Kristel Thornell was born in Sydney in 1975. She has also lived in Italy, Mexico, Canada, Finland and the United States, where she is now based. Night Street, which was published by Allen & Unwin in 2010, co-won the 2009 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award and won the Dobbie Literary Award, the Barbara Ramsden Award, and the University of Rochester’s Andrew Eiseman Award. It was shortlisted for the Glenda Adams Award and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Thornell was named one of the Best Young Australian Novelists by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2011.
First published in 2016
Copyright © Kristel Thornell 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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ISBN 9781760293109
eISBN 9781952535017
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Cover design: Emily O'Neill
Cover photography: Lee Avison / Trevillion Images
Contents
1 SECOND DAY, 4 DECEMBER 1926
2 SECOND DAY, EVENING
3 THIRD DAY
4 IN THE WINTER GARDEN BALLROOM
5 TORMENT ME NO MORE
6 FOURTH DAY
7 TWILIGHT SLEEP
8 THE MISSING WOMAN
9 FOURTH DAY, AFTERNOON
10 THE BLUE HOUR
11 SIXTH DAY
12 SIXTH DAY, EVENING
13 SAN CARLO WHARF
14 AUGUST 1926 TORQUAY
15 A VERY ELUSIVE PERSON
16 BRAIN FAG AND DEBILITY
17 SEVENTH AND EIGHTH DAYS
18 1922 TSS AENEAS
19 SAUDADE
20 TENTH DAY
21 WHAT HARRY TOLD TERESA
22 TENTH DAY, AFTERNOON
23 TENTH DAY, EVENING
24 NIGHT-TIME VISITATION
25 LAMENT OF THE NYMPH
26 FIRST DAY BERKSHIRE
27 TWELFTH DAY
28 1914 TORQUAY
29 TWELFTH DAY, EVENING
30 CONUNDRUM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1
SECOND DAY, 4 DECEMBER 1926
Harrods like the Titanic on a grey sea of winter daylight and nothing for it but to go aboard. Only she couldn’t budge, couldn’t even recall what she needed to purchase. The last hours had been simple. Now she was emptied and dopey again, her limbs dull, everything woolly. A woolly gentleman was holding open the door. Had he noticed her soiled shoes? A lady brushed past Agatha, all polish and ease. She was slim, dark-haired and piquant in an uncommonly well-tailored magenta dress.
A foppish young man at her side drawled, ‘Teresa, darling, I’ll see you in half an hour.’ It was clear that he wasn’t her husband.
Teresa wasn’t terribly young, Agatha thought, but she had not surrendered to age. She gave him a farewell peck and was so magnetic, heading for the open door, that Agatha with relief was able to follow her through it. And she continued to trail Teresa, the two women sauntering among covetable merchandise, Agatha pausing when the other paused and even, after a while, trying some of her gestures, which were wonderfully collected and free of anxiety. They stroked pairs of kid gloves, eyed hats with chin tilted. The gap between them was closing.
Until at last—they were each holding a copy of the same white silk shawl specked with silver—their eyes met. They didn’t smile but regarded one another candidly before turning away.
It wouldn’t have been seemly to go on following Teresa, so Agatha rested her bags from the Army and Navy Stores on the floor and fished in her handbag as if for a shopping list. She chanced on the ring with the loose setting that an age ago she’d meant to have fixed. Surely this wasn’t the purpose of her visit to Harrods? It wasn’t a pressing task, though there was always a sense of rightness about seeing to repairs. When she looked up, Teresa with her magenta glamour was gone.
Not entirely, for Agatha discovered traces of the other woman in her own stance and walk, which remained light and fluid as she retrieved her bags, straightened her spine aristocratically and proceeded on to the jewellery department.
She wavered only when the jeweller was examining her ring. So thoroughly, his touch delicate and humane, that she wanted to cry. She is all right. Saying it might make it so.
He reassured her that the mending would be a straightforward matter. ‘It’ll be as good as new,’ he avowed.
She swallowed. ‘Good, excellent.’ Her voice still wanted practice.
‘Where shall we deliver it to, miss?’
He must have studied her ring finger, a region that was his professional territory. She was taking a holiday from her wedding ring.
‘Where?’
‘Yes, miss, to what address?’
She hesitated. She was determined to get herself to Yorkshire, where she and her husband had intended to go for a little getaway, before. ‘To Harrogate.’ She remembered an advertisement she had seen. ‘The Harrogate Hydro.’
‘Very good, miss. And to what name?’
Behind her a voice exclaimed, ‘Cracking!’
‘Teresa,’ she said firmly. ‘Teresa . . . Neele. Mrs.’ He would find this odd, given her bare finger.
She made her way shortly after to King’s Cross, with the stealth of a spy, of a magician with his vanishing trick. For then it was all as light and silky as breathing in another’s breath.
2
SECOND DAY, EVENING
It was almost seven o’clock when the stone edifice appeared finally in the taxicab’s headlamps. The Harrogate Hydro was a dignified hotel, congenially discreet behind scrawls of ivy. The driver’s conversation had limited itself to the unlikeliness of snow in the coming days but she had remained indifferent to the weather throughout her long journey. She climbed out, requiring no assistance with her eccentrically meagre luggage, and stood before the entrance. She was acutely thirsty. Could this place be the very thing?
