The Little Stranger

  I returned to the bed, and looked into his face; but finally looked away, defeated. I said, ‘I have to leave you, Rod. I wish to God I hadn’t. Can I send Caroline to sit with you?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, you mustn’t do that.’

  ‘Well, is there anything else I can do?’

  He looked me over, considering. And when he spoke again his voice had changed, he was as polite and apologetic, suddenly, as the boy I had been picturing a few moments before. He said, ‘Let me have a cigarette, would you? I’m not allowed to, when I’m on my own. But if you stay with me while I smoke it, that’ll be all right, won’t it?’

  I gave him a cigarette, and lit it for him—he wouldn’t do it with his own hands, and he screwed up his eyes and covered his face while I struck the flame—then I sat with him as, wheezing slightly, he smoked it through. When he had finished he gave me the stub, so that I could take it away with me. ‘You haven’t left your matches, by mistake?’ he asked anxiously as I rose again. I had to show him the box, and make a sort of pantomime of putting it back into my pocket, before he’d let me go.

  And then, most poignantly of all, he insisted on coming to the door with me, to make sure that, after I left him, I locked it. I went twice, the first time to take his chamber-pot to the bathroom, where I emptied and rinsed it; but even for that short trip he insisted I turn the key on him, and when I returned I found him hovering on the other side of the door as if disturbed by the coming and going. Before I left the second time I took his hand—but again, the delay seemed only to agitate him, his fingers were lifeless in mine and his gaze slid nervously from my face. When I finally closed the door I did it very firmly, and turned the key with great deliberateness, so that there should be no mistake about it; but as I was walking quietly away I heard the creaking of the lock, and looked back to see the handle moving and the door shifting in its frame. He was making sure he couldn’t get out. The handle twisted two or three times in its socket before it was still. The sight of that, I think, upset me almost more than anything else.

  I took the key back to his mother. She could see how shocked and distressed I was. We sat in silence for a moment, and then, in low, dismal voices, began to talk over the arrangements that must be made for taking him away.

  It was a simple enough business, after all. I brought in David Graham first, to confirm that Rod was beyond ordinary medical help, and then the director of the clinic—a Dr Warren—came down from Birmingham to make his own examination, and to bring the necessary papers. This was on the Sunday of that week, four days after the night of the fire: Rod had gone sleepless all that time, violently refusing my attempts to sedate him, and had passed into a near-hysterical state which I think shocked even Warren. I didn’t know how he would take the news that we planned to commit him to what was effectively a psychiatric hospital; to my very great relief—but also, in a sense, to my dismay—he was almost pathetically grateful. Clutching desperately at Warren’s hand, he said, ‘You’ll watch me there, won’t you? Nothing will get out of me, if you’re watching. And even if it does, well, it won’t be my fault, will it, if something happens, if someone gets hurt?’

  His mother was there in the room while he babbled on like this. She was still weak and very wheezy, but had risen and dressed in order to receive Dr Warren. Seeing how upset the sight of Roderick made her, I took her downstairs. We joined Caroline in the little parlour, and Warren came down to us a few minutes later.

  ‘This is terribly sad,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Terribly sad. I see from his records that Roderick was treated for nervous depression in the months after his injury; but there was no hint, in those days, of serious mental imbalance? And nothing’s happened to bring this on? A loss of some kind? Another shock?’

  I’d already given him, by letter, a pretty thorough account of the case. It was clear he felt—as I did, at heart—that there was something missing, that no young man as essentially healthy as Roderick could have deteriorated so badly and so rapidly without some cause. We told him again about Rod’s delusions, his panics, those disturbing marks on his walls. I described the various burdens he’d had placed on him lately, as a landowner and master of the estate.

  ‘Well, we may never get to the real root of the problem,’ he said at last. ‘But, as his GP, you’re definitely prepared to put him into my care?’

  I said I was.

  ‘And as his mother, Mrs Ayres, you’re also willing for me to take him?’

  She nodded.

  ‘In that case, I think I can do no better than take him with me at once. I hadn’t planned to. I’d intended only to come and examine him, and return with proper assistance in a few days. But my driver’s a capable man, and I’m sure you won’t mind me saying that it’s doing no good at all, you keeping Roderick here. He certainly seems very ready to go.’

