On the Blue Train (10 page)

Later, he laughed because he'd discovered he scarcely cared.

He didn't care anywhere near enough.

Changing into a well-pressed navy-blue suit for dinner, he entertained himself with the idea that he was an insane chap dressing for the gallows, a smirk on his mad, sorry face.

9

FOURTH DAY, AFTERNOON

Hands at her waist. Briefly, she didn't understand what was occurring. Teresa laughed in confusion. ‘You had me hypnotised.'

‘I'm always putting people to sleep,' the masseuse said matter-of-factly.

She had seized Teresa's ankles and tugged her feet as if she would detach legs from body. There had been a slight pain, and then nothing.

‘Your ring, ma'am. I left it here safe.' It had slipped off so easily, testimony to lost weight.

She drank down the glass of water the masseuse, a rounded, hale creature, handed her. Her surprised stomach lurched a tad. Potent. Reminiscent, indeed, both of aged egg and seawater.

The clothes just delivered were radiant. New clothes remained almost as exciting to her as they had been when Mummy took her to the dressmaker in Paris who'd make her first semi-evening dress. Pale grey crepe de Chine. It was such a heady adult costume. The transformative possibilities of style! The surreptitious power of chic!

She enjoyed bathing with the
crème de lys
soap, and was prodigal with face cream,
papier poudré
and eau de cologne, which she even rubbed into the crooks of her arms and backs of her knees. Quite the coquette, she considered herself in the glass and had to conclude that the georgette gown and Harrogate agreed with her.

‘You were right, I adored the baths,' she told Mrs Jackman in the lounge. ‘I'll go again tomorrow.'

‘I
knew
you would. Our daughter adores them, and I think you and she might have similar tastes. Doesn't she remind you of Jane, my dear?'

‘Now that you mention it, she does, rather.'

Conversational procedures weighed on you less when you hadn't practised them for a time. Teresa asked after Jane, hoping Mrs Jackman wasn't one of those tiring people who prattle on about their children out of some fervid compulsion.

‘She's an interesting girl,' the latter said. ‘Very bright. You'd understand each other.' She lowered her voice. ‘Actually, poor
Jane had a tragedy not unlike yours.' She regarded Teresa softly. ‘Her baby died.' Teresa looked down into her lap. ‘Well, Jane lost her memory. Strange, isn't it? It was frightfully hard on Ned. First the baby, and then his wife not knowing him. It was hard on everyone. Jane didn't—she just seemed to go somewhere else, until things got easier to manage.'

‘My word,' offered a woman Teresa did not recognise, who was affixing herself to their conversation, despite its discreet volume. Her droopy pistachio dress was covered with overexcited beadwork and her inquisitive expression rather dull.

Smiling at the intruder, Mrs Jackman commented, ‘To be honest, she hasn't been the same since. She did eventually remember what had happened with the baby. After, I suppose, a couple of weeks, it all came back. And she was able to go on and live quite normally. She's philosophical, Jane.'

‘Stalwart girl,' Mr Jackman said.

Mrs Jackman reiterated, ‘She isn't entirely as she used to be. Her eyes are where you see it.'

‘Because she loved her baby,' surmised the hanger-on, animated, ‘she lost her memory.'

‘Yes,' said Mrs Jackman.

‘Intelligent ones suffer more,' the woman went on.

‘Oh, do you think so?' Mr Jackman smiled forlornly.

They were saved from further vapid discourse by the appearance of Harry. Once again, the sight of him was
more familiar than it should have been, given the newness of their friendship. Was it a friendship? She didn't think he was impervious to her georgette gown. He was looking at her differently, somehow.

Teresa and Harry hardly spoke during dinner. No mention was made of their walk. There was talk of bathhouses and of Cairo, where it turned out that the eager new addition to their party, whom Teresa found herself actively disliking, had spent a season at eighteen. Cairo as a place to come out was much cheaper than London and therefore a reasonable alternative for a family rather badly off but desiring to provide their daughter with appropriate opportunities. This was also a feature of Teresa's history, a result of the shift in fortune her family had suffered. The woman continued to be remarkably lacklustre right through to a last spoonful of meringue, when, realising she was having no great effect upon them, she sulkily announced she was pleased to be leaving the following morning for York. Teresa and Harry exchanged looks.

A relief to be freed to proceed to the ballroom. He was at her elbow as she entered it.

‘Will you trust me, Teresa, after last time, with another dance?'

He made this gallant invitation a joke, and not. It might have been the tedium of the dinner conversation that had left her restless, with the coiled energy best spent in exercise.
They excused themselves. It was a little like her youthful days of Cairo soirees.

They danced more smoothly this time to quite a sprightly instrumental piece he identified as ‘Rose Room'. But she sensed that something was wrong. He was gripping her hand tightly. Conversation had been fluent during their walk, but now silence mounted.

‘Everything all right?'

