He leaned forward slightly, recalling the feel of her in his arms when they’d danced. But had she recoiled? She’d reassumed that cordoned-off countenance, suggesting barred access to a space both desolate and charged.
‘Will you be coming to dine?’ she enquired.
‘No. I had something at Bettys not long ago.’
‘Ah. Good food. It impressed me. Self-respecting food.’
‘Yes, rather.’
She looked towards the entrance of the hotel. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you in the Winter Garden Ballroom, later?’
He oughtn’t to dance with her that night. He was weak, uncertain and susceptible. What he needed was the comforting canniness of the mystery novel he’d begun. Books could be so much more soothing than people. ‘Don’t think I’m really in the right frame of mind. But you will promise me a dance for tomorrow night?’
‘I don’t know that I should be making promises,’ she said. ‘It’s getting cold.’
‘It is.’
Were her words meaningful? Had he made her suspicious? Rain hadn’t come. The dog walker’s precautionary mackintosh a vain gesture. The sky by this time was onyx black, a thin shiver of moon upon it.
11
SIXTH DAY
The chambermaid’s knock.
It was a romantic dream at the rudder of which a semi-waking awareness had sat for spells. Leaving it was like lolling in a pool of sun, then being ejected into cold.
Odd, to be waking once more with vibrant, detailed recollections of dreams. By nature she was a great dreamer, but in the past months any dreams (other than those starring the Gun Man) had been as shallow as barely unlikely digressions of thought. Inadequate pseudo-rest that left her brain grisly and aggrieved. Offended with the world and all the more so for the suspicion that she had in some manner sabotaged herself. In Harrogate, however, deep sleep was returning. She lay still, reluctant for that particular sweet dream to dissolve.
In came the chambermaid with tea and newspaper. A wedge between Teresa and the warmth she’d been forced from. She said she’d take breakfast in bed, resentful of the young woman’s efficient movements and elastic spine. Yet there were dark dips still under her too-penetrating eyes. She might know what it was to be betrayed by sleep. She probably had a child, several, and must be an old intimate of fatigue. How had she kept her pleasing waist? Her days would involve a great deal of hard work, of course, and possibly letdowns that may or may not be blunter than suffering. The beauty not quite managed was receding, a treasured friend waving on the quay, a shimmer in the distance. Light hair discolouring, silver strands creeping in like minor but disruptive misunderstandings. When the husband’s eye roamed, she’d know it. Teresa continued to take exception to her energetic gaze.
Once she had departed, Teresa could dress. No penance of the green jumper and grey stockinette skirt for her today! Horrid baggy knits as slovenly as old skin . . . No, for her, hurrah, there was fresh tweed and a white blouse and a maroon jumper. Even new stockings and knickers.
Her shoulder seeming improved, the arm just a fraction weak, she gave a twirl and in the dizzy middle of it heard stately music—being played, she supposed, on Harry’s gramophone—that she might have identified if it had been louder. He had been a little off the last times she’d seen him, ill at ease. (Better not to give this much consideration. She was keeping her thoughts silken, thin.) Last night he preferred not to dance with her. Though he had wanted to be near her while they stood in front of the hotel. She was certain of that as a woman is of such things.
She put her head out of the window to gain an idea of the northern day. Sleep appeared to be sharpening her senses. Wood smoke and the opalescent silver and cream flecks of slate roof tiles. Clean, pristine cold. Light so fleecy it might have been filtered by cloud, when in fact the sky was quite clear. Even the stone of houses had a plush look, as if it were actually some stiff velvet or moss. No seagulls here, of course. No sea tang.
Two young people were down on the drive. His way of turning to her and arranging the scarf around her neck declared they were lovers. The girl’s shiny brown head rather towered over him. It was the dancers—from when? The night she and Harry danced. The boy gazed adoringly up at Birthday Girl, and then noticed Teresa.
She withdrew, vaguely panicked. She sat down at the writing table to see whether she could dispatch the postponed letter to Mr Neele. A quick note might be sufficient.
