On the Blue Train

by Kristel Thornell

  ‘He has to. All wells, are they?’

  In a flash he decided that if she was mad, it was simply the ordinary madness of heartbreak. He despised the man who had inflicted it on her. ‘I take it. What a naturally opulent area this is. Liquid wealth in its earth. Seems rather arbitrary, the way such riches are distributed, even unfair.’

  ‘Maybe. But you have to know to look for them, and be very organised and professional in how you use them.’

  The Quality’s style of thinking, he mused. Or the Successful Person’s.

  She went on, almost babbling, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to live underground? Be like a badger, the king of your own labyrinth? The dark would be customary. It’d never matter how you looked. You could get as fat as you liked. There’d be no newspapers. You’d miss the crosswords, but you might be a simpleton anyway. Things like the opinions of others wouldn’t worry you.’

  Her voice had turned plaintive, and he’d have gladly taken her far away from the aboveground world of newspapers and human judgement, if he could have. ‘Will you satisfy Mrs Jackman and let me accompany you to Birk Crag tomorrow, for some fresh air? It really might be good for you to avoid the hotel a little, you know.’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Until he comes for you,’ Harry added, biting the inside of his cheek until the pain brought a queer answering convulsion in his groin.

  ‘It couldn’t hurt, could it?’ she seemed to ask herself.

  Perhaps she was already sorry for the titbits of information she had tossed to him that day, a few relics from her former life. He was wolfish for these, while wanting her to remain safely hidden from others. He wished he knew more and could be confident that she wouldn’t try to hide in the conclusive way.

  She met his eyes. ‘What you had intended to tell me . . . you’ll get to that? Because today I find that I have been the one unburdening herself.’

  ‘Yes, I promise. It might take me a while to work up to it, but I will.’

  She continued to observe him. ‘It’s good to have a friend.’

  Again, this sounded like a question. He weighed the word friend and found it light. Could she truly still love the Colonel? She was definitely right to doubt that Harry could be a friend to her. He wasn’t sure of it himself. He agreed with her misgivings: the threat embedded in any bond between them was clear. Yet he was intensely drawn to her. ‘Meet here at lunchtime? One thirty, say? I could bring a picnic.’

  ‘I will bring the picnic,’ she said, showing that she was not conceding to him and remained on her guard.

  ‘Capital. You should go on ahead now. We shouldn’t arrive at the Hydro together.’

  He watched her leave the gardens. As she did her head tilted back and he interpreted this as an admiring appraisal of the Grand Hotel, surely the town’s most sumptuous lodgings. She would fantasise, he imagined, about staying there, seeing herself fulfilled in that deluxe turreted vision, glamorously sated, in the same way he fantasised about the sombre quietude he’d enjoy as an inmate of the Bath Hospital—also, admittedly, a magnificent structure—further along the road. How laughably different they were, despite his inherited money and passably English accent.

  He lingered awhile on the marshy ground, taking what he could from the winter sun while it lasted, knowing now with certainty what he’d as good as known since he’d met Teresa: his feelings for her were doomed. Perhaps it was the transient heat that brought back a memory of the immense summer sky above his parents’ farm. More than usual, he felt deracinated, an exile.

  He dined late, at ten, to avoid Teresa and the Jackmans. After, he took himself to the smoking room. The Russian was there alone, the air possessed by cigar smoke like a pungent, virtually material spirit. Harry considered about-facing and politeness be damned, but the Russian’s meditative expression stopped him. Incongruous—however, who was Harry to tell what in that face was in tune? He was hardly even acquainted with the man.

  The Russian nodded as if welcoming the intrusion and said, not at all unctuously, but rather forlornly, ‘I’m leaving in a few days.’

