The Stranger House (40 page)

“And at last it came. It was on a Saturday. My mates kept me busy all day, and that night Dad and the regulars put on a bit of a party for me here in the pub. Sam didn’t come. I didn’t mind. What he and I were going to do to celebrate didn’t need a roomful of people. Next day, Sunday, I went to church in the morning. Sam was taking the service. He kept on looking towards me from the pulpit then looking away. God, I could hardly keep still in my seat, people must have thought I’d got worms! Sam and I usually met on a Sunday night after evensong but I couldn’t wait. I helped Dad in the bar that
lunchtime till it got towards closing—it was two o’clock on a Sunday back in them days—then I told Dad I’d do the clearing up when I got back—he liked to go fishing on a Sunday afternoon—and I set off up to the vicarage.

“I knew the vicar took the Sunday School in the church at two o’clock, and as I went by at about five to, I saw him and his housekeeper going in as usual with armfuls of books and such to get things ready. Sam had his Bible class in the vicarage at three. That gave us a good hour. Long enough, I thought. But no time to waste.

“I went at him like a … I don’t know what. I kissed him, I caressed him, I felt him roused, and when he didn’t move quick as I wanted, I even took his hand, God help me, and put it between my legs. It must have been like dipping it into a bowl of hot honey.

“And he pulled away.

“I didn’t know what was happening. He was talking, saying that he couldn’t, not till we were married, his conscience wouldn’t let him, we had to wait, stuff like that. I wasn’t listening. I was bewildered, ashamed, angry, humiliated. I opened my mouth to yell at him. Then there was a tap at his door.

“I straightened my clothes. All I wanted to do was get out of there. It was Pete Swinebank outside. He was only a kid then, just eleven. I’d forgotten he might still be around. It didn’t matter now anyway. I pushed by him and headed back here to the pub.

“Dad had gone off fishing as usual, but there were still a few men in the bar, drinking up. He trusted his regulars, Dad. And it was true what they say about the old days, you didn’t need to lock your front door, at least not in the countryside. Someone shouted at me as I went past the barroom door, but I didn’t stop, I just headed
straight up the back stairs to my bedroom. I flung myself on the bed and lay there crying.

“A bit later I heard the regulars leave. But not all of them. There was a knock at my door. Then it opened. And Thor looked in.”

She paused and turned her gaze once more to the far end of the table. Sam turned her head. Rapt by Edie’s narrative, she’d forgotten all about the presence of another listener. Somehow he didn’t look like himself, but older, careworn. Even when their gazes met, he didn’t smile.

Edie Appledore said, “Thor asked me if I was all right. He’d brought a tray up with tea and biscuits. I sat up and looked at myself in the mirror. I was a mess. But Thor didn’t seem to notice. He poured the tea, took a flask out of his pocket and added a shot of Scotch. He said it would do me good, then he sat on the end of the bed and we smoked a couple of cigarettes and talked. He was always good for a laugh, Thor. One of my favourites in the bar. Easy to talk to. I found myself telling him what had happened. He said Sam must be mad … the loveliest lass in the valley … now, if it had been him—that kind of stuff, just what I wanted to hear. And somehow, it seemed inevitable that after a while he put the tray on the floor and lay down beside me, and suddenly my body was on the boil again, and our clothes were off and he was on top of me and I was yelling encouragement …

“And that was how Sam found us when he pushed open my door.”

She stood up abruptly and started opening drawers.

“I gave up smoking twenty years ago, but I could do with one now,” she said. But her voice suggested she was
just looking for an excuse to turn her back and hide her tears.

Thor Winander spoke, simply and undramatically.

“So you see, young Sam, your namesake was the very best of men, and my dearest friend, and I killed him. By the time I got dressed and went after him, he had vanished. I didn’t realize then it was for good. We were wrong to try and fob you off with evasions and half-truths, but it wasn’t clear that any of this really had anything to do with you. Pain makes you selfish, and just about everyone in Illthwaite feels pain when they recall we had a man like Sam Flood in our midst and he chose to kill himself. What they don’t know and what I’ve never had the courage to tell them is that that guilt isn’t theirs. It’s mine alone. I killed him.”

