The Little Stranger

  But he let the whisky flow. ‘All the more reason to pour it stiff. Give your patients some surprises! God, this smells good, doesn’t it? Here’s fun.’

  We touched glasses and drank. He gestured with his tumbler to a couple of dilapidated armchairs, hooking a foot around one to draw it closer to the fire for me, then doing the same with the other for himself; rucking up the dusty rug in the process, and not caring. From out in the hall the thunder of children went on, and in another minute the door was flung open and one of the good-looking boys put in his head and said, ‘Father.’

  ‘Get out!’ roared Seeley.

  ‘But, sir—’

  ‘Get out, or I’ll cut off your ears! Where’s your mother?’

  ‘She’s out in the kitchen with Rosie.’

  ‘Well, go and pester her, you little sub!’

  The door was closed with a bang. Seeley sipped violently at his whisky, at the same time fishing in his pocket for his case of Players. For once I beat him to it with my own case and lighter, and he sat back with the cigarette gripped between his lips.

  ‘Scenes from Domestic Life,’ he said, with a show of weariness. ‘Do you envy me, Faraday? You shouldn’t. A family man never makes a good family doctor; he has too many worries of his own. There ought to be a law making physicians single men, like Catholic priests. They’d be the better for it.’

  ‘You don’t believe that for a moment,’ I said, after drawing on my own cigarette. ‘Besides, if it were true, I’d be the proof of it.’

  ‘Well, and so you are. You’re a finer doctor than I am. You had a harder journey to get there, too.’

  I raised a shoulder. ‘I wasn’t much of a shining example tonight.’

  ‘Oh, routine work. You bring out the goods when the goods are needed. You said yourself, you’ve things on your mind … Want to talk about that? I’m not trying to pry, by the way. I know it helps sometimes, that’s all, to chew over difficult cases with another medical man.’

  He spoke lightly but sincerely, and the slight resistance I’d been feeling—a resistance to the charm of his manner, his untidy house, his handsome family—began to ebb. Perhaps it was simply the whisky doing its work, or the warmth of the fire. The room was such a contrast to my dreary bachelor home—a contrast, too, I realised suddenly, to Hundreds Hall. I had a vision of Caroline and her mother as they probably were at this time of night, hunched and chill and fretful at the heart of that dark, unhappy house.

  I turned the glass of whisky in my hand. ‘Perhaps you can guess my trouble, Seeley,’ I said. ‘Or part of it.’

  I didn’t look up, but saw him lift his own glass. He took a sip and said quietly, ‘Caroline Ayres, you mean? I thought it must be something along those lines. You took my advice, did you, after that dance?’

  I moved uncomfortably, and before I could answer he went on, ‘I know, I know, I was filthy drunk that night, and bloody impertinent. But I meant what I said. What’s gone wrong? Don’t tell me the girl’s turned you down. Too much on her mind, I suppose? Come on, you can trust me, I’m not drunk now. Besides—’

  Now I did look up. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, one can’t help but hear rumours.’

  ‘About Caroline?’

  ‘About the whole family.’ He spoke more gravely. ‘A Birmingham friend of mine does some part-time consulting for John Warren. He told me what a shocking state Roderick’s in. A nasty business, isn’t it? I’m not surprised if it’s begun to get Caroline down. Now there’s been some other sort of incident, I gather, out at the Hall?’

  ‘There has,’ I said, after a moment of silence. ‘And I don’t mind telling you, Seeley, the case is such a bloody queer one, I hardly know what to make of it …’

  And I told him pretty much the whole story, beginning with Rod and his delusions, then describing the fire, the scribbles on the walls, the phantom rings on the call-bells, and baldly recounting Mrs Ayres’s horrible experience up in the nurseries. He listened in silence, occasionally nodding, occasionally letting out a bark of grim laughter. But his laughter faded as the tale went on, and when I had finished he sat still for a moment, then leaned forward to flick ash from his cigarette. And what he said as he sat back was: ‘Poor Mrs Ayres. A pretty elaborate way of cutting one’s wrists, wouldn’t you say?’

