On the Blue Train (35 page)

How completely she knew that view, a lower variant on the one she had from the road outside Ashfield whenever she needed it, there throughout childhood. Her cherished Torbay. She squinted at the headland on its journey towards Brixham, the lighthouse at Berry Head pulsing like a slightly otherworldly greeting. She had a strange feeling of being inside something which, though familiar, she had until then known only from the outside. Numberless times, considering the Grand from Princess Pier or the Strand, or studying its distinguished shape on the seafront from the Imperial, whose lights glinted now beyond Beacon Hill, she'd had a thought for the ladies and gentlemen staying within it. On occasion, as she wandered along the beach below, she'd observed a soignée lady on her balcony, and daydreamed about the interior of the room behind those glass doors and the chic travels that
lady was poised to embark on. Yet abruptly the vantage point of the grown-up on her hotel balcony was hers. She found herself searching for a girl down on the beach.

‘Do be careful.' These words or their tone possibly not what she'd have preferred to hear. She was leaning over the balustrade, savouring a faint giddiness. ‘You could fall down there and kill yourself.'

She straightened up. ‘Says the pilot.' He didn't appreciate the joke and a disgruntlement ensued. He'd leave her absurdly soon to go back to all that. The things he wasn't inclined to discuss, not—beyond chipper, clipped sorts of résumés—in any interesting way, made him tense. This unpredictable balance between obstinate bravery and something less sturdy was fascinating. She'd mother, nurse, dote on, entrance him. They'd be absolutely everything to one another.

‘Come inside.'

‘But isn't it lovely?' It was possible that her special relationship with Devon disturbed him.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes.' Awfully good-looking when he was exasperating. His hand came to her waist. She was readying herself for compliancy as he murmured, ‘Forgiven me finally, darling, for the dressing-case?'

She went inside, husband on her heels. They'd laughed already over the row provoked by his Christmas present to her—somehow not what she'd expected, too workaday, though undoubtedly handsome and practical—but she remained
nonplussed at her own warlike display. Both embarrassed and righteous. She'd not imagined there was such a virago in her. A pugnacious might folded into her timidity.

He trailed her laxly while she reconnoitred the charming rooms, drawing curtains. They hadn't yet taken off coats and hats, and maybe it was this that suggested they were travellers propelled by chance into the same railway waiting room. Acquaintances who'd never before found themselves so casually together.

‘Come and get that off, will you?' He'd taken off his own coat and hat.

Having been shivery all day, she was sweating lightly, prowling around. If she didn't keep reminding herself of what was occurring with the drama and the levity of some party trick in the dark, it was difficult to believe. Today she was a bride, tonight was her wedding night, tomorrow they'd go home to Mummy for Christmas, and the day after that she'd accompany this remarkably attractive young man—
her
man, her
husband
—to London. From there he'd depart for France. She surrendered her coat obediently, and began to tease off gloves.

He leaned over and snatched her hat from her head. She was startled by this impatience. By air moving on her bared skin. She recalled the guarded winter-afternoon light that had suffused the church. After he'd hung their coats in the wardrobe, their eyes met. The blue of his: the heady shade
of water traversed by sunbeams, of fabled jewels. Somewhat troubling that at night you could only guess at it. He looked rather as if he might cry.

‘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 continue 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.