The Little Stranger (14 page)

The others kept upstairs, trying to comfort the girl’s mother. Mrs Ayres came down once, to ask how matters were progressing: she stood for a minute and watched me working, anxious for the girl and clearly upset by the sight of the stitching. Peter Baker-Hyde, I noticed, wouldn’t turn his head to her.

The job took the best part of an hour, and when I had finished, and while the girl was still woozy, I told her father to take her home. I meant to follow in my car, call in at the surgery for one or two things, and join them at Standish, where I could see her into her bed. I hadn’t mentioned the possibility to her parents, because I thought it a very slight one, but there was the risk of blood poisoning or infection to be guarded against.

Betty was sent to alert the girl’s mother, and Mr Baker-Hyde and Mr Morley carried Gillian up the stairs and out to their car. She was more sensible now, and as they laid her down on the back seat she began, very pitifully, to cry. I had put strips of gauze across her face—but more for her parents’ protection than for hers, for the stitches and the iodine made the wound look monstrous.

When I went back to the bright saloon to say goodbye I found everyone still there, sitting or standing in silence, as if stunned—as if in the aftermath of an air-raid. There was still blood on the carpet and the sofa, but someone had taken a cloth and water to it and turned it into creeping pink stains.

‘A wretched business,’ said Mr Rossiter.

Helen Desmond had been crying. She said, ‘That poor, poor child.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She’ll be terribly marked, won’t she? What can have prompted it? Gyp isn’t a snappy dog, is he?’

‘Of course he isn’t!’ said Caroline, in her new, taut, artificial voice. She was sitting apart from the others, with Gyp beside her; he was visibly trembling, and she was stroking his head. But her own hands were shaking. The rouge was livid on her cheeks and mouth, and the diamanté comb hung crookedly in her hair.

Bill Desmond said, ‘Something must have startled him, I suppose. He must have fancied he saw something, or heard something. Did any of us shout, or make some movement? I’ve been racking my brains.’

‘It wasn’t
us
,’ said Caroline. ‘The girl must have been teasing him. I shouldn’t be surprised—’

She fell silent, as Peter Baker-Hyde appeared behind me in the passage. He had his coat and hat on, a streak of scarlet just showing on his forehead. He said quietly, ‘We’re ready, Doctor.’ He didn’t look at the others. I don’t know if he noticed Gyp.

Mrs Ayres moved forward. ‘You’ll let us know tomorrow, I hope, how the little girl is?’

He was briskly pulling on his driving gloves, still not looking at her. ‘Yes, if you wish.’

She took another step, and said gently and earnestly, ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry that this has happened, Mr Baker-Hyde—and in my house.’

But he only gave her one quick glance. And what he said was: ‘Yes, Mrs Ayres. So am I.’

I followed him out into the darkness and started my car. The ignition turned several times before it caught, for the rain had been falling steadily for hours and the engine was damp: we didn’t know it then, but that night was the hinge of the seasons, the start of the gloomy winter to come. I turned the car, then hung back while Peter Baker-Hyde went on ahead of me. He drove with what felt like agonising slowness along the bumpy overgrown route to the wall of the park, but once his brother-in-law had jumped out to open the gate and close it behind us, he put his foot down, and I found myself speeding up in turn—peering through the sweep of the windscreen wipers, fixing my gaze on the piercing red tail-lights of his expensive car until they seemed to float on the darkness of the winding Warwickshire lanes.

I
left the Baker-Hydes around one, with a promise to return the next day. My morning surgery runs from nine until after ten, so it was almost eleven o’clock when I drew into the courtyard of Standish again; and the first thing I saw there was a muddy maroon Packard I recognised as belonging to Dr Seeley, my local rival. I thought it fair enough that the Baker-Hydes should have brought him in: he was their doctor, after all. But it is always awkward for the practitioners concerned when a patient makes a decision like that without informing them. Some sort of butler or secretary showed me into the house, and I found Seeley just coming down from the girl’s bedroom. He was a tall, well-built man, looking larger than ever on the narrow sixteenth-century staircase. He was clearly just as embarrassed to see me there, with my doctor’s bag in my hand, as I was to see him with his.

