On the Blue Train (7 page)

When the record finished, he set it playing a second time. He drained the dregs of his sherry. Almost there, the requisite haze. He slung his woollen dressing-gown once more over the chair, turned out the lights and climbed into the bed designed for a single sleeper. He was escorted into his lone slumber, into the ebb and flow of night proper, by a woman's satin distress.
Non mi tormenti più
. Torment me no more.

A female body in his arms, turned away from him.

But he knew the fine white skin of Valeria's back, which he worshipped. And all the more as time's poignant softening work made the bone rope less austere. He laid his hand against
that bone sheathed with skin. Kissed it. How he'd revered her back, though the truth was he'd also forgotten it. For whole years he'd been neglectful of this pallid desert, the hidden, wordless side of his wife. He felt the kind of guilt it was possible to feel returning home to one who has been waiting too long. He kissed her again rapturously. No response.

That was why monks lived in monasteries, he mused. To hide from anything that might divide their attention, tease their minds away from the intricacies, the less obvious, more desolate expanses of their loved one. To offer love the labour of observation it demanded. In ordinary, worldly life it was hard to love with the wholeness of a holy man. Was this the great failing and disappointment? Fragmentary love? He could almost taste the salt scald of weeping.

‘Darling, won't you turn around?' He wanted to see her face, apologise for his shoddy heart.

She gave a throaty, heedless laugh. Finally, unwillingly, his love turned.

It was
not her
. Not Valeria. A stranger in her place.

And an even more bizarre migration had occurred. For this woman was without life: a corpse.

A corpse, with Teresa Neele's face. The mystifying divide had just been crossed, and the body he felt along his own length was pliable and warm. The eyes were open, slate-coloured and prudent, even in death.

Just who had she been? Why did it seem he should know? To his confusion, amid his shock and disgust, he was overtaken by a sweeping attraction. He was hungry for information, true or even false, but greed was an error, for as he tried to hold her fast, to press secrets from her flesh, there was alarmingly no woman in his arms. No flesh at all, but the finest desert sand. White lunar dust escaping at speed through his clutching, futile hands.

6

FOURTH DAY

The
Daily Mail
claimed it was Monday, but how arbitrary being in an unfamiliar setting made time. Today she
had
to write the letter—indeed, she'd start the day by doing just that. Eager to be done with it, she sprang out of bed and winced. Her shoulder really was misbehaving. A piercing pain, as if originating from an injury. It went right down her arm, which felt weakish.
Was
it the neuritis back? What exertion had stirred it up? Funny how things came and went.

She ferreted out the laudanum in her handbag. The Torquay pharmacist's label was a prick of nostalgia. Sunlit-green Devon hills, Torbay seen from Barton Hill, pine scent. She took a dose, promising herself she'd make an appointment for a massage.

This time she wouldn't sit down and be cowed by stationery. First compose, pacing the room, then sit and
efficiently transcribe. Like a fisherman caressing a trout into submission before slipping in the hook. She strode back and forth.
Darling
. . .

I've been thinking of the Empire Tour
(she might say),
especially our month of heaven in Hawaii. Our escape from the folly. Bliss! It's probably the neuritis that has reminded me. It's returned, you see, and the first time it afflicted me was in Honolulu. Four years ago already. Staggering. Then it was all the royal bathing and surfing that did it. My right shoulder and arm were a shambles of pain, remember? But weren't we happy? Two fish. Rather indecently sunburned. The endless shedding of skin! I felt quite dashing in that skimpy emerald-green woollen bathing dress . . .
Or something about South Africa? Or Canada, maybe, or New Zealand? Australia? Mention having met an Australian in Harrogate? Who of course reminded her of Shy Thing, as she still called him to herself. Australia
was
the sort of place that caught in you like a tick. But her strongest memories of it weren't as gay and simple as the ones of Hawaii. And in them her husband didn't have a leading role.

Her husband. Mr Neele. He would remember inspecting various factories, doing the major's bidding. Meeting people who for the most part weren't really their sort. He wouldn't recall Sydney's overrunning light and the damp that surely contributed to those unpleasant hotel odours. Almost certainly not the fantastical riotous birds, or the trees she hadn't been
able to describe to Mummy, try as she might. Startling white trunks . . .

