On the Blue Train (36 page)

There was a baleful peace at their table. How normal barely mastered tension felt between them—she took this in. She'd ordered the sole and was behaving nicely, restrained and mildly amused. Do remember, though, that the roles should be played adequately well, by all means, but not
too
well. A virtuoso rendition might make you forget what lay lower, desires biding their time. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the Jackmans settling themselves at a table and observing her, Mrs Jackman probably in puzzlement. She turned towards them for long enough to transmit a smile
and have it good-naturedly returned. It wasn't all horrid and barren up here on the surface. There were bits of kindness.

One morsel of kindness sent you hunting for others, however. In the man opposite you. You didn't care for the rage so tightly laced inside his badly done coolness, though he'd have been through a lot, too—must have been quite humiliated—and was his jaw softening a little? Yes, there, and now you glimpsed the sanguine boy in the stony man, and would the boy see that you were graceful in your salmon-pink georgette? Mightn't he understand how sorry you were to have caused such a cock-up, the press and all those atrocities? That a broken heart had been the culprit? If he'd been suspected of doing away with her—well, wasn't there some truth to it? If he could see any of this, there might be generous moments to come with the child, also.

‘Our daughter is well,' he sneered. One of his erratic instances of perceptiveness.

‘Is she? Oh, thank heavens. I feel absolutely awful about leaving her.'

‘I daresay you do. She doesn't know anything. We've kept it from her. Carlo has been marvellous.'

As she'd known Carlo would be, bless her, in her secretary's fabulously dependable Scottish way. Dear Carlo. She'd be glad to see her again. ‘And . . . how is Peter?'

He knew she'd have asked this without delay. ‘Pining for you,' he spat.

She was too composed and mature to say she imagined his lover, the bona fide Miss Neele, was pining for
him
at this moment. Silk-enveloped golfing thighs in a hotel room's nectarine-tinted light. The sole had no taste at all, its texture discomfortingly fleshy. The question was: were morsels of kindness enough?

‘One of the chaps in the band recognised you from the newspapers.' It wasn't her message in
The Times
that had brought him. Had he ever been interested in decoding her messages? ‘I was thinking I should give them all some little memento, a thankyou for the service rendered.' Expertly unfeeling, he went on, ‘I'll have the car waiting for us in London. We'll drive back from there.' He wasn't able to bring himself to say ‘home'. Swallowing his beef bourguignon must have been uncomfortable with his teeth set like that. He'd suffer from indigestion later. ‘The only problem is the press. The bloody circus. Other thing we could do is get your sister here under wraps, take the train to Manchester and hole up at the hall. They won't expect that.'

Clever Sister would be a brick, of course, but how wearisome to have to justify herself to her. Clever Sister would be moderately appalled at the public display, faintly alarmed at the possibility that her younger sister had lost her mind, gone to pieces, something unseemly of that sort (and
was
this something of that sort?). Although being inclined to adventure and originality, she'd be stimulated by the cloak-and-dagger
flavour of it all. Hadn't she gone to Torquay railway station disguised as a Greek priest? Brought off her number at the finishing school, that leap onto the table laden with tea things? She might rather welcome a spicy diversion from the stolid routines of the hall. She'd think the amnesia line was bosh. Would she be hurt that her little sister hadn't gone to her?

‘Have you finished? I'll have to attend to the police now. Maybe even to the blasted journalists. I'll escort you upstairs.'

He hadn't asked if she wanted dessert. Maybe she did. Hadn't asked her to account for herself. Having no taste for the answer, and petrified she'd make a scene. How very little he knew her. She found she wasn't surprised that he had no wish to be alone with her, or even to know if she were well. He hadn't said her name. What had been coming was the opposite of desire—this death, the stone-cold cadaver of their love. She had known it, and stubbornly not known it, until then.

The chatter in the lounge was insistently loud. Mounting the stairs, she had the impression that the walls had grown closer from the pushing, from all sides, of a massive force. She would
not
look around.

‘Quick now,' breathed the man who—the world would soon be informed of it—couldn't bear to be her husband any longer.

One step, two. Another. Good girl, like that. And another.

The last steps were easy, because Harry was on the first-floor landing. What a heavenly unthinkable disaster it would have been to walk into his arms. Coming down the stairs, he showed no sign of recognising her or acknowledging her companion.
He
could act. To an insensitive onlooker, to her unwilling Other Half behind her on the stairs, the profound brown-eyed glance would no doubt have seemed entirely random and insignificant.

She reached down into its low sorrowful heart, hoping that he too could discern what was buried in her for safekeeping. And they'd passed him and were approaching her room.

‘Right,' her husband was saying in hushed tones, ‘I'm in number ten, on the other side of the staircase. Go in quickly.'

Her actions would be supervised now. She remembered something, searched desperately in her handbag and retrieved it. ‘Wait here. I just have to return an item to that man.'

‘Who? Well, hurry.'

Harry was still on the first flight of stairs.

‘Mr McKenna, I've kept forgetting to give you this back.' As he stepped up towards her, she stepped down into the warmth of cherry tobacco, sugared alcoholic sharpness, his rueful maleness. Standing over him, she offered his handkerchief. ‘I've been carrying it around.'

‘Why, thank you, Mrs Neele,' he said, without taking it. He whispered, ‘I looked for you all day.'

They were barely out of sight in that slim parenthesis of the stairs. ‘I couldn't see you,' she whispered back.