  Harry guessed that he’d hoped for an adventure he’d not found. He sat in the armchair opposite the Russian’s—a hefty, well-sprung thing—and set about preparing a pipe of cherry tobacco. Valeria had claimed to like the smell of it on his clothes. She had inhaled these sometimes after he’d undressed and hung them up, reminding him of his family’s blond mutt, Roger, who given half a chance would bury his head in dropped items of their underwear. There had seemed in the dog’s obsession to be a profound attachment to the family combined with an instinctive animal enjoyment, an incentive somewhere between sentiment and sex. It had caused uncomfortable giggles in the household, where neither sentiment nor sex, nor even laughter, were really acknowledged. Valeria’s habit had touched and aroused him.

  ‘Back to Russia?’

  ‘Oh no.’ He smiled. ‘Back to Knightsbridge.’

  Harry wondered if he’d fled the revolution, and if life seemed pale to him here at this distance from his more vibrant homeland. Or did he feel calmer, more at ease? It was companionable to be sitting smoking together. In this setting the Russian’s poise—or charisma, or whatever it was—wasn’t threatening. He seemed to embody that French concept of being well in one’s skin, contentedly, fully occupying one’s body. Harry realised he’d not been so relaxed in another person’s presence in some time. They were, after all, he discovered himself thinking, fellow émigrés, as well as sharing an appreciation of Teresa’s magnetism. That brio behind frosted glass.

  ‘I’m Australian.’

  ‘Ah,’ the other man reacted simply, without remarking on any accent or outlandish fauna. Harry did not ask about Russia or his reasons for leaving it, either. That was his business. After a while, into the conversational spaciousness that had formed and which now appeared to permit them to speak frankly, the Russian said, ‘Sometimes I get homesick, or—the Portuguese have a term, saudade. It can refer, I believe, to missing a place, but also just to nostalgia, to longing tout court. To something perhaps less precise, more fundamental than wishing you were somewhere in particular. A pretty, haunting word.’

  ‘You’re a linguist.’

  Yes, why shouldn’t he be a man of culture and feeling? Why should he have to be dangerously seductive, fascinatingly repulsive, louche? He wasn’t really a rival. Harry didn’t have to dislike him or find evidence of baseness in his words and physiognomy, making him into the slightest fiction of a fellow, a foreign villain such as might machinate in one of Teresa’s books. They were jaunty dreams, and what Harry was living now did have something of the unanchored bizarreness of a dream—but also the murkiness that tailed waking reality.

  ‘Vous parlez français, alors?’ Harry was always willing to have a shot at translating himself into this language.

  ‘Naturellement.’

  They chatted amiably for a quarter of an hour or so more. Harry noticed, with mild angst, what possibly were widening gaps in his French vocabulary, dwindling resources. It occurred to him that one might apprehend something similar on entering the new mental landscape of one’s dotage. Eventually, he left his companion to go for a breath of night air.

  Hearing Yorkshire voices coming from the drive that didn’t strike him as belonging to guests, he moved into the shadows of a tree. A moment of eavesdropping confirmed that he’d surprised a conversation between the saxophonist and the drummer. They were a little way from the front entrance, smoking. Harry recalled the saxophonist’s wry expression as he’d avoided raising his hat in Valley Gardens, and he intuited, feeling a cold inevitability, what they were talking about. Teresa.

  ‘Wouldn’t do that for a poor woman, would they?’ the drummer said. ‘They just wouldn’t. Would they look like that for you or me?’

  ‘No,’ agreed the saxophonist.

  They meant mount such an expensive and thorough search. Make such a fuss.

  ‘Yours.’ The drummer—older, shorter, and thicker in the waist—handed
over what must have been the saxophonist’s share of their evening’s wage.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be off to get some petrol for my bike. Wouldn’t fancy walking home.’

  It had indeed grown cold and breezy. Harry tried to imagine what it was like for such a young man to ride his motorbike through winter nights to a posh establishment where for a few hours he entertained the affluent by making the more responsive tap their feet or dance, before tucking a scarf down into his coat against the wind’s whims and climbing back on the motorbike to return to—what sort of home? Listening to the two men, so much more substantial there in the moonlight than himself in the shadows, it seemed to him that since he’d become a widower and ludicrously wealthy, money had been cushioning him with a layer of deadness, like pillows strapped about him. He’d barely had a thought for politics. Of course, some months previously it had been impossible to avoid hearing on the street and in hotel lounges inflamed talk of the General Strike, and being aware of the tides of nervousness and righteous indignation surging through the newspapers, but it had all remained pretty abstract to him, in the way of the plot of an implausible drama. The debate would have been real to these men. He envied them the dignity of their workingmen’s contact with life.

