The Stranger Came Read online

  She saw Maitland first and then with an unpleasant little shock the girl and that he was talking to her. The third figure in the group registered only vaguely; a man, and one smaller in stature than either of his companions.

  Seeing her, Maitland smiled and waved. 'Always faithful,' he said. 'My wife Lucy,' he said to the girl; and then to her, 'Miss Lindgren tells me you've already met.’

  'Miss Lindgren? But how – Didn't you say –'

  'Oh, yes.’ The girl smiling covered her mouth with her hand for a moment. 'You guessed right when you thought I might be a student. Actually in one of the Professor's classes. I've always been lucky.’

  'But your brother?' The last stragglers were lingering up from the platform. In a moment, their little group would be left behind alone. 'Oh, of course,' and she smiled at the man full of the warmth of relief, 'how obtuse of me. This gentleman must be –'

  All three of them joined in the laugh against her, the man, the girl Miss Lindgren, even Maitland.

  'Nobody's brother,' the man said. 'Sorry.’

  At that she saw him properly for the first time; thick dark hair and ugly-attractive face, rather dark complexion; and it seemed for a moment that he might have been introduced as a brother not of the girl but of Maitland. The resemblance was there, and then it blurred, for the stranger at best was too ordinary – merely a life-size version of Maitland, she thought, and smiled. Yet his voice caught her attention; a very deep voice, carefully resonant, and with the faintest shading on the vowels that seemed to echo back to a childhood somewhere in the English countryside. Devon came into her mind, a place with which she was unfamiliar.

  'This is Michael Norman. We became acquainted last night, neither of us feeling like sleeping.’ Maitland swept out his arm as if embracing the stranger. 'We've half decided I'm going to alter his life.’

  'Monty,' the stranger said. 'My friends call me Monty.’

  He struck her then as being common. It was like Maitland to gather up some stranger out of a humdrum journey on a train. I'd have snoozed all night – or pretended. I would have hated sharing with someone I'd never met before.

  Instead she had slept in her own bed, dozing and starting awake in case she overslept. Now suddenly, looking at them smiling, she was the one who was tired as if at the end of a journey.

  'Your brother,' she said to the girl, 'wasn't he on the train? Did he miss his connection? From Bristol, was it you said?'

  Infuriatingly, the girl shook back her hair, went again through the same pantomime. 'Oh, not on this train,' she said. 'Not on this one.’ And she smiled brilliantly. 'Not coming from Bristol.’

  Miss Lindgren seemed to be one of those girls who suffer a personality change in the presence of men. She longed to tell her, they won't think any more of you for simpering like an idiot. Nor much less of her, she added honestly – not when you're as pretty as this one is.

  'We can't offer you a lift then,' Maitland was saying to the girl, so firmly that it seemed he too had had enough of her, 'not if you're waiting for your brother.’ That settled, he turned to the man – what had he called him? Norman. Michael Norman. Monty – 'to his friends.’

  'But you'll come with us?'

  'I could walk – The station here's right in the centre of the city, isn't it? Maybe you could recommend a place?'

  'Not to a hotel,' Maitland said impatiently. 'Come back and have breakfast with us. We've plenty to talk about still.’

  Glancing back on some impulse, she saw Miss Lindgren was left behind and disconsolate. The impression was so clearly a trick of the imagination that she dismissed it at once. It distracted her, however, so that it was only at the car that she took it in properly that the man Norman did propose to intrude himself between them, and not just on the journey back, to which she had so much looked forward, but into their home. It was too bad.

  'Darling, are you being fair to Mr Norman?' she wondered. It was so unreasonable that another possibility occurred to her. 'Unless, of course, you were going on anyway? To Balinter?'

  'Where?' Monty Norman asked, and it was obvious that he did not know the village where they lived nor even the town of Balinter, or how far away they might be; and that, horribly, he did not care. He was ready on the strength of a casual meeting on a train to come with them. Yet he must, surely, have travelled for some purpose. No one travelled without a purpose.

  That was inexplicable to her.

  Chapter 2

  Her mind refused to accept the reality of the white cloth thrown over the corner of the glass, and as drowsily she questioned its presence she began to recognise the familiar corner of their bedroom and the reflection white in the tilted mirror of the window curtain with the sunlight behind it.

  Going to meet Maitland ... so excited ... surely it said something about the youthfulness of her heart. What a fool you are! Thought some Lucy Inside, and she came fully awake.

  Abruptly she rolled over. Maitland's bed was empty.

  What time was it? They had come home and the afternoon had passed and they had eaten that good dinner – a long leisurely meal with wine – just as she had planned it. But not for three.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Maitland had said when at last they were alone, ‘I have to go into the Department, but I'll take him off when I get back.’ He had turned away from her and gone to sleep.

  Perhaps, she thought, Maitland has come back and collected him and gone off again. He might not have wanted to waken her. Perhaps she had slept the morning away. Anyway, even if Maitland's inexplicable guest was still here, why should she be hospitable? Wasn't he the reason she had slept so badly last night? Closing her eyes, she felt the pressure in her bladder, conspiratorial, adding to the luxury of warmth and lying very still. A noise raised her head from the pillow. He might be wandering the house, prying. When she did get up, she had waited too long and had to crouch against the discomfort as she hurried to the door.

