The Stranger Came

by Frederic Lindsay

  'I don't mind. I expect it'll be enormous fun.’

  'Wonderful to be young,' he said, and she thought he was laughing at her. In her own ears, her foolish voice rang bright, enormously bright. 'Life begins at forty. Isn't that what they say?' As if it could matter to her what age he was, the little pompous creature. 'As a new arrival, I'm perfectly willing to find it so.’

  She stared out to the curve of road above the loch where a car would first come into sight.

  'Perhaps you're here to persuade Professor Ure?'

  'Persuade him?'

  But that was too shrill. He looked at her shrewdly. 'To go on your theatrical outing. Where are you taking them for entertainment – your unfortunates? '

  'This year it's to be the Palace.’

  'That great barn! Isn't it used now only for pop concerts? All those young things squealing and getting themselves overexcited. Would your sort enjoy that kind of thing?'

  Would Maitland never come? She forced herself to find something to say. 'It's very seasonal. Not a pop concert. A kind of variety show – singers, jugglers, a comedian, I suppose. The second half of the show is all the Great Sovek. It was that or a pantomime – and they voted for a change.’

  He shook his head. 'You'll never persuade him. I'd give up if I was you. Professor Ure and the Great Sovek – not forgetting the jugglers, and a comedian, you suppose!'

  It could only be by accident he sounded sardonic. Everyone knew he worshipped Maitland.

  'But he does go! …So Mrs Stewart tells me.’

  'It'll be because of his wife. People who live in villages tend to develop the Lady Bountiful thing. You know they live in a village? Lovely view of the hills.’ Without altering his tone, he went on, 'You're having a long wait. Perhaps he isn't going to come.’

  As he said this, he checked the time, not by glancing at his wristwatch or turning to look at the clock on the wall, but by looking up to where its image was reflected in the glass against the darkening sky. As she followed his gaze, the minute hand tugged forward as if to pull her bound by the wrists towards whatever was in wait for her.

  'I can't see that he's going to come now,' Sam Wilson said, and she was ready to believe him except that like a burly miracle a thick-set man in the grey uniform of the security staff appeared. 'Miss Lindgren? ...I was asked to check if you were still here. Professor Ure sends his apologies for being so late. He is on his way.’

  'I was on the point of offering you a coffee,' Sam Wilson said. 'Or something stronger – with it being the festive season.’

  'There wouldn't be time, not since he is coming.’

  'Well, yes, I had seen that. Perhaps another day.’

  They stood in silence. She wondered why he did not go. She needed time to prepare herself.

  'I have a flat in the residences. But perhaps you knew that?'

  'No.’

  'Rent free. It's one of the perks of being an academic warden. Normally the place is full of life and I like that. Being around young people, it's never dull.’ His voice had quietened and lost its odd emphatic stresses. 'But now, of course, they've all gone home.’

  As a student she had lived in one of the residences, and had a picture of him offering her coffee in a room like that; her on the seat by the desk and him cross-legged on the bed. She wanted to share the joke with someone, with Maitland if only he would come.

  'Do you keep up?'

  'Sorry?' What was he talking about now?

  'With the subject. Do you take an interest still at all?'

  Didn't he know that even those with honours degrees were counting themselves lucky to find jobs in sales or personnel? It was a different world from the one into which he had graduated. His question irritated her beyond reason. Does he think I should 'keep up' as a hobby? Or for love?

  When he began talking of Maitland's attitude to the students, it was worse because she had to hide her anger, having no right to it.

  It seemed to her a long time before the beams of a car, tilted by the crest of the ascent, raked like searchlights across the dark. When Maitland appeared, he came from the wrong end of the corridor, catching her by surprise.

  'You've missed Dr Wilson.’

  'Good.’

  'I couldn't get rid of him. When we saw your car, he went off towards the front door. But you came the other way.’

  'We don't want to stand here,' Maitland said. 'It's like a bloody fishbowl.’