  ‘All that money.’ They were talking about her again.

  He missed something, and then heard from the drummer, ‘I’m just saying it’s interesting, is all.’

  ‘A coincidence.’

  The tone now was knowing, wasn’t it? He could understand their resentment of the missing woman. How desirable and grotesque, like high fashion, would seem the existence of one like her to them. How vaporous, forbidden. Laughable. Maybe they were right.

  He moved along the front of the Hydro until he got to Ripon Road, where he began a night-time walk, knowing it would be a long while before sleep found him. When the entrance to Valley Gardens came into view, he remembered ambling there with Teresa at the speed of a ghosting swan. He continued on, wanting the Stray’s open monotony. It was no doubt true that if one of the bandsmen or he himself were to go missing, far less money and effort would be spent on a search. But they’d not become a spectacle as she had, either. A well-to-do female novelist, for all her easy privilege and confidence in her right to live in perfect happiness and style, wasn’t allowed to go a little demented from heartache in privacy. She didn’t have the privilege of coming apart quietly. And perhaps her type of privilege had been a layer of cushioning that, if anything, encouraged risky naivety, a belief in her entitlement to love and joy, forces over which money’s sway was questionable.

  His exhalations were visible, rifted escort clouds. He walked faster, blurring streetlamps and the largish moon that sat at the edge of his sight, and wondered if he should move back to Paris—if that would strip the pillows from him, help him to really live. Or to come properly, privately apart.

  20

  TENTH DAY

  She was feeling nothing of the neuritis, she realised in the dressing hall at the baths. Moreover, if everything was rather addling, she wasn’t on the whole passing an unpleasant time. It had been all right. Indeed, it had been a reviving change from the plain horror of before. A spa town was a fine thing: it was sometimes necessary to be taken care of. And admired. Perhaps the air of sanatorium romance that bathed these places was curative. It certainly affected the imagination, at least of one who already as a girl had been stimulated by the idea of nursing pale languishing men.

  She slipped into that peach-house-in-the-summertime heat, passing other robed or towel-draped women adorning deckchairs. The French word for those seats was transatlantiques. Where were they all headed on this odd ocean liner? The oriental sensation of walking over tiles in bare feet pleased her. She had become an initiate. How beautiful the female shoulder could be, proud and full, marbly. You did see why men went silly and primitive over women. (In some way you understood.) Her state of mind was still drawing on the wellspring of the romantic dream and it was a labour to be logical, though she was doing her best to keep her musing light. Her husband had to respond to her message. Nonetheless, she wasn’t feeling—she had to acknowledge—like his wife. She had begun to feel like another man’s lover. And such excitement had its troubling way of overruling caution.

  She was ready for the cold plunge bath. Lovers are audacious, not needing or able to hold themselves back from more extreme experiences. The small pool was at that moment empty. She disrobed.

  The metal rail icy to touch. The first step down—and the second. Oh! Feet and ankles crying out. Knees. Skin uncomprehending, lungs registering alarm. Pausing, breathing. Here we go now, move—immobility was thought and suffering.

  White-hot ice burn. Gasps. The work of gasping.

  And she swam, appalled mind cast off somewhere behind dumb body. A few strokes, turn around, back again.

  Harsh purity. Her skin finally opening, as if to seawater, the door to a new compartment of her mind sliding across, she saw her.

  The Neele girl.

