The Love of a Stranger (Kindle Single)

by Carol Drinkwater

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Carol Drinkwater

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN-13: 9781542098304

  Cover design by Patrick Saville

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  The Paris to Nice high-speed express was crammed to bursting. The cause of such a mass exodus from the capital was a spring holiday that Susan Parks, when purchasing her one-way ticket, had failed to note. She had arrived early, as was her habit, and was comfortably installed in her seat, paying little attention to the scrum going on around her until, unwittingly, she was drawn in. Her reservation turned out to be double-booked. A family of six had just now climbed aboard and the mother, a rather unattractive woman with her hair scrunched into a bun and a face like a disgruntled cod, was insistent that Susan’s window seat was one of theirs.

  ‘No, sorry, madame, I am in the right place. Here, please, see.’

  The woman glowered and shook her head, refusing to discuss the matter further. She and her family began to unload their belongings and spread themselves out in readiness for their journey. Susan stared up at them in alarm. Madame, towering over her, heaving with fury, was adamant that seat quatre was not Susan’s. Susan offered up her printed reservation once more to confirm that the corner with window where she was already installed was indeed hers. The matron with a quartet of children tugging at her clothes barked at Susan to get up and move away, ‘disembark if you so wish. That place belongs to my daughter.’

  The daughter, a bespectacled five- or six-year-old, eyed Susan with an ill-tempered glare. Susan was about to cave in when Madame’s husband signalled to a conductor. Much arguing and gesticulation ensued between husband and staff member while plastic boxes of food were pulled from backpacks and slammed to the table, where Susan’s few belongings were now being shoved into a careless pile against the glass. From out of the boxes came fresh tomatoes, a jar of olives, another of chutney, shiny apples, three oranges, bananas, two plump salami sausages, several chicken legs, half a dozen boiled eggs waiting to be shelled, followed by an assortment of cheeses. From a shopping bag appeared three baguettes, a flask of coffee, a bottle of mineral water, paper napkins, plates and white plastic cutlery. The picnic was ready to be consumed. All that was required from Maman’s point of view was the removal of the interloper.

  Susan made few protestations. She was not in a fighting mood. Her spirits were low and she was keen to settle back, to read or quietly stare out of the window at the passing scenery. However, the train was still in the station at the Gare de Lyon. Glancing at her watch, Susan noted that they were now running eight minutes behind schedule. The mood in the carriage was frantic, raucous. Decibel levels were rising, while the conductor was harassed and confused, desperate to put an end to the fracas. He pored over Susan’s ticket with a frown and then the handful of billets belonging to the crotchety holidaymakers, shaking his head. Each appeared to be valid. How had this error come about? All the while, the father was talking. Bullets of opinions and complaints were being lodged into the ear of the burdened SNCF employee.

  The compartment was now streaming with passengers and suitcases and still more were boarding. It was never-ending; it was a crush. Babies were screaming, youngsters were flicking at video games on their bleeping Nintendos and consoles, while their adult appendages ferreted for more space.

  Eventually, Monsieur the Inspector was brought into play. He was a short, stout man with a black, pencil-thin moustache, and an iPad clutched between his podgy fingers. Susan’s voucher was studied in deadly earnest once more, checked and then checked again on his tablet. After reflection from the chief, Susan was requested to gather up her few possessions and follow the uniformed gentleman out of the carriage.

  The family was triumphant.

  Susan obeyed with a quiet sigh, fully expecting to be delayed and rebooked onto a later train. Were her plans to be scuppered even before she’d left the starting gate? She was led along the quai, but not, as she’d expected, to the exit. Instead, further along the platform, to one of the first-class coaches.

  ‘Voilà, your new seat.’ The small man lifted off his cap with a gleeful flourish and grinned at the green-eyed lady standing before him.

  ‘Merci beaucoup,’ Susan replied with surprise.

  ‘You are most welcome, chère madame – belle madame. I ’ope you will be comfortable in zis compartment.’

  A voice over a loudspeaker announced that the train was finally ready for its departure. It seemed that Susan had been allocated a table for four all to herself. The inspector bowed hastily and set off at a trot, calling as he went, ‘Bon voyage, madame.’ Nothing delighted him more than offering a helping hand to a beautiful woman, and what a beauty this one was, if a little on the skinny side.

  Just at the moment when the doors were sliding to a close, three men squeezed themselves aboard, each with a briefcase and minimal amounts of hand luggage. They identified their places alongside the recently installed young woman and settled in. The one with the seat to the left of Susan was wearing an elegant raincoat even though it was not raining. This he took off, folding it carefully into the overhead luggage rack, before dropping a copy of Le Figaro on the table in front of him and acknowledging Susan’s presence with a nod.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he smiled.

  The train shuddered, inched out of the station and then set off at a gentle roll.

  The men, each stylishly if casually attired, began to spread themselves out, sliding smartphones and leather-clad tablets from their tailored jacket pockets.

