (vaguely ironic across a table, silently awaiting him in the corner of a room, intently crossing a public garden, drowsily rising from a sofa), to catch her mysterious shifts into total visibility. Harry seemed now to have no further need of resentment.

It was a short letter that took a long time to produce. He wasn't in any hurry. He informed Giacomo of Valeria's passing. He said he was sorry for what he must have gone through all those years ago. In plain words he stated that he understood and sympathised, because he also had loved Valeria very much. He also had been forced to let her go.

Sealing the envelope, Harry wondered how much this missive from England would surprise him, Giacomo Petri, teacher of classics. At this very instant could the man have been watching the sun lift whitely over that calm inlet of the Adriatic? Worn in his late middle age but turned out with consummate care, hands in the pockets of a long dark coat. Breathing in murky-sweet sea funk and purest Arabica coffee, and deriving a pleasure from these small things that made them as large as sacraments, primal enough to pacify desire, at least halfway. Harry hoped so.

When he finally drifted off, the corridors had been resonating hypnotically with footsteps for hours. He'd spoken
to a chambermaid, asking that he not be disturbed as he'd been up through the night and now intended to have a little kip.

It was two fifteen in the afternoon when he woke—physically restored but with the old child's anguish at having been deprived against his will of participating in a key phase of the world's proceedings. His engagement with Teresa at three darted into his head, and he sat upright in bed like a corpse returning to life in a farce. He hurried through dressing and shave. He was starving. He requested that coffee and some bread and butter be brought up.

He ate and drank standing at the window, gazing down at the stone facades of proud, tastefully affluent houses and the more ostentatious dome of the Royal Pump Room. From behind glass the afternoon looked gentle, foggy.

He thought he detected a change in the lounge when he went down, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Everything appeared much as it always did. He noted a newspaper on the table by the armchairs and apprehension quickened in him. He had no time for it, however. Perhaps he just didn't want to know what it contained.

He wished the proprietress of the Hydro a good day, and she reciprocated. There might have been a new carefulness in her efficient manner. He'd suspected she was shrewd.

Beginning the climb of Montpellier Hill, he saw the saxophonist and the drummer sitting together on an easy
seat in the adjoining gardens, conversing vehemently. Seeing Harry, the saxophonist hesitated in mid disquisition. He indicated the hotel guest to his companion, and they both waved and smiled. Though the saxophonist's smile was insistently familiar—like those he'd bestowed on Harry before, no doubt a manifestation of his artistic persona—it made Harry anxious. Hatless, the gawky angles of his pale ears made him seem very young and impressionable, especially alongside the drummer, whose pose on the other hand suggested braggadocio. On stage with the Hydro Boys, the latter had never really come to Harry's attention. He waved back and hastened on.

He arrived a few minutes early at the rendezvous opposite the Imperial Café. She wasn't there. Would she come? Their arrangement had been made before her late-night visit. He observed sartorially confident ladies coming and going from the café. Furs imperious, hats perky. The temperature was agreeable enough but a cooler wind roused itself from time to time. He fastened the buttons of his coat. By twenty minutes past three she had not arrived and he began to seriously fear she wouldn't. He lit a cigarette. The day was closing in. He recalled her teasing chiaroscuro form in his room in the early hours of the morning, her weight in his arms as he'd carried her from the edge of the crag.

Five minutes later, he ran frantically to W.H. Smith. With great impatience, he waited behind a soft-spoken boy, who
was methodically purchasing some letter papers and a pencil. Finally, Harry bought his
Times
and jogged back to his post.

No Teresa. He couldn't see her approaching from any direction. He considered the sky. It was the blue hour, which usually encouraged a soothing elongation in his mind. Tonight it did not.

On page sixteen of the paper he found it:
The Missing Woman Novelist
. Search by two thousand people. He read in jagged bursts, looking wildly up at intervals in case he should somehow miss her.

An arresting scene was evoked. Heavy mist. A force of fifty police officers leading search parties of volunteers and bloodhounds. The roads around the plateau at Newlands Corner, where her motorcar had been abandoned, congested with more than four hundred cars and many motorcycles. The Silent Pool searched. No trace of the novelist uncovered. Grand effort, in vain.

The sky's blue had very nearly been usurped by black when she arrived at three forty-five. Her cheeks were pink—from the baths? Or from knowing herself the object of an awesome manhunt?

‘I'm so sorry!'

Harry gave her his hand, and she briefly took it.

‘I thought you wouldn't come.' If he hadn't known her better, he might have wondered if she were inebriated.

‘I was leaving the baths and in the reading room I saw . . . that.' She'd noticed the paper under his arm. ‘A mix-up. Such a mix-up . . .'

‘I know. Shall we go somewhere quieter?'

She appeared to have trouble concentrating, so he took her elbow, but only for a second or two. Once they were on the Stray, she placed her feet surely.

‘This whole belt of land,' he said spinelessly, ‘which goes for over two hundred acres, I believe, was set apart by the legislature in 1770 as a free common for all people.'