The Little Stranger

  ‘You idiotic dog!’ she said, letting him lick her. Then she pushed him away. ‘Dr Faraday wants you, can’t you see?’

  I said, ‘Shall I do it here?’

  ‘No, I don’t want that. I don’t want to see it. Take him downstairs somewhere. Go on, Gyp.’ And she pushed him to me almost roughly, so that he stumbled from the ottoman to the floor. ‘Go on,’ she said again, when he hesitated, ‘you stupid thing! Dr Faraday wants you, I told you. Go on!’

  So Gyp came faithfully to me, and after a final glance at Caroline I led him from the room and quietly closed the door behind me. He followed me down through the house to the kitchen, and I took him out to the scullery and had him lie down on an old rug. He knew that was strange, for Caroline was strict about his routines; but then, he must have known there was upset in the house, and perhaps could even guess that he was the cause of it. I wondered what notions were swimming about in his mind—what memories of the party, and whether he thought of what he had done, and was guilty or ashamed. But when I looked into his eyes it seemed to me that I could see only confusion there; and after I had opened my bag and taken out what I needed, I touched his head and said to him, as I’d said to him once before, ‘Here’s a to-do, Gyp. But, never mind now. You’re a good old dog.’ And I went on murmuring nonsense like that, and I held my arm beneath his shoulders, so that after the injection had taken effect he sank on to my hand, and I felt the faltering of his heart against my palm, and then the failing of it.

  Mrs Ayres had told me that Barrett would bury him, so I covered him over with the rug, then washed my hands and went back into the kitchen. I found Mrs Bazeley there: she had just arrived and was tying on her apron. When I told her what I’d been doing she shook her head, distressed.

  ‘In’t it a shame?’ she said. ‘The house won’t seem right without that old hound in it. Can you make it out, Doctor? I’ve seen him about the place all his life, and I’d have taken me oath on there being no more harm in him that in the hairs on me own head. I’d have trusted him with me grandchild, I would.’

  ‘So would I, Mrs Bazeley,’ I answered miserably; ‘if I had one.’

  But there was the kitchen table, after all, to remind me of that recent, horrible night. And there, too—I hadn’t noticed her before—there was Betty. She was standing half concealed by a door that led to one of the kitchen passages; she had a pile of newly dried dish-cloths and was folding them up. But she moved with an odd jerkiness, her narrow shoulders seeming to twitch, and I realised after a second or two that she was crying. She turned her head and saw me watching, and began to weep harder. She said, with a violence that amazed me: ‘That poor old dog, Dr Faraday! Everyone’s blaming him, but it wan’t his fault! It in’t fair!’

  Her voice broke down, and Mrs Bazeley went across to her to take her in her arms.

  ‘There, now,’ the woman said, awkwardly patting Betty’s back. ‘You see how this’ve upset us, Doctor? We dunno what we’re about. Betty’s got some idea in her head—I dunno.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘Her thinks that little girl gettin’ bit has summat peculiar to it.’

  I said, ‘Something peculiar? What on earth do you mean?’

  Betty drew back her head from Mrs Bazeley’s shoulder and said, ‘There’s a bad thing in this house, that’s what! There’s a bad thing, and he makes wicked things happen!’

  I stared at her for a moment, then lifted my hand, to rub my face. ‘Oh, Betty.’

  ‘It’s true! I’ve felt ’m!’

  She looked from me to Mrs Bazeley. Her grey eyes were wide, and she was shivering slightly. But I had the sense, as I’d sometimes had before with her, that, at heart, she was enjoying the fuss and attention. I said, less patiently, ‘All right. We’re all tired, and we’re all sorry.’

  ‘It in’t tiredness!’

  ‘All right!’ Now I spoke sharply. ‘This is pure silliness and you know it. This house is big, and lonely, but I thought you were used to that now?’

  ‘I am used to it! It in’t just that.’

  ‘It isn’t anything. There’s nothing bad here, nothing spooky. What happened with Gyp and that poor child, it was a horrible accident, that’s all.’

  ‘It wan’t an accident! It were the bad thing, whispering to Gyp, or—or nipping him.’

  ‘Did you hear a whisper?’

  She spoke reluctantly. ‘No.’

