On the Blue Train

by Kristel Thornell

  ‘So, you don’t love him anymore? That’s why you’re breaking it off?’ it occurred to him to confirm, at the last minute, as they hastened across the square to the rendezvous at the Caffè degli Specchi.

  Her cheerless smile struck him as the most articulate expression he’d seen her features assume. ‘I’m breaking it off because I’m not happy, of course.’

  Giacomo Petri was at a table by one of the long windows giving on to the square. He rose, seeing her. They kissed as she and Harry had just kissed, and he continued to stand while Valeria removed her coat, gloves and scarf. A little behind her, Harry managed to disentangle himself from his own.

  ‘This is my friend Harry,’ she said in English.

  Giacomo was confused and perhaps disappointed, but he nodded and politely extended his hand. ‘Hello, pleased to meet you.’ His English was uncertain.

  Harry knew that he was much older than Valeria, married and the father of children. Still, he looked fairly young, credulous and defenceless. If physically nondescript, he was very well groomed, and his olive-skinned face gave an impression of softness and assiduous personal upkeep. Impossible to tell whether he suspected that something unfortunate was about to befall him.

  They switched to Italian, but had hardly begun to converse when the waiter came to take the order. When he’d gone, Valeria gave a low, deliberate speech, Harry considering his knees. The coffee arrived. They did not touch it. Harry drank his rapidly: singularly good. Short bursts of questioning from Giacomo, one or two concise answers from her. A quiet, desperate-sounding appeal from him. Harry was sharply aware of the absurdity of his own position. Once he caught Giacomo staring at him in a manner that could have been challenging, imploring, or merely curious. Harry tried for a congenial, philosophical demeanour, but soon dropped his eyes. Some time after, he saw Giacomo move to take her hand—she refused to allow it. Only later did it cross Harry’s mind that this gesture must have been a risk. They would have been accustomed, in public places, to dissimulating any signs of particular closeness.

  The full force of Valeria’s beauty became apparent as she was denying it to Giacomo, downing her espresso like a nip of liquor before standing to signal that it was all finished, as far as he was concerned. Her eyes as black as her hair, dignified in their determination. The exchange could have lasted fifteen minutes.

  Giacomo stood too, very quickly, as if afraid of missing his chance to do so. She conceded his final ritual kisses and he suffered the farewell like a wooden mannequin, arms inert at his sides.

  He didn’t volunteer his hand again and Harry didn’t blame him. Harry let himself look at Giacomo’s face properly just once. His eyes were fixed and glossy but it was especially from his listless mouth that you guessed at how deeply he was affected. There was no show of anger.

  They were quiet for some minutes after leaving the café. At the road running along the sea they turned right towards San Carlo Wharf where, bizarrely, they had met just the night before. A man with an air of the eternal student passed them, slowing to study Valeria approvingly. Indeed, her eyes were still very vivid and she walked with prowling elegance. Her movements were like her beauty more generally: you could fail to notice them, and then notice them. Abruptly she came forward, as it were, from the background. Harry never knew whether she somehow operated such changes on purpose. Ignoring the admiring man, she looped her arm through Harry’s. He glimpsed moisture on her cheek.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I told him I would go to London to be with you.’

  ‘Won’t he know, if you don’t?’

  ‘I’ve broken his heart, he says.’

  He pictured Giacomo’s emptied face. ‘Poor chap.’ He thought of the years during which they had been intimate. A nibble of jealousy. ‘Can’t dwell on that, though, can you?’

  ‘Thank you. For helping me.’

  ‘We’re getting married and I know so little about you,’ he said lightly. Mentioning their fictional engagement pleased him.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Oh. Was your childhood happy? Sorry, silly question.’

  Their pace grew dawdling, her child-thin arm holding him tightly, her hand virtually on his ribs, his arm brushing her compact body.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh? Well, could you tell me . . . some memory?’

  She mused. ‘When I was small’—staring at the sea, she appeared to be reciting—‘for carnival we dressed up, and my mother brought us to Piazza Grande.’

  ‘That sounds like fun.’

