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.’
‘I was sleepy. And anxious to get back to a book. But today I feel so full of energy. The ghastly water doing its witchcraft. Or this place. Harrogate is, I’m convinced of it, a tonic. And the shopping is delightful. Today I’ve decided that I need a shawl.’
He didn’t presume to know Teresa. How could he, when she was barely an acquaintance—an acquaintance who was possibly lying to him, to everyone at the Hydro? But this talk was, he sensed, wrong coming from her. To his ears, it had a slightly manic flavour.
‘Indeed? I might be able to advise you on shops,’ Mrs Jackman offered timidly.
‘I’d like that. What was the clue?’
‘The clue? Oh. Typical, now I’ve forgotten it . . .’
Finding the situation unreal, he returned to his newspaper. A Mrs de Silva, described as a family friend, said that the missing woman was a kind, sweet person, devoted to her husband. She had been severely afflicted by the loss of her mother, who had recently died . . . This had left the authoress poorly and unable to write.
Plates were taken away and Teresa, pink-cheeked, pronounced, ‘Delicious.’
Her eyes finally met Harry’s and she smiled, just a quiver. In that moment, he was certain she was her. To be the only one who knew her true identity was electrifying. It created a curious subterranean intimacy between them. He smiled in return and suffered from an urge to reach across the table to touch her hand, which seemed stranded. He was also entertaining a fantasy of catching her alone somewhere, cornering her and obliging her to explain everything to him.
‘I hear you have every kind of dangerous animal over there,’ Mr Jackman was saying to him.
‘Hm? Oh, in Australia? Well, I haven’t been back in over a decade, but, yes, the last time I checked.’
‘Harry grew up on a farm,’ Mr Jackman explained to his wife. ‘Livestock?’
‘Fruit orchard.’
‘Ah, what kind of fruit?’
‘Cherries, mainly. And some plums. Stone fruit.’
‘You have all that over there? I suppose you do. We’re fanatical about cherries. And I gather you have snakes that will kill you?’
‘Indeed.’
Harry was awarded a fascinated smile.
Mrs Jackman and Teresa left the dining room, bound in a tête à tête. Mr Jackman paused as the two men made to follow. ‘One last question about the Australian wildlife. Is it true you have a spider that . . .’
‘Yes, yes, it will all kill you.’
By the time they’d arrived at the foot of the stairs, the ladies were not to be seen.
He encountered another newspaper soon after. On Crescent Street, just outside the Royal Baths, a gentleman stood absorbed in a Daily Express. Harry halted. Staring right at him from the front page was Teresa.
It wasn’t at all how he had grown used to seeing her, and once again the image was grainy and shadowy, yet in some way he thought it came closer to precision than the last photograph.
She was accompanied by a female child. Of six years or so, he guessed. Had to be her daughter. Very pretty child. Their faces alongside one another, the child was notably prettier than the mother, with features neater and finer. She was more attentive to the camera, too, though her demeanour was somewhat cold. They were both sombre, but the mother looked weary with it, and aware of looking weary. What a thin, deflated mouth. Eyes a little hooded. The long, strong nose verging on hooked. Roman? Next to her daughter, she was slumping morosely into middle age. He had to recognise it: into plainness. Was that what Teresa had run from? This diluted, defeated version of her face? He found that because half of her true name was her husband’s, he was disinclined to stop thinking of her as Teresa Neele.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
Harry gave a start. The gentleman had lowered the screen of his newspaper. He was elderly and moustachioed, and Harry had the sense that they were taking part in some comical turn in a music hall performance. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Lost, are you? Wanting directions?’
‘Yes, thank you, yes. The Royal Baths. That’s what I’m after.’
The gent grunted. ‘Right under your nose.’
While lowering his body fatalistically into the frigid waters of the plunge bath, it came to him that not only were Teresa and Agatha likely one and the same, but the woman in question would do something desperate.
He gasped. Stood bolt upright, the shocking water at his waist, his lungs astonished. He remembered his negligent banter about desirable methods of taking one’s life and the gentl
eness of her response. Her description of a lovely last day, of swimming off to meet the end. It hadn’t occurred to him to carefully consider the consequence of her words—to ask himself, indeed, whether she could have designated the Hydro as the last hotel at which she would ever be a guest. Had she tried to put him off the trail by declaring she’d only countenance for such purposes an exotic locale like Casablanca?
