The Little Stranger

  She said she felt the sting of it in her palm almost before she knew that she had done it; and then she put her hands to her mouth, as startled and as frightened as if it were she herself who’d been hit. Rod abruptly fell silent, and covered his face. Mrs Ayres stood watching him, her shoulders twitching as she caught after her breath. Caroline said unsteadily, ‘We’re all a little mad, I think. We’re all a little crazy … Betty? Are you there?’

  The girl came forward, her eyes wide, her face pale, and striped like a tiger’s with streaks of soot. Caroline said, ‘You’re all right?’

  Betty nodded.

  ‘Not burnt, or anything like that?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  She spoke in a whisper; but the sound of her voice was reassuring, and Caroline grew calmer.

  ‘Good girl. You’ve been very good, and very brave. Don’t mind my brother. He—he isn’t himself. We’re none of us ourselves. Is there any hot water? Light the boiler, will you, and put some pans on the stove, enough for tea and three or four wash-bowls. We can take off the worst of the muck before we go up to the bathroom. Mother, you should sit down.’

  Mrs Ayres looked vague. Caroline went around the table to help her into a chair and to tuck a kitchen blanket around her. But her own limbs trembled as she did it, she felt as nerveless suddenly as if she’d been lifting impossible weights, and when her mother was settled, she drew out a chair for herself and sank heavily into it.

  For five or ten minutes after that, the only sounds in the kitchen were the roars of flame at the stove, the rising stir of warming water, and the clink of metal and china as Betty went about setting down bowls and gathering towels. Presently the girl called softly to Mrs Ayres; she helped her over to the sink, where she washed her hands, her face, and her feet. She did the same for Caroline; then looked doubtfully at Rod. He, however, had calmed himself down sufficiently to see what was wanted of him and to stumble over to the sink. But he moved like a sleepwalker, putting his hands into the water and letting Betty soap and rinse them, then standing limp and staring while she wiped the smudges from his face. His tarry hair resisted all her attempts to wash it: she took a comb to it instead, catching the crumbs of cindery oil in a sheet of newspaper, then screwing the paper up and setting it down on the draining board. When she had finished, he moved dumbly to one side, to let her pour the filthy water down the sink. He looked across the kitchen and caught his sister’s eye, and his expression was such a mixture, Caroline said, of fear and confusion, she couldn’t bear it. She turned away from him, meaning to rejoin her mother.

  Then a very strange thing happened. Caroline had just taken a step towards the table when, from the corner of her eye, she saw her brother make some movement—something as simple, she thought at the time, as putting up his hand to his face to bite at a fingernail or to rub at his cheek. At the same moment, Betty also moved—turning briefly away from the sink to drop a towel into a bucket on the floor. But as she turned back, the girl gave a gasp: Caroline looked properly and, to her absolute amazement, saw, beyond her brother’s shoulder, more flames. ‘Roddie!’ she called, afraid. He turned, saw what she had seen, and darted away. On the wooden draining-board, a few inches from where he had been standing, there was a small bundle of fire and smoke. It was the newspaper Betty had used to catch the cinders from his hair. She had screwed it into a loose sort of parcel—and now, somehow, unbelievably, it had managed to set itself alight.

  The fire was nothing, of course, compared to the terrifying small inferno they had tackled in Roderick’s room. Caroline went quickly across the kitchen and knocked the bundle into the sink. The flames rose higher, then rapidly dwindled; the blackened paper, gossamer-like, held its shape for a moment before collapsing into fragments. But the dumbfounding thing was how such a fire could have started at all. Mrs Ayres and Caroline looked at each other, thoroughly unnerved. ‘What did you see?’ they asked Betty, and she answered, with frightened eyes, ‘I dunno, miss! Nothing at all! Only the smoke and the yellow flames, coming up behind Mr Roderick’s back.’

