The Silent Stranger Read online

  On my way up to my room, I peeked in on my uninvited guest. The crack of light slid, almost to the bed. All I could see was a shape hunched under the covers and a mass of shadow beyond.

  “Are you alright?” I whispered. “Do you need anything?”

  I could tell that she was awake — there was a tautness in the darkened room, like someone was holding her breath.

  Chapter 4

  “Sis.” Tom always called early in the morning. “How are things? Have you run out of readies?”

  “Not this time.” I asked him about the girl. Did he know her?

  He laughed. “Is this a trick question?”

  “No,” I laughed with him. “But perfectly reasonable given your track record.”

  “I’m a reformed character these days.”

  “I know, I know. But listen.” I explained the circumstances, about how we’d found her.

  “I don’t know, Sis.” He sounded dubious. “Where’s she from?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  Then he asked the next obvious question.

  “How did she get up to the château in the first place?”

  “No idea.”

  “No one with her?”

  “No.”

  He thought for a while. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  “I’ve given a young girl a bed for the night. That’s all.”

  “Get rid of her.” His urgency took me aback. “You don’t know who the hell she is.”

  “She’s young enough to be your daughter.”

  “For God’s sakes, Sis.”

  “No, not that…” It hadn’t actually occurred to me. The girl was far too beautiful — and foreign — to be Tom’s progeny.

  “Why do you think she’s got something to do with me?”

  “I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  “No one knows about the château. Why don’t you just ask her what she’s doing there?”

  “I would if I could.”

  “Stop playing silly buggers.”

  “She doesn’t speak.”

  “Look Sis,” my brother’s annoyance gave way to exasperation. “I just want you to be careful. Please. No one just turns up.”

  There was nothing for breakfast for my uninvited guest, so I went down to the boulangerie. I’d forgotten how delicious a fresh, French croissant can be, so much better than the soft little bits of dough in a plastic bag which I’d been buying from the mini-supermarket on the edge of the village. My croissant was eaten by the time I’d walked back up to the château gates.

  I waited for the girl to emerge from the bedroom and while I waited, I resumed the tedious business of stripping away the orange paint from the wainscoting in the salon. The salon’s furnishings were completely uncoordinated — it could only have been by chance that the bulbous lampshades which hung over the sofas matched the wainscoting.

  Perhaps the sound of my scraping carrying on the heat-laden air woke her. It was almost ten o’clock anyway, with the sun white in the sky, and the dazzle blinding on the windowpanes.

  I could feel her presence before I turned to greet her. Her beauty was even more disconcerting in the full light of the day. I felt self-conscious, just to be looking.

  “Slept well?”

  She smiled. She held herself very erect, like a ballerina. She was wearing different clothes: a plain white shirt and khaki pedal pushers. I could see bruises on her arms and legs. She had nothing on her feet.

  “I forgot to ask you your name last night.”

  She said nothing. She didn’t look at me. She was looking around the room, her gaze finally resting on the Warhol prints on the back wall.

  There was a quality of stillness about her that I was hesitant to break.

  “I’ve got to call you something,” I said gently.

  “Okay then. It doesn’t matter.” I was still under the assumption that she would be with me for a couple of hours at most before going on her way.

  I took the girl down to the kitchen and warmed up a croissant. She watched me as I lit the ramshackle range — first turning on the gas, then lunging forward with ancient flamethrower before lurching back in case of explosion. She leant against the dresser, its surface covered with the paraphernalia of doing up a château.

  “There’s plenty of filter coffee, should you like a cup — fifteen bags of it — and if you would like it brewed — ” I open another cupboard door with a flourish, “there are five cafetières, four percolators and two filter machines. The choice is yours.”

  The girl’s expression was completely neutral. I flushed, conscious suddenly of how eccentric I must have looked, brandishing a gas lighter, hair flecked with paint, in an old stained t-shirt and shorts held up with a piece of string. I hadn’t bothered about my appearance since being at the château.

  “Nothing to do with me,” I said, laughing to hide my embarrassment. “The people before left everything. I haven’t been here that long. Do you like sugar? Greg does. Seven spoons. He needs the energy.”

  I talked as if she understood English, with lots of finger pointing and hand gesticulation in case she didn’t follow my meaning.

  In the end, as she didn’t express a preference, I gave my uninvited guest filtered coffee from a cafetière. She pulled the croissant apart with long fingers and spread it with jam and margarine. She ate hungrily and seriously. All her concentration was on the food. I became more concerned for her. Her shoulder blades jutted out too much. Her bra line sagged, as if she has recently lost weight. I didn’t know what more I could do for other than give her breakfast before she went on her way.

  “Would you like a lift somewhere?” I asked, when she had finished. She looked up at me, her eyes completely unfathomable.

  “How about seeing the house before you go?” I assumed she was interested in old houses, as she’d seemed genuinely interested in the salon. Besides, in the two months that I’d been at the château I hadn’t shown the house to anyone.

