The Silent Stranger Read online

  “On second thoughts, don’t tell me,” I said, changing my mind. “I’d rather have a blank canvas.”

  He turned then, to face me. “It’s been empty all the time I’ve been in these parts.”

  We left the tower to last and I couldn’t believe at first what I saw in the lower of the two rooms. For one heady moment, nothing that had preceded my arrival at the château mattered. Nothing mattered except the framed panels depicting episodes from the Cupid and Psyche story. They were sun-lightened but otherwise perfect. Quickly I closed the curtains that Greg had just drawn back. “These are grisaille panels,” I told him breathlessly, my heart thudding with excitement, “circa 1816.”

  “Grisaille what?”

  “Wallpaper. Very rare examples. Dufour.”

  I announced then that I would sleep in the upper room. I gave Greg the impression that I’d chosen the tower because of the grisaille panels. It wasn’t the entire truth. I’d always wanted to sleep in an eyrie but more than that, the tower had an old-fashioned grace that had been erased from the rest of the house. I liked that. I liked that it felt untouched by whoever had lived at the château previously because I knew, even then, that I wouldn’t have liked them.

  We went back down to the kitchen for another coffee. It was almost lunchtime and Greg cut his baguette in half to share with me.

  “What is it with you and wallpaper?”

  “It’s my job. I’m a conservator of wallpaper.”

  “A conservator?”

  “A bit like a painting restorer.”

  “I see, the blank canvas etc.”

  “Greg, please, I don’t want to talk about me.”

  He didn’t respond. He put both his elbows on the table and munched through his baguette. I ate mine. When he’d finished he crossed over to the sink. He ran water over the mug and plate. He placed both on the draining board.

  “Okay then,” he said. “Where do you think we should start?”

  I smiled. “What do you think?”

  “I’d better have a look at the roof — see what needs to be done.”

  While Greg investigated the roof, I went back up to the dining hall. I was looking for a vase but when I opened the doors to the enormous walnut sideboard, the two shelves were jam-packed with what I could only describe as jumble — old board games, frayed lampshades, boxes of surgical gloves, dirty tablecloths, fishing gear — all shoved on top of what turned out to be a Sèvres dinner service for a twenty-four place setting. Eventually, right at the back, I found what I was looking for. It was heavy fluted crystal, about two feet tall and just right for my purpose. I’d noticed a mass of canna lilies by the terrace and I filled the vase with them, placing the vase on the wooden chest in the hall. The flowers were tantamount to a flag for me. A woman had taken possession of the house.

  I spent the rest of that first day clearing out the personal effects of the previous inhabitants. If I was going to live at the château, I didn’t want to feel that I was trespassing on someone else’s territory. Besides it was territory which wasn’t to my taste, particularly on the first floor. I found eleven balaclava masks, six dildos, and nine pairs of furry, pink handcuffs. I didn’t tell Greg about them. I was too embarrassed. I just shoved the sex toys into the sacks I was filling with clothing, hoping that whichever charity received them would welcome the surprise. The clothes were of the finest quality but they smelt — not unpleasant, but with an oily scent which had lingered over the years. I kept aside a couple of linen jackets and shirts handmade in Savile Row, thinking that Greg might like them. He didn't.

  I junked everything in the bathroom cabinets. I chucked every magazine I could find. I found rows and rows of pornographic videos in a cupboard in the salon with hideously graphic images of women on their covers. “It’s just odd. There isn’t a TV anywhere,” I said, showing Greg the black bag when he came down from the roof.

  He shrugged. “There’s nowt so queer as folk,” he said helpfully, before launching into a yodel which turned the word folk into another ruder word as the echo bounced around the hall. His humour was so childish sometimes.

  Until Eveline arrived, I had nothing and no one to think about except the house. Deliberately so. I locked up my mind, focussing on the house. I locked myself up. I rarely went out. I was consumed by the château.

