The Little Stranger

  The poor child herself was white and rigid with shock. Her father was beside her and had his trembling hand at her face, was advancing his fingers and drawing them back, not knowing whether to touch the wound or not; not knowing what to do. I found myself at his side without being aware of how I had got there. I suppose my professional instincts had taken over. I helped him lift her; we got her to the sofa and laid her flat; a variety of handkerchiefs were produced, and pressed to her cheek—one, from Helen Desmond, with dainty lace and embroidery, soon sopping scarlet. I did what I could to staunch the bleeding and to clean the injury up, but it was a difficult job. That sort of wound always looks worse than it really is, especially on a child, but I had seen at once that the bite was a bad one.

  ‘Christ!’ said Peter Baker-Hyde again. He and his wife were clutching at their daughter’s hands; the wife was sobbing. They both had blood on their evening clothes—I think we all did—and the blood was made vivid and ghastly by the brilliant chandelier. ‘Christ! Look at the state of her!’ He ran his hand across his hair. ‘What the hell happened? Why didn’t somebody—? What in God’s name happened?’

  ‘Never mind that now,’ I said quietly. I had the handkerchiefs still pressed hard to the wound, and was rapidly thinking the case over.

  ‘Look at her!’

  ‘She’s in shock, but she isn’t in danger. But she’ll have to be stitched. Stitched quite extensively, I’m afraid; and the sooner the better.’

  ‘Stitched?’ His expression was wild. I think he’d forgotten I was a doctor.

  I said, ‘I’ve my bag with me, out in the car. Mr Desmond, will you—?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Bill Desmond breathlessly, running from the room.

  I called to Betty next. She had hung back when everyone else had surged forward, and was looking on as if terrified—almost as pale as Gillian herself. I told her to go down and boil a kettle of water, and fetch blankets and a cushion. And then—gently, and with Mrs Baker-Hyde at my side, holding the bunched handkerchiefs awkwardly to her daughter’s face, her hand shaking, so that the silver slave bracelets slithered and rang—I took the little girl in my arms. I could feel the chill of her, even through my shirt and jacket. Her eyes were dark and lifeless, and she was sweating with shock. I said, ‘We’ll have to get her down to the kitchen.’

  ‘The kitchen?’ her father said.

  ‘I’ll need water.’

  Then he understood. ‘You mean to do it here? You’re not serious! Surely a hospital—a surgery—Can’t we telephone?’

  ‘It’s nine miles to the nearest hospital,’ I said, ‘and a good five to my surgery. Trust me, I shouldn’t like to take to the roads with this kind of wound, on a night like tonight. The sooner we tidy her up, the better. There’s the loss of blood to think of, too.’

  ‘Let the doctor do it, Peter,’ said Mrs Baker-Hyde, beginning to cry again, ‘for God’s sake!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Ayres, moving forward and touching his arm. ‘We must let Dr Faraday see to it now.’

  I think I noticed at the time that the man turned his face from Mrs Ayres and roughly shook off her touch, but I was too busy with the little girl to give his gesture much thought. Something else happened, too, which hardly struck me then, but which, when I remembered it later, I realised had set the tone for many of the events in the days that followed. Mrs Baker-Hyde and I had carefully taken Gillian to the threshold of the room, where we were met by Bill Desmond, my bag in his hand. Helen Desmond and Mrs Ayres stood anxiously watching us go, while Mrs Rossiter and Miss Dabney, in their distraction, stooped to pick up the shards of tumbler from the hearth—Miss Dabney incidentally cutting her own finger rather badly, and adding fresh blood-stains to the general gore on the carpet. Peter Baker-Hyde was following me closely, and was in turn being followed by his brother-in-law; but the latter, as he came, must have caught sight of Gyp, who had been cowering all this time beneath a table. Mr Morley stepped rapidly over to the dog and, with a curse, gave him a kick; the kick was a hard one, and made Gyp yelp. To the man’s amazement, I suppose, Caroline darted forward and pushed him away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she cried. I remember her voice: shrill and strained and not at all like itself.

  He straightened his jacket. ‘Didn’t you notice? Your damn dog just tore half my niece’s face off!’

