On the Blue Train

by Kristel Thornell

  He found this fluster fetching and remembered again the wispy little wave she’d accorded him the night before. ‘Intrude by all means.’

  He should have let her be. He’d learned how wrong it was to see a woman as a conundrum that could be resolved. He tried to focus on the infatuated lovers, who were the only remaining dancers. The others must have realised how they paled in comparison.

  He had an urge to be honest and succumbed. ‘The official answer would be a hernia.’ He took an ample sip of brandy. Endeavouring not to sound doleful, he continued, ‘The real, hopelessly unmanly answer is that I sometimes lose my nerve. I get quite—dispirited. When I’m like that I need a break.’

  She opened her mouth partially and closed it again. He thought he saw panic in her expression, as if honesty stipulated honesty in return. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Breaks are important. There are times when it’s wiser to get away.’ She cleared her throat softly. ‘From it all. The Jackmans aren’t here? I’m assuming you know them.’

  Over one temple, a glint of silver in her reddish hair. Thirty-four or -five, surely. At least.

  ‘You were right to assume. I believe they had a dinner engagement. Fine people.’

  ‘Yes, very. I wanted to tell them I’d been to the Royal Baths on their recommendation.’

  ‘I’m a habitué myself. Addicted. Nothing like a Turkish bath to clear out the cobwebs. Enjoy it?’

  ‘Rather. I may almost have fainted, at one stage.’

  Harry couldn’t have said just why but he began to ask himself whether they mightn’t have something in common. Was Teresa Neele in her reused green and grey outfit somehow lost? In that slow voice, camouflaged, could there have been ruin?

  The lovers were waltzing. The girl laughed gleefully and then gave a little yelp and a grimace, probably at the boy standing on her toes. One, two, three, she was chanting secretively when they passed his table. Teresa Neele moved her spoon and sipped from her second cup of mortal coffee. He laboured to suppress the vision of her kneeling, along with the vague strife in his stomach. Belatedly, he considered her ring finger. A kind of internal shudder. Bare of wedding ring. And the Mrs Neele? She wore only one band—platinum, by the look of it, a setting with a small diamond—that sat loosely on her thin finger.

  ‘The Jackmans told me you’re from South Africa.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Her eyes on the gentle chaos of the waltz.

  ‘It must be a fascinating country,’ he persevered. ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  She continued to pay painstaking attention to the dancers, and it got into his head that perhaps she’d never been there either. Harry was disconcerted and somewhat thrilled to think she might be lying. It was as if they stood on either side of a screen through which he could only make out her shadow. Was she (and he was in all likelihood being too imaginative, his mother’s words echoing through hollowed years) a woman who didn’t know how to be honest—not out of deceitfulness but because she took human affairs as a quagmire about which precious little could be said with any exactness? Was she extremely sad?

  He was asking, ‘Where have you been happiest in your life until now?’

  Her gaze jumped. A perverse, too-intimate question.

  He forged on. ‘Try not to think about it. Just say the first place that comes to you. Me, I suppose London. Or Trieste. I’m Australian and, don’t get me wrong, my native country . . .’ He’d lost his momentum.

  ‘I’d never have suspected your origins. Your English is truly admirable.’

  Such comments always annoyed and somehow vindicated him. ‘Well, it is our mother tongue, you know.’

  ‘Of course, yes. It’s just that the Australian accent usually tends to be—forgive me for saying so—noticeable.’

  ‘To an English ear? So you’re familiar with it?’ His instinct would have been to respond peevishly to the assumptions now compelling her to recast him as a colonial, but tonight he was disinclined to. It was the persistent image of her on her knees, perhaps, or her oddly opaque attitude—that screen between them. ‘I do seem to pick up accents easily. Well, the French. And the English, as you kindly observe. My wife, my late wife, was Italian. I speak little Italian, and badly, but Valeria used to say my accent was deceptively good. I can’t detect any trace of South Africa in your accent, by the way.’ Her accent was, in fact, phenomenally plummy. The speech of the English Quality often sounded to him like a caricature, both repellent and intriguing.

