On the Blue Train (15 page)

‘No,' she said. ‘I might duck down for a needle bath.'

‘Excellent idea.' He was considering her. ‘We'll see you at dinner, then?'

12

SIXTH DAY, EVENING

Harry was not at dinner and, regretting this, Mrs Jackman asked, ‘Will he be at Bettys? What a rose you have in your cheek, my dear. How steam advantages a lovely pale young complexion. Not to mention that black silk.' She nodded appreciatively at the new dress that was so light and smooth to wear. She appeared not to have been told of the silly tumble Teresa had taken.

‘You're kind. Maybe Harry likes to keep to himself—isn't very social.'

‘Even the quiet ones usually enjoy some company,' Mrs Jackman said. ‘Especially of an evening. Between you and me, I do imagine he must be lonely. He lost his wife, you know, poor man. As you did your husband. Forgive me, my dear, for bringing it up.'

Golly, Teresa thought, is she matchmaking? ‘I expect you're right. Isn't this soufflé wonderful? I'm so fond of a good soufflé.' The cheese soufflé was in fact very good.

As she was about to bid the Jackmans goodnight, a man came to their table and asked her to join a game of billiards. Russian accent, or something like it. He was not prepossessing, though he intimated a type of physical confidence that a good-looking man might have had.

She'd have declined, but Mrs Jackman exclaimed, ‘Teresa, you must. You young people should have fun.' It was plainly her aim to lift the spirits of anyone in her orbit whose morale might be languishing.

The Russian and Teresa raised their eyebrows at being called young, and it was decided. She followed him out into the hall and to the staircase leading to the billiards room. His rolling walk was pure flirtation. She felt absent. Was Harry really alone at Bettys and under the weather? She recalled his stiff manner of the night before and his avoidance of the ballroom.

At the billiard table she was presented to the Russian's two friends, of Harrogate. It would be him and her against the locals. Her heart was still taking stock of the ascent of the stairs. The billiards room was warmer than the dining room and seemed imbued with the memory of male joshing and a limitless army of smoked cigars, which made her feel at the
same time nervous and devil-may-care. She professed herself deplorable at games, and proceeded to play fairly well.

They won.

Buoyed by the fleeting triumph of such success, Teresa said, ‘There is some precedent for this. My golf game is disgraceful, yet I once won a women's golf tournament.'

She wished she hadn't mentioned golf. Golfing greens had for so long divided her from her husband. How could fields prohibiting rambling and picnics not be corrupt?

‘And where was that?'

Eyes on her. ‘South Africa. I've lived in South Africa for many years.'

‘Cape Town?' Her partner in victory might have been a clandestine prince escaped from the Bolsheviks, but she was not really in the mood for chitchat.

‘Yes.'

‘You must tell us about South Africa. I've always wanted to go. The lions . . .'

‘Yes.'

Someone was asking, ‘Does anyone sing? Will anyone sing?'

‘They want someone to sing—to give the Hydro Boys and the Lady Entertainer a rest and, I suspect, the chance to go and quietly find something to drink. Will you volunteer?' He was amused.

‘Absolutely not.' She wished Harry were there.

‘You don't sing?'

‘No. Yes—a little. But I wouldn't here.'

‘Perhaps if I accompanied you? I play the piano, though I am also modest. We could make each other brave.' He held her gaze, immodestly proposing a song, and more.

‘I don't think so.'

If she knew how to be fast, she could slip him a note—no, not even that would be necessary, a gesture would do—and later, after everyone was in bed, there would be a constrained knock at the door of her room. Or Teresa would go stealing along corridors, a dressing-gowned silhouette in the gloom. Being slimmer now, she might look rather sinuous. What was stopping her, after all, from going to a man's room? One could learn to do anything. There were so many men's rooms, along so many corridors, corridors radiating out around her like spokes from the centre of a wheel.

‘I'm sure I can convince you,' he said.

They'd separated themselves from the table, but one of his friends, whose countenance had grown mean during the match, interpolated, ‘Another game! We demand revenge.'

‘No,' she said. ‘I think it's wise for an amateur to stop while she's ahead.'

He was reluctant to accept this and hung by the Russian's elbow. ‘That woman,' he went on in a disagreeable, teasing tone, ‘who has disappeared—they say she sent a letter to her brother-in-law. Telling him she was coming to a spa in Yorkshire.'

‘Who?' the Russian asked.

‘The authoress. Who went missing.'

‘Oh, there was something about that in
The Times
.'

‘It was the
Daily Mail
I saw. What do you say, could she be here in Harrogate?'

‘Unlikely.' The Russian clearly wanted to close the topic and return to a private conversation with Teresa. ‘The police don't believe she is in Yorkshire, do they?'

‘What's your opinion, Mrs Neele?' enquired his tenacious friend.

In that stuffy masculine air it was imperative that she keep her thoughts as slight and cool as sheets of silk. ‘You know, I haven't been following the story.'

‘No? It's interesting, though,' he insisted. ‘I think her husband killed her.' He regarded her. ‘Are you scandalised? Do husbands do such things in South Africa?'

A touch muzzy and incredulous, she replied, ‘Excuse me. I've just decided to sing down in the ballroom.'

The Russian was surprised but not unpleased. ‘Indeed.' From his smile, it was evident that he considered his other unspoken proposition accepted, too.

