‘Lucky to get this room,’ he muttered.
‘On such late notice.’
Their gazes struck against one another again and he was smiling. She’d been mistaken, or his humour had taken a sharp turn. This was an adventure to him. Impressive—but sport. She wasn’t vexed to see him go from delicate to incorrigible. His impetuousness had drawn her to him from the start. She could hardly credit her luck. Oh, she could, though, and she looked forward to a long career in wonder. (Should she have known that they’d never be so exotic to one another again? That only a beginning wears such a high polish?) She’d have liked to be free of shoes, yet was unsure how to proceed.
She said, ‘I’ll open the window so we can hear the waves.’
‘Let me.’
Waiting, six months of aeroplanes flying, lists of dead coming back like splintered, unbelievably reticent love letters, while she attended the harmed and faded men encumbering long lines of beds at Torquay Hospital. Thinking of him, she would walk home in the clean air, after her duties, uphill.
Death was not real, and then real, real and then not, a legend, numbers, anecdotes, Father. Blood was the departing vital fluid of a man. And just something red to be washed from a white uniform, from hands. You couldn’t hold the truths in your mind too long, not without life covering itself in a pall. Stories were the other side of the moon, but helped to lift the dreary cloth.
Like death, her husband was outright alien and wedded to her. Astounding. She clung to the tableau of the travellers in the waiting room—and to the dark screen that was a pending journey, awaiting the images that would flicker over it. She went to fill her lungs at the open window.
He seized her slippery hand and yanked her back. ‘Darling, I do love you so.’
She might have suddenly arrived, a hopeless provincial, wisps of hay in her hair, at a daunting metropolis. She was willing but lost. Much was at stake. What was it, exactly, this formidable thing? Paralysed and tingling, she smiled. Bright child that she was, she knew disguise—so, sophisticate or ingénue? She wanted to be intrepid, wanted to be duly retiring. Both were seemingly demanded of her and they erased each other. She was idiotically, shatteringly romantic.
‘We only have tonight.’ She sounded reproachful.
He bent his knees a little, so that they looked eye to eye, as if he would jocularly deliver a stern lesson. This stirred hilarity in her. An off-balance moment during which he looked younger, adolescent. She swiftly relived her outrage over the dressing-case, the disappointment.
He kissed her cheek and she closed her eyes, seeing him impulsive at the controls of an aircraft, herself drifting between lines of hospital cots in her white uniform, a version of a nun, though aware of admiring eyes. She was in her first youth, her zestful beauty giving her a certain nerve.
With a new haste he finally found her lips, the journey begun. Man and wife. They’d melt together, somehow. Make an eternal shining oneness that would fill every gap.
29
TWELFTH DAY, EVENING
She came downstairs at around seven thirty, presentable, she thought, in the salmon-pink georgette, and with a rampant appetite. At once, she registered a suffocated perturbation in the lounge.
The epicentre of it was a man seated in an armchair, his face curtained by a newspaper. The air had grown very thin and sly. It was just as well, after all, she hadn’t borrowed any more books, because whatever had been coming had arrived.
The newspaper shifted. And she recognised—her husband.
One last capacious holiday moment before time went faster. She had leisure to study his features, to observe him identifying her—quickly, his eyes, unwilling to linger or attach themselves, shot next, with insistence, to a man. A policeman, presumably. This was to be no warm reunion. There were to be no apologies on his part, no pleas for the future of their marriage. She absorbed all this, together with the pile of newspapers on the low table and a general stirring in the wings, as it were. And she mused that growing up was having disenchantment make plain that what you’d always taken for granted was yourself—the true dreaming-feeling part, the violent-loving part—didn’t necessarily have a place in daily life. So there was to be no being whole. Living was passing between a series of compartments in which you took up different roles. Wife in that one. Mother in this. Daughter-in-law. Daughter. Your husband’s lover. Lady being attractive and charming. Lady shopping. Lady lunching out. Lady vacationing alone. By and large the roles wouldn’t come as easily or be as diverting as those you had played as a solitary child on the lawn at Ashfield. The deeper waters hardly flowed into them. Was the most fiendish truth that you were called on to be your own Gun Man, anaesthetising your dreams—as they were resistant to being killed? After which the only thing for it was to get on, hoping not to seem too disrupted, or dead.
