At the airport she bought a paper, and then a copy of half a dozen others. None of them made a mention, not even in the most out-of-the-way paragraph, of the riot she had seen the night before. It was as if it had never happened.
BOOK SEVEN
Chapter 25
Screams From the Basement
The Tube station had tile walls and seemed to her a very white and open space after the long walk through the tunnels. At the bottom of the first stair two children sat side by side, one not more than four or five, the other older and it was the older one who held out her hand as you came down off the last step and made a plea without words a kind of brief keening, and what were you to do? Giving her a coin seemed not enough, nothing was enough but gathering them up in your arms and taking them home with you, and you were horrified, disgusted, where was the Fagin hiding? For there had to be one of those, perhaps the two were not even sisters, and you went by without giving them anything, not a coin, far less the love that had no thought of self. She saw Anne Macleod on the opposite platform dressed as a man and waved trying to catch her attention, wanting her to wait so that she could run down again through the tunnels and join her; she would tell her about the children. Instead without even glancing up Anne stumbled and spun over. Falling from the platform she made a black cross shape, trousered legs held up as she fell. Her hitting the ground came muffled and a little distant like the sound of blows. And two men ran almost to the edge and then swung off like gulls startled in flight, and both platforms suddenly were filled with people, hands everywhere thrown up to hold back the noise from the tunnel, the roar of the train dazzling from the tiled walls. She was the engine driver rushing into an unfolding openness of mouths stretched wide and hands crying Stop. And in the same moment the wall of the platform was rough against her bruised face and the rail sang by her ear as the train came. And she thought she must be Anne Macleod and then was herself and Anne Macleod's weight lay heavy on her and she was grateful for she was being protected, greater love hath no man than this only not a man of course, but then the weight on top of her was moving and thick flesh entered her. Anne was – Anne was, no, Maitland was inside her. And excitement became fear and turned to anger – why now? Couldn't he hear the train, what was the hurry? Why now? Anyway it was so long since they had anyway it was too late. The driver saw hands held up like posters but there wasn't time or room enough. It was stopping but not ever in time. Brakes shrieked. Maitland thrust into her. The train ground past the place under the soiled wall where she lay held by him. She stood on the platform and watched the train go by and knew she was dreaming and wakened and Maitland thrust and thrust again and groaning let his weight sag down on her.
She struggled to throw him off and he caught her wrists and with his whole weight held her down like an enemy.
'I can't breathe!'
He rolled to the side and in doing so somehow the grip on her changed into a holding for comfort; and she recognised the nature of this change even before he began to make soothing noises which at last resolved themselves into a murmured, 'You were sleeping.’
'Let me go,' she said, and waited until he took his arms away.
'I was sleeping,' she said. 'How could you?'
'It's all right.’ He made the mistake of using the same tone, as if calming a child.
'Oh, it's not, no, it's not. Don't think it, it isn't. I was asleep.’
'Yes,' he said.
'You weren't making love to me. Just doing what you wanted. Taking as if I was a thing. Not someone.’
'Oh, for God's sake.’ She was, it seemed, trying his patience.
'There's no love in that.’
In all the years they had been married, he had never done this to her. Making love was to someone, not to a body with the spirit elsewhere.
'You could make allowances.’
'What?'
He got out of bed. The curtain was drawn and his naked body before the window seemed to shine in the cold brilliant light. As clearly as if through her own eyes, she saw through his the full moon resting just for a moment on the dark edge of the mountain s.
'I almost died this morning,' he said.
Walking up through the woods, ground firm underfoot that had been a sucking of black leaf mould in summer, panting a little from the effort of climbing, she had wanted, but not been able to tell Anne Macleod about the phone call. Maitland had been killed.
'They told me you were.’
'I'm sorry.’ But he spoke without turning from the window, the shape of him dark against the light. 'I can't imagine who phoned, though.’
'A man.’
‘Yes.’
'He had an accent, from somewhere in England. That was what confused me. I knew you were going to Aberdeen. But, of course, that was where he was phoning from. A policeman.’
'He said he was a policeman?'
'I think so – I don't know.’
'It's very strange.’
'I don't know what you're saying. That you don't believe me?'
She had been standing at the window when the taxi brought him home near the end of the day. And the heart in her body had melted for joy to see him.
'I thought you were dead. For all those hours,' she said.
'If I'd been asked to guess what you would do on being told I was dead…That's a game all of us play in our heads, men do anyway…When I play it with you dead, I am grief-stricken, yet brave. Dignified. People are impressed. You, on the other hand, went for a walk. I wouldn't have guessed that.’
'Come back to bed.’
'This place is like a sick-room.’
'I closed the windows and put on the heating. After an accident your body is in shock.’
'It's functioning.’
He turned into silhouette so that she could see the rod of his penis erected from his body.
Feeling him inside her, she wanted to say, I never imagined you dead, not ever, I never played that game.
