On the Blue Train (34 page)

‘And I haven't really felt the neuritis in days,' she remembered. ‘The arm is just a little funny. The powers of the cure, no doubt. I'm afraid my appetite is restored, too. I've put on weight.'

‘You've a fine figure. If you can't enjoy your food, ma'am, what can you enjoy?' The masseuse's figure was hearty, bountifully proportioned, her glorious sleep-inducing hands muscular.

‘Yes,' Teresa said. ‘What else is there?'

To fill every last spare moment, any possible gap—to avoid imagining what was coming, or going to Harry—she ate apples in the bath. She had always considered this one of the finer ways to pass time or hatch a crime scene. But when her three apples were gone and her hands could only press into porcelain curves, her thoughts would not be corralled, and there was Mummy's absence.

That she was no longer a fellow inhabitant of life was a fact that had to be grappled with. An event that went on recurring.

She rescued herself with a vision of Peter. She could rustle this up, as he'd kept her company countless times while she bathed. She saw his firm little body and noble eyes. He would have preferred she desist from loafing in that obnoxious pond made from volatile rain. On guard by the door, he was committed to the job of protecting her. Surely one of the most delightful things about dogs was their breath-taking absence of self-doubt. How did they achieve it—embrace life so unreservedly? Peter wandered over to press his cool nose into her hand.
Dear
faithful Peter. He met his mistress's foibles
and whimsy with indulgence, always knowing how to draw her gently back to reality. Her little one. Her child.

After the bath, she went to check for letters and messages. Nothing, but Redhead looked at her curiously for a second or two.

Teresa chatted with a Mrs Robson of Harrogate. She'd sidestepped her before, knowing she was friendly with the Lady Entertainer. Like the Jackmans, Teresa found being forcibly entertained of limited interest. She was informed that a hotel party was going that night to a dance at the Prospect Hotel. Fatalistically, she announced she might come along. She shouldn't have been dallying in the public rooms but she felt careless and detached. What was there to lose? Night had set in.

In the hall outside the reading room, she heard Harry's voice. He must have just come in from a walk. Before she could distinguish more than scraps of words, she opened the door quickly and passed in.

Mr Jackman was there, alone. Maybe she could prepare him for her possible expeditious departure.

‘Oh, Teresa. How are you?' He laid a newspaper aside.

It was very warm close to the lusty fire. ‘Well, I guess.'

‘Please sit. Henrietta has abandoned me for the pleasures of York and I'm sick of newspapers.' He gazed at her.

‘I am, too. What a comfortable room.' She approved of the hardwearing bookshelves and armchairs, and the large
windows grandly showcasing the felty winter night as though it was a series of muted masterpieces at a picture gallery. ‘I like this hotel.'

‘So do I. No more falls?'

It took an interlude of groping about in her memory to recollect the day he'd come to her aid on the slippery cobblestones behind the Pump Room. He knows, she realised. There is no need to tell him.

‘No more. And how are you sleeping?'

‘It's up and down. You haven't seen Harry today?' he asked sadly.

‘I . . .' She looked into the flames. ‘I shouldn't.'

After a moment, he asked, ‘What's today? I never know what day it is here.'

‘Nor I—holidays are like that. Which is energising. Time usually seems so iron-fisted. But I gather it's Tuesday. The fourteenth of December.'

‘Already? We come here for Henrietta's health, you know.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes. She appears well, but—she told you about our daughter, Jane?'

‘She did.'

‘Who lost her baby?'

‘Yes.'

‘It wasn't Jane's but Henrietta's—ours.
Our
baby who died.' He rubbed his hands together. ‘Jane died when she
was a baby. Shocking thing. I was an automaton myself for a time.'

He wasn't asking for succour, so the confidence didn't weigh on her. ‘Terrible.'

‘Yes. That was when sleep became precarious for me. Anyhow, we talk of her as if she'd grown up. It's our little fiction. It makes it easier for Henrietta. And for me also, maybe.'

‘I'm so sorry.'

‘Thank you, my dear.'

The door opened to admit a waiter with a tray of coffee things. The disruption startled them. Voices from the corridor gave an idea of purposeful movement going on out there.

‘Teresa, can I trouble this good man for another cup for you?'

‘No, thank you. I should be going.'

When the waiter had closed the door behind him, Mr Jackman added, ‘I sometimes manage to sleep by resolving not to feel impotent. Acceptance is important but so is not seeing yourself as helpless, at the mercy of misfortune. One should believe one is the author of one's fate, of one's happiness, if only in small ways, through small actions.'

‘Yes.' They listened to the vivacious fire for a little, and then she told him, ‘I must go.'

They stood simultaneously, he with the physical sureness she'd noticed that day of her fall, when he'd escorted her back
to the hotel. She went over and gave him her hand, detecting an odour—a version of it, with a masculine inflection—that she in some way knew. From her Grannies? A melding of soap, cologne and older skin. She remembered being intrigued and reassured by this. She thought now that it was very human, in a slightly dusty way.

They held one another's hands until he pressed hers and said, ‘Teresa, I've betrayed you.'

‘How?' But she asked it slowly, extracting her hand.

‘I was talking with a couple of the bandsmen about the story,
that
story in the papers . . . about the lady . . .' He looked woodenly into the fire.

