The Little Stranger

  ‘I should never have left your brother alone! I let him down. I’ve let you all down … Where is he now? What does he say?’

  Her look grew odd again. ‘We’ve put him upstairs in his old room. But listen, we can’t get anything sensible out of him. He—he’s in pretty dreadful shape. We think we can rely on Betty, but we don’t want Mrs Bazeley to see him. We don’t want anyone to see him, if we can help it. The Rossiters called yesterday, and I had to send them away, in case he made some sort of fuss. It isn’t shock, it—it’s something else. Mother’s taken his cigarettes and everything like that. She’s—’ Her eyelids fluttered, and a little blood crept into her cheeks. ‘She’s locked him in.’

  ‘Locked him in?’ I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘She’s been thinking about the fire, you see, like I have. She supposed it an accident at first; we all did. Then, from the way he was behaving and the things he said, it was clear that something else was going on. I had to tell her about the other things. Now she’s afraid of what he’ll do next.’

  She turned away and started coughing, and this time the cough would not subside. She had spoken too long and too feelingly, and the day was too cold. She looked terribly weary and ill.

  I took her through to the little parlour, and it was there that I examined her. Then I went upstairs, to look at her mother and her brother.

  I went to Mrs Ayres first. She was propped up against her pillows, swathed in bedjackets and shawls, her long hair loose about her shoulders, making her face seem pale and pinched. But she was clearly very glad to see me.

  ‘Oh, Dr Faraday,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Can you believe this new calamity? I’m beginning to think my family must have some sort of curse upon it. I don’t understand it. What have we done? Whom have we angered? Do you know?’

  She asked this almost seriously. I said, as I hitched up a chair and began to examine her, ‘You’ve certainly had more than your share of bad luck. I’m so sorry.’

  She coughed, leaning forward to do it, then sinking back into her pillows. But she held my gaze. ‘You’ve seen Roderick’s room?’

  I was moving the stethoscope. ‘Just a second, please … Yes.’

  ‘You saw the desk, the chair?’

  ‘Do try not to speak for a moment.’

  I drew her forward again, in order to listen at her back. Then, putting my stethoscope away, and feeling her eyes still on me, I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do you make of them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you do. And oh, Doctor, I never imagined I would live to be afraid of my own son! I keep picturing what might have happened. Every time I close my eyes, I see flames.’

  Her voice caught. Another fit of coughing overtook her, more serious than the first, and she couldn’t finish. I held her shoulders as she shook, then gave her water to sip, and a clean handkerchief with which to wipe her mouth and eyes. She fell back into her pillows again, flushed and exhausted.

  I said, ‘You’re talking too much.’

  She shook her head. ‘I have to speak! I’ve no one to discuss this with save you and Caroline, and she and I have been talking each other in circles. She told me things, yesterday—extraordinary things! I couldn’t believe it! She said that Roderick’s been behaving almost like a madman. That his room was burned, before this. That she showed you the marks?’

  I moved uncomfortably. ‘She showed me something, yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t come to me, either of you?’

  ‘We didn’t want to unsettle you. We wanted to spare you if we could. Naturally, if I had had any idea that Roderick’s condition would lead to something like this—’

  Her expression grew unhappier. ‘His “condition”, you call it. So you knew he was ill.’

  I said, ‘I knew he wasn’t well. To be frank, I suspected he was far from well. But I made him a promise.’

  ‘He came to you, I think, and told you some tale about this house. About there being something in it, wishing him harm? Is that true?’

  I hesitated. She saw, and said, with humble earnestness, ‘Please be honest with me, Doctor.’

  So I said, ‘Yes, it’s true. I’m sorry.’ And I recounted everything that had happened: Rod’s fit of panic in my dispensary, his bizarre and frightening story, his sulkiness and temper since then, the threats implicit in some of his words …

  She listened in silence—putting out her hand, after a moment, and blindly catching hold of mine. Her fingernails, I saw, were ridged and elderly, and still dirty with soot. Her knuckles were marked from flying embers, the scars a little echo of her son’s. Her grip grew tighter the more she learned, and when I had finished speaking she looked at me as if bewildered.

