A former policeman was stating that, given the missing novelist’s talent, she would have a remarkably elastic mind. Smiling into her tea, she rather enjoyed this. She paid less attention to a plan for divers to search the pools in the area of Newlands Corner, and moved on to The Times. More about divers and a ‘comb-out’.
She jumped to the following story, also about a missing woman, a different one, a student of just twenty. She was taken with the description of her. A sensitive girl, and the death of her father two years before had hit her so hard it had harmed her health. Her nose was a little turned up and she was given to be pale. Her underclothing was marked with her name—an endearing particular, though how frightfully ashamed you’d be to know it had been made public—and she had disappeared carrying a yellow leather bag with some Chelsea Library receipts in it. You had to have a bad feeling about the girl. A gloomy feeling, indeed. But don’t get upset. Have a little more toast and jam, sweet-tart cherry jam, and look, the weather for the health resorts. Harrogate: fog, then drizzle. And it was Unsettled Generally in the whole country. How gladdening.
She went up in the lift for her library books. The bedside table looked bereft once cleared of them. The photograph of her daughter came into view. Beautiful.
She listened for Harry’s music, but of course it was too early for that. Had a floorboard creaked? Was he stirring? Before she had time to decide to go up to him, she dashed out, down the stairs, through the lounge, and out of the hotel. The whole operation completed without her being buttonholed.
She passed some quiet enough hours on the streets of Harrogate, of which she’d grown fond. It seemed as if the air were growing a little harder to breathe, however. The invisibility she’d known here was compromised.
She returned the books to the lending library, without borrowing more. She sat awhile on an easy seat in Crescent Gardens. The sky was overcast and promised more misty rain, but it wasn’t cold. Clement, for the season. She walked through Valley Gardens, past Bogs Field’s curious dotting of wells. She slowed to observe the swans on the little brook.
Lunch was an apple and scones that she ate idling along James Street, mesmerised by window displays. Lucent jewellery, warm-toned carpets. On a whim, she bought the sheet music for ‘Angels Ever Guard Thee’ for Mr Bolitho, who’d accompanied her on the piano the night she sang it in the Winter Garden Ballroom. Agreeable idea, guarding angels. By three she was at the Hydro and under the hands of the masseuse. The woman reported that her back was much improved.
‘And I haven’t really felt the neuritis in days,’ she remembered. ‘The arm is just a little funny. The powers of the cure, no doubt. I’m afraid my appetite is restored, too. I’ve put on weight.’
‘You’ve a fine figure. If you can’t enjoy your food, ma’am, what can you enjoy?’ The masseuse’s figure was hearty, bountifully proportioned, her glorious sleep-inducing hands muscular.
‘Yes,’ Teresa said. ‘What else is there?’
To fill every last spare moment, any possible gap—to avoid imagining what was coming, or going to Harry—she ate apples in the bath. She had always considered this one of the finer ways to pass time or hatch a crime scene. But when her three apples were gone and her hands could only press into porcelain curves, her thoughts would not be corralled, and there was Mummy’s absence.
That she was no longer a fellow inhabitant of life was a fact that had to be grappled with. An event that went on recurring.
She rescued herself with a vision of Peter. She could rustle this up, as he’d kept her company countless times while she bathed. She saw his firm little body and noble eyes. He would have preferred she desist from loafing in that obnoxious pond made from volatile rain. On guard by the door, he was committed to the job of protecting her. Surely one of the most delightful things about dogs was their breath-taking absence of self-doubt. How did they achieve it—embrace life so unreservedly? Peter wandered over to press his cool nose into her hand. Dear faithful Peter. He met his mistress’s foibles and whimsy with indulgence, always knowing how to draw her gently back to reality. Her little one. Her child.
After the bath, she went to check for letters and messages. Nothing, but Redhead looked at her curiously for a second or two.
