The Silent Stranger Read online

  “Anyone.” Tom and I had rehearsed the reason why. “It would make Daddy even further away.”

  “Oh for goodness sakes,” our mother said. “He’s just up the road.”

  Despite her protestations to the contrary, we very rarely visited the cemetery. It never occurred to me that perhaps it was just too much for our mother to bear.

  *

  My mother was a social butterfly. I am not. Before Eveline, as I’ve said, I hardly ventured out of the château. Plenty of English lived in and around the village and its surroundings. A few made it up the avenue to introduce themselves and I rebuffed them politely. Greg was different. I trusted him. He asked no questions of me and I, none of him. It was a perfect relationship in many ways. After a few weeks though, I needed a little more by way of conversation.

  I found the drinks party invitation in the letterbox at the end of the avenue.

  I showed it to Greg, who was on his knees in the downstairs cloakroom, replacing cracked tiles.

  “Why didn’t they just come up the avenue and say hello?”

  He wiped the grouting off his fingers with a rag. Normally, he wasn’t so fastidious.

  “It’s Babs and Dora, their annual do. Everyone’s invited.”

  “It would have been nice if they’d dropped by.” I must have sounded wistful.

  “After the way you’ve sent your few callers packing, it’s a wonder you’ve got an invite at all.”

  I laughed.

  “You’re not going to go are you? To be honest,” he looked at me so speculatively that, standing in the doorway in such close proximity, I blushed. “I wouldn’t have thought that the ex-pat scene was for you.”

  “I can’t hide away forever,” I said, which was true and I was lonely.

  Greg insisted on accompanying me. On the appointed evening, he trekked back up to the château in his inordinately long and shiny winkle-pickers. I had little choice in what I was to wear: jeans, shorts, or the only dress I had brought to France. For the first time ever, I’d ironed. Like ironing boards, there was an excess of irons in the house: seventeen in total, all found in nooks and crannies. All filthy. I spent a good half-hour scraping black sticky stuff off a flat plate before ironing my white linen dress.

  The party was held in a garden which ran down to the river. “Difficult to get away from eh?” Greg nudged me with his elbow, as we went through the gate. He nodded at the silhouette of the château high on the hill with the tower like the stump of a periscope, scanning the horizon.

  Babs and Dora were two octogenarian sisters.

  People were very kind, welcoming me to France. “How are you finding it?”

  “Wonderful.” It was wonderful, but the château was peculiar — which I was too bloody-minded to admit to myself, let alone anyone else.

  Greg hovered by my side. “What plans do you have for the château?” I don’t know how many times I was asked that question with varying degrees of intensity. In the end, Greg started answering for me. “She’s just doing it up for her brother.”

  “Tom Braid, isn’t it? I do hope,” a floral dress with fake pearl earrings touched me earnestly on the arm, “that the renovations will be sympathetic?”

  “Just because he is in business,” I tried to make the point light-heartedly, “doesn’t mean he has no taste.”

  I was surrounded by a good-humoured crowd. Greg was in his element, revelling in the attention, as he filled in details of exactly what we had been doing with the château. A large man with a ruddy face asked me if Tom was feeling the heat back in London. People stiffened, as if he were guilty of gross bad manners.

  I diffused the moment easily. I answered truthfully. “No I am. I’m the one who’s here after all.” A sausage fell off my fork. Greg picked it off the grass and made a great show of eating it, much to everyone else’s laughing consternation.

  Someone wanted to know when I would be replacing the gates. When would the pillars be repaired? I was congratulated on having had all the rubbish removed from the grounds. Heads shook, teeth tsked, eyes glanced up, up at the darkening bulk high on the hill, darker than the darkening sky. “Bloody disgrace it was, the way it was left.” The conversation moved on to someone's bid for planning permission at the other end of the village.

  So when Valerie introduced herself, she was a welcome relief. Greg shot off which was also welcome. I’d been like a prized possession of his all evening. Valerie raised an eyebrow at his departing back, but made no comment. She talked about herself, about how difficult it was to make ends meet as a single woman in this particular part of France. Finally she did ask a direct question.