  She took a slow sip of coffee. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that your wife has passed on.’ A drawn-out silence. Her long hands, sculpturally narrow-fingered and pale, were curved around her coffee cup for warmth or to convey composure. At last, she said, ‘You must be nostalgic for Australia. I hear it’s lovely.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I’m always thinking of Devon, where I was born. My early childhood was spent there. Then we moved to South Africa—I suppose my accent was already well established. But Mummy and I were so happy in Devon.’

  This sat before him. A green field nudging the sea. Teresa Neele in little-girl form, tentative, near translucent like Dresden bone china. Her face flushed with the self-importance of grave play. A breeze lifting her silky hair—blonde, beginning to melt into brown. A proud woman standing a carefully monitored distance away, looking on with hawkish Victorian eyes, oracular. Both woman and child with regal bearing and considering the closeness of their alliance eternal. Mummy should have known better, that everything would always be changing.

  ‘I was wildly happy as a child.’ After a moment’s pause, she returned to the lagging, limp rhythm to which he realised he’d become acclimated. ‘There are different sorts of happiness, though, aren’t there? The city of Nice comes to mind. Being in Paris was wonderful also, in its way, but I was at finishing school there and studying quite a lot. In Nice I distinctly recall looking at the light and understanding I was free.’

  He was about to proffer something flippant—which he didn’t, however, consider false—about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of bringing together an anchored kind of happiness with a more unbound, when he thought to say, ‘Funny you should mention that. A coincidence. I felt rather free in Nice, too.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I spent some months there once, before the war.’

  ‘Mimosas. Balconies looking out onto transparent blue water.’

  He rallied. ‘I almost felt guilty there, to be leading such a comfortable, simple life. Some afternoons, I’d doze off on a great rock by the sea.’

  ‘The French know that meals are Events. Starting with your morning café au lait and croissants—how I loved the almond ones, with orange blossom water in them.’

  ‘God, yes.’

  ‘And those preserves. So solid with crystallised fruit you can’t spread them in the usual way.’

  ‘They stand to attention. So you’re a voluptuary, Mrs Neele?’

  ‘With food, at least. And flowers.’

  He raised his eyebrows. To slay a silence that, despite their stillness, he experienced as squirmy, he said, ‘And here we are in the grey north of England.’

  They laughed ruefully.

  She cocked her head. ‘I love England too. Vous parlez aussi bien le français que l’anglais?’ Her French wasn’t in the same league as Harry’s, but it was reasonably nimble, the Englishness in it hardly stiff, really quite sweet and affecting.

  ‘Je fais de mon mieux.’

  ‘You do well when you’re doing your best. I was going to be a professional musician, back then.’

  His stomach muscles were loosening their grip and he was savouring her company. ‘One was going to be many things. What sort?’

  ‘A pianist, or an opera singer.’

  ‘Hence the study in Paris? And what happened?’

  ‘I had famous teachers. I worked hard at the piano, practised an awful lot. I wasn’t bad at it. Performance was the problem. I didn’t have the right temperament. That’s what my Austrian tea
cher concluded.’

  ‘And the singing?’

  ‘That I could do in public, for some reason. I wanted to be an opera singer very much. To sing Isolde . . . But later an American friend of my family, who knew people at the Metropolitan Opera House, listened to me and told me, compassionately but honestly, that I didn’t have sufficient voice. I’d only make a concert singer. And that didn’t interest me. The end of a dream.’ Her tone was mild.

  ‘What was wrong with concert halls?’

  ‘That would have been . . . a compromise. Maybe I was a snob. I really should be retiring. I’ve sleep to catch up on.’

  She appeared uneasy at having spoken of herself. She stood to leave, her height rather overwhelming, as the band commenced a charleston.

  He emptied his glass and lurched to his feet. ‘It’s been pleasant, chatting like this. Oh, “Yes! We Have No Bananas”. What does that mean, anyway?’

  He thought a ripple of hilarity, even hysteria, passed over her face.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest.’