  ‘My poor dear boy! I had no idea. He was never strong like his father, I knew that. But to think of his mind giving way like this! Did he really—’ She put her other hand to her breast. ‘Did he really speak like that against Hundreds? Against me?’

  I said, ‘You see? This is precisely why I hesitated to tell you. He wasn’t himself when he said those things. He hardly knew what he was saying.’

  She seemed not to have heard me. ‘Can it be true that he hates us all so much? Is that why this has happened?’

  ‘No, no. It’s clearly the strain—’

  She looked more bewildered than ever. ‘The strain?’

  ‘The house, the farm. The after-shock of his accident. His time in the service.—Who knows? Does it matter what’s caused it?’

  Again, she didn’t seem to be listening. She clutched my fingers and said, as if really anguished, ‘Tell me, Doctor: am I to blame?’

  The question, and the obvious force of emotion behind it, surprised me. I said, ‘Of course you aren’t.’

  ‘But I’m his mother! This is his home! For this thing to have happened—it isn’t natural. It isn’t right. I must have failed him in some way. Have I? Suppose there were something, Dr Faraday—’

  She drew away her hand, and lowered her eyes as if ashamed. ‘Suppose there were something,’ she went on, ‘that had got in the way of my feelings for him, when he was a boy. Some shadow, of upset, or grief.’ Her voice flattened. ‘I expect you know that I once had another child, before Caroline and Roderick were born. My little girl, Susan.’

  I nodded. ‘I remember it. I’m sorry.’

  She made a gesture, turned her head, acknowledging my sympathy, but also shrugging it off, as if it could have no bearing on her grief. She said, in the same almost matter-of-fact way as before, ‘She was my one true love. Does that sound odd to you? I never expected, when I was young, that I should fall in love with my own child, but she and I were like sweethearts. When she died, I felt for a long time that I might as well have died with her. Perhaps I did … People told me that the best and soonest way to get over the loss of a child was to start another, as quickly as one could. My mother told me that, my mother-in-law, my aunts, my sister … And then, when Caroline was born, they said something else. They said, “Well, naturally, a little girl will put you in mind of the lost one, you must try again, you must try for a boy; a mother always loves her sons …” And, after Roderick: “Why, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that people of our sort don’t make a fuss? Here you are, in your fine home, with your husband who came through the war, and two healthy children. If you can’t find a way to be happy with that, you must simply stop complaining—” ’

  Again she coughed, and wiped her eyes. I said, when the cough had subsided, ‘It was hard for you.’

  ‘Harder for my children.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Love isn’t a thing that can be weighed and measured, surely?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. And yet—I do love my children, Doctor; truly I do. But what a very dull and half-alive thing that love has seemed to me, sometimes! Because I have been half alive, you see … Caroline, I think, it hasn’t harmed. Roderick was always the sensitive one. Could it be that he grew up feeling a sort of falseness in me, and hating m
e for it?’

  I thought of how Rod himself had spoken on the night of the fire. I remembered him saying that he and his sister had disappointed his mother ‘simply by being born’. But her expression, now, was so anguished; and I had already told her so much. What good would it have done, to share that with her, too? So I took her hand again and said, very firmly, ‘You’re being fanciful. You’re ill, and tired. One upset summons up a crowd of others, that’s all it is.’

  She looked into my face, wanting to believe me. ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I know so. You mustn’t brood on things from the past. The issue we’ve to deal with now is not what’s made Rod ill, but how we’re to get him well again.’

  ‘But suppose this is too deep a thing for that? Suppose he can’t be cured?’

  ‘Of course he can. You’re talking as though he’s beyond help! With proper care—’

  She shook her head, beginning to cough again. ‘We can’t care for him here. We simply haven’t the strength for it, Caroline and I. Remember, we’ve been through this before.’

  ‘Then, perhaps a nurse?’

  ‘I don’t believe a nurse could cope with him!’

  ‘Oh, but surely—’

  Her gaze moved from mine. She said as if guiltily, ‘Caroline told me you spoke of a hospital.’

  I said, after a slight pause, ‘Yes. I hoped at one point to be able to persuade Rod to admit himself. The place I had in mind was a specialist private nursing home. For mental disorders, like this.’