  She seemed as bewildered as everyone else. After thinking the matter over, they could only conclude, doubtfully, that one of the cinders she had combed from Roderick’s hair still had the germ of a fire in it, and the dryness of the newspaper had encouraged it back into life. Naturally, this was a very disturbing thought. They began to glance nervously about, half expecting other flames. Roderick, in particular, was distressed and panicky. When his mother said that perhaps she, Caroline, and Betty ought to go back up to his room for another rake at the ashes, he cried out that they mustn’t leave him alone! He was afraid to be on his own! He ‘couldn’t stop it!’ So, mainly in fear of his breaking down altogether, they took him with them. They found him an undamaged chair, and he sat in that with his legs drawn up, his hands at his mouth, his eyes darting, while they went wearily from one blackened surface to another. But all was cold and dead and filthy. They gave up searching just before dawn.

  I woke an hour or two later, rather wearied by my bad dreams, but blissfully ignorant of the catastrophe that had very nearly swallowed up Hundreds Hall in the night; in fact, I knew nothing of the fire until I heard of it from one of my evening patients, who in turn had had the damage reported to him by a tradesman who’d been out at the house that morning. I didn’t believe him at first. It seemed impossible to me that the family could have gone through such an ordeal and not sent me word of it. Then another man mentioned the incident to me as if it were already common knowledge. Still dubious, I telephoned Mrs Ayres, and to my amazement she confirmed the whole story. She sounded so hoarse and so tired, I cursed myself for not having called her sooner, when I might have gone out there—for I had recently started spending an evening a week on the wards of the district hospital, tonight was one of those evenings, and I simply could not get away. She promised me that she, Caroline, and Roderick were all quite well, only weary. She said the fire had given them all ‘a little fright’: that was how she phrased it, and perhaps because of those words I pictured the incident as something relatively minor. I remembered all too vividly the state that Rod had been in when I had left him; I recalled the bullishness with which he’d been slopping his drinks around, the way he had dropped a lighted spill so that it burned unheeded on the carpet. I supposed he’d started a small blaze with a cigarette … But I knew that even a small fire can produce a great deal of smoke. I knew, too, that the effects of smoke inhalation are often at their worst a day or two after the fire itself. So I went to bed worried about the family, and passed another uneasy night on their behalf.

  I drove out to the house at the end of my round next morning and, just as I’d feared, they were all suffering. In purely physical terms, Betty and Roderick were the least affected. She had kept close to the door while the fire was raging, and had been darting back and forth to the lavatory for water. Roderick had been lying flat in his bed, breathing shallowly while the worst of the smoke collected high above his head. But Mrs Ayres was by now quite wretched—breathless and weak, and more or less confined to her room—and Caroline looked and sounded ghastly, with a swollen throat, and singed hair, and her face and hands marked crimson from embers and sparks. She met me at the front door as I arrived, and the sight of her was so awful, and so much worse than I’d been expecting, I found myself putting down my bag so that I could take her by the shoulders and gaze properly into her face.

  ‘Oh, Caroline,’ I said.

  She blinked self-consciously, and smiled, but her eyes began to glisten with tears. ‘I look like a poor Guy Fawkes,’ she said, ‘that got snatched off the bonfire at the very last minute—’

  She turned away, and started coughing. I said hastily, ‘Go in, for heaven’s sake, out of the cold.’

  By the time I had picked up my bag and joined her, her cough had subsided, she had wiped her face, and the tears were gone. I closed the door—but did it blindly, shocked now by the frightful scent of burning that met me in the hall; shocked by the appearanc
e of the hall itself, which might have been hung with mourning-veils, so thickly spotted and smeared was every surface with smuts and blacks and soot.

  ‘Rotten, isn’t it?’ said Caroline hoarsely, following my gaze. ‘And it only gets worse, I’m afraid. Come and see.’ She led me along the north passage. ‘The smell’s right through the house, even up in the attics, I don’t know how. Don’t mind your muddy shoes, we’ve given up on this floor for now. But be careful of your jacket against the walls. The soot sticks like anything.’

  The door of Rod’s room was ajar, and as we drew closer to it I could see enough to prepare me for the devastation that lay beyond. Even so, when Caroline went in, for a second I stayed at the threshold, too appalled to follow. Mrs Bazeley—who was in there with Betty, washing down the walls—met my gaze and nodded, grimly.