  I took her up the stairs and into the dining hall. “You should have seen it before.” I pointed to the best piece of furniture in the house; the fine eighteenth century table which could sit twenty. “That was covered in junk. You name it, it was there: old curtains, newspapers, boxes of broken crockery.” I didn’t tell her that the sideboards were still overflowing: crammed with everything and anything. Her fingers skimmed over the back of one of the grey plastic office chairs which provide the seating for the grandiose centerpiece. She gazed solemnly at the seventies replica of a glass candelabra.

  In the salon, she sat on one of the sofas as I told her that the beautiful paneled ceiling above her head had been hidden by aertex tiles. She examined it closely. “You know,” I confided, “when I first came in here, it was like the previous owners had just popped out. Pretty creepy.” She picked up an ornament, a small stuffed donkey with panniers and the inscription ‘A gift from Portugal’. She turned it over to look at its belly. “They were funny people, though, the people before,” I told her, “you know, odd, the sort of oddness that you don't really want to know more, especially when you're living here on your own.” She looked at me so studiously that I thought I should stop talking.

  She returned the donkey and opened a marquetry box. She spent so long gazing into it that my curiosity was piqued. I looked over her shoulder. The box contained what looked like shrivelled crescents of nail; toenail clippings. Nothing surprised me about the house anymore.

  “You see what I mean?” I smiled. “Yuck.”

  She snapped the lid shut.

  *

  At a window, I made her look out on the glorious far-reaching view of the hills of Provence.

  I showed her the library, the smallest room in the house with its heavy executive desk and five-foot tall bookcases, the thin glass doors protecting gold-tooled leather volumes. One of the bookcases I’d emptied. She stretched out her hand to feel its smooth wood and I warned her to watch out — the bookcase was very unsteady, not attached to
the wall. I caught our reflection on the thin glass doors. She was a good head taller than me. She could easily have been a model. I told her how it took almost two days to prise every sweet wrapper stuffed into every keyhole in the house, showing her exactly what I meant. She gave a little shudder. “Yes,” I said, “I know exactly how you feel. Who would want to do that? I mean, I am certain that no children have lived here for an awfully long time…” I stopped because I felt so foolish. I didn’t know whether she understood anything more than intonation and gesture and even if she did, why should a stranger want to know anything about me or the château?

  Chapter 5

  We returned to the hall and my visitor, without my invitation, started up the main flight of stairs. I was perplexed that she seemed to be so intent on the house but everything about her was so odd, it was just another oddity. For all I knew, she could have been a student of architecture. I was concerned that she would be disappointed in the upper parts; two floors, each with a corridor of still, almost empty rooms divided by a wide landing. There were still no beds. Greg and I had found a delivery of beds — the flat-pack variety — in the original packaging in the stables, but they were too damaged to be of any use.

  Greg and I had worked very hard. Except for one room, there were no longer any wires protruding from the walls, holes in the lath and plaster, or rotten floorboards. The plumbing had been fixed — which, in the event, was easy enough to do as the pipes were attached to the walls. Most importantly though, there was no sense of the dereliction which used to pervade the house. No rush of dust to settle like a second skin every time I opened a door.

  As I thought, the girl wasn’t interested in the upper floors. She seemed to withdraw further and further into herself, shutting herself off from me and her surroundings. It was as if she was disappointed and I was disappointed for her. I was so proud of what Greg and I had achieved. I wanted though, to show her the gym on the second floor. I could remember the real start of surprise when I first saw it. It was so incongruous.

  The girl didn’t react to the gym. She hardly gave it a glance. She seemed suddenly exhausted, drooping on her feet.

  I led the way to the first of the tower’s two rooms. She sat on the bottom rung of the spiral staircase while I drew back the four sets of curtains covering the four windows. Unlike me, when I first saw the grisaille panels, there was no gasp of delight.

  “These,” I said grandly, “are absolutely the most precious part of the château.”

  Her expression was blank, totally bored. I gave up then trying to placate her disinterest. I redrew the curtains, plunging the room back into a sunlit twilight. I didn’t take her up to the upper room, my bedroom. I’d exposed enough of myself.

  I stopped to turn round and to look up at her as she followed me down the stairs.

  “Please, if you’re in trouble, let me help.”

  She flinched at the suddenness of my movement but her eyes held mine before looking away towards the front door.

  “Why have you come?”

  A shadow flitted across her eyes.

  “Are you escaping from someone or something?”

  I took her lack of reaction as a ‘no’.

  I expected her to go at that point, to take her suitcase from the bedroom and to take her leave of me, with a slight wave of her hand. She didn’t. She disappeared straight out the front door. I watched her back, ramrod straight again, descend the front steps with some amusement. I couldn’t quite believe the cheek of her but, at the same time, I admired it. I didn’t call out ‘Your suitcase!’, because I knew, in that moment, that she had absolutely no intention of leaving just then.

  I was also relieved. I would have hated for her to walk out the gates with nowhere to go. She reminded me of myself when I first arrived at the château. I didn’t know if she was heartsick but whatever had happened for her to land up at the château gates, meant that she needed respite. It was such a small act of kindness to allow someone some respite. Besides, the house needed kindness. I just knew it needed that.

