The Little Stranger (34 page)

‘You don’t mind?’ Caroline asked apologetically as she moved away. ‘Brenda knows some people here, she wants to introduce me.’

‘You go and dance,’ I said.

‘I shan’t be long, I promise.’

‘It’s good to see Caroline out and about enjoying herself,’ Graham said to me, when she had gone.

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘You and she see a lot of each other?’

I said, ‘Well, I call in, whenever I can, at the house.’

‘Of course,’ he answered, as if having waited for me to say more. And then, more confidentially: ‘No progress with the brother, I suppose?’

I gave him the latest report I’d had from Dr Warren. We passed from that to exchanging news about one or two of our other patients, and from that to a discussion, with the Stratford man, of the forthcoming Health Service. The Stratford man, like most GPs, was violently opposed to it; David Graham was passionately for it, while I was still gloomily convinced it would mean the end of my career, so the debate was pretty lively and went on for some time. Every so often I’d lift my head and look for Caroline on the dance-floor. Now and then she and Brenda returned to the table for more wine.

‘OK?’ I’d call to her, or mouth to her, over Graham’s shoulder. ‘I’m not neglecting you?’

She’d shake her head, smiling. ‘Don’t be silly!’

‘Do you really think Caroline’s all right?’ I asked Anne, as the evening wore on. ‘I feel I’ve rather abandoned her.’

She glanced at her husband, and said something that didn’t quite carry over the music, something like, ‘Oh, we’re used to that!’ or even, ‘She’ll have to get used to that!’—something, anyway, that gave me the impression she had misheard me. But seeing the puzzlement on my face she added, laughing, ‘Brenda’s looking after her, don’t worry. She’s fine.’

Then, at half past eleven or so, someone got hold of the microphone to announce a Paul Jones, and there was a general migration to the dance-floor which Graham and I were persuaded to join. Automatically I looked for Caroline again, and saw her being pulled into the women’s circle on the other side of the hall; after that I kept my eye on her, hoping to coincide with her at the breaks of music. But with every reshuffle we’d go galloping towards each other, only to be helplessly tugged away in opposite directions. The ring of women, swollen with nurses, was fuller than the ring of men: I saw her smile and almost stumble as her feet tangled with the other girls’ and, once as she flew past me, she caught my eye and grimaced. ‘This is murder!’ I think she called. The next time she came she was laughing. Her loose hair had fallen forwards and was clinging in darkening strands to the sheen of perspiration on her face and lips. At last she finished a place or two to my left, and in the polite but determined jostling that followed I moved to claim her—only to be beaten to her side by a large, damp, hot-looking man I recognised, after a second, as Jim Seeley. He was, I think, her rightful partner in the ring, but she gave me an alarmed, comical look as he drew her into a close embrace, then led her off in a slow foxtrot with his chin against her ear.

I danced that number with one of the younger nurses, and when it ended and the circles formed more rowdily than before, I left the floor. I went to the bar for another cup of watery punch, then moved out of the thickest part of the crowd, to watch the dancing. Caroline, I saw, had extricated herself from Seeley and found a less overbearing partner, a young man in horn glasses. Seeley himself, like me, had given up on the floor altogether in favour of the bar. He had knocked back his punch and was taking out cigarettes and a lighter—and, happening to look up and catch my eye as he did it, he came over to offer me his case.

‘On nights like this I feel my age, Faraday,’ he said, when our cigarettes were lit. ‘Don’t these damn nurses seem young to you? I swear, there’s a little thing I danced with earlier on, she looked barely older than my twelve-year-old daughter. That’s all right for a filthy old pervert like—’ and here he named one of the senior surgeons, who’d been at the centre of a minor scandal a year or two before. ‘But when I’m dancing with a girl and I ask her how she likes the district, and she tells me it reminds her of the place she was evacuated to in 1940—well, it’s hardly conducive to romance. As for all this thundering about in circles, I’d sooner an old-fashioned waltz. I suppose they’ll break out the rumbas in a minute. God help us then.’

He took out a handkerchief and mopped his face, then passed the handkerchief under his collar and wiped all round his neck. His throat was scarlet, his bow-tie limp. His orchid was lost, I noticed now, only the fleshy green stalk of it remaining at his lapel, slightly milky at the tip. Fuelled by drink and exercise, he gave off heat like a brazier, so that it was impossible to stand beside him in that over-warm hall and not want to move away. But having accepted one of his cigarettes, I thought it only fair to keep him company while I smoked it. So he mopped and puffed and grumbled on for another minute or two; then our gazes moved naturally back to the dance-floor and we both fell silent, watching the couples jog by.