“We
killed him, Thor,” said Mrs Appledore gently, “Don’t take it all on yourself. But I hope you can see now, lass, that whoever abused little Pam Galley, it wasn’t Sam Flood. He never did a dishonourable thing in his life. He loved me. I offered myself to him, I put his hand between my legs and he had the willpower to turn away. You don’t think a man like that could have abused a child, do you?”

Even if Sam had still thought it, in the face of such loss and grief, she would have found it hard to say so. But when she ran the equations across the blackboard in her mind, she found the conclusion proved beyond all doubt.

“No,” she said, “I don’t. I’m sorry. It must have been terrible for you …”

“Must have been? Still is. Time heals, you can forget most things. But you never forget your own birthday. And every one I’ve celebrated for forty-odd years now
I’ve had to think, tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day the only man I ever really loved drowned himself because of me. You should take a look at the birthday cards I get. No one round here knows all the truth, but they saw what Sam’s death did to me, and they’ve got long memories. I don’t get many of them jokey cards, believe me.”

“I’m really sorry,” repeated Sam, rising, “Look, I’d better go.”

“Go where? You got somewhere to stay?”

She hadn’t. Nor had she thought about it. She hadn’t thought about much but her grandmother for the past few hours.

“Thought not. You can’t go rushing off into the night looking like that—you’d frighten the owls. Your room’s not taken. Get yourself back in there for tonight at least.”

Edie Appledore was right. The prospect of driving off and looking for a room somewhere was less than appealing.

“Is that OK? Thanks a lot. I’m really sorry for bringing all this pain back to you.”

“At least I’ve not cut my hair off,” said Mrs Appledore, “You’d best start wearing a hat tomorrow, else folk will think you’ve escaped. We’ll talk more in the morning, dear. You’ve likely still got questions to ask.”

“One or two,” said Sam, making her way to the door, “Just one more now. I take it my grandmother had been shipped off to Australia before this happened.”

“Oh yes. Couple of weeks.”

“And from what you say, I can’t see that my namesake would have been all that keen on this. So how did it happen?”

“No, he wasn’t too happy. He talked to me about it a lot. That was one of the things I loved about him. He talked to me about everything, like I was fifty rather than fifteen. It was only when it came to sex he remembered my age.”

She laughed, with surprisingly little bitterness. It seemed to Sam that despite their feelings of guilt at their involvement in his death, Edie and Thor had memories of her namesake so delightful they transcended negative feelings.

“He was really concerned about little Pam. She trusted him more than anyone else in the world, I think. But even with Sam it was a silent trust. She never talked about what was going on inside. But Rev. Paul was pushing him all the time, saying something had to be done about the child. Clearly she couldn’t go back to Foulgate. The only alternative seemed to be social services, though we called them something different back then. Once they got their hands on her, she’d just have vanished into some children’s home, and Sam refused to countenance that. Then the vicar and Dunstan got their heads together. Dunny had lots of connections in the Catholic Church, of course, charities and orphanages, that sort of thing. It was just after the Pope had made him a knight or something, and the nuns all thought the sun shone out of his arse. He knew all about this scheme for sending orphans to Australia. The way him and Rev. Paul told it, most of them were snapped up for adoption by caring families as soon as they arrived. It seemed an ideal solution. Sam had doubts, but finally he was persuaded this was the best on offer for the kid. A new chance in a new land where the sun always shone and the rivers ran with milk and honey—how could he stand in
the way of that? But no one knew the lass was pregnant. You’ve got to believe that, dear. No one knew she was pregnant.”

“I believe you,” said Sam. She looked with some regret at the chocolate cake. Somehow in the circumstances it didn’t seem right to ask if she could take a slice to bed with her.

“Yes, I believe you,” she repeated, “But if you think that makes it any better, you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ll say goodnight.”

Seated on his rickety chair, staring at his laptop which was perched on the dressing table, Mig Madero heard the stairs creaking. No reason he should recognize the Australian girl’s tread, but he knew it was her.