  Hurrying after him, she realised he must have seen Wilson standing with her as he got out of his car. She wondered if that was why he had chosen to come in by the other door. Breathlessly, she said, 'I was angry with him. He was criticising you.’

  Maitland grunted without looking back.

  'He thinks you upset the students by wondering if any of it matters. He can't understand why you do it.’

  The truth was that Wilson had surprised her by the strength of his feeling. 'I know,' he had said, 'that he's only…joking. That's not the right word either. He wants to challenge them into thinking about the value of what we do. But they misunderstand. They come to me and I tell them, Christ, the Professor's played his part – he's worked with everybody in the field who matters. It's all to do. There's plenty to do, I tell them.’ In his seminars, when she was a student, he had never conveyed to her, to any of them, this simple truth - that he was in love with his subject. 'The terrible thing is,' he said, a little patch of colour on each cheek, 'that it's the brightest students who are most unsettled by him.’

  Now, as she followed him into his office, Maitland asked, 'Did you want me to meet you so we could discuss Wilson's opinion of how I handle students?'

  'Did you know,' she responded, 'I've just realised you don't ever talk to me about any of that. You tell me what Wilson or Black are getting up to – or how McBain isn't much better than a Government stooge for the next round of cuts. That's only gossip. You don't share what you're doing with me – not your real work.’

  'My "real work.”’ He settled on the edge of the desk, unbuttoning his coat one-handed. The heavy cloth slid open over his thighs. His skin had the healthy look of a man who spent time out of doors. There were lines at the corners of his eyes, but with his brown skin and thick curling black hair he looked like a man in his thirties. 'It's not a particularly obvious topic between lovers.’

  'We could talk.’ She knew she was making herself vulnerable and silly, but could not stop. 'I have a degree. I try to keep up.’

  'Below a certain level,' he said, 'shop talk doesn't interest me.’

  Tears stung her eyes, although she knew he had not meant to be cruel. He meant no more than what he had said and, if she had drawn it out of him, then it was by her own foolishness. Unexpectedly, horribly, she heard herself asking, 'Can you talk to your wife? I suppose she'd understand more of it?'

  'She used to,' he said coolly. 'She's out of touch now.’ She could not believe she had got herself into this mess.

  She had been kept waiting too long for him.

  'You said you'd be here hours ago. I was so afraid you weren't going to come.’ It seemed whatever was in her head had to be blurted out. She had to control herself. 'It's just that you were so late.’

  'I always had this image of you as being placid,' he said.

  'It was one of the things I liked about you.’

  A swimmer going into cold water, she took her breath deeply. 'Did you know your wife was at the flat? With Monty Norman? I saw her there.’

  He stared impassively. At last, 'If you feel you must, tell me.’

  'It was in the afternoon. I had gone home…'

  Home is the safest place for weeping. People called it home where for a time they slept; even in a dreary room in a flat whispering with strangers. Real home for Sophie would have meant a train journey north, except that she would have felt it unfair to cry in front of her father. He had worked so hard to climb up out of the need for tears. It was a battle which he had been obliged to win, since the ones who did not had a high casual
ty rate. In charge at last of the company's sales team, he made a habit of retailing the mishaps of this changing cast to his family. Un-promoted salesmen were the walking wounded. Men she would never meet limped out of the memories of her earliest childhood, men with stomach complaints, men weeping on corners or found hallucinating in the bedrooms of small-town hotels. Their stories told over the dinner-table had been offered by her father to his family like guarantees of safety. His battle won, that table was the last place in the world to which she could bring her tears.