  Hard physical work was enough for the day, but not enough for the nights. There was nothing then to distract me from endlessly replaying in my head that last evening in London: what Philip had said to me, and what I’d said to Philip before I lost all self-control. In the small hours of the morning, I needed a switch to switch myself off. My eyes would strain against the darkness which would throw up shadows — one becoming me and another, Philip. We would be sitting in the garden talking, like the last evening, before I left. Then the shadows would become my parents, pressed up against a wall, dissolving into each other in a passionate clinch.

  Chapter 3

  The process of writing — the act of inputting word after word on the screen in front of me — I find excoriating. I spend a lot of time gazing at the terrace of narrow houses opposite, typical of so many streets on the outskirts of London. Already it is October. Leaves are falling off spindly trees. Honesty requires self-knowledge and I have always been too frightened by what I might find, if I delved deep. Writing this is like leaves falling inexorably off a tree: leaf by leaf, denuding the branches and leaving me so exposed and so blinded by tears that I can hardly see what I have to write next — but write I will. I owe it to Tom.

  *

  “Did you see the snake darling?” I remember my mother insisting on an answer, as I howled and my father comforted me.

  “A silver one,” I cried. Even after all these years, the memory of it slithering into the long grass makes me shudder. My mother glanced over to my father with eyes full of meaning.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Marks, like zigzags.”

  My mother ran back to the house. I lay slumped against my father, holding my leg. She returned with a knife. It glinted between her fingers. Tom, having been momentarily silenced by the gravity of our parents’ reaction, jiggled about pulling funny faces. Not even he could make me laugh.

  Whilst my father cradled me, my mother’s hand dipped with a glancing flash. I’ll never forget the sharp stab of pain. The next thing I knew, my mother had her head down, her hair fanned out right across my ankle and foot. When she raised her head, her mouth and chin dripped blood. She had to spit out a lot more blood before she could speak. “What a brave girl.” She smiled, revealing bloodied teeth like she’d been eating me. I went into hysterics. So did Tom. They had to pull him off me.

  When I returned from hospital, my father abandoned his writing to sit at the end of my bed and Tom offered me all his toys which I graciously accepted as my due.

  “I tell you what,” my father said, “when your leg’s better, we’ll go for a picnic — all four of us, and afterwards we’ll go to the cinema. What do you say?” I said it sounded wonderful. He never did take us to the film. By then, he was dead.

  *

  The day Eveline arrived, I had spent hours stripping tangerine paint from the wainscoting in the salon. The windows were wide open and my only distraction was listening to the sounds floating up from the village. The sense of anticipation was almost palpable. A circus had pitched camp the day before.

  After that hot, arm-achingly, tedious chore, I was glad, come the evening, to be sitting out on the terrace with nothing more taxing to do than to choose the paint colours — gradations of white from chalk to buttermilk — for the interior walls. It must have been a little after six o’clock. Six o’clock and Greg was off, wheeling his bike down the avenue.

  I had all the thin strips of card with the paint colours on the rickety little table in front of me. I was watching Greg gradually disappear under the avenue’s canopy of lime trees. I couldn’t concentrate. I was concerned that all the work Tom wanted done on the château would
be soon finished and I had no plans for my future. All I knew was that I had no intention of returning to London.

  Everyone in the village must have been at the circus, waiting for the performance to begin. The air was so still it was like varnish. There was no sound — just a dog barking monotonously like it had been shut up or forgotten, and the sudden screech of a car’s brakes as it took the steep incline of the hill.

  Then there was a shout. Sharp and near. Then another, and another. Greg burst out from under the trees, running, waving his arms. I stood up, so quickly that the table rocked and the strips of card went everywhere.

  “I thought it was another bag of rubbish dumped,” his voice came out staccato on his breath. “But it’s not. It’s dead.”

  Whether he was propelling me, or me him, I don’t know. We ran until we reached the gates. I could see Greg’s bike crashed to the ground beside a body which was in the foetal position, with one arm flung out and so inert, with its eyes closed, that I thought the worst. I put two fingers on the back of one still wrist just to check.

