The Stranger Came

by Frederic Lindsay

  'I never pretended to you that I wanted to change my life.’ In his bulky expensive coat, he rested on the edge of the desk like a rock, heavy and solid with darkness. 'I didn't think I had to put it into words. If I should have done, then I'm sorry.’

  For a rock, it was a handsome apology. Rock sins necessarily being sins of omission.

  'Are you being cruel to be kind, Maitland?' she whispered, hardly knowing what she was saying. 'Is that what you think you have to do? My father talks about being cruel to be kind.’

  'Neither the one nor the other,' he said, who had been so kind in the wordless sliding promises of his flesh in hers. 'Just realistic. You can't change one kind of relationship into another, Sophie, just by wishing. You weren't content with what we had – you wanted to change things. Well, that's what you've done. You've made it impossible for us.’

  'Your wonderful marriage,' she said. Her lips were numb as if after a beating. 'It's Christmas Eve. You should be at home hanging up stockings for the children. Only there aren't any. She hasn't given you any, has she?'

  'This isn't doing either of us a bit of good.’ He turned at the door, one hand resting on the handle, no more than pausing in the act of leaving. 'One thing. If you did tell my wife we'd been to bed together – if you couldn't stop yourself doing that – it would distress her and infuriate me. But it wouldn't alter anything. Be a sensible girl.’

  She sat at his desk and touched the things gently that lay on its surface. Only now did it occur to her that she should have asked Maitland if his wife suffered from migraine. Whatever she picked up, she was careful to set down in the same place. Nothing was disarranged. If Lucy Ure was ill, couldn't he see that proved she was telling the truth? Except that someone else might have told her about his wife being ill. Wasn't that what he would think? There was an executive toy perhaps given to him by some colleague as a joke, the dolphin, drawn back and released, rocked back and forward through a hoop. No matter how far back you took it or how often you tried, it would never rock free.

  The door was thrown open. A man stood there with one hand up as if ready for self-defence.

  'God, it's you,' he said. 'I didn't know who it was when I saw the light.’

  She recognised the security guard who had told her Maitland would come.

  'Professor Ure phoned from home that he'd forgotten to lock his door,' the man said. 'All these doors have to be kept locked.’

  'It's all right.’ She got up from behind the desk. 'I haven't touched anything.’

  Unexpectedly, at that he grinned. He had a flat face, brick red from the open air, and he grinned as if she had said something dirty.

  Sam Wilson had warned her, watching the lights of Maitland's car claw the dark sky.

  'Don't try not to take things too seriously, Miss Lindgren. You're not the first, you know. You have your whole life in front of you. That's precious. Don't let it be spoiled.’ Stopped then, staggered by his own daring, to blink and finish weakly. 'We've all been young and had our problems.’

  He had stared so solemnly, trying to hold her gaze – her eyes hungry to be done with him – willing her to understand without the risk of putting more into words. What he said meant nothing to her then, and she was glad when he chose to go, hurrying away along the grey corridors in the wrong direction for meeting Maitland.

  BOOK FOUR

  Chapter 13

  The Great Sovek

  When the Great Sovek threw back his head and laughed, Lucy was standing too close to him so that she saw his tongue and the inside of his mouth very red against the black frame of his beard. The impression stayed with her unpleasantly so that when later from the audience she watched him come on to the stage, against a background of black drapes and red curtains looped back at the sides, the red of the proscenium arch flecked with golden paint, it was as if he stood in an open mouth. Like a golden tooth, he glittered out at her from the open mouth of the stage.

  But that was later. Now, caught in the spiced outflow of his breath, she tried to step aside, but he held her still by the hand.

  'Nervous? No, I like to have company. I leave nerves to the fat comedian, whom you're having the good taste to give a miss.’

  Truth was, she would have liked to hear the comedian, and there would be singers, perhaps a juggler. People like that. It was Maitland who, having no patience for such things, had initiated this visit backstage.

  'Tell us though when you would like us to leave,' Maitland said. 'I imagine you must want time to yourself before you go on.’

