The Little Stranger (19 page)

It was late in the afternoon, after Mrs Bazeley had gone home, but as we drew near to the curtained arch that led to the service regions we could hear the faint chatter of the wireless that meant that Betty was at work in the kitchen. Caroline glanced over at the curtain as she turned the handle of Roderick’s door, and winced at the creaking of the lock.

‘You mustn’t think I make a habit of this sort of thing,’ she murmured, when we were inside. ‘If anyone comes, I’ll lie, and say we were looking for a book or something. You mustn’t be shocked by that, either … Here’s what I want you to see.’

I’d expected her, I don’t know why, to lead me to Rod’s desk and papers. Instead she remained at the door she had just closed, and gestured to the back of it.

The door was panelled in oak to match the walls of the room and, like just about everything else at Hundreds, the oak was not at its best. I could imagine the wood, in its heyday, having had a glorious, ruddy lustre; now, though still impressive, it was bleached and slightly streaky, and some of the sections had shrunk and cracked. But the panel at which Caroline pointed had a different sort of mark on it. The mark was at about breast height, and it was small and black, like a scorch-mark—just like a mark I could remember seeing on the floorboards of the little terraced house I grew up in, where my mother had once set down an iron while laundering clothes.

I looked quizzically at Caroline. ‘What is it?’

‘You tell me.’

I moved in closer. ‘Rod’s been lighting candles, and let one fall?’

‘That’s what I thought, at first. There’s a table, you see, not too far off. The generator has failed us a couple of times recently; I thought that for some queer reason Rod must have put the table here with a candle on it, and then I supposed he’d fallen asleep or something and the candle had burned itself over. I was pretty annoyed about it, as you can imagine. I told him please not to be such an idiot as ever to do it again.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said he hadn’t been lighting candles. If the power goes, he uses that lamp over there.’ She indicated an old Tilley lamp, sitting on a bureau on the other side of the room. ‘Mrs Bazeley says the same. She keeps a drawer full of candles downstairs for when the generator fails and, according to her, Rod hasn’t taken any of them. He says he doesn’t know how the mark got here. He hadn’t noticed it before I pointed it out. But he didn’t seem to like the look of it, either. It seemed to—well, to spook him.’

I moved close to the door again, to run my fingers over the smudge. It left no trace of soot on them, nor any kind of scent, and its surface was quite smooth. The more I studied it, in fact, the more it seemed to me that the mark had the faintest sort of bloom or patina over it—as though it had somehow developed just
below
the surface of the wood.

I said, ‘This couldn’t have been here for some time, without your having seen it?’

‘I don’t think so. I think it would have caught my eye whenever I closed or opened the door. And don’t you remember—the very first time you treated Rod’s leg? I stood just about here and complained about the panels. The mark wasn’t there then, I’m certain it wasn’t … Betty knows nothing about it. Neither does Mrs Bazeley.’

Her casual mention, not of Mrs Bazeley, but of Betty, made me thoughtful. I said, ‘You brought Betty here, and showed her the mark?’

‘I brought her quietly, like this. She was as surprised by it as I was.’

‘Was she really, do you think? You don’t think she might have been responsible for it somehow, then been too frightened to own up? She might have been walking past this door with an oil-lamp in her hand. Or maybe she spilled something here. Some sort of cleaning solution.’

‘Cleaning solution?’ said Caroline. ‘There’s nothing stronger in the kitchen cupboards than meths and liquid soap! I should know, I’ve used them often enough. No. Betty has her moods, but I don’t think she’s a liar.—And anyhow, that’s by the bye. I came back in here yesterday when Rod was out, and had another look around. I found nothing strange—until I did this.’

She put back her head and looked upwards, and I did the same. The mark leapt out at me at once. It was on the ceiling this time—that plaster lattice-work ceiling, stained yellow with nicotine. It was a small, dark, formless smudge, exactly like the one on the door; and again, it looked just as though someone had put a flame or an iron there, long enough to scorch the plaster but not to blister it.

Caroline was watching my face. ‘I’d like to know,’ she said, ‘how even a very careless parlourmaid could be careless enough to put a burn mark on the ceiling, twelve feet off the floor.’