  Susan’s Kindle was on the table in front of her.

  A hostess arrived with a trolley offering complimentary drinks: apéritifs. The men shook their heads.

  One of the two across from her, the plumper of the pair, turned in her direction. ‘What about our rather beautiful young companion? Do you care for some refreshment, madame? You have the eyes of a Persian cat,’ he remarked.

  Susan, nonplussed, requested water and a quarter bottle of white wine. Her neighbour – whose name was Gustave, she overheard later – he who had been engrossed in paging through his newspaper, changed his mind and accepted a small bottle of Evian. ‘I prefer not to see a lady drinking alone. Santé.’ Gustave poured and raised his glass to Susan’s with a glint in his eye. He was sandy-haired, sporty with long, rangy limbs. Arresting, she thought. Her late mother might have described him as ‘dashing’.

  The two men opposite were now pressed up close to one another, shoulders and arms brushing in an intriguingly conspiratorial manner, which rather drew Susan’s attention. Charles, seated diagonally across from Susan’s place, to her eye resembled a forty-something Jeremy Irons and was also rather ‘dashing’. He opened up his iPad and began to show his neighbour – the one who had offered her the refreshment – a series of photographs, which raised expressions of
surprise, of fascination. The man, who answered to the name of Jean-Christophe, was almost salivating. ‘Mon Dieu. Que c’est magnifique!’

  Susan attempted to concentrate on her reading while also throwing sneaky glances to the window to see whether she could catch a glimpse of their screen images in the glass’s reflection. Alas, the angle of the device made it impossible for her to see anything they were sharing.

  Whatever it was, the two men were engrossed.

  Snacks were served. She shook her head politely. The others brushed the cold collations aside with disdain. They remained glued to the electronic screen or, in Gustave’s case, to an architectural magazine, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, which he had pulled from a leather briefcase after neatly folding up his newspaper. He used a Mont Blanc biro to occasionally underline or make crosses, hastily scribbling remarks alongside one of the articles he was reading.

  Charles and Jean-Christophe paid their companion no attention. They were now browsing three smartphones and two tablets between them, all the time scrolling for and sharing photos Their conversation was in whispers close up against the other’s ear. Tantalising. Hard as she tried, Susan was not able to catch the subject of their discussion, or at least not without exposing a voyeuristic interest in the trio’s affairs.

  She turned her attention to beyond the window. The early afternoon beckoned, peaceful and bucolic, as the high-speed train bulleted through endless expanses of greensward, or kingdoms of agriculture where early shoots of wheat were pushing through uninterrupted acres of fields. Elsewhere she saw herds of horses in paddocks or meadows; large farms with dairy stock grazing; gently winding streams overhung with beechen green; the boundless expanses of rapeseed, not quite yet yellow, that carpet northern France in late spring.

  * * *

  Susan sighed and her heart ached – such tranquillity evaded her. Her life had been shattered, her happiness snatched cruelly from her. She had lost her partner, fourteen years her senior, a man she had been cohabiting with since she’d met him more than a decade earlier at university – a visiting professor of poetry, his special love being the Romantics. Justin had been taken from her at forty-five. She had been at his side for the final year, and at his bedside without respite in the last days of his life, where she had fed him and ministered to his fevers, struggling with the torrent of her own emotions as she monitored his suffering – trying her hardest to make him comfortable and relieve his pain, watching helplessly as his bright flame faded a little more each day.

  Any one of these men surrounding her might have been his confrère, would be the product of a similar upbringing: privileged family circumstances, a private education, she was thinking, biting back her grief as she stared towards, no longer seeing, the swiftly shifting landscape.

  * * *

  ‘Do you read French?’ enquired the man alongside her, drawing her from her reverie.

  ‘Sorry?’ Susan swung her head in his direction.

  ‘I was wondering whether you might like my newspaper. I’m done with it now.’

  She was lost for words, sunk deep in her memories. Gustave slid the folded paper towards her with a smile. His eyes travelled over her face, lingering a moment, and then he returned to his own reading.

  ‘Gus, look here,’ urged Charles. ‘Jean-Christophe, what do you think of this? This is the château at sunset, the most recent I’ve taken.’

  ‘Quel endroit,’ drooled Jean-Christophe.

  ‘Gus, have you seen this one? Have a look.’

  Gustave lowered his magazine and politely lifted his regard to Charles’s electronic gadget. ‘My, my . . . Yes, that photograph is indeed captivating, but I am not the one you need to convince.’

  ‘And its profitability?’ requested Jean-Christophe, sapphire-blue eyes gleaming. He reminded Susan of a small furry mammal, a lemur perhaps, attentive and watchful, with a hunted air about him.

  Figures were whispered, whistled at as though the two men were admiring the chassis of a vintage car or a female of exceptional proportions. The duo went silent. Both were impressed, musing on the success, the potential of Charles’s coup, not least Charles himself.