  ‘No. And neither did I. And neither did anyone else, in all that crowd of people at the party. Mrs Bazeley, have you seen any sign of this “bad thing” of Betty’s?’

  Mrs Bazeley shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t, Doctor. I’ve never seen nothing queer here at all.’

  ‘And how long have you been coming to this house?’

  ‘Well, very nearly ten years.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ I said to Betty. ‘Doesn’t that reassure you?’

  ‘No, it don’t!’ she answered. ‘Just ’cause she haven’t seen it, don’t mean it in’t true! It might be a—a new thing.’

  I said, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Come on now, be a good girl and wipe your eyes. And I hope,’ I added, ‘you won’t go mentioning any of this to Mrs Ayres, or to Miss Caroline. It’s about the last thing they need at the moment. They’ve been good to you, remember? Remember how they called me in for you, that time you were poorly, in July?’

  I looked into her face as I said this. She caught my meaning, and coloured. But her expression, despite the blush, grew mulish. She said in a whisper, ‘There is a bad thing! There is!’

  Then she hid her face against Mrs Bazeley’s shoulder and wept again, as bitterly as before.

  FIVE

  Not surprisingly, in the weeks that followed, life at Hundreds Hall seemed very changed and discouraged and sad. There was, for one thing, simply the physical absence of Gyp to get used to: the days were naturally sombre now, but the house seemed extra dim and lifeless without the dog trotting affably from room to room. Since I was still going out to the Hall once a week to treat Rod’s leg, it had become easier for me to let myself in like one of the family, and sometimes, opening up the door, I’d find myself listening out for the click and pad of paws; or else I’d turn my head to a shadow—thinking that the dark shape at the corner of my vision must be Gyp’s, and having to suffer, every time, a pang of dismay as all that had happened came rushing back to me.

  I mentioned this to Mrs Ayres, and she nodded: she had stood in the hall one rainy afternoon, she said, quite convinced that she could hear the dog pattering about upstairs. The sound was so distinct, she’d gone almost nervously up to look—and realised that what she’d taken as the sound of his claws on the floorboards was really the rapid drip of water from a broken gutter outside. Something similar happened to Mrs Bazeley. She found herself making up a bowl of bread and gravy and setting it down by the kitchen door, as she’d used to do for Gyp in the old days. She let it sit there for half an hour, all the time wondering where the dog was—and then almost cried, she said, when she remembered he was gone. ‘And the queer thing was,’ she told me, ‘I only done it because I thought I’d heard him coming down the basement steps. You know how he used to huff, like an old chap? I could have sworn I heard it!’

  As for poor Caroline—how often she mistook some other sound for the skitter of Gyp’s claws, or turned to a shadow supposing it him, I simply don’t know. She had Barrett dig a grave for him among the marble headstones that formed a quaint little pet’s cemetery in one of the park’s plantations. She made a dreary tour of the house, collecting the water-bowls and blankets that had been kept in various rooms for the dog’s use, and putting them away. But she seemed, in the process, to seal up her own upset and grief, with a thoroughness that unnerved me. On my first visit to the Hall after that miserable morning when I had put Gyp to sleep, I made a point of seeking her out, not wanting there to be any bad feeling between us. But when I asked her how she was, she said only, in a brisk, expressionless voice, ‘I’m fine. It’s all done now, isn’t it? I’m sorry I spoke so wi
ldly, that time. It wasn’t your fault; I know that. It’s finished. Let me show you this, that I found yesterday in one of the rooms upstairs—’ And she brought out some antique trinket she had unearthed from the back of a drawer; and didn’t refer to Gyp again.

  I felt I didn’t know her well enough to force the issue. But I spoke about her with her mother, who seemed to think that she would ‘recover in her own way’.

  ‘Caroline’s never been much of a girl for displaying her feelings,’ she told me with a sigh. ‘But she’s awfully sensible. That’s why I brought her back to help with her brother when he was hurt. She was as good as any nurse in those days, you know … And have you heard the latest news? Mrs Rossiter came out to tell us, just this morning. Apparently the Baker-Hydes are leaving. They’re taking the little girl back to London; the staff are following next week. Poor Standish is to be shut up and sold again. But I do think it’s for the best. Imagine Caroline or Roderick or I forever running into that family, in Lidcote or Leamington!’

