On the Blue Train (33 page)

From the quarry, uphill, alas, back to the Morris. She wasn't moaning.

But the motorcar wouldn't start. It
must
.

It was ten minutes after six and the morning had acquired a quivery tension, although the begrudging winter sunrise was a distance off yet. She climbed out and got busy with the crank. No good. Hot and awkward work in a fur coat, furthermore. She doffed the coat and laid it like a child's body in the motorcar. A breeze demonstrated that she was sweating. Her throat was dry, too. She'd have welcomed a glass of water, and what she'd have done for a gallon of milky tea. Another impassioned effort with the crank and—just as despair might have poisoned things—a man's voice.

‘Are you having trouble with your car, ma'am? Can I help?'

The freeze, and shudder, of shock.

A man on a bicycle. Not aggressive-seeming. Stout, athletic. Young, quiet sort of face. Farm worker, most likely. Her heart growing more reasonable, she understood that his arrival was fortuitous.

‘Oh, would you start it for me?' Bizarre to be speaking,
as if she had stopped doing so years ago. She smiled, aiming for neighbourly, run-of-the-mill. ‘I'd be so grateful.'

It was twenty minutes after six. He had it going in a jiffy, and was readjusting his cap and mounting his bicycle once more.

‘Thank you, thank you so much.' She felt an imprudent emotion—people could be so simply good. He was possibly envisioning a wild scenario. Lone woman out in the dark and so on. Ha.

She gave him as sober a farewell as she could manage, got into the motor again, and drove off, because she couldn't have him observing her. No sooner had she gone a few minutes towards Guilford than she about-faced and returned to Newlands Corner. Arriving, she was careful to make sure she had no company. Not a soul.

Her senses were fantastically alert, each move having to be true and efficient. The motor seemed very loud and the headlamps to blaze inordinately. She drove gingerly down the path that passed the quarry. It was a little bumpy and this made her short of breath. The headlamps caught the quarry's white glow, and then the Morris was facing that smouldering bareness. She stopped.

Brakes off and the gear in neutral, she got out. Took her handbag that had all her money in it, as she wasn't remotely lured by the thought of privation. Her shoes slipped, found traction. She staggered a little, recovered herself. Her shoulders and back leaning into the Morris's heft, she pushed, gave
everything she had. Something not worrying occurred in a muscle or a conjoining of them in the vicinity of her right shoulder. She felt both very light, liable to be blown away by the breeze, and awfully strong. The exultation of writing one's own fate! The car went the last extra distance, reaching and lodging in the bushes that had engrossed Peter. She waited. It stayed there, perfect magnificent beast, on the brink. Amazing how revitalising physical exertion was when it came to the forefront of your attention.

Twenty to seven. Almost time to sit back and regard with satisfaction what she'd done, seeing that it was good. She admired her own temerity. She'd worked hard and the results were pleasing, on first impressions. Resting on the seventh day would be nice. She took a certain pride in the details. The headlamps still burning. The items left behind: dressing-case, old driving licence (identifying documents striking her in present circumstances as in some way quaint), coat. She was warm and an abandoned coat was more affecting, insinuating fragility. While she wasn't, in fact, overly delicate, was she? That sleep had been nothing short of magic. How little one needed, after all.

So:

What kind of hypothesis would be formed? Well, the Morris had gone out of control, because she was so tired and
distraught, et cetera, and she'd had an accident. Knocked her head? After which she'd got out of the motorcar and—disoriented, not knowing quite who she was even . . . yes, suffering from amnesia, she'd wandered off across the Downs without her coat, into the night. Where anything might have occurred. Or someone had done away with her hours before, about the time she was lying down by the Silent Pool, and then done this to her poor Morris to make it appear that there'd been an accident. Something like that. They wouldn't find a body, of course. But by then the necessary initial impression would have been created. She wouldn't leave him to suffer long, just enough to wake him up. She'd send a letter soon, maybe today, to her brother-in-law, who valued her and had a sense of justice, letting him know where she'd be, once she'd decided. And she would write to her husband again. It wouldn't take him long to come for her, half raving with worry and remorse and remembered love. Something like that. Go from there.

One last look behind to see that she'd done all she needed to do. A fond goodbye to her Morris, not an adieu—though life showed you that beauty belonged to you only in the loosest manner. Agatha couldn't tell whether her puzzle was lacking, or pretty ingenious. You never could. She must believe her intuition was a faithful compass and she was operating in
complete secrecy. She would not let herself be distracted by the oddly luminous chalk quarry. Would she be sick? No, she thought not. Now she must go down, down the hill. She needed the weighted flow, the ease of a descent.

