Jane Shilling - The Stranger in the Mirror

It was the last tennis lesson of the summer holidays. There were no more idle sunny afternoons dawdling through the park, but a flurry of joyless last-minute shopping expeditions in pursuit of things with which more prudent mothers had equipped themselves weeks before. Alexander crammed his feet into stiff new shoes, shouldered his schoolbag with its pencil case full of cedar-smelling pencils and pristine rubbers, and set off disconsolately towards days chopped into arbitrary segments of maths, physics, chemistry and the rest, leaving behind an absence that reverberated in the silent house.

After the drifting expanse of summer the year seemed to gather speed as the leaves fell and the last roses were nipped by the first frosts. After Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes night came Alexander’s birthday – a sophisticated affair these days, marked by lunch in a restaurant and a trip to West Ham away at Chelsea. After that Advent and then, always wrong-footing me a little, always arriving just before I had managed to send the last of the cards, or ice the chocolate log still rolled up in a sugar-strewn tea towel, Christmas.

Alexander went to bed late now. Quite often I’d leave him sprawled in the dark living room, watching the homunculi on the television capering or gesticulating to bursts of tinny laughter while I went upstairs to bed. With some difficulty I persuaded him to go to bed before me on Christmas Eve, so that I could put the hidden presents under the tree and wrap the contents of the Christmas stocking on which he still insisted. It was just past midnight and I was working fast, wrapping the last of the stocking trash – a Teenage Decision-Maker die, its faces marked with HOMEWORK, CHILL OUT, WATCH TV, ANNOY YOUR PARENTS and so on – when the letterbox flap was quietly pushed open. A white envelope fell on to the mat before the letterbox slowly closed again with a click.

The lights of the Christmas tree flashed mechanically on and off. The house was silent. I hadn’t heard footsteps on the path, or the gate latch open. I sat with the half-wrapped die in my hand and my heart thumping, trembling as though someone had tried to break in.

Years of working at a table next to the front door hadn’t trained me not to regard the opening of the letterbox as a violation of my domestic security. The night after we moved in, I was woken in the small hours from a dead sleep by a muffled rhythmic banging. Still half asleep, I looked out of the window and saw a man rattling the letterbox, which was loose on its screws, as though he thought he could pull the whole door off. I wondered afterwards if it had really happened, or if it was an eerie bad dream – a companion piece to a recurring nightmare of a gang of jeering children who overran the house. Dream or reality, the incident had left me with a dread of the unexpected opening of that little hatch. Even the sound of the post arriving sometimes made me jump, but what I really hated was people peering in.

It happened surprisingly often. Jehovah’s Witnesses, men hoping to persuade you to change your electricity supplier, pushy boys selling expensive oven gloves and dusters door-to-door would advance up the path, bang on the door and, if there was no answer, push open the letterbox and squint in. Occasionally, if I hadn’t seen them coming in time to take refuge upstairs, I’d slide out of sight under the table, from which vantage point I once watched as an especially persistent would-be boyfriend manoeuvred a long-stemmed rose, bud-first, through the aperture – the flower on the end of its long stalk wavering about like the questing proboscis of some sightless, attenuated creature.

I finished wrapping the decision-maker die (CHILL OUT, it advised, as I folded the paper over it), and looked at the envelope on the mat which was, now I came to think of it, obviously a late Christmas card from a neighbour. I picked it up. My name was written on it in a familiar hand. It was a Nativity scene with a note inside, from James, the doctor for whose return I had longed so passionately.

For a long time after he had left me without a word, I told myself that one day he would come looking for me. One night there would come the sound of my front gate being unlatched, a footstep on my path, a knock at the door and I would open it and there he would be, standing on the doorstep. I would fall into his arms, and my long wait would be ended. As I stood looking at the card, there was a tap at the door. It was just as I had imagined. My lover had come looking for me. My long wait was over.

After a moment’s hesitation I opened the door and there he was, standing in the middle of the path, half turned away, as though he had changed his mind and was on his way towards the gate again, his hands clasped behind his back.

Hallo, I said. What a surprise, would you like to come in? Yes, thank you, he would. A drink, perhaps? No? Some coffee, then? No to that too. Well, do sit down, anyway.

So he sat on the edge of one of my little chairs, with his back wedged against the piano with the Nativity scene on top, and his knees brushed by the bushy branches of the too-large Christmas tree with its tinkling freight of silvery bells and spun-glass birds. And I perched on the sofa and waited for him to speak.

There was a pause. But years of working as a GP had rendered him extremely resourceful in tricky social situations. After a beat of silence he launched into a fluent stream of small talk. In the instant of deciding to open the door (rather than hide under the table until he’d gone away), I had braced myself for all sorts of exhausting drama. But for small talk I was unprepared. I balanced on the arm of the sofa as the flow of talk meandered gracefully from anecdote to anecdote. The central heating shuddered and died. It grew cold around us, but still he spoke.

I looked at the clock. It was almost 2a.m. Suddenly I felt overcome with confusion and misery. Why had he come here? What on earth did he want? I wondered whether, like the Duke of Wellington returning after years away at war to find his old love Kitty Pakenham so pale and altered that he no longer desired her, he was shocked by how much I’d changed. Perhaps he’d knocked at the door intending to make some dramatic declaration and been deflected into small talk by the sight of me. At any rate, I’d had enough.

Goodness, I said, getting up. Is that the time? He rose. Where was he staying? Oh, he was headed for home now. Home, I knew from the address on the card he’d put through the door, was several hundred miles away. It seemed a long trip to be making upon the midnight clear. Goodnight, then, I said.

I thought that was the end. But apparently it wasn’t. Postcards began to arrive: graceful, whimsical, affectionate. Occasionally he sent books – old hardbacks of Jennings, paperbacks of P.G. Wodehouse – to Alexander, who liked them and was pleased. From time to time he would take me out for dinner. Afterwards we would return to my house and sit for half an hour or so in awkward proximity by the unlit fireplace in my drawing room before he drove away again into the dark. After a handful of these excursions it occurred to me that he hadn’t come to London on other business, but was making a special journey – a round trip of many hundreds of miles – to eat dinner with me and drive home again afterwards.

Each time he came I thought that this must be the evening when he would address directly the thing that lay unspoken between us: that years ago, between one profession of eternal love and the next, he’d vanished without a word. I found its silent, oppressive presence impossible to ignore. It slouched on the hearthrug between us like some terrible old pet as we chatted uneasily in the drawing room. It loomed over the restaurant table, casting its distracting shadow over the plates of steak frites and poulet chasseur .