  ‘One year I was a queen. My mother had made me a beautiful costume. It had a very long dress, red and gold, that almost touched the ground. She made me promise not to run. I was so proud. Then I ran. Maybe I forgot. I was running fast through all the streamers and the confetti, chasing someone—or they were chasing me, I can’t remember—and I tripped. The dress was ruined. I looked down and it was ruined. Torn. Dirty. I could see my ankles through a big hole. My mother found me, and said, “What have you done?”’

  ‘How sad.’

  She pouted. ‘Now you.’

  ‘Me? You want one of my childhood memories? They’re quite boring. We lived on an orchard. I moped around, when I could get out of working on it.’ He reflected. ‘I walked back and forth along the fence line, speaking French to myself. Highly adventurous, you see. I seemed to spend hours staring at the tops of some handsome old gum trees that grew in the valley below. I listened to magpies.’

  ‘Mag . . . ?’

  ‘Magpies. A kind of Australian bird.’

  ‘They sing?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘You’d have to hear them. Melodic, pitched lowish. It’s a fluted warble, somehow watery, and it goes with the approach of dawn, or twilight. Sorry, it’s indescribable—though lovely. Nearly human, I sometimes thought.’

  ‘A nice memory.’

  He laughed. ‘Is it? I do miss that sound.’ He was losing his heart to her.

  ‘Will you go back to Australia?’

  ‘To live? Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘London is a good place to live?’

  ‘Yes—for me, anyway. There’s always something interesting to look at. The people, all sorts of people. You can lose yourself in a crowd if you’ve a mind to. Hear foreign languages. Potter around in the parks. Excellent parks. Like the gardens of country estates, or open fields. Smashing old pubs, like homey sitting rooms. As fine, wayward cities do, it irks you, and then calls to you like a siren.’

  Proceeding at a crawl along the jetty, they were almost at the spot where they had first spoken.

  She said, her tone analytical, ‘We’re getting married and you’ve never kissed me.’

  His breath caught in his chest. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re timid like an Englishman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She released his arm and he was cold where the faint warmth of her had been.

  ‘You might come to London, you know, to visit,’ he said to cover his embarrassment. He was acting at being a man. He was a maladroit boy.

  ‘To visit you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She kissed him. In the whipping wind that made him want to latch on to her, Valeria’s mouth was prime-coffee-scented, apathetic, and incongruously hot. The skin of her lips was slightly broken and this delicate abrasion hypnotised him. Her lazy laughter announced that it was over. Stunned, he tried to laugh too, bracing himself against another of the bora’s squalls.

  Speeding that evening out of the Stazione di Trieste Centrale, he knew that the encounter with Valeria, while so accidental, had hit him hard. He had been only a pretend husband-to-be but somehow the role had not felt untrue. He was already embroiled.

  More than a year later, after the war had begun, her family sent her to London. And she did seek him out, at the address on the piece of paper he’d pressed into her hand as they took their leave of one another.
/>   In greeting, she said bluntly, ‘Hello, husband,’ to which he responded, with equal forthrightness, ‘Hello, wife.’

  She didn’t visit her family again until peace was reinstated and Trieste had passed from Austrian to Italian dominion (Piazza Grande now renamed Piazza dell’Unità), and then just briefly. Long before that Valeria and Harry had made their own peaceful tumult of a married life as real as any. They were never engaged. It would have seemed redundant.

  ‘A needle bath now, to get that off you.’ He liked the painful sound of it, though how much could water prick? Not the same white-suited fellow as before, which was just as well, given how besmirched Harry was with mud. This one was bare-chested and clad in shorts, ready for the dripping prehistoric creature into which Harry had transformed, a visitant from a nightmare’s murk. ‘You should find the inflammation much reduced,’ he affirmed in a rich Glaswegian accent.

  Harry remembered mumbling some improvisation about being gouty to justify his interest in peat. ‘I sincerely hope so,’ he said.

  The highly pressurised water did in fact come harder than you would have expected, stinging certain areas of the body when directed in the right way.

