The Stranger Came

by Frederic Lindsay

  'I always drive fast.’ He raised an eyebrow. It was unlike her to question what he did.

  'It's just,' she tried to bring the idea into focus, 'just that I wondered if you haven't begun to drive more quickly. I've felt that recently without realising it.’

  'No,' he said. 'I shouldn't think so.’

  'Do you remember Jenny Craigie?' she asked on impulse.

  'Should I?'

  'She was my friend when I first met you. A stout girl, but always smiling – really rather a pretty face. She used to complain, “Oh, not pheasant again!” Whenever she got a parcel sent her from home. Her father was a gamekeeper, you see, not rich or anything. Usually, in fact, she was short of money. That's what made it so funny – “Oh, not pheasant again!” '

  'And I met her?'

  'Oh, yes. She went abroad though, just after we graduated. Somewhere extraordinary like Iceland. I wrote to her but never had a reply.’

  He laughed on a note of exasperation. 'Why are we talking about her then?'

  'I suppose she wasn't a keeping in touch sort of person...I was thinking about what you said the other day. And I remembered Jenny saying, Your Maitland should have been a pirate.’

  'Silly thing to say,' but she smiled when, after a moment, he murmured, 'funny I don't remember her. She sounds a bit of a character.’

  'I knew some interesting people. She wasn't your type.’

  'Oh, type…What was it I said the other day?'

  'You said, “All the fun's gone since the Garden Noamsky dug his own grave – and that's the deep grammar of that!” ' And spread out his arms pushing with the palms of his hands as if the hills round the campus were crowding in on him. Standing there by the edge of the frozen loch.

  She saw that he was smiling across at her. 'I think it sounded funnier when I said it.’ And in the voice of an Irish comedian, 'It's the way you tell them!'

  'It didn't sound funny to me. It sounded as if you felt you had made a mistake . And I couldn't understand why. You've made such a success of your life.’

  'Sam Wilson with my life – or Marshall or Turner – for them my life would be a success. It isn't good enough for me.’

  She was accustomed to the restless flow of his talk and to its touches of excess. He let the silence run on, however, and she thought about what he had said and found she disliked it. She really disliked it a great deal.

  'I don't think I've ever heard you being so…' she searched and could only find, 'humourless.’ As soon as she had used the word, she regretted it. If he had been angered, she would not have been able to defend using it.

  After a silence, he said, 'You shouldn't take things I say casually so seriously.’

  'You sounded serious,' she said, concentrating on the flow of shop fronts as they left Haymarket behind.

  'Perhaps I was irritated because they don't give out Nobel prizes for linguistics. All those molecular biologists are hogging them.’

  After all it was she who had been humourless. Her attention was diverted by a change in their route. Instead of going along Princes Street, he had swung right and was beating successive traffic lights on the amber speeding up Lothian Road. 'Didn't I say? We're picking up Monty Norman.’

  Just into a street of shabby brownstone tenements, he reversed into a space in a line of parked cars.

  'Come up with me to fetch him,' he said. 'There's no point in getting chilled sitting here.’

  As they walked along looking for the number, he mused, 'This would have been a fashionable area once, before the First World War perhaps. Now it's all sub-lets, students and multi-occupations. Give it a year or two and the students will be few and far between, the way things are going. There are development plans in the offing too, I believe. We should buy one, Lucy. Rent it out. The place will be sandblasted back into fashion and we'll clear thirty thousand.’

  Her husband did not impress her when he talked of ways of making money, not out of any moral objection but because as a girl she had met enough men who had made a great deal to know that Maitland lacked the gift. She did not think less of him for it. The men who possessed it had not been over-endowed with any others as far as she could see. The common factor had been how much making money had mattered to them. None of them would have wasted time on an irrelevancy like the Nobel Prize.

  Because the building hadn't been refurbished, the close had no entry phone, and that meant it smelt of cats and perhaps something worse. As a student she had visited friends in places like this. Then it had seemed like an adventure; now she wished she had stayed in the car.