  “Is she dead?”

  “She’s warm.”

  The girl couldn’t have been more than eighteen, twenty. Not older. Her face was upturned towards the sky, long lashes making deep shadows underneath her eyes. Her skin was the colour of desert sand and her clothes were black, but she looked grey from the chalky dust of the gravel. Luckily, she was wearing a long jacket and jeans.

  “Her pulse.”

  “Quiet, Greg.”

  “Is she in a coma?”

  “How would I know? I’m not a doctor.”

  “The doctor,” he said. “The police.” He slapped his back pockets looking for his mobile. I don’t know how many times he thumped himself until he found it.

  “She’s not dying.” The outstretched hand was clenched into a tight fist. I started to prise open the fingers ever so gently. Greg managed to dial one wrong number and then the phone slipped out of his hands. It missed the girl’s head by a whisker. He ran his palms down his grubby paint-splattered overalls. “What’s the emergency number for France?”

  “Honestly, Greg. How long have you lived here?”

  “Three years, but I’ve not had call to… Hallo!” he beamed, showing his white even teeth. The girl’s eyes were open. She didn’t look terrified or distressed by Greg’s funny face looming over her. In fact, she had no expression at all.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “Does your back hurt? Your neck?”

  Her eyes turned towards me and she started to sit herself up — awkwardly, as if her bones hurt.

  She was bruised I thought, hopefully no more than that.

  “Hell’s bells,” Greg said, bending for a closer look at what had fallen out of her hand.

  A bullet, a tarnished silver bullet, was lying on the gravel. I looked at the girl and she looked back, with nothing in her eyes except my reflection. I stretched to pick the bullet up but her hand snapped over it, hiding it again.

  “Do you need a doctor?” I asked.

  She said nothing in response to my barrage of questions. Nothing to who she was or where she had come from.

  We stayed outside on the avenue for quite a while, wondering what to do. I squatted beside her, frozen by indecision, unable to decide what to do for best. Greg paced back and forth, hands in pockets. He’d tossed his mobile into the long grass near the swing by the gates.

  “Useless. I don’t get the lingo half the time.”

  “Shhh, Greg. I’m thinking.” I was deliberating on the wisdom of taking a stranger in, even for an evening. Deep down in my sub-conscious, I must have known that the decision would have consequences — but just how devastating, I could never have guessed.

  I remember the moment like it was yesterday. Never again would the sun lie so thick and yellow across our backs, would the blue seep out of a crystal clear sky and the trees lining the avenue fling out their branches with such abandon. The sound of the circus welled up out of the village; a cacophony of yowls and shrieks and snatches of that jolly accordion music which the French seem to like so much.

  The girl was beautiful. She had the face of a Modigliani muse, as remote and as impossibly beautiful as a two-dimensional painting but when I turned to look at her again, her eyes connected with mine, wordlessly beseeching me not to abandon her.

  “It’s okay,” I said softly, “you’re safe here. I promise.”

  “Look what I’ve found,” Greg had walked out onto the road, and returned carrying a smart canvas suitcase emblazoned with a designer logo. “Found this on the other side of the pillar. Yours is it?” Greg asked the girl jokingly.

  She scrambled to her feet and stretched out her hand.

  The girl didn’t speak, I realised with a shock. She wasn’t going to speak.

  “What have you got in here? Rocks?” Greg laughed, moving the case from her reach.

  “Stop it, Greg!” He stopped, looked at me, looked at the girl, saw what I meant and, shamefacedly, handed her the suitcase. She insisted on lugging it up the avenue, not allowing either of us to help.

  I don’t know where Greg located the gendarme but the policeman wasn’t any use. By the time he arrived, Greg and I had eaten. Duck pâté out of a tin on stale baguette. The girl wouldn’t eat.

  It was lucky that the French words ‘immigrée clandestine’ sounded so like the English equivalents. How could I have known if the young woman was an illegal immigrant? She had just arrived, hadn’t she? Besides, she didn’t look like an illegal immigrant. I was more worried that she was a victim of trafficking.

