On the Blue Train (32 page)

She said, ‘I promise.' And continued, ‘I think I'll tell you now about the night I ran away from home. I'll make my deposition to you.' She smiled a little. ‘I might
fall asleep after, if you stay here by me.' She took the hand that had been touching her, making a mesh of their fingers. ‘Is this where the naughty cat scratched you?' She stroked the dainty bulge of the scar on his palm, and then released his hand. ‘I'll always prefer a dog. They adore you completely.'

Harry brought the chair over, to sit by her. It was good to be there and to listen to her voice. At last, she went quiet.

He kept telling himself he was awake.

He and Teresa were in two trains bound in opposite directions, which slowed as they passed one another, so that he was able to make out clearly, heart-wrenchingly, her dear lost face.

Daylight. The sentinel had slept. He woke as if receiving an electric shock. Twitching like the fish discovering a hook has tethered him by a taut line to doom. He recalled waking in this way often after Valeria's death, only then it had seemed to occur while he was scarcely at the lip of sleep. This sleep had been prolonged. The last vivid dream had involved bits of houses, some reworking of his parents' farm, funny staircases abutting closet-like rooms that had never quite existed.

He was folded in two and sore. He sat up. The bed was empty. He stretched, observing the play of sensitivities created
by the contorted night. An odd irrational energy, too. His yearning for her.

He got to his feet and looked about. His magnum opus had disappeared from the writing desk. He reassured himself that a doubtful, denuded feeling was common before a journey.

26

FIRST DAY Berkshire

Archie had not come home. She had waited until late and he had not come home. He had chosen to be with the girl. After promising to try again, after giving it all lengthy consideration, he wanted a different woman, a girl, and a different home.

Agatha left the house, with her wedding ring in it, with the child in it, and drove away.

Her only plan was to find some stillness and give herself over to it. She knew that she was warped: all of her limp, sunken, molested, infirm. Logic had derailed and sleep no longer answered exhaustion. But for the first time in weeks, it seemed possible that the flustered fluttering of her heart might have been fading a little, that sinister prelude to an ear infection receding. She sat in her snub-nosed Morris Cowley
by the Silent Pool, the beefy darkness of the countryside drawing at her motorcar. It was a magnetic pull, a centripetal gathering in.

Almost supernaturally, energy and purpose returned, and she got out to look at the lakes she'd never before stopped to visit.

It was dark, the moon flimsy. There was an odour of slack water, strangely familiar. Sweetish, verging on moribund, but too vegetable to be quite distasteful.

She passed the smaller of the two pools, making for the larger. They were enclosed by box trees and leaf-covered pathways. On one of these, as her vision honed itself against the night, she was startled by the exposed roots of a yew, like a thick mad plotting of entangled ideas.

She retreated to the edge of the Silent Pool. Water as composed as glass. Was it the perfect immobility that caused this singular quietude? That bit of nature had a depth, a stature unusual in those parts, and it had attracted the folklore about Prince John and the woodcutter's daughter. It was said that the maiden, who had been bathing there, drowned when he forced her into deep water, and that her ghost made midnight appearances. It could have been around that hour now.

But no sign of the maiden. Alongside or fused with the turbid smell, which was growing in some manner syrupy, she fancied she distinguished that of pondweed and even saw splotches of this in places on the surface, verdant, lush.

A gap, as if she'd been overtaken by a short formless sleep. It was a confounding sensation and for an instant she wondered what murky forest she was stranded in. Where? Why? How had she lost her way? What had her sins been? The surface of the small pond, scarcely lit by the attenuated moon, was so unmoving it resembled an impeccable sheet of pearl silk. A pellucid eye, without an iris, blank but not unseeing. She stared long and deeply into it.

She was submerged in vastness, in fright. She recoiled and stumbled.

She half ran back towards the Morris. Where was she, and how had she strayed?

