On the Blue Train

by Kristel Thornell

  She sniggered. ‘You wouldn’t be.’

  ‘I would. On my honour.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  ‘Please do.’

  He tossed her a lasso of a look, from which she slid free, with some awkwardness, continuing, ‘We won’t welcome into our home anyone who likes golf.’

  ‘That goes without saying. They’ll be barred. Or we’ll have a legend over the door to frighten them away: Abandon all hope golf players who enter here.’

  She just wanted to think of fun. ‘You realise that with our high-toned life we’ll need plenty of money?’

  ‘Well, there’s my fortune,’ he said.

  ‘You know, I think I could earn my living,’ she boasted on a little wave of jubilation, ‘maybe even well, if I really set my mind to it.’ For now, no need to consider never publishing again, having no legs to walk on, et cetera. The virtue of fantasies naturally being that disappointment and dullness didn’t have to reside within them. They were making a splendid vision.

  ‘I doubt it not. You’ll make a princely living. When we first arrive in Nice, we can stay at the Negresco, while hunting for our perfect abode. I met my employer, Mr Ainsworth, there. In 1913. I associate that night with the lightness of things before the war. An ambience—balmy and frivolous—in which anything seemed possible.’ He paused, and added quietly, ‘It was just youth, too, I suppose. That right to frivolity . . . Not that I ever particularly felt I possessed it.’

  Returning to a road full of people, motorcars and carriages was discordant. The day faded. They were like children who, having been left to their own devices playing at dress-ups, must take off the bright finery and face sullen adults. They concurred that in the interests of discretion they wouldn’t dine together. Only Teresa would eat with the Jackmans. Passing the Grand Hotel, they nodded to a regally stout old lady being towed along by a bent-backed bath-chair man. Teresa tried not to think of the other Grand, where she had spent her wedding night.

  ‘We’ll meet tomorrow?’ Harry enquired.

  She nodded. She’d lost all judgement concerning her conduct with him, and though she did not know what they were to one another, she was inclined to go on feeling like a lover. ‘Could we listen to the chamber ensemble together at the baths?’

  ‘Mightn’t it be injudicious—at this stage of affairs—to meet somewhere so public? How about the gardens opposite the Imperial Café? If we proceeded on across the Stray, we’d hopefully have some privacy.’

  ‘Yes, of course. All right. Three o’clock?’

  ‘I’ll be looking forward to it. We can make further plans for Nice.’

  She smiled and without further rejoinder hurried away from him. Her shoes were rimmed with the dark mud that appeared to ooze everywhere from the peaty northern earth.

  23

  TENTH DAY, EVENING

  The Jackmans lamented Harry’s absence and the headache Teresa claimed had obliged him to dine in his room. When she reported her impressions of Birk Crag, a hopeful glow came to Mrs Jackman’s cheeks. Teresa had determined not to dilate on the excursion, but it was tempting to gush over the grace of that place. She noted a warning of inexplicable tearfulness, warmth and constriction, in her sinuses and throat. The roast pheasant was tender and she tried to engulf her mind in that savoury submission to her teeth.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d find such country in South Africa?’ Mr Jackman asked.

  Mrs Jackman came to her aid. ‘I think that in the matter of beauty—true beauty—no style of nature, no particular lovely place can be said to be superior to any other.’

  ‘Well said, my dear.’

  The Hydro Boys weren’t playing that evening, and they were all intent on retiring early. By nine thirty they’d said their goodnights. Teresa checked with the night porter for letters. Not one.

  About to mount the stairs, she was startled by a hand on her elbow. Recalling the fine roots of an elegant dwarf tree. Mrs Jackman. She was, Teresa thought, prettily old.

  ‘It never seems right to bring this up before the men,’ Mrs Jackman murmured. ‘But I’ve been wanting to say . . .’

  Teresa nodded, light-headed. There it was: she was discovered.

