On the Blue Train (9 page)

Should he intervene, call out curtly to the man? But what was he seeing? The woman's will was not clear to him. What if this were only the half-playful theatrics of lust? Harry's hesitation made him feel complicit, the brute's accomplice.

They were kissing now, if that were the word for an act so rough and blurred. Rabidly embracing, though
her
arms remained limp. Was she responding—or just lethargic, snared?
Harry had an uncomfortable, intimate sense of pelvises colliding, of the jutting ridges of hips.

When they withdrew back into the room (who leading or forcing whom?) and the rippled sea gently filled the glass once more, Harry walked on. Sickly, stimulated, alone. The uncertain spectacle had stirred him, he realised, dismayed at his own peculiar disturbance. A husky impetus had awoken in him at the sight of whatever passion or violence he had witnessed. It terrorised him to think that he could be his father's son, though he had travelled so far. That lodged deep in his nature there might have been the instincts of a bully.

‘So you consider there to be a contradiction'—he was talking to Teresa jumpily—‘between a happy place and a quiet end.'

‘Casablanca?'

He noted her taste for the exotic. He tried to dissipate the mood the memory of Nice had induced in him with silliness. ‘How about jumping off a mountain, or feeding yourself to a large jungle animal?'

‘You'd want to be unconscious before it ate you.'

‘Assuredly.'

Pasture now to one side of them, and beyond it dales with wooded patches. Lavish greens and placid blue-greys.

‘Oh,' she remarked.

Nearby, a group of hardy cows. Further off, a speckling of sheep. The sky was very clear and cold. Shifting cows, the smell of livestock.

‘What an inviting place,' she went on meditatively. ‘But
is
it? The problem with describing a place is that an
idea
of the place interferes. Like wallpaper covering it over.'

It appeared to him there was something like self-loathing in these words. She had exposed herself, and it was important that he advance with extreme caution—not cause her to recoil. ‘I suspect we're all blinded by ideas,' he began. ‘So much for man's superior intelligence.' She looked quite bleak. ‘Don't you think it advisable to have something between us and the world, anyhow? A buffer, some diversions? Dreams, I suppose. The real world tending to be boring, or troublesome and disagreeable.'

‘But if we saw what was real, we might be happier, in the long run. Safer.'

‘Ah. Happiness.' He was not the man to comment on that. ‘What do you think those cows see, looking around?'

‘They seem content.'

He couldn't deny it. ‘Grass? Ideas of grass? Is there a difference?'

‘But grass
is
their reality. People have fanciful ideas that get
in the way
of reality. Some more than others. Some are purblind.' She was gazing fiercely straight ahead. ‘Which is really a kind of stupidity. Unforgivable.'

Harry didn't disagree here, either. He had lived blind or part-blind for a good number of years, enveloped in his own inconsequential drama that had prevented him from truly
seeing Valeria. From cherishing her as she had deserved to be cherished. The wisdom he had to offer was null. Still, he wanted to be reassuring. ‘Oh, but come, who sees clearly? Who is wise? And if we were all literal-minded,
would
life be better? God, imagine how monotonous it would be. Intolerable, I'm sure.' Her expression was uncertain. ‘Who's to say that cows aren't great dreamers?'

‘Wouldn't you like to be so docile?' she asked.

He didn't say what was in his mind: Docile until put to death.

She made an effort to pull herself together. ‘This does seem a healthy place.'

They were quiet on the return journey. He wondered if her neuritis was niggling at her. He hoped she wouldn't regret her elliptical yet frank-seeming words and deny a bud of confidence the possibility of blooming. The afternoon was frigid and delicate.

As they entered the hotel, she said, ‘I heard music last night, before I went to sleep.'

Lament of the Nymph
? ‘Did you like it?'

But they were distracted by the Hydro's proprietress, who announced, ‘There is a package for you, Mrs Neele.'

‘A letter?' Her voice betrayed hope.

‘No, a parcel. Small one. From Harrods.'

‘Harrods?'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘Of course. Thank you.' Teresa received the package—disappointed, he thought, or a little lost, but concealing it well.

‘Coming to hear the Hydro Boys again tonight after dinner?' he enquired as she made for the stairs.

‘Excuse me?'

‘In the Winter Garden Ballroom?'

‘Oh, perhaps,' she said. ‘I've a massage appointment at three thirty. I was almost forgetting.'

‘Well, I hope to see you later. I enjoyed our walk.'

‘So did I. Thank you. I think I'll take the lift up.'

She was looking pale again, indeed, rather washed out. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, aware of her in the lift's cage. He was jealous of the package she was holding, a reminder of an existence that laid claim to her and of which he knew nothing.

8

THE MISSING WOMAN

He rinsed his face at the basin in his room, and peered into the glass. Cheeks fringed with droplets of water, eyes glistening, he could have just dashed in from a storm. Well, what do you think you are doing? Harry asked this bedraggled specimen. He looked like he couldn't be trusted, couldn't trust himself. Prudence, he entreated the fool.

There was a tingling in his limbs and an ominous doubtfulness in his chest. This didn't feel like the other infatuations since Valeria, not at all. He was not faintly amused. He was fidgety, rather than slothful. Instead of feeling lascivious in a playful, mellow sort of way, he was painfully edgy. As if his skin had trouble deciding whether it was hot or cold. He considered and decided against changing into the woollen dressing-gown. He'd change his trousers for dinner, so it didn't matter how creased these became. Oh minor vanities,
he reflected, paltry and essential for keeping us pinned to the social world, where we would otherwise flutter away into the yawning holes of solitary hours.