Indoors, she found a hospitable fire burning, inviting armchairs, a fine grandfather clock. The lulling promise of the setting was mighty, though like tea-leaves it would take time to infuse and unfurl.
‘Good evening, madam,’ a woman of a certain age greeted her, solidly but well made and preserved, with a stolid air and a head of intricately braided dark red hair.
Concentrating, she introduced herself and declared interest in a room.
‘How long do you plan to stop with us, Mrs Neele?’
The question might have been put in a language she once knew. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said, at length. ‘That will depend. I’m awaiting word from friends.’
‘Very good, Mrs Neele. Your luggage . . . ?’
‘Just this. You see, I’ve not long arrived. From . . . Cape Town. My things will be sent along.’
She signed the visitors’ book dutifully, Teresa Neele. A wavy signature, light and silky.
Redhead now revealed herself as the proprietress and too professional for chitcha
t or cross-examining. Teresa was thankful. A chambermaid accompanied her in the electric elevator, one floor up.
The room and its robust, unflinching furnishings would do well. She’d be at her ease here, wouldn’t she? The maid got a fire underway, and went to see about tea.
The window gave onto the drive and the road the taxi had taken, with its line of smart stone houses. The North. She had been living on the numb side of amazement, but she felt then a remote shiver of adventure. She divested herself of the barely recognisable coat purchased in London that morning—just that morning?—at the Army and Navy Stores, along with the small case, a nightdress and a hot-water bottle. The maid returned, and departed.
Solitude and tea! Oh yes. The flames started to give off heat. She had only the clothes she wore and it was tiresome not to be able to change, yet she determined to go down to dinner like any traveller. Her memory for food was usually as faithful as her memory for conversation, but she struggled to call her last meal to mind. Something at King’s Cross? Egg-and-cress sandwiches? She avoided the looking-glass on the dresser, reckoning on fatigue’s shabby treatment of her face. And she’d postpone a letter to her husband until after dinner.
As she lay back into the animal contentment of a hot bath, she noted a twinge of lumbago, and quite a severe pain in her right shoulder or the side of her neck. Though these began to fade and she saw the view from the train again. The winter fields all lilac drifts of spindly trees and dark mists of hedges in the advancing night.
The only other tardy diners, she observed from a small table in an expansive, gracious room, were an elderly couple appearing to wear age rather pertly and a man who, while seated at their table, maintained a certain apartness. Dark brown hair, barely silvered. Eyes set deeply in a face between thin and gaunt.
The younger man, likely a year or two older than she was, that was to say, than Teresa, negotiated what seemed to be a vast pudding carelessly. He was also reading a newspaper—a stratagem for independence—with a studious but unstuffy aspect. Then he raised his eyes and nodded to Teresa so gravely and minimally that, had there not been a fugitive smile for confirmation, she’d have doubted having seen it. Her dormant hunger was roused. She ate a rabbit pie and two helpings of bread and sublime butter with relish. It was tasty, well-prepared country food, and she congratulated herself once more on having reached the Hydro. She only wished she had a book to hand. She toyed with the idea of taking some alcoholic drink—quite unlike her, a loather of the flavour of the stuff. She wasn’t particularly fond of the drinker’s bonhomie, either, which could be somehow eerily self-pleasing. But she’d sometimes regretted her aversion and it might have been a notion of ceremony or play-acting that was attractive that evening. Still, her travels had left her in enough of a stupor as it was, so she contented herself with water.
The elderly couple stopped by her table as she was relinquishing knife and fork. ‘Good evening,’ said the woman, amiably formal. ‘I am Mrs Jackman. And this is my husband. We were adjourning to the drawing room. I don’t suppose you’d care to join us there for coffee?’
Mrs Jackman conferred on Teresa that radiant, almost beatific smile that some older women possess, while Mr Jackman nodded chivalrously. Teresa wondered how to express her intention to retire to bed with diplomacy. However, she had noticed their vain efforts to persuade the younger man to accompany them to the drawing room, their eagerness for company only too plain. She herself had gone a long time without it, and maybe this fact too swayed her resolve.
‘I’m a widow,’ she said once they were seated, as if to clarify her position.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ The good lady blinked in stately sympathy. Her husband rearranged his serviette on his knee. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking,’ ventured Mrs Jackman tremulously, as if constrained to put the question, ‘whether you have any children?’
Feeling a touch in jeopardy, Teresa studied the pretty white flowers in the vase on the chimneypiece. She might have stood and left them with a vague excuse, but it was in her character to be socially meek. She sipped her coffee.
‘My baby girl also died.’
‘No!’ exclaimed Mrs Jackman, spellbound. Her husband’s leather armchair creaked as though communicating in its old, softly world-weary way a pity he could not formulate.
Mrs Jackman: ‘Illness?’
‘Accident.’