  I looked at him. ‘That’s how you see the case, then?’

  ‘My dear fellow, what else? Unless the wretched woman was simply the victim of someone’s idea of a nasty joke. I suppose you’ve ruled that out?’

  ‘I have,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, then. The footsteps in the passage, the heavy breathing in the tube: it seems a pretty plain case of psychoneurosis to me. She feels guilty about the loss of her children—Roderick, as well as the little girl. She’s started punishing herself. It was up in the nurseries, you say, that the incident took place? Could she have chosen a more significant setting for the whole affair?’

  I had to confess that the same idea had struck me—just as, three months before, I’d been impressed by the fact of the Hundreds fire having broken out in what was effectively the estate office—among the estate papers!—as if it were a concentration of all Roderick’s frustration and dismay.

  But something did not ring true to me. I said, ‘I don’t know. Even supposing this experience of Mrs Ayres’s to be purely delusional, and assuming that, incident by incident, we can find a perfectly rational explanation for everything else that’s happened out at the Hall—which, by the way, I think we can. Still, it’s the cumulative nature of it all that troubles me.’

  He took another sip of his whisky. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, put it like this. A child comes to you with a broken arm; all right, you set the bone and send him home. Two weeks later he returns, with broken ribs this time. Perhaps you patch him up and send him home again. A week later he’s back, with another fracture … The individual broken bones are no longer the main problem, surely?’

  ‘But we’re not talking about bones,’ said Seeley. ‘We’re talking about hysteria. And hysteria’s altogether stranger—and unfortunately, unlike broken bones, contagious. I was medical officer to a girls’ school years ago, and one term there was a fashion for fainting. You never saw anything like it: girls going down, in assembly, like skittles. In the end even the mistresses were doing it.’

  I shook my head. ‘This is a weirder thing even than hysteria. It’s as if—well, as if something’s slowly sucking the life out of the whole family.’

  ‘Something is,’ he said, with another bark of laughter. ‘It’s called a Labour Government. The Ayreses’ problem—don’t you think?—is that they can’t, or won’t, adapt. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve a lot of sympathy for them. But what’s left for an old family like that in England nowadays? Class-wise, they’ve had their chips. Nerve-wise, perhaps they’ve run their course.’

  He sounded like Peter Baker-Hyde now, and I found his briskness rather repellent. After all, I thought, he had never become a friend to the family, as I had. I said, ‘That might be true enough of Rod. Anyone who knew that boy well could have predicted that he was heading for some sort of breakdown. But Mrs Ayres, a suicide? I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m not suggesting for a moment that in putting her hands through that window she was really meaning to end her life. I should say that, like most supposedly suicidal women, she was simply creating a nice little drama, with herself at its heart. She’s used to attention, don’t forget, and I can’t imagine she’s been getting too much of it lately … You’ll want to be careful she doesn’t try the same sort of trick again, once all the current fuss has died down. You’re keeping an eye on her?’

  ‘Of course I am. She seems to be making a full recovery. That baffles me, too.’ I took a gulp of whisky. ‘The whole bloody business baffles me! There are things that have happened, over at Hundreds, that I can’t explain. It’s as if the house is in the grip of some sort of miasma. Caroline—’ I spoke reluctantly. ?
??Caroline’s even had the idea in her head that there’s been something almost supernatural going on—that Roderick’s been haunting the house, or something, in his sleep. She’s been reading some lurid books. Crank stuff. Frederic Myers, people like that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Seeley, stubbing out his cigarette, ‘perhaps she’s on to something.’

  I stared at him. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Why not? Myers’s ideas are the natural extension of psychology, surely?’

  I said, ‘Not as I understand psychology, no!’

  ‘Are you sure? You subscribe, I suppose, to the general principle: a conscious personality, with a subliminal self—a sort of dream-self—attached?’

  ‘Broadly, yes.’