  ‘You look like I done, Doctor,’ she said, ‘when I come in yesterday morning. And this is nothing to how it were then. We was wading in filth up to our ankles, wan’t we, Betty?’

  The room had been cleared of most of its furniture, which was standing higgledy-piggledy down on the terrace on the other side of the open French window. The carpet had also been rolled up and moved out, and sheets of newspaper had been laid on the wide wooden floorboards, but the boards were still so wet and ashy that the paper was turning to a thick grey pulp, like sooty porridge. The walls were running with more ashy water where Mrs Bazeley and Betty were scrubbing at them. The wooden panelling was scorched and charred, and the ceiling—that notorious lattice-work ceiling—was perfectly black, its mysterious smudges lost for ever.

  ‘This is unbelievable,’ I said to Caroline. ‘I had no idea! If I had known—’

  I didn’t finish, for my knowing or not knowing was beside the point, there was nothing I could have done. But I felt extremely unsettled to think that such a serious thing could have happened to the family in my absence. I said, ‘The whole house might have been lost. It doesn’t bear thinking about! And Rod was here, in the middle of it? Is he really all right?’

  She gave me, I thought, an odd sort of look, then glanced over at Mrs Bazeley.

  ‘Yes, he’s all right. Only wheezy like the rest of us. Most of his things have been lost, though. His chair—you can see it out there—seemed to get the worst of the fire; that, and his desk and his table.’

  I looked through the open window and saw the desk, its legs and drawers intact but its surface as blackened and crisped as if someone had lit a bonfire on it. Suddenly I understood why there was so much ash in the room. I said, ‘His papers!’

  Caroline nodded tiredly. ‘Probably the driest things in the house.’

  ‘Were any spared?’

  ‘A few. I don’t know what’s been lost. I don’t really know what was in here. There were plans of the house and estate, weren’t there? I think there were all sorts of maps, copies of the deeds to the farms and cottages, and letters, and bills, notes of my father’s …’ Her voice grew thicker. She began to cough again.

  ‘What a dreadful, dreadful shame,’ I said, looking around, and seeing new damage with every glance: a painting on the wall with its canvas charred, lamps with blackened globes and lustres. ‘This lovely room. What will you do with it? Can it be saved? The worst of the panels might be replaced, I suppose. The ceiling you could whitewash.’

  She gave a gloomy shrug. ‘Mother thinks that once the room has been cleaned, we might as well just close it up like the others. We certainly don’t have the money to restore it.’

  ‘What about insurance money?’

  She glanced again at Mrs Bazeley and Betty. They were still scrubbing at the walls, and under cover of the rasp of their brushes she said quietly, ‘Rod let the insurance payments go. We just found out.’

  ‘He let them go!’

  ‘Months ago, apparently. As a way of saving money.’ She closed her eyes, and slowly shook her head, then moved to the French window. ‘Come outside for a minute, would you?’

  We went down the stone steps and I surveyed the damaged furniture, the ruined desk and table, the armchair with its leather covering gone, its springs and horsehair stuffing laid bare like the diseased bones and intestines of some fantastic anatomical model. It made very bleak viewing, and the day, though rainless, was cold; I saw Caroline shiver. I wanted to examine her and Betty, along with her mother and brother, so I said she ought to take me back into the house, to the little parlour or somewhere warm. But after a slight hesitation she looked in through the open window, then drew me further away from it. She coughed again, grimacing against her swollen throat as she swallowed.

  She said very quietly, ‘You spoke to Mother yesterday. Did she say anything to you about how the fire might have started?’

  She kept her eyes on mine. I said, ‘She told me only that it had broken out in Rod’s room after all of you had gone to bed, and that you found it and put it out. I guessed that Rod, being so drunk, had done something silly with a cigarette.’

  ‘We thought the same,’ she said, ‘at first.’

  I was struck by that ‘at first’. I said warily, ‘What does Rod himself remember?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘I suppose he passed out, and then—what? Could he have woken later, gone to the fire, lit a spill?’