I didn’t see Caroline at first, and thought she might have left the floor. But she was dancing, still, with the young man in glasses, and once my eyes had found her out they tended to return to her. The Paul Jones had finished and this dance was more sedate, but there was a general air of subsiding hilarity and Caroline, like everybody else, was damp in the face, her hair untidy, her shoes and stockings streaked with chalk, her throat and the flesh of her arms still flushed and glowing. The heightened colour suited her, I thought. For all that her dress was so unshowy and her pose so plain, she looked very young—as if her youth had been whipped to the surface, by motion and laughter, along with her blood.

I watched her through all of that dance, and into the start of another; and only when Seeley spoke did I realise that he had been watching her, too.

He said, ‘Caroline Ayres looks well.’

I took a step away from him, to stub out my cigarette at the nearest table. Moving back, I said, ‘Yes, doesn’t she.’

‘She’s a good dancer, that girl. Knows she’s got hips, and what to do with them. Most Englishwomen dance from the feet.’ His tone and expression grew more speculative. ‘You’ve seen her on horseback, I suppose? There’s something there, definitely. A pity she doesn’t have the looks to match. Still,’ he took a last draw on his cigarette, ‘I shouldn’t let that put you off.’

For a second I thought I had misheard him. Then I saw by his face that I had not.

He saw my expression, too. He had pursed his lips, to direct away a plume of smoke, but he laughed, and the plume grew ragged. ‘Oh, come on! It’s no secret, is it, how much time you’ve been spending with that family? I don’t mind telling you, there’s quite a little debate locally as to which of the women you’ve set your sights on—the daughter or the mother.’

He spoke as if the whole thing were a tremendous joke—as if amusedly egging me on in some ambitious piece of mischief, like a prefect applauding a junior boy for having the pluck to peep through Matron’s window.

I said coldly, ‘What terrific fun for you all.’

But he laughed again. ‘Don’t take it like that! You know what village life is like. Almost as bad as hospital life. We’re all so many bloody prisoners; we have to take our entertainment where we can get it. Personally, I don’t know why you’ve been dragging your heels. Mrs Ayres has been a handsome woman in her day, I’ll give you that. But if I were you I’d plump for Caroline—purely on the basis, you know, of her having so many good years left in her.’

His words, as I recall them now, strike me as so offensive I’m astonished to think that I stood there, letting him say them, gazing into his boozy hot red face, without wanting to punch him. But what impressed me most at the time, still, was that hint of condescension. I felt I was being made an ass of, and it seemed to me that to strike him would only serve to give him the satisfaction that I was, at root, what he supposed me to be—a sort of rustic booby. So I stood tensely, saying nothing, wanting to shut him up but not quite knowing how. He saw my confusion, and actually nudged me.

‘Set you thinking, have I? Well, make your move tonight, old man!’ He gestured to the dance-floor. ‘Before that twerp in the horn-rims gets a chance to make his. After all, it’s a long dark drive back to Hundreds.’

At last I woke up. ‘I think I see your wife,’ I said, nodding over his shoulder into the crowd.

He blinked, and turned; and I moved away from him, finding an awkward, interrupted route around the tables and chairs. I was heading for the door, meaning to stand for a minute or two in the chill night air. But as I went, I passed close to the table I had been sharing with the Grahams, and the Stratford couple, seeing me going by with such a fixed expression, naturally assumed I’d lost my way back to my seat, and called out to me. They looked so pleased by my return—the wife walked with a cane, and was kept from the dancing—that I hadn’t the heart to press on, but rejoined their table, and stayed talking to them, then, for the rest of the night. What we talked about, I have no idea. I was so thrown by what Seeley had said, and in such a mixture of ways, I could hardly sort out my own feelings.

The fact that I had brought Caroline there, with no thought for how the thing would look, seemed suddenly incredible. I suppose I’d grown used to the idea of spending time with her, out in the isolation of Hundreds; and if I’d once or twice had a surge of feeling for her—well, that was one of those things brought on, between men and women, by simple closeness: like matches sparking as they jostled in the box. To think that all this time people had been watching us, speculating—rubbing their hands—! It made me feel fooled, somehow; it made me feel exposed. A part of my upset, I’m sorry to say, was simple embarrassment, a basic masculine reluctance to have my name romantically linked with that of a notoriously plain girl. Part of it was shame, at discovering I felt this. A contradictory part, too, was pride: for why the hell shouldn’t I—I asked myself—bring Caroline Ayres along to a party, if I chose to? Why the hell shouldn’t I dance with the squire’s daughter, if the squire’s daughter wanted to dance with me?

