The Little Stranger (13 page)

He said this last more to me than to Betty, having looked up and caught my eye. Betty put down her head and moved on, and as I poured out the lemonade he wandered over to my side.

‘Extraordinary place this, isn’t it?’ he murmured, with a glance at the others. ‘I don’t mind admitting, I was glad to be invited, simply for the chance to have a bit of a look around. You’re the family doctor, I gather. They like to keep you on hand, do they, for the sake of the son? I hadn’t realised he was in such poor shape.’

I said, ‘He isn’t, as it happens. I’m here on a social call tonight, just like you.’

‘You are? Oh, I had the impression you were here for the son, I don’t know why … Rotten do, that, by the sound of it. Scars and so on. Doesn’t care for company, I suppose?’

I told him that, as far as I knew, Roderick had been looking forward to the party, but that he tended to take on too much farm work, and must have overtaxed himself. Mr Baker-Hyde nodded, not really interested. He drew back his cuff to look at his wrist-watch, and spoke through the end of a stifled yawn.

‘Well, I think it’s time I was getting my gang back to Standish—always assuming, of course, that I can prise my brother-in-law away from that lunatic piano.’ He gazed over at Mr Morley, narrowing his eyes. ‘Did you ever see such a grade-one ass? And he’s the reason we’re here! My wife, God bless her, is determined to see him married. She and our hostess cooked up this whole do, as a way of introducing him to the daughter of the house. Well, I saw in two minutes how that would turn out. Tony’s an ugly little brute, but he does like a pretty face …’

He spoke entirely without malice, simply as one chap to another. He didn’t see Caroline, looking our way from her place beside the hearth; he gave no thought to the acoustics of that queerly shaped room, which meant that murmurs could sometimes carry across it while louder comments were lost. He swallowed the rest of his drink and put down his glass, and then he nodded to his wife, who had just returned with Gillian. I could see that he was only waiting for the right kind of break in the conversation, now, to make his excuses and take his family home.

And so there came one of those moments—there were to be several, in the months that followed—that I would forever look back on with a sense of desperate regret—almost with guilt. For I could so easily have done something to ease his departure and speed him on his way; but if anything, I did just the opposite. Mr and Mrs Rossiter finished their latest account of one of Roderick’s youthful adventures, and though I’d barely exchanged a word with them all evening, as I made my way back to Miss Dabney I called over to them something—something perfectly inconsequential like, ‘And what did the Colonel make of that?’—which started them straight off on another long reminiscence. Mr Baker-Hyde’s face fell, and I was childishly glad to see it. I’d had a pointless, almost spiteful urge to make life difficult for him.

But I wish to God I had acted differently; for now something terrible happened to his little girl, Gillian.

Ever since her arrival she’d been keeping up a rather monotonous show of being frightened of Gyp, ducking ostentatiously behind her mother’s skirts whenever his friendly wanderings around the room took him near her. Just recently, though, she had changed her tack and begun to make small advances towards him. Mr Morley’s plucking at the harpsichord had, I think, begun to bother the dog; he had taken himself to one of the windows and had settled down behind a curtain. Pursuing him there now, Gillian drew up a footstool and began gingerly petting and stroking his head, chattering nonsense to him: ‘
Good
dog. You’re a
very
good dog. You’re a
brave
dog’—and so on, like that. She was partly out of our view, being over by the window. Her mother, I noticed, kept turning round to her, as if nervous that Gyp might snap at her, and once she called, ‘Gillie, be careful, darling!’—making Caroline snort slightly, for Gyp had the gentlest temperament imaginable, the only risk was that the child would tire him with her chatter and her constant dabbings at his head. So Caroline kept turning to Gillian, just as Mrs Baker-Hyde did; and now and then Helen Desmond or Miss Dabney, or one of the Rossiters, would glance over, attracted by the little girl’s voice; and I also found myself looking. In fact, I’d say that probably the only person who wasn’t watching Gillian was Betty. After going around with the toast, she had put herself over by the door, and had been standing there with her gaze lowered, just as she had been trained. And yet—it was an extraordinary thing, but none of us could afterwards say that we had been looking at Gillian exactly when the incident occurred.

