The Little Stranger (16 page)

‘But you didn’t see him last night!’ she said. ‘Doctor, I’m afraid. If he should grow ill again, what on earth will happen? We’ve already lost so much here. My children try to keep the worst of things from me, but I’m not a fool. I know the estate is living on its capital, and I know what that means … But we’ve lost other things, too. We’ve lost friends; the trick of society. I look at Caroline: she seems to grow shabbier and more eccentric by the day. It was really for her sake, you know, that I threw the party at all. That was a disaster, like everything else … There’ll be nothing for her, after I’m gone. If she were to lose her brother, too—And now, to think of those people, talking of bringing in the police! I don’t—the fact is, I simply don’t know how I shall bear it!’

Her voice had been level but, on these words, darted unsteadily up the scale. She put her hand across her eyes, to cover her face from me.

When I thought about it later, I realised what burdens she’d been living under for so many years: the death of a child, the death of a husband, the stresses of war, her injured son, the lost estate … But she had hidden those burdens very successfully behind a veil of breeding and charm, and to see her lose her self-possession now, and openly weep, was shocking. For a second I sat across from her, almost transfixed; then I went and squatted beside her chair, and after a slight hesitation I took her hand—just took it, lightly, firmly, as any doctor might. Her fingers tightened around my own, and gradually she grew calmer. I offered her my handkerchief and she dabbed, embarrassed, at her eyes.

‘If one of the children should come in!’ she said, glancing anxiously over her shoulder. ‘Or Betty! I couldn’t bear to be found in such a state. I never saw my own mother weep; she always despised a crying woman. Do forgive me, Dr Faraday. The plain fact is, as I told you, I hardly slept last night, and sleeplessness never did agree with me … And now, how frightful I shall look. Turn off that lamp for me, would you?’

I switched off the lamp she meant: an ornamental reading-light, hung with lustres, on the table beside her chair. As the ring of the lustres faded I said, ‘You’ve nothing to fear from the light, you know. You never have.’

She was dabbing at her face again, but caught my eye in weary surprise. ‘I didn’t know you were so gallant, Doctor.’

I felt myself blush a little. But before I could answer, she sighed and spoke again.

‘Oh, but men acquire gallantry, as women acquire lines in their faces. My husband was a very gallant man. I’m glad he isn’t alive to see me as I am now. His gallantry would be sorely tested. I think I grew older by ten years last winter. Probably I’ll grow older by another ten, this.’

‘Then you will look all of forty,’ I said—at which she laughed, properly, so that I was pleased to see the life and colour returning to her face.

We spoke of ordinary things after that. She had me pour her a drink and bring her a cigarette. And only as I rose to leave did I try and remind her why I had come out there in the first place, by mentioning Peter Baker-Hyde.

Her response was to lift her hand as if exhausted by the whole idea.

‘That man’s name has been heard too often in this house today,’ she said. ‘If he wants to hurt us, we must let him try. He won’t get far. How could he?’

‘You really think that?’

‘I know it. This horrible business will rage for a day or two, and then blow over. You’ll see.’

She seemed as certain as her daughter; so I let the matter rest.

B
ut she and Caroline were wrong. The business did not blow over. The very next day, Mr Baker-Hyde drove out to the Hall to let the family know that he planned to take the case to the police unless they were prepared to destroy Gyp themselves. He sat with Mrs Ayres and Roderick for half an hour—speaking quite reasonably at first, Mrs Ayres told me later, so that for a time she really believed she might persuade him to change his mind.

‘No one regrets your daughter’s accident more bitterly than I do, Mr Baker-Hyde,’ she said to him, with what he must have recognised as genuine feeling. ‘But destroying Gyp won’t undo it. As to the likelihood of the dog’s snapping at another child—well, you can see how we live here, in so quiet a way. There are simply no other children to provoke him.’

That was an unfortunate way to phrase it perhaps, and I can easily picture the hardening effect her words must have had on Peter Baker-Hyde’s expression and manner. Worst of all, at that moment Caroline appeared, with Gyp at her heels. They had been walking in the park and were, I suppose, as I’d often seen them: Caroline flushed, sturdy, untidy, Gyp muddy and contented with a pink open mouth. Mr Baker-Hyde looked at them and must have remembered his daughter, lying wretchedly at home with her savaged face. He later told Dr Seeley, who afterwards reported it back to me, that if he had had a gun in his hand at that moment he would have ‘shot the damn dog himself, and the whole bloody family with it’.

