The Little Stranger
We began the search for a vacant table. But soon another man greeted me—one of the consultants this time, and, as it happened, the man to whom I’d submitted my paper on the successful treatment of Rod’s leg. There was no question of my not stopping for him, and he ran on for ten or fifteen minutes, wanting my opinion on some therapeutic process of his own. He made little effort to include Caroline, and I kept glancing at her as he spoke: she was gazing around the hall, taking rapid sips from her paper cup, self-conscious. But from time to time, too, she looked at me as the man addressed me, as if seeing me in a slightly new way.
‘You’re quite the somebody here,’ she said to me, when the consultant had finally moved on.
‘Ha!’ I took a mouthful of punch. ‘Quite the nobody, I assure you.’
‘Well, then we can be nobodies together. It makes a nice change from home. I can’t go into any of the villages these days without feeling everyone’s watching me, thinking, There goes poor Miss Ayres, from up at the Hall … And now, look.’ She had turned her head. ‘All the nurses have arrived, in a great big flock, just as I’d pictured them! Like blushing goslings. I thought of nursing, you know, during the war. So many people told me I was just cut out for it, it put me off. I couldn’t make that out as a compliment, somehow. That’s why I joined the Wrens. Then I ended up nursing Roddie.’
Catching the touch of wistfulness in her voice, I said, ‘Did you miss it, service life?’
She nodded. ‘Badly, at first. I was good at it, you see. That’s a shameful thing to admit, isn’t it? But I liked all the mucking about with boats. I liked the routines of it. I liked there being only one way to do things, only one sort of stocking, one sort of shoe, one sort of way to wear one’s hair. I was going to stay on at the end of the war, go out to Italy or Singapore. But once I was back at Hundreds—’
Her arm jolted, as a man and a girl pushed hastily past her; her drink slopped, she raised the cup to her mouth to catch the drips with her tongue, and after that she was silent. The band had been joined by a singer, and the music was louder and livelier. People were moving in some excitement to the dance-floor, making it harder for us to stand and talk.
Raising my voice above the music, I said, ‘Let’s not stay here. Why don’t I find you someone to dance with? There’s Mr Andrews, the house surgeon—’
She touched my arm. ‘Oh, don’t introduce me to any more men just yet. Especially not to a surgeon. Every time he looks at me I shall be thinking he’s sizing me up for the knife. Besides, men hate dancing with tall women. You and I can dance, can’t we?’
I said, ‘Of course. If you like.’
We finished our drinks, set down our cups, and made our way on to the floor. There was an awkward moment as we put up our arms and moved together, trying to overcome the essential artificiality of the pose and join the jostling, unwelcoming crowd.
Caroline said, ‘I hate this bit. It’s like having to hurl oneself on to a paternoster lift.’
‘Close your eyes, then,’ I answered, and guided her out in a quick-step. After a moment of being clipped and scuffed by the heels and elbows of other dancers, we found the rhythm of the crowd, and a route through it.
She opened her eyes, impressed. ‘But how on earth will we get off again?’
‘Don’t worry about that just yet.’
‘We’ll have to wait for the slow numbers … You dance rather well, in fact.’
‘So do you.’
‘You sound surprised. I love to dance. I always have. I danced like mad in the war. It was very best thing about it: all that dancing. When I was young I danced with my father. He was so tall, it didn’t matter that I was tall, too. He taught me all my steps. Rod was hopeless. He said I heaved him about, he might as well have been dancing with a boy. I’m not heaving you about, am I?’
‘Not at all.’
‘And I’m not talking too much? I know some men don’t like that. I gather it puts them off their stroke.’
I said she could talk as much as she liked. The fact is, I was delighted to see her in such good spirits, and to feel her so relaxed, so yielding and mobile in my arms. We kept a slight formal distance between us, but every now and then the pressure of the crowd would send her more firmly into my grip and I’d feel the spring of her full bosom against my chest, the solid push of her hips. As we made a turn, the muscular flesh of her lower back would tense and shift beneath my palm and outspread fingers. Her hand in mine was sticky, from the spilled punch; once she turned her head to look across the dance-floor and I caught the scent of brandy on her mouth. I realised that she was slightly drunk. Perhaps I was slightly drunk, too. But I felt a rush of fondness for her, so sudden and so simple it made me smile.