  They’ve come from lunch at the Savoy and will have drunk wine, because she’ll know how to. She likes the taste. She’s on a bed in the curtained, nectarine-coloured light of a hotel afternoon. Any shadow in that luxurious hideout is fabulously unreal. Silk bloomers reveal slim golf-adept thighs. Slight silk like something molten washing over the fine-grained young skin. Her small hand on her intact stomach that never had to house a child or comfort itself through the slow going of marriage. Those neat thighs clench and slacken, slacken and clench, a kind of swarthy shine upon them. Her eyes are widening as if in fear as he approaches the bed. Her stifled grin. The shame in it makes him so aware of sensation. His heart is smarting, because when the sex impulse is strong, how can the heart resist the flame? Nerves humming like lies. Their perfection disfigured by abandonment.

  He underestimated his wife if he thought she couldn’t see the appeal of all this. She was hardly blind to beauty. Hadn’t she chosen him?

  She had imagined such things before, hadn’t ceased imagining them for months—but not like this. Now her point of view was . . . almost conspiratorial. Not quite. However, her jellied understanding was setting. She swam around the tiny pool, a few strokes, turn around, a few strokes, until the cold wasn’t cold anymore, just something she was passing through, held up by. There was a pulse in it—her own heart’s.

  Later, Teresa went about the town in a state of anticipation, buying picnic things. Apples. A bottle of cider. Liver pâté. A block of orange cheddar, a wedge of Stilton. A cushiony white loaf of bread. Two sweet buns glossy with sugar glaze, their paper bag almost immediately mottled with oil.

  ‘You wouldn’t think there’d be any mountain scenery around here,’ she said as they were setting out.

  ‘You wouldn’t. We’ll have to pass through a crevice in the universe. But don’t be alarmed. I’m equipped with a guidebook.’ His voice was a little unsteady as he added, ‘So you’re in safe hands. I gather we go down here a bit, and then we’ll come to the footpath, see?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Despite glancing at the map, she didn’t, really. It was hard to concentrate on it, maybe because the plunge bath had left her elated.

  From Bogs Field they made for Cornwall Road.

  On the far shore of what seemed a substantial pool of silence, he said, ‘Those, I gather, are the Harrogate Corporation’s reservoirs. They supply the town.’

  ‘Ah?’

  He went on some minutes after, ‘Apparently, if the day were clear, we’d see mountains off over there.’

  There was nothing to be seen in the distance. It had rained in the early hours of the morning and a light lingering mist veiled any prospect. They laughed sheepishly. It was cold, a fresh Yorkshire cold.

  They followed Cornwall Road to the right till they reached the brow of the hill, then turned left onto what they figured must be the footpath leading to the Birk Crag Quarry.

  ‘That range of rock there—or millstone grit, against the side of the hill—is the result of volca
nic action,’ he said, reading from his guidebook.

  She thought he was using it as something of a shield or a diversionary tactic. What had he wanted to tell her? Walking with a person of the opposite sex in a civilised garden full of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen wasn’t at all the same as rambling alone together over more open country. True, he had kissed her at the hotel (and she him, astonishingly, something it was better not to think of ), where there had been people close by, but outdoors with hardly a soul around they were unable to look one another in the eye. Other than his late wife, Valeria, would he have had much experience of women? Not that they were courting, of course. What was this? Nothing. She didn’t even answer to her name here.

  ‘Birk is birch, you know, in Scottish.’

  ‘Oh? I met my husband at a ball near Exeter. We danced. He impertinently insisted I cut some of the other men from my dance card in order to dance with him twice more.’ Why discuss him? ‘The evening ended and I thought that was the end of that. I was, after all, engaged to another boy at the time.’

  ‘You were? Be careful of the path—it’s muddy in places. Then what happened?’

  The twang of curiosity in his voice. So congenial to inspire interest, to have a man intent on tunnelling with a lamp into the dark of your mind. ‘He came to Ashfield on his motorbike. I wasn’t at home when he called. I was across at a neighbour’s house, dancing again.’

  ‘You were quite the dancer.’

  ‘I was. A tango, if memory serves me.’

  ‘One last tango . . .’

  ‘Yes, something like that. Hard not to wonder what would have happened if one had gone on dancing. But that’s not possible, is it? One gets older and at some point the dancing stops.’