'This morning. It was, quite honestly, it was a disaster.’ About money, their meetings now were always about money. “He's the first professor I've ever seen come into a meeting with a Filofax,” Maitland had said of a new colleague; bids for projects, zero funding options, it's a new language. The afternoon was taut with a washed clean light and to her left where the country was flat she saw the fields like faded rugs thrown down under the hills.
'I know you take an interest,' he was saying.
'Sorry?'
'Perhaps I was wrong. I thought you took an interest. In the Department, the University, what is happening.’
'Not when it's about money.’
'Too depressing? Well, of course it is. We waste endless time on whether we can afford to do things, so that all the important questions about why we do them and how we do them, there's no time for them at all.’
Talk like this, she had heard it before, for years now.
Because he seemed to expect a reply, she offered, 'I know', and sighed.
'Oh, quite. We're all weary of it. It's part of the grey fabric. But it's the real world we have to live in and we have to cope with it. We can't just give up. That's not duty. '
'Duty.’
'You say it exactly the way Maitland would. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that the way it sounded.’ She said nothing, not caring; but he wasn't any good with silences. 'The thing is I know how splendid he can be when he's making fun of something. But he used to care as well.’
'Henney Low,' Lucy said. He turned his head sharply as if to check whether she was making fun of him. 'Someone Maitland talks about. A clever man who doesn't really care.’
'He was witty this morning,' Sam Wilson, 'but it didn't go down well. It didn't help. '
'I've changed my mind,' Lucy said. 'Let me out at the station, would you, please?'
'If you're not feeling well – if you have a headache? – I could take you home again.’
'No.’
Parking at the station entrance, he broke their silence. 'Despite – I mean, I have great respect for Maitland. The work he's done. That doesn't alter. And, of course, it's not surprising if he wasn't at his best – wasn't himself this morning – not after the accident.’
'Killing the child, you mean?'
But she could see from his expression Maitland hadn't mentioned that. She hadn't meant to be disloyal.
The headache started on the train. Just an ordinary headache, not the kind that was an affliction. For those it had been a long time, not one all the nights she had been in hospital. Suddenly that seemed strange to her and she caught herself rubbing at her temple in the old way until she brought the culprit hand into her lap and held it there. She closed her eyes. Opened them at once. A line of bare trees. She watched them and thought of stick men flickering by in a picture book under a child's thumb.
She made her way from the train into the booking hall. With the crowd swirling round her, after all she couldn't find a reason to be in Edinburgh. On the board there was a departure due that would take her back to Balinter. What she needed was a quiet place to be alone. She couldn't make up her mind what to do, and saw she was being watched by a man on one of the ugly plastic seats scarred with cigarette burns. An unshaven man with the battered look of hard times, two plastic bags held between his feet, he watched her as if for a sign.
There were no telephone books at the line of phones under the departure board. She had to walk along to the central post office at the east end of Princes Street. “I must speak to Doctor Anne Macleod,” she told the answering voice. “It's very important.”
The clock on the tower of the Balmoral Hotel read quarter to four. She couldn't remember if she had eaten for breakfast or lunch. And there had been the gins when Janet came. Little wonder she had a headache. Nothing more natural.
She took the glass lift down into the shopping mall by the station. After she had eaten something, she would phone again. I'll phone again, she had said. Please tell Doctor Anne Macleod I'm in Edinburgh.
Later her headache was worse and she couldn't recall whether or not she had eaten in the food court. Instead she remembered the way the tables were set out by the pool and the shape the fountain made as it rose and the drops from it falling in circles into the water below. When she found herself in the pedestrian precinct the first thing she took account of was how one of the bushes in the concrete pots had buds, though so tiny and tight you might not notice and think it was dead. After that she looked in the travel agent's window at brown bodies running hand in hand into the sea on another planet. Yellow sand, blue sea, meeting at an edge. By then she knew, of course, that the entry beside the agent's led up to the office of the Gregory and Rintoul Trust.
As she climbed to the Trust office, a young woman ran down the last flight towards her. The impression of a moment; but for an instant, young, full of life, seeing her in that place, it had been Sophie Lindgren.
Slowly she began again to mount the stairs. Hadn't she been promised nothing was certain? Not even the coming of pain.
When she came down across the Meadows, the great open grass space and the arch of sky overhead was like water to her after the noise of the streets. The beauty of the place was its trees; it would be bleak without them; but there were empty gaps on either side of the path where there should have been new saplings. One late survivor must have been attacked only the night before; the slender trunk snapped and bent over like a crippled dancer.
Recognising the street, she crossed the road on impulse and when she had knocked for some time, a man not much more than a boy opened the door.
'The Norman fellow's not in,' he said, sounding rude although that might only have been because of his accent, Belfast and abrupt.
'All the same…I've done too much walking…I'll have to sit down.’
'I don't suppose he'll be long,' the young man said, taking it all as a matter of course. 'I'm watching television in the kitchen.’ He gestured and when she was inside shut the door and started ahead of her along the lobby. 'It's the only warm bit in this hole. And you could have a cup of tea.’ After all he was friendly. 'Might make you feel better.’ Kind. 'I should be painting,' he was saying, 'but it's hard some days. I can't make myself get started.’