She put back her head to look into my face. ‘Why are you grinning like that? You look like a dancer in a contest. Have they pinned a number on your back?’ She peered over my shoulder, pretending to check; again her bosom came springily against me. Then she spoke into my ear. ‘There’s Dr Seeley! Whizz me round, so you can see his bow-tie and his buttonhole!’
I made a turn, and caught sight of the man, large and bearish, dancing with his wife. The tie was a polka-dotted one, the flower some sort of fleshy orchid; goodness knows where he’d got hold of it. A blade of hair, over-greased, had fallen forward over his brow.
I said, ‘He thinks he’s Oscar Wilde.’
‘Oscar Wilde!’ Caroline laughed. I felt the laughter in my arms. ‘If only he were! When I was young the girls called him “The Octopus”. He was always terribly keen to give one a lift. And no matter how many hands he had on the steering-wheel, there always seemed to be at least one more … Guide me away where he can’t see us. You still have to dish out all the gossip, don’t forget. Keep to the edge of the floor—’
‘Look here, who’s leading? I’m beginning to think I know what Roderick meant, when he said you heaved him about.’
‘Keep to the edge,’ she said, laughing again, ‘and as we go round you can tell me who everybody is, and who has killed the most patients, and which doctors are going to bed with which nurses; and all the scandals.’
So we stayed on the floor through two or three more songs, and I did my best to point out the major hospital personalities, and to offer up a few mild pieces of gossip; after that the music reverted to a waltz and the dancing thinned. We moved back to the bar for more punch. The hall was growing warmer. Looking up, I saw David Graham, just arrived with Anne and making his way through the crowd in our direction. Thinking of the last time he and Caroline had met—when he had come up to Hundreds to second my opinion of Roderick, the day before Rod was taken from the house—I leaned close to her and said, as quietly as I could over the music, ‘Here’s Graham headed our way. Will you mind seeing him?’
She didn’t look, but gave a small, tight shake of her head.
‘No, I don’t mind. I guessed he’d be here.’
The slight awkwardness of the Grahams’ arrival, anyway, was soon dispelled. They had brought guests, a middle-aged Stratford man and his wife and their married daughter; and the daughter and Caroline turned out to be old friends. Laughing and exclaiming, they moved together to exchange kisses.
‘We knew each other,’ Caroline told me, ‘oh, years ago! Way back in the war.’
The daughter, Brenda, was blonde, good-looking—rather worldly looking too, I thought. I was pleased for Caroline’s sake that she had turned up, but also vaguely sorry, for with her and her parents’ arrival it was as if a line were drawn between the older people and the younger. She and Caroline stood slightly apart from the rest of us, and lit cigarettes; and soon they linked arms and headed off in the direction of the Ladies’.
By the time they returned, I’d been thoroughly claimed by the Graham party, who had found a table away from the blare of the band and produced a couple of bottles of Algerian wine. Cups of this were given to Caroline and Brenda, and chairs offered; but they wouldn’t sit, they stood looking over the dance-floor, Brenda swinging her hips
impatiently to the rhythm of the music as she drank. The tunes were picking up again and they both wanted to dance.
‘You don’t mind?’ Caroline asked apologetically as she moved away. ‘Brenda knows some people here, she wants to introduce me.’
‘You go and dance,’ I said.
‘I shan’t be long, I promise.’
‘It’s good to see Caroline out and about enjoying herself,’ Graham said to me, when she had gone.
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘You and she see a lot of each other?’
I said, ‘Well, I call in, whenever I can, at the house.’
‘Of course,’ he answered, as if having waited for me to say more. And then, more confidentially: ‘No progress with the brother, I suppose?’
I gave him the latest report I’d had from Dr Warren. We passed from that to exchanging news about one or two of our other patients, and from that to a discussion, with the Stratford man, of the forthcoming Health Service. The Stratford man, like most GPs, was violently opposed to it; David Graham was passionately for it, while I was still gloomily convinced it would mean the end of my career, so the debate was pretty lively and went on for some time. Every so often I’d lift my head and look for Caroline on the dance-floor. Now and then she and Brenda returned to the table for more wine.