I stared at her for a second, then moved across the room until the smudge was right over my head. I said, squinting upwards, ‘Is it really the same as the other?’

‘Yes. I even brought in the step-ladder and had a look. If anything, it’s worse. There’s nothing underneath that might account for it—only, as you see, Rod’s washing-stand. Even if he’d put the Tilley on that, the distance involved … Well.’

‘And it’s definitely a scorch or a burn? It isn’t, I don’t know, some sort of chemical reaction?’

‘A chemical reaction that can make antique oak panels and plaster ceilings start smouldering all by themselves? Not to mention this. Look over here.’

With a slightly giddy sense, I followed her over to the fireplace and she showed me the heavy Victorian ottoman that sat beside it, on the opposite side to the kindling-box. Sure enough, the leather was marked apparently in exactly the same way as the door and the ceiling, with a small, dark smudge.

I said, ‘This is too much, Caroline. The ottoman could have been marked like this for years. Probably a spark from the fire once caught it. The ceiling might have been marked for a long time, too. I don’t think I’d have noticed.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said. ‘I hope you are. But you don’t think it’s odd, about this and the door? The door being the one that Rod walked into, I mean, the night he blacked his eye, and this being the thing he tripped over?’

I said, ‘It was
this
he fell over?’ I’d been picturing some dainty footstool. ‘But, this must weigh a ton! How could it have found its way across the room like that?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know. And why is it marked in this queer way? As if it were, well,
marked out
. It’s just so creepy.’

‘And you’ve asked Rod about these?’

‘I showed him the mark on the door and the one on the ceiling, but not this. His reaction to the others was too odd.’

‘Odd?’

‘He seemed … furtive. I don’t know. Guilty.’

She said the word reluctantly, and I looked at her and began to make out the anxious movement of her ideas. I said quietly, ‘You think he’s been making these marks himself, don’t you?’

She answered unhappily, ‘I don’t know! But perhaps, in his sleep—? Or in the sort of fit you mentioned? After all, if he can do other things—if he can open doors and move furniture about, and get himself injured; if he can come up to my room at three o’clock in the morning to ask
me
to stop moving furniture!—then couldn’t he also do something like this?’ She glanced at the door, and lowered her voice. ‘And if he can do this, Doctor, well, what else might he do?’

I thought it over for a moment. ‘Have you mentioned this to your mother?’

‘No. I haven’t wanted to worry her. And then, what is there to tell, really? Just a few funny marks. I don’t know why they bother me so much … No, that’s not true. I do know.’ She grew awkward. ‘It’s because we’ve had trouble with Rod before. Do you know about that?’

‘Your mother told me a little,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. It must have been tough.’

She nodded. ‘It was a bad, bad time. All Rod’s injuries were at their worst, his scars ghastly, his leg so bashed about it really seemed as though he might be more or less a cripple for the rest of his life. But he wouldn’t do anything to get himself better, that was the maddening thing. He just sat in here, brooding, and smoking—drinking too, I think. You know his navigator died, when their plane came down? I think he blamed himself for that. It was nobody’s fault, of course. —No one’s but the Germans’, I mean. But they say it’s always hard on the pilots when their crews are lost. The boy was younger than Roddie; only just nineteen. Rod used to say that it ought to have been the other way around: that the boy had had more to live for than he did. That was fun for Mother and me to hear, as you can imagine.’

I said, ‘I can. Has he said anything like that lately?’

‘Not to me. Nor to Mother, as far as I know. But I can tell she’s afraid of his getting sick again, too. Perhaps it’s just because we’re afraid, we’re imagining too much? I don’t know. There’s just—something not right here. Something’s going on, with Rod. It’s as though there’s a hoodoo on him. He hardly goes out any more, you know, even to the farm. He just stays in here, saying he’s going over his papers. But look at them!’

She gestured to his desk, and to the table beside his chair, both of which were nearly obscured by deep, untidy piles of letters and ledgers and flimsy type-written sheets. She said, ‘He’s drowning in all this stuff. But he won’t let me help him. He says he has a system and I won’t understand. Does this look like a system to you? Practically the only person he allows to come in here these days is Betty. At least she keeps the carpet swept, and empties his ashtrays … I wish he’d get away for a while, take a holiday or something. But he never would. He won’t leave the estate. And it isn’t even as though his being here makes any real difference! The estate’s doomed, whatever he does.’ She lowered herself, heavily, on to the marked ottoman, and rested her chin in her hands. ‘Sometimes I think he ought to just let it go.’

