The Little Stranger (38 page)

So, defeated, I moved down again, to the pink and liver-coloured marble floor. And I said, not warmly, ‘Yes, it seems awfully unlikely, at the moment’—putting on my hat and turning away from her, and letting myself out through the buckled front door.

I
began to miss her almost at once, but the feeling irritated me now, and a sort of stubbornness or tiredness kept me from pursuing her. I spent a few days avoiding the Hall altogether—taking the longer route around the park; wasting fuel in the process. Then, quite unexpectedly, I ran into her and her mother on one of the streets of Leamington. They had driven in to do some shopping. I came upon them too late to pretend I hadn’t seen them, and we stood and chatted, awkwardly, for five or ten minutes. Caroline was wearing that unflattering wool hat of hers, together with a jaundice-coloured scarf I hadn’t seen on her before. She looked plain and sallow and remote, and once the first shock of bumping into her had worn away, I realised unhappily that there was no leaping charge between us, no special sympathy at all. She had clearly spoken to her mother, who made no reference to my last visit; indeed, we behaved, all three of us, as if that visit had never occurred. When they left me I raised my hat to them, as if to any acquaintance on the street. Then I went moodily on to the hospital—and started a dreadful row, I remember, with the most ferocious of the ward sisters.

Over the next few days I threw myself back into my rounds, not wanting to give myself any time to be idle and brooding. And then a piece of luck came my way. The committee on which I’d been sitting was due to present its findings at a London conference; the man who was meant to give the paper fell ill, and I was invited to take his place. With things with Caroline so muddled, I leapt at the chance; and as the conference was a long one, involving a few days’ stay as an observer on one of the wards of a London hospital, for the first time in several years I took a complete break from my practice. My cases were handed over to Graham and to our locum, Wise. I left Warwickshire for London on the fifth of February, and altogether was away for almost two weeks.

My absence couldn’t, in practical terms, have had much impact on life at Hundreds, for I was often unable to call in at the Hall for longish spells of time. But I learned later that they missed me there. I suppose they had come to rely on me, and liked feeling that I was on hand, ready to drop in, if I had to, in response to a telephone call. My visits had eased their sense of isolation; now it seemed to rush back upon them, more dismal than before. Looking for distractions, they spent an afternoon in Lidcote with Bill and Helen Desmond, followed by an evening with elderly Miss Dabney. Another day they went into Worcestershire, to visit some old family friends. But that journey took most of their petrol-ration; and then the weather grew wet again, and it became more difficult to get about on the bad country roads. Fearful for her health, Mrs Ayres kept safely indoors. Caroline, however, was made restless by the constant rain: she put on her oilskins and wellingtons and worked hard on the estate. She spent some days with Makins at the farm, helping with the first of the spring sowing. Then she turned her attention to the garden, fixing up the broken fence with Barrett, and doing what she could with the blocked drainpipe. This last task was a dispiriting one: going closer to the problem she could see how very badly the water had seeped. When she had cleared it, she went back into the house, to check for damage in all the rooms on the west side. Her mother went with her; they found minor leaks in two of the rooms, the dining-room and ‘boot-room’. Then they opened up the saloon.

They did this rather reluctantly. On the morning following the disastrous party back in October, Mrs Bazeley and Betty had gone in there to try and remove the traces of blood from the carpet and the sofa—working at them for two or three hours apparently, taking away pail after grisly pail of cloudy pink water. After that, with the house so depressed, and with all the anxiety over Rod, no one had had the heart to go back in there, and the saloon had been more or less shut up. Even when Caroline had gone through the Hall in search of items to auction, she had left this room untouched—almost as if, I remember thinking at the time, she’d developed a sort of superstition about disturbing it.

But now, putting back its creaking shutters, she and her mother cursed themselves for not having looked it over sooner. The room was more damaged than they could have guessed, its decorative ceiling so bloated with water it actually sagged. In other spots rain had simply worked its way through seams in the plaster to fall unchecked on the carpet and furniture below. The harpsichord, fortunately, had escaped the worst of the damage, but the tapestried seat of one of the gilt Regency chairs was quite ruined. Most startling of all, the yellow Chinese wallpaper had tugged its corners from the rusting drawing-pins with which Caroline had fixed them up, and was drooping in ragged strips from the damp plaster behind.