‘OK?’ I’d call to her, or mouth to her, over Graham’s shoulder. ‘I’m not neglecting you?’
She’d shake her head, smiling. ‘Don’t be silly!’
‘Do you really think Caroline’s all right?’ I asked Anne, as the evening wore on. ‘I feel I’ve rather abandoned her.’
She glanced at her husband, and said something that didn’t quite carry over the music, something like, ‘Oh, we’re used to that!’ or even, ‘She’ll have to get used to that!’—something, anyway, that gave me the impression she had misheard me. But seeing the puzzlement on my face she added, laughing, ‘Brenda’s looking after her, don’t worry. She’s fine.’
Then, at half past eleven or so, someone got hold of the microphone to announce a Paul Jones, and there was a general migration to the dance-floor which Graham and I were persuaded to join. Automatically I looked for Caroline again, and saw her being pulled into the women’s circle on the other side of the hall; after that I kept my eye on her, hoping to coincide with her at the breaks of music. But with every reshuffle we’d go galloping towards each other, only to be helplessly tugged away in opposite directions. The ring of women, swollen with nurses, was fuller than the ring of men: I saw her smile and almost stumble as her feet tangled with the other girls’ and, once as she flew past me, she caught my eye and grimaced. ‘This is murder!’ I think she called. The next time she came she was laughing. Her loose hair had fallen forwards and was clinging in darkening strands to the sheen of perspiration on her face and lips. At last she finished a place or two to my left, and in the polite but determined jostling that followed I moved to claim her—only to be beaten to her side by a large, damp, hot-looking man I recognised, after a second, as Jim Seeley. He was, I think, her rightful partner in the ring, but she gave me an alarmed, comical look as he drew her into a close embrace, then led her off in a slow foxtrot with his chin against her ear.
I danced that number with one of the younger nurses, and when it ended and the circles formed more rowdily than before, I left the floor. I went to the bar for another cup of watery punch, then moved out of the thickest part of the crowd, to watch the dancing. Caroline, I saw, had extricated herself from Seeley and found a less overbearing partner, a young man in horn glasses. Seeley himself, like me, had given up on the floor altogether in favour of the bar. He had knocked back his punch and was taking out cigarettes and a lighter—and, happening to look up and catch my eye as he did it, he came over to offer me his case.
‘On nights like this I feel my age, Faraday,’ he said, when our cigarettes were lit. ‘Don’t these damn nurses seem young to you? I swear, there’s a little thing I danced with earlier on, she looked barely older than my twelve-year-old daughter. That’s all right for a filthy old pervert like—’ and here he named one of the senior surgeons, who’d been at the centre of a minor scandal a year or two before. ‘But when I’m dancing with a girl and I ask her how she likes the district, and she tells me it reminds her of the place she was evacuated to in 1940—well, it’s hardly conducive to romance. As for all this thundering about in circles, I’d sooner an old-fashioned waltz. I suppose they’ll break out the rumbas in a minute. God help us then.’
He took out a handkerchief and mopped his face, then passed the handkerchief under his collar and wiped all round his neck. His throat was scarlet, his bow-tie limp. His orchid was lost, I noticed now, only the fleshy green stalk of it remaining at his lapel, slightly milky at the tip. Fuelled by drink and exercise, he gave off heat like a brazier, so that it was impossible to stand beside him in that over-warm hall and not want to move away. But having accepted one of his cigarettes, I thought it only fair to keep him company while I smoked it. So he mopped and puffed and grumbled on for another minute or two; then our gazes moved naturally back to the dance-floor and we both fell silent, watching the couples jog by.
I didn’t see Caroline at first, and thought she might have left the floor. But she was dancing, still, with the young man in glasses, and once my eyes had found her out they tended to return to her. The Paul Jones had finished and this dance was more sedate, but there was a general air of subsiding hilarity and Caroline, like everybody else, was damp in the face, her hair untidy, her shoes and stockings streaked with chalk, her throat and the flesh of her arms still flushed and glowing. The heightened colour suited her, I thought. For all that her dress was so unshowy and her pose so plain, she looked very young—as if her youth had been whipped to the surface, by motion and laughter, along with her blood.