Her steps were on the landing now. As they reached his door, they hesitated. He found himself willing her to knock. But then the steps moved on.

He recalled words quoted in one of his seminary lectures—he couldn’t recall their source but it didn’t matter—
When God’s response to prayer is silence, maybe He’s telling you that you’re praying for something you can do for yourself.

He stood up, moved swiftly to the door and pulled it open.

Sam, her hand on the handle of her own door, looked round.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. Are you OK?”

“I’ve been better. You?”

“OK. I translated that document. Would you like to see it?”

He had a feeling that any direct reference to what had brought her back would have sent her straight into her room.

“Yes, I would,” she said.

He liked the way she didn’t hesitate.

She came into the room and he sat her before the computer then brought up the translation on the screen.

As she read it he stood looking down at her cropped skull. She’d made a real mess of it. He could see cuts and scratches in the skin over which scabs had not yet had time to form.

She said, “Wow. This Miguel, he’s that ancestor you were talking about?”

“Yes,” he said, “My lost ancestor.”

“And now you know what happened to him. That’s amazing.”

“I do not yet know everything, but I will know,” he said.

“I saw you in the bar with Woollass, the one whose daughter you fancy …”

“Gerry,” he said, “And no, I do not fancy Frek.”

“Fallen out, have you?” she said indifferently, “Shouldn’t worry. You fell out with her dad too, but now you’re drinking buddies. There was an old guy there too.”

“Dunstan Woollass. You took in a lot for someone who was so … upset.”

“I suppose I hoped someone would jump up with guilt written all over them and make a break for it, like in the old black-and-whites. Life’s not like the movies though.”

He smiled as he thought of his own cinematic fantasy.

“Sometimes it gets close,” he said.

“Does it? So what were you and the squires doing together?”

“I’ll tell you about it. But first things first.”

He went to his bag and took out a small medicine box.

“My mother insists I always travel with this,” he said, “As usual, she is right.”

He took out a small tube of ointment, squeezed some on to his index finger and gently began to rub it into one of the scratches on her skull. Instinctively she jerked away, then relaxed and did not flinch as his finger resumed contact. As he sought out and anointed her cuts, he gave her a quick sketch of what had happened to him that day, skipping over though not completely censoring his dealings with Frek.

When he finished he didn’t invite comment but tapped his finger gently on her skull and said, “So, are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“Why not?” she said, “It’s been a good day for finding out about ancestors. Or maybe not so good.”

He listened to her story without interruption.

When she finished, he said, “That is a truly terrible story. May God forgive all those concerned.”

“And that will make it OK, will it?” she snapped, “Well, you can tell this forgiving God of yours he needn’t expect any help from me. You not finished there yet?”

“Not quite.”

In fact he’d dressed even the smallest grazes, but he found himself reluctant to give up this excuse for touching her ravaged head.

Her gaze met his in the mirror. She glowered. He smiled. After a moment, she smiled back.

He said, “So we have been treading parallel paths. Perhaps after all we may turn out to be—what was that phrase you used?—an amiable pair?”

“An amicable pair,” she corrected, “Could be.”

“Anyway,” he went on brusquely, for fear his small diversion towards intimacy might drive her away, “we
are both near the final answers now. I wonder if we will want to hear them?”

“I don’t believe in final answers,” she said, “In maths, the best answers always ask new questions.”

“Is that what you meant when you said God was the last prime number? If you get the final answer, then you must have found God?”

“Maybe,” she said, “Or maybe I just meant that there is no last prime number. Euclid offered a proof two thousand years ago. Add one to the product of all known primes and you will have another prime, or a number one of whose factors is an unknown prime. It’s so beautiful it’s probably already in that book I told you about, but they should have put it in the Bible too.”

He thought, I’ll need to learn a new language if I’m to communicate with this woman.

He said, “That’s an oversight I must point out next time I’m invited to speak to the Vatican Council.”

She stood up and examined her head in the mirror.

“That should do the trick. You anoint me any more, you’ll have to make me a queen or something.”