The Little Stranger (50 page)

But Mrs Ayres played absently, losing piece after piece. And when the board had been put aside to make way for the tea-tray we sat together in near silence; there seemed little to say. She had lost her taste for county gossip over the past few weeks. I brought out a few stories and she listened politely enough, but her responses, when they came, were distracted or oddly delayed, as if she were straining her ears to catch the words of a more compelling conversation going on in a neighbouring room. At last my small fund of anecdotes was completely used up. I rose and walked to the French window, and stood gazing out over the dazzling landscape. When I turned back to Mrs Ayres, she was rubbing her arm as if cold.

Catching my eye, she said, ‘I’m afraid I’m dull for you, Doctor! I do apologise. That’s what comes of sitting so long indoors. Shall we go out, into the garden? We might meet Caroline that way.’

I was surprised by the suggestion, but happy to leave the airless room. I fetched her outdoor things myself, making sure she was properly dressed for the cold; I put on my overcoat and hat, and we went out by the front door. We had to pause a moment to let our eyes grow accustomed to the whiteness of the day, but then she linked her arm with mine and we moved off, going around the house, then making our way, slowly and idly, across the west lawn.

The snow lay smooth as foam there, almost silky to the eye, but crisp and powdery underfoot. In places it was broken by the cartoonish tracks of birds, and soon we found more substantial prints, the dog-like pads and claws of creeping foxes. We followed those for a minute or two; they led us over to the old outbuildings. There the air of general enchantment was even more pronounced, the stable clock still fixed at twenty to nine in that grim Dickensian joke, the stables themselves with their fittings all in place, their doors neatly bolted, but everything thick with cobwebs and dust, so that one half expected, on peeping inside, to find a line of slumbering horses, all thick with cobwebs, too. Beside the stables was the garage, with the bonnet of the family Rolls-Royce just showing at its half-open door. Beyond that was a chaos of bushes, and the fox tracks were lost to us. But our walk had taken us almost as far as the old kitchen gardens, so, still idly, we moved on, passing through the arch in the high brick wall to the plots beyond.

Caroline had given me a tour of these gardens, back in the summer. They were barely in use now that life at the house was so diminished, and I thought them the loneliest and most melancholy section of the park. One or two beds were still relatively well tended by Barrett, but other areas, which must once have been lovely, had been dug over for vegetables by the soldiers during the war, and since then, without the hands to manage them, they had run wild. Brambles rose through the glassless roofs of the greenhouses. The cinder paths were choked with nettles. Here and there were great lead pots, giant saucers on slender stems, the saucers tilting tipsily where the lead had buckled from the heat of too many summers.

We made our way from one untidy walled space to the next.

‘Isn’t it a shame!’ Mrs Ayres said softly, now and then pausing to brush aside a frill of snow and examine the plant beneath, or simply to stand and gaze around her, almost as if wanting to memorise the scene. ‘The Colonel, my husband, used to love these gardens. They’re arranged as a sort of spiral, each one smaller than the last, and he used to say they were like the chambers of a sea shell. Such a fanciful man sometimes.’

We moved on, and soon passed through a narrow gateless opening into the smallest garden there, the old herb garden. At its centre was a sundial, set in an ornamental pond. Mrs Ayres said she believed the pond still had fish in it, and we wandered over to look. We found the water frozen, but the ice was thin, quite flexible, so that we could press it and watch silvery bubbles racing about underneath, like the steel balls in a child’s puzzle. Then there came a flash of colour, a darting of gold in the murk, and, ‘There goes one,’ said Mrs Ayres. She sounded pleased, but unexcited. ‘There’s another, do you see it? Poor things. Won’t they be stifled? Isn’t one supposed to break the ice? Caroline would know. I can’t remember.’

Retrieving a scrap of knowledge from my Boy Scouting days, I said perhaps I ought to melt it a little. I squatted at the side of the pond, breathed into my ungloved hands, and put my palms to the ice. Mrs Ayres watched me, and then, with an elegant tucking in of her skirts, she lowered herself at my side. The ice stung. My wet hands, when I lifted them back to my mouth to warm them, felt numb and almost rubbery. I shook my fingers, pulling a face.

Mrs Ayres smiled. ‘Oh, what babies you men are.’

