The Little Stranger (39 page)

Mrs Bazeley wrung out her wet cloth and started to rub at the scribbles again.

‘I can’t say how they look, miss,’ she said, puffing as she worked. ‘I know they’re harder to get off than they should be! They weren’t here though—were they, Betty?—when we did out the room in the days before that party.’

Betty looked nervously at Caroline. ‘I don’t think so, miss.’

‘I know they weren’t,’ said Mrs Bazeley. ‘For I went over this paint-work myself, every inch of it, while Betty done the carpets.’

‘Well, then it must have been that child,’ said Caroline. ‘It was naughty of her; very naughty indeed. Do the best you can to remove them, will you?’

‘I’m doing it!’ said Mrs Bazeley, indignant. ‘But I’ll tell you something. If this is pencil, I’m King George. This is stuck fast, this is.’

‘Stuck? It isn’t ink, or crayon, is it?’

‘I don’t know what it is. I could almost fancy it’s come up from
under
the paint.’

‘
Under
the paint,’ repeated Caroline, startled.

Mrs Bazeley looked up at her for a second, struck by her tone; then she saw the clock, and tutted. ‘Ten more minutes, now, and there’s me time done. Betty, you shall have to try soda on this after I’ve gone. Not too much, mind, or you’ll blister it …’

Mrs Ayres turned away. She had said nothing about the marks, but it seemed to Caroline that her pose was a burdened one, as if this unexpected reminder of the party and all it had led to had put the final gloomy seal on her day. With slow and fumbling gestures she gathered together her things, saying she was tired and meant to rest for a while upstairs. And since the saloon had now well and truly lost its glamour, Caroline also decided to leave it. She picked up the box of rejected records and followed her mother to the door—looking back only once to the patch of scrubbed wainscot, with its indelible swarm of
S
s like so many wriggling little eels.

T
his was on the Saturday—probably at just about the time I was delivering my report to the London conference, with the whole affair with Caroline still niggling darkly at the back of my mind. By the end of that afternoon the work on the saloon was finished, and the room was effectively sealed up again, its shutters fastened and its door closed; and the scribbles on the wainscot—which, after all, were very small annoyances in the wider scheme of the family’s misfortunes—were more or less forgotten. Sunday and Monday passed off without incident. Both those days were cold, but dry. So Caroline was surprised, on passing the door of the saloon on Tuesday afternoon, to hear from the room beyond it a regular soft tapping sound, which she took to be the drip of rainwater. Dismayed to think that the ceiling must have sprung some mysterious new leak, she opened the door and looked inside. The tapping ceased as she did it. She stood still with her breathing softened, peering into the lightless room, just about making out the strips of torn paper on the walls, and the odd, lumpy-looking pieces of wrapped-up furniture, but hearing nothing more. So she closed the door and went on her way.

Next day, re-passing the saloon, she again heard the noise. A rapid drumming or pattering it was this time, so unmistakable that she went right into the room and drew back a shutter. As before, the noise had stopped by the time she had quite opened up the door: she checked the bowls and pails that had been left out to catch drips from the ceiling, and made a quick inspection of the drugget-covered carpet, but all was dry. She was just deciding to give the thing up, baffled, when the noise started again. This time it seemed to her to be coming not from inside the saloon at all, but from one of its neighbouring rooms. A soft but smart
rat-tat-tat
she said it was now, like a schoolboy idly drumming with a stick. More baffled and intrigued than ever, she went back out into the passage and stood listening again. She pursued the sound to the dining-room, but there it again abruptly fell silent—only to restart a few seconds later, this time apparently on the other side of the wall, in the little parlour.

She found her mother in there, reading a week-old newspaper. Mrs Ayres had heard nothing. ‘Nothing?’ asked Caroline. ‘Are you sure?’ Then: ‘There! Do you hear that?’ She held up her hand. Her mother listened, and after a moment agreed that, yes, there was certainly some sort of sound. A ‘knocking’, she called it, as opposed to Caroline’s ‘tapping’; she suggested it might be the result of air or water being trapped in the central-heating pipes. Doubtfully, Caroline crossed to the room’s ancient radiator. It was tepid to her touch and quite lifeless, and even as she drew her hand away from it, the knocking grew louder and clearer: it seemed now to be over her head. So distinct a sound was it, she and her mother were able to ‘watch’ its progress in the ceiling and the walls: it travelled from one side of the room to the other like ‘a small hard bouncing ball’.

