The Silent Stranger Page 6

  She shook her head with Eveline watching me, standing by her side.

  I’d had enough. I wasn’t going to allow strangers to judge me. I turned my back on both of them.

  People were still inside the Big Top, still having a jolly time. There were hoots and squawks and squeals of trumpet. The ringmaster bellowed. The audience shouted back. Eveline had to run to catch up. I looked back and the acrobat girl was standing motionless, watching us, her white face hanging like a moon beneath the tree.

  Chapter 11

  I found it difficult to get to sleep that night. ‘Bad! Bad! Bad!’ The circus girl’s cry was a drumbeat for my heart. I did feel bad: I felt bad for Eveline, I felt bad for myself. I regretted bitterly my offer for Eveline to stay for a few days. Her silence was a mirror, and I hated my reflection. I had noted the occasional flicker of derision in her eyes, and had pretended not to notice. I was the silly woman who had invited a stranger into her house.

  I was sure I heard crying once from the floor below but when I listened, all I could hear was silence thudding against my ears, with little bits and pieces of sound like flotsam. Suddenly Eveline’s bullet popped into my mind, a glistening fully formed image cradled in the pink of her palm. I had completely forgotten about the silver bullet. She was frightened of El Caballero’s bullet. I must have drifted off to sleep then, focusing on her bullet.

  Eveline washed her cup and plate, splashing water over the dirty crockery sitting in the sink which she chose to ignore — which annoyed me. I had allowed her to eat her breakfast in peace, and then I couldn’t find the right moment.

  “Eveline!” I called her back as she slipped out of the kitchen and into the archway.

  She turned around quickly, as if she knew what I was going to say. She lingered in the doorway, looking at me, waiting.

  “Last night was very upsetting,” I said. “I think it is time for you to think about moving on? You have been here four nights now. Long enough.” I made a batting movement with my hand.

  She gave no indication that she understood me. She dipped her head and smiled — so unexpectedly that I smiled back — and disappeared into the archway, out of my sight.

  When it came to it, I just couldn’t confront her head-on. My words were too weak in the face of her silence.

  The archway, which split the basement of the château into two, was a very inconvenient architectural detail. It belonged to another age, designed I think, for a carriage and horses. The stables, four walls and half a roof, were behind the house, quite a distance away.

  On one side of the arch, were the kitchen and cellars and on the other — more rooms, I presumed. The massive studded door which gave access to that side was locked. I had looked for the key which would have been as enormous as the one for the front door. I couldn’t find it, like I couldn’t find any keys to the interior doors. Greg wanted to try to open the door in the archway, but I hadn’t let him loose on it. I was mindful that the château was Tom’s and he hadn’t given me any instructions with regard to the archway.

  I waited until Eveline was down by the pool, dipping her feet in the water, leaning back on her hands, chest and face to the sun. Then I went up to her room in search of the bullet. Already, it had a smell of her, a light, indefinable fragrance which I caught sometimes, in other parts of the house.

  The room was untidy. Her bed was a rumpus of sheets and blanket, her dirty clothes tossed into a corner. An ironing board was in the middle of the room. I picked up the iron The flat plate was so sticky and black, she had obviously abandoned all notion of ironing. I looked around the room — the little stuffed donkey from the salon, ‘A present from Portugal’ was on the bedside table. There was a Pink Floyd album which I knew also to have been in the salon, on the dressing table. ‘She’s a little magpie’ I thought indulgently and then I noticed the heavy gold chain draped over the top left hand corner of the dressing table’s mirror. I thought I recognised that as well. I had to stifle the feeling of panic — that Greg’s not so subtle suggestions that she was casing the house were correct — but then I thought, if that were true would she not try to hide what she had taken?

  I checked anyway. I ran up the two flights of stairs to a room on the second floor, where Greg and I had found a leather box on the uppermost shelf of an otherwise empty wardrobe. I’d left it where we found it. The leather box was still at the back of the shelf and it was still full of trinkets — gold chains, pendants, a couple of odd cufflinks and a bracelet or two. I couldn’t be sure that the gold chain had been amongst them.

