On the Blue Train (19 page)

AUGUST 1926 Torquay

She couldn't simply drift down the hill to bathe in the sea, because there was too much to be done. She couldn't sleep. The only thing for it was to work, Mummy's possessions having to be sorted, stored, disposed of. A life in mementoes, one more suffocating than the last. The sprawling wreath of wax flowers preserved under a glass dome that was her grandfather's memorial! Not a gay object to contend with. What the deuce to do with that? Could she throw it away with a clear conscience?

In another of the endless boxes that had been closed up for years, a photograph of an ethereal blonde child in a garden.

Her child self. An earlier Agatha at Ashfield. Beautiful, with long, so-fair, delicately curled hair. Solemn pre-Raphaelite nymph. She smiled, and ceased smiling. There was something about that face.

She straightened her stooped and tender back, nearly knocking over the saucepan she'd put out to catch drips last night when the rain started. Peter sneezed and she bent again to pat him. The overcrowded room suddenly seemed impossibly oppressive, fusty with all that past she'd never slog through. She beat the dust from her hands and, followed by her companion-saviour, took the photograph downstairs to the conservatory. The light was better there, but Peter was disturbed by the wicker sofa's suppressed screeching when she sat, and not liking being woefully regarded by tiers of wilted ferns, she sprang up and went out into the garden.

Along with Peter, her only bit of succour. The garden, with its sea breezes. Nothing better for scrubbing out your mind than salt air. It positively murdered her spirit to think that Ashfield might have to be sold, because it was still an oasis, even in its current dilapidation, all the delightful greenery a little overblown and readying to ferment. Lack of money for a proper gardener had obliged Mummy to adopt a laissez-faire approach, and the small park had taken on an almost sexual dishevelment as the weather ripened. The Alba roses, at their lightest pink, sweetly fragrant best (the waste of Mummy not able to breathe them in), appeared tousled and harassed by the enduring sultriness. The creepers still gamely climbing the villa were limp. Distorted seasons they had been, alien spring and mildewy summer.

The real child, her voice coming now from the open window of the schoolroom, where the servant was occupying her, couldn't understand any of it. Six years old—very nearly seven. She didn't even realise that the cataclysm of her birth had taken place here, that her father had kissed her mother hours beforehand under that beech.

Why couldn't he make it down—just for a weekend? The flummoxing answer was golf.

Peter licking her ankle, she considered the photograph. The unmoved mouth. The shadows like bruising beneath already hooded, strikingly serious eyes. Aged. A face not looking out but in.

She wrested a handful of petals from one of Mummy's beloved roses, releasing frenzied scent and the longing to rage. Such was that unhinged summer that this urge was somehow misplaced. It was days after that her husband finally came down from London, an energetic, youthful blue-eyed man to her ruined phantom.

Saying, ‘Look, see, I want a divorce. I've fallen in love with someone.'

And she didn't scream (she would another day, and hurl a white teapot). Instead, she observed that it was only as quicksand swallowed your feet that you had its number.

15

A VERY ELUSIVE PERSON

Following his rise from the mud, Harry crossed paths with Mr Jackman in the dressing hall.

‘Well?' Mr Jackman was robed, glowing.

‘Seem to have survived,' Harry reported.

‘Jolly good. Me too. I've stewed in sulphur foam.' He grinned. ‘Feel fortified, rejuvenated. Starving like a boy of fourteen. I'm off now for a massage. You should have one, too, you know. You look a little rundown, if you don't mind my saying so.'

‘I don't. But later, perhaps. I was just going for a turn in the Winter Garden, to see if the orchestra's up to anything.' Harry felt guilty for always snubbing the affable fellow, but he was too oppressed by his own thoughts to be sociable. ‘Might see you after.'

He did not go to the Winter Garden. He sneaked out of the baths and loitered in Crescent Gardens, smoking, in the hope of spying Teresa leaving.

An hour or so passed, and the Jackmans emerged. They waited a few moments, he guessed for Teresa, but presently gave up and set out in the direction of the Hydro. He concluded that she must have already returned to the hotel, maybe via a side exit or the Winter Garden.

He concealed himself from the Jackmans behind the covered Promenade Walk, and then followed at a distance.

At the Hydro he waited for lunch to be well underway before furtively surveying the dining room from the doorway. No Teresa.

Too restless to eat in company, he stalked the corridors, on the lookout. He even went up to the mezzanine to see if she could be in the billiard room with the Russian and his cohort. Of course there was no one there and, coming back downstairs, he discovered the Winter Garden Ballroom likewise empty. Melancholy business, a deserted ballroom. He entered and found himself at the table where she had sat during their first conversation. He rested his hand on it briefly. The room grew cooler close to the glass walls. He looked out at the grounds and up at the muted winter sunlight falling in through the glass ceiling. With his head tipped back, he suddenly felt the effects of his broken night: an odd weight,
or weightlessness, and an idea that his own outlines were smudged. He must have slept on his feet for a second or two.

With a start, he flung out a hand to steady himself against the wall. A climbing plant would throw out an arm—more slowly—to the radiance of a window with a similar instinct for self-preservation. At the Hydro the guests weren't unlike plants living out their lives confined to a delicate semblance of the wider world.

