The Little Stranger (24 page)

She nodded, then gazed into my face. And after a little hesitation she said, ‘You are sure? About what he told you? He sounds so—so sane.’

‘I know he does. If you’d seen him yesterday you wouldn’t think that. And yet, even then, he spoke so reasonably—I swear, it’s the strangest mix of sanity and delusion I’ve ever seen.’

‘And you don’t think—There couldn’t be anything, really—any truth in what he’s saying?’

Again, I was surprised that she would even consider it. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Caroline. It’s terribly hard, when this sort of thing happens to a person one loves.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

She spoke doubtfully, then put her hands together, working the thumb of one over the knuckles of the other, and I saw her shiver.

I said, ‘You’re cold.’

But she shook her head. ‘Not cold—frightened.’

With an uncertain movement, I put my own hands over hers. At once, her fingers moved gratefully against mine.

I said, ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m so sorry to burden you with this.’ I glanced around. ‘This house is gloomy, on a day like today! That’s probably part of Rod’s trouble. If only he hadn’t let things slip so far! And now—Damn.’ Frustrated, I’d caught sight of the time. ‘I have to go. You’ll be all right? And you’ll let me know at once, if anything changes?’

She promised she would. ‘Good girl,’ I said, squeezing her fingers.

Her hands stayed in mine for another second, then slid away. We headed back to the little parlour.

‘What an age you’ve been!’ said Mrs Ayres as we went in. ‘And what on earth was that great crash? Betty and I supposed the roof was falling in!’

She had the girl at her side: she must have kept her back when she came to take away the tea-tray, or perhaps had rung for her deliberately; she was showing her the spoiled photographs—had laid out half a dozen of them, apparently pictures of Caroline and Roderick as infants—and now began to pick them impatiently back up.

Caroline said, ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I let a door slam. Now there’s dust, I’m afraid, on the library floor. Betty, you’ll have to see to that.’

Betty put down her head and gave a curtsey. ‘Yes, miss,’ she said, moving off.

Not having any time to linger, I said a polite but hasty goodbye—meeting Caroline’s gaze, and trying to will into my expression all the sympathy and support I could—and more or less followed the girl out. I reached the hall, and glanced in through the open library door, and saw her down on her knees with a dustpan and brush, dabbing without enthusiasm at the threadbare carpet. And it was only as I saw the dipping and rising of her slender shoulders that I remembered that queer outburst of hers, on the morning I had destroyed Gyp. It seemed a strange coincidence that her claim that Hundreds had a ‘bad thing’ in it should have found an echo, now, in Roderick’s delusion … I went in and spoke quietly to her, wanting to know if she had said anything that might have put the germ of an idea into his head.

She swore she had said nothing.

‘You told me not to, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, I haven’t said a word!’

‘Not even in fun?’

‘No!’

She spoke with great earnestness—but also, I thought, with the faintest touch of relish. I recalled suddenly what a good little actress she was: I looked into her shallow grey eyes, and for the first time I was uncertain whether her gaze was guileless or sly. I said, ‘You’re quite sure, now? You haven’t been saying anything, or doing anything? Just to liven things up? Moving things around? Putting things where they oughtn’t to be?’

‘I haven’t done nothing,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t said nothing! I don’t like to think of it, anyhow. It makes me frit if I think about it when I’m downstairs on me own. It in’t
my
bad thing; that’s what Mrs Bazeley says. If I don’t go bothering him, she says, he won’t come bothering me.’

And I had to be satisfied with that. She went back to dabbing at the carpet. I stood and watched her for a few moments longer, then left the house.

I
spoke to Caroline several times over the following week or two. She told me that nothing much had changed, that Rod was as secretive as ever but, apart from that, quite rational; and he himself, on my next visit, came to the door of his room when I knocked on it, only to tell me in sober tones that he ‘had nothing to say to me, and simply wanted to be left alone’—then closed the door, with horrible finality, in my face. My interference, in other words, had had exactly the effect I’d feared most. There was no question now of my continuing with the treatment of his leg: I finished my writing up of the case and submitted my paper, and without that reason to call at the house, my visits rather fell away. I found myself missing them, surprisingly badly. I missed the family; I missed Hundreds itself. I worried about poor, burdened Mrs Ayres, and I thought often of Caroline, wondering how on earth she could be coping out there, with things so bad; thinking back to that time in the library and remembering the tired, reluctant way her hand had moved away from mine.