‘Hullo,’ she said, going over.
He gave her a small frightful smile contaminated with irony. ‘Well.’
She sat down opposite him, not too close. His jaw was hard, as happens when you’ve been in the public eye, in an intolerable role, with your fixed countenance, for much too long. He was an inferior actor. Maybe that was why she’d loved him, because he was so poor at pretending. She’d thought there was something pure and savage in that. He was pure and savage. He had a black-and-white, one-track will—essential in those who are mad about golf?—and perhaps this was admirable. Foul but probable that she’d go on loving him. Danged handsome in a new, well-tailored black suit. That infuriating show of self-assurance that got her blood up. Clearest blue eyes . . . obtuse, false. Cowardly. The control in his youthful face betraying a terror of showing himself shaken. She recalled him in that rare moment of open fear and romance under the beech the night she gave the day—as the French would say—to his child. She’d been almost more worried for him than for herself. Now, if there’d been a tidy, untraceable way of doing it, she might have murdered him.
Mr Bolitho, her accompanist on the evening she’d sung in the Winter Garden Ballroom, was passing slowly through the lounge and it would have been rude not to acknowledge him. ‘Hello, forgive my speedy escape after our performance,’ she said. ‘You’re an accomplished pianist.’
He stopped by her. ‘And you could be a professional singer, Mrs Neele. But you’ve heard that before.’
‘Not true—but thank you. My brother has just arrived,’ she explained, nodding at the so-called brother, who looked quite at a loss.
He greeted Mr Bolitho curtly, making it evident that there was to be no conversation. ‘We should really go in to dinner,’ he intoned, blatantly only to her.
‘In a minute.’ She’d remembered the sheet music, ‘Angels Ever Guard Thee’. It was protruding from her handbag in a neat role. ‘A souvenir,’ she told Mr Bolitho, taking it out and dashing off a signature.
Teresa Neele. A name light and filmy on the page.
Mr Bolitho blushed, with the blend of regret and enjoyment he displayed at the piano, and accepted the offering with a bow from a more gentlemanly era.
She was standing when the man who had to be a policeman —she thought she’d noticed him in the lounge the day before, a broad, inoffensive-looking fellow—was suddenly addressing her. He asked if she could tell him what had happened to her during the past eleven days.
She was unequal to his intent solemnity. His eyes were a depthless grey and in them she saw her importance to him, his longing for a great unveiling. She was almost sorry not to oblige, to have to present him at the end of his steeplechase with a white wall.
‘Eleven days?’ She smiled vaguely for the benefit of those around them and tried not to breathe too deeply of the thin air. ‘So long?’ She wasn’t sure if the hiatus had felt less or more. ‘I . . . I seem to have lost my memory.’
‘Lost your memory?’
‘Yes, it’s only starting to come back now.’
‘That’s right,’ her husband said, relieved at how this might exonerate him. ‘She remembers nothing at all. We might c
ontinue this conversation later? My wife and I were going in to dinner.’
She nodded demurely at the policeman, who seemed not to have planned his next move. Mrs Robson, also dinner-bound, met her eye.
In a discreet but firm voice suggesting some sensitive family matter upon which it would be impossible to elaborate, Teresa said, ‘My brother has arrived, so, you see, unfortunately I won’t be able to come to the dance tonight. And I was so looking forward to it.’ She didn’t dare glance around for Harry.
There was a baleful peace at their table. How normal barely mastered tension felt between them—she took this in. She’d ordered the sole and was behaving nicely, restrained and mildly amused. Do remember, though, that the roles should be played adequately well, by all means, but not too well. A virtuoso rendition might make you forget what lay lower, desires biding their time. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the Jackmans settling themselves at a table and observing her, Mrs Jackman probably in puzzlement. She turned towards them for long enough to transmit a smile and have it good-naturedly returned. It wasn’t all horrid and barren up here on the surface. There were bits of kindness.