Thinking of Mummy at home, virtually alone and so curious, she'd wanted to share it all with her in letters. But she'd never really had the knack of capturing places. Not that she was unobservant—it was just that she concentrated on them in her own way. (Mummy hadn't taught her to be ashamed of dreaminess.
Might
she have? A high price to pay for being lazy about seeing reality.) Landscapes so subtly dour and secretive, not appearing to care whether you appreciated or understood them, hardly facilitated the task. Anything you might say about the downcast feelings they inspired, or the queer exhilaration, was unsatisfactory and only made you cross. Nor was the uncouth Australian voice mellifluous. Though Shy Thing's version of it was
not
grating—or was the harshness alleviated by his being so much her sort of person and her so at home with his family?

Harry had no trace of it she could hear, which was peculiar. Leaving you uncertain as to how to approach him. Unsure whether he might be your sort of person or not.

This attempt at the letter, too, was clearly aborted. Wrecked on the island of Australia. She didn't have long to be vexed, for here was the chambermaid come for her tray.

Teresa didn't want to be exposed to those intent eyes that put her on the qui vive. She tried not to show her face to the girl, by getting back into bed and fussing with covers. One
shouldn't be obliged to show one's face in the morning before one's toilette, anyhow.

She had to keep herself in motion. Teresa dressed quickly, so sick of the green jumper, grey stockinette skirt, grey cardigan and velour hat she'd have jubilantly banished them from her life forever. But today she would at last acquire new clothes. Before leaving the Hydro, she made an appointment for a massage for three thirty that afternoon.

Much better to be outside, where the air was brisk, the light clear and soft. At a fruiterer's stall on Cold Bath Road she bought some apples and pears, making speedy work of a crisp, enlivening apple. Harrogate's high-class shops pleased her. She could have done some profligate spending here. Peter would have enjoyed all those people and fine trees and moorland air. Promenading, she once or twice almost sensed him at heel.

At the fashionable Marshalls she contemplated appealing furs, evening wraps and lambskin slippers. She had to be practical, though, so focused on dance and dinner gowns. When she turned before the glass in a salmon-hued georgette, she saw a tall, tastefully stylish Teresa, somewhat ageless, blank-slateish. She smiled faintly at her preening. No pain now in the shoulder or arm. The laudanum was working. She'd have the dress—fortunately she'd a reasonable quantity of money, having followed Auntie-Grannie's principle of
always travelling with tidy folds of extra five-pound notes for anything unforeseen—and a frock for ordinary wear patterned with violets. Cheering to assemble the beginnings of a new wardrobe. She also tried and settled on a maroon jumper, a pair of black evening shoes, black gloves. Three pairs of stockings. She had the larger articles delivered to the Hydro.

She was anxious to go back to change, but there was more she needed. Further wanderings took her to a smart black cloche hat, with a pink stripe on the front of it, at the nicely named Ada Nettlefold. Then, at Taylor's Drug Company, she found face cream,
papier poudré
,
crème de lys
soap and rose eau de cologne, Mummy's love of the flower prompting this last choice. She continued to softly fancy that Peter accompanied her.

The solace of W.H. Smith! She became a member of the circulating library with alacrity, and borrowed several tomes, nothing heavy. With the books in her arms, an imbalance had righted itself. She looked forward to observing the stack of them on her bedside table, the little barricade. She only briefly contemplated purchasing letter pads and notepaper before finding herself back out on the street. It hit her that it was curious, given the array of temptations and the time of year, that she'd had no thought of Christmas shopping. Usually such a fun enterprise.

Finally, at a ladies' outfitter on the same street that was home to Bettys, Cambridge Crescent, she bought a
tweed skirt, two blouses, a lavender dressing-gown and some woollen underwear. She hesitated here, wondering how many days to provision for. She didn't think many, and she could avail herself of the hotel's laundry service as necessary.

The exemplary young waiter was absent from Bettys, but this time the cutlery did serve for anchoring a book. She started a mystery story along with her roast beef. The title of the book,
The Phantom Train
, echoed in her mind. Towards the end of her luncheon, with a slight start, she realised that she herself was writing a book about a train,
le train bleu
. A wretched train wreck of a book. Even remoter than a phantom to her it was, for she was receiving no visitations from it whatsoever. Rather like a woman scheduled to soon give birth who has ceased to feel her baby moving. A wave of something not unlike nausea ran through her. She doubted it was on account of the very good charlotte russe, for which her digestion would be as grateful as it ever was for excellent dessert.

Harry was in the lounge when Teresa returned to the Hydro, galvanised by a sense of having begun to furnish her new existence in Harrogate, which (as long as she thought just a little) was feeling like a fresh chance. He was sitting in an armchair, perusing a newspaper.