  'I have no nerves,' the Great Sovek reaffirmed, letting go of her hand and laughing widely as if to share with them his delight in himself.

  The greenroom was crowded with the privileged who had come behind the scenes and along the dusty little corridor to where the hypnotist was passing the time until the second half, his half, of the show should begin. Behind her, Lucy heard the soft rising note of the undulant young man who had shown them the way. 'Oh, reading it's all very well, but it isn't the play. I mean it was extraordinary. Everyone who was there speaks of it in such a special manner. We're like a club – we say to one another, Yes, I saw him that night and it was magical, such a performance.’

  She wondered if he could be speaking of the hypnotist, but then a woman's voice said something about Shakespeare and she realised that if he was stage struck it was not for the kind of performance they might expect from the Great Sovek. The woman's voice was soft with a different lilt to it so that it was easy to lose some of the words. When she spoke again, Lucy glanced behind and saw that it was one of the two women who had come from the hospital as part of the patients' escort, a pale heavy-featured girl with dark hair tightly pulled back and large unsuitable glasses. Meeting her glance, the girl smiled.

  'Shouldn't you be with your patients?' Lucy asked.

  Instead of answering, the girl made a face, pulling her lips together and raising heavy brows above the glasses' frame. It might have meant anything. Yes. No. Mind your own business, I'm having fun. Anything. But when, giving up, Lucy turned from the girl, she faced into a silence. People were looking at her. Sophie Lindgren was looking at her.

  'If I were liable to nerves,' the Great Sovek said, frowning around to lay claim to all of their attention, 'there wouldn't be any performance. I have to be confident – how else would I impose my will on others?'

  'Is that what you do?' Maitland wondered. 'It sounds ugly. Wouldn't you say it sounds ugly?'

  Appealed to, Monty Norman shrugged. 'It's a bit of fun, isn't it?'

  'Entertainment, you mean?'

  'I put on a show,' the Great Sovek said. Some of his vowels he spoke through his nose so that Lucy wondered if he might be American – or Canadian? 'People have a good time. They go out smiling.’

  'Couldn't the fat comedian say as much?' Maitland asked.

  When he took someone up in that way, it was because his interest was caught. He paid them the compliment of every scrap of his attention. She had been disturbed to hear someone – Sam Wilson? Yes, at some gathering of the faculty – a voice behind her saying, 'Maitland being aggressive again.’ The tone warm, affectionate, anticipatory, but to her it still seemed like a criticism. And one which wasn't true. They didn't understand the eagerness of his mind. In all the years, he hadn't changed in that; he hadn't changed. And she should have told him Sophie Lindgren's story, all of it, the invention of a sick girl. The sensible thing would have been to tell him (I've had the strangest experience ... And then she said ... Something will have to be done about her); but she had not been able to bring herself to do it. The whole thing was too shameful. Yet she should have told him. The girl was dangerous.

  'You haven't heard his jokes!' the Great Sovek cried, and there was a flurry of laughter which startled her. Monty Norman was laughing loudly with his mouth open like a man calling for help. May Stewart, on the other hand, and the man Terence, the one who had just written his thesis funded by the Trust, made a narrow grin of their mouths as if afraid t
oo much might escape; both of them with their eyes fixed on Maitland as if for permission. I hope at least he's paid for his own ticket, she thought; it would be disgraceful if the Trust has paid for his ticket. And thinking of nothing else, concentrated on thinking of nothing else, she looked at Sophie Lindgren who stared back as unsmiling as herself.

  'To come back to the idea of will-power, though. Is there much need after all for that commodity, I wonder?' Dull Mr Terence with his mouth making scholarly distinctions while his eyes checked with Maitland to see if this was an acceptable line to pursue. He knows which side his bread is buttered on, Lucy thought.

  'You think not?'

  'It seems a possibility that the ones who "go under" – would that be the right way to put it? – lack the power of resistance, don't have much will of their own to be overpowered.’

  'Easy meat, you mean?' The Great Sovek bared square white teeth as credentials for his power to chew.

