LOOK, STRANGER Read online

  The two men stared into each other’s eyes. Vereker thought: it is law and order with which this man is really concerned. Jarman said, ‘You’ve got your priorities wrong. Vicar. In my view, that is.’ He helped himself to marmalade and when Gwynneth returned they discussed details of an emergency meeting of the parochial church council.

  It was a quarter to eleven when Vereker left the Jarmans. When he got back to the house, Zoe would be there and they would talk about girls of Nan’s age. He quickened his pace. In Virginia Close men were washing their cars. One or two stopped to call out a cheerful good-day, and a woman supervising her husband paused long enough to issue an invitation to a wine and cheese party. He was a part of their landscape now, an odd feature to be pointed out to house guests from more sophisticated places. ‘There goes our mad American vicar. Don’t think we don’t have any curiosities in Helmsley!’ Vereker wasn’t worried what they thought of him. He had more important worries.

  The first thing he noticed when he entered the vicarage was the quiet; not the murmuring peace of early summer, but a quiet without resonance as though the current of life had been switched off. He went to the foot of the stairs and called out ‘Miss Lindsay’. No answer. He went up one or two steps and paused, looking up at the bedroom doors. He remembered doing the same thing a week after Alma’s death, seeing the door to her room ajar and a shaft of sunlight falling obliquely across the carpet. He called louder, ‘Miss Lindsay! Miss Lindsay!’

  The telephone began to ring. Of course! Something had delayed her and while he was out she had probably telephoned several times to explain. He hurried into the library and picked up the receiver.

  ‘. . . not excessive . . . could have been much worse. . . .’ It took Vereker a moment or two to realise that Colonel Maitland was talking about the damage to the church. ‘Pity you said that about tearing down the medieval structure, though.’

  Vereker said, ‘Yes, stupid of me. . . .’

  ‘I understood what you were getting at, of course, but I don’t suppose many of the rest of them did.’ Vereker looked about the room, noting that nothing had been disturbed by vacuum cleaner or duster. He felt scared as a lost child, abandoned in this house that was not his house, in this country that was not his country.

  ‘We used to have open air services when I was in Burma.’ Colonel Maitland was saying. ‘Splendid. Never felt the same inside a building. I went to hear Billy Graham for that reason. You know him, I expect?’

  Her role, though unspectacular, was more important than he had realized. That mid-morning cup of coffee to which he looked forward eagerly was not just a welcome stimulant; it was a reassurance that someone had given thought for his comfort.

  ‘A well-meaning man, but emotional. We had one or two of his converts here for a time; came expecting a revelation a day. A church can’t maintain that kind of emotional temperature, so they drifted off.’

  The tactful handling of a telephone call on his behalf not only saved him time, it was a gesture of sympathy. The wild flowers in the bowl on his desk gave him good cheer each morning.

  ‘But the army services were different. I had a talk with Slim about it once. Fine fellah. Slim. Much more sound than Montgomery.’

  The dusting, the hoovering, the polishing brought this dead house to life. These simple activities were her gift to him. Once given, a gift can’t be withdrawn. Can it?

  ‘I’ve got both of them,’ Colonel Maitland said. ‘I’ll lend them to you if you like.’

  Vereker said ‘Thank you’ and Colonel Maitland rang off.

  Vereker picked up the receiver and dialled Zoe’s number. When she answered, she said, ‘Oh hullo,’ as though she had been expecting him to ring her, but hadn’t wanted it. There was an awkward pause. ‘Oh dear!’ She sounded annoyed. ‘I was going to write to you. But now . . . I suppose. . . . Well, I’m afraid it’s just that I don’t think I can manage to come again.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Anyway, I will write.’

  ‘No, no, you mustn’t bother. I’m afraid we must have been a lot of trouble to you.’

  ‘No, you weren’t.’

  There was another pause, and then Vereker said, ‘Well, thank you for letting me know.’

  She said she was sorry and he said she mustn’t be sorry. He did not know which of them put the receiver down first.