  She went softly past the bedroom on the upper landing then remembered he had been put for the night into the little room at the back. Its door was closed. With a groan she scuttled into the bathroom. As if he in his turn might be listening, the gush of her water embarrassed her, though there was no controlling the pleasure of its issuing.

  Certainly, the house felt empty. After looking in the front room, she peeped into Maitland's study and then the back sitting-room. When there was no one in the big kitchen-dining room at the rear of the house, she relaxed, sure she had the place to herself.

  As she drifted about the rooms, she could have placed every item of furniture, every ornament, and told where each one had been bought or by whom gifted. This little chair by the phone, recovered in velvet to be respectable, had come from their first house and that chiffonier from an auction in Annan (the clearing out of some country mansion, furniture piled in the stalls of the cattle market) and the desk in Maitland's study they'd bought specially for coming here eleven years ago. She stared blindly at the painting that hung behind the desk, not seeing it but the day on which it had been bought. Sun in the park and the vivid colours like exotic flowers attracting them so that they ran hand in hand across the lawns to where railings were made over into a summer gallery of student art and the painters, the young painters – but the world was young then – and Maitland smiling at the girl and crying, ‘Yes! Though we can't afford it, five pounds, five whole pounds!’ Laughing, ‘But all the same we're going to have it! We're not going to let this one go – it's beautiful! It's an investment – we're investing in you, we're investing in your talent! This is our investment of faith in you.’ And she had never forgotten the wonderful look which the girl had given him when he said that to her – the look, yes, the look had been beautiful – as for the painting, privately she thought it a drab thing, a little square of brown colours, four potatoes on a cloth – but at some lost level of her mind she had never ceased to be warmed by the event of the girl's response – as if Maitland, not really all that much older and with no power or place in the world, had been
able to give a promise, a key to the future, golden like the sun; from somewhere in himself he had given the girl that as with authority. The painting had been the first thing Maitland and she had bought together; the following year they married.

  But, of course, it hung on a wall always in the same place any painting ceased to be seen. Not for years had she consciously examined it or thought of the girl and her joy in being young, in the miracle of her talent, all the uncertain future ahead of her and the wonder of a stranger's reassurance. He could make that kind of promise and be believed. He was Maitland even then…

  She could not recall the girl's name. When she came close to the canvas, she could make out the word Beth, but that did not jog her memory, and the name which followed was no more than a squiggle of the brush. But three years later, or it might have been four, after their marriage anyway, Maitland had unexpectedly made up his mind to discover what had become of the artist. ‘She's going to be a success,’ he had said, ‘just like I told her – this little canvas could be the cornerstone of our fortune.’ ‘Married?’ he had been angry when she suggested that. ‘What are you talking about? No, she had dedication that girl, she'll be in an attic somewhere painting, and the word will just be beginning to get out.’

  He had asked questions in galleries, looked through catalogues and journals, at first almost casually. As he found no one to admit having heard of the girl, however, his will took on a sharper edge until she would have hesitated to raise again the possibility that the girl might be married and have lost interest in being an artist. Yet it did not seem to her impossible; the impulse to create touched many people but for most of them – and not least for women when marriage came – it was no more than a part of being young. She imagined the girl by a fire, holding a baby; why would she not be content?

  And at the thought that Maitland, so exuberantly more gifted than anyone else in their circle, might be wrong, just for this once, there was the faintest shameful touch of satisfaction; but even that had changed to an unfamiliar concern as he persisted in his search, writing to friends from his own student days and following up every connection with the world of art. About then, if she had been driven to put into words the vague burden of her anxiety, it would have been an apprehension that Maitland had identified the promise he had made not simply with the girl's future but with his own, perhaps he too had never forgotten the look on the girl's face as if it were a mirror in which he had seen the image of the man he was going to be. Whatever was the truth, she never had to bring that perception to the surface, for finally it had been a friend of the girl who had written to him. Beth is dead, the letter said; she died that summer of the exhibition in the park. Maitland had never spoken of the painting again or paid it any attention. If she had not asked him, he would not even have told her about the letter. If it hadn't been for me, she thought, the painting would be lost now or lying in an attic. It was after all just the same picture whether the girl was dead or alive; just the same picture as the one he had fallen in love with that day in the park. It wasn't the picture's fault that the girl had died.

  Going from one room to another, she could name the price of everything, the shop, the auction, by whose gift – and wasn't that natural? Home was the place where what you saw told a story. If all these stories were added together, was that to be the sum of her life? Would there be nothing left over? The trouble with you is that you're too contented, she told herself. It's not good for anyone to be too much ... too much ... Her hold of the fancy slackened and it drifted away. Where normally everything pleased her, nothing did. All her familiar possessions . . .

  Like a jail, she thought, standing by the front door with her hands hanging by her sides, like a prison. A prison without any guards or bars. I guard myself. I turn the key.