December arrived, and the weather grew more wintry. There was an outbreak of influenza in the district: the first of the season. Two of my elderly patients died, and several others were badly affected. Graham came down with the illness himself; our locum, Wise, took on some of his workload, but the rest of his rounds were added to mine and I was soon working every spare hour. For the first few days of the month I got no nearer to the Hall than the Hundreds farm, where Makins’s wife and daughter were both lying ill, the milking suffering as a result of it. Makins himself was sour and grumbling, talking of throwing in the whole business. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Roderick Ayres, he told me, for three or four weeks—not since the most recent rent day, when he had come to collect his money. ‘That’s the so-called gentleman farmer for you,’ he said bitterly. ‘When the sun is shining, all’s well and good. The first trace of bad weather and he’s at home with his feet up.’

He would have gone grumbling on; I didn’t have time to stay and listen. I didn’t have time, either, to call in at the Hall as I would once have done. But what Makins had told me had worried me, and that night I telephoned the house. Mrs Ayres answered, sounding weary. ‘Oh, Dr Faraday,’ she said, ‘how nice it is to hear your voice! We’ve had no visitors in ages. This weather makes everything so hard. The house is so comfortless, just now.’

‘But you’re all right?’ I asked. ‘All of you? Caroline? Rod?’

‘We’re—fine.’

‘I spoke to Makins—’

The line crackled. ‘You must come and see us!’ she called, through the interference. ‘Will you? Come and dine! We’ll give you a proper old-fashioned dinner. Should you like that?’

I called back that I should, very much. The line was too bad for us to continue. We fixed on a date, between crackles, for two or three days off.

The weather, in that short time, seemed only to decline. It was a wet, blowy night, moonless and starless, when I went up to Hundreds again. I don’t know if the damp and the darkness were to blame, or whether, in keeping away for a while, I had forgotten how really shabby and neglected the house had become: but when I stepped into the hall the cheerlessness of it struck me at once. Some of the bulbs in the wall-lights had blown, and the staircase climbed into shadows, just as it had on the evening of the party; the effect, now, was a strangely lowering one, as if the inclement night itself had found a way in through seams in the brickwork, and had gathered to hang like smoke or must in the very core of the house. It was also piercingly cold. A few ancient radiators were bubbling and ticking away, but their heat was lost as soon as it rose. I went along the marble-floored passage and found the family gathered in the little parlour, their chairs drawn right up to the hearth in their efforts to keep warm, and their outfits eccentric—Caroline with a short cape of balding sealskin over her dress, Mrs Ayres in a stiff silk gown and an emerald necklace and rings, with clashing Spanish and Indian shawls around her shoulders and, on her head, her black mantilla; and Roderick with an ointment-coloured woollen waistcoat underneath his evening jacket, and a pair of fingerless gloves on his hands.

‘Forgive us, Doctor,’ said Mrs Ayres, coming forward as I went in. ‘I’m ashamed to think how we must look!’ But she said it lightly, and I could tell from her manner that, in fact, she had no idea how truly outlandish she and her children appeared. That made me uneasy, somehow. I suppose I was seeing them all, as I’d seen the house, as a stranger might.

I looked closest at Rod; and was pretty dismayed by what I saw. When his mother and sister greeted me he hung back, pointedly. And though he did shake my hand at last, he did it limply, without speaking, and barely raising his eyes to mine, so that I could see he only meant to go through the motions of making me welcome, perhaps for his mother’s sake. But all this I’d expected. There was something else, which troubled me more. His whole manner had changed. Where before he’d carried himself in the tense, hunted way of someone braced against disaster, now he seemed to
slouch
, as if barely caring whether disaster struck or not. While Mrs Ayres and Caroline and I chatted together, with an attempt at normality, of county matters and local gossip, he sat the whole time in his chair, watching us from under his brows but saying nothing. He rose only once, and that was to go to the drinks table to top up his glass of gin and French. And from the way he handled the bottles, and from the stiffness of the cocktail he mixed, I realised that he must have been drinking steadily for some time.