  ‘About your little daughter you lost.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  ‘I don’t speak exactly from my own experience—still, I observed it with my daughter.’ They moved to one side to let a young man pass. Mrs Jackman gazed at him, then appeared to make an effort to focus and brighten. ‘You won’t be as you were before, yet you will carry on. And you must remember that this is the case for us all, to a lesser extent. I mean, every day something is lost and we’re a little changed, are we not? And onward we go. But destiny might reserve any number of surprises for us. New loves, even . . .’

  Teresa assented dumbly. Though she was safe, her heart remained flustered. She was praying that Mrs Jackman, who was taking such an interest in her happiness, would never find out she’d lied to her, to them, that she wasn’t the woman she masqueraded as. ‘I’m terribly sorry for your daughter’s loss. And for yours. It must have been dreadful. Is it a happy marriage, your daughter’s? Impertinent question, I know.’

  Mrs Jackman had lowered her eyes to the circular designs of the oriental rug they stood on, or to those of her memories. She looked up. ‘Peaceful,’ she replied, after a moment. ‘Quite peaceful.’

  They nodded at one another with a gravity that struck Teresa as feminine. On impulse, she pressed Mrs Jackman’s small venerable hand and found both of hers clasped.

  ‘Sleep well, my dear,’ Mrs Jackman entreated her.

  This brief exchange transformed her mood. Her tread was heavy as she ascended the stairs. She returned to her room feeling—not a wife, no, not that. But a mother.

  Not exactly a mother. Certainly not a contented one. And yet, a mother.

  She turned her key and entered the room in darkness. She stealthily approached the bedside table. She picked up a framed boyish photograph of a little girl that sat behind the barricade of books, barely able to distinguish it by the light journeying up through the undrawn curtains of the windows on the ground floor.

  Just as her husband was not dead, nor was her daughter.

  Beautiful. Her girl.

  With Mummy there had been meetings of a kind in a lush place of the imagination. She’d assumed she’d share similar encounters with her own daughter. Who, however, had turned out like her husband. Not much given to imagining. Or Teresa had not known how to encourage it in her—really not having expected any special effort would be required. Mother and daughter were too unalike for their love to be altogether natural. Even her guilt was sporadic and incomplete. She could never entirely get over the sense that she was the injured, ill-used party. The child was supposed to have been a miraculous gift, a great gladness. Difficult not to blame her, being honest, for the loss of youth and lightness.

  When it was too late, after the interminable sick fatness and the bloody violence, you were shocked to see you’d signed a contract locking you in to mortal time. As she has begun today, I will end one day—quite so. (Was she the Gun Man, a pistol, a time bomb folded into the womb?) And with the same fatal gesture, you’d ceased to be the heroine of events in favour of a rather pathetic role as a disoriented survivor and a weary helpmeet. Your own childlike pleasure in life would not come so easily now. How hard you’d fight for it. Reality had firmed up, because indulging in fantasy, at least in the company of a child who didn’t, was awkward. The ongoing war of ensuring you were left properly alone! To lose the command of one’s solitude, the free run of one’s inner realm . . . What a price. There was endless fancywork of words and sentimentality seeking to embellish motherhood. But on most days, frankly, it was tatty and depleting. Being of service. Cumbersome slabs of boredom.

  She abandoned the photograph and closed the curtains. Stumbling a little, she went over to turn up the lights. She took off her shoes, undressed down to her petticoat, in which she stood before the
glass. Despite being thinner than she’d been for a long time, her figure nonetheless continued to suggest dumpiness. Mummy had berated herself for this and, incredibly, it had happened to her, also. The child had turned her into a frump of a matron. Just when she was coming through all the confusion, the discomforts, humiliations and suffering, the feeling so much an animal, she realised she’d produced a startlingly beautiful child—but this beauty had been in exchange for her own.

