The Little Stranger

  ‘There isn’t any point. Can’t you see? The marks are just like those others. We oughtn’t to have found them. I don’t want to look at them. Cover them up.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Caroline, with a glance at Betty. They manoeuvred the cabinet back into place.

  And it was only when that was done, she told me, that the queerness of the whole thing began to strike her. She had been unafraid before, but now the taps, the discovery of the marks, her mother’s response, the current silence: she thought it all through, and felt her courage begin to waver. With an attempt at bravado, she said, ‘This house is playing parlour games with us, I think. We shan’t pay it any mind if it starts up again.’ She lifted her voice, and spoke into the stairwell. ‘Do you hear me, house? It’s no good your teasing us! We simply shan’t play!’

  There were no answering knocks this time. Her words were swallowed up by the silence. She caught Betty’s apprehensive gaze, then turned away and spoke more quietly.

  ‘All right, Betty, you go on back to the kitchen now.’

  But Betty hesitated. ‘Is madam all right?’

  ‘Madam’s fine.’ Caroline put a hand on her mother’s arm. ‘Mother, come through to the warm, will you?’

  As on that other day, however, Mrs Ayres said she preferred to go alone to her room. She tightened her shawl, and Caroline and Betty watched her softly climb the stairs. She stayed up there until almost dinner-time; by which point, apparently, she was more herself again. Caroline, too, had recovered her nerve by then. Neither of the women mentioned the scribbles. That evening, and the day or two that followed, passed uneventfully.

  But some time later that week, Mrs Ayres had her first broken night. Like many women who had lived through the war, she was easily woken by unfamiliar sounds, and one night she started up out of sleep with the distinct impression that someone had called for her. She kept still in the deep winter darkness, listening hard; when she heard nothing more for several minutes, she began to relax back into slumber. Then, settling her head against her pillow, she thought she caught, beyond the rustling of the linen against her ear, another sound, and again sat up. After a moment the sound came again. It was not a voice, after all. It was not a rapping or a drumming, either. It was a fluttering, faint but distinct; and it was coming, unmistakably, from the other side of a narrow jib door beside her bed—that is, from her old dressing-room, which she now treated as a box-room for the storing of trunks and hampers. The sound was such an odd one, it conjured up a particular and peculiar image, and for a moment she was really frightened. She supposed that someone had got into the dressing-room and was plucking clothes from one of the hampers and letting them flutter to the floor.

  Then, as the sound continued, she realised that what she could hear was in fact the beating of wings. A bird must have found its way down the chimney and become trapped.

  This was a relief, after her rather wild imaginings; but it was also a nuisance, for now she lay wide awake, listening to the poor thing making its panicked attempts at escape. She didn’t relish the idea of going into the dressing-room and trying to catch it. As it happened she had never much cared for birds or other fluttering things; she had a childish fear of them flying into her face, becoming tangled in her hair. But at last she could stand it no longer. She lit a candle and got out of bed. She put on her dressing-gown, taking care to button it right up to her throat; she tied a scarf very securely over her head, and drew on shoes and her wash-leather gloves. She did all this—making ‘a complete guy of myself’, as she later told her daughter—then gingerly drew back the dressing-room door. As with Caroline’s experience in the saloon, the fluttering ceased the moment the door began its swing, and the room beyond it seemed undisturbed. There were no bird droppings on the floor, no fallen feathers; and the flap of the chimney, she found when she went to examine it, was rusted shut.

  She lay awake for the rest of that night, unsettled and wary, but the house stayed silent. The next night she went to bed early, and slept without much difficulty. On the night after that, however, she was again woken, and in exactly the same way as before. This time she went around the landing and woke Betty, and had her return with her and stand listening at the dressing-room door. It was about a quarter to three. Betty said she heard ‘something, she wasn’t sure what’; but again, when they nerved themselves up to look inside the little room, they found it lifeless … It then occurred to Mrs Ayres that her first instinct must have been right. She could not have imagined the sounds, they were too distinct for that; the bird must be inside the chimney itself, just behind the breast of it, unable to find its way back up the flue. The thought took hold of her, horribly. It was made all the worse, I suppose, by the lateness of the hour, by the stillness and the dark. She sent Betty back to her bed but again lay awake, upset and frustrated, and by the time Caroline went in to see her next morning she was already up, and back in the dressing-room; she was down on her knees in front of the hearth, prising with a poker at the rusted chimney-flap.