  And with that she came to her senses in fright. I've wakened in a strange mood, she decided, and felt better as if she had diagnosed and prescribed the cure all at once. She was not properly awake. She needed breakfast; with the thought, she was ravenous. With somewhere to go, she hurried. So energetically did she thrust open the kitchen door that it sprang back and struck her on the wrist. Fluffing up eggs yellow in a pan, she felt the burn and nip of the knock and wiped tears from her eyes. Seated at the divider between kitchen and dining area, she ate so greedily that pieces of the scrambled egg sprayed in crumbs from her lips. She was bent forward, dabbing them up so that nothing would escape her hunger, when she glanced to the side and saw a figure on the other side of the glass door.

  From the garden, with his face close against the glass, Monty Norman was watching her. As she stumbled to her feet, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  'You have a lovely home,' he said, the deep voice so calm, so indifferent to her fright, that she could have imagined for a moment he was making fun of her. 'That view,' he went on, 'all the way across to the mountains. I was standing at the bottom of your garden and they looked close enough to touch. There didn't seem to be anything between me and the snow on top of them. I felt good. As if I'd got the jump on the day being up so early.’ Her glance turned helplessly to the blue-faced clock above the dresser. It read half-past eleven. 'Did you see Maitland – my husband – this morning?'

  Uninvited, he sat at the table, though she remained standing. 'He'd gone when I got up. I thought maybe you might have gone with him.’

  Did he imagine they would have left him alone in the house?

  'There's a meeting of his department this morning. It won't be long until he's home.’

  'Not long?' he wondered. 'Mid-afternoon – wasn't that what he said? Last night, wasn't that what he said?'

  'I left you talking together, Mr Norman . I went to bed early.’

  'Monty,' he said. 'You didn't manage it last night, but I thought we'd got beyond Mr Norman. I thought we'd settled for not calling me anything.’

  It seemed he had charm; and perhaps it was only her impression that he was conscious of it and calculated its use which prevented her from responding. Still, it would have been easy to smile. To avoid what she felt as a difficulty she busied herself gathering up the plate and knife she had been using.

  'Have you eaten yet? Did you get breakfast?'

  'I raided the fridge. Not knowing whether you were here or not, I helped myself. I'm a good cook.’

  'I'm sure you are.’

  'You sound as if you don't approve.’

  'Sorry?' She ran the plate under the tap and set it upright in the drying rack.

  'You don't like me saying I'm good. You think that's pushy.’

  And this time the smile was there despite herself, for the memory that came was pleasant to her. By a kind of reaction, she frowned. 'My grandmother,' she said, 'always told us that empty pots rattled loudest.’

  She was not a woman to whom rudeness came easily and she felt her heart beat more rapidy.

  'Don't they always think they know best, the old women? My mother was just the same. Maybe a bit more,' he smiled and held up his clenched fist, 'emphatic than I expect your gran was.’

  He could go into the front room to read; if he had no interest in books, he could go for a newspaper or simply for a walk. He had talked about the mountains; let him walk up the Brae Road and he'd see across three counties and as many mountains as the horizon would hold. How else would they pass the endless time until Maitland came home?

  But as she tried to put one of these questions into words, he asked, 'Could I change my mind?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'And have some coffee. It would be no trouble to make it myself.’

  'Oh, no!' But that was excessive, and more mildly she finished, 'You've made your own breakfast already. That's bad enough.’

  The water ran through the grounds and flowed down the rod of the Cona. 'Smells good,' he said appreciatively. 'You're going to have some with me?'

  There seemed no reason to refuse; and pouring the cups, adding milk, fetching sugar for him, she was drawn into a pattern of domestic routine. She settled op
posite him. It might have been any one of those leisurely breakfasts that went with the mornings when Maitland was free.

  'If you'd said to me when I got on the train I'd be sitting here – in a place like this – with someone like you – I'd have laughed in your face.’ He sighed comfortably. 'Shows you can't read the future, no use trying.’

  'You met my husband just by chance then?' His look seemed to her to parody surprise. She cried, 'I know you said you got talking on the train. Only I wondered if – I thought perhaps you might have met before.’

  'No, I'm just a stray. This isn't the first time Maitland's brought one of them home, I'm sure.’ He took up the pot, offering her more, and on her refusal poured his own. 'He's a remarkable man. And I don't say that just because he's offered me a job.’

  Was there something at the University, something in the office? He didn't seem the academic type, nor even educated, not like Lucy’s idea of a properly educated man – and if that was snobbery it was based on signals from him she could sense but not analyse. Signals though that Maitland for all his cleverness might not pick up, perhaps because he spent so much of his life with students. Could that be it? Could Norman be a student, some kind of mature student? No one had said what he did. It would explain a good deal. Perhaps Maitland had offered him a little work; helping with the research on his book, reading through material in a library, but that wouldn't pay much. 'Late last night, after you'd gone to bed,' he said as if answering a question. 'He wants me to work for the Trust.’ She stared at him in disbelief. 'I understood the Professor spent a lot of his time on it…' For a moment, his certainty wavered.

  'Are you talking about the Gregory and Rintoul?'