By not loving her husband as he'd required? By dulling, sullying herself with grief for Mummy? And so she must undertake a journey of expiation. What a trial, hellish, and now! When she'd comfortably assumed herself as safe in marriage as a beloved pet in a snug domestic haven. Cast out at thirty-six, possibly the halfway point of her life, from all that was normal and kind.

But it wouldn't make sense to get back into the motorcar, because she didn't know where to go. She wasn't prepared for being confined in there once more. She needed to linger in the open air. She wasn't cold on that lenient winter night in her fur coat—the sort of coat in which
you could take on all weather. How bad could things be in such a coat?

She gravitated back towards the larger pool. Stars, bright and timeless. Not a breath of wind, the air becalmed. Her terror appeared to be abating. It was curious, but on a dim arboreal path she was taken by an imperious desire to lie down in that box-tree bower. Were she to sleep, though, would she encounter the Gun Man? She had no choice. If she couldn't rest a little, she might collapse. She sat and then stretched out, her head by the base of a tree, the coat like a silky languorous animal she was entwined with. She was also entwined with the possibility of death.

That nacreous eye, watching over her. If she chose to, she could stare into it again, drift towards the magnet of a watery end. The end would come about by her own hand. In her own hand she would write a carnal full stop.

Getting anything to happen meant proposing something. Knowing it
could
be so. Then deciding, making it so. Why was this decision so chilling? Like giving in to a terrifyingly powerful desire, or its opposite. The desire for nothing.

But she did not desire nothing. She woke in the box-tree bower, not paining anywhere or cold, aside from her feet. She had not dreamed of the Gun Man. As peculiar as it was to find herself there, it was also natural, like taking up a piece of
familiar piano music midstream. She was stiff and her bones slightly creaky as she stood, but she felt fitter than before. Less bruised, less diaphanous. Rather at home in the night, her heart more resolved. She didn't start when some small creature shifted by her. A bird uttered a sliding note or two. Could it be a nightingale? Her wristwatch held up to her face appeared to tell her that, extraordinarily, it was twenty-five minutes past five. Hours of sleep and she was unspeakably grateful for the reprieve, for some respite, finally.

Saturday.

She was aware of the anchored peace of the still waters, of their open, silken invitation. Yes—but.

But no.

No, not now.

Now—no.

She had lost everything. However, there was still a lot that she desired badly, and what took root in her mind was getting to some higher ground with a view. Had Mummy's spirit come to guide her? God? She couldn't detect the presence of God, but as she got into the Morris this wasn't too pressing a concern.

She drove cool-headedly, expertly, back up towards Newlands Corner. She'd turn in for that vantage point over the North Downs. Motoring by night had become as smooth as cream.

No one about as she arrived at Newlands Corner and parked.

The dark she emerged into had a live quality. She stood gazing over the drop of the Downs, recalling the restless blackness that had been the sea beyond the suite at the Grand Hotel, Torquay, where she had spent her first night as a wife. Beginning the journey of married life.

And so many years later, considering the slanting land that appeared more and more solid, the sky above it higher, softer and less material, she could not have said if she was continuing a journey or, having terminated one, was commencing another.

There was a surge in the air, a light gust of earthy freshness. The flicker of something: eagerness, if not joy. Wobbly inspiration. She'd never entirely believed in this country as
country
, though she had to recognise that it possessed something. She'd brought Peter here recently for a walk—let him not be fretting—and they'd rambled down that pathway. It passed a small quarry.

She began to follow their footsteps, making her way down to the quarry cautiously in her silly shoes, not the best for the occasion, yet how could she have known what to dress for? At last, the chalk pit was before her. Peter had nosed in those bushes at the edge of it, bemused.

This just might do to bring her husband back to her. To show him the vast romance in her that she could scarcely believe he failed to see. You were stifled by not being
ambitious, by fixating on whether something owed more to fancy than common sense. It could be the outlandish schemes that had a chance of saving you.

Odd, chalky luminescence.