This was sometime in the afternoon, after Mrs Bazeley had gone home; but now, naturally, they thought of Betty, wondering if she mightn’t simply be at work in one of the rooms upstairs. When they rang for her, however, she came straight up from the basement: she had been down there for half an hour, she said, preparing their tea. They kept her with them in the little parlour for almost ten minutes, during which time the house was perfectly silent and still; but no sooner had she left them than the knocking started again. This time it was back out in the passage. Caroline went quickly to the door, and looked out to find Betty standing bewildered in the middle of the marble floor while a soft, crisp drumming sounded from the panels of the wall high up above her head.

They were none of them afraid, Caroline said, not even Betty herself. The sound was queer, but not menacing; it seemed to lead them almost playfully, in fact, from one spot to another, until the pursuing of it along the passage began to feel like ‘a bit of a lark’. They followed it right out into the hall. This was always the chilliest place in the house, and today it seemed almost like an ice-box. Caroline rubbed her arms, glancing up the draughty staircase.

‘If it means to go upstairs,’ she said, ‘then it can go on its own. I don’t care about the idiotic thing that much.’

Rat-tat-tat!
went the drumming loudly, as if in indignant response to her words, and after that the sound seemed grudgingly to ‘settle’ in one spot, giving the bizarre impression that it was coming from a shallow laburnum-wood cabinet that stood against the panelled wall beside the staircase. The effect was so vivid, Caroline felt wary about opening the cabinet up. She caught hold of its handles, but stood well back as she turned them—half expecting the thing to spring open, she said, like a jack-in-the-box. But the doors swung harmlessly towards her, revealing nothing but a few odd bits of ornament and clutter, and when the tapping sounded again, it became clear that it was coming not from inside the cabinet, but from somewhere behind it. Caroline closed the doors, and moved to peer into the slender dark space between the cabinet and the wall. Then, with an understandable touch of reluctance, she lifted her hand and slowly slid her fingers into the gap. She stood still, her breath held, her palm flat on the dry wood panel.

The knocking came again, louder than before. She started back, alarmed but laughing.

‘It’s there!’ she said, shaking her arm as if to drive pins and needles from it. ‘I felt it in the wall! It’s like a little hand, rapping. It must be beetles or mice or something. Betty, come here and help me with this.’ She took hold of one side of the cabinet.

Betty looked fearful now. ‘I don’t want to, miss.’

‘Come on, it won’t bite you!’

So the girl moved forward. The cabinet was light but unwieldy, and it took the two of them a minute to shift it. The tapping faded again as they set it down, so that when Mrs Ayres, struck by the sight of something on the newly exposed wall, drew in her breath, Caroline heard her very clearly; and she saw her make a movement—stretch out her hand, then draw it back to her bosom as if in fright.

‘What is it, Mother?’ she said, still struggling with the placing of the cabinet’s feet. Mrs Ayres didn’t answer. Caroline made the cabinet steady, then went to her mother’s side and saw what had startled her.

The wall was marked with more of that childish scribbling:
SSS
SSSS
S SU S
.

Caroline stared. ‘I don’t believe it. This is simply too much! She couldn’t have—That child couldn’t possibly have—Could she?’ She looked at her mother; her mother didn’t answer. She turned to Betty.

‘When was this cabinet last moved?’

Betty looked really frightened now. ‘I don’t know, miss.’

‘Well, think! Was it after the fire?’

‘I—I think it must have been.’

‘I think it must have been, too. Didn’t you wash this wall, along with all the others? And you saw no writing then?’

‘I don’t remember, miss. I don’t think so.’

‘You would have seen it, wouldn’t you?’

Caroline moved right up to the wall as she spoke, to examine the marks more closely. She gave them a rub with the cuff of her cardigan. She licked her thumb, and rubbed with that. The marks remained. She shook her head, utterly perplexed.

‘
Could
the little girl have done it? Would she have? I think she went to the lavatory at some point, that night. She might just, perhaps, have slipped out here. She might have thought it funny, making a mark where we wouldn’t find it for months and months—’

‘Cover it up,’ said Mrs Ayres abruptly.

Caroline turned to her. ‘Oughtn’t we to wash it?’

