When she arrived back Sunday evening she found the girl close to hysterics. She said that on Saturday she had gone to pull the curtains across the French doors at dusk and had found a strangely contorted face, a man’s face, pressed against the glass, staring at her from the garden. She claimed she had fainted and had almost had her baby a month too early right there on the livingroom carpet. Then she had called the police. He was gone by the time they got there but she had recognized him from the afternoon of the tea; she had informed them he was a friend of Christine’s.

They called Monday evening to investigate, two of them. They were very polite, they knew who Christine’s father was. Her father greeted them heartily; her mother hovered in the background, fidgeting with her porcelain hands, letting them see how frail and worried she was. She didn’t like having them in the livingroom but they were necessary.

Christine had to admit he’d been following her around. She was relieved he’d been discovered, relieved also that she hadn’t been the one to tell, though if he’d been a citizen of the country she would have called the police a long time ago. She insisted he was not dangerous, he had never hurt her.

“That kind don’t hurt you,” one of the policemen said. “They just kill you. You’re lucky you aren’t dead.”

“Nut cases,” the other one said.

Her mother volunteered that the thing about people from another culture was that you could never tell whether they were insane or not because their ways were so different. The policeman agreed with her, deferential but also condescending, as though she was a royal halfwit who had to be humoured.

“You know where he lives?” the first policeman asked. Christine had long ago torn up the letter with his address on it; she shook her head.