The Little Stranger (9 page)

She snapped her fingers again for Gyp, and we moved on.

‘You’re not bored?’ she asked.

‘Not at all.’

‘Do I make a good guide?’

‘You make a capital guide.’

‘But now, oh dear, here’s one of those bits from which you must turn your gaze. Oh, and now you’re laughing at us! That’s unfair.’

I had to explain why I was smiling: the panel she meant was the one from which I’d prised that plaster acorn, all those years before. I told the story rather warily, not quite sure how she would take it. But she widened her eyes as if thrilled.

‘Oh, but that’s too funny! And Mother really gave you a medal? Like Queen Alexandra? I wonder if she remembers.’

‘Please don’t mention it to her,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t. I was one of about fifty nasty little grubby-kneed boys that day.’

‘But you liked the house, even then?’

‘Enough to want to vandalise it.’

‘Well,’ she said kindly, ‘I don’t blame you for wanting to vandalise these silly mouldings. They were simply asking to be snapped off. What you started I’m afraid Roddie and I, between us, probably finished … But isn’t that queer? You saw Hundreds before he or I ever did.’

‘So I did,’ I said, struck by the thought.

We moved away from the broken mouldings, and continued our tour. She drew my attention to a short line of portraits, murky canvases in heavy gold frames. And, just as in some American movie mock-up of a stately home, they turned out to be what she called ‘the family album’.

‘None of them is terribly good or valuable or anything, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘All the valuable ones have been sold, along with the best of the furniture. But they’re fun, if you can bear the bad light.’

She pointed to the first. ‘Here’s William Barber Ayres. He’s the man who had the Hall built. A good county chap, like all the Ayreses, but evidently rather near: we have letters to him from the architect, complaining of outstanding fees and more or less threatening to send round the heavies … Next is Matthew Ayres, who took troops to Boston. He came back in disgrace, with an American wife, and died three months later; we like to say she poisoned him … This is Ralph Billington Ayres, Matthew’s nephew—the family gambler, who for a time ran a second estate, in Norfolk, and just like a Georgette Heyer rake lost the whole of it in a single game of cards … And this is Catherine Ayres, his daughter-in-law and my great-grandmother. She was an Irish racehorse heiress, and restored the family fortune. It was said that she could never go near a horse herself, for fear of frightening it. Pretty clear where I get my looks from, wouldn’t you say?’

She laughed as she spoke, because the woman in the painting was strikingly ugly; but the fact is, Caroline did resemble her, just a little—though it gave me a slight shock to realise it, for I found I had grown as used to her mismatched masculine features as I had to Roderick’s scars. I made some gesture of polite demurral, but she had already turned away. She had two more rooms, she said, to show me, but would ‘save the best till last’. I thought the one she took me to next was arresting enough: a dining-room, done up in a pale
chinoiserie
theme, with a hand-painted paper on its walls and, on its polished table, two ormolu candelabra with writhing branches and cups. But then she led me back to the centre of the passage and, opening up another door, made me stand just inside the threshold while she crossed through the darkness of the room beyond to unfasten the shutters at one of its windows.

This passage ran from north to south, so all its rooms faced west. The afternoon was bright, the light came in like blades through the seams in the shutters, and even as she lifted the bolt I could see that the space we were in was a large and impressive one, with various sheeted pieces of furniture dotted about. But when she drew the creaking shutters back and details leapt into life around me, I was so astonished, I laughed.

The room was an octagonal saloon, about forty feet across. It had a vivid yellow paper on its walls and a greenish patterned carpet; the fireplace was unblemished white marble, and from the centre of the heavily moulded ceiling there hung a large gilt-and-crystal chandelier.

‘Pretty crazy, isn’t it?’ said Caroline, laughing too.

‘It’s incredible!’ I said. ‘One would never guess at it from the rest of the house—which is all so relatively sober.’

‘Ah, well. I dare say the original architect would have wept if he’d known what was coming. It was Ralph Billington Ayres—you remember him? the family blade?—who had this room added, in the 1820s, when he still had most of his money. Apparently they were all madly keen on yellow in those days; God knows why. The paper’s original, which is why we’ve hung on to it. As you can see’—she pointed out various spots where the ancient paper was drooping from the walls—‘it seems less interested in hanging on to us. I can’t show you the chandelier in all its glory, unfortunately, with the generator off; it’s quite something when it’s blazing. That’s original too, but my parents had it electrified when they were first married. They used to throw lots of parties in those days, when the house was still grand enough to bear it. The carpet’s in strips, of course. You can roll them back for dancing.’