  14

  AUGUST 1926 Torquay

  She couldn’t simply drift down the hill to bathe in the sea, because there was too much to be done. She couldn’t sleep. The only thing for it was to work, Mummy’s possessions having to be sorted, stored, disposed of. A life in mementoes, one more suffocating than the last. The sprawling wreath of wax flowers preserved under a glass dome that was her grandfather’s memorial! Not a gay object to contend with. What the deuce to do with that? Could she throw it away with a clear conscience?

  In another of the endless boxes that had been closed up for years, a photograph of an ethereal blonde child in a garden.

  Her child self. An earlier Agatha at Ashfield. Beautiful, with long, so-fair, delicately curled hair. Solemn pre-Raphaelite nymph. She smiled, and ceased smiling. There was something about that face.

  She straightened her stooped and tender back, nearly knocking over the saucepan she’d put out to catch drips last night when the rain started. Peter sneezed and she bent again to pat him. The overcrowded room suddenly seemed impossibly oppressive, fusty with all that past she’d never slog through. She beat the dust from her hands and, followed by her companion-saviour, took the photograph downstairs to the conservatory. The light was better there, but Peter was disturbed by the wicker sofa’s suppressed screeching when she sat, and not liking being woefully regarded by tiers of wilted ferns, she sprang up and went out into the garden.

  Along with Peter, her only bit of succour. The garden, with its sea breezes. Nothing better for scrubbing out your mind than salt air. It positively murdered her spirit to think that Ashfield might have to be sold, because it was still an oasis, even in its current dilapidation, all the delightful greenery a little overblown and readying to ferment. Lack of money for a proper gardener had obliged Mummy to adopt a laissez-faire approach, and the small park had taken on an almost sexual dishevelment as the weather ripened. The Alba roses, at their lightest pink, sweetly fragrant best (the waste of Mummy not able to breathe them in), appeared tousled and harassed by the enduring sultriness. The creepers still gamely climbing the villa were limp. Distorted seasons they had been, alien spring and mildewy summer.

  The real child, her voice coming now from the open window of the schoolroom, where the servant was occupying her, couldn’t understand any of it. Six years old—very nearly seven. She didn’t even realise that the cataclysm of her birth had taken place here, that her father had kissed her mother hours beforehand under that beech.

  Why couldn’t he make it down—just for a weekend? The flummoxing answer was golf.

  Peter licking her ankle, she considered the photograph. The unmoved mouth. The shadows like bruising beneath already hooded, strikingly serious eyes. Aged. A face not looking out but in.

  She wrested a handful of petals from one of Mummy’s beloved roses, releasing frenzied scent and the longing to rage. Such was that unhinged summer that this urge was somehow misplaced. It was days after that her husband finally came down from London, an energetic, youthful blue-eyed man to her ruined phantom.

  Saying, ‘Look, see, I want a divorce. I’ve fallen in love with someone.’

  And she didn’t scream (she would another day, and hurl a white teapot). Instead, she observed that it was only as quicksand swallowed your feet that you had its number.

  15

  A VERY ELUSIVE PERSON

  Following his rise from the mud, Harry crossed paths with Mr Jackman in the dressing hall.

  ‘Well?’ Mr Jackman was robed, glowing.

  ‘Seem to have survived,’ Harry reported.

  ‘Jolly good. Me too. I’ve stewed in sulphur foam.’ He grinned. ‘Feel fortified, rejuvenated. Starving like a boy of fourteen. I’m off now for a massage. You should have one, too, you know. You look a little rundown, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘I don’t. But later, perhaps. I was just going for a turn in the Winter Garden, to see if the orchestra’s up to anything.’ Harry felt guilty for always snubbing the affable fellow, but he was too oppressed by his own thoughts to be sociable. ‘Might see you after.’

  He did not go to the Winter Garden. He sneaked out of the baths and loitered in Crescent Gardens, smoking, in the hope of spying Teresa leaving.

  An hour or so passed, and the Jackmans emerged. They waited a few moments, he guessed for Teresa, but presently gave up and set out in the direction of the Hydro. He concluded that she must have already returned to the hotel, maybe via a side exit or the Winter Garden.

