The Little Stranger

  Caroline clearly thought the same. ‘Mother and I feel horribly exposed, ’ I remember her telling me when I called in there one day in the middle of January. ‘It’s as if we’re permanently out in our petticoats, like in some awful dream. But we’ve made up our minds to it, and that’s that. We heard from Dr Warren again this morning, you know, and Rod’s no better; it sounds to me as though he’s worse. The plain fact is, no one knows when he’ll be fit enough to come home again. The money from this sale will see us through the rest of the winter, and by spring the water pipe will be laid to the farm. That will change everything, Makins says.’

  She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand, her eyelids creasing. ‘I don’t know. It’s all so uncertain. As for all this—!’ We were in the little parlour, waiting for her mother to come down, and she made a hopeless, helpless gesture towards Mrs Ayres’s writing table, which she was using for her estate correspondence, and which was smothered with letters and plans. ‘I swear,’ she said, ‘this stuff is like ivy. It positively creeps! For every letter I send to the county council they want two more copies. I’ve started dreaming in triplicate.’

  ‘You sound like your brother,’ I said warningly.

  She looked startled. ‘Don’t say that! Poor Roddie, though. I understand better now why the business so consumed him. It’s like gambling: always the very next wager that promises to turn one’s luck. But look here.’ Drawing back the cuff of her sweater, she offered me her bare forearm. ‘Pinch me, will you, if you ever catch me sounding like him again?’

  I reached for her wrist and, instead of pinching it, gently shook it, for there wasn’t flesh enough to pinch; her freckled brown arm was as lean as a boy’s, her well-shaped hand looking larger but oddly more feminine as a result. Feeling the bone of her wrist move smoothly against my palm as she drew away, I had a queer little surge of feeling for her. She met my gaze, smiling, but I caught hold of the tips of her fingers for a second and said seriously, ‘Be careful, won’t you, Caroline? Don’t take on too much. Or, let me help you.’

  She pulled the fingers free, self-conscious, folding her arms.

  ‘You help us quite enough as it is. To be honest, I don’t know how we’d have managed without you in the past few months. You know all our secrets. You, and Betty. What a funny thought that is! But then, it’s your job to know secrets, I suppose; and hers too, in a way.’

  I said, ‘I hope I’m your friend, not just your doctor.’

  ‘Oh, you are,’ she answered automatically. Then she thought it over, and said it again, with more warmth and conviction: ‘You are. Though heaven knows why you are, since we’re nothing but a nuisance to you, and you’ve your patients to be that. Aren’t you tired of nuisances?’

  ‘I like all my nuisances,’ I said, beginning to smile.

  ‘They keep you in business.’

  ‘Some are definitely good for business. Others I like for their own sake. But they’re the ones I tend to worry about. I worry about you.’

  I put a slight emphasis on the ‘you’, and she laughed, but looked startled again.

  ‘Good heavens, why? I’m all right. I’m always all right. That’s my “thing”—didn’t you know?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I’d be more convinced by those words if you weren’t looking so tired as you said them. Why not, at least—’

  She tilted her head. ‘Why not what?’

  I’d been meaning to broach this with her for weeks, but the moment had never felt right. I said now, in a rush, ‘Well, why not get yourself a dog again?’

  At once, her expression changed, seemed to shut. She turned away. ‘I don’t want to do that.’

  ‘I was out at Pease Hill Farm on Monday,’ I went on. ‘Their retriever’s in pup, a lovely bitch.’ Then, seeing her resistance, I said gently, ‘No one would think you were replacing Gyp.’

  But she shook her head. ‘It isn’t that. It … wouldn’t feel safe.’

  I stared at her. ‘Not safe? For you? Your mother? You mustn’t let what happened with Gillian—’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ she said. And she added, reluctantly, ‘I mean, for the dog.’

  ‘The dog!’

  ‘I’m just being silly, I expect.’ She half turned away from me. ‘It’s just, sometimes, I can’t help thinking about Roddie, and all the things he said about this house. We packed him off to that clinic, didn’t we? We sent him away, because it was easier to do that than to listen to him properly. I came almost to hate him, you know, in those last few weeks. But suppose it was our hating him, our not listening to him, that made him so ill? Suppose—’

  She had drawn down the cuffs of her jersey, and they drooped almost to her knuckles. Fidgeting, she tugged them further, working at them with her fingers until her thumbs found a weakness in the wool and went right through. She said quietly, ‘Sometimes this house does seem changed to me, you know. I can’t tell if it’s just the way I’ve come to feel about it, or if it’s the way it feels about me, or—’ She caught my eye, and her voice changed. ‘You must think me crazy.’

  I said, after a second, ‘I could never think you crazy. But I can see how the house, and the farm, in the state they’re in now, could make you feel gloomy.’

  ‘Gloomy,’ she repeated, still working at her cuffs. ‘You think that’s all it is?’

  ‘I know it. Once spring is here, and Roderick’s better, and the estate gets back on its feet, you’ll feel very different. I’m sure you will.’

  ‘And you really think it’s worth us … persevering, with Hundreds? ’

  The question shocked me. ‘Of course! Don’t you?’