She pointed out one or two other features, lifting off dust-sheets to expose the fine low Regency chair or cabinet or sofa underneath.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, of one irregular-looking item. ‘Piano?’

She put back a corner of its quilted cover. ‘Flemish harpsichord, older than the house. I don’t suppose you play?’

‘Good heavens, no.’

‘No, nor I. A pity. It ought really to be used, poor thing.’

But she spoke without much emotion, running her hand in a business-like way over the instrument’s decorated case, then letting the cover fall again and going over to the unshuttered window. I joined her there. The window was actually a pair of long glass doors and, like the ones in Roderick’s room and the little parlour, it opened on to a set of flying stone steps leading down to the terrace. As I saw when I drew closer, these particular steps had collapsed: the top one still jutted from the sill, but the rest lay scattered on the gravel four feet below, dark and weathered as if they had lain there some time. Undeterred, Caroline seized the handle of the doors and opened them up, and we stood on the little precipice in the soft, warm, fragrant air, looking over the west lawn. The lawn must once, I thought, have been trimmed and level: perhaps a space for croquet. Now the ground was lumpy with molehills and thistles, and the grass in places was knee-high. The straggling shrubs all around it gave way to clumps of purple beech, beautifully vivid in colour but quite out of control; and the two huge unlopped English elms beyond them would, I saw, once the sun sank lower, cast the whole of the scene in shadow.

Away to the right was a clutch of outbuildings, the garage and disused stables. Over the stable door was a great white clock.

‘Twenty to nine,’ I said, smiling, looking at the stuck ornamental hands.

Caroline nodded. ‘Roddie and I did that when the clock first broke.’ And then, seeing my puzzled expression: ‘Twenty to nine is the time Miss Havisham’s clocks are stopped at in
Great Expectations
. We thought it awfully funny, then. It seems a bit less funny now, I must admit … Beyond the stables are the old gardens—the kitchen gardens, and so on.’

I could just see the wall of them. It was made of the same uneven mellow red brick as the house; an arched opening in it gave a glimpse of cinder paths and overgrown borders and what I thought might be a quince or a medlar and, since I am fond of walled gardens, I said without thinking that I’d like to take a look at them.

Caroline glanced at her watch and said gamely, ‘Well, we still have almost ten minutes. It’s quickest to go this way.’

‘This way?’

She put her hand to the door-frame, leaning forward and bending her legs. ‘I mean, jump.’

I drew her back. ‘Oh, no. I’m too old for that sort of thing. Take me some other time, would you?’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘Well, all right.’

She seemed sorry. I think our tour had made her restless; or else she was simply showing her youth. She stayed at my side for a few minutes more, but then went around the room again, making sure that the furniture was properly wrapped, and lifting one or two corners of carpet to check for silver-fish and moth.

‘Goodbye, poor neglected saloon,’ she said, when she had closed the window and fastened the shutter and we had made our way, half blind, back out to the passage. And because she had spoken with something like a sigh, as she turned the key on the room I said, ‘I’m so glad to have seen the house. It’s lovely.’

‘You think so?’

‘Well, don’t you?’

‘Oh, it’s not such a bad old pile, I suppose.’

For once, her jolly fifth-form manner grated on me. I said, ‘Come on, Caroline, be serious.’

It was the first time I had used her Christian name, and perhaps that, combined with my slightly chiding tone, made her self-conscious. She coloured in that unbecoming way of hers, and the jolliness faded. Meeting my gaze she said, as if in honest surrender, ‘You’re right. Hundreds is lovely. But it’s a sort of lovely monster! It needs to be fed all the time, with money and hard work. And when one feels
them
’—she nodded to the row of sombre portraits—‘at one’s shoulder, looking on, it can begin to seem like a frightful burden … It’s hardest on Rod, because he has the extra responsibility of being master. He doesn’t want to let people down, you see.’

