On the Blue Train (31 page)

‘Harry.' Her hand on his arm. He turned again and their gazes ran together, more freely than they ever had before. The perfume of roses. ‘Grief,' she sighed, her eyes long corridors of it. ‘I'm sorry.'

Her hand falling away, her warmth reached him nonetheless, like it had when they'd danced the first night, and when they'd kissed. No kiss now, only a holding of eyes. The unearthly idea struck him that ghosts would embrace so, nearness in place of touch. And weren't they ghosts? She going by an assumed name, a fugitive from her former life. He drifting through some vagabond's afterlife, some twilight sleep that did not spare him memory. Yet, as drained as they each were, a force moved between them. It had been there from the beginning, jittery, building into this vigorous electricity. It was elating, and sad. It frightened him. Excited him. Teresa made a throaty sound resembling truncated laughter, which caused his knees to tremble. Then she moved away.

‘I told you because I want you to know me,' he said rather breathlessly. ‘And to understand why I was afraid for you. I was seeing
myself
in you.'

After a moment, she mused, ‘There were several times, maybe once in particular, when I considered—that. When I thought it might be a road to take. Do you think we should have a drink? Start with those drinking lessons?'

‘Heavens, yes. Let's.'

Rain on the roof could suddenly be heard and her eyes lifted towards it.

‘Rain,' he said, serving the last measures of sherry from the bottle.

‘You've tidied?'

‘Oh, a little, yes. Mending my bad bachelor ways.' He smiled bravely.

Nodding at the glass she took from him, she said, ‘I never fancied losing control. I was arrogant enough to think I could entertain myself with my ordinary mind. I'd no trouble intoxicating myself. I always felt rather invincible, which may have been dear Mummy's fault, I suppose.' She sipped, coughed a little, and bowed her head. Her voice was disconsolate when she spoke again. ‘Is love where we go wrong? Where the grief comes from? I've been thinking that it might be too much of a burden to impose on someone—loving them, I mean, and expecting anything at all in return. I've always thought of my childhood as blissful, but I wonder now if Mummy didn't love me
too
much. If, in such love, there wasn't a demand too large for a child to fulfil. And she had to know I'd desire such love from others, also, and lose her, eventually.'

He pondered this at some length. ‘I wasn't particularly aware of love, growing up. Or I was, though it was rather threadbare.' He thought of his own mother's austere ways, the greyish, subdued look of her on the days when she'd slept poorly, her lemon-coloured apron. The very occasional weak antique jokes resuscitated from her childhood they'd shared, as he helped her to make preserves, and that heady atmosphere of stewing fruit and sugar. He asked himself whether she had hoped for another child but thought that probably she hadn't. His father might have—in a selfish, unreal sort of way. Harry found that tears were nudging at him, and forced himself to breathe deeply. ‘
I
never felt invincible, yet you and I have both suffered. Then take Valeria. I thought she was perfect, so nonchalant. And look . . .'

‘Quite,' Teresa said pensively. ‘I've been wondering how far back we have to go to discover the origin of sadness. For example, after she was widowed, Grannie, Mummy's mother, gave Mummy to her sister, Auntie-Grannie, to raise, and it seems to me that being sent away from her true home left a mark on Mummy. But is that far enough back to go? Must I look to earlier generations?'

‘Do a post-mortem on the childhood of all of one's ancestors, right back . . . to the garden? I follow you, and I do it, too: try to explain sadness to myself. I've been doing it lately, actually I do it all the time, but we can torture ourselves that way. And then again there may
be
no reason for sadness.
There certainly seems to be no motive. No one has anything to gain by it, do they? What possible logic . . . ?' He noticed she was unsettled and emptying her glass quickly.

‘What if it were simply
in
one's character? Heartache. Without any real beginning. So there was no preventing or escaping it . . .'

‘In the blood? But we must believe that we can be as we decide to be,' he said. ‘Otherwise . . .'

‘Otherwise it's unbearable.' With each sip she was grimacing a little or smiling strangely. ‘I lost everything. My mother, my husband. I had to get away from that house in that banal suburb. I drove to a place called the Silent Pool. The road you almost took—I saw it in front of me there.'

He sipped his sherry. ‘You're much stronger than I am. A woman of courage and daring. Maybe you
are
invincible, part god. Your mother was right.'

‘Hardly.' She flushed. They listened to the rain. ‘This isn't like me, to just say what's in my mind, private things—it's very against character. It's really incredibly easy to talk to you.'

‘That's how it is for me, with you. While we're at it, you'd better know the
very
worst of me. Here on the table is my magnum opus. All twelve pages of it.' He gave the thin stack a derisory tap with his fist. ‘I thought it might lighten your spirits, show you that the Blue Train isn't such a disaster. But my aim is also more egotistical than that. I want to show it to someone, finally. I want to show you. I never did to
Valeria.' She made as if to speak. He added, ‘I'll still love you if you don't like it. I do love you. Don't feel you have to say anything. I know the situation is . . . unusual. All this is so sudden and far-fetched. Like something one would invent.'

She went to the curtained window. He thought he saw her sway on her feet.

‘Did you see the moon?' she asked.

‘Magnificent. You're tired?'

‘Or drunk. Is this what blotto is? You expect . . . I don't know. My thoughts feel
less
slurred to me than usual, almost as if they were growing too distinct. I might not sleep tonight. I'm afraid. I feel something bad will happen, something is coming for me.'

‘You could lie down here for a bit.' She looked at him questioningly. ‘All strictly honourable—I'll sit in a chair, of course.' They tried to laugh. ‘If you fall asleep, I can wake you before dawn so you'll have time to return to your room before anyone is up.'

She finished her glass. Her colour had risen, it seemed to him even in the lamp shadows.

‘And what if
you
fall asleep?'