‘They called me in first thing this morning,’ he said, as he took me aside to discuss the case with me. ‘This is my second visit of the day.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I gather you were out at Hundreds when it happened? That was a stroke of luck, anyway. Bloody awful for the little girl, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘How does she seem to you? How’s the wound?’

‘The wound’s fine. You made a neater job of it than I could have done. And on the kitchen table! The scarring will be frightful, of course. Such a shame; especially for a girl of her class. The parents are keen to get her up to a London specialist, but I’ll be surprised if even in London they’ll be able to do much for her. Then again, who knows? The plastics boys have certainly got in enough practice in the past few years. What she needs now is rest. A nurse is coming in, and I’ve prescribed Luminal, to keep her groggy for a day or two. After that, well, we’ll see.’

He spoke a few words to Peter Baker-Hyde, then gave me a nod and went off on his round. I remained in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, still feeling the awkwardness of the situation but, naturally, hoping to see the little girl for myself. Her father made it clear to me, however, that he would rather leave her undisturbed. He seemed genuinely grateful for my assistance—‘Thank God you were there last night!’ he said, shaking my hand with both of his—but then his arm moved to my shoulder and, lightly but firmly, he guided me to the door. I realised that I had been completely dismissed from the case.

‘You’ll send me your bill?’ he said, as he walked with me out to my car. And when I answered that I wouldn’t trouble him with that, he insisted on pressing a couple of guineas on me. Then he thought of the petrol I’d used in coming twice out to Standish, and called for one of his gardeners to fetch a can of fuel. The gesture was extravagant, but at the same time there seemed something hard about it. I had the uneasy feeling he was buying me off. We stood in silence in the spitting rain as the gardener filled up my tank, and I thought what a pity it was that I couldn’t just slip upstairs for a final look at the girl. I should have much preferred that to guineas or petrol.

It was only as I was climbing into the car that I thought to ask him whether he’d yet sent word to Hundreds that Gillian was doing well; and at that, his manner grew harder than ever.

‘Them,’ he said, with a jerk of his chin. ‘They’ll get word from us, all right. We’re taking this matter further, you can be sure.’

I’d been half expecting this, but was dismayed by the bitterness in his voice. Straightening up again, I said, ‘What do you mean? You’ve informed the police?’

‘Not yet, but we intend to. At the very least we want to see that dog destroyed.’

‘But, well, Gyp’s such a foolish old thing.’

‘And turning senile, clearly!’

‘As far as I know, this incident was quite out of character.’

‘That’s small comfort to my wife and me. You don’t expect us to rest until that dog is got rid of?’ He glanced up at the narrow mullioned windows above the porch, one of which was open, and lowered his voice. ‘Gillian’s life will be fairly ruined by this; you can see that, surely. Dr Seeley tells me it was probably only the merest chance that her blood wasn’t poisoned! And all because those people, the Ayreses, think themselves too grand to tie up a dangerous dog! Suppose it attacks another child?’

I didn’t believe Gyp would, and though I said nothing, he must have seen the doubt in my expression. He went on, ‘Look, I know you’re something of a friend to the family. I don’t expect you to take my side against them. But I can also see what perhaps you can’t: that they believe they can swan it over everyone around here like so many lords of the manor. Probably they’ve trained the dog up, to see off trespassers! They ought to take a good look at that scrap-heap they’re living in. They’re out of date, Doctor. To tell you the truth, I’ve begun to think this whole bloody county’s out of date.’

I almost replied that, as I’d understood it, the out-of-datedness of the county was what had attracted him to it in the first place. Instead, I asked him at the very least not to take the matter to the police until he had seen Mrs Ayres again; and he said at last, ‘All right. I’ll go over there as soon as I know Gillie’s out of danger. But if they have any consideration at all, they’ll have destroyed the dog before I get there.’

None of the six or seven patients I saw on the rest of my morning round mentioned the affair at Hundreds to me; so swift is local gossip, however, that by the time my evening surgery started I discovered that lurid accounts of Gillian’s injury were already doing the rounds of the local shops and pubs. A man I visited after dinner that night described the whole incident to me, correct in every detail except that he had Seeley at the scene, stitching the little girl up, instead of me. He was a labouring man with a long history of pleurisy, and I was doing all I could to prevent the illness turning into something more sinister. But his living conditions were against him—his home was a cramped terraced cottage with a damp brick floor—and, like many labourers, he worked too hard and drank too freely. He spoke to me between bouts of coughing.