  On the door there was a card pinned at each corner and listing five names in uneven type. The first thing she saw was Monty Norman's name printed at the foot of the list clumsily with a red pen, then that the last of the names typed above it was S. Lindgren . As she registered the name, Norman was opening the door and there was no time to say anything and they were going in and she saw how large the flat was. There were three doors on each side of the corridor before it turned out of sight. Just inside the entrance there was a table with a phone and a full ashtray lay on the book. Her thoughts moved hastily, like insects rowing above the dark stretched surface of a pond. Seeing the cigarette stubs, she placed their dry taint and felt how wretched it would be to live in a place where the air was spoiled by strangers.

  The second room on the right, into which Norman led them, had a bed still unmade, a wardrobe and a chair by the window. Someone had hung a calendar turned to a print of an Italian townscape. She noticed it was for the wrong month. The vivid off-shade colours made the room drabber by contrast.

  'I decided it would be a good idea if you came with us,' Maitland said.

  Monty Norman threw the coverlet in an untidy sprawl across the bed. 'Would that be all right?' To Lucy it was plain he was flustered and angry, but Maitland seemed to catch no hint of that.

  'Not into the meeting itself, naturally. You'll wait in Mrs Stewart's room while it's going on. You can bring a book,' he glanced around, 'or a paper, something to pass the time.’

  'Would I do any good being there?'

  'We'll get it settled today. By tomorrow you'll be working for the Trust. They may agree without seeing you. As a group they're quite biddable. The one who might raise a difficulty is Henney Low, one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools. He'll put up an argument to show how sharp he is, but he'll give in at last because he doesn't really care. On committees, it's the dullard with principles I don't want as an opponent.’

  'I wasn't expecting – I'd need to get changed.’ Although Norman smiled, Lucy knew how little he was enjoying any of this.

  'Fine. My wife will wait outside. But you'll have to make it quick.’

  She wandered round the corner and found the kitchen. A frying pan with a lining of white grease lay beside a pile of unwashed dishes; and, though she tried to tighten it, the tap wouldn't stop dripping into the sink. In the corridor, the flat was held in mid-morning stillness apart from the murmur of Maitland's voice. Obviously it was empty. She took hold of the handle of the nearest door. Fractionally slowly, she began to turn it; so intent upon making no noise that her tongue crept out from the corner of her lips as it had done when she was a child.

  A man lay on a bed with his hands behind his head staring at her. The room was full of paintings, standing against the walls and leaning on the furniture and propped up on the solitary chair like an easel; the odd thing was that none of them were hung, and she looked back and forward and from side to side at them and the man said nothing, watching her, and she drew the door shut just as quietly as before.

  Then her heart began to shake her with its beating and she fled on tiptoe, and would have hidden but couldn't go into the room for Norman was still dressing. She leaned against the wall, trembling, panting for breath, pressing the tips of her fingers hard into her temples, waiting for the man to come into the corridor while behind her through the crack of the door Maitland's voice flowed on. 'Henney Low would make a splendid chairman fo
r a prorabotka. That's a Russian word for a very Stalinist practice. They stood some poor devil up to have his faults exposed and criticised by a series of colleagues and quondam friends. None of them, of course, with any real choice if word had come down from on high, say from the Provincial Committee of the Party. It could happen to factory managers or office clerks. Or University professors

  I could imagine Henney chairing one of those, mauling some potential rival who'd made the mistake of having a thought of his own. Henney's a born apparatchik. '

  'I see.’

  'Prorabotka – comes from the verb rabotat, to work. But when you add the pro on in front it changes into something like to give someone a going over. Like the pro in propustit when it's used in the phrase "to put through the mincer" .’

  'I didn't know that,' she heard Norman's voice saying.

  There was a pause and then the sound of Maitland's laughter.

  In the car, Maitland asked, 'How do you find your room? Comfortable enough?' And went on without waiting for an answer, 'It isn't ideal, but it is a berth for the moment.’

