On the Blue Train (30 page)

‘Ah? . . . I'd no idea I'd cause this, honestly.'

‘Of course you didn't. How could you?'

‘What will I do? I can't go back now, not like this.' Her lovely distant eyes were stunned, gleaming. ‘What a debacle. And here, will people start to . . . ?'

They were moving more slowly over the open ground. The fog and gloom gave the parkland a velour softness. Not wanting to alarm her, he didn't mention his intuition of something being wrong at the Hydro. Nor the apparently intense conversation he'd just witnessed between the bandsmen, or the other he'd overheard some days before.

‘I don't know. It might be best to think of moving on.'

‘Yes.' Her face remained abstracted.

‘We just need to stay calm and think this through.'

‘Make a plan,' she said. ‘It will be all right, won't it?'

Streetlamps came on along the perimeter of the common. Low on the horizon the moon was already visible. Even sheathed in mist, its shape was generous enough to make him speculate about its fullness. If it wasn't at its roundest, then it was only a hair away—to what side, just before or just beyond? It disturbed him not to know. ‘Yes, it will be all right. And . . . will you go back to him?' He refrained from referring to her daughter.

‘I can't divorce.'

‘Oh, no? You love him?' He had asked this before and not received a reply. His eyes stayed on the moon's veiled girth. So long ago, his father had taught him the name for such a moon:
gibbous
. But waxing, or waning?

‘It would be wrong,' was all she said. And after a pause, ‘I was sure he'd come. That he'd understand. But he's taken too long and it's all got so out of hand, so muddied.' She glanced at him and away. ‘I could go somewhere for a few days. Clear my head.' It had begun, very lightly, to drizzle. ‘That might help me to start writing, too. I tried again today. Absolutely nothing. And I must—I really
must
earn my living, don't you see?' The idea appeared to obsess her.

‘Be patient with yourself,' he said, suffering from atrocious impatience. ‘But I do think moving on would be wise. Would you like me to help, perhaps to look into travel arrangements?'

‘I don't know. I'm so on edge.'

‘What about . . . Edinburgh?'

‘Edinburgh. Would be nice. A city to get lost in. But just leaving all of a sudden would look odd—like fleeing.'

He agreed. Neither of them wore raincoats or had thought to equip themselves with an umbrella, but the fine moisture was reinvigorating. He felt he could have used a real dousing. ‘What if tomorrow you were to tell Mrs Jackman, say, that you've had a letter asking you to join a relation in London? A female relation unexpectedly arrived from Cape Town, or something like that. Then you could go the following morning.'

‘That might work.'

They continued a little in silence, and she offered him a sidelong smile, grateful—but it wasn't gratitude that interested him. The fog was growing thicker, the rain more decided.

‘You know, I really would like to help however I can. To come with you, even, if you wanted.'

‘Wouldn't it look suspicious?'

‘We wouldn't depart together. I could wait a day or two before joining you. That would give you time, too—to think in peace.'

‘You
are
kind.' She went on quickly, ‘I'll have to think about it.'

His heart had gone a little silly. It was gnawing at him that she'd just slip away. Like in his dream in which she'd
turned to sand, a woman who couldn't be held. ‘How will we meet next?' he asked desperately. ‘To talk, I mean.'

‘Shall I come to your room again?' she suggested. ‘Late?'

‘Yes,' he said, overeager. But he was also aware of the need to protect her. ‘Be careful no one sees you. And perhaps in general you could avoid the bandsmen. Tonight you might consider dining at Bettys. If you left a message for Mrs J saying you had an engagement, they wouldn't worry. It can be my turn to eat with them.'

‘They'll be pleased. They've been chagrined by your absence. They're going to be shocked, you know, when they find out.'

‘Yes. But they're warm-hearted. I think they'll understand.'

‘You believe so?'

There were few things he was sure of believing. He nodded, realising that having walked in a loop they were arriving back at the corner opposite the Imperial Café. Her face, he saw by the cloudy golden light of a streetlamp, shone with water. She allowed him to put his hand to the brim of her hat to gather a beading of raindrops before they fell.

Reluctantly, he proposed, ‘You should go back. You'll catch cold.'

‘Yes. I must think.'

‘
À ce soir, alors?
'

‘
À ce soir. Et merci
.'

Her company, Harry felt as she went off into the damp dark, was like that of the sea. Gentle, powerful. A commanding undertone telling him he could not do without it. Some twenty minutes later it was a drenched man who returned to the Hydro.

25

LAMENT OF THE NYMPH

The hours leading to her knock on his door were freakishly drawn out. After retiring to his room he found he was incapable of reading—it might have been different if he'd had more of Teresa's airy yet firmly delineated novels, but those he had with him by other authors proved unsuitable—and he'd no patience even for music. He pulled out his suitcase from under the bed, with an idea of packing. Of course, even if she agreed to let him join her somewhere, he'd promised to stay on at the Hydro for a little longer after her departure, so as not to give the impression they were travelling companions. He was, notwithstanding, aching to launch himself into the gestures of leaving, to convince himself that they'd really made a shared plan. She had seemed to assent to it, but she was evidently flurried, shaky. And she possessed great determination. A part of her still hoped for a reunion with the Colonel.

To calm his nerves, Harry pictured himself in a room with this blighter. There he was, foolishly debonair, slouched against a wall. Harry beckoned to him to approach. When the Colonel was close enough to hear a whispered secret, it was with a zippy little knife that Harry took the bloke off-guard. Just holding it up to his face, just to undo his self-congratulatory look. To teach him not to feel quite so unassailable, to have some imagination. Naturally, Harry had never wielded a weapon in such a way, though this didn't interfere with his enjoyment of the fantasy. Smiling, he opened the suitcase.