  'I couldn't see myself going under. I'm not the type.’

  'I don't take on challenges.’ At the admission, Mr Terence nodded as if to say, Just as well in this case. 'I used to, but it isn't wise. When I was younger, I did. One time the guy feeling himself go started lashing out. With his fists. I hadn't realised he was so afraid.’

  'And did you succeed?'

  'Oh, yes. But I got a black eye for my trouble.’

  Again there was a response startling Lucy by its strangeness, making her feel all of them were uncomfortable with this talk of submission, of going under, a metaphor for drowning. Why else would they produce these sounds not like real laughter, like mimicry of laughter? She bent her head under a flurry of barks and whinnying’s, soft expulsions and braying like the clatter of metallic parts.

  'What do you make these people do?' Lucy heard herself ask.

  Perhaps she had spoken too loudly or too abruptly; or perhaps only that it was unexpected, coming without any preparation. It made a silence.

  'I shan't spoil it.’ The Great Sovek shot a cuff to consult a wafer of gold strapped to the inside of his wrist. 'Not long to go, then you'll see for yourself.’

  'What? I can't imagine what. '

  He stared at her as if suddenly offended. 'You needn't worry. No one is made a fool of in my show. People have the wrong idea. I work in hospitals. Doctors ask my advice.’

  'You spoke of making others submit to your will,' Maitland said.

  'There's a power involved. That's one way of describing it.’

  'Isn't power something that lends itself to being abused?'

  'It doesn't work like that. Listen. If I told a young girl on the stage “take off your clothes!” What do you think would happen?' He looked from one man to the other around the circle, gauging each reaction in turn. Laughed. 'She'd wake up!'

  'So it's all a sham.’

  'I don't know that word.’

  'A kind of game. They are pretending.’

  'It's not like that. How would you go about pretending not to feel pain while a knife was cutting you open?' He drew a line with his finger across his stomach and then added in case of misunderstanding, 'Like I said, hospitals. At home in Toronto there's a doctor I work with.’

  'Ah, then, if it's a game,' Maitland said with the graceful air of a man conceding a point, 'it's a serious one.’

  No one realised about the man in the corner until he reacted to the bersagliere story.

  The Great Sovek told it. 'I heard it when I was in Italy. They say a lawyer in Palermo was defending a guy against a charge of rape. He went up to one of the bersagliere, the soldiers on guard in the court, you know those guys with the long feather in their hats? – I don't know, maybe this was a while ago – anyway, the guy is wearing a sword. So the lawyer gets him to take it out, and the lawyer takes the scabbard. “Put your sword back in the scabbard”, the lawyer says. And the guy tries, but he can't manage it. “Slip your sword in! Slide your sword into its place!” the lawyer encourages him. By this time the soldier is sweating, he's embarrassed, everybody is laughing. He's trying, but he can't manage it. Why?' The Great Sovek mimed with his hand, 'Because the lawyer is doing this – just moving the end of the scabbard a little back a little forward.’ He grinned round at all of them. 'The guy was acquitted. Not guilty!'

  Lucy did not see the point of the story or what connection it had with anything said before. Some people were smiling, however; and then the man in the corner, a very ordinary man with a fat pale face, the jacket of his suit too tight for him, not anyone you would notice, cried out, 'He should have put the sword to his throat!' He came forward to where the Great Sovek was lolling back in his seat, and gestured to him, 'You do it – the scabbard, yes, see, like that,' and the hypnotist held up his hand as instructed. 'I'm trying to put the sword in – and you're – that's right, moving it,' and he held out his empty fist at arm's length trying to match the wavering of the hypnotist's hand. 'But now!' and with the word, he moved his arm up until it pointed not at the hypnotist's throat but at his face and Lucy saw the sword there, the light running along its length, so that eased forward only a fraction it would plunge into the soft eye. 'Not a muscle, right? Don't risk it. Keep still.’ And slowly he lowered his fist and edged it forward straight-armed until the edge of it knocked at last with a small sucking sound against the palm of the Great Sovek's outstretched hand.

