The Stranger Came

by Frederic Lindsay

  'I thought you'd jumped.’

  'Do you think I'm daft? I have a drink problem. In here to get myself dried out. You're the lunatic.’

  A flush of heat at her stupidity went through her, and even an absurd desire to apologise. But before she could say anything he reached out and in a casual violation laid his hand on her crotch. Tell him you're old enough to be his mother, she thought. Old enough, certainly, to have been someone's mother.

  'As for that gasping for it bitch Macleod,' he said, the hard separate pressure of his fingers cold against her, 'is it her you want climbing into your bed? Is that what's wrong with you? Have you the same itch as her?'

  She felt his touch between her legs all the way down the stairs, and still when she saw her husband leaving Dr Cadell's room and crossing reception to go out to where the car would be parked to take him home. She could have called or run after him; but Maitland left without knowing she was there.

  Chapter 17

  'I don't know what age I was when it happened.’

  'We can think about that later.’

  'It was in the winter, I know, because I had been sitting in the window seat and it was dark outside. The light from the room behind me shone on the little bit of grass and the hedge and the gate. Though it was quite a large house, three floors of it, there was only this little patch of grass, no distance at all and then the hedge. It was a terrace house, you see, and the garden was at the back with three apple trees that grew at an angle, their branches pinned to the stone wall. It must have been winter or I wouldn't have been up late enough to see it dark outside. Not that I didn't – but that was upstairs – sitting up in my bed, not in the front room downstairs. Look out, I mean, at the dark. My bedroom was on the third floor, and when they thought I was asleep, I could sit up and see the stars or clouds going across the moon. “Be a good girl and fetch my briefcase,” he said, “I've left it by the table in the kitchen.”’

  'Your father said this?'

  'Yes. When I looked round, he had put down his book and was smiling at me. He was in his big chair by the fire. We used that front room downstairs then. Neither of us liked the sitting-room upstairs. “Go on”, he said.’

  'And then?'

  'You could go to the kitchen by going out into the hall. The door to it was round the corner, past the stairs. But it was easier to go through the passage. The passage ran with a door at each end from the downstairs front room to the kitchen. There was a sink in it and shelves. Of course, there were sinks in the kitchen as well – and in the washroom that you went two steps down into from the kitchen. That's where the back door was, from the wash room out into the garden where the trees were. A rowan tree, a laburnum, three apple trees against the wall.’

  'You went into the passage then? On your way to the kitchen. As your father had asked.’

  'Going that way was quicker than going out into the hall. He knew I'd go that way.’

  'And?' No waiting this time. Was he curious? Or just impatient?

  'The lights were out. And I went in and there was a horrible face with a light shining on it. He'd put it there, you see. I ran out screaming.’

  'A face?'

  'A mask . With the lips all pulled back. The eyes red. I saw one just like it in a museum and nearly cried out. But that was years later when I was grown up.’

  'And your father did this?'

  'Oh, yes.’

  'You must have been quite young.’

  'Six or seven. I couldn't have been any older, because it was just after Mummy died.’

  'And your father put this mask into a dark passage and then tricked you into going in there?'

  'But you don't understand! He did it to help me,' she said.

  'The thing is he didn't understand at all. He thought my father did it to hurt me.’ And then she said, 'I wish you wouldn't.’

  'Wouldn't what?' Anne Macleod asked.

  'Just wait, not saying anything. That's what he does.’

  'Well, why would your father do such a thing?'

  Soon it would be lunchtime; and then the long afternoon, this was a day when visitors came only in the evening. On some mornings the sun shone; today the sky was grey. A van was unloading at the side of the hospital. They turned from one path on to another.

  'After my mother died, I didn't cry. I stopped speaking. They couldn't get me to say a word. No matter how much they tried. I was a voluntary mute, that's what they call it. It happens with children if something hurts them too badly. Sorry, you'll know about that. Anyway, when I saw the mask, I ran out screaming and Daddy held me in his arms. He did it to help me. I started talking again.’