  She’d kept waiting to see herself slender, if not emaciated, in the weeks after the child’s arrival. She’d felt so hollowed by the shocking ejection, yet her figure appeared to have coarsened indefinitely. Things had moved and reassembled, changed irrevocably. Her hair and eyes were dulling. She’d not even had the consolation of seeing her own loveliness transmitted to the child. Her looks were her father’s. She was dark, lithe, delicate in her features. Neat, symmetrical, flawless. As if refusing her mother credit for the tempestuous months she’d accommodated her. He might have produced their offspring without maternal help, as in some Greek myth. Father and daughter were playmates. They were both pragmatic, easily physical. Shunning and scorning dreamy eccentricity. Their love for each other was perfectly independent of her.

  What were they doing now? Were they reassuring each other? Did they need reassurance? Was he learning to miss her? Was she? (The thought of her usually a little belated. It had been too easy to leave her behind for nearly a year to go on the Empire Tour.) As a child grew older you tried to go back to your normal mode of being, and at times you managed it. With a vague sense of peril, of having mislaid something that shouldn’t be lost track of. Making it hard to think with any seriousness of Nice.

  She took off her pearls and brushed her teeth. She washed her face, smoothed cream into it, and rinsed a little under her arms, dabbing some rose eau de cologne there afterwards. Mummy: how had she managed—and gracefully? Where had that love come from, that golden aura? Was it easier for Victorians, the ones as comfortably off as she, to create golden auras around their children? Did modern women go wrong in trying too much to steer their own course through life? To claim satisfaction? But Mummy, always on the watch for transcendence, had claimed satisfaction, oh yes.

  She filled her new hot-water bottle at the basin, knowing that she should have asked for boiling water, that this wouldn’t be hot enough. All the same, she got into bed with it quickly, appreciative of the rubbery smell.

  Panicky sadness was rising as it had last spring and summer during the days and weeks of her toil at Ashfield following Mummy’s death.

  The photograph of herself that she’d stumbled upon among Mummy’s things—looking so grave, aware of sorrow’s weight—had dismayed her. Where had such an expression come from? She’d had a marvellous childhood. Hadn’t she? So how to explain that face?

  All she could come up with was this: herself in bed in the nursery, watched over by Nursie. Nursie’s supper tray was brought and perhaps she would get a little of that tasty meat. The villa was plunged in quiet, though wind breathing among leaves was a reminder of the encircling garden. By inconstant firelight she studied the motif of mauve irises ascending the wallpaper until it mutated into a shimmery dance, nearly animate.

  Infuriatingly, she couldn’t quite place this homey scene. But—could Nursie, in her frilled cambric cap, have been an anachronism, and what she actually remembered was lying in bed years after Nursie had returned to her family in Somerset, missing Nursie, one evening following Father’s death? Perhaps during the weeks her mother and sister had been absent from Ashfield, resting in the south of France? If she strained, she could vaguely recall a notion from that interregnum of gigantic scope—as if space had acquired a new dimension. Something like the effect of an everyday room abruptly emptied of furniture, at once echoing and unknown. Or Mummy was back from France, but on the evening in question, still disoriented and grief-saturated, she had considered any company at all too fatiguing and so sent her young daughter early to bed.

  With the fanciful reasoning that a mind in pain sometimes burrowed into, this daughter, become an adult woman, imagined Mummy’s sadness flowing through their villa like ink in water, passing bluely through the walls of her bedroom.

  An underground suspicion told her that Mummy’s melancholy predated even her father’s illness.

  Then where had it started? Had Father himself been responsible? He adored you, darling Mummy, but lacked your intense sensitivity. Was he too quick to leave for his club of a morning, to host a dinner party or some amateur theatricals you wouldn’t enjoy? Too complacent a lover, oblivious or unable to reach your deeper yearnings? So damnably hard to pinpoint the origin of sadness.

  Was it simply an ocean lapping at babes in their mothers, leaking through the most immensely permeable walls, blueing the tunnels of infant veins? Was that where woe began?

  She had stared at the photograph of her younger, weighted self, the air rife with crushed roses. She could have screamed till she had no voice left. And it was only days till he would come to see her at last, divorce on his mind.