  “What are you doing?” Eveline’s sponge bag, full of expensive unguents in glass jars, nearly slipped from my fingers. It was Greg, taking a break from plastering over large cracks in one of ceilings upstairs. He was covered in chalky dust.

  “Looking for that bullet she had. And look what I’ve found.” I showed him the chain still draped on the mirror.

  “I told you she’s been snooping around.”

  “But why leave it out in full view if she were stealing?”

  “Search me,” Greg shrugged. “She’s weird.”

  “She could have taken the entire box… I don’t know what to do.”

  “You do. Tell her to get her skates on. Vamoose.” He looked around the room. “Did you get any joy at the circus?”

  I told him about El Caballero.

  “Crazy.”

  “Frightened. It was the pistol and the apple on top of the assistant’s head.”

  “Listen,” Greg said. “She’s not your problem. Your only problem is that she is here.” He nodded towards the suitcase I’d left open on the table. “No I.D. I suppose?”

  I rechecked the suitcase’s contents. “Nothing.” I fingered a cashmere top. “They’re good clothes, these.”

  “You’d wonder how she could afford it.”

  “Daddy,” I said.

  Greg snorted. “Sugar daddy more like. She’s a looker.”

  Like a mirage then, I saw Eveline lying on the bed in front of me like Matisse’s Blue Nude, hands behind her head, elbows akimbo, her small breasts (bra size only 70A) with nipples like little slivers of almond and a taunting smile on her lips, inviting me. The vision reverberated and vanished. The view from the window quivered with heat. Greg looked at me, as if he was going to step across the room and envelope me in his powdery arms. I was so tired that, just for a second, I could have rested my head on his narrow shoulder.

  “Here,” he said, making for the bed, not for me. “Have you looked under her pillow?”

  “Hang on Greg!” He stopped dead in his tracks midway between the door and the bed.

  “I’m sorry. Look at the floor. I don’t want her to know that I’ve been in here.”

  He looked at me levelly. “It doesn’t matter if she does.”

  I looked back.

  “Okay then.” He pulled a rag from the bib on his overalls and retreated, rubbing out the white footprints his trainers had left.

  There were a couple of damp, crumpled tissues under the pillow.

  “Have you looked in her shoes?” Greg asked from the door. “It’s where I keep my grandfather’s fob watch.”

  Eveline’s canvas lace-ups were by the bed. There had been a pair of extraordinary stilettos in the suitcase which were there no longer. The shoes were at the bottom of the empty wardrobe, neatly arranged side by side amidst the dust and fluff. They were green satin with a large pink rose detail. I could feel a small, hard object at the tip of the left shoe. I tipped it out. The bullet winked up at me. It had been polished, and it had a mark, a small zigzag across a triangle, scratched onto its surface. Greg hung off the doorpost, waiting.

  “What’s that there?” he asked, pointing into the wardrobe’s interior.

  There was a piece of paper inserted, half-hidden, between the frame and a side panel. Slowly, I unfolded it, hoping against hope that it would solve the question of Eveline’s identity. It was a photograph — an A4 photocopy of a head and shoulders shot — of a bespect
acled smiling young black man. His smile was spliced by a deep crease running down his head. The other fold practically decapitated him.

  “Let’s see,” Greg says, practically falling into my chest for a closer look. “He’s a bit young for a sugar daddy.”

  Underneath us, a door creaked open and closed. Eveline was back in the house.

  “You don’t keep cash hanging around?” Greg asked, knowing full well that I did.

  Chapter 12

  Greg’s wages were still intact under my mattress but that didn’t stop me from growing more and more resentful and angry with the girl I called Eveline. Her very presence was jeopardising the precarious peace I’d found at the château. I didn’t want it broken. I was still too fragile after London.

  I didn’t trust myself to speak to her. For the rest of the day, I worked furiously in one of the first floor rooms, preparing the walls for paint. I didn’t make lunch, and Greg didn’t come looking for it. Nor did Eveline.