The visit swiftly disintegrated into curses and threats, and he drove off in a roar of gravel. Caroline watched him go with her hands on her hips; then, trembling with upset and anger, she strode around to one of the outhouses and dug out a couple of old padlocks and some chains. She went right across the park, first to one gate and then to the other, and locked them shut.

My own housekeeper told me this; she had heard it from one of her neighbours, who was a cousin to Barrett, the Hundreds odd-man. The case was still being very freely talked about in all the local villages, with some people expressing sympathy for the Ayreses, but most apparently feeling that the family’s stubbornness over Gyp was simply making a bad situation worse. I saw Bill Desmond on the Friday, and he seemed to think that it was now only a matter of time before the Ayreses ‘did the decent thing’ and had the poor dog shot. But after that there came a couple of days of silence, and I really began to wonder whether things mightn’t be fizzling out. Then, at the start of the following week, a Kenilworth patient of mine asked me how ‘that dear little Baker-Hyde girl’ was—asked it almost casually, but with an admiring tone to her voice, saying she’d heard I was involved in the case and had practically saved the child’s life. When, amazed, I asked her who on earth had told her that, she handed me the latest issue of a Coventry weekly: I opened the paper and found an account of the whole affair. The Baker-Hydes had admitted their daughter for further treatment at a Birmingham hospital, which is where the story had been picked up. The little girl was said to have undergone a ‘very savage attack’, but to be making good progress. The parents were determined to see the dog in question destroyed, and were taking legal advice as to how best to achieve it. Mrs Colonel Ayres, Mr Roderick Ayres, and Miss Caroline Ayres, the dog’s owners, were said to be unavailable for comment.

As far as I knew, the Coventry papers weren’t taken at Hundreds, but they had a wide distribution throughout the county as a whole, and I thought the fact of this one’s having covered the case rather worrying. I telephoned the Hall, and asked if they had seen the paper; they hadn’t, so I took them a copy on my way home. Roderick read it in grim silence before passing it on to his sister. She looked the article over and, for the first time since the thing had started, her confident manner faltered and I saw real fear in her face. Mrs Ayres was frankly appalled. There had been a certain amount of newspaper interest in Roderick’s injury during the war, and it had left her, I think, with something of a morbid dread of exposure. For once, when I left them, she walked with me to my car, so that she could speak to me out of earshot of her children.

She said quietly, raising a scarf to cover her hair, ‘I’ve something else to tell you. I haven’t told Caroline or Roderick yet. Chief Inspector Allam called me earlier, to let me know that Mr Baker-Hyde is about to go ahead and press charges. He wanted to warn me; he and my husband, you know, were in the same regiment. He made it very plain that, in a case like this, with a child involved, we will have very small chance of winning. I’ve spoken to Mr Hepton’—this was the family solicitor—‘and he agrees. He tells me, too, that there may be more than a fine to pay; there may be damages of some kind … I just can’t believe it has come this far. Apart from anything else, we don’t have the money to take it to trial! I’ve been trying to prepare Caroline for the worst, but she won’t listen. I don’t understand her. She’s more upset over this than she was over her brother’s accident.’

I didn’t understand her, either. But I said, ‘Well, Gyp means a great deal to her.’

‘He means a great deal to all of us! But when all is said and done, he’s a dog, and an old one. I simply can’t have the family taken to court. I have to think of Roderick, if not of myself. He’s still far from well. This is the very last thing he needs.’

She put her hand on my arm and looked squarely into my face. ‘You’ve done so much for us already, Doctor, I hardly like to ask you to do more. But I don’t quite want to involve Bill Desmond, or Raymond Rossiter, in our troubles. When it comes to it, with Gyp—I wonder, could
you
help us?’

I said, in bleak surprise, ‘You mean, destroy him?’

She nodded. ‘I can’t expect it of Roderick, and clearly there’s no question of Caroline—’

‘No, no.’

‘I don’t know whom else to turn to. If the Colonel were alive—’

‘Yes, of course.’ I spoke reluctantly, but rather with the feeling that I couldn’t very well say anything else. So I said it again, more firmly. ‘Yes, of course I’ll help you.’