  Unable to resign himself to her going, he plunged. ‘Perhaps we could dance?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t. I’m not even in evening clothes.’ Thin fingers patting at the green jumper to prove it.

  ‘We won’t let that stop us.’

  They looked at one another. To his astonishment, he saw that she would let herself be persuaded.

  ‘It is quite a merry song.’

  Actually, it wasn’t a question of her deferring to his impulse. There was a playful tremor in her smile. Something insubordinate. They drifted to the dance floor to take their place beside the indefatigable lovers. He was relieved to note that the boy’s footwork continued to leave much to be desired, and wondered optimistically if the chap could possibly be an inferior dancer to himself. Harry was lousy at the charleston and found it somewhat irritating. But dance music sometimes buoyed him, even if his body didn’t easily fall in with its caprices. He was forty years old. Fortunately, with age, his monumental physical shyness had lessened. The evening seemed to be obeying some unorthodox logic.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Neele. They shall not intimidate us.’

  ‘Teresa,’ she said as they came closer together. ‘Please call me Teresa.’

  ‘Teresa.’ Out of the corner of his eye, the blurry continent of her cheek. Soap. Faint, sour-warm feminine perspiration. Dear Lord. His heart was as keyed up as if he’d been about to deliver a long-anticipated lecture to a priggish learned society. They clasped hands and his free hand found her back, hers coming to rest hotly on his shoulder. Their knees knocked together as they began, and she quickly retracted hers. ‘Forgive me,’ Harry apologised. ‘I’m terribly out of practice.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘No, you dance very well.’

  ‘I was better when I was younger.’

  Their fellow dancers nodded to them conspiratorially.

  ‘The birthday girl, I believe,’ Teresa said.

  The next time their knees collided, there was no rapid retraction and no apology. He might have been trying hard not to laugh, or not to fall. They avoided noticing whether they were being watched. At one point, Harry caught the saxophonist’s eye, but he was poker-faced.

  By song’s end, they were breathing heavily. Smiling, they separated, though he continued to feel the phantasmal pressure of her hand on his shoulder and a suggestion of the contour of her spine against the palm of his hand.

  ‘I must be going.’

  ‘Mrs Neele—Teresa,’ he said quickly, ‘would you care to come for a walk with me tomorrow in Valley Gardens? That is, if you’re not engaged.’

  ‘A walk?’ She hesitated. ‘Tomorrow . . . I’m not sure about tomorrow. Maybe . . .’

  As she was turning away, he entreated her clownishly, ‘Beware of coffee. And don’t forget Nice.’

  Her smile was sheer but not unfriendly. Harry remained in the ballroom, witnessing her retreat. He sat back down at his table. Aloneness pooled around him, while the Hydro Boys terminated the evening with the customary Blue Danube, to which the young lovers waltzed. The waiter insinuated that Harry might like another brandy. He acquiesced. He thought the saxophonist was observing him, though he tried not to meet the man’s eye again. It appeared to Harry that the bandsmen only made a display of indulgence towards their audience, knowing the guests comfortably classified them as provincial and of lower orders than their own. Whereas maybe it was the other way around—the audience the performance, some curious combination of well-to-do and poorly, for the musicians’ supercilious enjoyment. The music subsided and he applauded profusely, staring past the glass glossing over the night.

  5

  TORMENT ME NO MORE

  Back in his room on the second floor, Harry considered the decor, somewhat at a loss. Objects hinting at a lone man’s appreciation of easeful hours. Roll-top writing desk at which instructive, affectionate epistles could have been penned. A bottle of tawny port and another of Dry Oloroso sherry, a carafe of virtuous spring water, two clean, inverted glasses, all neatly aligned on a small table. On another table, a gramophone. A residual fire, coals crimson and orange—the colours of passion, or hell. Tartan dressing-gown slung over the homely wingback chair. Single bed, readied and fat with its duvet. It was sadly comical, and no doubt so predictably, contemptibly human, that when Valeria was alive, for all that Harry had loved her, he’d often secretly suspected himself of being a bachelor at heart. And now with her gone, he tended to feel like a would-be married man on whom the manacles of solitude have been imposed.