‘Excuse me,’ said a very handsome young man, not apologising but merely confirming his right to the space Harry had been occupying. He proceeded to plash and prance, undeterred by the iciness of the water, executing swimming strokes, then shaking water from himself like an unruly pup, laughing. Exuding health, athleticism and exuberance. ‘Aren’t you cold, standing still like that?’ he thought to ask.
‘I daresay I should be, but I’m quite resilient to the cold.’ Harry barely kept his teeth from knocking against one another. He turned away and exited the pool that he’d hoped would brace his mind.
‘Admirable—I mean, at your age,’ the younger man opined.
He was possibly sincere. He didn’t look subtle enough for irony. But Harry wasn’t in a mood to take a generous view of the insolent Adonis. He secured a towel around his waist, his body wanting to quake from the cold. The boy was performing some lazy form of callisthenics that permitted him to show off an enviable musculature and sensuous grace. How many would lose their hearts to him? Poor silly dears.
‘Age isn’t my exclusive property,’ Harry said, confronting him. ‘Wait and more will come to you. You won’t need much patience. Provided, of course, you don’t meet with an accident before then, there’s nothing on which you can rely more.’
And with this attempt at reinstating his honour he departed for the Caldarium, where he laid himself out on a deckchair like the sanatorium exhibit he was, one arm draped rather effetely over his eyes. He was chilled to the core.
Yes, it followed that Teresa spoke so readily of self-harm because this was at the forefront of her thoughts. It wasn’t her earlier queer languid manner or maybe sadness that had tipped him off, nor even his discovery of the notoriety she was earning in her escape from her detestable husband (assuming she truly was Agatha), but her brightness that morning at breakfast. Her ebullience, her almost aggressive gaiety. It appeared to Harry that this had to be a mask. And possibly—was it plausible?—a decoy to distract observers not only from her identity but from her serious plans. If grief over her mother’s death had left her ill and incapable of literary work, what role might this have played in the unusual measures she had taken? The loss of a loved one affected a person in unexpected ways. He had found her lucid, if erratic and novel—however, what if the illness mentioned had taken its toll on her mind? Should she have been laughing, eating with gusto in company and going about shopping when all the while the police and the press were after her, hunting her libidinously, and anyone at the Hydro who picked up a newspaper might have summed two and two, and known it?
His tension spurred him into a cold shower. What was Teresa planning? He was sickened to have arrived at her own death, that ultimate flight from any and all versions of one’s face, as her probable next move.
He didn’t return to the Hydro after the baths, because he didn’t know how he would have deployed himself there. Had he run into Teresa, he could hardly have questioned her. If she’d been willing to accompany him on another walk, as he’d have been tempted to propose she do, pretending that he hadn’t discovered her secret would have been difficult. The desire to plead, Tell me why, or, Don’t do it! might have overpowered him. And speaking his mind could lose him her trust, even conceivably cause her to run away once more. So he wandered about.
On Parliament Street he came to W.H. Smith and entered. Three of her books were in their circulating library.
‘Oh, she’s the one that’s gone missing.’ The lady who found them for him was affected by a marked rounding of the upper back that did not prevent her from somehow moving harmoniously, horsey and courtly. ‘She’s surely dead, poor thing. Dreadful for the family. Everyone will be wanting these now. I warrant it’ll make her reputation.’
Teresa’s other name on the books’ covers seemed an affront.
He proceeded to the Stray, where he began, while meandering along, to examine one of the novels. The cover was rather theatrical: a bear in a man’s suit appeared to be removing—or was about to hide behind—a human mask, whey-faced, raffish, vaguely lecherous. Harry smiled over the first lines. And, surprisingly quickly, was ensconced within the story, where he spent some hours, by turns drifting on foot and sitting.
A dog bounding into him returned him to himself some time later. An eager, pure-faced terrier. Remembering Teresa’s passionate glance at the corgi, he stooped to pat the animal, which became increasingly excited until his master, an indeterminate sort of man in a mackintosh, forcibly reclaimed him. It wasn’t raining, though the opaque sky was threatening. This man would be at home in the rain, and not just because he had dressed for it. His features already appeared nebulous and forlorn. He bid Harry good evening with a woebegone, slightly reproachful tone. The terrier extended a reluctant farewell. It was chilly and Harry had rushed out without his coat. Had he left it at the baths? He was also, he found, half starved but inclined to continue with the novel.