‘I'm a high-class professional when it comes to insomnia.'

‘I might, you know. If you're sure you don't mind—for a little. For some reason, the idea of being alone makes me nervous.'

While she settled herself, he turned down the lights, leaving only the lamp on the writing desk burning. He sat in the armchair. His hands shook.

‘Have you decided anything about where to go?'

‘I've thought about it constantly but haven't been able to make up my mind.'

‘Well, there'll be time for that tomorrow,' he said uncertainly.

‘I'm wide awake.'

He laughed. ‘Tell me something.'

‘Mummy encouraged me to go to a hotel on Dartmoor to see if I could finish my first novel there. It worked.'

‘Edinburgh might be like that. For the Blue Train.'

She groaned theatrically. ‘You
are
an awful man, bringing that up.' But she went on, ‘Visions of trains plague me. It's chillingly lifelike, exhausting. I sit in one compartment, I pass down the hall, go into the dining car. If I can see my characters at all, they only sit there regarding me with horrid placid stares. Katherine . . .'

‘Katherine?' he asked, when she faltered. ‘What's she like?'

‘Oh, not quite young anymore and not a flashy beauty, but she has something—in an autumnal sort of way. You'd like her. Grey-eyed. Very acceptable figure. Very English, level-headed, determined. And yet she won't do anything. It's galling!'

‘And . . . the little Belgian, does he appear in this one?'

There was a silence. Had he made a mistake? He thought she was striving not to smile.

‘You've read me.'

‘I confess, yes.'

‘Did you like him?'

‘Very much—coming across as so comically vain and irrelevant, while being as sharp as a mean knife. He's good company.'

‘Ah . . . thank you.'

‘One is sorry to put you down.'

‘Oh. Harry, I went to Australia once, some years ago. In a new country, trees and hills always catch my attention. There, neither was as I'd imagined. All those white-barked gums seem . . . reversed. Like the negatives of photographs of trees.'

‘Yes,' Harry said, surprised. ‘Spirits of trees.'

‘And we glimpsed some low mountains in the distance one day, the Blue Mountains. Indeed, they weren't the grey-blue of
our
far-off hills—but really blue, cobalt. You rather have trouble forgetting Australia.'

‘Yes. You rather do.'

A longer silence established itself. Thinking she was falling asleep, he savoured the altered mood in his room, the tenacious rain and the drink, whose flavour at the outset was slight: cool and lemony. After which came the alcoholic heat and toasted, walnutty roundness, with notions of wood, caramel and salt, while you held it in your mouth.

He heard something. He was disoriented for a moment, so he must have dozed off. Teresa was weeping. ‘Darling,' she was saying softly. ‘Mummy darling.'

He roused himself and went over to her. He kneeled by the bed. Her face was turned away. ‘Teresa, I . . . I'm here.' He touched her hair. She was hot. Rose fragrance, lightly peppery.

‘Darling, oh God, darling . . .'

It was painfully excluding, the darling being her mother. But he continued to stroke her hair, and gradually she ceased crying. Emerging from his blankets, her neck seemed staggeringly innocent and undefended, like an armpit laid open. He'd have liked to feel for the tremor of her pulse and, by a stronger light, to find the almost imperceptible creases in that skin, to smooth them with his thumbs. She turned her face. Her breathing was erratic.

‘You aren't afraid of feeling,' she said, measuring him up with liquefied eyes. ‘You remind me of things, of myself. It's chaotic. But you're so attentive and sweet.'

‘I used to be afraid of feeling. And I haven't always been . . . kind.'

‘You are with me. You are now. Trust me, I'm a good judge of character, usually. Harry, I'm so very sorry for what happened with Valeria. And afterwards.'

‘Since I've met you'—he went on caressing her hair—‘I'm more alive. I almost feel as if the broken parts of me were starting to knit back together.'

Teresa smiled, growing calmer under his hand. It appeared to him that he could comfort her in a way he hadn't been able to comfort Valeria. Whether because Teresa's suffering mirrored his own, because she chose to show it to him, or because he was finally able to share the distress of a woman he loved, Harry wasn't sure.

‘Couldn't we consider Nice, really?'

His heart beat hard awaiting her response—but this came with the playful flavour of make-believe, of a floaty kind of collusion.

‘Perhaps we'll just decamp. Cut and run. It
would
be lovely.'

Difficult to know if her eyes had brightened with mirth, or new tears.

‘We will, won't we? Give them the slip.'

‘It wasn't all a colossal bluff, you know.'

‘I know.'

‘I've made the most utter fool of myself. I'd never have caused all that drama.'

‘Don't worry. After Edinburgh—when we're living in Nice—such dramatics won't touch us. We won't care about them a jot.'

Her mouth went serious. ‘Could I be a good mother in Nice?'

What to say? He'd no idea how one went about being an adequate parent. He hadn't even made a success of himself as a husband, a childless adult. Was she contemplating a life with him? ‘There'd be so much tenderness in our home . . . And I'd help in all the ways I could.'

‘It might be easier to love her there.'

‘Yes, because we'll be very happy. Teresa?'

‘Yes?'

‘You wouldn't even think, ever, of doing what Valeria did, would you—not in Nice? I mean, one of us would never make a decision like that without the other. Of course, it'd be out of the question because we'll be so happy, but . . . if for any reason it wasn't, if it came to that, to Casablanca, we'd do it together, wouldn't we? Will you promise? Like you described, swim out into the ocean on one of those hot days. The important thing is we'd never leave the other alone, would we, darling?' He permitted himself the luxury of that
darling
, knowing he might not get another chance to say it. Her eyelids fluttered. He might have been going on excessively but his words seemed necessary for warding off a dark presentiment. And he wanted to offer her something absolute. He sensed that only a truly excessive love would soothe her.