One morsel of kindness sent you hunting for others, however. In the man opposite you. You didn’t care for the rage so tightly laced inside his badly done coolness, though he’d have been through a lot, too—must have been quite humiliated—and was his jaw softening a little? Yes, there, and now you glimpsed the sanguine boy in the stony man, and would the boy see that you were graceful in your salmon-pink georgette? Mightn’t he understand how sorry you were to have caused such a cock-up, the press and all those atrocities? That a broken heart had been the culprit? If he’d been suspected of doing away with her—well, wasn’t there some truth to it? If he could see any of this, there might be generous moments to come with the child, also.
‘Our daughter is well,’ he sneered. One of his erratic instances of perceptiveness.
‘Is she? Oh, thank heavens. I feel absolutely awful about leaving her.’
‘I daresay you do. She doesn’t know anything. We’ve kept it from her. Carlo has been marvellous.’
As she’d known Carlo would be, bless her, in her secretary’s fabulously dependable Scottish way. Dear Carlo. She’d be glad to see her again. ‘And . . . how is Peter?’
He knew she’d have asked this without delay. ‘Pining for you,’ he spat.
She was too composed and mature to say she imagined his lover, the bona fide Miss Neele, was pining for him at this moment. Silk-enveloped golfing thighs in a hotel room’s nectarine-tinted light. The sole had no taste at all, its texture discomfortingly fleshy. The question was: were morsels of kindness enough?
‘One of the chaps in the band recognised you from the newspapers.’ It wasn’t her message in The Times that had brought him. Had he ever been interested in decoding her messages? ‘I was thinking I should give them all some little memento, a thankyou for the service rendered.’ Expertly unfeeling, he went on, ‘I’ll have the car waiting for us in London. We’ll drive back from there.’ He wasn’t able to bring himself to say ‘home’. Swallowing his beef bourguignon must have been uncomfortable with his teeth set like that. He’d suffer from indigestion later. ‘The only problem is the press. The bloody circus. Other thing we could do is get your sister here under wraps, take the train to Manchester and hole up at the hall. They won’t expect that.’
Clever Sister would be a brick, of course, but how wearisome to have to justify herself to her. Clever Sister would be moderately appalled at the public display, faintly alarmed at the possibility that her younger sister had lost her mind, gone to pieces, something unseemly of that sort (and was this something of that sort?). Although being inclined to adventure and originality, she’d be stimulated by the cloak-and-dagger flavour of it all. Hadn’t she gone to Torquay railway station disguised as a Greek priest? Brought off her number at the finishing school, that leap onto the table laden with tea things? She might rather welcome a spicy diversion from the stolid routines of the hall. She’d think the amnesia line was bosh. Would she be hurt that her little sister hadn’t gone to her?
‘Have you finished? I’ll have to attend to the police now. Maybe even to the blasted journalists. I’ll escort you upstairs.’
He hadn’t asked if she wanted dessert. Maybe she did. Hadn’t asked her to account for herself. Having no taste for the answer, and petrified she’d make a scene. How very little he knew her. She found she wasn’t surprised that he had no wish to be alone with her, or even to know if she were well. He hadn’t said her name. What had been coming was the opposite of desire—this death, the stone-cold cadaver of their love. She had known it, and stubbornly not known it, until then.
The chatter in the lounge was insistently loud. Mounting the stairs, she had the impression that the walls had grown closer from the pushing, from all sides, of a massive force. She would not look around.
‘Quick now,’ breathed the man who—the world would soon be informed of it—couldn’t bear to be her husband any longer.
One step, two. Another. Good girl, like that. And another.
The last steps were easy, because Harry was on the first-floor landing. What a heavenly unthinkable disaster it would have been to walk into his arms. Coming down the stairs, he showed no sign of recognising her or acknowledging her companion. He could act. To an insensitive onlooker, to her unwilling Other Half behind her on the stairs, the profound brown-eyed glance would no doubt have seemed entirely random and insignificant.
She reached down into its low sorrowful heart, hoping that he too could discern what was buried in her for safekeeping. And they’d passed him and were approaching her room.
‘Right,’ her husband was saying in hushed tones, ‘I’m in number ten, on the other side of the staircase. Go in quickly.’
Her actions would be supervised now. She remembered something, searched desperately in her handbag and retrieved it. ‘Wait here. I just have to return an item to that man.’