And mixed up with it all was a kind of nervous possessiveness of Caroline herself, which seemed to have leapt upon me from nowhere. I recalled the smirk on Seeley’s face as he watched her moving about the floor.
Knows she’s got hips, and what to do with them
…
You’ve seen her on horseback, I suppose?
I should have hit him when I had the chance, I thought furiously. I would certainly have hit him now, if he’d come and said the same thing again. I even peered around the hall, with the crazy idea of going after him … I couldn’t see him. He wasn’t dancing, he wasn’t standing looking on. But I couldn’t see Caroline, either; nor the boy with the horn-rims. That began to bother me. I was still politely chatting with the Stratford couple, still sharing cigarettes and wine. But as we talked, my eyes must have been darting. The dancing looked nonsensical to me now, the dancers themselves like gesturing lunatics. All I wanted was for Caroline to emerge from the jolting, red-faced crowd so that I could put her into her coat and take her home.

Finally, at just after one, when the music had finished and the lights had come up, she reappeared at the table. She came with Brenda, both of them fresh from the dance-floor, with blurred eyes and mouths. She stood a couple of feet away from me, yawning, and plucking at the bodice of her dress to free it from the tug of moist skin beneath, exposing an edge of brassière strap at her armpit—exposing the armpit itself, a muscular hollow shadowed with fine stubble and faintly streaked with talcum. And though I had longed for her return, when she met my gaze and smiled, I felt, unaccountably, the sting of something that was almost anger, and had to turn away from her. I told her, rather stiffly, that I would fetch our things from the cloakroom, and she and Brenda went off again to the Ladies’. When they came back, still yawning, I was relieved to see that she had tidied her hair and made a neat, conventional mask of her face and throat with lipstick and powder.

‘God, what a fright I looked!’ she said, as I helped her into her coat. She gazed around the hall, up into the rafters at the bunting, which had revealed itself in all its faded VE colours. ‘A bit like this place. Isn’t it awful how the glamour goes, once the lights come on? Still, I wish we didn’t have to leave … A girl was crying in the lavatory. I suppose one of you beastly doctors has broken her heart.’

Without meeting her gaze, I nodded to her coat, which she’d left unfastened.

‘You ought to do that up. It’ll be freezing outside. Didn’t you bring a scarf?’

‘I forgot.’

‘Well, close your lapels, will you?’

She drew the coat together with one hand, and slipped the other through my arm. She did it lightly, but I wished she hadn’t done it at all. We stood saying our goodbyes to the Grahams, to the Stratford couple and to blond, worldly Brenda, and I felt horribly self-conscious, imagining I could see mirth in all their gazes, and guessing what they were thinking as they watched us heading off together for—as Seeley had put it—‘the long dark drive back to Hundreds’. Then I remembered the queer thing Anne Graham had laughingly said when I’d asked after Caroline: that Caroline would ‘have to get used to being abandoned’, as if she were soon to be a doctor’s wife … That made me more self-conscious still. When we had said good night and were crossing the emptying hall, I found a way of handing Caroline before me so that our arms became disengaged.

Out in the car park the ground was so frosty, and the cold so instantly penetrating, she caught hold of me again.

‘I warned you you’d freeze,’ I said.

‘Either that or break a leg,’ she answered. ‘I’m in heels, don’t forget. Oh, help!’ She stumbled, and laughed, and seized my arm with both her hands, to draw herself even closer.

The gesture jarred with me. She had had that brandy early in the evening, and, after that, a glass or two of wine, and I’d been glad to see her—as I’d thought of it then—letting off steam. But where, for those first few dances, she’d been genuinely loose and tipsy in my arms, it seemed to me now that her giddiness had something just slightly forced about it. She said again, ‘Oh, isn’t it a shame we have to leave!’—but she said it too brightly. It was as if she wanted more from the night than the night had so far given her, and was broadening and hardening her strokes against it in an effort to make it pay up. Once more before we reached my car she stumbled, or pretended to; and when I got her inside and put a blanket around her shoulders she sat and shivered unrestrainedly, her teeth chattering like dice in a cup. Since my car had no heater I had brought along a hot-water bottle for her, and a thermos of water with which to fill it. I saw to that, and handed it over, and she tucked it gratefully inside her coat. But as I started the engine she wound down her window and, still shivering, stuck out her head.