  'In up to the hilt,' he said. 'Guilty.’

  Lucy who had visited the hospital a long time ago when her father was alive and walked with him through the wards – 'Don't be afraid, child,' he whispered, the smell and warmth of his cheek beside her own – guessed at once; but most of the people probably didn't realise what was wrong until the pale girl with the glasses – covering half her face, like goggles, making her look stupid, anything to be in fashion – took him by the arm and led him from the room.

  Even then some of them didn't understand, and it was against the bright fluttering of explanations, relief, someone was laughing, 'Who was hypnotised that time?' at the Great Sovek who scowled, that she said to Maitland, 'He should have been kept with the others. He should never have been here. Or the girl either.’

  He looked at her for a speculative moment, and then turned away.

  She touched him on the arm. 'You should speak to the doctor.’

  'She is the doctor,' he said, and began to speak to someone else.

  Instead of going back to their seats, they went to the bar to spend the interval and she was more or less part of a group that seemed to be talking about Christmas and the undulant young man said, 'But who carried the flesh and wine – not to mention the bloody pine logs? Oh, yes, he was good, Wenceslas's page might have admitted, but only good as kings go' and the laughter spiralled up and drifted back with the thin smoke – people didn't smoke so much, not any more, not in public, she'd noticed that – and she held her headache at a distance like something ugly that might be a mistake and not there at all if only you could avoid looking full at it, keeping it in the corner of your eye. 'Are you all right?' Monty Norman asked, and she went right away across the room without answering him which must have seemed rude. When she dared to look back, he was talking with a sharp-faced older woman, who stared up at him putting strays of hair back from her forehead. She wasn't sure and then she was – It's Viv Law, for she had met the journalist, though just once or twice and not recently, and anyway, she was exactly as Sophie Lindgren had described her.

  That liar.

  All the time with one part of her she had wanted to confront the girl. Now she had to fight the urge to pull her away from where she stood in the circle around Maitland and drag her over beside Viv Law and Monty Norman. Look! she would say to her, no trembling hands, no hate, just two people talking together, normal people, not sick things out of a nightmare.

  What a scene that would be! How would she explain it to Maitland? Poor darling, he would wonder what was going on. He would have no idea. She saw Mr Terence nodding at her as if to share the joke and realised she had joined in the laughter.r />
  Maitland held their tickets in his left hand, glancing at them and then at the white letter painted on the end of each row; yet behind him Lucy had no difficulty in seeing where they must be going. The heavy-featured girl, the one Maitland had said was the doctor, from an aisle seat halfway down on the right was twisted round watching them.

  We're going to have to squeeze in past her, Lucy thought, and then by the patients – they were all there, probably they had remained seated all through the interval, that would have been best (unless they had wanted to go to the toilet? That would be why there would be two nurses, the male one she had mistaken for the doctor) – it was unpleasant to think of having to touch them, feel the pressure of their knees, bodies, would they realise they should stand up to let people pass? Worse almost if they did stand up. Then Maitland was stopping, leaning down to exchange words with the doctor, and there were two empty seats in the row just behind, and she was ashamed of what she had been thinking and busy with that she had sat down before realising the woman in the next seat was Sophie Lindgren.

  Before she could react, Maitland had taken his place beside her, still talking to the doctor woman . A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder. From the row behind, Monty Norman's face was pushed towards hers.

  'It's all right now?' he asked. 'The professor's wife suffers from headaches,' he explained to Sophie Lindgren .

  Nothing could have been more reasonably sympathetic than his tone, but Sophie Lindgren shrank from him. The movement was so exaggerated that Lucy knew the girl had to be acting.

  Monty Norman eased back until he was framed between May Stewart and cautious Mr Terence seated on either side of him, just where he should be, in the context of the Trust for which he worked, nothing could be more normal.

  'It's kind of you to ask.’ She felt a sudden warmth towards the little vulgar good-hearted man. 'You're quite right, I wasn't feeling well. But I feel better now.’