A Night on the Orient Express (22 page)

Well, he didn’t need his blessing.

Dad thought he knew everything about the world and how it worked, but he didn’t. Mum and Keith had been amazing. They’d promised him their support. Mum had even said they’d come and see the band when they hit Europe, though Jamie thought maybe that was taking things too far. His friends all thought his mum was hot but did he really want her jumping up and down at one of his gigs? Maybe not, but at least she had been supportive.

Not like Dad, who had made it pretty clear to him what the deal was. His dad didn’t care about him at all. His mum was right. All his dad cared about was himself.

A
fter dinner, Archie and Emmie went back to the bar for a nightcap. Well, several. Archie spotted a bottle of his favourite malt, and once he got started on Laphroaig it was difficult to stop. He had a horrible feeling he was sliding into drunkenness, but Emmie didn’t seem to mind. And drunkenness was better than remembering.

Besides, Archie was a very jolly drunk. He never got maudlin, or aggressive, just more benignly amiable. So he sipped his malt while Emmie toyed with an Irish coffee. For a while they sat in companionable silence. It was cosy in the bar – the blinds had been drawn and the lights dimmed. Some of the guests had already made their way back to their cabins to bed; the hard core remained. The pianist was playing ‘My Funny Valentine’, slowly, dreamily. Emmie swayed in time to the music, a smile on her face.

‘I’m having such a lovely time,’ she told him. ‘It’s been great, getting to know you, and knowing there’s no pressure. I was terrified that whoever won the prize was going to try it on. That they might think winning the prize gave them the right to . . . you know . . .’

Archie clutched his glass more tightly, went to drain it, then realised it was empty already.

‘I’m . . . just going to get a refill,’ he told her.

He got up to go to the bar to have his glass replenished, even though he knew the waiter would get him one if he so much as raised a finger. He staggered slightly on the way, and tried to estimate how much he had drunk. There’d been the champagne at lunch, then a couple of cocktails, and he’d certainly had the lion’s share of the bottle of white followed by the bottle of red they’d had with dinner. Then he’d had port with his cheese . . .

He’d slow down after this one, he thought.

On the way back to his seat, he stopped by the piano.

‘Hey, mate – do you know Van the Man? Van Morrison? Can you play . . . “The Right . . . Bright Side of the Road?”’ He corrected himself, trying not to slur.

The pianist nodded. ‘Sure.’ With the ease of the consummate professional, he started up the opening bars.

Archie stood in front of the piano and raised his glass.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. He was used to commanding attention. He was the expert toast-giver, best man, speech-maker.

He saw Emmie look up at him with a slightly alarmed expression on her face. Maybe he should go and sit down? He didn’t want to embarrass her. But no: he wanted to toast his friend, his friend who should have been here. Surely no one would mind?

‘This song is for my mate Jay,’ he told the remaining guests in the bar. ‘We’ve been friends since we were so high.’ He held his hand down low. ‘We grew up together. Did all the usual stuff: the rites of passage. We looked after each other. But sadly he died a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, this was his happy song. When we went on road trips, it was the first thing he put on in the car.’

There was a moment of suspended horror as the rest of the guests in the carriage took in what he was saying. Emmie froze. But then someone at the end of the carriage raised his glass.

‘To your friend,’ he said boldly. And moments later, everyone else followed suit, until the entire carriage combined in a toast, as the pianist started to play.

Archie held up his glass and smiled. He sang along, surprisingly tunefully.

Emmie stood up, not sure what to do, whether to get one of the bar staff to take him out, tactfully. Then she realised that no one seemed to mind his impromptu eulogy, that they were caught up in the spirit of it. So she came and stood by him, took his glass and put it on the bar, then held out her hands to dance. Gradually, they were joined by other guests and the bemused waiters hung back while the bar was filled with dancers.

Archie entwined his fingers in Emmie’s and spun her round. She looked beautiful, he thought, and realised she had kicked off her shoes. She barely came up to his shoulder without them.

