On the Blue Train Read Online Free

slightly stupefied look of one sporting new clothes. Had her luggage been lost?
    He acknowledged the prominent-eared saxophonist, who was smiling fraternally at him, and sat after a moment’s hedging at the table adjacent to hers. A young couple rose to dance, rather poorly but with evident mutual goodwill. An older couple joined them, these more controlled. Several songs exhausted themselves without any communication passing between Harry and the new guest. He suspected she preferred not to be engaged in conversation. She seemed bent on going unnoticed—risible, a woman of such majestic carriage—and somehow swollen with silence, battened down. Why was she there?
    He’d heard the Jackmans refer to her as Mrs Neele. The name pleased and perturbed him a little, offering a picture of her genuflecting. The previous night, when he’d come in from his stroll and seen her at the foot of the stairs, and she’d turned and given him a faint involuntary-seeming wave, she’d struck him, indeed, as a woman kneeling, as both debased and distinguished. A vanquished queen.
    The young dancing couple were more and more absorbed by one another. The girl was considerably taller and unembarrassed. It dawned on him that the two had to be lovers. The pockmarked waiter stopped by Mrs Neele. Harry had missed her signal to him. Her newspaper had been closed and folded. She ordered more coffee, and after the waiterdeparted, Harry addressed her with the clumsy fatality of one tripping. ‘You know Balzac ruined his health with coffee? I think it was Balzac.’
    Calmly, possibly interested, she asked, ‘Did he?’
    ‘I gather. Drank it constantly—I imagine to keep himself going.’ He wondered how old she could be. Thirty-two? Twenty-eight? Thirty-eight? Forty-one? He was usually pretty spot-on at picking ages.
    ‘Even good things can be overdone.’
    ‘Well, yes, and the problem is realising when something is turning into poison. Balzac didn’t, or didn’t care enough to stop.’
    ‘Or he simply couldn’t do without his coffee. I guess writing like he did would have been very trying. Like climbing mountain after mountain every day.’
    Her grey eyes—no, blue, but anaemic, almost ashen—were uncommonly evasive.
    ‘Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself. Harry McKenna.’
    ‘Teresa Neele.’ Her eyes went to a potted palm. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
    ‘The pleasure is mine. Are you literary yourself?’
    ‘Oh no.’ Her tone was appalled. She had reached over to touch a leaf of the palm. ‘You?’
    ‘Heavens, no.’
    In fact, in his youth, and also after he was old enough to know better, he’d let himself believe—as you indulgein believing certain things in youth, things so implausible, gossamery, seductive—he’d turn out a writer. He convinced Valeria he was working on a book, adoring her for sustaining the illusion. Over years of supposed toil he’d amassed maybe two dozen passable pages (those that didn’t make him altogether ill with shame), kept under lock and key in the drawer of a bureau. The alleged book really became an alibi for when he was in a foul blue funk. A sort of moan: I have to settle down to the book . And she’d compose her face and withdraw with that stealth she mastered like a solemn dance, leaving him to his own sad devices. It was also convenient for excusing his absence from dinner parties and bridge or mahjong soirees. But they were dingy times, when he slaved at the book. At better moments, they spoke, Valeria—nearly—achieving affectionate humour and he savage irony, of his magnum opus. His life’s work. Poor Valeria. How badly he had let her down.
    Mrs Neele’s coffee arrived. Stirring in sugar, she commented, ‘How many cups, I wonder, would you need to drink each day, and over how long a period, for it to prove lethal?’ It was as if there were a drag in the movement of her thoughts. Her voice was placid again, viscous.
    ‘A slow method for doing away with yourself, wouldn’t