I answered, laughing, ‘That’s just something women say. Why
do
women say it?’

‘Because it’s perfectly true. Women are built for pain. Now, if you men had to go through childbirth …’

She didn’t finish, and her smile faded. I had my hands at my mouth again, and my falling sleeve had uncovered my wrist-watch. She glanced at that and said, in a different tone, ‘Caroline might be at home now. You’ll want to see her, of course.’

I said politely, ‘I’m happy to stay here.’

‘I don’t want to keep you from her.’

There was something to the way she said it. I met her gaze, and saw that, for all that Caroline and I had been so careful, she knew perfectly well how matters stood between us. Slightly self-conscious, I turned back to the pond. I put my palms to the ice again, then lifted and warmed them, several times, until at last I felt the ice give way, and I saw that I had made two irregular openings into the tea-coloured water beneath.

‘There,’ I said, pleased with myself. ‘Now the fish can do what Eskimos do, in reverse: catch flies and whatnot. Shall we go on?’

I offered my hand, but she didn’t answer, and didn’t rise. She watched me shake the water from my fingers, and then she said quietly, ‘I’m glad, Dr Faraday, about you and Caroline. I’ll admit that I wasn’t, at first. When you began to come to the house, and I saw that you and my daughter might form an attachment, I didn’t like it. I’m an old-fashioned woman, and you weren’t quite the match I’d planned for her … I hope you never suspected it.’

I said, after a moment, ‘I think I did.’

‘Then, I’m sorry.’

I gave a shrug. ‘Well, what does it matter now?’

‘You do mean to marry her?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘You think a great deal of her?’

‘A very great deal. I think a great deal of you all. I hope you know that. You spoke to me once of your fear of being … abandoned. Well, in marrying Caroline, I mean not only to care for her, but for you, and the house; for Roderick, too. You’ve been through some desperate times lately. But, now that you’re better, Mrs Ayres, now that you’re calmer, more yourself—’

She looked at me, saying nothing. I decided to risk it, and pressed on.

‘That time in the nursery,’ I said. ‘Well, that was a strange thing, wasn’t it? A horrible thing! I’m so glad it’s all over.’

She smiled—an odd smile, patient and secret. Her high cheeks rose, narrowing her eyes. She straightened up, carefully brushing the snow from her wash-leather gloves.

‘Oh, Dr Faraday,’ she said, as she did it. ‘What a perfect innocent you are.’

She said it so mildly, and with such a touch of indulgence, I almost laughed. But her expression was still an odd one, and I began, without quite knowing why, to be frightened. I rose, hastily and not very gracefully, catching the tail of my overcoat beneath my heels and tipping myself off balance. She had begun to walk away. I caught up with her and touched her arm.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

Her face was turned from mine, and she didn’t answer.

I said, ‘There haven’t been … other things? You don’t still imagine that—that Susan—?’

‘Susan,’ she murmured, her face still half hidden from me. ‘Susan is with me all the time. She follows me wherever I go. Why, she’s here in this garden with us.’

For a second I managed to persuade myself that she was speaking figuratively, that all she meant was that she carried her daughter around with her in her thoughts, in her heart. But then she turned her face back to mine, and her expression had something terrible in it, a mixture of absolute loneliness, huntedness, and fear.

I said, ‘For God’s sake, why haven’t you spoken of this?’

‘And have you test me and treat me,’ she said, ‘and tell me I’m dreaming?’

‘But oh, Mrs Ayres, my dear Mrs Ayres, you
are
dreaming. Don’t you see?’ I took her two gloved hands in mine. ‘Look around you! There’s no one here. This is all in your mind! Susan
died
. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I know it!’ she said, almost loftily. ‘How could I not? My darling died … But now she has come back.’

I squeezed her fingers. ‘But, how
could
she? How can you think this? Mrs Ayres, you’re a sensible woman.
How
does she come? Tell me. Do you
see
her?’

‘Oh, no, I haven’t seen her yet. I feel her.’

‘You feel her.’

‘I feel her, watching. I feel her eyes. They must be her eyes, mustn’t they? Her gaze is so strong, her eyes are like fingers; they can touch. They can press and pinch.’

‘Mrs Ayres, please stop this.’

‘I hear her voice. I don’t need tubes and telephones to hear it now. She talks to me.’

