The Little Stranger (45 page)

What happened to her in the time it took the women to make their stumbling, frightened way up to the nursery, no one could afterwards say. They found the door to the room ajar and the speaking-tube silent, the ivory whistle fixed neatly in its socket. Mrs Ayres had worked herself rigidly into a corner and, effectively, ‘blacked out’. She was bleeding badly from the cuts on her hands and arms, so the three of them did what they could to bind up her wounds, tearing up one of her own silk scarves for bandages. They got her to her feet and half walked, half carried her downstairs to her bedroom, where they gave her brandy and tried to warm her, building up the fire in the grate and loading her with blanket after blanket—for now, in her shock, she’d begun to shake.

She was still shaking when I saw her, just over an hour later.

I had been visiting a patient—luckily, a private patient with a telephone, so when Caroline put through a call to my surgery, the girl at the exchange was able to pass on her urgent request that I stop off at Hundreds on my way home. I drove to the Hall as soon as I could, with no idea of what was awaiting me. I was utterly flabbergasted to find the house in such a state. A white-faced Betty took me up to Mrs Ayres: she was sitting with Caroline at her side, hunched and shivering, starting like a hare at every slight unexpected movement or sound; and at the first sight of her, I faltered. Her expression was so wild, she looked just like her son, just like Roderick in the last, worst phase of his delusions. Her hair was straggling around her shoulders, and her arms and hands were ghastly. The blood had caught in her bulky rings, turning all the stones to rubies.

But her wounds, by a miracle, turned out to be fairly superficial. I cleaned them up, and dressed and bound them, and then, taking Caroline’s place, I simply sat and gently held her hands. Bit by bit, the worst of the wildness faded from her gaze and she told me what had happened to her—shuddering and weeping with every fresh twist of it, and covering her face.

But at last she looked squarely and urgently into my eyes.

‘You understand what’s happened?’ she said. ‘You see what this means? I failed her, Doctor! She came, and I failed her!’

She clutched my fingers—clutched them so hard, I saw the blood rising to the surface of her dressings as her wounds reopened.

‘Mrs Ayres,’ I said, trying to steady her.

She wouldn’t listen. ‘My darling girl. I’ve wanted her to come, you see, so desperately. I’ve
felt
her, here in this house. I’ve lain in my bed, and felt her near. So near, she was! But I was greedy. I wanted her nearer. I drew her, by wishing for her to come. And then she came—and I was afraid. I was afraid of her, and failed her! And now I don’t know what frightens me more, the thought that she’ll never come to me again, or the thought that, in failing her, I’ve made her hate me. Will she hate me, Doctor? Say she won’t!’

I said, ‘Nobody hates you. You must be calm.’

‘But I’ve failed her! I’ve failed her!’

‘You’ve failed no one. Your daughter loves you.’

She looked into my face. ‘You think she does?’

‘Of course she does.’

‘You promise me?’

‘I promise you,’ I said.

I
would have said anything, at that moment, simply to calm her down; and soon I forbade her to speak any more, and I gave her a sedative and put her to bed. She lay fretful for a time, with her bandaged hands still clasped in mine, but the sedative was a strong one, and once she was sleeping I gently disengaged my fingers from hers and went downstairs, to go over the incident with Caroline, Mrs Bazeley, and Betty. They were gathered together in the little parlour, looking as pale and as shaken almost as Mrs Ayres herself. Caroline had handed out glasses of brandy, and the alcohol, on top of the shock, had made Mrs Bazeley tearful. I questioned her and Betty as closely as I could, but all they could confirm of Mrs Ayres’s story was that she had gone up to the second floor alone; that she had stayed there so long—they thought, about fifteen or twenty minutes—they had grown anxious about her, and had gone out to alert Caroline; and then, that all three of them had seen her crying out in that dreadful way at the broken window.

When I had pieced together their side of things I went up to the day-nursery to examine the scene for myself. I had never been up to the second floor before, and I made the ascent warily, pretty shaken by the mood of the house. I found the bare room looking hideous, with its broken window and its streaks and splashes of darkening blood. But its door moved smoothly on its hinges, and the key moved glibly, too, in the lock. I tried turning the key with the door both closed and open; I even gave the door a slam, to see if that might jar the mechanism—it had no effect at all. I listened again at that wretched speaking-tube and, as before, heard nothing. So then I went through to the old night-nursery, just as Mrs Ayres had, and I stood very still and expectant—thinking of the dead child, Susan; thinking of my mother; thinking a thousand gloomy things—holding my breath, almost daring something to happen, someone or something to come. But nothing did happen. The house seemed deathly silent and chill, the room felt bleak, unhappy—but quite lifeless.