  ‘C’est une bonne affaire, non?’ encouraged Charles with the glowing eye of a rogue. ‘You must agree that it’s a damn good deal.’

  Jean-Christophe nodded silently, reflecting, calculating, in awe.

  So, it was a property that had so excited their attentions.

  Susan idly wondered about its location.

  * * *

  Why was she on this train speeding towards le Midi, the South of France, a thirty-something woman alone? To laugh in the face of Fate, to spurn the brutal blow it had dealt her? It had been a year and two months now since Justin’s death. Susan Parks had celebrated – marked – her thirty-third birthday alone, in mourning. A widow, although she had never stood before an altar or registrar. She and Justin had never bothered with marriage. Perhaps if there had been children, they might have gone through the ‘rigmarole’, as Justin described it. Justin had been married once before, briefly: a relationship that had ended soon after he had fallen for Susan. His first brief liaison had also produced no offspring.

  Susan was alone.

  Great Britain was facing the upheavals resulting from its imminent rupture with Europe, and she felt a desire, an urgent need, to get off her small island and explore, to break from the grip of her heartache, her loneliness. She had no real idea where she was headed – a similar situation to her student days when she had taken off with nothing but a rucksack and leapt at whatever encounters had taken her fancy. Without any set destination, she’d travelled. Hers had been a gypsy spirit. In those days, she’d had an apportioned span of time to fill before she was due to return to university. Now there were no parameters, no deadlines. No structure to her life at all to speak of, having given up her contract as a supply teacher the year before Justin died in order that she might dedicate herself to his needs entirely.

  She could have gone back to work, picked up the threads. But the volition had not been there.

  She was facing a blank page.

  * * *

  During the month leading up to her departure, she had advertised her cottage in the local paper and fortunately found a couple to rent it. She and Justin had lived there together, on the outskirts of a village close to Oxford, for more than ten years. She wasn’t ready to sell, to dispense entirely with its memories, its scented garden decked with splendid displays of plants they had bedded in the earth together, but she could no longer abide being there. She felt trapped. She had a sum of money, her modest inheritance from Justin’s life savings and a small nest egg of her own – it amounted to several thousand. On top of which there would be the monthly £800 income received from the property. The death duties had been settled; probate granted; the paperwork finalised and, she prayed, filed away for good.

  Her intention was to stay out of the UK until there was nothing left to spend or until she grew bored with the travelling, the isolation. If, in a few months’ time, she needed to replenish her coffers, she could always find temporary employment, teaching English, private lessons to the offspring of wealthy parents summering in Monte Carlo or along the Riviera, or wait on tables.

  The notion of such open-ended freedom both terrified and exhilarated her. On the one hand, it made her want to bolt back to her solitary sanctuary, lock the doors, nestle beneath her duvet, bar life out. On the other, she felt the need to leap crazily, to fly with light wings over miniature islands, to waken and find herself washed up on a foreign shore, beating her escape with an insouciance she had not known for years.

  She had known blissful, carefree happiness with Justin. His learning, his erudition and curiosity, had constantly enriched her. His passion for words, rhythm, syntax had fuelled her hunger for literature. His love had lifted her up, inspired her, given her courage, left her giddy with the warmth and generosity of it. His death had reduced her to a shell, to nothing more than the discarded pelt of a sk
inned creature.

  In his final moments, she had gazed upon his sunken, sallow face, silenced, spectre-thin, and had asked herself if this really was Justin. Her Justin, the man she had loved so ardently and who in turn had bestowed such affection on her. In death, he had taken all with him and become a stranger to her.

  For more than a year now, she had been drained of energy, lacking direction, devoid of the will, the oomph, to continue to live. Even the simplest acts, such as dragging herself out of bed, pulling on clothes, even an old coffee-stained tracksuit, to walk to the village to buy a pint of milk, had demanded an insurmountable effort. Instead, she had slept and slopped about in baggy T-shirts and socks, eating nothing besides stale toast, dry breakfast cereals, growing more frail by the day.

  It will get easier, so many friends and associates had mouthed, attempting to soothe and comfort her. They were well-meaning utterances, but fourteen months on she felt no emergence of that ease. It was for that reason that she had settled upon this unformulated plan. This high-speed train to the South of France, where she intended to install herself for the foreseeable future, until her destiny pointed her towards a new direction. Or she might simply put an end to it all.

  A discreet suicide far from home.

  * * *

  She must have dropped off. She had developed the habit of napping at any time and in any position while keeping watch at Justin’s bedside. When she opened her eyes, a navy darkness had enveloped them and the train was wending its way alongside the Mediterranean shores, twinkling with a choker of coastal lights. Her Kindle had been slipped back into its case. Her quarter of wine, barely touched, and empty water bottle had been cleared from in front of her. The three men were still at her table. They nodded at her as she opened her eyes. Jean-Christophe, the plump one directly opposite, wrinkled his nose like a rabbit. She wanted to giggle, then apologised awkwardly to Gustave for disturbing him, but she needed passage to the loo.