  He was busy preparing his sermons for the rest of the day and on Sunday he was busy all day. At supper on Monday, Nancy said, ‘Zoe hasn’t been for a couple of days. Perhaps she isn’t well. Shouldn’t you call on her?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be appropriate,’ he answered.

  The next morning he set out to call on her. The damp meadow was threaded with wild flowers, but it was not the slender grace of Ragged Robin, or the modest charm of Scarlet Pimpernel with which he was concerned as he hurried along the footpath. He was thinking that her decision not to come to the vicarage any more had been made after that scene with the police. She had realized something, he had seen it in her eyes.

  He did not pause to look through windows; he went to the front door, lifted the heavy knocker and banged it down hard. It was only then that he asked himself what he would say if it was Tudor Lindsay who answered the door. In fact, no one came to the door. For the first time, Vereker wondered what had happened when the two cousins returned to the house after the scene with the police. He hammered on the door more urgently. Nothing stirred. He was by now a little alarmed, and he was about to turn away with some wild idea of trying to find an open window, when he heard the creaking of the stairboards. He waited, his heart beating fast. Footsteps crossed the hall, the heavy latch was lifted, and there was Zoe Lindsay, dressed in faded blue slacks and an old pullover with sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

  He said foolishly, ‘You’re all right, then?’

  She looked startled and not entirely pleased. ‘You’d better come in.’ She stood aside for him to cross the threshold and then shut the door. They stood close by the door. She looked at him speculatively, as though considering what to do with him now she had let him in. After a moment, he saw in her eyes that she had made a decision. He felt it was important, but he had no idea what it was. ‘I’m working upstairs.’ She turned towards the stairs and he followed her. ‘That’s why I took some time to answer the door.’ Her manner towards him had changed, but it was difficult to say in what way.

  They walked down a long corridor with doors on one side and windows on the other overlooking the orchard. The apple trees were heavy with blossom and their sweet scent hung faintly in the air. At the end of the corridor four narrow steps led to an attic room; he had a glimpse of sloping ceilings before she pushed the door wide open. It was a larger room than he had anticipated, running the width of the house, with windows at each end. It was sparsely furnished with a cane armchair, a day-bed with paintings propped on it, work-tables and easels. There were books on the floor, some arranged neatly against the skirting board, while others, propped open, were scattered haphazard over the floor.

  ‘I’m an illustrator,’ she said. ‘Mostly children’s books.’

  He looked round the room. ‘Is this why you stayed away? Because you had work to do here?’

  ‘No. I haven’t done any professional work for some time. I stayed away because I thought you were better off without the Lindsays.’

  ‘That’s absurd.’ He was a little apprehensive as to what was to come. He could still smell the apple blossom and he wished she had taken him out in the garden instead of bringing him up here.

  In the basement, when the police were questioning Milo, she had seen something that no one else had seen and she had been shocked. He was quite prepared to talk to her about that, if she chose to confide in him; but for that to suffice he should have come sooner. Since then, shock had had repercussions. Things moved fast in Helmsley; he was always a little behind events, bewildered and unprepared. He felt like a middle-aged Alice.

  ‘Why don’t you do any professiona
l work now?’ he asked to gain time. ‘Is it hard to come by? I don’t know much about the book trade.’

  ‘I’d better tell you about myself,’ she answered abruptly. ‘Tudor and I were lovers, you knew that? He couldn’t bear to be excluded from anything I was doing. He said it was bad for me to work here on my own. Whenever he was at home, he came up here with me; he would study my drawings and tell me what they revealed about my subconscious. Loathsome things!’ Her face puckered in disgust. ‘Gradually, I found I couldn’t draw; as soon as I started I was afraid of what I was revealing about myself. I suppose I could have locked him out of the room; but it would have destroyed my pride in my work if I had had to do it behind locked doors like a pornographer. So I stopped. That was why Genevieve Draisey suggested I should help at the vicarage. She thought I ought to be occupied.’

  Vereker looked down at his shoes and saw that they were caked with mud. ‘From my point of view, you were very usefully occupied.’

