The secret padding and suspension of her face had grown flaccid. Just a little, but enough to show the direction in which things would go. There was a flattening of her mouth that made it appear broader. Her cheeks, too, appeared broader. Her eyelids looser and heavier. Her much-lauded fair skin had started to look patchy, humdrum. Where was the indefinable yet essential something that had energised her whole appearance when she was at her best? That sort of creamy inner blaze?
To be dispossessed of it was baffling, chilling. Was it gone for good?
She had discovered that there could be brief revivals of her former looks. Very good sleep, a beautiful outfit, a long peppy walk on a cold day, or delight, might afford some hours’ grace. She appeared to have been awarded a little now, and it excited her to be pretty again for her husband, to whom her beauty had meant such a lot.
She rushed along the narrow corridor towards their cabin. The wine seemed to have rearranged weight in her, causing a leaning kind of propulsion and making rather a burden of her head. When she paused, she caught the roll of the ocean in her legs and hips. A distant tremor. She rode two seas, the enormous one beneath the boat and a smaller invisible one on which her body or soul was a vessel. She saw suddenly that she’d been waiting, throughout the years of their London life, for sensations this strong. Cramped rented flats and household economies had left her needing euphoria. She wouldn’t have admitted it.
The door of their cabin. Could he be waiting up? She entered.
It was dark. A pity he wouldn’t see the girlish contrast in her skin between rose and ivory, her adventurous eye. She moved blindly in the tight space, blundering mutedly out of her shoes. Smiling, she reflected, Marriage is a straitjacket, but who’d be free? She shed her shawl and stood in the satiny puddle of it, unfastening her dress. An awareness growing from the soles of her newly unshod feet, a diffuse goldenness. She distinguished his slender shape. Long flanks and bent knees: he lay on one side like a boy. She’d slip into the sweet conspiracy of conjugal repose, and at some juncture they might even awaken seeking one another. She could have been passionate that night.
But his breathing was not audible. He was too silent. A foot shifted. ‘Hello, darling,’ he drawled, utterly awake, as she jumped. ‘Have a nice time?’
In her confusion she opened a cupboard and her hands struck against a hard, complicated object, long and repetitive, and full of empty space. Ladder. She foundered searching for a black joke about its usefulness on the high seas.
‘It wasn’t too bad.’ The heat was draining from her face—no doubt returning her to plainness.
‘You’re loving this.’
‘What?’ she asked, breathless.
‘The late nights.’ His words were drawn out and sultry. ‘All the gaiety.’
She tried to skirt his displeasure. ‘Stomach’s still bothering you?’
He rolled onto his back, sighing. ‘Oh, much the same as before.’
‘Shall I fetch you some sodium bicarbonate?’ She was vigilant for any sign of an invitation to approach him. In the penumbra she detected none. They were powerless before a surly force.
He only sighed again. After a moment, he said, ‘You’re doing a splendid job.’
He meant that she was acting and pleased with herself. Not entirely wrong. He could be damnably perceptive, knowing she acted in company to avoid being tongue-tied. What else was she to do? The injustice! She was not unused to him insisting on socialising on his own terms, with a golf club in his hands. And well she knew him depressed and sulky, his needs becoming finicky. But she’d imagined that on this escapade, which was his work, he’d be jovial, mock-heroic and cocky. Instead, he appeared not to consider any of it even a little mythic. No, the odd small worlds of ships, the mandatory sociability and the foreign cuisine took a toll on him. The discomforts of travel riled, stupefied him. Well, she too had had to endure. This journey was not what she’d anticipated, either. And she was not the best sailor. That lurking mechanical smell of ships—a horrid clammy cold—made her as morbid as a dog about to be bathed. She always clung to her bunk with the maudlin misery of seasickness, too like morning sickness, for the first half or so of a sea voyage. Though since she’d overcome the last bout, she’d been, she thought, staunch and valiant.