She remembered the kitchen, just as untidy, the tap still
dripping. The only difference was the small portable television among the dishes piled beside the bread bin, an unwashed plate on top and a kitchen chair set in front of it. 'It's not really wasting time,' the young man said. 'It's like an Expressionist painting – all shot in the studio. That's Emil Jannings on there now. He's the professor. He's in love and it's driving him mad. He can still bring a tear to your eye. Mind you so can Fraulein Dietrich murdering one of those songs of hers – assuming that is you're a music lover.’
'Is that for me?' He had run a cup under the tap and now was shaking it dry. 'If I could wait in his room. All I need is to be quiet.’
She had hardly got herself seated when he startled her by bursting in with the cup held out. 'Get this down you. It'll help. Can't stop – don't want to miss the end.’ And he was gone. A growling version of 'Falling in Love Again' faded along the corridor.
Most of the room was taken up by a bed. It was a comfortless place. The top sheet was drawn up over the bed. She sat on a chair against the wall looking at the bed. To lie down on it and close her eyes. Side by side under a chest of drawers, there was a pair of black shoes and another of brown. Tidy, she thought. No mirror. Nothing on the walls except a calendar. For the wrong date. Not for this year. Some previous occupant might have pinned it there. She was cold.
The ringing of the bell didn't concern her. He would have a key. There were footsteps and the raising of voices at the bedroom door and then it opened and the young Irishman said, 'I told you he's not, but look for yourself.’
The man's face had been put together but you could see the places it had been broken. There was something wrong around the eyes and at one side of the mouth there wer
e little seams like the marks of frowning where the skin had been patched. He stared at her and then went back out and there was the noise of doors being flung open all along the corridor. At one point he said something and the young Irishman stopped protesting, so that after that there was only the sound of the doors.
He came back on his own and stood looking at her. 'This isn't your room?'
'No.’ Somewhere behind her vagueness the idea offended her.
'You live in this flat?'
'No.’ But this time as he waited she knew that wasn't enough. 'Have you made a mistake?'
'That's what I'm trying to find out.’
He opened the wardrobe and she glimpsed a jacket and some shirts on hangers and thought, so there is one, seeing the mirror fixed to the back of the door. He went through the chest of drawers, lifting clothes out and putting them back in place. When he had finished, nothing in the room looked disturbed.
'Mr Nobody, not even a letter.’ When he spoke, only the undamaged side of his mouth moved. 'What's he look like, describe him for me.’
She made a movement of denial. He had no right to question her. She should get up and leave.
He put his hand under her chin pushing her head back. 'I can't tell you why I'm here, I don't know why!'
Squinting against the dazzle of light, she saw him nod as if understanding something. 'For Christ's sake! He fixes you up, isn't that right? When you're poorly.’ He let her go. 'It has to be him.’
Hearing her come out, he turned. He was already at the outside door ready to leave.
'You were one of them,' she whispered.
'What?'
'Only they punished you.’ He came at her in a rush. 'That's what happened to your face.’ In her terror he seemed to fill the corridor. 'They ruined me, you said.’
And he had her by the shoulders. 'He tell you that?' She shook her head. 'Or Georgie Clarke – did he tell you?' She struggled but he was too strong, forcing her back easily into the room. No one had told her. A final shove sent her staggering back, and he had her down on her back across the bed. He forced his knee between her legs.
She had heard it on a tape, and hearing it had thought it something invented out of her own mind's darkness.
Perhaps it was the look on her face then that made him stand back. He touched his tie and then made the gesture of a man checking his flies.
'Tell you all about it, did he? Don't laugh, I still fucking dream about it. It was the best time I ever had. Not an old piece of meat, a piece of garbage – in a nothing drum like this. He must be desperate for it, darling.’
She closed her eyes. Would not open them to let him exist, until the voice of the young Irishman told her he was gone.
'Don't touch me,' she said.
'There wasn't anything I could do, honest to God. Sorry... Do you want tea?'
It was no wonder Doctor Cadell had felt disgust for what he had found in her mind. He couldn't admit how he felt, of course, any more than a surgeon could acknowledge the part of him sickened by the soft corruptions scooped out under his hand. He hadn't been able to hide what he truly felt, not from her, no matter how he deceived himself. It would be no wonder he felt disgust for her, for the dirty thing pieced together out of the scraps in her mind. Only now the scarred man had laid his hands on her and pretended they were real. Doctor Cadell, like Daddy had sent her into the dark.
Yet when she got outside she stood waiting at the entrance to the close, as if something prevented her from going away, and that was where Anne Macleod found her.
Chapter 27
With a shudder she brought up a last slick of vomit at the side of the road.
When she got back in, Maitland put the car into gear, twisting round to check there was a gap in the traffic as they moved off the hard shoulder on to the motorway. At once he was driving very fast, pulling out to overtake, braking as they closed on a car in front. Perhaps it had been that which made her sick. She found a tissue and wiped her lips; it made no difference to the taste in her mouth. After they had been married for some years one thing or another she had said started him quarrelling with her so badly he had raised his fist. He hadn't struck her, instead appalled by his own gesture had become subdued as if wanting her sympathy, so that she would see how much she was to blame for reducing him to such a state. ‘You have more strength than me,’ she had said, ‘it's a temptation to use it, I can see that.’ And that reply had driven him into a second rage: she 'didn't understand.’ She had been sick then too.
