On the Blue Train (4 page)

Teresa wafted out of the baths in a daze. The sunset was of a pink so tender it brought tears to her eyes. The Gun Man aside, it hadn't been a bad day, considering, had it? It had been all right. She hushed herself by picturing a jaunty stone cottage in some sweet isolated country, a life involving a dog, a kindly hammering typewriter, liberal meals. Walks, sky-gazing. Two dogs, at least. A remote, quiet existence. Could there be such a shelter? Mightn't she one day have the right to live without nightmares?

4

IN THE WINTER GARDEN BALLROOM

Accompanied by the agreeable if fragile voice of the Lady Entertainer, the Hydro Boys were abandoning themselves to ‘The Sheik of Araby' when Harry ambled into the Winter Garden Ballroom after dinner. It was his habit to take an evening tipple there. He appreciated that incongruous air of the summerhouse, with a winter night pressing against the glass walls. He was glad of the music's jolly vim. The six-piece band didn't usually play on Sundays. An anomaly, he gathered, in celebration of someone's birthday.

The new arrival was there, at a table far back from the stage. She was alone again and appeared to be solving a crossword puzzle. Her colour now was much higher than yesterday's pallor. She was dressed not in evening wear but the same green jumper, grey cardigan and grey skirt she'd
worn the day before—yet she had the slightly stupefied look of one sporting new clothes. Had her luggage been lost?

He acknowledged the prominent-eared saxophonist, who was smiling fraternally at him, and sat after a moment's hedging at the table adjacent to hers. A young couple rose to dance, rather poorly but with evident mutual goodwill. An older couple joined them, these more controlled. Several songs exhausted themselves without any communication passing between Harry and the new guest. He suspected she preferred not to be engaged in conversation. She seemed bent on going unnoticed—risible, a woman of such majestic carriage—and somehow swollen with silence, battened down. Why was she there?

He'd heard the Jackmans refer to her as Mrs Neele. The name pleased and perturbed him a little, offering a picture of her genuflecting. The previous night, when he'd come in from his stroll and seen her at the foot of the stairs, and she'd turned and given him a faint involuntary-seeming wave, she'd struck him, indeed, as a woman kneeling, as both debased and distinguished. A vanquished queen.

The young dancing couple were more and more absorbed by one another. The girl was considerably taller and unembarrassed. It dawned on him that the two had to be lovers. The pockmarked waiter stopped by Mrs Neele. Harry had missed her signal to him. Her newspaper had been closed and folded. She ordered more coffee, and after the waiter
departed, Harry addressed her with the clumsy fatality of one tripping. ‘You know Balzac ruined his health with coffee? I think it was Balzac.'

Calmly, possibly interested, she asked, ‘Did he?'

‘I gather. Drank it constantly—I imagine to keep himself going.' He wondered how old she could be. Thirty-two? Twenty-eight? Thirty-eight? Forty-one? He was usually pretty spot-on at picking ages.

‘Even good things can be overdone.'

‘Well, yes, and the problem is realising when something is turning into poison. Balzac didn't, or didn't care enough to stop.'

‘Or he simply couldn't do without his coffee. I guess writing like he did would have been very trying. Like climbing mountain after mountain every day.'

Her grey eyes—no, blue, but anaemic, almost ashen—were uncommonly evasive.

‘Forgive me, I haven't introduced myself. Harry McKenna.'

‘Teresa Neele.' Her eyes went to a potted palm. ‘Pleased to meet you.'

‘The pleasure is mine. Are you literary yourself?'

‘Oh no.' Her tone was appalled. She had reached over to touch a leaf of the palm. ‘You?'

‘Heavens, no.'