‘There isn’t any point. Can’t you see? The marks are just like those others. We oughtn’t to have found them. I don’t want to look at them. Cover them up.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Caroline, with a glance at Betty. They manoeuvred the cabinet back into place.

And it was only when that was done, she told me, that the queerness of the whole thing began to strike her. She had been unafraid before, but now the taps, the discovery of the marks, her mother’s response, the current silence: she thought it all through, and felt her courage begin to waver. With an attempt at bravado, she said, ‘This house is playing parlour games with us, I think. We shan’t pay it any mind if it starts up again.’ She lifted her voice, and spoke into the stairwell. ‘Do you hear me, house? It’s no good your teasing us! We simply shan’t play!’

There were no answering knocks this time. Her words were swallowed up by the silence. She caught Betty’s apprehensive gaze, then turned away and spoke more quietly.

‘All right, Betty, you go on back to the kitchen now.’

But Betty hesitated. ‘Is madam all right?’

‘Madam’s fine.’ Caroline put a hand on her mother’s arm. ‘Mother, come through to the warm, will you?’

As on that other day, however, Mrs Ayres said she preferred to go alone to her room. She tightened her shawl, and Caroline and Betty watched her softly climb the stairs. She stayed up there until almost dinner-time; by which point, apparently, she was more herself again. Caroline, too, had recovered her nerve by then. Neither of the women mentioned the scribbles. That evening, and the day or two that followed, passed uneventfully.

B
ut some time later that week, Mrs Ayres had her first broken night. Like many women who had lived through the war, she was easily woken by unfamiliar sounds, and one night she started up out of sleep with the distinct impression that someone had called for her. She kept still in the deep winter darkness, listening hard; when she heard nothing more for several minutes, she began to relax back into slumber. Then, settling her head against her pillow, she thought she caught, beyond the rustling of the linen against her ear, another sound, and again sat up. After a moment the sound came again. It was not a voice, after all. It was not a rapping or a drumming, either. It was a fluttering, faint but distinct; and it was coming, unmistakably, from the other side of a narrow jib door beside her bed—that is, from her old dressing-room, which she now treated as a box-room for the storing of trunks and hampers. The sound was such an odd one, it conjured up a particular and peculiar image, and for a moment she was really frightened. She supposed that someone had got into the dressing-room and was plucking clothes from one of the hampers and letting them flutter to the floor.

Then, as the sound continued, she realised that what she could hear was in fact the beating of wings. A bird must have found its way down the chimney and become trapped.

This was a relief, after her rather wild imaginings; but it was also a nuisance, for now she lay wide awake, listening to the poor thing making its panicked attempts at escape. She didn’t relish the idea of going into the dressing-room and trying to catch it. As it happened she had never much cared for birds or other fluttering things; she had a childish fear of them flying into her face, becoming tangled in her hair. But at last she could stand it no longer. She lit a candle and got out of bed. She put on her dressing-gown, taking care to button it right up to her throat; she tied a scarf very securely over her head, and drew on shoes and her wash-leather gloves. She did all this—making ‘a complete guy of myself’, as she later told her daughter—then gingerly drew back the dressing-room door. As with Caroline’s experience in the saloon, the fluttering ceased the moment the door began its swing, and the room beyond it seemed undisturbed. There were no bird droppings on the floor, no fallen feathers; and the flap of the chimney, she found when she went to examine it, was rusted shut.

She lay awake for the rest of that night, unsettled and wary, but the house stayed silent. The next night she went to bed early, and slept without much difficulty. On the night after that, however, she was again woken, and in exactly the same way as before. This time she went around the landing and woke Betty, and had her return with her and stand listening at the dressing-room door. It was about a quarter to three. Betty said she heard ‘something, she wasn’t sure what’; but again, when they nerved themselves up to look inside the little room, they found it lifeless … It then occurred to Mrs Ayres that her first instinct must have been right. She could not have imagined the sounds, they were too distinct for that; the bird must be inside the chimney itself, just behind the breast of it, unable to find its way back up the flue. The thought took hold of her, horribly. It was made all the worse, I suppose, by the lateness of the hour, by the stillness and the dark. She sent Betty back to her bed but again lay awake, upset and frustrated, and by the time Caroline went in to see her next morning she was already up, and back in the dressing-room; she was down on her knees in front of the hearth, prising with a poker at the rusted chimney-flap.