  I was relieved by this news, too. I hadn’t relished the prospect of regularly seeing the Baker-Hydes, any more than Mrs Ayres had. I was also pleased that the county newspapers had at last lost interest in the case. And though nothing could be done about local gossip, and though sometimes a patient or colleague of mine would raise the affair with me, knowing I had been slightly involved, whenever the subject arose I always did my best to turn or close it; and talk soon died down.

  But still, I wondered about Caroline. Now and then as I drove my car across the park I would catch sight of her, just as I’d used to; and without Gyp trotting beside her she struck me as a terribly forlorn figure. If I stopped the car to speak to her she seemed willing enough to talk, in what was more or less her old manner. She looked as sturdy and as healthy as she always had. Only her face, I thought, betrayed the wretchedness of the past few weeks, for caught at certain angles it seemed heavier and plainer than ever—as if, with the loss of her dog, there had come something like the loss of the last of her optimism and her youth.

  Does Caroline talk to you about how she’s feeling?’ I asked her brother one day in November, as I was treating his leg.

  He shook his head, frowning. ‘She doesn’t seem to want to.’

  ‘You can’t … bring her out? Make her open up a little?’

  The frown grew deeper. ‘I suppose I could try. I never seem to have the time.’

  I said lightly, ‘No time for your sister?’

  He didn’t answer, and I remember looking on in concern as his face darkened, and he turned his head from me as if not trusting himself to reply. The fact is, at this point I felt almost more uneasy over him than over Caroline. That the business with Gyp and the Baker-Hydes should have left its mark on her was understandable, but it seemed to have had some sort of devastating impact on him, too, which quite perplexed me. It was not just a question of his being preoccupied and withdrawn, of his spending too much time at work in his room, for that had been true of him for months. It was an extra something, that I saw or sensed forever at the back of his expression: some burden of knowledge, or even of fear.

  I hadn’t forgotten what his mother had told me, about how she had found him on the night of the party. It seemed to me that if this new phase of his behaviour had started anywhere, it was there. I had tried several times to raise the subject with him, and every time he had found some way, through silence or evasion, of putting me off. Perhaps I should have left him to it. I was certainly busy enough on my own account in those days, for the colder weather had brought along its usual rash of winter ailments, and my rounds were heavy. But it was against all my instincts to let the matter rest; and, more than that, I simply felt involved with the family now, in a way I hadn’t even three or four weeks before. So, when I had put the electrodes in place and started up the coil, I told him plainly what was bothering me.

  His reaction appalled me.

  ‘That’s my mother’s idea of keeping a confidence, is it?’ he said, moving furiously about in his chair. ‘I suppose I should have expected it. Just what did she tell you? That she found me in a blue funk?’

  ‘She was worried about you.’

  ‘God! I simply didn’t feel like turning out for some idiotic party! My head was killing me. I sat in my room and had a drink. Then I went to bed. Is that a crime?’

  ‘Rod, of course it isn’t. It’s just, the way she described it—’

  ‘For God’s sake. She exaggerates! She imagines things, all the time! As for what’s actually under her nose—Oh, forget it. If she thinks I’m about to go off my head, leave her to it. She has no idea. You none of you have. If you only knew—’

  He bit the words back. Puzzled by the intensity of his manner, I said, ‘If we knew what?’

  He sat rigid for a moment, clearly struggling with himself. Then, ‘Oh, forget it,’ he said again. And he moved sharply forward, catching hold of the wires that ran from his leg to the coil and pulling them free. ‘Forget all this, too. I’m tired of it. It’s no damn good.’

  The electrodes sprang out of their bindings and tumbled to the floor. He tugged the elastics loose, then clumsily rose and, with his trouser leg still rolled high and his foot bare, he went over to stand at his desk, turning his back to me.

  I gave the treatment up that day, and abandoned him to his temper. The following week he apologised, and we ran through the process as normal; he seemed to have quite calmed down. By my next visit, however, something new had started happening. I arrived at the house to find him with a cut on the bridge of his nose and a bad black eye.

