‘You remind me of my mother. High expectations. Mummy had a terrible hunger for wonderful things and excitement, which makes it hard to be content for very long. You’re always waiting for the next strong, decisive sensation. That’s why she tried out so many religions, I suppose.’
‘Greedy for the sublime . . . But shouldn’t one want a lot from life?’
‘I’ve lost my darling Mummy, you know.’
He looked at her for a lengthy interval, then exhorted, ‘Listen carefully. We’ve no time to lose. Will you trust me? You must decide. I’m leaving now and you’ll have to come with me, or I’ll have to leave you behind. I’m engaged to marry. The daughter of a wealthy family. It’s you I love—only you, darling. If you thought you could ever care for me in that way, well, we’d have to run off to elope before the others return.’
‘My decision is made.’ She laid her hand on his arm.
He led her to two very fine horses that were standing at the ready. They mounted and set off. Side-saddle, she rode with panache. It had never been so natural. At first they passed through Australian fields, untold dryness, then the terrain began to resemble the rough, bleakish beauty of Dartmoor in its autumn mauves. The immoderate Australian light diminished and rain was gathering.
A storm. Wild rivulets coursed beneath the horses’ feet and Shy Thing, leading the way, fell, his horse appearing to lose its substance beneath him.
She jumped down from her own steed and rushed to his side. When she touched him, he sucked his breath in, smiling weakly. His leg was injured.
The horses had taken fright and fled. However, not long before she’d noticed an abandoned hut to which she now managed to guide him, much of his weight upon her.
She nursed him there for days, months perhaps, preparing ointments from medicinal herbs she collected on the moor. Her wartime training as a VAD and a dispenser came in handy, though she worried sometimes that in this wilderness she couldn’t discern a poison.
She cared for him with such devotion that she tended to get badly overtired and delirious, fancying herself with numberless boys in her charge, arriving from France and Flanders and Gallipoli. How to accommodate them? The tone of it all was warm. She wasn’t green now as she’d been in her VAD days, no longer as hesitant and self-regarding. ‘Darling,’ she’d say. ‘Oh, darling.’ Then slim dark roots would twine themselves around her wrists and ankles, binding her to something cold and perfectly still.
And lucidity would return.
Just as she brought back Shy Thing’s health, they realised she was suffering from an overpowering frailty. He was desolate. When would they ever get themselves to a church and become man and wife?
One day there was something black on her leg. A growth on her fair skin, a horrifying spider-like filigree. Swamped by shame, she screamed, and wouldn’t look at it. To soothe her, Shy Thing stroked it. He found beauty in it, somehow.
They thought her strength might return if she could bathe in the sea. Her secret hope was to be freed of the black growth. He carried her over one shoulder like a sack of coal for so long she lost track of time, or maybe she was passing in and out of consciousness. They reached a place similar if not identical to the ladies’ bathing cove of her childhood. Torquay! However, mixed bathing being some years off, as distant as adolescence, Shy Thing shouldn’t have been there. She told him so. Saddened, he waved to her as she entered one of the bathing machines operated by a wizened, testy old man.
The door bolted, she changed into her flattering little emerald-green bathing dress from Hawaii, feeling all the old exhilaration but also confusion, because she was already an adult, after all, and what she wanted was to be with Shy Thing. The contraption began its bumpy roll from the stony beach into the sea. Abruptly she knew that he was inside it with her. He’d made himself minute, and hidden inside the black growth on her leg. Rather original.
‘Good heavens, you’re here,’ she said.
Do you mind?
She did not respond. The situation made her timid. As they could apparently now talk without speaking, she tried to avoid thinking. Like with Mummy.
Don’t worry. No one will find out.
The bathing machine had travelled as far as it would on its straps. She’d liked the sense of close confinement, but she unbolted the door on the water side.
The sea, its smell intensifying. She descended into the softly repetitious waves. They were separate again and he had returned to normal size, though he was keeping beneath the surface.
Won’t you have to come up for air?
Not so much.