I did consider one explanation: that somebody had staged the whole affair with the intention of tormenting Mrs Ayres, either as a sort of ghastly joke, or out of simple malice. I could hardly suspect Caroline; and since I wouldn’t believe it of Mrs Bazeley, who’d been a servant at the house since before the war, my suspicions had to fall on Betty. It was possible that she, after all, had somehow been behind the business with the speaking-tube in the first place; and Mrs Ayres herself had said that the footsteps she had heard, going back and forth beyond the door, were light ones—light as a child’s. According to Mrs Bazeley, Betty had been down in the hall with her throughout the entire incident, though she also admitted that, in her anxiety for Mrs Ayres, she had gone further up the staircase while Betty had hung back. Could the girl have run to the servants’ stairs, made her rapid way up them, locked the nursery door, and then gone pattering back and forth in the passage—all without the other woman’s having missed her? It seemed very unlikely. I had come up by the back stairs myself, and had examined them pretty closely by the flame of my lighter. They were covered with a fine layer of dust, which my own shoes instantly disturbed, but there were no other footmarks, heavy or soft, I was quite certain. And then, Betty’s distress over the incident seemed very genuine; I knew she was fond of her mistress; and finally, of course, there was Mrs Ayres’s own word against her involvement, for she had seen the girl with Mrs Bazeley outside the house while the sounds in the speaking-tube went on …

I ran through all this in my mind, looking over that bleak room; but soon the oppressions of the place proved too much for me. I wet my handkerchief at the basin and cleared up the worst of the blood. I found a few loose pieces of linoleum and did what I could to block up the broken panes of window. Then I went heavily back downstairs. I went down by the main staircase, and met Caroline on the first landing, just coming out of her mother’s room. She touched her finger to her lips, and we carried on silently together to the little parlour.

When we were inside with the door closed, I said, ‘How is she?’

She shivered. ‘She’s sleeping. I thought I heard her call out, that’s all. I don’t want her to wake up and be frightened.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘she should sleep for hours with the Veronal inside her. Come and sit by the fire. You’re cold. And God knows, so am I.’

I led her to the hearth, drew the chairs close together before it, and we sat. I put my elbows on my knees, and my face in my hands. Beaten and weary, I rubbed my eyes.

She said, ‘You’ve been upstairs.’

I nodded, gazing blearily at her. ‘Oh, Caroline, that horrible room! It looks like a lunatic’s cell up there. I’ve locked the door of it. I think you should leave it locked, now. Don’t go up there.’

She looked away from me, towards the fire. ‘Another room shut up,’ she said.

I was still rubbing at my sore eyes. ‘Well, that’s the least of our worries right now. It’s your mother we need to think about. I just can’t believe this has happened, can you? And she was quite herself, this morning?’

She said, without drawing her gaze from the flames, ‘She was no different from how she was yesterday, if that’s what you mean.’

‘She’d slept well?’

‘As far as I know … I oughtn’t to have gone down to the houses, I suppose. I oughtn’t to have left her.’

I lowered my hands. ‘Don’t be silly. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me! You’ve been telling me for weeks that she hasn’t been herself. I wish to God I’d paid more attention. I’m so sorry, Caroline. I had no idea her mind was as unsettled as this. If those cuts had been deeper, if she’d caught an artery—’

She looked frightened. I reached for her hand. ‘Forgive me. This is dreadful for you. To see your mother in such a state … These—these fantasies of hers.’ I spoke reluctantly. ‘These ideas about your sister, that your sister’s been … visiting her. Did you know about that?’

She gazed back at the fire again. ‘No. But it makes sense now. She’s been spending so much time alone. I thought it was tiredness. Instead, up in her room, she must have been thinking that, that Susan—Oh, it’s grotesque! It’s—it’s filthy.’ Her pale cheeks had coloured. ‘And it
is
my fault, no matter what you say. I knew that something like this would happen. That it was only a matter of time.’

