The Little Stranger (43 page)

B
ut the house, it seemed, would not be so easily subdued, and before another week had passed, a new trouble had emerged. The problem this time lay with a relic of the Hall’s Victorian years—an old speaking-tube, which had been installed in the 1880s to allow the nursery staff to communicate with the cook, and which ran right down through the house from the day-nursery on the second floor, to finish at a small ivory mouthpiece in the kitchen. The mouthpiece was stoppered by a whistle, fastened to it by a slim brass chain, and designed to sound when the tube was blown into at the other end. Naturally, with Caroline and Roderick both grown up, it was a very long time since the speaking-tube had last been put to serious use. The nurseries themselves had been stripped of their fittings at the start of the war, so that the rooms could be occupied by the officers of the army unit that had been billeted with Mrs Ayres. Altogether, in fact, the tube must have lain there, mute and dusty and undisturbed, for fifteen years.

Now, however, Mrs Bazeley and Betty went to Caroline to complain that the disused mouthpiece had started giving off eerie little whistles.

I had the whole story from Mrs Bazeley herself, when I went down to the kitchen a day or two later to see what the trouble was. She said that, at first, they’d heard the whistling and couldn’t imagine what was making it. It had been faint, then—‘Faint,’ she said, ‘and gusty; all blow. Well, just like the sound of a kettle working himself up to a boil’—and they’d concluded doubtfully that it must be the hiss of air escaping from the central-heating pipes. But one morning the whistle had sounded so clearly there could be no mistaking the source of it. Mrs Bazeley had been on her own in the kitchen at the time, putting loaves into the oven, and the sudden piercing blast had so startled her, she’d burnt her wrist. She didn’t, she told me as she showed me the blister, even know what the speaking-tube was. She hadn’t been at Hundreds long enough ever to have seen the contraption in use. She’d always thought the tarnished mouthpiece and whistle ‘part of the electrics’.

It had taken Betty to work the thing out and explain it to her; and so when, a day later, the whistle sounded shrilly again, Mrs Bazeley naturally supposed that Caroline or Mrs Ayres wanted to talk to her from one of the rooms upstairs. She went doubtfully to the mouthpiece, drew out the whistle, and set her ear to the ivory cup.

‘And what did you hear?’ I asked her, following her apprehensive gaze across the kitchen to the now-silent tube.

She made a face. ‘A queer sort of noise.’

‘Queer, how?’

‘I can’t say. Like a breath.’

‘A breath?’ I said. ‘You mean a person, breathing? Was there a voice?’

No, there wasn’t a voice. It was more of a rustling. Then again, not quite a rustling … ‘Well, like hearing the operator,’ she said, ‘over the telephone. You don’t hear her speak, but you know her’s listening. You know her’s there. Oh, it were queer!’

I stared at her, struck for a moment by the similarity between her words and Caroline’s description of the mysteriously ringing phone. She met my gaze, and shuddered; she said she had stuck the whistle hastily back in its socket, and run from the room to fetch Betty, and Betty, after nerving herself up to it, had put her own ear to the mouthpiece, and had also had the feeling of ‘something queer’ being in the tube. That’s when they had gone upstairs to complain about the business to the Ayreses.

They had found Caroline, alone, and told her everything that had happened. She must have been struck by Mrs Bazeley’s words, too: she listened carefully to their story, then accompanied them back to the kitchen and gingerly listened at the tube herself. But she heard nothing, nothing at all. She said they must have been imagining things; or that the whistles were caused by ‘the wind playing tricks’. She hung a tea-cloth over the mouthpiece and told them that, if the noise were to start again, they must simply ignore it. And she added, as an afterthought, that she hoped they would say nothing of this new nuisance to Mrs Ayres.

Her visit didn’t do much to reassure them. In fact, the tea-cloth seemed only to make things worse. For now the speaking-tube became ‘like a parrot in a cage’: every time they found themselves starting to forget about it, and to sink back into their old routines, it would let out one of its awful whistles and frighten them to death.

In any other setting, such a story would have struck me as farcical. But the Hall, by now, had a disconcertingly palpable air of stress of tension: the women in it were tired and nervous, and I could see that Mrs Bazeley’s fear, at least, was very real. When she’d finished speaking, I left her side, and went across the kitchen to look at the speaking-tube myself. Lifting the tea-cloth I found a bland ivory cup and whistle, fixed to the wall at head height on a shallow wooden mount. A less sinister-looking thing it would have been hard to imagine—and yet, when I thought of the disquiet it had managed to inspire, the very quaintness of the object before me began to seem slightly grotesque. I was reminded uneasily of Roderick. I remembered those ‘ordinary things’—the collar, the cufflinks, the shaving-mirror—which had seemed, in his delusion, to come to crafty, malevolent life.