It was a long time since they had quarrelled about anything.
It had been all right while Anne Macleod was still there. He had settled her into a chair, given her a drink to sip, told her to close her eyes. To the things Anne Macleod said, he had listened quietly. He was calm, so that he was the one who seemed to be in control. Listening without interruption, while she told the story of a man calling himself Rintoul who had used a brothel in London to satisfy appetites he was ashamed of. ‘Suppose,’ Anne Macleod said, ‘someone who knew about Rintoul needed to find a place to hide. Wouldn't Rintoul have been forced, for example, to find that person a place to live or, assuming he had one in his gift, even some kind of job?’
Lucy, closing her eyes as if to deny her own presence, had waited for him to say, ‘What is this to do with me?’ After a silence, not any longer than you gave someone out of courtesy to make sure they were finished, Maitland thanked her for bringing his wife home; ‘I was beginning to worry,’ he said.
‘Would it worry you that she was with Monty Norman?’ Anne Macleod had asked.
If she spoke at all, Lucy knew she would hear herself tell them about the scarred man. She must have made some kind of noise for Anne Macleod had bent over her, touching her on the shoulder to comfort her, saying, ‘Come with me, you can come away with me now, this moment if you want to.’ With eyes closed Lucy heard Maitland tell her it was time to go; ‘my wife is unwell,’ he had said, not sounding angry at all, ‘she needs to sleep.’
She wakened some time just after first light. Leaning up on one elbow, he continued to look at her for a while in silence, then he said, ‘I was trying to remember one time when you offered the first move before we made love. Or you ever touching me down there. Unless I asked you to.’ He lay down and she couldn't see his face when he said, ‘I know it has as much to do with me as you. Maybe if we'd had children.’
After that since he didn't say any more he had probably gone back to sleep, but now as she thought about what he had said during the night she knew that somewhere in her there was anger. It was very strange to know it was there and not be able to feel it.
'I was on the phone,' Maitland said.
She couldn't make sense of that, and then she wasn't sure if she had heard him properly. She had been looking at how the white of a cloud of mist linked the snow-covered tops of two hills. Behind them low in the winter sky the sun was small and moon-coloured.
'I was on the phone when you and Doctor Macleod came last night,' he said. 'I couldn't think who the call was from. I didn't recognise the voice. She asked me if I had any children. It's late for a survey, I said. But at that exact moment it came into my head who she must be. If you had any, she said, you wouldn't have killed mine. You couldn't have been so careless, not knowing how precious they are.’
'How could she do that?'
She meant how was the woman able to talk at all, if a child of mine had died under the wheels of a car I would have drowned in tears. But Maitland said, 'That policeman didn't like me much. Not that there's the smallest chance of proving he told her, if it was him.’
It seemed to her that in one way the mother had been brave. Thinking about that, she remembered the day she had hurried along the frozen burn calling 'Mr Rintoul!' She saw the picture of herself doing that, hurrying after the two men, as if she had been a watcher standing somewhere apart on a hill.
'Anyway she didn't threaten me or anything.’ Maitland braked and caught a gap that took them into the traffi
c on the first roundabout before the city. 'Of course, I did put the phone down before she was finished – when I heard the noise of the two of you coming in.’
The mist shrank and bent the light of the headlamps.
The locals called it haar, a word for a raw wind across the German plains, a word the old tribes had brought with them when they came north. It poured up off the water of the firth to fill the city. Out of the car, she shivered at its touch. 'Easier to park here and walk across,' Maitland said.
Her heart sank at the effort needed to walk across the links. Out in the middle of the open grassy space, it was hard to believe a city lay round them. She heard the hurry of her breath and their footsteps tapping on the frozen path. Trees came and went singly as stripes of darkness. From somewhere on their left a wordless yelling rose and fell silent. She wanted to sink down, but Maitland took her by the arm. She could not think why he had chosen to park so far away.
When she thrust her hand into her pocket, there were no gloves, she must have left them in the car. Instead, she found a bottle, a small square shape that she turned over and over between her fingers.
'I don't want to do any harm,' she said, 'to you or him.’
As they entered the street, he didn't answer. Perhaps she had only thought the words. In the ground-floor flats un-curtained windows showed long narrow kitchens fiercely lit or square shadowy rooms in glimpses, pictures, mirrors, a television set in a corner. As they went into the close, he said, 'There is no me and him. Isn't that what we're here to prove?'
Climbing the stair took an enormous effort. All the feeling seemed to have gone from her legs. Waiting for the bell to be answered, she was afraid she would fall down. Her hand clenched on the bottle, squeezing it in her fist. They waited so long it began to seem no one would come and he would have to take her home so that she could sleep. She saw him take out a ring with two keys on it. First he used the Yale and then with the long thin key turned the lock below that and pushed the door open.
The Stranger Came Page 20