But no development, apparently, on that front. No cooperative phrases to be found, the right ones still skulking behind a sort of dental-surgery woolliness of perception. When she muttered the simplest line aloud to coax it along (Darling, I think of you constantly), it came out ironic and mocking. The very touch of the pen against her hand was irksome. Hateful. Would she have been able to get something out on a typewriter? The music she couldn’t decipher went on and on. She wondered if it had somehow woven itself into her dream, as sounds sometimes intrude on sleep to reinvent themselves in a dream form. It might have been interesting to see Harry, but it was no doubt preferable to keep herself secluded this morning.
She needed an occupation, however. Not being able to write, nor even to think about writing in any diverting, strategic way, was so boring. And worse, more menacing, was the unkempt feeling it gave her, as if nothing could be taken charge of and made shipshape. If Peter were with her, she’d be less het up. Oh, for a piano! Yesterday, her spirits were high. Today the restlessness seemed fragile, and she didn’t want to become agitated. What she could, should, do was go out to buy more clothes.
She achieved this, rather admirably, with a cardigan to show for it—mauve, her favourite colour—from Henry Moore’s. And a black silk evening dress from Louis Copé, because she wouldn’t be able to get away with just the georgette for long.
Then she carried on to Valley Gardens. She’d liked it there. Her ulterior motive may have been to see whether a saunter would help to raise the Wretched Book from its mortuary sleep. Walking had been the best approach to a vexatious literary problem before. She’d unearthed many a useful piece of a puzzle in so doing. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t worked through adventures while wandering alone through nature. The habit became formal, as it were, on Dartmoor, thanks to Mummy’s characteristically capital idea that she go for a fortnight’s holiday there, to the Moorland Hotel, to finish her first novel. But she had spent the better part of her childhood strutting around the garden and little wood at Ashfield—threading through ashes whose sighs imitated the sea’s, circling the wondrous beech—lost in a kind of disconnected but fervent conversation with . . . whomsoever she chose. Virtuous or more curious girls her own age, captivating adults, cheeky anthropomorphic animals. Quite entertaining, frankly. Though there had been none of that for forever, as the stubborn Wretched Book was denying her such company.
And launching, now, her brain back into thoughts of Shy Thing and the morning’s dream.
She had lost her heart to him during the Empire Tour. Her husband, not an imaginer, wouldn’t have suspected it. Shy Thing was the youngest of the Brood. She had been acquainted with them in Sydney and was invited to go and stay on their gargantuan Queensland cattle station while her husband and the major undertook a dull, arduous tour of country towns.
She was always insatiably greedy for fruit, but the varieties served in the Brood’s homestead, at breakfast, for dessert, at any hour, made English fruit seem commonplace and rather flavourless. Their pineapples, oranges, grapes, sugar bananas and mangoes had a gaudy sweetness, almost candied. Given the chance, she’d have devoured mangoes like chocolate truffles, face running shamelessly with juice. She had to control herself. They were a frisky, warm, amusing family, the Brood, people who expected to enjoy themselves and therefore did. The three girls managed to be extremely attractive—each one more svelte than the last—and forceful. A dazzling combination. How did they pull it off? Teresa was also drawn to all four of the brothers, who treated her with an endearing reverence that h
ad nothing to envy in the most gallant Englishman. The siblings evidently shared a great deal of affectionate mutual regard, and she was struck by how they continually showed it. Touching, giving and receiving kisses. She watched, beguiled.
Her true crush was the quieter, musical brother they called Shy Thing. They related to him as to a jolly idiosyncrasy. It turned out that he and Teresa had in common inferior riding skills, and this fact, which she’d confessed to him, caused him to plead for her to stay behind one afternoon at the homestead in his company instead of having to embark with the others on a strenuous horseback expedition across the scrub.
‘She has promised to sing for me,’ he told the Most Svelte One, who conceded but smiled with a hint of mischief.