  For a moment, it seemed to Caroline that her mother might have lost her mind. Once she understood what the matter was, she helped Mrs Ayres to her feet and took over the prising of the flap herself, and when she had opened it up she fetched a broomstick and poked about in the flue until her arm ached. By then she was black as a minstrel, having brought down a shower of soot. The soot had not so much as a feather in it, but so certain was Mrs Ayres about the trapped bird—and so ‘peculiarly upset about it’ was she, apparently—that Caroline cleaned herself up and went out into the garden with a pair of opera glasses to examine the chimney-stack. She found the pots of all the chimneys on that side of the Hall covered with wire guards, the wire here and there broken, but so pasted with wet, dead leaves it seemed unlikely to her that a bird could have made its way into one of those cages and gone from there into a flue. But after thinking the matter over on her way back into the house, she told her mother that the pot in question looked to her as though it might recently have held a nest. She said she had seen a bird ‘go into it and then fly out again, quite freely’. That seemed to reassure Mrs Ayres a little, and she dressed and took her breakfast.

  But only an hour or so later, while Caroline was finishing off her own breakfast in her room, she was startled to hear her mother cry out. The cry was a piercing one, and sent her running across the landing. She found Mrs Ayres at the open door of her dressing-room, apparently backing feebly away, her arms held out, from something inside it. Only much later would it occur to Caroline that her mother’s pose at this moment might not, in fact, have been one of retreat; at the time she simply dashed to her mother’s side, imagining she’d been struck seriously ill. But Mrs Ayres was not ill—at least, not in the ordinary way. She let Caroline walk her to her chair, pour a glass of water, kneel at her side with her hand in hers. ‘I’m all right,’ she said, wiping her glistening eyes; startling Caroline all the more by her tears. ‘You mustn’t trouble. So foolish of me, after so much time.’

  As she spoke, she kept looking over at the dressing-room. Her expression was so odd—so apprehensive and yet somehow so avid—Caroline grew afraid.

  ‘What is it, Mother? Why are you looking? What can you see?’

  Mrs Ayres shook her head and wouldn’t answer. So Caroline rose and went warily across to the dressing-room door. She told me later that she didn’t know what frightened her more, the prospect of discovering something dreadful in the room beyond it, or the possibility—which at that moment, given her mother’s behaviour, seemed quite strong—of there being nothing untoward in there at all. All she saw at first, in fact, was a jumble of boxes, which her mother had obviously pulled out of their usual place in an attempt to dust them free of the soot that had settled on them from the unsealed chimney. Then her gaze was caught by what in the dimness she took to be a thicker smear of soot low down on one of the walls, which the drawing back of the boxes had exposed. She moved closer and, as her eyes grew used to the light, the patch resolved itself i
nto a block of smudged dark childish writing, exactly like the scribbles she had recently seen downstairs:

  At first all she was struck by was the age of the marks. They were clearly much older than everyone had been guessing so far, and must have been made not by poor Gillian Baker-Hyde, but by another child entirely, years before. Could she herself, she wondered, have made them? Or Roderick? She thought of cousins, family friends … And then, with a queer little dropping of her heart, she looked again at what had been written, and suddenly understood her mother’s tears. To her own amazement, she felt herself blush. She had to stay in the small dim room for a minute or two in order to let the blush subside.

  ‘Well,’ she said, when she finally rejoined her mother, ‘at least now we can be sure it wasn’t the Baker-Hyde girl.’

  Mrs Ayres answered simply, ‘I never thought it was.’

