The Hotel Eden(7)

When Porter came back I could see him striding down the platform in the gray light like a man with a purpose. He didn’t seem very drunk. He had a blue package under his arm. “Oh, matey, bad luck,” he said, sitting opposite me in our new compartment. It was an older train, everything carpet and tassels and wood in remarkably good condition. It was like a time warp I was in, sitting there drunk while Porter told me he was going back to London. “Have to.” He tapped the package. “They’ve overnighted all the data and I’ve got to compose the piece by tomorrow.” He shook my hand heartily. “Wish me luck. And good luck to you. You’ll love Cape Wrath. I once saw a submarine there off the coast. Good luck to you and your Gulf Stream.” He smiled oddly with that last, a surreal look, I thought from my depth or height, distance anyway, and he was gone.

Well, I couldn’t think. For a while I worked my face with my hands, carefully hoping that such a reasonable gesture might wake me, help me get a grip. But even after the train moved and then moved again, gaining momentum now, I was blank. Outside now the world was gray and green, the misting precipitation cutting the visibility to five hundred feet. This was part of a typical spring low pressure that would engulf all of Great Britain for a week. I didn’t really know if I wanted to go on alone, but then I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I wanted to get off the train, because I didn’t really know why I was on the train in the first place. I felt a little sick, a kind of shocky jangling that would resolve itself into nausea but not for about an hour, and so I put my feet on the opposite seat, closed my eyes, and waited.

Porter had been to our flat once. It was the day I had gone to the Royal Weather Offices in London, and when I came back, he and Allison were drinking our Whitbred at the tiny table. The place was a bed-sitter, too small for three people. I sat on the bed, but even so every time one of us moved the other two had to shift. Evidently Porter had come to invite us to some funky bar, the last mod pub off Piccadilly, he said. Allison’s face was rosy in the close room. I told them about my day, the tour I’d taken, and Porter got me talking about El Nio, and I got a little carried away, I guess. I mean, I knew this stuff. But I remember them exchanging glances and smiling. I was smiling too, and I remember being happy waving my arms around as the great cycles of the English climate.

Now I felt every ripple of every steel track as it connected to the one before it, and I knew with increasing certainty that I was going to be sick. But there was something more than all the drink rising in me. Something was wrong. I was used to that feeling, that is, that things were not exactly as I expected, but this was something else. That blue package that Porter had carried back. I’d seen it all night, the corner of it, sticking out of the blown zipper of his leather valise. He’d had it all along. What was he talking about?

It was like that for forty minutes, my stomach roiling steadily, until we stopped at Pitlochry. When I stood up, I felt the whole chemistry seize, and I limped to the loo and after a band of sweat burst onto my forehead, I was sick, voluminously sick, and then I was better, that is, just stricken not poisoned. My head felt empty. I hurried to the platform and wrangled with the telephone until I was able to reach Roger Ardreprice. I had tried Allison at home and at the museum, and then I called Roger at work and a woman answered the phone: “Keats’s House.”

“Listen,” I started after he’d come to the phone. Then I didn’t know what to say. Why was I calling? “Listen,” I said again. “I’m uneasy about something.…”

“Where are you calling from?” he asked.

“I’m in Scotland. I’m in someplace, Pitlochry. Porter and I were going north to the coast.”

“Porter, oh, for god’s sakes, you didn’t get tangled up with Porter, did you? What’s he got you doing? I should have said something.”

The phone box was close, airless, and I pressed the red-paned door open with my foot. “He’s been great, but…”

“Oh my, this is bad news. Porter, for your information, probably started the Lake fire. He was tried for it, you know. He is bloody bad news. You keep yourself and that young woman away from him. Especially the girl. What’s her name?”

I set my forehead against one of the glass panes of the phone booth and breathed through my mouth deeply two or three times. “Allison,” I said.

“Right,” Roger Ardreprice said from London. “Don’t let him at her.”

I couldn’t hear very well now, a kind of static had set up in my head, and I set the phone back on the cradle.