  ‘Mental disorders,’ she repeated.

  I said quickly, ‘Don’t let that phrase alarm you too much. It covers all sorts of conditions. The clinic is up in Birmingham, and quite discreet. But, well, it’s not cheap. Even with Rod’s disability pension I’m afraid the fees would be hefty. Perhaps, after all, a reliable nurse, here at Hundreds, would be the better option …’

  She said, ‘I’m frightened, Dr Faraday. A nurse could only do so much. Suppose Roderick were to start another fire? Next time, perhaps, he’d succeed in burning the Hall to the ground, or in killing himself—or in killing his sister, or me, or one of the servants! Have you thought of that? Imagine what would follow! Inquiries, and policemen, and newspaper-men—all in earnest this time; not like that wretched business with Gyp. And what would become of him then? As far as anyone knows, this fire was an accident and Roderick had the worst of it. If we send him away now, we can say we’re simply sending him out of the Warwickshire winter in order for him to recover. Don’t you agree? I’m asking you now as our friend, as well as our doctor. Please help us. You were so good to us, before.’

  I saw the sense in her words. I was very conscious that I had already dragged my heels over Roderick, with near-disastrous results. It could certainly do him no harm to get away from the estate for a while; I had wanted that for him from the start. And yet, there was a great deal of difference between encouraging him to admit himself to a clinic, and packing him off there by force.

  I said, ‘It’s certainly an option. Naturally, I would have to bring in another man, get a second opinion. But we mustn’t act too hastily. As frightful as this incident has been, it may well have the effect of jolting him out of his delusion. I still can’t believe—’

  ‘You haven’t seen him yet,’ she whispered, across my words.

  She had that odd look of Caroline’s. I said, after a moment, ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Go and speak to him now, will you? Then come back and tell me your thoughts.—Just a second.’

  I had risen, but she beckoned me back. And while I watched, she reached into the drawer of her bedside cabinet and took something from it. It was a key.

  Reluctantly, I held out my hand.

  The room they had put him in was the bedroom he’d had as an older child: the room, I suppose, in which he’d slept during his school holidays and, later, in his brief leaves from the Air Force, before his smash. It was just around the landing from his mother’s, separated from it only by her old dressing-room, and it was horrible to think of his having been in there all this time—horrible, too, to have to tap at his door and brightly call his name, and then, receiving no answer, put the key to the lock like a gaoler. I don’t know what I expected to find when I went in to him. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had come charging after his freedom. As I opened the door I remember I flinched, prepared for anger and abuse.

  But what I found was, in a way, far worse. The curtains at the windows were half drawn, and the room was gloomy. It took me a moment to see that Rod was sitting in bed, in a pair of boyish striped pyjamas and an old blue dressing-gown, and instead of making a rush at the open door, he watched me approach, keeping very still. He had one hand at his mouth, the fingers made loosely into a fist; he was rapidly flicking at his lip with his thumb-nail. Even in the poor light and from a distance I could see how unwell he looked. Drawing closer, I made out the greasy yellowish-white of his face, and his swollen, sore-looking eyes. There seemed to be traces of soot, still, in the pores of his skin and in the oil of his unwashed hair. His cheeks were unshaven, the stubble growing patchily because of his scars; his mouth was pale, the lips drawn in. I was struck, too, by the odour of him: the odour of smoke and perspiration and sour breath. Under his bed was a chamber-pot, which had evidently recently been used.

  He kept his eyes on my face as I approached, but didn’t answer when I spoke to him. Only when I sat beside him and opened my bag, and gently parted the lapels of his dressing-gown and pyjama top to put the stethoscope to his chest, did he break his silence. And what he said was, ‘Can you hear it?’

  His voice had only a hint of hoarseness. I drew him forward to put the stethoscope to his back. ‘Hear what?’

  His mouth was close to my ear. He said, ‘You know what.’

  ‘All I know is that, like your mother and sister, you breathed in a good deal of smoke the other night. I want to be sure it didn’t hurt you.’

  ‘Hurt me? Oh, it wouldn’t do that. It doesn’t want that. Not any more.’

  ‘Be quiet for a moment, will you?’