When the bubbly party had gone, Shy Thing turned to Teresa in the growing quiet and said, ‘Shall we?’
She approached the piano. He sat at it, lifted the lid, and drew back his broad shoulders. His seriousness usually made him appear almost middle-aged among his livelier, more physical siblings, and for the first time, though he was just as sober as ever, she noticed his youth. He was, after all, more than a decade her junior. Barely a man. Was it his concentrated energy as he prepared to play that was boyish? Or the reddish-brown hair falling into his eyes? Just that extreme undamaged pallor of the skin beneath a smattering of mahogany freckles? She was ordinarily much less nervous singing than playing the piano, but she had a flittering then of stage fright’s elemental doubt, the sense of nearing a trapdoor in herself.
His hazel eyes on her, eyelashes quite golden. His dusky-rose lips were rather self-consciously set. It darted into her mind that he might be stimulated by her age, by her greater experience of the world. Even by her being a married woman.
Fixing her gaze on the gracious ceiling rose, she sang. His accompaniment was understated and confident. They’d agreed on a program, Purcell’s ‘Passing By’ and Metcalf’s ‘Absent’, to get her going, then Cherubini and Puccini, beginning with the aria from Medea, ‘Dei tuoi figli la madre’. Her voice wavered slightly initially but was, she hoped, tolerable. She couldn’t tell. To be singing again like this, so excited, brought back her adolescent self in Paris, the one poised to become an opera singer enrapturing devoted crowds in the best theatres of Europe. It was as holy as ever. Jumping free of the mundane. She was half abandoned to the music, and aware of him beneath the melody, plumping her up. They performed many pieces to an audience of no one. She’d experimentally commenced the soprano’s part from the finale of La Bohème, ‘Sono andati? Fingevo di dormire’, when something made her pause.
The house was silent, with that rural silence that can seem timeless yet final. His widowed mother had gone to call on a neighbouring estate, and the servants gave no signs of life. It started to rain. A downpour arriving as if from nowhere. Stunning after the preceding lull, the sound frightening upon the corrugated-iron roof.
‘Storms here are first rate,’ he said, his usual modesty replaced by a kind of pride. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’
She followed him to a red sofa in a bay window, where they kneeled side by side on brocade cushions. The deluge was a vast gunmetal sheet stretching the entire length of the long field behind the house. Closing them off from any more distant landscape, it had a stupendously implacable appearance.
‘Will they find shelter?’ She meant his siblings, though she found it difficult at that moment to think of them.
‘Oh, they’ll be all right,’ he said carelessly. ‘They’re used to being out in all weather.’
‘You’re quite a band.’
‘Tell me about your brother and sister.’
During her singing, he’d seemed to listen to her, or to his own playing, with tremendous fixity. His voice now suggested this same scrutiny.
‘My sister is brilliant,’ she began awkwardly. ‘What energy. A natural storyteller. Uproarious—screaming! She once dressed up as a Greek priest to meet someone off a train. And while in Paris being finished, she accepted a dare to leap from a window, which involved landing on a table at which ladies were taking tea. She can and will do anything. She’s uncommonly intelligent.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘The Clever Sister. I have three of those.’
‘The Clever Sister.’ She smiled, emboldened. ‘And then there’s the Adventuring Brother. Just returned to England from Africa with a long-suffering native manservant. He’d had various schemes there for years. He’s quite intransigent but mysteriously charming—hugely popular, actually. Very expensive tastes. A great hunter. He and Clever Sister are both originals, you might say. Personalities.’ She paused. ‘I was the unremarkable one. The painfully diffident simpleton without anything amusing to say.’
He shook his head incredulously but said, ‘Me too. I’m the overshadowed child in my family. Receding into a corner with his books and his music. Oh, they love me, of course. Indulge me. They just don’t take me overly seriously.’
She pictured him as a little boy, humming muffled tunes by the cool glass of windows. ‘You appear to be such good playmates, though. I was practically an only child. Well, Clever Sister is ten years older than me and Adventuring Brother eight, so when I was growing up they were always away at school. I adored my nurse and my governess, but I played alone mostly.’