Her dress fell and she climbed into her bunk in her slip, nostalgic for the nights they had spent headed for South Africa on the Kildonan Castle, sleeping unclothed as it crossed the equator, the air whirled by the electric fan. She longed for him to touch her. To come to her, even in anger, so she might vent her own frustration. Being ruthless with each other, they could have found a path back to affection, or new forms of warmth.
‘You resent me enjoying myself.’
‘Oh, hardly. Let’s sleep, shall we? I’m worn out.’
A temper rising. He refused to share her carnival spirits. Her comeliness and the flexible, racy feeling wasted. He’d encouraged her at times to try wine, and now that she had and it flattered her, she might have arrived at a rendezvous point from which her husband had departed, loath to wait. She had already been obliged to recognise that their curiosities rarely met. She’d learned long before how astoundingly little given he was to anything imaginatively daring. But from this time on, it became harder to make their differences into comedy. And in that floating moment—although it would take weeks more until she fully measured it during a Queensland afternoon storm—she perceived a fissure between them. The barrenness of her thwarted desire. A certain lack. Thereafter, the drinking of alcohol would put her in mind of a close and tippy place, like a ship’s cabin, as sad and wanton and queasy as an imploding fantasy, as loneliness.
19
SAUDADE
En route for his appointment with Teresa at around ten forty-five the next morning, Saturday, Harry had reached the end of Swan Road, relieved at having got clear of the Hydro without waylaying encounters, when there was Mrs Jackman emerging alone from the Pump Room. Odd that she should be taking the waters without her husband. You always saw them together. Maybe on account of this, and because he was worked up over the prospect of meeting Teresa and telling her about Valeria, as well as hopefully learning something of her feelings for the Colonel, it had taken him a moment to place the older woman. Her face was already fixed on his and blossomed in a smile before he’d entirely made sense of it.
‘Harry. What luck. I’ve been wanting a private word with you on the subject of Teresa.’
‘Oh?’ he said, as if he were not racing towards the very woman.
‘I’m worried about her. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she seems rather up and down. I don’t mean to pry but I suppose I can’t help seeing my daughter, Jane, in her. Jane lost a child, too, you know. It’s the worst thing imaginable. They can appear perfectly well and not be well at all.’
He couldn’t doubt her sincerity. The Jackmans remained convinced of Teresa’s fabricated story. The comments at dinner about the missing lady novelist had been innocent chatter. Mrs Jackman drew nearer, bringing draped about her a soft old woman’s scent that he found not distasteful but mournful. He wondered if Mr Jackman smelled it, or if his stole of age prevented him from noticing. Would you be aware that a fragrance of waning life was creeping into your habitual odour? Into your wife’s? How could the realisation be borne?
‘I saw what it does to a woman. And they might think they’re better off on their own—but are they really? Should anyone be too much alone after such a thing?’
‘But you can hardly force company on someone. I’m a solitary sort myself, and I must say it’s a wily habit to break. People can be surprisingly content, too, left to their own devices.’
Her dubious smile took on something romantic, and suddenly he understood: she was trying to bring him and Teresa together! He felt a little burst of melancholy gratitude.
‘Incidentally, Birk Crag was glorious. Oh, beautiful! The moss, the ferns. True, fresh mountain scenery . . . You’d both adore it.’
‘I�
�m glad the outing was a success.’
‘You might consider going together.’ This was clearly no attempt at vicarious amusement, but a generous impulse. He was nearly inclined to bend and kiss her forehead, as he might have kissed his mother’s, if he’d had a different relationship with his mother.
‘You know, I like the idea. I’ll suggest it to Teresa, if I happen to run into her.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you to your assignation,’ she said, her expression telling him she knew he’d rather not be frittering away minutes conversing with one distanced from the real business of life.
She was less robust and blithe without Mr Jackman. He hoped they wouldn’t die far apart in time.
Teresa was seated by a window. She wore a dark blue dress—perhaps purchased in Leeds—that looked fine-woven but warm. A pinkish foulard at her neck. You had to admire her upright carriage that unthinkingly accepted her place in a world of eminently agreeable things. She couldn’t have chosen a better locale in which to disappear than Harrogate. She was a natural flowering of its self-pleasuring ambience.