He hadn't feared a woman since the early days with Valeria. And then the fear had in large part been excitement at the prospect of pleasure. Wonderment at the discovery of tenderness and the dearly tedious bonds it forged.

Had he, however, finally happened on what he'd been seeking for months? Was this the sea's-edge sensation? If so, it wasn't refreshing in the way he'd imagined. His back to the toasty hearth, he shivered, remembering the dream in which Teresa had turned into sand. His anxiety as she escaped through his fingers, leaving behind her such craving.

Bed, chair, writing table, gramophone, slippers, and especially the bottles of fortified wine (faithful guides to the vapours of sleepiness), all appeared absurdly precious. Only yesterday he'd considered this decor an irritating
mise en scène
, and now it gave him a pang to think he might lose what it represented, the relative calm he had fashioned for himself, the hush of hotel dwelling, of absconding, being well-nigh erased. He too had come to see the value, as Teresa claimed she had, of docility, regardless of how bland and empty his days could be. In truth, he was incapable of picturing a life different from his present one. Admittedly a kind of halved life to match the half-lie of the hotel furnishings. For though all the leisure time he enjoyed, particularly his compulsive
walking through wholesome surrounds, had made him quite physically tough, he had no illusions as to the fitness of his spirit.
It
remained convalescent, requiring cosseting.

He should have dined away from the Hydro that night and avoided the Winter Garden Ballroom. He would not, alas. But he had to be on his guard. At this very moment, she was preparing to lie down under the hands of a trained professional. How on earth was
he
to wade through the sluggish hours separating him from dinner?

He subsided into the wingback chair and snatched up the
Daily Mail
he hadn't had the patience for that morning. Some pages in he encountered a photograph of a woman. It was not a very sharp image, yet it caused him to pause. The woman resembled—rather a lot—Teresa Neele.

He inhaled raggedly. Look at the state you're in, he chided himself. Seeing her everywhere. The likeness, though, was considerable. He scrutinised the photograph until the grainy chiaroscuro visage was unmade into flecks of light and shade that nevertheless remained hauntingly feminine. Then he read the article. Three times.

He had overheard a little of this story from the conversations of other guests at the Hydro, without paying it much attention. A woman had gone missing from her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, three days previously, on Friday evening. She happened to be a quite renowned author of mysteries. Her abandoned motor had been found in nearby
countryside at eight o'clock on Saturday morning. It had lodged in some shrubbery at the edge of a chalk pit, possibly after having been purposely allowed to run down from a place called Newlands Corner. The police had spent the weekend scouring the North Downs. They had dredged something called the Silent Pool. No trace of the woman had been uncovered. She seemed simply to have vanished. ‘A beautiful woman,' was how the newspaper referred to her.

Somehow, this observation offended him as voyeuristic. They spoke of her with a nasty mix of surgeon's impassibility and circus-goer's idle glee.

Her husband claimed . . .

Husband
.

Her husband claimed she was undergoing a nervous collapse. He described her, furthermore, as ‘a very nervous person'.

He would. He had to explain her desertion so that it did not reflect badly on him. Which naturally it did. What a cad, to tell the press such things about his own wife, even if he believed them to be true. The stark fact that she'd run away from him was screaming evidence that he had not been the husband he should have been. These thoughtless comments confirmed it.

What appeared to be her sadness surely did, too. If indeed she was the person Harry knew as Teresa Neele.

When he returned to the fuzzy photograph, it seemed to him that the eyes were hers. The very vagueness of the
image was hers. The story began to bring this into focus, explaining her evasiveness and her unusual conversation—so careful, slow, and then queerly impromptu. Had he danced the charleston with a notorious woman? He'd suspected South Africa to be a lie. He hadn't suspected his dance partner had removed a wedding ring.

He had always thought Agatha, as the missing woman was called, such a lady's name. Just slightly wild, with grey trappings, something of moths' wings or mole fur. Or a prettyish fuzz of mould that would make your blood run a little cold.

Agatha's husband was a colonel. Oh yes. A small likeness of the man indicated an appearance that some would have considered handsome. In it, he clearly felt dashing and satisfied with himself. Harry thought him uninspiring and rather insubstantial in his military uniform, with his studiedly distant, thin gaze. (Harry was sometimes sensitive about not having served in the war on account of the examining officer, when he'd gone to enlist, discovering that his blood pressure was undesirably high and his hands trembled.) The Colonel had returned to Sunningdale on Saturday. So where was he on the Friday night of his wife's disappearance? Why hadn't he been at her side? She left a home that was empty of her spouse.

Harry looked again at the photograph. Could it really be Teresa, on whom he had become stuck? If it was, then this could hardly go well for him.

He went over to the window and hauled it up. A clever man would leave the Hydro at once. Cold air slithered over him. Swan Road. In the distance the Royal Pump Room was like a small, squat chapel. Wasn't it a kind of earthly church? No steeple gesturing to the heavens but a well leading down to underground waters promising their own form of salvation. The grey stone houses lining the street appeared especially earthbound, hunkered down, and he saw that the sun was already setting, one of those premature winter sunsets that instead of a gradual condensing of darkness seem a reneging of light. A childlike sense of being taken unawares. Muffled panic.

Was this one of those fatal last moments when there is still sufficient perspective to be sensible and keep from following a course that would be regretted? Had there been such a moment in his marriage, when he might have prevented disaster? When he realised he was allowing the blues to eclipse Valeria? Gazing out over nearly nocturnal roads, he couldn't recall. It was unlikely he'd ever had much perspective. Sucking in a final mouthful of cold air, he closed the window. Curtains drawn, he went back to the fire and squatted before it. He fed more coal to the flames, then sat hunched over the heat, muttering, This will not go well
.