  “What did you do with all the stuff they left behind?”

  I presumed she meant at the château, but before I could answer, we were interrupted.

  The woman was thin and small. “Are you going to have a party in the grounds soon? That would be so much fun and a chance to…”

  She was drunk, red wine sloshing around in her glass as she waved her hands because she couldn’t recall what else it was that she’d wanted to say. Valerie gave me a look and slipped away.

  A man appeared by her side, looking so embarrassed he had to be her husband. He put a hand on her elbow ready to steer her away.

  “Home time, Sandra.” He was firm.

  “You!” Without warning, she was cross. “You’re such a spoil-sport!” She chucked her wine at him half in fun, missed, and instead got me on my dress.

  It was mayhem. Her husband had to literally pull her away from me as she frantically tried to dab at the stain with the end of her scarf.

  I did not want the fuss. I definitely did not want to wear one of Babs’ or Dora’s frocks. Greg insisted on driving me back in his socks as his winkle pickers were too long for him to manage the clutch and brake.

  “I knew it,” he said furiously. “I shouldn’t have left you alone. You’re like a lamb among wolves with that lot.”

  I thought he was going a little too far but something the drunk woman had said worried me far more than the ruination of my dress. “Do they expect me to give a garden party?”

  “Don’t be daft, you’re not the Queen.”

  Chapter 10

  It was Greg who pointed it out. “The circus arrives and hey presto, you have a visitor. Two and two make four.”

  “Or they might make five,” I said. “You did send the photo off?” I had deliberately left my laptop in London — not that it mattered with no internet access.

  “I used the computer at the caff. You owe me five euros.”

  “Tom hasn’t called.”

  “Give him a chance. It was only yesterday.”

  Greg was making coffee, which involved a palaver with a cafetière. He was very insistent on explaining to me, the first morning he started working at the château, that since being in France, he couldn’t abide instant. I then discovered that he couldn’t abide my coffee either, so he made his own.

  “Where is Little Ms Stray anyway?”

  “Outside last seen making her way in the direction of the chapel.”

  The chapel was not far from the house, across what must have been once a lovely lawn, in a dip of the land. It was a ruin, with only a few grey stones left scattered about — the rest must have been carted off centuries ago — but someone, sometime in the last fifty years, had tried to rebuild one wall with a space for a door and a niche for St James of Compostela. At least, I assumed it was St James. He was high up and the weather had worn away all the detail on the stone, but I could just about make out a carving of a shell dangling from his waist.

  “Are you sure about her roaming about?”

  “What is there to steal?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not that, but how can you be sure?” He twisted his index finger into his forehead, looking quite mad himself with his wide eyes and bits of paint and straw in his hair.

  “For such a nice man,” I teased him, “you’re not very empathetic.”

  “All I know is that she
is all over the house. I’ve seen her opening doors and drawers when she thinks no one’s around.”

  “Your imagination’s running away with you.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He looked at me sheepishly then suddenly got serious. “But you should try to find out where she’s from. Someone must be looking for her.”

  “And what if they’re not?”

  “Then,” he said, “something is very wrong.”

  *

  Much later on that afternoon, I saw her sitting on the swing hooked up into the massive oak, staring into the long grass which almost came up to her knees. It was a patch of the grounds I hadn’t yet cleared, thinking that there was no use for the swing, not until Tom’s children visited. She looked so alone, so hopeless, that my heart went out to her.

  “Wait!” I shouted and her head came up and she watched me as I scurried off to the stables as fast as I could in the blistering heat. It took some time, but I found the scythe while she waited. She watched as I scythed a path through the grass to reach her. She held up her feet when bidden as I cut a swathe a few metres square around her. I felt I owed her an explanation.

  “I hate snakes. Even the idea of them.” I told her how Greg had laughed when he saw me scouting for snakes in the château. They rarely, if ever, came indoors. “I’ve haven’t even seen one outside yet,” I said. “Lucky me.” As soon as I said it, I saw a movement in the long grass nearer the avenue — just the tips, the seed heads moving. I couldn’t help myself. I screamed. Eveline jumped off the swing in panic.