  With his foot, he pushed his suitcase further under the bed to smother its whisperings of transience. He removed his shoes and served a little sherry. He quite fancied himself as a drinker, though he wasn’t much of one. Even for that, he might have needed a sturdier personality. He took just enough liquor to smudge the edges, to bring it all into a slight blur, and only of an evening when his brain was at its most overwrought. He’d not reached the desired point tonight, not quite, not yet. He sipped.

  It was true, what he’d said to Teresa (he liked her first name—like a sibilance of wind in trees—as much as her last) about having been dispirited. The past two years had been, no two ways about it, vile. After Valeria’s passing, he’d no longer required the pretence of literary efforts. His blue funks had changed, assuming a midnight hue. Become so frequent, he’d stopped remarking when one ended and the next began. Furthermore, he’d hardly minded.

  Until six months before, when he found himself in a particularly bad state. Rather, it was his landlord, Mr Vaughan, who discovered him. Later, the good man would explain he’d taken the liberty of entering Harry’s flat because the postman had complained that letters would no longer pass through the clogged mail slot and bottles of milk were multiplying at the door, rancid and despoiled by birds.

  Mr Vaughan had knocked awhile, and waited, and knocked again. He called out. Then, with his spare latchkey, he cautiously turned the lock. Slow to open, that door. It swelled with humidity, sullenly intent on refusing any passage in or out. He gave it an insistent tug that provoked a harrowing wail.

  From inside the flat, Harry heard this too. In fact, it was aeons since he’d heard anything so clearly. Peculiar—but recognisable, intimate. It had something of the strange purity of an infant’s squeal. Stirred into lucidity, he registered that it must have been Flash, Valeria’s cat. He still never thought of the beast as his. They shared a tolerably tranquil mutual annoyance.

  No sooner did Mr Vaughan have the door ajar than the cat sprang through it, with the reflex savagery of a powerful spring released, and that shriek, so eloquent, of famished rage. Mr Vaughan thought to pursue the cat and persuade her back, but when he turned to go after her she was already streaking around a corner, absolutely ungovernable.

  ‘Mr McKenna?’ he called once more through the open door, as proper as ever.

  This time Harry deciphered his voice. He even pictured Mr Vaughan wiping his shoes on the mat before stepping
with regretful dignity into the hall. ‘In the living room,’ Harry’s own enfeebled or just horribly bored voice informed him. The front door closing, and footsteps. Then the final door between them opened, the long, dark shape of the man appearing against dim light. He half turned back, maybe towards the glass panels of the front door, which allowed that trickle of radiance. The ringbarked light of hallways. He coughed.

  ‘Mr Vaughan,’ Harry saluted him casually, as if he were arriving fifteen minutes late for a regular rendezvous.

  ‘Mr McKenna, I’m afraid we may have seen the last of your cat.’

  ‘Valeria’s cat. Flash.’

  ‘Oh.’ He cautiously penetrated the gloom Harry inhabited.

  ‘Micio means “puss”. In Italian. That’s how you call a cat—micio, micio. Puss, puss.’

  ‘Ah, right.’

  ‘I’m more of a dog man.’

  Full daylight struck Harry a low blow. Mr Vaughan had drawn the curtains. Becoming painfully accustomed to this befuddling violence, Harry saw that his landlord was attired in the usual loose-fitting suit on a frame so slender and protracted as to seem desiccated, a vanilla pod. Ironic that deliverance should have arrived in this form, for though Mr Vaughan was a subtly spruce individual, his handsome sunken cheeks were rather sepulchral, belonging more to the Reaper than the angel. Harry wouldn’t have been excessively surprised to see him equipped with cape and scythe. Nothing would have surprised Harry very much right then. From his prior dealings with Mr Vaughan he’d gained the impression of a man who gave things measured consideration but not undue weight. This seemed such an awe-inspiring balance that, while Harry knew very little of him, he respected him (not the most common sentiment to harbour for a landlord). He even wondered whether Mr Vaughan wasn’t something of a clandestine sage. There was a movement of air, a window having apparently been opened, too.