On the Blue Train (8 page)

His eyes lifted to her, with a look of both surprise and recognition. Oh.
You
.

She barely knew him. They'd had, what? One conversation?

‘Mrs Neele. Teresa. I don't suppose you're free for that walk?'

She had not forgotten his invitation—she'd intended to decline it, if the need arose. But sometimes one had the illusion that a certain event had occurred before and would go on recurring, like an addictive unit of melody. That's how it was, coming back to find Harry reading and then looking up at her, though she barely knew him.

And so, instinctually, she accepted.

7

TWILIGHT SLEEP

He had fixated on the unlikely prospect of this all day. After Teresa had failed to appear in the dining room at breakfast, and again at lunch, he had lain in wait by the hotel entrance, increasingly despondent.

But she assented readily, only saying, ‘Give me a moment to leave these books upstairs. You see, I've had absolutely nothing to read.'

When they reconvened, he felt for some reason like a boy who has been caught out daydreaming. He was glad that there was only an impassive-faced young woman at the reception desk, her eyes remaining lowered as they departed.

They went down Swan Road and crossed to Valley Gardens. The air had grown sharper. Her pale coat was edged with abundant fur at the neck, wrists and hem.

‘We'll soon be warm,' he said. ‘Walking.'

‘I haven't really been feeling the cold,' she murmured. ‘Is that the Pump Room?' She gestured at the domed edifice outside of which several well-dressed people were waiting with an air of relaxed purpose.

‘Yes, it's the Old Sulphur Well. Strange to think of European royalty flocking here. To the queen of British watering-places.'

Her smile suggested that she liked the idea.

‘The Jackmans are always there of a morning before breakfast, taking the cure the proper way. Turns in the gardens between doses and so on.'

‘You don't go in for that type of thing?'

‘Me? No. I guess I'm not all that disciplined. I take the water at the Hydro occasionally, and I've seen their physician a couple of times. I do admire people who look after themselves. That conviction they have. Dickens, incidentally, apparently found Harrogate an exceptionally queer place, full of queer people living queerly.'

‘Oh? I wonder why.'

They entered the gardens. Bare trees grand and faintly dilapidated like aged beauties. Those surroundings seemed to gratify Teresa.

After a while, she nodded and said, ‘Charming.'

‘I suspected you'd like it here.' Presumptuous, knowing her so little.

An elderly couple accompanied by a stertorous corgi greeted them in passing. Teresa averted her face from the
salute, though he saw her affording the corpulent, bright-eyed dog a look of almost pained appreciation. Harry had a burst of envy for the dog, and for the human pair—for what might have been the comfort of their shared habits. A sturdy conjoining of two lives.

He glanced at Teresa sidelong. ‘Good day?'

‘Very industrious. I've shopped. Procured books. Been to Bettys.'

Feeling affection for them, he noticed below her coat the green jumper and grey skirt she'd worn on three consecutive days. Surely, he reflected again, given her evident social standing, a sign that something was astray. Her black cloche hat, however, could have been new. She blinked as if following his reasoning. ‘I've had to leave the bulk of my luggage with friends in Torquay, dear friends. I'm not quite sure how long I'll be staying in Harrogate, so instead of having it sent on right away, I decided it would be simpler for the time being to just buy a few things here—clothes and so on, I mean.' She changed the subject: ‘It must be because of this air that one sleeps so deeply.'

‘Sleeping well, are you?' The thought of her having disarranged his night, he was a little piqued.

‘You forget how smashing it feels.'

‘I seem to remember vaguely, from childhood.'

‘So long ago?'

‘I'm only exaggerating a little, I'm afraid.'

‘It wasn't just . . . ?'

‘After I lost Valeria that I started sleeping poorly?'

She nodded.

‘No. That made it worse. A lot worse. But for me sleep had been—let's say “temperamental” before.'