  Passing through the hall in the mid-afternoon, I caught sight of Eveline in the salon. Again she had been rummaging around — and so openly, I didn’t think that Greg was right to call it snooping. Certainly I couldn’t detect any guile in a girl who squinted at her reflection in the Venetian mirror, trying on the prescription glasses that I’d been keeping for charity. She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice me. There must have been twelve or so pairs of glasses and Eveline, it seemed, was going to try them all. ‘Good,’ I thought, softening a little because she looked so like a child playing innocently. ‘She’s bored. Maybe she won’t need the push from me.’

  I stopped work only when Greg shouted up the stairs that he’d see me in the morning.

  For supper, I made rice with tinned green beans and tomatoes. I boiled a tin of frankfurters. I called Eveline and she hovered shyly, in the doorway. I didn’t welcome her. I didn’t encourage her to enter with expansive hand gestures in case she didn’t understand me — when we both knew full well that she did. I was sick and tired of playing silly games and being made to feel like an idiot.

  I banged the plates of food down on the table. We ate in a tense silence because I wasn’t talking — me, who was no good at small talk and yet had spent hours those last few days spouting light pleasantries in the face of silence. I could feel her eyes travelling across my face, watching. She pushed the salt towards me. I took it without acknowledgement. She offered me water by picking up the jug. I nodded. I wouldn’t catch her eyes. I focussed on the hollow in her neck with its two delicate bones. The silence between us magnified every move she made. I hardly touched my meal because suddenly I was aware of the sounds I made as I ate. As I started to clear away the plates, Eveline’s hand brushed against mine. It was very slight, but it was a blandishment. It gave me courage.

  “Why did you take the gold chain?”

  For a second, her eyes registered shock — quickly erased and replaced with the familiar blank look of incomprehension. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with her. I took the back stairs up to the ground floor and her room. I snatched the chain still draped on the mirror. I was surprised to see Eveline still in the kitchen waiting for me. I’d half expected her to go.

  “This,” I said.

  Her hand reached out to take the chain and I hid it behind my back. Our eyes locked together. Hers were full of despair.

  “Tomorrow, first thing,” I said, “You have got to go. I can’t deal with you anymore. You are doing my head in — literally. This not speaking, pretending not to understand English…” It gave me great satisfaction to see her eyes flash with anger.

  Then the eyes switched into their non-communicative mode and her face realigned itself so that it was absolutely expressionless, the mouth immobile. She took a plate and let it clatter into the sink. The sullen sound resounded around the room.

  “I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” I said, enjoying my moment of triumph as she retreated from the kitchen.

  I swam that evening. I was desperate to reinstate the routine I had had before Eveline arrived. It had become such a ritual for me to peel off my sticky clothes after Greg had left for the working day and to slip into the pool. I passed Eveline on the terrace. She was sitting in my chair, staring out at the view. She could have been meditating, she was so still. I said nothing as I passed by. I had nothing more to say.

  The water was lovely. It was like slipping into a warm scented bath except that the perfume was of lavender and pine, cracked by the heat of a long day in the sun. I struck out. It was bliss. I could feel the tension leaving my body and my mind settling.

  When I got out of the pool, it was almost dark. Eveline was no longer on the terrace but I thought I could see her silhouette, head bent, walking near the chapel.

  Tom rang that evening. I wonder sometimes if he had a sixth sense.

  “How’s tricks?”

  He was out on a street, raising his voice above the traffic.

  “I’ve asked her to leave. I should have taken your advice in the first place…”

  A siren screeched past.

  Tom only heard the first part of what I said.

  He gave a great sigh of relief. “Definitely?”

  “Have you…” Another siren. I gave up trying to ask if he had circulated my photo of Eveline.

  “Great. Just going into a meeting.”

  “What? This late? It must be ten o’clock your end…” Another siren.

  “Catch you later!” He cut the connection.