‘Well,’ said Caroline, sighing, gazing at the mess, ‘we had our trial by fire. I suppose we should have expected to be tried by water, too …’

They called for Betty and Mrs Bazeley, and had them build up a blaze in the grate; they started up the generator, brought electric heaters and oil-stoves, and for the rest of that day, and through the whole of the day that followed, they devoted themselves to airing the room. The ceiling they knew they could do nothing for. The crystal cups of the chandelier held pools of cloudy water, and fizzed and crackled alarmingly when they tried its switch, so after that they dared not touch it. The wallpaper was beyond salvage. But the carpet they thought they could rescue, and the pieces of furniture too large to be taken for storage elsewhere they planned to clean, then bag or drape. Caroline herself joined in the work, putting on some ancient drill trousers and tying up her hair with string. Mrs Ayres’s health, however, had taken another slight dip, and she was not quite well enough to do much more than watch unhappily while the room was stripped and diminished.

‘Your grandmother would have broken her heart,’ she said on the second day, fingering a pair of silk curtains fantastically stained by creeping water.

‘Well, it can’t be helped,’ said Caroline wearily. Her long spell of work was catching up with her. She was struggling with a roll of felt, brought down from upstairs and meant for the sofa. ‘The room has had its life, and that’s that.’

Her mother looked almost stricken. ‘You talk as though we were making a tomb of it!’

‘I wish we were! We might get a grant from the county council for that. No doubt Babb could do the conversion.—What a beast this thing is!’ She flung the roll down. ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t mean to be flippant. Why not go back to the little parlour if the sight of all this is upsetting you?’

‘When I think of the parties your father and I hosted here, when you were small!’

‘Yes, I know. But Daddy never did much like this room, remember? He said the wallpaper made him seasick.’

She glanced around, searching for some gentle chore with which to occupy her mother; and finally, taking her hand, she led her to a chair beside the cabinet of the gramophone.

‘Look here,’ she said, opening the cabinet up and bringing out a heap of old records. ‘We might as well do things properly. I’ve been meaning to go through these for ages. Let’s you and I sort through them now, and see what we can throw away. I’m sure most of them are rubbish.’

She meant only, really, to distract her mother from the depressing business going on around her. But the records were all mixed up with other things, pieces of sheet music, concert and theatre programmes, dinner-menus and invitations, many of them dating from the early years of her mother’s marriage or from her own childhood; and the task became an absorbing and rather sentimental one for them both. They sat there for almost an hour, exclaiming over the things they turned up. They found music bought by the Colonel, and old dance-tunes of Rod’s. They found recordings of a Mozart opera that Mrs Ayres had first seen sung on her honeymoon in 1912.

‘Why, I remember the gown I was wearing!’ she said, letting the record sink in her lap and gazing softly into her own memory. ‘A blue chiffon, with handkerchief sleeves. Cissie and I had argued about which of us should have it. One felt one was floating in a gown like that. Well, at eighteen one does float, or we girls did then, we were mere children … And your father, in his dress-suit—and walking with a cane! He’d twisted his ankle. Only twisted his ankle, jumping down off a horse, but he carried that cane about for a fortnight. I think he thought it distinguished. He was a child, too: only twenty-two, younger than Roderick is now …’

The thought of Roderick was obviously a hard one, coming as it did upon her other memories, and she looked so wistful that, after watching her for a moment, Caroline gently took the record from her hands, opened up the gramophone, and set it to play. The disc was old, and the gramophone needle badly wanted replacing: at first all they heard was the hiss and crackle of the shellac. Then, slightly chaotically, there came the boom of the orchestra. The singer’s voice seemed to struggle against it, until finally the soprano rose purely, ‘like some lovely, fragile creature,’ Caroline told me later, ‘breaking free of thorns.’

It must have been an oddly poignant moment. The day was dark with rain again, and the saloon was quite dim. The fire and the purring heaters cast an almost romantic light, so that for a minute or two the room—for all that the paper was hanging from its walls and its ceiling bulging—seemed alive with glamour. Mrs Ayres smiled, her gaze loose again, her hand stirring, the fingers sinking and falling in response to the swells of the music. Even Mrs Bazeley and Betty were awed. They kept up their progress around the room, but did so stealthily, like dumb-show artists, softly unrolling lengths of drugget across the last uncovered strips of carpet, and gently easing mirrors from the walls.