She had a sort of trick, I realised, of turning the talk away from herself. I said, ‘I’m sure your brother’s doing all he can. You, too.’ But over my words there came, from one of the clocks of the house, the quick, bright striking of four; and she touched my arm, her look clearing.

‘Come on. My mother’s waiting. The sixpenny tour includes refreshments, don’t forget!’

So we continued along that passage to the start of the next, and went into the little parlour.

We found Mrs Ayres at her writing-desk, putting paste to a fragment of paper. She looked up almost guiltily as we appeared, though I couldn’t imagine why; then I saw that the fragment was actually an unfranked stamp that had rather obviously already been through the post.

‘Now, I fear,’ she said, as she attached the stamp to an envelope, ‘that this may not be quite legal. But heaven knows, we live in very lawless times. You won’t give me away, Dr Faraday?’

I said, ‘Not only that, I’ll be happy to abet the crime. I’ll take the letter to the post at Lidcote, if you like.’

‘You will? How kind of you. The postmen are so careless nowadays. Before the war Wills the postman would come right to the door, twice a day. The man who has the round now complains about the extra distance. We’re lucky if he doesn’t leave our post at the end of the drive.’

She moved across the room as she spoke, making a small, elegant gesture with one of her slim, ringed hands, and I followed her to the chairs beside the fireplace. She was dressed more or less as she had been on my first visit, in creased dark linen with a knotted silk scarf at her throat, and in another pair of mildly distracting polished shoes. Looking warmly into my face, she said, ‘Caroline has told me what you’re doing for Roderick. I’m so very grateful to you for taking an interest in him. You really think this treatment will make a difference?’

I said, ‘Well, the signs so far are good.’

‘They’re better than good,’ said Caroline, lowering herself with a thump on to the sofa. ‘Dr Faraday’s just being modest. It really is helping, Mother.’

‘But that’s marvellous! Roderick works so terribly hard, you know, Doctor. Poor boy. I’m afraid he hasn’t the way his father had, with the estate. He hasn’t the feel for the land and so on.’

I suspected she was right. But I said, politely, that I wasn’t sure a feel for the land counted for much any more, given how difficult things were being made for the farmers; and with that readiness to please that characterises very charming people, she answered at once, ‘Yes, indeed. I expect you know far more about it than I do … Now, Caroline’s been showing you over the house, I think.’

‘She has, yes.’

‘And do you like it?’

‘Very much.’

‘I’m glad. Naturally, it’s the shadow of what it once was. But then, as my children keep reminding me, we’re lucky to have held on to it at all … I do think eighteenth-century houses the nicest. Such a civilised century. The house I grew up in was a great Victorian eyesore of a place. It’s a Roman Catholic boarding-school now, and I must say, the nuns are very welcome to it. I do worry about the poor little girls, however. So many very gloomy corridors and turns of stair. We used to say it was haunted, when I was a child; I don’t think it was. It might be now. My father died there, and he hated Roman Catholics with a passion … You’ve heard about all the changes at Standish, of course?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. Well, bits and pieces, from my patients mainly.’

Standish was a neighbouring ‘big house’, an Elizabethan manor house whose family, the Randalls, had left the county to start a new life in South Africa. The place had been empty for two years, but had recently been sold: the buyer was a London man, named Peter Baker-Hyde, an architect working on Coventry, who had been drawn to Standish as a country retreat by what he considered to be its ‘out-of-the-way charm’.

I said, ‘I gather there’s a wife and a young daughter, and two expensive motor cars; but no horses or dogs. And I hear the man has a good war-record—was quite the hero, out in Italy. He clearly did all right out of it: it sounds like he’s already spent a lot of money on renovations to the house.’

I spoke a shade sourly, for none of the new wealth at Standish was headed my way: I’d learned just that week that Mr Baker-Hyde and his wife had registered with one of my local rivals, Dr Seeley.

Caroline laughed. ‘He’s a town planner, isn’t he? He’ll probably knock Standish down and build a roller-skating rink. Or maybe they’ll sell the house to the Americans. They’ll ship it over and have it rebuilt, like they did with Warwick Priory. They say you can get an American to buy any old bit of black timber, just by telling him it comes from the Forest of Arden, or was sneezed on by Shakespeare, or something.’