Buoyed by the fleeting triumph of such success, Teresa said, ‘There is some precedent for this. My golf game is disgraceful, yet I once won a women’s golf tournament.’
She wished she hadn’t mentioned golf. Golfing greens had for so long divided her from her husband. How could fields prohibiting rambling and picnics not be corrupt?
‘And where was that?’
Eyes on her. ‘South Africa. I’ve lived in South Africa for many years.’
‘Cape Town?’ Her partner in victory might have been a clandestine prince escaped from the Bolsheviks, but she was not really in the mood for chitchat.
‘Yes.’
‘You must tell us about South Africa. I’ve always wanted to go. The lions . . .’
‘Yes.’
Someone was asking, ‘Does anyone sing? Will anyone sing?’
‘They want someone to sing—to give the Hydro Boys and the Lady Entertainer a rest and, I suspect, the chance to go and quietly find something to drink. Will you volunteer?’ He was amused.
‘Absolutely not.’ She wished Harry were there.
‘You don’t sing?’
‘No. Yes—a little. But I wouldn’t here.’
‘Perhaps if I accompanied you? I play the piano, though I am also modest. We could make each other brave.’ He held her gaze, immodestly proposing a song, and more.
‘I don’t think so.’
If she knew how to be fast, she could slip him a note—no, not even that would be necessary, a gesture would do—and later, after everyone was in bed, there would be a constrained knock at the door of her room. Or Teresa would go stealing along corridors, a dressing-gowned silhouette in the gloom. Being slimmer now, she might look rather sinuous. What was stopping her, after all, from going to a man’s room? One could learn to do anything. There were so many men’s rooms, along so many corridors, corridors radiating out around her like spokes from the centre of a wheel.
‘I’m sure I can convince you,’ he said.
They’d separated themselves from the table, but one of his friends, whose countenance had grown mean during the match, interpolated, ‘Another game! We demand revenge.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think it’s wise for an amateur to stop while she’s ahead.’
He was reluctant to accept this and hung by the Russian’s elbow. ‘That woman,’ he went on in a disagreeable, teasing tone, ‘who has disappeared—they say she sent a letter to her brother-in-law. Telling him she was coming to a spa in Yorkshire.’
‘Who?’ the Russian asked.
‘The authoress. Who went missing.’
‘Oh, there was something about that in The Times.’
‘It was the Daily Mail I saw. What do you say, could she be here in Harrogate?’
‘Unlikely.’ The Russian clearly wanted to close the topic and return to a private conversation with Teresa. ‘The police don’t believe she is in Yorkshire, do they?’
‘What’s your opinion, Mrs Neele?’ enquired his tenacious friend.
In that stuffy masculine air it was imperative that she keep her thoughts as slight and cool as sheets of silk. ‘You know, I haven’t been following the story.’
‘No? It’s interesting, though,’ he insisted. ‘I think her husband killed her.’ He regarded her. ‘Are you scandalised? Do husbands do such things in South Africa?’
A touch muzzy and incredulous, she replied, ‘Excuse me. I’ve just decided to sing down in the ballroom.’
The Russian was surprised but not unpleased. ‘Indeed.’ From his smile, it was evident that he considered his other unspoken proposition accepted, too.
What a scenario. An age since she’d sung in public. Then suddenly a dream of singing, and this appeared to have conjured a real performance. She should have been mortified. But she was cavalier as they marched down the stairs and into the Winter Garden Ballroom.
The Russian wasn’t required, because there was already a gentleman in position at the piano, with wispy fair hair and a mien both apologising for his presence and grateful. He was introduced to Teresa as Mr Bolitho. All this blurring by, and the gathered hotel guests merely a kind of stickiness she would not adhere to.
‘Angels Ever Guard Thee.’
They were off.
Not at all as it was with Shy Thing. Yet the music did enter her and mercifully carry her somewhere. Restful and rather fun, the anonymity one could have singing, the flesh displaced by something fresher and less delimited, like spirit. The only interference came towards the end, when her attention caught a little, and then slid over—as silk might on a ragged fingernail—the figure of a man in the doorway. She no sooner noticed him than he withdrew from the room.