‘Being unable to fall asleep is distressing.' She did not elaborate. Beneath a show of sociability, she maintained the same reticence, the slight detachment she'd displayed the previous evening—except when they'd danced the charleston.

Three girls with tennis racquets were coming towards them, loose-limbed and boisterous. One smiled at Teresa, who did not reciprocate or even appear to notice. Harry nodded, and another giggled into her hand. The barely harnessed power of the young. Their vigorous voices receded as he and Teresa took the long rising pathway bordered by laurels. He was guiding her along his usual route to the place where Valley Gardens abutted the Pinewoods.

She chuckled, a self-deprecating sound. ‘I'm not very fond of going up hills. In Torquay you're constantly going up steep, endless hills. Maybe I climbed enough there for a lifetime. Or feel I should only bother with one if I'll be rewarded with a view of the sea.'

‘Shall we go another way?'

‘No, it's good for me, no doubt,' she countered, still with a cloudy tone of self-reproach. ‘I'm always vowing to take more exercise.'

He wondered whether to offer her his arm, but decided it might have been construed as too forward of him at this early stage of their acquaintance. ‘I'm sorry. I've been hurrying. I'm so used to walking alone.' He slowed.
He
had developed a certain appetite for mounting hills, welcoming them as due punishment.

They didn't speak further until they had reached the wood. He often encountered other walkers here. Today there was no one else about, perhaps owing to the raw turn the weather had taken. Teresa gave no sign of minding the cold. He invited her to pass ahead of him.

She hesitated, her eyes flicking to his face. Harry supposed she was asking herself if a jaunt in the forest with a virtual stranger were advisable. If he could be trusted. Fair question, he thought. Can I be trusted? Some quality of this quick appraisal reinforced his idea of her as bewildered, off course—but, in the manner of a hunted animal, furtive and canny, too.

She preceded him, hastening past the wooden crucifix, a simple war memorial he'd once stopped to examine, the circular stone base of which proclaimed,
They died so that we might live
.

Teresa slowing down, he ambled in the rear. Awkward, walking at another's pace. He tried not to stare at her figure. She moved as one who luxuriates in country rambles does, at a somewhat impractical, aristocratic speed, possibly allowing the
piney air to tease at her thoughts. It struck him that her new cloche hat had given her a slight swagger, and the childishness of this moved him. Her shoulders were narrow and sloping. She was slim but you imagined her plump, on account of a certain softness or of her ankles being little defined. He recalled her reflective ardour when discussing French jam.

To divert his mind, he said the first thing that came to him. ‘So we've rejected eventual coffee poisoning as a method for doing away with ourselves. What would be your suggestion for a more interesting end to it all?' His voice and the macabre topic rang weirdly to him.

But she laughed. Filling with a frail elation, he looked up at the brawny green of the Scots pines and the holly scattered through bald birches, rowans and sycamores. He pictured it here in summer. He adored the deep shade of forests in this part of the world, which made you feel yourself among the lamp shadows of a great sylvan boudoir. Roaming such privacy.

‘A one-dose poison would be neater,' she observed.

For a second or two, he was light-headed. ‘Such as? A large quantity of sleeping powder?'

‘For example. Certainly nothing that would be too gory or dramatic. Not strychnine, I wouldn't fancy the spasms.' So he could catch her words, she was obliged to turn her head, offering flashes of pale—rather Scandinavian—profile. ‘Not
mercury bichloride—painful,' she went on as if speaking to herself. ‘Some opium preparation would be superior.'

Absent steps. Sway of hips.

‘Laudanum?'

‘Yes. Or morphine. I took some laudanum this morning, actually. For a spot of neuritis.'

‘Oh, sorry to hear that. It's not still troubling you?'

‘No. I'm not feeling it anymore.'

‘I wouldn't have suggested a walk if I'd known. Shall we turn back?'

‘No, let's carry on. Hyoscine would be another option.'

‘Hyoscine?'

‘It's used as an anaesthetic, with morphia. Women may be given it during childbirth. Creates an amnesic condition without their quite going under. Twilight sleep, it's known as.'