  The gendarme shrugged his shoulders. “Then she must be your visitor.” He was obdurate. I wasn’t to know then that there had been a series of burglaries in a neighbouring village and, as the lone policeman, he was under a lot of pressure.

  There was no real need for the French/English dictionary that I’d gone up to my turret to find. The girl sat through the exchange between the three of us with total indifference. Greg was trying to help with his few words of French. I was getting frustrated by our inadequacy. I wanted to shake her and shout “What are you doing here?” To elicit some response.

  I asked the girl if she had anything with which to identify herself, but she just looked at me. I drew a rectangle with another small rectangle inside it. I drew a large question mark.

  “It’s supposed to be a passport,” I pre-empted Greg’s question.

  “You’ll have to go through her suitcase.”

  “I don’t like to.”

  “People don’t just land themselves on you.”

  “Don’t they?” I said, looking at the girl sitting still and mute on the other side of the table.

  Greg lifted the suitcase onto the table. “Maybe there’s an address inside — a contact number.”

  “Do you mind?” I asked as I tried to press open the locks but they were the combination type. Eyes downcast, the girl reached across the table and swivelled the suitcase to face her. Deftly, she notched the locks so that the lid sprung open. She didn’t look at me once. ‘000,’ I thought, ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

  Greg peered over my shoulder. The case was crammed with clothes, thrown in, pell-mell. They were nice clothes, a young person’s clothes, all of good quality, most of them designer labels. There was a pair of stiletto shoes and a sponge bag. Nothing else. No address. I folded the clothes and returned them to the case and shut the lid. The suitcase’s owner couldn’t have looked less interested if she had tried.

  “Her jacket?” Greg suggested.

  “I can’t strip search her.” I hadn’t meant to snap. He was only trying to help. “I’ll look later, when she takes it off.” It wasn’t easy talking about a person as if she were an unwanted delivery, however beautiful — particularly if that person was sitting opposite you — and she was. Like an unwanted delivery, I mean.

  Eventually the gendarme took his leave.

  Greg beckoned for me to follow him out into the archway, out of sight of the girl. He
bent towards me with his flyaway hair catching in the shaft of light from the kitchen. It was quite dark and, from the snatches of noise, the circus was in full swing.

  “There isn’t a B&B in the village.”

  “Then I’ll give her a bed for the night.”

  “She can stay with me, in the caravan.”

  “There’s plenty of room here.”

  “You don’t know where she has come from.”

  “She’s just a young girl,” I said. “What possibly could happen?”

  “You don’t know who is looking for her.”

  I couldn’t allow Greg to have a young girl to stay overnight, more for his protection than hers.

  Eventually Greg did leave, reluctantly, despite my reassurances. It didn’t occur to either of us that she might have planned to be taken in at the château.

  I gave the girl the only room with a bed, off the corridor in the hall.

  My unexpected guest stayed sunk in the armchair in front of one of the windows, as I busied myself making the bed. I let her be, wordlessly gesturing to her when the bed was ready. Listlessly she crossed over to her suitcase, her shadow trailing across the ceiling behind her like she’d lost it. She picked out what looked like a silk nightie, clutching it to her chest until I closed the door behind me. No sign of any gratitude. No sign of anything at all, except, perhaps, exhaustion.

  I tried to call my brother to ask if he knew anything about a girl turning up unannounced at the château gates. It was highly unlikely but I didn’t know what else to do. Samantha, his wife, answered the Oxfordshire landline. She sounded harassed, reluctant to talk.

  “I thought you were a journalist, phoning this late.”

  The press were always plaguing Tom. “Why? What do they want him to comment on now?”

  “Try Tom on his mobile.”

  “I have, but you know what he’s like.”

  “Do I?” Her laugh was bitter. She cut the connection.

  I thought, for a second, that the girl was in the room with me — but when I swung round, it was just the draught from a leaky window, playing with the fringe of the lampshade, causing its shadow to quiver on the wall.