Teresa chatted with a Mrs Robson of Harrogate. She’d sidestepped her before, knowing she was friendly with the Lady Entertainer. Like the Jackmans, Teresa found being forcibly entertained of limited interest. She was informed that a hotel party was going that night to a dance at the Prospect Hotel. Fatalistically, she announced she might come along. She shouldn’t have been dallying in the public rooms but she felt careless and detached. What was there to lose? Night had set in.
In the hall outside the reading room, she heard Harry’s voice. He must have just come in from a walk. Before she could distinguish more than scraps of words, she opened the door quickly and passed in.
Mr Jackman was there, alone. Maybe she could prepare him for her possible expeditious departure.
‘Oh, Teresa. How are you?’ He laid a newspaper aside.
It was very warm close to the lusty fire. ‘Well, I guess.’
‘Please sit. Henrietta has abandoned me for the pleasures of York and I’m sick of newspapers.’ He gazed at her.
‘I am, too. What a comfortable room.’ She approved of the hardwearing bookshelves and armchairs, and the large windows grandly showcasing the felty winter night as though it was a series of muted masterpieces at a picture gallery. ‘I like this hotel.’
‘So do I. No more falls?’
It took an interlude of groping about in her memory to recollect the day he’d come to her aid on the slippery cobblestones behind the Pump Room. He knows, she realised. There is no need to tell him.
‘No more. And how are you sleeping?’
‘It’s up and down. You haven’t seen Harry today?’ he asked sadly.
‘I . . .’ She looked into the flames. ‘I shouldn’t.’
After a moment, he asked, ‘What’s today? I never know what day it is here.’
‘Nor I—holidays are like that. Which is energising. Time usually seems so iron-fisted. But I gather it’s Tuesday. The fourteenth of December.’
‘Already? We come here for Henrietta’s health, you know.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. She appears well, but—she told you about our daughter, Jane?’
‘She did.’
‘Who lost her baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘It wasn’t Jane’s but Henrietta’s—ours. Our baby who died.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Jane died when she was a baby. Shocking thing. I was an automaton myself for a time.’
He wasn’t asking for succour, so the confidence didn’t weigh on her. ‘Terrible.’
‘Yes. That was when sleep became precarious for me. Anyhow, we talk of her as if she’d grown up. It’s our little fiction. It makes it easier for Henrietta. And for me also, maybe.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thank you, my dear.’
The door opened to admit a waiter with a tray of coffee things. The disruption startled them. Voices from the corridor gave an idea of purposeful movement going on out there.
‘Teresa, can I trouble this good man for another cup for you?’
‘No, thank you. I should be going.’
When the waiter had closed the door behind him, Mr Jackman added, ‘I sometimes manage to sleep by resolving not to feel impotent. Acceptance is important but so is not seeing yourself as helpless, at the mercy of misfortune. One should believe one is the author of one’s fate, of one’s happiness, if only in small ways, through small actions.’
‘Yes.’ They listened to the vivacious fire for a little, and then she told him, ‘I must go.’
They stood simultaneously, he with the physical sureness she’d noticed that day of her fall, when he’d escorted her back to the hotel. She went over and gave him her hand, detecting an odour—a version of it, with a masculine inflection—that she in some w
ay knew. From her Grannies? A melding of soap, cologne and older skin. She remembered being intrigued and reassured by this. She thought now that it was very human, in a slightly dusty way.
They held one another’s hands until he pressed hers and said, ‘Teresa, I’ve betrayed you.’
‘How?’ But she asked it slowly, extracting her hand.
‘I was talking with a couple of the bandsmen about the story, that story in the papers . . . about the lady . . .’ He looked woodenly into the fire.
She was much more equable than she would have expected. ‘Yes.’
‘And we concluded . . . that certain details corresponded . . .’
‘Ah.’
He advanced, ‘All I can say for myself is that when you aren’t sleeping, you aren’t quite yourself. You tend not to be your best self. It was a small action of which I am not proud. It gave me no happiness, none.’ The hand that he’d continued to offer sank now to his side, fatigued and knowing. ‘I couldn’t hold my tongue. It was probably senility, senile jealousy. I had been imagining things about you, I am embarrassed to say, imagining . . . that we might be coming to care for one another . . .’
