The Little Stranger

  Had she meant it, when she’d talked of sitting, smoking cigarettes? Had I, in picturing this place, somehow forgotten that it was two o’clock in the morning? With the fading of the headlamps that came when I turned off the engine, there was nothing to be seen of the pond, the grass, the circling rushes. We might have been anywhere, or nowhere at all. Only the hush was as I’d imagined it: a hush so deep it seemed to magnify every sound that broke it, so that I was unnaturally aware of the movement of Caroline’s breath, of the tightening and unclenching of her throat as she swallowed, of the unsticking of her tongue and palate as she slightly opened her mouth. For a minute, perhaps longer, we sat with no more motion between us than that, I with my hands on the steering-wheel, she with her arm out to the dashboard as if still bracing herself against jars.

  Then I turned and tried to look at her. It was too dark to make her out properly, but I could picture vividly enough her face, with its un-handsome combination of strong family lines. I heard again Seeley’s words: There’s something there, definitely … Oh, I had felt it, hadn’t I? I think I had felt it the very first time I’d met her, watching her work her bare brown toes through the fur of Gyp’s belly; and I had felt it a hundred times since then, catching sight of the flare of her hips, the swell of her bosom, the easy, solid movement of her limbs. But—again, I was ashamed to acknowledge it, am ashamed to remember it now—the feeling stirred something else in me, some dark current of unease, almost of distaste. It wasn’t the difference in our ages. I don’t think I even considered that. It was as if what pulled me to her also repelled me. As if I desired her despite myself … I thought again of Seeley. None of this, I knew, would have made any sense to him. Seeley would have kissed her and to hell with it. I’ve imagined that kiss, many times. The chill of her lip, and the surprise of the heat beyond it. The teasing open, in the darkness, of a seam of moisture, movement, taste. Seeley would have done it.

  But I am not Seeley. It was a long time since I had kissed a woman; years, in fact, since I had held a woman in my arms with anything other than a rather perfunctory passion. I had a brief flare of panic. Suppose I had lost the trick of it? And here was Caroline beside me, possibly as uncertain as myself, but youthful, alive, tense, expectant … At last I took my hand from the steering-wheel and placed it tentatively upon one of her feet. The toes shifted as if tickled, but apart from that she made no response. I kept the hand there for perhaps six or seven heartbeats, and then, slowly, I moved it—just moved my fingers across the fine, unresisting surface of her stocking, up over the arch of her foot and the jut of her ankle bone and into the dip of heel behind it. When again she kept quite still, I inched the hand steadily higher, until it was held in the cleft, slightly warm, slightly moist, between her calf and the back of her thigh. And then I turned and leaned towards her, putting out my other hand, meaning to catch at her shoulder and draw her face to mine. But the hand, in the darkness, found the lapel of her coat; my thumb slid just beyond the inner edge of it, and met the start of the swell of her breast. I thought she flinched, or shivered, as the thumb moved lightly over her gown. Again I heard the movement of her tongue inside her mouth, the parting of her lips, an indrawn breath.

  The gown had three pearl buttons to it, and I awkwardly opened them up. Beneath was a slip, some overlaundered thing with a limp lace trim. Beneath that was her brassière, solid, unfussy, severely elasticated, the kind of thing I’d seen many times on female patients since the war, so that, for a moment, recalling those unerotic consulting-room scenes, my faltering desire almost dwindled completely. But then she moved, or took a breath; her breast lifted into my hand and I became aware, not of the stiffly tailored cup of the brassière, but of the warm, full flesh inside it, hard at the tip—hard, it seemed to me, as the point of one of her own shapely fingers. That somehow gave the missing charge to my desire, and I leaned further into her, my hat slipping from my head. The leg that gripped my left hand I eased open and drew behind me. Her other leg came across my lap, heavy and warm. I put my face to her breast, and then must have reached for her mouth. I moved awkwardly over and upon her—wanting to kiss her, that was all. But she gave a sort of buck, and her chin clipped my head. She shifted her legs—shifted them further—it took me a moment to realise she was trying to draw them back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her movements growing stronger. ‘I’m sorry, I—I can’t.’