We all heard the sounds of it, however—horrible sounds, I can hear them even now—a sort of tearing yelp from Gyp, with, laid across it, Gillian’s shriek, a single piercing note that sank at once to a thin, low, liquid wail. I think the dog, poor thing, was as startled as any of us: he came rushing away from the window, sending the curtain billowing, and distracting us, for a moment, from the child herself. Then one of the women, I don’t know which, saw what had happened and let up a cry. Mr Baker-Hyde, or perhaps his brother-in-law, gave a shout: ‘
Christ! Gillian!
’ The two men sprang forward, one of them catching his foot on a loose seam of carpet and almost falling. A glass was set hurriedly down on the mantelpiece and went crashing into the hearth. The little girl was hidden from me for a moment by a confusion of bodies: I looked and saw only her bare arm and hand, with blood running down it. Even then—I suppose the sound of the shattering glass must have put the idea in my head—even then I thought only that a window had broken, and cut her arm, and perhaps cut Gyp. But Diana Baker-Hyde had darted up out of her place and, pushing her way to her daughter, began to scream; and when I moved forward, I saw what she had seen. The blood was coming not from Gillian’s arm, but from her face. Her cheek and lip had turned into drooping lobes of flesh—had been practically severed. Gyp had bitten her.

The poor child herself was white and rigid with shock. Her father was beside her and had his trembling hand at her face, was advancing his fingers and drawing them back, not knowing whether to touch the wound or not; not knowing what to do. I found myself at his side without being aware of how I had got there. I suppose my professional instincts had taken over. I helped him lift her; we got her to the sofa and laid her flat; a variety of handkerchiefs were produced, and pressed to her cheek—one, from Helen Desmond, with dainty lace and embroidery, soon sopping scarlet. I did what I could to staunch the bleeding and to clean the injury up, but it was a difficult job. That sort of wound always looks worse than it really is, especially on a child, but I had seen at once that the bite was a bad one.

‘Christ!’ said Peter Baker-Hyde again. He and his wife were clutching at their daughter’s hands; the wife was sobbing. They both had blood on their evening clothes—I think we all did—and the blood was made vivid and ghastly by the brilliant chandelier. ‘Christ! Look at the state of her!’ He ran his hand across his hair. ‘What the hell happened? Why didn’t somebody—? What in God’s name happened?’

‘Never mind that now,’ I said quietly. I had the handkerchiefs still pressed hard to the wound, and was rapidly thinking the case over.

‘Look at her!’

‘She’s in shock, but she isn’t in danger. But she’ll have to be stitched. Stitched quite extensively, I’m afraid; and the sooner the better.’

‘Stitched?’ His expression was wild. I think he’d forgotten I was a doctor.

I said, ‘I’ve my bag with me, out in the car. Mr Desmond, will you—?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Bill Desmond breathlessly, running from the room.

I called to Betty next. She had hung back when everyone else had surged forward, and was looking on as if terrified—almost as pale as Gillian herself. I told her to go down and boil a kettle of water, and fetch blankets and a cushion. And then—gently, and with Mrs Baker-Hyde at my side, holding the bunched handkerchiefs awkwardly to her daughter’s face, her hand shaking, so that the silver slave bracelets slithered and rang—I took the little girl in my arms. I could feel the chill of her, even through my shirt and jacket. Her eyes were dark and lifeless, and she was sweating with shock. I said, ‘We’ll have to get her down to the kitchen.’

‘The kitchen?’ her father said.

‘I’ll need water.’

Then he understood. ‘You mean to do it here? You’re not serious! Surely a hospital—a surgery—Can’t we telephone?’

‘It’s nine miles to the nearest hospital,’ I said, ‘and a good five to my surgery. Trust me, I shouldn’t like to take to the roads with this kind of wound, on a night like tonight. The sooner we tidy her up, the better. There’s the loss of blood to think of, too.’

‘Let the doctor do it, Peter,’ said Mrs Baker-Hyde, beginning to cry again, ‘for God’s sake!’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ayres, moving forward and touching his arm. ‘We must let Dr Faraday see to it now.’

