The Silent Stranger Page 4

  “You!” I was so surprised that I let go and toppled back, knocking my head. When the stars cleared, she was still standing there, still offering me her hand. She hauled me up, with a strength which belied her slender frame. The expression in her eyes was blank, like she was looking and not seeing. Like she had shut herself away.

  Chapter 7

  My lack of French was a serious embarrassment. I did try to ask the impassive Madame la Boulangère had she seen a young foreign girl wandering around the village a couple of days before. Somehow she thought that I was asking for a jar of her raspberry jam which she gave me and then realising that maybe it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, gave it to me for free. Even then she had to forcibly stuff my wallet back into my pocket before I understood.

  Tom called just as I arrived back from the boulangerie for the third time in less than twenty-four hours.

  “Before you say anything,” I told him, “I’ve told the girl she can stay a couple of days.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything so stupid.” His anger exploded down the line. “Why put yourself at risk?”

  “Please Tom, I can’t just chuck her out on the streets.”

  I could tell from the silence which followed that he was softening.

  “She could be a terrorist.”

  “She’s not. I’m sure of it. The gendarme was here, remember? She’d have made a run for it.”

  “Take a photograph and send it to me.”

  “Of her?”

  “No. Donald Duck. Seriously Sis, I sometimes wonder…”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Okay.”

  “I’ve got a contact in the police — they could send it through to Interpol…”

  “She wouldn’t be here if…” I gave up trying to argue. Tom was talking sense. “Okay. It will be some sort of security I suppose.”

  I didn’t think to take my camera when I left London so I asked Greg if I could borrow his. He liked to record our work on the château.

  Eveline was sitting on the balustrade of the terrace. She had her back to the view: ancient roofs of village houses tumbling down to the lake, glinting in the sun, which the locals used as a lido. I hadn’t yet been there. I really had been locking myself away.

  She was shy of the lens, turning her head. I panicked then, thinking that maybe she did have something to hide — what could be better proof than not wanting your photograph taken?

  “Please,” I said to her. “It’s for my brother. He wants to help you.”

  She put an arm up, half obscuring her face.

  “If you want to stay, you must let me take a photograph of you.” She must have heard the urgency in my voice because it was as if she were a model. She threw back her shoulders and tilted her chin — just so, in that disdainful way you see in magazines. I took a photo of a very beautiful woman without a voice, without a name — and I was both puzzled and flattered that she would want to stay with me.

  My brother was right. Eveline had to be at the château for a reason. We were too far up a hill for her to have arrived by chance. There wasn’t a train station for the village and the buses, Greg told me, were very infrequent.

  I did think that perhaps she had arranged to meet someone and that someone had failed to materialise. But then I noticed that she kept her eyes on the ground. Eveline wasn’t waiting for anyone.

  She spent a lot of time drifting around the house and if not the house, the grounds. I tried to keep watch over her as best I could, whilst still working on the château.

  Greg was sure that she wasn’t going to do anything silly. “Walking about the bloody place as if she owns it.” He was as exasperated as Tom that I hadn’t asked her to leave.

  “Don’t you like her?”

  “What is there to like?”

  “I saw you two yesterday,” I teased him. “By the stables.”

  He was embarrassed. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I was inside. I looked out when I heard her laughing.”

  “Yes,” he says. “She could be almost normal if she spoke.”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  He gave me a sceptical look. “She’s alright.”

  “More than alright, surely.”

  “She’s got no warmth about her.”

  He’d been flexing his biceps for Eveline, making her laugh out loud, peals and peals of girlish laughter. It had made my heart lift. She’d been so miserable earlier on, until I’d told her she could stay. Greg had a tattoo of a mermaid on his arm and when he crunched the muscle, the mermaid’s tail flicked. It was a party trick of his.

  “But you know,” Greg looked at me wonderingly, “as soon as she caught herself laughing, she stopped. Put on her zombie expression again. Nice girl and all that, but I don’t know how you sleep easy at night.”

  I slept better at night, with Eveline there. There was no longer any need to keep the lights blazing all night to keep the shadows at bay. It honestly had never occurred to me that she might creep up the stairs to the tower, and stand over me, ready to plunge a knife which she had found lying about in the kitchen, straight into my heart. I am sure had I thought her remotely capable of such an action, I wouldn’t have slept at all.

  I was only ever seriously frightened once — and that was very early on in my stay. I walked into the kitchen and was confronted by a wizened old hag, doubled over a stick, standing as bold as brass in the middle of the room, ranting at me. She could have popped out of the cellars — or worse still, not be real, though I didn’t believe in ghosts. If I’d believed in ghosts, I wouldn’t have been staying at the château. I grabbed the broom and shook it at her fiery eyes, screaming to drown out whatever incantation she was spouting. I followed her halfway down the avenue; she hobbling, still hurtling back at me God knows what. When I asked Greg about my visitor, he was very noncommittal.

  “It sounds like Claudine,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’s the local mad woman.”