‘Who? Well, hurry.’
Harry was still on the first flight of stairs.
‘Mr McKenna, I’ve kept forgetting to give you this back.’ As he stepped up towards her, she stepped down into the warmth of cherry tobacco, sugared alcoholic sharpness, his rueful maleness. Standing over him, she offered his handkerchief. ‘I’ve been carrying it around.’
‘Why, thank you, Mrs Neele,’ he said, without taking it. He whispered, ‘I looked for you all day.’
They were barely out of sight in that slim parenthesis of the stairs. ‘I couldn’t see you,’ she whispered back.
‘You won’t come away with me? We can leave this awfulness behind.’ His eyes were languid.
‘My daughter,’ she said, gesturing at the sticky, sickly congealing of events the dummy-woman she had to be belonged to. ‘I must go.’ She thought suddenly that it was probably not even possible, or at least not fair, to make of another person your safe haven.
A brief hesitation she’d not forget.
‘Thank you again, Mrs Neele,’ he said loudly, clasping her hand in his, closing her fingers so tightly on his handkerchief that it was painful. Then Harry nodded and gave her a sad little half-smile whose message was comfort. And adieu. These last words almost soundless: ‘See you in Nice?’
She turned.
And went back to her husband, who stopped his pacing to say, ‘Don’t worry—I’ll take care of things. Explain that you’ve lost your memory. That you don’t know me. You don’t,’ he added, ‘even know you have a child.’
Harry appeared to have changed his mind, coming into their view before exiting it to ascend the stairs. Her husband darted him an irritated look.
‘Very well,’ she replied with a new strength, seeing repressed turmoil unfold in the only face more familiar to her than her own. ‘Though just so you understand—I’ll do what you wish, for now. Go along with it. But when all this is over, I’ll do whatever I please. Count on that.’
He was livid, hardly breathing. �
��Is that a threat?’
‘If you think it one, then most certainly. Goodnight.’
‘Agatha,’ he implored, far too late, and she didn’t turn back.
Once she was finally alone, panic gleamed like the shiny lining of a coat flapping open in a gale. Oh God. Such scrutiny. She was notorious! A seedy, dreadful incarnation of the dream of promenading down the high street in a state of undress.
Harry’s music saved her. It was faint, trickling jerkily through floorboards and walls, over the increased noise bloating the Hydro. And her mind slowly began to dilate.
After some minutes, a soft channel down to a lower place was opening, and she drew on it. Everything would be all right, she told herself, if only she could do this, take periodic doses of this like sulphur water. She’d always done it, hadn’t she? Didn’t she know she always could? It would be possible when she was alone. When she was taking a walk in the country, or in a city throng. Perhaps even a little, much more surreptitiously, when she was in society?
Press on.
But being greedy, given to disquiet, the petted child peckish for splendour, she’d wait and wonder if she mightn’t get more than these modest measures. And if there wasn’t somewhere waiting for her a person who wouldn’t blink to see her in the high street en déshabillé, her imagination rippling over her skin.
Remembering his maudlin would-be aristocrat was like having an unobtrusive friend sidle into the room. A surprise. Harry’s protagonist, Henry, was not striking. But he was slender and rather agile from constant walking, and his eyes were melancholy in a gentle face. In those few pages, his life was fearfully unadventurous and something of a failure. He was bent on being urbane, a flawlessly comme il faut old-fashioned gentleman. He didn’t entirely manage it. That breed was dying, in any case. He did appear to have a considerable capacity for affection—he was always falling in love, with strangers who accidentally brushed his arm in the street, hopeful window boxes, queer architecture and all manner of foolish notions. Though he never travelled, only moped around London, picture galleries, parks and the banks of the Thames, he came across as a nomad. This despite the fact that he’d occupied unprepossessing lodgings in Bayswater for many years. Notwithstanding his despair over always losing what he loved, he had a way of making a thing that took his fancy into his heart’s one desire, a sacred home. The more she thought about Henry, the more she confused him with herself, this happening with people you cared for. With art, she supposed. Her eyes were wet. Elgar rather had that effect.
On the Blue Train Page 23