The Stranger Came by Frederic Lindsay Read Free Book Online Page B

was surprised by the outskirts of the city.
    'Are you driving too fast?'
    'I always drive fast.’ He raised an eyebrow. It was unlike her to question what he did.
    'It's just,' she tried to bring the idea into focus, 'just that I wondered if you haven't begun to drive more quickly. I've felt that recently without realising it.’
    'No,' he said. 'I shouldn't think so.’
    'Do you remember Jenny Craigie?' she asked on impulse.
    'Should I?'
    'She was my friend when I first met you. A stout girl, but always smiling – really rather a pretty face. She used to complain, “Oh, not pheasant again!” Whenever she got a parcel sent her from home. Her father was a gamekeeper, you see, not rich or anything. Usually, in fact, she was short of money. That's what made it so funny – “Oh, not pheasant again!” '
    'And I met her?'
    'Oh, yes. She went abroad though, just after we graduated. Somewhere extraordinary like Iceland. I wrote to her but never had a reply.’
    He laughed on a note of exasperation. 'Why are we talking about her then?'
    'I suppose she wasn't a keeping in touch sort of person...I was thinking about what you said the other day. And I remembered Jenny saying, Your Maitland should have been a pirate.’
    'Silly thing to say,' but she smiled when, after a moment, he murmured, 'funny I don't remember her. She sounds a bit of a character.’
    'I knew some interesting people. She wasn't your type.’
    'Oh, type … What was it I said the other day?'
    'You said, “All the fun's gone since the Garden Noamsky dug his own grave – and that's the deep grammar of that !” ' And spread out his arms pushing with the palms of his hands as if the hills round the campus were crowding in on him. Standing there by the edge of the frozen loch.
    She saw that he was smiling across at her. 'I think it sounded funnier when I said it.’ And in the voice of an Irish comedian, 'It's the way you tell them!'
    'It didn't sound funny to me. It sounded as if you felt you had made a mistake . And I couldn't understand why. You've made such a success of your life.’
    'Sam Wilson with my life – or Marshall or Turner – for them my life would be a success. It isn't good enough for me.’
    She was accustomed to the restless flow of his talk and to its touches of excess. He let the silence run on, however, and she thought about what he had said and found she disliked it. She really disliked it a great deal.
    'I don't think I've ever heard you being so … ' she searched and could only find, 'humourless.’ As soon as she had used the word, she regretted it. If he had been angered, she would not have been able to defend using it.
    After a silence, he said, 'You shouldn't take things I say casually so seriously.’
    'You sounded serious,' she said, concentrating on the flow of shop fronts as they left Haymarket behind.
    'Perhaps I was irritated because they don't give out Nobel prizes for linguistics. All those molecular biologists are hogging them.’
    After all it was she who had been humourless. Her attention was diverted by a change in their route. Instead of going along Princes Street, he had swung right and was beating successive traffic lights on the amber speeding up Lothian Road. 'Didn't I say? We're picking up Monty Norman.’
    Just into a street of shabby brownstone tenements, he reversed into a space in a line of parked cars.
    'Come up with me to fetch him,' he said. 'There's no point in getting chilled sitting here.’
    As they walked along looking for the number, he mused, 'This would have been a fashionable area once, before the First World War perhaps. Now it's all sub-lets, students and multi-occupations. Give it a year or two and the students will be few and far between, the way things are going. There are development plans in the offing too, I believe. We should buy one, Lucy. Rent it out. The place will be sandblasted back into fashion and we'll clear thirty thousand.’
    Her husband did not impress her when he talked of ways