Her hand was still on my arm. I put my own over it, and she bowed her head, in relief and gratitude, the flesh of her face sinking slightly into tired, almost elderly lines.

‘But you really think Caroline will allow it?’ I asked her, as she drew her hand away.

She said simply, ‘She will, for the sake of the family. That’s all there is to it.’

A
nd this time, she was right. She called me that evening, to tell me that Chief Inspector Allam had spoken to the Baker-Hydes again, and after a great deal of wrangling they had grudgingly agreed to drop charges, provided that Gyp were destroyed without delay. She sounded desperately relieved about it, and I was pleased that things had been resolved; but I passed a miserable night, thinking of what I’d agreed to do for her the following day. At about three o’clock, too, just as I was sliding at last into something like natural sleep, I was woken by a ringing on the surgery night-bell. A man had run from the neighbouring village to ask me to see to his wife who was having difficulties in labour. I dressed, and drove him home; it was the woman’s first confinement and a rather tricky delivery, but the whole business was finished by half past six, the baby bruised at the temples from the grip of my forceps, but noisy and healthy. The man was due in the fields at seven, so we left the mother and child in the care of the midwife, and I gave him a lift as far as his farm. He went off whistling to his work—pleased because the child had been a boy and his brothers’ wives, he told me, ‘could only make wenches’.

I was glad on his behalf, and I had the slight touch of euphoria that usually follows a successful confinement, particularly when accompanied by a lack of sleep; but when I remembered the task that lay ahead of me at Hundreds, the excitement curdled. I didn’t want to go back into Lidcote and have to come out again; I drove the car along a lane I knew, which passed through woods to end in a small clearing beside an overgrown pond. The place, in summer, was picturesque, a haunt of lovers. But it was also, I recalled too late, the scene of a wartime suicide, and the dark water and the wet, bruise-coloured trees looked very melancholy to me as I drew up and switched off my motor. It was too cold to get out: I lit a cigarette and wound down my window, and hugged myself against the chill. I’d occasionally seen herons here in the past, and sometimes courting dabchicks; today the pond seemed lifeless. A single bird called from a branch, called again, but went unanswered. Presently a drizzling rain started, and a breeze seemed to spring from nowhere to cast the stinging little drops against my cheek. I pinched out my cigarette and hurriedly wound the window back up.

A couple of miles down the road was the turning that would take me to the west gate of Hundreds Park. I waited until just before eight, then started the car and made my way over there.

They had taken the chain and padlock from the gate by now, so I got in easily enough. It was lighter in the open park than in the lanes, but the house, which was visible from the west for quite a distance, looked vast and solid in the murky twilight, a great dark cube. But I knew that the family were early risers, and as I drew nearer I could see smoke from some of the chimneys. And when I had rounded the back of the house and my tyres were crunching over the gravel, I saw a light come on at the windows beside the front door.

The door was opened before I reached it, by Mrs Ayres. She looked pale.

I said, ‘I’m not too early?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s all the same to us. Roderick’s over at the farm already. I don’t think any of us has slept all night. Neither have you, by the look of you. No one’s died, I hope?’

‘A maternity case.’

‘The baby well?’

‘The baby, and the mother … Where’s Caroline?’

‘Upstairs, with Gyp. She’ll have heard your car, I expect.’

‘You warned her I was coming? She knows why?’

‘Yes, she knows.’

‘How has she taken it?’

She shook her head again, but apart from that made no answer. She took me through to the little parlour and left me there by the spitting logs of a new fire. When she came back she was carrying a tray of tea and bread and cold bacon, and she set it down beside me, and sat with me while I ate, eating nothing herself. Seeing her playing the servant’s role only added to my unease. When I had finished the breakfast I didn’t linger, but took my bag and let her lead me out into the hall and up the stairs to the first floor.

She left me at Caroline’s door. It was slightly ajar, but I tapped, and then, hearing no answer, slowly pushed it open and went in. I found a large, pleasant room, with pale panelled walls and a narrow four-poster bed; but everything, I noticed, was faded, the bed-curtains bleached, the carpets threadbare, the floorboards with a white paint on them, worn to a streaky grey. There were two sash windows and Caroline was sitting at one of them, on a sort of cushioned ottoman, with Gyp at her side. He had his head in her lap, but raised his muzzle when he saw me, and parted his jaws, his tail thumping. Caroline had her face turned to the window and didn’t speak until I drew close.