  He and I attended to the paperwork while Mrs Ayres and Caroline went gloomily upstairs to prepare Rod’s things, and to fetch Rod himself. When they brought him to us, he came haltingly down the stairs like an old man. They had dressed him in his ordinary clothes and his tweed overcoat, but he was so painfully thin and shrunken, the garments seemed three sizes too big. His limp was very pronounced—quite as bad as it had been six months before, so that I thought with dismay of all those wasted hours of treatment. Caroline had made an effort to shave him, and done it badly: there were cuts on his chin. His dark eyes darted, and his hands kept fluttering up to his mouth to pluck at his lips.

  ‘Am I really going with Dr Warren?’ he asked me. ‘Mother says I am.’

  I told him he was, and I took him to a window to show him Warren’s handsome black Humber Snipe parked outside, with its driver beside it smoking a cigarette. He looked at the car with such interest, in such an ordinary, boyish kind of way—even turning to ask Dr Warren a question about the engine—that for a second he was himself again as he hadn’t been for weeks, and I had a dizzying moment of doubt about the whole grim affair.

  But it was too late. The papers were signed, and Dr Warren was ready to go. And Roderick grew edgy once we’d stepped forward to say our goodbyes. He returned his sister’s embrace very warmly, and allowed me to shake his hand. But as his mother was kissing his cheek his eyes were darting again. He said, ‘Where’s Betty? I ought to say goodbye to Betty too, oughtn’t I?’

  He threatened to grow so agitated about it, Caroline went hastily off to the kitchen to bring Betty back. The girl stood shyly in front of Roderick, and he gave her a quick jerky nod.

  ‘I’m going away for a while, Betty,’ he said. ‘So there’ll be one less of us for you to look after. But you’ll keep my room neat and tidy for me, while I’m gone?’

  She blinked, looked quickly at Mrs Ayres, and then said, ‘Yes, Mr Roderick.’

  ‘Good girl.’ His eyelid quivered, in the ghost of a wink. He patted his pockets for a moment, and I realised that, grotesquely, he was feeling for a coin. But, ‘That will do, Betty,’ his mother said quietly; and, obviously grateful, the girl slipped away. Rod watched her go, still fumbling with his pockets, his brow creasing into a frown. Afraid that he might grow agitated again, Warren and I moved forward and led him out to the car.

  But he went into the back of it quite without fuss. Dr Warren shook my hand. I returned to the steps and stood with Mrs Ayres and Caroline until the Snipe had creaked its way across the gravel and driven from sight.

  This was all done, as I’ve said, on a Sunday, in Mrs Bazeley’s absence. How much she knew about Roderick’s condition—how much she’d guessed, or been told by Betty—I don’t know. Mrs Ayres informed her that Roderick had gone away out of the county ‘to stay with friends’: that was the story she put about, and if anyone locally asked me about it I said only that, having seen him after the fire, I’d advised him to take himself off on a holiday for the good of his lungs. At the very same time I was taking the contradictory line of trying to play the fire down. I didn’t want the Ayreses to come under any sort of special scrutiny, and even
to people like the Desmonds and the Rossiters, who knew the family well, I told a mixture of lies and half-truths, hoping to steer them away from the facts. I am not naturally a duplicitous man, and the strain of warding off gossip was at times a tiring one. But these were busy days for me in other ways, for—ironically enough, partly as a result of the success of that paper of mine, on Rod’s treatment—I’d recently been asked to become a member of a hospital committee, and had a host of new duties. The extra work, in fact, was a welcome distraction.