  With Eveline around, I started to make lunch. I’d been making myself a well-balanced evening meal from tins of vegetables and meat left by the previous occupants — not that I had bothered much before Eveline came.

  Greg and I talked about what we were planning for the afternoon. It was stilted conversation, both of us very aware of the little pockets of silence between three people when only two of them talk. Eveline kept her head down, studiously avoiding eye contact. Greg started to tell silly jokes with silly gestures, looking mischievously at Eveline, willing her to laugh. “Why did the turkey cross the road?” It was one of his better ones. “Because he wasn’t chicken!”

  Eveline disappeared up the backstairs while I washed up. Greg went back out to the stables. He was in the process of replacing floorboards on the second floor and needed to sort through the planking. I’d told him that I would stay in the cool of the house restacking the empty shelves of the bookcase in the library.

  I love the smell of old books. I like the way they offer a direct continuum with the past — although our father has all but been forgotten except by universities. I can’t find him even in London charity shops anymore. I used to like buying second-hand copies of his novels. I liked the roughness of the pages that had been in baths, planes, trains. I found a rasher of bacon once, five pages from the end. I wondered what had interrupted the person reading. Had someone come to the door? Were they taken from behind in a bout of impulsive sex? I liked the fact that my father had been alive in somebody else’s head — even if, in the end, the last five pages were five too far.

  There was a tranquillity about the house in the afternoon — a quietness, like a membrane through which I could hear other sounds, like the faint hum of the antediluvian refrigerator in the kitchen. The whir of Greg’s saw lifted and faded on the air. I sorted through the pile of books I’d deposited on the threadbare carpet. For the first time in months I realised that I was happy. It was a lovely, liberating feeling of well-being.

  I reached up to open the glass doors to the bookcase and caught the shimmer
of movement as it toppled towards me. I broke its fall but I was holding books in my left hand, so that hand smashed through one of the glass panels and hit the back of the bookcase. I was crouched, contorted at an excruciating angle. A steady stream of blood ran down my arm. If I let go, my head would punch through the glass, giving me a necklace of unthinkable consequences.

  “Greg! Come quick!”

  I listened to the staccato of the saw.

  “Help!” The sweat was pouring off my face.

  I saw Eveline’s feet first: long and slender bones with bare, strong toes. I could feel the warmth of her body as she leant across me. Gently, she pushed the bookcase back against the wall. I scrambled to my feet clumsily, holding my cut hand.

  “Thank God, you heard me.”

  She smiled back at me, the smile lifting her face and there was this wonderful feeling — that we were partners, a sisterhood, allies together against this old house. Down in the kitchen, she helped me wash and bind the cut, her face full of concentration, her cool fingers pressing against my skin.

  Greg wasn’t pleased. He was cross. Guilty that he didn’t hear me calling. “There could have been a bloody awful accident. One slip with a piece of that glass…”

  “I know. My jugular.”

  He marched off to inspect. “I don’t understand. I fixed the bookcase to the wall yesterday. The braces have been unscrewed.”

  “Well I didn’t touch them.”

  He looked at me steadily.

  “Oh come off it,” I said with a laugh, “you don’t seriously think that that girl… why would she?”

  “You tell me.”

  “There’s got to be a simple explanation, like the braces being faulty.”

  He looked around. “Where is she now?”

  “In her room?”

  “Floating about like a bloody ghost.”

  I ignored my prickle of unease about Eveline staying at the house. I was beginning to realise how much more comfortable I felt at the château, with another woman around, albeit for a few days. I was no longer scuttling up to my room in the turret before night fell.

  Chapter 8

  The phone rang that evening, on the extension in the salon. It had to be either Tom or Philip. My friends had long given up calling as I refused to tell them why I’d left London — although surely they must have guessed. The reason was as old as Adam and Eve. I hoped it was Tom, so that I could tell him how Eveline had saved me from a very nasty accident. “You see?” I could have said, “ she has already repaid us tenfold.”

  It was Philip. My heart clenched when I hear his first, tentative “hello?” as if he felt he had no business in calling. He was right. He hadn’t. I could have put the phone down on him but I didn’t. I never had. Not once.

  “How are you?” Philip began.

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Missing you. Pepper’s pining.”

  “Poor Pepper.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “I have a guest.”

  “Who?”

  “Eveline.” Eveline looked up. She was sitting with me. She was looking at a large picture book of châteaux on the Loire. I couldn’t tell whether she was reading the text or not. I thought not; she was turning the pages so listlessly. All the animation of the afternoon was gone.

  “Who’s she?”

  “I don’t know, she just turned up. She’s going soon.” I glanced at Eveline. Her face was bent right over the book.

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Do you know, I don’t know?”

  “I don’t understand,”

  “How’s London?” I changed the subject.

  “Much the same. I’m thinking of visiting.”

  “Where?”

  “You. The château.”

  “I might be going away.” It was a lie. I really didn’t want to see him.

  “Going away? Haven’t you gone far enough?”

