The Little Stranger (35 page)

I said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’

‘I’m looking at the stars. They’re rather brilliant.’

‘Well, for God’s sake look with the window up. You’ll catch a chill.’

She laughed. ‘You sound almost like a doctor.’

‘And you,’ I said, catching hold of her sleeve and pulling her back in, ‘sound almost like the silly young girl I know for a fact you’re not. Now sit up straight and close your window.’

She did as she was told, suddenly meek, perhaps chastened by the note of irritation in my voice, perhaps puzzled by it. I was puzzled by it myself, for the fact is, she had done nothing to deserve it. It was all filthy-minded Seeley’s fault; and I had let him walk away.

We drove without speaking out of the hospital grounds, part of a lively gush of traffic at first, but soon breaking free of the tooting horns, the cheers and calls and bicycle bells, and entering quieter roads. Caroline sat huddled in the blanket and, little by little, as she grew warmer, I felt her long limbs begin to loosen. My mood softened slightly in response.

‘Better?’ I asked.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she replied.

By now we had left the outskirts of Leamington and passed into unlit country lanes. The ground was frostier here, the road and hedges white and sparkling: they seemed to part around our headlamps, to froth and rush back into darkness, like water churned by the prow of a boat. Caroline gazed for a time through the windscreen, then rubbed her eyes.

‘The road’s hypnotising me! Don’t you mind it?’

I said, ‘I’m used to it.’

She seemed struck by that. ‘Yes,’ she said, looking at me, ‘of course you are. Driving through the night. How people must listen out for your car, and watch for the headlamps. And how glad they must be when you arrive. If we were dashing to a bedside now, how badly those people would be longing for us. I never thought of that before. Doesn’t it almost frighten you?’

I reached to change gear. ‘Why should it frighten me?’

‘The responsibility of it, I suppose.’

I said, ‘I told you before, I’m a nobody. People don’t even see me half the time. They see “Doctor”. They see the bag. The bag’s the thing. Old Dr Gill told me that. My father bought me a fine new leather bag when I first qualified. Gill took one look at it and said I wouldn’t get anywhere with a thing like that, no one would trust me. He gave me a battered old bag of his own. I used it for years.’

‘Still,’ she said after a moment, as if she hadn’t been listening. ‘How those people must watch, and wait, and want you. Perhaps you like it. Is that it?’

I glanced at her, through the darkness. ‘Is what what?’

‘Do you like it, that there’s always someone longing for you, in the night?’

I didn’t make her any answer. She didn’t seem to want any. More than ever I had the feeling of there being something false about her, as if she were playing on the dark, dislocated intimacy of the car to try out another personality—Brenda’s personality, perhaps. She was silent for a moment, then started humming. It was one of the songs she had danced to with the young man in glasses, and, realising that, I felt my mood harden again. She reached for her evening bag and fumbled for something inside. ‘Has your car one of those lighter things?’ she asked, bringing out a packet of cigarettes. Her hand moved palely over the dashboard, then drew back. ‘Never mind, I’ve matches here somewhere … Shall I light one for you?’

I said, ‘I can light my own, if you’ll pass it to me.’

‘Oh, let me do it. It’ll be just like in the pictures.’

There came the rasp and flare of a match, and from the corner of my eye I saw her face and hands spring into luminous life. She had two cigarettes at her mouth: she lit them both, then took one from between her lips and reached across to put it between mine. Faintly disturbed by the sudden brush of her cold fingers—and by the dry nudge of the cigarette, which had a suggestion of lipstick about it—I at once took it out again and held it at the steering-wheel.

We smoked in silence for a while. She put her face close to her window, and started drawing lines and circles where her breath clouded the glass. Then, abruptly, she said, ‘That girl Brenda I met tonight: I don’t much like her, you know.’

I said, ‘You don’t? I’d never have guessed. You greeted each other like long-lost sisters.’

‘Oh, women always go on like that.’

‘Yes, I’ve often thought it must be exhausting to be a woman.’

‘It is, if you do it properly. Which is why I so seldom do. Do you know how I know her?’

‘Brenda? I imagined, from the Wrens.’

‘No, from just before that. We firewatched together, for about six weeks, that’s all. We were not at all alike, but I suppose the boredom made us talk. She’d been seeing a boy—sleeping with him, I mean—and she’d just found out that she was pregnant. She wanted to get rid of it, and she was after a girl to go with her to a chemist’s and help her buy some stuff; and I said I’d go. We went into Birmingham, where no one knew us. The man was horrible: prim and withering and excited, just as you’d expect. I can never decide if it’s reassuring when people turn out to be just what one’s expected, or depressing … The stuff worked, though.’