My father says that gentlemen from the Torbay Yacht Club watch the ladies bathing or lying on that raft through opera glasses.
Dirty old devils. Seeing me would teach them!
He was taking care not to touch her. There were the faintest whispery movements against her, like ribbons of seaweed or fish quivering past. Her bathing dress was gone. She was sure, then, that the black growth on her leg had gone, too. She was no longer frail. It was a little like the release of urinating after a long time of holding in, tension leaving, a burning melting between pain and rapture. Feeling was finally accepted and owned.
She wasn’t taking care not to touch him now. Delicious—so long as no one saw.
Bringing in tea, the chambermaid disrupted Teresa’s reverie, as she was wont to do. All at once keyed up, Teresa petulantly refused a newspaper and asked for breakfast in bed, evading the sensitive eyes of that well-formed, faintly sapped girl.
Alone again, she attempted a new tack. There was a notepad by the bed. At times you could catch the artistic part of yourself off-guard. I couldn’t care in the slightest how you pass your time, brain. This here is just in case you should need to make some list unrelated to work, to a train or anything like that. Shh, softly, softly. Thinking of nothing much, quite relaxed, thinking of nothing.
Now quick, hook through the throat: what horseplay might unfold on the Blue Train? Theft of expensive jewels? Don’t struggle. A train. Some doubtful individuals. One at least a thoroughly bad lot, and the others have to seem as if they might be, too. And a girl with grey eyes. A woman, really, not terribly young anymore, but enchanting to men who know how to see it . . . And?
Very well, just a train carriage. Go from there.
Lord, how agreeable a train journey to the Riviera would be. Victoria Station, the deep blue cars and brown-liveried attendants. The exotic, regimented business of tickets and passports. Hurtling into the green tunnel of Kent, passengers good-humoured from champagne and pleasant prospects. Aromas of fish and Stilton in the dining car. The lament of the Westinghouse brake making you giddy with that intoxication of leaving, part sorrow, part ecstasy.
Enough procrastination! A train carriage . . . Baggage rack, windowsill, wooden panelling. The confounded wooden panelling! Maddening having your eyes frozen on the frame of a picture. Where was the grey-eyed woman?
There, there was Katherine, now, good . . . But just sitting smugly, a slightly unnerving doll. Stubborn, stubborn. You could throttle her. And the train itself remained too real . . .
There was nothing on her hook, rien de rien. She pitched the notebook across the room, seconds before the maid knocked. Coming in with the breakfast tray, the girl noticed the fallen object with its splayed pages, but did not comment on it.
Gorging herself on toothsome kippers, Teresa wondered if she shouldn’t after all go on the Jackmans’ pleasure tour. But no, better to be alone. She especially shouldn’t run into Harry—not with that deviant dream lingering. She ordered another pot of tea, and drank as she dressed, in the tweed skirt again, with a white blouse and the mauve cardigan.
A speedy departure after checking with the hall porter for letters and nodding taciturnly at Redhead, who accorded her a taciturn nod in return. Noting something in a ledger, this lady was a strengthening sight, a portrait of dedication to work. Her solid shape only made her appear more dependable and unflappable. She might have been taller but an a
ssertive head of hair compensated for much.
Teresa passed through the crowd around the Pump Room, thinking sparingly, silky thoughts. She avoided the gardens clogged with water-drinkers taking their fifteen-minute turns between doses, and was soon confronting Montpellier Hill. It was the sort you leaned into, the way you leaned into Torquay hills—as if into a stiff wind, with dogged defiance. Prevailing over it, she gazed wistfully through the window of the Imperial Café, but just after breakfast had to be judged too early for cake (she did want to keep this improved figure for her husband), and the day would still have been wide open after that.
She had a great need for movement, a horror of inertia, which came on like a fear of asphyxiation. She knew this from her suburban life. From the worst days, when writing was difficult. A sense of slow drowning. Into her mind came the fine dark roots that had encircled her wrists and ankles at one point in her dream.
Go somewhere. Just go.