  ‘Well, then suppose that dream-self could, in certain circumstances, break loose: detach itself, cross space, become visible to others? Isn’t that Myers’s thesis?’

  I said, ‘As far as I know. And it makes for a good fireside story. But for God’s sake, there isn’t an ounce of science in it!’

  ‘Not yet there isn’t,’ he said, smiling. ‘And I wouldn’t like to air the theory in front of the county medical board, certainly. But perhaps in fifty years’ time medicine will have found a way to calibrate the phenomenon, and will have explained it all. Meanwhile, people will go on talking about ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties, simply missing the point …’

  He sipped at his whisky, then went on in a different tone. ‘My father saw a ghost once, you know. My grandmother appeared one night at his surgery door. She’d been dead ten years. She said, “Quickly, Jamie! Go home!” He didn’t stop to think it over; he put on his coat and went straight to the family house. He found that his favourite brother, Henry, had injured his hand, and the wound was rapidly turning septic. He cut off a finger, and probably saved his brother’s life. Now, how do you explain that?’

  I said, ‘I can’t. But I’ll tell you something. My father used to hang a bull’s heart in the chimney, stuck with pins. He had it there to keep evil spirits away. I know how I’d explain that.’

  Seeley laughed. ‘Not a fair comparison.’

  ‘Why not? Because your father was a gentleman, and mine a shop-keeper? ’

  ‘Don’t be so touchy, man! Listen to me, now. I don’t think for a moment that my father truly saw a ghost that night, any more than I think poor Mrs Ayres has been receiving calls from her dead daughter. The idea of one’s deceased relations floating around in the ether, keeping their gimlet eyes on one’s affairs, is really too much to stomach. But suppose the stress of my uncle’s injury, combined with the bond between him and my father—suppose all of that somehow released some sort of … psychic force? The force simply took the shape that would best get my father’s attention. Very bright of it, too.’

  ‘But what’s been happening at Hundreds,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing benign about that. Quite the reverse.’

  ‘Is that so surprising, with things for that family so bleak? The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a—a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration … Caroline suspects her brother. Well, as I said before, she might be right. Maybe it wasn’t only bones that got fractured in that crash of his. Maybe it was something even deeper … Then again, it’s generally women, you know, at the root of this sort of thing. There’s Mrs Ayres, of course, the menopausal mother: that’s a queer time, psychically. And don’t they even have some teenage housemaid out there, too?’

  I looked away from him. ‘They do. She’s the one who got them all thinking about spooks in the first place.’

  ‘Is that right? And how old is she? Fourteen? Fifteen? Doesn’t get much chance to flirt with the boys, I imagine, stuck out there.’

  I said, ‘Oh, she’s a child still!’

  ‘Well, the sexual impulse is the darkest of all, and has to emerge somewhere. It’s like an electrical current; it has a tendency, you know, to find its own conductors. But if it goes untapped—well, then it’s a rather dangerous energy.’

  I was struck by the word. I said slowly, ‘Caroline spoke of “energies”.’

  ‘Caroline’s a clever girl. I always thought she got the thick end of things in that family. Kept at home with a second-rate governess while the boy was packed off to public school. And then, just when she’d got out, to be dragged back again by her mother, so that she could wheel Roderick up and down the terrace in his Bath chair! Next I suppose she’ll be wheeling Mrs Ayres. What she needs, of course—’ He smiled again, and the smile was sly. ‘Well, it’s hardly my place. But the girl isn’t getting any younger; and, my dear fellow, neither are you! You’ve put this whole case before me and haven’t mentioned your own situation once. What exactly is it? You and she have some sort of … understanding, is that it? Nothing firmer than that?’

  I felt the whisky inside me. Raising my glass for another gulp I said quietly, ‘The firmness is all on my side. Rather too much of it, to be honest with you.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Like that?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, well. I’d never have guessed it. Of Caroline, I mean … Though there, perhaps, you have the root of your miasma.’