‘Bit her cheek nearly clean off, they say. Damn near took the nose off, too. There’s dogs for you. I’ve said many times, any dog’ll kill you. The breed’s not in it. Any dog’ll turn.’

Recalling my conversation with Peter Baker-Hyde, I asked him if he thought the dog in this case ought to be destroyed. He answered, without hesitation, that he did not—because, as he’d just said, every dog was a biter, and where was the sense in punishing a creature for what was natural to it?

Was that, I asked, what other people were saying? Well, he’d heard one thing and another. ‘Some say it should be whipped, and some say shoot it. Of course, there’s the family to think on.’

‘You mean, at Hundreds?’

‘No, not them. The girl’s family, the Baker-Pies.’ He laughed, liquidly.

‘But won’t it be hard on the Ayreses, having to give up their dog?’

‘Ah,’ he said, coughing again, then leaning to spit into the fireless hearth, ‘they’ve had to give up worse, ha’n’t they?’

His words rather unsettled me. I had been wondering all day what the mood was like out at the Hall. And since, when I left his cottage, I found myself close to the gates of the park, I decided to call in there.

It was the first time I had gone to the house without an invitation, and, as on the previous night, the rain was heavy and no one heard my car. I rang, then hurriedly let myself in, and was greeted by poor Gyp himself: he came out into the hall, barking half-heartedly, his claws tapping on the marble. He must have been aware somehow of the shadow of disaster he was under, for he seemed subdued and disconcerted, not at all like himself. He reminded me of a woman I’d once had the care of, an elderly schoolmistress whose mind began to fail her, so that she went wandering out of her house in her slippers and nightdress. For a second I thought to myself, Perhaps he
is
losing his wits. What did I really know about his temperament, after all? But when I squatted at his side and tugged at his ears he seemed very much his ordinary amiable self. He opened his mouth and his tongue showed, pink and healthy against his yellow-white teeth.

‘Here’s a to-do, Gyp,’ I said softly. ‘What were you thinking of, boy? Hey?’

‘Who’s there?’ I heard Mrs Ayres call, from further back in the house. Then she appeared, dim in the shadows, in one of her customary dark gowns and with a darker paisley shawl around her shoulders. ‘Dr Faraday,’ she said in surprise, drawing the shawl closer. Her heart-shaped face was pinched. ‘Is everything all right?’

I straightened up. ‘I was worried about you,’ I said, simply.

‘You were?’ Her expression softened. ‘How very kind of you. But come and get warm. It’s chill tonight, isn’t it?’

It wasn’t really so very cold, but it seemed to me, as I followed her back to the little parlour, that the house, like the season, had undergone some slight but definite shift. The high-ceilinged passage, which had been wonderfully cool and airy throughout the long summer, now had a feel of damp about it, after just two days of rain. In the little parlour itself the curtains were drawn across the windows, a crackling fire of sticks and fir cones was burning in the grate, and the fireside chairs and the sofa had been pulled up to the hearth; but the effect, somehow, was not quite cosy, more as if the seats formed an island of light and warmth with an expanse of worn carpet and pools of shadow just beyond. Mrs Ayres had obviously been sitting in one of the chairs, and in the other, facing me as I went in, sat Roderick. I had seen him only the week before, but his appearance now startled me. He was dressed in one of his bulky old Air Force sweaters, and his hair, like mine, was newly cut; with the wide wing chair behind his head he looked slender as a ghost. He saw me come in, and seemed to frown; after a fractional delay he gripped the arms of the chair as if to rise and give it up to me. I waved him down, and went over to join Caroline on the sofa. Gyp came and lowered himself onto the rug at my feet, giving, as he did it, one of those expressive doggy groans that sound so startlingly human.

No one had spoken, not even to greet me. Caroline was sitting with her legs drawn up, looking tense and unhappy, picking at the seam of woollen stocking across her toes. Roderick, with jerky, nervous movements, began to roll himself a cigarette. Mrs Ayres rearranged the shawl across her shoulders and said, as she sat, ‘We’ve all been rather at sixes and sevens today, Dr Faraday, as I expect you can imagine. You’ve been to Standish? Do tell me, how’s the child?’