  Again, I think I understood her just a beat too late; or perhaps it was simply that, having got so far with her, I found myself suddenly desperate to see the thing through. I put down my hands and caught hold of her hips. With a violence that astonished me, she twisted free. For a moment we actually tussled. Then she drew in her knees, and kicked out at me, blindly. Her heel caught my jaw, and I fell back.

  I think the blow must have stunned me for a second. I became aware of the jolting of the seats: I couldn’t see her, but realised that she had put down her legs and was straightening her skirt, refastening her gown—doing it all with hasty, jerky movements, as if almost panicked. But then she tightened the blanket around herself and turned and moved away from me, shuffling over as far as the narrowness of the car would allow, and putting her face against the window, pressing her forehead to the glass; and after that she was horribly still. I didn’t know what to do for her. I reached, uncertainly, and just touched her arm. She flinched at first, then let me stroke her—but it might as well have been the blanket letting me do it, or the leather seat; she felt dead to my hand.

  I said miserably, ‘For God’s sake! I thought you wanted it.’

  She answered, after a moment, ‘So did I.’

  That was all she would say. So presently, embarrassed, uncomfortable, I drew my hand away, and retrieved my hat. The windows of the car, with appalling comedy, had grown cloudy. I wound mine down, hoping to do something to relieve the atmosphere of intimacy and blunder. The night air came in like a flood of frigid water, and after a minute I felt her shiver. I said, ‘Shall I take you home, Caroline?’ She didn’t reply, but I started the engine—the sound was brutal in the silence—and slowly turned the car around.

  She began to stir only once we had rejoined the Hundreds road and were running alongside the wall of the park. She roused herself properly as we drew up at the gates, tidying her hair, working her feet back into her shoes, but not looking at me. By the time I had got out to push the gates open and had climbed back in, she had removed the blanket from her shoulders and was sitting up straight and ready. I took us carefully along the frosty drive and around to the sweep of gravel. A couple of windows caught the light of the headlamps, sending it back with the soft, irregular sheen of oil on water. But the windows themselves were dark, and when I switched the engine off the great house seemed somehow to edge closer, until it was impossibly looming and forbidding against the densely starred sky.

  I reached for the catch of my door, meaning to get out and open hers. But she beat me to it, saying hastily, ‘No, please don’t. I can manage. I don’t want to keep you.’

  There was no trace of drunkenness in her voice; no girlishness; but no upset, either. She sounded slightly subdued, that was all. I said, ‘Well, I’ll sit here and watch until you’re safely inside.’

  But she shook her head. ‘I’m not going in that way. Now Roddie’s gone, Mother has Betty bolt the front door at night. I’m going in the garden way. I’ve brought a key.’

  I said that in that case I would certainly go with her, so we both got out, and started silently and awkwardly together past the shuttered library windows, then turned on to the terrace to go along the north side. It was so dark we had to make our way almost by trust. Now and then our arms touched and we moved elaborately apart, only to step blindly onwards and find ourselves veering back together. At one point our hands met and snagged; she drew away her fingers as if scalded, and I winced, remembering that terrible little tussle in the car. The darkness began to feel almost stifling. It was like a blanket over one’s head. When we rounded the next c
orner and even the starlight was blotted out by the elms on that side of the house, I brought out my cigarette lighter and made a lantern of my palms. She let me guide her to the door, her key ready.

  Once the door was open, however, she stood on the threshold as if suddenly uncertain. The stairs beyond were faintly lit, but for a second, after I had blown out my flame, we were blinder than we had been in the total darkness. When my eyes had readjusted, I could see that her face was turned to mine, but her gaze lowered. She said, quietly and slowly, ‘That was stupid of me, before. The night had been such a nice one, too. I enjoyed our dances.’

  She raised her eyes, and might have said more, I don’t know. At that moment the stairs were lit up properly and she said quickly, ‘There’s Betty coming down for me. I must go.’ She leaned to me and kissed my cheek, quite primly at first; then, as the corner of her mouth overlapped with the corner of mine, she put up a hand to the side of my head and clumsily drew my face around. Just for a second, as our lips met, I felt a sort of tremor pass over her features, her mouth twitching and her eyes shutting tight. Then she moved away from me.