  ‘But you’re making it worse,’ she said, getting down on her knees and drawing Gyp to her. ‘You’ve terrified him!’

  ‘I’d like to do more than terrify him! What the hell do you mean by letting him roam about the place when kids are here? He ought to be chained up!’

  She said, ‘He’s perfectly harmless, when he isn’t provoked.’

  Mr Morley had moved away; but now turned back. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  She shook her head. ‘Stop shouting, can’t you?’

  ‘Stop shouting? You saw what he’s done to her?’

  ‘Well, he’s never snapped before. He’s a house-dog.’

  ‘He’s a wild beast. He ought to be damn well shot!’

  The argument went on, but I was only dimly aware of it, preoccupied as I was in safely manoeuvring the rigid child in my arms through the doorway and then around several corners to the basement stairs. And once I’d begun making my way down them, the raised voices grew faint. I found Betty in the kitchen, heating the water I’d requested. She’d brought the blankets and cushions too, and now, at my direction, and with shaking hands, she cleared the kitchen table and lay sheets of brown paper on it. I set Gillian down with the blankets around her, then opened my bag to sort through my instruments. So absorbed was I in these tasks that, when I took off my jacket to roll up my sleeves and wash my hands, I was astonished to find it a dress-jacket. I’d forgotten where I was, and thought I was in my regular tweeds.

  The fact is, I was often obliged to perform this kind of small operation, either in my surgery or in my patients’ own homes. Once, while still in my twenties, I had been called to a farmhouse to find a young man with a dreadfully mangled leg, the result of a threshing injury. I had had to cut the leg off at the knee, at the kitchen table, just like this. The family had invited me to take supper with them a few days later, and we had sat at the same table, now cleaned of its stains—the young man sitting there along with us, pale, but cheerfully eating his pie, joking about the money he’d save on boot-leather. But those were country people, used to hardship; to the Baker-Hydes it must have looked dreadful, as I soaked the needle and thread in carbolic and scrubbed my knuckles and nails with a vegetable brush. The kitchen itself, I think, alarmed them, with its blunt Victorian fittings, its flagstones, its monster of a range. And after the over-bright saloon the room seemed horribly dim. I had to have Mr Baker-Hyde bring an oil lamp from the pantry and put it close to his daughter’s face, so that I had light enough to stitch by.

  Had the girl been older I might have made do with a spray of ethyl chloride to freeze the wound. But I was afraid of her wriggling about, and, after I’d washed her with water and iodine, I put her into a light sort of sleep with a general anaesthetic. Still, I knew the operation would hurt her. I told her mother to rejoin the other guests upstairs in the saloon, and, as I expected, the poor little girl gave off a weak whimpering all the time I worked, the tears flowing ceaselessly from her eyes. There were no severed arteries to deal with, that was a blessing, but the tearing of the flesh made the job a trickier one than I should have liked—my main concern being how to minimise the scarring that would follow, for I knew it would be extensive even with the tidiest of repairs. The child’s father sat at the table, holding tightly on to her hand and wincing with every insertion of the needle, but watching me work as though afraid to take his eyes away—as though watching for a slip, so that he might check it. A few minutes after I’d started, his brother-in-law appeared, his face crimson from his argument with Caroline. ‘These bloody people,’ he said. ‘That daughter’s a lunatic!’ Then he saw what I was doing and the crimson
sank from his cheeks. He lit himself a cigarette and sat smoking it some distance from the table. Presently—it was the only sensible thing he did all night—he got Betty to brew up a pot of tea and hand round cups.

  The others kept upstairs, trying to comfort the girl’s mother. Mrs Ayres came down once, to ask how matters were progressing: she stood for a minute and watched me working, anxious for the girl and clearly upset by the sight of the stitching. Peter Baker-Hyde, I noticed, wouldn’t turn his head to her.

  The job took the best part of an hour, and when I had finished, and while the girl was still woozy, I told her father to take her home. I meant to follow in my car, call in at the surgery for one or two things, and join them at Standish, where I could see her into her bed. I hadn’t mentioned the possibility to her parents, because I thought it a very slight one, but there was the risk of blood poisoning or infection to be guarded against.