The aria drew to its close. The gramophone needle caught in its groove and gave a harsh repetitive crackle. Caroline rose and lifted it free, and across the ensuing silence there broke the steady drip, drip of water tumbling from the ruined ceiling into buckets and bowls. She saw her mother look up, blinking, as if waking from a dream; and so, to dispel the melancholy, she started up a second record, a brisk old music-hall song that she and Roderick had used to march about to as children.

‘
Jolly good luck to the girl who loves a sol-dier!
’ she sang lightly. ‘
Girls, have you been there?
’

Mrs Bazeley and Betty, relieved, began to move about more freely, picking up the pace of their work to match the clip of the music.

‘Now, there’s a fine old song,’ said Mrs Bazeley approvingly.

‘You like this one?’ called Caroline. ‘So do I! Don’t tell me you saw Vesta Tilley singing it on
your
honeymoon?’

‘Honeymoon, miss?’ Mrs Bazeley pulled in her chin. ‘I never had one! Only a night at me sister’s, at Evesham. Her and her husband went in with the kids, for Mr Bazeley and me to have the room. After that we went straight to me mother-in-law’s place, where we never even had so much as a bed to ourselves—no, not for nine years, until the poor old lady died.’

‘Good gracious!’ said Caroline. ‘Poor Mr Bazeley.’

‘Oh, he never minded. He kept a bottle of rum by the bed, and a jar of black treacle; he gave his mother a spoonful of them o’nights, and her slept like a dead un.—Pass us that old tin box there, Betty, there’s a good girl.’

Caroline laughed, then looked on, still smiling, as Betty handed Mrs Bazeley the box. It held a number of narrow sandbags, used in the house for stopping up draughts, and known in the family as ‘snakes’: they were very familiar from Caroline’s childhood, and she watched with a touch of nostalgic pleasure as Mrs Bazeley crossed to the windows of the saloon and began to lay them down on the sills and over the gaps between the sashes. She even, finally, went over and drew a spare sandbag from the box, taking it back to the heap of records so that she could turn it in her hands as she went through the last of the papers and discs.

She was vaguely aware, in time, of Mrs Bazeley making a soft exclamation of annoyance, then calling to Betty for water and a cloth. But it was another minute or two before she thought to look over to the window again. When she did look, she saw the two servants kneeling side by side, alternately frowning and rubbing gingerly at some spot on the wainscot. She called out, more or less idly, ‘What is it, Mrs Bazeley?’

‘Well, miss,’ Mrs Bazeley answered, ‘I don’t quite know. I can only think as it’s some mark left here by that poor little girl that was bit.’

Caroline’s heart sank. She realised that the window alcove they were looking at was the one in which Gillian Baker-Hyde had been sitting when Gyp had snapped at her. The wainscot and floorboards there had been badly splashed with blood, but that whole area had been thoroughly washed down along with the sofa and the carpet. She supposed now that some stain had managed to escape notice.

Something in Mrs Bazeley’s voice or manner, however, made her curious. She let the sandbag fall from her fingers and went to join her at the window.

Her mother looked up as she moved away. ‘What is it, Caroline?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing, I expect.’

Mrs Bazeley and Betty drew back to let her see. The mark they’d been rubbing at wasn’t a stain, but a number of childish scrawls on the woodwork: a jumble of
S
s, done apparently in pencil, randomly placed, and roughly or hastily drawn. The effect was like this:

‘God!’ said Caroline under her breath. ‘As if tormenting Gyp wasn’t enough for her!’ Then, catching Mrs Bazeley’s eye: ‘I’m sorry. What happened to that little girl was frightful, and I’d give anything to undo it. She must have brought a pencil with her that night. Unless she took one of ours. I suppose it
was
the Baker-Hyde girl? Do the marks look fresh to you?’

She moved slightly as she spoke: her mother had been drawn across the room by her words, and was standing at her side. She was gazing at the scribbles, Caroline thought, with an odd expression, half in great dismay, half as though she wanted to go closer, perhaps run her fingers over the wood.