  She went into the house as if stepping through a rip in the night and instantly sealing it up behind her. I heard her key turn in the lock, and caught the diminishing tap of her heels on the bare stone stairway. And somehow the loss of her made me want her, plainly and physically, more than the nearness of her had done: I stepped to the door and stood against it, frustrated, willing her to return. But she did not return. The silent house was closed to me, the tangled garden still. I waited another minute, and another; then slowly picked my way back, through the almost impenetrable darkness, to my car.

  NINE

  After that I didn’t see her for more than a week; I was too busy. And to be honest, I was grateful for the delay. It gave me a chance, I thought, to sort through my feelings: to recover from my embarrassment at the blunders of the night; to tell myself that, after all, nothing much had passed between us; to put the whole thing down to the drink, and the darkness, and the giddy after-effects of the dance. I saw Graham on the Monday, and made a point of mentioning Caroline’s name, telling him she’d fallen asleep in the car on the way out of Leamington and had slept ‘like a child’ until we reached the Hundreds gate; and then changing the subject. As I think I have said before, I’m not a naturally mendacious man. I’ve seen too many of the complications, in the lives of my patients, to which lies lead. But in this instance I thought it best to try and put a definite end to any speculation regarding Caroline and me; I thought this for Caroline’s sake as much as my own. I rather hoped to run into Seeley. I planned to ask him, baldly, to do all he could to quash those rumours he’d mentioned, which suggested that I was romantically interested in one or both of the Ayres women. Then I even began to wonder whether there really had been rumours. Couldn’t the whole thing have been simply a tipsy piece of mischief on Seeley’s part? I decided that it could, and when my path did at last cross his, I made no mention of the dance, and neither did he.

  But still, as that week ran busily on I thought of Caroline often. The frosty weather grew wet again, but I knew that rain rarely kept her from walking: taking my short-cut across the park, I found myself looking out for her. I looked out for her, too, in the lanes around Lidcote, and was aware of a sense of disappointment at not seeing her. And yet, when an opportunity arose for dropping in at the Hall itself, I didn’t take it … I realised, almost to my own surprise, that I was nervous. Several times I picked up the telephone, meaning to call her; always I put the receiver down with the call unmade. Soon the delay began to feel unnatural. It occurred to me that her mother might start to think it odd that I was keeping away. And it was the prospect of inadvertently arousing Mrs Ayres’s suspicions, as much as anything, that sent me over there at last, for I found I almost dreaded them.

  I went out there on a Wednesday afternoon, in a spare hour between cases. The house was empty, save for Betty, happily cleaning brass at the kitchen table with the wireless on; she told me that Caroline and her mother were somewhere in the gardens, and after a brief search I discovered them making a gentle tour of the lawns. They were surveying the effects, on the already untidy flower-beds, of some recent driving rains. Mrs Ayres was well wrapped up against the damp and the cold, but seemed very much better than when I’d last seen her. She caught sight of me before her daughter did, and came across the grass to greet me, smiling. Caroline, as if self-conscious, bent to the ground to pick up a sprig of slick brown leaves. But when she had straightened, she followed her mother, meeting my gaze without a blush, and one of the first things she said to me was, ‘You’ve recovered, then, from all that dancing? My feet were killing me last week. You should have seen how we punished the parquet, Mother! We were rather splendid, weren’t we, Doctor?’

  She was the squire’s daughter again, her tone light, deliberate, seamless. I said, ‘We were’—and had to turn away, unable to look at her, for it was only in that moment, feeling the sudden violent dropping or dashing of something inside me, that I knew what she meant to me. All my careful reasoning of the past ten days, I understood, was a sort of sham, a sort of blind, thrown up by my own unsettled heart. She herself had done the unsettling, had raised a cloudy stir of emotions between us; and the thought that she might be able now to seal those emotions up—seal them up, for example, as she had sealed up her grief over Gyp—was very hard to bear.