I watched her through all of that dance, and into the start of another; and only when Seeley spoke did I realise that he had been watching her, too.
He said, ‘Caroline Ayres looks well.’
I took a step away from him, to stub out my cigarette at the nearest table. Moving back, I said, ‘Yes, doesn’t she.’
‘She’s a good dancer, that girl. Knows she’s got hips, and what to do with them. Most Englishwomen dance from the feet.’ His tone and expression grew more speculative. ‘You’ve seen her on horseback, I suppose? There’s something there, definitely. A pity she doesn’t have the looks to match. Still,’ he took a last draw on his cigarette, ‘I shouldn’t let that put you off.’
For a second I thought I had misheard him. Then I saw by his face that I had not.
He saw my expression, too. He had pursed his lips, to direct away a plume of smoke, but he laughed, and the plume grew ragged. ‘Oh, come on! It’s no secret, is it, how much time you’ve been spending with that family? I don’t mind telling you, there’s quite a little debate locally as to which of the women you’ve set your sights on—the daughter or the mother.’
He spoke as if the whole thing were a tremendous joke—as if amusedly egging me on in some ambitious piece of mischief, like a prefect applauding a junior boy for having the pluck to peep through Matron’s window.
I said coldly, ‘What terrific fun for you all.’
But he laughed again. ‘Don’t take it like that! You know what village life is like. Almost as bad as hospital life. We’re all so many bloody prisoners; we have to take our entertainment where we can get it. Personally, I don’t know why you’ve been dragging your heels. Mrs Ayres has been a handsome woman in her day, I’ll give you that. But if I were you I’d plump for Caroline—purely on the basis, you know, of her having so many good years left in her.’
His words, as I recall them now, strike me as so offensive I’m astonished to think that I stood there, letting him say them, gazing into his boozy hot red face, without wanting to punch him. But what impressed me most at the time, still, was that hint of condescension. I felt I was being made an ass of, and it seemed to me that to strike him would o
nly serve to give him the satisfaction that I was, at root, what he supposed me to be—a sort of rustic booby. So I stood tensely, saying nothing, wanting to shut him up but not quite knowing how. He saw my confusion, and actually nudged me.
‘Set you thinking, have I? Well, make your move tonight, old man!’ He gestured to the dance-floor. ‘Before that twerp in the horn-rims gets a chance to make his. After all, it’s a long dark drive back to Hundreds.’
At last I woke up. ‘I think I see your wife,’ I said, nodding over his shoulder into the crowd.
He blinked, and turned; and I moved away from him, finding an awkward, interrupted route around the tables and chairs. I was heading for the door, meaning to stand for a minute or two in the chill night air. But as I went, I passed close to the table I had been sharing with the Grahams, and the Stratford couple, seeing me going by with such a fixed expression, naturally assumed I’d lost my way back to my seat, and called out to me. They looked so pleased by my return—the wife walked with a cane, and was kept from the dancing—that I hadn’t the heart to press on, but rejoined their table, and stayed talking to them, then, for the rest of the night. What we talked about, I have no idea. I was so thrown by what Seeley had said, and in such a mixture of ways, I could hardly sort out my own feelings.
The fact that I had brought Caroline there, with no thought for how the thing would look, seemed suddenly incredible. I suppose I’d grown used to the idea of spending time with her, out in the isolation of Hundreds; and if I’d once or twice had a surge of feeling for her—well, that was one of those things brought on, between men and women, by simple closeness: like matches sparking as they jostled in the box. To think that all this time people had been watching us, speculating—rubbing their hands—! It made me feel fooled, somehow; it made me feel exposed. A part of my upset, I’m sorry to say, was simple embarrassment, a basic masculine reluctance to have my name romantically linked with that of a notoriously plain girl. Part of it was shame, at discovering I felt this. A contradictory part, too, was pride: for why the hell shouldn’t I—I asked myself—bring Caroline Ayres along to a party, if I chose to? Why the hell shouldn’t I dance with the squire’s daughter, if the squire’s daughter wanted to dance with me?