In fact, in his youth, and also after he was old enough to know better, he'd let himself believe—as you indulge
in believing certain things in youth, things so implausible, gossamery, seductive—he'd turn out a writer. He convinced Valeria he was
working
on a book, adoring her for sustaining the illusion. Over years of supposed toil he'd amassed maybe two dozen passable pages (those that didn't make him altogether
ill
with shame), kept under lock and key in the drawer of a bureau. The alleged book really became an alibi for when he was in a foul blue funk. A sort of moan:
I have to settle down to the book
. And she'd compose her face and withdraw with that stealth she mastered like a solemn dance, leaving him to his own sad devices. It was also convenient for excusing his absence from dinner parties and bridge or mahjong soirees. But they were dingy times, when he slaved at the book. At better moments, they spoke, Valeria—nearly—achieving affectionate humour and he savage irony, of his magnum opus. His life's work. Poor Valeria. How badly he had let her down.

Mrs Neele's coffee arrived. Stirring in sugar, she commented, ‘How many cups, I wonder, would you need to drink each day, and over how long a period, for it to prove lethal?' It was as if there were a drag in the movement of her thoughts. Her voice was placid again, viscous.

‘A slow method for doing away with yourself, wouldn't you say? You'd need such doggedness.'

‘Yes.' Her gaze was skittery, then languorous, always distant. ‘It would take place in plain view, yet be invisible—because
so ordinary. But you're right, it'd take forever and I suppose be rather dull.'

She was an oddity. ‘One prefers a more colourful suicide?' He was suddenly a little bilious.

‘Well, less tedious.'

‘You're going to risk another cup, then?'

‘Yes, but I proceed with my eyes open.'

He smiled and noted, slightly aghast, how unusual this arrangement of his physiognomy felt when it was spontaneous. The other occupants of the ballroom would be watching them, beginning to speculate as to the whys and wherefores of their conversation. Soon, if it hadn't been already, the lack of a husband at her side would be remarked upon and subjected to deductions. As occurred in any small community somewhat removed from the wider world, gossip was a kind of drug among the sojourners at Harrogate, depended on to pass and variegate the time. Oh, it was handled with casual sophistication. The health spa's shifting population was naturally or unnaturally considerably more cosmopolitan than that of the average smallish town, its members less prone to being scandalised and adept at cultured discretion. Most were champions of tactfully managed and—as necessary—incognito convalescence and leisure. Still, gossip was an indispensable diversion. No matter how worldly and refined a person, his own ailments and concerns will become so stale as to threaten to asphyxiate him. And he must turn elsewhere.

The conversation petering out, Harry sensed Teresa preparing to take her leave and decided on detaining her. This was not typical of him. Despite his loneliness, he generally gave a wide berth to most of the hotel guests. ‘Will you be staying long at the Hydro? I've been here two weeks and plan to stay on another few.' His plans were rarely very clear, Valeria's legacy permitting him the luxury of being whimsical.

‘I'm not sure yet.' She inspected her coffee as if it might delicately metamorphose. ‘What complaints bring you here?' There was an interval while he was contriving a reply into which she hastily added, ‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude. It's just that today someone asked me what
my
complaints were. One doesn't necessarily come here for one's health, of course.'

He found this fluster fetching and remembered again the wispy little wave she'd accorded him the night before. ‘Intrude by all means.'

He should have let her be. He'd learned how wrong it was to see a woman as a conundrum that could be resolved. He tried to focus on the infatuated lovers, who were the only remaining dancers. The others must have realised how they paled in comparison.

He had an urge to be honest and succumbed. ‘The official answer would be a hernia.' He took an ample sip of brandy. Endeavouring not to sound doleful, he continued, ‘The real,
hopelessly unmanly answer is that I sometimes lose my nerve. I get quite—dispirited. When I'm like that I need a break.'

She opened her mouth partially and closed it again. He thought he saw panic in her expression, as if honesty stipulated honesty in return. ‘Yes,' she said finally. ‘Breaks are important. There are times when it's wiser to get away.' She cleared her throat softly. ‘From it all. The Jackmans aren't here? I'm assuming you know them.'

Over one temple, a glint of silver in her reddish hair. Thirty-four or -five, surely. At least.