  Greg came running up the avenue, red-faced with the exertion, a lathe in his hand. “What’s going on?” He looked at Eveline as if somehow, she was to blame. I willed myself to stop trembling. It was a mouse, I told myself. I’d disturbed a mouse. Greg returned to the château, stopping every so often to check back on us.

  Bees buzzed, attracted by the scent of the freshly cut grass. I flapped my arms energetically to ward them off and made Eveline sit back on the swing from where she gazed at me with her solemn eyes. She made me feel very conscious of the enormous damp patches underneath my armpits. I hadn’t bothered much about personal hygiene at the château.

  “Shall I give you a push?”

  Needless to say, Eveline didn’t answer. She didn’t have to; the silence she engendered was so powerful that it quelled any questions.

  She wasn’t squeamish about nature, I could tell. She didn’t flinch as a bee grazed her cropped hair. It was a brutal cut, which had me wondering if she’d had longer hair and hacked it off herself. Given her taste in designer clothes, her haircut was out of keeping. Nothing though, could have taken away from the sense of perfection about her lovely face: the brow, the high cheek bones, the chin below the beautiful mouth which occasionally displayed a faint smile.

  She remained sitting on the swing, so I went round behind her and gave a first tentative push, the way you do a child, with both hands on her back, pressing my thumbs into the knobbles on her spine beneath the thin cotton t-shirt. She used her legs to power the swing higher, and we fell into a rhythm of sending the swing and Eveline soaring into the branches of the tree. In total silence, but it didn’t matter. I could tell that she was enjoying herself as much as I was, and I was: with the swish of air from the movement of the swing, the heady scent of the cut grass under my feet, and the feeling of being totally at peace with another human being. I didn’t need to know her, nor she, me. We were women together, that was all that mattered. It didn’t last of course. It stopped as soon as she slipped off the swing, spots of perspiration peppering the cloth between her shoulder blades.

  In the evening, I took Eveline to the circus and she came unquestioningly, without a flicker of interest, as if it was quite normal to accompany someone she didn’t know downhill to an evening’s entertainment. It had been so hot that the tarmac smelt molten. Eveline walked a couple of paces behind me, like she was my shadow, so that I had to keep looking round to make sure that she was following. It was beginning to grow dark and her eyes were very large in her face.

  The ticket lady paid us no attention whatsoever. She banged down our tickets and my change and we were ushered through heavy tarpaulin drapes.

  *

  It was the smell which brings back memories of the only time that I have been to a circus. It’s that mixture of straw, earth and tarpaulin. Tom and I had gone with our father on that last summer holiday before he died. I remember burying my head in my father’s lap as the trapeze artists swung high above our heads. “Don’t be silly,” my father said, curling my hair into ringlets with his fingers. Tom had been transfixed by the acrobats’ display. Days after the circus, he was still spending hours up a tree trying to make himself fly from branch to branch. I taunted him that his arms were too short and he was too stupid, making him cry with frustration.

  Eveline and I were shown to seats by the ringside. We had arrived just as the lights dimmed. As far as I could tell no one behind us was pointing, no one was saying ‘Look! There she is! There’s Eveline! She has come back!’ Eveline didn’t belong there anymore than she did at the château. A spotlight swept across a suddenly silent audience and caught the solitary ringmaster in its beam. The show began. Eveline’s eyes danced. Strongmen built human pyramids. Dogs jumped through hoops. Acrobats flew above us. A fire-eater swallowed a plume of flame. Eveline gasped like the children around us, open-mouthed with wonder. It was as if she had forgotten who she was and whatever was troubling her.

  Then, with a drum-roll, ‘El Caballero’ appeared. He had a smile as white as a dollop of toothpaste. He cracked a whip, and the sound rolled round the Big Top like a volley of thunder. Unconsciously, Eveline leant into me.