  She swallowed uncomfortably again, and spoke with something of an effort. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think.’ She nodded back in through the window. ‘Did you notice the fireplace?’

  I looked, and saw the grate covered over with the grey mesh guard. Caroline said, ‘That’s exactly how it was when I left Rod, a few hours before the fire started. When I went back in, the grate was dark as if it hadn’t been disturbed. But the other fires, well, I keep picturing them. There wasn’t just one, you see. There were, I don’t know, maybe five or six.’

  ‘As many as that?’ I said, shocked. ‘It’s a miracle, Caroline, that none of you is more seriously hurt!’

  ‘That isn’t what I mean … They taught us about fire in the Wrens. They talked about how fire spreads. It creeps, you know. It doesn’t leap. These fires, they were more like the separate small fires that might have been started by—by incendiaries or something. Look at Rod’s chair: it’s as though flames broke out right in the middle of it; the legs are untouched. The desk and table are the same. And, these curtains.’ She caught up the pair of brocade curtains that had burned themselves free from their rings, and which had been slung over the back of the ruined armchair. ‘The fire starts here, look, half-way up. How can that be? The walls to either side of them are only scorched. It’s as if—’ She glanced back into the room, more afraid than ever of being overheard. ‘Well, Rod’s having been careless with a cigarette or a candle is one thing. But it’s as if these fires were set. Deliberately set, I mean.’

  I said, appalled, ‘You think that Rod—?’

  She answered quickly, ‘I don’t know. I simply don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about what he told you, that time at your surgery. And those marks we found on his walls—they were burns, weren’t they? Well, weren’t they? They make a horrible sort of sense now. Besides, there’s another thing.’

  And then she told me about that odd little incident down in the kitchen, when the parcel of newspaper had apparently burst into flame behind Rod’s back. At the time, as I’ve reported, they’d all supposed it the work of a cinder. But since then Caroline had gone to have another look at the scene, and had found a box of kitchen matches on one of the shelves close by. She didn’t think it very likely, but it seemed to her just possible that, with no one’s eyes upon him, Roderick could have got hold of one of the matches and started the blaze himself.

  This seemed to me to be simply too much. I said, ‘I don’t want to doubt you, Caroline. But you’d all been through such an ordeal. I’m not surprised you saw more flames.’

  ‘You think we imagined the burning paper? All four of us?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘We didn’t imagine it, I promise you th
at. The flames were real. And if Roddie didn’t start them, then … what did? That’s what scares me, almost more than anything. That’s why I think it has to have been Rod.’

  I didn’t quite know what she was getting at; but she was plainly very frightened. I said, ‘Look, let’s be calm about this. There’s no proof, is there, that the fire was anything other than an accident?’

  She said, ‘I’m not so sure. I wonder, for instance, what a policeman would make of it. You heard that Paget’s man was out here yesterday, bringing the meat? He smelt the smoke, and wandered round to look through the windows before I could stop him. He was a fireman in Coventry during the war, you know. I told him some slush about an oil-heater, but I saw him having a good look round, taking everything in. I could see in his face that he didn’t believe me.’

  ‘But what you’re suggesting,’ I said softly, ‘is monstrous! To think of Rod, cold-heartedly going about the room—’

  ‘I know! I know, it’s horrible! And I don’t say he did it deliberately, Doctor. I don’t believe he wanted to hurt anyone. I’ll believe anything but that. But, well—’ Her expression grew pinched, and desperately unhappy. ‘Can’t people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they’re doing them?’

  I didn’t answer. I looked around me again, at the ruined furniture: the chair, the table, the desk with its charred and ashy surface, over which I had so often seen Rod poring in a state very like despair. I remembered how, a few hours before the fire, he had been raging against his father, against his mother, against the whole estate. There’ll be tricks tonight, he had said to me, with dreadful coyness; and I’d looked from him—hadn’t I?—into the shadows of his room, and seen the walls and ceiling of it marked—almost swarming!—with those unnerving black smudges.

  I passed a hand across my face. ‘Oh, Caroline,’ I said. ‘What a ghastly business. I can’t help but feel responsible.’

  She said, ‘What do you mean?’