  'Oh, these fathers,' Anne Macleod said, not sounding like a doctor at all.

  'I was with my mother when she died. Not that they would have let me if they had known. But she wasn't supposed to, she had been ill for such a little while. And so they took me in to say good-night. Her eyes were closed. I thought she was pretending so I didn't want to kiss her, and Daddy said I had to. I bent over to kiss her. Her eyes were still closed. And then she sighed. I felt her breath going out, it touched me.’ Lucy put her hand to her cheek.

  Anne left the path and led the way across the grass. She was the one who had suggested walking outside, not caring any longer it seemed about the bank of hospital windows looking down on them.

  'I screamed because she was dead.’

  'And afterwards for a time you couldn't speak.’

  'No. Afterwards I was mad.’

  Anne Macleod stopped and stared at her. 'Do you mean –?'

  The boy's head pressing between the girl's thighs as she slid down in the chair. Horrible. But it wasn't that which had driven her mad. 'Just a little sigh, but I heard it under all the noise,' Lucy said. 'I must have known at once what it was, because of my mother. Sophie Lindgren was in the seat beside me and she sighed and then she got up although she was dead. She stood up and walked. She went up on to the stage. And I saw her up there and I knew. She had died in the seat beside me. That's when I began to scream.’

  'But have you told this to Dr Cadell?'

  'He tells me to go to sleep,' Lucy said. 'And when I wake up I can tell by the way he looks at me that he knows everything.’

  Chapter 18

  'I don't know why you should say such things to me,' she objected. 'You have no right.’ But knew that he had. Wasn't that the nature of Doctor Cadell's business? What else was he paid for? There was a game she played in her head in which he was a tradesman taken on for the job of reordering her thoughts as someone else might be hired to clean out gutters.

  She was not as fragile as he might imagine, as they might imagine.

  'Because your husband's here?'

  Yes. That was his offence.

  'It isn't true, you know,' Maitland said. 'There isn't anything like that between Janet and me.’

  'I didn't –’ but she had said it, shouted it one morning here to Dr Cadell, who loomed behind the desk waiting to call himself as a witness. And so, whispering, 'Yes.’ Yes, she believed Maitland, which didn't prevent the disappointment that he should be there at all and willing to discuss the unlit corners of their life together. He had never had any patience for the gratuitous confidences and smutty hints even people who should know better seemed to go in for nowadays; she had been embarrassed by how openly he despised the slack flirtatiousness of faculty parties. Maitland had dignity.

  She wanted to put out her hand and touch him, but their chairs were set apart in line with either edge of the desk where Cadell sat like a judge on a bench. Judge. Witness. Prosecutor.

  'I'm sorry,' she said.

  In the silence, Maitland turned his face to her. What else could he be assuming but that she wanted forgiveness for the sick images of him and Janet together in bed, and the bed theirs, the bed in which he should struggle only with her? The regret she felt, in fact, was vaguer than that, and for something more encompassing.

  It seemed to her that Maitland knowing her so well should
feel how sorry she was for bringing them to this indignity.

  The angle of the winter morning sun left one side of his face in shadow, distracting her. When she was shown in by the nurse, why had he given no sign of recognising how great was the shock of her surprise? Not to have been told he was going to be there was so unfair. If she had lost the right to the courtesy of being asked, then not even to be warned that he would be there. 'I felt it was better that your husband should be here this morning,' and Maitland not saying a word. The moment reran in her head, but this time Maitland held out his hands to her, kissed her on the cheek.

  This time he stood up.

  This time he stood up to welcome her. To comfort her.

  This time he stood up.

  'There comes a time,' Dr Cadell was saying, 'when the barriers have to be broken down. Afterwards the healing, but first the breaking down. I explained to your husband why it would be helpful if he was present when I played the tape to you. He agreed.’

  There was a tape recorder on the desk. She had not seen it before.