Yet when she said, ‘I’ve taken the liberty of ordering tea and cakes,’ the words were unstable and a hello patently absent. ‘Is that all right?’
‘Cake is always all right.’ His voice, too, was high-strung and somewhat breathless from his hurried march up Montpellier Hill. There was low piano music and the warm, heartening smell of good tea and coffee. ‘I’ve seen Mrs Jackman just now. She’s mad about Birk Crag and insists we take ourselves there at our soonest convenience.’
‘I like the Jackmans. But I’m nervous with everyone.’
She had not looked at him, saying this. His own eyes fell to her hands that she had subdued upon the tabletop, to her gracile wrists.
‘I understand. You don’t want anyone asking too many questions about South Africa and so on . . .’
‘No. That story will fall apart very quickly.’ She laughed wearily. ‘As stories do.’
He didn’t ask what she meant, though he recalled something mentioned in that morning’s Daily Mail—supposedly quoting her mother-in-law—to the effect that Teresa hadn’t been able to complete a novel she was working on because she was mentally unstrung. Their cakes were brought, and he was pleased to see her apply herself to them with her usual enthusiasm for food.
‘There was something you were going to tell me,’ she reminded him, as if he needed reminding.
He ate a macaroon quickly and coughed. ‘I know I said I would. How to come at it . . . in a café, in the light of day? It’s not a light matter, you see. I’m afraid it will make you think badly of me.’
‘Why should my opinion be important? Who am I? A shade. No one.’
‘You’re not no one,’ he said carefully. And continued, confused, ‘You are very far from being no one. Sometimes, travelling, one meets people by chance who one just knows instantly are important to one, however ephemeral the encounter.’
‘True.’
Their tea arrived, and she poured.
‘I failed my wife.’
She waited, but he added nothing.
‘What if I were to tell you that I failed my husband, too?’
Tautness between them, the flexed muscle of secrecy, each tipped towards the other, yet pulling back.
‘Would you talk to me a little about that? I promise I will try to explain myself, but I’ll need some more time. It’s harder than I thought.’ He saw her considering doubtfully, registering what he was asking—disclosure that he had not yet provided himself. He went further. He pushed her: ‘You’ve run away because he betrayed you?’ While she covered her mouth with a serviette, he carried on, ‘A sensible course of action, I’m sure.’
A spasmodic twitch of a smile. And then, her face going very neutral, she murmured, ‘I know it looks bad and complicated from the newspapers. But that’s all twisted. I didn’t anticipate . . . In fact, it’s quite simple.’ Her hand fluttered in front of her face, and returned to the table. ‘Yes, he betrayed me and I had to show him what he’s done.’
Harry nodded. Her hand rose again fussily, as if to check her lips for crumbs. He sipped tea and scalded his tongue. She was now cutting a slice of strawberry sponge cake into segments.
‘He doesn’t realise. He can be such a boy.’
‘I see.’ He felt a sick sort of exhilaration. He glanced around the café. No one appeared to be paying them any special attention. Why should they? There was no reason to think that a missing novelist, maybe the most notorious woman in the country at that moment, was in their midst. All that would be observed, looking at Harry and Teresa, would be—what? The two of them would not look easy enough together for a married couple, or as hardened in uneasiness. Would their laboured exchange seem that of new lovers? He found in himself a perverse desire to draw attention, for what was occurring between him and Teresa to exist in the eyes of the world, because that might have made it less uncertain.
‘He’s asked for a divorce. He thinks it’s that easy—snap your fingers and it’s done. Fifteen years of life razed.’
‘Ah.’ He was inspirited by the word divorce, but disturbed by the tight cadence of her speech. It was vital he take the right tone. He’d have given a lot to be allowed to hold and quieten her hand, to fondle her wrist.
Having just bitten into a wedge of cake, she said through a screen of fingers, ‘I threw a teapot at him.’ She appeared to swallow with difficulty. ‘The torte is excellent.’
‘Did it hit him?’
