The Little Stranger

  She spoke wearily but matter-of-factly, letting her eyes almost close, and again I was conscious of the curious nudeness of her slightly swollen eyelids. I gazed down at her, perturbed.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Caroline. You couldn’t bear to lose Hundreds, surely?’

  Now she spoke almost casually. ‘Oh, but I’ve been brought up to lose it.—To lose it, I mean, once Rod marries. The new Mrs Ayres won’t want a spinster sister-in-law about the place; nor a mother-in-law, come to that. That’s the stupidest thing of all. So long as Roddie goes on holding the estate together, too tired and distracted to find a wife, and probably killing himself in the process—so long as he goes on like that, Mother and I get to stay here. Meanwhile Hundreds is such a drain on us, it’s hardly worth staying for …’

  Her voice faded, and we stayed without speaking until the silence in that insulated room began to grow oppressive. I looked again at those three queer scorch-marks: they were like the burns, I realised suddenly, on Rod’s own face and hands. It was as if the house were developing scars of its own, in response to his unhappiness and frustration—or to Caroline’s, or her mother’s—perhaps, to the griefs and disappointments of the whole family. The thought was horrible. I could see what Caroline meant about the marked walls and furniture being ‘creepy’.

  I must have shuddered. Caroline got up. She said, ‘Look here, I’m sorry to have told you all this. It really isn’t your trouble.’

  I said, ‘Oh, but it is, in a way.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Well, since I’ve more or less become Rod’s doctor.’

  She gave her rueful smile. ‘Yes, well, but you haven’t really, have you? It’s just how you said the other day: Rod isn’t paying you to come here. You can dress it up how you like, I know you’re treating him now more or less as a favour. It’s awfully kind of you, but you mustn’t let us drag you into any more of our problems. Do you remember what I told you about this house, when I showed you round it? It’s greedy. It gobbles up all our time and energy. It’ll gobble up yours, if you let it.’

  I didn’t answer for a second. I’d had a vision, not of Hundreds Hall, but of my own home, with its neat, plain, undemanding, utterly lifeless rooms. I would be returning to them later, to a bachelor’s supper of cold meat and boiled potatoes and half a bottle of flat beer.

  I said firmly, ‘I’m happy to help you, Caroline. Truly I am.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what’s going on here, any more than you do. But I’d like to help you figure it out. I’ll take my chances with the hungry house, don’t worry about that. I’m a pretty indigestible fellow, you know.’

  She smiled properly then, and briefly closed her eyes again. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  After that, we didn’t linger. We began to be afraid of Rod’s returning and discovering us there. So we made our way quietly back to the library, for Caroline to tidy the room and close the shutter. Then, trying to shake off our anxieties, we went to the little parlour to join her mother.

  But I stayed puzzling over Roderick’s condition for the next few days; and it must have been on an afternoon early in the following week that the whole thing at last came together—or, depending on how one looks at it, fell apart. I was driving back through Lidcote at about five o’clock, and was surprised to see Rod himself, on the High Street. His presence there would once have been unremarkable, for in the old days he often used to come in on farming business. But, as Caroline had said, he rarely left Hundreds now, and though he still looked very much the young country squire, in an overcoat and tweed cap and with the strap of a leather satchel across his breast, there was something unmistakably burdened and ill at ease about him—about the way he walked, with his collar turned up, and his shoulders hunched, as if against more than the chill November breezes. When I drew up across the street from him to wind down my window and call his name, he turned to me with a startled expression; and just for a second—I could have sworn it—he looked like a frightened, hunted man.

  He came slowly over to the car, and I asked him what had brought him into the village. He told me he had been to see Maurice Babb, the big local builder. The county council had recently bought up the last free parcel of Ayres farmland; they planned to build a new housing estate on it, with Babb as the contractor. He and Rod had just been running through the final agreement.

  ‘He makes me come in to his office like a tradesman,’ Rod said bitterly. ‘Imagine if a man like that had suggested such a thing to my father! He knows I’ll do it, of course. He knows I’ve no choice.’