‘Twilight sleep,' he repeated slowly. ‘You're very informed.'

‘Not really. Well—I once worked in a dispensary.'

‘In South Africa?'

‘Yes,' she said indistinctly, not turning back. She fell silent.

He felt he must continue speaking. ‘What do you say to hanging oneself in a bell tower?'

‘A bell tower?'

‘Well, it seems a larger gesture than just dangling from the rafters of a barn. I thought you might approve of it as a less bland alternative.'

‘Oh.' He couldn't tell if she was smiling. He would have liked to intercept a smile meant for herself alone.

The path widened to allow for two to walk abreast and he came up beside her as she proposed, ‘It'd be preferable, though, not to leave behind a corpse at all. A corpse is so . . . untidy. Better to just disappear.'

‘Untidy, yes. How, disappear?'

She mused. ‘To some place—foreign, ideally—where no one knew you. Where it would make no difference to anybody whether you lived or not.'

‘And you'd—what?—quietly take your deadly nightshade in a fine hotel, between fresh sheets, in starched pyjamas?' Catching her restive eye, he went on, ‘After a good dinner? Flowers in a vase on the bedside table and your few possessions arranged just so?'

She was looking at the path again. ‘Yes. That might do. Organise it properly. Try to have a lovely last day. There'd still be a corpse to think of, however, wouldn't there? Better would be to leave your hotel late one evening, on a hot night, when the air is finally cooling off and starting to move. Slip into the sea. Have something and then simply . . . swim away.'

Their talk seemed to have become trancelike, reminding him of the way he and Valeria had sometimes chatted in bed before falling asleep. Discomposed, he waited for her to go on, restraining his breathing. After a minute, he enquired, ‘Do you envisage somewhere like Nice?'

‘I think of Nice as happy.'

He had seen something perplexing once in that city. He had walked the length of the beach alongside the Promenade des Anglais, hypnotised by the torpid aquamarine waves and all the thin men and women of indeterminate age, artfully dressed and groomed, whose carnivorous eyes declared longing. The beach petering out, he ascended to the road and was rounding the end of the promontory with the idea of continuing his stroll along the port. He happened to look up and into an apartment or hotel suite. Not understanding what he saw, he stopped.

The view resolved itself, through open terrace doors. Beyond them, an oval looking-glass, apparently mounted on the door of a wardrobe left open. The room's inhabitant must have gone off in a hurry. And the bluish, softly stippled reflection in the glass was the sea's.

But the room's inhabitant hadn't rushed off. A woman entered the doorway, showing first her narrow profile and then her back. Her dress was undone, flapping open to reveal a bony shoulder. And next there were a man's arms, shirtsleeves rolled up, gesticulating at intervals, underlining the tetchiness of his guttural tones. Harry distinguished the odd words.
Two days . . . how can you be so . . . why?
The woman remained largely silent.

The man's voice ceased and he came into full view, elfin yet muscular, and careless as to whether they might
be observed. He was at her side, forcing one hand into the opening in her dress and raising the other. She was unsteady, inebriated or terrified. The whiteness of her slip was visible.

She twisted away a little, her body blocking the mirror's sea view, her mouth agonised. She could not move far. He had her pinioned. His raised hand, which Harry had feared might strike a blow, lowered to her throat, encircling it—but not caressingly. His grip appeared to tighten. Just then the woman discovered the bystander, her eyes strangely blank.

Harry's heartbeat had gone light and harried. As the man's hand dropped from her neck to her hip, still clutching with brutish force, her dress fell quite from her shoulders. Her cheeks coloured and Harry averted his gaze. The briny fetor of the sea was in his nose, and a perfume—hers, probably—cloyingly floral and somehow low-slung. Looking back, gawking in spite of himself, he saw a shockingly white slip, a lustre of sweat at the start of the dip between her breasts, the olive shine of shoulders.