  His expression was slyer than ever now, and I took a second to understand him. I said at last, ‘You aren’t suggesting—?’

  He held my gaze, then started to laugh. He was enjoying himself enormously, I realised suddenly. He polished off the rest of his whisky, then generously refilled our glasses and lit a second cigarette. He began to tell me another ghost story, this one more fantastic than the last.

  But I barely heard it. He’d started me thinking, and the beat of my thoughts, like the ticking arm of a metronome, would not be stilled. It was all nonsense; I knew it was nonsense. Every ordinary thing around me worked against it. The fire was crackling in the grate. The children still thundered on the staircase. The whisky was fragrant in the glass … But the night was dark at the window, too, and a few miles away through the wintry darkness stood Hundreds Hall, where things were different. Could what he had suggested have any truth to it? Could there be something loose in that house, some sort of ravenous frustrated energy, with Caroline at its heart?

  I thought back, to the start of it all—to the night of that unlucky party, when Caroline had been so humiliated, and the Baker-Hyde child had ended up hurt. What if some process had begun that night, some queer seed been sown? I remembered, in the weeks that followed, Caroline’s mounting hostility towards her brother, her impatience with her mother. Both her brother and her mother had become injured, just like Gillian Baker-Hyde. And it was Caroline who had first brought those injuries to my attention—Caroline who had noticed the burns in Roderick’s room, who had discovered the fire, who had heard the taps and felt ‘the little rapping hand’ behind the wall.

  Then I thought of something else. The thing that had started with Gyp, perhaps as a ‘nip’ or a ‘whisper’—as Betty, I suddenly recalled, had put it—that thing had been slowly gathering strength. It had moved things about, lit fires, put scribbles on a wainscot. Now it could run on pattering feet. It could be heard, as a struggling voice. It was growing, it was developing …

  What would it be next?

  Unnerved, I moved forward. Seeley offered the bottle again, but I shook my head.

  ‘I’ve wasted enough of your time. I really must go. It’s been good of you to listen.’

  He said, ‘I’m not sure I’ve done much to reassure you. You look worse than you did when you arrived! Why not stay longer?’

  But he was interrupted by the noisy re-entrance of his good-looking son. Loosened up by the whisky, he leapt from his chair
and chased the child back out into the hall, and by the time he had returned to me I had finished my drink and had my hat and coat on, ready to leave.

  He had a better head for alcohol than I did. He saw me breezily to the door, but I made my way out into the night not quite steady on my feet, and feeling the liquor, hot and sour, in my unlined stomach. I drove the short distance home, then stood in my cold dispensary, the nausea rising like a wave inside me—and, rising with it, something worse than nausea; almost a dread. My heart was beating unpleasantly hard. I took off my coat, and found I was sweating. After a moment of indecision I went through to my consulting-room. I picked up the telephone and, with clumsy fingers, dialled the Hundreds number.

  It was after eleven. The phone rang and rang. Then came Caroline’s cautious voice. ‘Yes? Hello?’

  ‘Caroline! It’s me.’

  Her tone at once grew anxious. ‘Is something the matter? We’d gone to bed. I thought—’

  I said, ‘Nothing’s the matter. Nothing. I—I just wanted to hear your voice.’

  I spoke simply, I suppose. There was a silence, and then she laughed. The laughter was tired, ordinary. The dread and the nausea began to dwindle, as if punctured by a pin.

  She said, ‘I think you must be a little drunk.’

  I wiped my face. ‘I think I am. I’ve been with Seeley, and he’s been plying me with whisky. God, what a brute that man is! He’s had me thinking … ridiculous things. It’s so good to hear you, Caroline! Say something else.’

  She tutted. ‘How silly you are! What on earth will the operator think? What should I say?’

  ‘Say anything. Say a poem.’

  ‘A poem! All right.’ And she went on, in a prompt, perfunctory way: ‘ “ The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.” Now go to bed, will you?’

  ‘I will, in a second. I just want to think of you there. Everything’s all right, isn’t it?’