On the Blue Train Read Online Free Page B

mightn’t have something in common. Was Teresa Neele in her reused green and grey outfit somehow lost? In that slow voice, camouflaged, could there have been ruin?
    The lovers were waltzing. The girl laughed gleefully and then gave a little yelp and a grimace, probably at the boy standing on her toes. One, two, three , she was chanting secretively when they passed his table. Teresa Neele movedher spoon and sipped from her second cup of mortal coffee. He laboured to suppress the vision of her kneeling, along with the vague strife in his stomach. Belatedly, he considered her ring finger. A kind of internal shudder. Bare of wedding ring. And the Mrs Neele? She wore only one band—platinum, by the look of it, a setting with a small diamond—that sat loosely on her thin finger.
    ‘The Jackmans told me you’re from South Africa.’
    ‘That’s right.’ Her eyes on the gentle chaos of the waltz.
    ‘It must be a fascinating country,’ he persevered. ‘I’ve never been there.’
    ‘Yes, indeed.’
    She continued to pay painstaking attention to the dancers, and it got into his head that perhaps she’d never been there either. Harry was disconcerted and somewhat thrilled to think she might be lying. It was as if they stood on either side of a screen through which he could only make out her shadow. Was she (and he was in all likelihood being too imaginative , his mother’s words echoing through hollowed years) a woman who didn’t know how to be honest—not out of deceitfulness but because she took human affairs as a quagmire about which precious little could be said with any exactness? Was she extremely sad?
    He was asking, ‘Where have you been happiest in your life until now?’
    Her gaze jumped. A perverse, too-intimate question.
    He forged on. ‘Try not to think about it. Just say the first place that comes to you. Me, I suppose London. Or Trieste. I’m Australian and, don’t get me wrong, my native country . . .’ He’d lost his momentum.
    ‘I’d never have suspected your origins. Your English is truly admirable.’
    Such comments always annoyed and somehow vindicated him. ‘Well, it is our mother tongue, you know.’
    ‘Of course, yes. It’s just that the Australian accent usually tends to be—forgive me for saying so—noticeable.’
    ‘To an English ear? So you’re familiar with it?’ His instinct would have been to respond peevishly to the assumptions now compelling her to recast him as a colonial, but tonight he was disinclined to. It was the persistent image of her on her knees, perhaps, or her oddly opaque attitude—that screen between them. ‘I do seem to pick up accents easily. Well, the French. And the English, as you kindly observe. My wife, my late wife, was Italian. I speak little Italian, and badly, but Valeria used to say my accent was deceptively good. I can’t detect any trace of South Africa in your accent, by the way.’ Her accent was, in fact, phenomenally plummy. The speech of the English Quality often sounded to him like a caricature, both repellent and intriguing.
    She took a slow sip of coffee. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that your wife has passed on.’ A drawn-out silence. Her long hands, sculpturally narrow-fingered and pale, were curved around hercoffee cup for warmth or to convey composure. At last, she said, ‘You must be nostalgic for Australia. I hear it’s lovely.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I’m always thinking of Devon, where I was born. My early childhood was spent there. Then we moved to South Africa—I suppose my accent was already well established. But Mummy and I were so happy in Devon.’
    This sat before him. A green field nudging the sea. Teresa Neele in little-girl form, tentative, near translucent like Dresden bone china. Her face flushed with the self-importance of grave play. A breeze lifting her silky hair—blonde, beginning to melt into brown. A proud woman standing a carefully monitored distance away, looking on with hawkish Victorian eyes,