The Little Stranger

  Caroline and I approached one of the trenches. It was still in the process of being filled in, and as we stood at the edge of it I saw with dismay that the rubble being used for the foundations of the new houses consisted mainly of pieces of broken brown stone from the demolished park wall.

  ‘What a pity!’ I said, and Caroline answered quietly: ‘I know. It’s somehow horrible, isn’t it? Of course people must have homes, and all that. But it’s as if they’re chewing Hundreds up—just so they can spit it all out again in nasty little lumps.’

  Her voice dipped lower as she spoke. Maurice Babb himself was there at the edge of the site, talking with his foreman at the open door of his car. He saw us come and, in a leisurely fashion, began picking his way towards us. He was a man in his early fifties, short and rather barrel-chested: prone to boasting, but clever; a good businessman. Like me, he came from labouring stock and had pulled himself up in the world—and he’d done it all, as he’d reminded me once or twice over the years, without the help of a patron. To Caroline he raised his hat. To me, he offered his hand. Despite the coldness of the day his hand was warm, the fingers plump and bunchy and tight in their skin, like half-cooked sausages.

  ‘I knew you’d be down, Miss Ayres,’ he said affably. ‘My men said the rain would keep you away, but I told them, Miss Ayres isn’t the sort of lady to be kept off by a bit of bad weather. And here you are. Come to keep your eye on us, as usual? Miss Ayres puts my foreman to shame, Doctor.’

  ‘I can believe it,’ I said, smiling.

  Very slightly, Caroline blushed. A few strands of hair were being blown across her lips, and she drew them free to say, not quite truthfully, ‘Dr Faraday was wondering how you’re getting on, Mr Babb. I’ve brought him down to see the work.’

  ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I’m very glad to show it! Especially to a medical man. I had Mr Wilson, the sanitary inspector, out here last week. He said there’ll be nothing to beat these places in the way of air and drainage, and I think you’ll find you’ll agree. You see how the ground’s laid out?’ He gestured with one of his thick, short arms. ‘We shall have six houses here, then a break at the curving of the road; and over there, six more. Two homes per house, done semi-detached. Red brick, you’ll notice—’ he indicated the livid, brutal-looking machine-made bricks at our feet—‘to match the Hall. A nice little estate! Step along over here, if you’d care to, and I’ll show you about. Watch your step, Miss Ayres, on these ropes.’

  He offered her his bunchy hand. Caroline didn’t need it—she was several inches taller than he was—but obligingly let him guide her over the trench, and we moved further along the site, to a spot where the work was more advanced. He explained again exactly how each house would sit in relation to its neighbours, and then, warming to his theme, he took us into one of the squared-off spaces and sketched the rooms it would soon contain: the ‘lounge’, the fitted kitchen with its gas stove and electric points, the indoor bathroom with a built-in bath … The whole patch looked scarcely bigger than a boxing-ring to me, but apparently they had already had people coming out there, wanting to know how to get their names down for a house. He himself, he told us, had been offered money and ‘any amount of cigarettes and meat’, to ‘pull a few strings’.

  ‘I told them, it in’t up to me! I said, Go and talk to the Town Hall!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Just between us three, mind, they could talk to the Town Hall till they’re blue in the face. That list’s been filled six months already. My own brother’s boy, Dougie, and his wife, they’ve got their names down for a place, and I hope they gets it, for you know where they’re living just now, Miss Ayres, in two rooms in Southam with the girl’s mother? Well, they can’t go on like that. One of these’d be just the thing for them. Patch of garden they shall have out at the back there, you see, with a path and a chain-link fence. And the Lidcote bus is to be brought this way—had you heard that, Doctor? It’s to come along the Barn Bridge Road. June, I think they’re starting that.’