  Half of me wanted to cut the connection, the other half of me said brightly “I miss the sea.” It was true. I did miss a long, straight horizon and my toes curling into impacted, soggy sand.

  “So do I,” Philip said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  I was sorry too. In the end, he caught me unawares. I had known. Of course I’d known, but I thought the danger had passed — and the pity of it was, from what he told me, that I had been right; the danger had passed.

  “Here is nowhere near the sea,” I said.

  We’d lost our deposit in Norfolk. It didn’t matter that we’d been loyal customers for years: same cottage, same two weeks in August.

  “What about Pepper?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’d need a rabies vaccination.”

  “I thought I’d book her into kennels. So if I get some dates…”

  “We’ll see. I’ll have to check with Tom, see if he’s coming down.”

  “If Tom’s there…”

  “I know. You’d rather not.” I was aware that Eveline was watching me, all pretence of reading gone. She must have heard the tension in my voice.

  Eventually Philip began again. “Say hello to Pepper.”

  “Hello Pepper,” I said brightly. “Are you being a good girl?”

  “Talking about Tom, there’s a lot in the press at the moment.”

  “Is there?”

  “They might be on to something this time,” Philip hesitated. “In fact — ”

  “There is no internet here,” I cut him off. There were day-old English newspapers at the tobacconists, but I didn’t read them, not even the headlines. England was the last place I wanted reminding about.

  “Something to do with pension pots,” Philip said portentously. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned my husband was jealous of my brother’s business success. Philip was a backroom boy, an accountant, and totally risk-averse.

  “I’m sure Tom’s not bothered. People are always sniping at his success. He’ll face them down as he’s done before.”

  And, in the long silence which followed that silly jibe, I recalled the last evening in London.

  I’d been sitting out on the patio with Philip, enjoying a glass of wine on a lovely early June evening, revelling in the promise of the summer to come after a long, dark winter.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” he’d said, breaking the silence between us. There had been a lot of silences over the past months which I’d done my best to ignore. I hadn’t wanted confrontation. I’d told myself that if I paid no heed to the dead weight of suspicion which was dragging me down — making me feel that I was living life underwater — that eventually it would disappear and I’d be free again.

  “There is something I should tell you.” Only the once, should a woman hear that from her partner.

  “Did you sleep with her?” I’d asked stupidly, because his words hung in front of my eyes and I was having difficulty in linking them, to give them meaning.

  He told me. I could never have been prepared. Everything, utterly betrayed. I’d wanted to beat myself insensible, beating him. He wouldn’t fight back, enraging me even more. In the end, I picked up the vegetable knife lying on the draining board. I managed to stab him in the arm before he wrested the knife from me, dragged Pepper into the hall and left me, locking me in the kitchen.

  It was Pepper’s anguished howling which brought me to my senses — that, and the sight of Philip’s blood on my dress.

  Past midnight, to calm the dog, Philip took her for a walk in the park. My keys were in my handbag on the kitchen island. I let myself out by the back door, went around the side alley and re-entered the house through the front.

  By the time Philip had returned, I’d gone. I had packed a suitcase and left for France.

  *

  There was a click on the other end of the line as Philip hung up.

  “I’m fine,” I told Eveline who had got up off the sofa and was standing by it, looking at me as if she didn’t know whether to approach or stay away. She was looking
at my hand. I looked down to see that I’d been clenching the handset so tightly that the cuts on my hand had opened again and beads of blood were dripping onto the floor.

  Chapter 9

  Our mother met Uncle Mani about five years after our father’s death. She started cooking properly again and she didn’t leave us to go out to her drinking club. She actually — almost — sought my permission before Uncle Mani came to live with us. Tom wasn’t yet back from school. He was going through a phase of having evening detention almost every day. School rules, as far as Tom was concerned, were there to be broken.

  “You know it’s been very lonely for me since Daddy died.” We had a large wooden peppermill which appeared during the short time Tom and I had had an Italian ‘uncle’, and she was twisting it over a chicken she was preparing for our supper. The peppermill made a curious creaking sound which always made me want to laugh. She was looking at me, showering the white chicken in a red casserole with black pepper.

  I thought of my father and the thrilling sensation of being lifted high above his head with his big hands and twirled around and around. Had he been alive then, needless to say, he couldn’t have picked me up. I’d reached the grand old age of thirteen, far too big and heavy.

  “How much pepper does Uncle Mani like?”

  “Lots,” she said, popping the casserole into the oven. “No one could ever replace your father. He was the love of my life. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of our loss…”

  “I know,” I said, though I couldn’t have begun to know. My mother was embarrassing me.

  “I like Uncle Mani,” I said carefully, “but I don’t want you to marry him. Neither does Tom.”

  “Oh Tom,” I remember my mother’s dismissive shake of the head. “I am not going to marry Manfred, darling, but he would very much like to live with us. What do you think?”

  Then, before I could answer, she asked why I didn’t want her to marry. “Is it Manfred or any man?”