Harry.
The song over, the Russian’s stance was assured and expectant. Teresa smiled coolly without meeting anyone’s eyes.
She had stridden quickly from the ballroom and it was ten thirty by the grandfather clock as she took to the stairs. Reaching the first floor, feeling clammy, she saw Harry. He straightened himself and moved along the corridor towards her.
She realised she had half expected, or hoped, such a meeting would occur, even as she had been working to avoid one.
‘I was just . . .’ he began and shrugged. ‘You sang.’
A seamlessness, as if they were continuing a conversation only briefly suspended.
‘You heard? Had my usual dance partner been present at dinner, I might have danced instead.’
‘Yesterday evening, if you recall, you did refuse to promise him a dance tonight. I’m sure you were better off without him, anyhow. Not much of a dancer, from what they say.’
‘They’re wrong.’ The corridor was empty aside from the two of them. Singing was audible from downstairs, and the creaking of stairs or floorboards. ‘The Jackmans feared you weren’t feeling well. They didn’t see you all day.’
He laughed bleakly. ‘Whole days often go by without anyone seeing me.’
‘That can be reposeful.’
‘Yes. Or pathetic.’ They glanced away from one another. ‘I was at the baths. Lying low.’ He brought a hand to his forehead wearily. ‘I wanted to talk to you. You sang very beautifully, by the way.’
‘Thank you—I don’t know what I was thinking. You wanted to talk to me?’
Brusquely, he asked, ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘What do you mean?’
He was indicating her wrist. She turned her hand, uncomprehending. The outer edge was darkly outlined. Blood. Dried blood. Queer. She had a moment of embarrassed confusion, before recalling her fall behind the Pump Room. She must have scraped her hand, coming down. She’d bathed before dinner and not noticed anything. Maybe playing billiards had exacerbated the cut. She could have been bleeding while she sang!
‘Oh, I had another comical incident today. Slipped over on wet leaves. Mr Jackman was my knight in shining armour.’
He took a handkerchief from a pocket of his jacket. She accepted it, and dabbed once or twice ineffectually at the blood.
‘It’s funny that blood should be so . . . scandalous. Seeing it, I mean. When it’s constantly running through us, the very thing that keeps us on our feet. And yet the slightest visible evidence of it is sensational. Gothic horror.’
‘The red? And the fact of it being outside us, where it shouldn’t be?’ He held her eyes. ‘That, I think, is what makes it an affront, a travesty.’
‘If you see enough of it, though, you get quite blasé. That happened to me when I was a VAD.’
‘You were a nurse during the war? Well, I’m sure being afraid of blood is related to a primeval and very reasonable survival instinct—survival is the key, isn’t it?’ There was a sternness to his manner, something flinty that came and went. It put her on edge. ‘You were a VAD in England?’
She was looking at her hand. ‘The same colour is beautiful, say, on an autumn leaf. Or a lovely dress.’ If she were confusing Harry with his countryman, Shy Thing, could that have caused what was developing rapidly be
tween them—this intimate tone, the pressure of the unsaid? Certainly, Harry was as attentive to her as the boy had been. But he didn’t talk like an Australian. He was older, too, of course, and less handsome—at least in the common way. Perhaps he was also less desperately idealistic, less like Mummy. Less rapacious. More frugal.
‘You can talk to me. I realise we haven’t known one another long, but you can, if you need to. You remember our conversation on . . . coffee and Balzac? Methods for dying?’
‘Of course.’ Having taken it out of her handbag on the stairs, Teresa was holding the chain from which her room key dangled, oscillating slightly.
He came nearer. For a moment, they gazed at one another. She had not shared such a look with anyone in years. His brown eyes and overly lean face seemed anguished. They got at her. She wasn’t sure of his intentions, but nor was she, for that matter, of her own. Here in Harrogate, what was rational action? And good, and bad?
‘Teresa?’