‘She talks—!’

‘She whispers.’ She tilted her head, as if listening, then raised her hand. ‘She’s whispering now.’

There was something horribly uncanny about the intentness of her pose. I said, not quite steadily, ‘What is she whispering?’

Her look grew bleak again. ‘She says the same things, every time. She says,
Where are you?
She says,
Why won’t you come?
She says,
I am waiting
.’

She spoke these words in a whisper of her own; they seemed to hang for a moment in the air, along with the cloudy breath that made them. Then they vanished, eaten up by the silence.

I stood frozen for a moment, not knowing what to do. A few minutes before, the little garden had appeared almost snug to me. Now the small walled patch, with its single narrow exit leading only to another choked and isolated space, seemed filled with menace. The day, as I have said, was a peculiarly still one. No wind disturbed the branches of the trees, no bird rose, even, in the thin, chill air, and if any sound had come, any movement been made, I would have caught it. Nothing changed, nothing at all—and yet, it began to seem to me that something was there in the garden with us, creeping or edging towards us across the crisp, white snow. Worse than that, I had the bizarre impression that this thing, whatever it was, was in some way
familiar
: as if its bashful advance towards us was more properly a
return
. I felt the flesh of my back rise, anticipating a touch—as in a childish game of tig. I drew my hands from hers, and twisted round, looking wildly all about.

The garden was empty, the snow unmarked except by our own footprints. But my heart was lurching, my hands trembling. I took off my hat and wiped my face. My brow and lip were sweating, and where the cold air met my flushed wet skin it seemed to burn.

I was just putting my hat back on when I heard Mrs Ayres sharply draw in her breath. I turned back to her, and found her with her gloved hand at her collar, her face creased, her colour rising. I said, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ She shook her head and wouldn’t answer. But she looked so distressed, I thought of her heart: I plucked her hand back, drew open her scarves and coat. Beneath the coat she had on a cardigan; beneath that, a silk blouse. The blouse was pale, the colour of ivory, and as I watched, incredulous, three small drops of crimson seemed to spring from nowhere to the surface of the silk, and then, like ink on blotting-paper, rapidly to spread. I tugged down the blouse’s collar and saw beneath it, on her bare skin, a scratch, quite deep, evidently freshly made, still rising, still beading red.

‘What have you done?’ I said in horror. ‘How did you do this?’ I looked over her gown, for a pin or a brooch. I caught up her hands, examined her gloves. There was nothing. ‘What did you use?’

She dropped her gaze. ‘My little girl,’ she murmured. ‘She’s so eager for me to join her. I’m afraid she … isn’t always kind.’

When I realised what she was saying, I felt sick. I stepped back, away from her. Then, with a further surge of understanding, I caught hold of her hands again and pulled the gloves from them, and roughly pushed up her sleeves. Where the broken window had cut her a few weeks before, the wounds had healed, pink and healthy against the paler skin. Here and there among the scars, however, it seemed to me that I could see new scratches. And one of her arms bore a faint bruise, curiously shaped, as if the flesh had been pinched and twisted by a small, determined hand.

Her gloves had fallen to the ground. Trembling, I picked them up and helped her put them back on. I caught hold of her by the elbow.

‘I’m taking you back to the house, Mrs Ayres.’

She said, ‘Are you trying to take me away from her? It isn’t any use, you know.’

I turned, and shook her. ‘Stop it! You hear me? For God’s sake, stop saying these things!’

She moved loosely in my arms, and after that I found I didn’t quite want to look at her face again. I felt a curious shame about it. I took her wrist, and led her out of the tangled gardens, and she came quite readily. We went past the frozen stable clock, back over the lawns and into the house; I took her straight upstairs, not pausing to remove her outdoor things. Only once we were in the warmth of her own room did I take her coat and hat and snowy shoes, and I put her to sit in her chair beside the fire.

But then I gazed at the things that were near her, the coals in the hearth, the pokers, the tongs, the glass tumblers, the mirrors, the ornaments … Everything seemed brutal or brittle, suddenly, and capable of harm. I rang the bell for Betty. The lever moved uselessly in my hand, and I remembered that Caroline had cut the wire. So I went out to the top of the staircase and called and called into the silence, and eventually Betty came.