  She didn’t answer; and in another moment the little parlour door had opened, and her mother had joined us, and the chance for further discussion was lost. Mrs Ayres came in coughing, and Caroline and I moved forward to help her to her chair. She took my arm, saying, ‘Thank you, I’m fine. Truly I am. But I’ve been lying down for an hour, and that’s a foolish thing to do at the moment, for now my lungs feel just as though they’ve the bottom of a duck-pond inside them.’

  She coughed again, into her handkerchief, then wiped her watering eyes. There were several shawls across her shoulders, and around her head she had her lace mantilla. She looked pale and delicate, like some slender sheathed flower: the stresses of the past few weeks had aged her, the fire had slightly weakened her lungs, and the weakness had turned into a touch of winter bronchitis. Even the short journey she had just made down through the chilly house had wearied her. Her cough subsided, but left her wheezy.

  She said, ‘How are you, Doctor? Did Caroline tell you we’ve heard again from Dr Warren?’ She shook her head, tight-lipped. ‘Not good news, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

  The three of us talked this over for a while, and then we were led back to that other cheerless topic of the moment, the building-work. But soon Mrs Ayres’s voice began to fail her, and her daughter and I took up the conversation and continued it more or less on our own: she sat listening to us for a minute or two as if frustrated by her own silence, her ringed hands restless in her lap. At last, while we spoke on, she gathered her shawls and went across to her writing-table, and started going through the papers.

  Caroline followed her with her gaze.

  ‘What are you searching for, Mother?’

  Mrs Ayres was peering into an envelope as if she hadn’t heard. ‘So much nonsense from the council!’ Her voice was like cobwebs now. ‘Doesn’t the government talk of paper shortages?’

  ‘Yes, I know. It’s tiresome. What are you after?’

  ‘I’m looking for your Aunt Cissie’s last letter. I’d like to show it to Dr Faraday.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid the letter isn’t there any more.’ Caroline rose as she spoke. ‘I had to move it. Come and sit back down, and I’ll fetch it for you.’

  She went across the room to a cabinet, took the letter from one of its compartments, and handed it to her mother. Mrs Ayres returned with it to
her chair, one of her Spanish shawls slipping, its long, knotted fringe beginning to trail. She spent a moment settling herself, before she opened up the paper. Then she found that she had mislaid her reading-glasses.

  ‘Oh, good Lord,’ she whispered, closing her eyes. ‘What next?’

  She began to look about her. After a moment, Caroline and I joined in the search.

  ‘Well, where did you have them last?’ Caroline asked as she lifted a cushion.

  ‘I had them in here,’ answered Mrs Ayres. ‘I’m certain I did. I had them in my hand when Betty brought in Dr Warren’s letter this morning. You haven’t moved them?’

  Caroline frowned. ‘I haven’t seen them.’

  ‘Well, someone must have moved them. Oh, I do apologise, Doctor. This is awfully boring for you.’

  We spent a good five minutes making a search of the room, disturbing papers and opening drawers, peering under chairs and so on; all without success. Finally Caroline rang for Betty and—her mother protesting all the time that the journey would be fruitless, since she could remember very well where she last had the glasses, and it was right there, in the little parlour—she sent the girl off to look upstairs.

  Betty returned almost at once, having found the spectacles on one of the pillows of her mistress’s bed.

  She held them out with an air of apology. Mrs Ayres gazed at them for a second, then took them from the girl’s hand, turning her head in a gesture of disgust.

  ‘This is what it means to be old, Betty,’ she said.

  Caroline laughed. The laughter, I thought, was faintly forced. ‘Don’t be silly, Mother!’

  ‘No, really. I shouldn’t be surprised, you know, if I were to finish up like my father’s Aunt Dodo. She used to mislay her things so often, one of her sons gave her a little Indian monkey. He strapped a basket to its back and she kept her scissors and thimbles and so on in it, and led it around on a ribbon.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure we could find you a monkey, if you’d like one of your own.’

  ‘Oh, one could never do such a thing today,’ said Mrs Ayres, as she put the glasses on. ‘Some society or other would prevent it, or Mr Gandhi would object. Probably monkeys have the vote in India now.—Thank you, Betty.’

  The spell of breathlessness had passed and her voice was almost her own again. She shook open the paper, found the passage she wanted, and read it aloud. It turned out to be some piece of advice sent on by her sister from a Conservative MP very concerned about the breaking up of the old estates; and in fact it only confirmed for us what we already knew, that there would be nothing but penalties and restrictions for rural landowners so long as the present government was in power, and the best the gentry could do was to ‘sit tight and draw in its belt’ until the next election.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Caroline, when her mother had finished. ‘That’s all right for those with belts, but suppose one hasn’t so much as a buckle? If one could make a sort of bois dormant of one’s estate in the hope of a gallant Conservative government’s turning up in a few years’ time, that would be fair enough. But if we were to sit and do nothing to Hundreds for even one more year, we’d be sunk. I could almost wish the council wanted more of our land. Fifty or so more houses would probably just about pay off our debts …’