The pianist was smiling from ear to ear as he played the last chord. There was applause, then everyone went back to their seats. It was almost as if the spontaneous dance had never happened. Archie swayed slightly, blinking.

Emmie took him by the arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You need some sleep.’

She steered him back to his cabin, holding her shoes in one hand.

Archie stumbled in, loosening his tie and shrugging off his jacket.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told her. ‘I think I’ve had one too many.’

‘Hey. Don’t be sorry. It’s understandable.’

‘I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to end up doing karaoke in the bar on the Orient Express . . .’

‘It was wonderful. Everyone loved it.’

‘I’m surprised we didn’t get asked to leave.’

‘They couldn’t just throw us out in the middle of nowhere.’

Archie crashed onto the bottom bunk. He groaned, dropped his head back onto the pillow and went out like a light.

Emmie covered him up gently with the blankets. She reached out a hand to stroke his head, then stopped. She’d had a sudden urge to comfort him, but he might think that was a bit weird. She hovered, not sure what to do. She felt uncomfortable leaving him alone in that state. He was obviously taking his friend’s death harder than he cared to admit.

She left his lock on the latch and went back to her own cabin, changed into her night things and dressing gown and picked up the book Archie had bought her. Then she crept back into his cabin and sat on the stool opposite his bed, wrapping herself in a spare blanket. She would stay there for a couple of hours and read her book, just in case he woke and wanted someone to talk to. She didn’t want him to feel as if he was on his own.

The train pressed on through the ink-blank night, undeterred by the lack of moon and stars to guide it, for the cloud had seen fit to cover them over just after midnight. On board, the air was thick with somnolence as the passengers succumbed to sleep one by one, their blood running slow with rich food and wine. The train’s swaying motion as it curved along the track acted like a cradle, soothing even the biggest insomniac. Robert walked along the corridor, satisfied that his charges were all tucked up safely for the night, before settling into his bunk for a cat-nap. If anyone needed anything in the night, they only had to ring for him. He would be up again as soon as dawn broke, only a few hours away.

In her cabin, Imogen lay with Danny in her arms. He was nestled into her, fast asleep. She relished the warmth of his body, the rise and fall of his chest in time with hers, but her mind was racing. She wasn’t sure what the future held. She had a lot to think about. A lot of decisions to make. But in the meantime, she was going to make the most of the deliciousness of having him with her.

As she drifted off to sleep, she thought perhaps this wasn’t what her grandmother had had in mind when she had booked her ticket . . .

A
nd so began Adele’s affair with Jack Molloy.

She wasn’t proud of it. And she couldn’t defend it to herself, except to say that the affair swept her up and carried her away and she barely had any say in the matter. It sounded ludicrous, but she felt it was meant to be, that Jack had been sent to change her life and her outlook, and she was utterly powerless to walk away.

The terms were clear. She was, she knew, one of many women with whom he had been unfaithful. He wore his infidelity like a badge of honour, yet he was so disarmingly open and honest about it that she couldn’t judge him.

Open and honest with everyone except his wife, of course, whom he kept on a pedestal. He would never in a million years compromise his marriage or entertain leaving Rosamund. Jack was only ever on loan to anyone. He never promised his paramours anything. He was also, Adele sensed, something of a coward. He liked his security, his home, Rosamund’s social position and, of course, the family money. His philandering could never get in the way of that.

Fool that Adele was, she accepted the deal. After all, she had no intention of leaving William either. She, too, liked the security of being the doctor’s wife – but not, apparently, she scolded herself, the tedium. Wasn’t that why she was opening the gallery? Wasn’t that enough excitement?

In moments of rationality, in the calm of the kitchen when she was drinking cocoa with Mrs Morris, the voice of reason inside her told her to walk away, before she got hurt – or, indeed, before she got caught. Both were equally likely, but the latter would have spelt disaster. Hurting herself she could cope with, but the thought of hurting William was anathema to her.