In the bottom of it was a small sheaf of pages that he'd quite forgotten. He sat on his haunches considering them. Then he took them out and carried them over to the writing desk.

Next he looked around the room, assessing his other belongings. He gathered what little there was onto the bed. Clothes. His few gramophone records. A handful of novels. An electric flashlight (he always travelled with this, never using it, nor having any clear notion of what he expected to illuminate by night). A half-full bottle of port wine and one, almost finished, of sherry. The residue of a life. Indeed, he was struck by how this might have been a collection of last effects. Laid out, it all appeared both rather irrelevant and poignant, somehow embarrassing evidence of personality, of need.

He shook himself out of this meditation, trying various arrangements for the items in the suitcase. He worked as though the order he was creating was of consequence. He made some calculations as to the clothes he would require for his remaining days in Harrogate, and left these out, together with the wet things he'd changed out of after returning from meeting Teresa. He refolded trousers so that they hung more satisfactorily in the wardrobe. He drew closer to the fireplace the chair over which hung his sodden coat. He fancied a smell of pure Yorkshire rain was rising from it, and this brought him a vision of Teresa's pale, slick face. He tidied his shaving kit. For once relishing its statement of impermanence, he'd have preferred to keep the suitcase in view, but it was impractical manoeuvring around it there on the floor. He lowered the lid without fastening it and pushed it once more under the bed. In all the travels of his itinerant life since Valeria's death, he'd not experienced this anticipation. This hunger for adventure.

Waiting was more arduous after it turned idle. He was flighty. He stared a good deal at the moon through the window, tracking its slow, unavoidable ascent. When it freed itself of the mist, he was certain it was full. At around eleven a light rain set in once more. The humidity lifting off his drying coat, scented with the outdoors, kept her pallid, potent presence with him. The furnishings of that room he was soon to vacate wore as much as ever their aspect of affected cosy familiarity. But all furnishings, he reflected, not just
those of hotels and inns, were unsettling. Like the objects one travelled with, just on a grander scale. Decor was a kind of memento mori of the person who'd assembled or dwelled amid it. Such objects were so naked, so brightly, hopelessly possessed by aspiration.

Harry didn't know what he'd have done had she not arrived at midnight. She wasn't obliged to knock twice, this time.

Her entrance was silent, quick. She was more composed than earlier.

‘Are you all right?'

She nodded like a child displaying stoicism.

‘Good food at Bettys?'

‘Yes. I was very greedy.'

It pleased him to hear of her appetite. ‘Excellent. I was just deciding that the decor of rooms depresses me.'

‘Oh?'

‘Why, I don't know, it seems so much trouble to go to—
decorating
. A distraction. Endeavouring to make ourselves happy with pretty things . . . When one day someone will have the job of getting rid of it all, anyway. Clearing it out and starting anew.'

‘How morbid you are. I
adore
furnishings. I've spent so many amusing hours decorating. It's one of my favourite pastimes. You don't find it agreeable, coming into a well-furnished house?'

She herself had described the oppression of going through the contents of her late mother's house, but her mind was elsewhere, and of course he didn't wish to remark on that. It cheered him to be called morbid. ‘And how practical
you
are.'

‘I've never been accused of being practical before.'

‘Teresa, last night you told me about your daughter, and tonight there's something more that I want to tell you.'

‘Only fair.'

‘It's the rest of the story—of my past.'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Perhaps you could sit?'

She looked at him more carefully, then said, ‘Very well,' and complied.

He liked watching her long body arrange itself in his armchair. He moved to the hearthrug and stood facing the fireplace.

‘One other person knows what I'm about to tell you. Mr Vaughan—fine chap.' He cleared his throat. ‘After Valeria,' he began with a wavering voice that bolstered itself as he speeded up, ‘I wasn't well. I wasn't looking after myself much.' He swallowed. ‘I'd resigned from my work. I hardly went out. Sleep was . . . a problem. I couldn't have gone on like that, see?' He turned to her. She was listening, expressionlessly. He'd drawn the curtains when she arrived, but he gazed at them now as if the moon were still on show there. ‘I went to my doctor and asked him for a prescription of sleeping
draught. He considered me warily. I pitched myself into a furious speech about how I'd lose my mind if I had to endure another night without rest. He capitulated, at last, and gave me what I asked for. I got the stuff from the druggist and took it home.

‘I left it for days in a wooden box in the bottom drawer of the dresser in the bedroom. There were some of Valeria's summer things in that drawer. Blouses and skirts. A dress so old and ratty she'd deemed it fit only for wearing about home in heat waves. She used to move light things down to the bottom drawer in winter when she didn't need them. Anyhow, for a week or so I ignored the box remarkably well. Maybe it was my final effort at being a man of substance for Valeria. Or the opposite. Maybe I was trying to reject the path she'd shown me. In any case, I sat in our sitting room with Valeria's cat Flash, who was growing churlish—she scratched me once quite badly, I have the scar—and willed myself to forget that box among the light things whose season wouldn't come again. I avoided the bedroom. I slept on the sofa—I
was
the sofa.' The fire crackled and they both jumped. ‘There's nothing to say about it. One day I stopped ignoring the box. I opened the drawer, moved her soft old frock, and took it out. I prepared a tray, putting the poison on a plate. Filled a glass with water. Brought it all into the sitting room. The scene of the crime.' He laughed.

‘What happened?'

‘I tell you I would have done it, but I was interrupted. Mr Vaughan came calling.'

‘He saved you?'

‘He did. At the time I couldn't see it that way. I'd botched yet another thing. Couldn't even murder myself!' He turned awkwardly back to the fire. He heard her standing.