  He ran on like this for a while, until called to by his foreman, at which he made his apologies, offered me his sausage-like hand again, and left us. Caroline moved away to watch another man at work, but I stayed in the squared-off concrete space, standing more or less where I guessed the kitchen window would be placed, and looking back across the park to the Hall. It was clearly visible in the distance, especially with the trees before it so bare; it would be very visible indeed, I realised, from this house’s upper floor. I could see very well, too, how the flimsy wire fences that were to be strung at the back of the houses would do nothing to keep the children of the twenty-four families out of the park …

  I joined Caroline at the edge of concrete, and we chatted for a minute with the man she had been watching at work. He was a man I knew quite well; in fact, he was a sort of cousin of mine, on my mother’s side. He and I had shared a desk in the two-roomed council school I’d attended as a young boy; we had been good pals then. Later, once I’d started at Leamington College, the friendship had soured, and for a time he and his elder brother Coddy had rather persecuted me—lying in wait for me, with handfuls of gravel, as I came cycling back home in the late afternoons. But that was a long time ago. Since then he had married, twice. His first wife and child had died, but he had two grown-up sons who had recently moved to Coventry. Caroline asked how they were getting on, and he told us, in the ripe Warwickshire accent I could never quite believe had once also been mine, that they had gone straight into factory jobs, and between them were bringing home a weekly wage of over twenty pounds. I should have been glad to earn that myself; and it was probably more, I thought, than the Ayreses had to live on over a month. But still, the man removed his cap in order to talk to Caroline—though he looked more shyly at me, giving me an awkward sort of nod as we moved off. I knew that even after all this time it was queer for him to call me ‘Doctor’, but out of the question, too, for him either to use my Christian name or to address me as ‘sir’.

  I said, as easily as I could, ‘Goodbye, Tom.’ And Caroline said, with real warmth, ‘See you again, Pritchett. It was nice to talk to you. I’m glad your boys are doing so well.’

  I wished suddenly, and without quite knowing why, that she wasn’t wearing that ridiculous hat. We turned and began to make our way back to the Hall, and I felt Pritchett pause in his work to watch us, and perhaps to glance at one of his mates.

  We went in silence across the grass, following the line of our own dark footprints, both made thoughtful by the visit. When she spoke at last, it was quite brightly, though without meeting my eye.

  ‘Babb’s a character, isn’t he? And don’t the houses sound marvellous? Very good for your poorer patients, I suppose.’

  ‘Very good,’ I answered. ‘No more damp floors and low ceilings. Fine sanitation. Separate rooms for the boys and the girls.’

  ‘A proper start for the children, and so on. And awfully nice for Dougie Babb, if it means he can get away from his horrible mother-in-law … And, oh, Doctor—’ She looked at me at last, then glanced unhappily over her shoulder. ‘I would as soon want to move into a little brick box like that, with a lounge and a fitted kitchen, as live in our old cowshed.’ She leaned to pick up a piece of branch that had been blown across the park, and began to swipe at the ground with it. ‘What is a fitted kitchen, anyhow?’

  ‘There are no nasty gaps,’ I said, ‘and no odd corners.’

  ‘And no character, I bet. What’s wrong with gaps and odd corners? Who’d want a life without any of those?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, picturing some of the squalider homes on my round, ‘it’s possible, after all, to have too many.’ And I added almost as an afterthought, ‘My mother would have been glad of a house like that. If I’d been born a different sort of boy, she might well be living in one now, along with my father.’

  Caroline looked at me. ‘What do you mean?’

  And I told her, briefly, about the struggle my parents had had, simply to keep up with the scholarships and
grants that had got me through Leamington College and medical school: the debts they had taken on, the grim economies they had made, my father working extra hours, my mother taking in sewing and laundry when she was barely strong enough to lift the wet clothes from the copper to the pail.

  I heard my voice grow bitter, and could not stop it. I said, ‘They put everything they owned into making a doctor of me, and I never even realised my mother was ill. They paid a small fortune for my education, and all I learned was that my accent was wrong, my clothes were wrong, my table manners—all of it, wrong. I learned, in fact, to be ashamed of them. I never took friends home to meet them. They came once to a school speech day; I was receiving a science prize. The look on some of the other boys’ faces was enough. I didn’t invite them again. Once, at seventeen, in front of one of his own customers, I called my father a fool—’

  I didn’t finish. She waited a moment, then said, as gently as the blustery day would allow, ‘But they must have been very proud of you.’

