On the Blue Train

by Kristel Thornell

  ‘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 Afr
ica 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.

  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 slippe
ry 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.