  Betty was sent to alert the girl’s mother, and Mr Baker-Hyde and Mr Morley carried Gillian up the stairs and out to their car. She was more sensible now, and as they laid her down on the back seat she began, very pitifully, to cry. I had put strips of gauze across her face—but more for her parents’ protection than for hers, for the stitches and the iodine made the wound look monstrous.

  When I went back to the bright saloon to say goodbye I found everyone still there, sitting or standing in silence, as if stunned—as if in the aftermath of an air-raid. There was still blood on the carpet and the sofa, but someone had taken a cloth and water to it and turned it into creeping pink stains.

  ‘A wretched business,’ said Mr Rossiter.

  Helen Desmond had been crying. She said, ‘That poor, poor child.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She’ll be terribly marked, won’t she? What can have prompted it? Gyp isn’t a snappy dog, is he?’

  ‘Of course he isn’t!’ said Caroline, in her new, taut, artificial voice. She was sitting apart from the others, with Gyp beside her; he was visibly trembling, and she was stroking his head. But her own hands were shaking. The rouge was livid on her cheeks and mouth, and the diamanté comb hung crookedly in her hair.

  Bill Desmond said, ‘Something must have startled him, I suppose. He must have fancied he saw something, or heard something. Did any of us shout, or make some movement? I’ve been racking my brains.’

  ‘It wasn’t us,’ said Caroline. ‘The girl must have been teasing him. I shouldn’t be surprised—’

  She fell silent, as Peter Baker-Hyde appeared behind me in the passage. He had his coat and hat on, a streak of scarlet just showing on his forehead. He said quietly, ‘We’re ready, Doctor.’ He didn’t look at the others. I don’t know if he noticed Gyp.

  Mrs Ayres moved forward. ‘You’ll let us know tomorrow, I hope, how the little girl is?’

  He was briskly pulling on his driving gloves, still not looking at her. ‘Yes, if you wish.’

  She took another step, and said gently and earnestly, ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry that this has happened, Mr Baker-Hyde—and in my house.’

  But he only gave her one quick glance. And what he said was: ‘Yes, Mrs Ayres. So am I.’

  I followed him out into the darkness and started my car. The ignition turned several times before it caught, for the rain had been falling steadily for hours and the engine was damp: we didn’t know it then, but that night was the hinge of the seasons, the start of the gloomy winter to come. I turned the car, then hung back while Peter Baker-Hyde went on ahead of me. He drove with what felt like agonising slowness along the bumpy overgrown route to the wall of the park, but once his brother-in-law had jumped out to open the gate and close it behind us, he put his foot down, and I found myself speeding up in turn—peering through the sweep of the windscreen wipers, fixing my gaze on the piercing red tail-lights of his expensive car until they seemed to float on the darkness of the winding Warwickshire lanes.

  FOUR

  I left the Baker-Hydes around one, with a promise to return the next day. My morning surgery runs from nine until after ten, so it was almost eleven o’clock when I drew into the courtyard of Standish again; and the first thing I saw there was a muddy maroon Packard I recognised as belonging to Dr Seeley, my local rival. I thought it fair enough that the Baker-Hydes should have brought him in: he was their doctor, after all. But it is always awkward for the practitioners concerned when a patient makes a decision like that without informing them. Some sort of butler or secretary showed me into the house, and I found Seeley just coming down from the girl’s bedroom. He was a tall, well-built man, looking larger than ever on the narrow sixteenth-century staircase. He was clearly just as embarrassed to see me there, with my doctor’s bag in my hand, as I was to see him with his.

  ‘They called me in first thing this morning,’ he said, as he took me aside to discuss the case with me. ‘This is my second visit of the day.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I gather you were out at Hundreds when it happened? That was a stroke of luck, anyway. Bloody awful for the little girl, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘How does she seem to you? How’s the wound?’