  He drew close the lapels of his overcoat, and again looked burdened and miserable. I couldn’t offer him many words of comfort over the sale of the land. In fact, I was pleased to hear about the new houses, which were badly needed in the area. But, thinking of his leg, I said, ‘You didn’t walk in?’

  ‘No, no,’ he answered. ‘Barrett managed to whistle me up some fuel, so I drove.’

  He gestured with his chin along the High Street, and I caught sight of the Ayres’s distinctive car, a shabby old black and ivory Rolls-Royce, parked a little way along it. He said, ‘I thought she might give up the ghost on the way here. That would have been just about the last straw. But she made it all right.’

  He sounded more like his old self now. I said, ‘Well, let’s hope she gets you home again! You don’t have to hurry back, I take it? Come in with me for a while, and warm yourself up.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t,’ he said at once.

  ‘Why not?’

  His gaze slid away from mine. ‘I oughtn’t to keep you from your work.’

  ‘Nonsense! I’ve almost an hour before evening surgery, and this is always a dead time for me. I’ve hardly seen you lately. Come on.’

  He was obviously reluctant, but I kept up a light but determined pressure and he finally agreed to come in with me ‘just for five minutes’. I parked the car, and met him at the door to my house. Since none of the upstairs fires were lit, I took him into my dispensary; I brought a chair from behind the counter and set it with another, close to the room’s ancient Tortoise stove, which had just enough live embers in it to be kindled into a blaze. I spent a few minutes seeing to that, and by the time I had straightened, Rod had taken off his cap and put down his satchel and was going slowly around the room. He was looking at the shelves, where I kept some of the quaint old jars and instruments that had once belonged to Dr Gill.

  His mood, I was glad to see, seemed to have lifted slightly. He said, ‘Here’s that beastly leech-jar that used to give me such nightmares when I was a kid. Probably old Dr Gill never even kept any leeches in it, did he?’

  I said, ‘I’m afraid he probably did. He was just the sort of man to have faith in leeches. Leeches, and liquorice, and cod-liver oil. Take your coat off, won’t you? I won’t be a tick.’

  As I spoke I went through to my consulting-room next door, to open a drawer in my desk and bring out a bottle and two glasses.

  ‘Now, I don’t want you to think,’ I said, showing the bottle as I returned, ‘that it’s my custom to drink before six. But you look like you need cheering up, and it’s only some old brown sherry. I keep it on hand for pregnant women. They either want to celebrate, you see—or they need something to get them over the shock.’

  He smiled, but the smile fell quickly from his face.

  ‘I’ve just been given a drink by Babb. No old brown sherry for him, I assure you! He said we ought to toast the completion of the contract; that if we didn’t, it would bring bad luck. I nearly said that as far as I was concerned, I’d had my bad luck; selling the land was part of it. As for the money it’s brought in—would you believe me if I told you that’s practically spent already?’

  But he took the glass I gave him, and touched it to mine. To my surprise, the liquor trembled in his hand and, perhaps to hide the tremor, he took one swift sip, then began to roll the stem of the glass back and forth between his fingers. As we moved to the chairs I looke
d at him more closely. I saw the tense yet curiously lifeless way in which he lowered himself into his seat. He might have had odd little weights inside him, rolling unpredictably about.

  I said lightly, ‘You look done in, Rod.’

  He lifted his hand to wipe his lip. His wrist was still bandaged, the crepe now soiled and frayed at the palm. ‘It must be this business with the land,’ he said.

  ‘You shouldn’t take it so personally. There are probably a hundred landowners in England in exactly your position, all doing just what you’ve done today.’