  Chapter 6

  After my father died, my mother went off the rails. She was only thirty, fourteen years younger than I am today. Home life, for Tom and me, was punctuated by a bewildering series of ‘uncles’. She partied until the small hours and we never knew what strange man was behind our mother’s bedroom door. She would leave a tie or a sock on the door knob as a signal for us not to enter. At first she would still put on her bobbly white dressing gown and make our breakfasts. She gave up by the time I was ten. For a while I made boiled eggs and soldiers for myself and Tom, but soon we just stopped off at the bakery on our way to school. The ‘uncles’ always left us money under the pot plant in the hall.

  The men came in all shapes and sizes. Tom and I poured salt in their tea, placed pins in their shoes, filled the pockets of the suit jackets they left hanging off the backs of chairs full of sneezing powder, but most didn’t even look at us — their shiny eyes only reflecting images of our mother darting around the room, pouring them a drink, smoothing down her skirt, snapping on the standard lamp. She had a beautiful mouth which she painted red and she used to pucker kisses at us like a goldfish gasping for air. Tom tried to cling on to her. She brushed him off. ‘Darling you’re creasing my skirt.’ ‘Off you get sweetie, you’re messing Mummy’s makeup.’ It was ‘How lovely darling!’, when he presented her with something he had made at school, only to find it chucked in the wastepaper basket a couple of days later. I held him in my arms, his face against my skinny chest, his shoulders shaking. I hated her then.

  *

  Tom called again, early in the afternoon. “Has our visitor left?”

  I bristled at his easy assumption, sitting at his desk with a backdrop of the gleaming citadels of Canary Wharf. I was the one dealing with the situation, not him.

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think she is exhausted. Isn’t lack of speech a sign of trauma?”

  “It’s very sweet of you and all that, Sis, but seriously, she can’t stay. I’ll worry myself silly.”

  Despite my misgivings, I had to respect Tom’s wishes with regard to his property. So I went in search of my visitor and I found her sitting on the grass under the lee of the terrace. She didn’t look as if she was enjoying the sunshine. Her bruised arms hugged bony knees. As I approached she lifted her head and, all over again, I was struck by the loveliness of her face but she looked tired and miserable. I stood in front of her.

  “You can’t stay here,” I spoke quite clearly and slowly. I pointed up in the direction of the house so that she had to understand. “This isn’t my house. It’s my brother’s.” I pointed to her. Both my hands made a ‘no’. “He says you must go. Do you understand?”

  For a second, her eyes weren’t blank. I could see deep into the heart of her. She was like me, as I was when I arrived at the château, totally at a loss and full of heartache.

  The rigidity of her face shifted. She buried her face in her knees. I thought she cried, but she didn’t make any sound. Loneliness reeked from her.

  I sat on the grass a few feet away. I didn’t offer any comfort. She wouldn’t have wanted a stranger embracing her any more than I would.

  For a long time we just sat there. I watched a lizard sunning itself on a stone. I thought about how I came to be at the château, about how I drove like the wind to get away from London. I made a decision.

  “Why don’t you stay a couple of days? Get your strength back?”

  She raised her face, her eyes questioning mine.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, getting up from the grass. “I’ll sort it with my brother.” I brushed her hair lightly. “Everything will be okay.”

  The lizard darted between two stones. I watched for a while to see if it would reappear.

  “But, if you’re going to stay here,” I continued, “I have to call you something. I can’t go round saying ‘oi’ every time we’re to have a conversation.” Even as I said it,
it sounded a little ambitious.

  “Then can I call you Eveline? It’s one of my favourite names.”

  I had always been entranced by the name Eveline. It was the name of a character in my father’s first novel. I wanted to be that character when I grew up — or failing that, to call one of my daughters by that name. I had always thought that I would have four daughters and two sons — the younger, of course, I would have called Tom; the elder, by my father’s name.

  That evening, I became as sure as I could be that Eveline understood English. I was in the cellar, lying on my back in three inches of water, trying to stop a leak from underneath the old washbasin and shouting for Greg. I must have left the tap on, the last time I had been there. Not ever staying long enough to find out, I hadn’t realised that the sink leaked.

  The cellar wasn’t a place I liked but it was where the washing machine and drier were housed. It was lit by one low energy light bulb and was full of junk and superfluous items like rusty chest freezers, rolls of carpet, and the ten ironing boards which were haphazardly propped against broken tables and chairs. A couple were still in shop plastic, covered, like the others, in sticky spider web. There could have been others in the nether regions of the cellar. At the time I hadn’t explored. The excessive number of ironing boards gave me the creeps — conjuring up images of batty housewives and me in particular, back in London where I ironed everything, including Philip’s socks.

  I’d brought a torch and, shining it up, saw that an old washer had slipped. A trickle of water was dripping onto my face. It was just a matter of tightening the washer back into place. I heard footsteps near me.

  “Greg,” I said, “on the table by the door, there’s a monkey wrench. Can I have it?” There was no point in him getting as wet as I was for a job I could do myself. The rusting spanner was handed to me and with a couple of cranks, the washer was back in place.

  “Give us a hand,” I stretched out my arm to be pulled out of the dark space. I had barely time to register that the grip wasn’t Greg’s horny old paw before Eveline’s luminous eyes smiled down at me.