  'I take my comforts where I find them,' Norman said from the passenger seat behind her.

  'It's a base,' Maitland said. 'Lucky I heard about it. How are you getting on with your neighbours? Like I said,' he explained to Lucy, 'all these places are in multiple occupation.’

  'It was a help knowing Miss Lindgren,' Norman said.

  'She works for the Trust.’ Lucy understood Maitland was explaining again for her benefit. 'That's how I heard there was a room coming vacant.’

  Lucy nodded but could not find anything to say. She watched the crowds hurrying in and out of the shops. 'You met her,' he persisted, 'you told me you met her when you went to the office on Monday.’

  'No,' Lucy said, 'I didn't tell you.’

  'Suddenly,' Maitland said, glancing back over his shoulder, 'my wife has decided to take an interest in the Trust. So that gives you two votes.’

  Not that her vote made any difference. Julian Chambers, who had spent an hour on the phone to Maitland the previous evening, took it upon himself to explain the need for a new appointment to co-ordinate and initiate fund raising by the Trust. He reminded the committee of the problems caused by inflation and turned his thoughts back to the nineteen fifties when income from their holdings in tenemental properties had declined almost to nothing. 'For a period, the rights of tenants were so well protected that the needs of owners were lost sight of. It was a time to sell, but…a lack of foresight…there were difficulties.’

  The half-dozen who had put in an appearance for this routine business meeting, barely enough to make them quorate, sank in their seats as the old man worked his way into the Sixties. Lucy sensed Maitland's satisfaction as the pencils doodled. He had amused her with mimicries of Julian prefacing discussions with an historical survey; any potential opposition tended to be numbed into acquiescence.

  Even Henney Low's doubts took their foreseen course.

  'Last year's muddle over the student fellowship did the Trust's image no good,' Maitland reminded him. 'It wouldn't have happened if May hadn't been off ill, of course,' Mrs Stewart raised her head from the minutes in acknowledgement, 'but it does suggest a need which it's time we met.’

  'Even so ... What quality of person are we likely to get for what we can afford to pay?'

  Not only Henney Low was upset when it transpired the discussion was to be supplied with a candidate for the post

  Only one – and that he was waiting outside. None of them, however, when it came to a decision was obdurate enough to refuse. The Trust was one among many interests. They were busy men. It was that time of the afternoon when everyone was hungry and looking forward to dinner.

  When Monty Norman came into the room for the second time, it was to be told the decision had been made.

  Everything was working out well for him. Without effort, it seemed, he had been provided with a job. Why was it then, Lucy wondered, that he was so full of anger against Maitland? She knew that was so, even if for some reason no one else saw it and even though she could not have explained how she knew.

  Chapter 6

  On the Friday morning, she was enormously, inexplicably weary. Even to lift the coffee cup to her lips was an effort. She sat at the table in the kitchen watching the heavy clouds sink down and shroud the mountain summits. The muscles of her sides ached and her legs were heavy. It was as if she had been worked unendurably hard, and there was no reason for it. On impulse it was true she had gone into Edinburgh the day before, and that made her third visit of the week. Once there, though, she had done nothing but wander around and come home again.

  Such a waste of time; she wasn't the kind of person who filled the empty days by running off to town, three times in a week, that was trivial. What was the matter with her? It was ridiculous to be so tired. She stretched her neck and sighed. It was the life she led. She was living the life of an old woman.

  Listlessly she contemplated visiting Janet. There was a time when that would have been part of her routine, but it had been weeks since they had spoken. You couldn't count an exchange in the shop or a greeting called from a car. Then there had been the affair of the Sinclairs' party a month ago, after which a week had passed before her reappearance on the village street wearing dark glasses which did not hide the bruise yellowing about her eye. Poor Janet!

  Lucy sighed, took a mouthful of coffee and made a face.

  Neglected it had gone cold. A real friend went in even when she was unwelcome. After all it was herself she had not wished to embarrass. She would visit Janet.