  Once a week for the rest of that month I took Mrs Ayres and Caroline to visit Roderick in the Birmingham clinic. It was a very mournful journey, not least because the clinic lay in a suburb of the city that had been badly bombed in the war: we weren’t used to ruins and broken roads around Lidcote, and the sight of the hollowed-out houses with their jagged, gaping windows, rising eerily through what seemed to be a perpetual city fog, never ceased to depress us. But the visits were not a great success, for other reasons. Roderick was nervy and uncommunicative, and the supposed treat of showing us around, of taking us for walks in the bare wintry garden, of sitting at a tea-table with us in a room full of other listless or wild-eyed men, seemed to fill him with shame. Once or twice in the early days he asked after the estate, wanting to know how the farm was doing; as time went on, however, he seemed to lose interest in Hundreds affairs. We kept the conversation, as much as we could, to neutral village matters, but from certain things he said it was obvious to me—and it must have been clear to his mother and sister, too—that his sense of what we were talking about was shockingly dim. Once he asked after Gyp. Caroline said, in frightened tones, ‘But Gyp died. You know that, Rod’—at which he screwed up his eyes as if making an effort at remembering, and said vaguely, ‘Oh, yes. There was some trouble, wasn’t there? And Gyp got hurt? Poor old boy.’

  He might have been in hospital for years rather than weeks, so sluggish and cloudy were his thoughts; and after our third visit to him, just before Christmas, when we’d arrived to find the clinic decked out in muddy-coloured paper chains and garlands, and the men with absurd little cardboard crowns on their heads, and Roderick more vague and lifeless than ever, I was glad to be taken aside by Dr Warren’s assistant and given a report on his progress.

  ‘He’s not doing too badly, all in all,’ said the man. He was a younger man than Warren, with a slightly breezier approach. ‘He seems to have shaken off most of his delusions, anyway. We’ve managed to get some lithium bromide into him, and that’s helped. He’s certainly sleeping better. I wish I could say his case was an isolated one, but, as I expect you’ve noticed, we’ve lots of fellows of about his age: dipsomaniacs, nervous cases, men still claiming “shell-shock” … It’s all part of a general post-war malaise, in my opinion; all essentially the same problem, though it affects individuals differently depending on type. If Rod wasn’t the boy he was, with the background he’s had, he might have turned to gambling, or womanising—or suicide. He still likes to be locked into his room at night; we hope to break him of that. You haven’t seen much change in him, but, well’—he looked embarrassed—‘the reason I called you in is because I think it’s these visits of yours that are holding him back. He’s still convinced he’s some sort of danger to his family; he feels he has to keep that danger in check, and the effort exhausts him. With no one here to remind him of home he’s a different man, much brighter. The nurses and I have watched him, and we all feel the same.’

  We were standing in his office, which had a window overlooking the clinic’s courtyard, and I could see Mrs Ayres and Caroline making their way back to my car, hunched and wrapped against the cold. I said, ‘Well, these visits put a strain on his mother and sister, too. I could certainly dissuade them from coming, if you like, and come on my own.’

  He offered me a cigarette from a box on his desk.

  ‘To be honest, I think Rod would like it if you all kept away for a while. You bring back the past to him, too vividly. We must think of his future.’

  ‘But, surely—’ I said, with my hand poised above the box. ‘I’m his doctor. And quite apart from that, he and I are good friends.’

  ‘The fact is, Rod has specifically requested that he be left alone for a time, by all of you. I’m sorry.’

  I didn’t take a cigarette after all. I said goodbye to him, then made my own way across the courtyard to rejoin Mrs Ayres and Caroline and drive them home; and in the weeks that followed, though we wrote regularly to Roderick and received occasional spiritless replies, none of his letters encouraged us to make another visit. His room at Hundreds, with its charred walls and blackened ceiling, was simply shut up. And since Mrs Ayres now often woke breathless and coughing in the night, needing medicine or a steam inhaler, his old schoolboy bedroom just around the landing from hers was given over to Betty.

  ‘It makes much more sense to have her sleep up here with us,’ Mrs Ayres told me, wheezily. ‘And heaven knows, the girl deserves it! She’s been very good and loyal to us in all our troubles. That basement’s too lonely for her.’

  Betty, not surprisingly, was delighted with the change. But I found myself faintly unsettled by it, and when I looked into the room shortly after she had moved in, I felt more unnerved than ever. The Air Force charts, the trophies, and the boyish books had all been put away, and her few poor possessions—the petticoats and darned stockings, the Woolworth hairbrush and scattering of grips, the sentimental postcards tacked to the wall—were somehow enough to transform it. Meanwhile, the whole north side of the Hall, which Caroline had once described to me as ‘the men’s side’, went practically unvisited. Occasionally I wandered over there, and the rooms seemed dead as paralysed limbs. Soon it was eerily as though Rod had never been master of the house at all—as if, more thoroughly even than poor Gyp before him, he had vanished and left no trace.