‘You love your wife! Anyone can see that! Don’t you?’
‘Very much. Though what anyone can see is far from everything. And love is . . . a house of multiple rooms, rooms that look different on different days, in different lights. I don’t need to tell you this.’ He tried, with eyes that she had only then observed to be of a moist aqueous blue, to interrogate her. She wouldn’t allow it. ‘Rather late, I noticed it wasn’t me you were coming to care for. It was Harry. How petty I am—do you detest me?’
‘Heavens, why is love so mixed up?’ She backed towards the door.
‘Should it be simple?’
‘I don’t know if I forgive you.’ She was withdrawing from the reading room. ‘I don’t detest you. I think I do understand.’
She needed air. The side door led her into the hotel grounds. Still not cold enough for her to miss a coat, not after roasting by a fire, yet the rarefied, restless atmosphere she had been conscious of all day encouraged speed. Her presentiment was confirmed. It was just a matter of time. When was it not a matter of time?
Circling the Hydro, she passed a golden-haired youth relying heavily on a cane, his progress lead-footed. Her head reeled, reflecting on what it would be like having to walk thus, on Mr Jackman’s insomniac illusions and the inventions of his gracious, wounded wife. Even keeping to the less obvious suffering, there were so many sparks of pain burning in any one life and this multiplied across the population of a hotel, a spa town, ordinary towns, the island of Great Britain, the Continent, the Subcontinent, and so on. It wasn’t a picture that could be sustained for long, such fireworks. And really, how little was made of it all, considering. How quietly it was for the most part borne.
When she came back in, it was only five minutes after five. The arms of the grandfather clock were advancing with exaggerated sluggardliness. Two hours more till dinner. The dragging of winter nights. About to go upstairs, she heard a group of new arrivals—an older man, a younger, and an elegant woman of rather fuzzy age—asking if anyone fancied a billiard match. Supremely indifferent to the scheme, she fell in with it merrily. She lasted only one game, the luck from her previous game not holding, in the way of luck, before inviting them all to the dance at the Prospect Hotel and excusing herself.
As she was entering the lounge, the Jackmans’ voices stopped her. Harry’s, too. They had to be by the reception desk.
‘You haven’t seen Teresa, have you?’ His tone had two parts to it, a buoyant and a grave.
‘I’ve been in York all day, I’m just back,’ Mrs Jackman declared. ‘I have never seen anything like the Minster’s grisaille windows. The greyness of them—they are surprisingly dark—but all shot through with light.’
‘I think she was going out,’ Mr Jackman contributed.
Teresa waited.
‘I might go out myself. See what’s playing at the picture house.’
‘Good idea,’ Mr Jackman said flatly.
Harry seemed to leave immediately after. The Jackmans began a softer conversation that wafted out of earshot. She hesitated for another few seconds, and then made a bolt for the stairs.
In her room, she considered the bedside table emptied of books. Oh dear. A curse on her for not having borrowed anything else. She caught sight of Harry’s manuscript on the armchair. She took it to the bed.
Curled on her side, she read his pages through twice. His protagonist was a maudlin would-be aristocrat of humble rural origins. She felt her mouth moving into a smile. Not much happened. It was all rather lugubrious, not her kind of thing.
Strident laughter rose from the drive and she went to the window. A number of cars and taxicabs were arriving. The troops mustering for the dance? There was more than the usual amount of activity on the stairs, also, but then the dinner hour had to be approaching. Silence, of course, from Harry’s room.
28
1914 Torquay
She smelled the water as soon as they stepped down from the train. But the distance from the station to the hotel was only a few yards and their time in the outdoors so short, too short. It would have been better to linger in the open air, yet she crossed the ridiculously small space beside him to whom she, as of that afternoon, belonged.
And would belong for ever after.