It was somehow medieval to be setting out on foot, marching between those dewy fields. The box trees on either side of the pathway made her feel protected. Coatless she still wasn't cold. The morning was exceedingly mild, tepid even, and the odour of earth and foliage was alluring, if less fulsome than it would have been in spring. Onwards, down, down. Everything had been so stuck and rotten, but at last she was in transit. Had the sky taken on the faintest, whey-tinged phosphorescence? On the path before her were patches of moss, and a thistle flower abruptly filled her hand. When the sun hit them, these would be purple flares.

The first houses, and she turned right at the end of what she learned was Water Lane, sucking refreshment from the words. She knew how to get to Chilworth station from here, through Albury. It wasn't too far. What a shocking relief it would be to have London swallow her for a little, to drink tea in the buffet at Waterloo, while settling on her next destination. To board a train that would travel through the quiet rapture of sunrise. Her mind in that moment was limpid: she'd had to push through a wall—and enter a place with more give.

27

TWELFTH DAY

The presentiment of a fateful incident had intensified. Half awake, Teresa observed softened darkness: the sun hadn't risen yet but would soon. She remembered dreaming of the desert, of lands bare and inhospitable while also in some occult fashion attractive, luscious. She understood where she was. Her first instinct was to locate Harry, and she had only to turn her head to the left to do this. He was very near. He had slumped so far forward on his chair that his head rested on the bed by her chest. She could have pushed her fingers into his silvered sable hair. But she knew—as Mummy had known certain things by reading the currents in a room—that their
aventure
, if such a curious, fragile thing could be labelled so, was drawing to its close. A course was set. Too late for Edinburgh. Let alone Nice. It had always been too late for Nice.

The nightmare she'd run from, and her true name, were returning. She opened her mouth to the cotton of his pillow, breathing its faintest perfumes, sweet skin and breath, a faded smokiness. The fleeting well-being this inundated her with was nearly worse than what she'd fled. Then she'd been a worn-out, unloved sleepwalker in godforsaken Berkshire. Now she was refreshed and susceptible to tenderness. Devastating not to touch him.

As she forced herself to rise, a part of her remained low and safe in the bed beside which her secret lover slept. The female figure getting to her feet, pausing, a hand by his face, was gauzy. A spectre.

Her eyes fell on the writing desk and she recalled the pages waiting there in the shadows. Writers dreaded this sort of business, but with
his
manuscript it would be different, no imposition. In fact, having a piece of him with her would help her to leave the room. A final hesitation. Feeling danger approach, the last minutes of anonymity ticking sickeningly over, she went.

In her own room, she admonished herself, Be calm. Normal behaviour was the ticket. She managed to dress, and go downstairs. She took some newspapers from the hallstand and proceeded into the dining room for an early breakfast. No Jackmans, good. She buttressed herself with poached eggs, pork sausages and black pudding, handling the
Daily Mail
gently.

A former policeman was stating that, given the missing novelist's talent, she would have a remarkably elastic mind. Smiling into her tea, she rather enjoyed this. She paid less attention to a plan for divers to search the pools in the area of Newlands Corner, and moved on to
The Times
. More about divers and a ‘comb-out'.

She jumped to the following story, also about a missing woman, a different one, a student of just twenty. She was taken with the description of her. A sensitive girl, and the death of her father two years before had hit her so hard it had harmed her health. Her nose was a little turned up and she was given to be pale. Her underclothing was marked with her name—an endearing particular, though how frightfully ashamed you'd be to know it had been made public—and she had disappeared carrying a yellow leather bag with some Chelsea Library receipts in it. You had to have a bad feeling about the girl. A gloomy feeling, indeed. But don't get upset. Have a little more toast and jam, sweet-tart cherry jam, and look, the weather for the health resorts. Harrogate: fog, then drizzle. And it was Unsettled Generally in the whole country. How gladdening.

She went up in the lift for
her
library books. The bedside table looked bereft once cleared of them. The photograph of her daughter came into view. Beautiful.

She listened for Harry's music, but of course it was too early for that. Had a floorboard creaked? Was he stirring?
Before she had time to decide to go up to him, she dashed out, down the stairs, through the lounge, and out of the hotel. The whole operation completed without her being buttonholed.

She passed some quiet enough hours on the streets of Harrogate, of which she'd grown fond. It seemed as if the air were growing a little harder to breathe, however. The invisibility she'd known here was compromised.

She returned the books to the lending library, without borrowing more. She sat awhile on an easy seat in Crescent Gardens. The sky was overcast and promised more misty rain, but it wasn't cold. Clement, for the season. She walked through Valley Gardens, past Bogs Field's curious dotting of wells. She slowed to observe the swans on the little brook.

Lunch was an apple and scones that she ate idling along James Street, mesmerised by window displays. Lucent jewellery, warm-toned carpets. On a whim, she bought the sheet music for ‘Angels Ever Guard Thee' for Mr Bolitho, who'd accompanied her on the piano the night she sang it in the Winter Garden Ballroom. Agreeable idea, guarding angels. By three she was at the Hydro and under the hands of the masseuse. The woman reported that her back was much improved.