  EIGHT

  With Roderick’s removal, it was clear to all of us that Hundreds had entered a distinct new phase. In purely practical terms, changes occurred almost at once, for the estate’s already overstretched finances were hit hard by the fees of his clinic, and drastic extra economies had to be put in place in order to accommodate them. The generator, for example, was now routinely turned off for days at a stretch, and going up to the Hall on those wintry evenings I’d often find the place plunged into nearly total darkness. There would be an old brass lantern left out for me on a table just inside the front door, and I’d pick my way through the house with it—the smoke-scented walls of the passages, I remember, seeming to dance forward into the soft yellow light, and then to recede again into shadow as I moved on. Mrs Ayres and Caroline would be together in the little parlour, reading or sewing or listening to the wireless by the light of candles and oil-lamps. The flames would be weak enough to make them squint, but the room would seem a sort of radiant capsule in comparison with the inkiness all about it. If they rang for Betty she’d come with an old-fashioned candlestick, wide-eyed, like a character in a nursery rhyme.

  They all put up with the new conditions with what struck me as amazing fortitude. Betty was used to lamps and candles; that was all she had grown up with. She seemed used to the Hall now, too, as if all the recent dramas had served to fix her in her place in the household, even as they’d shaken Roderick from his. Caroline claimed to like the darkness, pointing out that the house hadn’t been designed for electricity anyway; saying that they were finally living in it as they were meant to. But I thought I could see through the bravado of comments like that, and it bothered me terribly that she and her mother were so reduced. My visits had fallen off during the last, worst part of Rod’s illness, but now I began to go out to the Hall once or even twice a week, often taking up small presents of groceries and coal; sometimes pretending that the gifts came from patients. Christmas Day drew near—always a slightly awkward day for me, as a single man. This year there was talk of my spending it, as I’d sometimes done in the past, with a former colleague and his family over in Banbury. But then Mrs Ayres said
something that made me realise that, quite as a matter of course, she was expecting me to dine with them at Hundreds; so, touched, I made my apologies to my Banbury friends, and she, Caroline, and I enjoyed a subdued dinner at the long mahogany table in the draughty dining-room—dishing up the meat on to our own plates, while Betty, for once, spent a day and a night with her parents.

  But here was another effect of Roderick’s absence. Gathered there together like that, I don’t think any of us could have failed to remember the last time we had sat at that table, a few hours before the fire, when Rod himself had cast such a brooding, unpleasant shadow over the meal. I don’t think any of us, in other words, could have failed to feel a guilty sense of relief at that shadow’s removal. There was no question that Rod was missed, and missed very keenly, by his mother and sister. The Hall at times seemed terribly muted and lifeless, with only the three hushed women in it. But life there was unmistakably less tense, too. And on the business side of things, for all Rod’s obsessing over the estate, the fact that he was no longer there to manage it seemed—as Caroline, I remembered, had once predicted—to make astonishingly little difference. Things continued to stagger along. If anything, they staggered rather less. Caroline herself sent for bankers’ and brokers’ reports to replace the ones that had been lost in the blaze, and discovered what a really parlous state the family finances had reached. She had a long, frank talk with her mother, and between them they started up those grim new economies over fuel and light. She went ruthlessly through the house looking for anything that might be sold, and soon pictures, books, and pieces of furniture which in the past had sentimentally been retained while lesser pieces were let go went off to Birmingham dealers. Perhaps most drastically, she continued negotiations with the county council over the sale of Hundreds parkland. The deal was struck at the New Year, and only two or three days later, driving into the park at the west gates, I was dismayed to see the developer, Babb, going over the site with a couple of surveyors, already pegging off the ground. Digging began soon after, and the first of the pipes and foundations were speedily laid. Overnight, it seemed, a section of the Hundreds boundary wall was demolished, and from the road that ran beside the breach one could stare right across the parkland to the Hall itself. The house looked somehow more remote, I thought, and yet oddly more vulnerable, than it had ever looked with its wall intact.