Reaching to change gear again, I said, ‘I doubt that it did, actually. That sort of stuff hardly ever does.’

‘No?’ said Caroline, surprised. ‘Just a coincidence, then?’

‘Just a coincidence.’

‘Just a bit of good luck, for good old Brenda. And after all that. But Brenda’s the sort of person that luck happens to—good luck and bad. Some people are like that, don’t you think?’ She drew on her cigarette. ‘She asked who you were.’

‘What? Who did?’

‘Brenda did. She thought you might be my stepfather! And when I told her you weren’t, she looked at you again with a horrid narrowing of her eyes and said, “Your sugar-father, then.” That’s the way her mind works.’

Christ!
I thought. That seemed to be the way that everyone’s mind worked; and I supposed it was a marvellous joke to all of them. I said, ‘Well, I hope you swiftly put her right.’ She didn’t answer. She was still drawing lines on the window. ‘Well, did you?’

‘Oh, I let her think it for a minute—just for a minute, just for the fun of trying it out. She must have remembered that time in Birmingham, too. She said the best of its being a medical man was, one was never so afraid of “tripping up”. I said, “My dear, you needn’t tell me! I’ve sprained my ankle four times! Doctor’s been a lamb!” ’

She took another puff on her cigarette, then spoke flatly. ‘I didn’t really. I told her the truth: that you were a friend of the family, being kind, taking me dancing as a treat. I think she thought rather the worse of me for it.’

‘She sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant young woman.’

She laughed. ‘How prim you are! Most young women talk like that—to other young women, I mean. I told you, I’ve never much liked her. God, my feet are perished!’

She fidgeted about for a second, trying to warm herself up. I realised she was kicking her shoes off; soon she hitched up her legs and tucked the skirts of her dress and coat behind her knees, and turned sideways towards me, setting her stockinged feet down over the slight gap between her seat and mine. Reaching forward with her hands, one of them with the half-smoked cigarette in it, she caught hold of her toes and began to chafe them.

She kept this up for a minute or two, finally getting rid of the cigarette in the dashboard ashtray, then breathing into her palms and laying them flat and still on the back of her feet. And after that, she was silent; she tucked in her head and seemed to doze. Or perhaps she only pretended to sleep. At a turn in the road I felt the car meet a patch of ice and glide a foot or two across it: I had to pump the brake and slow almost to a standstill, which surely would have roused her if she’d been slumbering naturally, but she didn’t stir. A little later I stopped for a crossroads, and turned to look at her. Her eyes were still closed, and in the darkness, in her dark dress and coat, she seemed an assemblage of angular fragments: the squarish face with its heavy brows, the full red diamond of her mouth, her uncovered throat, her muscular calves, those long pale hands.

The fragments shifted as she opened her eyes. She held my gaze, her own gaze gleaming very slightly in the reflected sparkle of the frosty road. When she spoke, the touch of brashness had gone from her voice; she sounded flat, almost unhappy. She said, ‘The first time you gave me a lift in this car, we ate blackberries. Do you remember?’

I put the car into gear, and moved on. ‘Of course I remember.’

I felt her eyes still on my face. She turned to her window and peered out.

‘Where are we now?’

‘On the Hundreds road.’

‘As close as that?’

‘You must be tired.’

‘I’m not. Not really.’

‘Not after all that dancing, all those young men?’

‘The dancing woke me up,’ she said, in the same subdued tone as before, ‘though it’s true that one or two of the young men nearly put me to sleep again.’

I opened my mouth to speak; then closed it. Then spoke anyway.

‘What about the fellow with the specs?’

She turned back to me, curious. ‘You saw him, did you? He was the worst. Alan—or Alec, I suppose it might have been. He said he works in one of the hospital laboratories, tried to make it sound frightfully technical and important; but I don’t think it can be. He lives “in town”, with his “mum and dad”. That’s as much as I know. He couldn’t really talk while he was dancing. He couldn’t really dance, either.’

She lowered her head again, so that her cheek touched the back of her seat, and again I found myself struggling with a curious mix of emotions. I said with a touch of bitterness, ‘Poor little Alan or Alec.’ But she didn’t catch the change in my voice. She had drawn in her chin, so that when she spoke again her words were muted. She said, ‘I don’t think I enjoyed any of the dances, actually, so much as the ones that you and I had at the start.’