She had the swaying feeling one could have becoming self-conscious about standing immobile. She was still a little larger than life from the performance downstairs, but that power was leaching away. She had not been so aware of her body in—how many years? She was both in it and marginally above. How very strange it was to have a body, so material, inescapable, and yet animated by energies that could not quite be grasped. She surveyed her room’s brass doorknob, the pleasantly papered wall, with its border of vines, the electric light sconces, the lift’s grille, the Turkey rug leading the padded crimson way along the hall. All looming as large and portentous as the furnishings of a hallucination.
‘Your poor hand.’ He stroked where she had hurt herself.
In her blood that was so dark when spilled and dried there was a great suspense. She only leaned a hair towards him. He crossed the remaining distance at once, but then hesitated. Teresa’s lips came to rest against his. He accepted the kiss as if lost in thought, or willing himself sedate. She felt his chest expand as he inhaled, a set of fine bones adjacent to her own heart’s cage. She drew back.
‘Teresa.’
He touched the side of her face. His fingers at her temple, thumb behind her ear, warm palm cradling her jaw. Next their mouths were meeting again and they had given themselves to something fuller. It was like being borne on a wave in Torbay. Limpness and vigour.
Recovering herself somewhat, she half whispered, ‘Going down a well? What do you say to that?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Drowning in a well.’
He seemed to shrink away. ‘As a means of dying?’
‘Yes. Harrogate should be the very place for such a method.’
Just then a pair of old ladies crested the stairs, tittering breathily as though at a mild impropriety.
‘Well, goodnight, Harry,’ Teresa exclaimed, stepping away from him. ‘Thank you again for returning my book.’
They nodded to the ladies. One raised a waggish eyebrow and the other waved indecisively before passing Harry and Teresa.
He approached once more. She was cautious, now. She had not been afraid to kiss him, only conscious of her fretful blood. But she could almost have drawn a man she barely knew into her room! She could not trust the vacillating body being returned to her. Hotels distracted you from your usual life, offering that choice of corridors radiating out in a circle, breathing into your ear that you could take any one of them, be whomsoever you decided to be. ‘I must to bed.’
‘Teresa, please.’ He came closer still. ‘You’re her, aren’t you?’
She must have jumped. A different fear.
‘No, please don’t be frightened.’
She had turned and clumsily fitted the key into the lock. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, as steadily as she could. ‘Who?’
She had believed herself incognito here, smugly pleased with—indeed, half convinced by—the story of the elegant, capable widow vacationing alone. The freedom of it had gone to her head. She had exposed herself horrendously. Allowed a man to come near her and find her out.
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone. It’s of no importance to me. None. That’s not why . . .’
She was turning the key, opening the door.
‘I’m sorry. Please! I just wanted you to know you could talk to me, if you wanted. Or not, of course.’
She was in the doorway of her room, inside at last, and she turned back, trying to smile. Her face was trembling. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re referring to.’
‘I want to be your friend.’ He looked distraught. ‘Whether or not you confide in me.’
She lifted her hand and he attempted to take it.
‘Trust me,’ he insisted plangently.
Tugging free, Teresa folded her arms. ‘Trust a man?’ She managed more or less to chuckle. The bitterness was real enough. ‘’Night, Harry.’
‘There are many sterling reasons not to trust men, I know.’ His hand on the doorjamb as if he would prevent her from shutting him out—but he removed it quickly. ‘Couldn’t agree with you more there. Frankly, I myself have hardly represented my sex as well as I might have and should probably warn you away from me.’ Curiosity stopped her from closing the door. ‘However, I do believe I’d do anything to help you.’ He paused, gazing up at the ceiling. ‘Teresa, I’m falling in love with you.’
It was those you presumed you could trust who revealed themselves as Judases. Harry’s eyes were brown, richly dark, and somehow deeply set in a face of hollows, but how not to remember the suave transparent blue of the Gun Man’s stare? The temptation to believe him was insidious. One always wants to believe oneself loved, and is hasty to take this bait.