‘Well,’ I said miserably, ‘then I should have known it, too. And I could have kept a closer eye on her.’

‘It doesn’t matter how closely you watch,’ she said. ‘We watched Roderick, remember? I should have taken her away—right away, from Hundreds.’

There was something odd about the way she said this; and as she spoke she looked at me, then almost furtively dropped her gaze. I said, ‘What do you mean? Caroline?’

‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ she said. ‘It’s something in this house! Something that’s been here all along, and has just … woken up. Or something that’s come here, to punish and spite us. You saw how my mother was, when you arrived. You heard what happened to her. You heard Mrs Bazeley, and Betty.’

I was gazing at her in disbelief. I said, ‘You can’t seriously mean—You can’t believe—Caroline, listen.’ I reached across her for her other hand, and held her fingers tightly in mine. I said, ‘You, your mother, Mrs Bazeley, Betty: you’re all of you at the end of your tethers! This house, yes, has put thoughts in your heads. But is that so surprising? One grim thing has led so clearly to another: first Gyp, then Roderick, and now this. Surely you can see that? You aren’t your mother, Caroline. You’re stronger than she is. Why, I remember her sitting, weeping, where you’re sitting now, months ago! She must have been fretting over the memory of your sister ever since those wretched scribbles appeared. She’s been unwell, not sleeping; her age is against her, too. And then that foolish business with the speaking-tube—’

‘And the locked door? The footsteps?’

‘The door was probably never even shut! It was open, wasn’t it, when you and Mrs Bazeley went up there? And the whistle was back in its place? As for the footsteps—I dare say she heard some sound. She thought she heard Gyp’s footsteps once, you remember? That must have been all it took, for her mind to begin to give way.’

She shook her head, frustrated. ‘You have an answer for everything. ’

‘A rational answer, yes! You aren’t seriously suggesting that your sister—’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No, I’m not suggesting that.’

‘What, then? That some other ghost entirely is haunting your mother? The same ghost, presumably, that made those marks in Roderick’s room—’

‘Well
something
made them, didn’t it?’ she cried, pulling her hands out of my grip. ‘Something’s here, I know it is. I think I’ve known it ever since Rod got ill, but I was too afraid to face it … I keep thinking, too, of what my mother said, when that last set of scribbles was found. She said the house knows all our weaknesses and is testing them, one by one. Roddie’s weakness was the house itself, you see. Mine—well, perhaps mine was Gyp. But Mother’s weakness is Susan. It’s as if, with the scribbles, the footsteps, the voice—it’s as if she’s being
teased
. As if something’s
playing
with her.’

I said, ‘Caroline, you can’t possibly believe that.’

‘Oh,’ she answered angrily, ‘it’s all right for you! You can talk about delusions and fantasies, and things like that. But you don’t know this family; not really. You’ve only seen us like this. We were different, a year ago. I’m sure we were. Things have changed—gone wrong—so badly, so quickly. There has to be
something
, don’t you see?’

Her face was white now, and stricken. I put my hand on her arm.

‘Look, you’re tired. You’re all of you tired.’

‘You keep on saying that!’

‘Well, unfortunately it keeps on being true!’

‘But this is more than mere tiredness, surely? Why won’t you see that?’

‘I see what’s in front of me,’ I said. ‘Then I make sensible deductions. That’s what doctors do.’

She gave a cry that was part frustration, part a sort of disgust; but the cry seemed to use up the last of her strength. She covered her eyes, sat still and stiff for a second, and then her shoulders sank.

‘I just don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it seems clear. Other times, it’s just—too much. It’s all too much.’

I drew her towards me, to kiss and smooth her head. Then I spoke to her, quietly and calmly.

‘My darling, I’m so sorry. This is hard, I know. But it won’t help anyone, your mother least of all, if we avoid the obvious … Things have clearly become too difficult for her. There’s nothing odd or supernatural about that. I think she’s been trying to retreat to an era, that’s all, when her life was easier. How many times has she spoken wistfully about the past? She must have made your sister into a sort of figure for everything she’s lost. I think her mind, with rest, will clear. Truly I do. I think it would help her, too, if the estate could get back on its feet.’ I paused. ‘If we were to marry—’