  ‘The wound’s fine. You made a neater job of it than I could have done. And on the kitchen table! The scarring will be frightful, of course. Such a shame; especially for a girl of her class. The parents are keen to get her up to a London specialist, but I’ll be surprised if even in London they’ll be able to do much for her. Then again, who knows? The plastics boys have certainly got in enough practice in the past few years. What she needs now is rest. A nurse is coming in, and I’ve prescribed Luminal, to keep her groggy for a day or two. After that, well, we’ll see.’

  He spoke a few words to Peter Baker-Hyde, then gave me a nod and went off on his round. I remained in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, still feeling the awkwardness of the situation but, naturally, hoping to see the little girl for myself. Her father made it clear to me, however, that he would rather leave her undisturbed. He seemed genuinely grateful for my assistance—‘Thank God you were there last night!’ he said, shaking my hand with both of his—but then his arm moved to my shoulder and, lightly but firmly, he guided me to the door. I realised that I had been completely dismissed from the case.

  ‘You’ll send me your bill?’ he said, as he walked with me out to my car. And when I answered that I wouldn’t trouble him with that, he insisted on pressing a couple of guineas on me. Then he thought of the petrol I’d used in coming twice out to Standish, and called for one of his gardeners to fetch a can of fuel. The gesture was extravagant, but at the same time there seemed something hard about it. I had the uneasy feeling he was buying me off. We stood in silence in the spitting rain as the gardener filled up my tank, and I thought what a pity it was that I couldn’t just slip upstairs for a final look at the girl. I should have much preferred that to guineas or petrol.

  It was only as I was climbing into the car that I thought to ask him whether he’d yet sent word to Hundreds that Gillian was doing well; and at that, his manner grew harder than ever.

  ‘Them,’ he said, with a jerk of his chin. ‘They’ll get word from us, all right. We’re taking this matter further, you can be sure.’

  I’d been half expecting this, but was dismayed by the bitterness in his voice. Straightening up again, I said, ‘What do you mean? You’ve informed the police?’

  ‘Not yet, but we intend to. At the very least we want to see that dog destroyed.’

  ‘But, well, Gyp’s such a foolish old thing.’

  ‘And turning senile, clearly!’

  ‘As far as I know, this incident was quite out of character.’

  ‘That’s small comfort to my wife and me. You don’t expect us to rest until that dog is got rid of?’ He glanced up at the narrow mullioned windows above the porch, one of which was open, and lowered his voice. ‘Gillian’s life will be fairly ruined by this; you can see that, surely. Dr Seeley tells me it was probably only the merest chance that her blood wasn’t poisoned! And all because those people, the Ayreses, think themselves too grand
to tie up a dangerous dog! Suppose it attacks another child?’

  I didn’t believe Gyp would, and though I said nothing, he must have seen the doubt in my expression. He went on, ‘Look, I know you’re something of a friend to the family. I don’t expect you to take my side against them. But I can also see what perhaps you can’t: that they believe they can swan it over everyone around here like so many lords of the manor. Probably they’ve trained the dog up, to see off trespassers! They ought to take a good look at that scrap-heap they’re living in. They’re out of date, Doctor. To tell you the truth, I’ve begun to think this whole bloody county’s out of date.’

  I almost replied that, as I’d understood it, the out-of-datedness of the county was what had attracted him to it in the first place. Instead, I asked him at the very least not to take the matter to the police until he had seen Mrs Ayres again; and he said at last, ‘All right. I’ll go over there as soon as I know Gillie’s out of danger. But if they have any consideration at all, they’ll have destroyed the dog before I get there.’

  None of the six or seven patients I saw on the rest of my morning round mentioned the affair at Hundreds to me; so swift is local gossip, however, that by the time my evening surgery started I discovered that lurid accounts of Gillian’s injury were already doing the rounds of the local shops and pubs. A man I visited after dinner that night described the whole incident to me, correct in every detail except that he had Seeley at the scene, stitching the little girl up, instead of me. He was a labouring man with a long history of pleurisy, and I was doing all I could to prevent the illness turning into something more sinister. But his living conditions were against him—his home was a cramped terraced cottage with a damp brick floor—and, like many labourers, he worked too hard and drank too freely. He spoke to me between bouts of coughing.