  He concealed himself from the Jackmans behind the covered Promenade Walk, and then followed at a distance.

  At the Hydro he waited for lunch to be well underway before furtively surveying the dining room from the doorway. No Teresa.

  Too restless to eat in company, he stalked the corridors, on the lookout. He even went up to the mezzanine to see if she could be in the billiard room with the Russian and his cohort. Of course there was no one there and, coming back downstairs, he discovered the Winter Garden Ballroom likewise empty. Melancholy business, a deserted ballroom. He entered and found himself at the table where she had sat during their first conversation. He rested his hand on it briefly. The room grew cooler close to the glass walls. He looked out at the grounds and up at the muted winter sunlight falling in through the glass ceiling. With his head tipped back, he suddenly felt the effects of his broken night: an odd weight, or weightlessness, and an idea that his own outlines were smudged. He must have slept on his feet for a second or two.

  With a start, he flung out a hand to steady himself against the wall. A climbing plant would throw out an arm—more slowly—to the radiance of a window with a similar instinct for self-preservation. At the Hydro the guests weren’t unlike plants living out their lives confined to a delicate semblance of the wider world.

  He resumed his patrolling of the hallways. Despite his recent familiarity with accommodations such as these, he couldn’t say he was at home in them. His presence there continued to seem a sort of joke at which he was laughing soundlessly and without mirth. The irony might have been entertaining if he’d had any real appetite for amusement. He was an impostor in this curative pleasantness. He was doing his best impersonation of one who was footloose, but he could resort to watering-places for aimless sojourns only thanks to an unearned wealth that sat uncouthly on him.

  Taking the electric elevator to the first floor, her floor, he reflected that to be an effective member of the Quality you must be born one, or become one before you’ve achieved full awareness of yourself and your position in life. Otherwise you won’t have the sense—the reflex—to take luxury and repose as your due. While doing your best to find it natural, you’ll suspect you’re befouling a key moral precept. The Jackmans and Teresa knew no qualms of this type. For them, there was nothing more normal than living among f
irst-class comforts, nothing strange or ironical in being a hothouse plant. Was he attracted to these people because he wanted them to teach him to be satisfied with comfort? To slough off guilt? He was a great one for guilt.

  After a circumspect examination of the first-floor hallway, he stood close to Teresa’s door and listened. Nothing. Where was she? Still at the baths? Out walking?

  Back to his pacing. Was it because he belonged to the servants’ caste that he could not feel at home here? His mother had been a maid before her marriage and his father had worked as a modest farmer. Granted, Harry hadn’t known what it was to go wanting but nor had he known surplus. Which rather rendered the sensation of enough dubious, haloing it with insufficiency, a certain lack. In his own working life he’d been an assistant to a rich man. Proximity to money gives you some understanding of its ways but not an inbred instinct for them. He’d maintained a household successfully, with infrequent worries. Though he’d had to live knowing that he provided Valeria with a simple London flat inferior to the fine bourgeois villa in which she’d been raised. She’d even had to take on employment of her own. Perhaps he’d not made anything of himself as a writer because he’d been too afraid to try his luck at earning their living that way only to realise that he couldn’t.

  Harry’s fraudulent feeling came in part, yes, from his failure to spend Mrs Mortlake’s fortune with nonchalance, but also from his being such an unconvincing spa visitor. He was not exactly a pleasure holiday-maker, and nor did he possess any well-defined malady or interest in being cured. He fancied he’d have rather enjoyed some tangible complaints, dramatic anaemia, something to make him bedridden—or mobile only in a bath chair. During his walks in Valley Gardens, observing the fine silhouette of the Bath Hospital against the sky, he’d sometimes nurtured a fantasy of being an inmate there. That would have been more the spot for him. Or, better still, the Home for Incurables a little further along Cornwall Road. In such an establishment it would be virtually de rigueur to feel blackly sorry for yourself. Hopelessness would be logical and self-evident. He imagined being grimly uplifted by this.