Despite all this madness, she loved her husband deeply. It was just that recently he had made her feel so very meaningless. She felt as if William could have managed life perfectly well with his secretary at the new surgery and Mrs Morris to run round after him at home. Adele really wasn’t sure where she fitted in, or what purpose she served. Sometimes, at the breakfast table, when he was preoccupied, William looked right through her and didn’t hear a word she was saying. Once, what she was saying might, she agreed, have been unutterably dull, but things were now moving apace as she got the gallery together and she did think he might have shown the tiniest bit of interest. Instead, he seemed to think that giving her a blank cheque to cover the expense was adequate. She didn’t want his money. She wanted his admiration.

Something Jack was only too happy to give her. Jack was always capable of firing her up to achieve greater things. He guided her, moulded her, challenged her. He taught her how to differentiate between a good painting and a great one, how to spot a copy or a fake, how to assess damage, how to check provenance – it was a complex world she was entering, and it wasn’t enough to have a good eye. It needed to be backed up with knowledge and experience. And it thrilled him to have an eager pupil. He accompanied her to sales and auctions all over the country, and artists’ studios and openings and private views.

If she could have left it there, the relationship would have been entirely defensible. He was her advisor and nothing more. But it never stayed in the auction house or the sale-room. It inevitably strayed further, and that was the part that Adele found so intoxicating. Both her mind and her body were being stimulated in ways she hadn’t thought possible. She felt as if she could take on the world. But at the same time the guilt never really left her; she knew she couldn’t maintain this double life indefinitely.

She never told anyone of her affair, no matter how much she longed to share the burden, because she knew she would garner no sympathy from anyone with a modicum of backbone. Her friends would be horrified; affairs simply weren’t acceptable behaviour in their social circle, even though Jack tried to convince her that people had them all the time. And whenever she tried to rationalise it, she failed. You can’t rationalise chemistry, what the French call a
coup de foudre,
a thunderbolt. She even made lists of Jack’s flaws and his qualities: the first was always much, much longer than the second, but even seeing the evidence in black and white didn’t give her the impetus to stop.

She couldn’t live without him and the way he made her feel.

The strain of it all started to take its toll. She would start awake in the night, panicking, not sure whom she was with. She had nightmares about giving herself away to William, nightmares so real she woke sobbing with fear.

These weren’t as terrible as the nights she dreamt she lost Jack. It was never clear how, but the grief tore at her, and the horror of it would cling on to her all through the next day, leaving her hollow-eyed with exhaustion.

The emotion of it all was draining. She became very thin. She told William it was because the boys were away, and so she wasn’t eating so many cakes and biscuits. She could see he was concerned.

‘I wonder if this gallery lark is becoming too much for you,’ he commented. ‘I mean, it’s not even open yet and you look wrung out. I think you should think about taking someone else on. Or ask yourself if it’s such a good idea after all.’

‘I can manage,’ Adele insisted. ‘It’s all new to me, that’s all. And there’s a lot of running about. Keeping an eye on the workmen, and going to sales, and managing the house on top of all of that . . .’

Managing the house? She barely did a thing there anymore. Not that William would know, or notice. She had increased Mrs Morris’s hours, had everything delivered and she never made cakes or puddings anymore. All of this brought her guilt into focus. Time and again she determined to stop the affair. She was a strong-minded woman – surely she could find the strength to walk away? She tried, on more than one occasion.

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she would sob to Jack.

‘Then don’t,’ he would reply mildly. Everything was so black and white to him. Everything was so simple. He had no conscience. He could never understand her dilemma, not really. But he was very patient with her and her outbursts. He would look at her, bemused.

‘Tell me it’s all going to be all right,’ she would beg.

‘Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?’

For a million reasons. Because she might break down. Because she might betray herself. Because it was driving her mad, the fact that she couldn’t control it, that she was obsessed, that she couldn’t stop it when she knew she should. The fact that her love for Jack was twisted and wrong and hollow and based on deceit.