It was late and they were overtired, while also far too excited to be sleepy. Taking possession of the first rooms that would be really theirs, they laid down their few pieces of baggage. Furtively they regarded one another, incredulous at the day’s happenings. Was it just the previous night that he’d awoken her in his mother’s house, urging her so rashly to marry him? After all their doubts and dithering, after her long wait for him, could this really be the Wedding Night? She went out onto the balcony, where she felt more sensible. The sea in a reflective mood.
‘Can you believe it’s Christmas Eve?’ she asked, hearing him behind her.
‘Your mother will never forgive me for marrying you without her there, you know.’
‘Oh, I daresay she will, eventually.’ She laughed. ‘She did warn me against you. She said you were ruthless.’
He laughed, too, his teeth disconcerting in the obscurity when she turned to see him. ‘Well, I suppose I am if I want something. I wanted you. And I’ve got you, haven’t I?’
How completely she knew that view, a lower variant on the one she had from the road outside Ashfield whenever she needed it, there throughout childhood. Her cherished Torbay. She squinted at the headland on its journey towards Brixham, the lighthouse at Berry Head pulsing like a slightly otherworldly greeting. She had a strange feeling of being inside something which, though familiar, she had until then known only from the outside. Numberless times, considering the Grand from Princess Pier or the Strand, or studying its distinguished shape on the seafront from the Imperial, whose lights glinted now beyond Beacon Hill, she’d had a thought for the ladies and gentlemen staying within it. On occasion, as she wandered along the beach below, she’d observed a soignée lady on her balcony, and daydreamed about the interior of the room behind those glass doors and the chic travels that lady was poised to embark on. Yet abruptly the vantage point of the grown-up on her hotel balcony was hers. She found herself searching for a girl down on the beach.
‘Do be careful.’ These words or their tone possibly not what she’d have preferred to hear. She was leaning over the balustrade, savouring a faint giddiness. ‘You could fall down there and kill yourself.’
She straightened up. ‘Says the pilot.’ He didn’t appreciate the joke and a disgruntlement ensued. He’d leave her absurdly soon to go back to all that. The things he wasn’t inclined to discuss, not—beyond chipper, clipped sorts of résumés—in any interesting way, made him tense. This unpredictable balance between obstinate bravery and something less sturdy was fascinating. She’d mother, nurse, dote on, entrance him. They’d be abs
olutely everything to one another.
‘Come inside.’
‘But isn’t it lovely?’ It was possible that her special relationship with Devon disturbed him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ Awfully good-looking when he was exasperating. His hand came to her waist. She was readying herself for compliancy as he murmured, ‘Forgiven me finally, darling, for the dressing-case?’
She went inside, husband on her heels. They’d laughed already over the row provoked by his Christmas present to her—somehow not what she’d expected, too workaday, though undoubtedly handsome and practical—but she remained nonplussed at her own warlike display. Both embarrassed and righteous. She’d not imagined there was such a virago in her. A pugnacious might folded into her timidity.
He trailed her laxly while she reconnoitred the charming rooms, drawing curtains. They hadn’t yet taken off coats and hats, and maybe it was this that suggested they were travellers propelled by chance into the same railway waiting room. Acquaintances who’d never before found themselves so casually together.
‘Come and get that off, will you?’ He’d taken off his own coat and hat.
Having been shivery all day, she was sweating lightly, prowling around. If she didn’t keep reminding herself of what was occurring with the drama and the levity of some party trick in the dark, it was difficult to believe. Today she was a bride, tonight was her wedding night, tomorrow they’d go home to Mummy for Christmas, and the day after that she’d accompany this remarkably attractive young man—her man, her husband—to London. From there he’d depart for France. She surrendered her coat obediently, and began to tease off gloves.
He leaned over and snatched her hat from her head. She was startled by this impatience. By air moving on her bared skin. She recalled the guarded winter-afternoon light that had suffused the church. After he’d hung their coats in the wardrobe, their eyes met. The blue of his: the heady shade of water traversed by sunbeams, of fabled jewels. Somewhat troubling that at night you could only guess at it. He looked rather as if he might cry.
On the Blue Train Page 22