  ‘There are probably a thousand,’ he answered, but without much force. ‘All the fellows I used to know at school, and all the chaps I used to fly with: every time I hear from one of them, they’re telling the same story. Most of them have run through their settlements already. Some are having to take jobs. Their parents are living on their nerves … I opened a newspaper this morning: a bishop was sounding off about “the shame of the German”. Why doesn’t anyone write a piece on “the shame of the Englishman”?—the ordinary hard-working Englishman, who since the war has had to watch his property and income vanishing like so much smoke? Meanwhile, grubby little businessmen like Babb are doing all right, and men without land, without family, without the eyes of the county on them—men like that bloody Baker-Hyde—’

  His voice had tightened, and he didn’t finish. He put back his head and swallowed the rest of his sherry, then started to twirl the empty glass between his fingers, even more restlessly than before. His gaze had turned inwards suddenly, he seemed alarmingly out of reach. He made some movement, and again I had that sense that there were unmoored weights inside him, making him jerky and off-balance.

  I was dismayed, too, by his reference to Peter Baker-Hyde. It gave me a glimpse, I thought, of what might have been troubling him all this time. It was as though he’d made a sort of fetish of the man, with his handsome wife and his money, and his good war record. I leaned towards him.

  ‘Listen, Rod. You mustn’t go on like this. This Baker-Hyde fixation, or whatever it is: let it go, can’t you? Concentrate on what you’ve got, rather than what you think you haven’t. Plenty men would envy you, you know.’

  He looked at me with a queer expression. ‘Envy me?’

  ‘Yes! Look at that house you’re living in, for one thing. I know it’s tough work keeping it going, but for goodness’ sake! Can’t you see that by holding on to this sort of resentment you’re hardly making life easier for your mother and sister? I don’t know what’s got into you lately. If there’s something on your mind—’

  ‘God!’ he said, flaring up. ‘If you like the damn house so much, why don’t you try running it! I’d like to see you. You’ve no idea! Don’t you know that if I were to stop, even for a moment—’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking painfully in his slender throat.

  ‘Stop what?’ I said.

  ‘Stop holding everything back. Keeping it at bay. Don’t you know that in every second of every day the whole damn thing’s in danger of crashing down, and taking me, and Caroline, and Mother down with it? God, you haven’t a clue, none of you! It’s killing me!’

  He put a hand on the back of his chair and made a move as if to push himself up; but then he seemed to change his mind and abruptly sat down again. Now he was definitely trembling—I didn’t know if it was with upset or with anger, but I looked away for a minute or two, wanting to give him time to pull himself together. The stove wasn’t drawing as it should: I moved forward to fiddle with the draught. But as I did it, I grew aware that Rod was fidgeting; soon he was fidgeting so badly there was something unnatural about it. ‘Hell!’ I heard him say, in a soft, desperate voice. I looked properly at him and saw that he was pale and sweating and shaking like a man in a fever.

  Alarmed, I got up. I thought for a moment that I must have been right about the epilepsy: that he was going into a seizure, right there in front of me.

  But he put a hand across his face. ‘Don’t look at me!’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t look at me! Stand over there.’

  Then I realised that he was not ill, but in the grip of a dreadful panic, and his embarrassment at my seeing him like this was making him worse. So I turned my back on him and went over to the window, and stood gazing out through the dusty net curtain. I remember the bitter, ticklish scent of it, even now. I said, ‘Rod—’

  ‘Don’t watch me!’

  ‘I’m not watching. I’m looking out, at the High Street.’ I could hear his rapid, laboured breathing, the catch of tears in his throat. I made my voice very level. I said, ‘I can see my car. I’m afraid she wants washing and polishing, rather badly. I can see yours, further down, looking even worse … There’s Mrs Walker and her little boy. There’s Enid, from the Desmonds’. She’s in a temper by the look of it; she’s put her hat on crooked. There’s Mr Crouch, come out to his step to shake a cloth … May I look at you now?’

  ‘No! Stay like that. Keep talking.’