‘Oh yes,' he replied. He seemed to debate with himself, and then he said tensely, ‘You didn't read today's
Daily Mail
?'

‘The
Daily Mail
? I flicked through it. Why?' (The trick, a buried part of her knew, was to have her thoughts go on slipping against one another with the least possible resistance, as thin and slippery as silken underthings.) ‘Did I miss some noteworthy disaster or scandal?'

‘Nothing caught your attention?'

They glanced at one another in the oblique, staccato way which dancing requires. Scrutiny at such close range would be unbearable.

‘Not particularly.' It suddenly occurred to Teresa to wonder if he could fancy he was falling in love with her. She'd lost the habit of such ideas. Did he have the barnyard-animal-feeling-poorly look? She smiled involuntarily. But surely not. She floundered for something to say and chanced on—she'd been doing this lately, like an old woman—the distant past. ‘When I was a young girl, I used to read the newspapers to
my grandmother, who was quite blind with cataracts. Sordid situations were a stimulant to her. It's often so for the elderly.'

‘Newspapers can provide certain necessary shocks.'

She said nothing to this, and presently the song ended.

‘Another?'

‘Better not. I think I'm feeling the neuritis again. Probably need an early night. Some reading in bed.'

‘What will you read? A mystery?'

‘Yes, as a matter of fact.'

‘That music you heard last night was
Lament of the Nymph
, on my gramophone. Monteverdi. I hope it didn't disturb you. Do you know it?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘A light opera about a woman with a broken heart.'

‘Goodnight, Harry.' She turned to the door.

10

THE BLUE HOUR

He had been afraid she would breakfast alone in her room again. When she joined the table in the dining room occupied by the Jackmans and himself, she greeted them with a vacant little smile for general consumption. Her face surprised him, though. It was flushed. It might have been this that made her eyes seem so dynamic.

Mrs Jackman asked, ‘How did you sleep, my dear?'

‘Excellently. And you?'

‘Endlessly. I only wish I could say the same of my husband.'

‘Never mind,' Mr Jackman said and raised his glass of fetid, health-giving water. ‘Here we go. Bottoms up—or, rather,
santé
.'

‘
Santé
,' they echoed, lifting their glasses and trying to hurry the stuff down their throats, while grimacing neatly.

‘Sweet elixir.' Harry coughed. ‘Makes you feel like a child pressed to drink medicine.'

Teresa giggled. He didn't think her a natural giggler.

‘Perhaps we
are
all children taking our medicine, if viewed from the right angle,' observed Mrs Jackman.

‘Funny how you can get used to anything, almost anything,' offered Teresa.

Mrs Jackman added cream liberally to her coffee, and passed the jug. ‘The line between what can be borne and what can't is different for different people. Or even the same person, at different times. I suppose I'm thinking of our Jane.'

Teresa received the cream and the heaped plate brought to her with apparent delectation. A glass of the water that was so good for one tended to dampen Harry's appetite, but she applied herself enthusiastically to eating. Mrs Jackman unwound a reminiscence about her girlhood, something about a dance master, Teresa nodding and paying great attention. Mr Jackman and Harry had achieved the sort of exemption from conversation that newspapers can secure.

Harry almost choked on the toast he was nibbling. He'd come to an article in the
Daily Mail
concerning the disappearance of the authoress. He glanced up at the woman tackling her second sausage across the table from him, apparently oblivious to all except her meal and Mrs Jackman's lilting narration. Nerves jangled, he returned to the article.

A man had presented himself to the police, claiming to have come across the missing woman at Newlands Corner. On first approaching her, he had heard her wailing. Clearly
in some distress, she had practically fallen into him. When she requested it, he had started her motorcar. Then he had watched her drive away.

In the opinion of the superintendent directing the inquiry, her motor had accidentally gone off the road at Newlands Corner, whereupon she had jumped out of it and watched fearfully as it careened down a slope and collided with some bushes over a chalk pit. After that, she had somehow blundered off and become lost. He seemed to view her chances of survival darkly.

Meanwhile, her husband the Colonel was utterly baffled and half desperate, their little daughter his only consolation . . .

Agatha and the Colonel had a daughter. This must have been mentioned in the article Harry had seen the day before, but he'd read over that detail. A daughter was left behind, too.

Teresa was concentrating on her toast. There were several newspapers at nearby tables, but no one appeared to be casting suspicious glances in her direction. Could it be that no one else at the Hydro had noticed this article or yesterday's? Or that no one who'd seen them had found any coincidence between the unexplained disappearance attracting so much attention and the arrival of the elusive Mrs Neele? Was discretion so much the norm here that if anyone had paused to wonder, they'd have guarded against showing it? Had Harry simply gone mad?

‘You didn't stay long in the ballroom last night, my dear,' Mrs Jackman reprimanded Teresa affectionately. ‘I was going to ask your opinion on a crossword clue—you solve them so masterfully—and I couldn't find you.'