  Like themselves, Janet and Ewen were incomers, but that would not in itself have drawn them to the younger couple since the village was just near enough to act in part as a dormitory for the city.

  'We have the rich,' Maitland would explain, 'a surgeon, a naval gent, a handful of company directors (one of whom is teetering on the verge of going broke our local bank manager tells me – in strictest confidence, naturally), and they live behind walls or formidable hedges on the hill above the village. The poor cluster below it in council houses round the older of the two churches. There's something satisfying about having your class structure tidily analogous to the geography.’

  More recently on the fields to the east there had been a development of large bungalows on small feus for supermarket managers and young accountants, a vet's widow, people like that. Like the Ures, Janet and Ewen Hayes were fortunate enough to live in the real village, on the straggling street which was the only one with any history to it. In the tiny pub beside the old manse house, Maitland would enjoy his occasional pint with farm labourers, a retired shepherd who had given up a job as a teacher after the war, Gordon who had sold the family printing business in Glasgow after his father's death and was drinking his way through the proceeds, Peter who owned the garage, a real cross-section. When Hugh talked about modernising the place to attract passing trade, Maitland would tell him he did not know the value of what he already had.

  Glancing in through the gap in the curtained window she had a glimpse of the half-dozen regulars already crowding the taproom. All of them men, of course; it was that kind of pub. Perhaps that was what Maitland meant when he called it valuable. She smiled to herself and was surprised to find the doctor's wife smiling back as she hurried past.

  In the dry morning light the village was sharp-cornered, cold and clean. There was no wind and it looked as if the rain clouds might stay where they were, resting on the mountain summits across the strath. She went on the sunny side past the post office and the old tearoom now a Pakistani grocer's, and by the time she came to the terrace of cottages, three of which had been knocked together by Ewen Hayes, she was feeling better. The walk had done her good.

  As she entered, she called out, but came at once on Janet curled up on the couch in the lounge with her head bent over a book. The red of her hair was vivid against a blanched prospect of winter garden.

  'Enjoying a good book?'


  'Oh, Jesus!' Janet cried out in fright.

  'My dear!' Lucy said flustered. 'How stupid of me.’

  But Janet, uncurling her long legs, was getting up, recovered and smiling. 'It's me who should apologise. You got more of a fright than I did. It's lovely to see you.’

  'Country manners,' Lucy said ruefully. 'I did call out. But you were lost to the world. It must be good.’ Curious she took up the book. It was a paperback with a cover showing a busty beauty in a Regency dress, hair wind­blown across a background of ships and swung cutlasses. It was not what she had expected to see and she began to read at the place where it had been laid open: 'Though she struggled against his grip and pled piteously, he drew her towards him inexorably. Slowly she was pulled down upon him and despite all her twisting the hard blade of his passion urged through the gossamer stuff of her gown against her straining thighs.’ She felt her cheeks flush. Her eyes swept down the page, 'as he surrounded the soft peak of her breast with the hungry lapping of his tongue, a shudder passed through her and her thighs fell open. The throbbing heat of him thrust into her. A fierce reply rose to meet his driving need. The licking flames of desire –'

  'Ohh!' she exclaimed, an unintentionally fastidious sound, and dropped the book on the couch. 'I don't think I could cope with that so early in the day.’

  'I believe they're known in the trade as bodice-rippers,' Janet said. 'Soft porn for stupid women.’

  'But you're not a stupid woman.’

  'No…I'm having another drink. Do you want to join me? Or is it too early for that as well?'

  There was a glass on the coffee table beside the couch.

  She wondered how often it had been emptied already.

  'Enough! – And lots of lemonade.’ She settled into the chair opposite Janet on the couch. 'Cheers! I didn't feel like housework this morning.’ Something ironical in the younger woman's gaze made her uncomfortable. 'It's been ages. Wherever does the time go?'

  'Do you know what age I am?' Janet took a long swig from the glass as she waited for an answer.