  We discussed this in a dispirited way until Betty brought up the tea-tray, and then we lapsed into silence, each of us lost to our own thoughts. Mrs Ayres still struggled slightly after her breath, now and then sighing, now and then coughing into her handkerchief. Caroline kept glancing at the writing-table, her mind presumably on the failing estate. I sat with the china cup in my hands, light and warm against my fingers, and found myself, I don’t know why, looking from one thing to another in that room and thinking back to my first visit there. I remembered poor Gyp, lying on the floor like a bowed old man while Caroline carelessly worked her toes through the fur of his belly. I recalled Rod, idly reaching to pick up his mother’s fallen scarf. My mother’s like a paper-chase, Doctor. She leaves a trail of things behind her wherever she goes … Now both he and Gyp were gone. The French window, which had been open then, was closed against the bitter weather; a low screen had been bolted across it to keep out the worst of the draughts, and it cut out some of the daylight, too. There was still the sour scent of burning in the air; the moulded plaster walls were full of greasy-looking shadows where soot had drifted during the fire. The room also smelt faintly of damp wool, for a few rain-soaked outdoor garments of Caroline’s had been put to dry before the hearth on an ancient clothes-horse. I couldn’t imagine Mrs Ayres, six months ago, allowing the room to be used as a laundry. But then I thought back to the tanned, handsome woman who had come stepping in from the garden in those distracting shoes of hers, that day in July; and I looked at her now, coughing and sighing in her mismatched shawls, and realised how much she had changed, too.

  I glanced at Caroline; and found her looking at her mother with an anxious expression, as if thinking the same thing. Her gaze met mine, and she blinked.

  ‘How dreary we all are today!’ she said, finishing her tea and getting up. She went to a window and stood looking out, her arms folded against the chill, her face lifted to the low grey sky. ‘The rain’s easing off at last, anyway. That’s something. I think I’ll go down to the building-work before it gets dark.—Oh, I go down nearly every day,’ she added, turning, and catching my look of surprise. ‘Babb’s given me a copy of the building-schedule, and I’m working my way through it. He and I are great friends now.’

  I said, ‘I thought you wanted him to fence the whole thing off?’

  ‘We did, at first. But there’s something horribly fascinating about it. It’s like some grisly sort of wound: one can’t help lifting up the bandage. ’ She came back from the window, took her coat and hat and scarf from the clothes-horse, and began to put them on. And as she did it she said to me, casually, ‘Come with me, if you like. If you have time.’

  I did, in fact, have time, for my list that day was a light one. But I had been to bed late the night before, and had been woken very early, and was feeling my age; I didn’t really relish the thought of a walk across the cold, wet ground of the park. Nor did I think it quite polite of Caroline to suggest that we leave her mother. Mrs Ayres, however, when I looked doubtfully in her direction, said, ‘Oh yes, do go down there, Doctor. I should so like a man’s opinion of the work.’ And after that I could hardly say no. Caroline rang for Betty again, and the girl brought in my outdoor things. We built up the fire in the grate, and made sure that Mrs Ayres had everything she needed. When we left the house, to save time we went directly from the little parlour, hopping over the screen at the French window and going down the flying stone steps, then striking off across the south lawn. The grass clung damply to our shoes, instantly soaking the cuffs of my trousers and darkening Caroline’s stockings. Where the lawn grew even wetter we went on tiptoe, awkwardly joining hands, then separating once we’d reached the dryer surface of a gravel path that cut across the rough open ground beyond the garden fence.

  The wind there was as solid as a velvet curtain; we had almost to fight our way through it. But we walked briskly, Caroline setting the pace, clearly glad to be out of the house, moving easily on those long, thickish legs of hers, her stride more than matching my own. She had her hands thrust deep into her pockets, and her coat, pulled tight by her arms, showed up the flare of her hips and bosom. Her cheeks had pinked with the sting of the wind; her hair, which she had inexpertly tucked up inside a rather frightful wool hat, had here and there escaped and was being lashed by the breezes into dry, demented locks. She seemed not at all breathless, though. Unlike her mother, she’d quickly shaken off the after-effects of the fire, and her face had lost the signs of tiredness I’d seen in it just a few minutes before. Altogether, there was an air of health and easy power to her—as if she could no more help being robust, I thought with a trace of admiration, than a beautiful woman could help good looks.

  Her pleasure in
the walk was infectious. I began to warm up, and finally to enjoy the buffets of crisp, cold air. It was novel, too, being out in the park on foot, as opposed to driving across it, for the ground that I saw from my car window as a uniform tangle of green looked very different at close range: we found patches of snowdrops, bending gamely in the agitated grass, and here and there, where the grass thinned, tight little coloured buds of crocuses were thrusting their way out of the earth as if ravenous for air and sunlight. All the time we walked, however, we could see ahead of us, at the farthest point of parkland, the breach in the wall and the stretch of muddy ground before it, with six or seven men moving over the area with barrows and spades. And as we drew closer and I caught more detail, I began to understand the true scale of the work. The lovely old grass-snake field was gone completely, gone for ever. Instead, a patch of land a hundred yards or more in length had been stripped of its turf and levelled, and the hard raw earth was already parcelled off into sections by poles and channels and rising walls.