  At this time of the afternoon, the flat would be empty; everyone had a job except the Irish boy who wanted to be a painter, and lately he had begun to let them all know that he found his room, which he used as a studio, too depressing to be alone in during the day. The corridor was dusky; the only light struggled through the transom windows above two of the bedroom doors. She stepped heavy­ limbed and slow as if under water through the twilight dimness. Her room was a cave full of shadows. Winter light pressed like grey water against the single window. In another week it would be Christmas. She huddled her coat around her and stared unseeing at the brown and grey cones of the unlit gas fire. Nothing here belonged to her, not the lumpy chair, or the scratched dressing-table, or the wardrobe with the piece of folded cardboard pushed in under the door to keep it from swinging open; not the bed, above which she had tacked up when she took possession in the summer a poste of the Theatre Moliere – Le Theatre Gai de la Porte de Namur. She had taken it down after Maitland made a joke about student digs. He had meant no harm but it was not the way she wanted him to think of her, and anyway she had only put it up because the wallpaper was so drab. This was the place where Maitland belonged to her and to no one else in the world. This was her true and only home.

  She touched the blank place where the Theatre Moliere and its comfort of bright colours had shone down on her in Maitland's arms. Months ago she had folded it into a bin sack in the kitchen and then, for fear anyone should ask her why, poured rubbish on to hide it from view. It had been warm then on summer afternoons, and thinking of how it had been she went restlessly into the hall. From beyond the door of his room, which was not quite shut, came the deep measured note of Monty Norman's voice. Horribly startled as if she had been spied on, she stood with her fingers pressed across her lips listening.

  'Down on his knees digging into her, made me laugh. Many's the laugh I've had with Georgie. I wonder what they did to him. Too fat to run away – poor bloody Georgie.’

  His voice came and went and there was the tramp of his feet as he moved about the room. She pushed at the door, just with one finger gently so that she could peep inside; impulsively, out of the silly feeling he had no right to be there.

  Back to her he was talking to himself, leaning forward with both hands on the iron rail at the end of the bed.

  'Georgie brought it on himself. Brought that young bastard in without a by your leave. Even so, who's to say Georgie Clarke isn't the lucky one? He's not stuck in this hole. What do you say? You say nothing, bloody nothing –'

  And on the last word, a little explosion of anger, he had pushed himself upright – and she glimpsed the bed and recognised the woman lying outstretched on it. Seeing Sophie, his face loosened with astonishment and then with a shrug he said, 'I'm complaining about having to live in this dump.’

  Although there was no hysteria in her laughter but a rich easiness of relief, she could not stop even when she discovered that Monty Norman had followed her back into her room.

  'Was there something you wanted?'

  At the ridiculous politeness of his question the laughter welled up filling her mouth and spilling out in bright shards.

  'I think you've made a mistake,' he said.

  She remembered his terrible contained anger in the bar when the reporter woman – what was her name? What was her name? – had humiliated him. Maitland had thought it funny when she told him. He had not seen Norman's anger or how his hand holding the glass had trembled. But still the laughter came, thinner and metallic with the taste of fear.

  'Come and see,' he said, and walked away not doubting that she would follow.

  She had not expected Lucy Ure still to be lying on the bed. It was as if she had intruded upon an act of death not sex. But the murderer said, 'I'm glad you've stopped laughing. I was beginning to worry about you.’

  'What have you done to her? Is she drugged?'

  He gave an odd snorting grunt of amusement. 'What an imagination you have!'

  'Her eyes are open, but she's not looking. What's wrong with her?'

  'No drugs,' Monty Norman said. 'Lucy, get up and make yourself comfortable in the chair… You see? She can hear. She moves. After all, there's nothing terrible happening.’

  Yet to Sophie there was something unnatural in her rising so responsively and in the manner of her sitting, upright but flopped and slack in the shoulders.

  'Mrs Ure?' she asked hesitantly. 'You said she could hear – but she can’t!'

  He turned his glance from one woman to the other. 'You know Professor Ure's wife is not well?'

  'No. I never heard anyone say that.’

  'Of course, there's no reason why you should know.’ He paused, and she made a movement of her head as if to agree. 'Have you been to their home?'

  She shook her head again. She had no reason to go; no reason. It was as if he was taunting her with her exclusion from Maitland's life.