Adjusting her cloche hat and gripping her bag securely, she went on to the train station, where—stroke of chance—a train for Leeds was drawing in. That would do for now. Go from there.
Being in the new city, where absolutely no one knew who she was, released the pressure from her lungs. She was mollified.
Teresa ambled and shopped at Schofields, drawn to taupe-coloured items but eventually persuading herself in favour of a midnight-blue dress, a nice classic in light wool. Another pair of stockings. A restrainedly pink foulard. In the department store’s restaurant at an appropriate hour—obliged to ask a thin, ancient deaf lady the time as she had no wristwatch now—she consumed leek and potato soup, and dryish roast chicken, neither noteworthy. Later, a similarly pedestrian scone. Usually deploring food that failed to live up to its potential, today she didn’t much mind. (She may have been, as she had done during her married life, as she had always done, using food to plug any possible gap.)
It had been dark for some time when she returned to the station. She pondered the boards with the destinations on them, so infused with the atmosphere of departure. The muscular desire for travel persisted. Still, she didn’t see how she could avoid going back to Harrogate, where her husband would soon arrive.
And where there was a room at the Hydro, with its bed and basin, a window regarding Swan Road and a wardrobe full of Teresa Neele’s agreeable new clothes. Where Harry was. On the platform it was damply bitter and she tucked her chin into the fur ruff on the coat that had also become familiar, she realised.
No riveting train-related antics occurred to her during the return journey. On the notepad she’d brought along, just to be moving her hand in that way, she wrote: Darling . . . My darling . . .
It would be essential to keep track of money, so she made a list of recent acquisitions. She had no trouble recalling the price of each, but the days on which she’d purchased them weren’t clear to her. During the first week or thereabouts of a trip, time was roomy, cavernous.
When she entered the Hydro—the grandfather clock recording ten—he was in the lounge, in an armchair by the fire. That was to say, Harry. Not her husband. A phlegmatic girl at the reception desk smiled noncommittally and went back to reading a newspaper.
‘Teresa!’ he said, standing.
She would sooner not have endangered her tentative self-command, but she could hardly recoil and turn around. She approached him. Its mussed appearance made you wonder if he’d been running his fingers through his hair, and his eyes, she let herself notice, were enervated and reddish. A forceful odour of tobacco reached her.
Remember, you aren’t sure you can trust him.
‘Where have you been?’ he demanded, with the offended righteousness of a wife reproaching a husband for coming home tardily.
‘Please lower your voice. I’ve been to Leeds shopping.’
‘Leeds!’ he retorted, as though finding this preposterous.
She made for the lift and he followed. She must have felt she owed him proof because she raised a hand to show him the shopping bags. They boarded the lift, and the ascent commenced.
‘Leeds?’ He was becoming more pliant. ‘What did you buy? Can I carry those?’
‘This and that. No thank you, they’re quite light. Well, I’m tired, so I’ll be saying goodnight.’
They’d alighted on the first floor. Harry accompanied her to her room. Awkward.
‘’Night, Teresa.’ But he continued to stand sentry by the door. He laughed. ‘God, I’m just relieved!’
He ran a hand through his hair. The compulsive gesture moved her. And some of the warmth of the queer dream returned—yet she was as apprehensive as she’d been that morning, waking. Steady, she said to herself. This man she had kissed knew who she was. She opened the door.
‘Sorry,’ he said, moving out of her way, only the length of a short step.
She could have gone in then without another word. ‘Relieved? I don’t see why you should be.’ He was leaning against the wall by the door now. The pose seemed to reflect not false casualness but a frank requirement of support. There was a looseness to him tonight. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Not a drop.’ He laughed again. ‘I was imagining things, that’s all.’
‘Imagining things—about me?’
‘I was afraid,’ he murmured.
‘Afraid? Whatever of?’
He exhaled heavily. ‘Afraid you might . . . do something to yourself.’
She snapped, ‘I don’t know what the devil you mean.’ Knowing, of course.