He resumed his patrolling of the hallways. Despite his recent familiarity with accommodations such as these, he couldn't say he was at home in them. His presence there continued to seem a sort of joke at which he was laughing soundlessly and without mirth. The irony might have been entertaining if he'd had any real appetite for amusement. He was an impostor in this curative pleasantness. He was doing his best impersonation of one who was footloose, but he could resort to watering-places for aimless sojourns only thanks to an unearned wealth that sat uncouthly on him.

Taking the electric elevator to the first floor,
her
floor, he reflected that to be an effective member of the Quality you must be born one, or become one before you've achieved full awareness of yourself and your position in life. Otherwise you won't have the sense—the reflex—to take luxury and repose as your due. While doing your best to find it natural, you'll suspect you're befouling a key moral precept. The Jackmans and Teresa knew no qualms of this type. For them, there
was nothing more normal than living among first-class comforts, nothing strange or ironical in being a hothouse plant. Was he attracted to these people because he wanted them to teach him to be satisfied with comfort? To slough off guilt? He was a great one for guilt.

After a circumspect examination of the first-floor hallway, he stood close to Teresa's door and listened. Nothing. Where was she? Still at the baths? Out walking?

Back to his pacing. Was it because he belonged to the servants' caste that he could not feel at home here? His mother had been a maid before her marriage and his father had worked as a modest farmer. Granted, Harry hadn't known what it was to go wanting but nor had he known surplus. Which rather rendered the sensation of enough dubious, haloing it with insufficiency, a certain lack. In his own working life he'd been an assistant to a rich man. Proximity to money gives you some understanding of its ways but not an inbred instinct for them. He'd maintained a household successfully, with infrequent worries. Though he'd had to live knowing that he provided Valeria with a simple London flat inferior to the fine bourgeois villa in which she'd been raised. She'd even had to take on employment of her own. Perhaps he'd not made anything of himself as a writer because he'd been too afraid to try his luck at earning their living that way only to realise that he couldn't.

Harry's fraudulent feeling came in part, yes, from his failure to spend Mrs Mortlake's fortune with nonchalance, but also from his being such an unconvincing spa visitor. He was not exactly a pleasure holiday-maker, and nor did he possess any well-defined malady or interest in being cured. He fancied he'd have rather enjoyed some tangible complaints, dramatic anaemia, something to make him bedridden—or mobile only in a bath chair. During his walks in Valley Gardens, observing the fine silhouette of the Bath Hospital against the sky, he'd sometimes nurtured a fantasy of being an inmate there.
That
would have been more the spot for him. Or, better still, the Home for Incurables a little further along Cornwall Road. In such an establishment it would be virtually de rigueur to feel blackly sorry for yourself. Hopelessness would be logical and self-evident. He imagined being grimly uplifted by this.

Thus he spent the afternoon, feeling a misfit, and somehow betrayed—by his birth or character. He returned to his room eventually, consigned Wagner to the gramophone,
Tristan und Isolde
, and threw himself onto the bed. This was his fate, was it? These hotels his purgatory? He'd proven himself to be incapable and undeserving of normal life, and places dedicated to health or amusement in which he didn't truly believe had become the limbo he was destined to inhabit. He struggled to sense Valeria lying beside him, their hands interlaced. His guilt was still shocking. The stain of it that would not be cleansed by all the bathhouse cures of Arabia.

Harry was at table with the Jackmans when Teresa entered the dining room, the Russian at her elbow. He was hovering like an insect around sweetness, but you could tell even from a distance that she was being offhand with him. Also that he was a seductive personage, despite there being nothing particularly imposing in his face or physique. Where did that come from? Was she really insensible to it? The Russian gestured to the table where his friends sat. Harry distinctly saw Teresa shake her head and glance at Mrs Jackman, who waved. Her eyes only hopped over his.

A long moment later she was settling herself at Mrs Jackman's side, with a smiling though inscrutable look.

‘We've chosen the French menu,' Mr Jackman informed her. ‘Will you be our accomplice?'

‘Certainly,' she said, all diffident courtesy.

‘I lost you at the baths,' Mrs Jackman lamented. ‘After my first dip in the plunge bath I couldn't find you.'

‘I lost this chap here, too,' Mr Jackman said.

‘I was ages in the Hot Rooms,' Teresa explained. ‘You forget yourself in those.'

‘You haven't braved the plunge bath yet?' Mr Jackman wanted to know. ‘I submerge myself fully, head included, five or six times during a Turkish visit. Swear by it.'

‘And look at his beautiful skin,' remarked his wife earnestly. ‘You'd say he wasn't a day over forty.'

‘Indeed.' Teresa was straight-faced.

Was she thinking what Harry was? They are old and love each other, still find each other beautiful. A success of a marriage. How is that done? She flushed slightly, looked down.

From the other side of the room the Russian was trying to catch her eye. Harry would have liked to pass him a surreptitious message: Desist from your designs. He noted the disagreeableness of his own disgruntled manhood.

Lobster bisque. Harry took to the chablis with a vengeance. Teresa was sipping only water, and he asked himself, Does she
never
drink?

‘She never drinks,' Mr Jackman said. ‘Poor thing. Nice chablis, don't you find?'

‘I do.'

‘Perhaps you can help us decide on an outing for tomorrow,' his wife proposed. ‘Ramble to Birk Crag or motor ride to Ripon Cathedral with the Lady Entertainer?'