What a scenario. An age since she'd sung in public. Then suddenly a dream of singing, and this appeared to have conjured a real performance. She should have been mortified. But she was cavalier as they marched down the stairs and into the Winter Garden Ballroom.

The Russian wasn't required, because there was already a gentleman in position at the piano, with wispy fair hair and a mien both apologising for his presence and grateful. He was introduced to Teresa as Mr Bolitho. All this blurring by, and the gathered hotel guests merely a kind of stickiness she would not adhere to.

‘Angels Ever Guard Thee.'

They were off.

Not at all as it was with Shy Thing. Yet the music did enter her and mercifully carry her somewhere. Restful and rather fun, the anonymity one could have singing, the flesh displaced by something fresher and less delimited, like spirit. The only interference came towards the end, when her attention caught a little, and then slid over—as silk might on a ragged fingernail—the figure of a man in the doorway. She no sooner noticed him than he withdrew from the room.

Harry.

The song over, the Russian's stance was assured and expectant. Teresa smiled coolly without meeting anyone's eyes.

She had stridden quickly from the ballroom and it was ten thirty by the grandfather clock as she took to the stairs. Reaching the first floor, feeling clammy, she saw Harry. He straightened himself and moved along the corridor towards her.

She realised she had half expected, or hoped, such a meeting would occur, even as she had been working to avoid one.

‘I was just . . .' he began and shrugged. ‘You sang.'

A seamlessness, as if they were continuing a conversation only briefly suspended.

‘You heard? Had my usual dance partner been present at dinner, I might have danced instead.'

‘Yesterday evening, if you recall, you did refuse to promise him a dance tonight. I'm sure you were better off without him, anyhow. Not much of a dancer, from what they say.'

‘They're wrong.' The corridor was empty aside from the two of them. Singing was audible from downstairs, and the creaking of stairs or floorboards. ‘The Jackmans feared you weren't feeling well. They didn't see you all day.'

He laughed bleakly. ‘Whole days often go by without anyone seeing me.'

‘That can be reposeful.'

‘Yes. Or pathetic.' They glanced away from one another. ‘I was at the baths. Lying low.' He brought a hand to his forehead wearily. ‘I wanted to talk to you. You sang very beautifully, by the way.'

‘Thank you—I don't know what I was thinking. You wanted to talk to me?'

Brusquely, he asked, ‘What have you done to yourself?'

‘What do you mean?'

He was indicating her wrist. She turned her hand, uncomprehending. The outer edge was darkly outlined. Blood. Dried blood. Queer. She had a moment of embarrassed confusion, before recalling her fall behind the Pump Room. She must have scraped her hand, coming down. She'd bathed before dinner and not noticed anything. Maybe playing billiards had exacerbated the cut. She could have been bleeding while she sang!

‘Oh, I had another comical incident today. Slipped over on wet leaves. Mr Jackman was my knight in shining armour.'

He took a handkerchief from a pocket of his jacket. She accepted it, and dabbed once or twice ineffectually at the blood.

‘It's funny that blood should be so . . .
scandalous
. Seeing it, I mean. When it's constantly running through us, the very thing that keeps us on our feet. And yet the slightest visible evidence of it is sensational. Gothic horror.'

‘The red? And the fact of it being outside us, where it shouldn't be?' He held her eyes. ‘That, I think, is what makes it an affront, a travesty.'

‘If you see enough of it, though, you get quite blasé. That happened to me when I was a VAD.'

‘You were a nurse during the war? Well, I'm sure being afraid of blood is related to a primeval and very reasonable survival instinct—survival is the key, isn't it?' There was a
sternness to his manner, something flinty that came and went. It put her on edge. ‘You were a VAD in England?'

She was looking at her hand. ‘The same colour is beautiful, say, on an autumn leaf. Or a lovely dress.' If she were confusing Harry with his countryman, Shy Thing, could that have caused what was developing rapidly between them—this intimate tone, the pressure of the unsaid? Certainly, Harry was as attentive to her as the boy had been. But he didn't talk like an Australian. He was older, too, of course, and less handsome—at least in the common way. Perhaps he was also less desperately idealistic, less like Mummy. Less rapacious. More frugal.

‘You can talk to me. I realise we haven't known one another long, but you can, if you need to. You remember our conversation on . . . coffee and Balzac? Methods for dying?'

‘Of course.' Having taken it out of her handbag on the stairs, Teresa was holding the chain from which her room key dangled, oscillating slightly.

He came nearer. For a moment, they gazed at one another. She had not shared such a look with anyone in years. His brown eyes and overly lean face seemed anguished. They got at her. She wasn't sure of his intentions, but nor was she, for that matter, of her own. Here in Harrogate, what was rational action? And good, and bad?

‘Teresa?'

She had the swaying feeling one could have becoming self-conscious about standing immobile. She was still a little larger than life from the performance downstairs, but that power was leaching away. She had not been so aware of her body in—how many years? She was both in it and marginally above. How very strange it was to have a body, so material, inescapable, and yet animated by energies that could not quite be grasped. She surveyed her room's brass doorknob, the pleasantly papered wall, with its border of vines, the electric light sconces, the lift's grille, the Turkey rug leading the padded crimson way along the hall. All looming as large and portentous as the furnishings of a hallucination.