On the Blue Train (25 page)

‘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
trans
atlantiques
. 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 volcanic 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.