Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

Margaret Gault turned.

An uncertain smile formed on her mouth, and he watched the spreading cushion of her lips and the revealed brilliance of her smile, the deep dimple in her right cheek and he thought, She’s beautiful.

“The bus stop,” he said. “I’m Chris’s father.”

“Oh.” The smile widened. “Yes.”

They stood opposite each other, silent for a moment. She seemed reluctant to leave, and yet he sensed an eagerness to leave, and he suddenly had the idea that she was afraid of him, and he thought, Am I that drunk?

And then for no reason that he could understand — it was not what he was thinking; it was the furthest thing from what he was thinking — he said, “You’re not so pretty.”

The smile faded from her mouth. There was, he noticed, a minuscule scar on her cheek. She seemed flustered for a moment, and then she picked up her package from the counter and said, “I must go. My husband’s waiting,” and she left the store.

When he got outside, the blue Chevy was gone. He drove home, pulled into the driveway, went into the house, and threw the bread onto the kitchen table.

“I just talked to a gorgeous blonde,” he said.

“Really?” Eve asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You couldn’t have talked very long,” Eve said. “She from the neighbourhood?”

“I think so. I saw her at the bus stop once.”

“Oh.” Eve nodded knowingly. “Margaret Gault,” she said. “Go wash your hands. Dinner’s ready. Chris! David! Dinner!”

Don Gault walked into the house with his hands in his pockets.

It was Monday evening, and he had put in a long, hard day at the plant. He had pulled down his tie and unbuttoned his collar the moment he’d stepped out of the automobile. Then, hooking his jacket over his arm, he had put both hands into his pockets, removing one briefly to open the front door, returning it to his pocket as he entered the house.

He wore a slender gold chain around his neck. A small locket containing a picture of his mother was cradled in the hollow of his throat, exaggerating the muscularity of his neck. He looked for Patrick in the living room, then crossed to the windows, walking past the cobbler’s-bench coffee table, and glanced out at the back yard. His son was nowhere in sight.

“Margaret!” he called.

“Don?” Her voice came from the upstairs bedroom.

“Hiya.”

“I’ll be down in a minute, honey.”

“Where’s the mail?”

“Kitchen table.”

“Okay.”

He threw his jacket over one of the chairs and went into the kitchen. The mail had already been opened, and Margaret had neatly stacked the slit envelopes in a little pile near the sugar bowl. He sat at the large round pine-top table and picked up the stack, thumbing through it quickly. Bills. Naturally, there’d be bills. There were always bills. He sat in the deepening darkness of the kitchen, the envelopes in his square, compact hands, his face vaguely troubled.

The face of Don Gault was curious in that it was absolutely clean. He wore his blond hair in a skull-tight crew cut which completed the immaculate square of his face. There was a geometric regularity to his features, an unblinking monotony about the straight blond eyebrows, the clean sweep of the nose, the hard unbroken line of the mouth. Only the eyes softened the face. Bright and blue, scattered with random flecks of white, they seemed at first as cold and clean as the rest of the face. But there was warmth there, and gentleness.

He was five feet nine inches tall, some four inches taller than Margaret in her stockinged feet, but inches did not matter with Don Gault. He was one of those perfectly proportioned men whose bodies have the flat, obdurate gleam of polished stone surfaces. The eyes were the only contradiction in the unbending geometry of Don Gault. And perhaps the eyes were the man.

It did not disturb him that Margaret had opened all the letters, including some addressed to him. He believed that marriage was an absolute partnership and the thought simply would never have entered his mind that there was anything in his mail which Margaret should not see.

Troubled, he thought only of the bills and of how difficult it was to earn money and hang onto it. For perhaps the fiftieth time he told himself he should have gone to college on the G.I. Bill after the war. He shouldn’t have let that opportunity go by. He always felt slightly inadequate in the presence of college men. He couldn’t exactly pin-point what it was about them that made him feel awkward. A certain slick façade, perhaps, or the arrogant knowledge that they were better equipped to lick, to defeat, life than he was.

In his heart he knew he would have been an absolute flop at school. He’d never had any patience with books or reading or sitting still and listening to another man talk. He was good with his hands, had always been. He could still remember the jewelry box he had made for his mother in a junior-high-school woodworking class.

“Did you make this, Donald?” she asked. “For me?” And he had nodded wordlessly, basking in her open admiration. “With your own hands? With your own hands?”

With his own hands, with these hands.

He held them out in front of him. They were good hands. They had been good to him.

I killed a man with these hands, he thought.

He immediately shoved the thought out of his mind. But like a nail driven too far into a narrow plank, the sharp tip of the thought protruded, catching at the fabric of his mind.

“Margaret!” he shouted, suddenly angry.

He put his hands into his pockets and walked into the living-room and then to the foot of the steps leading upstairs.

“Margaret!”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m coming.”

He waited, annoyed, and not knowing why, blaming it on the fact that he was hungry and there were no cooking smells in the house. She appeared at the top of the steps. She wore a tight black sweater and a flaring white skirt and exceptionally high heels.

“What are you supposed to be?” he said.

“What’s the matter?” She was smiling. She stood with one hand on the wooden railing, the other on her hip.

“Why do you always have to look like—” He bit off the sentence.

“Like what?” The smile was brilliant. Her hair, always wild, looked now as if she had purposely disarranged it before coming out of the bedroom.

“Like I don’t know,” he said harshly. “What are you always getting dressed up around the house for?”

“Don’t you want me to look pretty?”

“I don’t want you to look like a—”

“Like a what?” she asked quickly.

Her smile was beginning to infuriate him. “Never mind,” he said.

“I haven’t got anything on underneath,” she said.

“Margaret! For the love of...!

She came down the steps slowly, her hand gliding along the railing, burlesquing a movie siren, slithering down the steps, undulating her body, moistening her lips, the smile never leaving her mouth. In a sultry, sexy voice, she said, “Come on, big boy.”

“Where’s Patrick?” he asked.

“I sent him over to Betty’s.”

“Got this all planned out, huh?”

“Um-huh.”

She was a step above him now, so that her eyes were almost level with his. Her eyes were impishly bright, and the smile was fixed on her mouth, and he wanted to kiss her, pull her to him and cover her mouth with kisses. Her hand touched his shoulder, rested there a moment, and then slid over his chest, down, trailing fire behind it. She touched him, and he ached with the touch, and he felt himself come instantly awake, and her smile widened, widened until there was nothing in the room but her smile and her hand on him, and he thought, This is evil, this is evil.