  The cowboy bowed towards his assistant, a tiny lady in a glittering red bikini who was standing still, a few metres away, waiting for him. With theatrical deliberation, El Caballero removed a pistol from the holder slung around his waist. He spun the gun dramatically to the sound of a drum-roll — not just one roll of the drums, but three — and with the last drum-roll, Eveline hurtled to her feet. She stood transfixed, staring at El Caballero. I tugged on her jacket. I tried to pull her back into her seat. She didn’t respond. The little boy sitting on the other side of me, started to cry. I wondered if it was my fault that the ice-cream which he had been enjoying so much, was now in his lap. The people behind murmured their disapproval. Eveline was blocking their view.

  El Caballero realised that something was amiss. Slowly he turned to face Eveline. He had a thin cruel mouth when he wasn’t showing his teeth. For a moment, it looked as if he is going to abandon the act and then he smiled a slow, taunting smile, and turned towards his assistant again who had placed an apple on top of her yellow hair. El Caballero pointed his pistol. He steadied his arm in readiness. Another roll of the drums started slowly, then picked up pace.

  Eveline bolted like a startled racehorse. She trampled over my feet, and over the feet and possessions of everyone else in our row. She was out of the tent. She had gone. After a moment’s stunned silence, the noise from the audience started to swell.

  I came to my senses. I rushed after Eveline, alternating “sorry, sorry,” with “excusez-moi.” When I had reached the exit, I looked back. Every face, every chattering mouth, was turned towards me. El Caballero was watching me, motionless, his crooked shadow looming large behind him. Then with a heart-rending crack of his whip, the audience was silenced, and I was out of the tent into a chill, starry night.

  I was so frightened by what might have been, that I wanted to grab Eveline and shake her by the shoulders and shout right into her face, ‘What the hell do you think you were doing? One slip and that man could have shot the woman in the head.’

  It was deserted outside the Big Top, an empty expanse of scuffed ground. Multi-coloured lights blinked feebly around the vacant window of the box office booth. A scraggy moggie appeared from nowhere and threaded itself between my ankles.

  I could have gone up the hill to the château o
n my own, and left her there, just as I should have left her at the gates, three evenings before. The clowns were on; the Big Top rocked with silly noises and gusts of laughter.

  I followed the perimeter of the tent, towards the back.

  I saw Eveline in the distance, with someone else. When I got nearer, I saw it was a girl with her hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail. She was holding Eveline’s arm and gesturing animatedly. I could tell that Eveline wasn’t responding. As I hurried towards them, across the faint wash of light, the girl turned to greet me. I recognised her as one of the acrobats. She had pulled on a dressing gown, but she was still in stage make-up, a white face with glittering eyes heavily outlined in swoops of black eyeliner.

  “Elle parle francais?” she asked, indicating Eveline, smiling sympathetically.

  “No — non.”

  “Et vous? Anglaise?”

  “I’m English. Do you speak English?”

  “Leetle. Very leetle. Amie?”

  I hesitated. “Yes,” I said.

  “She… Quel horreur!” She stood rigid, like Eveline had. She cupped her face in her hands and contorted her face. My heart lurched. The make-up made her face a horrific parody of wide-eyed terror. Eveline looked at me. She held out her hand. I ignored it. The lights caught the tracks of her tears and I caught my breath. The acrobat pressed Eveline close to her, with Eveline about as responsive as a ragdoll.

  “Eveline, I’m going back to the château. Are you going to come with me or not?”

  Eveline started to disengage herself. The girl held her back, gripping her arm. “Le château? Non!” Her eyes were wide with urgency. She refused to relinquish her hold on Eveline, launching into a torrent of words which could have come from Russia, Hungary, Poland. She broke off when she realised that it was no use. We didn’t understand. She shrugged her shoulders, releasing Eveline. “Bad,” she said, puckering her mouth at me “Bad, bad, bad.”

  I felt cold with anger. “How dare you?” I said stiffly. “I’m just trying to do my best by this girl.”