  Caroline stood at her side. ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’

  ‘What have you to be sorry for, darling?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t say it, then.’ Mrs Ayres sighed. ‘How this house likes to catch us out, doesn’t it? As if it knows all our weaknesses and is testing them, one by one … God, how dreadfully tired I am!’ She made a pad of her handkerchief and pressed it to her forehead, tightly closing her eyes.

  ‘Is there something I can do for you, or fetch for you?’ asked Caroline. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed for a while?’

  ‘I’m tired even of my bed.’

  ‘Stay in your chair and doze, then. I’ll make up the fire.’

  ‘Like an old woman again,’ grumbled Mrs Ayres.

  But she wearily settled herself in the chair, while Caroline saw to the grate; and by the time the flames were lapping at the wood she had put back her head and appeared to be dozing. Caroline looked at her for a moment, struck by the lines of age and sadness in her face, and suddenly seeing her—as, when we are young, we are now and then shocked to see our parents—as an individual, a person of impulses and experiences of which she herself knew nothing, and with a past, with a sorrow in it, which she could not penetrate. All she could do for her mother just then, she thought, was to make her more comfortable, so she moved softly around the room, drawing the curtains part-way across, closing the dressing-room door, adding a blanket to the shawl that lay across her mother’s knees. Then she went downstairs. She didn’t mention the incident to Betty or Mrs Bazeley, but she found she wanted company, so she made up some chore to see to in the kitchen. When she looked in on the bedroom again later she saw her mother sleeping soundly, her pose apparently unchanged.

  Mrs Ayres must have woken at some point, though, for now the blanket lay in a heap on the floor, as if brushed or tugged aside; and the dressing-room door, Caroline noticed, which she had gently but firmly closed, stood open again.

  I was still in London while all this was going on. I came home, in the third week of February, in a rather perturbed state of mind. My trip, in many ways, had been a great success. The conference had gone well for me. I’d made the most of my time at the hospital, and become good friends with its staff; in fact, on my final morning one of the doctors had taken me aside to suggest that at some point in the future I might like to consider joining them down there on the wards. He was a man, like me, who had made the move into medicine from humble beginnings. He was determined, he said, to ‘shake things up’, and preferred to work with doctors who had ‘come in from outside the system’. He was the sort of man, in other words, I had once naively imagined I might myself become; but the fact was, he was thirty-three and already head of his department, while I, several years older, had achieved nothing much at all. I spent the train journey back to Warwickshire thinking over his words, wondering if I could live up to his estimation of me, debating with myself whether I could seriously consider abandoning David Graham; wondering, too, rather cynically, what really bound me to my Lidcote life, and whether anyone would miss me if I left it.

  The village looked desperately narrow and quaint as I made my way home from the station, and the list of calls awaiting me was the usual round of country ailments—arthritis, bronchitis, rheumatism, chills—it seemed to me suddenly that I had been battling uselessly against conditions like that for the whole of my career. Then there were one or two other cases, discouraging in a different way. A thirteen-year-old girl had got herself pregnant, and had been badly beaten by her labourer father. A cottager’s son had contracted pneumonia: I went to see him at the family home and found him appallingly ill and wasted. He was one of eight children, all of them sick in one way or another; the father was injured and out of work. The mother and grandmother had been treating the boy with old-fashioned remedies, binding fresh rabbit-skins to his chest to ‘draw out the cough’. I prescribed penicillin, more or less paying for the mixture myself. But I doubted they would even use it. They gazed warily at the bottle, ‘not liking the look of the yellow’. Dr Morrison was their regular doctor, they told me, and his mixture was red.

  I left their cottage with my spirits thoroughly depressed, and on my way home I took my short-cut across Hundreds Park. Letting myself in through the gate, I planned to call in at the Hall; I’d already been back three days by then, and had had no contact with the Ayreses. But as I drew closer to the house, and saw its marred and wasted faces, I felt a surge of angry frustration, and put my foot down and carried on. I told myself that I was too busy, that there was no point calling in there only to have to give my apologies and rush straight off again …

  I told myself something similar the next time I crossed the park, and again the time after that. So I had no clue as to the latest shift in mood in the house until, a few days later, I received a telephone call from Caroline, asking me if I wouldn’t mind dropping in and, as she put it, ‘seeing if I thought everything was all right’.