  ‘I am odd. Haven’t you noticed? I see the nuns, Tudor deduces from my sketches that I live on the borders of insanity.’ She spoke fiercely.

  ‘You may see the nuns,’ Vereker turned his left shoe to the side, wondering if he had muddied all her carpets, ‘but I’m sure you are not insane.’

  ‘Make me sure. I want you to tell me what you think of my sketches.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about art,’ he protested.

  ‘I don’t want an artistic judgement,’ she said impatiently. ‘My work is good, I know that.’

  He was the last person who should be asked for this kind of assessment, he thought wretchedly; he was always so conscious of other people’s separateness, their right to their own solution. He turned reluctantly towards the long table which was cluttered with line drawings, artist’s proofs, water colours; she must have decided to give herself a retrospective exhibition.

  He began to study the exhibits, afraid of what he might find; he could not bear the thought that there were maggots in this woman’s mind. Almost without exception they were illustrations of myths and fairy stories; and they did indeed reveal the topography of the artist’s mind, so that the observer could trace the recurrent themes and the contours in which they were contained. The landscape of Zoe Lindsay’s world was dark, a landscape seen through a gauze of mist or in a shaft of moonlight. There was a multitude of little creatures, gnomes, elves, pixies, who dwelt on the fringes of this landscape and formed a decorative frieze around many of the pictures. In the heart of the pictures, bounded by this frieze of half-malign, half-benevolent creatures, there were prisoners- children, maidens, princesses. Only the young men rode proudly across the distant golden fields. The prisoners all looked outward; hopefully waiting for release, they peeped from between the slats of log cabins, through the bars of a castle window, from a cave on a mountainside. All, that is, except the sleeping beauty, who must lie immobilized on her bed until one of the young men comes to give her life. There was a series of sketches of her, lying with hair streaming about the submerged dreamer’s face, while outside the window one after another of the young men rode indifferently by. There was not, Vereker noted, a picture of the beauty being woken in the accepted manner. He wondered how the particular story she was illustrating had ended.

  Another theme that was interwoven with that of the Prisoner was the Quest. But this was not the quest for the Grail, there were no knights here. This was the quest of the children for the key to a locked door, a path through a wood, a star to follow. It was the quest of the maidens who seemed always to be gazing into mirrors. Even the Wicked Queen, staring into her mirror, was taking part in the quest: her eyes demanded something more from the mirror than the assurance that she was fairest of them all.

  There was one drawing which was different from all the others. There was no landscape with mountains, no valleys, no frieze of Little People, no distant golden boys. In the foreground, there was a shadowy figure of a woman, back view, dark hair merging into the drifting cloak which enveloped her. In the centre, a pair of hands held a great crystal in which was reflected the face of the woman. But whereas the figure that gazed into the crystal was only a suggestion of a woman, a tentative idea, half-formed, incidental, the face in the crystal, brought into being by a few bold strokes, had above all qualities, clarity; neither beauty nor personality, passion or repose, but clarity. She was neither dark nor fair, for only the essential features were there, eyes, nose, mouth; it was like a face drawn on a smooth white stone, made radiant by refracted light. Vereker noticed that the hands which held the bowl did not seem to be holding it aloft so much as presenting it to the woman. He wondered what Tudor had made of this picture. But perhaps Tudor had not seen it; some sticky substance, glue probably, had caused it to adhere to one of the sleeping beauty series, and Vereker himself might have missed it had he not picked up the last of the series to see whether the name of the book might be written on the back. Whatever Tudor might have made of it, it gave Vereker satisfaction. When he looked at it, he did not have the feeling that he was peeping into a private world. He was puzzled, and he wasn’t sure that he understood its meaning, but he liked it because it was assured and affirmative and he felt it could stand on its own, independent of its creator.