  ‘Keep talking, all right. Funny how hard it is to keep talking, when someone asks you to start and not stop. And I’m more used, of course, to listening. Have you ever thought of that, Rod? About how much listening one has to do, in this job of mine? I often think that we family doctors are like priests. People tell us their secrets, because they know we won’t judge them. They know we’re used to looking at human beings as it were without their skins … Some doctors don’t like it. I’ve known one or two who’ve seen so much weakness they’ve developed a sort of contempt for mankind. I’ve known doctors—many doctors, more than you’d guess—who’ve taken to drink. Others of us, though, it humbles. We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive. Just being alive, not to mention having wars and whatnot thrown at one, and estates and farms to run … Most people, you know, seem to muddle through all right in the end …’

  I slowly turned back to him. He met my gaze with a wretched expression, but didn’t protest. He was holding himself impossibly tensely, breathing through his nose with his mouth shut tight. His face was bloodless. Even the taut, smooth skin of his scars had lost its colour. There was only the fading yellow-green bruise at his eye; and his cheeks were wet, with sweat and perhaps with tears. But he was over the worst of it, and growing calmer as I watched. I went across to him, and got out a packet of cigarettes, and he took one gratefully, though he had to hold it to his mouth with both his hands while I put the flame to it.

  As he blew out the first uneven plume of smoke, I said quietly: ‘What’s going on, Rod?’

  He wiped his face, and lowered his head. ‘Nothing’s going on. I’m all right now.’

  ‘All right? Look at you!’

  ‘It’s the strain of—of keeping on top of it. It wants me to buckle, that’s all. I shan’t give in to it. It knows that, you see, and keeps trying harder.’

  He spoke breathlessly still, and miserably, but in a measured kind of way, and the combination of anguish and reason in his words and manner was unnerving. I went back to my chair, and when I had sat I said quietly again, ‘What’s going on? I know something is. Won’t you tell me?’

  He raised his eyes to me, without lifting his head. ‘I want to,’ he said, with wretched simplicity. ‘But it’ll be better for your sake if I don’t.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It might … infect you.’

  ‘Infect me! I treat infections every day, don’t forget.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘Why, what is this like?’

  He dropped his gaze. ‘It’s a … filthy thing.’

  He spoke with a look and a gesture of disgust; and at that particular combination of words—‘infection’, and ‘filthy’—an idea began to break upon me about what his trouble might be. I was so surprised and dismayed, and yet so relieved that his predicament should turn out to be such a mundane one, that I almost smiled. I said, ‘Is it that, Rod? For God’s sake, why didn’t you come to me sooner!’

  He looked at me, n
ot understanding; and when I spoke more plainly, so that it was clear what I meant, he broke into a ghastly sounding laugh.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said, wiping his face. ‘If it were as simple a thing as that! As for telling you my symptoms—’ His expression grew bleak. ‘You won’t believe me if I do.’

  I said urgently, ‘Try me, will you?’

  ‘I told you, I want to!’

  ‘Well, when did they first appear, these symptoms of yours?’

  ‘When? When do you think? The night of that wretched party.’

  I had sensed this all along. ‘You had a headache, your mother said. Was that the start?’

  ‘The headache was nothing. I only said that to hide the other thing, the real thing.’

  I could see him struggling. I said, ‘Tell me, Rod.’

  He put a hand to his mouth, to push his lip between his teeth. ‘If it should get out—’

  I misunderstood. ‘I give you my word, I’ll tell no one.’

  That alarmed him. ‘No, you mustn’t do that! You mustn’t tell my mother or my sister!’

  ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

  ‘You said you were a sort of priest, remember? A priest keeps secrets, doesn’t he? You must promise me!’

  ‘I promise, Rod.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He looked away from me, and worked at his lip again, and was silent for so long I thought he’d retreated into himself and I had lost him. But then he drew unsteadily on his cigarette, and gestured with his glass.

  ‘All right. God knows, it’ll be a relief to share it with someone at last. But you must give me another drink first. I can’t face it sober.’

  I poured him out a large measure—his hands were still shaking too hard for him to be able to pour it for himself—and he swallowed it down in one gulp, then asked for another. And when he had drunk that he began, slowly and haltingly, to tell me exactly what had happened to him on the night the little Baker-Hyde girl was hurt.