  'While I was there, she became unwell. Do you know anything about migraine? Don't compare it to what happens when you get a bad headache. It's real pain. People who get it when they're driving, have to pull in at the side of the road. It blinds them. She's a bad case. She hates it and it frightens her. The attacks have been coming more often lately. She comes to me because I can help her.’

  'Help her?'

  'Go up to her. Closer. Do you understand?'

  'Her eyes are open, but she doesn't see me. Mrs Ure?'

  She stretched out her hand to touch the older woman on the cheek, and then drew it back, partly in fright, more from a sudden sense of shame.

  'She felt an attack coming on – they get a kind of warning, you see. And, luckily, she was nearby. She's under hypnosis. I've helped other people – and I'm trying to help her. It's something I can do, but I don't talk about it. It's not something I want to be known for – either people would pester me and make it cheap like a party trick, or they'd be begging for me to help them. I'd get no peace. I can't help everyone, and I wouldn't charge for it, not when it's a gift.’

  If he was telling the truth, he was taking back from her that wonderful chance, to free Maitland from his marriage – and not be blamed. It was too unfair. Yet his confidence confused her. If the story was crazy, its best witness was Lucy Ure, so blank-eyed and oblivious.

  At the same time, like a deep cut saving its hurt for later, she began the process of understanding that, if it was true, Maitland had told her nothing about his wife's illness. If that part of his life meant anything to him, he had shut her out.

  The snap of his fingers jerked her attention back. 'I thought you were gone.’ He clicked his fingers again, lightly, smiling at her. 'After all nothing so terrible. She's sick and I help her. I don't blame you for wondering what was going on. She's ill and now she's well. She's happy.’ Deep and pleasant, his voice was the only unusual thing about him. 'Why shouldn't you be happy too? Why not, eh? She'll wake up in a minute and be on top of the world. Look here, why don't you sit down? For a minute. You've had a bit of excitement. Why not rest for a bit?'

  'Does Maitland know what is going on?' she asked.

  'No,' he said sharply, his tone quite different. 'Mrs Ure prefers that her husband shouldn't know. Some men don't like to share the power they have over their wives. The idea of hypnotism upsets them. They don't understand it's only medicine. It's like getting upset because their wife takes aspirin. It makes life simpler if they don't know.’

  'Are you going to waken her?'

  'She'll wa
ken when it's time.’

  'If you woke her now, she could tell me herself. That she doesn't want Maitland to know .’

  'The treatment isn't complete. It isn't time to waken her.’

  'You could put her back to sleep afterwards.’

  'It doesn't occur to you she would be embarrassed? Waking up to find a stranger here?'

  Her breath came chokingly, as if the exchange had been with swords not words.

  'Not a complete stranger,' she said. 'And next time I see her I'll ask her about these migraines.’

  When he smiled, it changed his face which in repose was fleshy and slightly coarse. The thickness, the curliness, the very definite black of his hair gave a kind of expectation of handsomeness which although not really there would impose on some women. He was not Sophie's type.

  If she had been asked, she would have explained that by saying she preferred her men to look more intelligent. The way then in which this smile changed him disconcerted her. It lightened the load of flesh with a momentary illumination; and if it was a showman's charm, still it was charm.

  It was with this smile, he asked her, 'Will you tell her at the same time why you call her husband by his first name? "Maitland" – you say it so naturally. Are you going to explain to her why that is?'

  'Are you?' Maitland wondered.

  Yes. Sooner or later, somehow. Had Monty Norman thought he was being clever? She had wanted to say to him, ‘Wake her up! Let's tell her now who I am and what I mean to Maitland!’

  'Haven't I the right to be happy?' Unexamined, the appeal burst from her and broke upon his look of incomprehension. Trembling, she went on, 'You know I wouldn't.’

  'So what happened?'

  'That was all. I went back to my room. I sat on the bed. After a while, the outer door closed.’

  'You expect me to believe this?'

  She stared at him in shock. One hand reached out palm upward, longing to be held.

  Haven't I the right to be happy? Her question was a tremor of the air which separated them.