  'This comes from our most recent sessions,' Dr Cadell said, 'when you were under hypnosis.’

  'You didn't say anything to me about a tape.’

  He shook his head at that, glancing towards Maitland. But you didn't! You didn't! She had to restrain herself from crying that out, in frustration like a child. You must have begun each time after I had gone to sleep; taking the machine from wherever it was concealed, perhaps from out of a drawer in the desk.

  'Have you heard it already?' she asked Maitland.

  Instead of answering he looked to Dr Cadell, who after the briefest of hesitations said, 'What you're going to hear is edited. It would take hours to play the full record, as many hours as the sessions lasted.’

  It was obvious that he had already played the tape to Maitland. No doubt of that at all. She could understand the usefulness of being able to play back what had been said, could see it was no different in principle from taking notes on a case; but she felt it, in some kind, as a betrayal. If the act they were engaged in was whatever else also and as well only two people talking together, then what had been betrayed was trust. And why shouldn't there be a second recorder hidden and taping everything they said at this moment? Had Maitland thought of that?

  Clever Maitland.

  'I can see,' she said, 'that "the full record" of our sessions would be a bore. All those silences.’

  There was a silence.

  If she laughed they would be right to be angry with her. All the same laughter was there, like a tiny spool unwinding inside her, and that made it worse when Doctor Cadell pressed the switch and she began to understand what her voice was saying.

  ‘“You watch then”, that was what he said, and he took the nipple of her breast and hurt her. Yes, I felt the hurt though I wasn't supposed to, somewhere inside I felt it, somewhere inside. “I've seen that before”, one of the other men said “open your eyes, Sleeping Beauty”, he said to her.

  'Why are you doing this?' she whispered. 'I won't listen to this.’

  “Good dog”

  “Can I touch her? you're a lucky bitch”

  “Lift your leg ­– pee like the dogs do”

  “Finished with her? Who's talking about finished with her? We haven't bleeding started on her it'll be a long time before we're finished with her a long time before I'm finished with her.”

  How did they want her to react? The significance of what they were saying was muffled for her. Was she to be shocked? Words in a play acted for her benefit. For her benefit, surely in every sense. Whatever the words meant, the intention was to help her to be well.

  It would have been easier if she had been unaware of what they were doing. Then it would have been easier for Dr Cadell to help her.

  She was more intelligent than he realised, than they realised.

  'Isn't that so?' She realised he had been waiting for her to respond.

  'I thought we were happy together,' she said, not looking at Maitland.

  'It's possible to know and be determined not to know.’

  He had steepled his fingers again. It was her turn for a lecture. 'It would explain why you found her death so traumatic. You wanted it to happen – when it did, you went into shock.’

  'Is it true then?' she asked Maitland.

  'More than that,' he said. 'It's general knowledge. Sam Wilson was obliging enough to help the police with their enquiries by telling them about Sophie and me. I'm sorry.’ Sam Wilson, so busy in the Department, but not distinguished, he hadn't published anything worth reading, so Maitland said, and he ran around after Maitland, made such a fuss of admiring him –

  'How could he be so disloyal!' she cried.

  Instead of Maitland, she was accusing Wilson (and it was true; the little wretched creature). It didn't mean she had missed the enormity of what Maitland had admitted. The thing about Wilson just something she had blurted out. But even so. And Maitland hadn't smiled. If she had been Maitland, listening she might have smiled. No wonder if even the best of men despised women a little.

  'Mrs Ure?' She was listening, yes, she was listening. 'It was after our sessions of hypnosis that I made it my business to find out the details of the Great Sovek's performance that evening. I made a prediction to myself that there would be someone persuaded to impersonate a dog. I thought it might have been a woman. In fact, it was a young man. When Sophie Lindgren died, he was on all fours – just as you describe your girl in the "dream" to be – on all fours beside her. She died with him beside her like that.’

  She saw him. On all fours. His head nuzzled between the girl's legs.