She spoke wearily but matter-of-factly, letting her eyes almost close, and again I was conscious of the curious nudeness of her slightly swollen eyelids. I gazed down at her, perturbed.

‘You don’t mean that, Caroline. You couldn’t bear to lose Hundreds, surely?’

Now she spoke almost casually. ‘Oh, but I’ve been brought up to lose it.—To lose it, I mean, once Rod marries. The new Mrs Ayres won’t want a spinster sister-in-law about the place; nor a mother-in-law, come to that. That’s the stupidest thing of all. So long as Roddie goes on holding the estate together, too tired and distracted to find a wife, and probably killing himself in the process—so long as he goes on like that, Mother and I get to stay here. Meanwhile Hundreds is such a drain on us, it’s hardly worth staying for …’

Her voice faded, and we stayed without speaking until the silence in that insulated room began to grow oppressive. I looked again at those three queer scorch-marks: they were like the burns, I realised suddenly, on Rod’s own face and hands. It was as if the house were developing scars of its own, in response to his unhappiness and frustration—or to Caroline’s, or her mother’s—perhaps, to the griefs and disappointments of the whole family. The thought was horrible. I could see what Caroline meant about the marked walls and furniture being ‘creepy’.

I must have shuddered. Caroline got up. She said, ‘Look here, I’m sorry to have told you all this. It really isn’t your trouble.’

I said, ‘Oh, but it is, in a way.’

‘It is?’

‘Well, since I’ve more or less become Rod’s doctor.’

She gave her rueful smile. ‘Yes, well, but you haven’t really, have you? It’s just how you said the other day: Rod isn’t paying you to come here. You can dress it up how you like, I know you’re treating him now more or less as a favour. It’s awfully kind of you, but you mustn’t let us drag you into any more of our problems. Do you remember what I told you about this house, when I showed you round it? It’s greedy. It gobbles up all our time and energy. It’ll gobble up yours, if you let it.’

I didn’t answer for a second. I’d had a vision, not of Hundreds Hall, but of my own home, with its neat, plain, undemanding, utterly lifeless rooms. I would be returning to them later, to a bachelor’s supper of cold meat and boiled potatoes and half a bottle of flat beer.

I said firmly, ‘I’m happy to help you, Caroline. Truly I am.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what’s going on here, any more than you do. But I’d like to help you figure it out. I’ll take my chances with the hungry house, don’t worry about that. I’m a pretty indigestible fellow, you know.’

She smiled properly then, and briefly closed her eyes again. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

After that, we didn’t linger. We began to be afraid of Rod’s returning and discovering us there. So we made our way quietly back to the library, for Caroline to tidy the room and close the shutter. Then, trying to shake off our anxieties, we went to the little parlour to join her mother.

B
ut I stayed puzzling over Roderick’s condition for the next few days; and it must have been on an afternoon early in the following week that the whole thing at last came together—or, depending on how one looks at it, fell apart. I was driving back through Lidcote at about five o’clock, and was surprised to see Rod himself, on the High Street. His presence there would once have been unremarkable, for in the old days he often used to come in on farming business. But, as Caroline had said, he rarely left Hundreds now, and though he still looked very much the young country squire, in an overcoat and tweed cap and with the strap of a leather satchel across his breast, there was something unmistakably burdened and ill at ease about him—about the way he walked, with his collar turned up, and his shoulders hunched, as if against more than the chill November breezes. When I drew up across the street from him to wind down my window and call his name, he turned to me with a startled expression; and just for a second—I could have sworn it—he looked like a frightened, hunted man.

He came slowly over to the car, and I asked him what had brought him into the village. He told me he had been to see Maurice Babb, the big local builder. The county council had recently bought up the last free parcel of Ayres farmland; they planned to build a new housing estate on it, with Babb as the contractor. He and Rod had just been running through the final agreement.