It was horrible to see. Presently Betty came, to call us to dinner, and in the movement that followed I drew close to Caroline and murmured, ‘Everything all right?’

She glanced at her mother and brother, then gave a tight shake of her head. We stepped out into the passage and she drew close the collar of her cape, against the chill which seemed to rise up from the marble floor.

We were to eat in the dining-room, and Mrs Ayres, in order I suppose to make good her promise to give me a ‘proper, old-fashioned dinner’, had had Betty lay the table rather elaborately, with Chinese porcelain to match the oriental paper on the walls, and with ancient silverware. The ormolu candelabra were lit, and the flames of their candles dipped alarmingly in the draught from the windows. Caroline and I sat face to face across the width of the table between them, while Mrs Ayres took her place at the table’s foot; Roderick made his way to the master’s chair—his father’s old chair, I suppose it was—at the head of it. Almost as soon as he had sat down he poured himself a glass of wine, and when Betty had taken the bottle to the other end of the table and approached him with the tureen of soup, he put his hand across his bowl.

‘ “ Oh, take the nasty soup away! I won’t have any soup today!” ’ he said, in a foolish, jarring voice. Then: ‘Do you know what happened to the naughty boy in that poem, Betty?’

‘No, sir,’ she said uncertainly.

‘
No, zir
,’ he repeated, mimicking her accent. ‘Well, he was burnt in a fire.’

‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Caroline, with an attempt at a smile. ‘He wasted away. Which is what you’ll do, Rod, if you’re not careful. Though goodness knows, I don’t think any of us would care. Have some soup.’

‘I told you,’ he answered, putting on his silly voice again, ‘ “I
won’t
have any soup today!” But you may bring back the wine please, Betty. Thank you.’

He topped up his glass. He did it heavily, the neck of the bottle striking the glass and making it ring. The glass was a lovely Regency one, brought out of storage, I imagine, along with the porcelain and the silver; and at the little concussion Caroline’s smile faded and she looked at her brother, suddenly, with real annoyance—so that I was almost startled by the flash of distaste in her eyes. Her gaze stayed hard, then, for the rest of the meal, and I thought it a pity, for in the light of the candles she looked her best, with her heavy features softened, and the angular lines of her collarbones and shoulders concealed by the folds of her cape.

Mrs Ayres, too, was flattered by the candle-light. She said nothing to her son, but kept up a light, smooth flow of conversation with me, just as she had in the little parlour. I thought this simply a sign of good breeding, at first; I supposed she was embarrassed by Rod’s behaviour and was doing her best to cover it up. Gradually, though, I became aware of a certain brittleness to her tone, and I remembered then what Caroline had told me, that time in the library, about her mother and brother having ‘started quarrelling’. And I found myself wishing—what I couldn’t remember ever having done before, at Hundreds—I found myself wishing that I hadn’t come out there, and I began to long for the meal to end. The house, I thought, didn’t deserve their bad feeling; and neither did I.

Presently Mrs Ayres and I fell to talking about a patient I’d recently been treating for the influenza, an old Hundreds tenant who lived a quarter of a mile from the west gates. I said how lucky it was that I was able to use that road across the park in order to reach him; that it made a great difference to my round. Mrs Ayres agreed—then added, cryptically, ‘I do so hope that’s allowed to continue.’

‘You do?’ I asked, surprised. ‘Well, why shouldn’t it?’

She looked pointedly at her son, as if expecting him to speak. He said nothing, only gazed into his wine glass, so she dabbed at her mouth with her linen napkin, then went on: ‘I’m afraid, Doctor, that Roderick’s had to give me some unhappy news today. The fact is, it looks as though we’ll soon be obliged to sell off more of our land.’

‘You will?’ I said, turning to Rod. ‘I thought there wasn’t any more to sell. Who’s the buyer this time?’

‘The county council again,’ said Mrs Ayres, when Rod didn’t answer, ‘with Maurice Babb to build, as before. Their plans are for twenty-four extra houses. Can you imagine? I thought the regulations would forbid it; they seem to forbid everything else. But it seems this government is quite happy to hand out permits to men who intend to break up parklands and estates so that they might cram twenty-four families into three acres of ground. It will mean putting a breach in the wall, laying pipes, and so on—’