Then, as I drew the whistle free, another thought struck me. This was a nursery servants’ speaking-tube; my mother had been nursery maid here. She must have spoken many times into this device, forty years before … The thought caught me off guard. I had the sudden irrational idea that, in putting my ear to the cup, I would hear my mother’s voice. I had the idea that I’d hear her calling my name, exactly as I’d used to hear her, calling me home at the end of the day, when I was a boy playing out in the fields at the back of our house.

I became aware of Mrs Bazeley and Betty, watching, perhaps beginning to wonder at my delay. I dipped my head to the mouthpiece … And, like Caroline, I heard nothing, only the faint surge and echo of the blood in my ear—sounds which, I suppose, might easily have been translated, by an overwrought imagination, into something more sinister. Straightening up, I laughed at myself.

‘I think Miss Caroline had the right idea,’ I said. ‘This tube must be sixty years old, at least! The rubber must be perished; the wind gets in, and makes those whistles. I dare say it’s the wind that’s been setting the bells off, too.’

Mrs Bazeley looked unconvinced. She said, with a glance at Betty, ‘I dunno, Doctor. This child’s been saying for months that the house has something queer about it. Suppose—’

‘This house is falling apart,’ I said firmly. ‘That’s the sad truth, and all there is to it.’

And to put a stop to the whole business I did what Mrs Bazeley or Caroline, if they had been less distracted, might easily have done for themselves: I tugged the ivory whistle from its chain and put it in my waistcoat pocket, and I replaced it with a cork.

I assumed that that would be the end of the matter; and for several days, I believe, there was calm in the house. But then, on the following Saturday morning, Mrs Bazeley came into the kitchen as usual and noticed that the tea-cloth, which she had hung back over the speaking-tube after my visit, and which had remained there undisturbed since then, had somehow fallen to the floor. She supposed that Betty must have knocked it, or a breeze from the passage dislodged it, so, with shrinking fingers, she picked it up and put it back in place. An hour later she noticed that the cloth had fallen again. By now Betty was with her, having come down from her duties upstairs:
she
picked up the cloth and returned it to the mouthpiece—taking care, she told me earnestly, to tuck it tightly into the crack between the wooden mount and the wall. Again the cloth came free, and this time Mrs Bazeley actually caught a glimpse of it falling. She saw it from the corner of her eye as she stood at the kitchen table: she said it didn’t flutter, as if caught by a breeze; instead it slid straight down to the floor as if someone had tugged it.

By now she was tired of her own fear, and the sight exasperated her. She caught the cloth up and flung it aside, then stood squarely before the stopped-up tube and shook her fist at it.

‘Go on,’ she cried, ‘you hateful old thing! No one’s minding you! Do you hear me?’ She put a hand on Betty’s shoulder. ‘Don’t look at him, Betty. Come away. If he wants to go on pranking, let him try. I’m sick to death of him.’ And she turned on her heel and headed back to the table.

She had taken only two or three steps when she heard the sound of something softly striking the kitchen floor. She turned back to see that the cork, which a week before she had watched me screw snugly into the ivory mouthpiece, had been plucked or pushed from its socket and was rolling around at her feet.

At that, all her bravado left her. She gave a scream, and darted to Betty—who had also heard the cork fall, though she hadn’t seen it rolling—and the two of them ran from the room, banging the door closed behind them. They stood for a moment in the vaulted basement passage, almost frightened out of their wits; then, hearing movement on the floor above, they stumbled together up the stairs. They were hoping for Caroline, and I wish now that they had found her; I think she would have been able to calm them down and keep the matter in check. But Caroline, unfortunately, was down at the building-work with Babb. It was Mrs Ayres they met, just coming out of the little parlour. She had been sitting quietly reading, and, taken by surprise by them now, she imagined from the wildness of their manner that some new catastrophe had taken place—another fire broken out, perhaps. She knew nothing of the whistling speaking-tube, and when she finally pieced together their confused account of the falling tea-towel and the tumbling cork, she was nonplussed.

‘But, what has frightened you so much?’ she asked them.

They couldn’t properly say. All she could understand, finally, was how shaken they both were. The thing didn’t strike her as very serious, but she agreed to go and take a look. It was rather a nuisance, she said; but then, the house was full of nuisances these days.