She looked startled. Then they began to snicker, a naughty, lovely bridge of sound, feral notes in it that didn’t belong to gaiety.
‘No.’
Laughter abandoned them, and he asked, as insipidly as he could, ‘Who’s the other woman?’
‘A friend of friends. A golfer.’ She smiled caustically.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. And very young, I presume?’
‘Mais bien sûr.’
‘Won’t you be so much better off without him?’
The extent of this miscalculation was immediately obvious. Her face fell from humour into the innocence of shock, a white wall. She forgot her cake.
So she hadn’t run to escape him—but to bring him back. The cake plates had a look of ruin to them.
‘You still love him?’ Harry asked after a moment.
As if this made everything painfully evident: ‘He’s my husband.’
Her plummy accent that he’d somehow forgotten had come into relief with this declaration, obscurely impenetrable. He struggled not to be combative. ‘You say you’ve failed him. But isn’t it he who’s failed you?’ His smile felt sorrowful even as he tried to make it innocuous.
She shook her head wilfully. They had both lost their appetite. The cosy café had turned claustrophobic. Why had she kissed him? What had that signified? He remembered what Dickens had said about the freakishness of Harrogate and the lives lived there.
‘Could we walk?’
She assented, and he saw to the bill while she stared out of the windows. He feared that the confidences were over.
They didn’t speak again until they’d been strolling for some minutes by the stream in Valley Gardens. They were vaguely following the noble, leisurely progress of a swan. What an improbably graceful creature a swan is, he thought. You wouldn’t reckon it would survive much longer than a flower. The sun had presented itself, brilliant and quite searing, as winter sun could abruptly be on occasion. He was almost able to forget the quirky situation and pretend they were sweethearts, for a minute or two.
‘I left him alone too much. You see, my mother died and I couldn’t think. I was at rather a low point. I was trying to get everything organised at Ashfield, all her things. My God, the endless furniture, the musty rooms, the pictures, photographs, letters, piles of papers done up in ribbons . . . drawers and boxes . . . You don’t realise, all the drawers and boxes that go into a life. The weight of it. But I should have been at Sunningdale.’ She gave him a somehow ferocious glance.<
br />
‘Shouldn’t he have been with you? Standing by you through all that?’
‘No, you don’t understand. He’s never been good with suffering. Any kind of suffering, sickness, sadness. I knew that perfectly well. But I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t see for grief. I was blind with it, mucky, tacky—I positively stank of grief. That’s how I failed him.’ Her words were surprisingly acidic, self-hating.
He couldn’t stop himself. He took her elbow and held it tightly. ‘I do understand.’
A fleeting sense of her leaning into him, but just then the saxophonist from the Hydro Boys passed them, close enough for Harry to find the pinkish-white hue of his skin quite boyish in daylight. The saxophonist saw and recognised them, and made only an ironical little gesture at his hat, his usual stagy chumminess evaporated. He suspected her? Harry released Teresa at once.
‘The saxophonist,’ he breathed.
‘Seemed a bit queer,’ she said in an undertone.
‘Yes, I don’t like it.’ They were gazing around them now and, picking up their pace, they moved towards Bogs Field. ‘We probably shouldn’t be seen together too much. You know, in case. In case they discover . . .’
‘You don’t think they will, do you? The papers have to quieten down. Anyway, he’ll come for me soon.’ The Colonel. ‘Look.’
She’d taken a copy of The Times from her bag and was offering him a page from it. It took Harry a moment. Friends of Teresa Neele, please direct themselves . . . She was hoping to convey a backstairs message with this? For the first time, it truly occurred to him to wonder about the balance of her mind.
‘How will he know this is you?’ he challenged.
‘It’s her name—Neele. The golfer’s.’
‘Ah.’ So she’d taken her rival’s name as pseudonym. An odd transposition—with revenge as its motive? Or was there only a sad, private kind of violence in it? He sneaked a look at her face. She was studying the peaty, spongy ground. The small, triangular field they were standing in was dotted with scores of mineral springs marked with iron and stone lids. ‘You really think he’ll decipher this?’
On the Blue Train Page 15