  She rarely called me by telephone, and I wasn’t expecting her to call now. The sound of her low, clear, handsome voice sent a thrill of surprise and pleasure through me, that almost at once became a flutter of concern. Was something wrong? I asked her, and she answered vaguely that, no, nothing was wrong. They had had ‘some trouble with leaking water’, but that was ‘all fixed now’. And, she was well? And her mother? Yes, they were both quite well. There were just ‘one or two things’ she’d like my opinion on, if I could ‘spare the time for it’.

  That was all she would say. A sense of guilt flared up in me and I drove more or less straight out there, putting off a patient in order to do it; worrying about what was awaiting me; imagining that she had graver things to tell me but wouldn’t share them on the open line. But when I arrived at the house I found her in the unlit little parlour, in a pose that couldn’t have been more mundane. She was kneeling at the hearth with a pail of water and some crumpled sheets of newsprint, making balls of papier-mâché and rolling them in coal-dust, to be burned on the fire.

  Her sleeves were turned up to her elbows and her arms were filthy. Her hair was straggling over her face. She looked like a servant, a plain Cinderella; and the sight of her, for some reason, absolutely enraged me.

  She got awkwardly to her feet, trying to wipe off the worst of the muck. She said, ‘You needn’t have come so quickly. I wasn’t expecting you to.’

  ‘I thought something was the matter,’ I said. ‘Is something wrong? Where’s your mother?’

  ‘She’s up in her room.’

  ‘Not ill again?’

  ‘No, not ill. At least—I don’t know.’

  She was looking about for something with which to clean her arms, and finally caught up a piece of newspaper and rubbed ineffectually with that. I said, ‘For goodness’ sake!’—moving forward, offering her my handkerchief.

  She saw the crisp white square of linen and began to protest. ‘Oh, I mustn’t.’

  ‘Just take the wretched thing,’ I said, holding it out. ‘You aren’t a skivvy, are you?’ And when she still hesitated, I dipped the handkerchief into the pail of ink-stained water and, possibly not very kindly, r
ubbed at her arms and hands myself.

  In the end we were both slightly filthy, but she, at least, was cleaner than before. She drew down her sleeves and moved back. ‘Sit down, will you?’ she said. ‘Can I get you some tea?’

  I stayed standing. ‘You can tell me what the trouble is, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, really.’

  ‘You’ve brought me all this way for nothing?’

  ‘All this way,’ she repeated, quietly.

  I folded my arms, and spoke more gently. ‘I’m sorry, Caroline. Go on.’

  ‘It’s just,’ she began hesitantly; then, bit by bit she told me what had happened since my last visit: the appearance of the scribbles, first in the saloon and then in the hall; the ‘bouncing ball’ and the ‘trapped bird’; her mother’s discovery of that final patch of writing. To be honest, at this point it didn’t sound like much. I hadn’t then seen the scribbles for myself, but even when I did eventually go to the saloon and examine those phantom irregular S’s, I didn’t find them particularly troubling. Now, in response to Caroline’s story, I said, ‘But isn’t it clear what’s happened? Those marks must have been there,’ I thought it over, ‘well, nearly thirty years. The paint must be thinning and letting them through. Probably the damp has caused that. No wonder they won’t rub away; there must be still just enough of a varnish to seal them in.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I suppose so. But those creaks, or raps, or whatever you want to call them?’

  ‘This house creaks like a galleon! I’ve heard it, many times.’

  ‘It’s never creaked quite like that before.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s never been quite so damp before; and the place has certainly never been so neglected. Probably the timbers are shifting about.’

  She still looked doubtful. ‘But isn’t it strange, the way the tapping seemed to lead us to the scribbles?’