  24

  NIGHT-TIME VISITATION

  It was between two and three in the morning, but he wasn’t asleep when a knocking sharpened his attention. Reclined on the narrow bed in his woollen dressing-gown, he had been nestled in a cave of Sibelius and sherry. He waited for a second knock to be sure he hadn’t imagined it. It had been on his door.

  In a befuddled fashion he rose, wondering if he should dress and for once regretting his tipsiness. He stopped the gramophone. He hesitated. He didn’t call out to ask who it was. Some poor insomniac, most likely, wishing to insult him for his blasted music. It couldn’t be her, though he was convinced it was. He deposited the glass he’d been drinking from on the writing desk, retrieved his slippers and stepped into them, fastening the belt of his dressing-gown. He straightened blankets, patted down pillows. He seized a shirt from the armchair and threw it into the bottom of the wardrobe. He did likewise with a towel.

  Nervous that the knocker would desist and dematerialise into the strange indeterminate dark of hotel nights, Harry opened the door.

  Teresa. In a mauve dressing-gown. She seemed a little confused.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she whispered. ‘Wake you. It’s unforgivable.’

  He whispered, too. ‘I was wide awake. Will you come in?’

  ‘If you don’t mind. There’s something I feel I have to tell you.’

  It was uncanny to have her in his room, where for days the atmosphere had been unquiet with thoughts of her. They stood facing one another in lamplight.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Her hair was combed and her dressing-gown neat but there was something almost fevered in her appearance, perhaps in her pale eyes, which were extraordinarily elusive in the penumbra. She put a hand to her face, then folded her arms and half turned away from him.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult. Living incognito and all that.’

  He made a movement towards the light switch.

  ‘No—don’t put the lights up. The lamp is so much friendlier. I must be a mess.’ She brought a hand to her face again.

  ‘No, you’re lovely, if you don’t mind my saying so. Forgive my manners. Won’t you sit down? Can I offer you something to drink?’

  ‘No. I won’t stay long—but you sit. Do.’

  The armchair was too relaxed for the situation, so he turned the chair at the writing desk to face her, and settled self-consciously on it, rearranging his dressing-gown over his knees. When he looked up, she was taking in his room.

  ‘I have a daughter,’ she pronounced brusquely, harshly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’ She laughed a rattled sort of laugh. ‘How slow I am. The papers.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘People are nosy.’

  ‘They are—we are. We can’t help ourselves.’

  A silence, and then she said feebly, ‘You must think me a terrible mother, for l
eaving her like that.’

  ‘No, life is wretchedly complicated. You had your reasons, I’m sure. I don’t see why anyone should judge you.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to have a false idea of me.’

  She was an unstable apparition in the quiver of the lamplight. Harry would have liked to say something about appreciating her books, but bringing them up seemed a delicate matter—like encouraging two people between whom there is some private history you haven’t grasped to engage in conversation.

  Before he found words, she went on, ‘I don’t think I was made to be a mother.’ She smiled, her face richly shadowed.

  ‘Why surely,’ he said, ‘not all women are. I don’t think my mother was.’

  ‘No?’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He shrugged and turned his hands over on his knees. After a moment, he stood.

  ‘The thing is,’ she murmured wonderingly, ‘it’s more peaceful not to think of her. You really don’t find me bad?’

  He shook his head again and neared her a little. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ He held out a hand.

  She took it, bobbed her head. The most rapid, skimming kiss. The lightness of her lips and hands, and the tenebrous slopes of her inner arms, bared by the sleeves of her dressing-gown that had fallen to her elbows, affected him. But before he knew it, his hand appeared to be levitating in space. She’d stepped back. This tentative approach, together with his own actions earlier in the day, and especially her fear of him that he’d felt with his own hands, all stopped him from reaching for her.

  ‘I’ll go now. I don’t know that I trust myself to stay longer.’

  ‘You know I’d like it, if you did stay longer? If you didn’t—perhaps—trust yourself.’

  She smiled. So soon the door was closing and Teresa had gone. His fugitive. He saw her still in the lamplight. The image jumping, coming close and vanishing. She’d been in Harry’s room.