  I moved the bulb. His heart was thumping and his chest was tight, but I could find no trace of stickiness or deadness in his lungs, so I settled him back against his pillow and refastened his clothes. He let me do it, but his gaze moved away, and soon he returned his hand to his mouth and started flicking again at his lip.

  I said, ‘Rod, this fire has frightened everybody terribly. No one seems to know how it started. What do you remember? Can you tell me?’ He seemed not to be listening. ‘Rod?’

  He gaze came back to mine and he frowned, growing almost peevish. ‘I’ve told everyone, already: I don’t remember anything. Just you being there, and then Betty coming, and then Caroline, putting me to bed. I had a dream, I think.’

  ‘What sort of dream?’

  He was still flicking at his mouth. ‘Just a dream. I don’t know. What does it matter?’

  ‘You might have dreamed, say, that you got up. That you tried to light a cigarette or a candle.’

  His hand grew still. He looked at me in disbelief. ‘You’re not trying to make out it was all an accident!’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, yet.’

  He moved around in the bed, growing excited. ‘After all I’ve told you! Even Caroline can see it wasn’t an accident! There were lots of fires, she says. She says those other marks, in my room, they were little fires, too. Little fires that didn’t take.’

  I said, ‘We don’t know that for sure. We may never know.’

  ‘I know. I knew, that night. I told you, didn’t I, that a trick was coming? Why did you leave me on my own? Couldn’t you see I wasn’t strong enough?’

  ‘Rod, please.’

  But he was shifting around now as if he could hardly control his own movements. He was like a man with DT; it was terrible to see.

  At last he reached for my arm and held on to it. ‘What if Caroline hadn’t come in time?’ he said. His eyes were blazing in his face. ‘The
whole house might have burnt down! My sister, my mother, Betty—’

  ‘Come on, Rod. Calm down.’

  ‘Calm down? I’m practically a murderer!’

  ‘Don’t be foolish.’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying, aren’t they?’

  ‘No one’s saying anything.’

  He twisted the sleeve of my jacket. ‘But they’re right, don’t you see? I thought I could keep this thing at bay, stop the infection. But I’m too weak. The infection’s been too long inside me. It’s changing me. It’s making me like it. I thought I was keeping it away from Mother and Caroline. But all this time it’s been working through me, as a way of getting at them. It’s been—What are you doing?’

  I had drawn away from him to reach for my bag. He saw me bringing out a tub of tablets.

  ‘No!’ he cried, hitting out with his hand so that the tub went flying. ‘Nothing like that! Don’t you understand? Are you trying to help it? Is that what you’re doing? I mustn’t go to sleep!’

  The blow of his hand against mine, and the obvious madness of his words and expression, frightened me. But I looked in anxiety at his swollen eyes and said, ‘You haven’t been sleeping? Not since the night before last?’ I took hold of his wrist. His pulse was still racing.

  He pulled himself free. ‘How can I? It was bad enough before.’

  ‘But Rod,’ I said, ‘you must sleep.’

  ‘I daren’t! And you wouldn’t, either, if you knew what it was like. Last night—’ He lowered his voice, and glanced craftily about. ‘Last night I heard noises. I thought there was something at the door, something scratching, wanting to get in. Then I realised that the noise was inside me, that the thing that was scratching was inside me, trying to get out. It’s waiting, you see. It’s all very well them locking me in, but if I go to sleep—’

  He didn’t finish, but looked at me with what he evidently thought was tremendous meaning. Then he drew up his knees, put his hands before his mouth, and went back to flicking at his lip. I left the bed, to gather up the pills that he had knocked from the tub to the floor; I found my hand was trembling as I did it, for I’d realised at last how deeply, deeply lost he was to his delusion. I stood up and looked helplessly at him, and then I gazed around the room, seeing tragic little tokens of the charming, lively boy he must once have been: the shelf of adventure books still on the wall, the trophies and models, the Air Force charts, with annotations added in an untidy teenage hand … Who ever could have predicted this decline? How had it happened? It seemed to me, suddenly, that his mother must be right: no amount of strain or burden could explain it. There had to be something else at the root of it, some clue or sign I could not read.