‘You were right to assume. I believe they had a dinner engagement. Fine people.'

‘Yes, very. I wanted to tell them I'd been to the Royal Baths on their recommendation.'

‘I'm a habitué myself. Addicted. Nothing like a Turkish bath to clear out the cobwebs. Enjoy it?'

‘Rather. I may almost have fainted, at one stage.'

Harry couldn't have said just why but he began to ask himself whether they mightn't have something in common. Was Teresa Neele in her reused green and grey outfit somehow lost? In that slow voice, camouflaged, could there have been ruin?

The lovers were waltzing. The girl laughed gleefully and then gave a little yelp and a grimace, probably at the boy standing on her toes.
One, two, three
, she was chanting secretively when they passed his table. Teresa Neele moved
her spoon and sipped from her second cup of mortal coffee. He laboured to suppress the vision of her kneeling, along with the vague strife in his stomach. Belatedly, he considered her ring finger. A kind of internal shudder. Bare of wedding ring. And the
Mrs
Neele? She wore only one band—platinum, by the look of it, a setting with a small diamond—that sat loosely on her thin finger.

‘The Jackmans told me you're from South Africa.'

‘That's right.' Her eyes on the gentle chaos of the waltz.

‘It must be a fascinating country,' he persevered. ‘I've never been there.'

‘Yes, indeed.'

She continued to pay painstaking attention to the dancers, and it got into his head that perhaps she'd never been there either. Harry was disconcerted and somewhat thrilled to think she might be lying. It was as if they stood on either side of a screen through which he could only make out her shadow. Was she (and he was in all likelihood being
too imaginative
, his mother's words echoing through hollowed years) a woman who didn't know how to be honest—not out of deceitfulness but because she took human affairs as a quagmire about which precious little could be said with any exactness? Was she extremely sad?

He was asking, ‘Where have you been happiest in your life until now?'

Her gaze jumped. A perverse, too-intimate question.

He forged on. ‘Try not to think about it. Just say the first place that comes to you. Me, I suppose London. Or Trieste. I'm Australian and, don't get me wrong, my native country . . .' He'd lost his momentum.

‘I'd never have suspected your origins. Your English is truly admirable.'

Such comments always annoyed and somehow vindicated him. ‘Well, it
is
our mother tongue, you know.'

‘Of course, yes. It's just that the Australian accent usually tends to be—forgive me for saying so—noticeable.'

‘To an English ear? So you're familiar with it?' His instinct would have been to respond peevishly to the assumptions now compelling her to recast him as a colonial, but tonight he was disinclined to. It was the persistent image of her on her knees, perhaps, or her oddly opaque attitude—that screen between them. ‘I do seem to pick up accents easily. Well, the French. And the English, as you kindly observe. My wife, my late wife, was Italian. I speak little Italian, and badly, but Valeria used to say my accent was deceptively good. I can't detect any trace of South Africa in
your
accent, by the way.' Her accent was, in fact, phenomenally plummy. The speech of the English Quality often sounded to him like a caricature, both repellent and intriguing.

She took a slow sip of coffee. ‘I'm so sorry to hear that your wife has passed on.' A drawn-out silence. Her long hands, sculpturally narrow-fingered and pale, were curved around her
coffee cup for warmth or to convey composure. At last, she said, ‘You must be nostalgic for Australia. I hear it's lovely.' She smiled uncertainly. ‘I'm always thinking of Devon, where I was born. My early childhood was spent there. Then we moved to South Africa—I suppose my accent was already well established. But Mummy and I were so happy in Devon.'

This sat before him. A green field nudging the sea. Teresa Neele in little-girl form, tentative, near translucent like Dresden bone china. Her face flushed with the self-importance of grave play. A breeze lifting her silky hair—blonde, beginning to melt into brown. A proud woman standing a carefully monitored distance away, looking on with hawkish Victorian eyes, oracular. Both woman and child with regal bearing and considering the closeness of their alliance eternal. Mummy should have known better, that everything would always be changing.