She was much more equable than she would have expected. ‘Yes.'

‘And we concluded . . . that certain details corresponded . . .'

‘Ah.'

He advanced, ‘All I can say for myself is that when you aren't sleeping, you aren't quite yourself. You tend not to be your best self. It was a small action of which I am not proud. It gave me no happiness, none.' The hand that he'd continued to offer sank now to his side, fatigued and knowing. ‘I couldn't hold my tongue. It was probably senility, senile jealousy. I had been imagining things about you, I am embarrassed to say, imagining . . . that we might be coming to care for one another . . .'

‘You love your wife! Anyone can see that!
Don't
you?'

‘Very much. Though what anyone can see is far from everything. And love is . . . a house of multiple rooms, rooms that look different on different days, in different lights. I don't need to tell you this.' He tried, with eyes that she had only then observed to be of a moist aqueous blue, to interrogate her. She wouldn't allow it. ‘Rather late, I noticed it wasn't me you were coming to care for. It was Harry. How petty I am—do you detest me?'

‘Heavens, why
is
love so mixed up?' She backed towards the door.

‘Should it be simple?'

‘I don't know if I forgive you.' She was withdrawing from the reading room. ‘I don't detest you. I think I do understand.'

She needed air. The side door led her into the hotel grounds. Still not cold enough for her to miss a coat, not after roasting by a fire, yet the rarefied, restless atmosphere she had been conscious of all day encouraged speed. Her presentiment was confirmed. It was just a matter of time. When was it not a matter of time?

Circling the Hydro, she passed a golden-haired youth relying heavily on a cane, his progress lead-footed. Her head reeled, reflecting on what it would be like having to walk thus, on Mr Jackman's insomniac illusions and the inventions of his gracious, wounded wife. Even keeping to the less obvious suffering, there were so many sparks of pain burning in any one life and this multiplied across the population of a hotel,
a spa town, ordinary towns, the island of Great Britain, the Continent, the Subcontinent, and so on. It wasn't a picture that could be sustained for long, such fireworks. And really, how little was made of it all, considering. How quietly it was for the most part borne.

When she came back in, it was only five minutes after five. The arms of the grandfather clock were advancing with exaggerated sluggardliness. Two hours more till dinner. The dragging of winter nights. About to go upstairs, she heard a group of new arrivals—an older man, a younger, and an elegant woman of rather fuzzy age—asking if anyone fancied a billiard match. Supremely indifferent to the scheme, she fell in with it merrily. She lasted only one game, the luck from her previous game not holding, in the way of luck, before inviting them all to the dance at the Prospect Hotel and excusing herself.

As she was entering the lounge, the Jackmans' voices stopped her. Harry's, too. They had to be by the reception desk.

‘You haven't seen Teresa, have you?' His tone had two parts to it, a buoyant and a grave.

‘I've been in York all day, I'm just back,' Mrs Jackman declared. ‘I have never seen anything like the Minster's grisaille windows. The
greyness
of them—they are surprisingly dark—but all shot through with light.'

‘I think she was going out,' Mr Jackman contributed.

Teresa waited.

‘I might go out myself. See what's playing at the picture house.'

‘Good idea,' Mr Jackman said flatly.

Harry seemed to leave immediately after. The Jackmans began a softer conversation that wafted out of earshot. She hesitated for another few seconds, and then made a bolt for the stairs.

In her room, she considered the bedside table emptied of books. Oh dear. A curse on her for not having borrowed anything else. She caught sight of Harry's manuscript on the armchair. She took it to the bed.

Curled on her side, she read his pages through twice. His protagonist was a maudlin would-be aristocrat of humble rural origins. She felt her mouth moving into a smile. Not much happened. It was all rather lugubrious, not her kind of thing.

Strident laughter rose from the drive and she went to the window. A number of cars and taxicabs were arriving. The troops mustering for the dance? There was more than the usual amount of activity on the stairs, also, but then the dinner hour had to be approaching. Silence, of course, from Harry's room.

28

1914 Torquay

She smelled the water as soon as they stepped down from the train. But the distance from the station to the hotel was only a few yards and their time in the outdoors so short, too short. It would have been better to linger in the open air, yet she crossed the ridiculously small space beside him to whom she, as of that afternoon, belonged.

And would belong for ever after.

It was late and they were overtired, while also far too excited to be sleepy. Taking possession of the first rooms that would be really theirs, they laid down their few pieces of baggage. Furtively they regarded one another, incredulous at the day's happenings. Was it just the previous night that he'd awoken her in his mother's house, urging her so rashly to marry him? After all their doubts and dithering, after her long wait for him, could this really be the Wedding Night?
She went out onto the balcony, where she felt more sensible. The sea in a reflective mood.

‘Can you believe it's Christmas Eve?' she asked, hearing him behind her.

‘Your mother will never forgive me for marrying you without her there, you know.'

‘Oh, I daresay she will, eventually.' She laughed. ‘She did warn me against you. She said you were ruthless.'

He laughed, too, his teeth disconcerting in the obscurity when she turned to see him. ‘Well, I suppose I am if I want something. I wanted you. And I've got you, haven't I?'