When he lay by her side, she said, 'There wasn't anywhere for me to go. You were dead. I put down the phone and later I was outside. The odd thing is I'd got dressed for a walk. I'd gloves and boots and a heavy coat and scarf, though I didn't remember putting any of them on. In the woods I met someone who told me your friend Monty Norman is a kind of Nazi.’ She waited for him to answer, but he sighed and drew another breath like a man asleep.
He took her again just before morning. This time again she was awake. She had lain awake all night waiting for morning to come.
Finished, the weight of him stretched along her body, he whispered into her ear, 'I killed a child.’
Mysteriously the words connected to no event in her mind but ran instead out into an unknown of possibilities so that it was an easing, before the shock came, when he confined it to the narrow reality of what it was. When his car plunged through that corner it had hit an eleven-year old girl on a bicycle. The force of the impact threw her forward so that before the car went into the wall it almost struck her again, though by that time she was dead.
She wept for the child and for him. Hardly knowing what she said offered reassurance. It was an accident, no matter how terrible not his fault.
'The brakes failed,' he said. 'That's what happened and now I've to hope that's what their experts find.’
'Then they will.’
'The front was smashed up. I don't know about these things. Maybe that will make it harder. What do you think?'
She saw the Peugeot with the bonnet sprung open, the lamps emptied out like scooped eggshells. 'I can't bear it. You might have been killed.’
'I wouldn't know how to make the brakes fail. How do you think you would do that?'
'Make them?'
'Make them. Cut something or untighten something. I told you I don't know. But, of course, it would have to take some time. Not much point if they failed coming out of the garage.’
She sat up. 'No one would do that.’
He lay on his back. Only his eyes slid to the side following he
r.
'Do you remember the time someone put contraceptives into my briefcase? You said the same thing then.’ He lay there waiting for her to speak, and she knew it was important to find something to say. After a time, he got up and began to dress. 'Thank God, I hadn't been drinking.’ He said that as he was fastening the buttons on a shirt, his tone quite ordinary. And later, slipping his feet into his shoes, 'They call it reckless driving apparently if it comes to a charge. The maximum penalty for reckless driving is five years. A policeman told me that, he said it wasn't enough. Of course, some of them were upset because it was a child. That's natural.’
She wondered if the man who phoned had told her Maitland was dead to punish her. That seemed unfair since she had done nothing. One flesh. Married people all committing masturbation, one flesh. Monty Norman and Maitland. She heard him coming out of the bathroom and going downstairs. Men could love men as women love women. Not lovers, the idea foolish as much as sick, rather like a man and his image in the mirror – the image you love or dislike but which is closer to you than any lover – its skin, the dry roughness of gums, the weight of flesh under the eyes, peering out through gaps in its bones at a blurred twin. Maitland looking into a mirror and Monty looking out at him. What would she see if she looked in the mirror?
The idea of her body was strange to her, Maitland had made it strange to her. He had taken her body from her.
Chapter 26
From the kitchen window the silvery grey elaeagnus bushes hid the bottom of the garden. She listened to the silence in the house. A cup laid aside on the draining board was half full of coffee; when she laid a finger to its side, it was still warm.
Outside the air stabbed at her cheekbones and the hollow of her throat. With Anne Macleod yesterday she had sat under a grey sky, now it was the coldest cloudless blue except for a skin like wool teased out just underneath the sun.
Shivering across the crisp lawn to check if the car was gone, she went all the way round to the front drive. Like a fool, she thought. Hadn't she been told? In a police garage the car would be up on a ramp waiting to be examined. How could she have forgotten? Going back inside, out of habit she took care to shut the side gate. Lambs and ewes escaped in summer out of the fields, belly-flopping between fence wires. Let them in and they would destroy a garden.
Not expecting to find him, she made her way down past the hedge, not really expecting to find him there, going down anyway; an old lawn of rough grass, the vegetable bed gone to weeds, a garden hut with its rusty padlock snapped to, locking the door shut. Her head blocked the light and the dirt thick on the glass made it hard to see in. As she leant this way and that a piece of the window ledge broke off under her fingers. The hut was rotting into the ground.
They had set a stone into the bank as a foothold up on to the kitchen lawn. As she stepped from it, she saw a face at the window, only a glimpse, so quick it might not have been there at all and then certainly it wasn't. It had to be Maitland. Who else? She hesitated at the back door, left unlocked when she came out.
A hand fell on her right shoulder.
Part of her fright was superstition, for it was as if whoever had been at the window had conjured himself behind her.
Stepping back Monty Norman gave her fear room. 'I saw you come round to the front of the house,' he said, 'so I knew somebody was in.’
She said, 'He isn't dead, if that's why you've come.’
Later it occurred to her that if she had kept silent, he might have given himself away. But now by what she had said he was warned. Yet she could not have stopped the words and later would not regret them for it was by thinking about them afterwards that she began to understand what they had come from her own mouth to tell her.