‘I think it would be better if we didn’t meet alone again. Goodnight.’
She shut the door, registering the vibration unleashed by this action in the building’s walls and in herself, as if she were part of that structure of interconnected rooms and corridors.
She was walking back and forth, unnerved. Could Harry be a Gun Man? He knew who she was.
And claimed she could trust him, despite the fact that he had not behaved well in the past. Said he was falling in love with her.
Who exactly did he think he was falling in love with? Teresa Neele, whom he had known for a few days after she materialised from the blue at the Hydro, shared some chats with him, two dances and a walk? Was it love at first sight, then? Flattering to her vanity—but if he knew who she was, wasn’t it more likely he was smitten with the idea of a Mysterious Woman? With notoriety, maybe, the dirty excitement cooked up by newspapers? She flinched. (Stay clear of all that, it will make you sick again.)
Who, furthermore, was she attracted to? Was she really so taken with Harry? Or was it the memory of Shy Thing and Australia? A romantic dream making a halfwit of her. She reflected, Will we never know just what we desire, and if this is real? All terrifyingly unreliable.
She was discovered.
She was shaking. Would Harry keep her secret? She realised she still had his handkerchief. She’d been wringing it in her hands as she paced and the thing was utterly twisted. Rusty flakes of blood upon it. She went to the basin and ran warm water over her hand. She soaped and studied the cut, which could barely be made out. She washed Harry’s handkerchief, inhaling the lily scent of the soap, quaking.
An Australian had once reminded her of herself as a woman, and the past seemed to be repeating itself. How was it that one’s erotic life came to be buried? She had never stopped admiring her handsome husband, but along the misty path of marriage much was obscured, and that certain lack had come about for which retribution was being exacted. Her sensual impulses, it appeared, had been diverted into a deep place, where they had bided their time. Lambent.
A question of fault? Of going cold and staid? Her husband had not known how, perhaps had not cared, to reach the deep place. This had so dispirited her, she had to admit, that she had made no sincere effort to guide him there. She’d grown resigned to making love as though with a cl
umsy understudy in place of the leading man. Her own attempt at leading lady was certainly second rate. Heart not entirely in it, body an interloper displaying counterfeit emotion. Physical love had often been a question of settling on a serviceable part to perform, and fumbling to pull it off.
The sodden handkerchief appeared bluish white and compromised. Oh God, Teresa had sung before an audience. She’d played—admirably at that—a merry game of billiards! These things all at once seemed almost as shamefully immodest as the kiss. It was like that shuddering point in a particular sort of dream where you abruptly observe, Dear me, I’ve just gone down the high street without a stitch on! She wrung the water from his handkerchief violently and hung it over the towel rail, smoothing it.
Take care of chores, at least. Remove the black silk evening dress. Brush teeth, wash face with the crème de lys soap. Apply face cream, drawing the excess down the neck. Change into welcoming flannel nightdress.
The night was clear, she saw from the window. That moon could have been fully swollen, houses and trees and the curve of the road were so absolutely defined. Inside the room, too, the furniture looked burnished by moonlight. The bed and the wardrobe, the humiliating writing table. The indispensable books on the bedside table. Beside those the bottle of sleeping draught she might yet need. Shivering, she went to the fire.
She’d told herself she was waiting to be found, awaiting her husband’s arrival. The Russian’s nasty friend was right: before her own journey, assuming this would do the job, she had sent a letter to her husband’s brother advising him she was going to a Yorkshire spa. But the message she had believed clear had proved cryptic (things so upside down). Or her husband had not given the message as much attention as she had hoped. He had not come, anyhow. In the meantime, she had been found, yes, but by someone else.
Harry, whom she had kissed as Teresa—whose husband was dead—might kiss. Like a free woman, that is. Was she free?
She had run away.
Brought suspicion on her living husband. Mr Neele. Created rather a bad mess. Thrown a teapot. (Only because he refused to see reason, insisting he wanted a divorce. Hideous snake’s hiss of a word, divorce.)
On the Blue Train Page 10