The older woman asked no more. She would imagine—vividly, judging from her brightening, suddenly ageless eyes. Treacherous flight of stairs, unfortunate motorcar, rebellious horse. Mr Jackman’s despondent effort at a smile suggested he’d had experience of grief. It was commonly observed that men wouldn’t speak of emotional suffering. Indeed, it could be as if they had no words for it. They were still waiting on the arrival of that particular script. In fairness, Teresa too had come to distrust words, since Mummy had gone. What did anyone have to say about pain? What could be said?
This was their annual cure at the Hydro, Mrs Jackman explained, taking the burden of the conversation onto her own capable shoulders. She elaborated that they did not approve of diet meals and eschewed them. All three relaxed a little. The Jackmans wanted to know if this was Teresa’s first visit, and assured her she’d enjoy Harrogate. It was so restful, and beneficial for rheumatism. There was excellent exercise to be taken, many charming hours’ occupation to be found in Valley Gardens and on the moor. The healthy air made you ravenous and devoted patrons of Bettys Café Tea Rooms. They were mad for the Royal Baths. So well appointed. The firelight endowed their cheeks with a renewed rosy youth.
‘We try it all,’ stated Mr Jackman.
‘There’s the nicest Turkish bath suite you’ve ever seen,’ his wife emphasised. ‘You come out as fresh and bewildered as a babe. We must go together.’
‘I’d like that.’
The prospect of receiving curative treatments, of some self-indulgence, was not unappealing. Such a lovely word, convalescence: susurrating, dove-grey, respectable but steeped in sanatorium romance. Oh, to lounge and be coddled.
‘It’s decided. And you’ll be taking the water?’
‘I think I will.’
‘Pretty strong flavour,’ offered Mr Jackman. ‘Like old eggs. Or gunpowder. Not that I’ve tasted gunpowder.’
‘Salty. But you grit your teeth, you get used to it. There’s no question about it,’ Mrs Jackman ended, ‘it’s rather nice to be taken care of.’
A short while later, Teresa approached the foot of the staircase, about to retire to her room. The solitary man from dinner was passing in through the hotel’s entrance with a slow thoughtfulness, as if concluding a leisurely stroll. Was he given to reverie? It could be a mistake to assume a poetic spirit in a man, and to trust him, of course. But she lifted her hand, more a reflex than a conscious action. He returned her wave quite naturally. He had the face of someone you might have met before, with those deep-set eyes that appeared to be brown. Meeting them, she had to reach abruptly for the banister. It was the exhaustion, slinking up on her.
Without further delay, she would write to her husband.
Who was very much alive, contrary to what she’d said. Even if it wasn’t often owned to, it was reasonable to conceal aspects of oneself. Imitating the great icebergs was a prudent modus operandi—only the tiniest portion exposed and the rest of your leviathan self gliding beneath the waterline.
She seized the pen with a pang. How she longed to again be juggling sentences like so many flashing knives. Busy at that, she was always in her right mind. Like a child perhaps, being bold, but prettily, for the most part, and so quite getting away with it. However, this was a different business altogether. Peter was not at his usual station beneath her writing table: no gentle aroma on the air of wire-haired terrier, no torpid barrel of him warming the hollows of her feet. The pen was poised like a person, just beyond the threshold of a room, who has forgotten the task they came there to complete. For hours she’d been scrabbling aridly in her mind to compose a letter. Now she was
compelled to test its possible parts sotto voce before she could risk entrusting them to paper.
Darling.
Do forgive me for my last rushed note. I was in something of a state. You know I haven’t been myself. A cure will be just what the doctor ordered, then I’ll be as good as new. The idea of our reunion sustains me. Know that, darling.
None of it was right. Her pen had been thoroughly infected by the ugly inadequacy that had stalled her Wretched Book.
Sleep refused to snuff her out in a nice bed in the north of England. Her brain hummed on. She had difficulty taking deep breaths, something she’d learned to recognise as the presage of a bad night, that and the crouching sense of catastrophe. A brutal malediction, a brain not able to rest when it most needed to, resisting comfort. If it were to be so, there would be no mercy, no place to hide at all.
3
THIRD DAY
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am,’ the maid said, quietly but decidedly. ‘I’ve woken you. Shall I draw the curtains and have a fire going?’
‘Oh, please. Is it late?’ She rose onto her elbows, narrowing her eyes at brusque daylight. Teresa had slept—solidly. Astonished, she observed the springy mind that lifts from true rest. Recalling last night’s unease, she felt washed clean, hugely improved.
‘Ten o’clock, ma’am.’
A grasse matinée! The nightdress she’d broken in had a scent of pristine flannel. This and the regenerative sleep gave things a hopeful Christmassy aura.
Without being pretty exactly, the maid was youthfully willowy, her darkish blonde hair captive beneath a bonnet. At this age she could get away with violet depressions under the eyes, fatigue for now a touch of spice. Those eyes did not look at Teresa quite directly, yet they paid attention. They were keen. An observant eye wasn’t necessarily ideal in a servant. One rather preferred them less alert, at times.
‘Would you care for a newspaper, ma’am?’
Was there something strained in her tone? Teresa wasn’t ready for the wide world. ‘No. I don’t think so. Thank you.’
On the Blue Train Page 1