I didn’t answer. She went on, after a pause, ‘I wish we had some more of that black brandy. Don’t you keep a flask of something in the car?’ And she reached and opened up a pocket in the dashboard and started feeling about inside, among the papers and spanners and empty cigarette packets.

I said, ‘Please don’t do that.’

‘Why not? Have you a secret? There’s nothing there, anyway.’ She closed the pocket with a snap, then turned to look over at the back seat. The hot-water bottle fell out of her coat and went slithering to the floor. She had grown lively again. ‘Isn’t there anything in your bag?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘There must be something.’

‘You can have some ethyl chloride if you like.’

‘That would put me to sleep, wouldn’t it? I don’t want to go to sleep. I might as well be back at Hundreds then. God, I don’t want to go back to Hundreds! Take me somewhere else, can’t you?’

She moved about like a child; and either with that, or simply with the jolting of the car, her feet crept further over the gap between our seats, until I could just make out the small blunt movement of her toes against my thigh.

I said uneasily, ‘Your mother will be waiting for you, Caroline.’

‘Oh, Mother doesn’t care. She’ll have gone to bed, and put Betty to wait. Besides, they know I’m with you. The noble chaperon, and all that. It won’t matter how late we are.’

I glanced at her. ‘You’re not serious? It’s past two o’clock. I have my surgery at nine.’

‘We might stop the car, go for a walk.’

‘You’re in dancing shoes!’

‘I don’t want to go home yet, that’s all. Couldn’t we drive somewhere, sit, smoke more cigarettes?’

‘Drive where?’

‘Drive anywhere. You must know a place.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said again.

But I said it rather weakly. For, despite myself—as if the image had been waiting just under the surface of my mind, and now, at her words, sprang upwards—despite myself, I thought of that spot I sometimes drove to: the dark pond, with its border of rushes. I imagined the smooth, starred water, the grass silvered and crisp underfoot; the hush and stillness of the place. The turning was a mile or two ahead, that was all.

Perhaps she sensed some change in me. She stopped moving about, and we fell into a tight sort of silence. The road rose, then curved and dipped; another minute, and we were approaching the entrance to the lane. I really didn’t know, I think, until the very last moment, whether I would make the turn or not. Then abruptly I slowed, and put in the clutch, and changed hastily down the gears. Beside me, Caroline reached out a hand to the dashboard, to brace herself against the turn. She’d expected it even less than I had. Her feet slid further forward with the motion of the car, so that for a second I felt them right under my thigh, solid and purposeful as burrowing creatures. Then we ran more smoothly and she drew them back, and her seat creaked and tilted as she pressed in her heels to keep them from sliding further.

Had she meant it, when she’d talked of sitting, smoking cigarettes? Had I, in picturing this place, somehow forgotten that it was two o’clock in the morning? With the fading of the headlamps that came when I turned off the engine, there was nothing to be seen of the pond, the grass, the circling rushes. We might have been anywhere, or nowhere at all. Only the hush was as I’d imagined it: a hush so deep it seemed to magnify every sound that broke it, so that I was unnaturally aware of the movement of Caroline’s breath, of the tightening and unclenching of her throat as she swallowed, of the unsticking of her tongue and palate as she slightly opened her mouth. For a minute, perhaps longer, we sat with no more motion between us than that, I with my hands on the steering-wheel, she with her arm out to the dashboard as if still bracing herself against jars.

Then I turned and tried to look at her. It was too dark to make her out properly, but I could picture vividly enough her face, with its un-handsome combination of strong family lines. I heard again Seeley’s words:
There’s something there, definitely
… Oh, I had felt it, hadn’t I? I think I had felt it the very first time I’d met her, watching her work her bare brown toes through the fur of Gyp’s belly; and I had felt it a hundred times since then, catching sight of the flare of her hips, the swell of her bosom, the easy, solid movement of her limbs. But—again, I was ashamed to acknowledge it, am ashamed to remember it now—the feeling stirred something else in me, some dark current of unease, almost of distaste. It wasn’t the difference in our ages. I don’t think I even considered that. It was as if what pulled me to her also repelled me. As if I desired her despite myself … I thought again of Seeley. None of this, I knew, would have made any sense to him. Seeley would have kissed her and to hell with it. I’ve imagined that kiss, many times. The chill of her lip, and the surprise of the heat beyond it. The teasing open, in the darkness, of a seam of moisture, movement, taste. Seeley would have done it.