  'Are you all right?' It was Maitland's voice, very far away.

  'Was it you who killed her?' she asked him.

  'She killed herself!' It was exactly the note with which he would respond when he found something she had said exasperatingly ridiculous.

  'It was you who saw that something was wrong,' Dr Cadell said. 'No one else was watching her with such a...jealous attention. You knew she was your husband's mistress.’ He glanced at Maitland. 'We really must accept that somehow you had learned about it. To see her die like that when you were so full of anger against her. It must have been traumatic. Anger and the desire to punish, they're still there in the treatment of the girl in the "dream.” In throwing it up as a defence it also allows you to work out your aggression against me. I am the hypnotist prying into secrets – so you turn me into a monster. It explains everything.’

  But Lucy was not listening. Instead she watched his smile that had slipped out, secretive, satisfied, despite himself.

  No one tells me the truth, she thought. What if there has been a trial and I've been found guilty? Guilty but insane. A husband takes a young woman to love; why wouldn't men believe I killed her? The poor wife. Poor madwoman.

  What if the hospital I remember out there isn't the real one? What if every door is locked behind me, every window barred?

  Guilty but insane.

  Inside she began to scream.

  Chapter 19

  'What did he say then?' Anne Macleod asked.

  'That it could only be what he called a dream. Not something that could ever have happened.’

  But there were no images of a girl on all fours crouched naked as there would have been in a dream; just words, her own voice in her head, like a child reciting the stages of a Black Mass by rote.

  'Why not?'

  Lucy hadn't expected that question, the tone of cool enquiry, the sharp glance that went with it.

  'Because it was sick. Horrible.’

  'That's what he said?' And when Lucy shook her head. 'No, he knows sick things happen inside heads and outside them. Inside first and after a time someone goes and does them. Outside and they get to be part of dreams, even the ones you don't know you have.’

  'He told me no one can hypnotise you and make you do something that was wrong. You would wake up. Doctor Cadell told me that. If you were asked to do something wro
ng.’

  'I read about an experiment once –' Anne Macleod paused as a nurse clattering out from one of the side wards looked at them curiously. They were in the upper corridor again, walking it from one end to the other as they had done before. 'It was at one of those American universities with an exotic name – Tulsa, I think. The experimenter had a beaker of sulphuric acid. He told each subject what it was. Just to make sure there could be no doubt, he put a strip of zinc into the acid.’ And Lucy was able to picture that, white fumes steaming out like a mad horror film. 'He told them, this would scar, it could burn the eyes out of your head. Then he hypnotised them and told them to throw the beaker in his face. And some of them did.’

  'How could they?' Lucy protested.

  'After they were hypnotised, a glass screen was slid up between him and each of them. The subjects didn't know anything about it. There was one man who threw with such force the acid splashed all across the glass.’

  'I don't believe –' Lucy began. 'Your experimenter couldn't be sure – how could he be sure? I'm sure the man who threw the acid knew the screen was there.’

  Anne Macleod made no answer to that, and coming to the last window in the corridor they looked down to where a man with a stick was spearing up rubbish from the lawns.

  'If it had been me – anyway, if it had been me,' Lucy said, 'I couldn't have thrown – even if I'd realised the glass was there. Not acid. The idea is too horrible. Of hurting someone in that way.’

  'That man who threw the acid. He was a big man – one of those football players who get scholarships to American universities. And then he finds he has to do this as part of the course. And he is one of those who go under and can't seem to resist. I imagine he might be angry without knowing it. Being hypnotised perhaps just gave him per­ mission to do what he really wanted to do – punish the lecturer who was doing these things.’ The man below gathered up the mouth of a sack and began to drag it behind him across the winter pale grass. 'It isn't everyone who can be hypnotised really deeply. To walk around and do things, and then remember none of it once you're out of the trance. Sleepwalkers and amnesiacs. Somnambules they're called. They're quite rare. I imagine Sophie Lindgren might have been one,' Anne Macleod said.