You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [35]
After she leaves for the library, Paul sets out across the square, past the tables of books and china, heading into the narrow lanes. As he comes to the house and reaches out to knock on the low door, it opens and the old woman steps aside to let him enter.
“Good afternoon,” she says. “We never made our introductions yesterday. I’m Mrs. McLaggan.”
“Paul Lewis,” he says.
“Right. Mr. Lewis. I’m glad you’ve come.” They walk down the hall into the kitchen. “I’ll just be a minute,” she says, heading into the other room. It’s then he sniffs the air, finding it as thick and rank as the day before. A light comes on in the next room, the old woman calls to him, and Paul walks through the doorway.
Running along the far side of the room, completely obscuring the windows, is a wall of clear plastic gallon buckets filled with what appears to be petroleum jelly. They’ve been arranged in a single row and stacked from floor to ceiling. Along the adjacent wall stands a metal clothes rack on wheels holding twenty or more identical blue track suits. A sideboard across from this is laid with dishes of lamb, potatoes, and string beans. Mrs. McLaggan stands in the middle of the room under another naked lightbulb. At the center is a table set for two.
The low ceiling, the electric light, the pale brown walls, the strange provisions all give the room the feel of a way station on some forgotten trade route, or a bunker yet to hear news of the war’s end.
“Now, dear, I hope you’ll just help yourself to everything,” Mrs. McLaggan says, standing by her chair.
He is not hungry but fills a plate anyway and sits.
“Mrs. Lewis is getting on well at the university, then, is she?” she says, once she’s served herself and taken a seat.
“Yes.”
For a minute or two, they eat in silence.
“I was thinking perhaps you might meet Albert today,” she says. “I’ve told him about you. Difficult to know sometimes, but I think he’s keen to see you.”
“Do you do this often?”
“What’s that, dear?”
“Having guests you don’t know—strangers.”
Mrs. McLaggan looks down at her plate and smiles. “You’re not a stranger here,” she says. “In the restaurant the other night . . . How should I say it? . . . I recognized you somehow, not like I’d met you or such, but nonetheless. And then yesterday morning . . .” Her voice trails off.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” she asks. For years he’s had no alcohol because of medication—the warnings and the caveats.
“Sure,” he says.
She pours them each a glass. “My grandson’s not well, you see.” After saying this, she pauses, her eyes wandering left, then right, as if deciding how to proceed.
“Glenda, my daughter—she was awfully young when she had him. Father was some fellow I never saw. Course the old codgers round here never tire of saying, ‘Wasn’t so back in our day, was it then?’ I don’t know, though. Seems to me the world’s always had plenty of trouble to spare a bit for the girls . . . I suppose what’s different is she went off, left Albert with me. Would’ve been harder when I was young, that would—a woman going out into the world like that. But there we are. Manchester she went to first. Then London for a spell.”
She sips her wine.
“You try not to judge . . . Course when Albert got sick I rang. To tell her he’d gone into hospital. Tried the last number I had for her. No answer though, line disconnected. Been three years he’s been ill now.”
She looks up at Paul and smiles, wanly. “Here I am nattering on about my troubles.”
“It’s all right,” he says. He’s finished half a glass of wine. With the scent of it, the smell of the house has risen into his head again, but he fights it less now.
“You seem like a very sympathetic man,” she says.
When the meal is finished, they return to the kitchen and Mrs. McLaggan puts a kettle on the stove. “Shall we go up, then, and see Albert?”
“All right.”
She makes the tea