  I shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But pride doesn’t make for happiness, does it? They’d have been better off, really, if I’d been like my cousins—like Tom Pritchett back there. Maybe I’d have been better off, too.’

  I saw her frown. She swiped at the ground again. ‘All this time,’ she said, without looking at me, ‘I thought you must hate us slightly, my mother, my brother, and I.’

  I said, astonished, ‘Hate you?’

  ‘Yes, on your parents’ behalf. But now it sounds almost as though—well, as though you hate yourself.’

  I didn’t answer, and we walked in silence again, both of us grown rather awkward. Conscious that the day was sliding into evening, we made an effort to quicken our pace. Soon we left our own dark trail, looking for drier ground, and approached the house by a different route, arriving at a spot where the garden fence gave way to an ancient ha-ha, its sides so collapsed and overgrown it was more truthfully, I suggested, a boo-hoo. The comment made Caroline smile, and lifted us out of our low spirits. We struggled through the tangled ditch, then found ourselves in a patch of waterlogged lawn and, as before, had to tiptoe messily across it. My smooth-soled shoes weren’t made for that sort of treatment, and once I slithered very nearly into a splits. She laughed properly at that, the blood creeping up through her throat and into her already pink cheeks, making them glow.

  Mindful of our filthy footprints, we went around the house to the garden door. The Hall, as usual now, was unlit, and, though the day was sunless, to move towards it was like stepping into shadow, as if its sheer, rearing walls and blank windows were drawing to themselves the last of the light from the afternoon. When Caroline had wiped her shoes on the bristle mat she paused, looking up, and I was sorry to see lines of tiredness reappearing in her face, the flesh about her eyes puckering faintly like the surface of warming milk.

  She said, as she studied the house, ‘The days are still so short. I hate them, don’t you? They make every hard thing harder. I do wish Roddie were here. Now that it’s just Mother and me—’ She lowered her gaze. ‘Well, Mother’s a darling, of course. And it isn’t her fault that she’s unwell. But, I don’t know, sometimes she seems to be growing sillier by the day, and I’m afraid I don’t always keep patience. Rod and I, we used to have fun. Just nonsense things. Before he got ill, I mean.’

  I said quietly, ‘It really won’t be too long, before he’s back.’

  ‘You truly think so? I wish we could see him. It’s so unnatural, to think of him there, ill and alone! We don’t know what’s happening to him. You don’t think we should visit him?’

  ‘We can go, if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll happily take you. But Rod himself, he’s given no sign, has he, that he’d like us to visit?’

  She shook her head, unhappy. ‘Dr Warren says he likes the isolation. ’

  ‘Well, Dr Warren should know.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so …’

  ‘Give it more time,’ I told her. ‘As I said before: soon it’ll be spring, and everything will look different then, you’ll see.’

  She nodded, briskly, wanting to believe it. Then she kicked her shoes across the mat again and, with a sigh of reluctance, headed back into the chill and gloomy house to rejoin her mother.

  I found myself recalling that sigh a day or two later, as I was making my arrangements for the district hospital dance. The dance was an annual event, meant as a fund-raiser; no one except the younger people treated it very seriously, but the local doctors liked to attend, along with their wives and grown-up children. We Lidcote physicians took it in turns to go along, and this year it was the turn of Graham and me, while our locum, Frank Wise, and Dr Seeley’s partner, Morrison, remained on call. As a bachelor I was at liberty to take along a guest or two, and a few months earlier, thinking ahead to the night, I’d actually considered asking Mrs Ayres. Now that she was still so relatively unwell, her attendance was out of the question; but it occurred to me that Caroline might be willing to partner me, if it was for the sake of an evening away from Hundreds. Of course, I thought it just as possible she’d be appalled to be asked along, at the last minute, to what was essentially a ‘works do’, and I dithered over whether or not to suggest it. But I’d forgotten that ironic streak of hers.

  ‘A doctors’ dance!’ she said, delighted, when I finally called her up to invite her. ‘Oh, I should love to.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s a funny old event. And it’s more of a nurses’ dance than a doctors’. The women usually far outnumber the men.’