I think I noticed at the time that the man turned his face from Mrs Ayres and roughly shook off her touch, but I was too busy with the little girl to give his gesture much thought. Something else happened, too, which hardly struck me then, but which, when I remembered it later, I realised had set the tone for many of the events in the days that followed. Mrs Baker-Hyde and I had carefully taken Gillian to the threshold of the room, where we were met by Bill Desmond, my bag in his hand. Helen Desmond and Mrs Ayres stood anxiously watching us go, while Mrs Rossiter and Miss Dabney, in their distraction, stooped to pick up the shards of tumbler from the hearth—Miss Dabney incidentally cutting her own finger rather badly, and adding fresh blood-stains to the general gore on the carpet. Peter Baker-Hyde was following me closely, and was in turn being followed by his brother-in-law; but the latter, as he came, must have caught sight of Gyp, who had been cowering all this time beneath a table. Mr Morley stepped rapidly over to the dog and, with a curse, gave him a kick; the kick was a hard one, and made Gyp yelp. To the man’s amazement, I suppose, Caroline darted forward and pushed him away.

‘What are you doing?’ she cried. I remember her voice: shrill and strained and not at all like itself.

He straightened his jacket. ‘Didn’t you notice? Your damn dog just tore half my niece’s face off!’

‘But you’re making it worse,’ she said, getting down on her knees and drawing Gyp to her. ‘You’ve terrified him!’

‘I’d like to do more than terrify him! What the hell do you mean by letting him roam about the place when kids are here? He ought to be chained up!’

She said, ‘He’s perfectly harmless, when he isn’t provoked.’

Mr Morley had moved away; but now turned back. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

She shook her head. ‘Stop shouting, can’t you?’

‘Stop shouting? You saw what he’s done to her?’

‘Well, he’s never snapped before. He’s a house-dog.’

‘He’s a wild beast. He ought to be damn well shot!’

The argument went on, but I was only dimly aware of it, preoccupied as I was in safely manoeuvring the rigid child in my arms through the doorway and then around several corners to the basement stairs. And once I’d begun making my way down them, the raised voices grew faint. I found Betty in the kitchen, heating the water I’d requested. She’d brought the blankets and cushions too, and now, at my direction, and with shaking hands, she cleared the kitchen table and lay sheets of brown paper on it. I set Gillian down with the blankets around her, then opened my bag to sort through my instruments. So absorbed was I in these tasks that, when I took off my jacket to roll up my sleeves and wash my hands, I was astonished to find it a dress-jacket. I’d forgotten where I was, and thought I was in my regular tweeds.

The fact is, I was often obliged to perform this kind of small operation, either in my surgery or in my patients’ own homes. Once, while still in my twenties, I had been called to a farmhouse to find a young man with a dreadfully mangled leg, the result of a threshing injury. I had had to cut the leg off at the knee, at the kitchen table, just like this. The family had invited me to take supper with them a few days later, and we had sat at the same table, now cleaned of its stains—the young man sitting there along with us, pale, but cheerfully eating his pie, joking about the money he’d save on boot-leather. But those were country people, used to hardship; to the Baker-Hydes it must have looked dreadful, as I soaked the needle and thread in carbolic and scrubbed my knuckles and nails with a vegetable brush. The kitchen itself, I think, alarmed them, with its blunt Victorian fittings, its flagstones, its monster of a range. And after the over-bright saloon the room seemed horribly dim. I had to have Mr Baker-Hyde bring an oil lamp from the pantry and put it close to his daughter’s face, so that I had light enough to stitch by.

Had the girl been older I might have made do with a spray of ethyl chloride to freeze the wound. But I was afraid of her wriggling about, and, after I’d washed her with water and iodine, I put her into a light sort of sleep with a general anaesthetic. Still, I knew the operation would hurt her. I told her mother to rejoin the other guests upstairs in the saloon, and, as I expected, the poor little girl gave off a weak whimpering all the time I worked, the tears flowing ceaselessly from her eyes. There were no severed arteries to deal with, that was a blessing, but the tearing of the flesh made the job a trickier one than I should have liked—my main concern being how to minimise the scarring that would follow, for I knew it would be extensive even with the tidiest of repairs. The child’s father sat at the table, holding tightly on to her hand and wincing with every insertion of the needle, but watching me work as though afraid to take his eyes away—as though watching for a slip, so that he might check it. A few minutes after I’d started, his brother-in-law appeared, his face crimson from his argument with Caroline. ‘These
bloody
people,’ he said. ‘That daughter’s a lunatic!’ Then he saw what I was doing and the crimson sank from his cheeks. He lit himself a cigarette and sat smoking it some distance from the table. Presently—it was the only sensible thing he did all night—he got Betty to brew up a pot of tea and hand round cups.