He was installed at Bettys a handful of minutes later, reading as he awaited poached salmon, the intrigue rolling up around him like the light sheath of a stocking over a woman’s leg.
He emerged into early evening, beneath a sky of that drastic heartfelt blue, the dawn of black, which had always seduced him. He purchased The Times. The column of interest was in the middle of the paper.
The Colonel hadn’t received any news as to the whereabouts of his wife.
In their search for her, the police had dragged Albury Mill Pond.
Someone said he had seen Teresa at Milford railway station, a few miles south of Godalming.
This unfamiliar geography began to take on hazy contours in Harry’s mind. He saw a grim sort of marshland, spectral with fog.
He was nearing the hotel and it seemed that Teresa was standing in front of it. At first he wondered whether the vision was a trick of his imagination. But no. Drawing closer, he saw that she was wrapped in a luminous white shawl, its fringe trembling. He stopped before she had seen him, and rapidly folded the newspaper around the books he was also carrying. Hers.
Why was risk exciting? Resisted, the drive that should cause a person to flee worked like an intoxicant. He came forward. Her slanted head suggested contemplation of the sky.
‘Agreeable time of evening,’ he said. ‘My favourite time of day, in fact. The blue hour. Would you call that Prussian blue? Lapis lazuli?’
‘Beautiful.’ They considered the sky together. ‘God, I don’t know what I’d call it. Good day, Harry?’
‘Quite tolerable.’ He smiled. ‘And yours, Teresa? I see you found a shawl. Very handsome,’ he added awkwardly. ‘It suits you.’
‘Oh, this.’
Ducking his compliment, she was toying with the ends of the shawl, swirls of moonlight flashes. Really, how absolutely different she was here, tonight, from the woman in the Daily Express picture. Now she was glamorous, vital. He still thought there was a giddiness to her, something like euphoria—or was he only seeing his own?
She said, ‘I’ve come out for some air, because a ridiculous thing just happened to me inside. I’d gone into the lounge. I thought I might see the Jackmans there, or you, but there was only an old man in an armchair by the fire. Elegant, with a cane. Quite magisterial. But he was so still—like a statue—I thought he was asleep. I approached and he didn’t budge. I came closer. His eyes were open behind his glasses, though being so perfectly immobile he had to be sleeping or, it occurred to me, dead!’ She laughed. ‘Nothing stirred, the whole room seemed under an enchantment. As I was thinking of bending over and putting a little mirror under his nose, something in that vein, he lifted his eyebrows rather drolly. You
should have seen me jump.
‘“I assure you I’m with the living, if only just,” he declared. I couldn’t think of a word of excuse, I was so ashamed. I blurted a sorry and rushed out. You see how frightfully I lack social grace.’ She laughed again.
Harry laughed too, disoriented. He hadn’t heard so many words in a row from her since they’d met. ‘Yes, strange when you think how slight the difference is between a man and a corpse.’
Her eyes were back on the darkening sky and she didn’t appear in the mood to follow him down this philosophical avenue.
‘Social grace is probably highly overrated,’ he went on. ‘And are you well, otherwise?’
‘It’s been a pleasant day.’
He’d begun to acquaint himself with her literary accomplishments. The tale he was reading was hardly Serious Literature. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d had the grandiose pretension as a young man to dream he might produce. But it didn’t take itself for that. And it was clever. It ushered you in, as if into the reliably cheerful house of a spry rascally great-aunt. Teresa had to have a nimble, astute mind and considerable strength of character. Did he still think she could be plotting her own end? He found today’s volubility zany and a tad brittle. But she did appear to be capable of amusement, and resilient, somehow. Someone who could enjoy herself. Even if she was horribly sad underneath all this, was he arrogant enough to presume he could do anything about it? He was suddenly impotent and tired. His mind repeatedly showed its limits. He was not astute or strong. He tottered in darkness.
Was he even so sure that he had before him the escaped authoress of the book he had been reading?
‘What is it?’ She had caught his change in spirits.
‘I’m just rather exhausted. I had a long walk on the Stray.’
They were quite near to one another. He blinked and saw the photograph in which Agatha’s lovely daughter so upstaged her. If Teresa were to fall towards him in this instant, as Agatha allegedly almost had into the man who’d come upon her by Newlands Corner, he would catch her. Say into her warm neck, What set you on the run? Confide in me.
On the Blue Train Page 7