  He had come to the end now. He had not attempted to think what he would say to her; he had simply allowed the pictures to happen to him. Now, however, he went back to the beginning and studied them all again. This took some time. She had seated herself by the window, looking into the garden. She did not stir or turn her head; she might have been asleep for all he could tell. When he had finished, he went to her and touched her gently on the shoulder. ‘May I make my report now?’

  ‘Come and sit beside me. I must see your face.’

  He was disconcerted, and as a result he spoke at first with defensive asperity, like a schoolmaster who has been pinned down by a too-demanding pupil. ‘I have to confess that I have never been at ease in the fairy story world and these drawings of yours seem to me very disturbing because they are all about people who are on the outside of life trying to get in.’ He spoke slowly, ordering his thoughts. ‘But if I wanted to indulge in a little amateur psychology, one of the things to which I would call attention would be the liveliness of the figures, which look to me as if they would like to bust right out of their dream world.’ He was pleased about that, perhaps after all, he was acquitting himself rather well. He decided not to mention the face in the crystal, since he was not sure that he had been meant to see it, and went on. ‘The other thing I particularly noticed, was the strength of the composition, which suggested to me that the person who executed the work is more firmly in control of her mind than she herself imagines.’

  There was a pause. In the garden a thrush trilled unconcernedly and the sound of a car in the lane set a dog barking. Zoe roused herself and said, ‘Thank you.’ He realized that she had not been attending to what he was saying. How extraordinary women are! They beseech you for advice as though you were Solomon himself, and as soon as you start to speak their minds wander to other things. He wondered what she had been thinking about. Whatever it was, it seemed to have made her happy.

  Somewhere near at hand a car door slammed. Zoe started up. ‘That’s Tudor! I wasn’t expecting him.’ She moved towards the door. ‘Do you mind? I don’t want him to come up here.’ As they went down the stairs, she said, ‘When we got back yesterday morning the telephone was ringing; it was the police about one of his cases on the mainland. He was away for the night. I thought he would probably spend the week-end in Portsmouth; there’s a woman there he sometimes stays with.’

  Tudor was closing the garage doors when Zoe and Vereker came into the garden. As he came towards them, Vereker said idly, ‘You’ve got a pile of logs up against the fence. I should like to have a fire in the vicarage sitting-room. There’s an electric fire there now.’

  ‘You’d have to get the chimney swept,’ Tudor said. ‘I can give you the name of a sweep.’

  ‘A
nd logs?’

  ‘Do you want them sent to you? Or do you want to gather your own kindling?’

  ‘Oh, gather it myself, I think, don’t you? The complete ritual.’

  Zoe said, ‘We can tell you where to go for logs in the autumn.’

  They had been strolling across the lawn and had now reached the gate into the field. Zoe said to Tudor, ‘I forgot to go to the vicarage this morning and Mr. Vereker came across to see if I was all right.’

  Tudor said, ‘How very kind of him.’

  As Vereker walked away, Zoe called after him, ‘I will come to the vicarage as usual tomorrow.’

  Tudor demanded, ‘Why did he really come?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘That was a pretext. He was trying to find something out, wasn’t he?’

  ‘What is there for him to find out?’

  The sun was bright and he turned his eyes away from its glare. ‘I’ve been up half the night trying to find a J.P. to sign a care order. I’m too tired to think.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to bed? I’ll bring you soup.’

  He dragged a hand across his mouth in a gesture of irresolution. ‘Perhaps I will. Don’t bother with soup. It’s sleep I need.’

  They went into the house. Tudor looked up the stairs as though measuring the distance to his room. Zoe said, ‘Can you manage?’

  ‘Yes.’ He went up the stairs slowly, holding the banister rail, while Zoe watched from the hall. He drove himself hard at his work and had had sudden collapses before; but it seemed to her that at this moment he was like a person suffering from shock rather than overwork.

  When Tudor was in bed, Zoe returned to the studio and cleared away the drawings and paintings. She sorted them into three separate piles and put them away in the drawers of a map chest. The only one which gave her pause was the drawing of the woman gazing into the crystal; she looked at this in surprise, then shrugged her shoulders and put it in the top drawer of the chest.