She had the irrational idea that he would hear her heart beating. She almost slammed the door but instead she looked at him. His eyes were frightfully dark and disordered in that face both slim and deep. She felt fatigue, then, the zing of her nerves, and a kind of fellowship.
‘Well, we’d mentioned . . . Casablanca, and . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve been miserable these last days. And bushed. Though I did finally sleep last night.’
There was a silence that she fancied transparent, free of artifice or design. Two exhausted people occupying the same corner of space. Her resolve to resist him was softening. She was perilously close to inviting him in.
‘I know I had no right to be—worried—you’d hurt yourself,’ he was saying ramblingly.
‘Because of a flippant conversation? Or because of who you suspect I am?’ She felt something of a child’s fury, rather directionless and passing. She dropped her voice, which had risen. ‘You presume to know me?’ She was attempting not to watch his mouth, with its full bottom lip. She would not reveal herself.
‘No, listen. I don’t mean to presume anything. And I don’t care who you are. Officially, that is. I really don’t. The newspapers—it’s all a matter of perfect indifference to me.’ His eyes were downcast. ‘I shouldn’t have told you I loved you, either. Precipitate, stupid. Which doesn’t mean those aren’t my feelings.’ She remained mute. ‘We don’t have to discuss that. But I’d like you to know your welfare is important to me.’
‘Why should my welfare be in danger?’ she asked bumpily. She had inadvertently released the doorknob, which she had been holding.
The door swung open and they looked into her room. A fire had been laid but did not burn. His eyes travelled to the bedside table, and he seemed to blanch. Swiftly, she pulled the door to again.
‘Look here. I owe you an explanation. Well, there’s a story I’d like to tell you that might help you understand my . . . concern. If you’ll hear it. I’ve never told it to anyone, you see, but I want to tell you.’
His voice had gained a heated intensity that scared her. I must close the door on him, she decided, though she could not bring herself to refuse this request. ‘Very well, but you should go now. We can talk tomorrow. Perhaps not here at the hotel. Bettys? Eleven o’clock tea?’ He would let her close the door on him, wouldn’t he?
At last he nodded. ‘Tomorrow, then. Thank you.’
His voice resembled the voice in her dream, as she was remembering it. She did not know if it was t
he voice of someone she could lean on. He had not yet turned to go when she closed the door.
18
1922 TSS Aeneas
One night during the long sea journey that conveyed them to Australia, her husband returned to their cabin at around ten. This was usual, the later entertainments not his cup of tea. She stayed on with the mission at the captain’s table to listen to an after-dinner concert the Autumn Sighs had decided to bestow on them, despite being rather tight. Their stamina, considering, was admirable. Such silly evenings were no doubt so festive because by now it was dawning on them that the principal talent of the major, their director on the Empire Tour, lay in passing himself off as an expert through wild improvisation. This, along with his highly mutable humours, lent things a madcap tone that led one to wonder how successful they could possibly be in cultivating trade relations in the interests of the upcoming Empire Exhibition in London. Thoroughly amused by it all, she justified her enjoyment of the revelry by telling herself it was her job as the wife of the financial adviser to the mercurial major to be a good sport. Wanting to play her part that night, she’d even taken a glass of burgundy and, with heroic persistence, finished it. She supposed it was the very act of floating that made what happened on board a ship seem to flow with a peculiar current.
It was near on three am when she bade the company goodnight and rose to leave. Doing so, she caught her reflection in a looking-glass. Oh. Her colour had changed. The merriment or perhaps the wine had given a distinct light to her eyes. She lifted her hands to her face.
Beauty resuscitated.
She had always expected, when giving the matter any airy consideration, that the lapsing of her beauty would be awfully long and placid. A leisurely slide into a more sober handsomeness. Which in turn wouldn’t so much be lost, at last, as kindly subdued like a beloved landscape by gathering dusk.
Well, it was not so. The truth was that her physical attractiveness—what a lovely girl she was, had been—had begun quite abruptly to leave her a few years before. No gradual picturesque nightfall. Nothing tranquil. The great, rude shock of that merciless dulling.
On the Blue Train Page 14