  I had a wonderful dream that night. Tom and I were in Devon and it was as if our father had never died. We were playing on the beach, with our mother not far off, sitting reading, shaded by a long finger of shadow from one of the pines which fringed the bay. Tom was laughing, throwing back his head, showing all his pearly little baby teeth while I was trying to pull him down to the shore line where the waves lapped and the light sparkled like little diamonds caught in the sea. I woke once, disturbed by a creaking sound, but I managed to submerge myself back into the same dream except that time all four of us were sitting at the kitchen table eating fish fingers doused in tomato ketchup while our father’s hand lay on our mother’s lightly freckled arm and he looked lovingly at us, a true pater familias.

  *

  I woke hungry, immediately thinking of what I should buy at the boulangerie. Pains au chocolat. Maybe Eveline would like a little chocolate to set her up for her journey but then my heart sank at the thought of facing the girl, if she didn’t speak how the hell would I know where to drive her?

  The kitchen was particularly gloomy in the frail, early morning light. I was puzzled to see the door to the archway wide open. I was sure I had locked it the night before, but then I hoped against hope that it was Eveline’s way of telling me that she had actually left. That she had gone.

  I saw it then. Coiled on the floor. The head raised. The jaws open. The tongue flicking. Hissing. I opened my mouth to scream — but I couldn’t. I was facing a snake, not the terrifying prospect of death and I still couldn’t. A few choked sounds emerged from my throat. I was on the verge of blacking out.

  Eveline appeared. She just arrived in the middle of the kitchen. I saw her disappear in the direction of the range and reappear with a pair of tongs. She wasn’t cowed by the hissing. She crouched down and caught the snake with a swift pincer movement. Pinioned, it thrashed in the air. She held it at arm’s length and disappeared out into the archway. I sank into a chair.

  She must have been gone five minutes at least. By then I had calmed down but was still shaking uncontrollably. Eveline leant over me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. Her strong body was a source of strength and I held her tight, listening to the rhythmic beating of her heart until the trembling subsided.

  “Thank God you were here,” I kept saying over and over again.

  Gently she disengaged from me. She moved towards the kitchen door. It was then that I noticed the suitcase and panicked at the idea of being left alone.

  “Please don’t go
,” I begged. “Stay a little longer.”

  Greg snorted when I told him. “Ain’t that a coincidence.”

  “What?”

  He glared. “She knows how frightened of snakes you are.”

  I shook my head disbelieving.

  “I don’t trust her,” he said softly, “as far as I could throw her. What about the gold chain she nicked?”

  “She didn’t steal it. I’m not even sure that it is ours. Maybe we’re doing her an injustice.”

  “You should be careful. Before you know it, she’ll have squatters’ rights.”

  Chapter 13

  After that dreadful morning, there was a feeling of happiness, like a shadow had been lifted, about the place. Eveline stopped drifting around the house and started to help. She still looked through cupboards, but this time to empty them of their contents, sort through the junk and to clean the shelves as I had shown her, with a bowl of warm water and a cloth. Only once she seemed troubled, when she showed me a plastic bag full of what looked like little plastic stirrups. I knew I knew what they were, but I had to think hard. “They’re nose clips,” I told her, “for swimming.” I felt like a mother, handing down domestic traditions to a daughter. She became quite the model guest. When I looked into her room her bed was made without a crease on the counterpane.

  Tom didn’t call to tell me that he had received and had circulated Eveline’s photograph. He didn’t even call to check that Eveline had left, like I’d promised. I tried a couple of times to phone him to tell him that Eveline was, after all, going to stay on for a while. All I got was his P.A. who gave me to understand that my pleas for him to return my calls were not of high importance. I tried his mobile. Again, no response. I started to worry that I was putting Tom in an invidious position — that, in allowing her to stay, I had overstepped my authority and that Eveline could have some arcane squatter’s right over the property like Greg suggested.

  So a couple of days later, first thing in the morning, I told Greg that I was going into the main town. I wanted to ask the British Consul’s advice about what to do with a person who turns up, about whom you know nothing, who doesn’t speak, seems to be very nice and seems to be quite happy to stay and doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. Even as I was saying it, I knew it was an excuse to escape the château for a while and to be on my own.