When he followed her inside, there was no one in the kitchen. She took the empty cup from beside the sink and ran it under the tap. Behind her she could sense him standing too close. Maitland might have gone out walking; if so, there was no way of telling when he would come back. Or he might have gone to work, that wasn't impossible, caught a bus into Balinter and gone to the University. The water spilled over the side of the cup.
His hand reached over her shoulder and shut off the tap. In the silence there was the sound of a door closing. She knew at once it must be the lavatory at the end of the passage by the front door and knew, even before Maitland appeared, that he would be carrying a magazine or book. It had not occurred to her that he would reassert the routine of any ordinary morning.
He came into the kitchen reading aloud, 'Those of us in industry who have the privilege of leadership –' He stopped short. 'That's the bit I like,' he went on, drawing the words out, staring at Norman. ‘"The privilege of leadership.”’ He glanced down at the folder open in his hand. '"Those of us in industry who have the privilege of leadership should not leave the destiny of our country solely in the hands of politicians.” I thought I might use it in a seminar.’ And with no change of tone, 'Are we having breakfast? Suddenly I'm hungry.’
They ate breakfast sitting at the table and Lucy made it. She put muesli into a bowl and set it down in front of Maitland who poured on honey then milk. Monty Norman shook his head, not wanting any. She grilled bacon and made toast and not just coffee as usual but tea as well since that was what their guest asked for. She didn't feel at all like eating and when they were served she poured herself a coffee and sat at the table too. Part of her felt it as strange. But she did it. What sense would it have made to feel demeaned by something as everyday as making breakfast?
Afterwards though when the two men went out together, she began in her head to describe all of it to Anne Macleod. What words would she find to tell how she had made a breakfast eaten in silence and then how the two men had gone out leaving her? She sat looking from Maitland's bowl where he had pushed it aside to the two plates, crumbs, a fragment of crust. She began to gather the dishes together as if in a moment she would take them to the sink for washing.
And having got so far with Anne Macleod would she be able to find the words for that too? Just say it. Washed them. And then?
She got up and went into the hall. Moving more quickly all the time, she put on her coat and a hat. Not able to find the second glove, she stuck one hand in her pocket and hurried out by the back door leaving it unlocked again behind her.
Turning left, she couldn't pick out a car that might be Norman's. The scatter parked on either side seemed the familiar early morning pattern of the village street. On the other hand, it had to be said she was capable of trying to get the key in the lock of a different make from their own simply because the colour was the same, more or less the same, and so that didn't prove much. His car might still be there and the two men walking somewhere nearby.
She could go back down through the woods towards the estate as she had done yesterday. Or to the top of the Brae Road. From there on a day like this she would be able to look across all the counties of the strath.
With telescope, searching, unwanted, Lucy Inside gave her that image.
'I was watching you from inside the shop.’ The minister's wife tapped her on the arm with her newspaper. 'Standing in a dream.’ She started to walk, drawing Lucy into step beside her. 'The manse is finally sold, isn't it wonderful? An offer of sixty thousand. Believe me; they'll have to spend that much again to get rid of the damp. I can't tell you how glad David and I shall be to move. Did you know it has to be to a four-bedroom house? Not that we need so much. There's a church rule – bedrooms for children and you need one for the visiting minister. All out of date – nineteenth century, eighteenth, seventeenth, some century or other. All nonsense, in any case. Any century but this one.’
It was Janet's house they were passing. This morning would she be curled up in a chair head bent over a book about women opening their legs? Perhaps now she didn't have to. At the gable end there was a lane and Lucy turned into it. Behind her she heard the minister's wife rattle on for half a sentence before coming to a stop. She was a woman who was fonder of talking
than listening. ‘Poor Lucy,’ she'd say, ‘still behaving rather oddly I'm afraid.’
Madness had its privileges.
On this side of the street the village was as wide as a single house, each one with a garden so long that it seemed narrow; feus from a time when land was cheap. The burn of brackish water that wound along behind them was stilled in ice, and late autumn's sucking churn of mud beside it had frozen into a path. Cold weather had taken a grip just when it was time to think of the way things would be when spring came back.
They were no more than half a mile ahead when she came in sight of them, but beginning to hurry she made no impression, even after a bit seeming to fall further behind. It would be Maitland, she knew, setting the pace. I should call out, she thought; and then, what would happen if I called: ‘Mr Clarke!’ Would Monty Norman turn round? If I called, ‘Your friend Georgie Clarke is here!’ – But she wouldn't have the courage. Anyway they had stopped heads together, now were moving on, but more slowly, lingering along. In a moment, they would hear her footsteps or one of them would look round. The sound of her breath hurried in her ears.
'Mr Rintoul!' she called.
She wakened out of a dream and it was dark. It wasn't a frightening dream just strange, and she lay under the weight of her husband's arm piecing it together and then thinking about how the two men had turned and that the name she had called out might have been heard by them as 'Maitland!'
The Stranger Came Page 18