  ‘I bet they do! All pink and hysterical at being let off the wards, just like the junior Wrens used to be, at naval parties. And does Matron drink too much, and disgrace herself with the surgeons? Oh, say she does.’

  ‘Now, steady on,’ I said, ‘or there’ll be no surprises.’

  She laughed, and even over the imperfect telephone line I could hear the note of real pleasure in her voice, and I was glad I’d asked her. I don’t know if, in agreeing to be my guest, she had any other motive in mind. It would be odd, I suppose, for an unmarried woman of her age to look forward to a dance without giving a thought to the single men who might be there. But if her ideas were running that way, she hid them well. Perhaps her little humiliation with Mr Morley had taught her to be cautious. She spoke about the dance as if she and I would be a pair of elderly lookers-on at the fun. And when I picked her up on the night in question I found her dressed very unshowily, in an olive-coloured sleeveless gown, with her hair hanging loose and uncurled, her throat and hands, as usual, bare, and her heavy face almost free of make-up.

  We left Mrs Ayres in the little parlour, apparently not at all unhappy to have an evening to herself. She had a tray across her lap and was going through some old letters of her husband’s, putting them in neat, ordered bundles.

  Still, I felt awkward about leaving her alone. ‘Will your mother really be all right?’ I asked Caroline, as she and I set off.

  She said, ‘Oh, she has Betty, don’t forget. Betty will sit with her for hours. They’ve started playing games together, did you know that? Mother came across some old boards when we were going through the house. They play draughts, and halma.’

  ‘Betty, and your mother?’

  ‘I know, it’s queer, isn’t it? I don’t remember Mother ever wanting to play board-games with Roddie and me. She seems to like it now, though. Betty likes it, too. They play for ha’pennies, and Mother lets her win … I don’t think Betty had much fun at home over Christmas, poor thing. Her own mother sounds frightful, so I suppose it isn’t surprising she prefers mine. And people do like Mother, it’s just one of those things …’

  She yawned as she said this, and drew in her coat against the cold. And after a while, lulled by the sound and motion of the car—for it was almost a thirty-minute drive to Leamington on the wintry country roads—we lapsed into companionable silence.

  But once we reached the hospital grounds and joined the stir of vehicles and people, we both perked up. The dance was held in one of the
lecture halls, a large room with a parquet floor; tonight it had been cleared of its desks and benches, its harsh central lights were turned off, and pretty coloured lamps and bunting had been draped from beam to beam. A band, not terribly good, was playing an instrumental number when we went in. The slippery floor had been liberally powdered with chalk, and several obliging couples were already up and dancing. Other people sat at tables around the edge, getting up their nerve to join them.

  A long trestle arrangement did service as a bar. We started across towards it, but after only a few yards I was hailed by a couple of colleagues: Bland and Rickett, one a surgeon, the other a Leamington GP. I introduced them to Caroline, and there followed the usual sort of chat. They had paper cups in their hands and, seeing me glancing at the bar, Rickett said, ‘Headed for the chloroform punch? Don’t be taken in by the name; it’s like flat cherryade. Hang on a sec. Here’s the fellow we need.’

  He reached around Caroline’s back to catch hold of somebody by the arm: the man was a porter, ‘our resident spiv’, Bland explained to Caroline, while Rickett murmured in the man’s ear. The porter went off, and returned a minute later with four more cups, each brim-full of the watery pink liquid I could see being ladled out from the punch-bowls at the bar, but each, too, as soon became apparent, rather stiffly laced with brandy.

  ‘Vastly improved,’ said Rickett, having tasted and smacked his lips. ‘Don’t you think so, Miss—?’ He had forgotten Caroline’s name.

  The brandy was rough, and the punch itself had been sweetened with saccharine. When Bland and Rickett had moved on I said to Caroline, ‘Can you drink this stuff?’

  She was laughing. ‘I’m not going to waste it, after all that. Is it really black?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘How shocking.’

  ‘Well, I dare say a bit of black brandy won’t do us any harm.’ I put my hand to the small of her back, to steer her out of the traffic of people going to and from the bar. The hall was filling up.