They followed her down to the threshold of the kitchen, but further than that they would not go. When she went in they stayed at the door, clutching at the frame and watching in dismay as, bemused, she examined the lifeless cloth, the cork, and the tube; and when she delicately tucked back her loops of greying hair and lowered her head to the mouthpiece, they stretched out their arms and said, ‘Oh, madam, be careful! Oh, madam, do please take care!’

Mrs Ayres hesitated just for a moment—struck, perhaps, as I had been a few days before, by the sincerity of fear in their voices. Then she carefully put her ear to the cup and listened. When she straightened up, her expression was almost apologetic.

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite know what I ought to have heard. There seems to be nothing.’

‘There’s nothing there, now!’ said Mrs Bazeley. ‘But it’ll be back, madam. It’s in there, waiting!’

‘Waiting? But, what do you mean? You talk as though there’s a sort of genie! How could there be anything there? The tube runs right up to the nurseries—’

And here, Mrs Bazeley told me later, Mrs Ayres stumbled, and her look changed. She said, more slowly, ‘Those rooms are shut up. They’ve been shut up since the soldiers left us.’

Now Betty spoke, in a voice of horror. ‘Oh, madam, you don’t suppose—you don’t suppose summat’s got up there, and is up there now?’

‘Oh, my Lord!’ cried Mrs Bazeley. ‘The girl’s right. With them rooms all shut and dark like that, how do we know what’s been going on in them? Anything could’ve been going on! Oh, why don’t you call for Dr Faraday and make him go up and have a look? Or let Betty run and fetch Makins, or Mr Babb.’

‘Makins or Babb?’ said Mrs Ayres, coming back to herself. ‘No, I certainly shan’t. Miss Caroline will be home soon, and what she’ll make of this I can’t imagine. If you’ll just get on with your tasks—’

‘We can’t put our minds to house-work, madam, with that nasty thing a-watching us!’

‘Watching you? A minute ago it only had ears!’

‘Well, whatever he’ve got, he in’t normal. He in’t nice. Oh, at least let Miss Caroline go up and take a look, when she comes back. Miss Caroline won’t stand for no nonsense.’

But just as Caroline herself, a week before, had tried to keep her mother from being drawn into this matter, so, now, it occurred to Mrs Ayres that she might very easily sort this out before her daughter’s return. Whether she had any other motive in mind, I don’t know. I think it likely that she did—that, having just glimpsed the first, faint thread of a particular idea, she felt almost compelled to pursue it. Anyway, much to Mrs Bazeley’s and Betty’s horror, she declared that she would put an end to the whole business by going upstairs and examining the empty rooms herself.

So once again they followed her, this time up through the north passage to the hall; and just as they had stuck at the threshold of the kitchen so now, at the foot of the staircase, they hung fearfully back, clutching at the serpent-headed banister and watching her climb. She went briskly and almost silently in her indoor shoes, and once she had rounded the first landing all they could do was put back their heads and lean into the stairwell, to watch her go higher. They saw the flash of her stockinged legs between the graceful rising balusters, and the grip and slide of her ringed fingers on the mahogany rail. They saw her, high up on the second floor, pause and give a single glance back down at them; and then she moved off, over creaking boards. The creaks continued to sound after her footsteps faded, but at length even they died away. Mrs Bazeley overcame her fear enough to advance a little higher; further than the first landing, however, nothing would induce her to go. She kept hard at the banister, straining her ears: trying to pick out sounds in the Hundreds silence, ‘like trying to spy figures in a mist’.

Mrs Ayres, too, as she left the stairwell behind, was aware of the thickening silence. She was not afraid of it, she told me later, but something of Mrs Bazeley’s and Betty’s suspense must have infected her, even if ever so slightly, for though she had started up the staircase boldly enough, she now found herself moving more cautiously. This floor was laid out differently from the two floors below, with narrower corridors and noticeably lower ceilings. The dome of glass in the roof lit up the stairwell with a chill, milky light, but, as in the hall downstairs, this had the effect of filling the spaces to every side of it with shadows. The rooms Mrs Ayres had to pass on her journey to the nurseries were mostly box-rooms, or servants’ bedrooms, and had long lain empty. Their doors were shut to prevent draughts, and some had been made fast in their frames with rolls of paper or chips of wood. This meant that the corridor was gloomier than ever; and with the generator off, the electric light-switches were useless.