‘You won't come away with me? We can leave this awfulness behind.' His eyes were languid.

‘My daughter,' she said, gesturing at the sticky, sickly congealing of events the dummy-woman she had to be belonged to. ‘I must go.' She thought suddenly that it was probably not even possible, or at least not fair, to make of another person your safe haven.

A brief hesitation she'd not forget.

‘Thank you again, Mrs Neele,' he said loudly, clasping her hand in his, closing her fingers so tightly on his handkerchief that it was painful. Then Harry nodded and gave her a sad little half-smile whose message was comfort. And adieu. These last words almost soundless: ‘See you in Nice?'

She turned.

And went back to her husband, who stopped his pacing to say, ‘Don't worry—I'll take care of things. Explain that you've lost your memory. That you don't know me. You don't,' he added, ‘even know you have a child.'

Harry appeared to have changed his mind, coming into their view before exiting it to ascend the stairs. Her husband darted him an irritated look.

‘Very well,' she replied with a new strength, seeing repressed turmoil unfold in the only face more familiar to her than her own. ‘Though just so you understand—I'll do
what you wish, for now. Go along with it. But when all this is over, I'll do whatever I please. Count on that.'

He was livid, hardly breathing. ‘Is that a threat?'

‘If you think it one, then most certainly. Goodnight.'

‘Agatha,' he implored, far too late, and she didn't turn back.

Once she was finally alone, panic gleamed like the shiny lining of a coat flapping open in a gale. Oh God. Such scrutiny. She was notorious! A seedy, dreadful incarnation of the dream of promenading down the high street in a state of undress.

Harry's music saved her. It was faint, trickling jerkily through floorboards and walls, over the increased noise bloating the Hydro. And her mind slowly began to dilate.

After some minutes, a soft channel down to a lower place was opening, and she drew on it. Everything would be all right, she told herself, if only she could do this, take periodic doses of this like sulphur water. She'd always done it, hadn't she? Didn't she know she always could? It would be possible when she was alone. When she was taking a walk in the country, or in a city throng. Perhaps even a little, much more surreptitiously, when she was in society?

Press on.

But being greedy, given to disquiet, the petted child peckish for splendour, she'd wait and wonder if she mightn't
get more than these modest measures. And if there wasn't somewhere waiting for her a person who wouldn't blink to see her in the high street
en déshabillé
, her imagination rippling over her skin.

Remembering his maudlin would-be aristocrat was like having an unobtrusive friend sidle into the room. A surprise. Harry's protagonist, Henry, was not striking. But he was slender and rather agile from constant walking, and his eyes were melancholy in a gentle face. In those few pages, his life was fearfully unadventurous and something of a failure. He was bent on being urbane, a flawlessly
comme il faut
old-fashioned gentleman. He didn't entirely manage it. That breed was dying, in any case. He did appear to have a considerable capacity for affection—he was always falling in love, with strangers who accidentally brushed his arm in the street, hopeful window boxes, queer architecture and all manner of foolish notions. Though he never travelled, only moped around London, picture galleries, parks and the banks of the Thames, he came across as a nomad. This despite the fact that he'd occupied unprepossessing lodgings in Bayswater for many years. Notwithstanding his despair over always losing what he loved, he had a way of making a thing that took his fancy into his heart's one desire, a sacred home. The more she thought about Henry, the more she confused him with
herself, this happening with people you cared for. With art, she supposed. Her eyes were wet. Elgar rather had that effect.

Elgar
.

Presuming Harry finished his book and published it, something she was afraid he wouldn't find easy, it was unlikely anyone much would read it—not unless it got a good deal more straightforward and eventful. She couldn't see that happening. But you never knew. Harry's prose read like a translation, somehow, the result of a filtration process she couldn't comprehend. What sieve had it passed through? It was fortunate he had an inheritance. She established herself at the writing desk To Give An Opinion.

Dear Harry,

This is capital. You must carry on with it because I find myself becoming attached to Henry Jacobson and curious about his Fate. I do hope you'll give him some satisfactory romance. Otherwise, how can we bear it? Mind you're not afraid of being cheerful. People do like to be amused. A bit of a lark is pleasant and plausibility isn't terribly important, all said and done. Some restoring of order in the denouement is desirable, too—don't you agree?

I think you are a fine writer
(a sound judgement, or her fondness for him talking? Having received a similar endorsement from a Respected Author as a young girl, she knew what such sentiments could mean to one)
. Now
understand that it will be a shocking amount of most tiring work and at times you'll be quite fed up and reasonably expect to go insane. But I know you wouldn't take any desperate action. You and I have an agreement on that score, do we not? Actually, I suspect we are beyond it, or aren't cut out for it. That road we saw before us didn't seem interesting enough. Wasn't it like that, for you?
Was
it Mr Vaughan who saved you? Why did you wait so long to take the poison? Was the sadness not great enough after all? Anyhow, mostly you'll detest or half detest and half adore your scribblings with a mad defensive passion. But stay entertained. We are told art is second to life—are we to believe it? Does art stop life from beating the art out of us? Is that enough to go on with? I don't know, honestly. Though I don't know that it isn't, either. And that is something, I guess. A start.

Thank you for being a warm friend, just what I needed. I will miss our funny conversations. Until Nice, that is.

Yours,

(She hesitated, and chose)
Katherine Grey.