  ‘Now, don’t look like that,’ he said, when he saw my face. ‘I’ve had Caroline fussing over me all morning, trying to stick bits of bacon to me and God knows what else.’

  I glanced at his sister—she was sitting there with him, in his room; I think she had been waiting for me—then went over to him, to take his head in my hands and turn his face to the light of the window.

  ‘What on earth happened?’

  ‘A very stupid thing indeed,’ he said, irritably drawing himself free, ‘and I’m almost too embarrassed to mention it. I woke in the night, that’s all, and went blundering out to the lavatory, and some fool—i.e., me—had left the door wide open, so that I went smack into the edge of it.’

  ‘He knocked himself out,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s only thanks to Betty that he didn’t—I don’t know, swallow his own tongue.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said her brother. ‘I didn’t knock myself out.’

  ‘You did! He was flat on the floor, Doctor. And he’d given such a cry, he’d woken up Betty, downstairs. Poor girl, I think she thought we had burglars. She crept up and saw him lying there, and very sensibly came and woke me. He was still out cold when I came down to him.’

  Rod scowled. ‘Don’t listen to her, Doctor. She’s exaggerating.’

  ‘I’m not, you know,’ said Caroline. ‘We had to throw water in his face to bring him round, and when he came to he was most ungrateful, told us in very nasty language to leave him alone—’

  ‘All right,’ said her brother. ‘We seem to have proved that I’m an idiot. But I think I told you that myself. Now, can we leave it?’

  He spoke sharply. Caroline looked disconcerted for a moment, then found a way to turn the subject. He wouldn’t join in, however, but sat in moody silence while she and I chatted; and for the first time, when I prepared to treat him, he refused outright to let me do it—saying again that he was ‘tired of it’, that it was ‘doing no good’.

  His sister stared at him in amazement. ‘Oh, Rod, you know that’s not true!’

  He answered peevishly, ‘It’s my leg, isn’t it?’

  ‘But for Dr Faraday to have gone to so much trouble—’

  ‘Well, if Dr Faraday wants to put himself out for people he hardly knows,’ he said, ‘that’s his look-out. I tell you, I’m tired of being pinched and pulled about! Or are my legs estate property, like everything else around here? Got to patch them
up, get a bit more wear out of them; never mind that you’re grinding them down to stumps. Is that what you’re thinking?’

  ‘Rod! You aren’t being fair!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said quietly. ‘Rod doesn’t have to have the treatment if he doesn’t want it. It isn’t as though he’s paying for it.’

  ‘But,’ said Caroline, as if she hadn’t heard, ‘your paper—’

  ‘My paper’s practically written. And, as I think Rod knows, the best effect’s already been achieved. All I’m doing now is keeping the muscle ticking over.’

  Rod himself had moved away and wouldn’t talk to us. In the end we left him to it, and joined Mrs Ayres in the little parlour for a subdued tea. But before I left, I went quietly down to the basement to have a word with Betty, and she confirmed what Caroline had told me about the previous night. She had been fast asleep, she said, and had been woken by a cry; muddled with slumber, she’d thought that one of the family wanted her, and had gone dozily upstairs. She found Rod’s door open, and Rod himself lying on the floor with blood on his face, so still and white that for a second she’d supposed him dead, and had ‘very nearly screamed’. Pulling herself together, she had run to fetch Caroline, and between them they had brought him round. He had woken up ‘cursing, and saying funny things’.

  I said, ‘What sort of things?’

  She screwed up her face, trying to remember. ‘Just funny things. Queer things. Like when the dentist gives you gas.’

  And that was all she could tell me; so I was obliged to let the matter go.

  A few days later, however—when the bruise on his eye had turned a lovely shade of what Caroline called ‘greenery-yallery’, but well before it had faded completely—Rod suffered another small injury. Again he had apparently woken in the night and gone ‘blundering’ across his room. This time he had walked into a footstool that had mysteriously left its usual place to set itself directly in his path, and he had tripped and fallen, and hurt his wrist. He tried to play the incident down to me, and he let me bind up the injured wrist with a tremendous air of ‘humouring the old man’. But I could tell from the look of his arm, and from his reaction when I handled it, that the sprain was quite a bad one, and his attitude baffled me.