  Mrs Ayres had moved away from me, to examine another flower-bed. I went to her and offered my arm, Caroline joined her on her other side, and the three of us moved slowly on from one lawn to another, Caroline every so often stooping to pull up the worst of the battered plants, or to press the less damaged of them back into the soil. I don’t know if she looked at me at all. When I glanced at her she was looking ahead, or looking down, so that I saw mainly her flattish profile, and because we walked with Mrs Ayres between us, her face was often partially or wholly hidden from me by her mother’s. They talked a great deal about the gardens, I recall. The rains had brought a fence down, and they were debating whether or not it ought to be replaced. An ornamental urn had also become broken, and the large rosemary bush it held needed to be moved elsewhere. The urn was an old one, brought over from Italy as part of a pair by the Colonel’s great-grandparents. Did I think it might be repaired? We stood and stared at the forlorn-looking thing, its bowl jagged and gaping, exposing a mass of tangled roots. Caroline squatted down beside it and gave the roots a prod. ‘One half expects it to twitch,’ she said, her eyes on the rosemary plant above. Mrs Ayres also went closer, passing her gloved hands over the green and silver branches as if combing tresses of hair, then holding her fingers to her face to inhale the fragrance.

  ‘So lovely,’ she said, extending her hand for me to inhale it too, and automatically I bent my face to her fingers, and smiled—though all I could smell, I remember, was the bitter scent of her damp wash-leather gloves. My mind was all on Caroline. I saw her prod at the roots again, then straighten up and wipe her hands. I saw her adjust the belt of her coat, I saw her lightly kick one foot against the other to remove a clump of earth from her heel. I saw her do all these things without once actually looking at her—as if with a new, secret eye that she herself had called into being and now, in her carelessness, meant to trouble like a stray lash.

  Mrs Ayres led us over to the west lawn. She wanted to examine the house on that side, for Barrett had told her that one of the drainpipes might be blocked and leaking water. Sure enough, when we turned and looked back we could see a large dark irregular stain where water had spread from a joint in the pipe. The stain ran right over the roof of the saloon, disappearing into the lead-and-brickwork seam where the exterior half of the room jutted out from the house’s flat rear face.

  ‘I bet that saloon’s been a blasted nuisance since the moment they added it,’ Caroline said, putting a hand on her mother’s shoulder and raising herself on tiptoe, trying to see. ‘I wonder how far the rainwater has seeped. I hope the
bricks won’t need repointing. We might manage a repair to the pipe itself, but we haven’t the budget for anything more serious.’

  The subject seemed to preoccupy her. She discussed it with her mother, both of them weaving about on the lawn for a better perspective on the damage. Then we all moved up to the terrace for a closer look. I went quite silently, unable to summon up much enthusiasm for the task; I found myself glancing over to the other side of the angular bay of the saloon, to the garden door, where I had stood with Caroline in the darkness, and where she had lifted her head and clumsily moved her mouth to mine. And for a moment I was seized so vividly by the memory of it all, I felt almost giddy. Mrs Ayres called me over to the house; I made what can only have been a few rather idiotic observations about the bricks. But then I drew away, passing on around the terrace until that troubling door was well out of my sight.

  I had turned to face the parkland, and was gazing sightlessly across it, when I became aware that Caroline had also drawn away from her mother. Perhaps, after all, she had been bothered by the sight of the door, too. She came slowly over to my side, putting her ungloved hands into her pockets. She said, without looking at me, ‘Can you hear Babb’s men?’

  ‘Babb’s men?’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘Yes, it’s clear today.’

  She nodded to where, in the distance, giant webs of scaffolding were now being erected, with houses rising inside them, square and brash. Tuning my ears to the sound, I caught, on the still, damp air, the faint concussive clamour of the work, the calling of the men, a sudden tumbling of planks or poles.

  ‘Like the sounds of a battle,’ Caroline said. ‘Don’t you think? Perhaps like that phantom battle people are said to be able to hear in the middle of the night when they go camping on Edge Hill.’