‘Were you lonely?’ In spite of the casual lightness with which he asked this, the question made her think he’d have climbed into her mind with a lamp, if he could have done, to investigate the dimmer regions of her character. There was a private flavour to their talk, and something of the interrogation.
An astounding crack of thunder intervened then, like an immense dry thing exploding, and incredibly the flood increased. The absolute opacity they gazed on reminded her of certain storms in Torbay. A rush of craving hit her, for Devon, she thought. They might have been sea voyagers in that house, so cut off were they from anything else.
She mumbled, ‘I was glad to have Mummy to myself, I guess. And after my father died—I was only nine—she and I became closer still. We were everything to each other. Ashfield is, was, our world. In any case, I had fun on my own.’
‘Ashfield is your family home?’
She nodded, looking around the long music room. ‘This reminds me of what we called our schoolroom.’
‘Your mother must dote on you.’
It had been such a long time since a man had made her feel her own significance, listening to her as if any detail of thought or memory she might value was consequential. After the early days of courting and especially once a married life went on for some years, one listened less fully to one’s companion, on the whole. Perhaps it was less troublesome to view that familiar person as an eccentricity not requiring fathoming. Or as some lesson mastered long ago. This attentiveness was irresistible. ‘Yes. Dear Mummy.’
He put a hand to the window, long fingers spread. She caught a young man’s odour she recognised and was at the same time taken aback by. ‘She loved your father very much?’
‘Oh, utterly. She was his cousin by marriage, but they grew up in the same household, more or less as brother and sister, though he was much older and spent a lot of time away being a young gentleman in America and France. She’d worshipped him since she was a girl.’
The window glass had clouded from his heat, and when he took his hand away it left behind an exaggerated, wraithlike record of itself. Beyond this, torrential water glowed greyly. She was much less sure of her charm than she had been at twenty. She was growing discomforted.
‘Were you jealous of your father?’
‘Jealous? No. I don’t think so, no.’ Too thoroughly affable a man, too well satisfied with everything that befell him to have been a threat. He had possessed a mental transparency, the complacency of one not disturbed by an unremitting imagination, perhaps—or trust, an earnest reliance on people that made his life peaceful. At least until the money and medical worries came along. He had thought, having never worked but only enjoyed himself, that fortune and health were an
inexhaustible capital to the management of which he needn’t pay active attention. She had known that Father and Mummy would not share such dreamy, unpredictable conversations as mother and daughter braided between them. ‘I may have felt a little betrayed when he became ill. Isn’t that like a child? Oblivious and selfish! When I think of how she must have suffered . . . I was always happy enough at Ashfield, of course.’
Nevertheless, even the house had been slightly changed, grown somewhat insecure. She had a sharp image of herself striding about the garden, unsure of how she would ever go about being one of life’s dramatis personae, petulantly declaring, ‘I will not be bored!’
Witnessing an Australian storm, she said, ‘He was ill more and more. They were secretive about it. It seemed an adult, grim business. I saw that my mother was afraid and possessive of him. I don’t know that I’ve said all of this to anyone before.’
Either he asked it very quietly or the rain was particularly loud at that moment. To understand him, she had to turn and study his lips. ‘Not to your husband?’ It was the first mention of him.
‘Oh, he doesn’t ask many questions.’ She smiled, strained. ‘Or much like hearing about feelings. He hates any talk of sadness or illness. Anything gloomy.’
‘Ah.’
A silence formed, thickened by the rain enclosing it. The piping on the cushion was pressing through her skirt into her knees. She wondered if it would leave a branding, as a crumpled bedsheet will, a pattern that might take some time to fade. A clock sounded from afar. Count the chimes: it was three thirty—three-quarters of an hour after the expected return of the riding party. She remarked on this. Shy Thing appeared unconcerned.
On the Blue Train Page 8